1997: A Space Oddity : UFO Exhibit Takes Pains to Explain the Phenomenon but Fails to Make the Pieces the Top Priority

By turns maddening and enlightening--though too rarely visually captivating--”Are We Touched?: Identities From Outer Space,” has filled the Huntington Beach Art Center with materials produced by assorted UFO nuts, including artists in and (way) out of the mainstream.

Curator Tyler Stallings’ sympathetic treatment of the irrational, unproven belief in the existence of UFOs at times threatens to hijack the viewer’s patience in a swirl of copiously documented New Age babble.

In a wide-ranging catalog essay, he looks at such intriguing sidelights as ufology’s connection with modern sightings of the Virgin Mary, Jungian theories about the mandala shape of the classic flying saucer and the impact of technology and space on Americans’ fragile sense of personal autonomy.

But Stallings is so caught up in studying the anatomy of a belief that the art takes second place. Even the organization of the show--according to the artists’ presumed degree of belief in UFOs--bogs down in a strange confusion between cultish ravings and the playful or discursive appropriation of certain imagery or ideas.

Stallings likens the credulousness of a UFO believer to an artist’s openness to unusual experience, yet he fails to credit the artist’s ability to rethink and transform received opinion, which surely is equally important.

Indeed, the better pieces in the show reinterpret the pop culture “furniture” of outer space (the spaceship, the flying saucer, the teardrop-shaped “alien” head) while also suggesting the fears and ideals that inspire an obsession with supranormal events.

Eric Johnson’s silver-lacquered sculpture, “Classified,” neatly straddles dual planes of perception. A smooth abstract form when viewed from the side, it morphs into an “alien” when seen head-on. Perhaps through a trick of light, the forehead seems to be slightly dented, eerily suggesting that the creature is thinking.

Jason Rogenes built his glowing ceiling-hung spaceship, “project 5.42e,” from chunks of the humble Styrofoam packing material that houses delicate electronic equipment. Connected to an aggressive tangle of orange industrial electrical cords, it could have been made by some demented garage-bound tinkerer determined to beat the military-industrial complex at its own game. At once wistful and buoyant, the piece also is evocative of the abstract purity of minimalist art.

Apollo 13 (the duo of Perry Vasquez and Randall Evans) houses a tiny V-shaped object inside a stylized space station. Leaking (oil? blood?) onto a piece of gauze and faintly emitting crackling astronaut patter, “Implant” alludes broadly to the competing worlds of biomedical and space research, kitsch design and the popular reverence once reserved for Catholic relics.

The pieces that don’t quite jell in a visceral sense--including Loretta Birnbrich’s revolving device displaying ceramic flying-saucer shapes in a helix formation (“Modern Fairy Tales”)--tend to suffer from an overly engineered or deterministic approach that slights the importance of subtlety and chance.

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Another, more perilous, artist’s strategy is to find an equivalent for the sense of the sublime--the combined feeling of awe and terror associated with the visceral experience of vast landscapes that Stallings rightly identifies as part of the UFO mystique.

The only piece in this show that might qualify is Bill Witherspoon’s “Desert Sri Yantra.” Documented in photographs and a video, it is a giant Hindu meditation symbol--interwoven triangles, circles and lotus petal curves--”drawn” on a quarter-mile stretch of the Alford Desert in Oregon by a team of helpers who left no footprints or tire tracks.

Tellingly, though, the “secret” of this mystical piece--far from involving creatures from another planet--was broad cultural awareness and human willpower united for a common cause.

Some artists in the show (Connie Samaras, Apollo 13, Ken Gonzales-Day, Kenneth Huerta II and others) employ the UFO theme as a platform for critiques of racism and other forms of prejudice in contemporary American society. The alien theme must have been irresistible: “Illegal aliens,” after all, is the disapproving term used to single out noncitizens. Humor leavens the dogmatism of several pieces, but open-endedness is in short supply.

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Still other artists allude to the powers and limitations of technology by making peculiar or useless contraptions (Davis & Davis), obsessing on documentary proof (Chris Wilder) or taking sci-fi innovations at face value (Brad Spence).

Among the glut of generally amateurish-looking pieces illustrating alleged personal UFO experiences, Joni Johnston’s vinyl hoods and outfits for extraterrestrials are most striking. These garments, which look as though they were made for a large doll or small child, combine the patient application of the craftswoman with the obsessive fantasy life of the cultist.

There also is an ample display of more or less straightforward documentation, from Douglas Curran’s photographs of folks who have built flying saucers in their backyards to views of stuffed “aliens” speared on hangers in the gift shop at the International UFO Museum in Roswell, N.M. A sampler of commercial fallout (Buitoni Space Men, Scotch tape’s make-it-yourself flying saucer) grounds the theme in the perky blandness of mass culture.

It’s all rather overwhelming and over-credulous, even if you happen to know that Stallings’ own art (not in this show) incorporates an astronaut theme. Still, few curators anywhere are willing and able to wander off into a wild and woolly topic, and stumble back with sackfuls of data and a head full of theories.

The Space Age foil-wrapped pack of illustrated cards, one card per artist or piece of documentary material, sums up the show’s idiosyncratic, earnest and nonjudgmental manner of attempting to validate a topic at the margins of pop culture. Should we be bracing ourselves for future shows about snake handling, Elvis sightings or cryogenics?

* “Are We Touched?: Identities From Outer Space,” through Sept. 21 at the Huntington Beach Art Center, 538 Main St. Hours: Noon-6 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday, noon-8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and noon-4 p.m. Sunday. $2-$3. (714) 374-1659.