The L.A. Look, the L.A. Artist, the Stereotypes, and the City Itself

Please enjoy this essay I wrote sometime ago about, to put it simply, how Los Angeles rules.

Joseph Masheck opens his article, titled “California Color”, published in Artforum’s January 1971 issue, “Promising scholars and philosophers, the story goes, move to California and then just play tennis and swim for years”(Masheck, 1971). To a certain extent this generalization is not false, after all California is the Golden State. However, this stereotype of California forgets to acknowledge all that grows from the sunshine. The 1960s are a prime example of how a new faction of the art world benefited from this photosynthesis of freedom, freeways, and surf. In a press interview for her book titled Rebels in Paradise, Hunter Drohojowska-Philp explains the mystique Los Angeles had on artists. She explains, “they needed the freedom and the permission of Los Angeles, where there were few galleries and collectors and no museum. There was no infrastructure, so they could do what they wanted” (Hunter Drohojowska-Philp,NPR, December 2011). New York had those structures, but L.A. had the opportunity because it lacked what New York had. During the 1960s, the city of Los Angeles inspired artists to develop a style of the city, the ‘L.A. Look’. Even artists like David Hockney came to create in this city. Drohojowska-Philp later in her NPR interview states, “And the impact of a swimming pool on a young boy from Northern England in 1966 cannot be overestimated”(Hunter Drohojowska-Philp,NPR, DEcember 2011). Los Angeles was the background and context for the art that came about during the 1960s, and eventually the L.A. Look was conceived. The stereotypes of L.A. were there in the art. Pieces were clean and effortlessly Californian. To analyze and understand the city and its art one must look onto the face of this work. Ed Ruscha embodies the city in his work to a ‘T’. Through his art the city’s influence is revealed. Los Angeles in the 1960s established a style that came from the popular notions of California that groomed its own kind of artists. The scene of the 1960s has a massive influence on the current Los Angeles art scene. 

In order to get situated in time, Los Angeles in the 1960s was still not up to the caliber of respect that New York art harbored. Those on the east coast understood Los Angeles as simply being Hollywood and palm trees, not a place for art. However, in an article titled "Art Los Angeles: America's Second City” that came out in 1963, Jules Langsner deemed L.A. as the ‘Second City’ for art. In his article he remarks:  

"In the space of half-a-dozen years, the status of Los Angeles in the art community has changed from the home of the nuts who diet on nutburgers to a lively and vital center of increasing importance on the international art map; L.A. had become the country's second city with regard to caliber and number of galleries, collectors, museum activities, and creatively prodigal painters, sculptors, and printmakers.”(Langsner, 1963)

Langsner goes on to reference some of these artists, including Ed Ruscha. He continues to elaborate, "the more gifted California adherents are as witty and inventive as their more celebrated counterparts in New York although their renown is largely confined to the hip crowd in California”(Langsner, 1963).This praise and overall recognition for the happenings in Los Angeles was huge as it was published in Art in America. L.A. was happening whether people on the east coast recognized it or not. 

As art was being produced throughout the city in the 1960s, the stereotypes that ‘defined’ Los Angeles were doled out as labels that tried to cancel what was being created. John Doe, a Los Angeles punk rock pioneer, celebrates and gives credit to what makes L.A., L.A. For Doe, he credits the car culture as something that gave edge to what was being created in Los Angeles. John Doe explains in his memoir, Under The Big Black Sun, “Cars, rock ‘n’ roll & sunglasses are inseparable. This is where Los Angeles tapped into something much darker & more dangerous than NYC’s or London’s punk rock. Young Hollywood movie stars’ lives were cut short in car crashes. People got laid in backseats.”(Doe, 316) The stereotype, regardless of the denotations from outsiders, contained life within Los Angeles. As Doe puts it, one lives a life or ends a life in a car. In a city like New York, transporting around the city via subsidized transit fails to contribute to art because it is so automated. Doe goes on an elaborate more:

“All of this distance & freedom gave Los Angeles punk rock more gasoline (leaded), exhaust fumes, rumble, muscle & smoking tires than the punk rock that came before. New York bands, as influential as they were on LA, had art galleries & London, who also spun our heads & inspired, had the dole. But LA freeways, California auto culture & that freedom, that speed, the horizon with the windows rolled down on warm nights connected us to Chuck Berry, The Doors, Sun Records & Eddie Cochran.”(Doe, 318)

Los Angeles has the space that ultimately contributes to the creative products being produced. Those not from the city see the car culture as something that takes away from the environment but they fail to recognize that it is a part of life in Los Angeles. Car culture as the name suggests is cultural, which bleeds into what is produced throughout artistic media.

