The art explosion Today, there's more art, in more styles, than ever before. LATimes

"When I was a student, it was Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg who were clearly the most important artists," said Thomas Lawson, a painter and dean of the School of Art at CalArts. "Them and Andy Warhol. Everybody agreed that they were the ones. Now, because there are such diverse possibilities, it's much harder to say."

Of contemporary art today, two things, and maybe only two things, can be said for sure.
First, there is more of it — made in more styles and materials, by more artists who live, work and have exhibitions in more places — than ever before.

Second, it doesn't fit into neat categories or hierarchies. Thanks to the Internet, the ease of travel and the growth and globalization of the art market, the days of a single dominant style are long gone. Despite the proliferation of electronic media, many hip young artists devote themselves to drawing and painting or defy classification by dipping into a mixed bag of materials. The notion that an artist must live in a particular place to be successful is also a thing of the past. If there's such a thing as a prevailing trend, international eclecticism must be it.

"If you talk about local art, you sound like a Luddite," said John Baldessari, a pioneering Conceptualist who has been based in Los Angeles for decades but had his first success in Europe and is still in high demand there. With big museum shows in Germany and Belgium this fall, he's planning a retrospective at the Tate London in 2008.

To see his point and get a fix on contemporary art's big picture, consider the fall openers at Los Angeles area galleries. Painting, sculpture and photography coexist with new media, often in the work of a single citizen of the world who may be a visual storyteller, formal purist or social critic.

Among visitors from abroad, João Louro, a Portuguese impresario said to choose media "as a director selects the musicians for his orchestra," shows paintings and wall reliefs related to the film industry at Christopher Grimes Gallery. Henry Coombes, of Glasgow, exposes violence and domestic distress below the surface of British middle-class life in paintings, sculptures and a video at Anna Helwing. "Sea Change," an international group show, explores "ideas of three-dimensionality" in painting and sculpture at Roberts & Tilton. One artist, American painter Jimmy Baker, gives a surreal gloss to the evening news in highly refined but bizarre images drawn from popular culture.

American artists based outside L.A. also have a large presence. Tony Oursler, a New Yorker who merges video with sculpture and sound to mesmerizing effect, has dreamed up a history of space exploration in an installation at Margo Leavin. "Spaced," he calls the show, in a witty warning to visitors. Ernesto Caivano, who also lives in New York, has made up a tale about lovers reunited after a 1,000-year separation in a suite of 100 ink drawings at Richard Heller. Hung Liu, who cut her artistic teeth in China during the Cultural Revolution and lives in Oakland, has created a group of paintings based on her heritage for her L.A. debut at Walter Maciel.

"Translation is part of art-making," Liu says, "whether you are working from a photograph, a sketch, an observation, whatever. You lose something in the translation, but you also liberate yourself."

As for the home team, new media luminary Jeremy Blake presents "Sodium Fox," a digital, animated film made in collaboration with Nashville poet and musician David Berman, at Honor Fraser. Blake says he was inspired by Eugène Delacroix's romantic painting "Liberty Leading the People," but his version includes strippers, tattoos, graffiti, neon lights and Wal-Marts. Conceptualist Rodney McMillian offers a huge painting of a sky, for sale by the square foot, with pieces priced according to the buyer's income level, at Susanne Vielmetter. Frohawk Two Feathers, a.k.a. Umar Rashid, spins a narrative about colonialism and imperialism in paintings and sculptures at Taylor de Cordoba. Kevin Appel explodes buildings in meticulously crafted paintings at Angles.

The mix is no less daunting at biannual exhibitions that attempt to define the zeitgeist worldwide.

In "Still Points of the Turning World," Site Santa Fe's current contemporary art roundup, guest curator Klaus Ottmann dispensed with a theme and organized side-by-side solo exhibitions by 13 artists from Poland, Norway, Germany, Spain, France and the U.S. As Laura Steward Heon, director-curator of Site Santa Fe, wrote in the catalog: "In these postmodern times, the idea that a biennial could encapsulate a tidy overview of the art of a moment or place has been abandoned as hopelessly reductive."

The 2006 California Biennial, opening today at the Orange County Museum of Art, is limited to emerging artists who live and work in the state, but nine of the 36 were born outside the U.S. Their collective vision is said to reflect "today's eclectic communities, cultures and art movements."

The situation is much the same in Asia, where a spate of fall biennials with elastic themes celebrate homegrown artists in an international context. In Singapore, the theme is "Belief." In Gwangju, Korea, it's "Fever Variations," exploring Asian aesthetic roots and urban life. Shanghai's "Hyper Design" sounds relatively specific, but it branches into three sections: "design and imagination," "ordinary life practice" and "future and history." A concurrent show at Shanghai's year-old Museum of Contemporary Art, "Entry Gate: Chinese Aesthetics of Heterogeneity," offers a full spectrum of works by Chinese artists living in their native country and abroad.

Heterogeneity is no novelty in the West, where American and European audiences expect to have an international, multimedia menu of choices. Still, the ever-increasing variety of contemporary art taken seriously by curators, critics, dealers and collectors amounts to a profound change.

The progression of schools from Abstract Expressionism to Pop to Minimalism to Conceptualism has led to a Postmodern attitude that allows multi-tasking artists to take cues wherever they find them — mining history and placing it in a new context, or digging into personal experience while combining styles and media. Almost anything goes if it's packaged right or catches the art world's attention.

