PST, A to Z: 'Everyman’s Infinite Art' at Chapman University

Pacific Standard Time will explore the origins of the Los Angeles art world through museum exhibitions throughout Southern California over the next six months. Times art reviewer Sharon Mizota has set the goal of seeing all of them. This is her latest report.

When I set out for Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery, I fully expected to meet with closed doors. After all, “Everyman’s Infinite Art” was described as a re-creation of a 1966 exhibition in which the gallery was closed, proffering only a brochure to frustrated art lovers. This was four years before artist Michael Asher kept the Pomona College Museum of Art open 24/7 (a feat re-created for PST) and Robert Barry declared Eugenia Butler Gallery closed for the duration of his show there. While I can’t speak to the history of gallery closure as conceptual art, it seems Chapman professor Harold Gregor, who organized “Everyman’s,” was slightly ahead of his time.

In fact, Gregor was responding to an exhibition on the other side of the country. “Primary Structures,” at the Jewish Museum in New York, was an important show of Minimalist art that included works by Carl Andre, known for straightforward arrangements of unembellished construction materials. For “Everyman’s” Gregor wrote descriptions of works that also could be made from everyday materials, albeit less macho ones — rulers, ping pong balls, disposable cups. Work No. 6 read: “Twenty-five upright soup cans, labels removed, arranged to form a right angle with twelve cans comprising each leg and one can at the apex.” Although he actually built at least four of these works — only photographs survive— visitors to the gallery experienced them only as text descriptions.

It’s not clear whether Gregor thought Minimalism was a good thing or if he was mocking it. But in either case, for him, this was art at its limit. In the exhibition text — written in the style of a manifesto — he described how this type of work did not need to be realized: it was possible to experience it fully only as text. He went on to claim that, “it entails minimal spectator involvement and minimum artistic skill and discipline. In short ... EVERYMAN’S INFINITE ART.”

PST, A to Z: ‘Under the Big Black Sun,’ ‘Naked Hollywood’ at MOCA

Pacific Standard Time will explore the origins of the Los Angeles art world through museum exhibitions throughout Southern California over the next six months. Times art reviewer Sharon Mizota has set the goal of seeing all of them. This is her latest report.

One huge, black hole of a show, “Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981” at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Contemporary charts the flowering of pluralism in 1970s art — how in that turbulent era, art overflowed its traditional bounds and ran in any number of directions. Of course, the starting point for something new is more often than not the destruction of something old, and while “UBBS” is a celebration of pluralism, it also lives up to its name, full of acts of negation, derision and subversion.

With more than 400 objects on view, it's also nearly impossible to summarize. (Christopher Knight does a yeoman’s job in his review.) Such is the nature of true diversity, although I was dismayed to see works by African American artists Betye Saar and John Outterbridge alone in a cul-de-sac at the back of the galleries. Traditional notions of art history may have been chucked out the window, but some outdated boundaries are apparently more recalcitrant than others.

Still, artists were clearly out to dismantle, or at least expose, such borders. In her 1977 video “The East Is Red, the West Is Bending,” Martha Rosler reads the user’s manual for a consumer wok, managing through her deadpan delivery to convey the cocktail of exoticism and sexism that comes with globalization. Ilene Segalove’s collage series “Meet the Turk (Meet the Jerk)” from 1975 dissects images of a mustachioed model from Camel cigarette ads. Cutting out and cataloging his clothes, props and companions, she deftly (and humorously) defuses his masculine mystique.

Other artists took the idea of negation more literally. Christopher Williams’ 1981 series of re-photographed images of John F. Kennedy show only the back of his head (which is still eminently recognizable, by the way). In his 1978 gubernatorial campaign, Lowell Darling declared that if elected, he would hire his competitor Jerry Brown to run the state. (Brown won.) And in 1977, Ed Ruscha painted the back of the Hollywood sign with the sun going down behind it. It doesn’t get more “negative” than that.

