TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/042092/04209935.000

Text File | 1992-09-10 | 6.4 KB | 133 lines

                                                                                REVIEWS, Page 90

ART

Dada for the Valley Girl


By ROBERT HUGHES

    SHOW: Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990S
    WHERE: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
    WHAT: Painting and Sculpture by 16 Artists

    THE BOTTOM LINE: Helter Skelter? The title says it all.
You thought the art of the 1980s was bad? This is worse.


     "The risks of such a title are apparent," the catalog of
the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art prissily begins, "
-- that the grisly and gruesome Charles Manson murders would be
glorified, that the show would seem to be about the sixties .
. ." Aw, c'mon, just because we call an exhibition "Helter
Skelter," you wouldn't necessarily think better of Charlie
aging away there in maximum security, would you? A pity the
curator in question, Paul Schimmel, won't come out with it: We
want a lurid title but, hey, we're a museum. Maybe we need a
bit of sensationalism to, as they say, "reach out" and "address
the concerns of" the Los Angeles trendy art crowd, a fairly
debased rabble, we feel, and with shorter memories than mice.


    Anyhow, though the level of originality in the American
art world is bottoming out -- a fact abundantly confirmed by
this show -- the risk of actual copycat crime is low. The
critic, on seeing this heavily promoted exhibition, might be
tempted to practice a few arabesques on its thick skin with the
carving knife, but the sheer dumbness of the art itself is a
kind of body armor. Really bad art is probably invulnerable to
criticism, and so it is with this slumgullion. If you thought
new American art couldn't get much worse than it was by the end
of the 1980s, visit MOCA and learn. It isn't Charles Manson you
think of in "Helter Skelter" but John Milton on the topography
of the netherworld: "And in the lowest depths, a lower depth."
The thesis of the show is that just below the sunny promotional
surface of Los Angeles there is a stratum of alienation, murder,
bad dreams and apocalyptic fantasies that reflect themselves
inexorably in art.

    This, to put it mildly, is not an unfamiliar trope. It is
almost as old as Los Angeles itself -- the other side of its
perennial cultural struggle between civic boosterism and social
derangement. It has been implanted in the city's self-image for
at least 60 years, reflected in innumerable films, novels,
detective stories, photography. It begins long before Nathanael
West's The Day of the Locust, 1939, with its Ensor-like cast of
pathological misfits and its painter, Tod Hackett, dreaming of
his apocalyptic canvas of the burning of the city -- a vision
that would be made real by the 1965 Watts riots. It continues
long after the movie Blade Runner, 1982. It is not news; but to
qualify as news (at least in a museum), this imagery would need
to be embodied in some fairly convincing new works of art.

    Not this time. Installed in the vast, operatic spaces of
MOCA'S industrial annex, the Temporary Contemporary -- once a
police-car garage -- the show looks like the Gotterdammerung of
academic Postmodernism: inflated, whining, self-indulgent and
occasionally clever-clever. Given thousands and thousands of
square feet in which to diffuse itself, the intellectual vacuity
of the artists is such that their molecules of thought hardly
even bump together.

    So at one end, you have pointless conceptual art: Richard
Jackson's room, whose walls and ceiling are covered with
hundreds of clocks, all telling the same time; or, with a tiny
smidgen more sculptural content, Liz Larner's visually inert
installations of hanging chains and mirrors. At the other end,
you have the stale recycled leavings of Pop. Charles Ray does
fiber-glass mannequins that look like dumb footnotes to the far
more exacting work Duane Hanson and John De Andrea were making
20 years ago. Nancy Rubins would like you to know that she is
scared by the production of junk in our bulimic, gorge-and-puke
culture, and so she constructs a huge semi random object out of
trailer homes and hot-water boilers, laced together with steel
cable, like a maximally inflated Rauschenberg. It provides one
of the show's few faint sensations of risk -- but gravitational,
not cultural.

    At its none too impressive best, the show offers Chris
Burden's Medusa's Head, a seven-ton lump of scarred, dyed
concrete and rocks laced by serpentine model-train tracks and
hanging by a chain -- a fearful image of a terminally polluted
planet. Nothing else in MOCA measures up to Burden. Size is not
scale, a fact almost forgotten by American artists, but by none
as completely as Victor Estrada, whose Baby/Baby is 30 ft.
long, made of urethane foam, and depicts an enormous pair of
Siamese twins whose bodies meet in an imposing penis that,
rising 16 or so feet toward the roof, becomes a mushroom cloud.
At least this gross bibelot has some authenticity, as do Manuel
Ocampo's frantic, heavy-handed but indubitably sincere paintings
in an idiom derived from Filipino popular religious art. You
can't say that for much of anything else here.

    It is odd, in a show so dedicated to pretensions of
confrontation, to see how little real cultural alertness it
contains. Hey, folks, guess what? This culture sucks, and we're
part of it! In a daze of bad-boy posturing, the artists wander
passively along, picking up images the way a marshmallow picks
up carpet fuzz. When Mike Kelley builds a set of offices and
covers their walls with blowups of the kind of semi-dirty-joke
drawings that people in the mailroom fax to one another to
relieve the boredom of the workday, what kind of point is being
made? None that has any satirical, let alone aesthetic, value.
It's just visual zit popping.

    Probably the nadir of this Valley Girl Dada is reached by
Raymond Pettibon, whose fatuous, vaguely wistful scribbles, done
in a comic-book style but so ineptly that he couldn't land a
job as an inker for real comic books, are one long
free-associational natter. "Pettibon," says the catalog, "puts
his finger on the restless anxiety underlying adolescent
experience." Wrong digit; it's his toe, with which he apparently
draws. But adolescence is key here. America invented it; Los
Angeles glorifies it; and for the moment, MOCA is its Louvre.
Nobody could see this show without realizing what a scam the
making of art-world reputation has become.