The Getty’s Link to the Living

Lisa Lyons is an independent spirit working in a bureaucratic world.

A freelance curator of contemporary art who prizes the freewheeling ways of artists above institutional thinking, she likes art that pokes fun and makes you laugh, that questions the world and makes you see it in a new light. She likes art that provokes an uneasy feeling and makes you think. In short, she likes art.

For the past four years, Lyons has been bringing her vanguard sensibility to one of the most academic institutions in Los Angeles--the Getty Center in Brentwood, a place with virtually no history of exhibiting or caring for contemporary painting and sculpture. In the process she has helped the Getty commission major site-specific artworks by Ed Ruscha, Alexis Smith and Martin Puryear, three artists with very different sensibilities and styles. And last week, Lyons accomplished what might once have seemed impossible--the opening of a critically acclaimed exhibition of work by Los Angeles artists at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

“Departures: 11 Artists at the Getty,” which Lyons organized at the encouragement of Getty Museum director John Walsh, is designed to celebrate the art of our time while linking it to historical work the Getty museum collects. The name is particularly well chosen, for the show represents departures from the routine working process by the institution and the artists.

Lyons is the bridge between the two. Former director of the art programs at the Lannan Foundation and before that a longtime, distinguished curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Lyons, 49, has organized significant exhibitions of artists as diverse as Chuck Close, William Wegman and Chris Burden. She knows how museums work, as well as how artists work.

In October 1998, at the Getty’s invitation, Lyons proposed a show that would invite a group of L.A. artists to create work inspired by whatever part of the Getty holdings might interest them. She wanted to work with artists based in Los Angeles because they can get regular access to the collections and therefore are able to develop very personal reactions. Her concept was that art begets art, and that many artists today are drawn to--and find inspiration from--historical work not obviously related to their own. Lyons did not set limits on how or what might be used as a catalyst, and she says she began by visiting studios and galleries.

“My notion was to try and touch on as many parts of the Getty collection as possible,” she says in an interview at the Los Feliz home she shares with her husband, author and businessman Richard Grossman.

“In talking with people, I would ask them, ‘What kinds of things do you look at? What attracts your interest? Have you been to the Getty?’ ” In fact, she says, a lot of artists hadn’t been to the Getty, but that didn’t disqualify them. “I tried to invite people to go, just to look around.”

Her list of participating artists is impressive. All are at least mid-career with significant track records--John Baldessari, Uta Barth, Sharon Ellis, Judy Fiskin, Martin Kersels, John M. Miller, Ruben Ortiz Torres, Lari Pittman, Stephen Prina, Alison Saar and Adrian Saxe.

Lyons approached some artists who did not want to stop what they were doing to accommodate the exhibition’s program, even for a prominent institution like the Getty. And some who are on the list took persuading. Pittman says he never responds to commissions, and Lyons’ invitation was not a given. “I was excited and intrigued,” he recalls. “But if an institution that has a long history of showing contemporary art calls, I do have a different reaction.

“I’ve worked with a lot of institutions, but I’ve never had any conceptual guideline. It’s, ‘Do your Lari work.’ And that’s my forte, being Lari. So we had to discuss these things, and I think that Lisa was able to lay out a type of response to the Getty, but with a lot of amplitude on how this can come about.

“It’s a constructed challenge.”

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Pittman’s contribution to the exhibition, a mural-sized canvas titled “Indebted to You, I Will Have Had Understood the Power of the Wand Over the Scepter,” is a response, in part, to James Ensor’s “Christ’s Entry Into Brussels in 1889,” done in 1888, although the two works are similar more in their poignant spirit of defiance than in appearance.

Other artists were immediately responsive to Lyons’ concept, she says.

“Baldessari is a very good example. Over the years he’s done riffs on other artists’ work or been very influenced by other artists. At the time I first chatted with him, he was working on a series having to do with Goya. So we talked about what Goya meant for him in his work.”

