ART REVIEW : How the Art World Gained Through Division

Twenty years ago and more in art, these things happened:

* In 1968, Christine Kozlov tape-recorded news bulletins about the nearly simultaneous shootings of Andy Warhol and Robert F. Kennedy and then mounted the tape-reel in a picture frame, to be looked at rather than listened to.

* In 1969, British artist Richard Long walked repeatedly back and forth in a straight line across an open field, trampling the grass into an outdoor line-drawing.

* Also in 1969, Robert Barry held exhibitions in Amsterdam, Turin and Los Angeles in which each gallery remained closed for the run of the show.

* In 1970, Edward Ruscha silkscreened several hundred sheets of paper with pungent chocolate, which he then used to wallpaper a room.

* In 1974, the late Gordon Matta-Clark sawed in half a two-story house in New Jersey, beginning at the peak of the roof and continuing down through the floors until the division reached the foundation.

A house divided against itself cannot stand, Abraham Lincoln taught us as the Civil War loomed. A century later, in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, Matta-Clark demonstrated the maxim’s literal truth as a hideously divided nation reeled once more. His split house brought the idea home.

It also helped drive a wedge into art--or what was then comfortably considered to be art--as had Kozlov’s inaudible audiotape, Long’s “landscape drawing,” Barry’s no-show and Ruscha’s sweet environment, which was too much of a good thing that also attracted flies. The idea of what art was, and what art could be, was being taken apart.

These and dozens of other works by 55 American, Canadian and European artists are the subject of a huge, and hugely engrossing, exhibition called “1965-1975: Reconsidering the Object of Art,” which re-opens the Temporary Contemporary, the Museum of Contemporary Art’s stunning warehouse space in Little Tokyo. The TC, closed since May, 1992, is perfect for the show. An ordinary 1940s industrial building successfully turned to museum purposes in 1983--a moment of international frenzy in palatial museum-building--the downscale TC had deftly reconsidered the object of the art museum.

The show, organized by MOCA curator Ann Goldstein and guest curator Anne Rorimer, surveys the first decade of Conceptual art, in work produced by artists whose mature aesthetic had emerged by 1970. Skittishness is evident in its title, though, where the term “Conceptual” isn’t used. Instead you get a double-entendre: “Reconsidering the Object of Art” means re-examining the art object as a physical thing, as well as re-examining art’s objective as a cultural enterprise.

Which is, of course, what Conceptual artists did. A phobia now about using the term likely reflects the distaste for labels that prompted a number of Conceptual artists in the first place, given their commitment to dismantling established categories for art. Thirty years later, though, the term has become common art-world parlance, while few regard any ism as definitive. The show’s title feels precious and coy, which is antithetical to its strongest work.

Still, MOCA deserves cheerful plaudits for mounting a big survey of an art pivotal to developments in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. No other museum has dared tackle the subject. Conceptual art makes most museums blanch, because they suspect it won’t appeal to casual museum-goers.

One reason will be self-evident when you see the show, which anyone who claims serious interest in the art of our time simply must: “Reconsidering the Object of Art” is close to being the world’s first virtually all-black-and-white museum extravaganza.

Here’s a list of common Conceptual art materials: black typeface on white paper or white walls, black-and-white photographs and television, graphite on white canvas or white walls, white neon, projected white-light, transparent glass, gray file cabinets, black-and-white photostats, printed cards and photocopied papers in black bindings.

Color is a rare shock. Imagine a sudden encounter with William Leavitt’s patio installation with a potted plant-- green! --or Bruce Nauman’s luridly lit color photographs or the beaded-and-feathered costumes worn by Joan Jonas in her enchanting performance persona, Organic Honey.

Typically, the look tends instead toward austere, elegant sobriety. It isn’t Pop, and it definitely isn’t Color Field painting.

And that is part of its point. Conceptualism was openly disdainful of the cash-conscious, commercial razzmatazz of popular culture. Art-wise, it especially meant to dismantle the gelatinous rhetoric congealed around abstract painting. (For a good sense of the status quo of the 1950s and 1960s, visit MOCA’s generally outstanding permanent collection, handsomely installed in adjacent galleries.) New art meant to maneuver the culture’s minefields and capture occupied territory. In a social climate hyper-attuned to war, both hot and cold, an unprecedented concept of calculated artistic strategy was advanced.

The immensely powerful critic Clement Greenberg was the established yin to Conceptualism’s emergent yang. His narrow codification of what “real art really is” fairly begged to be challenged by a younger generation. (In 1965 these artists’ average age was 26.) Greenberg championed Color Field painting, which appears to have made black-and-white non-painting irresistible.

Mind you, for all its usual sobriety Conceptual art can also be very funny. James Coleman’s “Slide Piece” is emblematic, performing witty revenge on the tyranny of the art history classroom via a continuous slide presentation with recorded lecture. A grave voice intones a high-flown formal analysis of a thoroughly innocuous photograph of an urban gas station, projected large on the wall.

Each time the slide tray advances, the same picture comes up again, and the voice drones on as you scrutinize the dumb image in search of visual knowledge. The habitual ways in which voices of authority infuse images with meaning is wryly portrayed.

The show holds many such outstanding moments. Funny or not, the intellectually restive mood of the period is wonderfully evoked.

Its weakness is in not elaborating a history for the 10-year period between 1965 and 1975. Expect neither a chronological installation nor any distinctions between major and minor artists.

The broad influence of Conceptual art on subsequent generations has led to the Post-post-post Conceptual work so prevalent today, where ingrown, end-game strategizing is often indulged for its own sake. Formerly challenging Conceptual strategies moved easily into the university and art school, whose business has become the manufacture of disciples. Grossly attenuated third- and fourth-generation Conceptualists now get churned out.

It’s long since time that the house of Conceptual art was divided against itself. Maybe this big museum show will help bust up the imposing edifice, by adding an Old Master patina that will encourage a new generation to topple an aging Establishment.

* The Temporary Contemporary, 152 N. Central Ave., (213) 626-6222, through Feb. 4. Closed Mondays.