HERE AND OVER THERE, A YEAR OF THE BIG

The year was a little disorienting, like a slight lapse of memory, like the time I got on a sleeper train for Venice and woke up in Vienna. In 1985, something amorphous and climactic happened in the art world, but it is not yet possible to get a look at it. We are not outside it. We are inside something that contains us, so we cannot see what it looks like. Could Geppetto see the whale?

The beginning was ordinary enough, like getting the ’69 Ghia with the top down for a Saturday trip to the supermarket. The young year was swathed in an aura of cozy predictability, the blue cardboard box containing your freshly laundered shirts. 1984 had been hectic and magical, with the Olympic Games and the international arts festival. We were all a little wrung out, so ’85 would be pleasantly ordinary, a hiatus in the hardware store buying something redundantly useful. A large new yellow plastic flashlight in case a fuse blows.

After all, Los Angeles would remain productively incomplete all year. The County Museum of Art’s Anderson Building would not be finished. Arata Isozaki’s building for the Museum of Contemporary Art would not be open. Richard Meier’s design for the new J. Paul Getty Museum and think-tank would not be started.

Nobody needed a crystal ball to see it all coming, just the advance gallery schedules and a little horse sense. The Getty would make a fabulous purchase in England that would inspire national indignation and accusation that the work was fake. The museum would deny all charges. Right. The Getty paid $10.5 million for a Mantegna and the rest came in proper rank and order.

A prominent gallery director would resign and an institution would be in financial straits. One always does and they always are. The surprise was that it was Robert Smith, who had directed the L.A. Institute of Contemporary Art forever. It was not a surprise that LAICA was in financial straits.

Museums and galleries would hold exhibitions that would be respectable more often than terrible and terrible more often than superb. Almost everything that mesmerized in the museums had the quality of connoisseur’s fare, a little refined, a trifle offbeat. The Southwest Museum quietly unveiled a slew of pots from the Mimbres people of the ancient American Southwest and we learned that the vocabulary of children’s drawings could be used to evoke the most sophisticated emotional and perceptual shadings. It was a little spooky.

County Museum of Art--our cultural Clydesdale--turned 20 and as usual shouldered the main weight of special exhibitions. Different as they all were, they shared a certain appeal to rarefied sensibilities. A two-part survey of Japanese ink painting was nothing if not delicate. A summer show of paintings by American landscapist John Frederick Kensett was as solid and subtle as a quiet summer day on a New England beach. A certain appreciation for the understated work is required both for their current display of classic modernist art from the Baltimore Museum’s Cone Collection and a superb spread of master drawings from Budapest.

The Museum of Contemporary Art continued to lurch awkwardly toward maturity amid worries that it is more concerned about art politics and public image than with serious exhibitions. A gaggle of fuzzily incoherent presentations did give good looks at artists as interesting as Bill Viola and James Turrell. Personal tragedy mixed with public nobility when the untimely death of television executive Barry Lowen brought his collection to the museum.

Fare in commercial galleries tended to alternate between slick and schlock, but there were moments when contemporary artists at widely varied junctures in their careers unlocked new levels of clarity or wisdom. There were John Chamberlain and Peter Alexander and Leland Rice and J. de Feo, not to mention Jill Giegerich, Jim Lawrence and Allen Ruppersberg, to mention not everybody by any means.

All the same, this year that was supposed to be like a busman’s holiday was beginning to feel a bit unaccented, a bit like a year lacking definitive and climactic events--but then a funny thing happened. Grocery bags transformed into a garment bag with a portable word processor therein and the Ghia transmogrified into a 747 and there I was, off looking around at art in far-flung precincts from Montreal to Monchengladbach without having made any particular decision to do so. It just happened.