PST, A to Z: ‘Speaking in Tongues’ at Armory Center for the Arts

Pacific Standard Time will explore the origins of the Los Angeles art world through museum exhibitions throughout Southern California over the next six months. Times art reviewer Sharon Mizota has set the goal of seeing all of them. This is her latest report.

I admit that before seeing “Speaking in Tongues: Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken, 1961-1976” at the Armory Center for the Arts I didn’t really “get” Berman’s work, and was not a fan of Heinecken’s. Both are important but under-known Los Angeles artists. Berman’s collages, mail art and his influential journal Semina, always seemed too insular, like missives from an idiosyncratic world to which I had no point of entry. Heinecken’s cut-and-pasted, “revised” magazines and pornographic source materials on the other hand always struck me as smart but sexist.

Showing their work in relation to each other, “Speaking in Tongues” succeeds, not only in giving Berman and Heinecken their due, but in providing much-needed context. The two artists were friends, and the show smartly intersperses their works in a generative, running conversation. Ricocheting back and forth between the two, we see that though they used strategies of appropriation and pastiche differently, their work marked the emergence of a postmodern aesthetic in Los Angeles that runs rampant to this day.

PST, A to Z: ’46 N. Los Robles’ at Pacific Asia, ‘Proof’ at Norton Simon

Pacific Standard Time will explore the origins of the Los Angeles art world through museum exhibitions throughout Southern California over the next six months. Times art reviewer Sharon Mizota has set the goal of seeing all of them. This is her latest report.

At least one writer has characterized Pacific Standard Time as “overcompensation” for L.A.’s perceived art historical inferiority complex. But the story of the region’s ascent is more nuanced than this assessment suggests. “46 N. Los Robles: A History of the Pasadena Art Museum,” at the Pacific Asia Museum, and “Proof: The Rise of Printmaking in Southern California” at the Norton Simon Museum both capture that pivotal moment when Southern California seized its own artistic reputation by the horns, simultaneously reaching for and turning away from New York and Europe.

“46 N. Los Robles” is a small show with a big, somewhat convoluted story. In 1943, a community-run arts association in Pasadena merged with the better funded Pasadena Art Institute and moved into the Chinoiserie-style home and studios of Grace Nicholson at 46 N. Los Robles Ave. (now the home of the Pacific Asia Museum). Renamed the Pasadena Art Museum, it organized some of the most adventurous and cutting edge shows of contemporary art in the region, if not the country—notably, an early Pop art show in 1962, and a Marcel Duchamp retrospective in 1963. Riding on these successes, it relocated to a new building (the current site of the Norton Simon Museum) in 1969. But five years later, the cost of the building had put the organization in financial straits, forcing it to hand the museum over to Simon, who re-opened it as a more traditional institution.

PST, A to Z: ‘Artistic Evolution,’ ‘The Experimental Impulse’

Pacific Standard Time will explore the origins of the Los Angeles art world through museum exhibitions throughout Southern California over the next six months. Times art reviewer Sharon Mizota has set the goal of seeing all of them. This is her latest report.

Most Pacific Standard Time exhibitions offer a mix of artworks and documentation — such is the nature of a project with such a historical mission. But this approach sometimes makes the art look like a mere illustration of the history. It’s difficult to strike the proper balance between art that appeals to us on aesthetic terms, and history that seeks to tell stories or provide a broader context. Two PST shows, “Artistic Evolution: Southern California Artists at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles” and “The Experimental Impulse” at REDCAT don’t even try. The former is an exhibition of art; the latter features only documentation. As it turns out, both approaches work rather well, although they do require a bit of prior knowledge to fully appreciate the results.

“Artistic Evolution” is a small show in the rotunda of the Natural History Museum, which before 1965 was the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science and Art. As Christopher Knight discussed in his review, it’s smartly and economically curated with succinct, informative wall texts and some early gems by artists who later went on to prominence. Despite the show’s historical focus, it puts the art first, a move that feels surprisingly appropriate amid halls of prehistoric skeletons.

