Mike Kelley, Feudal War, 1987, acrylic on canvas, 48¼x60¼”. Courtesy of Rosamund Felson.

 

The Los Angeles art world is growing and changing more rapidly than at any time in its history. Even dealer attitudes are different than they were before. Top LA galleries, which for years avoided exhibiting local artists, now scramble to represent them. A number of younger artists are living off their sales quite independent of New York exposure. And when they want to show in the east, they can often choose among several offers. Much of the market boom is occurring in Santa Monica. You find as many galleries in that beach city as in West Hollywood, until recently the important district for showing art. Certain longstanding regional shortcomings have begun to be righted. European art now can be seen consistently at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and several galleries. And the area probably has as many competent curators as any place in America.

Angelenos may or may not read art criticism; they certainly don’t write it. The dailies are barely adequate and there is no weekly equivalent to The Village Voice, the Sunday Times, or New York Magazine. There are no monthly art magazines at all. The absence of an art press means that it is hard to figure out what’s going on in Los Angeles whether you’re there or not. Written criticism sustains discussion and, without an art press, a show just has impact while it is up and only can be experienced first hand.

Criticism is needed if art movements are to coalesce and get promoted. Its absence means that Los Angeles artists tend to make their impact as individuals. Since the sunset of the Light and Space Movement LA hasn’t seen the surges of group energy and competition so familiar in New York. The absence of cohesion is predictable because the scene is so dispersed and art is not such a big deal in the town: film and television dominate money and conversation.

In the beginning Chouinard and Otis and were Los Angeles’s art schools. Then in an overlapping sequence UC Irvine was built, Chouinard closed and Cal Arts opened, Claremont Graduate Center got going, UCLA and USC improved, Cal State this and Cal State that started pumping out students, Otis was merged into Parsons, and Art Center embraced the fine arts. Cal Arts has been the place to go for the last fifteen years, but the other schools have become possible places to teach afterwards. Which school you went to matters in LA’s art world. Schools provide one of the few local bases for contacts and community.

Wherever you live you have to spend time in the studio to make art and have to figure out a way to pay for that time. Unless your art is selling there aren’t all that many hours left over for other things, so one place becomes much like another. Indoors in indoors. As hard as it is to find a good place to live and work in LA, it’s much easier than in New York. To find space in New York you have to know someone or know someone who knows someone or be rich; in Los Angeles all that may help but isn’t essential. Artists seem to be happy there. And they get invited to better parties.

Outside the art world things in Los Angeles are less than great. The city is increasingly the victim of its own physical allure. The LA Basin continues to attract more people than it reasonably can accommodate. Traffic, smog, and public services are all getting worse, and no improvement is really in sight. On the freeways, where visitors once noticed more acts of courtesy than aggression, drivers are using guns to change lanes instead of directional signals. Bruce Nauman, Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, and James Turrell, half the big names, have moved from Los Angeles to places with similar light—New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona—but without the physical crush. They had to move to keep what they had.

I’ve never lived in LA. I went to grad school and worked in San Diego for six years. I moved back east in 1978 and with the distance have come to love LA. This section is a sampler of work, not an argument or case. Most of the artists have been seen in New York someplace sometime. I would gladly have doubled or tripled the present number, but there isn’t room. I’ve written specifically on Ed Ruscha and Chris Burden because I can’t imagine them living any place but Los Angeles, because their art is important and keeps getting better or at least doesn’t get worse.

With his sharp eye for design and very steady hands, Ruscha always has made things appear easy. His accomplishments are diverse: his exquisitely ironic early books are tours de force; Artforum looked its best when he laid it out; his drawings are masterful and idiosyncratic; his phrases stay in your mind like lyrics. But until recently he seemed better on paper than on canvas. Then in his grisaille paintings shown at the Whitney he got all his virtues together and on canvas. Name, Address, Phone and The Uncertain Trail were haunting and mysterious like no other works in the Biennial. Few 50-year-old artists like Ruscha now are doing their best work ever.

Perhaps 20 American sculptors born since World War II matter. Of these Chris Burden has been the toughest, the most wide ranging and physically inventive. He exhibits traits characteristically American. He’s impatient with the inessential, a natural tinkerer, active, able to travel light. He can take stuff straight out of the newspaper or Popular Science and make affecting and acute sculptures with it, works that are much more than topical. Burden doesn’t produce that many saleable products so his work is rarely deflected by the art market. Like his performances which involved extremes of action and of stillness, his sculptures make one aware of energy and entropy. In this he brings to mind Robert Smithson, another American artist who went after the big issues.

