Pearlescent high-rise ARTS
BRYAN ROBERTSON
Revisiting the West Coast after a decade is, like most return matches, a surprise, though the exhilaration and slangy independence of this latest, if endlessly delayed and provisional, flowering of American civilisation is as re- freshing as ever. There is, oddly enough, the same feeling of separation from New York that at certain levels gives me, at any rate, disquieting intimations of isolation, cultural loneliness, and above all regionalism; the reverse side of this occasional ache in the stomach muscles is the compensatory sensa- tion of illimitable possibilities—relaxation from the inbred, claustrophobic, pressures of cultural conformism which sometimes make mental barriers as dense as the physical con- strictions of New York life. There is still the illusion, at any rate on the West Coast, that things can be made up, invented from scratch, and paid hopeful attention until proved inferior.
Judging by the visible signs of everyday life and certainly by the art, the Westerner is now a dandy. The whole western ethos has gone rococo, a bundle of intriguing and charming mannerisms. Even the smog has a lethal glamour, shading those blue skies into velvety peach skin at noon, at sunset into blazing orange and ochre which half-smothers the set- ting sun's own echoes of violet, red and green. And the physical environment has the same extravagance. A huge university campus is built; bull-dozed earth and bare concrete must be humanised, so lawns are 'laid' overnight by the mile like wall-to-wall carpeting, sprinklers are installed, eucalyptus, bougainvilia and im- ported palms planted, and next morning the faculty strolls across colourful, verdant gar- dens; sculptures by Lipchitz, Moore and Noguchi will be landscaped-in by lunchtime. It's like Versailles with the will and taste of the Sun King dispersed into communal spirit, and implemented with staggering affluence.
An artist who wholly ignores the bright context is Edward Kienholtz; the fact that he grew up in the mid-West, where Chicago has long been a rallying centre for radical thought and protest, may be relevant here, for Kienholtz makes sculptures which are also elaborate tableaux complete with lifelike figures, interiors and domestic detail. One, called The Illegal Operation, would make any- one still hazy about the pros and cons of abortion reform faint with terror : for here it is, an account of the kind of outrage that one human being can inflict on another, factual evidence reinforced by metaphor and allusion. A cheap standard lamp has its shade fitted at a wide angle so that the light bulb blazes down on the panoply of instruments, rumpled mat, bloodstains and all. Other titles, like Roxy's (a notorious 1940s brothel) and Barney's Beanery (a still popular café and bar, plastered with mementoes and habitues who look like mementoes), are implemented in the same nightmarish world between reality and poetic symbol.
But, if Kienholtz stands out from it, there is still the cult of the dandy, the Westerner gone rococo. This confronts one on all sides. Los Angeles is a kind of mad paradise of new materials, often evolved for purposes other than art, but eagerly utilised and explored by local artists. They float in a luxurious sea of pearlescent paint (fish scales ground into lacquer, they say); iridescent surfaces for plastic, like luminous mother-of-pearl; candy-apple colours—of great intensity because over a metallic red, blue or whatever, is a skin of translucent lacquer: it is like looking at a permanently wet colour with the metallic glitter and lustre of bronze or silver; transparent plexiglass illuminated by built-in fluorescent lights; gleaming synthetic metals with or without oxidised surfaces; paint which glows a different colour when hit by artificial spotlights—a dead warmish-white turns into spectral discs of rose-pink, ice-green, orange and pale violet—and much else. With the Sylvania Paint Company and General Electric at the helm, anything is possible. Three months ago, they invented a plastic called `electrofluorescene which comes in any colour by the sheet, and has a built-in, abso- lutely invisible lighting system that gets its power from the atmosphere, no plugs or wiring needed. Are you with me?
Many of the artists in Los Angeles are making with these materials exquisitely beauti- ful and refined objects for contemplation. Larry Bell's boxes, for instance: made of plas- tic, they look like glass, reflective like a mirror on one side, iridescent or softly glowing, like a sunrise or early sunset in LA, on other sides; suddenly one side is transparent and you see the interior scaffolding of corners and sides made from burnished aluminium or sled. Robert Irwin makes discs which are lit by spots, appear to float in space about one foot from the wall (they fasten on to a socket behind, in fact) and change colour when lit : being slightly convex, they also cast four symmetrical shadows on the background white wall, which overlap at different densities of shadow.
The purest, most original and com- pelling works, at any rate with lacquers, are the ceramic sculptures of Kenneth Price, whose first show in Europe opens at Kasmin's this week. This man is like a latter-day Brancusi; I have rarely seen graver or more thoughtfully concentrated images. His sculptures are like small mountains, sometimes like rounded shoes with the foot still inside it—or alternatively, a differently coloured substance is rising out of the top. Each work is small, abstractly organic, and could sustain the space of any empty room. His drawings are equally mes- meric. Like Kienholtz, Price transcends the mannerisms of stylistic pressure.
At another level, equally fantastic but osten- sibly more concerned with practical issues, the work of the body-builders—of custom-built cars—seemed to me the most extraordinary activity in America today in terms of inven- tion, throwaway attitudes, boundless imagina- tion, and opulence. This is an underground movement, hard to penetrate, whose high priests are Von Dutch and Barris. The work ranges from Batmobiles and the Daktari station wagon to extravaganzas dreamed up for tycoons. The car identity is a mere starting point for invention: some end up by looking like a Magritte clubfoot, poisonous, glowing, stranger than surrealism. If plastic surgery is a comparison, these creations are not just nose jobs: transmutation is here. Watch out.
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