OPPOSITES ATTRACT; HAMMER ART SHOW REVEALS L.A.'S TWO SIDES.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

If you really want to know what makes L.A. tick, ask a foreigner.Hasn't this always been so? Didn't Austrian-born film director Billy Wilder create the definitive, Dorian Gray portrait of Hollywood with ``Sunset Boulevard,'' surely the most wickedly perceptive movie ever made about Tinseltown?

Haven't non-homegrown artists as disparate as David Hockney, Joni Mitchell and Charles Bukowski plumbed the subterranean cultural currents that rumble below the city's sun-stroked surfaces?

Maybe so. But that didn't make Lars Nittve feel any easier about the prospect of bringing a major exhibition of L.A. art before the hometown crowd.

Last Monday, when UCLA's Armand Hammer Museum and Cultural Center hosted its private opening reception for ``Sunshine & Noir: Art in L.A. 1960-1997,'' the amiable Swedish curator feared the event might turn into a roast, with himself as the main entree.

``It (the exhibition) wasn't intended to come here,'' says Nittve, 45. ``I really thought it would be pretentious (for) a European to tell L.A. what their history was. It was actually planned as a source of information and inspiration for Europeans.''

Although Nittve and co-curator Helle Crenzien's fears went unrealized - the opening, with dozens of local artists in attendance, was by all accounts a huge success - they weren't entirely unfounded.

Last summer, when ``Sunshine & Noir'' debuted at Denmark's respected Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 30 miles north of Copenhagen, the sharpest feedback came from U.S. critics, particularly those from Southern California. Any four-decade survey of an art community that has grown as fast and as haphazardly as L.A.'s is bound to be criticized both for what it includes and for what it leaves out. ``Sunshine & Noir,'' which features works by 49 artists plus two separate video programs, was faulted on both counts.

Why weren't more women artists and artists of color, such as Carole Carrompas and Betye Saar, represented? Shouldn't more space have been allotted to artists of the so-called Light & Space and Finish Fetish movements like Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, John McCracken and Craig Kauffman? How come there were so many more '60s artworks than '80s artworks?

Even so, most reviewers seemed to agree, this first postwar SoCal survey ever to hit Europe was decades overdue. (En route from Denmark to UCLA, the show also made stops in Germany and Italy.) Writing for the periodical Art in America, Michael Duncan declared that the exhibition demonstrated L.A. artists ``are more than ready to give theory-weary Europe a shot in the arm.''

Nittve, who recently was named to head the new Tate Gallery of Modern Art in London, readily admits that ``Sunshine & Noir'' isn't comprehensive. How could it be? Like the polyglot metropolis itself, L.A.'s art community since the mid-1960s has splintered into hundreds of individual visions and institutional camps.

Fed by the late-'80s collapse of the inflated New York City art market, L.A. has emerged as an art mecca in its own right. Whereas 40 years ago it might've been possible to divvy up L.A. artists into a half-dozen basic groups, the proliferation of artists, art schools, museums, galleries and alternative spaces today would render such an attempt quixotic at best.

``L.A. artists, more than anywhere else, you can't package them,'' Nittve says. ``They really tend to go to extremes, whether it's extreme beauty, like Robert Irwin, and L.A. art also can have some ugliness.''

The impetus behind the show's L.A. engagement came from Armand Hammer director Henry Hopkins, Nittve says. A seminal figure in the development of L.A. art circles as a teacher, curator, gallery and museum director and chairman of UCLA's art department, Hopkins thought it would be beneficial for L.A. audiences to see their cultural history through foreign eyes.

As an exercise in self-examination, the controversy that has greeted the show indicates how far L.A.'s once-provincial and ho-hum art scene has come.

``L.A. has such a huge community that the possibilities of quibbling are endless,'' says mixed-media artist Alexis Smith. A Los Angeles native, Smith is represented in ``Sunshine & Noir'' by her 1982 ``Ring of Fire,'' a wall-size work that practically envelops you as you stare at its gigantic pop-art flames licking a charred basketball hoop, above which floats the purposefully overheated mantra, ``... A Hellhole If Ever There Was One.''

Initially, the show's title seems to invoke the stereotypical dichotomy of L.A. either as a promised land of citrus groves and tanned surfer dudes, or else an apocalypse of natural and manmade calamities waiting to happen.

