and Larry Bell’s Minimalist cubes, folk car culture was transformed into the ‘cool, semitechnological, industrially pretty art’ that became the patented ‘L.A. Look’ of the 1960s.120 It was the avant-garde counterpart to the ‘Endless Summer’ depicted in Roger Corman movies, the Gidget novels (based on a Hollywood writer’s actual surfer-girl daughter), and the falsetto lyrics of Beach Boys’ songs. It was the mesmerizing vision of a white kids’ car-and-surf-based Utopia.
Kienholz was the major exception. As Anne Bartlett Ayres has pointed out, his ‘assemblages developed as a shadow side to the famous “L.A. Look”’,121 a kind of hotrod noir juxtaposed to the Pop luster of his colleagues. His Back Seat Dodge – 38 of 1964 – a work that so infuriated a right-wing County supervisor that he tried to have the new County Museum of Art shut down because of it – summarized the Southern California Dream in a single noir tableau. Literally hotrodding, Kienholz ‘chopped’ a ‘38 coupé and set it in a ‘Lovers’ Lane’ complete with discarded beer bottles on the grass and ‘mushy’ music. Dead lovers, locked in a grim missionary embrace on the front seat, seemed to symbolize an adolescence gone to seed in eternity – Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello petting after the Holocaust. Kienholz’s imagery – set in a fateful year – anticipated the worst.
This car–sex–death–fascism continuum also emerged as a dominant vision in L.A. underground film. In the notes to his ‘lost’ classic, Kustom Kar Kommandos (1964–65), Kenneth Anger – comparing L.A. eroticized custom cars to ‘an American cult-object of an earlier era, Mae West’ – emphasized that for the Southern California teenager, ‘the power-potentialized customized car represents a poetic extension of personality’.122 Anger – leader of the Hollywood film underground at various times in the 1950s and early 1960s – knew all about Southern California adolescence. This Hollywood brat reputedly ‘played the role of the child prince in Max Reinhardt’s movie of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and had Shirley Temple for a dancing partner at cotillions of the Maurice Kossloff Dancing School’, before launching his filmmaking career at age eleven. Another avid follower of Aleister Crowley, Anger was obsessed with the diabolics of Hollywood, homosexuality and speed machines of all kinds. His book, Hollywood Babylon has been described as ‘a slander catalogue amounting to a phenomenology of the myth of the scandal in Hollywood’, while two of his films, Scorpio Rising (1962) (which contains the seed of the 1980s film Blue Velvet in one of its segments) and Kommandos, explored the Nietzschean porno-mythology of motorcycle gangs and hotrodders.123
Adding to the L.A. car-culture phenomenologies of the Ferus artists and Anger, as well as inaugurating an improvisational voice that has been compared to Joyce but sounds more like Dolphy or Coleman, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) provided the ultimate freeway-map ontology of Southern California. A former technical writer in the West Coast aerospace industry (forced to produce eroticized descriptions of Bomark missiles and the like), Pynchon understood (better than some of the Ferus Gallery’s Pop artists) that in Southern California custom cars and their makers grew up into ICBMs and their makers. As radically ‘decentered’ as any contemporary Althusserian could have wished, Lot 49 wastes no time grappling with the alienation of its subject (as in Joan Didion’s ‘L.A. car book’, Play It As It Lays) but moves immediately into a postmodern lane. It maps a baroquely layered but ultimately one-dimensional reality (Marcuse a la Klein bottle?) ‘in which the city is at once an endless text always promising meaning but ultimately only offering hints and signs of a possible and final reality . . . like a “printed circuit”’ – or a freeway.124
