The Contemporary Not Temporary at LACMA

“This museum is going through a period of dramatic redefinition on every level,” says Lynn Zelevansky, an associate curator of 20th century art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where she’s overseen “Contemporary Projects: Longing and Memory,” an exhibition that opened Thursday and which launches a new series of yearly shows at the museum.

“Because it’s an institution that was without leadership for years and it now has a new president [Andrea Rich] and a new director [Graham W.J. Beal], everything from the ground up is being questioned, and that makes it a time of opportunity for curators,” continues Zelevansky, who came to LACMA in 1995 after eight years as a curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

“In order to show contemporary art in an encyclopedic museum, you must build a context for it, and that’s one of the things we hope to achieve with this series. We also plan to use it to mix artists from different places with artists from L.A. This is a wonderfully fertile city, but it’s amazing what doesn’t get seen here, and that’s something we hope to address with these shows.”

Designed to maintain optimum flexibility, the “Contemporary Projects” shows will be overseen by a rotating staff of curators, won’t be accompanied by catalogs (catalog production slows the exhibition process down considerably), and because there’s no designated space where the shows will be installed, they will be installed throughout the eight acres LACMA occupies.

Of “Longing and Memory” Zelevansky says: “Because this is the inaugural show, I thought it should embody the goals of the series, so it’s bigger than most of these shows will be in terms of number of works, number of artists and amount of space allocated to it.”

The precise theme of this show, however, is difficult to explain. In a sense an homage to the cathedrals we construct in our minds out of fact, fiction and desire, “Longing and Memory” includes painting, sculpture, film and photography by Stan Douglas, Jim Hodges, Guillermo Kuitca, Sharon Lockhart, Elizabeth Peyton, Jack Pierson and Rachel Whiteread.

“When I do a group show it usually begins with an idea triggered by one artist and Elizabeth Peyton was that artist for this show,” says Zelevansky, who’s currently working on “Yayoi Kusama in New York, 1958-68,” an exhibition opening at LACMA in March. “In thinking about Peyton’s paintings I found myself thinking about small paintings in general, and I was struck by the fact that they seemed to have a vitality I hadn’t seen in them before. Simultaneously, I became aware of a diminishing of irony in work by younger artists--the seven artists in this show are all in their 30s--and an embrace of sentiment that’s long been dismissed as unacceptable in intellectual circles.

“These shifts are partly attributable to the ongoing swing of the pendulum, and on one level this is simply one generation’s attempt to define themselves against the generation that preceded them,” she says. “Work by the most important artists of the ‘80s--Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine, among others--was theoretically based; work by the generation who followed them is markedly different in that it has no fear of the sensual pleasure of beauty. Peyton’s work, for instance, is about the romance of fandom and evokes the feeling of wanting to stay forever in the emotional space created by a song, a book or a film.”

One casts a wide net operating from such an abstracted premise and, in order to select the remaining artists in the show, Zelevansky narrowed her focus by looking for artists who dealt with longing and memory in distinct ways with different media.

New York artist Hodges, for instance, transforms cheap fabric flowers into curtains, and creates spider webs--which signify the passing of time--out of delicate chain. Argentine painter Kuitca creates maps and plans for imaginary cities, apartments and cemeteries that Zelevansky describes as “promoting a kind of mind-travel. It’s not surprising that he’s also made paintings of the heavens,” she adds. “Having covered all known territories he moved from an earthbound, existential vision to a personal cosmology.

“Rachel Whiteread deals with an indexical relationship to the trace and her work leans closer to abstraction than anything else in the show,” says Zelevansky of the British artist who won England’s prestigious Turner Prize in 1993 for her piece “House,” wherein she made a concrete cast of the interior of an actual three-story house.

“Sharon Lockhart [the only local artist in the show] ‘converses’ with artists from the past by using forms that are very familiar to us--she’ll use the form of Renaissance portraiture, for instance, or make a seascape that’s evocative of a Japanese print. And Jack Pierson works from a highly romantic vantage point not far from Peyton’s--his photographs remind me of a Sinatra ballad from the ‘50s.”

Canadian artist Douglas, who describes his work as “an attempt to isolate little ruptures and detours in modernity,” is represented by “Subject to a Film: Marnie,” a film loop based on the robbery sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1964 thriller, which Douglas has restaged and filmed in a modern office outfitted with computers. His piece also incorporates the sound of the movie projector, which Zelevansky describes as “a nostalgic sound we all heard as children that no longer exists.”

“Speaking of nostalgia in broader terms, this generation expresses nostalgia for a sense of the present that constantly eludes them because we live such speeded-up existences,” says Zelevansky, who has two daughters ages 19 and 23. “Youth has always been seen as a time for fantasy, but young people now are struggling to just hold onto something as life whizzes by at a frightening speed. Imagine what it must have been like to be Thomas Jefferson and have time to be a great statesman, and watch your garden grow. To experience life at that pace is simply not an option anymore.”

* LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., through Sept. 7. Tuesdays-Thursdays 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Fridays 10 a.m.-9 p.m., Saturdays-Sundays 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; (213)-857-6000.