PST, A to Z: ‘Art Along the Hyphen’ at the Autry

Pacific Standard Time will explore the origins of the Los Angeles art world through museum exhibitions throughout Southern California over the next six months. Times art reviewer Sharon Mizota has set the goal of seeing all of them. This is her latest report.

Chicano art has been defined as a mix of murals, posters, and graffiti that accompanied the rise of the corresponding political movements of the 1970s. At least that’s the stereotype lambasted by conceptual art collective Asco in their cheeky performances. But while Asco forecasted the future of Chicano art, the Pacific Standard Time exhibition at the Autry, “Art Along the Hyphen: The Mexican-American Generation,” looks at the work of six artists who were “Chicano” not only before it was cool, but before it existed.

Eduardo Carillo, Roberto Chavez, Dora de Larios, Domingo Ulloa, Alberto Valdés and Hernando G. Villa were part of a generation of Mexican American artists educated or working in Los Angeles during the post-WWII era. It is one of the failures (or perhaps just the slowness) of multiculturalism that most people haven’t heard of them. Perhaps because they worked in more traditional modes — painting, drawing, and sculpture — they were not taken up by the Chicano movement, even though they often dealt with similar themes of racism and cultural hybridity.

Still, even in their own time, they knew they were “uncool.” A poster for a 1964 exhibition at Ceeje Gallery, a space dedicated to then-unfashionable figurative art (and one of the few spots on La Cienega’s gallery row committed to the work of ethnic minorities and women), reads: “6 Painters of the Rear Guard.” And indeed, many of the works in the show seem to invoke the early 20th century more than the turbulent decades of the post-war era. The paintings of Villa in particular, who died in 1952 at age 71, hark back to the pastoral traditions of the late 19th century, depicting a mix of “Spanish” street scenes, dancing girls and stoic Native Americans. This is the stuff of kitsch and cliché nowadays, but Villa’s work does shed some light on the limited options available to an ambitious painter whom the press described as of “Spanish heritage.”

PST, A to Z: 'Mapping Another L.A.,’ at Fowler Museum, ‘Mural Remix’ at LACMA

Pacific Standard Time will explore the origins of the Los Angeles art world through museum exhibitions throughout Southern California over the next six months. Times art reviewer Sharon Mizota has set the goal of seeing all of them. This is her latest report.

At the entrance to “Mapping Another L.A.: The Chicano Art Movement” at the Fowler Museum, a sculpture of a Quetzalcoatl head meets a suit of Spanish armor…and Chicano culture is born. Of course it’s not that simple, but this meeting of the New World and the Old, the indigenous and the colonizer—and the variety of ways in which they collided, intermingled, and fused—is the origin of what we have come to think of as “Chicano” culture.

As if to drive this point home, behind this pair is the mural, “The Birth of Our Art,” from 1971 by Don Juan, a.k.a. Johnny D. Gonzalez. It depicts the conquistador Hernán Cortés and his native lover and interpreter Malinche with their arms outstretched, Michelangelo-style, toward a blaze of light. The piece once adorned the façade of the Goez Art Studios and Gallery, a community art center founded by Don Juan, José Luis Gonzalez, and David Botello in East Los Angeles in 1969. The neighborhood was a hot bed of the Chicano artistic movement in the 1970s, and “Mapping” features art works and ephemera associated with nine art centers or collaborative groups from that decade.

The other art spaces are Mechicano Art Center, Plaza de la Raza, Self Help Graphics & Art, Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), and Centro de Arte Público/Public Art Center. These organizations combined exhibition opportunities with educational workshops and community engagement. The exhibition also focuses on three artist groups who created work collaboratively: Asco, Los Four, and Los Dos Streetscapers.

