Convergent Ideas : Nature, Culture Intersect in Ambitious Huntington Beach Show, ‘Documenta’

Happily, the lame joke of naming a group show of Southern California artists after a huge international art event in Germany is the only really annoying aspect of “Documenta,” at the Huntington Beach Art Center through March 31.

It’s all well and good that guest curator Bill Radawec (an artist and alternative-gallery director) has a dry sense of humor, but not when it needlessly muddles the point of his exhibition. Both the title and Radawec’s brief catalog remarks about posterity’s treatment of artists suggest that this show was mounted simply as a career-builder for them.

In fact, the 23 artists are more or less united by an interest in the intersection of nature and culture, a theme Radawec explored last summer in a show at his gallery, which is called domestic setting. (In her catalog essay, center curator Marilu Knode interprets the theme of this exhibition as “nature, the human struggle with nature and . . . death.”)

That covers a lot of ground, to put it mildly. Grand ambitions aside, the best thing “Documenta” has going for it is a fairly large component of idiosyncratic, intelligent works that are immediately appealing on a visual level.

High on the list are Michelle Fierro’s eccentric paintings, Charles Leavitt’s quietly allusive photographs, Seth Kaufman’s deadpan mixed-media pieces, Paul Tzanetopoulos’ computer-modeled designs, Leonard Seagal’s rhythmic sculptural construction and William Loveless’ evocative patterns.

Fierro evokes a buzzing universe of distinct activities with a marvelously flexible vocabulary ranging from sculpted knobs and miniature towers of bright paint to faint, oily discolorations.

She hops around a canvas, instigating small, isolated events--turning a slab of pink paint into a Band-Aid protecting a vulnerable patch of yellow (“Everything Is Coming Up Roses”) or abandoning flimsy scraps of hole-punched paper (“Companion of Silence”). Exquisitely ordered despite their seeming casualness, Fierro’s paintings glancingly recall aspects of dominance and self-preservation in nature.

Leavitt seems to view nature as an almost transparent medium on which we inscribe our own emotional identities. In “A Cold Wind in August (For C.H.),” the juxtaposition of three elegiac black-and-white photographs of bare trees and barren fields in late fall or winter evokes an undisclosed sorrow or foreboding that knows no season.

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Kaufman works his alchemy on a blend of natural and man-made materials; by bluntly titling his works after their components, he leaves the metaphor business up to the viewer. “Chicken Bones, Resin”--a beautiful piece made from chicken bones arranged like mullions in a stained-glass window over the icy crackle of dried resin--reinforces the idea of bones as a natural framework.

In a more obviously metaphorical vein, Seagal’s writhing, vaguely tree-shaped heap of wooden saddletrees, “Crooked Tree,” simultaneously evokes the source of the wood, the internal energies of growth and the spirited, restless quality of the horse.

Although several artists in the show use patterning to replicate biological activities, two are of particular interest.

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Loveless’ delicate “Quietus” pieces have references ranging from petri-dish cultures to a telescopic view of a swirling planetary surface. Even in the making of such pieces, Loveless invokes aspects of gravity and chance, tacitly proposing a link between cosmic and artistic creation.

Tzanetopoulos’ paintings allude to varying qualities of randomness and pattern in nature, human activity and computer programming. In “Pink Leaf Field,” a computer-generated pink-and-black pattern of small leaves exhibits a strangely warped quality, an exaggeration of both natural mutation and the distortions made by an artist’s personal perspective.

Although Radawec selected other works of sensitivity and vision by such artists as Noel O’Malley and Liza Ryan, his generous overview ultimately seems too undiscriminating and unfocused, especially in light of the show’s broad theme.

A few pieces are mired in didacticism, sometimes without even making a cogent point, as in Jody Zellen’s “Untitled (Fan),” which sets up a baffling comparison between the legibility of imagery on stilled and moving fans.

Other works seem dispensable because of their blandness (such as Jill Poyourow’s paintings of fruits and vegetables) or utter witlessness (Ron De Legge’s installation, “Mousehole.”)

It’s hard to know just what to make of the show’s undisputed conversation piece, Jane Reynolds’ “Charms of Nature”: Below a pre-Raphaelite-style painting of big-eyed water nymphs fawning over a young man, a live spider weaves a web in a plexiglass box.

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Is this simply a one-liner about enticement? Is it important that the painting look so tacky? What does the presence of a live insect add that couldn’t be conveyed by a representation, and is that important to the meaning of the piece?

Such complaints and questions are virtually inevitable, given so much work by younger artists searching for workable ideas and approaches. Despite its flaws, “Documenta” has a enough solid and tantalizing work--handsomely installed too--to make the galleries come alive.

* “Documenta,” through March 31 at the Huntington Beach Art Center, 538 Main St., Huntington Beach. Hours: Noon to 6 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday; noon to 8 p.m. Thursday; noon to 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday; noon to 6 p.m. Sunday. $3; students and seniors, $2. (714) 374-1650.