ART REVIEW : MOCA ‘Light’ Is Just Half a Show

The Museum of Contemporary Art has just offered a delightful lesson in how to lose friends and alienate people. On Sunday, a show drawn largely from MOCA’s rarely seen permanent collection opened at the museum’s warehouse in Little Tokyo, with one small hitch: Exactly half the art was missing.

Absent and unaccounted for in “Perceptual Investigations: Light and Space Works from the Permanent Collection” were Robert Irwin’s untitled wall-disk, from 1966-67; James Turrell’s 1967 projection of xenon light, “Tollyn”; photodocumentation of Michael Heizer’s monumental 1969-70 earthwork in the Nevada desert, “Double Negative”; Bruce Nauman’s 1970 “Going Around the Corner Piece with Live and Taped Monitors” (the only work on loan, and not part of MOCA’s collection); Turrell’s room-size 1976 installation, “Laar”; Larry Bell’s untitled glass box from 1985; and Robert Irwin’s new site installation, “Open Space.”

When a show plans to feature just 13 works of art, the absence of seven of them is hard not to regret. And when the specific genre under review reached its aesthetic apogee not in discrete paintings and sculptures but in large-scale environments into whose sphere of influence the spectator typically enters, the lack of four of the six environments planned for inclusion tends to make hash of the entire undertaking.

Not surprisingly, during the hour I spent in the sprawling warehouse-gallery, where no other show is presently installed, museum visitors periodically arrived in puzzlement and soon departed in annoyance.

It’s too bad. MOCA has done remarkably well in assembling a collection at a time when sky-high prices and unfavorable tax laws have transformed museums into also-rans in the chase for great art. Yet MOCA has also made chasing after traveling exhibitions the highest priority to fill its 75,000 square feet of exhibition space. Too often, the permanent collection has languished in storage. Happy anticipation therefore greeted the announcement of a trilogy of long-term displays analyzing the museum’s holdings--including “Perceptual Investigations” at the Temporary Contemporary and “The Decisive Years: 1945-1960,” currently at the California Plaza facility.

After all, a permanent collection is the backbone of any museum. Its presence and availability, day in and day out, might not translate into attendance-boosting glamour, but relative constancy is, finally, what distinguishes a museum from other types of exhibition facilities.

And MOCA’s collection is certainly blessed with pretty remarkable bone structure. “The Decisive Years” amply demonstrates, yet again, that the museum, with an astonishing nine mixed-media works by Robert Rauschenberg, including the great “Untitled Combine (Man with White Shoes)” from 1955, is the most important repository anywhere for that seminal artist’s riveting work of the late 1950s. If MOCA owned nothing else, the Rauschenbergs would put the place on the international art map.

Of course, MOCA does possess a few other notable items. There’s the unparalleled depth of the fine holdings of Abstract Expressionists Mark Rothko and Franz Kline, represented by 10 and 12 paintings, respectively. For Ab Ex gravy there are three Jackson Pollocks, including his magisterial 1949 drip-painting, “No. 1.” And top it all off with more than a dozen papier-mache works by Claes Oldenburg, boldly painted sculptures that constitute an important transitional phase between Abstract Expressionism and Pop, and the finest work the artist ever did.

The way in which a museum chooses to install its collection also tells a tale or two. “The Decisive Years” isn’t about the so-called “triumph” of American over European art, but about the arrival of American artists in the international arena. Despite lacunae, it tells a story of the maturation of avant-garde artists in the United States in the decade following World War II.

Central pride of place is given to Pollock’s “No. 1.” Facing off across this entrance room are, at right, Alberto Giacometti’s 1960 “Tall Figures I and II” and, at left, Oldenburg’s “Bride Mannequin,” dating from the next year. In this context Giacometti’s willowy, attenuated bronze women, whose artistic lineage reaches back to the ancient and prehistoric Mediterranean, represent the venerable traditions on which European modern art was built. Meanwhile, Oldenburg’s brash, garishly painted bride, slapped together from newsprint, paste and paint, represents the upstart American entry into international prominence. In between, Pollock is the pivot.

The remainder of the galleries display some episodes in the postwar flowering of American modernism--especially the rooms devoted to Kline and Rothko--as well as a newly emergent aesthetic that began to shed the purist conventions of European modern art (the knockout room of Rauschenbergs, together with his suite of 34 lithographs illustrating Dante’s “Inferno”).

There are also some provocative, and more intimate, juxtapositions. A small, mist-shrouded gouache by Mark Tobey hangs adjacent to a muscular abstraction by Kline, whose Orientalist calligraphy is thrown into high relief by the pairing. And these two drawings hang next to Louise Nevelson’s large standing relief, “Sky Cathedral/Southern Mountain,” a pile of salvaged street junk that, painted uniform black, becomes an urban mountain nearly as mysterious as Tobey’s evocation of fog lifting in the Pacific Northwest.

Even the inclusion of decidedly minor art has its uses. The parched, scarified paintings of Spanish artist Antoni Tapies have been enjoying a certain vogue of late, thanks to the recent re-emergence of Spain onto the world stage. MOCA’s 14 postwar paintings by Tapies, which waver between complete abstraction and illustrative representation of war-ravaged fields--blood and sand, so to speak-- fail to sustain a fraction of the interest of the equally abundant Rothkos and Klines, between which they have been strategically installed. Tapies would be better served by a more stringent selection, but at least the grouping is instructive.

There was reason to believe “Perceptual Investigations” would be instructive, too. Nowhere in the world is there a permanent, public installation of light-and-space art, the phenomenologically based aesthetic often identified with Los Angeles in the 1960s and early 1970s, with important ties to the larger concerns of Minimalist art. The MOCA display would not be comprehensive; but, especially paired with “The Decisive Years,” the selection promised much. For even though the art of the New York School was the sounding board against which so many artists in Los Angeles developed, never has the complex relationship between 1950s Abstract Expressionism and 1960s light-and-space art been insightfully plumbed.

I had hoped “Perceptual Investigations” might initiate some inquiries, especially as it is planned to remain in place until late 1991. And who knows? Perhaps it will, if it ever gets installed. As of late Wednesday, a MOCA spokesperson said the show would be fully in place by the end of August. My advice is to call before you go.

“The Decisive Years: 1945-1960” is at 250 S. Grand Ave., to Nov. 18; “Perceptual Investigations” is at 152 N. Central Ave., to late 1991. Information: 621-2766.