O.C.’s Well-Groomed Art Scene

The other day, a friend tried for the umpteenth time to explain to a stylist in a Costa Mesa salon the sort of minimal, “downtown” look she wanted: tousled on top and jagged and wispy below.

The stylist smiled politely. But her conservative, neatnik soul simply couldn’t process the idea of artful mess. There was no way to keep her from snipping tidy, even edges where my friend had hoped for wildness. She had to make desperate gestures to keep the stylist from painstakingly constructing an irritatingly perfect pouf of hair, finished with a firm blast of hair spray.

My friend says she finally has learned her lesson. Next time, she’ll seek out a salon in Santa Monica or Hollywood that understands offbeat styles.

This story got me thinking about how Orange County is about essentially conservative notions of beauty and style.

Last fall, for example, Barney’s New York finally closed its Orange County outpost, in South Coast Plaza. For a purveyor of often severe, sometimes deliberately anti-pretty styles by international designers representing the cutting edge of fashion, perhaps there was little point in staying in an area where its outlook clashed with local taste.

It’s not too much of a stretch, I think, to relate these fashion tales to the hidebound nature of Laguna Beach’s early-20th century art colony.

As art historian Will South writes in his catalog essay for the exhibition, “Colonies of American Impressionism: Cos Cob, Old Lyme, Shinnecock and Laguna Beach,” the plein-air painters of Laguna were united against what one of them called “the contagion” of modern art.

Unlike the French Impressionists, who, as South writes, “initiated the deluge of modern art by dematerializing form and by taking modern life for subject matter,” the California Impressionists were in thrall to a soothing notion of orderly nature.

Refusing to abandon their fidelity to the structure of the world they saw, they borrowed only the sunny paint hues and (in watered-down versions) the broken brush strokes of their French forebears.

These days, Orange County arts leaders loudly trumpet their cultural aspirations. But stylistic conservatism still has an iron grip on local attitudes. People who move here--or who don’t leave once they’ve grown up--tend to seek a certain level of comfort and stability, a release from the nerve-jangling pulse of urban life and the bewildering, even threatening, habits of the radical fringe.

Yet the research and development centers of contemporary art forms--the great urban caldrons, from New York to Berlin--are wide open to extreme forms of behavior and belief. Cutting-edge art is generally adversarial by its nature. It’s about shaking viewers and listeners out of their preconceptions, not reinforcing them.

So who needs cutting edge? All major art centers do. Because they not only showcase significant art from elsewhere but also serve as an incubator of artistic transformation.

In suburbia, people tend to confuse the notion of an exploratory cutting-edge in art with commercially oriented wannabes: tattooed kids who hope to make it big in pop music; splatter-happy young painters who substitute whining for angst.

But serious R&D; in art is quite a different thing. Visionary artists of our time have achieved radical deconstructions of cultural modes, from the “pedestrian” movement in modern dance in the ‘60s developed by Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer and others to forms of ritual theater developed by Julian Beck and Jerzy Grotowski and the hauntingly repetitive music of Philip Glass.

In succeeding generations, such artists’ work often becomes beloved by precisely the sort of middle-class audiences that once rejected them (think of Van Gogh, whose paintings are raking in the crowds at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art).

But in their own time, these artists generally produce work for tiny audiences. Living in urban areas means having one another--other artists and sympathetic friends--for company and solidarity.

Many people have suggested that the big stumbling block in Orange County to nurturing this sort of cultural R&D; is primarily a lack of affordable real estate.

It’s certainly true that artist-friendly areas have cheap rents (for studios and living space) and a multitude of cheap and flexible performing and exhibition venues.

Spotting potential in dilapidated areas of cities, artists have historically worked to restore them as studio and living spaces. When yuppies inevitably move in and drive up rents, the artists move on to other seedy locales and start all over.

In recent years, the developer-led Artists Village in Santa Ana has tried to jump-start this process by renovating old buildings to create a sort of artists’ theme park.

But these efforts have not attracted the serious cutting-edge. Orange County lacks the openness and febrile intensity (not to mention the artistic leadership) that would lure radical young innovators from Des Moines or Abilene, or keep a recent graduate school student from UC Irvine from leaving town.

This is not to say that the county doesn’t have an ever-growing level of cultural activity. But the up-and-coming sopranos, the promising playwrights, the innovative artists inevitably come from somewhere else and depart for greener (or grittier) pastures the moment their showcase closes.