It's a hectic time for the art enthusiast in Los Angeles. Last weekend, on our return from our travels, we managed to make a jet-lagged visit to Art Platform, only one of the art fairs opening that weekend--and one of the best such events in memory: a fine, international representation of galleries, almost all of whom had brought with them excellent work. Art fairs are usually, in my experience, rather dreary commercial affairs. This one was refreshingly stimulating and of consistently high quality. We're hoping it will make a return visit next year. The opening of Pulse was regrettably the same evening, and we simply lacked the energy for both. I did hear good things about the latter, too.
In addition to the fairs, there's significant activity in the galleries, many of them piggy-backing on the much-anticipated Pacific Standard Time, an initiative involving "over sixty cultural institutions... coming together to celebrate the birth of the L.A. art scene." Right. I'll be planning to report on some of these events and exhibitions in the coming months. They cover pretty much the art activity in this part of the world since 1945. I myself arrived in Southern California after the the first two great waves--the hard-edge abstract painters and the "young Turks" of the early sixties, whose flagship was the landmark Ferus Gallery--but felt almost a part of the latter through my association with my wife, Ellie Blankfort and her family: Ellie's parents had been much involved from the late 1950s as art mavens and collectors of those who were, at that time, still the young and the unknown--artists like Ed Kienholz, Billy Al Bengston, Wallace Berman and George Herms. Ellie herself opened up a gallery showing the even younger and still more unknown in the early 1970s, and acquired a fine reputation for her eye and the quality of the artists she chose to represent. And it was around that time that I started writing about the art I saw around me in the galleries, and even edited a couple of issues of the LAICA Journal--the publication of the most serious of the alternative spaces that sprang up around L.A. So I feel a strong personal connection with what is now being celebrated.
So many different aspects to be explored, some relatively modest but no less interesting than the big museum shows. One such opened up last week at our friends Amy Inouye and Stuart Rapeport's Future Studio in Highland Park--a great little pocket of art activity just north of downtown Los Angeles off the Pasadena Freeway. They were too late in their planning to hop aboard the PST bandwagon, but their show, "Gang of Carp: Ephemera," is a trove of fascinating historical material from the archives of Carp, an alternative arts program run by Marilyn Nix and Barbara Burden in Venice, CA, in the 1970s--photos, postcards, letters and other material from the work of such then young artists as Chris Burden, Bruce Nauman, Kim Jones, Alexis Smith and others, who were just emerging on the art scene. They were still installing when we visited, and we were unable to make it to the show's opening, but we did see enough to get a good flavor of the time.
With obviously far more extensive resources, the Getty has also put together an exhibition of ephemera under the title Greetings from L.A.: Artists and Publics, 1950-1980 at the Research Center. The Getty...
(this is a seductive Charles Ray sculpture on the grand entry steps) ... spearheaded the Pacific Standard Time initiative, and will be providing important leadership in the overall exhibition programs in the course of the coming months.) We started there on our visit, Saturday, and were happy to have done so. The show digs into the museum's extensive archives, documenting not only the artists and their efforts to develop a new public for their work, but also the significant contribution of dealers and curators, critics and collectors. The Women's movement and the Vietnam War both left their mark and these, too, are included in the exhibition. Having known many of the people--and indeed collaborated with not a few of them--it was a pleasure to get reacquainted and be reminded of the role they played.
From "Greetings," we scooted across the Getty campus to the main exhibition area, where Cross Currents in L. A. Painting & Sculpture, 1950-197o, the first in a series of shows covering the blossoming of L.A.-based art in the post-WWII period. No photography, but there's access to plenty of images at the website. I've heard that there are a number of artists who feel they should have been included, but in general it's a carefully selected and well-defined collection, starting with a wonderful gallery covering the work of hard-edge abstractionists: John McLaughlin, Lorser Feitelson, Helen Lundeberg, Karl Benjamin and others. There was a time when these artists were widely and too glibly discredited or, worse, ignored. But the glow and poise of these works is a veritable pleasure for the eye. Beautiful, yes. And why not?
The next room brings together artifacts by assemblage artists, a number of them associated with the Semina circle inspired by the late Wallace Berman--including Bruce Conners, George Herms, Ed Bereal, Melvin Edwards, Kienholz and Betye Saar. Moving through the next galleries, it's also a pleasure to meet old friends like David Hockney's "A Bigger Splash" and Ed Ruscha's "Standard Station"--an icons of the 1960s Pop Art ; and to revisit some fine works by Bengston, Craig Kauffman, Ken Price, DeWain Valentine, Peter Alexander, Judy Chicago and others loosely identified with the so-called "Finish Fetish" and "Light & Space" schools--certainly not schools at all, but the terms are comfortable and familiar enough to set the scene. And more painterly works by Richard Diebenkorn, Ed Moses, Joe Goode and others. All in all a satisfying and eminently pleasurable show, small enough to enjoy without exhaustion and yet surprisingly exhaustive.
We made our way around the southern end of the museum with its spectacular views...
... and across the courtyard to the Getty's airy restaurant...
... with its interior spaces disarmingly decorated with food-related art by Alexis Smith, an absorbing, tongue in cheek challenge to the whole idea of "decoration" and still holding its own in the years since the museum's opening. Our close-quarters neighbor at the next table was inveighing cheerfully against "Cross Currents," pronouncing it too California for his New York taste; not enough there there, if I understood him right. Pretty much dismissing Southern California art wholesale. Which gave us the opportunity to reflect on the personal nature of aesthetic prejudices and expectations, on how tastes are formed and, once that happens, how hard it is to reach beyond them into art that is different or new. In my old "One Hour/One Painting" series, in which I invited participants to sit with me in front of a single painting for a full hour--not talking about it, but simply looking at it, with my guidance--the first thing I asked of them was to drop all the expectations they brought with them about what art should look like, along with everything they knew about what they liked or disliked. To clean, as it were, the eye and freshen up the mind. Those sessions were a great success. I regret that I have not had the opportunity to offer more of them in the past few years.
After lunch, back to work on PST with three single-artist contributions: an entryway installation, "Black on White" by Robert Irwin, a quiet, quasi-anonymous presence greeting museum visitors and guiding them subtly into the main plaza; Bruce Nauman's "Four Corner Piece"--a solid white block with video cameras placed in such a way that perambulating visitors would catch mere tantalizing glimpses of themselves as they navigate the central square, hugging the high white walls along the way; and "From Start to Finish: DeWain Valentine's Gray Column," a fascinating documentation of the process involved in creating that monumental polyester resin wedge...
Once done with the exhibitions, we took some time to walk through the Robert Irwin garden, now gorgeously filled out around the central maze of low hedges set in the circular water treatment...
The garden, like the museum, was quite crowded, but seemed quite able to cope comfortably with large numbers of people. What struck me particularly was the number of smiles: everyone seemed genuinely uplifted by the experience of spending their day with art, and artful nature, on a glorious fall day with clear skies and Southern California sunshine. And why not?
This was by no means the end of our Saturday, but is more than enough to fill today's page of The Buddha Diaries. More to come...
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