MOCA’s First 30 Years

The sprawling two-part exhibition of MOCA’s permanent collection on view at MOCA Grand Avenue and The Geffen Contemporary is notable for the diversity of work it incorporates into one show—everything from a Mondrian to a paint turd left by Paul McCarthy. Of course, there are also plenty of omissions, but they don’t take away from the sheer breadth of the material on display. Whether such curatorial broad-mindedness can be sustained or whether it will narrow into mere Broad-mindedness now that Eli Broad’s millions are the only ladder out of the financial hole the institution dug for itself is a topic much speculated upon over the past year. It is not a discussion I want to add to. More interesting to me is how the pieces on display relate to others and how they function as cultural symptoms.

To be sure, the collection has gaps, omissions, and redundancies that reveal a combination of curatorial and regional biases and the limitations of the collectors who’ve donated to the collection. Everybody I know has a list of these things. Some of what’s missing pops in your head when you think about the historical lineage of what’s on display. If you’re looking at Zoe Leonard’s crotch shots from the early ‘90s displayed alongside a couple of Kippenberger’s portraits in a bad boy/bad girl pairing, you might wonder where the “cunt art” produced by Judy Chicago and other feminist art pioneers here in California disappeared to. And following that line of thought, you might also wonder why Mary Kelly (“cunt art’s” conceptual nemesis) is not in the show. Both Chicago and Kelly, incidentally, were in MOCA’s 2007 WACK show but that show did not depend exclusively on MOCA’s holdings. Consider that, and you begin to appreciate why a contemporary art museum cannot simply rotate its collection but has to have the financial and curatorial wherewithal to collaborate with other institutions and collectors to stage thematic and historical exhibitions whose scope exceeds the limitations of any one institution.

As far as omissions go, it’s important to keep in mind that even this “largest-ever installation of MOCA’s permanent collection” does not display everything the museum owns. Still, anyone with a reasonable acquaintance with what’s been going on in Los Angeles in the last couple of decades will notice one or several omissions. Off the top of my head, I can name several who are not exactly unknowns in this city: Manuel Ocampo, Liz Craft, John Knight, Kim Jones, Meg Cranston, Tom Lawson, Tony Oursler, Skip Arnold, Monica Prieto, Lita Albuquerque …

But let’s consider what’s there.

One of the nicer moments going through the MOCA Grand Avenue installation is catching a whiff of chocolate as you approach what you discover to be a re-creation of Ed Ruscha’s Chocolate Room (1970). The work debuted in the summer of 1970 at the 35th Venice Biennale in Italy, and originally consisted of 360 sheets of paper silk-screened with chocolate and applied to the interior walls of the gallery space. The story goes that the work attracted anti–Vietnam war protesters who etched anti-war slogans into the chocolate-covered surfaces of the prints so that the installation became a spontaneous anti-war monument. It turns out that MOCA’s ownership of the piece means that it reprints the paper panels lining the room every time the piece is exhibited. In theory, this means that the public could be encouraged or at least allowed to reenact the public intervention that with the artist’s blessing transformed the Biennale installation into collaboration between him and his audience. However, when I visited, which was the same week that President Obama was giving his war is peace Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, the room was pristine and there were security guards keeping a sharp eye on visitors. In 1970, I suspect that the presence of the guards would not have prevented a less docile public from leaving a comment or two linking Afghanistan with Vietnam. As it is, the room might as well be a chamber in a Pharaonic tomb: the price of preservation within a museum has been the work’s mummification. Its function has been reduced to a purely art historical one, grandfathering Kelly Walker’s use of silkscreened chocolate in his work.

Contextualization sometimes works backwards. For example, Richard Prince’s Untitled (White Car Hood) (1992), displayed at the Geffen gestures toward the car-culture machismo that informed the material practices of the “Ferus Studs” who defined the Finish Fetish evident in the work of Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, and John McCracken. Because of the chronological arrangement of the artworks on display, Irwin, Kauffman and McCracken are all at the Grand Street building. You have to make the connection in your head. Prince’s Marlboro Man in the meantime has come to seem prescient of the cowboy posturing that replaced American statesmanship after 9/11.

