Giving thanks for MOCA, 40 years on
A unifying force in looking at photographs of Los Angeles in the 1970s is the smog.
Deep, mountain-view-blocking clouds of it. Q:
How on Earth did
L.A. become the home to the Light and Space Movement artists, or Hockney's poolside shimmerings, when the light was so bad?
A: They all worked in goodair Santa Monica, except for the great Helen Pashgian, who worked in Pasadena, which is even more amazing, as the smog was even worse.
When the reader opens the massive new volume “A History for the Future: The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, 1979-2000,” the first photographs, black and white, are of MOCA's Grand Avenue construction site, workers on its arched rooftop, with smog wafting around them and creeping down the skyscraper canyons of Downtown.
It's a wonder they didn't choke to death. It's a glorious thing, what they did, building that building, which marked two huge milestones: The acknowledgement that Los Angeles was one of the world's great centers of art, and that Downtown, not the Westside, was the center of art in L.A.
Yes, the Little Tokyo building originally called the Temporary Contemporary, a warehouse reimagined by the fantastic Frank Gehry, a moniker I still use rather than the rich person it's now named after, had for years been putting on brilliant and groundbreaking shows as the wild artistic, financial, development and civic wrangling described in this essential book took place and ended in the creation of the Arata Isozaki-designed Grand Avenue MOCA.
But the Grand building, problematic as it is, weird as the almost-underground space it's in is, built deep into Bunker Hill, was absolutely essential to letting the world see what L.A. had wrought, culturally, in the world of contemporary art. It put us on the map where we belong — beside MOMA, beside Paris's Beaubourg — as one of the loci of world art in our time.
This big book is properly written as a kind of love letter to former MOCA Director Richard Koshalek, originally hired as chief curator in 1979, and its big boss from 1983 to 1999, when he left to helm Art Center College of Design.
My favorite Richard story, which shows his undying commitment to Modernism: Pasadena cops, called to his house about a possible burglary there when he was out of town, telephoned him while peering into his (intentionally spare) living room through the wall of glass. “There's nothing left. Everything's gone.” He asked them to describe what they saw. “One chair. Coffee table. That's it.” But that's all there ever was, and the burglary call was a false alarm.
In her introduction to this lavishly illustrated, indispensable book, longtime Koshalek colleague Erica Clark describes the Downtown L.A. of 1979 that was just becoming the home to hundreds of artists, moving into lofts, pioneers of the vibrant scene we now know so well, over 40 years on: “MOCA was born at a pivotal moment in Los Angeles, following the demise of the few institutions that supported contemporary art and art-making, most notably the Pasadena Art Museum and the legendary Ferus Gallery. Naysayers likened the art seene of the early `70s to a mugging victim, battered and scared. Newcomers depicted the city as `a big, weird blank canvas,' a `cultural backwater.' They were wrong. The `blankness' that baffled those less familiar with Southern California was in fact suffused with space, light, and the lack of an established canon — the very things imbuing the region's artists with unique strengths.”
It was MOCA that made the Disney Hall possible, the Broad — the whole Downtown scene. Drop in sometime soon, and give thanks for what it built.