Creating the Future: Art and Los Angeles in the 1970s

367 Pages·2014·3.47 MB·English

by  Michael Fallon

CREATING THE FUTURE

Copyright © 2014 Michael Fallon All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written
permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and
reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fallon, Michael, 1966-author.
Creating the future : art & Los Angeles in the 1970s / Michael Fallon.
pages cm 1. Art and society--California--Los Angeles--History--20th century. 2. Art, American--
California--Los Angeles--20th century--Themes, motives. I. Title.
N72.S6F35 2014
709.794'9409047--dc23
2014014415
ISBN 978-1-61902-404-5
Cover design by Maren Fox Interior Design by Megan Jones Design COUNTERPOINT
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com
Distributed by Publishers Group West 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Nicole & Eleanor
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Confusion, Uncertainty, and the Southern Californian Origins of Art’s
Postmodern Plurality
CHAPTER I. A DEW Line for the Old Culture
1971, the “Art and Technology” Exhibition, and the End of L.A.’s Modernist
Daydreams
CHAPTER II. The Long March
The Rise of Women Artists
CHAPTER III. Viva Mi Raza!
The Rise of Chicano Artists
CHAPTER IV. A Laminar Flow at the Edges
Or, Anger and Dissent in the Early 1970s Art Scene
CHAPTER V. Not an Energy Crisis
L.A.’s Explosion in Conceptual and Performance Art
CHAPTER VI. “Devil With a Hammer and Hell With a Torch”
How L.A.’s Street Culture Inspired a New “Lowbrow” Art Movement
CHAPTER VII. The Horizontal City
Public Art in the Landscape of L.A.
CHAPTER VIII. The Mongols in the West
A Trio of Outsiders Quietly Subvert the L.A. Art World
CHAPTER IX. Future Shock
The Birth of L.A.’s Young Romantics
CHAPTER X. A Last Look at the “L.A. Look”
EPILOGUE
The Lingering Afterimage of L.A.’s Art of the 1970s
END NOTES
INDEX
INTRODUCTION
Confusion, Uncertainty, and the Southern Californian
Origins of Art’s Postmodern Plurality
L
OS ANGELES’ EMERGENCE AS A NATIONAL ART capital in the
mid-twentieth century owes as much to circumstance and timing as it
does to the artists of the era. Beginning in the 1950s, after a half-
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century of intensive polish, the far Western outpost region known as
Southern California emerged as America’s shining beacon of hope—a forward-
looking, golden Shangri-La by the Pacific Ocean.
Los Angeles—which had grown by mid-century to become California’s
cultural and demographic capital—was at the time a city engrossed in its rise to
the top. As the richest, healthiest, most admired urban area in the United States,
the city embodied the “California Dream.” By the 1960s, L.A. was where you
went to find openness and warmth, fulfillment and happiness; it was where you
could realize your dreams and be the person you were always meant to be. It was
a place where great riches were attainable, and where eternal youth seemed
possible. It was the home of Hollywood, of young, handsome politicians, of sexy
and free-spirited rock gods and goddesses. In the popular media of the time—in
films like Gidget and Beach Blanket Bingo, television shows like 77 Sunset
Strip, in Beach Boys songs and on album covers, and in countless magazine
picture profiles—Los Angeles was modern, hip, and far sexier than the
American norm.
As a visual concept, L.A. had wide appeal. Iconically speaking, the city was
associated with money, palm trees, glamorous movie stars, clear blue skies, and,
above all else, sunshine. Its colors—molten gold, linen white, deep azure blue,
and sparkling candy-apple red—were dazzling. Los Angeles evoked chrome and
bright plastic and neon signs and freshly laid asphalt gleaming in the midday
sun; it was the sleek ellipse of a surfboard hewn from space-age polyurethane. It
was the racy “streamline,” in the parlance of Tom Wolfe, of a ’57 Chevy Bel Air,
or it was the sweeping modernist arches over soon-to-be ubiquitous fast-food
hamburger joints (or over the H.G. Wellsian Theme Building at LAX, as the
city’s vast international airport was known). The lingering image one had after
leaving L.A. was of an endless river of steel and rubber churning and snaking
through the city’s wide valley passes and out across a vast and endlessly
productive land basin.
As Los Angeles grew through the middle years of the last century, gaining
confidence, stature, and notoriety, its culture naturally matured and spread into
areas long deemed the territory of the Eastern establishment. This included
literature, theater, dance, music, and visual art. L.A.’s first generation of noted
visual artists—celebrated in recent years in the Jeff Bridges-narrated
documentary The Cool School and in Hunter Drohojowska-Philp’s widely
praised book Rebels in Paradise—came to maturity right in the midst of
California’s colorful 1960s explosion of visual wish fulfillment. Like much of
the rest of California’s growing population, these artists—all intent on making a
big splash in this exciting and new city—had come to L.A. from a variety of
backgrounds and places. Wallace Berman, the oldest and initially most
experienced artist of the group, was born in Staten Island but grew up in L.A.
after his family moved to the Boyle Heights neighborhood during the 1930s.
Berman’s assemblage works heavily influenced the art of the era, and his first
solo show took place at a new space, the Ferus Gallery, which opened in Los
Angeles in 1957. Ed Kienholz was born in eastern Washington State and, after
settling in Los Angeles as a young man in the early 1950s, got involved in the
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local arts community and became one of the founders of the Ferus Gallery.
Billy Al Bengston, meanwhile, was born in Kansas City, eventually settling in
Los Angeles in the late 1940s and attending the Otis Art Institute in the 1950s.
His first solo show was mounted at the Ferus Gallery in 1958. Ed Ruscha was
born in Omaha, Nebraska, and Larry Bell was born in Chicago, Illinois. Both
moved to L.A. to attend the Chouinard Art Institute in the 1950s and both had
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their first solo shows at the Ferus Gallery in the early 1960s. The others in the
group—Ed Moses, Craig Kauffman, Robert Irwin, John Altoon, and Kenneth
Price—were born in disparate locations around the Los Angeles area and came
from a range of different upbringings before finding their ways to the Ferus
Gallery.
Beyond the fact that they were all male and of white European backgrounds,