Unfolding ‘Roadmaps’ to Societal Change

The Long Beach Museum of Art dipped into its modest 1,800-work permanent holdings to concoct a notably resonant and ingenious exhibition. Titled “Roadmaps: Structure, Process and the Collection,” it is less a show about individual objects than an exercise demonstrating how through juxtaposition and association artworks will interact to suggest new meanings.

The exhibition was organized by a panel drawn from the museum’s Artists Council that includes Slater Barron, Terrill Cascia, Victoria Damrel, J.J. L’Heureux, John Montich and Denise Scott. They formed an ensemble of rarely displayed contemporary art encompassing examples by half-forgotten talents, iconic superstars and rising debutantes. Thus, the roster swings ecumenically through Clinton Adams and Eugene Berman, Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg, Junko Chodos and Tom Nakashima.

The intent was to come up with a group of works that together would read as an artwork in itself. The result is a selection of some 50 paintings, prints, photos and sculptures that exercise an open-ended but haunting sense of interconnectedness. Using a combination of intuition and concentration on technical means, the panel chose the ordinary grid as their relevant structure.

In pure form, a grid is, of course, an abstraction. Significantly, however, works in the exhibition’s opening gallery embody the grid as a group of urban landscapes. Obdurate artistic purists will no doubt read the ploy as a means of dramatizing various permutations of Cubism. Weight of evidence, however, suggests the panel’s point was to suggest the grid be read as the “road map” of the show’s title, a visual metaphor for organized society with its promise of order and price of constraint.

The exhibition is not rigidly programmatic. There’s enough imaginative elbow room to allow every viewer their take. But given the envelope of the grid-as-civilization, it’s difficult to avoid the sense that the panel is out to use the recent past as an occasion to ruminate on the millennial present, with its intimations of cataclysmic anxiety.

It gets very close to home. For example, Robert Gore’s painting “Pico and Union” shows the downtown corner as it was in 1967, comfortably shabby but safely habitable. Today we remember Pico-Union as a flash point of the L.A. riots. A fairly innocuous painting has been charged with historical significance. As if to emphasize that the selection is no accident, nearby stands Darlene Nguyen-Ely’s 1994 “The Shrine XVI,” a combination junk-sculpture and architectural model that strongly suggests the full-scale work of architects like Eric Owen Moss and Morphosis who have tapped the zeitgeist for remarkably original buildings that turn the “Blade Runner” aesthetic into authentic Expressionist art.

“Roadmaps” is never again quite so specific, but the eschatological tone echoes throughout. A 1963 composition of decomposed paper by Charles Hill that used to look decorative appears prescient of decay. A somewhat delayed introduction of images of the human figure seems to pose the question of whether or not individuals count in a Baroque-conformist culture. A cool portrait by Sylvia Shap is made to suggest that it’s best to get in line and stay there. A painting by Hans Burkhardt, “In Loving Memory of Martin Luther King I,” in this context hints that passion is only permissible when masked and internalized.

The introduction of two 1963 garment collages by Tony Berlant uncorks a wave of nostalgia for the swinging decade. Titled “Betty” and “Jackie,” they bring back bittersweet nostalgia for the sexual revolution and introduce a spate of Pop-era works. Some simply act as poignant keepsakes of a time before love and other drugs were considered dangerous. Others act as omens of present unease. A 1970 series of Rauschenberg prints presents “The Media” as a spectral X-ray machine adept at reversing meanings.

A final gallery is devoted to images of people. It is not encouraging. In Larry Rivers’ “French Money,” Napoleonic heroes are demoted to meaningless icons. John Battenberg sees the romance of war as a battle of posturing roaches.

“Roadmaps” is, in itself, an impressive demonstration of the fluidity of meaning, how easily it can be changed by everything from time to human intervention. Perhaps the most useful lesson one can draw from the exhibition’s rather disconsolate tone is the assurance that this is but one of many possible interpretations.

* Long Beach Museum of Art, 2300 E. Ocean Blvd.; through Aug. 4, closed Mondays and Tuesdays, (562) 439-2119.