Art review: 'The Artist's Museum' @ MOCA

For most of the past two years, ever since the Museum of Contemporary Art's near-death experience from an extended period of fiscal mismanagement, its exhibition program has been in limbo. To keep costs in check while the battered endowment is rebuilt, the museum has emphasized shows largely assembled from its impressive permanent collection.

The effort has the benefit of getting a lot of art out of storage and on public view. MOCA has long since outgrown its modest Grand Avenue building, where permanent collection gallery space is limited. Its larger Geffen Contemporary building in Little Tokyo is not equipped with the necessary climate controls that would make incisive long-term displays feasible.

The latest in MOCA's reshuffled collection series is "The Artist's Museum," which opened Sunday at both downtown venues. What's most effective about the show is the same as what's least effective.

A survey of work by 146 artists based in L.A. since the museum opened in 1980, it's a temporary simulacrum of what could -- and should -- be a stable, long-term presentation in dedicated museum galleries. It's good, if no surprise, to have common knowledge confirmed that an impressive display could be assembled only from paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, video and installation art made by L.A. artists.

That speaks to the strength of the city's artistic life, partly fueled by MOCA's own role in the scene. But it's not much of a premise for a coherent short-term exhibition. Knowing that the show is temporary (it runs until Jan. 31) even puts the museum's space crunch front and center once more.

"The Artist's Museum" takes its name from MOCA's 1979 founding. Then, an ad-hoc group of about 150 artists came together as the idea for a museum began to percolate, and a committee of 15 was formed to help shepherd the civic project into existence over the next two years. Today, MOCA's board of trustees includes four artists -- virtually unheard of for major American art museums.

The show is divided into two parts. One outshines the other.

The traditional rooms at Grand Avenue look great. They hold primarily two-dimensional works, beginning with a lively lobby commission from Jim Isermann. It brings the building's exterior color scheme indoors, with a twist.

X-shaped vinyl decals of hot pink and dark green (the latter is nearly black) cover the walls, turning incongruously red where the lines cross. The sobriety of Russian Constructivism merges with the playfulness of Good & Plenty candy, sending a jolt.

The show concludes with Doug Aitken's multi-room, eight-channel video projection, "Electric Earth," which follows a lone, jittery man through deserted Los Angeles overnight, as if propelled by an unseen power source. In between, works are displayed as they would be in a smart permanent collection, so that individual objects converse with one another.

One gallery holds camera works by five artists. Judy Fiskin's Super-8 lamentation on the waning of film-based imagery in an emerging digital universe is linked to the passage of older, stucco-era L.A. Cindy Bernard's photographs of the vision-blocking interiors of ordinary security envelopes -- the kind consumer bills come in -- coax a menacing tone from abstract patterns and sleek business logos.

Andrea Bowers' funereal grid of photocopies of cryptic pictures and text about social marginalization based on gender hangs next to something different yet similar: John Divola's lush color landscape prints of remote desert shacks. And a large-scale satellite photograph of a mountain ski resort has been digitally manipulated by Florian Maier-Aichen, now suggesting some toxic virus or cancerous tissue seen through a microscope.

The juxtaposition of these five artists' works is inspired. Visually, it's a long way from Fiskin to Maier-Aichen, but deep conceptual connections emerge.

Another room focuses on urban infrastructure. A failed Utopia lurks within Sam Durant's  vandalized models of pristine Midcentury Modern houses. Catherine Opie's foreign-legion-style expedition to photograph ancient Egypt's monumental ruins is actually an exquisite group of pictures of San Fernando Valley freeways. Underground city life, hiding in plain sight, is implied by homoerotic commercial images suspended by Richard Hawkins beneath a Cézanne-style card table.

Yet another gallery brings together graffiti, low-brow and street art by Robbie Conal, Robert Williams and others, enthusiasms of new MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch. (Whether any of the show's artists have work in Deitch's own sprawling private collection, assembled during his years as a SoHo art dealer, is unknown, since he's declined to provide transparency on those holdings. Isermann, one of two to receive a special commission for the show, is the only L.A.-based artist Deitch Projects represented in New York.) One room also shows work by MOCA's original artist advisory council.

The Geffen, which features sculpture and installation art, is more scattered and less cohesive than Grand Avenue. Perhaps the formal restriction to sculpture blunts provocative connections.

Mike Kelley is the only artist I picked out with work in both halves of the show -- fittingly,  given his international stature, which coincides almost exactly with MOCA's own time line. The spine at the Geffen is his great "Pay for Your Pleasure," a corridor lined with 42 monumental painted portrait heads of artists, writers and thinkers who invoked destruction as a creative philosophy. This hall of "great men," including Mondrian and Thoreau, leads to an actual colored-pencil drawing by convicted serial murderer William Bonin, a.k.a. the Freeway Killer. The shocking juxtaposition throws the differences between art and life into vivid relief.

The show's low point comes nearby, in an installation of pioneer music videos and publicity stills of the otherwise swell nerd-rock band Devo, from a concept originated in Ohio by art students Gerard Casale and Bob Lewis. Devo's Top 40 hit "Whip It" was influential on MTV in 1981.

The band's postmodern concept of de-evolution, or the backward slide of civilization, does seem unfortunately fitting here. Inspired by Deitch's faith in pop culture crossovers as not just commonplace but somehow artistically significant, a quartet of video monitors is backed by walls covered in a grid of 270 souvenir "energy domes," the famous round-ziggurat red hat worn by band members.

