These Walls Can Talk--Eloquently

Last year, when the new Tate Modern opened in London to thundering international applause, only one feature of the monumental enterprise caused observers to pause and puzzle. The museum’s permanent collection had been installed in an unusual way. Rather than chronology, national origin, stylistic movement or other familiar organizing principle, the museum chose to hang its collection according to four familiar themes: history, the nude, landscape and still-life. The themes derive from those established by the 17th century French academy. At the Tate, they were made more elastic to accommodate things like pure abstraction, which didn’t exist 300 years ago.

In New York, meanwhile, the Museum of Modern Art had been experimenting with a similar thematic shuffling of its own celebrated collection. As MOMA prepared to shutter its building on West 53rd Street for a major renovation and expansion, the curatorial staff took the opportunity to organize a series of small shows in which the iconic permanent collection could be looked at in several ways. “MOMA 2000” grouped works according to categories like color or the repetition of an image.

Both installations had their strengths and weaknesses. At the Museum of Modern Art, part of the delight--and shock--of the endeavor simply came from where it was happening: MOMA’s collection, staggering in its breadth and depth, had always been the historical benchmark for 20th century art, and to see it shuffled was an inevitable surprise. At the Tate, by contrast, thematic hanging served another function: It helped obscure gaping holes in an erratic collection by shifting attention in an unexpected direction.

Both installations illustrated something else. Today’s roaring museum industry is dominated by temporary exhibitions, from international biennials to blockbuster extravaganzas, individual retrospectives and smaller, more focused surveys. Excitement and curiosity are certainly inspired by a museum’s temporary shows, but it’s easy to forget that, when all is said and done, the lasting proof resides in its permanent collection.

This fact was driven home the other day, during a visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art. MOCA has just opened a new installation of nearly 200 works drawn from its permanent collection, half at the main building on Grand Avenue and half at the Geffen Contemporary in Little Tokyo. Chief curator Paul Schimmel and curatorial associate Colette Dartnall oversaw the selection and installation, which will be on view indefinitely. Titled “A Room of Their Own,” it means to maximize the nucleus of MOCA’s collecting philosophy. The principle, which has nothing to do with themes, is simple but sound: Our understanding of an artist’s work is best achieved when it can be seen in some depth, through multiple examples, rather than in isolation. Whenever possible, the museum’s collection should reflect that fundamental truth.

“A Room of Their Own” does, emphatically so. About a third of the 61 artists are seen in some depth. Individual rooms are devoted to Mark Rothko (seven works), Franz Kline (seven), Helen Levitt (18), Robert Rauschenberg (10), Robert Frank (17), Claes Oldenburg (13), Diane Arbus (11), Robert Irwin (four), Brice Marden (four), Charles Ray (three) and more.

In between, other rooms feature one or two works by each of multiple artists to offer alternative directions, reflect divergent voices or provide an illuminating context. Sometimes, a room is devoted to a single work by one artist--Roni Horn’s aluminum and plastic sculpture of scattered words made concrete but kept elusive, a series of funky drawings by Mike Kelley, a haunting installation by Robert Gober that glimpses a regenerative underworld, a video projection by Pipilotti Rist that turns a visit to the grocery store into an erotic daydream.

Throughout, the level of quality remains exceptionally high. The result is perhaps the most beautiful, absorbing and satisfying installation of its collection that MOCA has yet achieved. It demonstrates something else too: There isn’t a city in America today--not New York, not Chicago, not Houston, not San Francisco--where a more impressive museum collection of contemporary art can be seen.

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The Grand Avenue installation focuses on examples of the postwar ferment in American art in the late 1940s and 1950s. Eight exceptional paintings, drawings and sculptures in the first room orbit around the blazing sun of Jackson Pollock’s “Number 1” (1949), a painting of such lyrical grace and carefully choreographed energy that it’s easy to lose yourself in the luminous liquidity of its dripped and poured paint. What an opener!

Next comes the Rothko room. The tactile animation and verve of the first gallery melt into a radiant glow of atmospheric color that, for all its ethereal buoyancy, seems somehow dense and totemic. Two early pictures from 1947 and 1949 show Rothko slowly building his chromatic forms from an abstract Surrealist vocabulary. Four big, brilliant canvases from 1953 to 1960 show him working at peak form. A smaller yet still skillful work in brushy browns, black and white from 1970 hits an almost desultory note of distraction and loss.

