A Changing Picture

Following a critically successful yearlong tour of European museums, the much-anticipated exhibition “Sunshine & Noir: Art in L.A., 1960-1997” arrives today in the city where its 100-plus paintings, sculptures, photographs, installation works and artists’ books were made by its 47 chosen artists. At the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art, the show looks considerably different than it did when it had its debut two summers ago at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art--a difference that turns out to be the result of various trims and subtle alterations in the exhibition checklist.

In Europe, the show looked like a wonderfully ambitious though inescapably flawed introduction to 37 remarkable years of artistic production in postwar America’s second city. Since the 1980s, a large and irreversible flood of L.A.-based artists has steadily taken Europe by storm, and the emphasis in “Sunshine & Noir” was clearly on this recent phenomenon. The show attempted a good bit of heavy lifting to fill in artistic antecedents and historical background, especially from the 1960s, but the largest number of works on view dated from the 1990s.

At the Hammer, interestingly enough, those numbers are reversed.

Although recent art is abundantly represented, the largest component of the show now dates from the 1960s. The exhibition feels a bit more like a venerable historical survey, with a distinct emphasis on the period of L.A.’s first flowering. Walking through the galleries you get the uncanny sense that this could even be an unusually strong permanent collection drawn from some unknown but decidedly savvy museum.

Here are a few of the changes in the checklist from the original show:

* The broad span of Ken Price’s remarkable career is filled out with the addition of three boxed cups (shades of Joseph Cornell) and an erotic ceramic egg, all from the 1960s.

* David Hockney’s classic “A Bigger Splash” (1967) has been replaced by the equally arresting “Beverly Hills Housewife” (1966-67).

* Two of John Altoon’s finest paintings have been added.

* Among works from the 1990s, Jennifer Pastor’s wiggy wedding cake, “Bridal Cave”; Robert Therrien’s “endless column” of huge, teetering, lipstick-red dishes--a kind of Pop Brancusi; and Jason Rhoades’ live, tele-video hookup to his manic studio make for compelling variations on work shown at the exhibition’s debut in Denmark.

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In all, some 30 new loans have been added to the Hammer show, often to replace work that could not travel (such as “A Bigger Splash”), sometimes to amplify an artist’s career (as with Altoon and Price) and sometimes to bring works not seen before in L.A. A helpful checklist itemizing the changes has been printed, and it can be usefully compared against the original catalog.

Perhaps the most curious feature of the show is that the decade of the 1980s--not especially well-represented in the original presentation--is almost nonexistent here. A mere half-dozen works from that decade remain, among them Llyn Foulkes’ painting installation “Pop,” in which a bug-eyed, stressed-out suburban Superman is consoled by his bland, blissful children; Larry Johnson’s digitally manufactured suite of photographs of the names of deceased movie stars, which float amid fluffy clouds; groups of scruffy drawings, small paintings and collages by Raymond Pettibon and Jim Shaw; and Alexis Smith’s environmental collage “Ring of Fire,” in which a tattered urban basketball hoop is affixed to a wall painted with stylized, leaping flames beneath the melodramatic legend, “. . . a hellhole if ever there was one.”

What’s ironic is that, despite this slim representation, the 1980s stands as a pivotal time for the cultural life of Los Angeles. During the period, a debilitating sense of lost promise was erased, while some of the most important American artists of the last 20 years began to produce their mature work.

Here’s a Cliffs Notes-style sequence of postwar artistic events in the first suburban megalopolis in world history: The ferment of the economically expansive, socially restrictive 1950s fed into the efflorescence of the 1960s, when contemporary art made in L.A. first drew national, and even budding international attention. Assorted social and economic traumas buffeted this vibrant, newly emergent scene, which pretty much collapsed by the mid-1970s.

By the end of the 1980s, L.A.’s artists were among those whose extraordinary work had broken the grip of New York as the monolithic center of important artistic production. Today, the city is prominent among cosmopolitan global centers for new art.

In the Hammer’s galleries you get no sense of the importance to this scenario of the lively 1980s. Chris Burden--an established artist who shifted dramatically from performance-oriented body-art to large-scale sculpture--and younger, critically significant new artists like Mike Kelley and Lari Pittman are not represented by their breakthrough work from the period. Sixties icon Edward Ruscha, whose terrific Pop paintings and self-published books of dead-pan photographs constitute perhaps the most well-represented body of work in the show, literally reinvented himself with resonant silhouette paintings in the 1980s--but none of those are on view.

The decision to emphasize more recent sculpture and painting is hard to justify curatorially, but it’s symptomatic of the way the original show favored being up-to-the-minute over being historically revealing. Lars Nittve and Helle Crenzien, the talented European curators of “Sunshine & Noir,” largely came to their interest in Los Angeles art within the past decade.

By contrast, Henry Hopkins, director of the UCLA/Hammer Museum, came to his abiding interest some 30 years before. At each venue, the show has been weighted accordingly.

Whatever its shape, “Sunshine & Noir” is an important show to see for anyone concerned with contemporary culture, if only because it’s the first to take stock of a landmark phenomenon. The shifting emphasis between the 1990s and the 1960s simply demonstrates how curatorial affinities shape historical interpretation, and how an exhibition can change in subtle but profound ways as it travels.

In a self-critical spirit of full disclosure, of course, it’s worth noting that my own close reading of the ins and outs of art made in Los Angeles began in 1980. That, no doubt, has something to do with my feeling now that the short-shrift given to the decade is excessive and misleading.

* “Sunshine & Noir: Art in L.A., 1960-1997,” UCLA/Hammer Museum of Art, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., (310) 443-7000, through Jan. 3. Closed Mondays.