You know you’re at a modern art exhibit when the woman staring at a piece of ordinary-looking red plywood mounted before you whispers with a bemused grin, “So I have this at my apartment. I bought it from Home Depot and I use it as my flooring.”
This was just one of many vocal reactions to LACMA’s “SoCal: Southern California Art of the 1960s and 70s” exhibit, which may be the most interactive and commotion-causing art show in Los Angeles this year.
The SoCal collection features a broad range of work, from light and space installations, geometric art, and a small devotional to the politically conscious artists of the day ““ artists who no doubt had Vietnam, abortion rights, the Kennedy assassination, and the Civil Rights Movement in mind.
Every piece is also rife with Southern California influence, whether it’s the acrylic sunset that greets you at the entrance or the undulating wave reflections of a glittery yellow square panel nearby.
Most of the contemporary exhibit’s works are vibrant, big color blocks evoking Andy Warhol and Austin Powers in equal parts. These pieces are appropriately tagged “Untitled,” as it is near impossible to describe them coherently in words. But it soon becomes hard to distinguish the first “Untitled” resin square sculpture from the 10th. Suitably, the adults walking by these works looked dazed and a little skeptical that they had to pay to see this.
But some works are able to convey the innovations of the period, which were partly due to advancements in aerospace and high-tech industries in the ’50s and ’60s. New materials developed during that time helped light and space artists explore new ways of integrating their art with the environment. An untitled installation by renowned space artist Doug Wheeler features a claustrophobic, dark space with a single light source: a dimly lit screen in the center of a wall that washes the entire enclosure in an eerie gray haze. Walking closer to this ethereal floating plane, you feel absolutely hypnotized, as if you’re wandering through a dream rather than looking at an oversized light fixture.
Another highlight is “Cube,” by Larry Bell, a transparent square made of vacuum-coated glass that sits at chest level and allows you to look at it ““ and your own reflection ““ from every perspective, making the viewer a working, breathing part of the art.
Meanwhile the works of the more realistic artists of the period are often, quite literally, trash. In a memorable assemblage work, an inebriated male teenager, made of chicken wire, feels up a girl in the backseat of a rusting ’38 Dodge.
And after the geometric perfection of the installation artists, the area where rusting altars and anthropomorphic abortion displays (a cement bag violently slit open) predominate serves as a reality check that the ’60s and ’70s weren’t just the good ole days ““ they were times of conflict and social reflection.
The exhibit’s combination of both the glamor and grime, the nonsensical and symmetric will leave visitors with their own strong reactions to one of California’s most volatile time periods.
-Linda Chang
E-mail Chang at lchang@media.ucla.edu