Saturday

Peter Frank’s Museum Views

Filed under Art

J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM
Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art 1945-1980
Thru February 5

From Start to Finish: De Wain Valentine’s Gray Column
Thru March 11

THE GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE
Greetings from L.A.: Artists and Publics, 1950-1980
Thru February 5

Pacific Standard Time is in full swing. Indeed, the “swing shift,” where the first line of exhibitions finishes up and the second line opens, takes place this month – a reminder to get to those shows you’d spent the entire fall saying you’d get to.

You have the whole month to climb up the mountain and visit the beating heart of PST. The initiative’s archipelago of exhibitions radiates out from the Getty, which designed, planned, and, to a large extent, funded PST. The powers that be allowed its myriad collaborating institutions to formulate their own exhibitions, only playing traffic cop so that programming would hew to the basic guidelines – Southern California art, 1945-1980 – and wouldn’t prove redundant. Indeed, if the PST exhibition and event roster seems to skew this way or that, favoring one group or movement or medium over another, it’s not the fault of the Getty, but of current curatorial taste. Indeed, the Getty’s own exhibitions – especially its banner show, “Pacific Standard Time,” and the Research Institute’s own “Greetings from L.A.” – acknowledge, even discover, a catholicity of means, media, and attitudes throughout the postwar Los Angeles art scene.

“Pacific Standard Time” is nothing if not a carefully organized, carefully revelatory parade of greatest hits, as close to a compendium of period masterpieces as one might dare assemble at this point. However you might cavil at the absence of a particular artist, you marvel at the presence of other artists seen at their very best. The “Pacific Standard Time” show presents itself quite deliberately as a point in a work in progress, a spur to future projects. That’s the excuse: the reason to see the show is it’s a fabulous eyeful. Everybody looks good. Legendary artworks, such as Ed Kienholz’s pogo-stick-mounted assemblage portrait of Walter Hopps or David Hockney’s pool painting A Bigger Splash or early, mural-size claywork by John Mason or funky wall sculptures assembled from Watts-riots ruins by Noah Purifoy and Betye Saar are all here, glistening not with nostalgia but with a presence at least as vibrant as they must have had when first exhibited forty-fifty years ago. This is work that looks really good in a museum setting, the Getty’s not least – although, admittedly, some of the rough-and-tumble late-’50s clayworks and Beat-era and Watts-era constructions occupy their niches restlessly, as if itching to run back out into the street yelling “Occupy PST!” But that’s as it should be; if the exhibition can preserve some of the artwork’s original rebelliousness, not tame it into submission, then it’s paying the art its props.

“Greetings from L.A.” pays similar homage to the art world that engendered these spectacular objects – and concepts. A quintessential Getty Research Institute display, it brims with clippings, photos, exhibition mailers, personal letters, and an avalanche of ephemera that all piece together the events and the mindsets that constituted art activity in the postwar Southland. Given the nature of the time, and the place, it is crucial to establish this sense of milieu and activity; after the 1950s, at least, the artworks themselves aren’t enough. Indeed, sometime during the ’60s, milieu and activity became artwork.

Happenings, performances, events, situations, conceptual gestures, publications, broadcasts, and other low-level material that had a high impact in its day survive only in their documentation, some of it carefully photographed, but some of it enduring only by word of mouth or the merest idea-sketch. Other shows in the PST constellation – the Orange County Museum’s “Around 1970,” for instance, or “Under the Big Black Sun” at MOCA Geffen – are built around such material, but it’s largely absent from the Getty’s flagship show, relegated instead to “Greetings From L.A.” A reasonable call: such self-effacing artwork wants to hang with show invites and newspaper articles, and together all this paper (and video and such) describes an art scene as fun, and yet aesthetically and socially profound, as the art it supported.

While up the hill, don’t miss “From Start to Finish,” documenting the restoration of De Wain Valentine’s Gray Column. Itself a masterpiece of finish/fetish-light-and-space art, the imposing polyester resin slab creates special problems for restorers. The show documents its fabrication in the mid-1970s, looking at Valentine’s pioneering techniques and also at the problems posed since because of the formal instability resin assumes in this shape and at this scale. The exhibition – and the work itself – makes all the techie stuff thoroughly fascinating. For more information, please visit the museum’s website at: http://www.getty.edu/museum/