Bearing Witness to Trial by Jurors

This is a tale of two juried shows, one in a conservative North County community’s art center; the other, in the museum of a South County city long known for its tolerance of eccentricity, artistic and otherwise.

Now, here’s the riddle: Why does the “Made in California” show at the City of Brea Gallery have a fair number of unusual, strongly personal works, while the “Southern California Open” at the Laguna Art Museum is overwhelmingly devoted to tired knockoffs of famous art of the past?

It seems likely that the answer lies in the identity of the two jurors. Brea’s was Noel Korten, veteran of such jury duties as the Irvine Fine Art Center’s “All Media ‘93” and the 1989 “Pasadena Armory Show.” As program director of the Municipal Art Center in Los Angeles, he has a constant, hands-on relationship to art being made right now.

Laguna’s juror was Henry Hopkins, director of the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center. Hopkins, 68, hasn’t been a curator since the 1960s, and he is known to be more in tune with an older generation of artists. At the opening of his show, according to people who attended it, he even remarked that he believes the most promising vein of work being made today is not “cutting-edge,” but traditional-minded.

Still, it was a shock to see so many appallingly derivative pieces in the Laguna show. One or two of the baldfaced borrowings from Picasso, Goya, Rodin, Frans Marc, Magritte, Dali, Duchamp, George Herms and others clearly were intended as parody, but all fall resoundingly flat in the fresh-idea department. Good art is always about risk; it’s a far better thing to fail on your own terms than to lean helplessly on somebody else’s style.

Somehow, Hopkins managed to winnow down 1,400 slides to 130 pieces without making a single real “discovery,” except perhaps Tony Raczka, whose multi-part drawing, “Procullier,” conjures a mysteriously emotional realm of part-animal, part-human creatures rendered in an elusive, billowy style.

Otherwise, the most competent artists tend to be the older ones, such as Howard Hitchcock (“Freeway Series No. 10,” a mechanical metaphor for commuter angst) and Eugene Karlen (“Artist and Model,” a School of Paris-flavored painting on a traditional theme). At least these artists, who probably have been toiling away in their chosen styles for decades, came by the now-dated look of their work honestly.

Other popular genres in this show include flat-footed protests against injustice of one sort of another and blandly prettified projects, including Lucy Brown’s decoratively charred and gold-leafed tree branch (“Alembic”).

The large number of Laguna Beach artists--21--in a contest open to artists throughout Southern California makes the show unusually parochial. There’s even a photograph showing male genitals that has been protectively--or pro-actively--draped in red velvet. What a dispiriting way to usher in the Laguna museum’s first months of hard-won freedom from control of the Orange County Museum of Art.

Korten had 500 slide submissions to play with in Brea. While the 104 pieces he selected include many dull and hackneyed pieces, quite a few actually are as he described them in an accompanying essay: “reflective of the chaos and complexities we are all experiencing in our own lives.”

Korten also added a most welcome invitational component to the show: a sampler of work by four well-known female artists from distinctly different California generations and stylistic affinities: Helen Lundeberg, Betye Saar, D.J. Hall and Terri Friedman.

Sharon Ryan, whose painting on birch wood, “10.1,” took first prize in “Made in California,” is far and away the most exciting artist in the show. Ryan had a solo exhibition of her archly seductive work last year at Gallery LASCA, a Los Angeles hot spot for younger artists.

Slender lines of dark red paint curve languidly, swell unexpectedly into pod and vaginal shapes, or cluster like cilia around tiny forms. The dreamy meanderings of the lines (akin to Surrealist “automatic drawings”), the glancing sexual references, the vulnerable-looking pale wood and Ryan’s painstaking, calligraphic labors keep the painting tantalizingly off-balance.

The highly artificial construct of the painting teems with organic symbolism, overwhelming the natural expressivity of the wood’s vein pattern. Ultimately, Ryan seems to be after something different than the Surrealist plumbers of the psyche: something about the rhythmic and retinal effect of suggestive shapes and our willingness to fall under their spell.

Ryan’s work felicitously relates to Lundeberg’s delicately surreal 1946 painting “Biological Fantasy,” a night scene illuminated by an egg-like moon bathed in haze, ovary-like plants and organisms that float above a dark body of water.

Aside from Lundeberg’s other works--a spare lithograph of curiously anthropomorphic trees from 1937 and a study in the nexus of landscape and abstract planes of color from 1975--the other high point of the show is Friedman’s piece, “Sunny Sideways with Oxygen.”

The “Sunny” in question is socialite Sunny von Bulow, once a darling of the tabloids, who has been in a coma since 1980. Behind a huge vinyl sheet patterned in cheery yellow, tiny yellow lights wink in a spiral pattern. Yellow liquid runs merrily through a tube and bubbles into a plastic container.

The intriguing thing here is how simulated human waste is dressed up in a perkily attractive guise, and how mechanical and showy rhythmic effects are--as in life support--linked to the body’s natural rhythms. Friedman puts on a dazzling sideshow with great sensory appeal while simultaneously alluding to the pulse of life itself.

In the juried portion of the show, the other works of interest are mostly odd, unclassifiable things. Jennifer Celio’s untitled painting features flyspeck-sized pink ornamental scrolls escaping from a tiny piano: a weirdly plausible vision of well-tempered sound.

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Joseph Palmer’s woodcut of an angel has the off-center sensibility of “outsider art,” with pink lips on huge wings and curving plant-stem breasts. Bruce Wood’s painting, “Mystery Bones,” describes a fantasy landscape with a gold streamer balanced on Greek columns and tagged bundles of unrecognizable upright objects dotting the grass.

In a more mainstream vein, Michael Beringer imbues a black-and-white documentary photograph, “Hands of a Fisherman,” with the soft grays and controlled lighting effects of a vintage print. Lynda Nugent, who won second prize for her pastel drawing, “Black Shell,” has a commendable sensitivity of touch and observation. Joseph Holt’s triptych, “Days Away,” briskly evokes the mixture of lust, fondness and guilt of a businessman thinking of his wife and small child at home.

Still, it’s too bad up-and-coming artists of Ryan’s caliber don’t appear in Southern California juried shows with any regularity; perhaps more of them ought to be invited to show along with the unsolicited applicants.

A concerted effort to recruit jurors with high standings in the contemporary-art world and to spread the word in top art schools and art departments also might help improve matters. Otherwise, the Southern California juried show is doomed to remain the preserve of has-beens and wannabes.

* “Made in California,” City of Brea Gallery, 1 Civic Center Circle, Brea. Noon-5 p.m., Wednesday-Saturday. $1 (free on Thursday to Brea residents only). Through May 15. (714) 671-3601.

* “Southern California Open,” through June 15, Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday. Admission: $5 adults, $4 seniors and students, free for children under 12. (714) 494-8971.