The Undisputed Arrival of Frank Gehry : MOCA Does Justice to a Worthy Talent

A preview of Frank Gehry’s panoramic survey exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art unfurled on one of those pluperfect summer Valentine’s days we’ve had recently. That morning, however, we awoke to a sharp jolt, another earthquake warning against getting uppity. Clearly Nature was feeling poetic, scattering omens and portents like petals from a garland while smirking slightly to herself.

The town has fallen momentarily into a state of grace. Between David Hockney’s wonderful retrospective at the County Museum of Art and Gehry’s remarkable compendium at MOCA, L.A. fulfills herself. It’s nice for local pride to remember that this really is a place that nurtures planet-class artists. It is even nicer that they can be honest talents beyond the gauze of mere celebrity, guys who go about their business with sunny originality tinged by an independence that is not afraid to shake up the neighbors.

The Gehry exhibition, organized by Minneapolis’ redoubtable Walker Art Center, is on view in Arata Isozaki’s MOCA building on Bunker Hill rather than at the nearby Temporary Contemporary building that Gehry himself renovated. The show celebrates the indisputable arrival of the Canadian-born architect who grew up on the fringes of downtown L.A., where a couple of his best-known projects--the Loyola Law School and the California Aerospace Museum--now startle passers-by. A week from Monday he will be 59, which is worth noting symbolically because that makes him a Pisces, and fish have come to play a prominent role in his work.

The first thing encountered in the exhibition is a room--covered in metal scales--that looks like the belly of Jonah’s whale. Inside, it is all curved metal struts that evoke marine architecture, Gothic cathedrals and the alternative architecture of the flower children. There is a big desk and chairs of laminated, corrugated cardboard--the furniture Gehry that started designing in the ‘60s and that put him on the public map. It looks like the corporate headquarters of an old hippie who grew up to be Neptune. Something fishy here, but no sense carping about it.

No sense indeed, since the exhibition is at least three kinds of landmark. It does justice to a worthy talent, comes with a blissfully readable catalogue and--best of all in wider terms--overcomes the generic problems that make most architectural exhibitions more enervatingly dull than waiting for a shuttle flight to San Bernardino.

Good models always help, and a copious number are sensibly installed and supported by good photos and wall labels. Traditionally those things give you a notion but leave you frustrated because you can’t walk into them.Here the problem is finally overcome with half a dozen full-size environments that give the flavor of Gehry’s space and articulation. It is a standard-setting show reflecting the Walker’s enlightenment, Gehry’s experience designing exhibitions and MOCA’s own growing ability to get things right.

For years, Gehry was something of an underground architect whose reputation fermented among the L.A. artists who were his main cronies. He openly admires pure visual artists, and their influence shows in his work. It is obvious in recent collaborations with Claes Oldenburg and his partner-wife Coosje van Bruggen when we see a pair of giant binoculars as the gateway to a project on Main Street in Venice or a charming milk-can building in Camp Beverly Hills in the mountains. The chain-link screen lettered “Santa Monica Place” on the shopping mall echoes both Robert Irwin and Ed Ruscha. Gehry’s undersea interior for Rebecca’s restaurant may owe something to Peter Alexander, and his studio for Ron Davis clearly mirrored the artist’s concern with illusionary geometry.

Which is not to say that Gehry is a slavish emulator of artists. What he has derived from them is more like basic thinking than superficial gloss. A catalogue essay by Thomas S. Hines puts unusual emphasis on Gehry’s biography: his shabby background on Burlington Street, his casual contact with Hollywood luminaries, his hindsight regret at having somehow denied his Jewish heritage by changing his name from Goldberg.

It all sounds like writing usually deemed more crucial to the understanding of an artist than an architect, on account of the artist’s clearly personal and idiosyncratic approach to his work. Architects usually get the old historical treatment . . . the influence of the Parthenon and all that. Gehry is not uninfluenced by architectural history, but his thinking is clearly more that of an artist. He derives forms from deep personal experience and distributes them emotionally.

His preferences in material and shapes seem to come from kid memories of stark summer days in downtown L.A. alleys with their abrupt angles and blank swaths of corrugated aluminum, plywood walls and chain-link dividers. Those alleys are almost like prisons with their fortress-like body shops and warehouses and labyrinthine twists. For kids, they are mysterious and scary with odd little nooks and passageways, but they are also playgrounds where you can roughhouse and find endless surprises playing hide-and-seek.

Gehry’s architecture continues to reflect that kind of experience, whether in the fortress-like introversion of Lou Danziger’s studio or the meandering detachment of a house designed for a film maker.

It is an architecture that will not easily yield to definition, seemingly willing to do abrupt about-faces to remain elusive. It can be as starkly restrained as his Hollywood Branch Library or as eccentrically experimental as his own house, but among its consistent themes is the artist’s insistence that art is not about what rich people think it is about. It is not about prestige shapes, status reputations, rich materials or conformity. Gehry takes pride in being able to work with tight budgets and invent in cheap materials like cardboard, and the pride is less economic than aesthetic. It’s the pride of Picasso making a masterpiece with old Metro ticket stubs or a fish bone.

So Gehry’s art winds up as a kind of Populist Minimalism with tributaries running off in the direction of the primitive, occult and humorous. There is something Japanese about it. It’s full of Zen surprises and refined respect for natural materials. A bunker of his furniture looks like a grotto for the homeless. A wood-clad ramped spiral tower evokes everything from Babel to Russian Constructivism to a coiled snake. Snakes and fishes. Phallic and resonant of good, evil, comfort and phobic fears.

It’s inspirational work that makes you look around the house and think you might just take off the ceiling and punch out a big skewed skylight. It’s odd, compelling work flavored with a post-apocalyptic, “Blade Runner” science-fiction inventiveness. It’s like something put together out of necessity after the Big One shakes all the houses sideways and bounces the garages into the middle of the street.