COMMENTARY : San Diego Contemporary Art Museum Is Brand New at 50 : La Jollans are getting their first chance in years to see what the museum owns. A desperately needed renovation and expansion program gets under way next fall.

They changed the name. Again.

Fifty years ago, a group of local artists got the bright idea of fighting neglect by opening an exhibition space to show their own work, and so acquired a vacant house built for heiress Ellen Browning Scripps on a magnificent bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Since the house itself was a domestic masterpiece of early modern architecture by the great Irving Gill, the choice made poetic as well as practical sense. Thus was born the Art Center in La Jolla.

In the intervening half-century, the institution has been transformed, both in the scope of its ambitions and the national notoriety of its programming. In the process, the Gill-designed building has been obliterated by assorted expansion programs, and the museum has gone through more name changes than a recidivist in the federal witness protection program.

The Art Center in La Jolla became, in 1964, the La Jolla Museum of Art. Seven years later, with a policy statement tightening the focus to art made since 1950, it became the more pointedly descriptive La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art. And last year, its geographic identification expanded by dropping the name of the wealthy seaside neighborhood in which it resides and adopting that of the sprawling city and county which surrounds it. The San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art is thus brand new, even though it has entered its second half-century.

This latest name-change speaks of a new relationship to the burgeoning region. La Jolla is the northernmost township in the city, but dramatic changes are under way. In the last decade, the population center of San Diego County has been steadily moving north, as massive growth has taken place in hitherto undeveloped areas. The population center is expected to become fixed in an inland area due east of La Jolla.

Meanwhile, farther south, the central city has been the focus of an ongoing redevelopment program. The museum has operated a temporary exhibition space in downtown San Diego, and negotiations are presently under way to open a permanent satellite museum there.

San Diego is the second largest city in California and the sixth largest in the United States, but in many respects it’s a suburb of the even larger Mexican city of Tijuana. Museum director Hugh Davies has initiated a program called “Dos Ciudades/Two Cities” to explore aspects of the relationship between the border communities.

All these factors no doubt played a role in the decision to go with Name No. 4. My guess is a practical consideration did, too.

Dropping “La Jolla” from the title in favor of “San Diego” was first discussed in the late 1970s. I was a curator at the museum then, and a proposed renovation of the building required the launch of a capital campaign. Some felt that enlarging the geographic identity broadcast by the name would also enlarge the pool of potential donors, who otherwise might shy away from contributing to a perceived “neighborhood project” in the rich and rather socially snobbish seaside enclave.

Others argued that the museum’s hard-won national reputation, which had developed under the banner of the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, was priceless. Those others prevailed.

I was one of those others, and I guess I still am. (Sentiment may be clouding my judgment, but remember what happened with the New Coke?) But the deed is done. La Jolla is out, San Diego in. And fund-raising looms.

The museum has been working on a desperately needed renovation and expansion, designed by architect Robert Venturi and set to break ground next year. The scheme is wonderfully conceived. Irving Gill’s original facade for the Scripps house will be restored--or perhaps re-created is a better word, given its near-total erasure over the years. Existing galleries, which are at best a barely coherent hodgepodge after repeated piecemeal alteration, will be sharply reconfigured.

A snag has developed in a hoped-for addition, planned to contain 10,000 square feet of gallery and support space (building along the Pacific Coast is never easy). Yet, negotiations for a satellite space in downtown San Diego are centering on a two-story, 10,000-square-foot, free-standing building--part of a tower development by Chicago architect Helmut Jahn. A museum spokesman says three-quarters of the $9 million needed for the renovation and downtown expansion already has been pledged.

One principal reason for the expansion is that the museum’s collection has far outgrown the building. And in the long run, a museum rises or falls on its collection, for that is where its long-term commitments reside.

In the 1970s, the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art established its reputation chiefly through the presentation of temporary exhibitions. Its smallish collection usually languished in storage. Now, the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art means to match its exhibition program with a substantive collection regularly on view.

To that end, it has organized a traveling survey of its holdings. “On the Road: Selections From the Permanent Collection” began its national tour last year, coincident with the name change, and continues until the fall of 1992, when the museum will close for its renovation. The show has now landed in La Jolla (it remains through Aug. 4), offering the first real chance in years for the hometown crowd to get an idea of what the museum owns.

