Little goes a long way

A darkened auditorium. Two empty chairs onstage. Three full bottles of Arrowhead spring water: two on a table, one on the floor. Why did they leave, these two people who are no longer here? Are they lost, confused -- thirsty?

Perhaps they did not leave at all; perhaps they have not yet arrived.

These thoughts needle the mind as the hypnotically repetitive music of Minimalist composer Philip Glass plays in the Ahmanson Auditorium, downstairs, downtown at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. The work of other Minimalist musicians, including Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Meredith Monk, follows in a continuous loop.

Spending a few minutes as the sole spectator at a nonappearance by two people provides the perfect mood enhancer for the main event: “A Minimal Future? Art as Object: 1958-1968,” a landmark retrospective of the Minimal movement, continuing through Aug. 2.

Who comes to an exhibition of Minimalist art in Los Angeles? To find the answer, one must tear oneself from the dark velvet underground to head upstairs to brightly lighted galleries containing 150 objects from an art movement that, according to museum notes, “propelled a redefinition of the structure, form, material, and production of a work of art, as well as its relationship to physical and temporal space, to other objects, and the spectator.”

Such a description surely does not forecast peaceful landscapes and still-lifes with fruit, pastel waterlilies or self-portraits with one ear -- all available on tote bags and note cards in the gift shop. A certain degree of challenge is implied.

And, for the most part, on a recent Friday, the visitors -- a mix of art professionals who reveled in the opportunity to see the early work of familiar artists, students on assignment and the merely curious -- seemed up to that challenge.

Victoria and Kevin McDaniel of Orange County were celebrating their 20th anniversary with a trip to Los Angeles and decided to drop in with three of their seven children: Josh, 18, Tyler, 16, and Liam, 9 months. “We just wandered in off the street,” said Victoria McDaniel. “Obviously we don’t know everything the tour lady was telling people, but some of the pieces are just fun.”

Son Josh was having fun too: “Some of them go right over your head, but some of them play games with perspective,” he observed. The family said baby Liam particularly enjoyed an installation of large, colorful blocks.

Amalia Kaufman, a tourist from Israel, struggled with the language but was clear on her feelings: “It is very moderne, beautiful, I like it. I feel really empty of art, I mean, full of art.”

Erin Douglass and Ryan Dahl, downtown office workers on their second visit, loved the playfulness: “I laughed the most at the little green squares,” said Dahl, referring to Robert Barry’s untitled 1967 “painting” composed of four 2-by-2-inch panels positioned near the corner of a wall.

There exists a breed of art skeptic who could look up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and say: “Hey, I could do that.” Chances were high that an exhibition that includes black canvases, neon tubes, bricks, steel plates, beams, mirrors, billowing fabric and a glistening shaft of ice formed by condensation on a copper pole (Hans Haacke’s 1966 “Ice Stick”) might provoke the same reaction.

Cleveland attorney Gene Stevens, visiting L.A. with wife Paula, is a contemporary art collector. He said he’s no longer surprised by disdain for the Minimal, especially after the viewer finds out such an object may sell for six figures. “You can have any show of French Impressionists, even a poor one, and it draws tremendous numbers,” Stevens observes. “The general public looks at abstraction and thinks it’s silly.” Paula Stevens nods in agreement. “Everybody says ‘I could have done that,’ but nobody did,” she said tartly. “When they did it, nobody was doing it.”

No one interviewed on this particular Friday said “I could do that” -- but one visitor suggested that no one should.

One perk of jury duty in a downtown court building is free admission to the museum, so two jurors wandered down Grand Avenue during their lunch break. One of them, Linda Farnworth of Altadena, found Minimalism maximally displeasing. “I like the Huntington Library and the Getty Museum, I like the Old Masters. This is too progressive. I walked in here and said: ‘This is a waste of space.’ It is art to some people, but not to me.”

Farnworth’s companion on the jury, Nancy Tsai of Arcadia, was less judgmental. “I like some of the colors, I do appreciate the simplicity, I just wish there were more on the little label to explain it,” Tsai said, referring to the title plaques on the walls. “To me, it is an object, an everyday thing.”

Philip Trusela, 23, a student at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, visited the exhibition on his own. “It makes me think of those old James Bond movies. The Minimalism, the colors, straight lines, that’s the thing that pops into my head.” He stood transfixed before Claes Oldenburg’s off-kilter “Leopard chair.” “Something like this I like, because it challenges the normal way of making a chair -- it’s just like someone pushed it, like that,” Trusela said, giving the air a shove with one hand. “It’s cool.”

An assortment of students roamed the galleries, notepads in hand. No ink allowed; museum staffers circulate to replace pens with stubby candy-striped pencils. These pencils have no erasers; write nothing until you’re sure. For Glendale Community College student Angel Hwang, 24, that moment never came.

“I was very frustrated. Some of them were very interesting, but some of them were just too simple,” Hwang fumed behind dark glasses as she and friend Joseph Kim smoked a cigarette at the museum’s outdoor cafe. She waved fingers tipped with black nail polish in the air. “I got a headache, standing there for so long wondering: ‘What am I supposed to feel?’ ”

Companion Kim is not a student, so he perhaps felt freer to simply respond. “There was this one piece that was little mirrors, and at first I couldn’t see my feet,” he said enthusiastically, describing Robert Smithson’s “Mirage No. 1,” a serial progression of mirrors. “Then, as I walked along, I started to see my feet. To me, it’s about life. When you’re small you don’t know where you’re going, but as you get older and decide what career you want -- at that point you can see your feet, and you know where you’re going.”

At the beginning of her visit, Jill Sullivan of Pacific Palisades was uncertain. “I want something that’s going to give back a feeling to me more -- it doesn’t give back to me enough.” But by the end, even thought she was running late, Sullivan dashed back for one more look at an untitled canvas by Robert Irwin, fascinated that the artist had managed to create the effect of glowing yellow light by using nothing but tiny green and orange dots.

A return visit to the downstairs Ahmanson Auditorium. The music loop continues, but the two chairs and three bottles of water are gone. The two people who were not here before are apparently never coming. And if the comments of visitors to “A Minimal Future?” are any indication, they’ll miss a lot.