‘Panza’s’ Two Divergent Worlds

“Panza: The Legacy of a Collector” is a two-part exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art that heads in divergent directions. Part 1 chronicles once-peripheral artists who ended up establishing a mainstream. Part 2 charts artists in a post-mainstream world. A sense of retrospective authority is followed by a distinct impression of splintering and uncertainty. Notably, two very different art worlds emerge.

Part 1, which has been on view since early December, surveys the mostly New York art of the 1950s and early 1960s famously acquired by Italian collector Giuseppe Panza di Biumo and his wife, Giovanna. Eighty works from the Panza collection, including the finest public assembly anywhere of mature and critically important works by Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, James Rosenquist and Franz Kline, made up a landmark 1984 purchase by MOCA to form the core of the young museum’s permanent collection.

Part 2, which opened Sunday, follows from the first--if only indirectly, because the quality of these more recent works is considerably less consistent. Not long after the sale to MOCA, the Panzas began aggressively collecting new art, including work produced by artists living in Los Angeles and environs. Five years ago they selected seven examples by each of 10 artists, all male, and donated them to the museum.

The most powerful and compelling body of work is a group of sculptures by Robert Therrien, all dating from 1982 to 1988 and smashingly installed in the show’s light-drenched first room. Therrien is an important artist who has lived and worked in L.A. for nearly 30 years, but his quirky and poetic sculpture has been seen here only intermittently. This installation, together with a show of large-scale sculpture from the 1990s set to open later this month at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, goes far in rectifying an unfortunate absence.

Four of the seven sculptures at MOCA are in the shape of free-standing keystones, three of them as tall or taller than a standing person and one lying low and squat on the floor. Made from wood rubbed with oil and wax, or from richly patinated bronze, each sculpture pits its weighty volume against an elusive, even ethereal surface.

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Mysterious and mute, these totems have the distinctive presence and personality of eccentric personages. Their unusual shape--square columns, narrower at the bottom than at the top--presses lightly on your consciousness, not unlike the way a keystone resolves conflicting forces to keep an archway from collapsing.

Therrien’s other sculptures are also marked by precariously balanced oppositions. One, standing on the floor and abutted against a wall, recalls an oversize Dutch-door, offering simultaneous entrance and egress into visual space.

The others are shallow metal boxes hung on the wall like paintings, their hard surfaces softened with brushy, cloudy-white enamel. An incongruous row of wax-filled jingle bells hangs across the bottom edge of each, reverberating in the mind’s ear, rather than its eye, by giving unexpected form to muffled silence. The jester’s bells act as a wry analogue to the cottony visual surface of the “painting.”

Therrien’s sophisticated eccentricities set the high watermark for Part 2 of the Panza show, while the sculptor’s Postminimal sensibility smuggles psychological conundrums and perceptual ambiguities into the unified industrial clarity common to much Minimalist art. It’s a touchstone for the work by the other artists.

Therrien, born in 1947, is the oldest of the 10, the others now ranging in age from 40 to 50. The exhibition, though, is largely composed of work produced earlier, when these artists were in their 30s. Frequently (but not always) that’s when the first blush of mature work by a young artist might be expected.

The selections are uneven. Ross Rudel’s most engaging work is a pair of balloon-like spheres of painted wood that seem to have inflated, as if from air being expelled through the gallery wall. Greg Colson layers maps of neighborhood streets or sports stadiums over cobbled-together bits of urban detritus, in an effort to embody the conflicting tensions inherent in contemporary experience. Jeff Colson (Greg’s sibling) takes on a not dissimilar ethos in a totally different way, employing industrial materials like plywood, motor oil, plaster and an automotive bonding agent to create random but unengaging marks on rigorously gridded surfaces.

Gregory Mahoney also makes abstract maps, most compellingly with ball bearings embedded high in a gallery wall in the celestial pattern of the Big and Little Dippers. Mark Lere’s steel, aluminum, bronze and painted wood sculptures allude to functional or organic objects, ranging from bones to funnels, but they exude the unreal aura of stage props. Ron Griffin goes the other way, transforming castoff consumer packaging into elegant abstractions and the grain of wood into allusive landscapes.

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More consistent are the hybrid painting-sculptures by Lawrence Carroll, in which battered, yellowed surfaces of oil and wax on canvas read as a cross between gigantic bandages and tattered mattresses. Peter Shelton’s widely exhibited sculptures of cast iron, bronze and copper extend body metaphors in surprising ways. Finally, Roy Thurston’s monochrome paintings also emphasize their status as three-dimensional objects, their sometimes ribbed surfaces playing with light to create ambiguous perceptual experiences.

This emphasis on art as a material object set against ephemeral illusions or evanescent ideas is encountered in all the work in the Panza gift. So is a relative disinterest in color, except as it manifests itself in natural processes like rust, and an overall embrace of an organic style of visual poetry. Silence and solitude prevail.

It is, in other words, a very specific, pointedly narrow view of art produced in L.A. between 1982 and 1993. So, the gift stands as a quiet yet unabashed polemic. Through focused exclusion it pits this work against the commercially aggressive, sometimes raucous, often sociopolitical, wildly diversified art of the period. As always, the Panzas put their money where their heart is--which is finally the best way to acquire art.

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And yet, the fact that only a small portion of the show is fully satisfying suggests how different the world of art has been in the last 20 years from what it was in the 1950s and early 1960s, when the almost always staggeringly beautiful art in Part 1 of this show was being assembled. We forget, for instance, just how tiny the contemporary art scene was back then, how localized in Manhattan it was presumed to be, how indifferent most art museums were toward new work and how minuscule the collecting public was.

All that is changed, and there’s no going back. Nor is there any reason to, given the abundance of very different, but nonetheless soul-satisfying art produced in 1980s L.A.--even if it is pointedly bypassed here. Part 2’s quiet quarrel about what’s most important in recent art is finally unconvincing, perhaps because it exudes a nostalgia that nowhere characterizes the fearlessly progressive Panza collection so magnificently celebrated in Part 1.

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* “Panza: The Legacy of a Collector,” Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., (213) 626-6222, through April 30. Closed Mondays.