ARTMAKING IN A CONTESTED EDEN.

Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity,

1900-2000

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art 

Los Angeles, California

October 22, 2000-February 25, 2001

Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity.

1900-2000

edited by Stephanie Barron, Sheri Bernstein

and Ilene Susan Fort

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000

351 pp./$40.00 (sb), $60.00 (hb)

Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity 1900-2000" is one of the most ambitious exhibitions one can imagine. California is so huge, its population so diverse and its influence so great that the idea of a show attempting to critically organize 100 years of artmaking seems unimaginable--but the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has done just that. Since 1994 the museum's curators have been assembling and organizing the region's overwhelming artistic and cultural output and have mounted a very interesting, albeit frustrating, exhibition.

The idea that anyone could digest such a massive amount of artwork and cultural ephemera is ridiculous, but to their credit, the curators have systematically separated the exhibition into five separate shows, each covering a 20-year duration. Each two-decade period is assigned an overarching theme giving it a broad historical overview while serving to limit and condense the curatorial scope. One problem present throughout the exhibition is the lack of explanatory text for individual works, especially those that are not well known. The exhibition is accompanied by a beautiful catalog that will continue to inform long after the show has closed, allowing an in-depth reading and contemplation of this immense project. The catalog provides a general overview with some discussion of individual works, but unfortunately the lesser-known pieces are somewhat glossed over and suffer from the omission. The real strength of the catalog lies in the excellent essays by Sheri Bernstein and Howard Fox and the insightful and e ntertaining opus by Richard Rodriguez. The writings chronicle the century's artmaking in a mostly linear fashion, helping to clarify the overwhelming subject matter. The Rodriguez piece is by itself wonderful and, like so much artwork from California, it is both highly personal and yet speaks to our shared American cultural experience.

Section One was "Selling California 1900-1920." The century's first two decades were marked by a population explosion that was to a large degree encouraged and funded by railroad and real estate interests. The Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroads sponsored trips to southern California for artists in exchange for scenic photographs and paintings that were then exhibited in the companies' rail stations across the country. A tradition of imagery emphasizing natural beauty was promoted by Pictorialist photographers and the "California Impressionist" plein air painters, whose work was in commercial demand. The rising Arts and Crafts movement further encouraged outsiders to view California as an eden of protestant work ethic values--rugged individualism and handcraftsmanship versus the eclecticism and industrialization of the East Coast. Southern California was a predominately heterogeneous region, reflecting the ethnic make-up of mid-western states. These two major aspects of California--immense, untamed natur al beauty and a homogenous, white population--provided the major thrust of the popular depiction of the state.

Imagery in Section One included the dreamy Pictorial landscape photography of Anne Brigman, Karl Struss and others. Brigman's The Lone Pine (c. 1908) epitomizes this photographic style. The image shows a wind-swept pine bending severely over a rocky precipice. A nude woman is sitting at the base of the tree and leaning with it, her head nestled in her arm in a soft-focus allegory of humankind bending to the will of the natural world. This work is contrasted with the documentary photographs of Arnold Genthe whose golden-toned images portray the everyday, albeit exotic, world of San Francisco's Chinese community. Throughout the exhibition are display cases of ephemera such as orange crate labels and postcards depicting California's opulent agriculture. A preponderance of uniformly unpopulated nature paintings by California Impressionists Granville Redmond, Guy Rose, William Wendt and others further promote the idea of California as a place of open unspoiled land with great potential and prosperity.

Section Two was entitled "Contested Eden 1920-1940." By 1920 Los Angeles had become California's largest city and with that distinction came the urban problems familiar to other big American cities. Massive immigration from Mexico, China and Japan created tensions with the now-established former mid-westerners. Images of urban California, which had been relatively rare before, became more common and the rise of Modernism brought a sharper edged style and contemporary subject matter to art made after 1920. The geometric designs and architecture of Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler and the paintings of urban life by Phil Dyke, Diego Rivera, Millard Sheets and Bernard Zakheim overtook the Arts and Crafts and plein air styles in contemporary art.

The booming economy of the 1920s was contrasted with the Great Depression of the 1930s and accompanied by a critique of capitalism by artists. Social critique rose with the documentary work of the Farm Security Administration, most notably in California with the photographs of Dorothea Lange as well as those of Horace Bristol, John Guttmann and Otto Hagel. This was the heyday of the socially conscious murals of Rivera and Zakheim and the massive art projects of the Works Progress Administration. Peter Stackpole's Life magazine photograph The Lone Riveter (1935) is a heroic image of a worker high up within the construction apparatus of San Francisco's Bay Bridge, suggesting sleekness and technological might. Contrasting this vision of successful industrialism is Lange's A Sign of the Times (1934), a beautiful and poignant image of a stenographer's legs in badly mended stockings.