Around the corner, the saturation of color that is Rothko is suddenly erased by the drama of blacks and whites in Kline. He built his elegantly rough-hewn pictures with black paint, white paint and empty patches of canvas, as surely as a master carpenter builds a house with lumber, nails and shingles. The doorway between the Rothko room and the Kline room features a simple statement by Kline to the effect that his paintings are not black symbols painted on top of white grounds, like letters printed on a page. That’s about all a visitor needs to know to be drawn into the holistic organism of his work, where conflicting poles of positive and negative authority mesh in a taut field of tensile strength.

So far, hardly a word of interpretive text has appeared on MOCA’s gallery walls. One reason this installation is so powerful is that it ignores the increasingly common institutional tendency to aggressively insert the museum in between the work of art and the audience, lecturing on how we should regard what we see. Instead, these first three galleries perform a poetic choreography. Sensitive curatorial selection of specific objects and their thoughtful placement in spatial environments put them into conversation with one another and with viewers. The art resonates on a visual and experiential level.

It works in the galleries because that’s how artists work in their studios. Convincing art is always made as part of a conversation with other art that came before. The eloquence of MOCA’s installation far outpaces clumsy efforts at hanging verbose information panels on the walls or recording anecdotal soundtracks to be played through headphones.

At a recent panel discussion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Institute for Art and Cultures, a professor of American studies insisted on the supposed necessity of such jackbooted direction. Works of art, this unwitting enemy of art declared, are mute. He affably insisted that paintings and sculptures have no voice and do not speak. The museum’s responsibility is therefore to tell us what to make of them--to act as Edgar Bergen to the mute object’s Charlie McCarthy.

Four of this befuddled professor’s five fellow panelists themselves remained mute in the face of his cheerfully dismissive attack on art and artists. Their silence spoke volumes about the pernicious infiltration of academic ideology into museum practices today. Because museums must deal with objects while universities don’t have to, the two institutions are as different as day and night.

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Happily, MOCA’s “A Room of Their Own” is as articulate a refutation as could be hoped for. A work of art is actually like a vessel. It’s made to be filled up with meaning, which is poured in over time by sundry observers. But not all their meanings fit. The vessel has a specific form. The object can accommodate a lot, including ambiguity, but it can also overflow or be overwhelmed. Believing that a work of art has no say in the meanings invested in it is a good way to smash it to pieces.

Is MOCA’s permanent collection installation perfect? Of course not. At the Geffen, George Segal’s floor sculpture of ghostly figures reclining on an urban rooftop is way too large for the room. A fine pair of Sol Lewitt wall drawings reside uneasily in an entry hall.

More important, too few women are afforded “a room of their own” displaying sizable bodies of their work. (This is ironic, given that the title is borrowed from a Virginia Woolf essay on art, society and sexism.) Almost every artist represented is white. It is late in the day to be disappointed again by such omissions. These are serious issues MOCA must address.

Museum gallery space is also at a greater premium than ever, thanks to the rise of space-gobbling installation art and video projections, and the increase in scale of individual works during the past 25 years. The display of multiple works by individual artists has been made far more difficult. As 8-by-10 pictures, Helen Levitt’s 18 astonishingly intimate photographs of public street life in New York City during World War II can comfortably fit on a few walls, where they make for a small but satisfying survey of her work. A similar number of mural-size Cibachromes by Andreas Gursky, the young German artist whose enormous saturated photographs record the spectacular atomization of contemporary public life, would require most of the available collection space at the Geffen. A single terrific Gursky, showing browsers bobbing through the aisles amid a sea of discounted items at a 99 Cents Only store, must suffice.

Still, the installation’s trend-bucking refusal of themes in favor of emphasizing individual artists and what they make is refreshing and appropriate. The point is doubly made by a head-turning surprise.

MOCA is home to the nation’s greatest collection of hybrid works from the 1950s by Robert Rauschenberg, whose combination of painting, sculpture and collage was instrumental in exploding art’s definitions for the last half of the 20th century. Ten of them are given a room of their own, and one turns out to be an unexpected but most welcome visitor: “Factum II,” the pivotally important companion work to MOCA’s “Factum I” (both 1957), is on long-term loan from MOMA for their first-ever reunion in Los Angeles.