Things Are Popping Up at the Getty

From its psychedelic flier to its lineup of deep thinkers on the likes of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, “Media Pop” appeared to be a peculiar project for the Getty Research Institute. Sure enough, those who trekked up to the Getty Center to attend the conference Friday and Saturday found themselves staring at projected images of Marilyn Monroe, Campbell’s soup cans, comic-strip romances and beefcake photos while art historians dissected and analyzed every last squiggle and dot.

All this at the Getty? That bastion of high culture and old art?

There are reasons for this curious development.

First, the Getty’s leaders continue to chip away at the institution’s elitist image, partly by presenting a wide variety of programs in cooperation with other organizations. “Media Pop” was a collaboration between the Getty Research Institute, UCLA and UC Irvine.

Second, while the art collections at the Getty Museum stop at the end of the 19th century--with the notable exception of photography--the Getty Research Institute has extensive holdings of 20th century material, including artists’ letters, scrapbooks and notebooks.

Third, the institute’s new director, art historian Thomas Crow, has an unusually broad range of expertise, from 18th century French art to contemporary practices. Among his writing credits is “Modern Art in the Common Culture,” a critically acclaimed book that examines connections between avant-garde art and popular culture.

“Media Pop” wasn’t Crow’s idea, but he quickly agreed to a proposal for the conference, made by art history professors Cecile Whiting of UCLA and David Joselit of UC Irvine, soon after he arrived at the Getty last summer.

“I thought it was just perfect,” Crow said. “It was a good chance to do a project with institutions in the area, so that the Getty doesn’t persist in whatever reputation it has for being rather isolated and going it alone.”

What’s more, he said, “It seemed like as natural a subject as we could find.” The theme for this year’s round of visiting scholars at the research institute is “Reproductions and Originals.” The scholars’ work would mesh neatly with the proposed investigation of mass-media sources of Pop art, which are routinely acknowledged but rarely scrutinized.

As the conference shaped up, professors from Barnard College and Stanford, Princeton, Boston and New York universities joined their Southern California counterparts to “broaden the definition of Pop art by addressing an expanded field of 1960s media activities, rigorously examining the interdependencies between art and the visual media of mechanical reproduction,” as the printed program put it.

Art history conferences tend to be unbearably stuffy for outsiders. Largely because of its subject matter, “Media Pop” was a relatively lively affair. Warhol loomed largest, but several other artists came under the conference’s spotlight as well.

Pamela Lee, an assistant professor at Stanford, confessed that her topic, Op art, is rather embarrassing in scholarly circles but she forged ahead with an exploration of British artist Bridget Riley’s paintings, including the ‘60s fashion craze that spun off her dizzying abstractions. Richard Meyer, of USC, discussed David Hockney’s youthful fascination with Physique Pictorial, a gay men’s magazine published in Los Angeles, and pointed out photographs of male nudes that inspired some of his paintings in the early 1960s.

Thelma Golden, chief curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, noted that she was “the lone museum worker” on the program, then proved that she was up to the challenge. Instead of reading a paper, as the academics did, she spoke spontaneously--in considerable depth--about Romare Bearden’s use of collage as he attempted to create new images of African American culture.

Still, if words such as “epistemology,” “de-skilling,” “noncomopositionality,” “protophotographic,” “narrativize,” “symptomology,” “instamantalization” and “constitutive” don’t roll off your tongue and into your conversation, this was not a conference for you. During one particularly dry presentation, one of the few artists in the audience fell asleep and snored loudly.

Everyone was wide awake on Friday night, however, when the local art crowd joined the scholarly contingent to hear artists Vija Celmins, Edward Ruscha and Dennis Hopper reminisce about L.A.’s art scene in the 1960s. In a freewheeling conversation laced with wry wit, they recalled their impressions of the city when they arrived in the late ‘50s or early ‘60s, their studios and artistic struggles, the cars they drove, seminal exhibitions, influential galleries and Monday night art walks on La Cienega Boulevard.

But art historians who had hoped to gain insight into the meaning of the artists’ work must have been a bit frustrated.

“I just say whatever comes into my brain,” Celmins said, recalling her own futile attempts to explain an image of a burning house she painted many years ago.

Ruscha often says that he paints words because they “don’t have a size” like recognizable objects. He repeated that explanation in response to a question, then sighed and said, “I don’t know.”

But Hopper cut him off. “That’s cool,” he said of Ruscha’s first answer. “Stick with that.”

“Media Pop” was only the first in a series of three Getty Research Institute conferences on pioneering artists of the 1960s who took an adventurous approach to media. Next comes “Harry Smith: The Avant Garde in the American Vernacular,” a symposium on the filmmaker, painter and musicologist, on April 20-21. The final event, “The Art of David Tudor: Indeterminacy and Performance in Postwar Culture,” will examine the work of the avant-garde pianist and composer, on May 17-19.

Information and reservations: (310) 440-7300.