The Lingering Influences of Pasadena’s Radical Past

Thriving art scenes--complete with hard-working artists, risk-taking collectors, insightful curators, perceptive critics, curious viewers and trusting board members--are the stuff of legend. Throughout the 1960s and into the ‘70s, all of these roles, filled by all sorts of people, each with their own passions and prejudices, orbited around the old Pasadena Art Museum.

Today, a three-venue exhibition titled “Radical P.A.S.T.: Contemporary Art in Pasadena, 1960-74” surveys this mythical era, when Southern California first began to shrug off its regional reputation. The fitful process continued through the following two decades, until the city emerged as an undisputed leader in the international art world.

The acronym in the show’s title stands for “Pasadena Art Show Tour,” and the best place to begin a self-guided trip is at the Norton Simon Museum of Art, where “Highlights From the Collection and Archives of the Pasadena Art Museum” provides a useful overview of this ambitious, collaborative project, which also extends to the Armory Center for the Arts and Art Center College of Design’s Williamson Gallery.

The Norton Simon display includes documentary photographs, exhibition announcements in the form of posters and mailed invitations, and a half dozen vitrines filled with catalogs, newspaper clippings and letters from the museum’s archives. Large wall labels document yearly events, outlining the small institution’s impressive exhibition history, which included historic shows by European Modernists and up-to-the-minute installations by artists from both coasts. The quality and quantity of these solo and group shows, whether organized by the museum or brought from other venues, should embarrass the staffs of current contemporary art museums, whose larger budgets produce a lower number (and percentage) of landmark exhibitions.

Three additional galleries display works on paper, paintings and sculptures made by Los Angeles-based artists between 1959 and 1974. Although this part of the exhibition includes a handful of masterpieces, too many first-rate artists are represented by second-rate examples.

Standouts include sculptures by Robert Irwin, John McCracken and Peter Alexander; assemblages by Bruce Conner and Claire Falkenstein; paintings by Edward Ruscha, Joe Goode, Llyn Foulkes, Ed Moses, Jay DeFeo and John Altoon; and a collage by Wallace Berman. Of the remaining 34 artists’ works, minor pieces by Larry Bell and Craig Kauffman and flat-out duds by Ron Davis and DeWain Valentine do not live up to the title’s promise of highlights.

Even more disappointing is that painters Billy Al Bengston, William Brice, Sam Francis, Ynez Johnston and Lee Mullican and sculptor Ken Price all are represented only by lithographs. And there are very few surprises here. Peter Voulkos’ bodily scaled bronze sculpture and Robert Graham’s plastic diorama of three showering women are the only pieces that take viewers back to work made before the artists became famous.

The most fascinating aspect of this installation is its dual emphasis. Focused on both myth-making and art-making, “Highlights From the Collection and Archives” lays out some of the fundamental differences between art scenes and art objects.

Outlining the former is a matter of research and writing; as the lengthy wall labels and text-based evidence of the show’s documentary half suggest, it is more suited to books than galleries.

Presenting art objects is another matter. Strange as it may seem, art cannot be mythologized--unless, of course, it has been lost and only exists, like history, in written or photographic documents.

As long as a work of art is available to be seen, it is a part of present-day experience, subject to the first-hand assessment of viewers. If you go see it and it doesn’t measure up to your expectations, nothing you read will convince you of its significance. If a sufficient number of others share your view, the work will eventually fade into obscurity.

In this sense, art lives by defying history. Historians are often uncomfortable with art precisely because it won’t stay in the past, but instead keeps generating new experiences--new evidence that historians must account for if their own work isn’t to become out-dated and irrelevant. Art, with its feet firmly planted in the present, is less elitist, more accessible and much more participatory than any history written about it.

The show’s two other venues bypass the struggle between art and history, simply by presenting the goods. At Armory Center for the Arts, an intimate and wide-ranging display of art made in Southern California between 1969 and 1974 by 48 familiar names and nearly forgotten eccentrics is arranged in five overlapping sections that capture the excitement of the time.

A roomful of smart, side-splitting pieces by John Baldessari, Scott Grieger, Allen Ruppersberg, Alexis Smith and William Wegman demonstrates that photo-text Conceptualism thrived in L.A. by not taking itself too seriously. Minimal, ephemeral works by Jud Fine, Lloyd Hamrol, Peter Lodato and Connie Zehr sketch the beginnings of a rich tradition of installation art.

With one eye on the slick surfaces of the Finish Fetish school and the other on Light and Space installations, such artists as Ron Cooper, Mary Corse, Jim Eller and Helen Pashgian give bodily presence to intangible sensations. For their part, Karen Carson, Patrick Hogan, Richard Jackson and Bruce Nauman emphasize the time-consuming process of making--and viewing--art. Black-and-white photographs by Lewis Baltz, Robbert Flick, Robert Heinecken and Anthony Hernandez round out the engaging show, which, as a whole, has the presence of a storeroom jam-packed with often overlooked treasures.

At Art Center, things couldn’t be more different. “Influences: Selections From the Contemporary Collection of the Norton Simon Museum” consists of 20 artists’ works made outside California, with a focus on gigantic Pop, Minimalist and Color-Field paintings from New York. These are big-ticket items, with an emphasis on big.

Mural-size abstractions by Roy Lichtenstein, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella and Robert Morris fill the main gallery, dwarfing a 1963 replica of Marcel Duchamp’s 1914 “Bottle Rack.” In an exhibition that sets 10 of Andy Warhol’s silk-screened images of soup cans back-to-back with a segmented sculpture by Donald Judd, Duchamp’s famous ready-made functions more like a relic than a work of art. As a result, the piece by the “Father of Dada” links this third of the exhibition to the archival section at the Simon. Invited to test objects against our own experiences or to accept what others have said about them, viewers are in a terrific position to see whether history--and art--are all they’re cracked up to be.

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* Norton Simon Museum of Art, 411 W. Colorado Blvd., (626) 449-6840, through May 9; closed Mondays-Wednesdays. Armory Center for the Arts, 145 N. Raymond Ave., (626) 792-5101, through April 11; closed Mondays and Tuesdays. Williamson Gallery, Art Center College of Design, 1700 Lida St., (626) 396-2244, through April 11; closed Mondays.