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Love with Strangers: LA Countercultures, Rise of an Art Capital, and the Ends of Art, 1950s-1990s

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“Art offers the possibility of love with strangers”

--Walter Hopps[1]

During the very years that Julius Shulman created an image-landscape of modernist mid-century Los Angeles--financed by major corporations and military contractors--a cultural underworld of Los Angeles formed around a circle of Hollywood and West LA Beatniks.

These counterculturalists built the foundations for a massive institutional presence of “fine arts” by the early 21st century, sparking the rise of Los Angeles as a global fine arts capital.  Epitomized by Kienholz's 1959 John Doe, the 1950s Beats rejected everything about corporate, white-collar, conformist, Cold War commercial culture of the United States.  But they also had deep connections with the commercial mass media, and those connections were central to their artistic practice. Like many an avant-garde before them, their revolution became institutionalized as the capitalist art market and the cultural aspirations of the Los Angeles moneyed elite strove visibly for “world-class” cultural stature, transforming that Beat underworld into a hierarchical overworld.

The central figures in this drama were Walter Hopps and Edward Kienholz, and the central place for this revolution was the Ferus Gallery cofounded by them at 736-A N. on La Cienaga, in 1957.  Walter Hopps provided intellectual, curatorial, and organizational leadership; Kienholz provided existential energy and creativity, and the very essence of American liberty as an artist.  Bohemian culture rebels in the darkest days of McCarthyism, Hopps and Keinholz wove jazz music and street theatricality into the already-powerful stream of avant garde modernism directly transmitted from the Dada and Surrealist movements, and inspired a regional explosion of creativity by an electrified Los Angeles-area arts community. Collectively, the artists of the Los Angeles School achieved the ultimate culmination of an aesthetic revolution that literally ended a phase of Western art.  If Renaissance was a rebirth of classiscism, the Los Angeles School saw to its death.   Paris, New York, and San Francisco also worked toward this turning point, but Los Angeles emerged as the spearhead. The revolution rested on three premises. 1) The rejection of neo-classical aesthetics; 2) The abandonment of genres; and 3) The erasure of the boundary between commercial, popular, and mass cultural visual surfaces and those of fine art.

Already the capital of global mass culture industry by the end of World War II, Los Angeles was the most likely place to consummate this unholy mélange. Thanks to the courage and sheer, reckless joy of a handful of culture rebels, the Ugly became Beautiful; Art escaped—at least for a brilliant moment—the easel, the frame, and the clutches of cultural authority; and Walt Disney’s Wagnerian dream to combine all of the expressive arts was ultimately, ironically, even subversively, realized.

Drawing lines of relations between the creative centers of Paris, New York, and San Francisco, Hopps and his friends disturbed the cultural field with eddies and whirlpools that generated several waves of original (and doubly ironically, if only eventually, financially valuable) artistic production. The first wave was the “Cool School” of artists represented by the Ferus Gallery on La Cienaga Boulevard. These included Larry Bell, Allen Lynch, Ed Moses, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, John Altoon, and Ed Ruscha. Next, an entire branch of this revolution took place within the genre of photography, led by and Robert Heineken at UCLA. It is no accident that no women’s names have appeared in the last three paragraphs, a patriarchal and therefore undemocratic world until the feminist moment of the 1970s.

The founding of the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in the mid-1960s and early 1970s by Walt Disney led to the institutional empowerment of a more wide-ranging cultural revolution, newly opened-up by women as both artists and leading critics. Many new mentors emerged at a rapid pace circa 1970, such as Judy Chicago at the Woman Space on MacArthur park (the site of the earlier Westlake Arts concentration).  But the signal breakthroughs involved a redefinition of art itself, first , growing from a revival of Dadaism via Marcel Duchamp, a break from aesthetics, second, the development of Pop Art, using everyday commercial culture as source and subject, and finally, the abandonment of genres and even the art object itself, epitomized by the artistic practice of CalArts professor John Baldessari. Baldessari and his colleagues then send wave after wave of original students who carried the flag of the LA School back to the New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo art capitals.

Born in Glendale in 1932, Walter Hopps’ father was a doctor who had been born and raised in the Mexican oil-export city of Tampico. His grandfather had been a permanent Tampico resident since 1880s and the young Walter spent a year as a teenager with the elder Hopps, acquiring the nickname “Chico,” and remembering a household filled with Pre Columbian art. Schooled sat home until junior high school, he attended Eagle Rock High School in the late 40s. Hopps was a serious intellect, taking 3rd place honors with awards in science, but his precocious passion for cultural knowledge also led to acts of rebellion. His classmate, the future Ferus artist Crag Kauffman, painted a “hard core modernist, Bracque-esque” version of the school’s mascot, a Cavalier, which the principal labeled as Communist and “absolutely freaked out.” The gifted Kauffman nearly won a prize for an architectural drawing that was judged by Richard Neutra, but his entry was disqualified because he had placed a nude model in the rendering. “I cannot [over] emphasize,” recalled Hopps, “how much, in the late forties and early fifties, everything that looked modernistic, in terms of new art, was considered Communist.” Hopps entered Stanford University in 1950, but was suspended before the end of his freshman year for “having collaborated on putting out a pornographic issue of the Stanford Chapparel.”[2]

While in the Bay Area, Hopps was able to indulge his passion for the artistic avant garde. San Francisco, long an outpost for American and international rebels, was home to a vibrant circle of Abstract Expressionists , which had an institutional base at the California School of Fine Arts. There Clay Spohn mentored Clyfford Still, who in turn joined the faculty and mentored Frank Lobdell, Jay DeFeo, and others. This “San Francisco School” mirrored the New York School of Abstract Expressionists such as Mark Rothko, who rejected representational, figurative art. Inspired by the still-revolutionary example of Marcel Duchamp and the Surrealist/Dadaist tradition, many in the San Francisco School went a step further by rejecting conventional standards of “beauty,” rendering their works intentionally ugly.

