The current exhibition at the MoCA (Museum of Contemporary
Art, Los Angeles, in downtown L.A., on Grand Avenue, across the
street Northeast of the curvaceous and reflective Walt Disney
Concert Hall, perched atop a hill that overlooks the city like a
jewel, with a lavender mountain ridge as a backdrop) is titled
Collection: MOCA's First Thirty Years. To any one who has
frequented the museum even the past half a decade, many of the
works are familiar. Traveling southeast to northwest,
counterclockwise, through the galleries on the main level, one
sees Warhols and Rothkos and Tapies, and a Pollack and a Krasner,
that one has seen in recent exhibitions.
The first thing that is
different about this collection is the audio tour. Attendees are
greeted with a handout that instructs them to call 213-455-2926,
then press the number associated with the work. I really like
this idea. A whole audio tour with headphones seems like too much
of a commitment for our commercial and internet shortened
attention spans. I never pick up the headphones for that reason,
and, I have to sift through so much I do know to find the few
nuggets of information I don't know. With the cell phone tour, I
skipped over artists who have oversaturated contemporary art
history classes with their justifications and agendas, and only
called and pressed the number for the few pieces that either
intrigued (such as #12,Gautemalan-born Alfred Jensen, whose
colorful abstraction, A Quadrilateral Oriented Vision, looked
like kodachrome Braille but referenced the Mayan calendar) or
charmed me (Edward Ruscha's Chocolate Room, 1970-2004, which I
learned from the audio presentation had originally been presented
at the 35th Venice Biennial, and attracted both ants and
anti-Vietnam war protesters, who respectively consumed and vandalized the installation. As a bonus, the room gave the impression
one had walked into a giant chocolate scratch and sniff sticker).
The sound
bites, both textually on the wall, and on the cell, brought the artists' visions to life, as in Rosenquist's "dread of the drip"
or Ad Reinhart's tongue-in-cheek "12 Technical Rules" which
included "no color" and "no brushwork" beneath a very blue
painting. I was delighted as well that nearly one full room was
devoted to Franz Kline's signature black and white canvasses with
all their arduous mimicry of spontaneous movement. Really that
was enough to make the trip worthwhile. But this show doesn't
stop. It keeps giving until you realize you just might not be
physically or mentally capable of absorbing everything you should
without coming back for a second walk-through, with a fresh mind,
starting backward and going the opposite direction. Luckily, the
show started 11/15/09 and runs all the way to 5/03/10, so I will
have time to do just that.
The photography was mixed in with the painting, a curatorial
decision which at first created tension but soon seemed natural.
The most psychologically disturbing, emotionally wrenching work
was the photography. Nan Goldin, Larry Clark, and Diane Arbus
shot misfits, freaks, transvestites, heroin junkies, Down's
syndrome sufferers, skinheads, parents, triplets, and punks with
a candid yet carnival-like immediacy. In many of the paintings
you felt the subject was an idea or an object. Either it was an
idea about beauty or order or paint its self. With these three
photographers, you felt, the idea was to put back into art all
that painting had shut out of the door: places you, as a
high-minded art patron, don't go and people you, as some one with
an education, don't see.
Then there was sculpture: A row of Claes Oldenburg's pieces that
looked like giant cookies trying to mimic other real objects, but
made out of mashy paper mache. And a strange circle of Yayoi Kusama's silver
shoes in the middle of the Nan Goldin room, with what looked like
the sprout buds that grow on potatoes, except they were silver,
and growing out of silver shoes.
There were the instantly recognizable artist's: Ellsworth Kelly,
who has no real imitators. You can always spot one of his shaped
and brightly colored thin framed canvases. Sam Francis is another
whose signature (bright poured primary colors, often flirting
with all the edges of the picture plane) no one has encroached
upon. Dan Flavin is another. You see a flourescent light in a
museum that's not on the ceiling, and you know it's Dan
Flavin.
Almost like themselves; there was one Kenneth Noland whose
signature circle inside a circle inside a circle ring of pure
color didn't quite look like I'd imagined his work would look
after seeing it reprinted and thus scaled down so many times.
There was a Donald Judd that seemed too sleek and beyond
utilitarian to be a Donald Judd, because the deep blue seemed to
invite rather than impose. There was so much op art. Bridget Riley's Green & Magenta Diagonal, 1968, did more than pulsate. The even bands of peppermint stick alternating
magenta green magenta/green magenta green candy cane diagonal
stripes blurred, buzzed, popped, dilated and striated. It was
only with great effort that one could discern that the swatches
were of even width and proportion.
For further mind-bending, one only had to look to that screwball
cousin of sculpture, installation. A Bruce Nauman maze of
corridors led you just around the corner, to a televsion screen,
where you could just barely see yourself 15 feet behind where you
had just been. Or was it fifteen feet ahead of yourself? A Doug
Wheeler room made me feel like I was inside a movie where I had
died. The room was full of UV white light emanating from a
rounded glass cube mounted on the wall. You had to take your
shoes off before entering. Once acclimated to the inside, the
world outside seemed garishly yellow.
In closing, with over 500 works of art, this is a show within a show, one you can return to over and over. I urge you to go see for yourself.www.moca.org