The ‘Gift’ Unwrapped

Considerable dismay registered among L.A. art folk last December when the Lannan Foundation decided to stop acquiring art, disperse its collection of contemporary works and move its headquarters to Santa Fe, N.M. It looked like an institutional downturn in an already befogged art community.

Now an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s cavernous Geffen Contemporary in Little Tokyo smartly turns the whole megillah into a cause for celebration. “A Lasting Legacy: Selections From the Lannan Foundation Gift” unveils 112 works, by 52 artists, given to the museum by the foundation.

Instead of appearing as a bunch of wan leftovers, the trove generously addresses two of the L.A. art scene’s most intractable institutional problems--the possession of enough work to make coherent sense, and the need for showplaces sufficiently accessible to attract the largest general audience.

Aside from the fuss over its retreat, no one ever doubted the Lannan’s integrity, its sharp eye for fine examples of underrated cutting-edge art or the beauty of its pristine gallery. The trouble was that its relatively small size and to-hell-and-gone location, in an industrial area on the border of Mar Vista, tended to attract only the already converted. Having the work in a major venue can only increase its aesthetic and educational value.

Even more heartening is the way the gift eases L.A.’s other major arts institutions’ embarrassing historical gaffe in failing to collect enough of its own best art when the time was ripe. This ensemble provides a significant fix by focusing on the exceptionally original work that made Los Angeles a world player, beginning in the late 1950s.

Seminal Beat Generation assemblage poet Wallace Berman is seen in 14 examples. Concentrating on his sometimes-complex trademark verifax collages, the ensemble suggests that Berman got better results when he simplified his imagery. Two early-’60s ceramics by Ken Price are gems of the period. No news is all good. John Altoon’s 1958 Abstract Expressionist “Fix” looks a little turgid.

MOCA curators Paul Schimmel and Ann Goldstein deftly arranged thematic groupings and double-take juxtapositions. The scope of the exhibition isn’t locally confined. It includes variously related masters, ranging backward from recent stars like Jeff Koons and Julian Schnabel to relatively old masters like Lester Johnson and the Northwest coast painter Mark Tobey. His “Composition” hangs next to an unusual John McLaughlin, an L.A. artist best known as a painter of severely reductive hard-edge abstractions. This early example reveals a latent image resembling a Northwest coast Indian animal mask.

McLaughlin’s more familiar work is also placed so as to hint that he functioned intuitively as a forerunner of Light and Space art. Which brings us to four historically crucial works by Robert Irwin. His 1962 “Bowl of Cherries” consists of a few yellow horizontal lines on a gray-green field. Such compositions began the artist’s painstaking attempt to winnow painting down to its essential presence. The following year he executed a brace of paintings of near-invisible dots that in normal viewing come across only as a kind of glowing optical blush. From 1965 to ’68 he made two sets of convex circular discs that became both trademark and swan song, marking the end of his activity as a maker of conventional art objects. Since then he’s concerned himself with art that alters the larger environment.

The two discs here are displayed cantilevered from the wall, one aluminum, the other plastic with a silver stripe. Normally the pieces are displayed under four equidistant spotlights, placed to cast shadows of the disc. Concentrated viewing causes a perceptual illusion in which the whole thing slowly vanishes and reappears. The startlingly convincing sensation can provoke philosophical meditation on the nature of reality.

Here--for the first time in my experience--the discs are shown in natural light. One is reminded that this was Irwin’s original intent; spotlights were a rare compromise.

Seeing them as initially conceived is a revelation. Without intrusive fixtures, a subtle but troubling feeling of theatrical artificiality is eliminated. The sensation of seeing these specter-like entities as a natural phenomenon actually bending light and space enhances their profundity.

Anyone who subscribes even partially to a logic of progress has to view these discs as an achievement after which art could never be quite the same. It takes a real effort of mind to look at later works here and not find them, at least momentarily, a bit dated.

One piece that entirely escapes obsolescence is Chris Burden’s 1979 “The Big Wheel.” A huge spoked metal thing about 10 feet tall, it’s mounted on a massive wood frame looking like some juggernaut from the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The whole is attached to a dwarfed motorcycle placed to set the big wheel spinning with its rear tire. Activated, the behemoth turns with ominous power.

At the same time, one is aware of how delicately balanced its axle must be to keep it rotating for long periods. There’s a quality about the piece that’s like viewing an elephant ballet from under the elephant.

Even though the Irwins are purely optical and the Burden intensely mechanical, they have in common a harnessing of natural forces that make for a physically direct aesthetic experience. It’s markedly different from those polite art thrills critic Bernard Berenson termed “ideated sensations.”

The presence of such stellar works casts a contagious glow over the rest. A group of gently understated optically oriented hard-edge abstractions by John White make a very workable conservative half-step backward from Irwin.

Seven pieces by Charles Ray prove there is more than one way to derail perception. You might say his tactic is to rely on the habit of some viewers to browse in and out of galleries. His “No” looks like a photographic self-portrait until you realize that the subject is a sculptural likeness. Leave the gallery, return and it fools you again.

Meantime you wonder about a simple table set with rudimentary dining utensils. It looks a little different a second time around. Actually it’s the same, but the whole is rotating at a glacial pace.

A couple of caveats crop up that are also invisible to the naked eye.

A large painting by Alfred Jensen is composed of nesting rectangles rendered in dollops of bright, frosting-thick paint. It’s a wonderful combination of stability and activity, in spirit reminiscent of Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie-Woogie.” Jensen’s title, however, puzzles. The piece is called “Reciprocal Relation III, IV.”

So where are “I and II”? As it turns out, two clearly related compositions owned by the Lannan were separated. The other went to the Art Institute of Chicago. Similarly, a group of drawings by Nicholas Africano went to the Windy City while his big “He Turned Round and Round” came to MOCA.

Museums are ethically bound to maintain related works together for obvious reasons. Foundations are not subject to such restrictions. All the same, it’s a pity the Jensens and Africanos weren’t kept together.

That’s regrettable. The whole, however, is decidedly nifty, important and welcome.

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“A LASTING LEGACY: SELECTIONS FROM THE LANNAN FOUNDATION GIFT,” Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, 152 N. Central Ave. Dates: Tuesdays to Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Ends Dec. 14. Prices: adults, $6; senior citizens and students, $4; children 12 and under, free. Also, free on Thursdays, 5 to 8 p.m. Phone: (213) 626-6222.