May 1972.

Thirty years ago this month, contributing editor Peter Plagens took the measure of a nascent Pasadena art scene. Senior editor Eric C. Banks revisits the chronicles of Artforum's California man.

"ARTFORUM--BORN IN SAN FRANCISCO (1962), reared in Los Angeles (1964-67), and then heartbreakingly whisked off to New York--employed me for vernacular truth-telling and comic relief from its theoretical preachiness," painter-critic Peter Plagens comments in the introduction to the second edition of his Sunshine Muse: Art on the West Coast 1945-1970, originally published in 1974. "I started writing five-dollar reviews for it in 1965, when I was assistant curator at the Long Beach Museum of Art and needed both gas money and a goad to make the trip to the La Cienega Boulevard galleries twice a month," Plagens recalls. "In 1972, I'd just returned to LA from a teaching stint at Berkeley, moved back into my day studio in Pasadena, and resumed writing my 'Los Angeles Letter' for Artforum--the column of reviews meant to answer the ongoing question, 'Why is the house organ for New York minimalism even bothering with art from its old hometown?'"

Plagens put this question to the test every time he went to the plate, and he didn't miss many at bats, publishing near-monthly his bumptious reflections on the meritorious and the mundane in Southern Californian art. Joining an Artforum lineup loaded with critical sluggers, Plagens was the flashy shortstop, blessed with a golden glove, good range to the left or right, and a knack for peppering singles all over the park. The degree of coverage the magazine afforded the LA area back then may seem somewhat surprising today, but three decades ago Plagens regularly turned out features on West Coast figures like Ed Moses, Billy Al Bengston, and Larry Bell while covering the embryonic beat at a time of rapid museum and gallery expansion. Threading all these efforts is Plagens's abiding contextualist curiosity regarding the state of artmaking in Southern California in the early '70s. Those reports today read like a working draft for a postscript to Sunshine Muse.

Case in point: "The Decline and Rise of Younger Los Angeles Art," which ran in these pages exactly thirty years ago. Assessing the Barbara Haskell--curated "15 Artists" at the Pasadena Art Museum, Plagens diligently doles out the positive and negative to each artist in the show, but, as in all his writing, he can't help but furrow his brow a bit. (One charm of the critic's period reviews is their ever-so-slight restraint, the sense of a talented writer working with his foot on the brake. That traction enables the veering asides that give Plagens's criticism its punch while keeping the wheels on the road.)

"15 Artists" was one of those local talent shows that don't register so forcefully in the era of international your city's name here biennials, but at the time it marked a coming-out for Pasadena's youngish troupe of artists--the "Williamsburg of its day," Plagens retrospectively describes the community, as opposed to Chelsea-ish Venice Beach. With comers like Allan McCollum, William Wegman, Karen Carson, and Richard Jackson showing, expectations ran high. Plagens characterizes the survey as a professional effort, "leaving the art alone to say what is, at least to me, uplifting in the short run, but then, as I worry about it all, a long, sloping, slight, but discernible peneplain of depression." And he hits the exhibition--and the implicit scene-making aspirations--where it hurts most: its inconsequentiality.

A lock-step system of nice (young?) artists working in clean, white rooms, making clean, rollable, elegant, ropy, dismountable, portable art to fit into the bed of a Ford Ranchero, to be driven to the clean, sunny parking lot of the clean new museum, where it's documented and fussed over by young curators, shown to other (young?) artists, young critics, nice, clean, elegant dealers, and older, richer collectors of artists and art, talked about at a series of nice, clean, beachy lawn parties and in nice, clean, lacquer-coated art magazine articles.

If that sounds bitchy, the grumpiness is redeemed by Plagens's recoil at honeyed hype. The question of regionalism was always bottom line in his LA missives (calling "15 Artists" a "social gestalt, with meaning beyond the pale of the nuggets of quality in its component parts," he brokers its significance for West Coast art). Was the work being produced in Southern California--from "LA Look" to "Aerospace Minimalism" to "Light and Space"--a (poor) cross-country cousin to the halcyon Pop and Minimalism on the East Coast or was it more a case of featherweight local exceptionalism? Allowing the Hobson's choice to animate his criticism, Plagens found a frame that brought his reviews to life. If the extremes of second-cityism have all but vanished between then and now, the immediacy of Plagens's reports from his (and our) old hometown is a trenchant reminder of LA's early anxious days--and Artforum's own love-hate investment in that city's scene.

In this ongoing series, Artforum looks back on an essay of note from our pages ten, twenty, or thirty years ago to the month. Visit artforum.com to view the contents of all three issues and read selected articles from each.