The Dark Side of Pop
John Baldessari was among the first generation to make Californian art prevail
against the New York hegemony. Californian artists profited from a
fascination for the land of eternal sunshine – and from an uneasiness in
the face of Hollywood’s culture industry. Harald Fricke on
the myths and iconography of American West Coast art.
Paul McCarthy: Bossy Burger, 1991, Mixed Media Installation.
© Courtesy Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York
Photo: Kunstmuseum
Wolfsburg
Robert Hughes was not amused. On April 20 1992, the
Time magazine critic wrote: "You think the art of the eighties was
bad? This here is even worse." What prompted his reaction was an
exhibition at the Los Angeles
Museum of Contemporary Art: for
"Helter Skelter," the curator Paul Schimmel invited 16
Californian artists from the past three decades who have been
investigating themes such as sex, violence, and death in their works.
There was a toy train driving through an apocalyptic comet landscape from
Chris Burden;
Charles Ray presented a nine and a half-foot high doll of a woman in a
manager outfit next to the shriveled figure of a naked man; in addition to
an installation of an office space,
Mike Kelley created the disturbing video film
Heidi together with
Paul McCarthy; and
Raymond Pettibon’s drawings, which combine hippies and surfers with
motifs from 40s thrillers were exhibited in a museum for the first time.
Yet for Hughes, all of these works merely testified to art’s downfall. In
them he saw nothing more than an "outsider art" that wasn’t above using
every last "hackneyed juvenile slang" or "cliché from the American
psychotherapy scene," as long as it shocked the public.
Raymond Pettibon: Untitled (The Figurativer), 1998.
Photo: Deutsche Bank Collection
Hughes was right.
"Helter Skelter" turned out to be a scandal – and made contemporary art
from Los Angeles famous worldwide. The title alone, which alludes, like
the
Beatles song, to
Charles Manson’s Satanic cult of the late sixties, was
criticized by the press as being tacky. Others were disturbed by the way
Paul McCarthy addressed sexuality in his installation
>The Garden, which showed a male doll mechanically copulating with
a tree. In general, the explicit portrayals in many of the works were a
challenge to America’s prudery and Christian morals, to say the least.
Mike Kelley: Spectral Personification, 1998,
Photo: Deutsche Bank Collection
"Helter Skelter"
not only invoked a counter-image to the religious persuasions of a senator
the likes of
Jesse Helms; the exhibition seemed to bid farewell to the ideal of a
clean-cut America altogether. But it also felt like a late revenge on the
eighties, throughout which New York had dominated the art scene with
Neo-Expressive painting. Now, the redneck cousins from California were on
the doorstep, whose drawings, installations, and videos were brimming with
the raw and aggressive power of punk and smothered all the brilliant
surface shine. And they succeeded in doing so: over 8,000 visitors came to
the opening of "Helter Skelter," and afterwards, the public was waiting in
line in front of the museum for weeks.
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Ed Ruscha: Standard Station, 1966,
©Photo: courtesy Greystone Gallery
Yet
despite all this, "Helter Skelter" was never a product of the zeitgeist,
but the result of a tradition that had already been in place for around
forty years. The art of the West Coast always seemed to embody the dark,
forlorn side of Pop. While New York
Pop Art formed a bridge to contemporary product design and the
Madison Avenue advertising industry during the sixties, even back then
artists in San Francisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles were more interested
in the marks consumerism was making on everyday life.
Andy Warhol’s silkscreens might have made icons out of
Campbell soup cans, but for
Ed Ruscha and
John Baldessari, mass production was an expression of the social
impoverishment determining reality to a large degree. In 1963, Ed Ruscha
published his photo book Twenty-six Gasoline Stations; each
photograph portrays nothing more than an empty gas station taken from the
same perspective.
Ed Ruscha: Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1963.
©Ed Ruscha
The series was meant to portray
the standardization of industry visually overtaking the country: each of
the photographs was taken along Route
66 on the way from Los Angeles to Oklahoma City, which Ruscha traveled
several times a month. The myth
Jack Kerouac invoked with his novel "On the Road" crumbled in Ruscha’s
uniform landscapes populated by identical signs. Trips no longer seemed
like adventures, but like an endlessly monotonous repetition of the
everyday. Over the following years, Ruscha expanded this view to include
other phenomena and published the photographic volumes Some Los Angeles
Apartments (1965), Every Building on Sunset Strip (1966), and
Thirty-four Parking Lots in Los Angeles (1967).
John Baldessari: Ball Oldsmobile, 1935
National City Blvd., National City, Calif., 1996,
©Courtesy Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles and
Sonnabend Gallery, New York / Photo: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg
In similar manner, in the sixties John Baldessari unmasked Pop’s promise to
reveal the illusion behind it. His photographs printed on canvas such as
Econ-O-Wash or Looking East on 4th and C from 1967 are based on
images he shot driving by in a car. The sky is overcast, the pavement
grey, telephone poles stick out like bare rods in a wasteland of streets
and row houses. Baldessari wasn’t interested in employing a particularly
"anti-artistic" staging to formulate a critique. Instead, it’s the real
situation being examined here, one from which he saw no escape: "These
places were always like this, long before I myself was born – nobody
wanted to live in this neighborhood." Baldessari showed the ordinariness
of an overly settled, socially dysfunctional environment; that was his
early criticism of California’s suburban system, which was already booming
back then.
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