PST, A to Z: ‘Craft Revolution’ at Mingei and ‘Phenomenal’ at MCASD

Pacific Standard Time will explore the origins of the Los Angeles art world through museum exhibitions throughout Southern California over the next six months. Times art reviewer Sharon Mizota has set the goal of seeing all of them. This is her latest report.

It’s hard to find two Pacific Standard Time shows more different than “San Diego’s Craft Revolution: From Post-War Modern to California Design” and “Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface.” The former, at San Diego’s Mingei International Museum, traces the evolution of craft practices from classic midcentury modernism to something stranger and homegrown; the latter, at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, looks at 1960s and '70s sculpture and installations that probe the mechanics and mysteries of perception.

One is overflowing with wooly, knobby, handcrafted objects; the other features the sparest interventions in space via plastics, lighting and architectural alterations. But in their distinct ways, each is emblematic of a questioning, exploratory spirit that characterized much California art of the period.

In “Phenomenal,” Larry Bell’s early glass cube sculptures from the late 1960s are decorated with solid and mirrored shapes that create layers of reflections that echo and fragment from front to back. Oddly, a similar effect is also found in “Craft Revolution,” in a 1970s stained glass window by James Hubbell. It’s 180 degrees from Bell’s sharp edges and tight geometries, but nevertheless creates a similar effect (at least as it’s lighted and installed on the museum wall). Sharp pyramidal shapes point to the center of the window, but the rest is organic and rather lumpy. Truth be told, it’s a bit over the top, like something you might find on the set of “The Lord of the Rings” movies, only more so.

PST, A to Z: ‘Exchange and Evolution’ at Long Beach Museum of Art

Pacific Standard Time will explore the origins of the Los Angeles art world through museum exhibitions throughout Southern California over the next six months. Times art reviewer Sharon Mizota has set the goal of seeing all of them. This is her latest report.

In 1974, the Long Beach Museum of Art turned its attic into a video production studio and became a home base for the then-nascent video art scene. It was a good deal for artists, who were free to use the facility as long as they donated a copy of what they made to the museum’s collection. The museum also initiated a wide-ranging exhibition program that brought in artists and video works from all over the world.

This ambitious initiative, which also included unrealized plans for a museum cable channel, came to an end in 1999 as desktop editing and commercial facilities became more widely available. The museum’s collection sat in storage until 2005 when it was acquired by the Getty Research Institute, which restored and presented selected works as the centerpiece of the 2008 exhibition “California Video.”

That expansive show is a hard act to follow. For Pacific Standard Time, the LBMA decided to revisit the collection with a focus on international exchange, featuring works by artists from abroad and by U.S. artists who address cross-cultural issues. All of the works in “Exchange and Evolution: Worldwide Video Long Beach 1974-1999” were either created or shown at the museum. The result is a bit scattershot — “cultural exchange” is a big theme — but the show does demonstrate one of the key benefits of PST, bringing otherwise forgotten or under-known works to the fore. 

One of the highlights is Japanese artist Ko Nakajima’s unflinching “My Life,” a two-channel, black-and-white piece that spans the years 1974 to 1992, juxtaposing footage of his mother’s deathbed and funeral with the birth and growth of his daughter. There are some unsettling comparisons — coffins and cradles are both boxes for bodies — but the poetic work suggests that coming and going are just part of the same process. The piece also has two separate soundtracks (playing through two pairs of headphones), meaning you can never quite take it all in — like life.

PST, A to Z: ‘State of Mind’ at OCMA

Pacific Standard Time will explore the origins of the Los Angeles art world through museum exhibitions throughout Southern California over the next six months. Times art reviewer Sharon Mizota has set the goal of seeing all of them. This is her latest report.

With a few exceptions, the only art I’ve seen since September has been part of Pacific Standard Time, a circumstance that leaves me feeling as if I’m traveling in a wobbly time warp that nets out somewhere in the early 1970s. “State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970” at the Orange County Museum of Art does little to dispel this sensation, focusing on a narrow but fertile span of time, from the late 1960s to the mid-'70s.

