Artwork on the 'Cutting Edge' : Exhibit: Laguna Art Museum spotlights pieces by untrained 'folk' artists. But <i> please </i> do not call their crafts 'folk art.'

By RICK VANDERKNYFF

June 15, 1991 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

LAGUNA HILLS — Ted Gordon spent 45 years in the lower ranks of the civil service before retiring here with his wife. “Rather an ordinary man of solitary and contemplative disposition,” as he describes himself, Gordon sits at the kitchen table of his Leisure World apartment each morning and fills a scrap of paper with swirling pen lines that, slowly, begin to form a face.

“Whatever face appears is my face, whatever expression, my expression at the moment of execution,” says Gordon, 67, choosing his words carefully. “Doodling is for me an exercise in self-observation and self-transformation.”

Gordon’s once-private exercise has become a very public one. His compulsive “doodles” are exhibited widely, including a recent solo show at the Collection de l’Art Brut in Switzerland and are the subject of growing academic and collector interest. Two of his drawings are included in “The Cutting Edge: Contemporary American Folk Art From the Rosenak Collection” at the Laguna Art Museum.

Jon Serl, whose work is also in the exhibition, painted his first piece in the ‘40s to fill an empty space on the wall of his aging adobe home in San Juan Capistrano.

“I went to buy a painting, and they were all expensive,” recalls the 96-year-old artist. “Fifty dollars was the cheapest I could find. I didn’t have 50 cents, so I painted my own.”

The first recognition of Serl’s paintings came in the ‘70s. Now his works, painted on boards and canvases he has salvaged from junk heaps or bought at swap meets, can command several thousand dollars. The subject of a 1982 solo exhibition at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, Serl is a favorite among collectors and has two paintings in “The Cutting Edge.”

Launched late last year by New York’s Museum of American Folk Art, the exhibition aims at an overview of sorts. Stylistically, it’s a mixed bag; the common thread is that these are untrained artists working outside the art establishment. This celebration of individualism, even eccentricity, is gathered rather uneasily under the “folk” tag, which is not used in the traditional sense--no patterned quilts or wooden duck decoys here.

“What we’re talking about, first of all, is work by people who are untrained in the arts and isolated from the academic tradition in America,” says Chuck Rosenak, who with wife Jan has crisscrossed the United States for two decades collecting the work of more than 400 artists. Seventy-two are represented in the Laguna show.

The second part of the folk definition is that these “self-motivated” individuals “are not aware that they are artists and are not doing it for any commercial reasons,” Rosenak says.

Of course, that can change once the artists, who often work in isolation and without recognition for years, are “discovered” by such collectors as the Rosenaks. The sudden realization that their works can bring a measure of fame and fortune is difficult to ignore.

“When an artist becomes a celebrity, it can change their work, and not always, perhaps, for the better,” admits Rosenak. He mentions Howard Finster, the Georgia preacher whose Scripture-inspired paintings have made him probably the best-known artist in the exhibition. Once, he was unsure whether he should sell to the unconverted; in recent years, he has added a Talking Heads album cover and several appearances on “The Tonight Show” to his credits.

The consequences of introducing these “outsider” artists to the commercial mainstream are controversial.

“There are folklorists who believe you should build a fence around artists and study them as if they were caged animals,” says Rosenak, who argues that artists should not be sheltered, despite the possible effects on their work.

Gordon’s style has remained relatively unchanged, but he is aware of the newfound attention.

“As soon as I knew there was an audience, I became self-conscious,” says Gordon, who relates a lesson learned from his layman’s interest in physics: “The mere presence of the observer changes the object observed.”

Doodling since the ‘50s (he declines to call his work art), Gordon first became aware that his work might be of interest when he read an article on l’Art Brut in 1969. Roughly translated as “art in the raw,” the movement was championed by the late French painter Jean Dubuffet, who valued the directness and spontaneity of the amateur artist.

Gordon later wrote to “outsider” art expert Robert Cardinal, who put him in touch with the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland, where Gordon still sends his small works. Committed to scraps of waste paper and cloth, these drawings are still largely spontaneous, Gordon says, and function as a means of releasing anxiety and exploring his state of mind.

