Another in a Cresting Wave of Exhibitions

In the 1960s, the arts in America flourished like never before. Boundaries between media disintegrated as the orderliness of the Eisenhower era gave way to freewheeling experimentation. Fun suddenly appeared to be a goal worth pursuing. Pop art, rock music and the pill (not to mention loads of other chemicals) made life exciting. A counterculture was born.

Twenty years later, university departments got in on the action. Art history and studio arts programs ballooned with courses in visual and cultural studies. Restless professors began to treat comic books, B-movies and salt-and-pepper shakers with the seriousness that was once reserved for paintings and sculptures. The results were mixed: Some delivered terrific insights into everyday objects; most presumed that merely focusing on common things (rather than high art) was enough to identify its author as a bona fide anti-elitist.

Another 20 years passed before museum curators jumped on the bandwagon. Paying lip service to art’s pleasures and to the knowledge scholars build around it, they act as if they are most interested in beefing up attendance. Exhibitions of motorcycles, high-end clothing, orange-crate labels and all sorts of cultural ephemera are as likely to be found in museums as are straightforward displays of art. The counterculture may not have died, but its effects are being laid to rest in institutions.

At the Laguna Art Museum, the latest installment of this let’s-look-at-anything approach to exhibition organization is “Surf Culture: The Art History of Surfing,” an awkwardly titled, profoundly confused and poorly presented mishmash of surfboards, paintings, posters, photographs, prints, installations, shrines, videos, mementos, children’s book drawings and a couple of custom cars.

To make room for the sprawling show, the museum has cleared all of its halls, stairwells and galleries. It has extended its hours (10 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily, seven days a week) and increased the price of admission by 40%.

Guest curators Tyler Stallings and Craig Stecyk have taken the shotgun approach to their job. Rather than tracing the historical development of a style, material or design, they have packed every square foot of the building with a little of this and a little of that. Rather than presenting insightful juxtapositions to make a coherent argument, they have simply tossed a laundry list of things together.

Juicy bits abound. Thoughtful overviews are nowhere to be found. Background information is treated no differently from featured artifacts. The only questions the curators appear to have asked are, “Does it have anything to do with surfing?” and “Can we get our hands on it?”

As a whole, “Surf Culture” is the visual equivalent of a run-on sentence: Lacking a goal but animated by hyperactive energy, it takes you past a good number of compelling clauses and far too many pointless phrases.

More than a sport and nothing less than a way of life, surfing provides Stallings and Stecyk with a topic that’s stylish and sexy. They deserve credit for starting to look into it. There’s something to catch your eye in most rooms.

Just inside the entryway is “The Surfite,” a bright yellow dune buggy that Ed “Big Daddy” Roth designed and built in 1964. With a bubble-shaped cab flanked by a cushioned compartment where a matching surfboard rides in first-class comfort, the single-passenger vehicle allows a surfer to travel alongside his trusty board, even when he’s nowhere near the beach.

Upstairs, a handful of 18th and 19th century etchings of wave-riding Hawaiians are displayed at the beginning of a hallway hung with kitschy illustrations, folksy oils on canvas, Sunday-painter watercolors and black-and-white snapshots. All depict some aspect of beach life. Most are banal.

Mounted below them, at about knee-height, are a dozen or so surfboards from the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s. Far more aesthetically satisfying than the pictures, they include a plywood paddleboard from 1948, a beautifully striped model from 1935 and a streamlined board made by Pacific Systems. In the stairwell stands a surfboard owned by onetime Times publisher Otis Chandler, with a swoop of blue paint decorating its redwood, balsa and pine body like an abstract family crest.

Downstairs, other highlights include John Van Hammersveld’s poster for Bruce Brown’s 1964 movie “Endless Summer”; Rick Griffin’s pen-and-ink drawings for “Tales From the Tube,” a 1974 comic book; and Jeffrey Vallance’s photo-documentation of his 1988 audience with the King of Tonga, to whom he presented a royal surfboard and king-size swim fins.

Also captivating is George Greenough’s “The Innermost Limits of Pure Fun,” a 16-millimeter film he made in 1970 by strapping a floodlight-equipped camera to his back and riding the waves on a super-maneuverable short board known as a V-bottom. Five examples of these hang nearby, providing a nice comparison with DeWain Valentine’s “Yellow Roller,” a symmetrical, rainbow-tinted sculpture from 1974 that’s fabricated in much the same way as the boards.

The two best galleries are the smallest. The first juxtaposes fantastic abstract sculptures by Craig Kauffman, Peter Alexander, John McCracken and Laddie John Dill with an airbrush-decorated surfboard from the early ‘70s and a monitor on which plays “Endless Summer.” Using resin, sand and light, the sculptures, which date from 1968-74, transform materials familiar to surfers (and ordinary beach-goers) into mesmerizing objects that go far beyond such mundane references. It’s a rare instance of curatorial clear-sightedness in a show overcrowded with third-rate works, pieces included only because of their subject--or the fact that a surfer made them.

The second gallery features one of Robert Irwin’s discs from 1969. Floating in front of the wall like a futuristic apparition--or some glitch in your perceptual system--it’s accompanied by a magazine clipping that shows the Light-and-Space artist on the beach, holding his hand-painted surfboard.

The least successful spaces are the three largest. In one, 31 surfboards lean against a railing or lie on the floor around it. Dating from 1924 to at least 1963 (two-thirds of their labels had not yet been installed the day the show opened), they could tell a fascinating tale of how materials and designs evolved over half a century. Instead, the sloppy installation encourages viewers to pick out a few favorites and forget about history.

Standouts include Duke Kahanamoku’s weighty plank of redwood in which the letter V has been chiseled; the oldest known production polyurethane board, from 1956; and Pat Curren’s elegant pinstriped model from 1963. Across the gallery, a balsa and redwood board inlaid with abalone suggests comparisons to jewelry and low-riders.

The remaining galleries demonstrate that the wave of surf-inspired art crashed in the early ‘70s. Heavy-handed installations (by Kevin Ancell and Simon Leung) and half-baked paintings (by Sandow Birk and Michael Knowlton) are the visual equivalent of a day when no waves are breaking.

Put bluntly, there is no such thing as “the art history of surfing.” An exhibition about the history of surfing would make more sense, as would one about the art of surfing, or even the relationship between art and surfing. But that would require the curators to make discriminating decisions.

Such value judgments are unpopular in contemporary museums, where the radically democratic spirit of the 1960s lives on as a hollow excuse for all-inclusiveness. That’s what happens when administrators treat museums as if they’re the educational arm of the entertainment industry--and the quantity of paying customers is more important than the quality of what’s on display.

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“Surf Culture: The Art History of Surfing,” Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach, (949) 494-8971, through Oct. 6. 10 a.m.-8 p.m. daily. Adults: $7.