Time Traveling Through the Laguna Art Museum: Abstracts, Monkeys and UFOs

Wandering the three exhibitions on display through May 15 at the Laguna Art Museum -- Extract; Landscape and Figuration; and Brad Coleman: Reproductions -- it would be difficult not to be moved in some unexpected way. Unless your eyes are closed.

Extract: Developing Exhibitions Inspired by the Collection occupies the central floor. Focusing on underrepresented artists, Extract offers a motley collection of small, one-person shows of interest for future exhibitions. The works span more than 80 years, dipping into various art movements and counter-movements, from the dynamic symmetry of Elanor Colburn to the abstracts of Oskar Fischinger and Ruth Eaton Peabody, from the monkeys of George Brandriff to the totemic designs of Peter Krasnow, from the hard-edge paintings of Florence Arnold and Jules Engel to the conceptual high modernism of Chris Wilder and the “light sentences” of Laddie John Dill. At its core, Extract reflects California’s historical dialogue with its artists, as well as the museum’s own idiosyncratic past, dating all the way back to the Laguna Beach Art Association, founded in 1918.

The oil paintings by German-born Oskar Fischinger alone make a visit to the museum more than worthwhile. Known for his 1947 animated film Motion Painting No.1, in which he recorded the creation of an oil painting on glass one brushstroke at a time over the course of 9 months, he also invented the Lumigraph color organ, which was featured as a “lumichord” in the 1964 film The Time Travelers. His paintings here track the progression of his lifelong passion for the visual expression of color in motion.

Criss-Cross, an early piece from 1939, features a cascade of never-enclosing triangles, seemingly manic yet persistently harmonic in its dimensions. Around this time Fischinger was also designing the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor sequence for Walt Disney’s Fantasia, but he quit without credit after the studio allegedly made his designs more representational. You might wonder if Criss-Cross encapsulates Fischinger’s frustrations with Disney or the film industry in general, because from this point forward he increasingly turned to the canvas as one of his preferred creative channels.

Standing in front of Fischinger’s paintings, your eyes go back and forth between rectangular grid-like pieces, such as Woven Square (1946) and Abstractions 243 (1963), to works focused more on circular patterns, such as the red-orange-yellow orb in Satellite (1959) contrasted by the X-shaped arrangement of smaller white orbs floating around a halo of blue space, the spirallic ratios of Frequencies (1960) and the cellular blobs overlapping/blending densities in Abstractions 460 (1963).

At least three of the artists featured in Extract, all born east of the Mississippi, share Laguna Beach as the place of their passing: Brandriff (1890-1936), Colburn (1866-1939) and Peabody (1898-1967).

Brandriff moved to Orange County in 1913, attended the USC College of Dentistry and opened his own practice in 1918. Then, after 10 years, he abandoned dentistry to devote his life to art. Most of his paintings in Extract mark a shift from the more impressionistic beach scenes and landscapes, such as White Wash (1930), to a new arena of social consciousness through allegorical still lifes.

In the middle of Brandriff’s show stands a plaster statue by Lora Woodhead Steere called Monkey (1930). The image of this unmoving statue reappears in many of the Brandriff paintings nearby, creating spatial tension between the thing-in-itself (3-D plaster) and its two-dimensional oil reincarnations. Suppliant to Mars (1930) depicts the statue of a monkey sitting cross-legged, propped as if looking over a statue of a Japanese woman who rests on her knees with a wash bowl, propped as if staring up at a bust of Mars, the Roman god of war, who is propped as if staring off at new frontiers.

In Futures (1934), painted the same year Brandriff became president of the Laguna Beach Art Association, the monkey is sitting on a table, its shadowy figure sinking into the background. The monkey is propped beside an empty bottle—its label turned away—staring down at a naked newborn who is sinking into the palm of a used and empty medical glove. Considering Brandriff's tragic suicide two years later, the image of an abandoned infant seems especially poignant.

The 1930s brought about similar artistic transformations in the works of Colburn and Peabody. Colburn’s paintings evolved from post-impressionist, such as Mother and Child (1925), to pieces more inspired by her study of Dynamic Symmetry, a proportioning system that calls for the tight organization of compositional space, as seen in Primitive Mother (1929), which bares the confluence of pre-Columbian sculpture, Mexican muralists of the 1920s and Colburn’s reverence for the theme of mother and child.

In Peabody’s The Cook Book (1925), a woman is seated at a table next to an empty bottle of wine, a glass full of milk, an empty bowl. She holds a closed cookbook in one hand. Her other hand is on her hip as she contemplates her day, or what she might make for dinner, or what she would rather be doing. By the mid-1930s, Peabody discovered what she would rather be doing as she began a series of pure abstract works. Influenced by artist Frederick John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky (1885-1974) and psychologist Louis Danz, Peabody began to see the lines, forms and colors of her abstracts (“neural structures,” according to Danz) as extensions of her own nerve patterns.