For “Departures,” Baldessari chose a small, early 16th century watercolor and gouache drawing by Albrecht Durer, “Stag Beetle,” and replicated the work on paper at a scale of 11 1/2 by 14 1/2 feet. Huge. An equally inflated replica of a specimen pin pierces the center of Baldessari’s blowup, reducing the viewer to bug size in relation to the work and recognizing that just being big is too often seen as a premium in the contemporary world.

It is a piece that Getty Museum director Walsh points to as capturing all that the show set out to do. “It’s one of the great sight gags of our time,” Walsh said in a separate interview. “And then you come closer and the object is extremely beautiful, and the play between size and scale is wonderful. The venerated German artist is taking a little piece of paper and making a picture of this incredibly scary prehistoric figure, and John [Baldessari] has realized the nightmare. Making it the size of a tank pinned on the wall, it becomes a meditation on what we collect.”

On the contemplative side, the precise, minimal work of Miller represents a response to medieval manuscripts, Lyons says. Miller’s images are consistent with previous works--patterned abstractions that are quiet parades of simple, uniform geometric shapes.

Lyons explains the link to the intricate detail of his inspiration, which might otherwise be elusive: “I think his work is moving in a more spiritual direction, even though I think it might make him uncomfortable to say that. And also he’s drawn to a direct connection between the viewer and a manuscript, the notion of picking up a book and holding it in your hand and having a very intimate experience with that work of art. It is something that he seeks in his own work, even though it’s a monumental painting on the wall.”

Lyons’ training at the Walker under former director Martin Friedman--also mentor to former Museum of Contemporary Art director Richard Koshalek, among others in the museum field--led her to make artists’ interests primary in the creation of any exhibition. The Getty’s usual focus on artists who are dead--with the exception of Lyons’ commissions and, most notably, Robert Irwin’s garden--made “Departures” a somewhat new experience for the Getty staff. Everyone has had to retain their sense of humor, particularly in response to Kersels, who made a replica of the famous “Getty Kouros (Young Man),” a prized acquisition cataloged by the museum as “ca. 530 BC or modern forgery” that has been subject to every possible kind of academic scrutiny about its authenticity. Kersels took his replica into the real world and had himself photographed with it in a series of mockingly destructive situations--jumping through the air, bounding into bushes.

Fiskin also poked fun at the Getty Center as a whole in a video work titled “My Getty Center,” a response to citywide banners that carried that slogan when the center opened in late 1998.

“I was interested in what they wanted to do, in how an artist makes a museum visit and how it comes out in work,” Lyons says.

“For Judy [Fiskin], it’s the whole ball of wax. Her piece really is about a kind of love-hate relationship with museums in general. And when we previewed the tape recently for a number of people at the museum, they were hooting with laughter.”

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Ambivalence about museums today is something Lyons shares with many of the artists in the show. Her work at the Lannan Foundation, once a small but distinctive exhibition space on the Westside, ended on a sour note in 1996 when Patrick Lannan decided to close the space and disperse the collection. Lyons quit rather than help sell and/or give away works she had carefully helped acquire for the foundation. Since then she has been reluctant to join the staff of any museum, viewing today’s institutions as out of step with her values.

“These days it seems to me that the art is really getting lost at museums, because many other things are being put before the art,” she says with more than a touch of anger in her voice. “Such as entertainment. Education. The cult of the personality. For me, museums are all about art.

“I believe there should be an educational component to every exhibition, but all these things, to my mind, are supposed to be in support of the art. Museums are trying to make people feel comfortable and give them familiar surroundings to operate in. Too many museums feel like shopping malls, or theme parks, as opposed to institutions dedicated to something that might make you feel uncomfortable. That might challenge you. That might not look familiar. That is always what is interesting to me about art. I’m always looking for something I’ve never seen before and that maybe I don’t understand. In a way, this exhibition allows people to get a bit inside artists’ heads.”

Lyons grew up in Minneapolis, with a social-worker-turned-homemaker mother and lawyer father. While art was not a primary focus in her home, one of her earliest memories is of visiting the Walker as a small child in a stroller. It is a memory she cites in the introduction to the “Departures” catalog.

She earned her undergraduate degree from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., just north of Chicago, and a master’s degree from Columbia University in art history. She made stops at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York before ending up back at the Walker as a curator, where she stayed until 1982, during which time she met her future husband.

It was Grossman, in fact, who started Lyons on a path away from the museum world. From 1983 to 1989, the couple established a philanthropic entity in Minneapolis called the Museum Fund, “a corporate consulting firm founded to create a new source of philanthropy for American museums,” as she describes it. “Through a very specific kind of lease program that had significant tax and business advantages for corporations, works of art could be donated to the museums of the corporations’ choice. . . . We offered a variety of programs to corporate clients,” she recalls, but “much to my dismay, I found that our clients were simply interested in having art on their walls and weren’t interested in the philanthropic aspect. Ultimately, most people really just wanted me to decorate their offices, and I had no interest in doing that. Just at the point when I was thinking this is not what I want to do, I was approached by the Lannan Foundation.”

Lannan did give Lyons a home base for nearly seven years and has made her a die-hard Angeleno. She and Grossman have taken to acquiring and fixing historic homes in Los Feliz, with much attention to the original architecture. It is a sideline occupation that Lyons loves, made clear as she gives a tour of her current home with its collection of contemporary art.

She says she does not want to leave L.A., and at least for now her insider-outsider status is just fine. “I really am not willing to make the kinds of personal sacrifices that it would take to go back to working in a museum. I’m not willing to uproot myself at this point to chase some job in another city,” she says, adding, “When you’re outside of an institution, you don’t get so wrapped up in its culture, and you have the ability to see what seems odd and what seems right.”

This attitude seems right for the Getty, too, as it dips its institutional toe into the murky waters of working with living artists. Walsh, a scholar of 17th century Dutch art who also has a long-standing interest in contemporary art, says the museum will consider acquiring some of the works in the show, and he speaks admiringly of Lyons.

“She looks at everything. She knows how to sort through, pretty confidently, to get to the artists who have real strengths and real staying power but are not necessarily established. She’s not a doctrinaire conceptualist. She’s not one thing or another.

“She’s a pragmatist.”

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“Departures: 11 Artists at the Getty”

Related Programs

Film and Video:

* “Vinyl II,” a 20-minute film by artist Stephen Prina, screens in the Museum Lecture Hall on Tuesday-Sunday at 12:30, 2:30 and 4:30 p.m. Additional screenings Thursday and Friday at 7 p.m.

* Q&A; with Judy Fiskin including special screening of her 16-minute video “My Getty Center” on April 7, 7:30 p.m. “My Getty Center” also screens throughout the run of the exhibition.

Gallery Talks:

* Sharon Ellis: March 24, 6 and 7:30 p.m.

* Ruben Ortiz Torres, April 7, 6 and 7:30 p.m.

Artists’ Lectures:

* Lari Pittman, March 30, 7 p.m.

* Martin Kersels, April 13, 7 p.m.

* Adrian Saxe, May 4, 7 p.m.

Performances:

* “La Zamba del Chevy,” Ruben Ortiz Torres’ Chevrolet lowrider, will perform on the Getty Museum plaza on Saturday at 2 p.m. and April 16 at 1 p.m.

* “An Antigone Story,” inspired by the “Departures” exhibition by Los Angeles-based Cornerstone Theater Company, Friday at 8 p.m.; Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m. and next Sunday at 2:30 p.m.

J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood. Hours: Tuesdays-Wednesdays, 11 a.m.-7 p.m.; Thursdays-Fridays, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Admission is free, parking is $5, and reservations are required, with the exception of college students. Ends May 7. (310) 440-7300; (310) 440-7305 TTY. Seating reservations required for lectures and theater productions.