Little Guys Got the Big Picture : New Huntington Beach Art Center and Guggenheim Gallery Stand Out

This was the year of the little guys, the year most of the better shows came out of smaller institutions. Could we possibly need more proof that the secret of turning curatorial ideas into exhibition gold isn’t based on budget size but imagination and all-around savvy?

Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery--the site of four of this year’s better home-grown exhibitions--and the Huntington Beach Art Center account for a large chunk of this year’s glory. Under director Richard Turner and (as of this year) full-fledged curator Maggie Owens, the Guggenheim has continued to offer stimulating themes and adventurous art that often can be seen nowhere else in the county.

And, a mere nine months after it opened, the Huntington Beach Art Center has already become the bright beacon among Orange County’s community art centers.

In contrast to the timid leadership at the Irvine Fine Art Center (where a small ceramic piece with a male sex organ was removed from “All Media ‘95” before the juried show opened to the public, for fear of budget reprisals from the city) the Huntington Beach Art Center declined to remove two controversial works (one involving fake feces, the other dealing with a lesbian family) from inaugural shows of student and professional work.

Instead, center director Naida Osline opted to post an explanatory note alongside one of the works and to discuss the issues with disaffected viewers. Despite factions on the City Council who found the controversy a handy reason for reducing the center’s budget , the flap blew over and the center prevailed. City-mandated funding cuts were made in such a way as to save both the programming and center’s lively, inclusive approach to art and the community.

The center also gets top marks for demonstrating the cultural context of skateboard art in “GRIND: The Graphics and Culture of Skateboarding.” Education director Tyler Stallings’ small, inexpensively produced show introduced a slice of youth culture from an insider’s perspective, which meant dealing freshly with aspects of consumerism, law and business as well as graphic art. “GRIND” was popular and smart, which made it Most Likely to Succeed among this year’s mini-trend of pop culture shows in the county.

The other pop-oriented shows--particularly the Laguna Art Museum’s “Eye Tattooed America,” “The World of Clive Barker” and “Seuss Is Loose!’--seem to have been driven primarily by a perceived need to attract a large viewership rather than to illuminate exotic or familiar materials from a fresh point of view. Surely it is possible to do both?

Naomi Vine, hired in March as director of the Laguna Art Museum on the basis of her dual background in business and art--has given the museum a newly restrained sensibility: ultra-cautious and focused on the bottom line. Still, even the cautious can stumble. The Barker show, with its pseudo-horrific art and T-shirts, was a laughable mixture of kitsch and consumerism, without the saving grace of irony that illuminated the show’s predecessor at the museum’s South Coast Plaza mall site, “Deborah Brown: Vanity Fair.”

It is ironic that by far the best exhibition at the Laguna this year--”Llyn Foulkes: Between a Rock and a Hard Place” (through Jan. 21)--was guest-curated by a former Newport Harbor Art Museum curator, Marilu Knode, now at the Huntington Beach Art Center.

Truth to tell, though it was good to hear that Bolton Colburn’s conscientious and even-handed work as curator of collections was rewarded this year with a promotion, it was a bit disappointing that Vine gave him--and not a maverick outsider with a brilliant writing style--the post of chief curator, vacated when Colburn’s wife, Susan M. Anderson, became an associate producer at KOCE Channel 50.

At Newport Harbor, the really big news was a scandal: former museum treasurer Charles Diamond’s $4.5-million bankruptcy filing and his astounding refusal to reimburse longtime friends--as well as museum director Michael Botwinick--who trustingly gave him their savings to invest.

Meanwhile, the official news was anticlimactic: the launch of a $6-million fund-raising campaign to allow the museum to expand into the former library building next door. First announced in 1993, the plan will free up space to display work from the collection as well as temporary exhibitions, with newly designated areas for educational programming.

Hampered by a leaky roof that reasserted itself last spring, the museum axed the most promising-sounding shows from its schedule, “Masculine/Masquerade: Masculinity and Representation” and “Joe Goode” (rescheduled to November 1996, when the library renovations are supposed to be completed).

