Seriously, Dude

Every year around this time, in between their usual encounters with truth, beauty, scholarship and donor-cultivation, the museum directors of North America can be seen facing another humbling challenge: How can their indoor spaces compete with the great outdoors on a sunny summer day?

The answer this year, if you’re the Laguna Art Museum, is to paddle with the prevailing tide. That is, to mount a show on the cultural implications of surfing. Beginning today, the museum is doing just that and betting heavily that it will draw visitors far beyond its usual audience.

During the run of “Surf Culture: The Art History of Surfing,” through Oct. 6, the Laguna museum will stay open seven days a week instead of six, will operate from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. instead of 11 to 5, and will bump its adult admission fee from $5 to $7.

If all goes as planned, the museum will match its previous record attendance for a single show, which is about 6,000 paid admissions (or 12,000 visitors, if museum members and school groups are included). On the other hand, if prospective visitors decide they would rather admire the genuine article--the surf itself, which foams and laps about 300 feet from the museum door--the curators are doomed.

Either way, the record will show that this was the summer that museum director Bolton Colburn and his team took a plunge. Drawing on major sponsorship from surfwear manufacturer Quiksilver, the small museum is emptying its 10,000-square-foot space, then filling it with 90 surfboards, two automobiles, two dozen oversized and weapon-bearing hula-dancer dolls, about 40 paintings, and more than 150 photographs and other objects. The museum is also publishing a 240-page companion book featuring essays along with reproductions of artworks and artifacts.

“We’re interested in ideas that are brought about by surfing and notions that arise in someone’s head when they see someone surfing,” Colburn said recently, as boxed and swaddled art and artifacts accumulated in the museum’s closed galleries. The crux of the show, Colburn said, is locating those points where the worlds of art and surfing overlap.

Among the ideas in play: the evolution of surfboard design during the last century (they got shorter and lighter); the economic impact of surf-inspired fashions (growing); the permutations of surf kitsch (myriad); and the many artists who have appropriated surfboard forms and materials (like polyurethane), which were themselves appropriated from the aerospace industry in the 1950s.

If it’s beginning to sound like the museum is burying this sunny subject in sober scholarship, consider the opening words of the companion essay contributed by University of Hawaii anthropology professor Ben Finney:

“During the summer of 1952, while working as a lifeguard in San Diego....”

Artists represented include Craig Kauffman, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin and Sandow Birk, and many works tend toward the playful and deceptive. Under the first category comes Birk (a surfer and son of Seal Beach), whose 1999 painting “North Swell (Washington Crossing the Delaware)” shows a flotilla of wet-suited surfers, arranged to echo the famous Emanuel Leutze painting of George Washington and company heroically paddling.

In the deceptive category is “Aloha Oe,” a collection of motorized hula dolls made of cast resin by artist Kevin Ansell two years ago. The dolls, which were part of a summer 2000 Surf Trip show staged at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (and later that year at Track 16 Gallery in Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station), wear grass skirts and bikini tops like the usual dashboard-dwelling hula girls, but stand life-sized and carry guns, grenades and other weapons of revenge. A closer look reveals bruises around their eyes and needle tracks on their arms--hints, writes curator Tyler Stallings, of Yankee imperialism and the erosion of indigenous cultures.

Competing with the beach has never been easy for California museums, although, as artists and curators admit, it has occasionally been fun.

At the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, for instance, the museum’s Krichman Gallery has long been problematic for curators because it’s so pretty to begin with: It’s dominated by windows with a postcard view of La Jolla’s coastline. And so in 1999, museum director Hugh Davies invited artist Robert Irwin to create a site-specific work there.

Irwin responded with an installation called “1nternational 2nternational 3nternational 4nternational,” removing three rectangles of glass, two from corner windows and one from the central window. The idea was to violate the line between interior and exterior, to bring outdoor sounds, smells and other sensations into the spare, subdued space of the museum. But another factor, Davies said, was that Irwin was fed up with people walking into that gallery, pointing to that window and exclaiming, “Now there’s the real art.”

The beach, said Meg Linton, executive director of the Santa Barbara Contemporary Art Forum, “isn’t just summer competition. It’s competition all year round for us. It’s difficult. In New York, you go to museums to be warm during winter, and then you go to museums to be cool during summer.”

Author and critic Peter Plagens takes this idea and sprints with it in “Sunshine Muse,” his 1974 history of West Coast art from 1945 to 1970. One of art’s principal roles, he says, is to “mitigate urban ugliness. America’s greatest art center (New York) has been ugliest longest; Los Angeles’ most important art appeared (1962-68) only after the city suffused itself in smog and trash architecture.”

Conversely, taking into account the way Santa Barbara looks most of the year, the Contemporary Arts Forum uses summery strategies all year long. In 1998, the forum did a skateboard design show, “Skatelore Expo,” that was so popular with younger audiences, Linton said, that “when I first got here in 1999, there were still kids coming up and asking where the skateboards were.”

