DOWNTOWN--IS THE LEASE UP ON A DREAM?

For some five years downtown L.A. has developed patchily as a cradle of new art, a nouveau SoHo, a yankee Montmartre. Things seem to blossom apace, but there are distressing signs of a dream eroding.

As noted last week in these columns, the good news remains bracing. The Museum of Contemporary Art is chugging along in its informally grand Temporary Contemporary quarters while Arata Isozaki’s intriguing permanent building takes palpable shape amid the California Plaza redevelopment on Bunker Hill. Wonderful.

The Japanese American and Cultural and Community Center presents exhibitions and provides a handsome oasis for Little Tokyo with its plaza by Isamu Noguchi. There is art to be seen in the towers of Security Pacific, ARCO, Wells Fargo and Crocker Center representing such important names as Alexander Calder, Mark di Suvero and our own Robert Graham. Splendid.

Much of the credit for these cultural amenities can be traced to the city’s rule that developers use 1% of their costs to purchase art or comparable appurtenances such as the MOCA building.

Recently, the administering Community Redevelopment Agency adopted a plan retooling the rule. Revised, it will raise more money divided more liberally, with 60% continuing to go for on-site artworks. The rest will funnel into a trust fund split to fuel a biennial Downtown Arts Festival and other activities such as performing and visual arts projects and the cost of buildings and maintenance. The plan was applauded by merchants and culturati, artists and dilettanti alike. It all seems so liberal, enlightened, benign and logical. Who could object?

A plan like this can only enhance art’s assured role downtown. At the same time the urban art-watcher is troubled by nagging anxieties. Some are amorphous and philosophical; others are immediate and tangible.

An incipient downtown art boom imposed the idea of itself in a purely informal and casual way. One kept hearing that young artists were no longer searching for studio space in gentrified Venice but were braving the wilds of the industrial district east of Spring Street, where they found spacious lofts on the cheap. There they set to living and creating despite discomfort, inconvenience and violation of zoning laws.

The trend took on a public face when art dealers whiffed the wave of the future and located galleries downtown. By 1981 it was possible to report that there were more than 20 art showplaces of one kind or another. Among the commercial galleries the most professional and aesthetically interesting were undoubtedly Cirrus, Ovsey, Riko Mizuno, Stella Polaris, Adrian Simard, Simon Lowinsky and Kirk De Gooyer galleries.

Today it is rather sobering to contemplate the fact that all but two have either gone belly-up or relocated outside the area, as have such entry-level outposts as the Oranges and Sardines, Downtown and Traction galleries. Of the remaining two--Ovsey and Cirrus--Ovsey is contemplating a move because its lease is up. Gallery partner Alice Ovsey admits they have been searching outside downtown parameters.

“If we move it’s not because we are down on downtown,” she said. “The area has been good to us. We have never had a drop in sales but it is no longer possible to find good, secure lease agreements here. The area is less and less commercial and more taken over by artists co-op galleries and nonprofit institutions. Private people can’t compete with all the government and city loans and grants they are getting. There is not the influx of either new galleries or artists we expected. There is a higher proportion of arts-related people like architects and commercial photographers taking over loft spaces. It’s a kind of gentrification forcing some artists further south and east. There is another kind of attrition where the more successful artists are moving to New York. Judy Simonian who showed with us has just moved back there.”

Jean Milant, director of Cirrus, was among the first serious dealers to relocate downtown. His combination gallery and lithographic workshop now commands an entire industrial building on Alameda Street.

“I’m staying,” he asserts firmly. “My business increases by 20% a year. I began by thinking this was a powerful potential center and I still believe it. But there is this ingrained negativity about downtown. L.A. is a fickle, faddish place. People make big noises about supporting a downtown art scene but it turns out they have big voices and small pocketbooks.

“This may just be a quiet period of weeding out over-optimistic galleries that opened with no backing and nothing to fall back on. It could all come back in three years. Or five. Anyway I am staying.”

Two galleries that decided to decamp offer various reasons for shaking downtown dust from their heels but none of their reasons are as eloquent as their new addresses.

Polaris moved to Beverly Hills, which pretty well tells its own story. The Simard/Halm Gallery retains little of its downtown identity other than the name of Adrian Simard (who is evidently no longer associated with the gallery). Anyway, it rematerialized on booming Melrose Avenue which, as all the world knows has become a kind of international New Wave Rodeo Drive flashing with neon and redolent with traffic from punks with spiky fuchsia hair to aging yuppies dining in fashionable restaurants.

Melrose is, in fact, the Downtown Dream made flesh 10 miles west. It’s an absolute wonder of an apparently spontaneous generation of the urge for a heterogeneous urban mixing place east of La Cienega. There are few galleries in the thick of it but the center seems to be spreading both west of Fairfax and up and down La Brea, where galleries are just waiting to be absorbed into the mix.