“Subject matter is purely personal and I feel no need for it,” Peabody said in 1939. “My interest is in form, color and emotion.”

The work of Krasnow (1886-1979) shows a similar, albeit dramatic, shift from representational to abstract. Aside from Krasnow’s name being on the tag alongside his Untitled self-portrait (1923), there are few indications that this is the same artist who later created the masterpiece K-3 (1949). Like Peabody, abstract forms seemed to have liberated Krasnow from the confines of representational conventions.

“My paintings subscribe to no period or school,” he said in a 1975 interview. “Their visible concept may ostensibly reveal characteristics of Time and Place, but the roots reach deep into ethnic strains of ancient culture through which the archetype emerges as indicator of the universal and eternal urge toward creation.”

Wilder’s conceptual piece UFO Sighting, Chroma Key Case #17, from a series created in 1989, consists of a wooden stool in front of a giant canvas that has been smoothed over in chroma key green paint. Basically it looks like—and could function as—a green screen on which visual effects, such as a hoaxed flying saucer, might be projected.

Born out of his involvement in the Los Angeles punk music scene of the late 1980s, as well as his experience with UFO subcultures and his father’s belief in flying saucers, Case #17 reflects Wilder’s skeptical view of the phenomenon, implying that any experience which cannot be verified is illegitimate, and is therefore a kind of psychosis of modern mythology.

In interviews, Wilder has cited the inconclusive findings of the government-sanctioned Project Blue Book as inspiration for the series.  Rather than specifically addressing the authenticity of pictures released to the public by the government several decades ago, Wilder seems to extend such allegations to the whole of the UFO phenomenon. In naming Case #17 after the infrared paint used for the construction of composite images in science-fiction films (i.e., “chroma key”), the implication is that all UFO cases originate in a similar, two-dimensional and fictional fashion: staring into a greenscreen void of the human imagination through which sightings are made possible merely by the trickery of human perception, wish fulfillment, delusion or intentional hoaxes.

One is left to ask: Is the piece suggesting that the mysteries of the UFO phenomenon are impossible to penetrate, or that there are no mysteries to penetrate? If the former, then the piece fails to incorporate even the existence of a mystery. If the latter, then the concept presupposes an absolute, that UFOs are never objectively real. And if that’s the case, Case #17 could perhaps be seen as a reaction to—or an attempt to reason beyond—some primordial fear of the unknown.

For me, when staring into the green from behind the stool—according to the closed-in feedback loop of Wilder’s design—nothing open-ended or mysterious arrived. Instead, all I could picture was a stool and a bright greenscreen, confronted by the same empty canvas as every other person, without exception. This “without exception” became the loud undercurrent of the piece, which successfully conceptualizes the artist’s perspective more than it makes some sort of epistemological statement.

In contrast, Laddie John Dill’s Untitled, created shortly after he graduated from Chouinard Art Institute in 1968, gives a voice to the phenomenon of light, while marking a complete departure from wall pieces of any kind. The early 1970s spurred a dialogue between artists exploring the relationship between nontraditional materials like neon, cement and sticks. Influenced by artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Dennis Oppenheim, who were experimenting with the interaction of light, earth and space, Dill found himself drawn to the limitlessness of three-dimensional art. He started working with light by arranging neon and argon tubing. Then, searching for new materials that would mimic the act of painting more than sculpting, he filled one of the rooms in his studio with 10,000 pounds of silica sand.

"It was very much like doing a painting,” Dill said. “Except that it was on the floor, and I used shovels and brooms instead of a brush.”

Untitled is one of the pieces that came out of this period, expressing a unique synthesis of light, shadow, movement and location. From a distance, it just looks like a mound of sand taking up an entire corner of the museum, but as you approach, its form and effect starts to take shape. Three rectangular pieces of glass protrude from the mound parallel to one another, perpendicular to the floor and evenly spaced, revealing the interior strata of the sand. Three smaller pieces of glass face you on an angle.

As your eyes adjust, all the glass pieces mysteriously illuminate along their edges due to a row of green argon hidden beneath the surface. Revisit Untitled throughout the day and you start to see why Dill describes this piece as one of his “light sentences" -- it constantly changes its narrative from moment to moment, relying on its coordinates as much as the story of daylight interacting with the argon, interacting with the relationship between the angled glass, casting faint reflections across the miniature dips and ridges in the mound.

Both Dill and Wilder will be at Laguna Art Museum on Sunday at 1 p.m. to talk about their work and answer visitor questions (free with admission).

Check back soon for Part Two: Landscapes, Sheep and Sheep.

Extract, Landscapes and Figuration from the Collection: Early to Mid-Twentieth Century and Brad Coleman Reproductions run through May 15 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach, (949) 494-8971; lagunaartmuseum.org. Open daily 11 a.m.-5 p.m. and on First Thursdays Art Walk. Admission: $12 general; $10 students, seniors, active military; free for children under 12 and museum members.