Auto-centric Los Angeles

http://www.laweekly.com/2013-05-30/art-books/pacific-standard-time-presents-getty/

Hello Everyone:

First some sad news.  On Friday June 7, 2013, a shooting took place at Santa Monica College killing five people and injuring a number of others.  The shooter was a student distraught over his parents' divorce and other personal problems.  He set fire to his family home in Santa Monica, California, carjacked a woman, strafed a bus, then entered the college library to continue his shooting spree.  I feel a deep sense of violation, anger, and loss over this because SMC was place where I was able to pick up the shards of a damaged academic career and start over on the path I'm on now.  I also believe that schools are place for opportunities where people of all backgrounds can come together for a common purpose.  It's painful to think about it.  Someone so distressed about their personal life, instead of being steered to therapy, was allowed to slip by, purchase a gun and ammunition, and violate the halls of academia.  Anyway onto to today's topic: L.A. Car Culture.

Specifically, I want to talk about Los Angeles' car culture as a theme in the ongoing series of exhibitions "Pacific Standard Time Presents."  Transportation was one of the things that enabled Los Angeles to spread (sprawl) out like it does.  In her article on May 30, 2013 for the LA Weekly, Alissa Walker takes a critical look at the use of the automobile as a recurring theme in the PSTP exhibitions.  The point she is attempting to make is are the exhibitions around town too focused on the car?  Has the automobile become so ingrained in Los Angeles that it has become inextricably connected to Los Angeles' identity?  Think about it for a second.  What is one of the images that come to mind when you think about Los Angeles?  It's a rhetorical question because the answer is a car.   The first piece of evidence Ms. Walker presents is a 1961 painting by Roger W. Kuntz of a shadowed overpass stretching into infinity and Michael Light's 2004 aerial photograph of the pretzely 5/10/60/101 interchange with the downtown skyline fading into the background.  Ms. Walker even points to the name of the Getty show, "Overdrive L.A. Constructs 1940-1990." as more evidence of the overfocus on the automobile.

Other works of art are placed into evidence by our interrogator.  An Edward Ruscha retrospective featuring gas stations and entire streets photographed from a car, at the MAK Center (http://www.makcenter.org) an exhibit was mounted featuring freeway art from the 1970s that are displayed behind plexiglass vitrines give the audience the impression of looking at the pieces from a windshield.  The question Ms. Walker asks is "Is driving what we talk about when we talk about L.A.'s modern architecture."  Well, in one sense yes, driving is part of L.A.'s modern architecture.  It has been before 1940, with the construction of the Bullock's Wilshire building on Wilshire Boulevard and Westmoreland in the 1920s.  The entrance was deliberately placed in the rear so that cars could turn off the street and park in the back.  Writer D. J. Waldie provides an answer, "When we think about Los Angeles at the end of the 20th century, we see ourselves in cars...before the freeways became 24/7 hells..."  Mr. Waldie sums up L.A. architecture, "All or even most of Los Angeles can't be summed up by automobiles, but driving remains the simplest metaphor for what is utopian and what is dystopian about Los Angeles.  Ms. Walker points out amusing irony here, the Getty Trust, which is funding PSTP, was made possible by Getty Oil which fed the cars.

Thus while other cities examine the architecture from the same period in terms of parks, plazas, muscular buildings, we get photographs of oil fields.  As a side note, the great mystery writer Raymond Chandler uses the oil industry as background for his first novel The Big Sleep.  It isn't as if cars haven't been prominent themes in post-World War II art.  Ed Kienholz Backseat Dodge '38 and the hood of a Corvair ornately painted by Judy Chicago.  Los Angeles' monuments?  The freeway of course.  Parking lots as public space.  This is what Los Angeles has to show for itself architecturally, according to Ms. Walker.  Apparently she forgot some of Los Angeles' great pre-World War II monuments such as the Los Angeles Public Library or City Hall.  Let's not forget the great postwar monuments such as the Music Center or Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Currently at the Architecture and Design Museum (http://www.aplusd.org), there is an exhibit , "Windshield Perspective," examining a twelve block stretch of Beverly Boulevard.  Admittedly Beverly Boulevard is not the most elegant street in Los Angeles.  It's more like the city itself, it's a mix of everything, the elegant homes of Hancock Park and the strip malls of area between Virgil and Normandie, the focus of the exhibit.  According to curator and architectural critic Greg Goldin, "We want to see the city as it has made itself with its own hands, and not as it has been made by those who sallied forth with big ideas, about architecture, urbanism or any commanding view."  True enough.  Beverly Boulevard is a hotchpotch of urbanism and architecture.  That's good because Los Angeles is really like that.  This is not to say that the bold faced architecture isn't worth consideration anymore.  However, it is heartening to know that lesser, vernacular works are being given their due.  So while the Getty heralds the big guns, we have the smaller works to remind the audience that this is Los Angeles seen and not seen from the car.