The work emanating from the city ultimately began to take a shape of its own, becoming the ‘L.A. Look’. Peter Plagens is credited with coining the term. Plagens describes it, “The patented “look” was elegance and simplicity… It has, in short, the aroma of Los Angeles in the sixties--newness, postcard sunset color, and imitations of aerospace profundity”(Plagens, 127). The L.A. look emphasizes the newness of the Los Angeles art scene. By displaying clean lines pays an homage to the city itself and the available potential. The L.A. Look has another faction within the style, Finish Fetish a term conjured by John Coplans(Rivenc et al, 2011). In an article exploring the ins and the outs of Finish Fetish works, the Getty explains, “The term alludes efficiently to the importance of surface properties”(Rivenc et al, 2011). Finish Fetish art is commonly represented as works of resin, like Billy Al Benston’s Dento Paintings (Billy Al Bengston, Three Faces West, 1968), while other artists such as Judy Chicago took the the Finish Fetish approach by taking hard surfaces like a car hood and giving it a face lift using spray paint lacquer(Judy Chicago, Car Hood, 1964). Bengston’s resin works are those that nod to give credit towards the influence of Californian surf culture, while Chicago’s Car Hood and even Kienholz’s Backseat Dodge ‘38 are works that pull from the ever present car culture(Rivenc et al, 2011). The L.A. Look came from its environment, a sprawled city best explored by an automobile. 

In order to piece together what Los Angeles as a city is to a particular artist and their work, is hard to find, but one in particular is the seminal Los Angeles artist, Ed Ruscha. There is a somewhat common preconceived notion that ‘no one is from L.A.’, in a 2019 letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times, titled “The Myth That Nobody is Actually from Los Angeles” mentions that “native Californians are “rare, like a unicorn”(Resch, 2019). Ed ruscha himself is from Oklahoma, and in 1956 he made the pilgrimage to Los Angeles, via automobile, to study commercial art at Chouinard. In 1960 he concluded his studies and the following year Ruscha, his mother, and his brother flocked to Europe driving through numerous countries. Ruscha seemed to realize while in Europe that he was not interested in scholarly art. Upon his arrival back to the U.S, Ruscha visited New York City and The Big Apple seemed to leave a bad taste in his mouth. Ruscha explains, “I was overwhelmed by the number of people in New York and the impersonality of the place, I feared being chewed up by the whole machine.”(Philp 71). Once back in Los Angeles, Ruscha came to make some of his most famous pop art pieces such as Actual Size, 1962, that depicts big yellow letters reading ‘spam.’ Ruscha’s paintings were henceforth featured in the first ever Pop Art exhibition in the United States that the Pasadena Art Museum hosted in 1962. The show was a success and Artforum, when still located in San Francisco, included it in an issue following the show (Drohojowska-Philp, 70-72). Using the umbrella term of the L.A. Look to categorize Ruscha’s art is correct. Some of his work he erred on the side of Pop Art which easily stems from Los Angeles being that the city is a popular culture mecca. Some of Ruscha’s namely Pop Art works that depict quintessential Los Angeles are his Hollywood Sign(Ruscha, Hollywood, 1968) and Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights(1962) that depicts the Twentieth Century Fox logo. This style of his work contains the ‘postcard sunset color’ and depicts the ‘aroma of Los Angeles in the sixties’ that Plagens refers to as the trademarks of the LA Look. Ruscha’s few photography books contain photographs that display the ‘simplicity’ that Plagens also refers to as a hallmark of Los Angeles art. Some Los Angeles Apartments(1965), Every building on the Sunset Strip(1966), and Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass(1968) are all works that demonstrate the emblematic Los Angeles landscape. Each book, regardless of content, features the same style, which is nonchalant and simple. Ken D. Allan describes Rucha’s work as “having a deadpan quality that projects a kind of cool indifference”(Allan, 231). In Allan’s journal he discusses the typical LA imagery seen throughout these photography books. Allan continues to explain, 

“Ruscha's treatment, has further repercussions: it not only responds to the surfaces and signs of Los Angeles but also resonates with the unique spaces of the city, evokes the particular consciousness and unconsciousness of the body that is central to its urban experience, and makes felt the artificiality of the manufacturing of place in 1960s Los Angeles”(Allan, 247-248).

