A Powerful, Defining Moment

Lari Pittman’s magnificent mid-career survey at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art tells a spine-tingling tale of an individual’s struggle to live by democratic principles amid the befuddling hustle and bustle of the real world. Bringing together 35 large, sometimes mural-size paintings plus six lushly painted gourds, this smartly chosen show contains a higher percentage of masterpieces than any contemporary exhibition in recent memory.

Excellence and accessibility dovetail in Pittman’s crisp paintings. Across their hyperactive surfaces, immediately recognizable images are juxtaposed and interwoven to form tense compositions that invite you to supply any number of open-ended narratives. Organized by Howard N. Fox, the curator of contemporary art at LACMA, Pittman’s show is a spectacular extravaganza whose influence is likely to echo well into the next century.

Since the 44-year-old artist’s boldly patterned paintings don’t look like anything that preceded them, LACMA’s 14-year survey appears more like a feverish vision of the future than a tidy recap of the past. This alone distinguishes it from museum retrospectives that chronicle the development of established masters, tracing careers well after they have flourished and faded. It also stands out against most museum surveys of the work of younger, untested artists, which often fizzle out halfway through because the works wear thin when seen together.

With Pittman, however, Fox hit the jackpot.

To walk through the beautifully installed show is to feel you’re standing in the presence of history as it’s happening--not because someone in the future may look back at these paintings as high points of fin de siecle American culture, but because they’re so loaded with hot-blooded vigor and juicy visual stimulation that you can’t take your eyes off them. The more time you spend with them the more convinced you become that this is it--that you’re in the middle of an event of unparalleled significance.

And that centrality is exactly what Pittman demands of his strident art. An openly gay painter, he has no interest in occupying one of the safe, marginal positions contemporary institutions currently provide for art about race, gender, class, sexuality or religion--as if these topics were endangered and in need of special treatment.

In contrast, Pittman’s flamboyant paintings race to center stage, where they beg only for more spotlights (with even more wattage). Flaunting garish palettes and gaudy designs, and festooned with glitter-caked components and in-your-face incidents, these overloaded images put on such an electrifying show that it’s impossible to mistake them for well-behaved wallflowers.

Pity and condescension have no room to maneuver in Pittman’s art of muscular decoration. With increasing shrillness, every last piece demands to be seen as gay and mainstream.

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Simultaneously specific and general, these bawdy paintings locate, all through society, desires and thoughts typically ascribed--but by no means confined--to homosexuals. By proffering powerful displays of visual stimulation and inviting your pleasure to take precedence before them, Pittman’s shameless pictures physically demonstrate that there is no such thing as gay art (only gay artists). The experiences and sentiments his images depict and engender have the potential to be shared by all people.

Anxiety plays a major role in this exciting American experiment. In the earliest works displayed, like “Netherworld,” “From Venom to Serum” and “Maladies and Treatments” (from 1982-83), apprehension brews just beneath the surface. The rich, earthy palette of these probing paintings suggests underground landscapes or shadowy interiors, where inchoate intuitions take root.

What is clear in these uncharacteristically tentative images is Pittman’s conviction that art is a transformative power, that it changes whomever it touches. Also evident is his abiding belief in the double-edged nature of art, in its capacity to harm and to heal, as well as its capacity to capture life’s joys while acknowledging its tragedies.

In his next body of work, including “Plymouth Rock 1620,” “The New Republic” and “Thanksgiving” (all 1985), the uncertainties of an isolated individual take shape in terms of the founding fathers’ promise that the United States will not be a nation unless all its citizens are ensured life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Likewise, “An American Place” (1986) links domestic tranquillity and civil society, intimating that without one, the other is a hollow shell.

If Pittman’s own anxiety seems to percolate through these pieces, causing them to bristle with the disquieting energy we expect from modern art, his five most recent series pump up the volume with such confidence and aplomb that the expressive intimacy of the earlier works gives way to a far-reaching exploration of wider social issues. This self-effacing anonymity remains central to Pittman’s art.

A tour de force of utopian optimism, “Where the Soul Intact Will Shed Its Scabs (8624 A.D.)” (1988) stands out as a hallucinatory mantra to a future we could share, if current ideals were taken seriously. Another 8-by-16-foot painting from the same year--with “What?!” boldly emblazoned across its bright orange surface--suggests that although utopian dreams always crash to Earth, and innocence is regularly destroyed, the desire for something better cannot be crushed so easily.

Beginning in 1990, Pittman’s art reaches a new level of aggressiveness. Rather than give form to underlying anxieties, these paintings cause viewers to experience anxiety’s stomach-knotting tug.

Brash, overwrought and ugly, these lurid meditations on mortality burn with furious energy and drip with over-dramatized sentimentality. Coffins abound in this world of gothic cataclysm as owls weep, rats defecate, nooses proliferate, trees are cut down and androgynous puppets tote ambiguous placards. “A Decorated Chronology of Insistence and Resignation,” Pittman’s rambunctious and unsettling series from 1992-94, realistically depicts the grim world in which art must labor.

The constant battle between making spirited demands and losing hope altogether is played out with dizzying dazzle in the show’s grand finale, an 8-by-26-foot altarpiece to secular life titled “Like You” (1995). In this masterful mural, elation and despair take turns dominating as Pittman demonstrates that what you do is not nearly as important as how you do it.

With inspiring panache, his five-panel painting embodies the argument that the spirit we bring to our daily activities links us more intimately than the rudiments of our tasks. At the same time, Pittman’s radically democratic art implies that communities cannot be based simply on race, class and gender. Something deeper is required.

As obnoxious as they are endearing, the artist’s graphic paintings are a feast for the eyes and a challenge for the mind. Every one is an operatic drama of epic proportions, a multilayered saga compressed into two dimensions. Pittman art is for viewers whose eyes have been weaned on TV but whose souls demand more meaningful stories.

* “Lari Pittman,” the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., through Sept. 8. Tuesdays-Thursdays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Fridays 10 a.m.-9 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Admission: $6. (213) 857-6000.