‘Curvature’: A Twisting of Attitudes

Installation, a genre that has become immensely attractive to artists in the ‘90s, embraces almost anything that changes a viewer’s perception of a specific space. All you have to bring to some of these pieces is a sense of curiosity. Others require more--more time, more thought, more intuitive leaps.

Seven years ago, Newport Harbor Art Museum (now the Orange County Museum of Art) purchased David Bunn’s 1989 installation, “Curvature (Some Projections).” On view at the museum for the first time, it is visually distinctive but undeniably frustrating.

Bunn, a Los Angeles artist, will be remembered for his amusingly topical installation, “Of Color,” made for the museum’s third “Newport Biennial” in 1991.

That piece contained an idiosyncratic wall map that organized the 69 colors promoted that year by a marketing group according to the geographic implications of their trendy names (“Taos Brown,” “Madras Mauve”).

Viewers had a special perch in the center of the room, like a ship’s railing or a witness stand, from which to observe Bunn’s wry view of global marketing.

“Curvature,” which has been shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, also involves the intersection of geography with other systems of categorization, but without a broadly populist theme.

The main reference point of “Curvature” is the history of modernism in the United States as it intertwines with the life of celebrated art collector Peggy Guggenheim, a member of a Swiss emigre family that made its fortune in the late 19th century with a worldwide mineral empire.

The curving birch walls and the ceiling with recessed lighting that enclose the viewer mimic a famously bizarre gallery space devised in 1942 by Frederick Kiesler, an emigre sculptor and theater and set designer, for Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery in New York. Kiesler, who believed in fusing art media with theatrical and architectural concepts, hung unframed Surrealist paintings on sawed-off baseball bats extending from curved walls.

Guggenheim, niece of copper tycoon and museum founder Solomon Guggenheim, was briefly married to Surrealist painter Max Ernst and is now best known for her collection of 20th century art housed in a palazzo in Venice.

Bunn’s gallery replica replaces the avant-garde contemporary paintings of the original with what appear to be colorful small tiles that vaguely resemble sunspots--or cross-sections of minerals mined by her family’s company.

These abstract images are actually varnished, out-of-focus Polaroids of small sections of a map of the region between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, including portions of Africa, South America and the Pacific Islands.

As suggested by its full title, “Curvature (Some Projections)” plays on the various meanings of “projection.” The images, taken from map projections, literally project from the walls. Viewers make some projections, too, extrapolating meaning from a plethora of data.

Some of the wood brackets holding the photographs on the wall are inscribed with various information: numerical map coordinates, cryptic phrases (“drunk on a pot of paint,” “looks faintly menacing”), names and dates (“Jackson 1943”) and mineral names (“Rhodesian Moonstone”).

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A set of 12 laminated guide sheets--found in wooden bins adjacent to the installation--provides sources for this information, drawn partly from the catalog for the first show in Guggenheim’s gallery.

One guide lists Guggenheim’s collection of African and Oceanic art; another discusses her jewelry collection. Tidbits from other guides include:

* Hitler’s condemnation of abstract artists as deranged;

* Piet Mondrian’s discussion of distortion in art “to evoke aesthetic sensations”;

* Guggenheim’s recollection of an exotic pet, a Tibetan Lhasa apso she received from Ernst, who called it “Kachina” after his Hopi doll collection; and

* Henry Miller’s disparagement (in his novel “Tropic of Capricorn”) of anyone emerging from a “nice warm” womb who would not want to live in a tropical country.

The diverse frames of reference in the piece suggest such topics as the psychology of collecting (Guggenheim was a collector of art, jewelry and romantic conquests); links between African sculpture and Western modern art; and the cross-cultural dialogue created by Jewish artists uprooted from Europe to the United States in the ‘40s.

But the piece also has a more elusive side related to frequent wistful invocations of “primitive” culture in the various texts. Viewing a foreign culture as “exotic” and viewing an object as “aesthetic” involve the creation of a fake mystique, whether it is the Western myth of “carefree savages” or the aura of mystery surrounding modern art.

By turning pieces of an ordinary map of tropical regions into jewel-colored objects and placing them within the context of a famous art exhibition, Bunn slyly “projects” aesthetic value from humble cartographers’ representations of “exotic” locales.

“Curvature” also contains its own brand of poetry. The disconnected fragments of phrases in the piece, and the game-like aspect of looking them up on the guides, are related to the Surrealist and Dada aesthetic.

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More recently, Bunn has made other installations--notably a commission for the Los Angeles Central Library--that are more accessible (and more purely literary) without sacrificing wit and seriousness. But the knotty fancifulness of “Curvature” has its own charms.

Viewers would be better served, however, by wall text clearly explaining that each laminated guide provides different information, since the sheets look identical when stacked in the boxes. A permanent bench to sit on while reading or thinking about the changing exhibitions in the installation gallery also wouldn’t be amiss.

* “Curvature (Some Projections),” by David Bunn, through June 7 at the Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Tuesday-Saturday. Admission: $5 adults, $4 seniors and students, children under 16 free. (714) 759-1122.