DESIGN CULTURE

Design Culture



Design Culture

Introduction

In the 1960s, the New York Times, Art News, Art in America, Vogue, and Time magazine covered the Los Angeles art scene and, for the first time, brought its young artists to the forefront of national media attention.1 Vogue's November 1967 issue featured a six-page article by critic John Coplans on the most prominent of Los Angeles's artists, including Edward Kienholz, Ken Price, Craig Kauffman, Billy Al Bengston, Larry Bell, and Robert Irwin. Los Angeles, a city notorious for a lack of civic culture and a hostility toward modernism, suddenly hosted the most exciting trends in contemporary American art, including junk, assemblage, finish-fetish, and the city's own L.A. Look. Coplans wrote that: (Ethington 2001:29)

As few as ten years ago southern California was an intellectual desert. No institution in Los Angeles had enough insight, determination or vitality to bring to bear the kind of pressure needed to create an environment in which art could flourish as a living and vital entity. Given this background, the blossoming of the Los Angeles area as a center of modern art during the past decade seems nothing short of miraculous.

Discussion

According to Coplans, Los Angeles had spent the past decades in a creative vacuum only to produce a new generation of brash male artists whose hipness was overshadowed only by their genius. He argued that L.A.'s artists were driven by a compulsive search for quality in their own work and by an insistent demand to see first hand the important art of their time. (Solnit 2008:22)

Despite the city government's internal battles over public art, including a 1951 ban on abstract painting and sculpture and the attempted closure of Edward Kienholz's 1966 exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, these artists, known as members of the Ferus Gallery group or, less generously, the Venice Beach mafia, had indeed emerged as significant Los Angeles-based artists. Today examples of Kienholz's politically and sexually explicit assemblages can be found in most major American modern art museums; Robert Irwin designed the gardens of the new Getty Museum; along with Ed Ruscha, Craig Kauffman, Ken Price, Larry Bell, and Billy Al Bengston, they form the mainstay of the postwar Southern California modernist canon.

Both the Ferus Gallery and Venice Beach have become mythic spaces in Los Angeles cultural lore as sites where a handful of ragtag bohemians produced their artwork on the margins of the city. Even as municipal and county authorities clamped down on artistic expression, these artists overcame local provincialism to emerge stars of the post-abstract expressionism, pop art world. Reiterating Coplans's themes, and going so far as to claim the new art scene as emblematic of the city, in an article enticingly titled California's Cool Comers, (Crow 2006:20)Time magazine pointed out that in the Southern California landscape, there have sprung up like desert flowers a new variety of artists. [The artists] vary widely but are united by a common dedication to cool materials far divorced from the conventions of oil paint and bronze—plastics, neon, ...