COMMENTARY : It’s Not a Pretty Picture : Budget and staff problems beset the L.A County Museum of Art, but that doesn’t excuse lackadaisical work or a scarcity of exhibits

So far, the protracted ruckus at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has seen a $2-million budget cut followed by forced staff reductions, assorted willing defections (several from the curatorial staff, including at least two of the highest caliber), a notable decline in membership revenue, a variety of high-level administrative positions that linger unfilled, a variety of program cancellations and, overall, morale around the office that is lower than the belly of the proverbial lizard.

The capper to this B-grade soap opera is a lawsuit filed against the museum in Superior Court by a senior curator, resident at LACMA since 1964, who seeks, among much else, reinstatement to his post as head of the department of 20th-Century art. The suit, complete with attachments consisting of four months worth of unrelievedly petty and unseemly correspondence between the long-time curator and the museum’s new director, provides a decidedly vulgar climax to events of the past five months.

It also encourages a query: Since the director himself has a demonstrated interest in modern and contemporary art, having been a curator in the field in a prior professional capacity, and, since an attempted dethronement of the department head responsible for shaping the program in 20th-Century art suggests a marked displeasure with efforts in that high-profile area, might we reasonably expect a dramatic, forthcoming change in the way LACMA collects or presents the art of our time?

I hope so. A quick scan of recent exhibition efforts shows why.

Compare LACMA’s program to that of its nearest colleague in the 20th-Century field, the Museum of Contemporary Art. When one thinks of living art and living artists among large L.A. institutions, one thinks first--and last--of MOCA, even though the subject is a valid concern for both museums.

During the current and the most recent fiscal years, beginning July, 1991, and ending in June of this year, MOCA will have presented to the public 11 major exhibitions of postwar art. Six of the 11--more than half--have originated with the museum’s five-person curatorial staff or with its director. Even with the closure last fall of MOCA’s Little Tokyo warehouse space, the Temporary Contemporary, that’s a clear sign of an actively engaged museum.

By stark contrast, during the same two-year period LACMA’s department of 20th-Century art will have managed to present just five major shows. Of those, only two were organized by the curatorial staff, which also numbers five people. The LACMA department employs the same number of full-time curators as MOCA, but is its program anywhere near as vigorous? The blunt answer is: No.

Curators, of course, do more than just organize shows. They develop collections (and collectors), raise funds, do research, give lectures and more.

And, to be sure, direct comparisons between the two institutions cannot be simply made. LACMA is a general museum, with diverse obligations, while MOCA is specialized. MOCA focuses on art made during the past 50 years, but LACMA’s departmental purview extends to the beginning of the century.

Furthermore, as one of 10 curatorial departments, LACMA’s department of 20th-Century art had a total exhibition budget of $747,000 for the past two fiscal years, compared with a budget four times that size at MOCA. Neither is the 20th-Century department the only one at LACMA concerned with the cultural production of our time: The departments of photography, decorative arts, prints and drawings, and costumes and textiles also have such programs.

Still other distinctions could be drawn, distinctions which offer legitimate reasons for expecting a program of a different kind and character at LACMA than at MOCA. Despite these caveats, however, there’s no getting around this fact: Overall, the County Museum’s program in 20th-Century art seems lackadaisical.

Given the museum’s prominent evolution in the past decade, which includes construction of a highly visible building for the art of our time smack on Wilshire Boulevard, it’s reasonable to expect better.

If a program change is indeed in the offing, it could go one of two ways. The museum might scale back, perhaps even entering into a cooperative arrangement with the Museum of Contemporary Art to divvy up shared turf. Or, conversely, LACMA could step up its program, jolting the listless patient with an aggressive, innovative dose of invigoration.

Surely this last is the way to go. Scaling back, perhaps to focus on prewar art while ceding postwar culture to MOCA, would be disastrous. There are two main reasons why.

One is that the ongoing life of art ought to be a central feature of any general museum’s program, lest the institution sink into complacent vanity. Ideas are open and provisional amid the volatile and shifting tides of contemporary art. They’re always up for grabs.

Culture is a conversation, sometimes even a belligerent argument. It’s not a monologue. There is no single, correct point of view on 20th-Century art, past or present, which one institution could neatly lay out.

How a museum “writes” the history of art, through exhibitions and its permanent collections, determines its character. At LACMA, a decidedly different take on modern European art in the early decades of the century has been in evidence for some 15 years.