Against the backdrop of events since and specifically the invasion and occupation of two distant countries by a rampaging American military, Paul McCarthy’s performances now seem like attempts to alert an indifferent world to the savagery that hides under the Disneyfied façade of American culture. The Tokyo Santa from 1999 featured in the Geffen building installation is a cross between Pere Ubu and Freddie Kruger. The association of this figure with that of the hyperphallicized expressive artist gifting the world with his effusions suggests that artist bad boys invert rather than dismantle the authority of their fascist fathers. I don’t think McCarthy ever gets beyond that bind. And in a sense the art world has been complicit in making sure he doesn’t get beyond it, since McCarthy’s productivity as an artist is of a piece with his compulsion to repeat.

This imperative to ceaselessly produce stuff and fill the large empty spaces of institutions like MOCA is for me one of the most oppressive features of contemporary art. Jim Shaw, who is himself one of its victims (and who has a number of his drawings included in the show), once referred to it in an installation by the clinical phrase Horror Vacui, a fear of empty spaces.

I cannot help but think that this horror that drives artists to incessant production is the apprehension that the time of art is over. Duchamp announced as much with his ready-mades but we’ve pretended that those were just provocations. We’ve read Benjamin on the death of the aura and technology’s reduction of art to distraction. But the aura of the artwork , which was its connection to the sacred, couldn’t be allowed to evaporate because, strangely enough, art cannot be commodified without some remnant of the sacred remaining associated with it, the paradox being that we need art to have something like a “soul” in order to trade it at a price above what mere goods fetch.

The last purchase that art had on something resembling spirituality was through the much-abused notion of criticality. That too is now used up thanks to the postmodernist conflation of critique and complicity. And despite attempts to reinvent the idea of community through subcultural affiliation (see Catherine Opie’s Self Portrait (1993)), community would seem to require a foundation that exceeds the atomizing power of capital, which ceaselessly uproots and disperses people.

The signs are that MOCA’s financial difficulties can eventually be overcome. The larger question of what art’s purpose might be beyond amusing jaded rich people or contributing a veneer of sophistication to a city that has long billed itself as the entertainment capital of the world will remain. Bill Viola’s installation Room for St. John of the Cross (1983) at least has the temerity to suggest that in Bob Dylan’s words, even art “gotta serve somebody.”

Published: Artscene, January 2010

Lines of Thought

“Pen and Ink” provides a fair sampling of the uses to which drawing is currently put. Formerly an adjunct of the other plastic arts, drawing long ago emancipated itself from this subordinate role and now is widely accepted as an autonomous medium. Two developments have contributed to this. One is the central position which the Idea has come to occupy in art under the impact of the avant-garde’s deliberate fusion of art and ideology. With this transformation, the “arts” became “media” (of communication). The diagramming of ideas consequently became a key function of art, and it was no accident that cubism’s decisive modernity rested on its suppression of painting in favor of drawing. The other factor was and remains the romantic preoccupation with the authorial and autographic element in art, a preoccupation that sacrificed the pictorial in favor of the gestural and led the way to the discovery of mark-making as an end in itself. Any superficial conflict between these two developments—which may be understood as late echoes of the Classical and the Baroque—is overshadowed, in the modernist context, by their common assertion of the flatness of the picture plane and of the tangibility of its surface, which is why diagramming and mark-making are to be found side by side in the work of Cy Twombly and in the graphic output of Joseph Beuys, two artists who between them limned almost all the possibilities which contemporary drawing continues to explore. What has happened in the intervening period is that diagrammatic activity increasingly serves a conceptual—and, by extension, political—end, whereas the autographic/gestural approach has mutated into a writerly one, the distinction between the two diminishing as drawing, and art in general, have become more cerebral. Most of the work in “Pen and Ink” qualifies as conceptual to a larger or lesser degree. None of it would qualify as a traditional “study after nature.”

Sixteen artists have contributed work to this exhibition, and in the length available to me here, I can do no more than make some remarks about the items I found most memorable. Foremost among these were Colin Gray’s group of nineteen small pieces. Until Pop came along, the diagrammatic image was acceptable only in the context of cubist formal analysis, where it could at least retain some association with the conventions of high art. Pop’s formal innovation was to bring the cubist enterprise down to earth by exploiting the inherently diagrammatic character of cartoon and display imagery, and it is this imagery that Gray employs here. Laid out in a grid, his ink and wash drawings suggest, a storyboard for some absurd tale of mindless and violent striving. The characters in the story are wheels, single or coupled together at the axle, bristling with revolving spades or attached to flailing armamenta of various kinds. They spin, they race around, they tear the ground, they go to pieces. The series is titled The Somme, after one of the most futile and bloody battles of World War I, and one could read into it many things—a funky Buddhist take on the hell wrought by passion, a satirical reference to California car culture, etc.—but what keeps these wheels spinning in my mind is the simultaneously horrific and ecstatic quality of their insane dynamism.

The interest in the three drawings by Dan Connally, on the other hand, derives from the light they shed on the source of the strain that troubles his painfully achieved paintings, a strain that fascinates me because it never enters my own work. One drawing consists entirely of abstract shapes and marks; in another, abstract forms predominate but are set off, Saul Steinberg-like, against the silhouette of a Mary Poppins(?) figurine; in the third, a man enters diagonally into the plane of the paper sporting an erection that is either blossoming or penetrating a flowery orifice. Upon reflection, it occurred to me that these drawings perhaps allegorize a conflict between compulsive mark-making and the inhibiting need to yoke this dangerously autistic, regressive activity to the production of a picture which rationalizes and validates it. Jacci Den Hartog’s drawings, on the other hand, seem to assert the exact opposite: that formlessness is an impossibility, and that form is not something one wrests out of chaos but rather something which chaos throws up ceaselessly and profligately.

Only the works of Raymond Pettibon and Theresa Pendlebury contain any real writing, but references to writing, oblique or otherwise, abound in this show.

A number of artists draw with ballpoints (Paul McCarthy, Russell Crotty and Sue William), while others (Crotty again and Bruce Conner) make a more overt reference to writing by adopting its “compositionless” structure. Crotty repeats variations of the same scribbled image on paper that has been divided into tiny rectangles by a grid. Galaxies is the hand-drawn equivalent of a star catalog and at ten-by-twenty two feet is cosmic in dimension as well as subject matter; yet Crotty’s writerlintss, while ultimately harking back to calligraphy and gesture, is a device that denies personal involvement or expression. Crotty is just filling in, like the kid who has to write “I will not talk in class” a hundred times. Bruce Conner’s Inkblot Drawings are more rewarding because, while equally impersonal, the inkblots function as elegant pictographs. Moreover, there is a wryly humorous congruence in these Gothic drawings between the artist’s activity of filling the page and the encouragement these blots give the viewer to fill them with projected fantasies.

Published: Artweek, May 19, 1994

After Helter Skelter: A Commentary

. . . the break with the world of childhood is recognized in native thought and expressed in the [initiation] rituals as a death and rebirth: to become an adult is to die to childhood and to be born to social life, since from that moment on, girls and boys may freely express their sexuality . . . the community also wishes, through the ritual practice, to show the young people that their pride in attaining the world of adulthood is at the cost of an irremediable loss the loss of the carefree, happy world of childhood.
—Pierre Clastres, “Indians of the South American Forests,” in Mythologies (compiled by Yves Bonnefoy)

In a society ridden by compulsions but, thanks to its secular pride, bereft of rituals, the direction of cultural transmission is reversed: it is the old who submit to the young, whose every word and gesture thereby acquire the resonance of oracular emission. I exaggerate but, if a show such as Helter Skelter is anything to go by, not by much. The juvenilization of art, already implicit in the romantic/modernist linkage between creativity and rebellion, would seem to have reached a point of exhaustion as an explicit equation between profundity and adolescent onanism.

Launched like a new Hollywood release, replete with box-office sticker warnings about potentially offensive language and imagery, “Helter Skelter” was a show that tried very hard to be provocative but which, on the whole, turned out to be remarkably unaffecting. Indeed, so unaffecting that I remember it chiefly as a demonstration of the peculiarly dissociated quality that characterizes adolescent attempts at provocation which typically rely on fantasized acts of transgression whose effortless plasticity makes them kin to the inconsequential outrages perpetrated in cartoons. So much in this show meant to be horrific–or at the very least unsettling—but almost nothing was, least of all, I might add, the texts incorporated in the catalog. Benjamin Weismann, for instance, manages, in the space of a few pages to cover everything from coprophagia to necrophilia but you know damn well he’s just showing off. It’s intellectual aerobics. He’s read William Burroughs and J. G. Ballard and Georges Bataille and whoever else is on the Punk Intellectual’s Reading List; he is one of the initiated. Rimbaud said that one must become a clairvoyant through a systematic disordering of the senses. Mr. Weismann and his Beyond Baroque pals apparently believe they have accomplished the same feat by spending some time browsing at the LACE bookstore.

