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

Cecile Whiting, Pop LA.:Art and the City in the 1960s. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2006. 268 pp., 20 color ills., 77 b/w. $39.95

Attempts to think historically about Los Angeles must first confront the myriad of popular images of the city that portray it either as a soulless capital of hedonism and consumption culminating in Disneyland, or as an unfathomable puzzle of sordid desires epitomized by the film noir tradition. Hackneyed as these images may be, they reflect the importance of geography and setting to the history of Southern California's "exceptionalism," identified most notably by Carey McWilliams in his late-1940s studies of the region, Southern California Country: An Island on the Land and California:The Great Exception. As Cecile Whiting notes in her new book, Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s, discussions of the culture of Los Angeles often present the particularities of place as the prime movers of stylistic change--an "it could only happen here" attitude--in an easy substitute for the kind of historical inquiry that McWilliams found vital for understanding the area.

This tendency to interpret the culture and history of Southern California superficially is especially dangerous when confronting Pop art in Los Angeles, where the style's ambiguous relationship to the culture of the commodity is even more pronounced. But Whiting, professor of art history at the University of California, Irvine, challenges the view of West Coast art as a simple celebration of surfboards and hot rods by addressing the ways Southern California artists of the 1960s resisted the typical dichotomy between "sunshine" and "noir" accounts of Los Angeles. Looking at the work of lesser-known artists such as Vija Celmins and Noah Purifoy together with major figures such as Ed Ruscha and David Hockney, she argues, allows for more complex understandings of the expanding postwar urban landscape. Her book combines readings of advanced art, popular culture, and urban history to argue that space is the central issue through which cultural production and social change must be read in 1960s Los Angeles.

Whiting's study is a timely addition to the burgeoning scholarship on art and culture in postwar Southern California. This is apparent from a recent spate of museum shows, such as the Centre Pompidou's survey, Los Angeles 1955-1985: Birth of an Artistic Capital; a growing body of literature on individual artists, such as Ruscha; and Peter Selz's recent survey of art and activism, Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond, as well as Eric Avila's excellent cultural history Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles. Avila's study of the consolidation of white identity around pop cultural venues such as Dodger Stadium and Disneyland particularly complements Whiting's nuanced reading of the forms of advanced art, which performed a similar function for the primarily Anglo elites who promoted the Los Angeles art scene in the "culture boom" years of the early 1960s.

Pop L.A.:Art and the City in the 1960s demonstrates the range of art activity in Los Angeles throughout the decade, which in most accounts tends to be reduced to the Pop painting of Ruscha and Hockney or the "finish fetish" work of Billy Al Bengston and sculptors such as Larry Bell and John McCracken. Whiting expands the discussion to include Llyn Foulkes and Celmins, who practice a kind of pop-oriented landscape painting; the assemblage artist Purifoy and the artistic response to the 1965 Watts Riots; the Los Angeles Happenings Alan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg staged at key sites in the commercial architecture of the city; and the importance of locale to the performance and installation work of Judy Chicago and others at the influential feminist co-op Womanhouse. Chapters on Ruscha and Hockney also do much to broaden our understanding of the roots of their visions in the public and private spaces of Los Angeles and help to set up Whiting's readings of other artists in relation to the importance of automobility and the erotic in Southern California.

In the framing of her argument, Whiting nicely avoids becoming mired in what might be termed the "second city" problem: the question of how to account for the emergence of Los Angeles as an art center in the 1960s and to what extent it was in dialogue with the New York art world. But her book certainly allows room for this kind of account to emerge even as the trope of an East Coast/West Coast divide is problematized by recent work, such as James Meyer's essay on Minimalism in the exhibition catalogue, A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968. (1)

