Velvet Underground

“Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas,” art critic Clement Greenberg wrote in 1939. “Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. . . . Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money--not even their time.”

In this seminal essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Greenberg sorted out the essential differences between a Saturday Evening Post cover and a painting by Picasso. One was kitsch; the other was part of a fully matured cultural tradition. It was clear whose side he was on.

Sixty years later, some otherwise cultured people are not so derisive of kitsch. They are intrigued by its popularity, by its connection to other aspects of contemporary society and by the very notion of a “debased” medium or style unfit for “high” art.

So it’s conceivable that the Huntington Beach Art Center might have mounted a worthwhile show about the phenomenon of velvet painting, a kitschy subject if ever there was one. “A Rascal in Paradise: The Velvet Paintings of Edgar Leeteg” is not that show.

Leeteg, who died in 1953, was a Midwestern mama’s boy who moved to Tahiti in the 1930s and wound up drinking too much, bragging too much, bedding local women and making a good living by painting stereotyped portraits of nubile girls and others on velvet.

One of the catalog essayists--and if anything redeems the show, it’s the range of considered viewpoints in the catalog--notes that “the medium has yet to recover from the crass commercialization of Leeteg’s work.”

The bashful nude with a flower in her hair whose body just happens to fall into a pose made famous by classical statuary, the happy hula dancer, the serious little boy, the grave old man--this is stereotyped “calendar” art, neither ethnographic portraiture nor imaginative re-creation.

Yep, these images are all painted on velvet, a lush material that begs to be stroked and capriciously allows whatever is painted on it to register clearly only under proper lighting. Leeteg reputedly developed a technique to keep the fabric from cracking under the paint.

But by enshrining his work as if Leeteg were a high-art master, co-curators Greg Escalante (a member of the center’s board of directors who had long pushed for this show) and John Turner (a curator at the San Francisco Craft and Folk Art Museum) misguidedly glorify Leeteg in an old-fashioned way as a culture hero.

A more viable and contemporary approach would have been to exhibit work by velvet painters both known and anonymous, to discover commonalities of their subject matter and styles. In that way, the spotlight would properly fall on velvet as a medium--or the nature of kitsch, which has become a subject for many contemporary artists--rather than on the output of a forgettable individual whose contribution to art is slender indeed.

This show follows others (at various venues in Orange County in recent years) devoted to such pop fare as cartoons, tattoos, custom cars, surfboards and Deadhead memorabilia. The challenge in mounting intelligent exhibitions of such subject matter is to consider the artifacts in a dispassionate way as reflections of their culture.

But Escalante, who was involved in the “Kustom Kulture” car show at the Laguna Art Museum several years ago, is too much of an enthusiast to be interested in such niceties. He seems primarily interested in displaying stuff that attracts art-allergic viewers who don’t want to put any effort into enjoying what they see.

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The center also strikes out with its two concurrent one-woman shows, guest-curated by Maggi Owens, the capable co-director of the Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University. Both artists work on a large scale and deal with such potentially absorbing themes as nostalgia and relations between the sexes.

According to the catalog, the touchstone for Barbara Benish’s installation, “Sandcastles,” was her childhood fascination with a white concrete modernist house in Newport Beach (which she later learned was designed by Austrian emigre architect Rudolf Schindler).

Without this information, it would be hard to figure out that Benish means to invoke the Constructivist solidity of Lovell Beach House with her huge cast concrete flowers, shaped to resemble the cartoonish Pop blooms popularized by Andy Warhol lithographs.

The piece also includes mounds of real sand, clusters of real flowers and a brief video of a child abandoning his sandcastle (the architectural motif translated to a childlike scale) to walk down to the ocean with his mother.

Benish, now an emigre herself (she lives in Prague), seems to be interested in how real memories of a place become inextricably jumbled with its famous stereotypes--in this case, the free-spirited California mythos embodied by the ‘60s flower-power image. But the elements of her piece seem to have been selected for personal reasons that don’t fully translate to viewers.

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Sculptor Susan Hornbeak-Ortiz is another Newport Beach artist who has shown quite a bit locally in recent years. When she falters, the problem is generally an over-elaborate scheme that dwarfs or obscures the idea behind it.

The four pieces in this show all take up a lot of space, but they don’t necessarily yield an equivalently full-bodied image.

The best is the most forthright. “My Life as a Vacuum” consists of a video of a hurricane forming, attached to a vacuum unit with yards of thick black rubber hose and a soundtrack of pigs grunting. This is a scenario of female rage: Treated as merely a device for sucking up other people’s problems, a woman finally lets her anger out, only to be called a shrew. (It wasn’t so long ago that hurricanes were given only female names.)

The other pieces are simply baffling (“Peace Disrupts,” with its three huge, arm-like fluorescent lights surrounding a tiny film of a tornado, and the noisy, fountain-like “Aurora”) or reliant on tepid, too-precious imagery (“Pearl”).

One of Hornbeak-Ortiz’s earlier works reproduced in the catalog (but not in the show) is a deceptively simple wall piece made from a wooden bow, cable and pulleys. “Balance” contrasts a flirty female outline with “masculine” notions of strength. It has exactly the marriage of visual freshness and wit that these new pieces lack.

* “A Rascal in Paradise: the Velvet Paintings of Edgar Leeteg,” “Barbara Benish: Sandcastles” and “Susan Hornbeak-Ortiz: Thirst,” Huntington Beach Art Center, 538 Main St. Noon-6 p.m. Tuesday-Wednesday, noon-8 p.m. Thursday, noon-6 p.m. Friday-Saturday, noon-4 p.m. Sunday. $3 general, $2 students and seniors. Through April 4. (714) 374-1659.