from peddling his amalgam of black magic, psychotherapy and science fiction to gullible hippies in the 1960s. Five years after his death was announced to two thousand of his followers gathered in the Hollywood Palladium, Hubbard’s original Dianetics was enjoying a resurrection on bestseller lists – a discouraging reminder of science’s fate in local culture.
THE COMMUNARDS
L.A. needs the cleansing of a great disaster or founding of a barricaded commune . . . Peter Plagens, 1972
Los Angeles has almost no cultural tradition – particularly no modernist tradition – to overthrow. Peter Plagens, 1974110
Living in Skid Row hotels, jamming in friends’ garages, and studying music theory between floors during his stint as a elevator operator at Bullocks Wilshire, Ornette Coleman was a cultural guerrilla in the Los Angeles of the 1950s. Apotheosized a generation later as ‘the most influential single figure to emerge in African-American music since Charlie Parker’, he spent the Eisenhower years as a lonely, messianic rebel: bearded, dressed in eccentric clothes, ‘the complete antithesis of the clean-cut, Hollywood High School undershirt and tidy crew-cut image of the cool jazz musician’.111 The revolution that Coleman, a Texan, and a small circle of Los Angeles-bred musicians (Eric Dolphy, Don Cherry, Red Mitchell, Billy Higgins and Charlie Haden) were trying to foment was ‘free jazz’112 – an almost ‘cataclysmic’ widening of the improvisational freedom that Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie had pioneered in the 1940s. At the time of Coleman’s revolutionary 1958 album, Something Else!, they were a veritable ‘underground within the underground’, on the margin of a ‘hard bebop’ community that was itself locked out of Los Angeles’s white-dominated ‘cool jazz’ scene.113
Coleman’s underground situation was indicative, not only of the color bar in Los Angeles cultural institutions (just beginning to break down in music with the integration of the Musicians’ Union, initiated by Charlie Mingus and Buddy Collette), but of the predicament of L.A.’s young Modernists in general. Abstractionism in either jazz or painting faced similar repression. If the so-called ‘bebop invasion’ of Los Angeles in 1946 had been repelled and Bird incarcerated in Camarillo, abstract expressionism fared little better in face of cold war hysteria married to cultural philistinism. Ancillary to the great Hollywood witch-hunt, a satellite inquisition in 1951 was mounted against ‘subversive modern art’ at the (old) County Museum in Exposition Park.
A group called Sanity in Art swore they detected maps of secret defense fortifications sequestered in abstract paintings, and one painter, Rex Brandt, was accused by an investigating committee for the City Council of incorporating propaganda in the form of a thinly disguised hammer-and-sickle within a seascape. Finally, the City Council resolved that the artists were ‘unconscious tools of Kremlin propaganda’ and didn’t rescind that opinion for eight years.114
If Los Angeles’s architectural modernists of the Exile generation (Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler) and their younger contemporaries (Raphael Soriano, Gregory Ain, and Harwell Harris) fared better in the early cold war than jazz musicians or modern artists, it was partly because of the circum-scription of their project. Their Hollywood Hills pleasure domes and ‘case-study’ homes corresponded better to evolving middle-class sensibility on Los Angeles’s nouveau riche Westside.115 Yet increasing acceptance of the International Style in domestic architecture was accompanied by a new intolerance for public housing – virtually outlawed by a 1952 ordinance directed against ‘socialistic projects’.
On the whole, however, the younger generation interested in new forms and practices was driven towards bohemia. For partisans of hard(er) jazz and its canvass counterpart (New York’s abstract expressionists had already acknowledged bebop’s seminal influence on their work), as well as what might be labelled ‘late surrealism’ in both art and film – that is to say, for the Los Angeles ‘hipster’ generation that came of age in the late 1940s and 1950s – there was little alternative but to form temporary ‘communes’ within the cultural underground that burgeoned for almost a decade.
One of the qualities shared by these diverse groups was their concern for critically reworking and re-presenting subcultural experience – a quality that made them the first truly ‘autobiographical’ intelligentsia in Los Angeles history. For Coleman, Dolphy, and other local jazz guerrillas, that shared existential ground was Black Los Angeles’s distinctive Southwestern blues tradition. Coleman had started his musical career honking out heavy, if slightly unorthodox, blues riffs in Texas and Louisiana juke joints, later playing the emergent ‘R&B’ sound that synthesized blues and swing. Los Angeles in the late 1940s, with the greatest number of independent studios, was the capital of R&B recording, while Central Avenue’s dazzling ‘Main Stem’ offered an extraordinary spectrum of jazz, blues and R&B, dominated by musicians from the Southwest circuit of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Lousiana (the region that had sent the most Black migrants to work in the West Coast’s war plants).
However, with the slow decline of the Central Avenue scene, partly as a result of police antipathy to ‘race mixing’ in the clubs, and with Black musicians excluded from lucrative studio jobs, the music of the younger ghetto jazzmen became leaner and harder, seeking through introspection and experiment to fashion a hegemonic alternative to the deracination of the ‘cool jazz’ played in beach nightclubs.116 In 1961, after Coleman, following Dolphy, had left for New York, the pianist and composer Horace Tapscott founded the Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension (UGMAA) and the Pan Afrikan Peoples’ Arkestra. Like the similar jazz collectives organized by Sun Ra and Roscoe Mitchell in Chicago, UGMAA communalized and utopianized the struggle for free music – striving simultaneously to become a performance laboratory, people’s school, and local cultural arm of the Black Revolution.117
The art counterpart to the jazz underground (although never with such radical aspirations) was the informal cooperative organized by a score of younger artists during the late 1950s around Edward Kienholz’s and Walter Hopps’s Ferus Gallery on La Cienga Boulevard. ‘A motley batch of beatniks, eccentrics, and “art types”’, they became the ‘seminal source for the blossoming of modernist art in Los Angeles during the sixties’.118 The Ferus core, including Billy Al Bengstrom, Ed Moses, Craig Kauffman, Robert Irwin, Larry Bell and Ed Ruscha (along with Kienholz himself) were far too individualistic to form an identifiable ‘L.A. school’, but they were temporarily unified by common passions. One was their desire to break the academicist stranglehold over Los Angeles’s backwater art world, although they differed on the means towards that end (abstract expressionism versus hard-edge abstractionism, for example). Another was a biographical and aesthetic camaraderie based on enthusiasm for the hotrod and motorcycle subcultures that had developed in Southern California from the 1940s.
In his talks with Lawrence Weschler, Robert Irwin (who had attended L.A.’s Dorsey High School with Eric Dolphy) repeatedly emphasized the importance of custom-car ‘folk art’ to the emergence of the Ferus group and the ‘L.A. Look’ which they eventually created. Earlier, critic Nancy Marmer, in contrasting the Northern and Southern California avant gardes, had made the same point:
Aside from the backdrop influence of Hollywood and the hypertrophied ‘neon-fruit supermarket’, there has also existed in California an idiosyncratic welding of sub-cultures and a body of small but curiously prophetic art, whose influence, if not always direct, is at least in an askew relation to contemporary Pop Art. For example, the Los Angeles hot-rod world, with its teenage rites, baroque car designs, kandy-kolors, its notion of a high-polish craftsmanship, and, perhaps most influential, its established conventions of decorative paint techniques, has flourished in the southern part of the state since the 1940s. If the imagery (‘Mad Magazine Bosch’, one writer has called it) has fortunately not been especially important, the custom-coach techniques of air-brush manipulation, ‘candy apple-ing’, and ‘striping’ have been variously suggestive.119
