1993 Year in Review : ART : It’s Called Art, Not Politics : With identity politics overriding the art world, it was a relief to see shows by artists like Vija Celmins and Adrian Saxe

If there was a landmark art event for 1993, the disastrous installment last March of New York’s Whitney Biennial was it. The show rivaled the train wreck sequence in “The Fugitive.”

Hating the Whitney Biennial is, of course, a countrywide biennial sport. The show always begs for critical slams, since virtually any “national survey of recent artistic trends” inevitably fails to celebrate the virtues of this, that or the other pet artist, idea or peeve cherished by the viewer. But the 1993 outing was different--in a big way.

Negative responses seemed more stunned than angry, in dazed recognition of the degree to which artistic conservatism had gripped the museum. Self-described as the “multicultural Biennial,” the show had abandoned the idea of a national survey in favor of a thematic presentation of issue-oriented art about class, race, gender, sexuality and the family. The wheezy presumption that a fundamental essence could be shiningly revealed by peeling away encrusted layers of misrepresentation by the dominant culture remained intact, although now transferred from individual identity to identity politics.

In Los Angeles, meanwhile, a small but important repudiation of this reactionary idea caused a brief flurry of debate. The lobby of Downtown’s First Interstate skyscraper became the site of a new relief mural by the team of Russian-emigre artists, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, who offered a wickedly pointed satire on the way in which once-progressive issues of identity politics have been effortlessly absorbed by Establishment power.

The mural’s detractors--and there were some vocal ones--apparently believe art’s responsibility is to idealize social policy. Russian-born Komar and Melamid, however, having survived the artistically crushing Soviet mandates for Socialist Realism, understand that art’s actual responsibility is to tell the truth. A standout in a field otherwise marked by mediocrity, their mural is easily the finest work of public art to have been erected in the city in several seasons.

The deep and protracted recession, still severe in California and on the East Coast, continued to take an art world toll, but for galleries the story was slightly less grim than before. After a volatile period of closures in 1992, L.A.’s gallery scene this year was marked instead by downsizing--most visibly in Santa Monica, where a number of galleries came together in smaller spaces in an alley off Broadway.

That downsizing was also reflected in a vague sense of exhibition cautiousness. High-ticket items seemed more carefully selected, low-ticket (or more widely affordable) items in greater supply. There were still a lot of worthwhile shows: I stopped counting at 52--a show a week, on average--that I was happy to have seen during the year.

The impact of the weak economy on museums can be felt at all levels, from increased competition for scarce government, foundation and corporate resources, to the shrinking of disposable cash available to individual patrons at all but the highest incomes.

For Los Angeles, this last has had a doubly severe impact because, overall, the wealthiest segment of the local population does not financially support art museums in a substantial way. A shocking, confidential management study commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and obtained by the Times bleakly showed that, at the highest income levels, individual philanthropy to art museums is lower in L.A. than in any other major urban locale in the nation.

The money-crunch exacerbated a larger museum concern of long standing. Major museums in Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Baltimore and Seattle are all currently without directors, and a certain uneasiness is part of the reason why: Museum directorship, a once-coveted job, is now widely regarded among the curatorial ranks that traditionally has supplied candidates as a rather less-than-desirable “promotion” to the occupation of full-time fund-raiser.

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Locally, the rockiest road has been traveled by the (now director-less) County Museum, which underwent a flurry of program cuts, staff defections, lawsuits and such. The museum even decided to close its doors to the public two days a week, rather than one--a stunning decision, whose minimal boon to the balance sheet suggested a Draconian ploy in tortuous budget negotiations with the County Board of Supervisors.

What specific effect might come from a windfall gift of $23.5 million, gained in a recent lawsuit settlement with the Christian Science church, remains to be seen. However, LACMA board president Robert F. Maguire has said those funds will be added to the museum’s otherwise tiny endowment.

