Los Angeles: 1960s-1970s

This week's materials were composed of a short video by Reyner Banham entitled Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, and two readings relating most directly to Edward Ruscha's work in and about LA: Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s by Cecile Whiting and Ed Ruscha, Pop Art, and Spectatorship in 1960s Los Angeles by Ken Allan.

As an overview, the Banham video was shot in 1972 by BBC, sort of documenting Reyner Banham's excursion through LA and its not so well known "touristy" areas (or, rather, it's well known areas that are not pegged as tourist locations). The entire video is based off of this made-up "Baede-Kar" guidance system, where a horrible automated female voice directs one around the city via cassette tape in the car's tape player. To make the viewing experience more "edgy", Banham decides to boldly ignore some of her recommendations to go to places, such as Malibu, and head to spots that he has pegged "tourist-worthy". A few of these destinations, whether they be Banham's or Baede-Kar's, are simply landmark objects seen in passing from the freeway, such as billboards. Most all shots in this film are taken from the car, where the world can be seen blurring by behind Banham, or out the front windshield. Towards the middle of the film, we are taken on a bus tour, where all landmarks, whether originally intended or not, are seen merely in passing. In the late '60s, early '70s, there was also this huge movement of "van culture". Though there really isn't a solid definition to give to this term as to what exactly it would encompass, it is broadly the idea that people became enthralled with the ideas and versatility that vans could provide. You could paint them, live in them, play piano in them, sell food from them, have sex in them, drive in them...the possibilities are quite endless. They became just as much an art form as they did a practical driving object for which they were created. Cecile Whiting described a piece entitled Back Seat Dodge '38 by Ed Kienholz, which depicts a sexual act between a plaster woman and a chicken wire man in the interior of a rusting vehicle (not a van, but same idea).

Ed Kienholz Back Seat Dodge '38, 1964

Banham also asks some interesting questions about the idea of LA as a city. "Is LA a style or a frame of mind? A sort of mass-produced fantasy for people to live in? Could this city be a mechanism and style to impose on the rest of the world?"

Cécile Whiting goes more in depth with the idea of this infatuation over car culture in the 1960s. Billy Al Bengston created works on canvases using techniques of paint application on motorcycles and cars, asking viewers to relate his paintings to the motorcycle culture he was deeply a part of. Judy Chicago used male and female abstract sexual forms in her painting of a car hood (Car Hood), and was on track with the rest of her male peers in combining sexuality and hot rod culture. Though these ideas, when placed in the '60s and '70s seem sort of, well...super ambitious, or maybe humorous, for something as simple as a car, it's quite ironic that we are still using our cars and vans (okay, vehicles) for the same types of things today. Though not as outwardly prominent as this new idea of hot rod culture was then, a good number of people are still involved in "pimping" their cars today. There are tv shows about it, there are car shows (Chicago's auto show just ended), and there are specialized body shops everywhere that pursue it. Not to mention the number of people who work on their cars in their own driveways. Maybe it's less about flashy paint now, but this idea of creating a car into something other than a mechanism of getting from point A to point B is still valid. People still have sexual encounters in cars. People sell food from cars: ice cream trucks, taco trucks, hot dog trucks. The culture has interwoven itself into the threads of society more seamlessly, but it is definitely still there.

Not dealing with the sexual themes and flashy styles that Bengston and Chicago were, Vija Celmins and Ed Ruscha created work dealing with the automobile as well. Celmins work, specifically here Freeway, explores the idea of this arbitrary moment: driving down the San Diego Freeway. Whiting describes this painting as having "transform[ed] the urban freeway into a landscape with its own unique space and topography while drawing attention to the experience of viewing through a car's windshield." What is curious here, is the use of the word "viewing"; that this is an "experience of viewing", as if this experience was not before noticed before we had freeways such as this one to focus our attention upon. Even Banham states that the freeway is a "complete way of life." Maybe what Whiting did not realize, was that the experience of viewing had been noticed and utilized at least a hundred years prior by a type of people that have been referred to as "flaneurs"; and this is just what the car culture allowed people to become in LA.

Vija Celmins Freeway, 1966

Ruscha, though not quite able to be referred to as a flaneur, was still an observer of sorts. He created a handful of different photo series and paintings, documenting, such as the Bechers began producing in the '80s and '90s, similar items in a almost sickeningly repetitive way. Some Los Angeles Apartments, Twentysix Gasoline Stations, and Every Building on the Sunset Strip are just three examples (and probably his most well known). Through these series, Ruscha, unlike other artist's of the time, was creating a practical way of looking at the city versus making a social commentary about whether it works or does not work.

Ken Allan describes Ruscha's work as going against the norm "to conjure up associations with a later era of urban development that would produce an entirely different city in form and experience." The way in which Ruscha photographed was not in the typical photographic way; he did not aesthetically compose his images and was not worried about their beauty or aesthetic qualities as a photograph. He made images. Ruscha's Some Los Angeles Apartments were all photographed very straightforward from street level, sometimes at a slight angle and sometimes straight on. Each image in and of itself did not mean much, but as a whole collaboration between all of the images, it represented a certain style of apartment living with in the LA area. This is LA. Or, rather, this is ink on paper representing what LA looks like. He was very careful to make sure that people were not able to step into the images that he created. Though some of this has to do with composition and the type of splicing he used in his Every Building on the Sunset Strip series (where different cars were spliced together and buildings edges were repeated and cut off at strange points as each image was bumped up against the next), it also has to do with how Ruscha presented his pieces. His paintings, as well as his photographs, were very physical objects. The pages of his book were meant to be handled and be held. They were palpable. He even produced a photograph called Hand Flipping Pages, where it shows hands turning the pages of his book Twentysix Gasoline Stations. In his paintings, he would paint a large word, and then make the viewer step up to the canvas to look at a life-sized image (perhaps a pencil, or a newspaper with writing to be read), where the paint and canvas would be very much a real part of the piece. Sometimes, he would even change the plane of view from the top half of the image to the bottom half, whereas the word on the top would be looked at from an upright position, and the newspaper on the bottom half would be seen as being looked down upon. It seems that his play against the convention of the upright picture frame mimics the way in which LA plays against the convention of the standard city. Ruscha's work "asks us to connect spectatorship, painting, and the spacial experience of the new American urban landscape of the 1960s."

The idea of these photographs as tangible objects and not places, seems in stark contrast to one of Stephen Shore's images:

Stephen Shore Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 21, 1975

As I'm sure you've noticed, this image was taken in LA as well, a little over a decade after Ruscha produced his Gasoline Station work. Not only is this in color, but it is taken at street level by somebody standing on the sidewalk (unlike Ruscha's Every Building on the Sunset Strip, taken by moving picture from his car), and everything seems very...real. It would seem quite simple to walk right onto this image and down into the depth of the vanishing point.