Rebels in Paradise Read Free

Hubert Humphrey wins nomination. Richard Nixon, promising to end the Vietnam War, elected 37th president by narrowest margin since 1912.
    Death of Marcel Duchamp in New York.
    1969
    Perceptual and Conceptual art addressed in The Appearing/Disappearing Object with John Baldessari, Michael Asher, Allen Ruppersberg, Barry LeVa, and Ron Cooper at the Newport Harbor Art Museum.
    Judy Chicago is featured at the Pasadena Art Museum. Lloyd Hamrol shown at Pomona College Art Gallery.
    West Coast 1945–1969 organized by John Coplans for the Pasadena Art Museum.
    Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider released.
    John Altoon dies of a heart attack.
    Sharon Tate and others murdered by gang led by Charles Manson.

 
    Introduction
    Lorser Feitelson moved to Los Angeles in 1927, after living in Paris and New York. “Here I found I couldn’t sell my work,” he told Artforum in 1962. “I had no audience, therefore I painted for my own satisfaction and what a wonderful thing that was!” By that time, the painter of geometric abstractions was an elder statesman whose art lectures were broadcast on television in Los Angeles. Many younger artists had come to the same conclusion: When you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose.
    In 1960, Los Angeles had no modern art museum and few galleries, which was exactly what renegade artists liked about it: Ed Ruscha, David Hockney, Robert Irwin, Ed Kienholz, Larry Bell, Joe Goode, Bruce Nauman, Craig Kauffman, Judy Chicago, Vija Celmins, and John Baldessari among them. Freedom from an established way of seeing, making, and marketing art fueled their creativity, which, in turn, changed the city. Today, Los Angeles has four museums dedicated to contemporary art, hundreds of galleries, and thousands of artists. This book tells the saga of how the scene came into being—how a prevailing permissiveness in Los Angeles in the 1960s brought about countless innovations: Andy Warhol’s first show, Marcel Duchamp’s first retrospective, Frank Gehry’s unique architecture, Rudi Gernreich’s topless bathing suit, Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider , the Beach Boys, the Byrds, and the Doors. In the 1960s, Los Angeles was the epicenter of cool.
    This decade was so dense with activity, much of it overlapping if not actually connected, that a strict chronology proved impossible. The book is organized according to groups of people who knew one another as well as key events. I’ve included a timeline for clarification.
    Since this book is not encyclopedic, I apologize in advance to all of those who feel they should have been included or whose work deserved more attention. I agree with you. So many artists, so little time! Despite that possible failing, please accept this as a love letter to Los Angeles, still a place of perpetual possibility and infinite invention.

 
    CHAPTER TWELVE
    Set the Night on Fire
    The Watts Riots forever changed the world’s irresistible dreamy view of Los Angeles. Instead of celebrity and weather reports, television sets were tuned to its black citizens being dragged and beaten by uniformed white policemen while buildings went up in flames to chants of “Burn, baby, burn!” For a searing, smoggy week, from August 11 to 17, 1965, Los Angeles was stripped of her customary disinterest in political engagement. Coincidently, the artist who had spent most of his life constructing the ceramic-encrusted towers in Watts, “Simon” Rodia, had died that summer in San Francisco, having given his spectacular creations to his neighbor and then leaving with no forwarding address.
    The riots resulted in $40 million of damage to property in the Watts area, but the towers were untouched. They had become home to an art center founded by African American assemblage artist Noah Purifoy with teacher Sue Welsh and musician Judson Powell. (Purifoy, a Chouinard graduate, scavenged the detritus of the riot with others to make assemblage sculptures