Identifying the art that matters

AMONG living artists, Rauschenberg and Johns are so thoroughly written into art history and their work is so well represented in major museum collections that their immortality seems assured. Other over-60 contenders include German painter Gerhard Richter, Russian installation artist Ilya Kabakov, British painters Lucian Freud and David Hockney and Americans Baldessari, Lee Bontecou, Louise Bourgeois, Robert Irwin, Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, Edward Ruscha, Richard Serra and Frank Stella. Plenty of younger artists are waiting in the wings, but only time will tell who will be remembered.

"Take somebody who is very important to artists doing video," Lawson said, "somebody like Douglas Gordon, who just had a big show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and is on the cover of the fall issue of Artforum." The British artist known for appropriating and altering commercial films "seems to have hit the zeitgeist because he did a film portrait of Zidane just before Zidane head-butted the Italian player in the World Cup," Lawson said. "Douglas is a truly significant player. At the moment, he's as visible as Johns was when he had his first retrospective at the Whitney in 1976, but he's only going to influence younger artists doing time-based work."

The art world has ways of measuring such things. Auction houses with a rapidly expanding reach track who's on top — or new and hot — in sales boasting record prices. Museum curators cast votes for artistic posterity as they decide who deserves the next big mid-career survey or retrospective. But artists also have a lot to say about the art that matters. The work they look at, think about, respond to and build upon is the art most likely to last.

Given the complexity of today's scene, that covers a lot of territory.

Photographer Catherine Opie — who recently showed her work at OCMA, is represented at Site Santa Fe's biennial and is looking forward to a retrospective at New York's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2008 — is partial to Baldessari and Richter. She sees Baldessari, who serves on the board of Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art and is known for helping young artists, as a model of artistic rigor and community-minded generosity. Richter is a soul mate. Intrigued by the German artist's proclivity for blurring boundaries between painting and photography, she senses that they share an approach to exploring "basic ideas of representation."

For Baldessari, LeWitt is the most enduring model among living artists. "He has figured out a way to sidestep taste," he said of the New York-based artist known for devising plans for wall drawings and paintings to be carried out by someone else.

Charles Gaines, another veteran conceptualist — whose "Snake River," a collaborative film with Edgar Arceneaux, is on view at CalArts' Gallery at REDCAT — gravitates to other artists who treat art as a critical discourse. Some are his former students at CalArts. Sam Durant, for example, investigates notions of class. McMillian, he said, "is struggling with the possibility of art on a critical level" and "exploring his own conceptual limitations and understandings in a political context."

Among younger artists, Kenyan-born, Brooklyn-based Waneguchi Mutu — who merges beauty and horror in figurative mixed-media collage paintings and is also represented at Site Santa Fe — finds inspiration in art and music. Each of her favorite artists — including sculptor Bourgeois, installation artist David Hammons, Icelandic chanteuse Björk and Argentine classical pianist Martha Argerich — has "an exceptional and distinct aesthetic language, imbued with layers of brilliance and wit," she wrote in an e-mail message. "Great artistry is almost childlike in its desire to be loved, ruthlessly sincere, relevant and yet illogical."

Jane Callister, an abstract painter born on the Isle of Man and based in Santa Barbara, has created a 23-foot wall for the California Biennial at OCMA and is working on another wall project at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona. Citing Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock and Color Field painter Morris Louis among early influences, she now draws inspiration from a broad roster, including new-media artist Jennifer Steinkemp, conceptual sculptor Matthew Barney, photographer Andreas Gursky and painters Polly Appfelbaum, Linda Bessemer, Karen Carson, Sharon Ellis, James Gobels and Lisa Yusgavage.

Such artists address "ongoing challenges," she said. For the painters, that means grappling with questions: "What does it mean to paint? Why paint? How best to paint now? How is painting perceived now in light of new technologies and media arts? What is its function? How far can it be stretched before it breaks?"

Sandeep Muhkerjee, an Indian-born, L.A.-based painter who had a short career in engineering before becoming an artist, said he is drawn to "philosophically driven" artists who ask unanswerable questions. Among them are Richter, Bourgeois, LeWitt, Vija Celmins, Lari Pittman, Laura Owens, Charles Ray and Yayoi Kusama.

While American artists, especially those who teach budding careerists, often debate the compatibility of aesthetics and ideas and worry about art that appears to be created for the market, their counterparts in Asia are more inclined to see the big issues as social and political turmoil.

But, more and more, they all look at the same art. Chinese painters Yu Hong and Liu Xiaodong, for example, travel frequently and are well versed in the work of their peers. The videos of American Bill Viola are of great interest to Yu because of his evocations of human feelings of fear and helplessness in the face of destructive power. Liu is most intrigued with artists he perceives as descendants of Marcel Duchamp, including British artist Damien Hirst and Chinese conceptualist Cai Guo-Qiang.

As a longtime observer of the international contemporary art scene, Baldessari said he is "increasingly aware that art is not relegated to the Western world. It used to bother me that when I looked at a globe, art in the Western world covered very little of the Earth's surface. I knew that art was going on everywhere," he said.

"Now I think what has brought the world together is art prices. That's a cynical thing to say, but all of a sudden, the auction houses have gone into China and India and Dubai. In one way it's good and one way it's bad. You have to have a sense of absurdity. It's money that brings us together." By Suzanne Muchnic, Times Staff Writer