While it is about buildings, Goldin's exhibition actually subverts the celebration of modernism in all the other PSTP shows. "We're duking it out with them," he says. "This is the idea that the real design of L.A. is happening in the streets, that we’re making and remaking the city here on places like Beverly." Goldin likes to use the term “built reality.”
Sure, there are the clichéd references to the car as a "lens" or a "shield" or a "scrim," but in the end this is the most progressive of all the PSTP shows so far. Not only does it acknowledge a different type of built environment but it also asks its viewers to question how they should best engage with it.
The name "Windshield Perspective," as it turns out, is a provocation. It's not really about driving at all.
6032 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90036
Category: Museums
Region: Mid-Wilshire/ Hancock Park
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A Tour Through the L.A. That Could Have Been
Our Diary of the Getty's Architecture Project: Where Are the Women?
Our Diary of the Getty's Architecture Project: 'Everything Loose Will Land,' the A D Gala and Machine Project
Coming Home
The Weekly's World News: The Paper Looks to Central America and Comes of AgeFor two years Goldin walked these blocks, knocking on every door, attempting to talk to each resident and business owner, he says. Goldin hopes this will inspire other Angelenos to do the same. "We want to get people to see one street, but then I want people to go out and find their own streets."
The question is whether viewers — most of whom will arrive via car — will see it that way, too. "I firmly believe that over the past decade Los Angeles has seen a fundamental shift in how Angelenos view, experience, interpret and interact with their built environment," says Nat Gale, a policy analyst in the Mayor's Office of Transportation, who consulted with Goldin on the exhibition and has helped manage Villaraigosa's rapturous support of rail expansion, CicLAvia and the city's new Car-Free L.A. initiative. "If a handful of people walk out of the exhibit with a new concept of their daily commute, and take a moment to get out of their car to explore a new area by foot, I think the show has succeeded."
As I was biking home from "Windshield Perspective," I stopped to walk the stretch of Beverly featured in the show. A U.S. Public Interest Research Group study had just declared that Americans drove fewer miles over the last decade. Evidence of this was everywhere. Crowded bus stops. Bikes negotiating the pedestrian-heavy sidewalks. A busy Red Line station, just across the street from the Mount Vernon–on-Vermont. Four-dollar-per-gallon gas at the Chevron.
I remembered another line from "Overdrive," a 1941 quote from E.E. East about L.A.'s auto-centrism: "Will it become the accepted pattern of tomorrow's cities, or have we built upon a foundation of sand?"
According to Christopher James Alexander, the "Overdrive" curator with Wim de Wit and Rani Singh, our changing relationship with the car is a reason their survey ends at 1990. "By the late 1980s, people’s attitudes toward the car and the freeway change radically," Alexander says. "The 1990s usher in a new era, rooted in the promotion of public transportation and increased neighborhood density, in order to facilitate the region’s ongoing growth."
He also points out that in the same car-crazed section, you'll find oddly familiar visions for subways and light rail: "These same schemes are now being constructed throughout the region, decades after they were first proposed."
Pacific Standard Time Presents gives us a chance to see how L.A. was made modern, but it also chronicles the rise and the fall of the car in Los Angeles culture. Maybe, by seeing this narrative so persuasively presented in museums, alongside the artifacts of other cultures, we can finally admit that our affair with the automobile is history.
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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