A Lore-Filled Blast From the Eternally Cool Past of the ‘L.A. Art Scene’

Certain things have to happen before a culture gets nostalgic. Apparently local art has fulfilled the requirements, otherwise there’d be no impulse to make an exhibition like “Photographing the L.A. Art Scene 1955-1975.” It evokes the Golden Age when Los Angeles invented a distinctive art fueled by great talents like Edward Kienholz.

On view at the Craig Krull Gallery, it’s an in-group, milestone 174-work show that comes with a catalog interested parties will find indispensable. The exhibition’s organizer is the gallery’s proprietor. Krull is a 35-year-old L.A. native who studied art history. Along the way he became fascinated by the things that make L.A. culture unique.

“I always found myself attracted to the kinds of little personal photographs you see scattered among the chronologies at the end of exhibition catalogs,” he said. That attraction led to the present melange of memorabilia, posters and authentic art photographs.

Krull’s distillation of L.A.’s art scene makes it look like something put together by a casting director. Artists like Larry Bell were as handsome as leading men. Whether seen dressed as a “Guys and Dolls” gangster or imitating a Marx brother in his undershorts, dudes like him had charisma and a flair for Dada drama. It’s all a little like watching a revival of “A Hard Day’s Night.”

Everybody’s in costume playing a role as themselves. Billy Al Bengston and Peter Alexander do a camp on a ‘30s comedy wearing tuxes in bed in a fancy hotel.

Guys who weren’t of star quality got cast as characters. Bruce Conner turns up in a bathtub in a roomful of cute half-dressed women, including dancer Toni Basil.

The few female artists included had to have the devastating tomboy panache of an Alexis Smith or the moxie of Judy Chicago. She’s gussied up as a prizefighter in the ring. While the high jinks are afoot, we get a quiet reminder that back then the scene was mainly a males-only club. Women were mostly set decoration.

These photographs are cinematic. They rarely look like amateur pictures. No wonder. Many of the artists, like Bell, Ken Price, Jerry McMillan and crossover artist Dennis Hopper, were accomplished photographers. Pros like Charles Brittin and Edmund Teske were part of the gang. It’s significant that also on view at the Krull gallery is a small show of Teske’s portraits of Jim Morrison and the Doors. L.A. artists admired Marcel Duchamp and Warhol, but they were hellbent to raise the status of artists to a level with film and rock celebrities.

A 1958 Brittin shot of Wallace Berman, the purest of L.A.’s Beat Generation artists, shows him walking on the Venice boardwalk with his wife and son. Oddly, they’re strolling past what looks like a border crossing kiosk under an arch labeled “Mexico.” Turns out the anomalies were part of the set for an Orson Welles film. The sense of Hollywood was everywhere.

Everybody knows that Tinseltown has no sense of real history. What it’s really good at is legend. This show includes some 20 pictures each of Ed Ruscha and Bengston, but I didn’t see a single shot of Richard Diebenkorn. The list of not-included significant actors in the L.A. art drama is much longer.

What this boils down to is a kind of canonization of a hip orthodox view. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, as long as we understand what’s going on. We see Berman’s legendary bust for showing an obscene drawing. We see the poster for the legendary “War Babies” show that offended both liberals and conservatives and closed the Huysman Gallery. It’s all part of the lore, but it’s not the whole story.

One of the requirements for nostalgia is that its subject has faded far enough into the past so the details are fuzzy.

If you were around, nostalgia has a funny sweet ‘n’ sour taste. The past evoked by this show is witty, glamorous and super-cool. The fun of these pictures seems eternal. There’s a shot of me with a pretty friend of Bengston’s taken by Price at a party in 1967. We mug gleefully. Two months later the girl was dead of an overdose.

There’s nothing overtly sad about a 1971 shot of “24 Young L.A. Artists” posing on the steps of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to publicize their show inside. This was the second generation. It included artists such as Vija Celmins, Laddie Dill and William Wegman. Exceptionally gifted every one, most had to leave town or compromise their best ambitions to make reputations. None achieved the legendary status of the best ‘60s artists.

In order to be nostalgic, a thing has to be over.

* Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Building B3, Santa Monica, through Aug. 11. (310) 828-6410.