View from the Coast

By * Robert Hughes

The "Los Angeles look" has been visible in American art for years now. It is both unmistakable and hard to define. Developed by a generation of Southern Californian artists who became nationally known in the early and middle '60s, it is cool, elaborately finished and somewhat hermetic: craftsmanship pursued as a form of meditation.

At one end of the spectrum, the Los Angeles look can be seen in Billy Al Bengston's "dentos"--crumpled aluminum sheets with depths of shimmering, candied and gaseous sprayed color trapped under layers of glossy acrylic. At the other, it is apparent in the prismatic bloom of Larry Bell's immaculate glass boxes, and in Robert Irwin's pale disks floating into immateriality above their own cast shadows. The "look" is always playing games with media (where but in L.A. would an artist do drawings in caviar and gunpowder, as Ed Ruscha did?) and it stops just this side of fetishism and overrefinement.

The L.A. look may refer to the West Coast folk culture of hot-rod and chopper, or to aerospace technology; it has little to do with the "mainstream" of art as defined in New York, and some critics find this hard to forgive. "It is apparently as easy," snorted one writer in Art forum recently, "to rack up in Los Angeles as an artist as it is to be a stringer of beads. In California, the idea of luxe, calme et volupte is simplified into prettiness and expensive-lookingness."

This is Eastern chauvinist rhetoric. But such attacks do, at least, indicate one crucial difference between the art scenes on the West and East coasts. New York has an efficient phalanx of museums and publications to sustain the discourse between new art and its audience. Southern California has not. Its museums, declares Los Angeles Critic John Coplans, "are basically social clubs with a strong materialistic background of acquisitions for local trustees. You can't walk into any museum in L.A. for most of the year and see a permanent installation of vital work that's being done here." Adds one artist realistically: "We are not maintained here."

Changing Stereotype. The fact remains that no American city outside New York has produced such a remarkable number of vital talents as Los Angeles. The minimal cool and delicacy of much Los Angeles work can be seen as partly a retreat from the incredibly blatant environment in which it is made. But the stereotype of L.A. style (shiny plastic and jewel finish) is by no means as rigid as it looks from New York. The scene is very diverse. Among its more gifted members: ED MOSES, 43, was born at Long Beach, Calif., and ran through a number of careers before turning to art--spray painter, riveter, lifeguard. Unlike many Los Angeles artists who rely on an even, machine-like finish, Moses' work is nuanced: hints of abstract expressionism are never far away. Byrn Verde is a sheet of canvas sewed and patched with delicate arabesques of thread and crosshatched with fine bleeding lines, then immersed in honey-colored resin and left to dry. The final image is almost Oriental in its airiness and apparent spontaneity.

LADDIE JOHN DILL, 27, graduated from the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1968, and shares a beachside studio in Venice with his sculptor brother Guy. He began as a painter, but found that "paint wasn't doing anything for me --spatially or any other way. I wanted to three-dimensionalize it." The method he found involves making "sites" of beach sand, combined with sheet glass and neon tubing. Like bamboo, the thin tubes are divided into segments, each of which is coated with a differently glowing color. Sometimes they are buried in sand and release their light mysteriously along the edges of the glass panes; in other pieces, they lie on the surface of the sand, spilling their unnatural polychrome radiance across its furrows and ridges so that the image hovers between landscape and abstraction.

DAVID DEUTSCH, 27, strives "to make sculpture without using material--to get to painting through sculpture." In his mural-size images, swags of polyethylene sheeting are stapled to the wall. Then Deutsch injects dye between the sheets and the wall with a large hypodermic syringe. The color runs down, staining the wall surface with the pattern of the sheets' folds like a gigantic fingerprint. Since the wall cannot be shifted, there is no feasible way of transporting Deutsch's work. It falls into the area of a one-shot performance, but an indelible one. It is a circumstance he enjoys. "I like the idea that I can't be sold, bought or dealt with so easily."

Perhaps the most idiosyncratic of the younger Los Angeles artists is Scott Grieger, 24, whose activities run to a kind of meditative criticism of other artists' work. In 1970 he published a book, Impersonations, which consisted of photographs of himself mimicking the "look" of other artists. The photo entitled Rauschenberg shows Grieger on all fours with a car tire round his waist, in imitation of Rauschenberg's stuffed angora goat. His present Combinations, which the Los Angeles County Museum is exhibiting through Feb. 16, are just that: hybrids of style. The rhomboidal canvas of a 1965 Stella, for instance, is married to the orange field and stripes of a Barnett Newman.

In a sense, Grieger's concerns are emblematic of the situation of Los Angeles' young artists. They are still largely dependent on the New York market for cash and cachet, but their view of New York style is tinged with irony. Even their elegance becomes a denial of provincialism--and an assertion of independence.

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