It includes more than 150 works of art that could be described as “conceptual,” that is, installation, performance, video — basically, any form that didn’t come with centuries of artistic, moneyed baggage. Since then, of course, conceptual art has become a dominant influence (and is exceedingly marketable), and many of these works are familiar. Ed Ruscha’s artist’s book, “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” Bas Jan Ader’s films of himself crying and falling, and documentation of Chris Burden’s “Shoot,” in which he had himself shot in the arm, are unavoidable but obligatory signposts.

However, the show also includes many surprises. An uncharacteristically demure 1971 work by Paul McCarthy is a sequence of 25 slides of the same street corner taken at different moments. Equally modest and self-contained is a clear plastic wall piece by Michael Asher, better known for large-scale architectural interventions.

Most intriguing is documentation of a spate of performance works by San Francisco Bay Area artists, a cohort somewhat outside the official scope of PST but one that has resonance for OCMA. Formerly known as the Newport Harbor Art Museum, it played host to a range of conceptual art shows, including “The San Francisco Performance Exhibition” in 1972. Curated by artist Tom Marioni, it included an interactive piece by Paul Kos — daring visitors to use a pool table surrounded by animal traps — and a work by Bonnie Sherk in which a rat gave birth inside a tent.

Nowadays PETA would have something to say about that, but Sherk also put her own body out there. In 1971’s “Public Lunch,” she dined in a cage in the Lion House at the San Francisco Zoo alongside feline neighbors enjoying their meals. And in “Sitting Still Series,” she sat in a chair at various outdoor locations for an hour at a time. Effecting a subtle, fleeting change in the landscape, she became a work of public sculpture, in a way, but also drew attention to the plain fact of physical presence.

Sherk’s performances weren’t explicitly political, but other Bay Area artists joined public art with activism. In 1969, Joe Hawley, Mel Henderson and Alfred Young wrote the word “OIL” in nontoxic dye in the waters of San Francisco Bay near the Standard Oil docks. They also once called 100 yellow cabs to the intersection of Market and Castro in San Francisco, strangling traffic in a move that presaged flash mob tactics.

Terri Keyser, Marc Keyser and David Shire of Sam’s Café, a collective run out of a former greasy spoon near UC Berkeley, also orchestrated several, er, time-based, participatory works that might otherwise be regarded as complex pranks or nascent forms of culture jamming. For their final piece in 1971, titled “Sam’s Collection Agency,” they sent fake bills to middle-income San Francisco residents with contact phone numbers for the local newspapers, TV stations and Bank of America. The switchboards clogged with calls. These companies also received a “press kit” from Sam’s Café that included vials purportedly filled with the artists’ excrement. Tried in federal court for sending a “filthy and vile substance” through the mail, the artists were acquitted on the testimony of an expert witness — an art critic — who stated that the act was in fact conceptual art.

Although there is plenty to look at in “State of Mind,” the exhibition’s chief appeal is stories like these — the narratives that unfold from the objects. It’s the way in which conceptual art foregrounds that unspooling, the point at which art meets life (and sometimes disappears into it) that has made it so endlessly compelling. As artist Douglas Huebler once said, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting: I do not wish to add any more.”

-- Sharon Mizota

Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach, (949) 759-1122, through Jan. 22. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays. www.ocma.net

Photos, from top: Bonnie Sherk, "Sitting Still II," November 1970 from the "Sitting Still" series; performance documentation: Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco. Photo: Robert Campbell / Chamois Moon, courtesy SFMOMA Research Library and Archives.

Chris Burden, "Shoot," Nov. 19, 1971; performance at F Space, Santa Ana, Calif. Photo courtesy of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; gift of the Naify Family. Descriptive text for "Shoot": “At 7:45 p.m. I was shot in the left arm by a friend. The bullet was a copper jacket .22 long rifle. My friend was standing about fifteen feet from me.”