Once again, good exhibitions at Newport Harbor were in short supply. A last-minute addition to the schedule turned out to be the year’s best: a single brilliant piece (“The Blind,” through Dec. 31) by French conceptualist artist Sophie Calle. Its psychological immediacy overshadowed the work of another conceptualist photographer, Jochen Gerz, whose retrospective “People Speak”--organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and shown here last winter--proved oddly elusive.

The other Newport Harbor retrospective, “The Art of Peter Voulkos” (through Feb. 25), organized by the Oakland Museum, seems more tailored to the blue-chip crowd--and more’s the pity.

The show is too polite and even-handed, failing to make apparent the raw brilliance of Voulkos’ early work in the late 1950s--the reason for his acclaim--while granting more than equal time to the boring bronzes and recent work that now, for all its effortless mastery of the medium, seems stuck in a time warp.

Newport Harbor also had the dubious distinction of showing one of the year’s two most ill-conceived exhibitions, “Western Artists/African Art” (July 1-Sept. 10), which seems to have been conceived in homage to the good taste and decorating schemes of North American artists who collect African art, rather than to illuminate the African artists and their cultures.

The other show that stumbled on a faulty premise was “Behind the Orange Curtain,” at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center (through Dec. 31)--a clumsy attempt by the guest curator, Sarah Bain Gallery owner Sally Waranch, to make a case for home-grown art, despite the fact that most of the artists came to the county to study at UC Irvine or Cal State Fullerton and departed soon thereafter.

Thanks to a 464-year-old miracle, the Bowers Museum had a brighter year than usual. The fall exhibition, “Visions of Guadalupe: Selections from the Museum of the Basilica de Guadalupe”--curated by Jorge Guadarrama, director of the basilica museum--proved a winner, with appealing vernacular art making a case for Mexico as the new Jerusalem.

Speaking of miracles, some unrealistic hopes seem to have been invested in the renovated Santora Building, a cornucopia of art studios, art galleries and related businesses that opened last spring in downtown Santa Ana as the first element of a so-called Artists’ Village. (Other components are to include the new site of the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art.)

Art colonies are organic entities that live or die depending on the personalities and activities of the artists themselves. The only useful things city governments or philanthropic individuals can do are to peel away sticky regulations, provide seed money and get out of the way.

The powers that be are likely to measure the Artists’ Village’s level of “success” by how much yuppie foot traffic it generates, how many more dollars get spent within the city and the degree of cultural polish it gives the city’s less-than-stellar image.

But the real measure of the village’s viability as an art colony will lie in the quality of work that is made and sold there, and the presence or absence of an ambience conducive to experimentation and excellence. And that reckoning isn’t due for many years to come.

Incidentally, without benefit of a city-subsidized business license, Dark’s Art Parlor in Santa Ana--dedicated to “the art of the fantastic”--not only has survived its first year but has begun publishing a handsomely illustrated magazine of its wares. While most of this art is kitschy Grand Guignol stuff, its genre appeal gives the gallery an exotic niche in Santa Ana’s diverse, cosmopolitan culture.

The other public art of note was the unveiling in January of “The Anamorph,” a fountain-like sculpture on the plaza at the Pond in Anaheim, one of two works (the other is Nam June Paik’s “Video Arch”) funded by 1% of the arena’s construction budget. A collaborative effort by artists Ann Preston, Michael Davis and Richard Turner, the eye-fooling piece represents a creative and user-friendly solution to a difficult site problem.

Two art institutions closed this year, the Severin Wunderman Museum--a collection of art and artifacts relating to French literary figure Jean Cocteau, which found greener pastures at the University of Texas at Austin--and the BankAmerica Gallery, obliged to move from its Costa Mesa office building when the site was leased to a subsidiary of the Unocal Corp. The museum was just beginning to improve the scope of its exhibitions, and the gallery was able to draw on the bank’s vast collection of contemporary art. Both will be missed.

