Strides Here, Setbacks There

Here are the 10 most notable art exhibitions, activities and events of 2001, in chronological order:

1. Valie Export. In March, the Santa Monica Museum of Art’s “Valie Export: Ob/De+Con(Struction)” focused on the Austrian artist’s early feminist performance actions and Conceptual works, dating from the 1960s and ‘70s. It neatly ranked as the year’s most interesting solo museum show saddled with the least felicitous title.

2. Bamian Buddhas. During America’s culture wars a decade ago, it was rarely remarked that most of the organized agitators were fundamentalist Protestants, while most of the targeted artists had Catholic backgrounds. When the Islamist Taliban in March blew up the monumental Bamian Buddhas that had graced the mountains of northern Afghanistan for the better part of 2,000 years, no one missed the fact that contemporary religious iconoclasm had reached an unspeakable plateau.

3. Hirsch Perlman. For almost four years sculptor Perlman labored quietly in a back room of a rented house on Mt. Washington, where he taped together some empty cardboard boxes into rudimentary figures that he posed doing various activities: hanging out, despairing at the world, playing games, fighting, chatting among themselves, and finally being replaced by an odd, enormous head made from flotsam. Like a suburban Dr. Frankenstein, Perlman photographed the antics of his ramshackle clan with a pinhole camera, which made for a gritty, poignant display--in April at Blum & Poe Gallery--of the interior workings of artistic imagination.

4. World War II Memorial. Congress, apparently worried that a federal court would side with opponents’ persuasive legal arguments, took the flabbergasting step in May of exempting the planned World War II Memorial in Washington from all judicial review, thus assuring that the ugly monument will be built on (and despoil) the grounds of the unparalleled Lincoln Memorial. Of course, what grandstanding politician could possibly resist all those appeals from Tom “I’m not a WWII veteran, but I played one in the movies” Hanks?

5. Native American museum. The Pechanga band of Indians in Temecula entered into discussions last spring with the Southwest Museum about opening an inland branch of the venerable L.A. institution--home to one of the nation’s great collections of Native American art and artifacts. An alliance between the Southwest and the Pechangas would be a landmark, both for Indian philanthropy and direct Indian involvement with its cultural patrimony.

6. Emerging L.A. artists. At the UCLA Hammer Museum over the summer, “Snapshot: New Art From Los Angeles” took the initiative to perform a quick, broad, unpretentious survey of what’s happening now around town among mostly young, mostly unknown artists. The result was stuff to like, stuff to forget and stuff in between, complete with the most energizing opening party in memory. Definitely a lively endeavor worth repeating (the show, not just the party).

7. Santa Fe biennial. With voluptuous seduction as its leitmotif--not to mention a decided tilt toward the bounties of L.A. artists--”Beau Monde: Toward a Redeemed Cosmopolitanism” lifted New Mexico’s Site Santa Fe high above the humdrum level that has come to characterize it and the other four-dozen biennials that now crowd the global art calendar. To wit: The summer’s granddaddy of them all, Italy’s Venice Biennale, featuring an endless and dreary video arcade, was a bust. Again.

8. Tourist attractions. Some art museums have tied their fortunes more closely to the potentially lucrative tourist trade than to their local communities, making them vulnerable to vicissitudes in travel. In the wake of Sept. 11, and led by the Guggenheim’s new, two-venue branch on the Las Vegas Strip, art museums in major tourist destinations such as New York and San Francisco have been feeling the strain.

9. Luca Giordano. For its first Old Master painting show since 1988, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art brought together an eye-opening array of 77 paintings for the first-ever survey of Giordano (1634-1705), the Neapolitan Baroque painter. Cosmopolitan erudition found an eloquent spokesman in the bespectacled painter, and we found a new artist to admire.

(The show is still on view, through Jan. 20.)

10. The end of a publication. The LA-based magazine Art issues, deciding after nearly 13 years that its work was done, announced Dec. 8 that it was ceasing publication for aesthetic more than financial reasons. Like its London counterpart, Frieze, Art issues helped define the city’s explosive arrival as a major international production center for new art, all the while incubating dozens of writers.

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Christopher Knight is The Times’ art critic.