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In this extensive exhibition at Centre Pompidou in Paris, Los Angeles is presented as the final bastion of the 20th-century avant-garde. Multi-layered and versatile, art from Los Angeles spoke the appropriate language for a contemporary, multicultural metropolis where life could be as hard and as cynical as it could be free and uninhibited. Domeniek Ruyters considers the exhibition in Paris which covers the years between 1955 and 1985 and Bruce Hainley adds cursory notes on what has been happening in the LA art scene since.

PART 1The Exhibition1955-1985

by Domeniek RuytersWhere the generating of interesting art is concerned, Los Angeles has been catching up with New York City for some time. New York may still hold first place as the art capital of the world, with the best museums, the biggest galleries, the largest numbers of artists and the most extensive private collections, but it is more and more frequently finding its match in ‘LA’, where artists from all over the world converge for long-term or for short-term periods. Sprawling Los Angeles, sandwiched in between the sea and the desert, is a greater port of refuge than the worldy old New York, which has clearly begun to suffer the strain of being leader of the pack. Los Angeles lacks the cultural infrastructure and intellectual climate that give the United States’ Eastern Seaboard so much colour and character, but this has proven to be more an advantage than a drawback. In the absence of a prevailing artistic discourse, artists in LA could say anything they wanted – and they have done just that. LA is just making a lot of noise, at least in the eyes of New York, where the art elite, behaving like cloistered monks, occupy themselves with formulating the rules for what is and what is not allowed in art. Politically correct art is a New York invention, while Los Angeles prefers laissez faire, private interests and irrational love affairs, if not total anarchy. As an exhibition, Los Angeles 1955-1985: Naissance d’une capitale artistique/Birth of an Art Capital, now at Centre Pompidou, is certainly meant to be the European coming-out for America’s nuimber two art capital. The most important, if not the only purpose of the 20 galleries of the exhibition is to convince the European public that LA is a fully fledged art capital, with its own mature art scene, its own themes and its own unique working climate. Work by 80 artists is being shown, nearly all of them big names. We pass them by, one by one, the heroes of the white cube – Edward Ruscha, Edward Kienholz, David Hammons, David Hockney, Bruce Nauman, Chris Burden, Allan Kaprow, Michael Asher, Bas Jan Ader, Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley, Bill Viola, James Turrell. Art in Los Angeles knows only celebrities.The show in Paris is not simply a city portrait of the kind we see so many of these days in international art. Paris is presenting the evolution of LA as a centre of the avant-garde, the 20th-century’s last. There are explicit references to the legendary city exhibitions that were held in the late 1970s and early 1980s at Centre Pompidou, honouring the great 20 th -century centres of the avant-garde. New York, Berlin and Moskow were included in monumental exhibitions that enticed half of Europe to Paris. Now, 25 years later, Los Angeles is being added to that illustrious list.

