Human Spirit Infuses ‘Life’

It’s a safe bet that the Laguna Art Museum has never displayed so much richly provocative and fiercely intelligent contemporary art in its 80-year history as the work that fills the main-floor galleries right now. But it won’t be there forever.

“Life Lessons: How Art Can Change Your Life,” a group of works loaned by two Southland collectors--Judy E. Vida, a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, and her husband, Stuart Spence--closes Jan. 3.

This is emphatically not a “trophy” collection of blue-chip names (though some are celebrated conceptual artists). What makes the group of 140-odd pieces so memorable is its quirks--odd pieces by unknowns, wonderful early pieces from the ‘70s and an emphasis on soul-searching questions of identity and the nature of creativity.

The “life-changing” aspect of the show’s title represents Vida’s passionate belief that art can, as she has put it, “illuminate our inner lives.” Yet the collection contains many coolly distanced pieces that tend to operate more on the intellectual level of a clever puzzle than in a full-bodied, emotional way.

By mixing these works with naive or unfashionable art that wears its heart on its sleeve, the Spences achieve what might be called a collectors’ symbiosis. Somehow, in this context, even the most self-conscious postmodernist acquires a keenly human dimension.

Artists’ attempts to define who they are and what they’re trying to do--expressed with permutations of rueful irony, desperation or dry humor--account for a big chunk of the work in this show.

Scott Geiger’s title for his vintage-style abstract painting of gray rectangles lined up like featureless paintings on a wall, “Squares Masquerading as Artists,” suggests fraudulence. “Squares” in the colloquial sense are unsophisticated, conservative--the opposite of the artist’s supposedly hip persona.

John Boskovich’s shtick--adding his phone number to paintings of maritime disasters and serene landscapes by anonymous amateurs--projects a paralyzing self-doubt (co-opting somebody else’s wishful “masterpiece”) coupled with the sort of anonymous self-promotion found in restroom graffiti.

In a lighter key, John Baldessari’s photograph “Choosing Green Beans,” (in which the artist’s finger points to a lineup of progressively less crooked vegetables), wittily mimics the arbitrariness of aesthetic decisions, including the ones made in everyday life.

Works dealing with sexual roles tend to register with a swift one-two punch. Erika Rothenberg’s “Secret Penis” is a pair of pantyhose--goofily packaged to resemble a phallus--that promise to make the wearer feel equal to men. Elizabeth Pulsinelli puckishly appliques a pair of bean-bag chairs (“Stacked”) to resemble huge breasts.

Occasionally a text-and-image piece spills beyond ironic self-awareness into raw emotional territory.

By combining a blurry, blown-up snapshot of someone in a beagle costume with a plaintive handwritten description (“needs medication”), Chris Wilder imbues “Missing” with the awkward, frantic concerns of real-life domestic tragedy: a child, or perhaps a mentally impaired adult, who hasn’t returned from trick-or-treating. Disguised as a cartoon animal, the missing relative seems another species, unknowable and forever out of touch.

Most of the memorable work exploring

deeply personal themes cuts quickly to the bone with purely visual means.

Meg Cranston’s “Unconsolable,” a piece of pink satin whose center has been rubbed so raw that it is shredded, is a startlingly visceral image of emotional crisis.

The embroidery hoop that encircles and stretches the fabric of Jill Poyourow’s fragmentary embroidered faces, “Mother With Child,” suggests the dual strands of intimacy and needy tension between mother and baby.

Corey Stein’s “The Balancing Act” might be overlooked in a more mainstream group of contemporary works. But in this charged setting, her sculpture combining a bird trapped in a neck brace and a piece of driftwood with tiny, cord-bound figures adrift on it is almost unbearably poignant.

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Other work is concerned with politics gone sour, from the assassination of Bobby Kennedy to the doomed lives of South American emigres desperate to reach the U.S. border.

While some of these pieces are by artists acclaimed for their irony and wit, Mark Heresy’s “Father”--a large 3-D swastika made from Coors beer cans and an American flag--has the obsessively crafted, self-righteous shrillness of amateur work. Still, it seems at home here as an example of personal voodoo, an attempt at exorcising familial demons. As an accompanying text explains, Heresy’s father, a former member of Hitler Youth, imported his twisted obsessions to the U.S., where they simmered, marinated in alcohol, beneath the veneer of suburban daddy.

* “Life Lessons: How Art Can Change Your Life,” through Jan. 3 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday (closed Christmas Day and New Year’s Day). $5 general, $4 students and seniors, free for children younger than 12. (949) 494-1530.