A Note on Pacific Dreams

The art world is always in the throes of continual evaluation and revision, as attempts are made to historicize the recent past. Major survey exhibitions and blockbuster retrospectives have become the rule of thumb for cultural institutions in the midst of embattled policy. Often these exhibitions are attempts to establish new perspectives on an artist’s oeuvre or to further the reputation of an artist in the midst of a developing career. For major institutions, the rewards of such exhibitions are popularity and visibility; but this approach at times leads to curatorial emphases and impositions which distort as much as redefine the art on display.

Within the province of smaller exhibitions there is the potential for encountering genuinely fresh perspectives, as well as work which might not be overly familiar. One recent exemplary small exhibition was Neo-Dada: Redefining Art, 1958–1962, curated by Susan Hapgood and Jennifer Rittner for The American Federation of Arts (see PAJ 49, 1995). Another similar example is the now touring Pacific Dreams: Currents of Surrealism and Fantasy in California Art, 1934–1957, curated by Susan Ehrlich for the University of California-Los Angeles at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center. One of the fascinations of these special exhibitions is the discovery of the connections between artists and media which can be revealed precisely because of their relative modesty.

Instead of relying on acknowledged important works, the more adventurous exhibitions focus on those which are often little known, even ephemeral, pointing to the inherent performative nature of much twentieth-century art. The intermingling of painting, sculpture, and photography highlights the immediacy of the art. Going through these exhibitions conveys the excitement of artists’ attempts to find new forms, new modes of expression, new media. To approach them in terms of aesthetic consecration, as “masterpieces,” would prove to be unrewarding, for it is in discovery, in recovering the freshness of artistic experimentation, that these exhibitions find their meaning.