Art : COMMENTARY : Slouching Toward the Present : The Museum of Modern Art’s current colonization of Los Angeles provides reason to explore a momentous trend

Remarkable as it might seem, there are signs that the Museum of Modern Art might join the late 20th Century before the late 20th Century comes to an end.

Typically, and with good reason, the venerated New York institution is thought of as the most important and distinguished museum of its kind. From the unrivaled collection, filled with more pivotal works of 20th-Century Western art than any other, to its historic role as a successful proselytizer for modern art through groundbreaking exhibitions and acclaimed publications, MOMA holds a special place in the pantheon of art museums.

With equally good reason, however, the Museum of Modern Art also occupies a rather less exalted--some might even say negligible--position in matters of the art of its own time. Tension between the museum’s accepted role as codifier of the achievements of the past and its thornier position as arbiter of the unsettled artistic issues of the present day is a dilemma of long standing. Generally, it has been resolved on the side of history.

When MOMA opened its doors in 1929--a new and progressive institution dedicated to all that was bafflingly modern in the tumultuous world of art--the exhibition program was inaugurated not with a show of the new Parisian Surrealism, nor of the interdisciplinary inventions of the German Bauhaus, nor of the radical abstraction of Mondrian and Dutch De Stijl, all of which had been boiling over in the fecund European art centers of the previous decade.

Instead, the Modern opened with a rich display of paintings by Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Seurat--the historic “founding fathers” of 20th-Century art, all of whom had been dead for a generation or more.

MOMA’s conflicted relationship to contemporary art has been especially evident since the 1960s. A formerly daring and lonely outpost of 20th-Century art was by then an established, mainstream fixture in the newly anointed capital of international culture--which meant that hitherto unknown demands were being pressed at every turn, while its established reputation was now at stake. In a way, the Modern had become something of a victim of its own success.

Now might be an appropriate moment to examine the museum’s conflicted relationship to recent art, and for two particular reasons. One is a simple matter of convenience.

For the summer months, the Museum of Modern Art has virtually colonized Los Angeles. The three most prominent local venues for the display of 20th-Century art are presently host to high-profile exhibitions that originated on Manhattan’s West 53rd Street. Together, they made up a prominent--and revealing--chunk of MOMA’s exhibition schedule for the last season.

At the Museum of Contemporary Art through Sept. 15, “High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture” has filled the galleries with undisputed masterworks, together with some of the pop culture source material, such as comic books and advertisements, on which that art depended.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is the site of “Liubov Popova,” a retrospective survey of paintings, drawings and designs for textiles, theater sets and costumes by the great Russian avant-gardist, which continues through Sunday.

And “Head-On/The Modern Portrait,” a display of more than 140 paintings, prints, drawings, photographs and sculptures selected from MOMA’s permanent collection by the American portrait artist Chuck Close, occupies the galleries of the Lannan Foundation through Sept. 7.

Second, a variety of developments during the 1980s do bear witness to the Modern’s stepped-up efforts to come to terms with its historically troublesome relationship to contemporary art, but none has been more dramatic and hopeful than last fall’s appointment of a curator charged specifically with the art of the present day. There had been such an appointment several years before, but this time, adding substance to the symbolism, the announcement was followed by an immediate clearing of the decks to accommodate for this autumn a substantive exhibition of recent art.

Robert Storr, a highly respected, New York-based critic, painter and free-lance curator, was named to the post. October is the designated month for his debut exhibition of site-specific installations, titled “ Dis locations,” which will feature work commissioned for the occasion from Louise Bourgeois, Chris Burden, Sophie Calle, David Hammons, Ilya Kabakov, Bruce Nauman and Adrian Piper.

To get an idea just why this news was dramatic and hopeful, here’s a little test. MOMA describes “ Dis locations” as an effort to examine the return of installation art to international prominence, after a decade in which painting and sculpture as self-contained mediums had been the focus of consideration. Now, name the last substantive show the museum organized that tried to get a handle on a recent, specific yet broadly influential development in contemporary art.

Time’s up. By my recollection, it would have to be the big survey of Conceptually oriented art titled “Information”--a show that was mounted exactly 21 years ago. Your kid could have been born, raised and graduated from college since then. When our flagship museum of 20th-Century art goes that long between such shows, you get an inkling that contemporary culture is barely a consideration, never mind a priority.

“ Dis locations” signals that something notable is afoot, but the Modern’s evident desire to regain a prominent role of leadership in the international dialogues of contemporary culture is not brand new. Signals have been building. Some were as blunt, if finally unfortunate, as the renovation and expansion program at its much be loved mid-town building, a program that, among other banalities, unveiled to the world in May, 1984, a perfectly awful array of subterranean galleries for temporary exhibitions.

