Earthly creators find the divine in their details

When contemporary artists look for God, what do they see? A large, quietly engaging traveling exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum asks that unexpected question, and it offers more than 100 answers. Among the responses:

God is a shower of velvety black stars.

God is a gourmet hamburger with everything on it.

God is a Pop icon -- specifically, a Day-Glo painting of Marcel Duchamp’s famous sculpture of a urinal.

God is a neon sign, upside-down and backward, extolling Elvis.

God is a pebble in your shoe.

God is an exquisitely crafted, lime-green coffee table.

These idiosyncratic conceptions by Gary Simmons, Alexis Smith, Michael Craig-Martin, Terry Allen, Mike Kelley and Jorge Pardo, respectively, suggest the diversity of imagination evident in the sprawling show. In fact, just about anything you might think of is called into service to represent a monotheistic god in this wide-ranging exhibition.

Anything, that is, except for the image of a mature Caucasian patriarch with flowing white hair and beard denoting the wisdom of the ages. That description fits the Judeo-Christian deity most often represented during the last many centuries of Western art, including iconic representations by the likes of Michelangelo and William Blake. Here, “mature Caucasian patriarch with flowing white hair and beard” only describes John Baldessari, one of two Los Angeles artists who acted as curators for the show.

I don’t know whether or not curators count as gods today. Together with Meg Cranston, however, Baldessari invited scores of American and European artists that they both admire to provide one work that in some way dealt with the concept of a deity. They agreed to accept whatever was submitted, presuming the piece could be easily packed and shipped so that the show could travel.

“100 Artists See God” is the pleasant, sometimes unusually provocative result. But be forewarned: If you go expecting big, grandiloquent statements on the philosophical nature of divine being, you will be disappointed. Of course, with an expectation like that you may also be a refugee from another century. Modern art was born at just about the same moment God died -- that is, at the end of the 19th century, when Friedrich Nietzsche used poetic prose to introduce the existentialist concept of God’s demise.

Public rhetoric about God today, by contrast, is rarely poetic. Whether uttered by feverish terrorists, fatuous politicians or fervent television evangelists, it tends toward the pompous and declamatory. These 100 artists see God by looking another way. Modesty trumps ostentation. The Laguna show does include some works that I find startlingly condescending, and some that are just inoffensively dopey. Mostly, though, it is characterized by contributions notable for thoughtfulness, vivifying eccentricity and a good dose of humility.

Take that swell lime-green coffee table by Pardo. The artist is internationally known for making beautifully fabricated objects that split the differences among painting, sculpture and functional design. He’s made everything from fragile glass chandeliers to a boathouse and dock. His low-slung table, just over 2 feet tall, shows how much mileage Pardo can get out of a savvy melding of seemingly simple motifs.

The table’s peculiar shape -- something like a wide, inverted pyramid standing on its point -- appears to fold in on itself as you move around it. The compendium of sharp angles and intricate planes of stained plywood suggests the precision craft of Japanese origami -- a familiar re-creation today, albeit one that began centuries ago as a ceremonial practice.

Yet Pardo’s design is also as futuristic as a spacecraft in a Japanese sci-fi comic. And the spatially dynamic plywood form is reminiscent of utopian, post-Nietzsche aesthetic movements from the past, like Russian Constructivism and Dutch De Stijl. When Pardo spies God in the living room, traditional concepts of universality and eternity loom in nontraditional ways.

There’s more. I’ve described the acidic stained color of his plywood table as lime-green, but that’s only a ballpark approximation. The actual hue can’t be precisely pinned down with words. Color is ineffable.

Plus, the table’s top-heavy, asymmetrical form is visually precarious. Is some mysterious, hidden ballast keeping it stable and secure? A gnawing element of uncertainty is salutary for any conception of an ineffable higher power.

A coffee table is an ordinary point of domestic convergence for social gathering, which Pardo manages to sacralize through injections of surprise, precision of design and art. Clearly this isn’t just any coffee table, poised as it is on a pedestal in an art museum.

At the other end of the show’s wide spectrum is Christian Jankowski’s unfortunate video, “The Holy Artwork,” which was a low point of the 2002 Whitney Biennial in New York. Made while the Berlin artist participated in a residency at ArtPace, the hipper-than-thou alternative space in San Antonio, Texas, it shows a spontaneous, 15-minute sermon on the biblical meaning of creativity, which the artist requested of the pastor at a Christian fundamentalist church in San Antonio.

The unctuous reverend lets the platitudes rip. But whatever you might think of the sentiments expressed by Peter Spencer, pastor at the Harvest Fellowship Community Church, your heart soon goes out to him. Jankowski’s supercilious video is designed for art snobs who get off on sneering at the rubes. The patronizing attitude so common to religious fundamentalism of any denomination finds its unwitting aesthetic mirror here.

Happily, “100 Artists See God” for the most part lands closer to the Pardo end of the divine spectrum than to the Jankowski end. There’s quite a bit more heaven than hell, even without major philosophical sermons and in spite of a rather numb installation in the Laguna Museum’s notoriously difficult exhibition spaces. The show is divided into 16 loosely conceived themes: God as architect, tyrant, love, extraordinary force of nature and so on. Each group is accompanied by a brief but pithy paragraph of introduction by Cranston.

Mostly the categories are useful as points of entry into works that, on the surface, might not seem related to the supreme theme. An especially compelling 1979 painting by James Hayward is emblematic. Thirty-three inches square and painted in pure, uninflected white acrylic on canvas stretched over wood panel, the work at first recalls the secular spirituality associated with abstract white squares throughout the history of 20th century art. Soon, however, a wrinkle comes over your brow.

The painting is framed in an airless shadowbox covered with glass. A slight blemish, just off center, mars the otherwise pristine white surface of the canvas. Is this a blot on the pure abstraction of perfect harmony and balance?

It’s locked behind the protective glass shield, away from prying eyes and fingers. Like the princess rudely bruised by an almost imperceptible pea, you long to get behind the glass to “fix” the perceived flaw -- which, of course, is simply evidence of human fallibility. A profound urge toward impossible perfection is what “seeing God” is all about. The exhibition includes a good number of unpredictable nuggets like this.

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‘100 Artists See God’

Where: Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach

When: Through Sept. 5: 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Sundays through Thursdays, 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. Regular hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. daily.

Ends: Oct. 3

Price: Adults $9, students $7

Contact: (949) 494-8971