ART : COMMENTARY : ‘LAX/94’: Where’s the Heat? : Los Angeles’ second biennial observation of the best in local art is merely another arts festival, an umbrella for nine smaller institutions.

Biennial exhibitions--like triennials, quadrennials or any other -ennials scheduled at regular intervals by art museums--occasionally shed some light on recent art. Almost always, however, they at least generate heat.

Heat is when the audience can’t help but get fired up, exclaiming, “What? You call this the best there is?” or “Yes! I believe in this work” or any combination, variation or permutation thereof. Germany’s Documenta, Italy’s Venice Bienale, Pittsburgh’s Carnegie International, New York’s Whitney Biennial--inevitably, these shows generate heat.

A biennial isn’t just any art exhibition that happens every two years. Instead, a true biennial is an institutionally considered declaration of curatorial conviction, mandated to occur at regular intervals, which giddily identifies the most consequential art recently made. That’s why audiences respond, either pro or con, summoning a critical vigor to match the level of institutional assuredness.

Then there’s “LAX/94.” This show, the second installment of a biennial exhibition for Los Angeles, couldn’t be more different. Like the inaugural outing in 1992, this one has generated almost no heat. Overall “LAX” feels, well, lax.

How come?

“LAX/94” began in mid-November. Numerous artists of merit are included, and many people have been dutifully visiting some or all of the show’s nine locations.

Two parts of the show--”No Alibi: Works by Harry Gamboa Jr.” at Cal State L.A., and “Five Japanese Artists in Los Angeles” at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center--have already closed, and “LAX/94 at LACE” concludes today.

The six remaining parts--at Barnsdall Park, the California Afro-American Museum, USC, Otis College of Art and Design, the Santa Monica Museum of Art and the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena--will be winding up during the month. But I’ve yet to hear a passionate word spoken about the biennial, one way or the other.

Artists and art observers hereabouts aren’t exactly known for quietude. Is L.A.’s biennial somehow the rare, unimpassioned exception that proves the biennial-heat rule? Is the tepid response a sign of some psychic disposition unique to our art scene?

Well, no. I think there’s another, simpler explanation for the absence of heat. It’s hard to get worked up about “LAX” because, in traditional terms, it isn’t a biennial at all.

Instead, “LAX/94” is just another arts festival, an umbrella for the curatorial products of nine smaller institutions around town. There are glimmers of a traditional biennial lurking here, most notably at Otis, Barnsdall and the Santa Monica Museum, but those dim flickers are anomalous.

Read the show’s catalogue and you don’t get a strong, clear, considered voice saying, “This is the most consequential art currently being made in Los Angeles, and here’s why.” What you get is a dreamy schmooze about cross-institutional cooperation amid suburban geographical sprawl.

Are terms important? Well, only insofar as the “LAX” series was founded in response to a perceived need for a biennial, not for a festival.

A private-sector, nonprofit organization called the Directors of LAX: The Los Angeles Exhibition, which grew out of an old support group at the city-funded Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park, came up with the plan and raises money for the show. Neither the Los Angeles County Museum of Art nor the Museum of Contemporary Art organizes a biennial. “LAX,” as its executive director Edward Leffingwell explains in the catalogue, was created to fill a gap.

Whether or not you ever saw the absence of a local biennial as a problem, though, “LAX” clearly doesn’t fill any gap. It’s business as usual.

“LAX/94” is a collection of wholly unrelated exhibitions, each with its own distinct curatorial agenda. It doesn’t gather diverse artists together. This biennial gathers diverse institutions together, then puts them on display.

The biennial merely sets aside, every two years, an “L.A. month” in the smaller nonprofit and university art galleries. At each venue the staff or a guest curator chooses the artists it will present and the format: a one-person show, a theme show, a theme-less survey and so on. Occasionally, the next exhibition in an institution’s regular lineup is simply tagged a biennial entry.

Twelve different curators created “LAX/94.” Their discrete shows are held together by three tenuous links: They’re simultaneously on view, they share one catalogue, and all the artists work in Los Angeles.

A big, gooey marshmallow of cultural cuddliness, “LAX” comes across as a promotional event, not all that different from something like UK/LA. While the UK/LA arts festival sells British cultural products to Southern California consumers, “LAX” advertises our cultural providers to ourselves. It’s LA/LA.

No wonder it’s hard to get excited.

If you doubt it, check the catalogue again. The introduction, titled “Mappings,” doesn’t address today’s art. It ruminates on how the smaller art institutions fit together in the bigger L.A. picture.

The catalogue headings for each show are unnecessary but expensive fold-out pages, which show individual aerial maps of the nine institutions’ locations within the suburban sprawl. Institutions, not art, get the pricey, up-front play.

If the directors of LAX think there’s a need for a biennial exhibition locally, then they should put one on. To do it right, however, requires making some hard choices.

In a true biennial, the institution certainly doesn’t disappear. Far from it. The institution, pointedly acknowledging its power, steps forward with no demurral to say: This is the worthwhile art of the moment. Love it or hate it, the declaration starts a conversation about art.

“LAX/94” is part of a whole different mind-set. It dissembles. It pretends that its coterie of smaller institutional players is demure, self-effacing and not really authoritative--unlike those big, bad museums across town. This pseudo-biennial sidesteps the responsibility of wise use of its own potentially expansive power.

No wonder there’s no heat. “LAX” is afraid of fire.