On the Scene--The Year That Wasn’t

Well, of course nothing happened. What could we expect from poor old 1987 after the giddy Olympic year of ’84 and L.A.’s bar mitzvah as an art center in ‘86? Everybody was pooped after the opening of Arata Isozaki’s exquisitely witty Neo-Exotic downtown Museum of Contemporary Art, fatigued from christening Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer’s Deco-Babylonian Robert O. Anderson Building, the new home to the art of our time at the County Museum of Art. The world came to “Whoopee!” and went away impressed with L.A.’s shiny new cultural appurtenances. After all that, everybody needed 1987 as a year of well-deserved schlepping around the cultural kitchen in robe and slippers and spending a long Sunday morning reading fat newspapers in a big leather chair.

“Excuse me. Sorry to interrupt, but we all must go to the shelter. The radio says there is a tornado coming down Wilshire Boulevard.”

(Offstage sounds of roaring winds, sirens and general confusion, which gradually subside.)

“Sorry. It turned out it wasn’t a tornado anyway. It was a blizzard. The palm fronds are covered with snow and the kids are skating on the swimming pool. Where were we?”

Oh, right. Nothing changed. This was especially noticeable at the Museum of Contemporary Art. After igniting anticipatory excitement, the museum decided to leave its panoramic but befuddled inaugural exhibition, “Individuals,” up all year. This was OK for first-time visitors catching up with the opening, but gung-ho aficionados felt that MOCA lost steam by not having more activity. Not that they didn’t try. Unfortunately, a series of mid-size solo exhibitions devoted to currently fashionable artists like David Salle and Donald Sultan tended to find their art incapable of filling our minds, much less the vast spaces of MOCA’s Temporary Contemporary satellite.

Only a sadist would flagellate the museum for taking time to regroup after the protean effort of getting the operation rolling, but the net result is that after a year the character of the place is still fuzzy. That it is being run by a serious and responsible bunch became clearer when they raised some $5 million to finish paying for an $11-million core collection purchased from Count Panza of Milan. Speaking of Panza, events made it disappointingly clear that local efforts to buy the rest of his big collection of Minimalist and Conceptual art are in terminal fizzle and the work will go elsewhere.

“What? Desolate to interrupt again but look at the time. Bunch of errands to run on the way home. Have to get off the Hollywood Freeway to look at the new Musee D’Orsay. That’s at Vermont, I think. Then a stop at the Safeway for bread and a nip over to the new Turner wing at the Tate, which is now somewhere around Beverly and Fairfax. A quick bite and off to that auction at Sotheby’s, where they’re selling a Van Gogh that’s supposed to go for $50 million or so. Goghing, Goghing, Goghn. Look up the address in the Yellow Pages. Somewhere in the Valley.” (Sound effects up, clock ticking against hurry-up music like “London Again.”)

Well, all right, something did change. The climate and landscape of art changed irrevocably in L.A. Sure, suave new galleries opened in Santa Monica, and La Brea Avenue’s gallery row expanded, but the real difference was larger, more crucial and more atmospheric. 1987 became the first year in which the cultural borders between this town and the rest of the world were erased. Just as the world of finance now lives in a global economy, the galaxy of Los Angeles’ museums, galleries, artists and collectors is now fused with its counterparts in the rest of the world.

Time was that when an L.A. artnik traveled to foreign art ports, the natives were touched that he had come such a long way to see their treasures but, after all, the aborigine had to do something to get a little Kultur. This year it was different. “Oh, here is a chap from that town where so much is happening. Tell us about it. Is the Getty really going to buy all the art in England? How does it feel to be so rich? We hear that San Francisco is about to fling itself off the Bay Bridge in despair.”

A lot of such talk is society twaddle forgetful of the aspects of art that really count, but it does signal a broad perception that what happens here now ripples to the rest of the world and what happens there registers on our litmus paper. There is a certain glow in realizing you are a big kid now, but it’s no reason to get uppity. When Andy Warhol died untimely in New York, he died just as absurdly here.

When it was discovered that the Getty had quietly allowed its curator of antiquities to retire after he’d used collecting practices that were against museum rules, it kicked up a nasty media scandal that caromed from here to London and back and wound up casting doubt on the authenticity of several of the museum’s most admired antique sculptures. When Mayor Bradley decided that his general manager for cultural affairs had fibbed about his qualifications for the job, the manager retired rather than face possible firing. Scandal of that dimension was once virtually unknown in L.A. art precincts.

