L.A.’s Fall Art Season Has Little to Show for It

It’s late October. Do you know where your fall art season is?

Me neither. By now, if all were working properly after the usual doldrums of August and back-to-business ethos of September, the art scene would be in full swing, generating enough vigorous momentum to carry us to the doorstep of the holidays. But, it hasn’t happened.

The fall art season in L.A. is MIA. What went wrong?

It isn’t that the galleries, scattered abundantly from Hollywood to Santa Monica and in other, more isolated pockets, haven’t produced the usual mix of contemporary exhibitions. They have. They’ve also reflected a typical qualitative spread of good, bad and indifferent.

Tim Ebner, Sharon Ellis, Michelle Fierro, Charles Garabedian, Roberto Gil de Montes, Richard Misrach, Monique Prieto, David Regan, Andrei Roiter, Megan Williams, Joseph Cornell--already that’s not a bad reckoning for satisfying season-opening gallery shows, especially insofar as the list is necessarily incomplete. And one ambitious historical effort--unusual for L.A. galleries--was also engineered, by Track 16 and Robert Berman Gallery.

This large joint show, complete with catalog, focused on American Surrealist Man Ray (1890-1976) and the decade he spent working in Los Angeles (1940-1951). The assembled paintings, photographs, drawings and objects finally aren’t persuasive in securing the artist’s reputation, especially during his L.A. years. (Having come of artistic age in Europe, Man Ray was perhaps stymied by the oft-remarked indigenous Surrealism of the Hollywood Dream Machine.) But the exhibition, which continues through Dec. 27, is nonetheless an admirable accounting of some notable events in the formation of L.A.’s postwar cultural life.

Then, add in things like the dual presentation of 19th century photographs by Britain’s Julia Margaret Cameron at the J. Paul Getty Museum and Scripps College, or the Getty’s small “The Making of a Hero: Alexander the Great From Antiquity to the Renaissance,” or the commercially savvy photos of Ruth Bernhard at Cal State Long Beach, or shows at other university or nonprofit venues around town, and the eventful fall season would seem to be pretty much like any other in recent years.

Except it’s not. Something’s missing--something essential to generating impact and momentum.

You’ll notice nothing’s been said so far about the L.A. County Museum of Art or the Museum of Contemporary Art. That’s because neither institution is presenting anything remotely like a significant fall season. And frankly, therein lies the problem.

In June, LACMA abruptly canceled its major fall show, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Illusion in Art From Jasper Johns to Virtual Reality,” which meant to survey the prickly subject of illusionism in postwar painting and sculpture. Depending on whom you listen to, lackadaisical fund-raising or personnel squabbles at the museum were responsible for the unprecedented 11th-hour quashing of the exhibition.

Over at MOCA, meanwhile, plans for an October show of work by the highly regarded American sculptor Robert Gober fell apart sometime last spring. The artist had expected to construct a site-specific installation of a full-scale house inside MOCA’s sprawling Geffen Contemporary, complete with all the domestic sculptural accouterments for which he is known.

Much anticipated was the unveiling of a previously unexhibited new work--a dream-inspired “fountain,” made from a grand staircase with water running down its steps. Gober, though, was apparently overextended with other exhibition commitments, so the MOCA show has been postponed until summer 1997.

MOCA filled its unexpected gap by installing a tepid, last-minute display of post-1975 works from its permanent collection (surely unintentional is the funereal edge of its title, “Just Past”). LACMA plugged its sudden hole by importing a mediocre show of mostly minor works on paper by perennial public favorite Marc Chagall.

Both shows feel like what they are: filler.

The resulting absence of major museum efforts, especially in 20th century art, doesn’t just constitute a vacuum. It’s more a black hole, hungrily draining energy from the surrounding landscape.

Why? Because LACMA and MOCA, even more than other more specialized museums in L.A., form a critical bridge between the public life of art and the hugely significant but cloistered professional world of working artists in our midst. In the fragile ecology of the city’s art life, they’re essential.

Without these two museums in full autumn regalia, efforts in commercial galleries and smaller venues seem cut off, isolated from larger implications in the cultural life of L.A.--and that means cut off from the larger world, too. Metaphorically speaking, the bridge is out.

Here’s a sharp irony: This fall marks the 10th anniversary of MOCA’s grand opening on Bunker Hill; and, it’s also the 10th anniversary of the debut of LACMA’s Robert O. Anderson Building for 20th Century Art. Both places got built amid earnest exhortations about their critical role in supporting L.A.’s emerging stature as a cultural powerhouse, and about the new collegial competitiveness that would energize the scene. Now, not only is neither museum doing anything of significance to mark these anniversaries--not even, say, a symposium “on the occasion of”--neither was able to muster the requisite ambitious fall schedule.

Who could have imagined, during the ecstatic, soul-vivifying galas that marked the heady 1986 openings of these two museum buildings that, a decade later, such a significant anniversary would not only be largely ignored, but the museums couldn’t even muster a business-as-usual level of effort. MOCA and LACMA are AWOL, leaving the fall art season becalmed and adrift.