One can either view the Melrose phenomenon as downtown-co-opted or as downtown-in-the-future. Either way, it makes the galleries’ reasons for relocating self-evident. The art world’s downtown still lacks the connective tissue that keeps people walking from one gallery to the next. Most are (or were) located on bleak industrial streets that are forbidding if not actually dangerous.

Is downtown dangerous? There are true tales. An artist who was mugged was so traumatized he later developed hypertension and had a heart attack. He left town. A sculptor woke at midnight in his studio loft with a straight razor at his throat and a threat in his ear. He survived but moved to a more secure building.

Such intelligence notwithstanding, most downtown denizens insist that, excepting some obvious bad patches, it’s no worse than anyplace else. Nobody, however, insists that a deserted street with a derelict collapsed in a doorway constitutes an enticing promenade for a bright young thing from Brentwood. Clearly, that part of downtown is never going to fulfill its promise without street-level commercial development.

As far as anybody can tell the CRA is a terrific organization, but no bureaucratic body can legislate the kind of scene that makes Melrose a bracing, breathing entity. Losing so many significant downtown commercial galleries is a bad omen.

Even the ever-upbeat MOCA director Richard Koshalek admits that the atmosphere downtown is “troubled.”

“Things are moving more slowly than we thought they would,” he says while still envisioning that MOCA along with new theaters for dance and drama will constitute a, “Quantum leap for downtown. The new CRA plan could make a big difference and L.A. could wind up as a model for U.S. cities but we need more time. It could take another five or ten years for things to develop fully.”

Talking to informed downtown art people one begins to form a consensus image of the area. Joy Silverman is director of L.A. Contemporary Exhibitions, a nonprofit “alternate space” that acts as an informal social center for the indigenous young art population of the area. It has been so successful it is about to move from its picturesque quarters in the landmark Victor Clothing Co. Building to larger picturesque quarters on Industrial Street. Like Koshalek, she is an unabashed booster. She says there is a large, partially underground art scene that includes loft exhibitions and a scattering of hangouts such as Al’s Bar, Gorky’s, Yee Mee Loo’s and Phillipe’s restaurants, plus a smattering of after-hours clubs with names like Power Tools and Dirtbox.

“Our current show of downtown artists includes 300 people,” she enthused. “Six hundred people came to the opening. When we hosted a performance by Survival Research Laboratories (a San Francisco group) 2,000 people came. Filled every restaurant in the area afterwards. It’s true the commercial galleries are in a lull but the nonprofits are really active. I think downtown was hyped before its time and it was wrong to see it as a new SoHo. L.A. is different and it is never going to work like that, but it is by no means dead.”

Silverman’s sentiments were echoed by Howard Spector, who directs the L.A. Center for Photographic Studies, a nonprofit showplace located on Spring Street. He thinks community galleries like his flourish precisely because they don’t have to concentrate on sales and can show younger artists doing riskier work. But he also worries about the geographic discontinuity of the scene and would like to see the various cultural institutions concentrated where all can be reached on foot, “Like around the new Pershing Square,” he speculated wistfully.

Spector also feels anxious about smaller organizations like his own losing crucial corporate and private-sector grant money to a more “glamorous and visible” institution like MOCA. His observations somehow called forth an image of a single monolithic downtown museum that reflects surrounding corporate and bureaucratic mentalities rather than the intimate scale so crucial to a humane mid-town.

Obviously the role of the fine visual arts is but one factor in a complex ecological symbiosis required to revitalize downtown but its established association with the area gives its fate a significant symbolic value.

That symbolic value also has its disturbing side. Virtually every institutional proposal one reads on the question of public art--here and in other cities--contains a pronouncement claiming that art should be part of this or that urban development because it is (wince) “good for business.” It is trumpeted as virtuous because it attracts tourism, keeps the working population in the area after office hours and thus lends prestige and promotes commerce.

One fervently hopes that everybody making and supporting such claims realizes they are foisting off a bit of cheerful hypocrisy. For even if the presence of art has commercially salubrious side effects, art is not a loss leader for the muse of retail sales.

For nearly a century contemporary art has been among the last bastions of creativity pursued for its own sake. Its products, often as eccentric, oblique and socially critical as they are exalted, have been protected in the confines of museums and galleries.

Now art once again becomes a public issue, toddling onto park and plaza where it is subject to the kind of general man-in-the-street reaction that greets the products of the performing arts. Inevitably that art is going to have to gain general tolerance where in past it has taken aristocratic pride in being greeted with general consternation.

A new era appears to already have dawned. It appears it will include a new stylistic category called “Public Art.” Let us hope the term does not come to be snidely pejorative. Let us hope that art does not indeed become a tool to entice browsers to eat pasta salads.

The downtown phenomenon makes it abundantly clear that art now wants a role in the larger scheme of things. Let us hope this desire can be fulfilled without so badly blurring the distinctions that made art special that it becomes simply another pleasant distraction. That is not what it is about.