Biennial arrives, and so does a museum

The 2004 California Biennial, which opened Tuesday at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, means to send a message. It offers recent work by 28 young artists from around the state, as any biennial might do; but it also intends to declare that this particular museum, which has been less than vigorous for many years, is back on its feet.

Mostly it succeeds.

With 120 works by more than twice as many artists as were included in 2002, the show is the biggest ever. It fills the entire building, which was closed for renovation last spring. (The Newport Beach firm Bauer and Wiley Architects did the handsome makeover.) Several video works are also being shown in the newly refurbished and recently opened auxiliary space, the Orange Lounge, in the South Coast Plaza shopping mall six miles down the road in Costa Mesa.

Reopening in expanded quarters with new art by California artists suggests that OCMA is positioning itself to be the go-to museum for the region’s art. And since California -- especially Southern California -- has been producing arguably the most significant American art since the 1990s, the prospects are tantalizing.

The level of sustained accomplishment is unusually high for a biennial. More than half the exhibition is satisfying, while several surprises also turn up.

First, a few facts and figures are worth noting.

The average age of these artists is 31. The show, selected by curators Elizabeth Armstrong and Irene Hoffman, goes out of its way to emphasize recent art by younger artists. OCMA is pointedly affiliating itself with the new.

Cosmopolitanism is also a standard. Only nine of the 28 artists were born in California. A like number were born abroad -- Denmark, England, Germany, Italy, Israel, Japan, Korea, the Philippines and Portugal. The rest moved here from around the United States; like most of their foreign-born counterparts, they typically came for one of the state’s celebrated art schools, then stayed.

Los Angeles is the epicenter of new art. Nineteen of the artists are based in L.A., with the rest working around the Bay Area. L.A. is a powerful magnet for talent, with an array of significant studio and exhibition possibilities more dense and more readily available than elsewhere. The Orange County Museum is taking good advantage of its location as a satellite of its northern neighbor.

The show is strongest in video, so-called “new media” (digital forms, especially) and performance-related genres. Painting and sculpture are hit-or-miss.

Joel Tauber’s extraordinary video projection chronicles the metaphysical underpinnings of a human urge toward flight. Shown twice in L.A. since it was completed last year, the half-hour documentary retains its capacity to enthrall. The video, a record of a foolhardy quest to fly without the aid of a mechanical device, metamorphoses into an eccentric and touching spiritual journey.

Tauber brings the quizzical passion of an amateur to a thorny physics problem. There’s a soapbox derby element to the steady refinement of his outlandish improvisations. In our age of science, with its exaltation of rational discipline, Tauber’s elegant refusal of both results in the biennial’s most unforgettable work.

In a related vein, Simon Evans, who is apparently self-taught as an artist (he’s a former professional skateboarder), maps the social universe in an ad hoc manner. His cartographic drawings of heaven and the world, as well as his neurotic lists of “all that’s wrong with sex” or 1,000 types of smiles, are assembled from layers of torn and cut paper obsessively taped together. They’re like composted thought, yielding fertile mulch.

Karl Haendel’s drawings deftly insert the artist’s hand into the machinery of mass reproduction. He exploits the pencil’s immediacy as a sign of artistic thought.

A graphite copy of a textbook reproduction of a famous Caspar David Friedrich painting is faithful to the 1842 image -- tellingly, a shipwreck frozen in an ice floe. But Haendel’s dramatic change in color and size takes on significance when you notice a white line meandering down the center. The reproduction he copied was torn in two, and he was true to that pictorial wreckage. The drawing affirms the power of acute observation.

If the biennial endorses drawing -- Josephine Taylor’s handsome if rather more conventional drawings employ monumental scale and physical distortion as psychological similes -- painting doesn’t fare as well. Given the abundance of excellent recent painting in Los Angeles, the imbalance is notable.

Strongest are Kim Fisher’s strange, crystalline abstractions, which view the world as if from a vantage inside a cut and polished gemstone, and Brian Calvin’s pictures of androgynous youth in ambiguous landscapes. (The primeval blankness of Calvin’s Pacific Ocean seascape, “Almost Golden” is inexplicably poignant.) By contrast, the usually reliable Mark Bradford stumbles with an enormous collage-painting that evokes a weathered billboard, albeit to little effect.

Sculpture is also weak. The exception is Sean Duffy’s “International Playboy,” which greets visitors at the front door.

A 1993 Geo Metro automobile has been cut apart and propped up so that when first you see it the sculpture looks like an ordinary car. When you walk around it, the form visually falls apart. From behind, the props holding it together are all exposed. Duffy’s sculpture deconstructs a modern icon, offering a witty rejoinder to car-culture anthems.

The show is strong in video and new media, including Marco Brambilla’s haunted evocation of the hypnotic excitement of violent video games. Mungo Thomson’s tour de force, “The American Desert,” brilliantly articulates qualities of grim vacancy and stunning beauty in both popular culture and art culture -- just by digitally removing the characters from old Chuck Jones cartoons. Maleri Marder’s video of fitful nudes asleep during daylight hours feels eerily invasive, like a daydream inside a nightmare.

In Kerry Tribe’s split-screen “Here & Elsewhere,” the tracking camera appears to steadily erase its own images. The perceptions of an astonishingly self-possessed 10-year-old girl seem to collapse in on themselves, creating an exquisite metaphor for the fragility of time and space.

Shirley Shor’s “Landslide” projects a dazzling grid of colors onto a floor sculpture, evoking a fluid map in which territory is continuously occupied, given up, taken over, ceded and finally homogenized. And Kota Ezawa turns early 1970s film clips into strange computer animation; the social and political activism of musician John Lennon, critic Susan Sontag and artist Joseph Beuys is rendered bittersweet.

In a 30-foot-wide, billboard-size painting hung across the front of the museum, the artist known as Rigo 23 dramatically announces social and political questions around contested landscapes. Blaring orange letters against a black background cross populist street graffiti with official government signs to declare: “We buy scalps.” No art museum, regardless of high-minded aims, stands outside the larger social structure.

Ruben Ochoa also mixes establishment and populist norms -- albeit in a witty reversal. He’s set up a mobile art gallery inside his father’s old tortilla delivery truck. The interior of a 1985 Chevy van is outfitted with a blond hardwood floor, pristine white walls and halogen track lighting. This elegant white-cube gallery space, complete with an office up front in the driver’s seat and a storage area out back, gives new meaning to “vanguard” art.

Undeniably, the show would have more art-world impact if it were in Los Angeles or even San Francisco, but no museum in either city has seen fit to fill the need. So what will the reinvigorated show actually mean for OCMA?

The answer depends on the place it comes to occupy within a larger exhibition program. The better the program, the more resonant the biennial will be.

The California Biennial began 20 years ago, back when the Orange County Museum of Art was still called the Newport Harbor Art Museum -- and ranked as arguably the most adventurous small museum in the country. Then it was a modest, quick-hit survey of young artists and new art in a state whose cultural profile was exploding fast and on the rise.

Now it is reborn as a large, substantial overview within a mature art scene. The museum lost its way in the transition from “Newport Harbor” to “Orange County,” but this show suggests it might be back on track.

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2004 California Biennial

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Where: Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays, closed Mondays

Ends: Jan. 9

Price: $7

Contact: (949) 759-1122