ART CONFEREES GET THE BIG PICTURE

‘I’m supposed to be at the College Art Assn. meeting but (a) it’s a meat market and (b) the weather is too nice,” declared a pale young woman from Delaware as she headed for Little Tokyo on the minibus. So much for scholarship.

Meanwhile, back at the “meat market,” several hundred of her colleagues were agonizing over employment interviews at the Hyatt Regency Hotel and thousands more were listening to academic programs at the Biltmore.

The College Art Assn., a national organization of about 9,000 art educators, historians, museum directors and curators, has brought an estimated 4,000 to Los Angeles for its annual conference, plus another 600 members of affiliated groups also holding their annual meetings here this week.

The convergence of art professionals has been a sort of three-ring circus, with the College Art Assn. occupying the largest ring and conducting its own three-pronged event: a placement service (lending the meeting its “meat market” aspect), a scholarly showcase of research papers and panels and a social/educational/political component allowing participants to make contacts through art tours, museum receptions, exhibits of publications and art supplies, casually arranged sight-seeing and--the most prevalent activity--milling around and chatting with peers.

The milling took on a decidedly anxious edge Wednesday through Friday at the Hyatt Regency, where the association’s placement service was in full swing. Hosts of nervous-looking people wandered through a lobby area, carrying briefcases stuffed with resumes and plastic-cased slides of their work. They perused a bulletin board to see if their names had been posted for interviews. The lucky ones waited their turns around the fringe of a ballroom filled with 70 numbered tables, while seated interviewers squinted at applicants’ slides. Still other interviewers were squirreled away in hotel rooms at the Hyatt, Biltmore and Hilton hotels.

“The association publishes job listings throughout the year and mails them to subscribers,” explained Ann Jackson, who was hired to administer the conference placement center. “Some of the openings are prelisted and matched, but we get new listings here. We gather information from interviewers about jobs available and how they can be contacted. Then we give that information to candidates who are off and running to set up their own interviews.”

For some weary candidates, the “off and running” part meant repeatedly making a three-hotel circuit to drop off resumes, returning to the Hyatt center to see if anyone wanted to talk to them and then going back to the rooms where they were called. Rumors circulated that there were 100, then 1,000, graduates with MFA degrees for every job. Numbers given at the placement center--though tentative--were considerably more encouraging: about 500 listings for twice that many candidates.

At the Biltmore, the conference schedule was crammed with about 60 academic sessions, plus workshops and meetings of special-interest groups. Rose Weil, the association’s executive secretary, speculated that attendance (large for a California meeting but smaller than the 5,550 to 6,000 who usually sign up when the conference is held in New York) reflected a high level of interest in the J. Paul Getty Trust’s activities. On opening day of registration, hand-lettered signs proclaimed that tours to Getty facilities were already sold out.

Academic sessions began Thursday morning with nine simultaneous programs, ranging from deliberations on “The Artist and the Critic” to a series of papers on such subjects as “Italy and the North in the Early Middle Ages.”

While each of these presentations attracted a coterie of devotees and snoozing dropouts, a session on “California Art and Culture 1920-1945” brought a lively mob. People sat on the floor, leaned against walls and snatched up newly arriving stacks of chairs brought by attendants who had been alerted to the overflow. Susan Erlich introduced the subject with an illustrated overview of such pioneering artists as Helen Lundeberg, Peter Krasnow and Man Ray.

Most academic sessions dealt with art history, reaching back to antiquity and reassessing everything from cultural relativism to Oriental influences on Greek art. One of the few programs to look ahead was a Thursday-afternoon panel on “The Next Twenty-Five Years.” During a rambling series of discourses and questions from the audience, artist John Baldesarri noted that money had already begun to direct the course of art and would probably have increased influence.

Critic Edit de Ak confessed to feeling like “an antique” who was out of touch with new technology and predicted “a beautiful, beautiful battle between image and language.” Rachel Rosenthal warned of two deepening schisms: between elitist art and “social graffiti,” and between traditional and more theatrical, entertaining, spectacular forms of her medium--performance art.

College Art Assn. meetings continue this morning with four programs at the Biltmore: two symposiums on the interpretation of abstraction and landscape, a panel on “Teaching Non-Traditional Mediums in an Academic Institution,” led by artist Chris Burden, and another panel on “Video and the Education of the Un-Artist.”

Ten afternoon sessions will address such topics as “Early Christian Rome and Reform,” “The Common Photograph” and “The Comic in Northern Art.” Studio workshops on sculpture, photography and murals will be held at Otis/Parsons from 2 to 5 p.m.