Assessing the Golden State - Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000

Art in America, April, 2001 by Michael Duncan

Armed with an abundance of material, both popular and elite, the L.A. County Museum set out to deconstruct the mythical allure of California. But the state may have gotten the better of the intrepid curators.

Which revisionism? Whose revisionism? Everywhere, seemingly, museum curators are scrapping traditional methods of selecting and presenting art in an attempt to desanctify the viewing experience and to open up institutions to social realities. Yet, despite their good intentions, the new modes of museum display have substantial drawbacks, most evident in the pigeonholing of art works into tendentious thematic niches. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art's sprawling exhibition, "Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000," aggressively asserted a politically correct, socially proactive role for the institution as an interpreter and conveyor of cultural history. The result was a disaster--a poorly installed, ill-designed mish-mash of stale ideas and heavy-handed curatorial decisions.

Using the questions, "Which California? Whose California?" as their mantra, 18 LACMA curators under the aegis of Stephanie Barron (now tellingly both senior curator of modern and contemporary art and vice president of education and public programming) surveyed the state's evolving image over the past century in more than 800 art works and 400 pieces of ephemera. The exhibition was the largest ever organized or hosted by the museum, mixing paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, furniture, textiles, costumes, architectural sketches, videos and vitrine after vitrine of pamphlets and postcards. Divided into five 20-year sections, the show took a hard-nosed critical stance, aiming to debunk myths and ideals about the state, attack stereotypes that have plagued Latin American and Asian subcultures, and assert the values of identity politics.

As Barron indicates in her revealing catalogue introduction, "Made in California" was a revisionist exercise guided by the critical writings of institutional theorists such as Carol Duncan and Steven Dubin. As a model for the exhibition, she cites the overtly "critical historical approach" of the National Museum of American Art's controversial 1991 exhibition "The West as America" [see A.i.A, Sept. '91]. Scorning formalist approaches to museum display, Barron offers as a kind of paradigm the ideas espoused in Alan Wallach's book Exhibiting Contradictions: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States (1998). She paraphrases his definition of the museum's mission: "By exposing museum-going audiences to exhibitions that present art in relation to its social, political, and historical context, the public will grow to value artworks as more than timeless, transcendent, or universal objects of beauty that speak for themselves."(1)

Following this determined line of thinking, Barron and her curatorial team used didactic panels and pointed thematic hangings to speak for--and against--the art and objects they displayed. For example, the first part of the 1900-1920 section, "Selling Eden," juxtaposed California landscapes by artists such as William Wendt and Granville Raymond with real-estate and travel-agency brochures. Wall text critiqued the mythically bucolic paintings for playing into the greedy hands of "boosters" who used such images to lure newcomers to the state. The "boosterism" of real-estate developers, travel agents, corporate exploiters and Hollywood producers was the exhibition's bete noire, demonized over and over again throughout the catalogue and accompanying book of essays.

Looking at history through a politically correct lens, the curators found fault continuously with the art they presented. Wall text for a group of early landscapes lamented the fact that those images of bounteous vegetation "rarely alluded to industrialization or to the human energy expended--largely by immigrant and nonwhite workers--to cultivate the natural terrain." The 1915 International Expositions of San Francisco and San Diego were reprimanded in wall text because they "proclaimed the nation's imperial ambitions for the Pacific Rim by celebrating the construction of the Panama Canal and touting the Golden State as a gateway to the East." Another early section, "Mistaken Identities," debunks the "fanciful myths about California's cultural heritage" promoted by both the neoclassical symbolism of Theosophy and the romanticism of paintings of Spanish missions.

And so it went, as the exhibition trotted through a cliche-ridden critique of California history, on the level of a ninth-grade social studies class. The subsection "Hollywood Glamour" opened with glossy production stills of Anna May Wong and Dolores Del Rio, both, according to wall text, victims of the "controlled exoticism" that the movie business fostered in the promotion of ethnically diverse actors. A seven-minute montage--projected not as film but as fuzzy, big-screened video--gave a capsule history of the Hollywood studios that would seem entirely familiar to anyone who has ever flipped through channels with a remote control. A subsection covering the effects of World War II skimmed over the state's radical economic growth and increased female workforce to focus on the Japanese internment camps, art works made by internees and the xenophobic outburst of the anti-Latino Zoot Suit riots of 1943.