92 Year in Review : The Cover Thing : Shake, Rattle and Roll : L.A.-based artists go cosmopolitan in European shows, galleries shrink in the economic slump, and alternative venues offer hope

Consider this list of L.A.-based artists who, in the year just coming to a close, were a significant presence in important or well-received European exhibitions, including Germany’s sprawling Documenta IX: Jon Borofsky, Chris Burden, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Manuel Ocampo, Raymond Pettibon, Lari Pittman, Stephen Prina, Charles Ray, Erika Rothenberg, Nancy Rubins, Edward Ruscha, Jim Shaw, Robert Therrien, Jeffrey Vallance, Bill Viola.

I’ve probably forgotten to include some who rightly belong in this compendium--a list that, not so long ago, would have been unusual if it boasted just a couple of names. Even the likelihood of omission is noteworthy, however, for it indicates the breadth with which L.A.’s art scene is now embedded in the internationalized art world. If any doubts have lingered about the capacity for artists based in Southern California to participate fully within that newly invigorated international arena, 1992 is the year that should once and for all lay those uncertainties to rest.

Enormous curiosity from the art world beyond Southern California greeted “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the ‘90s.” The raucous exhibition, which kicked off the season at the Museum of Contemporary Art in February, rested on a dubious premise built around a supposed evocation of the “dark side” of L.A. Mostly it was notable for an energetic enthusiasm that shined a bright spotlight on some of the most gifted artists working anywhere today--a situation that led to its fat catalogue being eagerly circulated and perused throughout the country and in Europe.

Ironically, the chief ingredient working against this newfound cosmopolitanism is also fallout from the 1980s, and has been likewise international in scope: a globally stalled economy, which hit California later than it did other regions, and which is commonly expected to last longer here.

The ramifications of this economic malaise are far from unique to L.A. New York has witnessed an almost eerily becalmed season in its galleries, with observers taking refuge in blockbuster museum shows such as “Matisse.” Chicago, meanwhile, has almost no gallery crawl left to speak of.

Gallery instability has been marked in what had been the ‘80s boom town of Santa Monica. The James Corcoran Gallery, which has long represented a number of established artists who emerged in Los Angeles in the 1960s, and which led the gallery bandwagon to Santa Monica in 1986, recently announced that it will cease its exhibition schedule in February.

Elsewhere, such highly visible dealers as Fred Hoffman, Linda Cathcart, Stuart Regen and Daniel Weinberg have turned to mergers, quasi-private operations or plans for scaled-down activities during the economic slump.

Encouragingly, the contraction of the gallery scene was met this year by an expanding phenomenon of small, quirky, quick-on-their-feet exhibition spaces. With names like TRI, Foodhouse, Bliss and Nomadic Site, and often run by artists, these exhibition venues are found in such out-of-the-way places as apartment living rooms, light industrial complexes and borrowed public spaces.

On a larger but nonetheless related scale, the artist-run Foundation for Art Resources sponsored the sprawling FAR BAZZAR as an aggressive counterpoint to the Los Angeles International Art Fair, December’s woeful invalid. More than 200 mostly young artists (including students) turned two floors of the Old Federal Reserve Bank building in downtown L.A. into a series of rough-hewn installations and dissonant exhibition spaces. The determined energy of the show was impressive, even if the upshot, aesthetically speaking, was the distraught feeling that most of these artists might want to consider getting into a different line of work.

Alternative venues such as these are only partly a reaction to diminished possibilities for artists to exhibit in commercial galleries. More significantly, they signal a shift in art world topography. In the market-driven ‘80s, dealers became the principal tastemakers leading the scene. These new spaces, almost all of them artist-run, are instead substantially motivated by a desire to put artists in the driver’s seat.

The stalled economy also had institutional ramifications. The L.A. County Museum of Art saw its fiscal fortunes dim, and so began a money-saving system of closing galleries on a rotating schedule and reducing staff.

Earl A. Powell III, who left the LACMA directorship in the spring to head Washington’s National Gallery of Art, had overseen a vast expansion program during his 12-year tenure--an expansion that was not, alas, matched by an equally vigorous increase in the museum’s operating endowment. Newly appointed Director Michael E. Shapiro, a curator from St. Louis who was the surprising choice to succeed Powell, faces a formidable challenge.

