Art review: 'Collection: MOCA's First Thirty Years'

By Christopher Knight
Art Critic

It resonated like a huge stone dropped into a big pond: A year ago, as reports surfaced that the Museum of Contemporary Art had dug itself into a deep financial hole from which it might not be able to emerge, a shudder rippled outward from Los Angeles to the international art world. Since its fledgling days of 1979, MOCA had grown — in terms of facility, program and collection — into the nation's museum-flagship for art after World War II.

MOCA has not yet fully climbed out of the financial crater, although the balance sheet is far better now than it was then. And this week, the museum opened a remarkable 30th anniversary exhibition of its remarkable permanent collection — the ultimate reason any museum finally matters. About 500 paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, videos and installations by more than 200 international artists fill the Grand Avenue building and the Geffen Contemporary warehouse in Little Tokyo. The show's title urges forward-looking optimism: “Collection: MOCA's First Thirty Years” implies there will, in fact, be a second 30 years.

But this is not just a promotional treasure-house show. Installed chronologically by chief curator Paul Schimmel, it also tells a story — although one that's rarely heard. The postwar rise of American art is paired with the simultaneous rise of Los Angeles, from shallow backwater to cultural powerhouse.

At the Grand Avenue building, which spans 1939 to 1979, the distinctive emergence of a mature L.A. art is embedded within the larger postwar prominence of the United States, artistically dominated by New York. At the Geffen — the story picks up in the year MOCA was born.

Two telling works flank the Grand Avenue entry. At the left, a lovely little 1939 abstraction by Piet Mondrian signals Modernism's shift from Europe to America as war loomed. At the right is Sam Francis' luminous cloud of gray-white color, painted in postwar Paris in 1951 as an atmospheric evocation of urban light. Francis later moved to Santa Monica and served as a founding MOCA trustee.

Andy Warhol offers an early narrative clue. Warhol is the most influential artist of the last 40 years, but overall he's a modest presence in the show. MOCA's pivotal 1961 painting of an old-fashioned telephone is here, wittily asserting that in our mass-media world, painting is an outmoded communication form. Also on view, however, is a 1962 Campbell's soup can painting — one of just five loans to the show.

Its inclusion is a pointed reminder that the New York artist's career-breakout took place not in Manhattan but in an L.A. gallery show. It featured the now-classic soup can paintings.

The Grand Ave. display is rich in implications such as these. MOCA's astounding depth in certain New York artists — Rothko, Pollock, Rauschenberg, Kline, etc. — is vividly displayed, but so is the incomparable extent of its Southern California holdings. Crucial are the Beat Generation assemblages of Wallace Berman, the painted cosmologies of Lee Mullican, the gestural sign-language of Emerson Woelffer and the Japanese-inspired geometric abstractions of John McLaughlin.

One great moment juxtaposes three pristine McLaughlin paintings with three geometric abstractions by Ellsworth Kelly. L.A.'s McLaughlin is the artist for whom the term “hard-edge painting” was first coined, a designation now typically assigned to Kelly, the far better-known New Yorker.

The clear light and open space of McLaughlin's Zen-inflected paintings resonates with the profound L.A. emergence of Light and Space art. A large selection of Robert Irwin's work, charting his transition from a traditional painter, joins Doug Wheeler's walk-in 1969 perceptual environment of diffused neon light.

Language-based Conceptual art also looms large. Ed Ruscha's word-painting, “Lisp,” John Baldessari's photo-painting of Artforum magazine and Alexis Smith's narrative collage, spinning a story from bits of found trash, are joined by a big Guy de Cointet painting. Titled “Halved Painting,” the French-born expatriate's little-known work splits open the text of a made-up language.

At the Geffen the show's tone sharply changes, becoming more raucous and hurly-burly. Chris Burden's two-ton, 8-foot cast-iron flywheel, “The Big Wheel” spins with ferocious silent power, driven by an attached motorcycle. It's an industrial-strength, easy-rider remake of Marcel Duchamp's genteel 1913 mounting of a bicycle wheel atop a stool, Modern art's first kinetic sculpture.

The Geffen installation goes far afield, from Europe to Asia, reflecting art's emerging internationalism from multiple centers around the globe—including L.A. A rowdy installation of 22 forlorn Christmas trees surrounded by big, blaring photographs of Paul McCarthy performing as a deranged “Tokyo Santa” nods to the L.A. stalwart's European prominence. McCarthy's younger protege, the late Jason Rhoades, is represented nearby with a large installation made from cardboard, tinfoil, plastic bins and yellow legal pads. In an era of soulless, high-tech fabrication, both installations sing with do-it-yourself obsessiveness.

