A MOCA SHOW TO HOLD YOUR BREATH BY

It is not yet even Independence Day, much less Labor Day, Halloween or Thanksgiving and already artniks and culturati are holding their breath anticipating the opening of the Museum of Contemporary Art on Bunker Hill, an event that will attract international attention and determine if Los Angeles really becomes a cosmopolitan leader in the field or just another overdressed groupie lusting for attention. The suspense is barely bearable but it doesn’t all happen until the first week in December. If people hold their breath that long it will adversely effect their health. The opening will be attended by citizens with fuchsia faces.

Certain facts must be taken into account in the interest of relieved respiration. A year ago we faced the possibility that Arata Isozaki’s building might well be an architectural turkey. Today it is perfectly obvious to anybody driving by on Grand Avenue that we have a gorgeously crafted, wise and witty building twinkling between towering redevelopment monoliths. Inside, gallery spaces appear capacious and handsomely proportioned. There are lingering alarms and anxieties about how well the building will work in its rather chilly and potentially isolated corporate environment, but why buy trouble? There is reason to be cheered up.

A year ago cocktail-party Cassandras were mumbling that it was all very well to indulge the old edifice complex and build a monument to contemporary art, but whence would come a permanent collection to cause this shell to gel into a pudding of substance? Were not all the great icons already in the Modern, Whitney and Guggenheim museums? Didn’t the Australians have Jackson Pollock’s “Blue Poles” as well as America’s Cup? What was a poor waif from the West Coast to do?

Danged if he didn’t up and buy an entire core collection from the Italian collector Count Giuseppe Panza di Biuomo. For a mere $11 million MOCA got 80 objects bracketing the era from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art, including particularly impressive braces by Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg. Well, yes, a few too many Tapies and Fautriers but never mind, it was a coup. There was reason to be cheered up.

Fine, all well and good. The building looks dandy and there is some classic and essential work from the ancient contemporary period to put in it. But this is a shrine to the living present, what about that?

Negotiations are still going ahead between Count Panza and various museum directors hereabouts concerning his unique and extensive holdings in conceptual and environmental art, including prime examples of California light and space art. One gathers that the principal suitors are MOCA, the L.A. County Museum of Art and the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art on this side and, of course, Count Panza on the other. Like arms-treaty negotiators, everybody wants the same outcome, an agreement that the works will come here and stay essentially together even though large dimensions might require them to be parceled out among the several institutions along with the rumored, stiff-sounding $20-million price.

There is reason to be hopeful about that if not cheered up.

Meanwhile MOCA’s embarrassing time gap between ‘60s Pop art and the present has been firmly sketched in, if not exactly filled, by the gift of the Barry Lowen collection, which has just gone on view at MOCA’s Temporary Contemporary, where it will stay until Aug. 10.

A fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by critic Christopher Knight accompanies this, the first public exposure of a permanent legacy bequeathed to the museum by Lowen, a television producer, collector and MOCA founder who died last September at age 50.

The compendium consists of some 65 works--many of large proportion--and concentrates on Minimalism and that chaotic bag of recent figurative work known as Neo-Expressionism. Like all but the rarest of private collectors, Lowen put together a selection that would make any home look like the palace of a modern renaissance connoisseur prince, but which reads rather differently in a museum where quality standards go sharply upward.

There are fairly routine works by people like Frank Stella, Donald Judd, Jean Michel Basquiat and Neil Jenny. That comes as no surprise. Sometimes a collector’s judgment is momentarily swamped by the desire to have an example of a hot artist’s work, any example. What is bracing is the number of rock-solid pieces by artists who are in such great demand that collectors have trouble acquiring even their most banal toss-offs.

The Ellsworth Kellys are respectably representative, but the Robert Mangolds bring out a certain gentle sparkle in an often pedantic artist. The Cy Twombly and Agnes Martins are--well--typical but four Brice Mardens humanize his abutted, one-color canvases. Unexpectedly he lives up to his reputation as a romantic, a Manhattan romantic. “Fass” becomes the corner of a wall on a moody evening, “Frieze” clatters by like a funky subway car. “Red, Yellow, Blue” is a searing August sunset behind a blocky high rise.

As the show shades into Neo-Ex one expects problems to compound. The genre in general is spewing out so much bad art one anticipates a grudgement of appreciation. Sometimes that’s the way it is. Julian Schabel is an over-rated artist but his Eve-like nude “Corinne Near Armenia” is a museum-quality example of his work if anything is. It brings out his most touching expressive vector--a kind of chubby wistfulness.

David Salle’s work has recently started to look like something more than a perverse and illusive tease, and there are strong hints of his best side in “View the Author Through Long Telescopes” and “Brother Animal.” Salle begins to feel like painting’s answer to Jean-Luc Godard, a trenchant head-tripper, tender and nasty.

The collection has such a texture, but what really nails our best attention are Lowen’s strengths as an independent eye. He did remarkably well in such relatively offbeat choices as Larry Clark, John Ahearn and Peter Drake. Without these quirky, humanizing selections the collection might look merely knowledgeable and well-advised. With them comes a deeper belief in the emotional response he must have felt to important pictures like Eric Fischl’s insinuating “Master Bedroom” or Susan Rothenberg’s apocalyptic horse, “The Hulk.” It is straight out of a bad case of delirium tremens.

That is hardly all. There is the frantic, political obsession of Anslem Kiefer, the mean humor of Jonathan Borofsky and the classical distance of Brian Hunt. In the end, however, the most intriging question posed by the ensemble is what possible continuity can be found between two styles as magnetically repellent as cool Minimalism and chaotic Neo-Ex?

Was Lowen being merely chronologically correct? Did he possess a temperament that could actually encompass such emotional polarities? Maybe the answer lies somewhere between the evidence on view and the degree of Lowen’s artistic maturity.

He actually began collecting as recently as 1972, suggesting that he was still learning to the end. The great lesson of Minimalism is that art is made up of its own basic grammar, that its shapes, colors and lines are its nouns, verbs and adjectives. Neo-Expressionism teaches--altogether too insistently--that art is about an expressive outpouring.

What comes clear here is that the polarities are but the yin and yang of the same system. Some of the most interesting art on view stands exactly in the trough linking the paradox into a single truth. I find Joel Shapiro’s work a trifle cute and sentimentally hip, but his little houses and falling men are brilliant demonstrations of expressive formality. Scott Burton’s stacked rectangles resolve the esoteric and the commonplace.

On the expressive side one finds that, say, Elizabeth Murray’s “Heart and Mind” derives its sense of primal oddity from the basic device of simply reversing the same two formal motifs while Richard Bosman uses banal images to create ironic anxiety through formal emphasis reduced to a cliche.

The Barry Lowen collection gives the mind something to chew on. It also allows us a few cheered-up breaths while we wait for the museum to seriously open.