noir town

Los Angeles Reader

MORE SPECTACLE HAS SURROUNDED “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s” then any other MOCA show. Eight thousand people jammed the members’ preview two weeks ago. The line stretched all the way from Alameda Street to the entrance of the Temporary Contemporary, where the atmosphere was more like that of a dance club than a gallery opening. How many times have you been to an opening where the show’s name appears on a punk’s leather jacket? There were even punk bands performing beneath lights designed to simulate the searching spots of police helicopters. At the door, the line degenerated into a restless crowd, and the bands were silenced by the fire marshal. The last one signed off with a few words from its mohawked singer: “The very gentlemanly fire marshal asked me to tell you that you’ll all get to view the artworks, so don’t push or shove or break anybody’s ribs.” What’s going on here? Does this show really deserve all the hype?

By now you’re probably familiar with MOCA chief curator Paul Schimmel’s concept for the first show he’s organized for the museum since assuming the top spot two years ago. By choosing work by L. A. artists that “addresses the darker, angst-ridden side of contemporary life,” he hopes to demonstrate there’s more to Los Angeles than its traditional, sunny image suggests, and, in the context of the “high” art world, that there’s more to Los Angeles than just the bright “light and space” and “finish fetish” movements through which the city’s art first gained international recognition (and which, consequently, have defined the character of the city’s art and culture for the world ever since). The show accomplishes these goals to a fair extent.

The works do indeed present an unsettling view of society as we approach the year 2000, touching on everything from environmental apocalypse and overpopulation to serial killings. Victor Estrada's “Baby/Baby” is a massive sculpture constructed of “grow foam,” one of the smelliest, most noxious materials around when in its workable form. Two babies, one wearing the mask of comedy, the other of tragedy, sit facing each other with legs spread. They’re joined at the middle, and from this spot rises what looks like both a huge phallus and some horrible technological waste to which the babies are giving birth and that’s simultaneously sucking them up. Llyn Foulkes’s painting “Double Trouble” is a portrait of a partially masked individual with a bloody, mutilated face who’s cradling a mummified fetus in his mouth. His arm hangs out of the picture frame, and he holds a revolver. It looks as if he might suddenly turn and point the weapon at the viewer.

The diversity of the works is also impressive. They range from such traditional conceptual pieces as Liz Larner’s “Forced Perspective,” a perspective grid made of chain, to highly visceral paintings such as Robert Williams’s tightly rendered, and darkly hilarious, obscenities that comment on the exploitation of baser human impulses. Williams’s titles even poke fun at the conceptualism of someone like Larner, as well as art criticism in general and his own “low-brow” approach (each painting has three titles: a main one, a “museum catalog title,” and a “colloquial title”).

Yet, can this art really be held up as representative of Los Angeles’s art in the l990s? It’s already been noted in the press that relatively few minorities are represented here, and far from being a banal argument, this is essential. For what, if anything, is more representative of Los Angeles at the turn of the century than its multiculturalism? So why, then, has Schimmel decided to give virtually no attention to this pivotal issue? Perhaps the answer lies with an earlier L.A. tradition of dark art.

In his fascinating essay that leads off the show’s catalog, Norman Klein discusses this earlier tradition, that of noir, also a response to the contrast between the promoter’s vision of Los Angeles and the city’s reality. Los Angeles, he says, is the first city born strictly of promotion. In order to lure customers here from elsewhere in the states, real estate and transportation entrepreneurs created a vision of a sunny paradise with all the benefits of a metropolis like New York but none of its Babylonian drawbacks. They avoided “undesirable” elements such as joblessness, crime, and the nonwhite population, creating an invisible city that grew ever worse, and a dangerous contrast that alienated those who did arrive, sometimes pushing them toward violence. Noir was a reaction to this, creating (and here Klein quotes Mike Davis’s book City of Quartz) “the transformational grammar turning each charming ingredient of the boosters’ arcadia into a sinister equivalent.” And “Helter Skelter,” says Klein, is a kind of contemporary noir. The problem with noir, though, as Klein points out, is that it went from one extreme to another, creating an equally unrepresentative vision of Los Angeles. Furthermore, its darkness was in certain respects so romantic and captivating, so “exotically compelling,” that it has become a myth as irresistible as that of the sunny paradise.

Ironically, in his zest to make his coming-out party a success, Schimmel has, in a way, combined the promotional vigor of the realtors and red-car owners of years past with the misleading darkness of noir. By avoiding multiculturalism in favor of the extremity of the visceral—of darkness, madness, explicit sex—Schimmel in many ways has opted for sensationalism over an authentic picture of Los Angeles and its art. Of course, as a result he’s come up with an extremely salable product, which leads us back to the birth of Los Angeles. So perhaps through his salesmanship and sensationalism, Schimmel has managed to capture at least one fundamental aspect of L.A.

In his essay Klein says, “beyond the fantasies, L.A. actually ‘exists,’ has a stable population often ignored in spicy stories about transience, high suicide rates, and bizarre cults.” It’s a shame we don’t see that Los Angeles here. However, Klein also states that “in L.A. one can easily live a lifetime as a tourist, see mostly what the smoke sends by way of promotion, never visit what is left out....” I take this to mean that we all have the option, if we wish to make the effort, of discovering the diversity and reality of our city for ourselves. The night of the opening, a group of protestors, objecting to what they saw as “Helter Skelter”’s sexism, caused various disturbances. One walked into Larner’s “Forced Perspective” installation (the perspective grid made of chain) and tore one of the chains out of the wall. The symbolism was not lost on me, and, indeed, at that moment, with that impromptu performance piece, the work of art in consort with an individual viewer transcended the artist, the museum, and the curator’s vision as well. +