The experience of habitating in a city in which one creates, the city ultimately becomes the context of the art. The image capturing of all the buildings on the sunset strip showcases one of the most notable city streets within Los Angeles, and all was created by mounting a camera on Ruscha's car as he drove it down the street. The ideal of a swimming pool is as Californian as a drive down Pacific Coast Highway(or being parked on I-5). His images were straight forward, the pictures themselves were the city. Allan makes a great point pondering over how Ruscha embodies a L.A. artist. Allan explains, “This approach also asks us to be more specific about the ways that this archetypal "L.A. artist" (an oft-repeated cliche that obscures more than it explains) actually responded to the spatial experience of Los Angeles as a new art scene emerged there early in the decade.(Allan, 231). Ruscha’s works that were completed during the decade of the 1960s participated in the greater art movement of that time. His photography and Pop Art pieces were of the spaces and places of Los Angeles. It was the Hollywood sign and the Sunset Strip, to separate locations that are both within the same city, yet completely their own. The art happening, as previously acknowledged, was shaking the art world up. New York no longer was the only art capital, the second city had stuff to show and it was all the new. Ruscha is a Los Angeles artist creating Los Angeles art, all the while highlighting the city within the work itself. 

The art scene that came about in the 1960s out of Los Angeles started a whole new faction of the art world. Today, Los Angeles is home to a few art schools, such as CalArts and ArtCenter, there are numerous museums and galleries all throughout the city. While the sun is still shining and cars zoom through the streets, the art scene today came about from those who set the tone in the 1960s. The grit of emerging artists is even more present in Los Angeles today. What started on the west side eventually bled throughout the city and now art spaces are expanding to the east side and downtown. The west side, Venice and Santa Monica, still are home to galleries like IPNT Gallery and LA Louver. INPT Gallery itself is an art project taken on by the founder of the gallery Micah William Grasse with the purpose of pursuing his ethos of Casualformalism. Grasse explains Casualformalism as an attempt to have a free open discussion with the greater population of humanity that aims to not participate in segregation of thought. Grasse explains, “I am illustrating my ethos in an ongoing art project which began with me renting a tear down property in Venice Beach and turning it into an art gallery.  I named it the IPNT Gallery (I Prefer Not To Gallery) and the patrons themselves are an intrinsic part of the art.” (Grasse, 2018). IPNT and Grasse’s ethos are attempting to create something new. While IPNT is new to the west side, LA Louver has been located in Venice since 1975 and is dedicated to being a space that displays contemporary art(LA Louver, 2020). Moving across freeways and into downtown, the Arts District established itself as its own sect. The Arts District has numerous warehouse spaces that mostly were constructed in the 1920s. Throughout the 1970s and 80s artists went to the then vacant warehouses for cheap spaces as the west side was no longer financially welcoming to artists. All the murals and gritty aesthetic of the neighborhood belong to this art scene that is inspired from old warehouse spaces that are mostly artists’ home and studio spaces (Los Angeles Conservancy). The Arts District hosts upcycled Art warehouse spaces such as ICA LA and even smaller galleries like MASH Gallery. MASH gallery defines itself as a space for artists by artists all the while “embodying the spirit of what makes the Los Angeles art scene so prevalent and vital: the belief that art transcends and embraces all.”(MASH Gallery, 2018). Even in Chinatown, spaces like 1700 Naud are opening to be open creative spaces for the extensive art community in Los Angeles. The space itself is actually a collaboration between the beer conglomerate Pabst Blue Ribbon and the magazine Monster Children that aims to be a space for artists residencies free from regulations and bureaucracy (1700 Naud, 2020). The current Los Angeles art scene’s spaces have expanded across the city into many neighborhoods, yet a common factor between all of them is that they all aim to cultivate community and do away with anything that considers exclusivity as a priority, similar, to the artists and the scene of the 1960s that aimed to create their own place of art.

Los Angeles has the cars, the sunshine, and the surf, but it also has the art. The art world in Los Angeles made a name for itself in the 1960s when it became the second city. New York at that time was chock full of galleries and big museums, but LA was free and open. The freedom gave way to a style that grew from the inspiration of the city, which was seen across all media like music and film. The characteristics of the city helped to cultivate who was making what, and thus the LA artist came to be. In particular, Ed Ruscha came to the west and began his career. His works highlighted what is popularly known of Los Angeles, but gave the stereotypes context. The art scene during which Ed Ruscha worked in, helped lay down the groundwork for the current Los Angeles scene. New York is concretely established and gridlocked, but Los Angeles has that western expansion available. Today, art galleries are anywhere on both sides of I-405, some facing the coast, others by the train tracks and hills. Nonetheless, Los Angeles is an established art hub, mainly because the city’s open sprawl cultivates an open willingness for galleries and spaces that build community. Los Angeles continues to remain the west, home where the sun sets and the artists here are chasing that light.