History on the surface: Pop art and postwar urbanism in 1960s Los Angeles

While Whiting makes a good case for Ruscha's and Hockney's work as offering sophisticated readings of the surfaces and facades of Los Angeles, her claims could be strengthened by a discussion of the way both artists were conscious of the larger discourse of Pop painting and the critical debates occurring around it in New York and London at the time. Throughout the book, in fact, setting more of the local readings of the work Whiting considers within a larger art-critical context would bring into sharper relief the way her artists responded not only to the urban geography of Southern California but to the stylistic discourse circulating in Los Angeles and New York during the 1960s as well. A more sustained consideration of the work of Edward Kienholz, who was such a central figure to the development of the Los Angeles art scene in the 1960s, might have supplied more of this dimension to Whiting's argument, as his work often ironically referred to New York artists. Kienholz even offered a pointed artistic challenge to Robert Rauschenberg, whom he saw as his East Coast competitor in assemblage sculpture. His Odious to Rauschenberg (1960) was initially conceived to be sent to the artist directly and employs a deer head, in reference to the goat in Rauschenberg's famous Monogram, which would secretly interrupt local television reception through a radar device concealed within it.

One of the strengths of Whiting's book, however, is her choice to look at artists less familiar to a general audience in order to broaden the picture of West Coast art as simply in competition with New York. She begins with novel readings of the collagelike paintings by Foulkes of nondescript Western landscapes and the deadpan drawings of the surface of the Pacific Ocean by Celmins that place these artists in a context in which they are rarely considered: the history of images of the American West and the concept of the sublime. The discussion of their work in relation to landscape photography introduces the way that Los Angeles's sprawling urban infrastructure was incompatible with the authentic natural beauty of California: "Neither artist, no matter how he or she resolved the challenges posed by photography's reign over nature, grounded the sublime in southern California as a geographic site.... The sublime reemerged in paint and graphite only as a memory, as a glimpse of somewhere else" (59). Whiting's very inclusion of Foulkes and Celmins in her account of art in 1960s Los Angeles announces the originality of her perspective. Both artists have consistently been marginalized in relation to the dominant styles of abstract and Pop painting in 1960s Los Angeles, epitomized by artists such as Bengston and Ruscha. Whiting's focus on the relationship between art and place, which in earlier modes of art-historical inquiry meant the influence of landscape and regional geography on artistic practice and temperament, allows Foulkes and Celmins to be repositioned within a narrative of postwar Los Angeles art not limited to stylistic development or structured by the formalist criticism that has shaped most previous accounts. (3)