Dude! If it weren’t for legendary surfboard designers Hobart “Hobie” Alter and Gordon “Grubby” Clark, California art from the 1960s and 70s might be known for something other than light and space. Many California artists during that time dropped in and started using the same polyester resin used by the innovative board makers. The current exhibition “Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface” curated by Robin Clark and Hugh Davies is now on view at both the Downtown and La Jolla venues of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. The exhibition features many artworks exploring the far out optical properties of polyester resin and feature other artworks that use light to create some awesome Harry Houdini-like effects. Some of the artworks on view are “primo” but some fall short.

One “rad” artwork is Bruce Nauman’s Green Light Corridor (1970). Installed in La Jolla, Bruce Nauman’s Green Light Corridor is a narrow passage made of drywall akin to Torrey Pines State Park’s “Fat Man’s Misery.” The passageway is lit with green fluorescent lights, which burn one’s retinas as the viewer squeezes through the narrow artwork. The bonus experience happens upon exiting the passageway as one’s eyes compensate from the intense green light with a “gnarly” complementary afterimage. The experience is psychedelic and totally cool.

Other artworks on display in La Jolla do not fare so well. They are mostly translucent, tinted polyester resin geometric sculptures. They seem like artifacts stuck in the period when they were created—instead of being timeless. Slightly yellowing and some scratched, they feel beat and dated like burnt-orange shag carpeting and olive green appliances.

Although, some resin pieces in La Jolla are exceptional. Peter Alexander’s wall-hugging stripes in his work entitled May 5, 1971 (1971) are dazzling. The artwork consists of five slightly convex resin stripes that mysteriously hang on the wall. Each stripe is black becoming more smoky and translucent at each stripe’s four sides to create a ghostlike aura around each one. The artwork is mesmerizing and “da bomb”!

Also in La Jolla, works from the ‘60s and ‘70s by the late John McCraken are still bodacious. They are opaque rectilinear resin and fiberglass sculptures in various hues looking like stiff boards or monoliths painted with hundred of coats of smooth shiny car paint. They are elegant, stately, and fascinating to look at as well, especially his Five Paintings IV (1974). This wall work is an intense shiny infinite black. Tiny dandruff-like flecks scatter its surface like stars on a moonless night.

Another exceptional work in La Jolla is McCraken’s Blue Block in Three Parts (1966).Three perfect cerulean blue rectangular blocks stand side by side to form a cube. The sculpture’s mass seems heavy and dense, but the shiny blue surface is reflective, vibrant, and light, which contradict the sculpture’s stolid shape.

A bummer experience is viewing too many glass cubes by Larry Bell crammed together in a single La Jolla gallery. Bell’s cubes individually are fascinating objects, but they lose their unique wonder when so many are seen together in a single space. Several featuring mirrors become kitschy as installed together with his more minimal works.

Downtown, James Turrell’s Wedgework V (1975) is intense. A viewer must walk into a dark space where he or she will come upon a scene of a misty red hollow of space appearing to turn a corner. The experience is quieting and mysterious. The scene is literally and figuratively tubular and would be a great entrance to nirvana or hell—depending on one’s lifestyle choices.

Douglas Wheeler’s DW 68 VEN MCASD 11 (1968/2011) is an almost sublime experience. A wall, the size of a drive-in movie theater screen, is framed with an aura of white light. Installed in a cavernous gallery Downtown, the aura of light makes the huge space glow with a light violet hue. The only problem is that the huge space should be absolutely pristine. Unfortunately, the ceiling is covered with white Tyvek ® paper. As the light hits the paper, it appears as a ceiling badly painted by an amateur with a cheap brush and becomes distracting. Marks on the floor from visitor’s shoes also detract from the viewing experience. Visitors should be required to remove their shoes to view the artwork.

James Turrell’s Stuck Red and Stuck Blue (1970) are two magical floating rectangles, one red and one blue, appearing in two diagonal corners of a darkened Downtown gallery. As a viewer gets closer to the two floating rectangles, the secret of how they are created is revealed. Razor sharp cuts in the drywall are important to the work. Unfortunately, when a viewer looks closely, the drywall work does not have the precise finish necessary for the complete success of the artwork as globs of drywall joint compound can be seen around the edges of the two rectangles.

Downtown, Robert Irwin’s masterful work Square the Room (2007) also gets pounded because of careless installation. The Irwin work is supposed to appear from one vantage point as a solid wall and from another viewpoint as a foggy mist. The work depends on perfect execution. Although, an uncovered recessed lighting fixture and what looks like a missing ceiling tile create two black holes in the white area beyond the magic wall, which ruins the mystery effect of the artwork.

Most of the Downtown artworks depend on perfect execution of fine details, but many flaws in execution diminish several of the works. Better installed are the La Jolla galleries.

Initiated by $10 million in grants by the Getty Foundation, this exhibition is part of a huge project, “Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980”—a vast collaboration of more than sixty cultural institutions across Southern California. The overall project tells the story of the birth of the Los Angeles art scene.

“Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface” could have been an epic adventure; but many choppy Downtown installations and a few missteps by the curators make parts of the exhibition flounder. However, the exhibition is still worth seeing.