BROWSING IN THE ‘SUMMER 1985’ BOUTIQUE

Around the art sphere these days, the most persistent pejorative simile for art museums is that they’ve become department stores, mindlessly promoting the latest cultural fashions. Where once they erred on the side of exclusivity, partisanship and scholarly esoterica, they now ride a metronome ticking to the beat of surface entertainment and consumer values.

Like all intellectual caricatures, this one is an exaggeration, but it does seem uncomfortably apt when applied to “Summer 1985,” the Museum of Contemporary Art’s long-running exhibition of nine L.A. artists. It remains on view to Sept. 29, but probably no amount of time would suffice to make sense of it.

One wanders the showrooms with an invisible hovering floorwalker exuding haughty affability as heavy as the scent from the fading gardenia in his lapel. “If Sir or Madame would care to step this way, I am sure we have something to your taste. May I suggest photos by Jo Anne Callis? Chic as a Melrose boutique but vaguely agonized to demonstrate seriousness. No? I quite understand. Just through here we have a line which has been so popular among our more discerning clients it seems fair to call it a classic . Neo-Expressionism as interpreted by Steve Galloway, Suzanne Caporeal, Jill Giegerich and several others. Quite a selection. . . . No?

“Well, I can certainly understand anyone who feels that the trend has peaked. I see; there is that problem--you like it but are concerned about the reaction of friends and relatives. Shows great delicacy of feeling. Perhaps these subtle minimalist Mary Corse Originals? They are full of profound meanings for sensitive individuals. To everybody else they just look rather pretty, like watered silk or Jean Harlow satin.

“Well, don’t be discouraged; I am sure we have something that will fancy your tickle. I mean, if these traditional forms seem un peu passe or overly refined, there are new, bold streetworks by Gronk and Willy Herron in the Supergraphics boutique. Then of course there is the perfectly understandable possibility that you are sated and bored with inanimate art altogether. Who could blame a person after 10,000 interminable years of things that just stand there. Woolly mammoths in caves or undraped ladies in salons. All they do is stand there.

“We believe in moving with the times here at Mocangdales. Our new Television and Electronics Center currently features video by Bill Viola. For those who really are quite discouraged with art, we have Performance as represented by the late Guy de Cointet. Such work allows us to become blase about the theater. Schedules available at the Information Desk.

“Nothing at all today? Quite all right. Drop in anytime. We consider it a privilege to stimulate you to the point of indecision. Bye-bye then.”

Critics visiting MOCA found the summer exhibition virtually unreviewable. Well, so much for critics. What do they know anyway?

Well, they tend to know when an exhibition offers itself in such a way as, first, to act as an experience with a modicum of coherence, and then leave a residue of memory that gives the mind something to mull over, chew upon and become enlightened thereby. If critics with their bottomless capacity to find (or invent) content in aesthetic vacuums are unable to derive meaning from these nine exhibitions, that certainly suggests that members of the general audience will find them less than thought-provoking, less than revealing, except perhaps as individual entities. As to that, a significant fraction of the work is familiar from recent local gallery exhibitions, so exposure at TC does little but lend the museum’s cachet to the artists.

One begins to wonder what that cachet is worth. “Summer 1985” would be less disturbing if it did not feel like the straw that props up a generally jelling hypothesis that there is an odd ring of intellectual vacuity about MOCA. The fat exhibitions catalogue contains no general essay or interpretive profiles to put these artists in context. There are only vitae and timid Q&A; interviews that commit the museum to nothing. They are printed in pale blue ink, as if hoping to be too vague to read.

It is part of a pattern set by the museum from its opening about 18 months back. The inaugural “The First Show” presented a ton of art from private collections. Much of it was very fine, but installed and catalogued in such a way as to render it impossible to ponder in orderly historical fashion. Instead it acted as a celebration of private acquisition (and the museum does hope for donations). Its subtexts inevitably had to do with art as a purchasable commodity offering accrual value and lending social status.

Their next blockbuster blitz was “Automobile and Culture,” for last summer’s Olympic Arts Festival. Viewed with seasonal casualness, its melange of exotic real autos and artworks was a hoot extravaganza. Seriously examined, it was a tired, everything-is-art idea left over from the ‘60s. The book catalogue didn’t jibe with the actual show and insight was smothered by a feeling that shabby artworks were not nearly as exciting as sleek automobiles.