What was painful about this show was watching an idea from which the breath of life fled a long time ago–the idea of avant-garde art–a corpse of an idea, wired up like Paul McCarthy’s humping dummies and made to go through a few extra spasms. At this point, that’s all it can do. One has to get used to that. It’s part of growing up.

Published: Artweek, May 21, 1992

Gimme Shelter: Helter Skelter at MOCA

I
If Cézanne were a young artist today I wouldn’t rate his chances of ever reaching artistic maturity very high. As a beginner he spent just over a decade, from 1859 into the early 1870s, painting, drawing and doing watercolors in which rape, murder and calamity are incessant themes. Until recently, they tended to be summarily, and I think rightly, dismissed as the thrashings of an immature novice. To me they seem to allegorize unconsciously Cézanne’s desperate struggle to master and possess the medium of painting, and I see their violence as issuing from the frustration suffered by a young painter with grand ambitions who is as yet incapable of accepting that it will take a lifetime of struggle and dedicated application to realize his goals. As such, the young Cézanne appears to me as the prototype of the young modern artist who must choose between a facile exploitation of shock and voluntary submission to the rigors of self-mastery or, on another level, between perpetual adolescence and the acquisition of wisdom.

In this particular case, what saved the artist from painting trash for the rest of his life was that in his lifetime there was as yet no developed market for it. Rebuffed, Cézanne retired to the country and learned to paint. Less than a century after his death we are tantalized by crowd-drawing museum exhibitions that advertise themselves as displays of “alienation, dispossession, perversity, sex and violence.” In the opinion of some we have come a long way.

II
Artist Jim Shaw, whose collaborative comic-strip painting Horror Vacua is included in Helter Skelter, was quoted in an L.A. Times Calendar-section feature on artists who are also involved with rock music—a dual interest shared by many of the artists in the MOCA show—as saying: “I’m addicted to music. . . . It moves me in a way art rarely does….” In the same article, artist Tom Henry III says: “When I saw Aerosmith in concert I was mesmerized. There is no way I can make a painting that powerful. . . .”

It is a peculiarity of these artists who derive so much of their inspiration from music that they do not consider Abstract Expressionism-which one would assume to be the perfect vehicle for artists who want their work to embody and release intense emotion and a feeling of abandon-as an option. Perhaps this is because, as Nietzsche was the first to understand, form-giving of any kind is Apollonian. It is mediated. Only music is Dionysian. The artist who was blown away by the Aerosmith concert had experienced a mystical fusion with the One and for him art per se could hereafter only qualify as a half-measure, a memento of the climactic experience or, like an image of the god, a sign post that directs the initiated toward contemplation of the mystery, which by its very nature is incommunicable. This particular artist paints “wall-size, Day-Glo canvases lettered with names of hard-rock bands–Motley Crue and Van Halen.”

I didn’t come across anything like that at Helter Skelter but the very reference in the title to the Beatles tune is sufficient warning that this was a show with a soundtrack. Without this soundtrack, which should ideally be played at deafening volume, a visit to the show turns into the equivalent of a daytime visit to an underground night club: You encounter all the appurtenances of the musical culture but in the absence of the music itself they seem as deflated and limp as a leather jacket hanging in a closet. What is ironic about this is that many of the artists in Helter Skelter are unhappy products of CalArts and are reacting against their former alma mater’s excruciating political correctness and enervated conceptualism. It appears, however, that despite their best intentions they have inherited the conceptual disbelief in the autonomy of art. They have, it is true, substituted rock ‘n’ roll for post-structuralist theory as the underpinning of their art, but in their inability to formulate art that is itself like music, rather than merely an appendage to it, they remain the victims of an art education that deliberately withheld from them the technical and moral means to allow them to express their deepest feelings.