The stakes went up precipitously. Take the much more benign scenario at the County Museum of Art. In the first year after its grand expansion it didn’t drop a stitch, opening new graphic and photographic galleries and perking along with one highly respectable exhibition after the next, showing everything from Russian narrative painting to Machine Age decorative arts, craftsman furniture and ancient Chinese ceramics.

Two years ago you’d have had to say the home team was winning. That was before we grew up and the borders were erased. Now we are obliged to ask ourselves if LACMA had any exhibition as revealing or moving as the best museum shows we saw anywhere in the country. In New York the Met showed Van Gogh’s late paintings and the first American survey of the brooding Francesco de Zurbaran. Superb Raphael drawings materialized at the Pierpont Morgan Library. The National Gallery opened its year with Matisse and rounded it out with Berthe Morisot and Georgia O’Keeffe. The sleeper of the year was unquestionably the Hirshhorn’s astonishing survey of England’s Lucian Freud.

Nobody wants to be unkind about LACMA’s solid, steady-as-she-goes progress. There were wonderful moments like the juicy, intelligent Smooke Collection, the poetics of Jasper Johns’ prints and Robert Frank’s photographs, but the museum needs more swing to the sublime and the surprising.

“Yes, yes, but what about the littler guys?”

The eruption of two landmark international operations caused worry that changing aesthetic ecology would tilt to cut interest in mid-size museums and community Kunsthallen. The worry is real but belied by smaller institutions’ talent for the offbeat. Little Plaza de la Raza set the tone with intense paintings of Frida Kahlo and it echoed in Nancy Graves’ goony camels at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, John Graham’s cross-eyed ladies at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, Hans Haacke’s subversive sociopolitical conceptual art at La Jolla and the weirdness of contemporary history painting in “Morality Plays” at the Laguna Art Museum.

“Fine, but what about the big boys?”

This year an epochal idea became entrenched, that of the collector as auteur. Just as our perception that the real creative force in films has moved from actor to writer to producer to director, our notion of the key player in art has moved from artist to dealer to critic to curator and now to collector.

It’s a fascinating phenomenon. It reflects the shambling mediocrity of a herd of undirected, marginally creative artists, ever-rising prices for established art and the rampant egotism and financial coercion of the Reagan era. Wealthy collectors are seen as king-pin figures because their money makes artists, dealers and museums dependent on them.

The year saw a spate of openings of private museums, the most concentrated and controversial fruit of the auteur-collector phenomenon. One, the Menil Museum in Houston, proved that a collector with a great eye and a coherent sensibility can establish a thrilling private museum. Two others, Washington’s museum for women artists and Chicago’s Terra Museum, confirmed the ancient wisdom that most collectors would be better off donating their treasures to public museums where they can be integrated into coherent historical and aesthetic order.

Naturally, Los Angeles reflected the phenomenon. Norton Simon opened negotiations with UCLA to eventually take stewardship of his princely blue-chip collections in a museum that would in essence be his creation. Contemporary collector Frederick Weisman continued to seek a home for his huge holdings, and other key local collectors are said to be considering establishing private museums.

Let’s hope some of them have severe attacks of modesty and brotherly love before we have a half-dozen meaningless little shrines to rampant ego dotting the landscape. We don’t need them a fraction as much as MOCA and LACMA need to build their collections for the public weal.

So, thanks to anno domini neunzehnhundertsiebenundachtzig , we are a little more cosmopolitan and blessed with the attendant perks and anxieties.

Somehow the whole year recalls a wonderful scene in a documentary film called “The Stripper.” It’s about a convention in Las Vegas at which dancers compete for a big prize and the honor of being judged the world’s best exotic dancer. An aging showgirl enters. In order to compete with the young steppers she finds herself concocting elaborate costumes, a tricky set and working with a trainer. She jogs for miles in the desert, bikes for hours and works out on a Nautilus machine. She’s lifting weights and dripping sweat as the trainer assures her all the exertion is necessary to meet the competition.

“Oh god,” she moans, “what happened to the old days when you just took your clothes off?”

What happened to the old days when we just made art?