Index: Conceptualism in California from the Permanent Collection features over two hundred works by more than sixty artists working across collage, drawing, film, installation, photography, printmaking, sculpture, and video. The exhibition draws from MOCA’s unrivaled collection of postwar art in California, a locus of the conceptual art movement of the 1960s, which helped define the international lexicon of conceptualism that emerged in the decades following. In keeping with this theme, Index’s artworks emphasize the primacy of ideas over objects, adopting a critical position to mass culture and institutional authority through both intellect and humor. Highlights include David Lamelas’s Los Angeles Friends (Larger than Life) (1976), comprising forty drawings and eighty slides depicting artists, curators, and gallerists in LA; Chris Burden’s Exposing the Foundation of the Museum (1986/2008), a 52 x 16-foot trench dug through The Geffen Contemporary’s concrete floor, originally commissioned by MOCA and recreated for this show; and Andrea Fraser’s Little Frank and His Carp (2001), a satirical, sexualized tour of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain. Other artists in the exhibition include Michael Asher, John Baldessari, Douglas Huebler, Allen Ruppersberg, Edward Ruscha, Jack Goldstein, Barbara Kruger, Nayland Blake, Mike Kelley, Stephen Prina, and others.
Index: Conceptualism in California from the Permanent Collection is organized by Philipp Kaiser and Corrina Peipon, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.