Heaven and Hell

The exhibition begins with 1955 and ends in 1985, and we, the European audience, only began to notice LA in the 1990s, with the success of Mike Kelley en Paul McCarthy. Why this historic period was selected, remains unclear. Catherine Grenier, the curator responsible for the show, outspokenly contends that it was a relatively arbitrary demarcation. At the same time, she points out that the selected time frame was defined by two moments of intense change in the city of Los Angeles. In the 1950s, LA changed from being a provincial outpost into a regional and national centre of art, with the power to attract artists from both the region and farther afield. In the 1980s, it experienced a new peak, when in terrific tempo, a variety of museums opened doors in new locations, a gallery curcuit opened up, collectors moved in, and art schools assumed growing prestige nationally and overseas, with an enormous influx of talent as a result.There is another, more hidden, metaphoric explanation for the selection of this period. The exhibition begins when Disneyland was established in 1955 and ends with the rise of a generation of artists who were brought together by Paul Schimmel in 1992, for the controversial Helter Skelter exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art – MOCA. Disneyland represents the sunny LA cliché, the city where life is all glitter. Helter Skelter confronted this utopian image, so adored by Hollywood, with unadulterated anti-utopia. Instead of that surfing cheerfulness, Helter Skelter presented the art of a generation of artists for whom alienation, perversity, sex and violence served as the major motifs of their work. Instead of eternal happiness, these artists illuminated a dark existence permeated with fear and desire, through which mankind hurtles as little more than the plaything of fate.Even though this notorious show falls outside the period covered by the Paris exhbition, the ghost of Helter Skelter is nonetheless a presence, and not only because its most important artists, including Larry Pittman, Paul McCarthy, Lyn Foulkes and Jim Shaw are prominently represented. It looks as though Helter Skelter has not only coloured the perception of Los Angeles art since 1992, but has also influenced the perception of art from the years preceding it. It is as if, because of Helter Skelter, we can no longer look at LA without being conscious of the city’s twisted psychology, which creates such compelling polarities to its sunny reputation. That is apparent, for example, in the horrifying sculpture ‘The Illegal Operation’ (1962), by Edward Kienholz, the underground film Scorpio Rising (1963), by Kenneth Anger, and Chris Burden’s extreme performances. Typically, it seems to be most present in the work from which you expect it the least: in the slick minimal art of the 1960s and 1970s by such artists as John McCracken, Craig Kauffman, Kenneth Price and Billy Al Bengston. In Paris, however much this work is described as ‘LA Cool’ or the ‘finish fetish’, it seems not particularly ‘cool’, but sultry, and not sublime, but indeed troubled. In LA, there was no golden slice or calculated materialism, as in the East Coast minimalism of Donald Judd and Robert Morris, but embryonic forms in pastel shades. Even the etherial work of Robert Irwin and James Turrell does not escape a hint of psychologizing, in the sense that even though it also played with the principles of perception, their work was in the end more obfuscating and beguling to the senses than it was clarifying and analytical in character.Throughout the exhibition, Grenier concedes to her sensitivity to the mythical polarities of Los Angeles, by hanging more war-weary works whenever the exhibition threatens to become too focussed on the sunny LA cliché. Across from a relatively unthreatening David Hockney swimming pool, she has hung Ed Ruscha’s puzzling painting of the MOCA in flames. Across from a poetic interpretation of the opera Madame Butterfly by Alexis Smith, is Bruce Nauman, busy painting his balls black, in close-up. The cheerful Allen Ruppersberg, opening a café and hotel for his colleagues, has the pleasure of the company of Chris Burden, who is engaging in self-mutilation in all manner of performances. And picturesque views by Dennis Hopper and Judy Fiskin are paired with the somewhat disconcerting photographs of deserted and oil-stained parking places by Ed Ruscha and John Divola’s police films of burglary damage.

Free-thinking Individualism

In the catalogue, Howard N. Fox, curator for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, puts the popular mythology of heaven and hell in Los Angeles into perspective. The city may well be a place of optimism and idyllic landscapes, where immigrants and utopian dreamers have long wanted to be, and it may also at the same time be an apocalyptic city, with looming natural disasters, ethnically divided neighbourhoods and an extensive underground scene, but LA is more. Fox soberly points out the fact that the film, television and music industries are huge, and they largely create the image, but that people often forget that LA is also home to one of the largest ports in the world. With a total population of fourteen million, a lot more is going on in urban Los Angeles than Hollywood could ever cover.For this reason, Fox wants to get away from the simplistic polarities of Disneyland and Helter Skelter, and he mentions three other benchmark factors underlying the rise and success of art in LA: its art evolved in response to social and economic circumstances; it flourished especially in milieus that rejected art on principle, letting artists follow their own incentives and interests; and finally, Los Angeles’s geographic distance from and utter disinterest in developments in New York or Europe.For Fox, Los Angeles is a city fueled by individual histories, and it is only with difficulty that any convincing general conclusions can be drawn. No bastions, no ‘kongsi’ sharing, no prevailing discourse: in LA, everyone works under his own command. In LA’s liberal individualism, Fox sees today’s globalized art world, for which it is equally true that no single argument or medium holds sway. In LA, you can learn how art survives as an ‘ungoverned, unruly activity’ in a ‘mutual diaspora’, where ‘generosity of the spirit’ guarantees continuing interest in the adventure.The notes in the margins of Fox’s text all the more clearly demonstrate how Centre Pompidou is trying to present LA as a complex, multicultural art metropolis, one you can not easily put your finger on. The constructed regimen of stars whose work apparently fits into tidy movements under the ubiquitous dichotomy of heaven and hell takes on the character of a story within a story, in the same way that there are so many more stories that can be told about Los Angeles. None of them is decisive, and none can explain it all.In this context, by way of an epilogue at the end of the exhibition, the presence of the 1974 film, The Desert People, by David Lamelas, is very revealing. Lamelas presents a film that starts as a road movie, develops into a documentary report of the meeting of a number of caucasians with the local Native American population, to end abruptly in a crash that kills them all. Loners all, they stand alongside one another on their way to the end, while the stories they tell bear witness to fundamental misunderstandings of one another and the real history of the place, the tragic lot of the original inhabitants. The amalgam of stories by which one tries to build an image of reality does not really offer an optimistic reflection on Los Angeles, but it does offer something that may be close to the reality, at least the reality of this exhibition, in which the artists, despite their frantic efforts at integration, do not very convincingly hang alongside one another. Los Angeles 1955-1985 Naissance d’une capitale artistiqueCentre Pompidouthrough 17 July

