Paul Schimmel on MOCA's future, part two

Part one here. Part three here.

On Wednesday MOCA chief curator -- and top art staffer -- Paul Schimmel and I talked about MOCA's plans for its permanent collection. Today Schimmel and I talk about MOCA's exhibition program -- and Schimmel reveals the bad-boy artist who will be returning to the United States with a MOCA commission.

MAN: I think there's a perception among many art lovers that even though MOCA has been saved that its exhibition program -- and perhaps even its rigor ad ambition -- will suffer.

Paul Schimmel: We'll be doing two very large-scale exhibitions a year and three medium-sized exhibitions a year, as well as three-to-four small Pacific Design Center exhibitions a year. On top of that there may be some smaller 'Focus'-type series or individual projects but what I'm outlining here in terms of five major shows a year between the two major buildings is a clear architecture on which we are building the exhibition program.

MAN: So in line with what we discussed [Wednesday] in terms of collection display, you'll be running exhibition programming in both buildings at the same time. Kind of like 'before.'

Schimmel: Yes. These things will happen simultaneously which is one of the true extraordinary qualities of MOCA. When we are at our best we are really thinking very smartly about which space works the best with both the kind of work and in some cases playing against that too.

MAN: So what's coming up at the Geffen?

Schimmel: We have three shows being worked on by three different curators. They're still the kind of large-scale, thoughtful, revisionist thematic exhibitions that MOCA is internationally known for.

The first is a show that Alma Ruiz has been working on for really the last three or four years -- and that kind of lead time is still typical at MOCA, in terms of thinking and developing. It's a kind of book-end to a marvelous show that she did almost seven years ago that did not get as much acclaim as I think it deserved. It was called The Experimental Exercise of Freedom. It was the first in a series of shows she's organized of Latin American artists, and this exhibit was a kind of political proposition coming out of a sculptural change that came out in the '60s in Latin America. It was both formal and in a sense political, a radical movement. [Image above: Gego installed in MOCA's 1999 exhibition The Experimental Exercise of Freedom.]

At the same time, and in some cases with the same artists, a group of disparate but overlapping artists emerged in the '50s and '60s in Latin America and the show will be called A Latin American Light and Space. The earliest work in the exhibition is one of these great Fontana light sculptures that are almost like drawings in space that were from the late '40s and early '50s. Also included is Carlos Cruz Diaz, Helio Oticica, Julio le Parc and Jesus Soto.

These will be room-sized installations giving the viewer an opportunity to really, immersively experience the work. It will show a very early example -- radically early even by LA standards -- of the non-traditional use of color light and use space.That will be next spring. It will not travel.

MAN: Is that a concession to tighter budgets? Traveling a lot of shows at once eats up staff, staff time...

Schimmel: In the last year or so MOCA has had an extraordinary run of traveling shows. At this moment we have Kippenberger, Dumas, Murakami (as I understand it there are lines around the block in Bilbao) and we have had WACK! In Vancouver. It is an embarrassment of riches, but it is frankly too many shows for an institution our size to be circulating simultaneously. You make a certain amount of revenue from circulating shows but you also incur expenses. This kind of program for an institution of MOCA's size is not sustainable.

MAN: So that's one of the more ambitious shows you have coming up...

Schimmel: Next show coming up at the Geffen after the Latin American show is a show that to some degree was one of the real reasons we hired the art historian and curator Philipp Kaiser (who has also planned out into the future a very important show of the LA artist Jack Goldstein). The Geffen show that's coming up in the fall of 2010 is called Wasteland: Art after Earth Art. It is comprehensive of both the generation of earth artists, beginning with one of the great masterpieces in MOCA's collection, Michael Heizer's Double Negative and in some ways then book-ended with a commission of a new large-scale project in the Mojave Desert by Christoph Buchel. [Image: Heizer's Double Negative.]

MAN: Oh, really. You are brave.

Schimmel: Yes, we are. (Laughs.)

Philipp has worked with him before. He feels real confidence. It's import for MOCA but it's important for the artist. So, yeah, let's get that part straight. Philipp feels real confident that working together they can do something that works within the budgetary and the practical constraints of any project.

So Wasteland is being co-organized with [UCLA's] Miwon Kwon. It is really an exhibition that not only looks at the 'earthwork' genre, but in a sense excitingly dynamically it looks at the generation of '70s and right-up-to-the-present artists who in a sense come out of that legacy.

MAN: And the third big show coming up?

Schimmel: This is a project that I'm organizing  about California and the '70s, which is very much, I think, about a period in the history of this state that is to a large degree overlooked.

It's hard to imagine that with all of the interest that has happened both internationally and the plethora of exhibitions dealing with aspects of art here in LA that this period somehow got lost to some degree. This isn't just a California issue: The 70s is really... we're just beginning to deal with its impact now. We went from the '60s to the '80s and forgot in many ways the '70s was the most profoundly transformative decade.

I will argue that I believe in terms of what we and California saw a specific pluralism in this period, a plethora of simultaneous of styles and attitudes that overlapped within neighborhoods of Los Angeles and San Francisco, but even within artists and individual oeuvres. You didn't have to have a kind of singular style. The idea that at the same time -- and maybe this is sort of one of the beginning points of the show -- that you could have within two blocks of each other Dick Diebenkorn doing the first of his great Ocean Parks and then Chris Burden being crucified to the back of a Volkswagen. [Above, 1974.]

The notion that the 'post-modern' was created by the 'pictures generation' of New York is just wrong. I think in fact that very generation of artists were both directly and indirectly finding their foundation in the schools, the universities, the arts communities of California and places like CalArts.

In fact the studio practice of post-modernism -- its foundations were in California in the '70s, and it's in a sense the second generation and one that became more academically refined was to happen subsequently in New York.

It'll be 120-plus artists. It's going to be one of those (I hope) epic, revisionist large-hunk-of-history shows. That will be in the fall of 2011, as part of the Getty 'Pacific Standard Time' series.

Part three.