The museum-designed installation, meant to look like art, actually looks like a cheesy record-store display. Contradicting the show's theme, it's a lamentable example of a tendency for curators to usurp the artist's role.

"The Artist's Museum," developed from an idea by MOCA chief curator Paul Schimmel, was organized by associate curator Rebecca Morse (with input from Deitch, staffers Alma Ruiz and Bennett Simpson and former publications director Lisa Gabrielle Mark). In the wake of MOCA's troubles, it plainly means to re-engage a local core constituency. Whether it will, only time can tell.

-- Christopher Knight

@twitter.com/KnightLAT

The Artist's Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave.; Geffen Contemporary, 152 N. Central Ave., (213) 626-6222, through Jan. 31. Closed Tuesday and Wednesday. www.moca.org

Photos: Robbie Conal, "Contra Diction," 1987-88; Florian Maier-Aichen, "Above June Lake," 2005; Sam Durant, "Abandoned House #4," 1995; Credit: MOCA; Devo installation. Credit: Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times

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Comments

[Bob Landers]

Christopher Knight is reflecting the whiteness of the walls by focusing only on the art of white artists. Los Angeles Times could do better by allowing others with a broader spectrum of appreciation for art and artists to write reviews for the diverse creative genius that is exhibited in MOCA's "The Artist's Museum".

[Jean]

One of the benefits (and perhaps joys) of not knowing the biography or appearance of an artist as a spectator of his or her work is the freedom from feeling the need to delve into (and forcefully extract) race or identity politics.

The spectator is then allowed to experience the work without the increasingly popular pressure to consult a Benetton catalog as gallery guide.

[Donald Frazell]

The only color that the "artscene" is interested in is green, as in money. That wasted on superficial and useless MFAs to fuel the art industrial gallery/academic/museo complex. This elimiates the vaste majority of black and brown folks in this country, leaving Asians as the basically only 'Minority". The few that are shown are wealthy tokens who tow the Ivory way of thinking, as feeling has obviously been de-evolved and seen as no longer necessary.

Color is unkown, as it is all made insterile white cubes, and never taken outside to reveal whether it has a life force or not. The laboratory items of singular isolated color, rather tham chromatic, chordal structures of flowing life can't exist in the great Ivory way. Get outside, life is out here. Until these brats start doing some landscapes and learn light, life, and nature, it will continue to be but sterile "ideas" presented to show how clever one is. Until we get back to understanding that creative art is NOT illustration of limited and academic theories, things that have no value or veritas outside of the classroom, this is what will continue.

As it is easy to teach, one cannot teach talent, dedication, commitment and responsbility, all traits of the true artist. And lacking in the Halls of the Ivory Tower dwellers.

Save the Watts Towers(Nuestro Pueblo) the true and only great work of art created in LA, ignored by the scared and selfish MFA class. Which LACMA is in the process of date raping.

[LocalGal]

This and other MoCA permanent collection shows only reinforce my impression that their collection is painfully thin, often second-rate and lacking in any kind of curatorial independence or vision. Half the time, you can draw direct lines from local collectors and powerful galleries (Blum & Poe, Regen) to what is shown.

[Jean]

Blum & Poe used to have such great exhibitions, but now they only have a great building.

When does the MOCA Director position become available again?

[GM]

Knight's ignorance of art by p.o.c in a 'minority-majority' city is truly sad and speaks of the rude last gasps of the old guard.
Los Angeles deserves an art critic, that understands the depth and references that the majority of the city is comprised of.

[Bodie]

Somebody wake me up when MOCA's re-engaged their local core constituency.

[MatGleason]

When is Christopher Knight going to be transparent about his art holdings and by what if any discounts they were acquired?

And when you take time off from being a hypocritical scold, calling Devo Ohio artists is like calling Mike Kelley a Detroit artist or you a New England critic. Always petty when it is convenient.

[Donald Frazell]

Calling Devo or Mike Kelley artists period is pretty convenient to peddling these guys wares, as if contempt art is anythng but careerist nightmares of twisted childish dreams. And CK a critic? Well, when not about Contempt it's OK for a critic, but they are always off base. Read only real artists, go back to Cezanne, Matisse, Klee and even Kandinsky. And then compare to now. Scary.

Save the Watts Towers(Nuestro Pueblo) LAs greatest work of art and ignored by the Getty during Pacific Standard Time next year. And whored by LACMA, MoCA isnt even interested as it cant comprehend what is real.

[David Hinnebusch]

That's were you guys hang out. I should be painting. Oh wait you can watch Bert Esenherz and my experience with MOCA on youtube. I really don't get this art scene at all. I like Track 16.

[henry]

mat gleason's comment is appropriate: Knight should come clean about art-holdings and, especially, why MOCA censorship is itself censored by Knight. In any case, the work cited is very thin---and the fact that Knight knows most of these artists personally over a very long period of time undercuts any review but that of more promotion of l.a artists. Imagine Krugman in the NYTimes promoted his colleague David Brooks as an important social critic!
Something is very wrong with art that cannot stand on its own--the discourse on Kelley here is particularly appalling: exactly why are portraits of writers etc. on creative destruction juxtaposed to a serial killer? Why are Bowers and Divola joined--because of juxtaposition? Well, if the latter is all by itself criteria, then art is anything compared to anything that is not-art, a really childish game.