Returning to Los Angeles in 1950, Hopps lived in the “slums of Brentwood” attending UCLA and fomenting a Beat movement on the West Side. The rebellious arts of that moment included jazz music and poetry. The Los Angeles Beats sought to combine all of these arts, playing improvisation off of the rigid, bureaucratic, conformist formalism of the Cold War and capitalist rationality. By 1952, Hopps and L. James Newman, a jazz fan and later producer, opened their first gallery, named Syndell, after Maurice Syndell, who had committed suicide in the middle of the desert. Hopps and Newman even remade the unfortunate man into an artist. In what became a running joke, numerous artists created “Syndell” works, placing them in shows for years thereafter.[3] Hopps and his circle sought “to establish ways that new and radical artists … could create working relationships with one another and engage a concerned public. This involved founding and literally building galleries managed and directed by the artists themselves. It involved artists trading their own art works with one another when no one else was interested [and] engaging the official art world and a sometimes confused public with as much direct confrontation and talk as possible.”  Indeed, they had little choice, because, as Richard Candida Smith and Sarah Schrank have made clear, this avant garde was openly hounded and persecuted by the Anti-Communist Otis-Chandler / LAPD regime.[4]

“Everyone” in this circle “was unimaginably poor,” Hopps recalled. The general economy was overflowing with military-industrial wealth, but “the art world didn’t have it.” Painter George Herms called their poverty “economic censorship,” and Hopps “didn’t count on fifteen cents from my family. I couldn’t. They didn’t like what I was doing.” When one artist made a sale, they often shared some of the proceeds with the others.[5] The Los Angeles Beats loved everything that the mainstream of Cold War America abhorred: flagrant erotics, leftist politics, drugs, and underground jazz music. Their rebel practice had a firm foundation in poverty. They literally had nothing to lose.  

Despite the bohemian lifestyle, no one who knew him underestimated Walter Hopps. Practically alone among his circle, was always clean-shaven and dressed in suit and tie (“fronting for the operation,” he later recalled). Already by the age of 20, in 1952, he taught informal art appreciation classes to the wealthy elite in Los Angeles, some of whom, interested in the avant garde, ventured into the Syndell, and later, the Ferus Gallery, wanting sincerely to know what these new revolutionary art forms were all about. Hopps showed a series of slides that began with Edward Hopper’s A Woman in the Sun then Hopper's student Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm, and then “I’d show them a [Joseph] Cornell,” the reclusive assemblage artist who made small boxes filled with found images and other objects. While not overtly hostile to Abstract Expressionism, Hopps showed a persistent preference for art that was not constrained by the narrow modernist rules codified by Clement Greenberg and his circle. Hopps especially appreciated new artists who drew on the Surrealist and Dadaist traditions of found-object assemblage, genre-busting, and confrontational, counter-cultural critique.

While still in High School, Hopps had been inspired to study art history by visiting the collection of Walter and Louis Arensberg, Los Angeles residents since 1927 who had earlier been leading champions of Dada and Surrealist artists in New York City. That tradition was centrally represented by Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), who had already lived a long career in art and critical influence that can be seen, in retrospect, as a model for Hopps’ own. Duchamp the artist was a powerful innovator in the modernist, Surrealist, and Dadaist movements that spanned Paris and New York City. As a critic, dealer, and collector, he was an instrumental figure in the assembly of New York City’s major art institutions, advising not only the Arensbergs, but also Peggy Guggenheim and the directors of the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr and James Johnson Sweeney in the their collection priorities. By the 1930s, Duchamp mostly abandoned art production in lieu of becoming a chess master, but remained very involved in the art world, as in his 1968 chess-music collaboration with composer John Cage, Reunion.

Already with his Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), Duchamp disrupted the cubist movement and earned rejection from the avant garde itself. He went on to propound “anti-art,” “found art,” and “readymades,” or objects of vernacular material culture. Most infamously, Duchamp submitted a urinal titled Fountain and signed “R. Mutt” to the 1917 New York City show of the Society of Independent Artists, under Mutt’s name. As a fountain of influence on the rise of the Los Angeles arts revolution, the central themes of Duchamp’s artistic theory and practice are impossible to exaggerate. When Hopps was appointed curator of the Pasadena Art Museum in 1962, he mounted the first-ever retrospective of Duchamp the following year in 1963, crowning a direct channel to avant-garde Paris, playing chess with Duchamp as a performance artwork in the show itself.

Adherence to Duchamp’s principles of anti-art, absurdity, three-dimensionality, and kinetics helps explain Hopps Southern California promotion of the San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionists--which had already drunk from Duchamp’s Fountain, principally via Clay Spohn’s tutelage under Duchamp in 1930s Paris. Hopps helped the budding Los Angeles collectors to appreciate Clyfford Still, Hassel Smith, and Richard Diebenkorn. Among his pupils were Marsha and Fred Weisman, and the wife of Weisman’s partner, Betty Freeman. Marsha Weisman was the sister of Norton Simon, who later founded one of the major Los Angeles art museums. Hopps essentially lived a double life. Smoking dope with his Beat friends—eventually becoming a heroin addict—he presented the clean front for the group. Collectors would pay his airfare to New York, so he could give them personal gallery tours. This clever, and in fact sincere, wooing of the monied classes, enabled Hopps to adopt the role of avant-garde intermediary, linking the two major established art capitals of new York and San Francisco, to Los Angeles, pollinating the latter, as it were, with path-breaking gallery shows and cultivating a base of patrons and collectors. It would be impossible to overestimate the pivotal role that Hopps played in the “birth of an art capital” in Los Angeles. He and his wife, Shirley, a grad student in Art History at UCLA, joined later by Ferus partner Irving Blum gave classes for years. “That entire first-generation of California collectors,” Blum later recalled, “came out of those classes.”[6]

The defining elements of the Los Angeles Beats can be seen in the first of the important shows organized by Hopps during the Syndell years “Action One,” mounted in the abandoned 1910 merry-go-round at the base of the Santa Monica Pier. With a gay bar—the Tropical Village—across the street, the Santa Monica Merry-Go-Round had become “a real bohemian hangout.” “Action” was the key term. Breaking with the modernist insistence on stable genres of easel painting, sculpture, and architecture, Hopps and his circle brought a theatrical, performative element to the show, as Pollock had briung “action” to painting. Newman and Hopps had made tapes of jazz concerts and played these throughout the show, which they alternated with Merry Go Round calliope music . They also produced a full performance of John Cage’s revolutionary “Fourteen Radios” (19**), which required tuning fourteen radios to the prescribed frequencies on cue, using a stop watch. Action One prominently featured the San Franciscans Jay DeFeo and Clyfford Still, mixing them with the new work by the Los Angeles Beats, especially that of Craig Kauffman and Wallace Berman. The show was an underground success, attracting Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and writer Jack Kerouac from San Francisco. Hopps later recalled that the show was met with hostility by Los Angeles Times art critic Arthur Millier, but in fact, there is no mention of the show at all in the Times. Millier seems to have paid “Action One” the greater insult of ignoring the show entirely.

In 1953, shortly after the Action One show, Edward Kienholz arrived in Los Angeles, an event also impossible to overestimate. If you conjured a Man of the Earth, an Odysseus, a Trickster Hero, it would be this industrious, ambitious burly craftsman who, with no formal art education (except “rudimentary training as a boy”), was determined to be a great artist. the Born in 1927 in Fairfield Washington, Kienholz grew up on a farm, where construction and repair of nearly everything of use (buildings, furniture, water pumps, guns, electrical equipment, tractors, engines, stone walls, etc.) is a matter of daily life. Kienholz “was so determined to have a career and take care of himself that shortly after high school he simply went out into the world.” Despite a few attempts to attend college, he hit the road, travelling mostly in the west, As a principled pacifist, Kienholz rather casually dodged the Korean War draft but never faced charges.

In Minneapolis he encountered a Rembrandt exhibition that “he often referred to as a decisive experience in persuading him to become an artist himself.” In 1953, he set up a storefront studio in El Paso Texas, supporting himself doing odd jobs, painting [Thomas Hart] Benton-like figurative art, crossed with the abstraction of Miró” on found wooden surfaces. Active in El Paso was the WPA-era Student Arts League artist Tom Lea. Kienholz asked him to come review his work, and Lea, after a careful inspection, “You have to go to New York or Los Angeles. I admire what you are doing—it has great courage—but it’s not going to survive here in El Paso.” For Kienholz the Westerner Los Angeles was the only real choice.[7]

Kienholz always preferred peripheral landscapes, settled first in the San Fernando Valley, so set up shop in the San Fernando Valley in 1953 as a handyman jack of all trades, who always wrote scrupulous estimates and contracts. He painted his International pickup truck door simply “Edward Kienholz EXPERT [phone].” It is worth quoting the insightful prose of Walter Hopps at length to take stock of the character and art of Edward Kienholz at the time of his arrival in 1953:

“It was the beginning of the Beat period, and he had exactly the right attitude and sensibility to be part of it immediately. He had a very different background from important writers who came out of San Francisco, but his existential temperament and his willingness to solve problems and to improvise—whatever direction that might take him – put him in a league with them and even made him a kind of mentor to the LA scene.”

Kienholz’ “existential temperament” is an important observation. It oriented him to the everyday material and symbolic landscape, drawn literally from the cast-away artifacts of the Los Angeles world. And, coupled with his ambition, it empowered him to simply invent an LA art scene that he wanted to be part of. Kienholz scavenged for nearly everything he made. He developed his vision from within his extensively-varied craft experience with the materials of the world. Kienholz, a “natural leader” was also networking the LA arts scene together, literally building a significant spatial portion of the Los Angeles art world cityscape. Hopps continues: “He built and outfitted new coffeehouses, advising people on where to find good cheap rentals and how to bring them up to the minimum health code.” “Many experimental artists would turn up in these coffee houses, and that’s where Kienholz began to find his constituents.”[8] In his artworks, Kienholz always confronts the viewer bluntly with the ordinary, never shrinking from representational, symbolic and textual components, almost perfectly in unison with the theories of Marcel Duchamp, who came to admire his “vulgar” assemblages.

Walter Hopps had been doing essentially the same thing, less as an artist and more as a critic, educator, and entrepreneurial gallerist, by the time Kienholz arrived, and they almost inevitably joined forces, thanks to their compatibility. “We couldn’t have been more different sorts of people, but it was clear to both of us that we had an agenda to further the kind of art that interes4ted us in our own ways. I was a college boy, and didn’t dress like a beatnik; Kieinholz, in his heavy work clothes, rough and muscular, looked nothing like the stereotype of the artist. Many of the best artists of that period thought of themselves as workers: making art was their job, just as they ran a machine shop or cleared trash for a living…. Kienholz looked like a lumberjack just in for lunch. They identified physically and absolutely with the working class.”[9]

Keinholz and Hopps wrote out an “informal contract on a hot dog wrapper…shook hand and formed a new partnership.” Merging their two former galleries (Now and Syndell, respectively) the partners set up Ferus Gallery at 736-A North La Cienega Boulevard. Like Syndell, Ferus was also the name of a suicide—James Ferus, an artist friend of Hopps from high school.[10] Kienholz divided the space, with his studio into the back, ran and tended the studio while Hopps studied at UCLA and networked (teaching collectors, organizing shows, signing avant-garde San Francisco artists, like Hassel Smith, one of their first. Smith loaned them a Clyfford Still for their opening show; they also borrowed a Richard Diebenkorn.

By 1959 Kienholz had developed his low-relief paintings into fully three- dimensional illusionistic assemblages from found materials. Fearlessly confrontational toward the corporate, Cold War modernist ruling aesthetic, he executed a series of shocking parodies. John Doe (1959) is a vicious parody of the postwar white male. John Doe’s heart is replaced with a cross in a hole through which his castrated phallus is visible, placed in a special compartment. A painted sign on the front of the sculpture reads: “Riddle: Why is John Doe like a piano? Answer: Because he is square, upright, and grand.” But Kienholz wasn’t done savaging the pretense of the 1950s. Jane Doe (1960) is a severed head on a sewing table, the lace tablecloth serving as her skirt. Sardonically echoing Victorian fetishes, the legs are slender and lithe. The viewer of this work is invited to violate the figure, lifting her skirt and opening drawers, wherein one discovers her miscarried fetuses. This work is feminist in a very confrontational way. Finally, Kienholz in 1961 completed his little anti-family with Boy, son of John Doe. Boy is fused with his automobile; the trunk is filled with his hedonistic image-building consumer artifacts: condoms, beer cans, cigarettes. In Walter Hopps Hopps Hopps (1959), Kienholz unsparingly caricatured even his friend as a street hustler of art objects dressed, as he always was, in a neat suit and tie (indistinguishable from the commercial image of the suburban Father).

Kienholz started mounting major shows of his large-scale works at the second Ferus (at 723 North La Cienega Boulevard) in 1959 and 1960. Hopps persuaded the young director of the Thomas Leavitt of the Pasadena Art Museum to mount an exhibit of very confrontational artworks in 1961, including A Bad Cop (Lt Carter) (1961): “Kienholz singled out a real bully from the Los Angeles Police Department and made a horrible-looking vertical piece, about 5 feet high, by tarring-and-feathering an industrial steel cabinet. A kind of phallus stuck up from the top of the box, and Kienholz had cut out a photograph of the actual Lieutenant Carter’s face and glued it on, making the piece pretty explicit.” Kienholz refused Leavitt, pleas to remove the direct references: “Can we just call it A Bad Cop?”[11]

Already by 1961 Kienholz was included in the Museum of Modern Art show “The Art of Assemblage,” organized by curator William Seitz. “The exhibition placed Kienholz in the company of Picasso, Schwitters, Duchamp and Cornell and really established his international reputation by introducing such major European museum figures as Pontus Hulten to his work.”[12] And he physical scale of Kienholz’s artistic output kept expanding. By 1962 he had completed a full interior space, a genre he called a “tableaux,” called Roxys (1961-2), a brothel scene containing grotesque sex workers. Surrealist dealer Alexander Iolas exhibited Roxys exhibited in his New York gallery in 1963. These moments of recognition, however, only dotted a much more extensive range of activities, primarily enacted on the stage of Los Angeles, as a very public figure leading the countercultural world.

Kienholz was not at all interested in taking his famous work to New York, a path taken by many who would follow in the Los Angeles booming art scene that Kienholz helped to build. In fact, he did not even attend the opening of the 1961 MOMA show, shunning the opportunity entirely. This quality makes him all the more interesting as a Los Angeles actor. Because actor he was, invading the Republican-dominated, anti-Communist, surburban, Cold War public culture of Los Angeles. No intervention better typifies his audacious radical stance than the major one-artist show that Maurice Tuchman, Director of the brand-new--and still very conservative--Los Angeles County Museum of Art, mounted in 1966. Included was Back Seat Dodge ’38 (1966), a chopped-down 1938 Dodge with a very graphic man and woman having intercourse. The man, made of chicken wire complete with an erection penetrating a female manekin, but the two figures share a common head because, as Kienholz said, they “have the same thing on their mind.” Grotesque, like Barney’s Beaney, the piece caused a major furor with the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors.

Kienholz was not a leftist, but his art practice was pure political-cultural rebellion, far more radical than any organized party politics that sought actual governmental power—even remotely, like the Socialists or Communists. Kienholz did not merely slap the establishment in the face with his grotesque obscenities—merely in the long-established Parisian-modernist tradition of “epater le bourgoisie (to taunt/abuse the middle class). He did intentionally shock the viewer, but he did so with a passionate and uncompromising purpose. His was a hostile, specific charge against specific injustices. To protest the execution of Caryl Chessman in 1960 by the State of California, and to protest the death penalty in general, he executed The Psycho-Vendetta Case (1960). In the year of Jack Kennedy’s spectacularly sunny starring role as the prince of Glamour in Los Angeles, Kienholz would have nothing of celebration. Into an open-able wooden case, he fashioned a bent-over male buttocks, complete with hanging testicles and open rectum, into which the viewer perforce stuck her/his face upon viewing. Inviting the viewer literally to lick Chessman’s arse, the text reads; “If you believe in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, stick your tongue out. Limit three times.”[13]

Having created many artist spaces in which artists met or showed or produced their work, Kienholz achieved one of his most powerful works portraying those artists within a space he had not originally built or remodeled, but rather inhabited as regularly as anywhere else. The exploration of interior space as a social and cultural environment that began in Roxys continues even more powerfully in The Beanery. Barney’s Beanery was a popular bar and grill favored by the artistic avant-garde, and eventually for celebrity rockers like Jim Morrison.

Just out of sight of the commanding heights of Case Study House #22, Barney’s in the late 1950s and early 1960s was worlds apart from the Arts & Architecture world of John Entenza, Chuck and Carlotta Stahl, Pierre Koenig, and Julius Shulman. Barney’s stands on the north side of Holloway, just at the base of a steep hill connecting the Sunset Strip with Santa Monica Boulevard just short of its connection with Sunset Blvd via Holloway. Keinholz opened this 90% scale assemblage in front of the real Barney’s Beanery. Social horror greets the eye of the viewer, where every denizen of the Beanery has a clock for a head, ticking time toward death, in agony or dispiriting decay dripping with the wet-seeming thick resins and bloody colors.

Edward Ruscha (pronounced “rooSHAY”), born in 1937 in Oklahoma City, knew by his early teens that he wanted to study art in Los Angeles, a city his family had visited. Intending to be a cartoonist or an animator, in 1956 he enrolled in Chouinard Art Institute, founded by Nelbert Murphy Chouinard (1879-1969) and supported financially by Walt Disney to ensure a steady supply of artist/animators. Ruscha was deeply impressed with the Abstract Expressionists, “but I saw finally that I couldn’t travel on this language. I couldn’t make abstract paintings.” Ruscha, like Hopps and Kienholz, was inspired by the “very pure art form” that the Abstract Expressionist had developed, but was much more interested in the visual landscapes of everyday America, particularly its popular culture.[14] Having intended to produce artwork for commercial popular culture, Ruscha instead transformed it into the subject of his artwork and became a founding figure, along with Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and others.

While still in art school, Ruscha began painting words, fascinated by their look and sound, such as SWEETWATER (1958). Drawn, like anyone interested in the avant-garde to Ferus Gallery, Ruscha recalled “It was almost like a jazz catalog, where there are a lot of different voices under the same record label….Each had a very distinctive take on the world and on his work, and so that made it a very vital place to aspire to and to be.”[15] Having seen Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958), he was also powerfully influenced by roads, travel, and the every day cultural condition of North American culture. “I don’t have any Seine River like Monet,” he once said, “I’ve just got U.S. 66 between Oklahoma and Los Angeles.”[16] There he became fascinated by vernacular commercial architecture and signage on gas stations and other ordinary building. “Popular culture to me is printed matter and sound matter, what comes in your eyes and ears….It’s a way of todayness as opposed to, let’s say ‘nature.’”[17]

By the time Ruscha arrived in Los Angeles, Ferus Gallery had already undergone a major transformation. Ferus artists were eager to emerge from the isolation of the original off-street address with its very underworld feel. In 1958 Hopps convinced Kienholz to sell his share, persuaded Lucile and Norton Simon’s friend Sadie Moss to invest $125,000 as a “silent partner,” and brought the furniture salesman and art aficionado Irving Blum on to run the gallery, moving it across the street to 723 North La Cienega Boulevard.[18] By all accounts, the move to the new Ferus Gallery with the commercially-minded Blum at the helm increasingly mainstreamed the rebel art that it showcased. But it certainly seemed more rebellious than commercial for the first several years. Hopps and Blum persuaded Andy Warhol to mount his first one-artist exhibition at Ferus on 9 July 1962, consisting entirely of his 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962).[19] In its new location, until Blum moved to New York and closed Ferus in 1966, the gallery fostered a distinct group who came to be called ”The Cool School,” consisting of Ed Kienholz, Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell, John Altoon, Billy Al Bengston, Ed Moses, Robert Irwin and Kenneth Price.

In 1962 Hopps left Ferus to become a curator at the Pasadena Art Museum, where he organized the landmark “New Paintings of Common Objects” exhibition—much more than just a founding moment in Pop Art, which it was. Featuring Warhol, Lichtenstein, Ruscha, Robert Dowd, Wayne Thiebaud, and Jim Dine, the exhibition established a principle that practically up-ended the entire Western art tradition and marked the twilight of Modern Art. The substance of this amazing claim lies in the abandonment of the concept of transcendent “aesthetics,” a term coined in 1750 by Alexander Gottleib Baumgarten. Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, and others then reinforced Baumgarten’s contention that the visual evaluation of forms was a sensual, emotive, and spiritual kind of consciousness, categorically different than analytical and other types of cognition, lifting us from the everyday, scientific and practical life and bringing us close to God, or at least to a sublime awareness.

Thus, while the New York School of Abstract Expressionists saw itself as truly revolutionary modernists—breaking even with the play of perspectives and the residue of figuration in Picasso’s work to produce forms divorced from any existing or possible object—they were actually still part of Baumgartian aesthetics: producing uniquely valuable objects of beauty, pure art that spoke directly to the sensual, emotional and spiritual consciousness. By the 1940s, Clement Greenberg and his circle of critics (especially Harold Rosenberg) and artists (Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Franz Klein, Mark Rothko), mounted a powerful assault on representational and figurative art, completing the aesthetic movement by theorizing and producing an art that referred only to form.

Crucial to understanding the achievement of the Los Angeles scene circa 1962 are questions of space and time. Greenberg ruthlessly ridiculed the Albertian compositional rules of perspective, which he called “fictive space,” as antithetical to artistic value, and exalted “flatness” as the proper form of visual art.[20] “From Giotto to Courbet,” writes Greenberg, “the painter’s first task had been to hollow out an illusion of three-dimensional space on a flat surface. One looked through this surface as through a proscenium into a stage. Modernism has rendered this stage shallower and shallower until now its backdrop has become the same as its curtain, which has now become all that the painter has left to work on.”[21] The Abstract Expressionists were, therefore, culminating an attack on history itself. Heroically rejecting representation and referentiality, they sought a pure present devoid of history or context. “Frank Stella’s painting is not symbolic,” the Minimalist sculptor Carl André explained in 1959: “His stripes are the paths of brush on canvas. These paths lead only into painting.”[22]

The paths of the Pop Artists, indeed of all the Ferus artists beginning with Ed Kienholz, led back to the world, merged with it, erasing the very boundary between art and world. In the words of critic Douglas Crimp, it is work “whose dimension is literally or metaphorically temporal, and which does not seek the transcendence of the material condition of the signs through which meaning is generated.” The mutual interpenetration of fine art with everyday, commercial visual culture in this moment cannot be exaggerated. We are not, as Crimp explains, “in search of sources or origins, but structures of signification: underneath each picture there is always another picture.”[23]

One of the experimental, underground places of the Beat artists was a shop called Stone Brothers Printing, on Sawtelle on the Westside of LA. While filming Rebel Without A Cause (1955), the actual rebel James Dean (1931-1955) frequented Stone Brothers to see what Hopps and his friends were up to. He brought with him his young protégé, the actor and artist Dennis Hopper. Dean visited avant-garde galleries because he was living on the edge of the commercial world, and his mass cultural iconicity reified all those rebellious things kids could do with cars and sex. James Dean made the Los Angeles youth and car culture, not to mention landmarks such as Griffith Observatory, a major part of postwar Los Angeles’s placeness. He was an icon who straddled the worlds of John Entenza and Walter Hopps.

After his mentor’s romantic death in a Porsche, Dennis Hopper the Hippie became the Court Jester of the Hopps circle Hopper’s Double Standard.  contrasts sharply with a typical Shulman treatment of this essential part of the Los Angeles landscape, the gas station. Of course it is a double standard: the whole world of commercial design, of LA, of the corporate world, of America. This is the world of irony in this carefully staged photograph. Hopper uses the car as an actor, a model, and agent in the whole scene. Caught in mid-intersection, the driver, Hopper, (who, like a vampire, does not appear in the mirror) must have held the camera, so this is a one-handed action shot, the other hand on the moving tripod, as it were—the steering wheel. The car for Hopper is an extension of the photographic equipment, just as it is in Ruscha’s Every Building on Sunset Strip (1966).

The Pop Art revolution had an enormous and highly ironic impact on the status of photography as fine art. Despite more than a century of efforts by fine photographic artists since Nadar, Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and many others, the fine art establishment had successfully resisted photography’s inclusion in the halls of high culture. As late as the 1960s, fine art schools did not teach photography, galleries that showed easel paintings did not show photographs, and major museums did not hang photographs. Even the greatest photographs from masters could be bought for a song. In effect, it was only when artists showed total disregard for classical aesthetics that the medium was accepted. A signal breakthrough is the appearance of Edward Ruscha’s photographic books, Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) and Every Building on Sunset Strip (1966).

“Photography had a reality to me then,” Ruscha recalled. “When I grew up in Oklahoma, photographers…were either nerds, or pornographers, or both. Then I saw Robert Frank’s Americans….I also started seeing the work of Walker Evans, which had a profound effect on me.” Walker’s intensely close, homely, unsparing documentary style was an inspiration to many in this moment, and the next, in the 1970s. For Ruscha, the inclusion of signs and words in Evans’s photographs was especially instructive. Even after this discovery, however, Ruscha still only considered photography “a secondary medium, and yet it had so much potential, I thought, for a painter.”[24]

For Every Building, Ruscha mounted a motor-driven 35-mm camera in his pick-up truck and shot mechanically, in a mockery of Hollywood tracking or background cameras. The book is composed of a single, 27-foot long accordion-folded page, with the north and south sides of Sunset printed in continuous montage. Caption text records the address of every building, and no other text is offered for explanation. Ruscha had worked as a printer’s devil, which imbued him with a lifelong love for bookmaking. “That’s what I wanted to do most of all, really, to make a book, not necessarily to take photographs.”[25] As the implications of Ruscha’s photographic work began to sink in, the impact was profound. He had, at long last, liberated fine art photography from the standards of easel painting, and recast the camera as a tool that no longer claimed elevation above the situated plain of historical landscapes. The unaesthetic camera returned to the industrial world to redeem the artistic content of the everyday.

Every Building is a colossal “found” artwork, following both Duchamp and Warhol. The bland black and white photography flattens the colorful diversity of the built surfaces and signage, exaggerating the mass-produced quality of Los Angeles’s commercial “strip” architecture. That is Ruscha’s joke, of course, the “Sunset Strip” is a 27-foot continuous strip of paper. The lithography is carefully wrought (recall Ruscha’s love affair with book printing) to the specs of a slick catalog, are the conceptual equivalent of Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans. Warhol’s choice of a can label that had not changed since the Coolidge Administration, repeated originally in the Ferus Gallery as a single line of products on a symbolic supermarket shelf, and his own seeming mindless repetition of them (following Wallace Berman’s mid-50s experiments with Verifax machines and the gridding of found images).[26] Norman Mailer had as much already in his 1960 “Superman Comes to The Supermarket,” in which he famously quipped that Los Angeles was “...a city without iron, eschewing wood, a kingdom of stucco, the playground for mass­men—one has the feeling it was built by television set giving orders to men.”[27] 406

The overthrow of classical aesthetics arose from the two capitals of popular-cultural photography and cinema: Paris and Los Angeles. From Paris, Guy Debord helped to found “situationalist” art, in his new journal Internationale Situationniste. In his 1958 “Theses on Cultural Revolution,” he characterized “traditional art” (by which term he included all of the modernists, including Picasso and the Abstract Expressionists) as a genre in which “the degree of aesthetic success is thus measured by a beauty inseparable from duration, and tending even to lay claim to eternity.” The “Situationist goal” he proposed as an alternative “is immediate participation in a passionate abundance of life, through the variation of fleeting moments resolutely arranged. The success of these moments can only be their passing effect.”[28]

Cementing the connections between Paris and Los Angeles in this moment of cultural upheaval was the arrival in 1963 of Marcel Duchamp himself, for his first-ever Retrospective show, organized by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum, “By or of Marcel Duchamp of Rrose Sélavy,” October 1963. The show not only featured Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), his mobiles, and the collaborative works he executed, as the model in drag, with Man Ray as “Rrose Sélavy”[29], but also his own performance playing chess with a nude Eve Babitz and a fully dressed Walter Hopps. (Duchamp by this time primarily saw himself as a chess master--whose published theorization of the “Endgame” is now considered classic).

Los Angeles not only became the center of a revolution in the very understanding of fine art photography, but also a proving ground for “conceptual art.” Emerging form the Otis and Chouinard Art Institutes in 1959, John Baldessari (b. 1931 National City, California) rapidly fell into harmony with the Ferus artist presenting photographic works as “The Back of Every Truck…” taken through his windshield and presented as a grid. Baldessari, along with Ferus artists Robert Irwin and James Turrell, however, began pushing the logic of the art/world boundary collapse. Irwn’s “light and space” artworks made gallery spaces into interactive sites where lights and shadows on three-dimensional works created interactivity with the viewer and travelled far from any conception of the easel, the frame, or even sculpture. Dennis Hopper staged “happenings,” like the group construction of ice sculptures that fulfilled the situationist credo of time- and space-bound art. Baldessari’s great innovation was to incorporate art theory itself, to generate works that fulfilled a concept.

In 1970 [?] Robert Heinecken became the first artist hired to teach photography on the fine arts side of a major American school of fine art: the UCLA School of Fine Arts. Until then, art schools taught photography in their commercial design programs.[30] His slogan became a mantra to hundreds of art students over the next three decades: “A photograph is not a ‘picture’ of something, but is an object about something.” Heinecken’s artworks are primarily composed of found images in magazines: he rarely used a camera. Thanks to the transformation of photographic art, the artistic visual force of a photograph can now be appreciated as fully situated.

The ultimate apotheosis of Art took place in Valencia in a new kind of art school envisioned by none other than the Sorcerer of popular culture, Walt Disney. Early in his career as a great inventor of animation, Disney envisioned a new art form in the union of music and animation, which he explicitly realized in his third feature-length film, Fantasia (1940), conducted by Leopold Stokowski. Late in life, he saw the opportunity to train a new generation of multi-disciplinary artists who disregarded genre distinctions in an environment where all of the arts were explored in unison. Before he died in 1966, he had arranged for the merger of two struggling schools, Chouinard Art Institute, and the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music. Leaving fully 45% of his estate to this dream, Disney dubbed the new school the California Institute of the Arts, with the ambition to make it the “Cal Tech” of the arts, hence its nickname, “CalArts.” After several delays the campus was finally opened in 1971 on a sprawling campus in Valencia, miles north of Los Angeles. Taking the late Walt Disney at his word to achieve a truly revolutionary school, the hastily-assembled leadership hired radical cadre of instructors, including John Baldessari. Almost immediately, the school became notorious for countercultural excesses. After reports that faculty regularly swam naked in the CalArts pool, an emergency board meeting was called, which including Walt’s widow Lillian Disney and his brother Roy. Called to testify, one instructor proceeded to disrobe completely, shutting down the meeting can causing even more furor, resulting the resignation of its first president. Under the next president, Robert J. Fitzpatrick, the school stabilized and became the epicenter of a phenomenal output of avant-garde production.

There, an influential set of teachers, John Baldessari, Michael Asher, and Douglas Heubner produced a wave of radical artists, known as the “CalArts Mafia” who took the New York scene by storm in the 1970s. But these artists were largely absorbed by the “Art World” scene of New York. The magazine ArtForum, founded in San Francisco and headquartered in Los Angeles on the floor above Ferus Gallery from 1965-67, when moved to New York to capture the citadel, and then become the new establishment.  Some cynically would say, to serve an art market whose highest value galleries were in New York.Note

As Hopps and Keinholz literally built the spaces for the cadre of LA avant gardists in the late 1950s and early 1960s, so the feminist arts avant garde had to build their own spaces as well.  All liberation movements emerged together in the 1960s, and an indispensable key to this whole story is the gendered dimension of of the Los Angeles "Art Capital."  There has always been a gender- and sexual-liberation current in the California AvAnt garde, and very little of the misogyny that typified the men who led the New Hollywood simultaneously in the 1960s.  Nevertheless, women were definitely excluded and the female artists were few in comparison Jay DeFeo (1929-1989) and Joan Brown (1938-1990) were major figures, but they were mostly based in San Francisco.   CalArts broke significant ground in hiring some women faculty in the earliest years, and more aggressively in the late 1970s.

The corrective to the sexist shutout of women artists began abruptly by the creation of yet more alternative art spaces, in an effort headed by an artist who named herself after a different city, Judy Chicago (1939-).  Teaching at CalArts, Chicago decided that women's work would never be equally valued in male-dominated institutions, so she quick in 1973 to founded Feminist Studio Workshop (FSW) and Womanspace Gallery in the former building of Otis College of Art and Design, near MacArthur Park.  The named their new site the Women's Building (named in honor of the Women's Building at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair).  Women in in Design Poster 1975

A view of the global art market that recognizes its nodes and flows, however, Baldessari's denigration of LA and veneration of the New York art scene is ironic.  He and leading galleries such as Nicholas Wilder Gallery (1965–70), sat atop the LA art scene and out-vanguarded the New York Avant Garde.  His and Asher's "CalArts Mafia" was sort of a monstrous capture of New York by LA, all the while having it both ways.  In truth, the mavens of this transnational Art World were bicoastal and transatlantic, transpacific, jet-setters.  The leading edge now was Conceptual Art, which Asher and Baldassari took to extremes.   In Situational Work (1974, Asher hollowed-out teh Claire Copley Gallery, exposing the "office" portion.Note   Baldessari carried on wholesale the Duchamps-Ruscha appropriation of the found environment, anti-art visualscapes of the mass cultural world, making artwork from a list of locations that a canvas has been shown, the canvas simply being updated on its surface as a list.  “More than anyone else, remembers Nancy Chunn,  "[Baldessari] had connections with all of the European artists; no one hit LA without coming up to CalArts.”Note

"The historical period that the avant-garde shared with modernism is over.  That seems an obvious fact," wrote Rosalind Krauss, in her influential 1984 essay "The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Reception."  ArtForum was Krauss's principal platform until 1976.  It had seized leadership of American critical art discourse while en route from its origins in San Francisco to its sojourn in LA from 1965, through its move to New York in 1967, under the editorship of Philip Lieber.  Krauss, eventually Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia, and now University Professor, was one of the most influential voices declaring the end to modernist art in the profusive Glasnost of the 1970s. Krauss, perhaps more than any other once she broke with ArtForum and founded October in 1976, has established a fully post-Modern world.  The Los Angeles contribution to this genuine global revolution in the arts, is impossible to measure, but obviously very heavy.Note

Krauss was right.  Not only modernism, but its presumptive twin.  Something called "Art," that had been inseparable from modernity since the Early Modern period, ended on the streets of Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo, San Francisco, Paris.  Clearly, artists lived on and Art remains as institutional power as strong as it was before the 1960s.  Conceptual art, performance art, found art, recycled mass media, grafitti, Every Building..., have completely dethroned Baumgarten's aesthetics.

Where did this happen?  Not from the high seats on the editorial board of ArtForum or October, but literally from the streetscapes and mediascapes of Los Angeles.  Duchamp opened this revolt in Paris and New York, 1912-1917; Hopps and Keinholtz continued it in their LA Beat moment of the late 1950s-early 1960s. Hopps sealed the Duchamp circuit in his Pasadena Museum of Art Duchamp retrospective in 1963.  

By the time in the early 1970s that Harry Gamboa, Jr., Willie Herrón,  Glugio "Gronk" Nicandro, and Patssi Valdez formed the artist collective ASCO ("NAUSEA") in the early 1970s, Duchamp and Keinholtz were already an old memory.  The Keinholz Back Seat Dodge stink at the newly-opened LACMA in 1966 was a sensation to every young artist in LA, especially in East LA, where chopped low-riders were invented.  As Chavez's United Farm Workers movement mobilized thousands, a revolutionary sprit epitomized by Corky Gonzales's defiant poem, "I am Joaquin," swept the schools of LA, where students were deliberately not prepared for college, tracked into manual arts programs, and prohibited from speaking Spanish.  Harry Gamboa Jr. and Patssi Valdez took part in the epochal "Blowouts" of 1968: massive walk-outs by students to demand quality education and an end to discrimination.  Valdez, Gronk, Gamboa Jr., and Herrón erupted onto the LA art scene with a barrage of artistic practices that parodied everything, from the peak institutions of the Anglo-Dominated arts establishment, to the now-orthodox Rivera-Orozco-Siquieros mural tradition, to Hollywood, even the New Hollywood that still hd no place for Latin culture.Note

Gamboa, Jr. dropped out after the 1968 Blowouts, but Valdez graduated in 1970, the year of the bloody Chicano Moratorium demonstration in East LA of August 29.  A peaceful protest against the Vietnam War, was stormed by the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, killing three, including the assassination of LA Times journalist Ruben Salazar at the Silver Dollar Cafe on Whittier Blvd.  "For the previous three years," writes historian Edward J. Escobar, "militant Mexican-American activists, who called themselves Chicanos, had waged a campaign to end discrimination against people of Mexican descent living in the United States. Nationally, this campaign comprised several smaller struggles, addressing issues such as farm workers' rights, land tenure, educational reform, political representation, the war in Vietnam, and "police brutality." Note

These events, as much as any legacy from Duchamp, fueled the creative energies of ASCO, who staged a series of brilliant interventions during the 1970s and 1980s.  A signal work was "Spray Paint LACMA" (1972).  As the title suggests, ASCO "tagged" the exterior walls of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, elevating graffiti to museum status while performing an Anglo stereotype of barrio pachuco gangsters.  Designed by the Cold War modernist William Pereira, the LACMA campus had been sited at the La Brea Tarpits, far to the west of East LA, in the "Miracle Mile" segment of Wilshire Boulevard, adjacent to Beverly Hills.

ASCO went on to invent "walking" or "instant" murals," such as the one in which Gamboa, Herrón, and Gronk affixed Patssi Valdez to a wall on Whittier Boulevard," and "No Movies," which documented their absurdist-political interventions.  No-Movies were performances from a script, but were only recorded on a single photographic slide.  One 35-mm slide was in fact one frame of standard cinematic film.  One frame cannot constitute a movie, hence the name, but the paradox of the piece lies in the potential, and the question of why not? And what is not?   The list of ASCO's major No-Movies read like a non-filmography: "Tumor Hats" (1973); "First Supper (After a Major Riot)/Instant Mural"; Cruel Profit (1974);  Á La Mode (1976); Search and No Seizure, La Dolce, Waiting For Tickets (1978).  ASCO's street theater performance works drew heavily from Luis Valdez's Teatro Campesino, which in 1965 had begun performing skits on truck beds for farm workers in the fields being organized by Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers.

In 1973 Willie Herron and Gronk created a (no-)mural on a prominent wall of Estrada Courts Housing Community, facing Olympic Boulevard.  Titled "Moratorium," this curious mural discards all the 20th-century conventions of Mexican muralism.  Gone are colors of Mexico: green, yellow, reds, browns, instead, a grid of black-and-white movie- or TV-style frame stills, document the tensions and terrors of the LA Sheriff's shotgun raid on the August 29 protestors. Like a film-strip, the Moratorium mural is also a grid, enabling a spatial compression of the events that took place in Laguna Park (soon thereafter renamed Ruben Salazar Park), Whittier Boulevard, and the site of Salazar's assassination, the Silver Dollar Cafe.  The mural was executed just two years after the Moratorium, among scores of important, but by comparison, traditional, murals throughout the Estrada Courts complex, which had been built in 1940 to house Mexican migrant war workers and their families. The following year, 1973, ASCO staged another No-Movie, "First Supper (After a Major Riot)/Instant Mural." In this performance, they set a  death-feast at a dinner table in the middle of Whittier Boulevard, on the course of the 29 August 1970 march, and then concluded their mock commemoration by taping Valdez to a nearby wall.

ASCO's street art practices completely dissolved and yet thematized all the boundaries that culminated as both hard and porous in the 1970s and 1980s: between art and non-art, between Anglo and Latino and Mexicano and Chicano, between Chicano and American, between mass culture and fine arts.  Their parodies of the mural movement notwithstanding, street art, known as Graffiti, 

Avant-Gardes in the fine arts have typically been absorbed by the establishment and commodified to the point where their original critical force is lost.  The Art Market boomed in the Reagan Era of procapitalist growth and global capital accumulation.  Wealthy and corporate art buyers parked their surplus capital in contemporary and mid-century art as a wise investment, to conspicuously display their cultural status.  Radical artworks of the 1950-s1970s had become inspiration for industrial and fashion design by the 1980s.

But that familiar cycle, what Tom Wolfe called the "mating dance" of the avant garde with the art buyers, is by no means the whole story.  Avant garde art has created utopian space in the cultural sphere, from urban spaces under siege, in Los Angeles since at least the 1921 Artes Populares exhibit of Mexican revolutionary art. Especially because the 1960s-70s LA avant garde exploded in the vacuum left by the fall of censorship in the American mass mediated public sphere, it created a two-way tunnel.  Commodification of art objects, in other words, was matched by a more subtle but very real colonization of the channels of commercial culture by radical, rebellious, and humanitarian communication.

The LA avant-garde had not merely established an Arts Capital, they had carved holes in the walls of dominating Nixon-Reagan regime for the Uprising of 1988-1992.

Endnotes

[1] Although this quotation is widely attributed to Hopps, he presented it as the quote of a friend, during a 2005 talk at the Santa Monica Museum of Art: “A poet friend of mine, a UCLA student from the first Syndell Studio that we had, once said, ‘Art is the possibility of love with strangers.’” The poet’s identity is not known, but it should be noted that Hopps variously attributed the names of his two original galleries, Syndell and Ferus, deceased people in his past. My impression is that he liked to bury his creations in stories about others.

[2] “Conversation with Walter Hopps,” 16 November 2004, in “Modern Art in Los Angeles: The Beat years,” Audiorecording. Getty Research Institute, Special Collections. (Hereafter GRI) Quotation at 58 min 22 sec.

[3] “Conversation with Walter Hopps,” 16 November 2004, in “Modern Art in Los Angeles: The Beat years,” CD #2. GRI.

[4] Quotation in Hopps (1967): n.p.; Candida Smith (1995); Schrank (2009): Ch. 3.

[5] “Conversation with the ‘Beat Group’,” 19 November 2003, in “Modern Art in the Beat Years,” CD #7. GRI.

[6] Blum quoted in Grenier, ed (2006): 100.

[7] All quotations in this and the previous paragraph are from Hopps (1996), p. 26.

[8] Hopps (1996): 27.

[9] Hopps (1996): 29.

[10] Hopps (1996): 30.

[11] Hopps (1996), p. 33.

[12] Hulten acquired a Kienholz masterpiece, The State Hospital, in 1966 for the Stockholm Moderna Museet. Hopps (1996), p. 33-4.

[13] Hopps (1996), p. 83.

[14] Hopps (1993): 107.

[15] Isenberg (2000): 197.

[16] Hopps (1993): 100. This quotation is actually Hopps quoting Ruscha in conversation with Ruscha.

[17] Isenberg (2000): 198.

[18] “Conversation with Walter Hopps,” 17 November 2004. “Modern Art in Los Angeles: The Beat years,” “Modern Art in the Beat Years,” CD #3. GRI.

[19] Coplans (1962); Plagens (2000), 138; Grenier, ed. (2006): 102.

[20] Greenberg ([1948] 1986) :222.

[21] Greenberg (1961), p. 136.

[22] Quoted in Thierry de Duve (1990): 245.

[23] Crimp (1984): 184, 186.

[24] Ruscha quoted in Hopps (1993): 100.

[25] Ruscha quoted in Hopps (1993): 101.

[26] Varnedoe (2001).

[27] Missing Foonote here!

[28] Quoted in McDonough (2001): 93.

[29] A French pun on “Eros, c’est la vie.”

[30] “It was because of [Don] Chipperfield’s recommendation that Heinecken began teaching photography in the UCLA extension division while he was still a graduate student. When the art division underwent changes in 1961, Heinecken initiated photography into the fine arts curriculum. In 1962 the graduate program began.” Katzman has process right but the dates wrong. Katzman (1984): 50.

[31] Grody (2006): 15-25.

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