Anna Maria Maiolino at MOCA (LA)

Real art isn't just beautiful, it's beautiful because it's real. Looking at real art is like talking to someone you love, knowing you don't have to say a thing to be loved, knowing that you both can be quiet for hours, neither of you having to say a thing since each of you know that being in one another's presence is not only enough, it's somehow more than enough, it's as much as you'll ever get in this world.

Everything real and right about art is at work in the art of Anna Maria Maiolino, an Italian-born (1942) woman who made her life in Brazil, whose retrospective at MOCA closes the last day of 2017, December 31.  Her art is everything art hopes to be--serious, funny, obvious enough to be socially and politicially provocative and insecure enough to be vulnerable. Maiolino composes in virtually every medium--painting, drawing, ceramics, video, book-making--and every conceivable (conceivable at least to me) movement, from the representation-ness of european arte povera to Duchampian conceptualism, to sort of an anti-magical realism/rain-forest Feminism, not merely as investigations of each but as fresh, startling art that looks and feels like it was made just yesterday or the day after tomorrow. I've never seen anything like Maiolino's art.

On the wall in the first gallery of her exhibit at MOCA is a small piece, Buracao Preto (Black Hole, 1974). She's managed to co-opt/mingle/create a conversation with three male giants of contemporary art: the corners and edges are Mondrian; the rectangle in the center of the piece, a construction made of paper behind which a thin wire has been suspended from one side to the other, is Joseph Cornell; the paper, slashed here and there, a Lucio Fontana move. I can't remember ever seeing art so fresh and so grounded in art history, or in the social/political/cultural moments of its time, 1974.

I fold my arms in the presence of real art while I walk around looking at it. It seems an appropriate gesture. After seeing the Maiolino show I walked through MOCA's permanent collection, finally sitting down in a room full of Rothko's, spending some quiet time with Rothko's paintings, in the state of peaceful restlessness and restless peace that real art always puts me in.