Most general museums look to France, putting Paris at the center; LACMA hasn’t slighted France, but it has looked elsewhere, with such ground-breaking shows as “The Avant-Garde in Russia,” “German Expressionist Sculpture” and “Degenerate Art: Nazi Germany and the Fate of the Avant-Garde.” Likewise, the permanent collection in Russian and German modern art has been beefed up, and now features surprising works by unexpected artists you might not see elsewhere.

These savvy moves have given LACMA’s 20th-Century art department a distinct flavor. And that’s why cross-town competitiveness between LACMA and MOCA in contemporary art was much anticipated a decade ago, in the wake of nearly simultaneous announcements of plans for a new museum on Bunker Hill and a new wing at the County Museum. But a lively rivalry never really panned out.

It still could, to the benefit of both--which also means to the benefit of the public.

A cooperative arrangement dividing up cultural turf between different, ostensibly appropriate institutions is not the solution. Art--not to mention artists, collectors, curators, trustees and other living creatures, who are stuck with a vagary called human nature--is nothing if not resistant to the bureaucratization that such planning-by-flow-chart represents.

Look at the so-called Three Museums Agreement attempted in 1947 by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art. An attempt to subordinate intermuseum competition by assigning each a primary collecting field, it quickly came a cropper. The museums went their own ways, shaping distinctive profiles, and we’ve all been the better for it.

The second reason to favor aggressive development is that LACMA claims a resource unique in the city--namely, the proximity of modern and contemporary art to large and diverse historical collections which feature art from Europe, the Middle East, the Americas and Asia (especially Japan). Locally, no one else can boast such a potentially invigorating relationship--not the Getty, not the Norton Simon, not the Huntington, not MOCA. It’s LACMA’s own.

Ideas in contemporary art may be provisional and always up for grabs, but here’s a little secret: The same is true of the history of art. Although art’s history often appears to be firmly fixed in place, it is in fact framed by the exigencies of today. History is fluid--more like thick and slowly moving molasses than rushing water, perhaps, but fluid all the same.

We tell our histories--and retell and revise them--in order to explain, justify and give credence to our present situation. Because our present situation is defined by multicultural stresses and strains of great moment and consequence, the opportunities represented by a general museum with diverse historical collections and a commitment to the life of contemporary art cannot be lightly tossed away.

In fact, they could be embraced in challenging and provocative ways. Other institutions in Europe and the United States, from the Tate Gallery in London to the Getty Center for the Arts and Humanities in Santa Monica, have invited prominent outsiders, including scholars and writers, but especially artists, to organize special exhibitions drawn from the resources of their permanent collections. Such shows can illuminate the artist’s own imaginative way of making art, or create linkages among disparate cultural artifacts that specialists in discrete disciplines might never make.

Either way, they’ve offered highly individuated, even eccentric methods of looking at art. They’re important, because they stand counter to the often monolithic interpretation that inevitably issues from our institutionalized world of art.

Of course, the meat and potatoes of curatorial work needs to be accomplished. That array should prominently include the identification of crucial artists working in Southern California and, through prescient exhibitions and substantial acquisitions, the elucidation of their place within the larger currents of the 20th Century.

Los Angeles has long since emerged as a major cosmopolitan center for the production of art. Its significant postwar artists date from the 1940s on. Many of the most important artists working anywhere work here, including some who are under 45. Yet, despite some noteworthy activities, you wouldn’t really have a clue of that liveliness from a visit to LACMA--or even repeated visits, over months and years.

The turmoil engendered by the museum’s budget crisis, which was several years in the making, should be expected to take time shaking out. While its effect has been keenly felt throughout the institution and its special pressures have focused on the department of 20th-Century art, it’s high time LACMA set about turning a fiasco into a long-needed opportunity.

Comparing the Museums

Between July, 1991, and June of this year, the Museum of Contemporary Art will have presented 11 major exhibitions, the department of 20th-Century art at the L.A. County Museum only five. Here is a comparative list (a check denotes a show organized by the museum’s own staff): * MOCA

A Dialogue About Recent American and European Photography

Terry Winters

Ad Reinhardt

Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s

Alexis Smith

Martin Puryear

Richard Diebenkorn

Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition, 1955-1962

Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture

Thinking Is Form: The Drawings of Joseph Beuys

Robert Irwin * LACMA

Carlo Maria Mariani

Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art

The William S. Paley Collection

Jacob Lawrence: The Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman Series

Mark Tansey