III
Bourgeois notions of propriety and decorum seem to have survived the anti-bourgeois ’60s by reinventing themselves as “feminist” virtues thereby guaranteeing the power of the indecorous and the improper to continue to give offense. The epithets of opprobrium may have changed-“sexist” tends to do service where in bygone years “indecent,” “crude,” “rude,” “dirty,” “nasty,” “licentious,” “lewd” or just “bad” might have been employed- but there is a remarkable continuity between the things that sin against political rectitude and those that used to just plain sin. It is therefore fitting that the real bad boy of this show, the one artist who managed to provoke feminist ire by his inclusion, is Robert Williams who is neither boyish (he is going on 50) nor, in the traditional sense, an artist, having started his career as a customizer of hot rods for Ed “Big Daddy” Roth and then gone on to work in cartoon strips and to become, in 1968, one of the original co-founders of Zap Comix.

An odd combination of literary erudition, hot rod panache and nasty lowbrow humor, manic and uninhibited by any scruples, the glorified comic book panels (in oil on canvas) that represent Williams in Helter Skelter tend to make the more knowing work of younger artists like Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw look positively precious and forced if not downright pretentious. I submit that in his own way Williams is a genius of sorts, the inventor of an insanely coherent, pataphysical universe in which as a matter of course toddlers are consumed as jerky (shades of Swift?) and the tooth fairy is “a beatnik bitch . . . after your calcium.” In a show that wears its angst on its press releases, Williams is alone among the 16 artists represented to convey through his work an almost Buddhist sense of life as the domain of karma, life as a collision of monstrous appetites and obsessions, in the context of which it is futile to attempt to distinguish between evil and raw vitality.

This intimation of the fundamental mendacity of moral discrimination, so alien to traditional Western notions of morality (in other cultures it is accepted as a given) remains, even in these secular times, a deeply troubling one, indeed so troubling that rather than “relativism” what it has spawned is a tendency toward compensatory moral stridency whose manifestations in this country are the coincidental development of, on the one hand, the fundamentalist right and, on the other, the ascendancy within the academy of an equally constrictive leftist-feminist orthodoxy. And with this heightened moralism (reflected in the public’s censorious preoccupation with politicians’ sex lives) we witness a corresponding intensification of the general conviction that the world is going to hell.

Nietzsche’s astute observations on the origin of modern pessimism are pertinent here. “The most powerful desires of life . . .” he observes in The Will to Power have been “slandered,” they have been rendered into transgressions. “So a curse weighs on life.” For it is abundantly clear from their persistence throughout human history that greed, cupidity, cruelty and the egotistical urge to dominate others are intrinsic to life. Not only have all utopian attempts to dispense with them failed but invariably such attempts prove to be driven by the very urges they wish to abolish: the will to power never rests, it merely changes disguises. In that sense, life itself is a sin, inherently impure and always incongruent with the ideologies of its putative improvers. Pessimism originates, therefore, when the refractory incorrigibility of the world convinces the latter that something is fundamentally and terribly wrong with the world, when in fact what is hopelessly wrong is the presumption that anyone is in a position to pass such a judgment. As Nietzsche is at pains to point out, pessimism says nothing about the world. What it betokens is only the pessimist’s lack of worldliness. For those who would be saints, or, more accurately, for those who would have us all be saints, the world is hell. And among the demons to be encountered in it is Robert Williams.

IV
Nietzsche’s take on pessimism-that it is the product not of a moral deficiency on the part of existence but of a surfeit of morality on the part of those who would presume to judge it-is useful to keep in mind when going through this exhibition because Helter Skelter is an exhibition custom designed to express the frustrations of the ideologically insular. Surprise, surprise: The world at large is not politically correct. Commodity addiction is rampant, “commodification sucks the world of life” and Marxist dweebs get no respect (they get teaching jobs at CalArts). No wonder Lane Relyea in his introductory essay to the exhibition is moved to barely disguised rhapsody over Charles Manson:

In his eyes the LaBiancas [a couple murdered by Manson and his followers] belonged to a different species. Moreover they typified that species; to Charlie [Relyea is on a first name basis] they were no more than display animals in the wax museum society presented itself as, only abstractions, examples to be used in the delivery of his crude poli-sci lectures. And so his pupils, as instructed, turned the LaBiancas’ bodies into writing tablets, their blood into ink. ¹

And that I guess showed them. Gee Lane, while you were at it maybe you should’ve put in a word for PoI Pot. You know how he felt about commodities.

