Dada for The Valley Girl

SHOW: HELTER SKELTER: L.A. ART IN THE 1990S

WHERE: MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, LOS ANGELES

WHAT: PAINTING AND SCULPTURE BY 16 ARTISTS

THE BOTTOM LINE: Helter Skelter? The title says it all. You thought the art of the 1980s was bad? This is worse.

“THE RISKS OF SUCH A TITLE are apparent,” the catalog of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art prissily begins, ” — that the grisly and gruesome Charles Manson murders would be glorified, that the show would seem to be about the sixties . . .” Aw, c’mon, just because we call an exhibition “Helter Skelter,” you wouldn’t necessarily think better of Charlie aging away there in maximum security, would you? A pity the curator in question, Paul Schimmel, won’t come out with it: We want a lurid title but, hey, we’re a museum. Maybe we need a bit of sensationalism to, as they say, “reach out” and “address the concerns of” the Los Angeles trendy art crowd, a fairly debased rabble, we feel, and with shorter memories than mice.

Anyhow, though the level of originality in the American art world is bottoming out — a fact abundantly confirmed by this show — the risk of actual copycat crime is low. The critic, on seeing this heavily promoted exhibition, might be tempted to practice a few arabesques on its thick skin with the carving knife, but the sheer dumbness of the art itself is a kind of body armor. Really bad art is probably invulnerable to criticism, and so it is with this slumgullion. If you thought new American art couldn’t get much worse than it was by the end of the 1980s, visit MOCA and learn. It isn’t Charles Manson you think of in “Helter Skelter” but John Milton on the topography of the netherworld: “And in the lowest depths, a lower depth.” The thesis of the show is that just below the sunny promotional surface of Los Angeles there is a stratum of alienation, murder, bad dreams and apocalyptic fantasies that reflect themselves inexorably in art.

This, to put it mildly, is not an unfamiliar trope. It is almost as old as Los Angeles itself — the other side of its perennial cultural struggle between civic boosterism and social derangement. It has been implanted in the city’s self-image for at least 60 years, reflected in innumerable films, novels, detective stories, photography. It begins long before Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, 1939, with its Ensor-like cast of pathological misfits and its painter, Tod Hackett, dreaming of his apocalyptic canvas of the burning of the city — a vision that would be made real by the 1965 Watts riots. It continues long after the movie Blade Runner, 1982. It is not news; but to qualify as news (at least in a museum), this imagery would need to be embodied in some fairly convincing new works of art.

Not this time. Installed in the vast, operatic spaces of MOCA’S industrial annex, the Temporary Contemporary — once a police-car garage — the show looks like the Gotterdammerung of academic Postmodernism: inflated, whining, self-indulgent and occasionally clever-clever. Given thousands and thousands of square feet in which to diffuse itself, the intellectual vacuity of the artists is such that their molecules of thought hardly even bump together.

So at one end, you have pointless conceptual art: Richard Jackson’s room, whose walls and ceiling are covered with hundreds of clocks, all telling the same time; or, with a tiny smidgen more sculptural content, Liz Larner’s visually inert installations of hanging chains and mirrors. At the other end, you have the stale recycled leavings of Pop. Charles Ray does fiber-glass mannequins that look like dumb footnotes to the far more exacting work Duane Hanson and John De Andrea were making 20 years ago. Nancy Rubins would like you to know that she is scared by the production of junk in our bulimic, gorge-and-puke culture, and so she constructs a huge semirandom object out of trailer homes and hot-water boilers, laced together with steel cable, like a maximally inflated Rauschenberg. It provides one of the show’s few faint sensations of risk — but gravitational, not cultural.

At its none too impressive best, the show offers Chris Burden’s Medusa’s Head, a seven-ton lump of scarred, dyed concrete and rocks laced by serpentine model-train tracks and hanging by a chain — a fearful image of a terminally polluted planet. Nothing else in MOCA measures up to Burden. Size is not scale, a fact almost forgotten by American artists, but by none as completely as Victor Estrada, whose Baby/Baby is 30 ft. long, made of urethane foam, and depicts an enormous pair of Siamese twins whose bodies meet in an imposing penis that, rising 16 or so feet toward the roof, becomes a mushroom cloud. At least this gross bibelot has some authenticity, as do Manuel Ocampo’s frantic, heavy-handed but indubitably sincere paintings in an idiom derived from Filipino popular religious art. You can’t say that for much of anything else here.

It is odd, in a show so dedicated to pretensions of confrontation, to see how little real cultural alertness it contains. Hey, folks, guess what? This culture sucks, and we’re part of it! In a daze of bad-boy posturing, the artists wander passively along, picking up images the way a marshmallow picks up carpet fuzz. When Mike Kelley builds a set of offices and covers their walls with blowups of the kind of semi-dirty-joke drawings that people in the mailroom fax to one another to relieve the boredom of the workday, what kind of point is being made? None that has any satirical, let alone aesthetic, value. It’s just visual zit popping.

Probably the nadir of this Valley Girl Dada is reached by Raymond Pettibon, whose fatuous, vaguely wistful scribbles, done in a comic-book style but so ineptly that he couldn’t land a job as an inker for real comic books, are one long free-associational natter. “Pettibon,” says the catalog, “puts his finger on the restless anxiety underlying adolescent experience.” Wrong digit; it’s his toe, with which he apparently draws. But adolescence is key here. America invented it; Los Angeles glorifies it; and for the moment, MOCA is its Louvre. Nobody could see this show without realizing what a scam the making of art-world reputation has become.