COMMENTARY : The World Comes to L.A. . . . Sort Of : International Exhibition of Art Doesn’t Quite Achieve Its Goals

Last weekend, about 40 galleries throughout Los Angeles, stretching from the beach neighborhoods through Beverly Hills and Hollywood to downtown, hosted a series of private social events and public inaugural parties for what is being billed as the L.A. International Invitational.

Dealers had invited, at their individual discretion, counterparts in Austria, Belgium, England, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Canada, Japan, China, Korea and Australia to each mount an exhibition in their respective Los Angeles spaces. For the future, the possibility is open for a reciprocal show in the guest gallery’s hometown.

The general notion of such a citywide exhibition isn’t a bad one. An international exchange of art and of artists, many of whom came to Los Angeles for the opening events, is pragmatic and sensible for a locale that, in the last half-dozen years, has seen many of its own resident artists become prominent fixtures on the international scene.

Principally, however, the idea for the much-publicized exchange was this: Amid a protracted period of lethargy in the economically battered art market, host a special event to inject some vibrant energy into the city’s gallery scene.

On Friday night, things were lively. The event got under way with two overlapping series of exhibition openings. They began in Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, and continued east into galleries in the area of Beverly and La Brea boulevards. The following afternoon, a third spate of openings picked up at participating galleries in Venice and Santa Monica. Lots of people turned out on both days.

In some respects the steady stream of people, periodically bunching up into full-scale crowds in one gallery or another, recalled the height of the mushrooming market boom several years back, when the Saturday gallery-crawl briefly assumed the proportions of team sport. On another level, however, this monthlong event is fundamentally different.

What is different is the at-best middling quality of almost all the 40-odd shows. I managed to see most of them during the opening marathon, and only a couple will be worth revisiting to examine without the crowds. There’s a decided thinness to the L.A. International Invitational and it’s worth spending a moment to figure out why.

Some galleries are simply showing artists they normally show, with a foreign hook identified. Gemini G.E.L. is displaying the striped prints it produced with French Conceptualist Daniel Buren, while James Corcoran Gallery is showing abstract objects and small monoprint-paintings by Japan’s Tomoharu Murakami.

At Steve Turner Gallery, which typically shows early-Modernist art made in Los Angeles, the obvious dilemma for an internationalist event was solved by clever repackaging. “Exiles in Angeltown: European Artists in Los Angeles, 1920-1960” emphasizes the city’s internationalist past, while simply grouping together individual paintings, sculptures, collages, drawings and photographs by Man Ray, Knud Merrild, Oskar Fischinger and other artists the gallery regularly shows.

At Christopher Grimes Gallery, Luciano Perna’s witty spaghetti-paintings and a “fountain” of dirty pots and pans occupy the small project room in back. Perna is described as hailing from Italy, which he does--although he’s long lived in Culver City and has been a regular in the L.A. art world for several years.

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Most common, however, is a different kind of exhibition altogether. It’s what one artist perceptively described as a “suitcase show.” Lots of foreign dealers brought the art they could fit into a suitcase--actually or metaphorically--or, perhaps, that could be slipped in as excess baggage.

Burnett Miller Gallery is hosting three artists from London’s Laure Genillard Gallery, and their work is very simply made, utilizing a few pieces of ordinary lumber, or paint applied directly on the walls, or light shone into the room with the aid of an overhead projector. At Sue Spaid Gallery, the Belgian team of Wastijn and Deschuymer present laser color prints of laboratory mice, push-pinned to the walls, which can be seen with cardboard 3-D glasses.

Unframed drawings and a videotape at Ruth Bloom Gallery, flowers pressed into the skylight at Kim Light Gallery, curtains dividing the space into a maze at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, “sculptures” and “paintings” made from ordinary books laid out on the floor or nailed to the wall at Thomas Solomon’s Garage--given such rudimentary, inexpensive or easily transportable materials, it’s plain that keeping expenses down was a chief concern of the participants. (Foreign dealers were required to pick up shipping and transportation costs, while host dealers paid for advertising, opening parties and related exhibition expenses.)

Not all the exhibitions are suitcase shows. Jan Baum Gallery is presenting a fairly extensive group of recent prints and paintings by Berlin’s Rainer Fetting; Dorothy Goldeen Gallery has an elaborate installation by Choong-sup Lim and mixed-media works by Cho Duk-hyun; Tatistcheff Gallery offers a group show of British realists, and so on.

But exhibitions such as these are in the minority. In economic hard times, who can blame dealers for wanting to minimize the financial risk?

Furthermore, suitcase shows don’t necessarily mean bad shows. Two of the few exhibitions I plan to see again are Peter Wuthrich’s books at Thomas Solomon, assemblages that seem to have imbued a certain airy freshness into a widely used idea, and Peter Kogler’s curtains at Shoshana Wayne, which create an oddly affecting, psychological mind-scape by way of fabric woven like Rorschach blots (imagine Freud as an interior decorator).

There’s no denying, however, that a pretty big gap separates the high falutin’ aspirations for this “international event,” which is envisioned as a biennial attraction, and the rather wan group of shows actually offered. (Most will remain on view into April.) You get the feeling that a Potemkin village has been erected, while it’s dearly hoped the false front won’t be noticed by the passing parade of gallery-goers.

Maybe a more useful approach to the economic dilemma, which has been both the cause and the pitfall for the inaugural International exhibition, would be to turn it to advantage. Suitcase shows are possible because of the widespread entrenchment of Post-Conceptual art, which often shuns the object-orientation of more traditional forms of painting and sculpture. And part of the reason for the entrenchment of Post-Conceptual strategies is that they accommodate the nomadism of artists in our time--the very nomadism that has made the art world an international place since the late 1970s.

An International that pointedly conceived of itself as a suitcase show, rather than as something grander that couldn’t quite make the grade and became a suitcase show by default, could pose an intriguing array of artistic possibilities. Handled with imagination and wit, it might even generate the international notoriety that this event’s organizers so clearly hope for.