On closer inspection, however, the exhibition treats these extremes not as polar opposites but flip sides of a common sensibility. The show's primary opposition is more aesthetic than sociological, a contrast between purity and impurity, serenity and subversion.

This duality can be glimpsed in the contrast between, on the one hand, McCracken's lacquered, fresh-off-the-assembly-line black-and-red fiberglass planks, or the transcendental clarity and blissed-out mysticism of Irwin's illuminated white convex discs; and, at the other extreme, the scabrously funny visions of the late assemblage-art pioneer Edward Kienholz (1927-1994), whose pat-rack aesthetic yielded nightmarish walk-in replicas of heartless brothels, hopeless asylums and decaying diners assembled from junk parts.

Building the exhibition around Kienholz, Hockney, Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari, Edward Ruscha and a few others who are relatively well-known in Europe, the curators attempted to emphasize similarities between artists across generational boundaries. Ruscha's appropriations of advertising icons and commercial texts, for example in his 1962 painting of a giant Spam logo, can be seen as a forebear of Allen Ruppersberg's wall-spanning display of pulp fiction titles in ``Good Dreams, Bad Dreams, What Was Sub-Literature'' (1996).

Similarly, Hockney's 1966-67 painting ``Beverly Hills Housewife,'' depicting a rich blond matron unwittingly trapped in the prison of her own privilege, engages in silent dialogue with Catherine Opie's '90s photographs of heavily fortified Beverly Hills homes.

In Europe, according to Nittve, the exhibition's ``noir'' aspect dominated its sunny side. In Denmark, for example, visitors entering the show passed by Chris Burden's ``L.A.P.D. Uniforms.'' Created in the aftermath of the Rodney King beating trial and the 1992 riots, this lineup of five, crisp new cop suits, complete with badges, Beretta 92F guns and nightsticks, makes a caustic fashion statement about (pun intended) uniformity and its impact on behavior.

But at UCLA, Burden's work has been installed in a cross-courtyard gallery, where its formal qualities are heightened by comparison with Jim Isermann's exuberantly patterned psychedelic constructions of hand-sewn cotton, acrylic yarn and foam rubber. A wall panel offers the observation that Isermann's witty, folk-art-on-acid works suggest feel-good isn't necessarily the same thing as frivolous.

Not that the Armand Hammer has shunted feel-bad art into a back room. While the exhibition takes up the museum's entire upstairs gallery space, its layout is deliberately decentralized. Mimicking L.A.'s own deconstucted, postmodern traffic flow, ``Sunshine & Noir'' invites visitors to devise their own private pathways.

In reaching back across 40 years, Nittve strove to avoid sealing off a vital chapter of L.A. art history and embalming it with reverence. Though the exhibition imparts a sense that a period of L.A.'s cultural life has ended, Nittve says he's surprised at how contemporary even the older works still feel.

Armand Hammer director Hopkins, who's stepping down from his post this fall after a long, distinguished career, put L.A.'s past and present in perspective.

``Those of us who live here know this city has never been very interested in the past. It's always tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow,'' Hopkins said. ``But at the same time, now in the 1990s, enough of us have been here for a generation that a lot of people are getting interested in the past.''

THE FACTS

What: ``Sunshine & Noir: Art in L.A. 1960-1997.''

Where: Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood.

Hours: 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday; 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday; 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday; closed Monday. Through Jan. 3.

Admission: $4.50 adults; $3 seniors, non-UCLA students, UCLA faculty/staff and Alumni Association members with ID; $1 UCLA students with ID; free for museum members and children 17 and under. Free admission 6-9 p.m. Thursdays. Call [phone]; TTY [phone].

CAPTION(S):

4 Photos

Photo: (1--Color) ``Beverly Hills Housewife'' (1966-67) by David Hockney. Acrylic on canvas. two panels.

(2--Color) ``Walter Hopps Hopps Hopps'' (1959) by Ed Kienholz. Mixed-media assemblage.

(3--Color) ``Like You'' (1995) by Lari Pittman. Oil and enamel on mahogany panel.

(4) ``Ring of Fire'' (1982) by Alexis Smith. Mixed media