Trip Through a Downtown Wasteland

Say you are about to be visited by a cousin from the East Coast who, having been told so by East Coast critics, believes that Los Angeles is a cultural wasteland.

How to entertain the snob?

If your cousin is at all susceptible to contemporary art, you would do well to arm yourself with “Canvassing L.A.: An Artful Guide to Contemporary Art Galleries, Museums, and Restaurants.”

This pocket or purse-size book, published by the nonprofit Pasadena Art Alliance ($15.50), seems to list every contemporary art gallery in Los Angeles, plus nearby restaurants and parking places, with maps of locations and routes.

They’re listed in clusters--Downtown, La Brea and Beverly, Mid-Wilshire, Melrose and La Cienega, Almont and Robertson, Venice, Santa Monica and Pasadena.

Some of the suggested tours might intimidate anyone who doesn’t run the marathon, but of course they may be taken in part, or in easy stages. Since it is closest, I started with one leg of the downtown tour.

Rather than parking in a lot at 1st and Central, as suggested, I parked in the Times garage and took the DASH central city bus to 1st and San Pedro and walked two blocks to the Temporary Contemporary.

This enormous gallery has been adapted from a warehouse, and its origin is starkly visible in its wooden rafters and steel struts. It was used for contemporary art shows before the new Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) was built, and proved so popular that it has endured--a sort of Permanent Temporary Contemporary.

I bought a ticket for $4 that would entitle me also to visit MOCA. The exhibition was devoted mainly to abstract painting since 1960. I have not yet caught up with pre-1960 abstract painting, so I found much of the work perplexing. But perhaps that is exactly what would impress a snob from Buffalo.

I read one of those wall cards that explain the work: “If the artist’s hand and his personal imagery are not evident on first glance, perhaps a closer inspection--not just of the painting’s physical surface but of the reasons for its given form--will reveal another signature, the artist’s decision-making process.”

I studied an oil by John McLaughlin, large black-and-white rectangles separated by a narrow white stripe and a wider black stripe. Next to it was an untitled oil and crayon work by Cy Twombly: loops and scrawls made by a tan crayon on black. Next, the celebrated Frank Stella’s Tomlinson Court Park: a large black canvas on which a small chalky oblong at the center is enclosed in increasingly larger ones, to the edge.

Evidently, Stella had decided to paint a bunch of oblongs of increasing size. I must say that he did it very well. I remembered the reactionary curmudgeon Al Capp’s definition of abstract art: “A product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.” Of course Capp was only a vulgar pop cartoonist.

I don’t mean to say that I wasn’t stimulated and provoked by all these stripes and squares and scrawls. I’m sure they say something about the artist in our times. And I loved the vast empty and quiet warehouse.

As the guide suggested, I walked across 1st Street to the Japanese Village Plaza (brick walks, topiary trees, Japanese shops and cafes, women walking under parasols from “The Mikado”) and had fried orange roughy and a Diet Coke at Sushi-Teri ($4.84).

I crossed 1st Street again and caught the DASH at San Pedro for a lift to Grand and walked two blocks south on Grand to MOCA, where my ticket stub was good. MOCA is an architectural bonbon: red terra cotta boxes under glass pyramids with a great glass drum on top. It looks like a tiny carved jewel box against the bunch of skyscrapers on Bunker Hill.

The main exhibition showed the work of Anselm Kiefer, a German artist born in 1945, the last year of World War II. It was like walking through a German woods hideously ravaged by war: Great moldy halls and ancient myths heroically resurrected among the ruins, fires burning in charred fields. Was there a message of rebirth and redemption? I didn’t see it. The fires were still burning.

Let’s not hear any more talk about Los Angeles being a cultural wasteland.