Finally getting to cut loose at the Getty

On Mondays, the Getty Center closes to the public, its assembled masterpieces get a little privacy, and the staff putters in peace. It’s all very calm. So why, two days ago, were hundreds of merry browsers crowded into an underground hallway with nearly 200 freshly hung artworks?

Why did those artworks include a just-completed portrait of museum volunteer Charles Gherardi’s ex-mother-in-law? Why was security supervisor Chris Petrakis plucking 16th century melodies on a guitar instead of barking into a walkie-talkie? And that barrage of sound emanating from the Herculaneum conference room -- was that a live cover version of “Resist Psychic Death” by Bikini Kill?

The answer to all of the above is that every two years, the staff and volunteers at the Getty Trust stage their own art exhibition, with performances and writers’ events thrown in. Monday afternoon marked the unveiling of the nonpublic show, a giddy event aimed at boosting spirits among 1,500 staffers, 600 volunteers and sundry other insiders after more than a year of public scandals and top-level resignations.

“It’s been a hard year,” acknowledged Getty special event specialist Anne Combs amid a mingling patio throng. “And we’ve pulled through.”

A moment later, Combs spotted the Getty Trust’s acting president, veteran administrator Deborah Marrow, and raised a glass to her efforts at building morale. Marrow grinned and resumed circulating quietly. To the question of how she would measure morale, she only shrugged.

“It’s all anecdotal,” Marrow said.

This Westside biennale, known as Getty Underground, began in 1998. Molly McLellan, co-chair of the event, said the budget this year was $13,000, same as it was in the summer of 2004, before The Times began running investigative stories on the lavish spending by the Getty Trust’s then-president, Barry Munitz, and the state attorney general’s office launched a still-open investigation of the tax-exempt institution’s financial practices.

The turnover in Getty executive offices since then has shaken the institution profoundly -- resignations since the last Getty Underground include museum director Deborah Gribbon, antiquities curator Marion True, Munitz, Munitz chief of staff Jill Murphy, vice president Bradley Wells, trustee Barbara Fleischman and trust chairman John Biggs. Even as Marrow mingled Monday, plans were afoot for a Tuesday announcement that trustee Louise Bryson would take Biggs’ place as chair of the trust.

If anyone wondered how the Getty’s rank and file have remained sane amid such tumult at the top -- or what form creativity might take at the world’s wealthiest arts organization -- Monday’s staggering variety of oils and acrylics, prints, photos, assemblages and sounds provided an answer.

“There’s supposed to be a Barry Munitz commemorative coin somewhere,” one young staffer whispered gleefully.

There wasn’t. But there was “Pages From My Journal” -- a cartoon examination of “Getty days and nights” by Ellen South.

The panels included kibitzing at the coffee cart, daydreaming at staff meetings and the fateful Friday afternoon in February when word of Munitz’s resignation careened around the Getty computer network.

“There is a God!” one character exclaims, stepping outside the museum to revel.

“We need to take a six-pack to Debbie’s,” says another. (Gribbon cited conflicts with Munitz when she resigned.)

“Now the Getty will be a good place to work again!” another character says.

South, a senior staff assistant in the museum’s sculpture and decorative arts department, was unavailable to comment on her contribution Tuesday. Getty spokesman John Giurini said artists were allowed one submission each, the works limited only by size and weight.

Stanley Smith, whose day job is overseeing the museum’s photo-documentation of its holdings, turned his own camera on supermarket-shelf color patterns for a photo collage that would look at home on the walls of the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Barbara Lee Furbush, a reference librarian at the Getty Villa, concocted an interactive mosaic project -- allowing her colleagues to fill in a series of circles with designs of their own devising and continuing a tradition of interactive contributions that began with the first Getty Underground.

Brenda Trejo, an imaging technician, collaborated with her boyfriend on a flute-and-steel-drums version of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.”

Robert Cangemi, a security guard, produced an oil painting of a winged nymph with pendulous breasts that might have graced the side of a van.

Zarina Bouinatcheva, a visitor services staffer at the Villa, framed a necklace and bracelet of her own design.

“I didn’t know she did jewelry,” said her colleague Paul Melendez, who had an original lithograph hanging a few feet away.

“Why,” somebody asked, gazing upon a portrait of a woman in the golden light of a drawing room, “did you paint a picture of your ex-mother-in-law?”

“Because I like her,” said artist Gherardi, a longtime Getty volunteer, standing before his work.

Other works examined autumn leaves in New Hampshire, the World Trade Center towers and a cat named Chester, while performers offered selections from Leonard Cohen, Pink Floyd, Beethoven and Babes in Toyland, along with original compositions. The Bikini Kill song came courtesy of the half-Gettyite band Magic Johnson, so named because Monday was Johnson’s birthday.

Later “underground” events will include two nights of readings by Getty creative writers and four lunchtime sessions at which Getty staff artists will talk about their works and techniques. At the end of the exhibition, the trust will print a black-and-white catalog with writing samples and art reproductions.

Monday, there were 198 artworks in all on display, along with 15 individual and group performers, many of whom had invested considerable time in the project.

“We did about three rehearsals,” said Jim Richards, a visitor services staffer who played trombone with the combo Three-Hole Punch. “We wanted it to be loud. Volume was key.”

The band explained itself further with a mission statement whose cadence had a certain curatorial ring. The music, it said, “explores the deep complexity of quotidian chaos, in so far as it relates to an indeterminate interplay of layered multiplicities.... “

Perhaps. But the result sounded like a three-round scuffle in an elephant enclosure. It also drew hoots of approval.