An Outsider’s L.A. Story

Like so many other things, time isn’t what it used to be. At least not in the judgment of Lars Nittve, a youngish 45-year-old who organized the contemporary art exhibition “Sunshine & Noir: Art in L.A. 1960-1997,” and who has taken up the post of director of the new Tate Gallery of Modern Art that is to open here in the year 2000.

“The modern person’s concept of time is changing with exposure to modern technologies,” Nittve said. “For my 9-year-old son, who watches a VCR and satellite TV, time is all mixed up. Or, there is not a big difference between real and recorded time. With satellite broadcasts, he might be watching something that is happening tomorrow, because it is happening in Japan. More and more, time is relative.”

One of the criticisms of the “Sunshine & Noir” exhibition, which showed in Denmark, Germany and Italy before arriving at the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum for Wednesday’s opening, was that it did not strictly adhere to a timeline. It steps out of chronology.

“Chronology is something we should rethink,” Nittve said, referring to his past as well as future work.

Themes, he said, may be a better means of organizing art exhibitions. As in “Sunshine & Noir.”

The Swedish-born Nittve is an ambitious curator with an active curiosity and aspirations to make the new Tate into the contemporary art museum of its time. He was selected from a list of 20 candidates earlier this year--the first outsider to head a major British museum--largely because of his success as director of Denmark’s highly respected Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, where he organized the first historical survey of postwar Southern California art ever to appear in Europe.

The exhibition of 49 artists focuses on the period 1960-1997, but is organized around the theme of the light and dark sides of Los Angeles. Nittve said he and his Louisiana Museum co-curator Helle Crenzien tried to avoid the cliched paradise-hell dichotomy often used to describe Los Angeles by stressing the interplay between the two. “Sunshine usually has an underbelly, and it is the other way around too,” he said.

Nittve, whose own sunny personality masked a bad cold and a serious scholarship in art history, stressed that the show was organized by Europeans for Europe, where it was well received.

Torben Weirup, art critic of the Danish newspaper Berlingske Tidende, called the Los Angeles exhibition “genuine” and said it was “very well laid out, with a good logic to it.” He thought the title was well chosen, as were such contrasting works as David Hockney’s “A Bigger Splash” and Edward Kienholz’s “The Beanery.”

The Italian daily La Stampa described the “historic quality” of the show, which demonstrated that Los Angeles art “explodes, ferocious and infantile, polymorphic, without boundaries.”

The harshest criticism of “Sunshine & Noir” came out of Los Angeles, a fact that did not surprise Nittve in the least.

“If you come from Scandinavia and you are telling people on the other side of the globe what their history is, you’re bound to be criticized,” Nittve said. “But I am happy to bring it to L.A. And also I am curious what the reactions from the public will be.”

Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight and others faulted Nittve’s selection of works and, in some cases, even his selection of artists. Knight said Nittve omitted several key figures in the Los Angeles art scene, while many of those included were represented by works that were not their strongest or were not signature pieces.

Writing in the magazine Art in America, critic Michael Duncan complained that “the absence of art-historical rigor often created misleading associations between artists and reduced groupings of works to curatorial one-liners.”

Nittve says he makes it a policy never to argue with critics. But then in an affable, Scandinavian sort of way, he does. With a smile.

“Always, when you make an exhibit there are things you could have done differently. I can’t say I regret anything, though. You can always discuss what is the right work, what is the best work by an artist. Ultimately these judgments have to be personal. There is no right or wrong answer, really,” Nittve said.

“In most cases here, our choices were made in discussion with the artists, if the artist was alive. That doesn’t mean the artist is always right, but there was this dialogue.”

Although Nittve studied Los Angeles art for at least 10 years before completing “Sunshine & Noir,” according to a former colleague at the Louisiana Museum, he remains an outsider looking in the window and telling others outside what he sees.

“This was conceived and made to be shown in Europe. I took that as a starting point in my choices of works. Certain artists were underlined for different reasons,” he said.

Bruce Nauman, who has had two retrospectives in Europe in recent years, was very well known. “In that case I chose to indicate his presence in the L.A. art scene, but didn’t feel he really needed exposure. Others, like Allen Ruppersberg, are comparatively more present, partly because I think his work is extremely important in the L.A. context. . . . His work is not very well known in Europe. I chose to underline his work,” Nittve said.

Whatever its shortcomings, even critics such as Knight hailed the exhibition as a landmark show that sought to familiarize Europeans with Los Angeles art, indeed, to teach them that there is such a thing as Los Angeles art.

As Milan, Italy’s, financial daily Il Sole 24 Ore said, the show “makes us look to communities beyond, and opposed to, the centrality of New York. The idea that art has a single sorting center was, in truth, a convenient expedient during the first half of the century. . . . Since then, other art centers like Moscow, Johannesburg, Havana, Tokyo have shown their artistic autonomy, and now we must take stock of the singular art scene of Los Angeles.”

This was Nittve’s intention.

“If Los Angeles artists are known to Europeans, they are thought of as New York artists. Most people don’t think Nauman and [Edward] Ruscha are L.A. artists. They are thought of as New York artists because that is the port of export for Europe, or because when Europeans see art in America they see it in New York,” Nittve said.

