When I moved to Los Angeles in January, 2000, I arrived in search of a suntan and a place I found no longer existed, a centerless stretch of art and beer blasts and big wide metal cars. I was 24 at the time, was from New York and didn't know how to drive so cars had a particular flirtation for me.
In truth though, I was searching for the Los Angeles of the 1950s, the Los Angeles of big hair sprayed hair, and clam-diggers and of course, of Ferus Gallery. And especially of co-founder Ed Kienholz, who's work has made its way under my skin and stayed there since I first saw his
Back Seat Dodge '38 (above top) when I was in high school at The Whitney. In fact, when
Back Seat Dodge '38 was shown in 1966, the LA Board of Supervisors declared the installation obscene and practically demanded that the LACMA close the exhibit. The LACMA wound up showing the installation but with a closed car door, a guard and the provision that anyone under 18 would not be allowed to enter the exhibit.
Though the piece depicts a car crash and two enmeshed bodies on top of each other in the backseat, there's a certain romanticism and peaceful stillness that creeps in, just behind its humor, vulgarity and garish erotic horror in color. I guess I've been trying to do something like that with my own poetry, capture that amazingly nuanced mixture that I think can only come out of Los Angeles because of its color.
This is the city that birthed Noir, red carpets and pink cadillacs and blue martinis but this is also the place where from about 3pm - 8pm is called "the magic hour" because of the luminescence that hangs over the hills, and dusts its entire expansiveness, through Figueroa, Vermont, La Brea and Centinella, past Pico and Olympic, past Venice, Washington, and out to the Pacific Coast Highway.
“I used to say, ‘John,
what about the artist who just goes into his studio, paints paintings
and tries to make them the best that he can? What about an artist that
just does that?” He said, “Kienholz goes out at night in his pick up
truck and tries to find them and run them down.”
--Critic Peter Plagens in coversation with artist John Altoon