On a positive note, the birth of the OC Weekly last fall has brought a new, regular source of art commentary to the county. A plurality of views and purviews is exactly what we all need. But the paper made a big mistake in dismissing artist and reviewer Suvan Geer; none of the other writers making cameo appearances in the Weekly’s pages has demonstrated her breadth of knowledge, sensitivity to new forms of art and stylistic grace.

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CATHY CURTIS’ FAVORITE EXHIBITIONS

In chronological order:

* “Jochen Gerz: People Speak,” Newport Harbor Art Museum, Jan. 14-March 19. Photo-based conceptual work by a German artist with a literary bent, examining the notion of human absence. Implicit is the mood of a generation still wracked by war guilt. Organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery.

* “Issues of Empire,” Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman University, Feb. 6-March 8. The impact of colonial domination and cultural imperialism interpreted in overwhelmingly fresh and visually effective ways. Curated by gallery director Richard Turner.

* “The Greek Legacy,” Decorative Arts Study Center, San Juan Capistrano, March 14-June 10. Traditional Greek decorative arts, artfully arranged to evoke the ambience of a rural Greek home. Curated by Irini Vallera-Rickerson, director of the Orange Coast College Art Gallery.

* “Fabrication: Formal, Found and Funky,” Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman University, March 16-April 20. Work by 15 artists using fabric in unusual ways to score formal points in an informal manner. Organized by curator Maggie Owens.

* “Vested Power: Icons of Domination and Transcendence,” Cal State Fullerton Main Art Gallery, April 9-May 14. A preliminary look at an unusual topic, contemporary artists’ depictions of pointed headgear. Curated by graduate student and Griffin Linton gallery co-owner Meg Linton.

* “Pervert,” UC Irvine Art Gallery, April 11-May 6. Dicey subject matter treated with wit and taboo-slashing honesty by 17 artists. Curated by gallery director Catherine Lord.

* “Veered Science,” Huntington Beach Art Center, July 1-Sept. 4. New high- and low-tech work with a skewed technological edge. Organized by curator Marilu Knode.

* “Confronting Nature: Silenced Voices,” Cal State Fullerton and Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman University, Sept. 9-Oct. 8. A generous survey, with many tongue-in-cheek views of our imperfect relations with the natural world. Curated by grad students Maggie Owens (curator of the Guggenheim Gallery) and Jeannie Denholm.

* “Visions of Guadalupe: Selections From the Museum of the Basilica de Guadalupe,” Bowers Museum, Sept. 10-Dec. 31. Engaging and meaningful objects relating to a local miracle. Curated by Jorge Guadarrama, director of the basilica museum in Mexico City.

* “Komar and Melamid: ‘The People’s Choice: The Polling of America,’ ” Huntington Beach Art Center, Sept. 16-Nov. 12. Two Russians’ wry take on national taste, contemporary art and the tyranny of statistics. Organized by the Alternative Museum, New York.

* “GRIND: The Graphics and Culture of Skateboarding,” Huntington Beach Art Center, Sept. 16-Oct. 15. A gem of a show, done on a shoestring, that situates skateboards within their own subculture as well as broader aspects of contemporary life. Organized by education director Tyler Stallings.

* “Takeoffs: Cartoon and Caricature in the Fine Arts,” Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman University, Oct. 16 -Nov. 12. Rambunctious work by younger artists who use cartoon styles and characters to tweak a lopsided world. Curated by the gallery’s Richard Turner.

* “The Blind,” Newport Harbor Art Museum, Oct. 17-Dec. 31. A photo and text installation by Sophie Calle, an artist who weds conceptual rigor to a deep and immediately graspable sense of humanity.

* “Llyn Foulkes: Between a Rock and a Hard Place,” Laguna Art Museum, Oct. 28-Jan. 21. A long-overdue survey of an unclassifiable California artist who has never really bested the work he did in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Curated by Marilu Knode of the Huntington Beach Art Center.