PART 2Cursory Notes1985-2006

By Bruce Hainley1. It probably cannot be overstated: in terms of art production and reception, a key difference between LA and any other city in the United States, perhaps in the world, is the dominance and tradition of its graduate art programs: Art Center College of Design; California Institute of the Arts (CalArts); Claremont College; Otis College; University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); and University of Southern California (USC). It would be intriguing to make a flow chart of where and how energies connected to specific artists, both as teachers and graduates, move from one place to another over the last twenty years.2. Stereotypically (which is not to say, untruthfully), an early sign of artistic success in New York is when the artist no longer has to teach to pay the rent; in LA, major artists, for over thirty years, continue to teach throughout or in addition to dynamic careers. This changes the intensity and seriousness of the conversations and discourses about art. With more schools and a lineage of important artists-as-teachers, but a much smaller collector base, fewer art galleries, younger museums, and few Los Angeles-based art publications—compared to New York—LA’s art scene, at its best, thrives on its participants’ knowledge of art.3. That knowledge combines with a superabundance of all kinds of materials, available because of the film, television and music industries (the “sun” around which almost all things revolve in LA), and (relatively and until very recently) cheap real estate for studio space, which allows for artistic practices constantly challenging and experimenting with the spatial-temporal continuum through complex interstices of material, personal, and imaginary histories.4. No matter what its actual historico-philosophical ramifications, if it isn’t all done with the appearance of the chic and ease of a surfer, seemingly effortlessly, shooting a tube; the suddenness of a boy or girl figuring out that he or she’s just become a star; the grace of a has-been making a return—not to mention the spiraling out of control (insert recent pix of Whitney Houston or mug shots of Nick Nolte or Michael Jackson), the slide from Somebody to Nobody—it isn’t going to fly in LA, a city whose art has trafficked excellently in the equivalents of all these states and then some, frequently, strangely, with a strategic deployment of nonrepresentation and/or abstract signage as much as mimesis. 5. Of course, all of the above information is fairly rote. 6. Los Angeles 1955-1985 at the Pompidou closes with works by Christopher Williams and Larry Johnson, among others. Their inclusion isn’t wrong (both men were born in or near Los Angeles; both were graduates of CalArts, both—especially Johnson, who was, until recently, the head of the undergraduate photo program at Otis College—remain key artist-teachers in Los Angeles), but with Williams’ first solo show occurring in 1982 and Johnson’s in 1986 (in New York), it’s a retrospective representation of 1985 rather than of what the feel might have been in the moment. This is the problem with history, in that so much of the coming-and-going give-and-take of the immediate social scene is occluded. Certainly, similar aporia clutter these brief notes.7. Between 1985 and 2005, the shifts and changes to the LA art scene have been, well, seismic, but one of the stabilizing points of reference—not just for LA—remains curator and writer Ralph Rugoff’s Just Pathetic show at Rosamund Felsen Gallery in 1990. Including both Mike Kelley and Jeffrey Vallance, among others, Rugoff’s show synthesized the mood and mode of an aesthetic associated with Los Angeles; named it, for better or worse; and, in no small part, influenced Paul Schimmel’s Helter Skelter exhibition at MoCA, Los Angeles in 1992, the second unshakeable foundation of recent LA art, if, for no other reason, than presenting the fictive as one of the best ways to negotiate the critical (rather than only art historians or academics, many of the texts in Helter Skelter’s catalogue were by many of LA best writers [Dennis Cooper, Amy Gerstler, Benjamin Weissman])—which may still be the case: the novels of Dennis Cooper and Bret Easton Ellis; the films of Morgan Fisher, William Jones, and Nicole Holofcener; the music of X, they will all tell you as much as if not more than Mike Davis about LA. Schimmel’s repeatedly invoked show finally brought long overdue limelight to Paul McCarthy (it was his first inclusion in a major museum show), for his awesome and eerie The Garden. Giving the hometown its artistic props, both shows quickly became even more catalytic as myth than, perhaps, in actuality. 