This is totally off the wall

Ten years ago, it was fashionable for artists to make works about their social and sexual identities, for curators to exhibit these broadly autobiographical pieces, and for critics to write about them in glowingly overblown terms. For a while, it seemed as if all it took to be taken seriously as an artist was the ability to display one’s desire to change the world, or at least to point out a few of the many things wrong with it.

Like all fads, the one known as “identity politics” passed, but not without doing some real good: transforming the lily white precinct of the art world into a somewhat more colorful -- and occasionally more interesting -- place.

At the Laguna Art Museum, a disorderly, complacent exhibition travels back to this moment. But “Whiteness, A Wayward Construction” ignores too much of what has happened over the last decade (in the visual arts and the world at large) to be much more than a specious footnote to the historical record.

Organized by guest curator Tyler Stallings and sponsored by the Fellows of Contemporary Art, the 30-artist, themed show has the presence of a burp: An unexpected reminder of a partially digested feast, it provides nothing nutritious, leaves a bad taste in your mouth and fails to whet the appetite for more.

The ideas Stallings aspires to address are important and timely. Unfortunately, the relationships among whiteness, power and invisibility are better articulated by well-documented sociological analyses and thoroughly researched studies than the preposterously convoluted exhibition he has organized.

On numerous wall labels and in the handsome catalog, Stallings makes claims that are wildly out of sync with the works.

The first of the show’s three sections, titled “White Out,” includes three tabletop sculptures by Kelsey Fernkopf. Each combines porcelain tchotchkes, plastic fruit and dollhouse furniture in 3-D collages that are whimsical monuments to absurdity. In one, a horse sticks out its tongue and balances a Goodyear tire on its back while standing atop a pear-packed cornucopia. Miniature toilets appear in “La Brea Faberge” and “Saws All,” along with another horse, a bathtub, a sailing ship, a refrigerator and an out-of-scale daisy.

Fernkopf’s goofy baubles are funny enough to bring a smile to your face. But what’s truly laughable is the wall label, which reads, “The toilet, as a pedestal, represents the conduit by which products and information are consumed and then excreted and, as such, symbolizes ideas of purification and cleanliness and the desire for sanitizing history.”

If you believe that, you’re one of P.T. Barnum’s suckers born every minute. Or, to paraphrase Freud, sometimes a toilet is just a toilet.

In any case, the statement shows Stallings making more leaps in logic than an inspired artist lost in his labors. The curator’s everything plus the kitchen sink explanation of Fernkopf’s works mimics their linking of disparate things in funky clusters that resonate visually. But unlike the artist’s amusing figurines, what Stallings is saying never gels.

The show’s inability to focus on a manageable issue or to sustain an intelligible line of inquiry is reflected in another wall text in the first section. Mounted next to James Casebere’s benignly haunting photographs of two dramatically lighted interiors and a shadowy exterior, it states: “Casebere creates dreamlike, tabletop models of specific man-made institutions and objects, which he then photographs. The subjects are ones that discipline and punish our bodies and/or our minds, which have now been internalized and appear in our dreams.”

If you think that the subject of Stallings’ last sentence gets lost in wayward grammar, you’re right. In art, ambiguity is an asset. In an exhibition’s supporting documentation, it signals neither complexity nor sophistication. Sometimes muddled thinking is just muddled thinking.

The second section, titled “Mirror Mirror,” includes four wall-mounted viewing devices that resemble the eyepieces of specially designed periscopes or strangely shaped binoculars. When you look into each of Tim Oberst’s pieces, an internal arrangement of angled mirrors allows you to see a part of your body you ordinarily wouldn’t, like the top of your head, the bridge of your nose or your temples.

The experience isn’t especially interesting. It’s not all that different from catching your reflection in a rearview mirror or revolving door. But by this time, you suspect that the wall label will more than make up for the works’ boring shortcomings. It doesn’t disappoint: “Oberst makes devices that allow the viewer to see a part of his or her head not usually seen, creating a literal and symbolic experience which examines how people project and portray themselves both privately and publicly.”

It is true that art creates experiences. But it’s wrong to treat these experiences as if they were examinations of social facts. Art must do something interesting to your body before your mind even begins to interpret or analyze the experience. Collapsing one into the other neutralizes both. And it’s just plain nutty to pretend that an optical device that gives me a closeup view of the cowlick in the middle of my wavy locks promotes soul-searching self-reflection.

The third section, titled “The Graying of Whiteness” carries on where the others leave off: using art to illustrate ideas more clearly articulated elsewhere. It’s not about aging but aims to account for the hybridized nature of human identity.

Kammy Roulner’s set of six computer-enlarged baseball cards sums up the bathos that runs throughout the show. Each player’s surname is a color, such as Bud Black (a white man) and Frank White (a black man), not to mention Chris Brown, David Green and Vida Blue. “This simple gesture,” Stallings states in the catalog, “evokes the history of racism in sports and also the manner by which people are identified or misidentified by their names.”

Sometimes art is so powerful it makes your jaw drop. Rarely does a wall label leave me speechless. In any case, at a time when the best rap musician is white and the best golfer black, Stallings should be able to find a work of art that’s a little more nuanced than Roulner’s.

As a white man, I’m often ashamed and sometimes morally outraged by what’s done in my name. As an art lover, I’m just plain embarrassed by “Whiteness.” Its half-baked ideas and ridiculous claims represent the last gasp of the academy’s attempt to drag the vague mishmash of cultural studies out of the classroom and into the museum, where fuzzy sociology and remedial artistry merge in a shameless farce.

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‘Whiteness, A Wayward Construction’

Where: Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach

When: Daily, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.

Ends: Through July 6.

Price: $7 adults; $5 seniors and students; free, children 12 and under

Contact: (949) 494-8971