Maurice Tuchman, the curator of the County Museum of Art, ‘conceived [in the late 1960s] the somewhat dubious notion of placing artists with corporate sponsors in a vast Art and Technology program’.127 With the patronage of ‘Missy’ Chandler of the Times dynasty, Tuchman ‘married’ seventy-six artists to forty major local corporations.128 As Peter Plagens notes, the resulting exhibition in 1971 was the ‘swan song of sixties art’ – a programmatic turning-point towards the mercenary, corporate-dominated arts dispensation of the late 1970s and 1980s.
The exhibition’s catalogue is not so much the narrative of a completed project, but an interim report on a hoped-for ongoing metamorphosis of modem art, centered in Los Angeles. Its candid and lengthy description/documentation of every attempted collaboration between the museum-matched artists and corporation admits to every artist’s arrogance . . . as well as the easy alignment of artists with hard-core capitalism and war-related industries (while the war in Vietnam was at its height).129
The ‘L.A. Look’, which in the early 1960s suggested the possibility of a critical-artistic strategy that interpreted the city from an indigenous sensibility, progressively collapsed into mere self-affirming veneer, ‘mock worship of California’s earthly paradise’.130 Christopher Knight, writing about the 1970s, has described the implosion of the Los Angeles arts scene as a febrile, Popish ‘regionalism’ – based on pastel sentimentality and ‘a distrust of intellectualism’ – which attempted to fill the cultural vacuum left from the defeat of the 1960s. But out of this ‘morass of determined provincialism’ no ‘broadly convincing local aesthetic’ emerged, only a ‘gruesome’ celebration of trivialized made-in-Los-Angeles productions.131
The itinerary of Edward Ruscha probably best typifies the post-1960s gentrification of the Ferus generation. Although he still describes himself as an ‘underground artist’, he has become in fact a reigning art god whose own Brobdingnagian portrait looms over Downtown in a five-story-high mural by Kent Twitchell. As critics have pointed out, Ruscha’s progression has been from advertising art, via some brief subversions in the 1960s, to ‘advertising art advertising itself as art that hates advertising’.132 If Ruscha-like images now emblematize L.A.’s good life on the walls of myriad corporate waiting rooms and beachfront condos, it is perhaps because (as Edward Lucie-Smith suggests) ‘willed neutrality is [his] essence’.133 His slogans and trademarks shimmering on the warm, dayglo Los Angeles landscape, which once seemed ironic, now are reassuring advertisements for the postmodern condition:
Ruscha wants to mirror the dream-like state which many people find typical of California living, to give the feeling that there is no longer any hierarchy – of ideas, emotions or events. He is the essence of California cool.134
While Pop was cooling down into neo-boosterism, the survivors of the original L.A. underground totted up the body count: Eric Dolphy dead of a heart attack in a Berlin nightclub in 1964;135 Kenneth Anger lost in a Rimbaud-like flight into obscurity after the theft of his personal film archive in 1967. Pynchon, of course, went successively deeper into his personal underground, becoming the B. Traven of West Coast writing (Vineland [1990], however, celebrates the inter-generational continuity of a counter-culture of resistance). Kienholz – disgruntled by the superficial 1970s art scene – simply moved back to his hometown in Idaho.
What survived best was what was most deeply rooted in local soil: the ‘Watts Renaissance’ and the other ethnic community arts movements (including Chicano muralism) which were inspired by its example. Although, as we shall see, the corporate culture bonanza of the 1980s has actually impoverished the arts infrastructure in inner-city communities, new vigor has come from rap as well as from the arrival of an exile contingent of younger Latin American artists, poets and writers. A remarkable local example of the perdurance of communitarian cultural values is the magisterial five-suite history of Black America (Roots and Folklore) recently composed by John Carter, another Texas blues-rooted L.A. jazz veteran. In this work, as well as in the dogged persistence of Horace Tapscott, Bernard Jackson and numerous other inner-city cultural workers, a fragile continuity is preserved between the progressive avant gardes of the past and future.
THE MERCENARIES
With galleries and museums springing up like weeds, with the Getty Trust and its money glittering like the spires of Oz, with the hot-shot L.A. Festival grabbing important performance premieres even before the Brooklyn Academy of Music . . . well, what other choice is there? L.A., the Jewel in the Pacific Rim, has got to be the arts mecca of the coming century. Even New York magazine says so. . . . Linda Frye Burnham136
I think of the best efforts of the ‘60s, of all the pain we went through. Now we find we’re sinking to the bottom. C. Bernard Jackson (director, Inner-City Cultural Center)137
Like the anti-hero of Less Than Zero, Didion and Dunne – publicly critical of almost every aspect of Los Angeles in the 1980s – voted with their feet. Yet, even the defection to New York of the city’s most celebrated writers was hardly noticed amidst the tide of prominent new arrivals. The stretch limousines from LAX continued to disgorge Houston architects, London painters, New York critics, Tokyo designers, Boston composers, Oxford historians, and Parisian fakirs.138 Indeed the current continental and international shift of the intelligentsia to the West Coast invites comparison to the great Hollywood immigration of the 1930s. The ‘push’ factors of this migration are predictably diverse: ranging from the impact of Thatcherite cuts upon the British university system to the relative decline of architectural commissions in the rest of the Sunbelt. More important, however, is the major ‘pull’ factor: a boom in cultural investment at the level of the design professions, fine arts institutions, and elite university departments – as well as a new siren song from the studios. The broad trend of this immigration, moreover, is thoroughly mercenary, as the new wave of designers, artists and professors have come to praise Caesar – in this case, international real-estate capital.
The large-scale developers and their financial allies, together with a few oil magnates and entertainment moguls, have been the driving force behind the public-private coalition to build a cultural superstructure for Los Angeles’s emergence as a ‘world city’. They patronize the art market, endow the museums, subsidize the regional institutes and planning schools, award the architectural competitions, dominate the arts and urban design taskforces, and influence the flow of public arts monies. They have become so integrally involved in the organization of high culture, not because of old-fashioned philanthropy, but because ‘culture’ has become an important component of the land development process, as well as a crucial moment in the competition between different elites and regional centers. Old-fashioned material interest, in other words, drives the mega-developers to support the general cultural revalorization of Los Angeles, and, more specifically, to endorse the concentration of cultural assets in nodes of maximum development.
This culture strategy has a long history behind it. Since the 1920s, the ‘Downtown elite’ (composed of old guard families, led by the Chandler dynasty of the Times, who had sunk their patrimonies in Downtown real estate), faced with the centrifugal movement of investment westward along Wilshire Boulevard, have struggled to ‘recenter’ the region around a revitalized central business district. At various times, they have tried to repell, or assimilate, the autonomous ‘Westside’ power structure that arose out of Jewish interests in the entertainment, savings-and-loan, and suburban real-estate sectors. Contrastingly, the Jewish elites have pursued their own spatial strategy of centering academic and cultural institution-building on the Westside. More recently, as offshore capital has partially supplanted this old ruling-class antinomy, central-place rivalries have been subsumed into a more ambitious neo-regionalism geared up to compete with San Francisco and New York.
Public cultural investment has been an integral variable in these ‘place wars’ since at least the mid 1940s, when twenty-five of the most powerful Downtown leaders formed the Greater Los Angeles Plans Incorporated (GLAPI)