Significant Work of Cirrus Editions Spread Too Thin : Art review: The large exhibition at LACMA celebrates the workshop’s venerable history and role in L.A. printmaking.

Cirrus Editions is one among the triumvirate of workshops that has made Los Angeles an unusually important center for printmaking in the past 40 years. In fact, the story of the development of a thriving American market for contemporary prints, which is relatively recent, cannot be told without it.

“Made in L.A.: The Prints of Cirrus Editions” is a worthwhile exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that celebrates the workshop’s venerable history. If the show finally disappoints, it is because it suffers an unmanageable excess of good intentions.

The founding of Cirrus Editions in 1970 by master printer and art dealer Jean Milant capped a vigorous decade for American art, which had witnessed two unprecedented developments in Los Angeles. One was the unmistakable emergence of the city as a significant center for the production of art. The other was a sudden, simultaneous burst of activity in the specialized medium of printmaking.

The Tamarind Lithography Workshop had gotten the printmaking ball rolling in L.A. around 1960, seeding the field by training master printers with the expertise, enthusiasm and inventiveness to realize assorted artists’ printmaking ambitions. Several years later Gemini G.E.L. was established, an adventurous shop that mostly imported emergent New York talent to work in L.A.

By 1970 Cirrus was underway. Two inaugural prints by Terry Allen, one showing a juke-box-style image of a haloed pinto bean ascending to heaven, announced the workshop’s aim of involving more L.A.-based artists in the printmaking medium.

The large exhibition at LACMA, organized by prints and drawings curator Bruce Davis, lays out the breadth of Cirrus’ achievement in the past 25 years, with more than 130 graphics by some 50 artists. The prints have been drawn from LACMA’s Cirrus Archive, an important resource acquired in 1986 and including more than 1,000 editioned prints, trial proofs and developmental drawings.

Since then, the museum has continued to acquire work produced at Cirrus. The archive is now a magnificent trove of historical documentation of the period, while also boasting a strong core of first-rate art. Together with similar collections of prints produced at Tamarind and Gemini, it makes the museum the principal center for the study of contemporary printmaking in Los Angeles.

For its anniversary debut at LACMA, however, the indisputable significance of the Cirrus workshop has been somewhat diluted. Almost every artist whose work is in the archive seems to have been represented in the sprawling exhibition, which is too large by half. The archive would have been better served if attention had remained tightly focused on work that comprises the collection’s most impressive core.

This is the first time an exhibition has been organized about the production of prints at Cirrus, and the first job of an initial museum show on any subject is always to help secure its artistic reputation, which cannot be taken for granted. “Made in L.A.” suffers from an overly ambitious desire to represent instead the full spectrum of wildly diverse interests--good, bad or indifferent--explored at the print shop.

Exceptional prints will certainly be found in each of the exhibition’s half dozen rooms, including widely admired classics from the 1970s and 1980s by Vija Celmins, Edward Ruscha, Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari and others. Impressive works by younger artists are also on view, among them such diverse examples as Sarah Seager’s pale white-on-white drifts of floating phonemes and Lari Pittman’s raucously effusive paeans to life and love, sexuality and mortality.

Singular surprises will likewise be encountered. They include the late Guy de Cointet’s signlike print of a diary entry in a made-up language, which nonetheless feels haltingly intelligible, and an intoxicating lithograph by Allen Ruppersberg, made from a collage of liquor receipts.

There is much that is of lesser interest here too, however, and it has been given equal weight with the rest. The show is finally about Cirrus Editions, with primary emphasis on the workshop, without having first established the stature of Cirrus Editions, by emphasizing the most decisive art.

Further strain is put on the work by an ill-fated attempt to contextualize it all within the larger ebbs and flows of a quarter century of art in Los Angeles. The 130 prints have been assembled into thematic groups, composed of arbitrary categories such as “Self-Expression and Personal Issues,” “Language: Verbal and Visual” and “Landscape/Nature: Subject and Substance.” These contrivances serve primarily to build retroactive fences around the artists’ work, which limits our understanding of it.

One bright spot in the installation is a videotape, featuring commentary by Milant, printer Francesco Siqueiros and a number of the artists, including Baldessari, Ruscha, Karen Carson, Jill Giegerich and Ed Moses. Lively, iconoclastic and to the point, it injects a welcome dose of working artist knowledge into the estimable proceedings that make up Cirrus Editions.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6000, through Jan. 14. Closed Mondays.