There was a lot of stuff to see, from Caravaggio at the Met to Francis Bacon in Stuttgart’s Neue Staadtsgalerie and from Christo wrapping Paris’ Pont Neuf like so much fromage to America’s National Gallery importing half of England’s greatest objects for “Treasure Houses of Great Britain.” Whether it was as contemporary as Jonathan Borofsky or Red Grooms, modern as Paris’ new Musee Picasso, exotic as Indian Sculpture in D.C. or as aristocratic as the Met’s “Liechtenstein, the Princely Collections,” it all had one thing in common.

It was BIG.

The scale of the art world, like the scale of the culture in general, took on a magnitude that resists any description less flamboyant than stupendous . Western culture--especially the German branch--is building museums with the enthusiasm of aerobic dancers and the reverence of pharaohs erecting temple tombs. There is an excitement about art that is all the more surprising considering the embarrassing ineptitude and shameless ambition that accompanies much of its current production, but understandable in a United States in the grip of a Neo-American Renaissance that values glitz and status. The best payoff of all that so far is impressively clever architecture and profoundly amusing design. It’s not an ambiance that produces art, but it might finally inspire some latter-day Degas or Lautrec to limn the spirit of an odd, compelling time.

When this colossal spectacle focused back on Los Angeles, one discovered the town is not a peripheral province but very much a player in the extravaganza. What started as a slightly sleepy year ended with the realization that we have evolved as an art center of no mean proportion. But, as a relatively young member of the international cast, we still have to do a lot of work to flesh out our role.

All right, coach, what’s the game?

Culturally convincing cities great and small are both distinctive and urbane. Given Los Angeles’ reputation as the home of ozone-brained trendiness, one might assume that we need to work on our cosmopolitan aplomb. Actually, viewed as a city of artworks and attendant institutions, Los Angeles is in quite good shape. Splendid old-master collections at the Huntington Gallery and Norton Simon Museum lend firm foundations. Add the prospects of the County Museum to the staggering resources of the Getty, and it’s a safe assumption that our first-hand experience of the general history of art and humanistic scholarship will continue to grow apace.

That’s good because great art centers are catholic and receptive as well as discriminating. It’s those qualities that cause people to have the impression--for example--that London’s National Gallery is the world’s greatest picture repository.

But distinctiveness must also be served or things get dull. Traveling around modern and contemporary museums in Germany, one began to find certain artists--call them the intercontinental touring company--a bit too omnipresent. Even such talented folks as George Segal and Claes Oldenburg come to contribute to a sense of franchised homogeneity when encountered in every museum fur modernekunst in Deutsch-bloody-land. Who wants to see Frank Stella in Stuttgart or Henry Moore in Hanover? We want hometown heroes like Otto Dix or Kurt Schwitters. And there, by gum, we get them, along with endearing local obsessions for offbeat foreigners, be it Burne-Jones the Pre-Raphaelite or Yves Klein the blue-blooded French Neo-Dadaist.

Hitler sold off a lot of this art and the Germans put themselves to great pains to get it back. They seem to have the sense to value their own heritage.

Would that Los Angeles could say as much.

This town has such a convincing worldwide mythical reputation that we don’t seem to realize that we have very little to back it up in visual fact, other than in the spectacular natural light of the place and the Watts Towers. We have been remiss about gaining visual distinction.

My crackpot solution to our lack of urban profile is to mural every available building in downtown Los Angeles. That’d make ‘em sit up and take notice. Los Angeles, the world’s biggest picture palace.

Perhaps even more crucial, however, is our lack of a really first-rate collection of our own contemporary art. This town has spawned art that caused eyeballs to roll all the way from the overload of Ed Keinholz’s tableaux to Robert Irwin’s invisible frissons and yet we have no proper permanent public holding of our own master art.

Solving that one will take time, effort and luck. One coup that would put us well in the game would be the acquisition of the Panza collection. It, of course, is the Italian holding rich in California Light and Space Art whose owner is anxious to see it returned here intact if one of our museums can muster the will and the resources. Everybody has been holding his breath on it all year.

Let us fervently hope that ’86 is the year of the great exhale. For once, it would be nice to get on the sleeper train for Vienna and wake up in Venice, Calif.