MOCA Gets a Great Deal

The Museum of Contemporary Art’s Temporary Contemporary on Tuesday opens a fire sale of new exhibitions--one of which looks suspiciously like a discount department store.

There will be photography, sculpture and painting, plus ladies shoes, hunting gear and a snack bar.

MOCA hasn’t really resorted to retail sales a la Pic ‘N’ Save. “The Discount Store” is in fact a huge, wacky walk-in installation by Red Grooms recently acquired by the museum.

Occupying 1,500 square feet, the 15-foot-high tableau was commissioned in 1970 by Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center and Target Department Stores, which served as its model. Inside the mixed-media emporium, viewers encounter stressed-out cashiers, a burly gun salesman and teen-age lovers sharing the national pastime of strolling, shopping and gorging on junk food.

The work was given to MOCA by Florida art collectors Irma and Norman Braman in December, but paper work was not finalized until this month.

Museum director Richard Koshalek said Norman Braman, who owned the artwork for about five years, gave it to MOCA because “he was impressed with the quality of space here and especially at the Temporary Contemporary, which is appropriate for this kind of large-scale installation.”

Portions of “The Discount Store” were shown at the TC in 1986 during Grooms’ 25-year retrospective.

Reviewing that exhibition, Times Art Critic William Wilson called the work “a revelation,” with its “patient, dopey shoppers and the overbearing lady behind the snack cart that oozes the smell of buttered popcorn and confetti doughnuts. That’s how to suffocate to death with sheer gluttonous ecstasy.”

“The Discount Store” is one of five installations going on view Tuesday. The others include “Sollie 17” by Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, “Exhibition 1987” by Louise Lawler and “The Knife Ship II” by Claes Oldenburg.

Other exhibitions opening Tuesday include “Boyd Webb,” with photographs, sculpture and an environmental installation by the New Zealand-born artist and “Fischli & Weiss,” with photography and sculpture by the Swiss-born team Peter Fischli and David Weiss.

Like Grooms, the artists in these shows emphasize humor and use imagination, says MOCA Chief Curator Mary Jane Jacob. Boyd, for example, has photographed a surreal outer space scene he constructed from green carpet, and Fischli and Weiss shot a “Sausage Series” in which frankfurter-cars collide.

“We have here an incredible study of the idea of creative play,” Jacob said recently.

“Striking Distance,” also opening Tuesday, is a multimedia exhibit featuring the first group of works acquired by MOCA with a grant supporting the work of California artists from the El Paso Natural Gas Company. Represented are Jill Giegerich, Mike Kelley, Lari Pittman, Stephen Prina, Peter Shelton, Alexis Smith, Mitchell Syrop and Bill Viola.

All exhibitions run to June 19.

FOR POSTERITY: “A work of art is itself a record. Any effort to document the artist or the work, however conscientious, introduces still another point of view. . . . The very record can supplant or undermine the artist’s purpose.”

With this contradiction in mind, the Southern California Committee for Contemporary Art Documentation will bring together artists, critics, historians and archivists for a daylong seminar Saturday addressing the documentation, preservation and accessibility of the visual arts.

“Art for the Record: Issues of Documentation and Contemporary Art” will feature such speakers as Pontus Hulten, founding director, Museum of Contemporary Art; Henry Hopkins, director, Frederick R. Weisman Collection, and Nicholas Olsberg, Getty Center Archives for the History of Art.

Topics to be analyzed include the role of memory in culture, the pitfalls of documenting art on film, and the interplay between artists and research institutions.

The free seminar, from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., will be held at the Archives of American Art, Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens. Reservations necessary: (818) 405-7847.