Lots of ‘Sunshine,’ Little Light

HUMLEBAEK, Denmark —  With the Cold War over, Europe’s future is no longer circumscribed by superpower struggles to the East and West. Fortune’s enduring uncertainty remains, but its focus is shifting.

The region is trying to sort out its changing identity, as it groans beneath the weight of powerful stresses and strains that make European Union a perilous issue. What will--indeed, what can--the new Europe be?

History is always a good place to start the search for answers, and the tangled hunt for essential roots to the new Europe has led in many directions--including Southern California. “Sunshine & Noir: Art in L.A., 1960-1997” is a daringly ambitious new exhibition at a European museum that plainly seems framed by the question.

The idea that Europe should look to the cultural history of L.A. as one source for its destiny takes a little getting used to, because the traffic usually flows the other way: Americans are more attuned to looking toward Europe, and toward Europe’s de facto outpost in New York, as our modern fountainhead.

But make no mistake: L.A. has become a wellspring of its own. Modern mass culture has finally gone global, and mass culture is inescapably American. Los Angeles is its historic capital city.

“Sunshine & Noir” is the first comprehensive effort by any museum anywhere to examine the history of artistic production in the place that is the sine qua non of postwar mass culture. The exhibition--organized by director Lars Nittve and curator Helle Crenzien for the prestigious Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, an hour’s drive north of Copenhagen--brings together work by 49 artists. If its reach exceeds its grasp--and by a not inconsiderable margin--it is nonetheless a pioneering show.

(Incidentally, a clever and spirited exhibition of recent L.A. architecture can be seen in downtown Copenhagen, at the Danish Architecture Center, Gammel Dok, through Sept. 14; the show has an Internet catalog: https://www.kulturnet.dk/gldok.)

The Louisiana, gorgeously perched on a bluff overlooking the sound that separates Denmark and Sweden, has a large and enviable collection of international postwar art. For nearly 40 years it has been an important outpost for advanced ideas in contemporary European and American culture. “Sunshine & Noir” extends that progressive tradition.

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The entrance to the show is a sunny corridor lined on one side with windows and on the other with Chris Burden’s “L.A.P.D. Uniform” (1993), a row of 12 identical blue police uniforms seemingly authentic right down to their badges and billy clubs.

Authentic, that is, with one exception: Each of Burden’s police uniforms is 6 feet 10 inches tall. Visually, the big uniforms--made in the wake of the 1992 riots yet never exhibited in Los Angeles--propose their wearers as a clan of ominous giants, quietly articulating the outsize role the LAPD plays in both the private experience and public perception of life in Los Angeles.

Yet it isn’t just L.A. that reverberates in Burden’s piece or in its choice as the first work visitors encounter. The row of identical garments hanging on a gallery wall also recalls a famous multiple work by influential German artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986).

Beuys, who at 19 had flown with Hitler’s Luftwaffe, was of a generation of German artists preoccupied with grinding guilt for Nazi atrocities. He went on to produce a diverse body of shamanistic works concerned with the redemptive power of art. Among them is a group of 100 identical business suits, each cut from heavy gray felt, which hang on the wall.

You can’t look at the Burden without thinking of Beuys. While each work claims its own specific tone and context, both have something to say about the profound need to acknowledge the depths of historic social injury and about the spiritual strength that comes from facing present fears.

The Beuysian entrance to “Sunshine & Noir” is also a concise reminder that we will be seeing L.A.’s art from a distinctly European perspective.

Sometimes, as in the stunningly beautiful installation of Jim Isermann’s deft hybridizations of painting and sculpture with handicraft (weaving, quilting, hooking rugs), the Danish Modern context offers an unexpected resonance. Elsewhere, the curators run into trouble.

Nittve and Crenzien wisely propose no monolithic theme. Instead, today’s idea of art as a largely individualist pursuit that shuns conceptions of purity common to older, Modernist art is instead seen as a loose thread that has always twisted and turned through the history of L.A.’s painting, sculpture and installation work.

Juxtapose in your mind, say, Isermann’s 1996 sculpture “Cubeweave,” which is upholstered in a vibrantly colored, hand-woven plaid fabric, and one of Larry Bell’s industrially fabricated iridescent glass boxes, made 30 years before. Both cubes are structured on the quintessential Modern form of the grid, yet neither embraces its purist aspirations.

The European perspective also explains the show’s chronological span--1960 to 1997. Dozens of promising artists have emerged recently, but the mid-’90s artists arbitrarily chosen for the show--Jennifer Pastor, Jason Rhoades, Diana Thater--tend to have shown rather widely in Europe before, while such equally gifted but uninvited artists as Ruben Ortiz-Torres, Victor Estrada and many others have not.

At the other end, it was in the 1960s that L.A.’s art began to enter international consciousness.

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L.A.’s contemporary history really begins in the 1950s, though, as the postwar dynamo revved into gear. It’s difficult to understand what happened after without that remarkable foundation.

The tensions among traditional handicraft, space-age technology and painting and sculpture that echo later in the work of Bell and Isermann first erupted in 1954, in the ceramics studio of Peter Voulkos and friends. But Otis clay, as their ceramics have come to be called, is missing from the show.

So are the brilliant 1980s porcelain sculptures of Adrian Saxe, contemporary heir to the great Voulkos lineage. As a result, the exquisite ceramic objects by Ken Price from 1973 and 1995, which are exhibited, seem falsely sui generis.

Another critical history that doesn’t register is the pivotal shift in black consciousness in American art, which happened between 1965 and 1975. L.A.’s artists played a decisive role, but a lone group of early 1970s prints by David Hammons, in which the artist inked his own body as if it were a printing plate, appear to have come out of nowhere.

In fact, Hammons’ prints were a radical response to an established tradition of painted or sculpted depictions of black humanity, which had been dominant since the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. They are part of a landmark change--part political, part spiritual--toward a new conception of blackness, which could easily have been conveyed by also showing Noah Purifoy’s seminal 1965 assemblage “Watts Riot” and Bettye Saar’s potent 1972 feminist riff on black power “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima.”

For a panoramic introductory survey such as this, selection of specific works is critical. Connoisseurship requires thorough knowledge of each artist’s work, but here the selection is erratic.

David Hockney’s 1967 “A Bigger Splash” is a classic picture of the wake left by a diver just vanished into a backyard swimming pool. Its vacant sunniness is given added effect by having been installed immediately after Burden’s grim police uniforms.

More recently, Paul McCarthy’s “Bossy Burger,” a 1991 video installation with stage set, is among the strongest works in his influential career. Nancy Rubins, who makes on-site installations, has risen to the occasion with a magnificent carbuncle of old water heaters and rusty radiators, all trussed up with steel cable and suspended in space.

Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode, Doug Wheeler--other artists are also appropriately represented. But not everyone fares as well.

John McCracken arrived at his signature lacquered planks of fiberglass and wood, which bridge the space between floor and wall, in 1966-67. Why show just two much later works, from 1985 and 1990?

Alexis Smith’s “Ring of Fire” (1982) is a fine example of her distinctive brand of Pop environmental assemblage. But historically speaking, 1980’s “Hello Hollywood” is her breakthrough work in the genre.

Mike Kelley’s sculptural installation of punishment devices, first shown in 1992’s Documenta exhibition in Germany, is certainly representative of his wicked wit. But for a survey like this, Kelley’s “More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid,” his seminal 1987 assemblage of stuffed animals, is the critical work to have.

Sam Francis’ best paintings date from the 1950s--too early for this show, so absent. With crucial artists like Vija Celmins and Bruce Nauman, who are currently the subjects of competing museum retrospectives in Germany, essential loans were perhaps impossible to secure; they are not shown to best advantage.

In all, more than half the 49 artists are represented by work that is either not their strongest or historically inappropriate. That’s far too high a percentage.

The problem might be explained by a look at the exhibition checklist. It includes about 110 discrete works, plus large suites of drawings by Raymond Pettibon, photographs by Dennis Hopper, videotapes by Bill Viola and small mixed-media pieces by Jim Shaw.

Overall, fewer than 20 works were borrowed from public collections, which often own critical pieces. The show instead relies heavily on work in commercial gallery inventories.

Another big disappointment is the show’s multi-essay catalog, which will live on long after the exhibition has closed. Although poised to become an indispensable document, it has a hole in its heart.

Several notable authors with extensive knowledge of the scene--Anne Ayres, William R. Hackman, Russell Ferguson--do labor valiantly at the impossible task of summarizing large and unwieldy volumes of art and time. And irascible urban social critic Mike Davis, whose acclaimed 1990 book “City of Quartz” is the source for the exhibition’s title, offers a typically blunt, insightful meditation on the city’s present social landscape, laced with turbulent currents of pessimism and hope.

The real chasm, though, is encountered in the individual artists’ entries, which are also unfortunately adapted as wall labels in the galleries. These brief sketches, compiled by local writer Terry R. Myers, should be the substantive core of the catalog, the sun around which all satellites revolve.

Instead, the vapid entries read like space fillers, while the slipshod biographical and bibliographical information is mostly useless. Myers, who has lived in Los Angeles only since 1994, apparently knows less about this art than the Europeans who are meant to be enlightened by the show.

The Louisiana has obviously had some difficulty with its otherwise enthusiastic reckoning of Los Angeles’ art. But the museum’s bold desire to understand artistic production in mass culture’s “city of stupid dreams” is a testament to the magnitude and significance of the subject. A resolute search for roots is never easy.

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* “Sunshine & Noir” continues through Sept. 7. It travels to the Wolfsburg Art Museum in Germany in October, to the Rivoli Castle in Italy in April 1998 and to the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum in Westwood in September 1998.