Pacific Standard Time: The making of an art capital

Founders of the Woman's Building: Judy Chicago (C), Arlene Raven (L), Sheila Levrant de Bretteville (R), 1973, offset printing/digital reproduction, Woman's Building Archive, Otis College of Art and Design © It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman's Building at Otis College's Ben Maltz Gallery until January 28, 2012. Exhibition explores the work and world of feminist artists, art collectives at the Los Angeles Woman's Building from 1973-1991. The exhibition, programs and publications are in collaboration with Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980.

The canard about Los Angeles used to be that it was hundreds of square miles across and an inch deep. It had less culture than a pint of yogurt and tended to ignore, if not destroy, whatever history it might have accrued – this despite, or perhaps because of, the cultural and commercial predominance of the entertainment industry. That canard doesn't quack anymore, however; having emerged as the nation's current capital of creativity, LA has begun to look seriously at how it got that way. If the culture is there, what is its history?

"Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980" looks at this history. Boy, does it look at this history. More than 60 cultural institutions strewn across southern California, augmented by countless commercial galleries and other exhibition and performance spaces, are coordinating at least some of the programming they're doing between October of this year and May of next with "Pacific Standard Time" (a/k/a "PST"). Nobody wants to be left off this bandwagon – and not just because the Getty Foundation, the local art scene's benevolent King Kong, originated it, supports it, and is steering it. No, "PST" is an unprecedented, not-a-moment-too-soon explosion of civic (well, regional) pride, an assertion not simply of accomplishment, but of pedigree, by the erstwhile dumb blonde of American cities.

Why 1945-80? Because that's when it happened. That's when Los Angeles – or, more accurately, southern California – metamorphosed from a bucolic backwater known mostly for fruit 'n' movies to one of the nation's – make that the world's – most vital social and cultural loci. Transformed by the exigencies of wartime, LA became the hub of America's aerospace industry, and by extension a vast laboratory for the creation of new materials and new ways to make new things out of those materials. Meanwhile, California's postwar building boom didn't just tie the state – and in particular the sprawling LA basin – together with freeways, but amped up the intellectual quotient with myriad college and university campuses, places where the world could be studied—again, in new ways. As it happened, most if not all these new schools, from the smallest community college to the largest UC or Cal State campus, prominently featured various arts departments, providing employment to local – and, notably, imported – artists, providing them with spaces to exhibit, and bringing forth succeeding generations of artists.

The state schools did not drive the private colleges or art schools already scattered across the Southland out of business; if anything, they re-energized the old schools, upping the competition for innovative thinkers, and, by the end of the 1960s, even New Yorkers were coming out to teach, to study, and, increasingly, to stay. By then an audience for local contemporary art had emerged as well, and a commercial gallery scene flourished. That scene all but disappeared when the aerospace industry collapsed, but the audience stuck around, as did the artists (who issued forth from the schools at ever-greater rates), necessitating the appearance of less profit-oriented, more experimental exhibition spaces – not a few of them supported by government largesse – where anything could, and did, go. The small-town mentality of prewar Los Angeles struggled to maintain in the 1950s and into the '60s – the annals of LA cultural history from this time brim with red scares, witch hunts, and pornography busts – but finally gave way to the countercultural revolution. Indeed, between Beat poets and Watts riots, no American city was more profoundly or permanently transformed by the upheavals of the 1960s than was Los Angeles, a place just waiting to bust out of its chrysalis.

The idea behind "Pacific Standard Time" is not simply to assert that such a moment of radical change took place in southern California, but to document this extended moment through its art and its cultural artifacts – to valorize the dynamism of the moment and the often crazy stuff that got made and done in the midst of that dynamic. To this end, a long roster of public institutions and a crowded field of private initiatives have zoomed in on the era, each in their own way and focusing on a different facet of what is proving to be an immense, multi-faceted jewel. Some places are looking at certain kinds of art; others are looking at certain kinds of art-makers. Some museums are looking at aesthetic idioms like Pop, for instance, or Light & Space, or even architectural styles, while others are documenting times and places when and where art got made or shown (certain schools, for instance, or certain exhibition spaces), and still others are documenting the social and political issues of the day, from antiwar sentiment to feminism to minority consciousness, through art. Some galleries are proudly displaying the early work of their veteran artists, while other galleries, themselves dating back at least to the 1970s, are proudly tracking their own legacies. From the Huntington Library to the Grammy Museum, from the Eames House Foundation to the Vincent Price Art Museum of East LA College, from the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA to the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, from museums in San Diego and Laguna to those in Santa Barbara and Palm Springs, "Pacific Standard Time" is sewing together a narrative of great change and excitement – and terrific art, so much of which seems at least as fresh as anything being done anywhere nowadays.

In particular, "PST" promises to revive our appreciation for the era's wackiest stretch, the 1970s. There will be surprises galore from previous decades, to be sure, but appreciation for the artistic achievements of 1950s and '60s LA has been on the increase since, well, the '80s. The '70s, however – that poor orphan of a decade, burdened (the world over) not with an embarrassment of cultural riches so much as a richness of cultural embarrassments – will reveal itself in this context as a period of astounding invention and risk in southern California, a veritable kablooey of the unexpected. If you can remember the '60s, goes the saying, you weren't there; well, if you can recognize the 1970s, you were here. Performance art, video art, artists' books, abstract painting made of everything but paint, sculpture made of air, photographs of empty spaces, throwaway "punk" art, art made by women for women, by gays for gays, by Latinos for Latinos, and on and on – anything went back then, and a hell of a lot of it proves to have been worthwhile doing.

The years 1945-1980 were the most vital ever for American art. That was the time when New York became the world's art capital – first the place where the most important art was being made and then the place where the most important art was being sold. But while Manhattan was turning from the crucible of new art into its marketplace, Los Angeles was turning from a farm team into a hotbed of influential ideas and practices in its own right. Other American cities had older and more substantial avant gardes, to be sure – San Francisco won't let LA forget that fact for a moment – but by 1980, with advanced artistic practice no longer concentrated in New York, the most serious challenge to Gotham's predominance had become Tinseltown. It took at least another decade for LA to awaken to its own newfound prominence as a center – an international center – for the production of visual art. But by 1980 the die was cast and the Los Angeles art scene was already headed on its trajectory to the stars. "Pacific Standard Time" sheds plenty of daylight on that trajectory and the arc it took, on the reasons it happened at all, on the people who made it happen, and the objects and gestures and ideas they produced to make it happen.

For additional information, please visit www.pacificstandardtime.org

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