Object lessons - various artists, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California - Cover Story

A wide-ranging exhibition at MOCA's Temporary Contemporary in sees Angeles reconsiders the "dematerialization" of the art thing perceived during the heyday of Conceptual art. It reveals the contradictory impulses that l a generation of artists to take up like supposedly neutral mediums as photography, film and language.

One of the greatest in quantity striking things about the exhibition "Reconsidering the thing perceived of Art: 1965-1975," at LA MOCA's Temporary Contemporary end Feb. 4, is the improbability of its having been organized by means of an American museum. With around 200 works in a variety of mediums, the present to view is sufficiently large and ambitious to be a blockbuster. Coinciding with the much-anticipated reopening of the Temporary Contemporary, it functions as a emblem of MOCA's vitalized and expanded program. Nevertheless, the exhibition bears little resemblance to any novel American show of comparable scale.

Organized through MOCA curator Ann Goldstein and MOCA curatorial associate Anne Rorimer, it includes work through 55 artists from the U Canada and Europe who are identified with what is generally called Conceptual art--a plant of practices characterized most ofttimes by the use of language and photography to redefine the conditions and forms of the art external reality Consequently the exhibition demands--and repays--a significant horizontal of concentration by museum visitors, who are called on to read sometimes extensive and difficult true copys and to attend to video, film and slide installations of lengthy duration which offer little in the way of traditional visual pleasure.

MOCA's presentation of an exhibition whose satisfied could not be further from the now-anodyne imagery of Impressionist landscapes or the well-digested oeuvre of blue-chip contemporary artists is a remarkable and commendable accomplishment. however with this high-profile museum presentation of art committed to challenging just of the like kind institutions as the museum, the curators missed the opportunity to frame the work in a historic or plane ironic context. Perhaps the greatest in quantity curious thing about the exhibit is its complete lack of didactic focus: aside from a brief newsprint flyer visitors receive no indication of the historical stakes and circumstances surrounding the art upon exhibit. Moreover, the sequencing of works in the galleries arrives solitary haphazardly at useful juxtapositions, and artists usually considered fundamental to the evolution of Conceptual art, similar as Sol LeWitt or Joseph Kosuth are given no particular priority.(1)

This radical leveling is further exemplified by means of the curators' refusal on principle to use the limit "Conceptual art." As they explain in their catalogue introduction, "Rather than set apart our efforts to a proces of terminological definition, we have attempted instead to engage directly with the works of art, and to encourage an examination of the broad range of practices that can be associated with the proces of reconsidering the art existence and the objective of art."(2)

That disclaimer points to the central paradox of this fascinating and frustrating exhibit For though the curators chose not to engage in a "proces of terminological definition," it is precisely this kind of make an effort which preoccupied almost every artist exhibited here. Moreover, it is profoundly contradictory to encourage viewers to "engage directly" with a collection of art works whose primary aim is to make visible the mediation of experience by means of the institutional and discursive networks of agriculture Nonetheless, a direct encounter with Conceptual art is, in fact, the objective of the exhibition, and, for better or worse, it is largely accomplished. This apparent curatorial passivity, however, revolves out to have its rewards.(3) by dint of refusing to promote any single vision of Conceptual art--a boundary that I, for one, will not thus easily relinquish--the exhibition functions as a testing turf for several alternate readings.

To their credit, the curators have encouraged a lively range of replys through the excellent catalogue that accompanies the show; it includes extensive entries upon each exhibiting artist as well as essays through Lucy Lippard, Stephen Melville and Jeff Wall. However, I did not find my hold experience of the exhibition throw backed in any of the three critical true copys The lack of registration between the exhibition and these essays is greatest in quantity tantalizing in the case of Lippard's "Escape Attempts," in which she charts a feminist and activist tradition within Conceptual art which is either absent or submerg in the pluralist milieu of the exhibition. I would have liked to diocese for example, the work of to leeward Lozano, whom Lippard calls "the major female figure [in Conceptual art] in fresh York in the 1960s."(4) And I bewildermented after seeing the important mid-'70s work of feminist artists Mary Kelly and Martha Rosler in the present to view "Division of Labor: Women's Work," simultaneously upon view at MOCA's California Plaza building, wherefore they were not included in "Reconsidering the existence of Art." While in general it is unproductive to second-gues curators as to their criteria of selection, Goldstein and Rorimer's pluralist approach leaves them make open to such questioning, particularly in light of their underrepresentation of important directions in Conceptual art which are explicitly feminist.(5)