Offering refuge amid the retail

Three months into its life at South Coast Plaza, Orange Lounge is still something of a curiosity. But the new satellite of the Orange County Museum of Art -- billed as the first West Coast museum space devoted exclusively to video and digital art and the only operation of its kind in a major retail complex -- has an audience. If mornings are deadly quiet, afternoons bring museum members, art savvy travelers and baffled shoppers who stop to look on the way from Crate & Barrel to Macy’s Home Store. Now and then, the trickle swells to a flood when a college professor shows up with a class of budding artists.

“We’re still in a test phase, but the response has been gratifying,” says Irene Hofmann, the museum’s curator of contemporary art, who oversees the adventurous outpost. “Some people are very surprised by Orange Lounge, but having an attendant on duty goes a long way to help people enjoy the experience, even if they have never heard of video art or new media or if they get stuck.”

Located on the third floor of a relatively new wing of the mall, Orange Lounge replaced the museum’s former satellite that displayed more conventional art in South Coast Plaza’s main complex. With a 2,100-square-foot, rent-free space provided by the shopping center and a $200,000 grant for design and construction from the Segerstrom Foundation, the museum hired Bauer and Wiley Architects to devise a comfortable, art-viewing environment. In the front room, computer stations and plasma screens are equipped with a variety of seating arrangements, including a lounge. The back room is a wide-open space, to be used for video projections and other large installations. The James Irvine Foundation provided funding for programs; Integrated Media Systems contributed technical assistance.

The inaugural show presented video works by Christian Marclay and Diana Thater. On view through Jan. 30 is a component of the museum’s “2004 California Biennial” -- works by Shirley Shor, Kota Ezawa, Mungo Thomson and Amy Franceschini of Futurefarmers, a new media and design collective.

Plans call for four exhibitions and eight other programs each year, including collaborations with the Beall Center for Art and Technology at UC Irvine, a research and exhibition center that explores relationships among the arts, sciences and engineering. Lounge visitors also have access to a new-media study collection linked to the Web and the museum’s video art collection. And there is shopping: catalogs, CDs and new-media products.

“We are still figuring out what this can be,” Hofmann says. Given the ever-evolving nature of the art, that may not change. But one thing is clear: “This really does work in a mall,” Hofmann says. “We didn’t know that.”