Pop L.A.:
Art and the City in the 1960s
by Cécile Whiting
University of California Press, Berkeley,
CA, 2006
268 pp., illus. 20 col/77 b/w. Trade,
$119.85; paper, $39.95
ISBN: 0-520-24460-5; ISBN: 0-520-24460-3.
Reviewed by Jan Baetens
KU Leuven
Faculty of Arts, Blijde Inkomststraat
21, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium
jan.baetens@arts.kuleuven.be
Paris, London, New York, Tokyo, and (just
tomorrow or Already today?) Shanghai
we all know the cities that have "made"
art, that "are" art, whose image
has been shaped by artists living and
struggling in it, and whose dynamism and
growth have proved able to make a difference
in the cultural field. In comparison with
the aforementioned cities, the status
of Los Angeles is quite ambivalent: Although
it is one of the most mesmerizing and
rapidly changing urban environments of
the world, it is not considered a real
city, neither by its inhabitants (who
often regret its "lack" of centre,
of structure, in a word of image), nor
by its visitors (who find no city but
only a freeway system, who look in vain
for something that would go beyond its
superficiality); and although it hosts
a lively art scene, it has never been
able to seriously challenge "the"
other city that is New York. Not a city?
Never an art centre? Obviously, except
perhaps in the 1960s, when L.A. urban
and demographic structures were exploding
and a new form of art, pop, was celebrating
the collapse of traditional Modernism.
It is the interaction between these two
fields, the mutual shaping of the urban
and the cultural that is the focus of
this wonderful book by Cécile Whiting,
who succeeds in sketching an image of
L.A. that can bear the test with the best
studies on the cultural construction of
and by other great cities. It must, therefore,
be seen as an important contribution to
the renewed interest in space, not only
as a broad cultural marker (and L.A.,
which is "all space and no time"
is of course a great case study) but also
as the steppingstone toward a renewed
evaluation of the spatial vernacular,
i.e. of the local and the regional, deprived
of its negative connotations of provincialism
or geographic essentialism.
The notion of "urban" as well
as that of "cultural" are defined
by Whiting in a sense that is simultaneously
narrow and broad. It is first of all broad,
since the notion of "urban"
covers a wide range of spaces and uses
of space: the author discusses issues
such as the outdoor life, the shift from
city dweller to car driver, the typical
L.A. "sprawl", the façade
culture, the gap between public and private
sphere, and the dialectics of marginalized
places and places for marginal Angelenos.
As far as the notion of the "cultural"
is concerned, Pop L.A. emphasizes
inevitably the visual arts, more appropriated
to match the citys pure "superficiality"
than the temporal arts of literature,
hence the focus on painting, sculpture,
photography, but also on performance (the
most ephemeral and therefore superficial
of temporal arts). At the same time, however,
Whiting avoids to take on board any material
that might have fit her project: Hollywood
is hardly represented, and equally absent
is much of the non-visual pop culture
of the era (pop music, underground comics,
psychedelic design, for instance, are
only mentioned in the background). It
is thanks to this highly delicate balance
between the foregrounding of visual environment
of the city and its visual representations,
on the one hand, and the low profile representation
of other aspects of the culture of the
60s, that Whiting has succeeded in offering
a vision of the city that is as sharp
as its forms and structure may seem blurred
and shapeless.
The same sharpness characterizes the content
of the various chapters, and the points
the author wants to drive home. Pop
L.A. is built around four major case
studies, which each brings into prominence
a certain place, a certain way of moving
around, a certain genre or medium and
an artist (or a group of artist). One
finds thus extremely interesting and innovative
readings of for instance,
Ed Ruschas photographic artist books,
which create a new vision of L.A.s
commercial spaces seen from the drivers
seat, David Hockneys upgrading of
Physique Cultures
homosexuality and his dialogue with high-modernist
debates on the meaning and the medium
of painting, the reuse of junk and debris
and its amazing reflection in Simon Rodias
Watts towers, and the politicization of
the happenings by artists like Allan Kaprow
and Judy Chicago, who bring in new forms
of radical and feminist contestation,
very different from the classic lamentations
on the loss or absence of what a city
is supposed to be.
A similar acuteness can be found in the
major theses that Whiting is defending
in this book, which does not fall prey
to the extreme visions of the city: the
boosterism of the citys developers
and speculators, the elite condemnation
of pops shallowness. Given the importance
of place, the author correctly and healthily
insists on the dialectical and structural
aspects of this notion: no place without
its opposite (in this case: no
vision of Southern California without
a comparison with Northern California,
or with the Desert, or with the East Coast),
no place without mediation (one
of the best known forms of mediation is
of course the tradition of the landscape,
and Whiting has brilliant pages on the
impossibility of excluding photography
from the practice of painting), no place
without observer (and this observer
is mobile, and motorized), and finally
no place without time (i.e. cultural
memory, planning, and the tension between
both).
In short, a crucial book on the era in
which L.A. tried hard to become a city
and an art centre, i.e. a city as art
centre and an art as representation of
new urban life, and a dramatically helpful
tool in our own attempts to get a better
understanding on the new L.A. that has
never ceased to destroy and to exceed
itself.