Other signs were more optimistic--perhaps none more than the well-received 1989 retrospective of Andy Warhol’s art. MOMA had made a colossal blunder in the 1960s, hitching its wagon more tightly to the wan airiness of Color-field painting than to the far more trenchant developments of Pop, Minimalism and Conceptual art. Warhol’s belated anointment spoke a quiet mea culpa .

Among artists who had emerged since the dawn of the 1960s, only one had hitherto seemed to be regarded by MOMA as crucial--the abstract painter Frank Stella, remarkably the subject of not one but two career surveys at the museum. The Warhol show was a signal event, for it was his brand of Pop that had emerged as a touchstone for its generation, as well as for a whole generation of younger artists who, to their astonishment and delight, were suddenly welcomed into MOMA’s aesthetic orbit.

At least, they thought they had been welcomed in. Almost immediately there was reason for doubt. The virtual hail of critical condemnation that crashed down on that other, more recent colossal blunder--the exhibition “High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture”--suggested they now felt otherwise.

“High & Low” is a traditional, even academic accounting of specific sources in popular culture that have turned up in the work of 20th-Century artists from Pablo Picasso to Jeff Koons. In great and gruesome detail, it chronicles its subject in ways that could only be supported by those who fervently wish that great events in the last 25 years of art and critical thought had never happened--including the art of Warhol himself. A museum simply couldn’t claim to understand the significance of Warhol and mount a show like this.

“High & Low” was the much-anticipated debut presentation by Kirk Varnedoe, MOMA’s newest director of its department of painting and sculpture, and thus holder of perhaps the most powerful curatorial position of its kind in the world. Smart, charming, ambitious and by all accounts dedicated to reinvigorating MOMA, Varnedoe is also an academic who came to his museum post from the faculty of New York’s prestigious Institute of Fine Arts. (His former student, New Yorker art critic Adam Gopnik, collaborated on the MOMA show with him.) Before “High & Low,” he had virtually no track record in the difficult curatorial task of organizing persuasive exhibitions of postwar art.

In 1984, Varnedoe had participated in the contemporary section of another highly problematic MOMA show, “Primitivism in 20th-Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern,” spearheaded by his mentor and predecessor in the department directorship, the formidable William Rubin. Like “High & Low,” “Primitivism” paired modern masterworks with sources outside traditional Western art, in this case from tribal cultures.

Significant scholarly detective work was accomplished, but a storm of dissent arose over “Primitivism’s” implied endorsement of what many felt to be the artistic equivalent of ethnographic colonialism. Similarly, “High & Low” took heat for tacitly implying that, whenever so-called high culture needed a boost of adrenaline, it went slumming among the low pleasures of the working class.

Notably, neither “Primitivism” nor “High & Low” was as much a museum exhibition as it was a kind of three-dimensional lecture--a display that lined up modern masterpieces and their sources side by side, rather like a slide presentation in a university class. Pedagogy may work fine in the professorially ruled classroom, but few in the functioning art world took kindly to being treated like unknowing students of so central a feature of recent art. They yelped, rightly, at the quietly condescending pretention.

Both shows marshaled facts with considerable erudition. Yet, perhaps most important, both also viewed the work of Western artists principally through a lens of formal analysis. You could plow through the often remarkable two-volume catalogue to “Primitivism” and come out the other end thinking modern artists were mainly attracted to tribal art by its powerful formal qualities. Likewise, you could get through “High & Low” without ever finding out why Warhol chose specifically to paint cans of soup, from among the endless list of supermarket possibilities.

Formal analysis of the history of modern art has always been MOMA’s forte. For one obvious example, see the installation of its extraordinary collection of painting and sculpture, which is guided by stylistic taxonomies. For another, see its aforementioned commitment to Color-field painting, a genre practically invented by formalist critics.

Although undeniably useful, art-historical formalism has long since been toppled as the central doctrine of contemporary artistic discourse. Dissonance between MOMA and a significant segment of its most attentive audience therefore seems inevitable.

The museum’s historical retrospective of Liubov Popova (1889-1924) is symptomatic of this formalist problem. Popova was an artist who absorbed with astonishing rapidity and skill the most advanced aesthetic ideas of her day, ideas that were principally worked out in the paintings and sculptures of other innovators, which she incorporated into her own ambitious work.

Many of her canvases are beautiful and provocative. However, her true brilliance came later, after she stopped painting, when she transformed those ideas in astonishing designs for textiles, costumes and theatrical sets. In the MOMA show those extraordinary final works get short shrift, because of an apparent, hidebound faith in a formalist hierarchy that puts painting and sculpture at the apex of art.

The exhibition is exciting because a crucial artist, hitherto obscured, is brought into the spotlight. Nonetheless, it feels forced and flat. It’s a “classic MOMA” show: Popova’s reputation is resuscitated, but to accomplish the task her actual achievement has been distorted.

