No Canvas Required

From time immemorial, artists have labored long and hard to produce objects that live through the ages as their artistic legacy and their contribution to the cultural heritage. We know American artists Willem de Kooning and Roy Lichtenstein--who died only last year--for their paintings, just as we know Giotto for murals painted in Italian chapels during the early 14th century.

Some things never change in the art world, but that isn’t the message of “Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979,” opening next Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Contemporary facility in Little Tokyo. The landmark exhibition of wildly adventurous art--organized by MOCA’s chief curator, Paul Schimmel, with an international team of advisors--tracks a revolution that has increasingly emphasized the act of artistic creation rather than the objects produced.

Plunging into what they perceived as a void of creative energy after World War II, lashing out against the specter of a nuclear holocaust and generally rebelling against all forms of received wisdom and blind authority, artists all around the world engaged in a wide variety of aesthetically subversive activities.

Marrying elements of performance art with object making, they were inspired, in part, by the Abstract Expressionists’ efforts to make art a physically engaged activity. But frustrated by the art world’s isolation and deeply entrenched, rarefied traditions, they also wanted to operate in a much broader, more socially conscious sphere.

A similar mood of unrest had produced Dada and Surrealism after the First World War. Schimmel’s show explores a related but far more widespread and unruly phenomenon.

“The exhibition begins with the generation of artists that came of age in the fallout of the post-atomic age and reached maturity during the Cold War and ends with the generation that matured during the aftermath of the Vietnam War and its legacy of global cynicism,” he said.

Members of the Gutai group in Japan made explosive artistic statements during the late ‘40s and early ‘50s by crawling in mud, shooting paint from cannons or crashing through panels of stretched paper, symbolically breaking painting’s picture plane. The Viennese Action Group staged bloody, disturbing performances that required great physical endurance and sometimes emulated bodily harm. In one widely publicized case, Rudolf Schwarzkogler in 1965 staged a fictional human castration, recorded in photographs and mistakenly thought by some to represent the artist’s self-mutilation.

Working in a considerably lighter vein in Paris, around 1958-60, Yves Klein used female nudes as “living paintbrushes” and had paint-daubed models press their naked bodies against canvas as he created artworks in a public arena. With the help of a photographer and several negatives, Klein also created a famous photograph, “Leap Into the Void,” in which he appears to dive out of a second-story window.

Many of these works are preserved only by photographs, video and printed material, but MOCA has gathered a huge assortment of actual objects along with voluminous documentation. Some 400 works by about 100 artists and collaboratives from 20 countries will fill the cavernous space of the Geffen and spill out onto the pavement in front of the museum.

But we’re not talking about finely honed products of studied genius and technical expertise. Consider, for example, Brazilian artist Lygia Pape’s “Wheel of Delight,” which invites viewers to taste the nasty flavors of beautifully colored liquids; or “Yard,” a walk-through environment of rubber tires by Allan Kaprow, the American artist who coined the term “Happening.”

Among relatively ordinary-looking artworks, French artist Niki de Saint Phalle’s “Tirs” were created by attaching pigment-filled balloons to assemblages and shooting the balloons with a gun. Kazuo Shiraga’s “foot” paintings were executed in a rhythmic sweep of motion while the Japanese artist swung from the ceiling and dragged his paint-covered feet across a canvas spread out on the floor.

Each piece on display either was produced by unusual physical activity--most likely from unconventional materials--or played a role in an event known as an action, a Happening or a performance conceived as an artwork itself. While some of the artists represented were mainly concerned with expanding the territory of art, others had political or social agendas that extended well beyond their studios.

Take German artist Wolf Vostell’s intentionally wrecked Mercedes-Benz, “130 km per hour.” Destroyed by a locomotive traveling at that speed, the car is a remnant of a nine-part Happening staged in 1963. The event was conceived as a scathing commentary on German consumerism and a reminder of trains that had carried Jews to death camps during World War II. (In mid-January, MOCA re-created a version of “130 km per hour” for the show at a railroad yard in Santa Clarita.)

Far more modest in appearance, British artist John Latham’s “Art and Culture” is merely a ball of hardened pulp. But it is composed of pages from a book by provocative Modernist critic Clement Greenberg that were chewed up and spit out by Latham’s students at London’s St. Martin’s School of Art in 1966 at a party called “Still and Chew.” Latham had borrowed the book from the school library; when he returned it, as a ball of pulp, he was fired.

Still other works address feminist issues or foreshadow recent body art. “Electric Dress,” a floor-length costume of electric lightbulbs, was designed and worn by Japanese artist Atsuko Tanaka at a performance in 1956. Tanaka patterned the dress after the pathways of her nervous system, veins and arteries.

Two, three or four decades after they were made, many of these works continue to raise questions about the nature of artistic expression. But the shift toward action has effected a profound change in the perception and practice of art, Schimmel and his colleagues say.

In her catalog essay, art historian Kristine Stiles characterizes the artists as “aesthetic cosmonauts exploring modes of being and living and doing and thinking that will become models for radically changing futures.”

Schimmel cites four figures as primary forces. First, there’s American Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock, who moved his canvas from the easel to the floor and poured liquid pigment from cans, building up skeins of color in enormously complex orchestrations.

Inevitably dubbed Jack the Dripper, Pollock became a mythic presence in art history. His fame and influence are due in no small part to photographs by Hans Namuth portraying the artist at work and fueling the notion of artists as actors whose energy is embodied in their work.

Another influential American, experimental composer John Cage, known for breaking down artistic hierarchies, created music based on chance, constructed “prepared pianos” by inserting various objects between the strings and organized simultaneous performances of unrelated music, dance, lectures, films, poetry reading and painting.

The third seminal figure was Italian abstract painter Lucio Fontana. Questioning concepts of illusionary two-dimensional space and dismissing Pollock’s efforts as mere “Postimpressionism,” Fontana began poking holes and cutting gashes in his canvases. Meanwhile, in Japan, Shozo Shimamoto glued stacks of paper together, painted them and punctured their surfaces. Moving on to more audacious methods of painting, he shot pigment from a cannon and hurled glass jars of paint at canvas.

The exhibition chronology begins with a 1949 Pollock drip painting and works by other pioneers that symbolize what Schimmel calls the “violent birth” of the movement.

Cutting across national boundaries but pointing out geographic centers of intense activity, the show encompasses a wide variety of sensibilities and subtexts. One theme involves Claes Oldenburg, Ben Vautrier, Yoko Ono and others who operated shops as artworks, willfully blurring the border between art and real life. Final sections deal with 1970s performances by Los Angeles-based artists Chris Burden, Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley, among others.

Far-reaching as it may be, the exhibition encapsulates an idea that has been buzzing around in Schimmel’s head for years while he has organized smaller shows involving some of the same artists in a different context. He has finally realized the exhibition with major funding from the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Foundation, dedicated to the memory of Sydney Irmas.

“This is a summary of all the disparate interests I’ve had throughout my career, from the New York School to multidisciplinary installations and performances,” Schimmel said. “How else could I have brought to gether Jackson Pollock on the one hand and Chris Burden on the other?”

*

“Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979,” Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, 152 N. Central Ave. Opens next Sunday. Regular schedule: Tuesdays to Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Ends May 10. Adults, $6; students and senior citizens, $4; children under 12, free. (213) 626-6222.