But the Endless Summer of the avant garde (expressed in the new painting as a ‘bright ethereality’) came to an abrupt end in August 1965. Southcentral Los Angeles exploded in rage against police abuse and institutional racism, creating for a few days the ‘barricaded commune’ (Plagens) and ‘burning city’ (West) that Los Angeles intellectuals had frequently dreamt about as a kind of liberation from the Culture Industry. In fact, the Watts Rebellion, as well as the police attack on peaceful anti-war demonstrators at Century City in July 1967, politically galvanized artists and writers on the first broad scale since the Hollywood witch-hunt. Pynchon wrote a stirringly sympathetic and unpatronizing piece called ‘A Journey into the Mind of Watts’ (really a meditation on urban segregation), Ruscha painted The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire (1965–8), Schulberg organized a Watts Writers’ Workshop, anti-war artists contributed scores of pieces to the ‘Artists’ Peace Tower’ on the Sunset Strip, the underground Los Angeles Free Press flourished, and Kienholz’s tableaux denounced war (see his Portable War Memorial [1968]).125
Most importantly, the Rebellion inspired unity and élan in Southcentral Los Angeles, giving birth to a local version of the Black Arts Movement across a full spectrum of practices from Tapscott’s Arkestra to the rap poetry of the Watts Prophets. Bernard Jackson and J. Alfred Cannon founded the Inter-City Cultural Center in 1966 which grew into a flourishing theater center with its own press and school. Wanda Coleman, Kamau Daaood, Quincy Troupe, K. Curtis Lyle, Emory Evans, and Ojenke established a distinctive Watts idiom in fiction and poetry, while Melvin Van Peebles pioneered an alternative Black cinema with his outlaw odyssey, Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song. The Watts Festival, meanwhile, brought cultural cadres together with the community in annual celebrations of unity and rebellion.
But the heroic moment of Underground Los Angeles Culture quickly passed. As a local art historian pointed out, ‘the high -flying spirit of the ‘60s . . . crashed and burned.’126 The local dearth of jazz clubs and modernist galleries/collectors irresistibly drove part of the late 1950s and early 1960s avant garde (including L.A.’s Artforum magazine) to Manhattan (or, sometimes, in the case of experimental film and poetry, to San Francisco). After a student rebellion in 1966, Disney endowers moved Chouinard Art Institute, reborn as the California Institute of the Arts, to an isolated suburban fringe where their conservative proprietary interests would be maximized. Inner-city cultural institutions, meanwhile, were starved of financial support and media attention. Then, amidst the recession of avant-garde hopes, there were suddenly the seductions of Los Angeles’s own emergent corporate arts nexus.
Maurice Tuchman, the curator of the County Museum of Art, ‘conceived [in the late 1960s] the somewhat dubious notion of placing artists with corporate sponsors in a vast Art and Technology program’.127 With the patronage of ‘Missy’ Chandler of the Times dynasty, Tuchman ‘married’ seventy-six artists to forty major local corporations.128 As Peter Plagens notes, the resulting exhibition in 1971 was the ‘swan song of sixties art’ – a programmatic turning-point towards the mercenary, corporate-dominated arts dispensation of the late 1970s and 1980s.
The exhibition’s catalogue is not so much the narrative of a completed project, but an interim report on a hoped-for ongoing metamorphosis of modem art, centered in Los Angeles. Its candid and lengthy description/documentation of every attempted collaboration between the museum-matched artists and corporation admits to every artist’s arrogance . . . as well as the easy alignment of artists with hard-core capitalism and war-related industries (while the war in Vietnam was at its height).129
The ‘L.A. Look’, which in the early 1960s suggested the possibility of a critical-artistic strategy that interpreted the city from an indigenous sensibility, progressively collapsed into mere self-affirming veneer, ‘mock worship of California’s earthly paradise’.130 Christopher Knight, writing about the 1970s, has described the implosion of the Los Angeles arts scene as a febrile, Popish ‘regionalism’ – based on pastel sentimentality and ‘a distrust of intellectualism’ – which attempted to fill the cultural vacuum left from the defeat of the 1960s. But out of this ‘morass of determined provincialism’ no ‘broadly convincing local aesthetic’ emerged, only a ‘gruesome’ celebration of trivialized made-in-Los-Angeles productions.131
The itinerary of Edward Ruscha probably best typifies the post-1960s