He wanted his compatriots to stop “the vain search” for Europe or European schools in Los Angeles art--what they often find in New York--and to see it for what it is: individualistic, go-out-and-do-your-own-thing art taken to extremes of beauty and fear, light and dark, beyond where New York artists will go. “It is pushed to the edge,” he said admiringly. “The artists are impossible to package.”

Nittve will attend the Hammer’s opening of the exhibition, which he hopes will allow Angelenos to look at familiar art from another perspective--through foreign eyes.

Nittve is an outsider to London’s art world, as well. Newspaper reports of his appointment as director of the new Tate Gallery of Modern Art last spring described him as “a relatively unknown Swede” and “a near-stranger within London’s sometimes insular art circles.”

The Independent daily newspaper said the Tate had “bypassed the British art world” for the biggest job to come on the market in contemporary art for some years. It had very little to say about Nittve other than that the director of the Louisiana Museum was born in Stockholm and had written extensively on modern art.

In part, this is because Nittve was something of a late bloomer and a fast climber in the field of art curating.

The son of an engineer and social worker with no interest in art, Nittve says he was expected to get a “real job” when he grew up, like his older brothers who went into medicine and computers. To this end, Nittve studied science in high school quite unhappily, while working as a photographer on the side.

“One day the headmaster called my parents to say that they had not seen Lars at school for a while,” Nittve recalled. He had been out shooting pictures for magazines and documenting exhibitions for the Moderna Museum in Stockholm.

He tried working as a librarian, a postman and a ski instructor before seeking a university degree from the Stockholm School of Economics, “the kind of place you go if you think you want to be a CEO.” There he made a friend who was interested in modern art and who took him along to galleries.

“To me it was like coming home. Soon I noticed that I was rewarding myself by going to exhibitions after passing an exam or delivering a paper. I felt like everything was upside down. I was studying something that was not what I wanted to be, while I had this fabulous interest in art. I read all I could about art, was traveling to see exhibits, and so I decided to turn the tables and study art history. Suddenly I had energy and resources I never thought I had,” he said.

Within 18 months, one of Nittve’s professors invited him to start teaching and Nittve soon began writing art criticism for a Swedish newspaper even though, he admits, he might not have been entirely prepared for the job.

“I figured people wouldn’t die if I did a bad job. I might look stupid or get fired, but that’s it,” he said.

From there, he moved swiftly to become senior curator of the Moderna in Stockholm in 1986 and, four years later, founding director of the Rooseum Centre for Contemporary Art in Malmo, Sweden, before moving to Copenhagen.

Nittve’s position as an outsider may have helped secure him the job as director of the new Tate under Nicholas Serota, who will remain overall director of the Tate’s four galleries at Millbank, St. Ives, Liverpool and the modern art gallery at Bankside.

Britain’s first national museum of modern art hopes to put itself on the map very quickly as an international museum of the historical scope and quality of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim. A director with Nittve’s international perspective and experience could help to do that.

“Until now, directors of major museums in this country have all been British,” said Richard Cork, art critic for the Times of London. “The new Tate does not want to be seen as a local effort. Nittve is aware of what is going on in contemporary art in the rest of the world. He is looking outward.”

Intentionally or not, Nittve is following in the footsteps of another Swedish curator, Pontus Hulten, founding president of the Pompidou Centre and first director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

A boyish blond just two weeks into his weighty new job, Nittve clearly felt silly donning the requisite rubber boots, fluorescent vest and hard hat for a tour of the gutted Bankside Power Station that will become the new Tate. The 1946 building by Gilbert Scott is being converted by Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron from a hulking industrial fortress into a 21st century showcase for the Tate’s 5,000 major works of modern art.

It is a spectacular, 8.5-acre site on the south bank of the River Thames across from St. Paul’s Cathedral. A new millennium bridge will connect the two monuments to religion and art.

“There is a common saying that art is the new religion of the Western world. Museums are the cathedrals of our times. It may be true,” Nittve said.

The power station’s original turbine hall is an enormous space 100 feet high that dwarfs workmen and has a cathedral-like feeling. But the new Tate is not meant to have the hushed, hands-off quality of a church. From the entrance, a long ramp like a street will draw visitors into the main hall, the turbine room-turned-town square that should be busy, noisy, accessible and cutting-edge.

Nittve wants the new Tate to be a unique museum for the 21st century.

“It is very important that it be clear we are a museum that didn’t open in 1929, like the MOMA or in 1977, like the Pompidou. We are opening in 2000, and this should signal something else,” he said.

So, while giving prominence to paintings by Picasso and Hockney, the museum also will emphasize newer forms of art. It will present traditional, historical surveys of modern art and give space to the best of the new artists, like some of those coming out of Los Angeles.

“For a long time, modern art was painting and sculpture. Then maybe it was printing and photography. Now it is all kinds of art. Film, video, mixed-media, performance. The field has expanded and this has to be reflected,” Nittve said.

“The basis of the museum is that the Tate has a major modern art collection, like the MOMA and the Pompidou. I hope you will see on the one hand a solid museum of modern art, and on the other hand contemporary projects that will challenge the set of expectations you have about museums,” he said.

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* “Sunshine & Noir: Art in L.A. 1960-1997,” UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood. Opens Wednesday. Regular schedule: Tuesdays-Saturdays, 11 a.m.-7 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Sundays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Adults, $4.50; seniors and students, $3; 17 and under, free. Ends Jan. 3. (310) 443-7020.

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Janet Stobart in The Times’ London bureau contributed to this report.