Thematically Overwrought

Certainly it’s disconcerting to pick up the catalog to a big millennial art exhibition and find your name listed as an advisor to the event, when in fact the claim is a fabrication. I’ve just had that weird experience with “Made in California: Art, Image and Identity, 1900-2000.” The book erroneously adds my name to a distinguished roster of some 50 consultants to the show, when I (along with many others) was actually just a silent observer at an early daylong planning symposium.

Now, having seen the disheartening exhibition that is the occasion for the catalog, I almost wish I had been on the team.

If you have little or no interest in art, you may well get a kick out of “Made in California,” the massive show whose first four sections (out of five) opened Sunday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. There’s some great art, but the show features more third-rate (and worse) painting, sculpture and photography than any local exhibition in memory too. It’s also gleefully packed with lots of cool stuff: furniture, bathing suits, postcards, dishes, lamps, posters, orange-crate labels, publicity stills, book jackets, customized cars, pottery, surfboards, soft-core porn, movie clips, magazines, ashtrays and other assorted knickknacks. Think of the giant flea market at the Rose Bowl, albeit sifted and sorted and endowed with pretensions.

The chief pretension is that this amalgam of (mostly) flotsam constitutes a serious exhibition, worthy of a major American art museum. The show is divided into five 20-year chunks. (Part five, which covers 1980 to 2000, will open Nov. 12.) Each section gets its own complete floor at LACMA, starting on the plaza level of the Hammer Building and then moving upstairs, and concluding across the bridge on all three floors of the Anderson Building. The five sections have themes, sub-themes and sub-sub-themes. Who says art museums haven’t become theme parks?

“Made in California” is a novelty show. Like “the dog in art” or “food in art,” it classifies diverse and unrelated materials according to common subject matter, regardless of artistic content. Instead of dogs or food, the subject matter here is “California’s image” as seen in art.

Whether that art is an oil painting, a woman’s two-piece bathing suit with matching jacket, a resin sculpture or a postcard showing elephantine strawberries on a railroad car doesn’t matter. Image is what matters--image, and nothing more. And once an image is cut loose from artistic content, it’s available to be put into a whole new context by the curators.

Unhappily, a whole new context that diminishes your experience of art.

Here’s one example of what can happen. George Inness’ big, moody landscape painting, “California” (1894), is perhaps the earliest dated object in the show, and if it’s not the finest work ever made by that estimable painter, it is the first significant work of art a visitor encounters.

Rendered in a brushy, vaporous palette of greens and browns on a strict but subtly calibrated compositional grid, the expansive picture shows a pastoral scene infused with radiant, golden light. The curatorial theme of the galleries in which it hangs is “Selling California,” which refers to turn-of-the-20th-century efforts to get settlers to move west by making idealized images of the state. Aside from a five-year sojourn in Italy and occasional touring jaunts, Inness lived and worked almost entirely in the northeastern United States, from 1825 to 1894. So I have a question: Is the show’s evocative Inness landscape really concerned with “Selling California,” when the painting is virtually identical in general subject, style and content to the artist’s numerous pictures of New Jersey?

Inness’ painting is a visual articulation of his spiritual faith (he was a committed Swedenborgian), not a grandiose real estate brochure for some turn-of-the-century Fred Sands. Theme shows mean to tell a story, but when fundamental doubts about the reliability of your author/guide are raised before the first chapter has barely begun, you can lose interest in the tale pretty fast.

In fact, the numbing alteration characterized by the Inness example occurs in gallery after gallery at LACMA. Kentaro Nakamura’s starkly modern infusion of abstract principles of Japanese design into old-fashioned American Pictorialist photography is grouped with picturesque images promoting tourism--apparently because Nakamura’s 1926 subject is a breaking wave in the Pacific Ocean (surf’s up!). John Baldessari’s grainy 1967 snapshot masquerading as a painting is a bleakly witty meditation on the fate of art in a mass-media world, but here it’s said to demonstrate ecological issues of Southern California urban sprawl because the picture shows a mundane street in Chula Vista.

*

“Made in California” radically simplifies works of art, inventing pop literary contexts that dumb them down into false but easy-to-read visual sound bites. By contrast, powerful exhibitions maximize art’s complexity, which is what makes looking at art a singular experience finally worth having.

In fact, the five-part show divides California’s historical chronology into a series of big cliches, which I suppose is fitting for its pop-culture viewpoint. I’d call part one the New Eden, which is just the Old Eden that characterized an earlier myth of America, postdated to a time after Manifest Destiny. Part two, the Roaring ‘20s and the Depression, is Boom and Bust. Part three, 1940 to 1960, is War and Peace. Part four, 1960 to 1980, is Decline and Fall. Part five, 1980 to 2000, isn’t open yet--so be grateful for small favors.

Artists have been putting established images into new contexts to provocative effect ever since 1915, when Duchamp moved a snow shovel straight from the hurly-burly of a hardware store into the rarefied air of an art gallery. Through the shift in context, he changed a functional manufactured object into a sculpture whose new use was contemplation.

Today, context-shifting curators are behaving as if they’re artists, too. “Made in California” was organized by a whopping committee of 16 curators--led by Stephanie Barron, senior curator of modern and contemporary art and vice president for education at LACMA--which means there’s a whole lot of recontextualizing going on. But as the example of Inness’ ethereal landscape, Nakamura’s curling wave or Baldessari’s suburban photo-painting shows, it’s just an academic parlor game.

Conceived first as an extravaganza for the millennium, and second as a celebration of the state’s sesquicentennial, “Made in California” wants to be cutting edge. (How’s that for a Left Coast cliche?) But intellectually it’s a Johnny-come-lately show. Like a ripple arriving at the shore from a stone long ago thrown into a pond, it represents the depressing large-scale arrival into the art museum of an ineluctable shift in university education over the last 30 years.

Increasingly, universities have replaced the traditional study of art history with cultural studies. An interdisciplinary field whose focus tends to be sociological rather than artistic, cultural studies examines neglected aspects of contemporary life, including popular culture. Cultural studies are important, but for an art museum exhibition those studies form the background research before the show gets done. In “Made in California,” cultural studies are inscribed on museum walls, big-time.

And why not? For five years LACMA has been the largest American art museum headed not by an art historian but by a former university administrator, with no knowledge of the discipline. What should we expect?

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-6522, through Feb. 25. Closed Wednesday.