Taking it to the minimum

By Kristen Peterson

Sunday, Jan. 22, 2006 | 8:05 a.m.

It took decades for the public to fully appreciate the historic importance of pop art. On its heels came a reluctant grasp of minimalism, which scholars say over the last couple of years has become the next big art form.

Southern Nevadans will be able to join in the dialogue now that the Las Vegas Art Museum's showing of the city's first large-scale show of works by top Southern California minimalist artists has opened.

The exhibit is a landmark event in a city that commercially has favored the old masters and other proven works.

In the museum on West Sahara Avenue, walls have been built, preparators have been brought in from Los Angeles, unexpected expenses have arisen, and research into how to properly hang nontraditional works has been exhausting.

"There are a lot of X factors, especially with pieces on loan," JW Caldwell, a preparator with the Las Vegas Art Museum, said while devising a way to hang a slender Ron Davis piece that has no room for traditional hardware.

"Each person has displayed it in a different way," Caldwell said. "You have to track down the most appropriate manner for putting it up."

Then there are the James Turrell light projection pieces, which not only require that new walls be built, but a ceiling added.

But here it is in the three galleries of the museum: 18 works by Turrell, John McCracken, Larry Bell, Craig Kauffman, Davis, Peter Alexander, Judy Chicago and Robert Irwin.

"It's the real deal," Libby Lumpkin, LVAM consulting executive director, said last week while scanning "Southern California Minimalism," on display through March 31.

"It's really great to give the viewer the opportunity to understand what it was like in the 1960s to be forced to consider the way you understand art. The artists were forcing viewers to consider philosophic conditions when looking at art," she added. "The idea was to ask people to understand a different relationship in which art speaks about the world."

Pointing to a glass cube by Bell, she said, "The piece is not the box. The box is there to create ambiguities of light and forces the viewer to consider ambiguities of perception."

In curating the show, Lumpkin wanted to focus on the phenomenon of Southern California minimalists.

"East Coast minimalism is much more strident, ideological," Lumpkin said. "West Coast minimalism is just kind of more cool. They're more glamorous, colorful, optimistic, future looking. You have to consider the kind of California that existed in the 1960s: Convertibles with fins, surfboards."

Looking at the works, you definitely get a sense of that shiny California culture influenced by aerospace traditions, surfboards, open spaces and high-tech materials.

The Larry Bell pieces -- "Cube 11 (Blue)" 2004-05, "Untitled" 1964, and "Untitled," 1965 -- capture the atmospheric conditions of Southern California, as do untitled Alexander pieces.

The exhibit also includes three Kaufman pieces, including "Untitled (Donut)" 2001 and "Untitled (small bubble)" 1968-69, both made with lacquer and acrylic on vacuum-formed Plexiglas.

Irwin's painting, "Matinee Idol," which presents perceptual ambiguity, is included, as is the artist's, "Untitled (#2221)," 1968, which was borrowed from Frederick Weisman Art Foundation in Los Angeles.

There are three of the typically high-polished, saturated-color works of McCracken, including "Dimension" (2004), which will be familiar to anyone who attended the two-piece "Turrell + McCracken" July-through-September exhibit at the downtown Godt-Cleary Projects.

The gallery loaned the piece to the museum for the exhibit. The rest of the work is on loan anonymously from a local collector, from two Los Angeles galleries and from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

"The fact that she's (Lumpkin's) pulled together this type of work and put together a show of this level is wonderful," Michele Quinn, gallery director at Godt-Cleary Projects, said. "We get the tried and true at the Guggenheim and Bellagio, but they haven't shown real contemporary works."

But Quinn said, "This art community is still a little behind in exposure. They don't have the daily opportunities. That's our dilemma. Most other cities have it integrated into their daily lifestyles."

Regarding Godt-Cleary Projects, which is in the middle of showing a Richer Serra exhibit, Quinn added, "I think a Richard Serra show is difficult, but I don't concern myself with that because this is great work and the community needs to see it."

Lumpkin, whose foray into the Las Vegas art community was as curator of the inaugural Steve Wynn collection at the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art. She joined the Las Vegas Art Museum last summer and is steadfast in her determination to give it an identity as an educational contemporary art museum.

Her arrival has brought a list of big names to the museum's board and inspired a spring of donations of quality art to the museum that includes $500,000 worth of contemporary works by local collectors Patrick Duffy and Wally Goodman, and funds donated from Mark and Hilarie Moore of Los Angeles for the purchase of two early Michael Reafsnyder works, an early David Ryan and two works by Stephen Hendee.

Museum officials are looking toward the possibility of developing a branch in a more centralized location. Its most recent exhibit featured the work of Los Angeles abstract artist Reafsnyder to fill an opening in the museum's schedule.

"Southern California Minimalism" is Lumpkin's first official planned exhibit signaling the museum's new direction in contemporary art.

Lumpkin acknowledges that the exhibit may challenge general audiences, who are used to seeing realist exhibits at the museum.

"This brings in a type of art that may frustrate expectations of those who go to art for narrative, emotion, transcendence," Lumpkin said. "That type of ... composition that they're used to seeing, all of these things are absent from those works.

"Minimalist work is generally about a piece within a space. You're involved in perceiving space around the object. You become aware of your presence in the room. You become conscious of yourself looking at the art. With traditional painting ... you go through.

"But here, it stops here. It's about the immediacy of the present."

Or, as LVAM assistant executive director Renee Coppola, said, "When you walk into a museum you sign an unwritten contract where the rules of the real world don't apply.

"You have to open yourself up."

Kristen Peterson can be reached at 259-2317 or at [email protected].

archive