MOCA also tightened its belt in July by shutting down--temporarily--its much beloved warehouse facility in Little Tokyo. The museum’s public explanation has been that the closure was necessary to accommodate the imminent construction of a mixed-use development project that will surround the building on three sides. However, as nary a spade of dirt has yet been turned in that “imminent” development, the early closure is now widely regarded to have been a quiet economy measure.

As economic pressures were felt throughout the arts infrastructure, dismay began to mount over operation of the Los Angeles Endowment for the Arts. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are annually redirected away from the visual arts by this civic enterprise, to be spent on trivial, though politically expedient, social service programs.

Under Cultural Affairs Department General Manager Adolfo V. Nodal, the L.A. Endowment, once seen as a promising and enlightened mechanism for funding adventurous artists and programs throughout the city, continues to be a great disappointment. Taken together with the battered National Endowment for the Arts, which has been crippled in a different way, prospects for public funds being used as a catalyst to stabilize and expand the art-infrastructure have remained slim.

Money might have been generally scarce this year, but acquisitions of major paintings were made by the J. Paul Getty Museum and LACMA. The County Museum acquired an important Cezanne landscape, which fills a big hole in its collection, while the Getty purchased a small Goya painting of a bullfight and, most spectacularly, Titian’s “Venus and Adonis,” formerly owned by Queen Christina of Sweden and publicly exhibited only once in the past 150 years.

A sizable number of outstanding exhibitions could also be seen in Southland museums. The single most impressive was “The Century of Tung Ch’i Ch’ang” at LACMA, in which the astonishing paintings of this important, late 16th- and early 17th-Century Chinese artist and critic were abundantly displayed, together with those of dozens of artists who had been influenced by him.

MOCA presented the mid-career retrospective of the estimable Alexis Smith, who has made the medium of collage into a fully environmental genre, with lasting consequences for the difficult field of public art. The museum finished up the season with “Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition, 1955-62,” which deftly charts one aspect of a dramatic cultural sea change. (The show is still on view, through March 7.)

The Getty Museum in Malibu presented a small, quietly stunning exhibition called “Art and Science: Joris Hoefnagel and the Representation of Nature in the Renaissance,” which focuses on a pivotal manuscript in its collection while also unveiling an extraordinary new acquisition: Martin Schongauer’s 1473 watercolor of peonies, the earliest known life-study in the history of Northern European art. (This show too can still be seen, through Jan. 17.)

The Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego and the Newport Harbor Art Museum in Newport Beach both remained sadly toppled from their former high perches among the most invigorating small museums in the country. Despite an occasional glimmer, their exhibition schedules were wan.

Some of the slack was taken up by other venues. Among them were the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, which organized the insightful “Watkins to Weston: 101 Years of California Photography, 1849--1950”; the Laguna Art Museum, whose “Proof: Los Angeles Art and the Photograph, 1960--1980” picked up a thread near where the Santa Barbara show left off; the Lannan Foundation, where Chris Burden’s chilling “The Other Vietnam Memorial” shared the stage with his thrilling “The Big Wheel”; the Otis Art Gallery, which mounted a concise survey of works on paper by Abstract Expressionist Emerson Woelffer, and UCLA’s Wight Art Gallery, where another paper survey, this one of New York Realist painter Sylvia Plimack Mangold, was likewise a model of revealing concision.

Finally, perhaps the most perplexing show of 1992 was the recently opened “LAX: The Los Angeles Exhibition.” A proposed biennial event, it consists of nine separately organized shows at seven different venues, with no overarching theme save for the required local residency of all participating artists.

The show has brought a few powerful works of art to light--especially “Visiting Hours,” an installation-cum-performance by Bob Flanagan and his collaborator, Sheree Rose, that has turned the Santa Monica Museum of Art into a charged arena for wrenching confrontations with desire and dread. “LAX” also proved a useful fund-raising strategy for the participating venues, whose combined leverage allowed publication of a joint catalogue that none, on its own, could likely have afforded.

Still, the nonsensical decision to restrict participants to artists resident in L.A. is purely promotional. Publicity for “local art” becomes, by default, this far-flung show’s unifying theme. The problem is that such narrowness doesn’t simply belie the title, for “LAX” invokes more than just the airport call letters for “L.A. International.” The name is a handy shorthand for the cosmopolitanism that now characterizes the art scene in Los Angeles--a situation any subsequent biennial might do well to consider.