Artists, LA Iconoclasts, Through the Lens

Looking @ LA

Los Angeles occupies a distinctive position in the American cultural imagination. Unsurprisingly, the city’s dramatic hills, canyons and beaches are a  prime location for the projection (and production) of America’s fantasies. The city’s richly varied landscape coupled with its film, art and music industry are just a few reasons why so many eyes around the world are fixed on what Angelenos will do next.  Still, there are less obvious reasons that Los Angeles is such an engaging city. LA holds a particular fascination for anyone interested in thinking deeply about contemporary culture. Its identity has been more fiercely debated and critically dissected than any other American city, spawning countless books, films and artworks dealing with the city’s legacy.  The following profiles don’t cover outstanding civic achievements, rather they honor both well-known and lesser-known figures in Los Angeles’ cultural fabric that engage thoroughly with the city and, most importantly, have played a pivotal role in shaping perceptions of the Southland from without and within.

Walter Hopps

Walter Hopps was clearly a visionary. The self-taught curator’s 2005 obituary in the Washington Post aptly observed: “Go back through his record, and it’s like a pounding drumbeat, first, first, first, first.” The former director of the Ferus Gallery and the Pasadena Museum of Art made great strides in promoting Los Angeles’ burgeoning art scene in the late 1950s and 60s. Famous for his laid back sense of time (the curator was notoriously late and given to disappearing for days at a time), Hopps was an “artist’s curator,” widely respected for his inventive thinking and lasting relationships with many of the artists whose work he promoted. Just as Hunter S. Thompson changed what it means to be a journalist, this so-called “gonzo curator” played a vital role in shaping the taste of the latter part of the twentieth century, presenting the first career retrospective of Marcel Duchamp at the Pasadena Museum in 1963 and introducing the work of Ed Ruscha, Barnett Newman, Joseph Cornell and R. Crumb to the American public.

Eve Babitz

Friend to Neil Young and Gram Parsons, former lover of Jim Morrison, goddaughter of Stravinsky…Eve Babitz knew everyone in LA in the 1960s and 70s and purchased Steve Martin his signature white suit to boot. She may be best known popularly for playing a game of chess nude with Marcel Duchamp during his retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of Art, but her legacy should belong to her writing.  Babitz’s breathless, yet incisive roman a clefs possess a Proustian potency. No one explicates the significance of 1960s and 70s Los Angeles counterculture as brilliantly as she does. Her candid insights into LA living in Slow Times, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh and LA and Eve’s Hollywood place her in the ranks of great California writers like Joan Didion, Nathanael West and John Fante. And if her taut, moving prose isn’t enough, the woman is cool. In the tradition of the best observer-participants, Babitz lives what she writes about and shares her stories with unabashed candor.

Mike Davis

Though his detractors have called him a “city-hating socialist,” Mike Davis has stayed in Los Angeles, despite the earthquakes, floods, riots and wildfires he describes in Ecology of Fear and Dead Cities, making vital contributions to academic life in Southern California through his teaching positions at Southern California Institute of Architecture; University of California, Irvine; and University of California, Riverside. The Fontana born former meat-cutter and self-proclaimed Marxist-Environmentalist became an academic sensation in the early 90s for his astute application of Marxist theory to issues in Los Angeles’ social policy, architecture and race relations. His book City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles has become a corner stone of urban studies and kindled international interest in studying Los Angeles as a quintessentially post-modern city.

Jack Goldstein

Other than Las Vegas and Dubai, few cities are as spectacular as Los Angeles. It is only natural that the “Pictures Generation,” a group of young artists in the 70s and 80s working at the intersection of conceptualism and pop, began in Los Angeles. The Canadian-born, Los Angeles-bred Jack Goldstein worked at the forefront of this movement, which included art super-stars like Richard Longo, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Krueger and David Salle.

Goldstein was a veteran of John Baldessari’s post-studio art MFA program at CalArts, which is largely credited for coaxing the nascent movement into existence with his emphasis on found photographs and mixed media experimentation. Goldstein’s influential work experienced a boom in the 1980s, only to be followed by years of relative obscurity until his death in 2005. Early works, like the film Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, which loops the MGM lions roar over a bright red background, distill images to their very essence. Goldstein’s diverse oeuvre, which includes performances, films, painting, photographs, form a coherent inquiry into the seductive power of the image and the nature of spectacle.

David Lynch

David Lynch takes Bunker Hill’s noirish tales of women in trouble, young starlets and physical brutality and transports them to a nightmarish present in which dreams and reality collide in the canyons and flatlands of contemporary Los Angeles. Few can rival the free -floating, dreamlike malaise Lynch conjures in his films.  The influence of his movies has extended far beyond the film industry. With Lynchmob, an exhibition of 30 international, emerging artists, Berlin based curators Emilie Trice and Christopher David sought to “‘invoke in the viewer the same psychological and emotional response as Lynch’s films.”  It seems that Lynch himself is not above making work inspired by others. He created original photographs to accompany Danger Mouse’s album Dark Night of the Soul.

Richard Neutra

British architectural critic/LA Enthusiast, Reyner Banham, aptly noted in his seminal book on Los Angeles that architect Richard Neutra’s buildings possessed a “Californianated” version of the “creative angst” of European modernism. Together with his longtime friend, Rudolph Schindler, Neutra is responsible for the architectural style casually known as California Modernism. His design aesthetic, which he deemed “nature-near” was a striking combination of geometric forms in glass and wood which emphasized surrounding natural elements, incorporating prototypically Californian concerns such as health and the fluidity between indoor and outdoor space. An exhibition of Neutra’s drawings and architectural sketches is on view at the central branch of the Los Angeles public library until September.  Originally founded in 1926, his architectural practice has been presided over since 1970 by son and partner, architect Dion Neutra.  This year, the firm celebrates its 83rd year in practice.