The Getty Adds Just the Right, Light Touch

It’s disconcerting--as well as hopeful--that the Getty Center has been commissioning artists to create permanent works for its glamorous new campus in Brentwood. Disconcerting because, to date, the Getty has been strongly identified with art made before the 20th century. And hopeful because, in assuming the historic role of discerning but risk-taking patron of living artists, a powerful cultural institution poised for greatness is vigorously expressing essential confidence in the art of our time.

Working with Lisa Lyons, former director of art programs at the Lannan Foundation, the Getty Trust commissioned two important artists, both based in Los Angeles, to inaugurate the program for works in public areas of the site. Edward Ruscha has made a sleek mural-size painting for the lobby of the Harold M. Williams Auditorium, and Alexis Smith has created an elaborate mixed-media installation whose principal components wrap around three walls of the center’s restaurant. Different in style and substance while intimately connected to artistic traditions that matured in postwar L.A., both are terrifically important additions to the site.

Both projects also bring a light touch of playful humor to an imposing hilltop setting that could easily drone with self-importance. Ruscha’s painting and Smith’s installation bring things down to earth (Acropolis, schmopolis), without sacrificing seriousness.

The painting by Ruscha, 60, is blaringly titled “PICTURE WITHOUT WORDS,” and it walks a careful tightrope between abstraction and representation. Painted in acrylic on canvas stretched over an aluminum support 23 feet high and almost 12 feet wide, it shows transparent rays of golden-white light flooding a darkened, blue-black space. From a rectangular “window” depicted at the upper right, light seems to pour diagonally down the canvas to puddle in a second, perpendicular rectangle on the floor. It’s like a Baroque transfiguration, except without the saints.

The painting is installed on a tall, narrow wall next to a wide bank of gridded windows that wraps all the way around the auditorium’s facade. In the daytime, as sunlight streams diagonally into the lobby, the painting becomes a witty picture of the actual occurrence in the room; at night it’s a poignant memory, oddly anticipating the next day’s arrival. Moving through the lobby to engage the delicately painted picture close-up and from a distance--a viewer’s normal dance when looking at paintings, which demands bodily engagement--you move in and out of the room’s actual light and shadow. Material fact and disembodied visual knowledge coexist, in a sly picture of spiritually inflected enlightenment that is both image and event.

Ruscha’s subtly unassuming painting is California Light and Space art as reinvented with new substance and panache by a Pop artist. In the restaurant, 48-year-old Smith, a principal second-generation inheritor of the L.A. Pop tradition, has created a deceptively simple installation that is, in fact, a dense and engaging meditation on the Getty and its endeavor.

“Taste,” as her restaurant decor is aptly titled, might start you thinking about food. Yet, when you discover the cleverly hidden figures of Adam and Eve with the serpent in the Garden of Eden, just at the fateful moment when the apple will be tasted, it’s clear that the issue is larger than deciding what’s for lunch. The sensory and empirical qualities of taste are set against its abstract and metaphorical properties.

Hilariously, Smith first prepared the restaurant’s walls with a mottled beige surface, which is a decorator’s riff on the travertine panels that clad the Getty Center. Her main color scheme--silhouetted black figures and terra cotta accents--derives from the painting on ancient Greek vases, artful implements linked to food and a cornerstone of the Getty’s important antiquities collection.

One wall features a panoply of big art icons: Chippendale chair, violin, Dior dress, Greek amphora and so on. Around the corner, Asian and Latin cultures are evoked in a wall painted with a ritual scene of an epicurean feast derived from a domestic Japanese screen, which segues into a high-style image of a living room flanked by the stylishly scripted Spanish words “modernismo” and “elegante.”

Hanging on these murals are elaborately framed collages, ranging from a saucy poster of a fruit-bedecked Carmen Miranda to pairs of facing profiles that create the illusion of a vase (the optical trick, famously employed in painting by Jasper Johns, is called a Rubin’s figure). “Taste is the flower of good sense,” declares the caption printed across Miranda’s beaming picture. “Good taste is better than bad taste,” insists the text on a gilded Rubin’s figure, “but bad taste is better than no taste.”

One of the best collages isn’t in the main dining room but is thoughtfully installed just outside the restrooms. On a classic photograph of a barbecue in a 1950s suburban patio, Smith pasted a plastic hamburger and a matchbook cover adorned with the Venus de Milo, thus establishing a union between ancient Greece and modern L.A. almost as unlikely as the Getty itself. “Without taste, Genius is but sublime folly,” reads the self-deprecating caption, its attribution to French statesman Chateaubriand merging nicely with the juicy picture of grilling steak.

Last but not least, the restaurant workers get their own private thought. Painted on the wall by the kitchen door, out of the sight of restaurant patrons but the last thing a waiter sees on the way to delivering food, is the gentle admonition: “No dish pleases all palates alike.” Wise counsel for the servers--and for visitors to an art museum.

In a small gallery on the second floor of the museum’s West Pavilion, curator Lyons has installed a concise exhibition called “A Matter of Taste,” which lays out the myriad sources for Smith’s installation, its preparatory drawings and studies, a selection of earlier but related collages and several photographs of other permanent public projects the artist has executed. In May, a similarly intended show, organized by Getty Museum director John Walsh, will focus on Ruscha’s auditorium mural.

Although Ruscha’s and Smith’s commissions engage serious philosophical and artistic issues, one target of their wit is worth emphasizing: Both works are happy to poke fun at their patron and the august setting of the Getty Center. This is art, not brain surgery or an end to world hunger, these self-aware works imply, but inestimable value will still be found in the independent voice of the artist. That the patron, in return, has happily obliged them, putting its full institutional weight behind the sentiment, is a small but propitious omen for the Getty’s future.