But these smaller works, then, often become models for larger drawings on cardboard that he creates specifically for the Braunstein/Quay Gallery in San Francisco. Gordon admits he is trying to have it both ways, courting both the scholarly interest of the l’Art Brut movement (the museum recently published an academic dissertation on his work) and the favors of art collectors.

“It’s a hypocritical game maybe, but that’s the way I do it,” Gordon says. While the work remains a reward in itself, he says, he enjoys the “further reward” his drawings now bring. And while the income generated by his work has not made him wealthy, it does pad out his federal pension.

Jon Serl, whose many jobs have included a stint as a child performer in Vaudeville and bit parts in movies, is bemused by the attention, although he says he has little use for the money these days.

“The fact that I’m good enough to sell paintings, that’s all right. An actor, that’s what he lives for--approval,” he says. “I suppose I’m only human, and when I go to an (gallery) opening and they begin to applaud, I suppose I react. But if I never went, I wouldn’t care. I don’t want to go.”

Says Rosenak: “Fame isn’t too likely to change him. He lives sort of a Bohemian existence.”

Serl lives in a rambling wooden shack in Lake Elsinore, much of which he built himself after moving there in 1972. Chickens, mice and his two Chihuahuas have free run of the ramshackle structure. Serl’s frequent visitors are encouraged to sign their names on the walls, and paintings are hung haphazardly and stacked everywhere.

Serl, amazingly robust for his age, is given to theatrical outbursts.

“I’ve got ‘em all fooled. I’m nobody, nobody at all,” he says, with perhaps a touch of false modesty. “It’s just that I’m a freak, a fish out of water, and I’m doing the best I can.”

Nevertheless, in a review last year, the New York Times called his work “complex and sophisticated in both meaning and style,” and described his images as “cartoonishly buoyant yet emotionally weighted, spiritual yet worldly and sexually aware.”

Serl’s daily routine remains rigorous, despite his age: “Three o’clock every morning, I slip on my shoes, in the wintertime I put on a coat and a scarf, and I go in and I paint. What I paint comes through the air like static on a TV. It’s clear, I can feel it, I can hear it, I talk to it spiritually.”

The ghostlike figures in Serl’s paintings are based on people he knows, or has known.

“They don’t think they look that way, but they do,” the artist says. “There’s no need to try and paint the physical. The good Lord has done that. I paint the feeling they give.”

Like Serl and Gordon, many of the artists in the show are compelled to create and build their works from a variety of found materials, from Elmer’s glue caps to light bulbs.

“This art comes out of an intense urge to make something, whether or not someone has formal artistic training,” says Laguna museum director Charles Desmarais. The museum is showing the exhibit as part of an effort to “recognize that art comes in lots of different packages.”

The Rosenaks, bored with collecting modern art, began traveling what they call “dirt track America” in 1973 in search of such artists working outside the mainstream. Back then, Rosenak says, there was little formal recognition of the field, but now “there are shows in museums proliferating all over the country.”

Rosenak, who also collects extensive biographical information on the artists he collects, is not shy about taking a certain amount of credit for the growing acceptance. It’s an area of art he says he and his wife believed in from the start: “We thought that we really had discovered the cutting edge of American art.”

Their collection and the biographical information they have amassed form the foundation of the “Museum of American Folk Art Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century American Folk Art and Artists” (Abbeville Press), published in conjunction with the opening of “The Cutting Edge” in New York. At 416 pages, the tome is even longer than its unwieldy title.

The book and exhibition are the result of more than 10 years of contact between the Rosenaks and Robert Bishop, director of the Museum of American Folk Art. The museum has specialized in 19th-Century folk art, but Bishop decided the time was right to explore contemporary work. Rosenak hopes the exhibit leads to more recognition of these artists in mainstream museums.

“That would be wonderful for us,” he says. “Maybe we could get rid of the word ‘folk.’ ”

At least, Rosenak hopes, the show’s diversity of cultures and artistic impulses will dissuade audiences of the notion that television and other forces have completely homogenized the United States. That’s a lesson the Rosenaks learned in building their collection.

“We didn’t understand the diversity of cultures and the diversity of individuals in this country,” Rosenak says. “It’s very easy to discover there’s a great diversity among us and everyone is not the same.”

“The Cutting Edge: Contemporary American Folk Art From the Rosenak Collection” will be shown through Aug. 18 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive in Laguna Beach. Museum hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is $1 to $2. Information: (714) 494-6531.