One of California's greatest enduring myths surrounds Hollywood. Rivaling the boosterism of the tourist, automobile and railroad industries, by 1930 Hollywood's obsession with youth, beauty, prosperity and glamour became the nation's obsession. Besides the films themselves, the rise of celebrity photography and popular movie magazines fed the country's growing hunger and celebrity photographers George Hurrell and Clarence Sinclair Bull led the way in romanticizing and glamorizing the beautiful people of California. Hurrell helped established the identity of many actresses and actors and created an iconography of steamy sexuality with dreamy glamour.

Part Three, "The California Home Front 1940-1960," emphasizes the war years and the rise of the defense industries, the persecution of Japanese-Americans, high modernism in architecture and design, the increasing suburban nature of the state, the continuing rise of Hollywood glamour, film noir and the Beat Generation. The hyper-modern design work of the husband and wife team Charles and Ray Eames is demonstrated with furnishings and a beautiful set of molded plywood leg splints and stretcher. Large floral designs in textiles are represented with women's bathing suits and dresses that complement Julius Schulman's photographs of modern architecture.

The boom in industrial output necessitated by the war stands in stark contrast to the previous section's imagery of the Great Depression. Lange's End of Shift (1942) shows a mass of blue collar workers--both men and women, white and black--leaving a factory in Richmond in 1942. After Pearl Harbor, the vitriol against people of Japanese descent is represented in propaganda posters urging national unity through xenophobia. Posters condemning "Japs" and warning of the "Yellow Peril" are shown along with Ansel Adams's photographs of internment camps from his project Born Free and Equal (1944), Lange's Pledge of Allegiance (1942) and images of camps by Japanese American Toyo Miyatake.

Industrial growth propelled the nation's economy and lifted its self-image to new heights; art from this era depicts the development of suburban bedroom communities and freeways. William Garnett's Lakewood Housing Project (1950) is a group of six aerial photographs of neatly arranged housing tracts and presages the similarly encyclopedic work to come from Edward Ruscha. In Max Yavno's quintessential California photograph Muscle Beach (1941), athletic youths flex their muscles and toss each other into the air in a crowed beach scene and Dwight Eisen-hower, ever the icon of self-satisfied 1950s America, is shown in a Sid Avery photograph barbecuing steaks with a range of mountains in the background. Some of the paintings in this section that also foretell contemporary work include Charles Sheeler's California Industrial (1957), a painting of bold geometric patterns and flat fields of color and Roger Kuntz's Santa Ana Arrows (c. 1950s), a powerful oil painting of a tightly cropped freeway sign raked by sunlight. Postmodernism is suggested through Robert Frank's Television Studio, Burbank (1956), Jess's Tricky Cad, a clever take-off of Dick Tracy comics, and copies of Wallace Berman's handprinted magazine Semina (1955-56).

America's veneer of uniformity during this period was challenged by the jazz and beat movements and socially conscious artists. William Claxton's blurry photograph of musician Stan Getz from 1954, Stan Getz, Hollywood, 1954 is pure sound and action while Rico Lebron's The Yellow Plow (1949) is a hideous fiasco of jarring color that would fit perfectly into the tasteless decor of a cheap motel room. Don Normark's La Loma (1949), is a touching, one-of-a-kind artist's book of a long-gone community and the wonderfully silly "physique" photographs of Bruce of LA simmer with homoerotic subversiveness. Along with Bruce of LA, Robert Mizer's "physique" photos of three muscle boys in fantasy costumes work wonderfully with Hurrell's equally fantastic celebrity shots of Jane Russell and Ann Sheridan. Against this over-the-top artificiality are Yavno's subtle photographs of Los Angeles at night--city overviews and street scenes whose mood meshes with the more dramatic film noir clips running continuously in the gallery nearby.

Part Four, "Tremors in Paradise 1960-1980," looked at the growing conflict throughout American society and how California became the symbol of American youth's new attitude. If anything, subersiveness is the overarching theme of this period where traditional ideas about art were being demolished. At the entrance of Part Four was Ed "Big Daddy" Roth's fantasy car Road Agent (1963) and Judy Chicago's impressive, geometric custom paint job Car Hood (1964). There is a case of Ruscha's books 26 Gasoline Stations (1962) and Every Building on Sunset Strip (1966), which many consider the beginning of the self-published photography book. Robert Heinecken's TV Dinner/After (1971) is a photograph of a partially eaten TV dinner with a cigarette squashed into it. The image is printed onto a crumpled aluminum foil plate and represents just one of this artist's seminal works.

