The Outsiders

All too often exhibitions of folk, or “outsider,” art are big on whimsy but deficient in the skewed and startling outlooks that make this untutored, eccentric work so compelling.

But “Selections From the Collection of John Turner”--at Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery, with spillover in display cases at the Argyros Forum--is the ideal “outsider” art and curio show: vast, uncensored and hugely eclectic.

There is imagery on paper plates, screen windows and a scrap of carpet. There are pieces by John Wayne Gacy and Jack Kevorkian, and plastic baby pants autographed by drag star Divine. There is a bunch of coconuts carved into homely human heads, a courtroom sketch of a curiously square-jawed Patty Hearst holding an automatic rifle and a small cloth rug made by residents of a senior center.

There’s Haitian voodoo art, an Afghanistan war rug, a hand-painted Chinese dentist’s sign and a breezy-looking abstract canvas with swipes of brown and deep red that represents the artistry of Annabelle the Painting Elephant in the Anchorage Zoo.

There is a purse woven by a prison inmate from cigarette packs, a sheet of mysterious tiny markings corralled into neat grids and a wood sculpture, “Pissing Lady” that actually, uh, works. Not to mention thrift-store paintings, a ballpoint pen collection and paintings by Bible-steeped folk artist Howard Finster.

Turner, brother of gallery director Richard Turner, is a middle-age television news editor and arts producer in Berkeley who has been amassing strange stuff for 30 years.

In a statement, he remarks that his aim was never to own the “biggest, the best or the most complete” collection. He only recently began admitting that his passion for poking around swap meets and curio shops makes him a collector--a term more frequently associated in this era of collectibles with someone in grim pursuit of obscure items of value.

Turner, who lived in Southeast Asia with his family as a child, aptly says he views his motley hoard as “ethnographic signposts and moments in popular culture” that are “united only by the personal time-line of the collector.”

Viewed in its mind-boggling variety, Turner’s stuff is partly a study in the odd ways people combine bits and pieces of experience and knowledge, fantasy and reality, to express states of mind we may never fully fathom.

Finster, who bills himself as “man of last days visions,” shows collector Turner swimming in the Amazon River with prehistoric animals. Somebody glued a pancake syrup container in the shape of a log cabin on a painting of a forest landscape.

The objects also vividly underline the everyday intersections of banality and bleakness, faith and humor, obsession and joy. Innocent of mainstream art theory and practice, many of the artists imbue interpretations of images from folklore or popular culture with raw personal feelings.

A number of the pieces deal with fearsome or grotesque situations. Some gleefully promote terror, while others seem intended to allay fear.

Kevorkian’s laser print shows a man hurtling down a passageway toward the viewer, scraping deep gouges in the wall with bloody claws. Gleaming in the blackness are white pinpoints--the eyes of a dimly seen posse of malevolent-looking men. Strange stuff indeed from the man who, against all odds, has devoted his life to assisting the journey down the ultimate dark passageway to death.

A piece of ironwork by an anonymous Haitian consists of an interlacing pattern of sprightly devil heads--as if their evilness somehow could be tamed by decorative multiplicity.

On the Chinese dentist’s sign, cut-away profiles of men’s faces have red, yellow and white patterns of teeth, gums and arteries that are simultaneously repellent and abstractly attractive.

Death takes various guises. From the look of Sam Doyle’s painting of “The First Black Undertaker,” the poor man seems to be preparing a body that hasn’t quit this mortal coil. Elegiac in the extreme, a painting of a coal mining disaster shows a handsome young victim in an upside-down pose reminiscent of the martyrdom of St. Peter. The safety light on his fallen cap symbolically beams into the emptiness beyond the edge of the canvas.

Perhaps the most grimly fascinating thread in the show concerns fallout from the Vietnam War, both in Southeast Asia and in the United States.

A bizarre painting with an inscription by Carl Chappel shows President Ford on a plane, carrying a “Victnanese” baby in a bloody blob of red blanket. Next to him sits an improbably toothy woman in a painstakingly painted mosaic-print dress.

A dancing figure made from a plant root by an anonymous Vietnamese artist appears to have one hand resting on a gun holster.

Baseball jackets with appliques bitterly commemorating the Vietnam War (“When I die I’ll go to heaven because I spent my time in hell / Long Binh Bien Hoa”) hang near a cardboard sign inscribed with the words “Vietnam Vet Homeless Hungry.”

A microcosm of a crazy world, this group of mongrel objects seems to have a magical grip on everyone who comes in for a quick look and stays for a dose of sheer amazement.

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* “Selections From the Collection of John Turner,” Guggenheim Gallery (through Nov. 21) and Argyros Forum, second floor (through Dec. 31), Chapman University, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange. Gallery: Noon-5 p.m., Monday-Friday; 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday. Forum: always open. Free. (714) 997-6729.