Richard Turner at Crossroads of Martini, Beatnik

When Richard Turner showed a group of his Beat era-influenced works at the Irvine Fine Arts Center some years ago, I was so baffled by them that I decided not to write a review. Now Turner’s art is in the spotlight again--in “Should a Beatnik Drink a Martini?” at the Huntington Beach Art Center--and it suddenly makes wonderfully crazy sense.

While the pleasures and challenges of recent contemporary art may have sharpened my eye, the strong impact of this show was aided greatly by perceptive and stylish curating by programs director Tyler Stallings.

Turner, who teaches Asian art history and studio art at Chapman University in Orange and directs the Guggenheim Gallery on campus, was 16 in 1959 when his family moved from Michigan to Vietnam. His fascination with Abstract Expressionism and the beat culture he read about in magazines mingled with his enthralled discovery of the street life of Saigon.

Decades later, he still perceives the world from a floating platform. Often using found objects and drawings and paintings made by other hands, Turner constructs idiosyncratic tableaux that frequently combine bits and pieces of Asian and American culture.

As the witty title of this show implies, Turner’s touchstone is that moment in U.S. cultural history when the sober, isolationist ‘50s yielded, in a sincere but naive way, to the mind-bending, Eastward-looking ‘60s.

Although billed as a 10-year survey of Turner’s work, most of the art dates from the past few years. Even so, on first viewing, it tends to look as though it was made by several different people. Actually, although Turner’s media are enormously variable, his subjects and working methods are constants.

Some of the works are basically one-liners, but apt ones. Turner employs a repeating abstract pattern and brief texts in “What Color Was . . . “ to evoke prismatic aspects of the ‘60s, from pop songs (“What color was a whiter shade of pale?”) to politics (“What color was the President’s blood?”; “What color was the jungle?”).

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The more ambitious, or ambiguous, pieces evoke a universe in which we are all inquisitive outsiders. Works corral such materials as the culturally bifurcated contents of a fictitious artist’s studio in 1959 (a Brancusi-style sculpture, Asian landscape drawings); a painting of an Indian dancer’s insect-like gesture and an equally delicate miniature silver pavilion (“Insect Mudras”); and Oleg Cassini’s sketches for globe-trotting Jacqueline Kennedy’s clothes (“Hail Jackie, Queen of America”).

In “The Thornbirds of Manila,” Turner’s tour de force, he combines movie-poster-like close-ups of Filipinos with images evoking the intersection of Asian and U.S. cultures, and the mingling of historical moments from the recent and distant past.

Undulating patterns drawn over the faces of a couple evoke both a beaded curtain in a nightclub and Op Art patterns of the ‘60s. Sketches of shoes with clever trimmings evoking corruption and colonial architecture (heels in the shape of a chess pawn and a grand stairway with a nude statue) obscure the faces of Imelda Marcos and another woman. A young man’s face is obscured by the gray shadows of military planes being filmed for “Apocalypse Now.”

A key work in the show, combining Turner’s interest in the intersection of Western and non-Western culture and the meanings artists and viewers extract from art, is “Watches and Pillows.” Pale-colored canvases bearing the images of pillows and two brand-name watches are aligned with rectangular swatches of carpet pad to make a peculiar multimedia painting.

Looking like a dim, sanitized descendant of a David Salle painting, this piece was commissioned (as an accompanying text relates) from a southern Indian painter who charges by the square foot.

Curiously, the pillows look amateurishly wooden while the watches could pass for commercial illustration. Even the juxtaposition of these objects, floating on peculiarly neutral backgrounds, suggests an certain degree of miscommunication, a faulty translation of meaning and value from one culture to another.

Although Turner’s public art necessarily gets short shrift in this show (no photograph would do justice to “Wall Gazing Gallery,” Turner’s deliciously atmospheric outdoor piece near the art department at Cal State Fullerton), a few sculptures and photographs from a project for the Metropolitan Bisolids Center in San Diego County give some idea of his recent work in that sphere. The sculptures have a rather generic look, perhaps deliberately (some recall Richard Deacon’s style), but an untitled group of photographs of toys that traveled through the sewage system once again documents Turner’s personalized treatment of unlikely objets.

Turner’s art seems to exist primarily as part of an ongoing, highly intuitive experiment in making or exposing connections between apparently dissimilar things. His willingness to risk being thought glib or culturally maladroit in pursuit of a cockeyed vision may be his greatest gift.

* “Should a Beatnik Drink a Martini?” through May 4, Huntington Beach Art Center, 538 Main St. Hours: Noon-6 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday; noon-8 p.m. Thursday; noon-9 p.m. Friday, Saturday; noon-4 p.m. Sunday. Admission: $3 general, $2 students, seniors. (714) 374-1650.

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Hung chandelier-style from the ceiling, two bunches of wax-stiffened girls’ panties greet the visitor to Ron Breeden Gallery in Orange. Adorned with flowers, frills and cartoon heroines, these “panty cloud/bouquets” may initially seem innocuous, for all their oddness. But at close range, the dark hairs visible in the crotches of a few of the garments give the piece a deeply unsettling quality.

Artist Alexis Weidig, a newly minted graduate with a master’s in fine arts from UC Santa Barbara, is part of a generation of artists who deal with issues of sex and gender in ways radically different from their feminist forebears. By luring the viewer with prettified images or lush surfaces, and by avoiding an explicitly moralistic approach, younger artists have put their own stamp on issues of power, freedom and vulnerability.

The viewer’s taboo-breaking action of peering into the panties is very much a part of Weidig’s piece, which uses conventional images of girlhood to suggest real and imagined fears relating to puberty. The contrasting words of the title (cloud/bouquet) evoke the combination of heavy (emotional) weather and celebration that accompanies puberty.

Other pieces by Weidig--tableaux of tiny plastic or candy animals enacting romantic or sexual roles--are more derivative; toys have become routine materials for conceptual artists with gender and developmental issues. But it is always encouraging to see genuinely provocative work in small, out-of-the-way Orange County venues.

* “Dreamy,” solo installation by Alexis Weidig, through March 15 at Ron Breeden Gallery, 675-F N. Eckhoff St., Orange. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday; 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday. Free. (714) 937-5934.