Fight the system; search for beauty

Abject art enjoyed its moment in the spotlight in the late 1980s and early ‘90s. Across the country, artists zeroed in on life’s ugly underbelly, making raw, nervy works whose lack of formal niceties evinced their contempt for middle-class blandness, fake suburban contentment and saccharine-sweetened hypocrisy.

By the mid-’90s, the sharp edges of down-and-out slacker art had worn dull. Beauty, fueled by the demand that art change the world and not merely represent it, came to the forefront. For the rest of the decade, art dedicated to sensual pleasure, formal refinement and sharp-witted sophistication defined a hip sort of hedonism. Its enemy was not the self-satisfied complacency abject art had attacked but a more mean-spirited atmosphere of cultural conformity in which intolerant self-righteousness and hatred left little room for messages more complex than sound bites or bumper stickers.

At the Orange County Museum of Art, “Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art and Street Culture” combines the best aspects of both moments to capture the tenor of our times. The sprawling, often raucous show, organized by guest curators Aaron Rose and Christian Strike for San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center, features paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, videos, prints and installations by more than 40 artists, designers and filmmakers, most inspired by skateboarding and the antiauthoritarian attitude that accompanies it.

Their rambunctiously unpolished pieces fill five large galleries and a rabbit warren of smaller rooms and halls, spilling over into the museum’s entryway, patio, cafe, bookstore and parking lot. They create the freewheeling atmosphere of a rollicking party -- not the snobby sort, but a come-one, come-all celebration that’s big enough to interest a range of visitors and so well stocked with surprises that individuals can still make intimate discoveries.

The exhibition’s heart and soul reside in the four largest galleries. Each contains works by four, five or six artists. Painting predominates and steals the show with its whiplash fusion of formal sophistication, big-picture accessibility and gritty urgency. Highlights include works on canvas, panel, paper, plywood and drywall by Thomas Campbell, Ryan McGinness, Margaret Kilgallen, Os Gemeos, Clare E. Rojas, Phil Frost and Romon Kimin Yang.

Campbell flaunts his facility with multiple media in a 3-D wall relief, abstract photographs and spunky paintings depicting landscapes populated by world-weary folks wearing costumes that resemble flightless birds and supersize carrots. His 18 paintings, hung in a tight cluster, look like the punk offspring of Lari Pittman’s more delicately orchestrated but equally hospitable paintings.

McGinness borrows more directly from Pittman, as well as Jim Isermann, Kara Walker and Beatriz Milhazes. On adjoining walls he has painted a symphony of symbols and hung six panels and three canvases over them. On the walls, his crisp, hard-edged shapes rarely overlap. In the paintings, they pile up like decorative wrecks. Together, the components of his installation turn generic signs and advertisements into a 2-D Tower of Babel with bodily impact and verve.

Hung side-by-side, Kilgallen’s six big paintings mimic the format of comic strips to tell stories that spin off in many directions while always conveying stubborn willfulness.

Installed in an exterior courtyard visible through floor-to-ceiling windows, Gemeos’ mural painted on standard sheets of plywood plays off construction-site graffiti. Its fat, cat-eyed figures lumber though a surprisingly lovely landscape filled with Christmas lights and spray-painted fish hanging from ghostly trees. In Rojas’ mix-and-match wall-works, Russian folk art and avant-garde Constructivism intermingle promiscuously, blending poignancy and gallows humor in the blink of an eye. Frost’s allover abstraction nearly covers a wall. Like a Philip Taaffe painting from the wrong side of the tracks, its boxy protrusions, broken bits of mirrored glass and leafy patterns recall crudely carved woodblock prints and unexpectedly elegant tiki kitsch. Similarly, Yang’s solitary painting on unstretched canvas harks back to Matisse, via the abstract patterns found in ancient art from the South Pacific.

The exhibition falters when its focus shifts from the objects artists make to the lifestyles they lead. Just inside the museum’s main entrance, an animatronic mannequin holds a can of spray paint as its arm moves back-and-forth over the wall. In the parking lot, his doppelganger stands in an overturned delivery truck, doing the same thing. Made by Barry McGee and Josh Lazcano, the robo-taggers bring none of the risky vitality of graffiti into the institution.

The same goes for Ed Templeton’s roomful of snapshots, Larry Clark’s hallway filled with similar memorabilia and Terry Richardson’s ridiculously narcissistic pictures of his penis. Meant to illustrate the wild vitality of lives lived as if they had nothing to lose, these tedious works rehearse cliches already worn thin.

The exhibition’s more formally astute works embody the thrill of urban life more fully: its dynamism, primitive rhythms, polyglot chaos and sense that anything could happen, at any minute. They are participatory, not voyeuristic.

The first two words of the show’s title attest to the compressed complexity of its best works. If you find the combination of beauty and defeat confusing, think of its opposite: ugly winners. In the age of abjection, ugly winners gloated. Today, gloating is gone, but not because graciousness has taken its place. Instead of ostentatiously displaying the spoils of victory or simply taking the gains and running, ugly winners now appear to find no satisfaction (and certainly no pleasure) in their triumphs -- which seem to be poisoned by vindictiveness. Many behave as if they are victims, their speech seething with resentment and anger for anyone who disagrees, doesn’t fit in or refuses to tow the line.

Such toxic emotions are nowhere to be found in “Beautiful Losers,” which is driven by a renegade optimism and street-smart rebelliousness. Its best works are far less topsy-turvy than the world they inhabit. Immanently reasonable, they argue that when winning is as ugly as it is today, losing is a far better option: It leaves room for beauty, independent thinking and the freedom essential to both.

This outlook also registers the melancholy that accompanies shattered dreams, broken promises and failed ideals, all of which make up a large part of contemporary life. Such sentiments can be traced back to Courbet, Manet, Van Gogh and Gauguin. Their formally inventive works also pack a social punch felt far beyond its immediate context.

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‘Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art and Street Culture’

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

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays and until 8 p.m. Thursdays

Ends: May 15

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

Contact: (949) 759-1122; www.ocma.net