 

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Craig Gholson Do you think there are concerns specific to an LA artist?

Mike Kelley No, I don’t see that. The art scene is so international now that a lot of what is going on in different cities is very similar although different. Pools of artists take things in slightly different directions or different ways. So I think the flavor of some of Los Angeles’ artists is different than other cities, but I think a lot of the concerns are similar.

CG What flavors…or how would you define those concerns?

MK Compared to what is going on in the East, for example, the work there tends to be very “super cool” right now. And even the “cool” work here is less “cool” than that. It has a weirder edge to it. A creepier edge. There’s a lot more interest here in more transgressive type work, more obviously transgressive.

CG Why would you define it as a “creepier” edge to the work?

MK Because I think there’s less of a focus on an art market here. So art still retains a bit more connection to being about forbidden things. I think there’s less monetary pressure.

CG So you would say that a functioning artist in LA is freer from those kind of pressures?

MK Not in any obvious way, but I think in a psychological way because the city itself is less culture-bound. It’s also a city that has much more of an entertainment industry. So I think there’s more of a split between entertainment industry and art production. There’s a lot of interest in New York in merging the two things. I see it especially in performance work from New York. You don’t see that so much here.

CG As LA is essentially a film and television town, what effects do you see being surrounded by those industries?

MK Not much because you don’t have direct access to it. It’s filtered. Like television, for instance, you can’t tell where it’s coming from. Except, it affects the social scene. Rather than the art scene being the predominant social scene, film and television is. So artists aren’t really glorified the way they are in the East. And I think there might be a slight backlash against it. But not much because I don’t think film and television have too much daily presence or at least not any more than in any place else in the country they do.

CG It actually seems inverted to me. It seems as if artists in New York have much more of a romance about the film industry.

MK Yes, because they don’t see it as an industry. They think it’s magical. Here you see all the bones about it. You see how tacky it is and how it’s just like any other industry. There isn’t a romance about it.

CG Artists such as Robert Longo and Laurie Anderson seem very much enamored of film. In fact, increasingly it seems as if what they want is to be filmmakers. I can’t think of an LA artist who has filmmaking as a priority.

MK Maybe Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, but they’re coming from a video background. Even they have a much more perverse take on it. In the East, I think a lot of the criticism about media has engendered a whole fascination with media as a real abstraction and not as another sort of image factory.

When I first got out of school I worked in the film industry and it’s really a hateful industry to work in. You really see how insipid the whole way of producing things is. I think you lose that sense that you get if you approach it with a more critical base—that it’s a big conspiracy. That there’s a real intelligence behind it. When you’re in it I think you see that there’s no intelligence behind it. It’s just cranking out stuff on the lowest level common denominator.

CG Actually one big non-intelligence would be an improvement over the lot of little non-intelligences that seem to really have power.

MK Yes, so I just laugh now at the whole East Coast Media Conspiracy Theory. I just see it as literature, I can’t really apply it to the industry itself.

CG Do you think there is an antagonism between East Coast and West Coast artists?

MK Slightly.

CG And what form does it take?

MK I don’t think it takes any specific form. On a realistic level I don’t see it. I don’t see much antagonism between the artists themselves. I think it’s more of a general antagonism that has to do with economics. At a personal level I don’t see it.

CG Can you ever imagine living and working in New York?

MK At one point I spent more time there, but as I’ve gotten older it doesn’t seem to make much difference being there. It’s difficult to spend much time there because it takes me away from getting things done.

CG What is it about LA that you like in terms of your work?

MK It’s easy for me to work here. I don’t have to worry about money so much. I can get by. You’re away from the economic base, but you also don’t have to worry so much about producing so much capital. So I think that’s it. I’ve never had an antagonism about being in New York, it always seemed to me a practical thing. I could never build up enough money to make the move and everything inflated as I got more money it inflated even more. It became unreasonable.

CG What about something like the brighter light in California. Would something technical like that be a concern in where you choose to live?

MK I think that’s a big fallacy. Not too many painters work in natural light anymore. I don’t see that as having to do with anything. I work in a house. In Los Angeles.

 

Part of Wade Saunders’s Los Angeles Portfolio (BOMB 22/Winter 1988).