MOCA MAIDEN EXHIBIT GOES FOR BAROQUE

Really it is kind of Magnificent.

The Museum of Contemporary Art flings its doors open to the world on Wednesday and the world is going to find it difficult to come away unimpressed. Arata Isozaki’s witty architectural Baedecker of a building on Bunker Hill is a triumph of cosmopolitan intelligence, toying with the myth of L.A. like a Noel Coward hero swizzling his martini olive on a toothpick.

The chunk of the inaugural show, “Individuals,” housed on the hill inspired grouses about an unclear theme that doesn’t gel in catalogue essays, which are as murky as they are intelligent as they are unstrung. Nonetheless, the catalogue is physically imposing and the Expressionist and Minimalist art on the walls intones the accents of the modern classical.

Then there is MOCA’s Temporary Contemporary warehouse in Little Tokyo where the yearlong show sprawls to culmination in even more up-to-date styles and special projects commissioned by the museum.

Immense banners by Matt Mullican hang before the entrance, the compelling red, black and white of the Nazis and the Russian avant-garde recast as occult international airport graphics.

A dead-end hunk of Central Avenue that provides a funky ceremonial approach to the museum finds a crew of art workers burrowing away to finish a kind of instant rain forest by Robert Irwin.

Inside Chris Burden excavated a yawning crypt in the museum floor exposing pilings that hold up the building, igniting a creepy feeling that the whole temple might crumble upon us, Samson style. Nearby stands a Brobdingnagian sculpture by Richard Serra--two vast walls of steel curve away from one another but tilt together. To stand between them is know the fear of being crushed by implacable authority.

Equally awesome machines by the likes of Jannis Kounellis and Joseph Beuys punctuate galleries like elephantine exclamation points. Works of more normal proportions are less likely to sing in their own voices than to be dragooned into a mosaic chorus that makes “Individuals” belt out an anthem it seems not to have intended.

One has heard echoes of it before in inaugural exhibitions at Paris’ Beaubourg Center or at international art circuses like Germany’s Documenta or the Venice Bienalle but never before has a contemporary show quite equalled this level of operatic grandeur.

We tend to look at contemporary art one movement at a time and to formulate an impression of a whole based on a piece. Crystallize on Pollock and Abstract Expressionism and the epoch since the end of the last great war is a paean to frenzied individualism. Fasten on Pop and it is social satire. Fixate on Minimalism and it is either intellectually rigorous or arid as the Sahara.

But “Individuals” is a Noah’s Ark that herds two classic Popsters like Rauschenberg and Oldenburg up the gangway with regional cowboys like William Wiley and mystical phenomenologists like James Turrell. Sigmar Polke--loaded with good German baggage full of guilt and cuteness--elbows past Cindy Sherman laden with costumes and make-up kits for her roadshow rol1702043745already in the salon dressed in a motorcycle outfit of antelope leather--toasts bon voyage with Eric Fischl, who lasciviously eyes a teen-age Susan Rothenberg who realizes it and is about to panic and jump over the side.

Everybody is here. Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot fighting in the captain’s tower. Actually, everybody is not, and at some point it might be useful to wonder why no delegate of the Photorealist school is aboard the vessel that is to save all important pooh-bahs of the art jungle from the deluge. Never mind. Right now we have our hands full dealing with what the show is doing without worrying about what it is not.

The real theme of the experience of “Individuals” is that contemporary art is the Baroque phase of modern art. Look around. Nobody has seen this much artistic fanfaronade since the Catholic Counter-Reformation. The show just bowls you over like a big Italian ceiling fresco writhing with gods made out of bloody beefsteak and nymphs of pure meringue.

Serra is Caravaggio, brutal and earthy. Other Minimalists pair off with the classicists, Poussin and the Carraccis. Pop artists are the Dutch Genre painters casting an aristocratic eye on the quaint ways of plain folks. Turrell and Doug Wheeler make Tiepolo’s limpid space real but empty of mythical figures. It takes the whole company huffing away on the anvil chorus to evoke Rubens or Rembrandt, and the Neo-Expressionists are like every revival of the Baroque into the 19th Century. David Schnabel has a whiff of Delacroix’s little-boy hero worship and Charles Garabedian makes a pretty good Puvis de Chavannes.

The ensemble effect doesn’t make us thoughtful. It doesn’t want to. It wants us giddy and gaga and we are.

The show is a rolley-coaster ride through St. Peters.

But we have to get our wits about us here because we have finally discovered the leitmotif of “Individuals.” Why didn’t they tell us up front? It’s a good idea. Why keep it a secret? Why call it “Individuals” when it plays like the Harlem Globetrotters?

This show says that all the artistic disarray being fobbed off these days as “pluralism” has certain binding traits. For one, with rare and arguable exceptions, there is not an idea in it that had not already occured to great modernist innovators from Picasso to Kandinsky, Mondrian and Duchamp. That crew were the great rebels, inventors and theoreticians. The contemporary artists are the great dramatists. (This does not make them of a lesser order. Rubens is not a lesser artist because all his ideas are implicit in Michelangelo.)

Here is late 20th-Century Anarchist Baroque. A long time ago, Bernard Berenson said that art consists of sensations turned into ideas. This art deals in ideas turned progressively into sensations. If there is a new idea here, it is in the pure distillation of sensation achieved by the California light and space artists.

There is a touch of Rembrandt’s humanity in Ed Keinholz, but in our time even a painting as big as “The Night Watch” is not considered sufficiently boffo. Keinholz’s “Sollie 17” is a masterpiece, but it is significant that today the once-minor genre subject of an old derelict in a flophouse requires a full-scale walk-in tableau.

Today much is being made of the relationship between images and words, as if the way they intertwine in the mind were a new discovery. What really seems new is the way the word is treated as an image and vice versa. A tiny word printed on a page should resonate fully in the mind, but Ed Ruscha found it necessary to blow them up to billboard size, as if poetry could not function in this world without being broadcast over stereo speakers in full color.

Alexis Smith started her career as a delicate word-worker. Her small collages of literary texts and found objects have grown evermore handsome and encrusted, but she finds it necessary to present them with oversize graphics in “Installation” formats that are often distracting from their real substance.

This is no time be an intimist.

If the demands of the epoch have dented Smith’s art, they have improved John Baldessari’s geometrically. Time was when his word-based juxtapositions of photographs seemed starved and sour. Now, employing enlarged, graphically compelling images that echo the pop-mythology of movie stills, he makes clear how meaning is altered through juxtaposition. (Every movie editor knows this but Baldessari gives us wise and witty visual lectures on the subject.)

Once having grasped the self-asserting theme of this extravaganza, we are free to notice all manner of interesting subtexts triggered by juxtaposition. Seeing Garabedian next to Fischl, for example tips both their hands. Garabedian finds the commonplace in the mythical, Fischl the mythical in the commonplace.

You can’t even play on this field without a panoramic appearance, and it is interesting to note that it’s possible for both splendid and mediocre work to have a wide-angle sweep. Anselm Keiffer makes epic art while squatting in the muddy rubble of a devastated Germany and the work thrums with regret, violence and disbelief. Next door, Julian Schnabel’s walls of broken plates have never looked more authentically preoccupied with the past, but their content is just longing itself.

We have a whole year to ponder such insights, to reorganize this mass of material into multiple theme exhibitions of the mind. Meanwhile, we’re left with a conviction of never having seen anything quite like it anywhere. Warts and all, the scale of the endeavor is awesome. It seems to occupy all the space between Bunker Hill and Little Tokyo and make L.A. the place to come to see the grandest Baroque Opera of the eyeball known to the contemporary world.