GETTY EXHIBIT MARKS DEPARTURE FROM ORDINARY, ARRIVAL OF HIP.

Byline: Reed Johnson Staff Writer

The late billionaire J. Paul Getty loathed modern art almost as much as he loved squeezing a buck. His tastes ran instead toward the tried and true, such as Dutch landscapes, ancient Greek torsos and Louis XV furniture dripping with ornamentation.

But ever since Getty's death in 1976, the well-endowed museum that bears his name has been busy snapping up world-class photography collections and commissioning provocative new contemporary artworks by the likes of Alexis Smith and Ed Ruscha to decorate the $1 billion Brentwood hilltop campus.

The Getty also has brought numerous L.A.-based dance, theater and musical artists to perform there, as a way both of extending a hand to its hometown and of making its antiquarian art collection interface with the 21st century.

This spring, the Getty is pushing that cultural agenda a step further with the exhibition ``Departures: 11 Artists at the Getty.''

Organized by guest curator Lisa Lyons, a consultant to the Getty Trust, the show rounds up 11 contemporary Southern California artists and, literally and figuratively, turns them loose in the Getty's marble-enshrouded galleries.

Lyons' idea was to have contemporary artists respond to objects in the Getty's collections and let the artistic sparks fly where they may.

Her aim is that the results will encourage more Getty repeat visitors - including artists - to spot connections among different artistic styles and eras, and to view the Getty's permanent collection within art history's evolving continuum.

Lyons herself had that experience often while growing up in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, where she made regular visits to the renowned Walker Art Center.

``My hope is that these works will be kind of a lens for people to go back in and view works in the permanent collections,'' Lyons says. ``Usually, we're concerned with dead artists here at the Getty. It (the exhibition) really was about helping L.A. artists to make the museum your own.''

Some of the artists in ``Departures,'' like Lari Pittman and John Baldessari, the group's elder statesman, have national and even international reputations. Others are less well-known but deserving of wider audiences, Lyons believes, citing as an example abstract painter John M. Miller.

For ``Departures,'' Miller produced three large, related panels titled ``Prophecy,'' ``Sanctum'' and ``Atonement,'' whose visually boisterous dark and light bars ultimately resolve themselves in graceful, contemplative patterns.

Miller's triptych dialogues with a 15th-century French prayer book, the Hours of Simon de Varie, from the Getty's collections, isn't intended as an abstract reaction to the little book's reverential religious narrative. Rather, Miller has said that he was drawn to the prayer book's brilliant colors, intimate scale and the medieval diptych's ability to bend time and space in paradoxical ways.

Artist Sharon Ellis found inspiration for her richly illusionistic painting ``A Vision of Spring in Winter'' in two popular Getty canvases: Lawrence Alma-Tameda's ``Spring,'' a late-Victorian fantasia of a Roman flower festival; and Caspar David Friedrich's melancholy ``A Walk at Dusk.'' She also studied photographs of flowers in Robert Irwin's Central Garden at the Getty Center.

For his ambitious project, Mexican-born Ruben Ortiz Torres created a 3-D video incorporating the Getty Research Institute's holdings of 1890s stereographs of Cuba during the controversial Spanish-American War. The old photos led him into an exploration of his own cultural ancestry, and also prompted his creation of a customized, hydraulicized 1960 Chevrolet Impala lowrider that ``dances'' to a samba beat.

``After the show, we're going to replace the tram with this,'' a museum staffer jokes.

Other commissions display a more overt streak of irreverent humor toward the Getty's prized artifacts.

In ``Specimen (After Durer),'' Baldessari decided to blow up Albrecht Durer's watercolor of a stag beetle to monstrous proportions, then impale it with a giant specimen pin. The resulting trompe l'oeil gag offers a sly commentary on art's perpetual project of trying to pin down nature.

Alison Saar's larger-than-life sculpture of a cornrow-haired female nude ``Afro-di(e)ty'' plays off the idealized Western male beauty of the Getty's first-century Hercules statue. Adrian Saxe's ``1-900-Zeitgeist'' gently tweaks the Getty's decorative arts furniture with his goofy faux-antique sculptures crowned with figurines of Austin Powers and Dennis Rodman. Talk about ``trophy art.''

And Judy Fiskin's hilarious pseudo-documentary video, ``My Getty Center,'' lampoons the museum's somewhat self-consciously earnest mission of making highbrow art accessible to the multicultural masses.

``Part of it is that artists love and hate museums,'' Lyons comments, laughing. ``Obviously, Sharon Ellis has really embraced the collection, whereas Judy has stabbed it in the back. Baldessari is sort of poking it in the ribs. It's nice to pull the rug out from under yourself now and then.''

THE FACTS

--What: ``Departures: 11 Artists at the Getty.''

--Where: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood.

--When: Through May 7. Museum hours are 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Closed Mondays.

--Admission: Admission is free. Parking, for which reservations are required, is $5. Reservations are not required for college students with current ID or visitors arriving by taxi, shuttle, motorcycle, bicycle or public bus. Call [phone].

CAPTION(S):

6 photos, box

Photo:

(1 -- color) Adrian Saxe's ``1-900-ZEITGEIST'' is a mixed-media installation found alongside other colorful works of art at the vibrant exhibit ``Departures: 11 Artists at the Getty.''

(2 -- color) Ruben Ortiz Torres' 1960 Chevrolet Biscayne lowrider, ``La Zamba del Chevy.''

(3 -- color) John Baldessari's ``Specimen (After Durer)'' is ink-jet on canvas with a stainless steel T-pin.

(4 -- 5 -- color) Alison Saar's ``Afro-di(e)ty,'' left, and Lari Pittman's ``Indebted to you, I will have had understood the power of the wand over the scepter,'' below.

(6 -- color) A wall graphic of revolutionary Che Guevara is at the entrance to Torres' 3-D video projection ``La Zamba del Chevy.''

Box: THE FACTS (see text)