Calendar’s Summer Splash : Critic’s Choices : ART

Art buffs learn to live, like oriental sages, without hope or anticipation. If one is so rash as to hope that this or that exhibition will be marvelous the fates contrive to make it a turkey. If one is so unkind as to anticipate that this other show will be a dud the resulting bad karma turns it into the Taj Mahal just to prove we’re not so smart. Better to wait in blissful neutrality.

On the other hand it is delicious to dream and what’s the harm? It’s just a game.

I can’t exactly anticipate the Frank Stella exhibition at the County Museum since I saw it already at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Stella’s recent paintings are as big as baby elephants and almost as thick. They look like massive metal French curves dressed up to go dancing in sequins, glitter and popsicle colors. In New York they appeared the very embodiment of Manhattan’s frenetic energy and pizzaz. I’m betting they are chameleons which L.A. will transform into exotic tribal objects.

By now “A Forest of Signs” at the Museum of Contemporary Art has been open long enough to be seen by any interested citizen. It is all about how present artists use words or images that imply words. The presence of that show tempts one to anticipate “The Dada and Surrealist Word Image” coming to the County Museum of Art. It will be about how now-classic modern artists like Marcel Duchamp and Rene Magritte used words in their art decades before the young whippersnappers over at MOCA. Taken together the shows are liable to prove there is really nothing new under the inverted bowl we call the sky. But then we already knew that.

Nothing seduces one to the sin of anticipation more than the promise of a really hard look at an artist who has been interesting in isolated glimpses. The Belgian Marcel Broodthaers turned up for years in European extravaganzas with one big absorbing piece per show. I remember one at a Documenta in Germany made up of old wheeled cannon and Victorian furniture. It had the literary density of a 19th century novel. Broodthaers inherited the Surrealist tradition then expanded it into the realm of environmental and conceptual art. One cannot resist hoping that the first survey of his work coming to MOCA is going to change one’s life.

you look at your cereal box like an artwork. But its the encounter that counts.