For Better or Worse, Work That Stood Out

Herewith, in no particular order, the 10 most notable art exhibitions, events and episodes for Y2K:

1. Conner and McCarthy Shows

Simultaneous survey shows (both still on view) at the Museum of Contemporary Art gave long overdue prominence to two exceptionally gifted Californians. The innovative assemblages--including films--of San Francisco’s Bruce Conner opened doors for much subsequent art, while the performance-based work of L.A.’s Paul McCarthy returns truthful (if psychologically disturbing) dimensions of pathos and wit to narratives typically flattened out in mass culture.

2. The Getty

As the director’s baton at the J. Paul Getty Museum passed from John Walsh to Deborah Gribbon, a sequence of three absorbing shows stood out. “Departures: 11 Artists at the Getty” featured commissions by a diverse group of gifted, L.A.-based artists, who rose to the occasion and made compelling new work in response to aspects of the museum’s collection. Then came an unprecedented exhibition of stained-glass window designs by Durer, Holbein and other German Renaissance masters, followed by a revealing show of powerful drawings by the brilliant young Italian Renaissance painter Raphael, from the collection at Windsor Castle.

3. World War II Memorial

J. Carter Brown, former director of the National Gallery of Art, assured the destruction of one of the greatest civic spaces in America when he railroaded the relocation of a planned World War II memorial from Washington’s prominent Constitution Gardens to a hallowed site on the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial. Plus, the Imperial Kitsch design of the new memorial by Friedrich St. Florian makes a mockery of the ordinary American citizens--the Willies, Joes and Rosie-the-Riveters--it was meant to honor.

4. Tate Gallery for Modern Art

With the opening of the Tate Gallery for Modern Art inside the reconfigured interior of a massive, riverside power station, London, which has long had a testy relationship with new art, became the unexpected home of the best exhibition space for contemporary art in all of Europe.

5. Withering Whitney

Despite some inspiring individual works, New York’s Whitney Biennial of American Art, once among the most important survey exhibitions of new art anywhere, lapsed into sheer irrelevance. Will it--can it--return from the dead?

6. Young L.A. Sculptors

“Mise en Scene,” a lively gathering of user-friendly sculpture by six, young L.A.-based artists at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, showed how a light touch applied to compelling but diverse work could make for a convincing group exhibition. In the last decade, sculpture had been pretty much subsumed into installation art, or forgotten amid the rise of video and the return to prominence of painting. But Liz Craft, Evan Holloway, Jason Meadows, Jeff Ono, Paul Sietsema and Torbjorn Vejvi are renewing older sculptural forms in surprising ways.

7. LACMALab Project

When the Los Angeles County Museum of Art commissioned 11 Southern California artists to produce work specifically for kids, the museum happily realized the need for its education programs to privilege imagination over knowledge. The LACMALab experiment was the sole saving grace of “Made in California: Art, Image and Identity, 1900--2000,” the current extravaganza of art, ephemera and pop culture billed as the biggest show ever organized by the museum--and perhaps best described as five floors of fiasco.

8. Long Beach Museum of Art

After more than a quarter-century of earnest planning, grand public announcements and false starts, the Long Beach Museum of Art finally opened a modest but handsome 13,000-square-foot expansion to its seaside home. Still up in the air: the fate of its large and important collection of video art.

9. Chinatown’s Galleries

L.A.’s large gallery scene, always peripatetic, got an energetic boost as Chinatown blossomed as the site of a half-dozen new galleries, showing the work of mostly younger artists.

10. San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art

In “Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art,” San Diego’s Museum of Contemporary Art took a provocative look at the recent aesthetics of dynamic display by 16 artists of Mexican and South American descent. The museum also quietly acquired some land adjacent to its La Jolla building, thanks to a $30-million windfall from the estate of a former trustee. Perhaps it will be the site of gallery space so sorely lacking now--which important shows like “Ultrabaroque” demand.