Hall of Mirrors

Bay Area artist Robert Cremean is an angry man. In fact, judging by two recently published collections of his writings, he seems to have been angry for more than 30 years at an art world that doesn’t take him seriously enough.

This state of affairs might be of little local concern, except that the Orange County Museum of Art is displaying Cremean’s massive sculptural installation, “Vatican Corridor: A Non-Specific Autobiography,” which has been part of the permanent collection since 1980.

Constructed from 1974 to 1976, the piece is part of a vast project Cremean calls the “Narcissus Pentology.” Each of the 20 8-foot-tall laminated sugar pine columns that form the corridor serves as a niche for a life-size male nude figure carved from the orange-hued wood.

In creating this stylized monument to himself as the embodiment of an Everyman who has achieved self-realization, Cremean wished to evoke Renaissance ideals of proportion and harmony.

As you run the gantlet of these figures, they become progressively more (or less, if you’re coming from the other direction) anatomically complete. Opposite figures mirror each other, except that the body parts shown in the round on one side of the corridor (which Cremean calls the “outer wall”) are concave on the other side. This “inner wall” is supposed to represent a more evolved state of being.

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Truncated arms on the inner wall extend toward the figures on the other side, as if futilely attempting to embrace mirror images of themselves. The net effect is at best enigmatic, at worst hopelessly in thrall to a rigidly predetermined set of private beliefs.

Cremean, now in his mid-60s, has spent much time in Italy. In copious notes on the preparatory study for the piece, which the museum also owns, he mentions a bleak period in Florence in 1961, when he felt like “a snail between shells.” But the Vatican connection remains unclear. Is he imagining that in some better world, his labors would be part of the papal art collection?

If he were, it wouldn’t be surprising. Both his turgid, privately printed book, “The Tenth Arch”--written, he notes, as “an extension of the ‘Corridor’ itself”-- and the only slightly more digestible “Seven Lectures” strike the reader as products of a highly self-absorbed sensibility.

“The Tenth Arch” consists of parables, dialogues (mostly between “the Eye and the I,” or between “Artist and Other”) and other miscellaneous writings, organized according to an elaborate system seemingly designed to puzzle even the most devoted reader.

As if desperate to inherit the mantle of a Thomas Merton or, who knows, a Lao-tze, Cremean strains to produce simple yet timeless philosophical nuggets about the nature of culture in the modern world. But his writing style sounds like outtakes from a bad 1930s biopic or New Age-tinged academic jargon.

“Compromise! You must compromise like the rest of us,” the Other--obviously a Philistine representative of the art world--says at one point. “What right have you to this god-like stance?”

Presented as a work of art building on “Vatican Corridor,” this book is as murky and authoritarian as its predecessor. While Cremean’s defenders say he was bravely holding out against a tide of vapid experimentalism, the real problem with his art is not the figurative form it takes.

Rather, it is his seeming confusion between establishing a private, largely therapeutic, system of belief and making work that is novel, visually compelling and intellectually challenging--as opposed to bullying.

He seems hell-bent on viewing the artist as a sort of Charlton Heston figure handing down the Truth, while contemporary art stresses the importance of multiple coexisting interpretations and the role of the viewer’s perceptions in “completing” the work.

“Seven Lectures,” Cremean’s other recent book, is a compilation of talks he gave from 1964 through 1985 at various museums and educational institutions, in which he rails against a culture he views as no longer properly appreciative of the artist’s role as creator.

Clinging blindly to a model of art as the embodiment of timeless virtues, Cremean huffily denies that artists are products of the tensions and values of their times. His whipping boy is the Culture Maker, his epithet for skeptical commentators who lack his positivistic view of humankind. Amusingly, the intensity of his rage weakens only his own position.

Renouncing the base appetites of the contemporary art world, Cremean has declined to show his work for several decades. But cash has come his way by other means.

In 1991, the then-59-year-old artist became the beneficiary of an unprecedented deal between a patron and the Fresno Art Museum. For the rest of his life he will receive what museum officials have described as “a significant annual salary,” in return for the donation of his archives, most of his personal art collection and all future work (excluding commissions). The museum plans to build a gallery and library to house these materials.

Yet in a strange way the Fresno deal is pure Cremean: a monument funded, in the Renaissance manner, by a patron, and dedicated to a monumental ego frozen in time.

* “Vatican Corridor: A Non-Specific Autobiography,” through Sunday, Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Tuesday-Sunday. Admission: $5 adults, $4 seniors and students, free for children under 16.

“The Tenth Arch” (printed in three limited editions, from $45 to $1,500) and “Seven Lectures” ($25) are available from Manuscript Press, Box 372, Tomales, CA 94971. (707) 878-2420.