ART REVIEW : When the Once-Radical Looks Dated

The Museum of Contemporary Art presents two new installations as part of its “Focus” series. One, by the noted American conceptual artist Sherrie Levine, is a recent work called “Newborn.” The other is “Line Drawings,” which presents ‘60s-era works by Piero Manzoni, an Italian artist never before seen in California.

These presentations are certainly no worse and quite a lot better than many similar exercises, yet they create a sensation of having walked backward in time.

The only sensible way to account for such an effect is to reflect on the real time that now enfolds them. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. That event is also commonly used in art circles to mark the start of “contemporary” art. It thrived in the economic and culturally stable climate created by the Cold War. Now that’s over too. The culture finds itself in a new epoch facing an uncertain future symbolically marked by the approach of the year 2000.

No wonder these works have taken on such a curious aura. Five years ago, they could still pass as continuing a radical tradition launched by classic modernism. Now suddenly they’re lingering relics from a closed chapter of history. The reactions they kindle must be akin to what people felt looking at a painting by Honore Fragonard made after the French Revolution toppled the Rococo, or at a Jacques-Louis David that post-dated the fall of Neo-Classicism after Waterloo. It’s really quite odd.

Manzoni is little known in this country. He died at age 30, in 1963. Abroad he’s respected as a pioneer of conceptual and performance art. His advanced thinking and early demise recall the similar career of the better-known French artist Yves Klein.

His works on view include two objects. The largest is a tube about the size of a small barrel clad in zinc squares. It encases a roll of paper bearing a single line I calculate to be roughly 4 1/2 miles long. Its title is “Line 7200 m., 1960.” Works framed on the wall each bear a single horizontal line. The lines are quite beautiful in themselves, and with a little squinting you can turn them into Oriental landscapes.

That was not, however, Manzoni’s point. In a way, it was the job of contemporary artists to take the heritage of the original radical modernists and remix it into something that appeared to reject the dead hand of the past while eating out of it. This doesn’t make a lot of sense, but there is something admirable about people who do their thing no matter what.

Levine came to note in the ‘80s making work that looks to most people like either a flat-out copy of another artist’s work or an object so commonplace as to merit no attention. She duplicated a photograph by Walker Evans, rendered a piece of plywood and replicated a checkerboard. Stuff like that. Her point was less visual that dialectical. She wanted to “challenge modernist assumptions about originality and authenticity.”

Her piece here consists of nine Baldwin baby grand pianos in neat, squared rows of three. They have brushed brass hardware and luscious black matte surfaces. Each bears a similarly finished black orb about the size of an infant’s head. The work is gorgeous in the manner of a black velvet evening gown and has a vaguely provocative manner, but it doesn’t seem to offer anything more challenging than some cocktail chat about obscure philosophers. Any normally literate citizen not completely initiated into the mysteries of the subculture could be forgiven for shrugging and walking out.

Lurking beneath this formally glamorous surface is Levine’s rumination on two modern masters who were friends. The stylized heads on the pianos are replications of a well-known sculpture by Constantin Brancusi. Enlisting the baby grands as art objects mimics the practices and ideas of the Grand Dragon of Dada, Marcel Duchamp. All manner of attitudes and ideas can be extrapolated from Levine’s work, not the least of which is the subject of the basic differences in the way men and women look at things. But no matter how you slice it, something lazy and boring infects art that is all references.

There’s many a good burgher who’ll greet the historical fade of this kind of art with a hardy “Well, thank goodness that nonsense is over. It had just turned into a form of scholasticism.”

There’s also many a good reason to suspect that, if things go badly for the world, such work might someday be seen with a sigh of regret for a lost golden age. It was, after all, a luxury to be able to afford an artistic subculture that could thrive virtually as a pure research and development lab for apparently useless aesthetic ideas. Something very civilized and democratic about that.

* The Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., through March 26. Closed Mondays. (213) 626-6222.