As seen in the eye of the beholder

RALPH RUGOFF has a message for all you lazy art viewers: Get to work.

Not that he would state it so rudely. The director of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, a forum for presentation and discussion of contemporary culture at the California College of the Arts, is a gentle persuader. He’s a brainy, shy person who slips provocative ideas into exhibitions and catalog essays and lets them develop as they will.

His trademark group shows explore such themes as sight gags and slapstick, therapeutic values attributed to art and proposals for national monuments, but they always demand audience engagement.

“The main current in my curatorial work is putting a focus on the viewer’s role,” Rugoff said, walking up a metal staircase in CCA’s industrial-style facility south of Market Street and into a gallery where his latest show, “A Brief History of Invisible Art,” offers little to see but much to ponder. “It’s your experience, but so much of it is what you bring to it.”

Some visitors who bring nothing poke their heads through the door, see the nearly vacant gallery and assume that the show hasn’t been installed. Those who are attuned to conceptual art -- and comfortable with the notion that art can be more than what meets the eye -- find the gallery quite full. There’s a sculpture by Michael Asher made of a column of air propelled from a box on the ceiling and a ghost of Andy Warhol on a pedestal once occupied by the artist. Paintings by Bruno Jakob were rendered in water that has evaporated. A snapshot of a film crew is all that remains of a movie by Jay Chung, shot with no film in the camera.

“I want to get people to think of themselves as collaborators when they come to an exhibition,” Rugoff said. “I love entertainment, but I don’t think art should be treated as entertainment. Big museums are in a jam these days because they are trying to sell tickets. Sometimes they end up selling their shows as if they were entertainment, as if you could come as a passive spectator. This is a show where you have to come as a reader, as an interpreter. You have to think.”

Rugoff has been shaking up apathetic viewers for 15 years, the last five at CCA, where he runs the exhibition program and works with visiting curators. Well known in contemporary art circles, he has gained increasing respect over the years, but a hefty monetary award recently catapulted him to a new level of fame. Rugoff is the inaugural winner of the Ordway Prize in the arts writer-curator category. Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo won in the artist category. They each received an unrestricted award of $100,000.

The biennial prize was established by the Penny McCall Foundation, which supports contemporary artists, arts writers and curators. Named for philanthropist Katharine Ordway, the new award recognizes creative individuals in midcareer who have made significant contributions to contemporary arts and letters. Rugoff was chosen by a panel of arts professionals appointed by McCall Foundation Director Jennifer McSweeney. He prevailed over two finalists from New York, Lynne Cooke of the Dia Art Foundation and David Rimanelli, an independent critic and curator.

“His curatorial practice has redefined the concept of thematic group shows,” McSweeney wrote in an e-mail response to a query about Rugoff’s selection. “Not only have his methods inspired others, but he has become a specialist in creating the unexpected. Ralph has staked out very independent territory by consistently exhibiting the work of international artists who are under the radar screen of the American art establishment and presenting their work in unorthodox ways. Additionally, he illuminates the work through witty and original essay. His curatorial work has developed its own particular vernacular.”

Winning the award was “an incredible surprise,” Rugoff said. “I think of it as being struck by lucky lightning. The odds are about the same. But it’s fantastic. It will provide an opportunity to travel more than my budget allows. These days traveling is a big part of knowing what’s going on.”

A West Coast transplant who was born in New York City in 1957 and spent his youth there, Rugoff has been curious about what’s going on in the arts for most of his life.

“I was always interested in art,” he said, “but I was also very interested in literature and film and psychology. I went to Brown University and majored in semiotics. In the ‘80s, people thought that meant you must be able to write about anything. But I was primarily interested in film when I was in college. After that, I spent a couple of years making a documentary film about Laotian people called the Hmong who were resettled in Rhode Island after the Vietnam War. They had tribal customs from living in remote mountain villages, but they had been relocated in urban areas. The film is called ‘The Best Place to Live’ because they felt that where they had come from was the best place to live.”

Rugoff moved to Los Angeles in 1983, but not to pursue a career in the film industry. The attraction was friends and the ambience.

