In Contemporary Art Quarterly, Damon Willick applies the "there is no there there" argument to Los Angeles art while considering two recent exibitions: the Centre Pompidou’s Los Angeles 1955-1985: A Birth of an Artistic Capital and Translucence: Southern California Art from the 1960s and 1970s at the Norton Simon Museum.
Common clichés of Los Angeles as the sum total of Hollywood movies, Disneyland, congested freeways, urban sprawl, gangland crime, and temperate climate often obscure views of L.A. art. Los Angeles is obviously more than these stereotypes; at its root, the city is essentially a working-class town, though more geographically dispersed and climatically sunny than most American urban centers. However, art critics and historians, particularly New York-based writers starting in the 1960s and 1970s, have long approached Los Angeles art as the anomalous product of a foreign region, surprised that serious art can come out of the shallow eccentricities of a West Coast city. As the subtitle to Barbara Rose’s Art In America article of 1966 announced: “A report from the sprawling, palm-studded land of Disney and DayGlo colors suggests a distinct and recognizable ‘LA sensibility’—derived from as disparate sources as the bizarre atmosphere of Hollywood and the surrealist forms of Arp and Gorky—has been forming among younger artists there.”Or, as Jules Langsner proclaimed in 1963 of L.A. art’s emergence: “In the space of a half-a-dozen years the status of Los Angeles in the art community has changed from the home of the nuts who diet on nutburgers to a lively and vital center of increasing importance on the international art map, having become in the interim the country’s second city.”Ignoring for the moment what exactly is a nutburger, such essays cast Los Angeles art as of secondary importance to New York art, the product of outsiders unaware of their own contributions to art history. An extreme example of such inaccurate if not negative notions of L.A. art is Peter Schjeldahl’s 1972 New York Times essay, aptly entitled “LA Art? Interesting – But Painful” that declared all important American artists were New York artists. Schejeldahl wrote: “It is perhaps a little foolish to speak of California art versus New York art. New York’s gravitational field is so strong that any American working in the mainstream (New York) mode will, should he become influential, more or less automatically be a ‘New York artist.’”Needless to say, such notions of Los Angeles marginalize its art as peripheral to an East Coast center. Whether it be the trumpeting of the Ferus Gallery artists in the early-1960s or the recent recognition of the area’s vibrant MFA programs and faculties, the significance of L.A. artists is something critics, historians and curators have been wrestling with for the past half-decade. Too often, however, L.A. is perceived as continually emerging in a state of adolescence or gets cast as other or foreign to the staid, serious, and historically significant New York scene.
This is the year that was:
