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History on the surface: Pop art and postwar urbanism in 1960s Los Angeles.

Article Excerpt
Cecile Whiting, Pop LA.:Art and the City in the 1960s. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2006. 268 pp., 20 color ills., 77 b/w. $39.95

Attempts to think historically about Los Angeles must first confront the myriad of popular images of the city that portray it either as a soulless capital of hedonism and consumption culminating in Disneyland, or as an unfathomable puzzle of sordid desires epitomized by the film noir tradition. Hackneyed as these images may be, they reflect the importance of geography and setting to the history of Southern California's "exceptionalism," identified most notably by Carey McWilliams in his late-1940s studies of the region, Southern California Country: An Island on the Land and California:The Great Exception. As Cecile Whiting notes in her new book, Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s, discussions of the culture of Los Angeles often present the particularities of place as the prime movers of stylistic change--an "it could only happen here" attitude--in an easy substitute for the kind of historical inquiry that McWilliams found vital for understanding the area.

This tendency to interpret the culture and history of Southern California superficially is especially dangerous when confronting Pop art in Los Angeles, where the style's ambiguous relationship to the culture of the commodity is even more pronounced. But Whiting, professor of art history at the University of California, Irvine, challenges the view of West Coast art as a simple celebration of surfboards and hot rods by addressing the ways Southern California artists of the 1960s resisted the typical dichotomy between "sunshine" and "noir" accounts of Los Angeles. Looking at the work of lesser-known artists such as Vija Celmins and Noah Purifoy together with major figures such as Ed Ruscha and David Hockney, she argues, allows for more complex understandings of the expanding postwar urban landscape. Her book combines readings of advanced art, popular culture, and urban history to argue that space is the central issue through which cultural production and social change must be read in 1960s Los Angeles.

Whiting's study is a timely addition to the burgeoning scholarship on art and culture in postwar Southern California. This is apparent from a recent spate of museum shows, such as the Centre Pompidou's survey, Los Angeles 1955-1985: Birth of an Artistic Capital; a growing body of literature on individual artists, such as Ruscha; and Peter Selz's recent survey of art and activism, Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and...

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