LA Weekly

If and when most people think about the History of Modern Art, they don’t usually conjure up images of ­psychedelic light shows, Disney cartoons, theosophical and tantric spiritualist iconography, computer fractals, sci-fi-movie special effects or discos. The predominant narrative is still the one where artists gradually abstracted and siphoned off representational content until only the pure, unmediated materials remained — a mute block of cast steel or a torn-out notebook page scrawled with the date on which an impulse to generate a concept occurred.

But the History of Modern Art isn’t a single, agreed-upon story that follows a clear linear path. It’s more like a bunch of competing accounts jostling for room on a lifeboat off the sinking Titanic of utopian Modernism (which probably accounts for art historians’ obsession with cross-dressing — “Women and children first!”). One of the alternative stories that covers a wide range of cultural phenomena and philosophical realms unaccounted for in the paradigm of minimalist distillation — including the unlikely ones mentioned earlier — is brought to life in a spectacular new show co-mounted by L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington and currently on view at MOCA Grand.

“Visual Music” takes on the enormous task of covering “the charged and profoundly generative relationship between art and music over the last 100 years.” That’s a heapin’ helpin’ of vittles to tackle all at once, but if you’re thinking of Roger Dean album covers, Busby Berkeley musicals or Tony Bennett paintings, you’re lined up at the wrong buffet. “Visual Music,” for sure, bites off more than it can chew, but it follows a very specific and clearly defined lineage rooted in the works of many of the very same early-20th-century abstract painters cited by the reductive formalists. But instead of the logical outcome of an unfinished plywood pyramid, “Visual Music” traces a history from turn-of-the-century non-figurative European easel painting to the immersive multimedia freak-outs of the Summer of Love.

The show starts with a bang, converting MOCA’s frequently awkward first gallery into a theater, screening enormous projections of digitally remastered classic abstract animations. Depending on your timing, you may be engulfed by something as austere as the silent B&W geometric permutations of Berlin Dadaist Viking Eggeling’s 1924 Symphonie Diagonale, or something as giddy and exuberant as Len Lye’s A Colour Box, a 1935 British Post Office cinema ad for “Cheaper Postal Rates” that was painted directly onto blank film stock and set to a jazzy Latin dance tune. Enter at another moment and you might catch Oskar Fischinger’s Radio Dynamics, with its complex and colorful geometries — equal parts austere and exuberant — and its self-important injunction “Please! No Music. Experiment in Color-Rhythm!”

Frantisek Kupka, Disks of Newton (Study For "Fugue in Two Colors") (1912)

Fischinger is a pivotal figure in this secret history, cropping up again and again throughout the exhibition (though surprisingly unrepresented in the actual painting-on-canvas section). A quintessential European-exile Angeleno, Fischinger emigrated from Germany in 1935 at the behest of fellow Berliner Ernst Lubitsch (Ninotchka, 1939) and wound up working for several major studios — most notably with Orson Welles at RKO and on Disney’s Fantasia. Up until the point that Fischinger quit that Jurassic MTV project over Disney’s banalization of his vision, the most abstract and experimental manifestations of visual art seemed completely compatible with the capitalist mass media and popular taste.

The next two galleries rewind the story to its origins in early-20th-century abstract painting. Russian-born Bauhaus regular Wassily Kandinsky is generally credited with creating the first truly abstract artwork (though some of our African, Asian, Middle Eastern, Aborigine, Native American, and quilt-making brothers and monolith-erecting sisters might disagree), and central to that breakthrough was the idea that visual sensations correspond to sound — that unsuspected soundscapes lurk encoded within the world’s great masterpieces of art, and that music can be painted.

Several stellar examples of this period of Kandinsky’s work — my favorite; his later rectilinear work seems relatively tone-deaf (not to mention colorblind) — are included, alongside Klee, Kupka and Marsden Hartley. Los Angeles’ underappreciated Stanton MacDonald-Wright makes his first (but not most impressive) appearance in the show, alongside Helen Torr, Arthur Dove, and Georgia O’Keeffe of the Stieglitz Gang. Stieglitz’s own late-’20s “Equivalence” series are the only still photographs in the show. Powerful works by supposed anti-art Dadaists Francis Picabia (a gorgeous 1912 Cubist pastoral) and Hans Richter (abstract graphic narrative scrolls from the early ’20s) are among the pleasant surprises in what is one of the most historically cohesive groups of paintings you’re likely to see.

Thomas Wilfred, Untitled, Opus 61(1965)

Richter, who collaborated with Eggeling for several years pursuing abstract geometric animation, is the strongest direct link to the experimental-filmmaking tradition that is the strongest element of the show. In the early ’70s, many in the art world looked to experimental cinema as the last frontier of the avant-garde — much of the Artforum-era discourse on art is directly descended from ’60s Film Culture criticism, and the wide distribution of influential books like Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema and P. Adams Sitney’s Visionary Film ensured that, though seldom seen, avant-garde film would remain in the conversation. Before delving into that rich vein, though, “Visual Music” explores a stranger and even more obscure medium: the light organ.

The theoretical correspondence between musical and color spectrums led tinkerers as early as the 18th-century Jesuit Louis Bertrand Castel to design instruments that could be used to play optical compositions. As artists in the early 20th century began exploring the relationship between sound and vision, a wide variety of abstract-color-projection instruments began appearing, including devices designed by Fischinger and MacDonald-Wright. Few of these (usually one-of-a-kind) instruments survive, but “Visual Music” manages to include documentary footage of several performances, as well as several functional models. Unfortunately, Daniel Vladimir Baranoff-Rossiné’s Piano Optophonique is a big snore, and MacDonald-Wright’s ultracool Synchrome Kineidoscope is scheduled for only a single demonstration performance on the afternoon of March 13. Thankfully, an entire dark chamber is devoted to the breathtaking programmed lightboxes of Thomas Wilfred.