Given that Whiting surveys such a disparate collection of artwork, it is surprising that the explanatory model she employs is one often used in the discourse of painting, the rather conventional opposition between surface and depth. But Whiting successfully reclaims this polarity, with its formalist baggage, to articulate the different relationships between art and place constructed by the work she considers. This metaphor is at work most prominently in her discussion of Ruscha and Hockney in the chapters entitled "Cruising Los Angeles" and "The Erotics of the Built Environment." Here Whiting is concerned with how the artists' treatment of the actual and the depicted surface in painting and photography challenged the condemnation of Los Angeles and its inhabitants as superficial. Although they pictured different aspects of the city, Ruscha and Hockney "paid attention in their paintings simultaneously to the two-dimensional surface of the canvas and the facades of the built environment--of private homes, commercial structures, and advertising signs," and Whiting claims that their work "redeemed the surface of both the canvas and the city, providing exciting visual designs, highlighting a new urban spatiality, or enabling sexual display" (15). Whiting's detailed reading of Ruscha's 1968 screenprint of the Hollywood sign in comparison to images of Los Angeles's signs and facades by Robert Frank and Diane Arbus is a particularly good example of this kind of redemption. Frank's 1956 photograph of the view from atop Mt. Lee behind the "H" of the Hollywood sign "gives us Hollywood, stripped of its glamour, its stark reality exposed, including the armature behind the sign, the weeds encircling the base of the letters, the twinkling lights of the Los Angeles Basin glimpsed through fog--or is it smog?" (174). But Ruscha is not as judgmental about the "facadedness" of the city, as Whiting terms it: "In contrast, Ruscha's paintings, instead of removing masks to reveal reality, capitalize on the reality of the facade itself" (74-76). (2)

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)

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In the latter half of Pop L.A. Whiting expands her study to consider the way sculpture, installation, and performance work drew attention to overlooked, interstitial areas of the rapidly expanding city or marked neighborhoods and sites adversely affected by urban development. Whiting's emphasis in the previous sections of the book on the way artists reimagined Los Angeles takes concrete form in the last two chapters, "The Watts Towers as Urban Landmark" and "L.A. Happenings and Performance Art."

While the Watts Towers, a folk-art monument made by the Italian immigrant laborer Simon Rodia, has been one of Los Angeles's most enduring cultural symbols since the mid-1950s, Whiting reads the way its meaning shifted in relation to Purifoy's promotion of a similar assemblage aesthetic after the 1965 Watts Riots. Organizing a traveling show of junk art made directly from the burned debris of the riots, Purifoy "relocated both Assemblage art and the Watts Towers right back in the heart of the African American neighborhood" (163). Here is one of the few moments in Whiting's argument where we are confronted by the human costs and social conflicts surrounding the period of urban development to which she sees her artists responding. In the case of Purifoy and the Watts Towers, Whiting notes the repeated failure of such projects to effectively promote change within the community of Watts itself. Yet she still reads the surfaces of these works, the bottle shards and tiles of Rodia's towers, and the charred wood and melted neon signs of Purifoy's commemorative sculptures, as "insist[ing] on the possibilities of reinventing the self and reimagining the built environment, even while pointing to the restrictions imposed by place on such projects of renewal" (17). Although it falls outside of the scope of Whiting's book, this is an issue that would occupy Los Angeles artists in the 1970s as they struggled to make more legible the impact of the city's rapid modernization on minority communities.

In the last chapter of the text, Whiting turns to the interventions in urban space made by three Los Angeles Happenings: Kaprow's Fluids of 1967, Oldenburg's 1963 Autobodys, and Judy Chicago's Multi-Colored Atmosphere of 1970. She goes on to discuss Chicago's role in establishing the feminist art program of the California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts) in an abandoned mansion in Los Angeles. Whiting describes the often-overlooked pieces by Kaprow and Oldenburg and, as with her discussion of Ruscha, reads them in relation to the visual and spatial impact of the car in the urban infrastructure that supports it and the unique point-of-view it offers of the city itself. Whiting compares Oldenburg's Autobodys, a tightly scripted, nighttime performance involving fifteen automobiles, spilled liquids, flares, and recorded noise, to the avant-garde poetry the artist was immersed in at Greenwich Village's Judson Church before his move to Los Angeles in 1963. The kind of "arbitrary directives in the script and aleatory effects" Oldenburg ascribed to the performers' bodies as well as to the automobiles, suggesting a pun on the "autobodys" of the title, might also have been inspired by the performances of the Judson Dance Theater and the work of Yvonne Rainer that Oldenburg would also have seen before traveling west (176). Whiting's primary aim here, however, is to read Oldenburg's performance in a parking lot as an opportunity for the audience to reconceive of the car and the banal, empty lot as a site of theater.

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.

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.

3. For a historiographic study of this approach in the discipline of art history, see Thomas Dacosta Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

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