8. Nodes: Richard Kuhlenschmidt Gallery (in its various incarnations). Against Nature: A Group Show of Work by Homosexual Men, 1988, at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, curated by Dennis Cooper and Richard Hawkins (the show is picketed by Douglas Crimp, among others, in part for privileging the aesthetic over the “political,”—i.e. overt ACT UP-y agitprop; Cooper even receives death threats) A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation, 1989, at MoCA, curated by Mary Jane Jacob and Ann Goldstein. Stuart Regen Gallery. Bergamot Station’s opening in 1994. Dave Muller’s Three Day Weekend exhibits launch. “Baby” Bergamot at the Nebraska art strip mall: ACME, Dan Bernier Gallery, Marc Foxx Gallery. Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965-1975 at MoCA, 1996, curated by Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer. The Bliss House. Dennis Cooper’s 1997 article in Spin, “Too Cool for School,” covering a windfall of talent at UCLA. “Sharon Lockhart, Laura Owens, and Frances Stark” [“3 x 3”] at Blum & Poe. Tom Solomon’s Garage. “Scene of the Crime” at the UCLA Armand Hammer Museum, 1997, curated by Ralph Rugoff. ACME, Bernier, and Foxx move to 6150 Wilshire. Room 702, at 702 Heliotrope Drive, run by UCLA grads, Brent Petersen and Mark Grotjahn. Andrew Hultkrans’s 1998 article in Artforum, “Surf and Turf,” with portrait photographs by Jeff Burton.9. Brent Petersen opened Brent Petersen Gallery at 6150 Wilshire in 1998; it ran for about a year. An artist himself, Petersen did some of the liveliest shows of the moment. Debuted Paul Sietsema’s Untitled (A Beautiful Place). Allowed Tim Rogeberg to “flood” the gallery for his show of “satellite” and “fountain” sculptures. In the most unlikely pairing, he put a great digital “cave” photograph of Richard Hawkins with a Jorge Pardo chandelier; lit by moody candles, the chandelier dripped wax puddles on the floor. For its brief run, this gallery, because of the man who ran it, captured the essence of what was best and most particular to recent art in LA.10. China Art Objects opened in January 1999 on Chung King Road in Los Angeles Chinatown. Started by Art Center alums, Peter Kim, Steve Hanson, Giovanni Intra, and Amy Yao, with business assists from Mark Heferman, the storefront space is designed by artist Pae White. Begun as a kind of alternative operation, it soon morphs into a lively commercial venue, and, with the arrival of other galleries, Chinatown becomes one of the new art zones of LA.11. Jens Hoffman curates A Show That Will Show That a Show Is Not Only a Show in the summer of 2002 at The Project—excepting Gagosian and the brief stint of PaceWildenstein, one of the first New York satellite venues. Investigating the LA scene as only a savvy foreigner unfamiliar with the city could, Hoffman curated the show day by day, adding artists and works, one artist or contact leading to another, until the show closed, a kind of Venn diagram of the town. He produced one of the strangest and most diverse exhibits “about” and/or “of” LA, even if it didn’t look like an LA anyone local quite recognized.12. Blum & Poe inaugurate their new space in the Culver City section of Los Angeles in September 2003; due, in part, to its black hole-like pull, Culver City soon becomes party to numerous galleries, many of them second venues for New York establishments.13. I think LA produces better and stranger art and artists than anywhere else; this is, of course, not an unbiased opinion. I have been living in LA for a decade; most of the writing I have done about art has been about Los Angeles-based artists. It is curious to me that for all the shows attempting to represent LA art—from Sunshine & Noir: Art in LA 1960-1997 at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in 1997 to “L. A.” at Lucas Schoormans Gallery and Sugartown at both Elizabeth Dee Gallery and Participant Inc in New York this past summer—there haven’t been analogous shows about San Francisco, which makes sense only because San Francisco’s art scene is seen to be smaller and, depending on the vantage, insular or parochial. Given that two of the most prepossessing younger artists at work today, Trisha Donnelly and Vincent Fecteau, both live and work in San Francisco (Donnelly was born there; Fecteau has lived there for almost fifteen years); that city is still home to both Tony Labat and George Kuchar, this is, at best, odd. It is even curiousier that I don’t think anyone would try to sum up thirty years of “New York” art. I am suspicious of grand summations anyway, and I would emphasize the cursory, impromptu, and even ridiculous aspect of these notes themselves. For all the discussion of a new globalism in art, my belief is in cultivating my own garden. The list of what grows is my own, and it changes with the seasons.