In summer 2000, the exhibition space took another tack in bringing the Southern California landscape indoors. In “Dustin Shuler Targets Transportation,” the forum presented a Los Angeles artist’s vision of the freeway system as a modern Serengeti, its vehicles as beasts. The show included such artifacts as the hanging pelt of a Volkswagen bus, parts of a small plane nailed to a wall and a Cadillac fin sculpture. Writing in The Times, critic David Pagel dismissed the show as “more a souvenir stand than an art exhibition,” but it drew more than 4,000 visitors to the smallish space in eight weeks--by the forum’s standards, a blockbuster.

For the Laguna museum, “The Art History of Surfing” represents an accumulation of influences. The clues begin with director Colburn, who was raised in California and educated at UC San Diego, and won a national amateur surfing competition in 1977 at age 22. He came to the Laguna museum as a curator in 1989 and became its director in 1996.

But even before Colburn became director, the Laguna museum had a reputation for taking pop culture seriously. One of the institution’s best-remembered and most-praised shows during the last decade is its 1993 “Kustom Kulture” exhibition on Southern California car customizers. In fact, Colburn confesses, the surfing exhibition was conceived as a sibling to the car-culture show, then delayed as other projects popped up and the difficulties of assembling a worthwhile surf show became clear.

“If you grew up here or were going to school here, the two things that may have affected you, in terms of culture, are the surf culture and the car culture,” Colburn said. “It’s a little bit different than growing up someplace else.”

Besides Colburn and curator Stallings (who was the museum’s former curator of exhibitions when preparation of the show began but has left the museum), the surf show’s collaborators include guest curator Craig Stecyk (who co-wrote and co-starred in “Dogtown and Z-Boys,” a 2001 film about rebel skateboarders in 1970s Venice Beach); anthropologist Jacqueline Bryant; graphic designer David Carson (another erstwhile surfer whose credits include Raygun and Beach Culture magazines, along with several books); and essayists Finney and Deanne Stillman (whose lively profile of the original Gidget reveals that the first female surfer in the public consciousness was really a nice Jewish girl who grew up to marry a Yiddish scholar and college dean).

The exhibition is scheduled to travel to the Contemporary Museum of Honolulu in January 2003 and the San Jose Museum of Art in August 2003. Colburn said he’s still looking for other possible venues.

With its companion book, extended hours and inflated price, the Laguna surf show is expected to cost about $120,000. That puts the show among the costliest produced by the museum, which counts about 1,800 members and about 30,000 visitors yearly.

But even so, says Colburn, the curators realized early on that their ambitions were too broad. As a result, they backed away from ideas of tracing the history of surfing and its sociological context, Colburn said. After all, California has half a dozen institutions devoted to straight-ahead surfing history, including the International Surfing Museum just up the coast in Huntington Beach.

Instead, the Laguna show’s mission became an exploration of how surfing’s image evolved and how surfing fashions, materials and ethos found their way into art and society at large.

The oldest piece in the show is from the days of Captain Cook in the Hawaiian Islands: a 1784 sailor’s etching of surfers, borrowed from private collector Dan Pincetich of Sun Valley, Idaho. The 90 surfboards, which will mark a path through the show like vertebrae in a spine, have been borrowed from three dozen private collectors, mostly in California.

The show also notes an art-surf overlap with particular Southern California resonance: In May 1968, Andy Warhol and his band of film collaborators came west and made “San Diego Surf,” a film about surfers in La Jolla. But Warhol was shot and nearly killed the following month, and the film, his last, was never released. A 22-minute documentary, “Andy Makes a Movie,” tells the tale, and on Aug. 11, the Laguna museum’s Surf Culture Lecture Series will feature veterans of the La Jolla shoot, including filmmakers Robert Smith and Aaron Sloan.

As for artifacts of surfing’s commercial culture, there are plenty, from logos to advertisements. Although surfwear maker Quiksilver’s name is atop the list of sponsors, Colburn is quick to note that “we certainly didn’t want their influence on the curatorial part of the show. They were not involved in any way in that.” The show includes advertising images from Quiksilver as well as Gotcha, another surfwear maker, and Gucci, neither of which are sponsors.

With so much tempting material floating around in pop culture, Colburn acknowledges, it’s been a challenge to keep the show from lapsing into a big bunch of unorganized neat stuff.

“The subject is immense, a lot more immense than we’d thought it was going to be,” Colburn said. “I know that this isn’t the end-all and be-all of exhibitions like this. But I hope it opens people up. This is the first time a lot of beach-lifestyle people will be introduced to a museum, and we want to give them a reason to come back.”

*

“Surf Culture: The Art History of Surfing,” Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. July 28-Oct. 6. 10 a.m.-8 p.m. daily. Adults: $7. (949) 494-8971 or www.lagunaartmuseum.org.

*

Christopher Reynolds is a Times staff writer.