I hate critics who spend their review talking about how the curator should have provided an experience more along the lines of what they expected. My personal take is they should shut up, examine the curator's intent, and then tell readers whether they delivered on that intent. But I'm going to go against my own critical dictum and eat my “do as I say and not as I do” cake, talk about the successes (and failures) of “The Avant-Garde Collection” at the Orange County Museum of Art, and then tell you why I wish it had been something different.
Curators Dan Cameron and Fatima Manalili reach back to the original use of the word avant-garde (a French military term for the first wave of soldiers to go into battle), programming work by artists visionary enough to be at the vanguard of art movements over the past century. As a history lesson, it's hard to beat, curated with taste and thoroughness, vast—approximately 100 pieces, all from the museum's permanent collection—but how relevant is it today?
To be fair, Cameron and Manalili, in their introductory notes, acknowledge the knee-jerk reactivity of many past art movements (and, by association, some of the artists within those movements), with Cameron saying in the press release, “There is no longer an avant-garde today.” That statement would be a rousing call to arms if it weren't utter bullshit and contradicted by the curator's programming: 10 percent of the work exhibited is from within the past 15 years. While none of the modern artists represented seems to be part of a specific movement, certainly the work qualifies as avant-garde—at least in the mind of the curators—if included in a show bearing that title?
Standouts include William Powhida's overtly political A Post Minimalism (2013), accompanied by his tongue-in-cheek take on the 1 percent AND commercialized art in the painted proposal notes; Nikki Pressley's 2010 Word and its dueling creation myths from the Bible and African folklore; Tom LaDuke's sculpture Private Property (2001), its landscape of corporatized human flesh (cast from his own body) invaded by mini power lines. All three artists, provocative to some degree or other, fit the more common usage of avant-garde, with the representative ghosts of long-buried childhood/motherhood projected on the walls by Jennifer Steinkamp's computer animation Moth 5 (2012), certainly qualifying as innovative in my book.
Not to say that the old stuff here isn't great: the Goth treats of Bruce Conner and Gordon Wagner's ageless assemblages, dating back to the 1950s and 1960s; Vija Celmins' oversized acrylic-on-balsa-wood pop art Eraser, with its lettering faded where a large hand might have held it, the edges smoothed and discolored from use; Llyn Foulkes' Abstract Cross, any potential figure on it obliterated with black paint and angry brushstrokes of gray; Frederick Hammersley's 1963 oil-on-linen Come, its black circle embraced by three light blue circles on an otherwise blue canvas, like a dream of a post-Ferguson future; Ed Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Keinholz's mixed-media collaboration End of the Bucket of Tar With Speaker Trail 2, an anti-war assemblage of photographs and a coffin-sized bathtub holding what looks like charred detritus, possibly bone fragments, with barely audible classical music playing through the hiss of a broken speaker; the sweet contrast between the illuminated serenity of Robert Irwin's Untitled (#2220) cast acrylic (1969) and the bleak, swirling morass of his Untitled canvas from 1960; Stanton Macdonald-Wright's Untitled (Vase of Flowers) (1925), the recognizable flowers literally framed by a glaucomic blur of kaleidoscopic rainbows, and then by the gilded frame itself; the unsettling, sexually charged moans and howls emanating from Tony Oursler's installation Come to Me; or Andy Warhol's 10 serigraphs of Chairman Mao as a bedazzled drag queen.
Ironically, it's the last piece (two decades old, yet feeling as fresh as yesterday) I saw that made me wish the curators had offered us more danger and newer artists, instead of just rehashing work from the museum's dusty vaults, a lot of which anyone who has visited over the past few years would have already experienced. It's Kim Dingle's 1994 Priss Room Installation, its two smug-faced toddler girls standing in a crib, above their heads a dartboard with a nipple for a bull's-eye, darts jammed into the wall around it. The floor around them is littered with disemboweled toys, open SKOAL cans and dirty diapers and the meticulous wallpaper behind them covered with scribbles and soiled with fecal matter.
If the avant-garde was the first rush of soldiers into the arms of death, then I applaud curators Cameron and Manalili for memorializing them. But now it's time to bury them, pat down the dirt on their graves—despite my love for their work, the Ferus Gallery gang would be a great start—and then put a shoulder into looking for the angry little anarchists toiling away, smearing shit in obscurity.
Dave Barton has written for the OC Weekly for over twenty years, the last eight as their lead art critic. He has interviewed artists from punk rock photographer Edward Colver to monologist Mike Daisey, playwright Joe Penhall to culture jammer Ron English.