Whole Life Times: Eye Candy

April 2006 | Features

Eye Candy

An Orange County Exhibit Presents Art for Beauty’s Sake

by Caroline Ryder

“If you’re cute, or maybe you’re beautiful, there’s more of us ugly motherfuckers out there than you. So watch out.” —Frank Zappa

I have a confession to make: I’m pretty. Yes, actually I am. Cute face, nice body, smiling eyes—the usual. Unfortunately, I have had to pay the price for my prettiness all my life. You see, prettiness isn’t respected in this world. Pretty equals feminine, and ‘feminine’ generally stands for weak, frilly, vacuous, silly. “Don’t you feel oppressed in those high heels?” a Bay Area feminist once asked me. English author and art critic John Ruskin summed it up nicely, reminding us that “the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless: peacocks and lilies, for instance.”

So, assuming that prettiness and uselessness must always go hand in hand, it’s safe to say the Landscape Confection exhibit at the Orange County Museum of Art is probably one of the most useless things in the world.

The exhibit, which runs through May 7, aims to present landscape art in its most decorative and eye-pleasing guises. So rather than a traditional oil-on-canvas depiction of a tree, Landscape Confection brings you a flowing flower tapestry that looks like it was hand-stitched by fairies. There are Neal Rock’s powder pink and creamy blue wall sculptures, which look so like cake icing it’s hard not to bite off a chunk when you walk by. Then there are cobwebs made from metal jewelry with crystals glistening within them, like fresh morning dew. And an entire wall of plasticine shaped into a Little Mermaid-esque underwater world. These works are pure eye candy, incredibly sensual and just so darn pretty.

“I used to worry that my work was a little too pretty,” says LA artist David Korty, who has several pieces in the exhibit. Korty does for urban landscapes what plastic surgeons do for aging socialites, taking ravaged environments and magically transforming them into things of beauty again. “Our Los Angeles urban environment is so messy and dense, it is endlessly fascinating and very rich to me,” he says. For example, one of his paintings depicts a garbage-strewn hillside, but by using soft pastels he turns it into a dreamy, hazy place, the sort you’d take your lover for a romantic walk to. Nonetheless, Korty’s work has been criticized, simply because it is so nice to look at. “Having your work labeled ‘pretty’ is a drag,” he says, “because when people call things decorative, that denotes a certain kind of naiveté.”

Korty is on the frontline of the “pretty = dumb” debate that has dogged the art world for the last 50 years, creating a guilt complex for many artists who do enjoy creating art for beauty’s sake. “The art world has been held hostage by the doctrine of minimalism, the belief in a pure aesthetic,” says Elizabeth Armstrong, curator at the Orange County Museum of Art. “Artists who were interested in the decorative were denigrated as being not high art, but feminine and messy.” According to Armstrong, people are starting to come down off their minimalist high horses, and artists are giving less of a damn about their work being too pretty to be taken seriously. “There’s less of a taboo now,” she says. “I think this generation has benefited from a certain kind of openness to craft materials, and to beauty. People are rethinking their ideas about modern art.”

So the phrase “not just a pretty face” is as applicable to art as it is to the realm of America’s Next Top Model, with many so-called “decorative” artists reminding viewers and critics that they, too, have something important to say. “My goal is to make beautiful objects or pieces that actually have something else going on, you just have to try and get past the beauty,” says Kori Newkirk, who has four bead curtains in the exhibit. He uses thousands of hanging beads to create stark natural landscapes inspired by his childhood in rural New York state. He started using beads as a medium after becoming transfixed by Venus Williams’ hair in the late 1990s. He says: “If you just want to read my work as a beautiful hanging bunch of beads that’s great, but if you want to do the work that is required to see into it a little deeper, then you’ll discover there are many other levels of conversation. I want to disarm the viewer with beauty, and then hopefully make them realize there is also a lot more going on.”

So like cheerleaders who read Niezstche, let’s not forget that sometimes pretty things may actually have something interesting and important to say. And as I told the Bay Area feminist—just because I’m wearing high heels, that doesn’t make me an oppressed moron, it just makes me feel prettier. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Caroline Ryder is an LA-based freelance writer.

Landscape Confection is at the Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach until 5/7. 949.759.1122, ocma.net.

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