Artistic Impressions

Can there be anything more sadly predictable these days in the art world than juried exhibitions?

One thing you can bet on is an abundance of really bad work: shrill, hackneyed, half-baked, poorly presented and unrelated to the issues and approaches that make contemporary art viable today. A reviewer can be hard put to find more than one or two pieces worthy of comment.

As I toured “Left, Right and Center,” the annual juried show at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, and “Centered on the Center,” the big annual open-call (nonjuried) exhibition at the Huntington Beach Art Center, it occurred to me that maybe, for the great mass of emerging artists, the presence of a juror is actually beside the point because the work simply isn’t at a level that makes professional discrimination worthwhile.

It is possible that high-profile jurors attract a greater proportion of relatively sophisticated entries from artists eager to be seen by someone who might offer their career a major boost. That’s what the Laguna Art Museum Heritage Corp. seems to be banking on by selecting Henry T. Hopkins, director of the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, to jury a show of Southern California artists opening in April.

But the most able younger artists today generally don’t bother with juried shows. What matters to them is being seen with other artists who share a vital aesthetic, not being buried under an avalanche of mediocrity.

At the same time, curators putting together surveys of up-and-coming artists’ work depend overwhelmingly on word-of-mouth and studio visits, rather than on juried exhibitions, which contain the same sort of work they see in the unsolicited slides that pour into curatorial mailboxes every day.

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Despite the undying myth of the undiscovered genius, artists with that special something in fact are rarely overlooked, unless they deliberately cultivate obscurity.

All of which firmly relegates the juried show to a secondary realm. It serves primarily as a pat on the back for artists who make the cut and a source of frustration for those who don’t.

Actually, the OCCCA show tries to have it both ways, with a pathetic salon des refuses--a slide carousel stocked with the 83 submissions rejected by juror David S. Rubin, curator of 20th century art at the Phoenix Art Museum.

The viewer can imagine Rubin, faced with a tide of dismal offerings from artists in several western states, trying to devise a mechanism for selecting enough work to fill the space. By titling the 42-piece show “Left, Right and Center,” he acknowledges the outspoken agendas of many of the contributors, who rail against war, sexism, racism, poverty, greed and the deprivation of constitutional rights.

The problem is that the artists inevitably state the obvious without leaving the viewer with a fresh perception or a striking new image. Equally awkward is the substitution of dreary earnestness for the sort of open-ended, ironic and wryly self-aware approaches that have become a hallmark of truly contemporary art.

The better work in this show--like Jeff Martin’s photograph, “Million Man No. 2” (a pale-skinned man in the crowd at the Million Man March in Washington pokes his head, turtle-like, inside his jacket), Suki Berg’s “Self Portrait Triptych II” (photographs of a tense, aging body) and Kelly Phillips’ wall piece about free speech--operates in a more low-key way.

Phillips has a knack for presentation that eludes most of the others. In “Oral Harvest,” a grid of tongue-like dried fruits, she offers an ironic meditation on the literal consequences of “biting your tongue.”

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The Huntington Beach Art Center takes a different approach to juried exhibitions: It doesn’t have them. The prospectus for “Centered on the Center”--open to artists throughout Southern California--states that up to two pieces of artwork will be accepted from everybody “until the galleries are full, on a first-come, first-served basis.”

The result is a 300-piece-plus bonanza of awkwardly amateurish, glitzy, commercialized, blatantly ripped-off, studiously traditional, wildly misconceived and pathetically confused work. The fun of this show, however, lies in its sheer diversity and mass (the works are neatly stacked on the wall, giving them the no-frills look of a thrift store display).

Many of the artists who bypass stodgy traditional styles seem overly enthralled with slick, content-free imagery or purely decorative values.

The same camera-toting Mark Sonday who saw the abstract potential in a narrowly cropped line of cigarette burns on a concrete bench also confusingly submitted a shot of a pudgy club kid wearing a silver-painted T-shirt. A duo who bill themselves as Davis and Davis add a rare jolt of irony with huge photographs of stiffly posed dolls in garishly simulated natural environments (“4-H Boy,” “Heidi”).

Among the painters, Sue Hutchins adds brief, awkwardly appealing texts to her paintings of dogs seen from odd angles, and Bonnie Brady surmounts problems in rendering the figure with the quiet honesty of a frowning, wheelchair-bound woman and a thin-lipped man (“Helen” and “Jack”).

Stylistically, the three-dimensional works are clunky retreads, even James Nickell’s timely summation of Loretta Sanchez’s congressional victory over Bob Dornan (“B-1’s Bomb”).

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All in all, there is no single piece in this show that would make a curator’s heart beat faster. But by being so artlessly inclusive, “Centered on the Center” is in the best position to accomplish the central role of the juried show: giving more artists a chance to show the public their work. The absence of a juror also means the absence of “losers”; it is truly a win-win situation.

For venues that prefer to host a higher-quality juried exhibition, however, the answer may be to add a separate invitational show. By asking jurors to request works from their favorite up-and-coming artists, the messy democracy of public submissions could be leavened by a glimpse of the sort of visual insight so many strive for and so few obtain.

* “Left, Right and Center,” through Jan. 25, Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, 208 N. Broadway, Santa Ana. 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday. Free. (714) 667-1517. “Centered on the Center,” through Feb. 2, Huntington Beach Art Center, 538 Main St. Noon-6 p.m. Tuesday-Wednesday, noon-8 p.m. Thursday, noon-9 p.m. Friday-Saturday and noon-4 p.m. Sunday. $3 general admission, $2 students and seniors. (714) 374-1650.