Pumping in some new life

THE other day I logged onto the Getty’s website, and the home page featured this short entry under Exhibitions: “New works by Tim Hawkinson, postwar Japanese art, photographs by Sigmar Polke, and more.” That meant a California artist born in 1960, the eruption of avant-garde art in Japan in the 1950s and ‘60s and the earliest photographic experiments by one of Germany’s most important artists of the last 40 years. The current Getty exhibition roster is awash in, well, current art.

The “and more” cited in the entry includes a group of 12 abstract paintings by Gerhard Richter, Polke’s friend and co-holder of the unofficial title Greatest Living German Artist.

Yes, there are Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque and other works on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum -- the zenith being a terrific loan from the Dresden State Museums of eight moody and evocative German Romantic landscape paintings by Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840). These are juxtaposed with the dozen darkly luminous abstractions by Richter, a Dresden native.

But clearly, with a lineup heavy on recent art, this is not your father’s Getty Center.

Of course, your father would have to be just 10 for that distinction to obtain, since the Getty Center opened in 1997. Still, something notable is up. The results might be a bit shaggy and unfocused, but the Getty has gone contemporary -- and more aggressively than at any time since 1954, when the late oilman opened his house on the edge of Malibu to the public.

Hawkinson’s contribution is in two parts. It starts in the Getty Museum’s rotunda, where the L.A. artist’s maniacally witty musical sculpture “Uberorgan” is installed. Made in 2000, the giant oompah-machine has never been shown in Los Angeles before.

Fabricated from six enormous polyethylene bags wrapped in red plastic netting and tied with bright yellow cord, the “Uberorgan” is hoisted high overhead in the lobby. Air ducts snake through the space linking the sacks together, and long sounding-tubes made from cardboard wrapped in silver-foil protrude from them. Organ pipes are crossed with Gabriel’s angelic trumpet.

Over to one side is a gizmo based on a player-piano mechanism. An electronically enhanced homemade spool of Mylar sheeting and Magic Marker black dots has been hooked up to the plastic bags and cardboard tubes. The spool begins to turn every hour on the hour, and for five minutes the “Uberorgan” plays a deep, rumbling, almost slow-motion concert.

The guttural honking is sort of like the intergalactic greeting cobbled together in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” when Francois Truffaut and friends commandeered a synthesizer to communicate with the unknown inhabitants inside a starship. In the glass-and-white-steel Getty lobby, you get to be the alien.

Hawkinson is a leading practitioner of DIY art, with most of his sculptures and collages looking as if they had been jerry-built from Home Depot salvage. The do-it-yourself genre is a robust antidote to the commercially and industrially fabricated art that has proliferated since the 1990s, in which artists hire professional manufacturers or employ vast armies of workers to make the piece. “Uberorgan” stands as an earthy, garage-band counterpoint to the extravagant, sleekly produced techno-pop of such artists as Jeff Koons or Matthew Barney. And the contraption provides a sharp, lively contrast to the entry pavilion of the Getty’s over-produced, billion-dollar travertine spectacle on the hill.

Typically Hawkinson’s sculptural objects derive from the human body. This super-organ makes obvious visual reference to the stomach and intestines of a digestive tract, a theme popularized by L.A. artist Mike Kelley in the 1980s. What goes in one end feeds body and soul, but what’s left over eventually does come out the other end. The gastrointestinal canal is a slyly funny metaphor for the transformative powers of art.

Hawkinson gets two main uses out of the metaphor here. The musical organ proposes that making art is a basic, even elementary human function. Art defines humanity.

But the rude noises squeezed out like clockwork by the ungainly “Uberorgan” provide a raucous contrast to the sedate institutional setting in which it, like its fellow museum visitors, temporarily finds itself. Especially given the Getty’s well-publicized troubles in recent years, the close encounter with a gigantic farting machine in the lobby generates involuntary smiles of delirium all around.

In the museum’s West Pavilion, a small show of four Getty-commissioned works by Hawkinson is less satisfying, if only because it comes across as a modest version of his regular local gallery exhibitions. (He shows with Ace.) Each of the four represents an animal, real or imagined -- an octopus, bat, dragon and dinosaur -- though all are associated with mythic terrors, large and small.

Hawkinson once again links these works to the human body, whether through the calligraphic hand-gestures of the ink brush used to summon a vaguely Chinese dragon, or the rudimentary clay figures with which he formed the skull and bones of the dinosaur.

He also manufactures provocative puns along the way. The dinosaur skull is made from a single large human figure, tucked into a kneeling pose. The figure’s own head -- his skull -- connects to the prehistoric creature’s spine, which is composed from an undulating line of 72 figures deployed as rowers. Their pairs of oars extend outward to form the animal’s ribs.

