ART : A Few Real-Life Lessons for ‘Graduate’

Every now and then I get a letter from someone in a snit about a review I’ve written who wants to know why I don’t curate my own exhibition and demonstrate what (if anything) I really like.

Well, now I’ve done it--together with Richard Iri, former director of the Works Gallery in Costa Mesa--and the results are on view through July 9 at SITE, a small nonprofit space in downtown Los Angeles.

Obviously, I’m not about to review my own show. But the experience of mounting it is a story in itself. It certainly gives me a new respect for the curator’s job.

Back in October, 1992, Iri asked whether I’d be interested in selecting work by graduate students in studio art for a show opening in March of 1994. I was intrigued by the idea of viewing massive quantities of advanced student work in celebrated Southern California art departments and choosing my favorite pieces.

Iri good-naturedly agreed to my two stipulations: that the show could contain weird and distinctly unsalable work, and that I would avoid reviewing shows at his gallery to eliminate any hint of conflict of interest. (Of course, I would not be paid--either in cash or art--for my services.)

During the next year, we visited more than 90 student studios and several student exhibitions at seven institutions in the Los Angeles-Orange counties area. The 17 artists we finally chose came from Otis College of Art and Design, Claremont Graduate School, UC Irvine, USC and CalArts. (For some reason, we didn’t find what we sought at Cal State Fullerton and Art Center College of Design in Pasadena; UCLA never made its studios available.)

The show was to have no theme, which freed me to consider a wide array of work in all media. My only guidelines were that the art had to have a distinctive visual presence, be engaged with recognizably contemporary issues, and be fresh and personal and witty.

Iri and I visited studios when the students were not present. Constrained by the frequent presence of an art department representative, we remained silent while hastily scribbling brief notes about the work.

Of course, the stuff artists leave lying about in their studios doesn’t come neatly labeled. Miscellaneous objects on the floor, pinned to the wall or dangling from the ceiling might or might not be--or eventually become--finished pieces.

It was our task to ferret out whatever art-like things we could find, and make our decisions based on them. As a result, I was obliged to come to grips with my notion of what a work of art can be--a notion (not surprisingly) shaped largely by other works of art I’ve seen.

Would some of the seemingly unfinished or hopelessly obscure pieces in the studios prove to be the next wave of contemporary art? I was haunted by the feeling that another curator would have seen promise in work that looked like little more than hermetic exercises to me.

Much of what we saw was easy to reject, however. Even at good schools there are students making bland and simple-minded pieces. Some work was stridently polemical or numbingly theoretical. Some artists worked in traditional modes that didn’t excite me.

But certain pieces made me practically jump up and down with excitement. I could hardly wait until Iri and I had climbed back into his truck to start babbling about my “finds.” Happily, they often were the same works he had noted. This was the ecstasy.

The agony didn’t kick in until many months later, when we settled on our list of artists and figured out which pieces we wanted from them.

Despite our requests, several of the artists never sent us slides of the work that had attracted us to them in the first place. My mental images of these pieces became increasingly fuzzy. (I regret now that I didn’t make my initial rounds with a camera.) Meanwhile--since artists tend to believe their most recent work is their best--we received hopeful notes appended to slides of new work that was sometimes very disappointing.

We had our first big crisis in mid-March of this year: Our show--now dubbed “The Graduate”--was abruptly canceled by Works Gallery owner Mark Moore barely two weeks before it was to have opened. Deeply in debt, Moore--who owns another gallery in Santa Monica named after himself--had decided to close the Costa Mesa gallery by the end of the month.

At first he pleaded with Iri and me to keep the news a secret. But we felt responsible to our artists. We called them with the bad news and pledged to find another space as soon as possible--before summer, we hoped.

That proved very difficult. For conflict-of-interest reasons, I could not allow “The Graduate” to be shown at an Orange County museum or gallery whose shows I review. (Yes, we had offers.) But even seemingly modest nonprofit galleries in the greater-L.A. area were booked through 1995.

One of the artists in our show happened to be the director of SITE, a six-year-old nonprofit gallery housed in a former Japanese restaurant in downtown L.A. When the gallery’s board gave us the green light, I was in clover. The artists sounded happy, too.

But I had neglected to do my homework. Had we realized we’d be dealing with an all-volunteer gallery with a skimpy history of critical coverage, we probably would have postponed the show indefinitely.

The first inkling of trouble came when SITE’s board decided to nix our playful exhibition title for some obscure reason (the director eventually caved in and let us keep it).

Then we were told we had to become paying members of the gallery for the privilege of housing our show there. In our view, the gallery was privileged to get a novel and exhaustively researched exhibition rather than simply another uncurated show of work by member artists. There was no follow-up from SITE staff, and I never did mail my check.

By the time I received a stack of contracts to forward to the artists, I was no longer surprised at being dragooned into a task that should have been handled by the gallery. (The contracts were between the artists and the gallery; Iri and I were out of the loop.)

But I was appalled to see they included a disclaimer to the effect that the gallery was not responsible for the art exhibited there. This smacked of the small print on cloakroom receipts rather than the finicky insurance procedures I recall from my museum staff days.

Every day, it seemed, there was more bad news. An artist who had made a devastating piece told me she was unable to install it because she couldn’t get it to hang properly from the ceiling. (She substituted another work--very strong, but not that piece.)

Another artist told us the one work of hers we wanted was in a show in the Netherlands. Several artists preferred not to lend pieces that had already been exhibited in other shows.

Four days before the opening, the gallery director called me in a panic. He had just spackled the walls (to fill holes left by the previous show) and tried to cover the marks with paint stored at the gallery. But it turned out to be the wrong shade of white. He wanted to know whether Iri or I could come down to the gallery, buy properly matching paint and do the job? We couldn’t.

Nor could I oblige his request that I come in and adjust the lights. I’ve never lighted a show, and no one would be present to teach me. Do playwrights run the lights for productions of their plays?

Why bother to open a nonprofit gallery, I wondered, if there is no one--no staff, volunteers or interns--to do these things? Eventually, board member Barbara Nathanson came in and painted the gallery; Iri came in early the day of the opening and lighted the show.

Meanwhile, the director and I embarked on a frantic search for VCRs and monitors for our two video artists. SITE then agreed to spend $100 on VCR rentals, the Museum of Contemporary Art loaned one monitor, and one of the artists supplied the other.

When I discussed the problem with Carole Ann Klonarides, media arts curator at the Long Beach Museum of Art, she told me it is routine for video artists to supply their own equipment. What a sorry situation!

All in all, it was probably just as well I didn’t learn about the last-minute resignation of SITE’s director until the opening reception.

That Sunday afternoon I saw all the art in one place for the first time. Some pieces still tickled me pink, while a few others proved that choosing work solely on the basis of a long-ago studio walk-through is not always a good idea.

In retrospect, I see a certain unifying logic to most of our choices, though to an outsider I imagine they seem strangely arbitrary. Most of the students we picked make objects of one sort or another, or paintings so encrusted and embellished that they resemble objects. (The show also includes two videos, a drawing and two small-scale installations.)

The artists who showed up for the opening were mostly pretty cool, in both senses of the word. There were few complaints about a very embarrassing omission (somehow, neither of us had assembled up a checklist), and there were a few modest expressions of pleasure in the show.

I know I won’t be doing this again for a long time, if ever. But I credit the experience for teaching me what enormous compromise, unfairness, fallibility and miscommunication can be part of the process of culling works of art and showing them to the public.

* “The Graduate” continues through July 9 at SITE, 719 W. 7th St., Los Angeles. Hours: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. Admission: Free. (213) 629-4532.