Tying the Geffen start-date to MOCA's own arrival on the scene audaciously asserts the museum's instrumental role in the city's art-life. The fact that Rhoades' big 1994 installation — from his debut solo show — was reassembled from smaller parts acquired over eight years from six different collectors reflects the long-term importance of MOCA's curatorial process.

There's much more — including inevitable missteps.

Women made 40% of the objects, a much higher percentage than most museums manage; but that comes with a caveat. Half are from large photographic suites by just five artists (Diane Arbus, Cindy Bernard, Judy Fiskin, Nan Goldin and Helen Levitt). Only one-fourth of the 200-plus artists in “Collection” are women. That's not enough.

“Collection” has no catalog. (Last year MOCA published a sumptuous book surveying its holdings.) As always, though, the art is the thing. An unparalleled permanent collection and a compelling thematic exhibition, this is an installation to spend time with. The two-for-one double-header amply testifies why MOCA matters.

--Christopher Knight

Photos: Paul McCarthy, "Tokyo Santa, Santa's Trees" (1999), Credit: Al Seib/Los Angeles Times; Andy Warhol, "Telephone" (1961), Credit: Paula Goldman; Doug Wheeler, "RM 669" (1969), Credit: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters; Jason Rhoades, "Swedish Erotica & Fiero Parts" (1994), Credit: Al Seib/Los Angeles Times

"Collection: MOCA's First Thirty Years," Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave. and 152 N. Central Ave., 11-5 Mon & Fri; 11-8 Thu; 11-6 Sat & Sun. $10. Ends May 3. (213) 626-6222. www.moca.org

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Comments

[Cate]

Tori Amos sings it best:

“MOCA’s got it all in hand now
Big wheel turn my fantasy”

[William Wray]

"Perhaps by then it will have been on view long enough for people to realize what we've been missing."
I'd have to add what's missing for this collection is what's missing for the last thirty years of modern art; much of anything with lasting depth and meaning that reflects the history it lived in. I'm over charm, whimsy, satire, fashion, and the set decoration of found objects that passes for art. It’s all Wall Street investment turned into the biggest pyramid scam of all time. While there is some good things in the collection a flamethrower taken to 90% of it would be the best art performance ever. If you want the public to support contemporary art, give them something they can experience from a culturally emotional level, so much of this collection feels like altars of artists sense of self-entitlement. If people cared about this stuff there would be a 100 posts of ejaculatory revelation at the wonder of it all with lines outside MOCA’s door stretching for miles. As it is people have to be begged to come. Art needs to be relatable to the masses, not just the perversely educated.

[Cate]

There's a Danny Elfman song with the lyric:
"We close our eyes, and the world has turned around again."

Those words say to me, "If we sleep, time passes, the world spins on as it always has, and nothing ever changes. If we open our eyes, we can turn the world around again."

The reason there's nobody else commenting here, William Wray, is because too many people have their eyes closed. Not everybody. The Big Wheel is turning on me, and there's nothing "perverse" about that.

MarK said elsewhere in one of his comments that great art is not necessarily measured by its popularity, and I've come to agree with that. It took awhile for me to wake up and see it, but now I do.

[Cate]

As for the art reflecting the history in which it lived, "The Big Wheel" most definitely represents these times of Change. It reflects the political, economic, and societal changes we're facing now, in particular. One might argue that it reflects all change in the world since the invention of the gasoline-powered engine. Think of the endless cycle of motor engines that drive most of the world today.

Loudly revving those engines is not necessary. All that noise drowns out the music of nature. It alarms little old ladies and small children, and just annoys people like me. Gently open up the throttle to get The Big Wheel moving in an amazingly powerful way.

Sticks and stones may break bones, but flamethrowers will never burn the Art. To borrow some words from Donald Frazell, that's just flame retarded.

[William Wray]

Museums are supposed to be for the people are they not? If the people don't come, something is wrong. Every form of art and education has a structure that builds a foundation for the true artist to legitimately experiment with the form except contemporary art. That's why the first 30 years of modern art in interesting, the first generation modern artist then could draw and chose to distort.
Contemporary art has contempt for hard work, deep understanding of things meaningful like honest emotion. This exhibition is mostly based on thin ideas that have long since lost there shock value. One hundred years later Van Gogh still wows and attracts millions.
This place will close again next year unless propped up open by the wall street poker players who want to protect their investments.