Ironically, the Modern is probably the museum least likely to be able to deal conceptually with an artist such as Popova, who moved among different artistic disciplines and brilliantly wove several together. Established on a corporate model, MOMA is notoriously Balkanized into six separate curatorial departments--painting and sculpture; drawings; prints and illustrated books; architecture and design; photography, and film--each with its own director. Sometimes, they seem to operate as walled fiefdoms beleaguered by internecine warfare.

Originally, the creation of these individual departments spoke of a commitment to inclusiveness in considering the breadth of modern artistic creativity. MOMA made news by taking such once-radical steps as mounting shows of industrially designed objects and accepting movies into its purview.

Contemporary art, however, has become increasingly hybridized, with clear distinctions among disciplines vigorously challenged in the work of many crucial artists. Now that disciplinary distinctions are often impossible to make, the departmental structure can be a serious impediment. “High & Low,” for example, suffers as an exhibition exclusively of painting and sculpture--it contains not a single work made with a camera--because the subject of popular culture is unthinkable without the modern arrival of mechanical reproduction.

Overcoming that departmentalized impediment was one of many motives apparent in “Head/On: The Modern Portrait,” organized by the artist Chuck Close. He chose portraits from most every department of the museum and jumbled them together in an installation design that recalls a storeroom--the messily vital place where work in MOMA’s collection languishes when not publicly sorted out for display in discrete departmental galleries.

Close’s show was third in a new series called “Artist’s Choice,” inaugurated by Varnedoe. (The late sculptor Scott Burton and painter Ellsworth Kelly had previously been invited to organize a show from MOMA’s great collection.) Varnedoe also hired Robert Storr and paved the way for his “ Dis locations” show. All these decisions speak of a welcome and insightful effort to open up the museum to diverse voices. They are Varnedoe’s most important actions to date.

Close’s curatorial decision to mix up mediums stood in stark contrast to typical MOMA shows. Coincidentally, however, when shown in New York last winter “Head-On” overlapped on the schedule a sprawling, in-house exhibition called “The Art of the Forties,” also drawn from every nook and cranny of the museum’s collection. Its first gallery alone included a Jackson Pollock screen print, a photographic portrait of Winston Churchill by Yousuf Karsh, a U.S. Air Force poster by Leo Lionni, Picasso’s grisaille painting “The Charnel House” and Charles Eames’ molded plywood study for the nose cone of a glider.

“The Art of the Forties” surveyed an especially volatile decade. Significantly, that period had been the crucible for radical shifts in Western culture--shifts that would give rise to the very conception of a new identity for art, one that didn’t seem to be strictly “modern” and so came to be called “contemporary.” The show was seriously flawed, but its surprising multidisciplinary thrust was widely--and gratefully--noted.

MOMA’s general ambivalence about contemporary art has always been acutely felt within the display of its permanent collection. The final room in the chronologically ordered galleries of painting and sculpture is devoted principally to the 1970s and ‘80s, but the selection has never seemed more than haphazard and arbitrary.

Never, that is, until the last several months. A visit last spring showed how Robert Storr had reinstalled the gallery to make a number of points. The display speaks volumes about MOMA’s current aspirations and about their sharp divergence from orthodoxy. In addition to often sensitive juxtapositions, Storr scored a polemical bull’s-eye.

The room contains a dozen works. The earliest is a 1963-64 torso sculpture by Louise Bourgeois, a major artist of the New York School. The most recent are a 1990 sculpture made from afghans and stuffed animals by Mike Kelley, and a 1990 painting by the expatriate Abstract Expressionist, Joan Mitchell. In between are works by Alice Aycock, Eva Hesse, Ralph Humphrey, Lois Lane, Elizabeth Murray, Dorothea Rockburne, Susan Rothenberg, Richard Serra and Jackie Winsor.

The proportion of artists who are women (nine) to those who are men (three) is just about the exact opposite of what one usually finds in shows of recent art, despite the profound influence of feminism in contemporary culture. In fact, this single room holds more than twice the number of works made by women than will be found in all the prior galleries of 20th-Century painting and sculpture combined.

The recentness of the work is also given depth and resonance by having been bracketed by artists of an older generation--Bourgeois is 79; Mitchell, 65--whose sensibilities were shaped by the postwar efflorescence of art in New York. Storr’s selection of “new” art doesn’t just chronicle the young and the restless.

And Kelley, who is the youngest of the group and thus an avatar of the most recent developments in art, is significantly not based in New York. His floor piece makes obliquely critical reference to the drip-paintings of Jackson Pollock, which were executed on the floor, and thus to the origins of the schism that opened between “the modern” and “the contemporary.” But his sensibility is inseparable from a mass-culture milieu, which makes Kelley’s residence in Los Angeles telling.

Right next to the door, Kelley’s is the final work in the Museum of Modern Art’s sweeping chronology of 20th-Century painting and sculpture. When you leave the hallowed halls, you can’t help but be convinced that something momentous might well be under way.