I daresay the most likely reason Mike Kelley is so big with this crowd is because like Warhol, but even more so, he traffics in recycled images of the most banal and debased sort and as such serves as an ideal instrument with which to rub the bourgeois’ nose in the dirt of capitalist culture. His contribution to Helter Skelter is Mike Kelley’s Proposal for the Decoration of an Island of Conference Rooms (with Copy Room) for an Advertising Agency Designed by Frank Gehry which features blown up copies of fax jokes. The real joke here, however, is on those who profess to find “darkness” in samples of lowbrow humor, thereby betraying what a bunch of sheltered ninnies they are.

To varying degrees the artists represented in Helter Skelter owe their inclusion to their ideological sponsors’ perception that their work can perform the same function as Mike Kelley’s. Even within the narrow purview of this intention, however, there are large variations in quality. For instance, Nancy Rubins’s Trailers, Drawings, and Hot Water Heaters, a gargantuan heap of same, does a better job than Chris Burden’s Medusa Head at suggesting the world is turning into a huge garbage dump. At seven tons, the Burden piece is seven tons too heavy. It’s a grim, one-liner joke that would have been done justice by a cartoon. But then I wouldn’t want to be the one to take Burden’s scale models away from him.

The assemblages and paintings of Llyn Foulkes and Manuel Ocampo are both characterized by an incredibly crude didacticism, but in both instances the work somehow transcends the intention behind it. Ocampo, for one, seems to have an almost limitless range of techniques he can resort to in order to distress the surfaces of his huge canvases. The resulting surfaces are full of textural incident, like old decaying murals. The recurring images of swastikas, hooded ecclesiastics, amputation, and gun-toting colonialists, painted in ex-voto style are unremittingly crude in their symbolism but the imagery is oddly congruent with Ocampo’s brand of painterliness and you end up admiring these things as strangely suggestive, exotic artifacts. Foulkes’ technique and content are also congruent but in a very different way from Ocampo’s. Foulkes is one of the original California beatnik assemblagists and he shares with the likes of Ed Kienholz and Bruce Conner a predilection for grottiness. His messages, like Ocampo’s, are crude and simplistic but Foulkes somehow manages to convert them into genuinely creepy images, creepy less for their overt content than for what they reveal about the claustrophobic mind that incubated them. For sheer emotional impact there is simply nothing in this show to match these extremely unpleasant works and I suspect this is so for a number of reasons, not least of which is that Foulkes is not preoccupied with proving how hip he is. Then too, there is nothing cursory about his assemblages. Quite the contrary. They couldn’t possibly be fussier and it is this that gives them their febrile, delirious quality.

The rest of the work in this show is inconsequential. Paul McCarthy’s Garden which sports two male dummies, pants around their knees, one humping a tree, the other humping the ground, is notable only for the shamelessness with which it exploits shock. Richard Jackson’s clock-faced room Big Time Ideas, on the other hand, is one of those conceptual works which promises more as an idea than it delivers as a realized work. The same might be said of Raymond Pettibon’s A Yarn Spun to No Mend, a roomful of his annotated drawings tacked to the walls with no particular order and only fragments of sequences discernible. Again the idea is interesting, commendable even, but Pettibon’s art is too delicate and tentative to hold the wall in this circus of a show and it just ends up looking tatty.

V
Amy Gerstler, whose poetry and fiction are included, along with contributions by several other writers, in a book that serves as both catalogue and a self-contained anthology, had this to say about the rationale behind this exhibition:

The way the show was explained to me, the curators suggested that they believed LA. had something to prove . . . that it is time to consider that we have as much weight intellectually and artistically as New York. So how are we going to demonstrate this? We are going to show work that is dark and convoluted, maybe twisted and depressed, and maybe sexual-whatever-so New York sees that we, too, can hook our claws into heavy themes.” ²

Did you get that New York? We’re closing the darkness gap.

1. Lane Relyea, “Art of the Living Dead” in Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s (MOCA), p. 33-34.
2. “A conversation with Amy Gerstler,” Artweek, Vol. 23, No. 11, p. 11.