LITMIR.BIZ

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      The art counterpart to the jazz underground (although never with such radical aspirations) was the informal cooperative organized by a score of younger artists during the late 1950s around Edward Kienholz’s and Walter Hopps’s Ferus Gallery on La Cienga Boulevard. ‘A motley batch of beatniks, eccentrics, and “art types”’, they became the ‘seminal source for the blossoming of modernist art in Los Angeles during the sixties’.¹¹⁸ The Ferus core, including Billy Al Bengstrom, Ed Moses, Craig Kauffman, Robert Irwin, Larry Bell and Ed Ruscha (along with Kienholz himself) were far too individualistic to form an identifiable ‘L.A. school’, but they were temporarily unified by common passions. One was their desire to break the academicist stranglehold over Los Angeles’s backwater art world, although they differed on the means towards that end (abstract expressionism versus hard-edge abstractionism, for example). Another was a biographical and aesthetic camaraderie based on enthusiasm for the hotrod and motorcycle subcultures that had developed in Southern California from the 1940s.

      In his talks with Lawrence Weschler, Robert Irwin (who had attended L.A.’s Dorsey High School with Eric Dolphy) repeatedly emphasized the importance of custom-car ‘folk art’ to the emergence of the Ferus group and the ‘L.A. Look’ which they eventually created. Earlier, critic Nancy Marmer, in contrasting the Northern and Southern California avant gardes, had made the same point:

      Aside from the backdrop influence of Hollywood and the hypertrophied ‘neon-fruit supermarket’, there has also existed in California an idiosyncratic welding of sub-cultures and a body of small but curiously prophetic art, whose influence, if not always direct, is at least in an askew relation to contemporary Pop Art. For example, the Los Angeles hot-rod world, with its teenage rites, baroque car designs, kandy-kolors, its notion of a high-polish craftsmanship, and, perhaps most influential, its established conventions of decorative paint techniques, has flourished in the southern part of the state since the 1940s. If the imagery (‘Mad Magazine Bosch’, one writer has called it) has fortunately not been especially important, the custom-coach techniques of air-brush manipulation, ‘candy apple-ing’, and ‘striping’ have been variously suggestive.¹¹⁹

      In the evolving work of motorcycle racer Billy Al Bengston’s heraldic auto surfaces, Ed Ruscha’s gas station and parking lot books, Craig Kaufmann’s Plexiglas paintings, and Larry Bell’s Minimalist cubes, folk car culture was transformed into the ‘cool, semitechnological, industrially pretty art’ that became the patented ‘L.A. Look’ of the 1960s.¹²⁰ It was the avant-garde counterpart to the ‘Endless Summer’ depicted in Roger Corman movies, the Gidget novels (based on a Hollywood writer’s actual surfer-girl daughter), and the falsetto lyrics of Beach Boys’ songs. It was the mesmerizing vision of a white kids’ car-and-surf-based Utopia.

      Kienholz was the major exception. As Anne Bartlett Ayres has pointed out, his ‘assemblages developed as a shadow side to the famous “L.A. Look”’,¹²¹ a kind of hotrod noir juxtaposed to the Pop luster of his colleagues. His Back Seat Dodge – 38 of 1964 – a work that so infuriated a right-wing County supervisor that he tried to have the new County Museum of Art shut down because of it – summarized the Southern California Dream in a single noir tableau. Literally hotrodding, Kienholz ‘chopped’ a ‘38 coupé and set it in a ‘Lovers’ Lane’ complete with discarded beer bottles on the grass and ‘mushy’ music. Dead lovers, locked in a grim missionary embrace on the front seat, seemed to symbolize an adolescence gone to seed in eternity – Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello petting after the Holocaust. Kienholz’s imagery – set in a fateful year – anticipated the worst.

