Two artifacts displayed behind Plexiglas introduce the show: a hand-amended draft of Richard Nixon's resignation speech, dated two days before its delivery; and Gerald Ford's actual pardon of Nixon, signed September 8, 1974. Despite restricting its focus to the years bracketed by the Nixon and Reagan presidencies, 1974-1981, MOCA's Under the Big Black Sun encompasses an overwhelming number of Los Angeles artists—over 150—making it both frustratingly ponderous and uniquely ambitious among the Pacific Standard Time efforts. The included works share little more than an origin in what the exhibition text describes as “a turbulent, often anarchic center for artistic freedom and experimentation.” Like historical documents, the artworks are also artifacts, relics of their time. The pieces in the exhibition do not necessarily follow from Nixon's resignation, but have in common with Nixon and Ford a listless national moment—one marked by the sense that, for politicians and artists alike, the rules no longer apply.

To the right of Ford's letter hangs Llyn Foulkes's rejoinder, Letter to President Ford, 1975. The painting depicts an envelope stuck to the bloodied face of a politician. The exhibition includes its share of more didactic political works, like Chris Burden's illustrative and unwieldy The Reason for the Neutron Bomb, 1979, a low platform neatly covered with 50,000 matchsticks glued to 50,000 nickels—one for every tank in the Russian arsenal. Scare tactics of this kind are playfully subverted in an adjacent piece by Eleanor Antin, The Nurse and the Hijackers, 1977, which redirects the climate of fear through the stereotypically feminine aesthetic of paper dolls. Feminism, punk, the chicano movement, workers' rights and sexual liberation are all represented, yet would soon be consumed in the backlash of the culture wars—as presaged in an untitled piece by Randy Hussong, in which the front page of The San Francisco Examiner from the morning after Reagan's election has been whited out, leaving only the President's corpselike face, and the headline “Reagan's Amazing Sweep” redacted to “weep”.

In a video by Allan Sekula and Nöel Burch, clips of applause from Reagan's inaugural address have been intercut with scenes from his movies, not so subtly framing his presidency as just another role. The show also includes ephemera from Lowell Darling's performative run in California's 1978 gubernatorial contest—an office held by Reagan, as well as then- and present-governor Jerry Brown. Among other actions, Lowell is shown placing giant acupuncture needles in gas station flowerbeds. In the psychic backwash of Vietnam and Watergate, artists turned with varying degrees of earnestness to New Age notions of healing. David Lamela's 1974 film The Desert People recounts in a series of interviews the failed search of a group of friends for a better, simpler life among a Native American community. A 1977 video by Linda Montano shows the floating face of the artist as she chants the story of her husband's sudden death, acupuncture needles dangling from her lips and cheeks.

Back at the entrance, Robert Heineken's Inaugural Excerpt Videograms, 1981, adds one more “film” to a succession of retransmitted images. The piece consists of warbly bluish Polaroid transfers taken directly from a television screen during Reagan's inaugural proceedings. How, indeed, could we ever come close to the core of such heavily mediated events? The show as a whole is as confused and inscrutable as the decade it portrays. Lightning, 1976, by Paul and Marlene Kos, is a simple one-minute video shot on an empty highway, a thunderhead in the distance. “When I look for the lightning, it never strikes,” Marlene says. “When I look away, it does,” and as she turns her head towards the camera, a brilliant fork of lightning fills the windshield of their car. One would do well to carry this mantra throughout the show. Against a backdrop of political exhaustion, Big Black Sun tries to frame an elusive energy, a rawness and abandonment of convention, often sensed but never quite captured in any of these diverse works. 

Travis Diehl is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles.