Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode, Billy Al Bengston, John McCracken and Ken Price, seen here in this room, are representatives of Pop Art and Minimalism in Southern California in the 1960s. These five, together with eight of their fellow artists, appear in Goode’s LA artists in their cars, a calendar the artist made for the year 1969 in a large edition.
The emergence of these tendencies roughly coincides with the Beach Boys’ first releases of 1963, devoted to the themes of surf, custom cars and high school romance under an endless sun. With Beach Boys songs flooding the airwaves, Southern California quickly attained mythical status around the world, particularly for young people in older, colder environments. However, only Dennis, one of the three Wilson brothers in the band, actually surfed.
Pop Art, as one would expect, reflected the iconography of Los Angeles. Minimalism on the American West Coast also embodied its social environment: the materials and processes the sculptors used were shared by local surfboard shapers and car customisers. Like them, and like Brian Wilson’s approach to the Beach Boys’ famous harmonies, these artists laboured away in pursuit of the perfect sheen, inspired by the brilliant Californian light. The better-known Minimalists in New York, meanwhile, tended to take materials as they found them. LA art of successive generations is unusually open to, though not necessarily uncritical of, its social environment. Unlike most of the Beach Boys, many of the artists surfed.
Notes:
Mel Bochner’s Beach Boys 100% March 1967, is one of the first to use a page of a magazine as site for an artwork, a strategy explored by other Conceptual artists in the late 60s, such as Dan Graham and Robert Smithson. The text here is entirely appropriated from a range of sources.
Malibu-based Russell Crotty’s California Homegrounds, a few of which are shown here, are exhaustive, idiosyncratic surf diaries.
Starting in 1963, Ed Ruscha’s self-published books inaugurated the genre of the artist book. Each book presents variations of a single motif: palm trees, apartments, swimming pools, parking lots, and so on. Together they evoke the distinctive topography of the Los Angeles that we also recognise from Beach Boys lyrics around that time. The images in the books are without commentary; it’s up to us to decide what these books are and what to do with them.
Peter Blake, a key figure in British Pop Art since the 1950s and a fan of the Beach Boys from the outset of their careers, designed the album art for Brian Wilson’s Getting in Over my Head 2004 after Wilson read that Blake would rather have designed the cover for Pet Sounds 1966 than the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band 1967.