The Imperfect Vision That Peers at Nostalgia : ‘L.A. Pop in Sixties’ presents a confusing exhibition blurred further by artspeak in catalogue

Looks like nostalgia all over again. The other day Abbie Hoffman died; adieu grand yippie. Local radio recently added another station specializing in Golden Oldies, and the Newport Harbor Art Museum just opened “L.A. Pop in the Sixties.”

The exhibition, which will go on tour after closing here July 9, was organized by guest curator Anne Ayres, who is director of Los Angeles’ Otis/Parsons Gallery. It is the second ambitious retrospective survey Ayres has launched here within the month, the other being “Forty Years of California Assemblage” at UCLA’s Wight Art Gallery. Both shows make practically no sense, suffering as they do from overinclusion and underdefinition. They do, however, raise important questions about the purpose and value of such enterprises.

In her introductory catalogue essay Ayres says the show is “meant to be something of a reconsideration, if not exactly a perverse enterprise.”

Personally I’d vote for perverse.

She concludes: “The impure Pop of Los Angeles in the 1960s emerged from a mix of Surrealism, Dada and formal abstraction, and in most cases the interesting spin came from Pop’s conceptual challenges.”

Now what’s wrong with that?

Nothing.

How can there be anything wrong with it? It doesn’t say anything.

With the exception of a few bright patches, all the catalogue essays are couched in the language of artspeak, using buzzwords so banalized they no longer communicate even to the cognoscenti. Worse, erecting a wall of this kind of language around the art suggests it has neither the intense personal meanings poured into it by the artists, nor any larger resonances from the general poetics of the epoch.

Back in the ‘70s artists mounted a kind of palace revolt against this sort of theme exhibition, complaining that they distort the individuality of the art and throw the spotlight onto the organizer, making the curator the star of the show like an auteur movie director. (The persistence of such feelings can be found in Kristine McKenna’s interviews with some of the artists, on Page 92.)

It is no help to say that art made during the ‘60s was tinged with a Pop sensibility. Everything and everyone was. The decade seemed to many either their first or their last chance to be truly young. Thirtysomething ad men with crewcuts grew Beatle coifs and dressed in leather. Young moms from the suburbs burned their bras and had their thighs tattooed. The decade belonged to rebellious adolescents from Berkeley to Bejing and Paris.

One way or another all adolescents must overthrow the old order. That has more to do with this exhibition than Surrealism. One way or another adolescents must be cool. Being cool, pithy and monosyllabicc has a lot more to do with this art than formal abstraction.

By chance, Newport is also presenting a suite of Henri Matisse’s classic “Jazz” lithographs. With their flat poster-like forms and syncopated patterns, they come closer to a visual definition of Pop than two-thirds of the artists in the L.A. show.

If you want to play art history games, how interesting it is to think of Matisse’s European proto-Pop being Americanized by Stuart Davis and then re-Europeanized by Robert Motherwell. Look at Ed Ruscha’s two earliest works here. They are suave adaptations of Motherwell collages one year, the next they are his famous big-funny word paintings of such ejaculations as “Honk” and “Flash, L.A. Times.” Ruscha re-Americanized Motherwell. Nationalism was rife in the ‘60s.

Speaking of nostalgia, this exhibition might go a long way toward correcting any lingering notions that the ‘60s were all groovy and psychedelic. It is surprising to revisit it after so many years and find how troubled it was. Ruscha gets saddled with a reputation as a wry and stylish comedian, but “War Surplus” was worried about Vietnam.

In the next gallery the most striking thing about Llyn Foulkes’ post-card paintings is that they are dominated by the diagonal stripes of traffic signs signaling “Caution.” Caution about what? Often they are images of the hills in the North Valley. One is dedicated to Chatsworth. Is this an early ecological caution about the environment? There is a subliminal image of a woman’s crotch in one mountain painting. A classic caution about the power of Mother Nature and her daughters? Or is the fact that these so-called L.A. paintings were painted as far away as Chula Vista and National City a caution against the sprawl of giant cities?

Caution not to overinterpret, but art is nothing if not a poser of questions.

Is it silly to have a show about L.A. Pop at all? So it appears, given the utter chasm of sensibility between most of these artists. Since we’re stuck with the suggestion, we might learn something about L.A. It is not altogether about glitz. It is about a million semisecret enclaves which shrink down to millions of isolated individuals. On evidence L.A. is about the joys and terrors of Anonymity.

There are Joe Goode’s milk bottle paintings all lined up like tract houses painted different pastel shades. Maybe he was having an argument with Barnett Newman in his mind as he did them. Maybe he was saying: “Look, art is not about abstract theories. Art is about an empty street on cool morning and the clink of the dairyman’s wares on the stoop.”

A little nostalgic. What a pity these paintings are not as good as one remembers them. Seem to recall there are 14 altogether and there are eight here. Maybe the others are better.

A funny little painting of a dollar bill by Robert Dowd seems downright prescient today. The face on the note is that of Vincent van Gogh, currently more famous for million-dollar auction prices than his wrenchingly superb art. Phillip Hefferton also painted money and could not resist a title like “Winkin’ Lincoln.” One picture foreshadows late Philip Guston but otherwise one wonders what these two artists are doing here. They were not big players at the time and are rarely heard from anymore. There were a whole flock of Photorealist painters who were this Pop, and Bob Graham was as Pop as everybody at the time. What’s the standard?

Yes. Definitely perverse.

Billy Al Bengston is still heard from, but this group of paintings is about the weakest work he ever made--images drawn from a BSA motorcyle in a mad rush to beat the deadline for an exhibition and no more or less Pop than a Nehru jacket.

Was Bob Dylan a Pop artist? If he was, then so was Wallace Berman with his verifax collages of a hand holding a transistor radio whose speaker pictures everything from skin mag nudes to buddhas and snarling panthers. They are like a pack of doomsday Tarot cards. Looks more like a Bay Area sensibility than an L.A. one. On the other hand, Topanga Canyon has its own character.

If Eric Burden and the Shangrilas were both Pop, then Pop doesn’t mean anything. We need some distinctions around here.

Good thing there is some bemusing art in this show lest one be really ticked off.

Much of it looks surprisingly archaic. It looked OK at the time, but every artist still known from the group makes finer work today.

Vija Celmins scarcely belongs here, but the pictures are fascinating--strange gray images of destruction--hand shooting a pistol, World War II bombers limping home from a mission, Bonnie and Clyde’s riddled jalopy. The only image in color is a comforting bowl of matzoh ball soup. Celmins knew war in her childhood in Latvia so these images are surely personal, but they are treated like strange distanced TV images--the hand that shot Lee Harvey Oswald, planes going down in Vietnam.

Nobody before the ‘60s or since ever thought of John Baldessari as a Pop artist. Works here include early conceptual japes like a screen photo of Artforum magazine with the caption, “This is not to be looked at.” Other offerings include blotchy reproductions of anonymous snapshots that bring L.A.’s cool anonymity to an estate of impersonal depression.

One begins to suspect that the point lurking behind the curatorial muddle of the show is an attempt to set up largely non-existent L.A. Pop as a precursor of art presently fashionable, art that exists largely to tell us that all visual imagery creates a fake vision of the world--especially that wrought by television.

If that is the point, it could have been made more economically if not more convincingly. The real message one takes from all this is an urgent sense of the need for a new, more widely cultural approach to such exhibitions.

Art is undergoing an enormous popularization, an apparently welcome development with all manner of pernicious side effects, the worst of them being a tendency to forget that the fine arts are--well--fine. The continuation of curatorial connoiseurship is crucial. People with a knack for it must go on making distinctions between the excellent and the merely OK, between the topical and the significant. That all serves the artist in the end.

But art’s new and burgeoning audience needs help. Art is not in the end an activity for the uninititiated. The viewer must be actively engaged. Art’s new audience is not dumb, but it is liable to need help making the right connections between the visual arts, other kinds of cultural activities and life itself. It is high time exhibitions like this one come with catalogues by experts who address the audience instead of one another. This does not mean vulgarization of art writing, it actually requires very smart people versed in art and capable of making connections to literature, music, history and the rest of the humanistic disciplines.