Such shows tend to reduce art to pure sensation, as accessible as circuses and ice follies. From what we know of TC’s future schedule, this show-biz syndrome seems likely to perpetuate itself. Traveling retrospectives of the art of Red Grooms and of Jonathan Borofsky are slated for the museum. Both are wonderful artists, but both represent the best of a breed dedicated to Brobdingnagian entertainment full of motorized figures, walk-in works and talking pictures. It is close to Disneyland, with elements of subversion.

Even as we grouch at MOCA, we realize that the museum is a victim, as well as an architect of its times. The tendency for once-dignified institutions to indulge in wretched, crowd-pleasing excess is so widespread as to represent an irresistible historical tide, a kind of Blockbuster Baroque. MOCA’s part in it has produced undeniably positive results. Los Angeles’ reputation as an art center has been enhanced by such prestigious goings-on. Purchase of a core permanent collection from the fabled Panza holdings was a responsible act. It has all given silver-lined hope to battalions of L.A. artists who see the institution as an avenue to larger legitimacy.

Everyone, in fact, seems to be pleased, except a small corps of Cassandras who keep wringing their hands and worrying that all this magnificence either arrived at a time when art itself is on the fizzle or that somehow the quality of the (gag) “support system” is trivializing the very art it is supposed to select, preserve and interpret.

With proper interpretation, for example, perhaps the East L.A. street artists Gronk and Willy Herron would not appear to be co-opted by the museum environment. Herron is represented by large hanging banners depicting either the head of a shouting man or a nude male torso. They might be dramatic slathered on an alley wall, but here they just look like self-promotion for a commercial designer who has crossbred Cuban posters with Julian Schnabel.

Guglio Gronk Nicandro fares much better. His huge wall mural proves him a painter of formidable energy and touch. A purgatorial montage is executed with a rare combination of ferocity and exquisiteness. However, the subject, if there be one, is but trivial light satire about a youth’s rite of passage into the consumer culture. It’s a debutante’s isn’t-life-in-the-fast-lane-scary-and-how-do-I-get-there theme that blends John Held Jr. with Guy Pene Dubois. It looks like street art domesticated for Precocious Upscale Professional Youth (puppies).

The closest thing to a revelation provided by “Summer 1985” is the art of Bill Viola. His two video installations just clean out all the tangled static of the rest. One is titled “Room for St. John of the Cross.” It consists of a tiny cell, centered in a dark room. The cell contains a bare table, pitcher and a mini-TV with a static picture of a great snowcapped peak. Outside the cell, a projection television shows a chaotic shot of an alpine-like blizzard, with a camera swinging around so vertiginously it literally makes one dizzy.

A posted wall label links the piece to the historic St. John of the Cross, who wrote classic poetry of freedom while imprisoned. In practice, however, the work is a genie’s bottle of uncorked epiphanies. It poses questions about the difference between the still, monumental God of the closeted recluse and the angry, random God of nature in action. Thoughts eddy out toward questions of art and perception.

No less provocative is Viola’s other installation, “The Theater of Memory.” There’s a bare, uprooted tree, festooned with lanterns that seem to flash to the tinkle of wind chimes. On the wall another TV projection flickers with fitful, unclear imagery. The piece evokes all the magic and morbidity associated with the act of remembering. Recall is as important here as it was to Proust, but Viola is more pessimistic. There is no catharsis in his remembering.

A certain negativity about classic aesthetic rumination may account for his remarkable quality of originality. He deals seriously with highly literary ideas of religion and philosophy while insisting on sensuously immediate imagery. The combination makes you anxious to view his program of videotapes to confirm the suspicion that major talent is revealed here.

Alas, after two hours or so, the excited viewer decides to flee before his positive first impression is further diluted (a dozen other visitors have entered the video room and left before a single tape ran out). The determined watcher has seen many more bright patches than offered by the average tape. Viola has a knack for transforming ordinary heat shimmers or water reflections into visual magic by the use of simple camera devices like long lenses, stop-frame or lapse-time photography. At the same time he blunders into all the video-artist traps of underediting and overextending.

Never mind. The kind of hope offered by Viola’s best work makes all the other muck and worry worth the trouble.