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History on the surface: Pop art and postwar urbanism in 1960s Los Angeles
Art Journal, Winter, 2007 by Ken Allan
Throughout the book Whiting successfully demonstrates that this wide variety of work can best be understood through its relationship to the locations and spatial contexts in which it was produced. This is especially evident in the way she takes into account the building and the location in which Judy Chicago and the participants in the Cal Arts Feminist Art Program chose to establish their creative headquarters, Womanhouse. The group renovated a seventeen-room, seventy-five-year-old, abandoned house on North Mariposa Avenue (not Mariposa Street as it appears in the text) in Hollywood to provide meeting and exhibition spaces, far from the new suburban Cal Arts campus in Valencia, California. Whiting sees Womanhouse not only as a much-needed venue for the exhibition of feminist art in this period, but as a challenge to the kind of boosterist view of the city promoted by the architectural historian Reyner Banham in his popular book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies and by much of the cultural establishment at the time. As Whiting articulates it, "by locating themselves in a neglected and marginal corner of the city and granting visibility to a dilapidated mansion, the group not only questioned Banham's celebration of 'a giant city, which has grown almost simultaneously all over,' but also claimed space for a feminist art project far from the galleries on La Cienega Boulevard, LACMA [Los Angeles County Museum of Art], and Pasadena Art Museum" (192). The institutions and gallery scene that Whiting refers to here constituted the local arts establishment at the time. Whiting's claims about artists such as Foulkes, Celmins, and Chicago, who were excluded in different ways from this network, would be more legible, however, if she were to discuss in more detail the power these galleries and museums wielded in the postwar Los Angeles art world.
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Overall, however, my criticisms here pale in comparison to the pioneering contribution Whiting has made to the scholarship on this topic. Pop L.A. is a well-written, highly readable book, and Whiting's detailed readings of art objects as well as the publicity material that often accompanied them (her analysis of a Vogue article about Hockney stands out here) add much to the literature on the individual artists she discusses. In the breadth of art she covers and her focused arguments about their relationships to the spaces and local histories of Los Angeles, Whiting's project will be central to any further work on West Coast art in the postwar period.
Ken Allan is an assistant professor of art history at Seattle University and a contributing editor for X-tra: Contemporary Art Quarterly. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2005 and is working on a book about artistic practice, social space, and spectatorship in 1960s Los Angeles.
1. James Meyer, "Another Minimalism," A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968 (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004), 33-49.
2. Robert Frank's book The Americans was, however, one of Ruscha's major influences early in his career. See Silvia Wolf, Ed Ruscha and Photography (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art/Steidl Verlag, 2004), 270-71.
