ART REVIEW : Eccentric ‘Glimpse’ at Norton Collection

It’s not intended as a seasonal feel-good exhibition, but the new main-stage show at the Santa Monica Museum of Art has that spirit. Titled “A Glimpse of the Norton Collection as Revealed by Kim Dingle,” it’s a buoyant, antic exercise in intertwined eccentricity.

The players are Eileen and Peter Norton, a now-well-known pair of multimillionaire L.A. art collectors and philanthropists. They seem to have been born from the best dreams of bohemian idealism.

He retired young after making his bundle inventing a computer software program called Norton Utilities. It has relieved thousands of panicked PC users by doing such things as retrieving lost files and heading off potential disaster by fixing fragmented discs.

She is an African American from Watts and a former ghetto elementary schoolteacher. Norton purposely searched her out with a personals ad because he thinks black women are gorgeous. Their interracial alliance is commemorated in a double “portrait” by Byron Kim. It consists of just two swatches of skin makeup, one Peter’s color, the other Eileen’s.

*

Elevated to the ranks of the idle rich, they decided to establish a charitable foundation concentrating on emerging offbeat local art but not excluding other stuff. Such art suits them temperamentally, especially if it deals with the social issues of this multicultural age. One example on view is David Hammons’ “Rocky.” It consists of a beat-up decorative wrought-iron stand topped by a stone wearing a toupee of kinky black hair.

Dingle is a mid-career artist in the Norton mold. She likes to collect things like erasers and marbles. She has a penchant for jails, which is reflected in a piece on view by New Yorker Robert Gober, “Prison Window.” It consists of a wall with a barred window high up. Through it one sees blue sky, but it’s not clear whether we are inside looking out or vice versa. Here is the fantasy of many artists who so value their creative privacy they think a cell might actually be a nice thing.

But Dingle adds a new twist to Gober’s piece. Normally viewers see only the front of the wall. Here it is installed so that one can walk behind it to discover its reality as kind of a stage set, a fake thing. It suggests the truth that the most common prison is one’s own mind.

Seeing from a different angle is Dingle’s big idea here. On arrival, viewers are liable to think, “Oops, I must have arrived too early. This show’s not properly hung yet.” There are crates all over and a lot of works are still wrapped. But this is the way artist-curator Dingle wanted it. Preparing to select from the Nortons’ 1,200-work collection, she became fascinated with the whole mechanism of storing, shipping, sorting and protecting the art. In effect, she made her own artwork out of the Norton collection. The meaning of the whole is reinterpreted.

But how? A hostile and paranoid mind could easily see this arrangement as exposing art’s true estate as merchandise. Wrapping the Lari Pittman painting or those Dennis Oppenheim deer in plastic shows they’re nothing but commodities to be shipped here and there to aggrandize the ego of the collectors and drive up the value of the objects.

But that’s not what she’s up to. Dingle emphasizes the care with which the objects are protected by people--often artists themselves-- who respect them. Even the “storage room,” where we see little art except in Polaroid photos pasted on labeled boxes has an aura of gentle affection.

*

By the same token, the Nortons’ collecting habits could be savaged by a jaded hard-nose. Nothing here but a bunch of warmed-over examples of Dada and sentimentalized social commentary.

Wrong again. Everything here, from Carrie Mae Weems’ photo of a black mother and child doing makeup to Donald Lipski’s big oval plastic tube full of water-lily pods speaks volumes more than that.

Charles Ray’s 8-foot female store window mannequin may be in the assemblage tradition, but it has something chilling and hilariously new to say about the way men hold women in awe. Carter Potter’s abstract compositions of film strips may hark back to Mondrian, but they also provoke new thoughts about art and the media. Even as interpreted by Dingle, the exhibition marks the most extensive showing of the Norton collection to date. Taken together, it reveals enthusiasm, humor, courage, intelligence, individuality and toughness. This exhibition returns the collecting and interpretation of works of art to an act of love. There are worse things to have on our mind at this or any time of year.

* Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2437 Main St., Santa Monica, through Feb. 25, closed Mondays and Tuesdays, (310) 399-0433.