The collection is impressive. Doubly so, if one knows of other major pieces not included among the 35 chosen for the tour.

Ellsworth Kelly’s “Red Blue Green” (1963) is to my mind the most important painting in the collection, but the pristine surface of this stripped-down essay in shape and color is too fragile for the demands of extended travel. Chris Burden’s great, room-size installation, “The Reason for the Neutron Bomb” (1979), poses a daunting problem for a tour: Laying out a grid of 50,000 nickels with matchsticks glued on top--a galvanic representation of the tanks once lined up along the border of Eastern Europe--requires a staggering amount of labor. And, as with any exhibition, not everything one might like to show can be shown within the parameters of the undertaking.

For “On the Road,” those parameters seem to have included giving as broad an overview as possible of the diversity of the museum’s collection, which is mostly by American artists and mostly dates from the 1960s on, and which includes painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, video and installation art.

Much of the first-rate work dates from the 1960s. Pop, Minimalism, Conceptual art and Earthworks are represented in exceptional pieces by Carl Andre, Richard Artschwager, John Baldessari, Billy Al Bengston, Edward Ruscha, Robert Smithson and Andy Warhol. Some are classic examples of an artist’s work, such as Andre’s checkerboard floor-sculpture, “Magnesium-Zinc Plain” (1969) and Warhol’s big, brash assault on Color Field painting, “Flowers” (1967).

Others are magnificent early examples by artists whose mature work was just beginning to emerge, such as Baldessari’s wry list of sign-painted critical adjectives, “Terms Most Useful in Describing Creative Works of Art” (1966-68); Ruscha’s “Ace” (1962), in which the title word is formed by crashing waves of thick paint; and Artschwager’s untitled, 1967 wall-sculpture, in which a forced-perspective composition collides with a trompe l’oeil Formica surface, crossing cognitive wires of visual perception and physical reality.

Not an overview of the period, this selection can best be described with a rather old-fashioned word: connoisseurship. Bengston’s radiant “Buster” (1962) not only dates from the artist’s most important period, but it’s also the single finest painting of his career. And Smithson’s sleek “Mono Lake Non-site” (1968) is not among the most imposing of the late artist’s sculptures, but it is among his most resonant.

The discrimination with which these works have been selected extends to objects that wouldn’t be described as signature pieces. The six abstract panels that make up Roy Lichtenstein’s 1971 painting “Mirror” do not comprise either a comic-strip image or a stylistic quotation from art history, which are his most commonly sought-after subjects. Yet, the conflicted sense of deadened absence one feels when standing, Dracula-like, before a non-reflecting mirror that blithely refuses to offer up your image is as brisk a slap to one’s insistent ego as could be imagined. It’s a knockout.

The museum has also acquired significant works that would be difficult for most institutions to cope with. Take Vito Acconci’s terrific “Instant House” (1980). A visitor sits on a swing suspended from the gallery ceiling, the weight pulling up four enclosing walls made of American flags on the inside, Soviet flags on the outside. Wrapping yourself in the flag results in the simultaneous construction of an enemy enclosure.

Most of the selections in the show are by well-established artists. Perhaps the least well-known are Gregory Gillespie, whose hyper-realist still life makes a fetish of academicized surrealism, and the young Conceptual artist Lorna Simpson, whose pairing of evidential photographs and ominous captions are nonsensical exercises in fashionable deconstructionism.

As Gillespie’s and Simpson’s examples show, not everything here is first-rate. William Wiley’s familiar mappings of the fragmented modern consciousness are wildly uneven, and “Nothing to Blame” (1979) is a large but poor example. Krzysztof Wodiczko is represented by a gussied up souvenir--a back-lit photograph of a temporary, outdoor installation.

The show’s catalogue identifies 196 notable works in the collection. It’s worth noting that 135 of them, or nearly 70%, were acquired since 1981--quite a feat, given the rise in market prices and the shutdown of gifts through revisions in the tax code during the 1980s.

Certainly, the catalogue overstates the case when it declares “the museum’s holdings today survey every major American movement of the past half-century.” It’s much spottier and more erratic than that portentous statement allows. Still, the collection of the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art has moments of real greatness. We deserve galleries for their regular display.