Satiric Art in Store

If someone gave you a fabulous gift, like a diamond ring, or a new car or an entire art exhibit, you’d probably want to show it off to the world. That’s just what the Laguna Art Museum will do with a display of 124 works recently donated by Peter and Eileen Norton.

The Los Angeles-based couple distributed 1,000 pieces from their collection to institutions across the country, and the Laguna Art Museum received the largest gift of all.

The exhibition, “ReCharge--L.A. Art in the Early ‘90s,” features, as its centerpiece, a complete recreation of the 1991 “Store Show,” an installation that, when it was shown at the Richard/Bennet gallery in Los Angeles almost a decade ago, commented on the relationship between art and commerce during the recession.

Since the Nortons bought an edition of every piece in the original “Store Show,” they were able to donate the entire installation.

Tyler Stallings, who joined the museum in September, recreated the show because the pieces are better viewed as a whole concept rather than individual works, he said. “They--as a whole--represent a particular sensibility among the young artists who took part in the Los Angeles scene during the early ‘90s,” he said.

“The show symbolized how people were seeking different ways to get their artwork noticed. I thought it would be interesting to recreate that spirit.”

Visiting “ReCharge”--the first show curated by Stallings--is a bit like going to the supermarket. Some works are displayed on shelves along with the cardboard boxes they came in, and the store-like feel to the exhibit is no coincidence.

In the original show, prices--ranging from $19.95 to $295.95--were displayed prominently, creating an atmosphere akin to a Pic ‘N’ Save of art. To emphasize the ironic nod to “art as commerce,” the show’s program was a mail order catalog, and many works--sculptures, photography or prints--were made as multiples.

Some of the works on the shelves are common objects, such as a bottle of shampoo, or a tube of paint. “The titles are what determine the meaning,” Stallings said.

For example, Mark Heresy’s bottle of green shampoo carries a label describing its contents as “Political Ideology Remover.”

Richard Ralph Roehl’s “Money Brush” has been dipped in a money shade of green paint, and bears the insignia of a dollar bill on its handle. Perry Vasquez’s “Gertrude Stein Autograph Baseball Bat” is simply that: a baseball bat “autographed” by Stein.

As Stallings writes in his introduction to the exhibit:

“The store was less about a reaction to artistic standards and more a response to the recessionary art market of the 1990s . . . the artists . . . responded with their products/artwork that humorously engaged in a dialogue between art and commerce.”

Although the store is central to the exhibit, the gift from the Nortons also features other work.

Thaddeus Strode’s collages and ink drawings make references to popular culture as well as formal painting but with the hallmark humor of the store artists.

In selecting which works to donate, the Nortons, known for an eclectic collection of contemporary art, summoned their curator Susan Cahan and Tom Solomon, an independent curator and former gallery owner, to help them cull their collection piece by piece.

Creating comprehensive gifts was important to the collectors, Solomon said. He originally showcased many of the artists in his now-defunct Fairfax garage in the early ‘90s and chose the Laguna Art Museum as recipient of these works because of its continued emphasis on young, contemporary California artists.

“My task was to put together thematic packages. I researched institutions and collections, talked to curators about how the gift would fit into the museums program. Every gift was unique to each institution,” Solomon said. “Laguna has over a number of years been very committed to showing new contemporary California art, as well as older Southern California art.”

*

The gift shows how a particular sensibility coalesced in the Los Angeles scene in the ‘90s.

“It was important in one of the gifts to show California artists in a concentrated way,” Solomon said. “The Nortons are committed to buying not one, but in depth . . . They bought the whole ‘Store Show.’ We wanted to keep it intact [and] I felt [the gift] gave a nice overview of the artists.”

The title of the show, “ReCharge,” refers to the years from 1990 to 1993 when the recession hit Southern California. Galleries closed en masse, forcing artists to decide whether to stay in Los Angeles, which was coming into its own as an art hub, or go to New York, where they ostensibly had more opportunity to sell their art.

Many artists, however, decided to stay and exhibit their art in noncommercial venues such as bedrooms and garages.

“What came out of it was a blurring of artists, dealers, artist-run spaces, commercial galleries, and critics, many people wearing all of these hats, in an effort to recharge the L.A. art scene,” the curator of “ReCharge,” Tyler Stallings, writes in his introduction to the exhibition.

“The low overhead and the crisis actually created more experimentation,” Stallings said of the period.

Kenneth Riddle, who has two pieces in “ReCharge,” was a founder of Bliss, one of the many artist-run spaces that opened as a result of the crisis.

Establishing noncommercial venues gave the artists an opportunity to make satiric references to art as commerce, he said.

“In a strange way, the recession gave people freedom,” Riddle said. “There was a lot of energy . . . In New York, people were still doing much more formal painting.” In Southern California, the freedom afforded by the recession made the artists more daring in their use of materials, he said.

Riddle’s two pieces on display are part of the Norton’s gift to the museum but not part of the original “Store Show.”

They are mounted on the wall, opposite from the recreated store. Both works are of mixed material.

One piece substitutes a steel plate dripping in lead for a traditional canvas. Its “frame” is made of red Lego. Another piece resembles an amalgam of washed-ashore materials, but is mounted on the wall, fusing painting and sculpture.

*

Bolton Colburn, chief curator at the Laguna Art Museum, describes the Norton gift as a seamless extension of the museum’s collection of California art from the ‘80s and ‘90s.

“We’re a regional museum, we’re interested in [displaying] a Western aesthetic, articulating a California vision,” Colburn said.

The gift also fits with the museum’s threefold mission to display historical works, like the plein-air painters; cutting edge contemporary art; and popular art, such as tattoos and surf culture works.

“That brings in mixed audiences and everybody gets exposed to everybody else,” Stallings said. “They’ll come here to see [one exhibition], and hopefully walk through the other exhibits. It’s a way to educate.”

Above all Stallings hopes visitors will enjoy what gifts are essentially about--surprise. “By expanding the boundaries of what art can be they [the artists] create the unexpected for the museum-goer, and that tension creates a level of humor.”

BE THERE

“ReCharge--L.A. Art in the Early ‘90s” continues through March 26 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Tom Solomon will give a lecture on the selection of the Norton gift, and Bennett Roberts will discuss L.A. art in the early ‘90s at 7 p.m. March 23 at the museum. Museum hours: Tuesday to Sunday, 11 a.m to 5 p.m. Admission: $5; $4 for seniors and students; children 12 and younger admitted free. The first Thursday of every month admission is free and the museum is open from 5 to 9 p.m. (949) 494 8971.