A rowboat propelled by a pair of oars is called a scull -- think of Thomas Eakins’ famous paintings of sculling on the Schuylkill River -- which connects back down the spine to the animal skull. Hawkinson inventively tracks an unbroken line of continuity between extinct animals and humans. It’s nearly as convincing as anything in Darwin.

Showcasing photographs

THE Polke photographs and Richter paintings are also in the West Pavilion, where the Getty has carved out a recently opened Center for Photographs to accommodate its only important collection of Modern art. (Polke’s 35 gelatin silver-prints are all from the Getty’s collection.) The museum, unlike most that collect camera work, has a Department of Photographs, not a Department of Photography. The semantic difference rightly emphasizes the art object -- the photograph -- rather than the amorphous activity implied by the word “photography.”

Polke’s photographs date from 1968 to 1972, which I think of as his reeducation period. Like many artists he spent the years immediately after graduation from art school -- he was at the Dusseldorf Art Academy, where Richter also studied, from 1961 to 1967 -- putting what he had learned into a conceptual blender, then turning the dial to “high.”

The Getty photographs are characterized by a strange, disconcerting intimacy. On the rare occasion that a long shot appears, Polke overlays a close-up view in a double exposure that smashes things together on the paper’s surface. A snowy urban street and a studio interior, for example, are respectively layered with a potted plant and a magazine advertisement.

Camera images were ubiquitous by the 1960s, thanks to omnivorous mass media. Polke recognized that the phenomenon was changing human perception, creating a false but common belief that camera images are transparent. Casual viewers wrongly conclude that seeing a photograph of, say, a snowy urban street equals seeing the actual snowy street -- as if experiencing an image is the same as experiencing the world depicted in it.

Interrupting the street view with a potted plant shows how the camera actually domesticates nature, as the viewfinder discretely severs life’s endless continuities. Meanwhile, the whimsical garden gnome lurking at the base of the plant injects a primitive nature spirit -- one that inhabits a different physical dimension from you and me.

Polke’s photographs are also physically crummy. The negatives, which he printed in a makeshift darkroom, are often scratched, dusty or blurred, while the layering of images seems almost accidental, even though it’s not. Like Hawkinson’s DIY aesthetic, Polke’s offhand quality is crucial: His pictures play against the era’s ruling esteem for exquisite printing in art photography.

A wall label in the show says that this work, especially the photographs showing stuff for sale in shop windows, is “a critique of consumer excess.” The pictures, however, don’t support the claim. It’s one of those tired academic ideas, especially popular among European Marxists at the time these photographs were made, that could itself benefit from a refreshing spin in the blender.

These homemade darkroom concoctions revel in a sensibility that is also appropriate to their 1968 time frame. Call it “better seeing through chemistry.” The student upheavals of the period were part of a widespread social movement toward critical self-reflection. At the Getty Research Institute, a documentary survey of postwar Japanese art touches on similar themes.

The show’s descriptive title is a mouthful: “Art, Anti-art, Non-art: Experiments in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan, 1950-1970.” The display is loosely bracketed by two major events. The allied occupation of the country officially ended in 1951, but the 1972 return of Okinawa to Japan represented the practical conclusion of postwar occupation. The show chronicles an old nation’s young artists trying to figure out a new identity.

Most of the show chronicles ephemeral events, including guerrilla theater, musical concerts and disposable junk assemblages. (In the only society ever flattened by atomic bombs, making art from junk was virtually a poetic necessity.) The drawback is that the library’s survey is largely limited to documentary artifacts -- photographs, musical scores, posters, periodicals and announcements -- for the Gutai group, Hi Red Center and others. It’s a fascinating history, but with the exception of some small Tokyo Fluxus objects, the disjointed, text-heavy exhibition is rather like a pop-up Cliff’s Notes for the book the Getty published about the period.

Still, it’s good to see the Getty venturing into multiple arenas of global contemporary art, even if the choices are somewhat staid. The last Getty solo show for an L.A. artist was in 2003 -- Bill Viola videos -- and it came only after the artist’s heralded 1997 retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Likewise, Hawkinson’s much-admired retrospective was at LACMA just 18 months ago. Surely the Getty can cast its nets a bit wider.

And if the institution plans to develop a serious program in contemporary art to complement its historical offerings, it does need to go a step further. There is no curatorial specialist in contemporary art on staff, which may explain the somewhat cautious, bookish feel of the current exhibitions.

The Getty has waded knee-high into the pool. Now the only question is whether it will dive in all the way.

christopher.knight@latimes.com

*

A notable array of contemporary art

--

What:

* “From Caspar David Friedrich to Gerhard Richter: German Paintings From Dresden,” through April 29

* “Sigmar Polke: Photographs, 1968--1972,” through May 20

* “Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan, 1950-1970,” through June 3

* “Zoopsia: New Works by Tim Hawkinson” and “Uberorgan,” through Sept. 9

--

Where: The Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles

When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays; 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; closed Mondays

Price: Free

Contact: (310) 440-7300; www.getty.edu