Collating Bits of Throwaway Society

It’s not surprising that collage, pieced together with bits of paper from diverse sources, is Michael McManus’ preferred medium. At 45, he has spent a chunk of his life in a rambling, quixotic search for meaning and purpose.

Not that he would put it that way--unless he added a lopsided grin and a twinkle of embarrassment for sounding so highfalutin.

On a recent afternoon, McManus, best known locally for a stint as curator of the Laguna Art Museum in the late ‘80s, holds forth on topics from his first encounter with the paintings of Joseph Albers to the wonders of the Zippo lighter.

Beginning at Peter Blake Gallery--site of his second-ever one-man show--the monologue reluctantly wound down hours later in the apartment McManus shares with his wife, Stephanie. Paging through an album of their vacation snapshots, he mocks the way he used to lecture his Irvine Valley College art appreciation class about the Taos pueblos.

“Ah, the structural integrity of the native form . . .” he intones. “And then you go back there and look at it, and, man, they’re in 1997 too! Just like us. With all those signs that say, ‘Fried bread, five bucks.’ ”

McManus’ Southwestern souvenirs include rubber coyote stamps and cactus stickers, which find their way--along with bits of junk mail, kung fu comics and the embossed stamps of defunct oil companies--into collages on paper and wood.

Alternately criticizing society’s ecological indifference and celebrating its infinite variety, he is loyal to a highly finished, craft-conscious aesthetic.

To make his collaged paintings, McManus painstakingly affixes layers of stickers to wooden panels and locks them in place with lengths of transparent fibrous paper imported from Asia, adding a finishing coat of varnish.

This obsession with presentation and permanence seems unusual for someone who gleefully reminisces about the anarchic performance-art pieces (students feigning illness, running a speak-easy, playing a xylophone for three days straight in a stairwell) that dominated his graduate school art department at UC San Diego in the late ‘70s.

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McManus says his “urge to make things” comes from a need to have “something as a shield between myself and the world. [My art] is mine, but it’s not me.”

For someone who has happy memories of high school metal shop, helping his father restore old houses and repairing the neighbors’ broken window sash weights for $10 a pop, making art is also about what he calls “being in the shop.”

The biggest influence on McManus’ outlook, artistic and otherwise, seems to have been the workaday, no-nonsense culture of his native Cleveland, where he was the second-eldest of five in a devout Irish Catholic family.

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Growing up so close to Detroit, he dreamed of designing cars, like his cousin Willy. At the Cleveland Art Institute, McManus studied with Viktor Schreckengost, one of the godfathers of American industrial design. But he found the waste involved in the business dismaying: For the first class project, students designed protective disposable packaging for lightbulbs.

“I’d come out of the ‘50s,” McManus says, “and we had glass milk bottles that were washed out and cafeterias where they washed the plates. That always seemed eminently sensible to me.”

When reps from Chrysler--the major employer of design department students--broke the news on campus that no more jobs were available, that was the last straw.

Meanwhile, McManus was in the eye of a proto-punk musical storm. Along with pals from high school art class, he haunted clubs where the Velvet Underground played, and he made industrial-grade noise with tools and sheet metal at early concerts of the Electric Eels, an “art terrorist” band whose singer was McManus’ brother, Dave E.

The new anti-music was a thrill for a disaffected kid who’d been thrown out of parochial school for his interest in atheism. In fact, McManus might have turned his back on art--and education--had it not been for the Velvets’ bassist, Sterling Morrison.

“Sterling was sort of just hanging around after sets,” McManus recalls. “A lot of [the talk] was, should we go to art school or should we pursue music? He encouraged me to stay in college, particularly in art school. I took great heart from that.”

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Thinking of changing his major to architecture, McManus hitchhiked to Arizona in the summer of 1972 to work for visionary but hard-driving Italian designer Paolo Soleri, who was using unpaid student labor to build Arcosanti, a soaring structure intended as a self-contained city for 5,000.

McManus admired Soleri--for whom he continued to work on other breaks from school--for his opposition to planned obsolescence and disposability. But he decided that he didn’t have the temperament to be an architect.

So he changed his focus at the Cleveland Institute to painting and photography. The faculty was unfashionably dedicated to geometric abstraction and the mainstream tradition of early 20th century modernism--which became a lasting influence on McManus’ outlook.

There remained the nagging question of making art with a social purpose. UC San Diego advertised its graduate school of art with a cheap mimeograph (“it looked like a hoax”) and had a faculty that included Helen and Newton Harrison, whose ecological projects focusing on water use were about as far as one could get from commercial art.

McManus won a fellowship to UCSD and also wangled a job as the Harrisons’ studio assistant. The working relationship lasted a decade, until he moved to Laguna Beach in 1987.

In recent years, McManus--who left his job at the museum in 1990, when Charles Desmarais became director, but sits on the exhibition committee--has found a personal happiness that had eluded him.

Once a heavy drinker, he has given up booze. His third marriage is a dream. His usual assortment of odd jobs has been replaced by three teaching positions, including a visiting professorship in the Cal State Fullerton painting department.

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And then there is the work, where he pays homage to modern art--from the elegant calligraphy of Robert Motherwell to the particular shade of blue paint made famous by Yves Klein--while simultaneously employing the throwaway imagery of comics and gum wrappers and the sensuous qualities of foil and handmade paper. It’s the vision of a guy whose early rage and restlessness have mellowed into a playful embrace of life’s possibilities.

* “Michael McManus and His Modernist Media Massage,” through Saturday at Peter Blake Gallery, 326 N. Pacific Coast Highway, Laguna Beach. 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Wednesday-Sunday. Free. (714) 376-9994.