Often, narrowly focused historical exhibitions are like exclusive parties: nearly impossible to break into if you aren't already among the small group of popular kids. For the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art's contribution to Pacific Standard Time — the Getty-led, 60-institution-strong museum extravaganza and reevaluation of postwar art in Los Angeles — curator Paul Schimmel wanted to get as far away from those impenetrable cliques as possible. "This is more like a block party," he said.

Indeed, "Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981," is an exhaustively thorough presentation of art made in Los Angeles during the tumultuous period beginning with Richard Nixon's resignation and ending with Ronald Reagan's inauguration. The show is undeniably block-party-like in its inclusiveness, featuring a staggering 435 objects by 130 artists, from famous figures like Mike Kelley and Ed Ruscha to less familiar artists such as Susan Mogul and Randy Hussong. Like many of the Pacific Standard Time exhibitions, however, MOCA's is not block-party-like in its mood. This is no casual, lighthearted gathering, but rather a serious, academic endeavor.

The show opens with an original copy of Richard Nixon's resignation speech (complete with edits in red pen) coupled with a wall of black-and-white photographs by Chauncey Hare, an amateur photographer and Standard Oil research engineer who once said, "All art is political." The rest of the show seeks to prove him right, at least with respect to art made in the five-year window MOCA has chosen to highlight. From Suzanne Lacy's bracing "Three Weeks in May," a map and chronicle of every rape that occurred in Los Angeles during a three week period in 1977, to Bruce Conner's hypnotic "Crossroads," a 36-minute film capturing the 1945 atomic bomb explosion in the Bikini Atoll in super-slow motion, the artists in MOCA's exhibition are skeptical, anxious, frustrated, and bizarrely fascinated by what they see as an unpredictable, illogical patriarchy.

The show groups art together based on common themes rather than common media. (Pluralism, Schimmel says, is the great legacy of the 1970s.) This technique is most effective when those themes are visually evident or clearly explained through wall text, such as Allen Ruppersberg, John Baldessari, Karen Carson, and Charles Gaines's common interest in text and writing. Other groupings, by contrast, require almost encyclopedic prior knowledge to parse the connections.

More often than not, the work in the show is less eye candy than it is art historical vegetables. Nevertheless, some works, like Chris Burden's "The Reason for the Neutron Bomb," pack both a political and visual punch. Fascinated by Cold War international power dynamics, Burden painstakingly placed 50,000 matchsticks on top of 50,000 nickels — one for every Soviet tank in the country's massive division.

Burden's exercise is far more mechanical, but no less exhaustive, than the act of creating the exhibition itself. Schimmel worked tirelessly to recover, rediscover, and regroup artists to create something that doesn't intend to be cohesive as much as it is comprehensive. "We had seen a kind of linear line of modernism, one movement leading to the next," he said. "That came to a disturbing end in the '70s."

To see images from L.A. MOCA's "Under the Big Black Sun," click on the slide show.