An L.A. Annual: Here’s Why

When the Museum of Contemporary Art was in its formative stages in the early 1980s, a topic of simmering debate among artists, curators, collectors, critics, dealers and assorted other art enthusiasts around town concerned the question of a biennial. Should MOCA organize a wide-ranging, regularly scheduled show to survey what, in the opinion of its informed staff, seemed to be the most significant or compelling new art made in the previous two years?

The question could be argued on its merits, but the argument also concealed a submerged sense of competitive zeal. A MOCA Biennial would automatically be seen as a rival to the Whitney Biennial, the big, unruly, aggressive exhibition in New York, which many used to chart the pulse of contemporary American art. In the booming ‘80s, MOCA was being touted as evidence of the emergence of Los Angeles into international prominence as a cultural powerhouse, and it was thought (by some) that an upstart biennial to rival the Whitney’s would seal the deal.

Everybody knew that the Whitney Biennial was fiercely parochial. It was the museum exhibition that functioned like that famous New Yorker magazine cover by Saul Steinberg: Every two years, the Whitney’s survey of American art showed the United States as a crabbed and distorted little cultural wilderness beyond the Hudson River, while Gotham loomed large and lovely in the foreground. Important art made in Los Angeles was regularly left out, and had been for decades, while inferior goods from south of Houston Street and east of Avenue A were given pride of place in the Whitney’s Upper Eastside digs. A MOCA Biennial would fix that--and show them, to boot.

We know which side won the argument. There has never been a MOCA Biennial--and boy, let’s be grateful for that! It was truly an awful idea. Nothing demonstrates a provincial mind-set more clearly than an overweening nervousness Out Here about what is thought Back East. What is thought--anywhere--is only important if it’s compelling, beguiling and convincing. Beyond that, who cares? L.A. was indeed coming into international prominence as a cultural powerhouse in the 1980s, but the phenomenon had nothing to do with getting a permission slip from the principal’s office. MOCA’s levelheaded refusal to entertain the lame idea of establishing a “rival” to the Whitney Biennial was part of the proof.

Now, however, the proof lies elsewhere.

Times have changed, and the time has come for the museum to establish a regular survey exhibition. Not a biennial, either, but an annual. As the millennium dawns, what the art public in Los Angeles needs is a MOCA Annual.

If you hear a loud groan right about now, it’s probably echoing from the canyons of Grand Avenue, where MOCA’s curatorial staff would no doubt rather have bamboo shoots slid underneath their collective fingernails than entertain this particular conversation. I can’t say I entirely blame them. No exhibition is simple to organize, and a survey of very recent art would up the already considerable curatorial pressure applied by collectors, dealers, artists and others. A regularly scheduled survey would also fill an annual slot that would automatically push other pet projects further into the future, making curatorial competition for gallery space more acute.

But them’s the breaks. There are pressing reasons why we need an annual survey. They start to come into focus when you think about such a show.

First, banish from your brain the current models from among the numerous survey shows that turn up regularly from Cuba to Korea, Sao Paolo to Istanbul. Making L.A. a stop on the Grand Tour is not the object.

The MOCA Annual should simply bring together whatever, in the estimation of the museum’s director and several curators, was the most significant, unforgettable new art they had encountered in the previous year. No limits should be placed on nationality, age or medium. The show should make no effort to detect “trends,” chronicle “movements” or argue “big themes” in art. It should only restrict itself to whatever has been on public display anywhere in the previous 12 months.

The MOCA Annual should be small. Twenty artists or 25 artists would be plenty. A boisterous extravaganza is not the point. The art world keeps growing exponentially, and the bigger it gets, the less past fictions about surveying “trends” or comprehensive “developments” can be sustained. The MOCA Annual should emphasize individual enthusiasms on the part of knowledgeable observers, which is where art always finds its most authentic power.

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First and foremost, a MOCA Annual would be of service to the art community in Los Angeles. It should seek to inform the audience here. The big international surveys that now take place with frequency in Europe, the Americas, Asia and the Middle East certainly have their uses, and their recent proliferation in the globalizing art world is hardly without significance. But the MOCA Annual would be something else. It would be about our need to know.

In fact, that’s the main reason why such an exhibition is essential now. We have an intense need to know, through firsthand experience (the only means that finally count) what’s indispensable from among today’s international avalanche of new art and exhibitions. And given the speed and pervasiveness of secondhand experience, through mass media, electronic gossip and big-money promotion, we need to know as quickly as possible.

Which is why a leisurely biennial or glacially paced quadrennial, rather than a fleet-footed annual, just won’t do. A MOCA Annual would not presume to be a summation for the ages. It wouldn’t be art’s State of the Union address, as artist Doug Aitken once bemoaned about the way the Whitney Biennial is commonly received. That’s what dooms certain of the big extravaganzas, which get leaden with pretension--and we all know how dull, self-serving and contrived the State of the Union address tends to be.

Instead the annual should be a quick, informed, concise snapshot of the moment, shot through MOCA’s particular curatorial lens. It should be agile, prepared to turn on a dime. Let the big, lumbering international extravaganzas do a good bit of the preliminary sorting. And pay attention to what’s turning up in galleries, too, from Chinatown to London’s East End and beyond. The big internationals have spiked the growth of a particular style of art--what has astutely come to be called festival art, for the way it smartly engages the quick-hit pleasures of the nomadic art crowd. But that’s not the only notable art being made today.

Think of the MOCA Annual as a report from the front--a report about individual artists and individual curatorial passions of the moment, both given the collective enthusiasm and boost of institutional support.

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It isn’t just the art public in Los Angeles that needs an exhibition like this. MOCA needs it too. Sometime in the 1990s an elusive but distinct sense of institutional disengagement came to characterize the museum. The remoteness lingers.

It is not a disengagement from art. How could it be, when an achingly beautiful show like the current survey of work since 1958 by San Francisco’s Bruce Conner, a quintessential artist’s artist, occupies the galleries so magnificently?

No, the disengagement has been from the area’s art public--from the specific constituency of warm bodies and sharp minds in Los Angeles, who have somehow come to seem less significant to the museum than does a generalized and amorphous world of art luminaries, wherever they might reside. Any art museum has two main constituencies. One is art itself, or the artistic ideals the museum considers apt. The other is the art public, which is tangible and mostly local. MOCA serves the first constituency better than many museums do, but there are problems in its relations with the second. A MOCA Annual should be an inescapable service show, born of curatorial commitments to certain art but geared to audiences here. There would be no question about which audience the museum was speaking to.

The need for this kind of exhibition arrives in tandem with a certain irony. One reason a MOCA Annual is possible now is that the Whitney Biennial has recently faded far into the background. Last spring’s biennial was an exercise in sheer irrelevance. The world of art has changed dramatically, but New York’s biennial has not. Comparisons between a MOCA survey and the Whitney’s would have been inevitable in the 1980s, but not any more.

A MOCA Annual should play against type--and that’s a show worth seeing. It should shun the reigning model of the theme park and forget about plugging cultural tourism. With luck, it might even be fun.

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Christopher Knight is The Times’ art critic. He can be reached by e-mail at christopher.knight@latimes.com.