“The ‘80s boom had started, and New York felt like the Hollywood of the art world,” he said. “When I visited L.A. I was really attracted to the idea of a major city that wasn’t New York. As I walked around New York, it felt culturally claustrophobic. Even today when you get off the plane in L.A., you feel this sense of freedom. Somebody else might feel it as a huge void, but you have places like the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which you don’t get in New York. You can do different kinds of things in California.”

He established himself as a freelance journalist, writing Sunday pieces for the Herald Examiner and contributing to many other publications, including The Times, L.A. Weekly, Artforum, Parkett and Vogue. His subject matter varied, but as he met more and more artists he began focusing on contemporary art. One of them, Mike Kelley, jump-started his curatorial career.

“I gave a lecture on pathetic art, a term I had made up, to a class at Art Center,” Rugoff said. “Mike didn’t attend the lecture, but he heard about it and said I should curate a show on it.” Kelley suggested the show to dealer Rosamund Felsen, who agreed to provide a space for it in her gallery, then on La Cienega Boulevard. She presented “Just Pathetic” in summer 1990 with works by 11 artists including Kelley, Raymond Pettibon, Cady Noland, David Hammons and Jeffrey Vallance.

“The work in that show did something that is still a crucial part of my interest in art,” Rugoff said. “It gave you this really contradictory experience. It could make you feel sad, but it could also be hilarious -- the idea that you could feel amused but also kind of compassionate at the same time. The art made you realize that we are made up of contradictions. That’s one of the great things art can do.”

In his review of “Just Pathetic,” Times art critic Christopher Knight found the “blunt aesthetic of failure, embarrassment and thumping degradation” a refreshing antidote to the usual “aggrandized images of resounding success” and deemed Rugoff’s curatorial debut “a low-key gem.”

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Curatorships come calling

RUGOFF organized exhibitions at Felsen’s gallery the next two summers and took on other curatorial projects, always writing essays in accompanying publications. That work led to an arts journalism fellowship, which took him back to New York from fall 1996 to spring 1998. By then, his wife, British writer Denise Bigio, was pregnant and wanted to give birth in England. They moved to London, where Rugoff co-curated a show, “The Greenhouse Effect,” with Lisa Corrin at the Serpentine Gallery and the Natural History Museum and looked for a steady job as a journalist.

Nothing opened up, but suddenly -- within a month’s time -- he was invited to apply for three curatorial jobs, all in the U.S.

“I just thought, ‘Something is calling me,’ ” he said. “I am not getting staff jobs at newspapers, and curatorial work is what I prefer doing.”

Two of the employment queries were from museums, which Rugoff declined to identify. The third was the California College of the Arts, seeking a director-curator to succeed Lawrence Rinder, who had accepted a curatorial position at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

“This was most appealing to me because it had the most possibility of creating a new program and implementing ideas I was interested in,” Rugoff said. “It also had the advantage of being a curator and director.” Founded in 1907, the school operates out of its historic home in Oakland as well as the relatively new branch in San Francisco.

Rugoff works in “an ethos of art production,” as he puts it. Exhibitions are planned well in advance, but the program allows for spontaneity and last-minute changes. At any given time, visitors are likely to see a four-ring circus of exhibitions, including a “bulletin board” student project in the lobby and a visiting artist’s show under the auspices of the Capp Street Project, a long-standing program formerly run by another nonprofit exhibition space.

CCA’s exhibition program also has legs. “Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast and Contemporary Art,” a collaborative project, traveled to the Seattle Art Museum, the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art and the Vancouver Art Gallery in Canada in 2003 and ’04. “Monuments for the USA,” featuring proposals by an international slate of about 65 artists, appeared at White Columns in New York in December and January. A sprawling exhibition of new work by Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn, co-curated with the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, debuted in Boston and will appear at CCA March 10 through May 13.

“There are not many jobs where I could do what I am doing here,” Rugoff said, reeling off the benefits of working in a small, freewheeling institution. But the curatorial component is what he likes best, partly because it allows him to explore relationships between art and life.

“One of a curator’s roles is just being a bridge between the artist and the public, trying to create the most interesting way for people to access what the artist is doing,” he said. “One of the great effects of art is that it makes you connect things that you don’t normally connect. Ideally, that’s also what you do as a curator.”