VISUAL ARTS

For its 50th anniversary, the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) is showcasing its permanent collection in a series of twelve installations, each lasting between two and six weeks. To stimulate discussion within the museum’s audience around the works’ historical and aesthetic meanings, more than fifty works by twenty-four artists who are included in OCMA’s collection will be juxtaposed in combinations that run against the grain of their typical generational and/or stylistic affinities. Artists familiar from the 1960s are contrasted with those who have emerged over the past ten years, painters are paired with video artists, abstraction gets re-joined with representation, and conceptual art pioneers will meet their post-conceptual successors. Featured artists include Joan Brown, Joe Goode, Walead Beshty, Llyn Foulkes, Charles Ray, Chris Burden, Daniel J. Martinez, John McCracken, and Lewis Baltz, among others. The rotations will run February 29 through December 30, 2012.

Ruppersberg (b. 1944) is one of the first generation of Conceptual artists in the U.S., and his complex installation work from 1979, Raymond Rousel Falls to the Floor (Discovering Art): A Biography (with Additional Notes), helps explain his considerable influence among younger artists interested in exploring linguistic meaning through art. Questions about our notions of self, time and memory, provide the content to an early video by Tribe (b. 1973), Here and Elsewhere [2002], where they are directed at a young child. "You can only remember what you see, feel, touch and taste," she says at one point, wise beyond her years though looking doubtful, and her uncertainty is something that all of us end up sharing with her.