A Collective Effort

Museum exhibitions on the subject of private art collecting are frequently unsatisfying. A classic example was “The First Show,” the 1984 inaugural exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Lots of good postwar painting and sculpture from eight international collections was assembled to create a kind of tacit wish list for building MOCA’s permanent collection. “Buy art and give it to us,” was the unspoken--and uninspiring--subtext of the fledgling institution’s show.

A museum exhibition’s primary function is to provide a rigorous and illuminating platform for experiencing works of art. Here, it took a back seat to a genteel hucksterism, proselytizing on behalf of an art world social activity. However important that activity might be, “The First Show” was an odd duck: The art exhibition as public service announcement.

“East of the River: Chicano Art Collectors Anonymous” is another show that takes art collecting as its subject. In form and motive it’s quite different from the MOCA predecessor, not least because the Santa Monica Museum of Art, where the show opened last week, does not collect. “East of the River” is not a veiled plea for art gifts.

But, unfortunately, the show is just as unsatisfying. Guest curator Chon Noriega writes in the accompanying catalog that its goal “is less about what you see on the museum walls in and of itself than it is about an act of collecting taking place somewhere else.” He means that in a positive sense, of course, because the show wants to illuminate a community-oriented social dimension to the activity of collecting art. But the sentiment dooms the exhibition. “What you see on a museum’s walls” is always paramount to a show’s success, and here it wasn’t at the top of the curatorial agenda.

Chicano Art Collectors Anonymous is a loose affiliation of some 100 men and women who have been actively buying art since the 1980s. What you see on the Santa Monica Museum’s walls are disparate paintings, drawings, photographs and other works, some intriguing and many not, grouped according to one of seven representative collections.

As represented by the show, and as documented in the catalog by several essays and Harry Gamboa Jr.’s photographs, the collectors are Chicano and non-Chicano, married and single, straight and gay. Most are middle-class. They acquire work by artists who self-identify as Chicano, as well as by artists who don’t. Some live “east of the [Los Angeles] river,” as the title suggests, but others live west.

They also partake of the transformative humor common to marginalized groups, in which negative attributions made by others are appropriated and worn as a badge of honor--as when “bad” means good, or “queer” means distinctive. CACA, the group’s initials, suggests the bilingual vulgarism for excrement.

At the museum, the breadth of works is vast. Long-established artists such as Judy Baca, Daniel J. Martinez, John Valadez and the late Carlos Almaraz are included, as are many younger or less widely recognized artists. A visitor can go through four different collections and see, for example, a total of seven small works by Salomon Huerta, dating from 1993 to 1999, that together show his art’s evolution toward a stripped-down, tightly focused, eloquently mute form of painting the backs of people’s heads, for which he has lately become well-known.

Selections from two of the collections are installed as tableaux, meant to recall the collectors’ domestic environment. A corner of the living room of Mary Salinas Duron and Armando Duron is complete with a green velvet chair, carved wooden chest, area rug and a picture window, around which paintings, photographs and drawings are hung. A free-standing version of the hallway in the home of David Serrano and Robert Willson is jampacked with nearly 90 small paintings, prints and drawings, and it’s topped by artist Serrano’s own painted ceiling.

Conceptual art, abstraction, Neo-Expressionism, Pop, mural art, ceramics--clearly, every effort has been made not to limit, close off or narrowly define what is meant by the term Chicano art, or by Chicano art collector. CACA can be usefully read in two different ways at once: Chicano art collectors; or, Chicano art collectors.

This type of fluidity seems critically important to the show--especially given Chicano history. Most of the affiliates of CACA grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Chicano movement got underway, and Noriega points out that the period has informed their approach to collecting in the 1980s and 1990s. Chicanismo, the sense of being Chicano, is a collective social abstraction; pinning it down to something concrete, which could be embodied in a single material object like a painting, would run counter to that spirit.

While the aspiration to avoid narrowing the field is certainly appropriate, the exhibition that resulted is decidedly dull. Anybody who has been around contemporary art for any length of time knows people who acquire art in exactly this manner, and they’ve been in homes (or live in them) where art is displayed just like this.

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In fact much art, and maybe even most art, is acquired as an element of collective social activity. It’s part of the process of building a community of friends, a network of associates and a group of acquaintances whose common denominator is the particularity of art. It could even be argued that this social dimension is what distinguishes between an informal accumulation of art and a formal art collection.

Here’s how: An accumulation is diaristic, recording the social activity of being among artists (and other like-minded souls) and supporting artistic activity. By contrast, a collection begins precisely at the point where social activity stops.

Collecting begins when a single-minded concern for “what you see on the walls” takes over. An art accumulation is the residue of a dialogue among art people, but an art collection is established as the physical embodiment of a dialogue among works of art. Both are perfectly fine activities, but the distinction is not insignificant.

The show at the Santa Monica Museum had an added hurdle. Like most civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the Chicano movement benefited mightily from collective social principles derived from Marxist philosophy. Private art collecting, on the other hand, has never exactly been a Marxist ideal. So “East of the River” tries to parse the conflict through its emphasis on collecting as a social activity. Inviting visitors to a public museum into a “mock” living room and other representations of private domestic spaces seems intended to emphasize this social dimension. But it just feels fake.

Some themes just don’t lend themselves to an exhibition format. Yet perhaps the social aspect offered here as a core of Chicano art collecting could be approached another way.

Rather than attempt to “represent” it in an exhibition, why not embody it right there in the museum? Why not conceive of the galleries as a fluid and inclusive social space? Why not create a show that doesn’t just point to social activity going on “elsewhere,” but one that is itself productive social activity?

I’m not quite sure what such a show would look like. But I am sure of this: It would start with putting the highest curatorial priority on what you see on the museum’s walls. In the end, that’s where art’s most meaningful social dimension is always initiated.

* Santa Monica Museum of Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., (310) 586-6488, through Nov. 18. Closed Monday.