Rudi Gernreich's funny and elegant black topless women's bathing suit from 1964 (Topless Bathing Suit) is contrasted with his absolutely awful, garish unisex caftan from 1970 (Unisex Caftan). Robert Irwin's groundbreaking disc floating on the wall (Untitled, 1968) is still breathtaking and Ruscha's pair of Standard gas stations--one a screenprint of the station (Standard Station, 1966) and the other an oil painting of the same station on fire (Burning Gas Station, 1965-66), are essential viewing. Edmund Teske's murky abstract toned photograph (Untitled) from 1962 brings to mind Susan Rankaitis's later and more complex works and contrasts well with this reviewer's favorite Ansel Adams work--a coffee can printed with one of his 1969 photographs of Yosemite Valley's Inspiration Point, (Yosemite Valley, from Inspiration Point, Yosemite National Park, [1969]--from pristine nature to your grocer's shelf.

Part Five, "Many Californias 1980-2000," examined the variety of artistic concerns that arose in this period including identity politics, the digital age, multi-culturalism, AIDS and environmentalism. Of course, the history closest to us is always most difficult to assess, and this section is the least satisfying. Artwork addressing environmental concerns include Kim Abeles's fantastic Forty Days & Forty Nights of Smog (1991), a table with legs made from car mufflers and a glass top with smog-stenciled place settings. Joe Deal's photograph Cotton, California (1981) shows the precarious balance between a tumultuous geological fault and suburban housing and Sant Khalsa's Seven Oaks Dam Site (1992) is a beautiful photograph of the land contoured into a step-pyramid around the construction site. The California cityscape is shown in Judy Fiskin's "Dingbat Series" of little photographs of non-descript buildings, Lewis Baltz's huge color photograph of an anonymous city street scene 11777 Foothill Boulevard, Los Ange les, California (1991) and Robbert Flick's Pico B (1998-99), a composite of hundreds of tiny video stills of continuous street scenes shot from his car. There is a separate video room with a day's worth of viewing by artists including Bob Flanagan, Paul McCarthy, Bruce Nauman, Martha Rosler and Bill Viola, among others. Works on identity politics include a Lari Pittman painting of a flaming anus titled Spiritual & Needy (1991-92) and there is a set of Jerome Caja's sad little works including Bloody Marys from Heaven (1994), a crude but emotionally charged portrait painted in nail polish and white out. There is the wonderfully nasty Charles Ray mannequin with hyper-real genitalia, Male Mannequin (1990), Dinh Q Le's woven photograph Buddha of Compassion (1997) and Ruben Ortiz-Torres's souped-up, custom leaf blowers from 1999." The subject of AIDS is briefly represented through Albert Winn's photographic self-portrait, Akehah (1995), and Masami Teraoka's watercolors, but the Pittman and Caja pieces might be addr essing the subject also. The body and appearances are represented by Laura Aguilar's Nature #7 Self Portrait (1996) showing herself in the desert, Liza Lou's Super Sister (1999), a massive updated soul sister made from polyester beads, and those creepy siblings digitally fabricated in the photograph Triplets (1993) by Keith Cottingham.

The exhibition has been roundly blasted for everything from revisionist history (what history isn't?) to political correctness (some things need correcting) to curatorial ineptitude (don't try this at home). While there are many valid points of criticism about the show's reach and organization the truth is there are so many wonderful, beautiful and highly significant objects in this show that tell the story better than any curator can.

California may be the most contradictory place in America. It's popular image is one of rampant liberalism, decadence and eco-radicalism, but right-wing organizations flourish here and there are more plastic Jesus fishes and Christian bumper stickers on cars in California than anywhere. Gas guzzling SUVs run amok at 85 MPH and there are as many gun shows as in any five other states combined. The idea of looking to California's art and culture as a barometer of who we are as Americans, and to understand its influence and pervasiveness on much of world culture, is an impossible task. But if a museum won't attempt it, who will? Life is messy and so are art and history; sometimes you have to do what you think is important and interesting instead of what can be successfully accomplished. Curators try to make sense of the cultural stew and I'm happy that the LACMA had the courage to take on the huge, impossible task that is "Made in California."

THOMAS MCGOVERN is the author of Bearing Witness (to AIDS) (1999) and Professor of Art at California State University, San Bernardino.