Elsewhere, the Museum of Contemporary Art kept dark its much-beloved auxiliary warehouse, the Temporary Contemporary, thus operating without two-thirds of its normal gallery space. The Southwest Museum entertained competitive bids from neighboring counties anxious to lure the museum from its historic site at the foot of Mount Washington (Mayor Riordan announced his intention to do everything possible to keep the venerable institution in the city). The fiscally imperiled California Afro-American Museum came within an inch of canceling its 30-year retrospective of sculptor John Outterbridge, while the Craft and Folk Art Museum still has not completed its permanent gallery space.

A question mark floated above Pasadena’s Norton Simon Museum in June, upon the death of the eponymous, 86-year-old industrialist, who was the greatest postwar art collector in the United States. For years observers have speculated on whether Simon could sufficiently endow his museum in perpetuity, or whether a merger was in the offing with the multibillion dollar J. Paul Getty Trust, whose elaborate new campus of buildings is slowly rising above the San Diego Freeway in Brentwood. However, Simon Museum officials insisted there are no plans to leave Pasadena.

Amid these vexing problems, a healthy schedule of notable art exhibitions was kept in area museums last year. Some of the best were at the otherwise beleaguered LACMA; so was the worst.

Selections from the well-known Maurice Wertheim collection (housed at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum) displayed an exceptionally high level of Impressionist and Postimpressionist painting, while a small show of two early series of narrative paintings by American artist Jacob Lawrence offered an insightful chronicle of his youthful transformation from a minor to a major key. “The Golden Age of Danish Painting” could have improved upon the selection of loans it was able to secure, but the show still managed a surprisingly affecting survey of its little-known subject.

LACMA added to its decade-long string of outstanding considerations of modern German culture with “Expressionist Utopias: Paradise, Metropolis, Architectural Fantasy” and “John Heartfield,” both given lively installation designs by the adventurous architectural firm, Coop Himmelblau. The show of Heartfield’s Nazi-era photo-montages was especially compelling, both for the trenchant brilliance of his work and for the rigorous standard it set for the many artists today attempting to make politically inspired art.

Also remarkable were “Robert Smithson: Photo Works,” which lucidly examined the Conceptual basis for the late artist’s often witty use of the camera, and “The Clay Art of Adrian Saxe,” a beautiful retrospective that could have gone a bit further in demolishing mediumistic prejudices toward ceramics as art (note the queasily qualifying title).

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The year’s dumbest show was managed by LACMA too: an incomprehensible mess of modern costume jewelry in a startlingly ugly display, organized not by an independent curator but by a Viennese firm that manufactures celebrated rhinestones.

MOCA hosted one impressive retrospective--the just-opened “Vija Celmins,” which dazzles in its restrained visual eloquence--and organized two others: “Robert Irwin,” an absorbing chronicle of the pioneer of Light and Space art, and “John Cage: Rolywholyover A Circus,” which managed to capture the philosophical flavor of the late composer’s playfully profound point of view, as well as its complex relationship to postwar visual art.

Also impressive were the large survey of Joseph Beuys’ drawings and the small survey of Lee Bontecou’s hybrids of painting and sculpture from the 1960s.

Other venues brought us a focused body of wonderful small collages by Roy Dowell (Santa Monica Museum of Art); a sprawling, two-part survey of recent German photography (Lannan Foundation); a provocative examination of a single, 19th-Century photograph by Camille Silvy, as well as “Women on the Edge,” a survey of women photographers in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s (both at the Getty Museum). In San Diego, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Centro Cultural de la Raza presented a timely, often bittersweet collaboration called “La Frontera/The Border: Art About the Mexico/United States Border Experience.”

Finally, 1993 saw the passing of Richard Diebenkorn, whose death in March at the age of 70 marked a milestone. After 20 years of work, Diebenkorn’s widely celebrated “Ocean Park” abstractions of the 1960s helped catapult him into the position of the first L.A.-based painter to secure a national reputation.