"Los Angeles' identity is inextricably linked with the automobile," reads the first line of wall text opening the Getty's current show about postwar architecture in Los Angeles. In case you miss reading that line, the entire first room of the exhibition proceeds to hit you over the head with its hypothesis: Photos of drive-ins, sketches of car designs, a poster of Disneyland's Autopia ride. There's even a section of freeway art, something I have to admit I never really thought existed, but here it is, presented on a wall almost as its own particular genre. A 1961 painting by Roger E. Kuntz of shadowed overpasses marching into infinity. Michael Light's 2004 aerial photograph focused on the sinewy tangle of the 5/10/60/101 interchange, with downtown's towers fading away in the distance.
Even the name of the Getty's show puts the focus on driving: "Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future 1940-1990." We not only drive, we over-drive!
This isn't the only exhibition highlighting driving in the regionwide Pacific Standard Time Presents initiative. There are car-centric elements everywhere. Also at the Getty, Ed Ruscha's photography retrospective features gas stations and entire streets shot from an automobile. Over at the MAK Center, there's freeway art from the 1970s and Plexiglas display cases that feel like you're peering through the windshield of a car. At the A+D Museum, the show is named "Windshield Perspective."
6032 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90036
Category: Museums
Region: Mid-Wilshire/ Hancock Park
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The Weekly's World News: The Paper Looks to Central America and Comes of AgeIf that weren't enough, promotional materials for the initiative, featuring beautiful images of three iconic L.A. structures — LAX, Capitol Records and Samitaur Tower in Culver City — have cars added in as illustrations. We are now digitally parking cars in front of buildings to promote a show about architecture in Los Angeles.
Is driving what we talk about when we talk about L.A.'s modern architecture?
"When we think about Los Angeles at the end of the 20th century, we see ourselves in cars. ... In cars before the freeways became 24/7 hells — burdened with nostalgia for the libidinous freedom that the freeways once implied," says D.J. Waldie, the renowned L.A. architecture writer (who himself doesn't drive). "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."
So where other cities studying their architecture of the same period might include exhibits on parks or plazas, we get photos of landscapes harvesting oil — Getty Oil, I might add, in the Getty Museum — to feed those cars.
Not that cars and driving haven't made their way into our museums before. The Los Angeles art world grew up by borrowing the visual language of car culture; movements like Finish Fetish, with its glossy, synthetic surfaces, couldn’t have existed if not for the automobile. In the first Pacific Standard Time highlighting art of the same postwar period, we had works like Ed Kienholz's Five Car Stud, with vehicles surrounding a brutal, racially charged scene, and the hood of a Corvair ornately painted by Judy Chicago.
But in this architecture-focused go-round, it feels like a simplified argument. Freeways are our monuments! Parking lots are our public space! We made buildings shaped like the things inside them because we were going too fast to see what was inside!
It was with trepidation that I headed to the A+D Museum to see "Windshield Perspective," which is up through July 9. In my mind the title represented the worst stereotype of L.A., the idea that the city was designed for the car, its architecture is best appreciated from that car, and God forbid you ever get out of that car.
I was pleasantly surprised when I threw open the door and saw the curator, architecture critic Greg Goldin, standing there with his bike. I interviewed him while he was wearing his bicycle helmet.
The exhibition also was not what I expected. "Windshield Perspective" examines L.A.'s built environment using a stretch of Beverly Boulevard from Virgil to Normandie, about 12 blocks. After looking for the one street that perfectly summarized L.A., Goldin realized he could focus on any street — except for one like Wilshire, because it has been subjected to "explicit, self-conscious city-building," he says. "We wanted 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 other commanding view."
A continuous ribbon of photos and text that rings the room documents the history of every single building on that 0.9-mile stretch. Some you've noticed and wondered about, like the Citibank that was built as a replica of Mount Vernon; others you've ignored but will gain an appreciation for, like the Dewey Pest Control building that used to be covered in Heath tile. In the exhibition, designed by Todd Erlandson, Lara Hoad and Andrew Byrom, there are life-size cutouts of this ad hoc urbanism — hand-painted pupuseria signs and (my favorite) a Grecian pillar painted as a barber pole — along with photographs of street life and a series of maps tracing Beverly's development.
Surprised there was no mention of Cathy Opie's striking series of platinum prints, LA Freeways, from 1994 - 1995. And of all artists mentioned, Judy Chicago was the only woman artist noted.
BTW, KCET's Departures series explores LA's streets / neighborhoods from the ground level and the people who inhabit them: http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures/
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