      This car–sex–death–fascism continuum also emerged as a dominant vision in L.A. underground film. In the notes to his ‘lost’ classic, Kustom Kar Kommandos (1964–65), Kenneth Anger – comparing L.A. eroticized custom cars to ‘an American cult-object of an earlier era, Mae West’ – emphasized that for the Southern California teenager, ‘the power-potentialized customized car represents a poetic extension of personality’.¹²² Anger – leader of the Hollywood film underground at various times in the 1950s and early 1960s – knew all about Southern California adolescence. This Hollywood brat reputedly ‘played the role of the child prince in Max Reinhardt’s movie of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and had Shirley Temple for a dancing partner at cotillions of the Maurice Kossloff Dancing School’, before launching his filmmaking career at age eleven. Another avid follower of Aleister Crowley, Anger was obsessed with the diabolics of Hollywood, homosexuality and speed machines of all kinds. His book, Hollywood Babylon has been described as ‘a slander catalogue amounting to a phenomenology of the myth of the scandal in Hollywood’, while two of his films, Scorpio Rising (1962) (which contains the seed of the 1980s film Blue Velvet in one of its segments) and Kommandos, explored the Nietzschean porno-mythology of motorcycle gangs and hotrodders.¹²³

      Adding to the L.A. car-culture phenomenologies of the Ferus artists and Anger, as well as inaugurating an improvisational voice that has been compared to Joyce but sounds more like Dolphy or Coleman, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) provided the ultimate freeway-map ontology of Southern California. A former technical writer in the West Coast aerospace industry (forced to produce eroticized descriptions of Bomark missiles and the like), Pynchon understood (better than some of the Ferus Gallery’s Pop artists) that in Southern California custom cars and their makers grew up into ICBMs and their makers. As radically ‘decentered’ as any contemporary Althusserian could have wished, Lot 49 wastes no time grappling with the alienation of its subject (as in Joan Didion’s ‘L.A. car book’, Play It As It Lays) but moves immediately into a postmodern lane. It maps a baroquely layered but ultimately one-dimensional reality (Marcuse a la Klein bottle?) ‘in which the city is at once an endless text always promising meaning but ultimately only offering hints and signs of a possible and final reality . . . like a “printed circuit”’ – or a freeway.¹²⁴

      But the Endless Summer of the avant garde (expressed in the new painting as a ‘bright ethereality’) came to an abrupt end in August 1965. Southcentral Los Angeles exploded in rage against police abuse and institutional racism, creating for a few days the ‘barricaded commune’ (Plagens) and ‘burning city’ (West) that Los Angeles intellectuals had frequently dreamt about as a kind of liberation from the Culture Industry. In fact, the Watts Rebellion, as well as the police attack on peaceful anti-war demonstrators at Century City in July 1967, politically galvanized artists and writers on the first broad scale since the Hollywood witch-hunt. Pynchon wrote a stirringly sympathetic and unpatronizing piece called ‘A Journey into the Mind of Watts’ (really a meditation on urban segregation), Ruscha painted The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire (1965–8), Schulberg organized a Watts Writers’ Workshop, anti-war artists contributed scores of pieces to the ‘Artists’ Peace Tower’ on the Sunset Strip, the underground Los Angeles Free Press flourished, and Kienholz’s tableaux denounced war (see his Portable War Memorial [1968]).¹²⁵

      Most importantly, the Rebellion inspired unity and élan in Southcentral Los Angeles, giving birth to a local version of the Black Arts Movement across a full spectrum of practices from Tapscott’s Arkestra to the rap poetry of the Watts Prophets. Bernard Jackson and J. Alfred Cannon founded the Inter-City Cultural Center in 1966 which grew into a flourishing theater center with its own press and school. Wanda Coleman, Kamau Daaood, Quincy Troupe, K. Curtis Lyle, Emory Evans, and Ojenke established a distinctive Watts idiom in fiction and poetry, while Melvin Van Peebles pioneered an alternative Black cinema with his outlaw odyssey, Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song. The Watts Festival, meanwhile, brought cultural cadres together with the community in annual celebrations of unity and rebellion.

      But the heroic moment of Underground Los Angeles Culture quickly passed. As a local art historian pointed out, ‘the high -flying spirit of the ‘60s . . . crashed and burned.’¹²⁶ The local dearth of jazz clubs and modernist galleries/collectors irresistibly drove part of the late 1950s and early 1960s avant garde (including L.A.’s Artforum magazine) to Manhattan (or, sometimes, in the case of experimental film and poetry, to San Francisco). After a student rebellion in 1966, Disney endowers moved Chouinard Art Institute, reborn as the California Institute

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