LACMA’s ‘P.L.A.N.’ Isn’t Your Standard Photo Show

“P.L.A.N.”--the acronym stands for “Photography Los Angeles Now”--is an exhibition that goes in lots of different directions at once. So many, in fact, that a Thomas Bros. Guide would be helpful in navigating through the dense tangle of its three compact galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

A variety of fairly standard photographic techniques is on view among the 79 works by 66 artists, who are divided into a roughly equal representation of men and women. There are Ektachrome, Cibachrome, Polaroid and platinum prints, and more.

Some, such as Lyle Ashton Harris’ big portraits or Intae Kim’s elegant landscapes or Betty Lee’s poetic narrative, are attractive if routine studio photographs. Others, such as Anne Walsh’s small, sharply cropped pictures of bodybuilders’ arms, suggestively brushing against one another at what appears to be a pose-down, establish a dialogue between what can be seen inside the picture’s frame and what remains forever outside and unseen.

In addition to photographs such as these, the newly opened show also features collages, assemblages, looped-film and video projections, sculpture, digitized computer pictures and a wide variety of other mixed-media methodologies. Only under the loosest of definitions could these disparate works, which make up about a third of the exhibition, be described as photography.

Indeed, at the entrance to the show, LACMA curators Robert A. Sobieszek and Tim B. Wride explain that this broad selection of artists working in Los Angeles County since 1990 might better be described as a survey of photographic activity , rather than of photography. Many artists are still hauling out the Hasselblad and holing up in the darkroom--but many more are not.

Digital ink-jet printing seems an up-and-coming favorite. It’s used by Peter Alexander in his aerial view of Westwood at night, in the fictional crime-scene images by Kathy Haddad and Jerry Mosher, in Jonathan Reff’s “cameraless portrait” and several others.

Reff and Darryl Curran don’t use cameras at all, completely fabricating their images by electronically generated means. Steven Peckman doesn’t use a camera either but he apparently makes his photograms the old-fashioned way: by placing objects onto photo-sensitive paper, as artists began doing in the 19th Century.

The curatorial embrace of something called photographic activity, rather than photography, serves mostly to face us with some unhelpful questions. When exactly does photography become photographic activity? And what, in fact, is activity that is photographic, if an image not only can be made by abandoning cameras, but by forsaking virtually everything in the traditional photographic repertoire?

Is a suitcase decorated with assorted mementos, including some photographs, symptomatic of a newfangled photographic activity? Or is it just old-fashioned assemblage?

Do film- and video-projections count as photographic activity only if their images are projected on the surface of a three-dimensional object placed in an art gallery, as they are here, rather than on a flat screen in a darkened theater?

What about plain old video art, which isn’t in the exhibition? Is video a photographic activity, since it is usually made with a camera, or is it something else?

Can an overview of recent photographic activity in what is held to be one of the most important centers for such art in the world really be taken seriously, when works by artists responsible for establishing that centrality in the 1970s and 1980s, such as John Baldessari and Judy Fiskin, are not included in the show?

Like I said, unhelpful questions. A big problem with “P.L.A.N.” is that these are pretty much the only kinds of questions you find yourself thinking about. The show is so cluttered with them that they get in the way of the art--some of which is very good, most of which is competent.

That’s because the show has been based on a consideration of the medium of photography--a consideration we would expect from a museum’s department of photography--while a lot of the artists being shown seem utterly uninterested in the subject. For them, a photograph is just another material that might be used, like a broken wheel or a plastic dish-drainer, if the art they’re making calls for it.

Connie Hatch’s little plastic magnifying cubes, which hold layered pairs of black-and-white transparencies of famous 20th-Century couples, don’t explore the medium of photography. Instead, you’ll glimpse the face of Marilyn Monroe through a picture of JFK, Lotte Lenya through a picture of Kurt Weill, Edie Adams through a picture of Ernie Kovacs. Images of women are seen through a filter of their men. Patriarchy is Hatch’s focus, and patriarchy isn’t a function of photography; it merely plays itself out in modern materials.

Other artists do consider the medium but in deeply conservative ways. Photographs are fabrications whose depictions of the world cannot be trusted, many of these pictures declare, in a recitation that is by now the golden rule of the photographic academy.

Typical of this academic conservatism are “Photofinishing Inquiry No. 1” and “Photofinishing Inquiry No. 2.” Ink-jet prints by the team of Haddad and Mosher, they show what appear to be dead bodies strewn about the floor. You look at the scenes of apparent crime or disaster through an acetate overlay, on which is printed a standard commercial form that outlines a customer’s order for photofinishing: The deadly story told by a photograph can be endlessly manipulated.

Inquiries like this don’t really question anything. They’re simply illustrations. They describe widely accepted views as set forth in any number of theoretical texts about photography, which have been taught in art schools for years.

This conservative, academic strain of photography is prominent in the exhibition, but it is surpassed by a second, even thornier institutional problem.

In the 1980s, artists who are not photographers in the classical sense (Baldessari, Fiskin, Larry Johnson, Cindy Sherman, Sigmar Polke, etc.) came to prominence by using photographs in revolutionary ways, building on precedents set by Rauschenberg, Warhol, Ruscha and Wallace Berman. The legacy of today’s “photographic activity” is traced to them, not to classical photographers.

This has made for something of a crisis in art museums where departments of photography are established. The real action lately has been elsewhere, among artists who do not conceive of themselves narrowly as photographers. Classical photography, meanwhile, has divided up into formats that are either traditional or academic.

LACMA’s department of photography is trying to cope by embracing art made outside its historically narrow field. But, corralling art under a rubric of “photographic activity” is unconvincing. The description, I suppose, is accurate for “P.L.A.N.,” given the listlessness and lack of joyful rigor that the feeble word activity implies. But imagine a show about “sculptural activity” or “painterly activity,” rather than about painting or sculpture; it makes me shiver.

The listlessness is reflected in the surprising absence of an exhibition catalogue. Information about “P.L.A.N.” has instead been posted through the Internet on the World Wide Web (address: https://www.LACMA.org/), which is used by less than 3% of the American population. Users will be able to engage in dialogue activity.

* LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6000, through Sept. 17. Closed Mondays.