Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s"Pop L.A. maps the relation between a new urban and cultural space and the artists who confronted it and gave it form. Los Angeles in the 1960s in Cécile Whiting's smart and incisive study was home not only to a zany, outré popular culture but also to a Pop Art as expansive, crisscrossed, and de-centered as the city's entangled freeways and urban sprawl. Ruscha's photographs of gas stations and parking lots, Hockney's paintings of swimming pools and tract homes, Rodia's Watts Towers, and more--after this book, none will look the same."—Anthony W. Lee, Mount Holyoke College, author of Picturing Chinatown "Sun, surf, sand, sex, strip malls, subdivisions: all are present in Cécile Whiting's trenchant anatomy of Pop Los Angeles. And all were central to the vision artists constructed of this protean city as a site of both pleasure and emptiness, speed and stasis. Some artists, however, went further, not merely representing the city, but intervening in it, and for Whiting, the results—whether a performance by Kaprow or a tower by Rodia—further demonstrate the wild diversity of a multicentric city that somehow seems both more and less than a circumscribable place."—Anne Wagner, author of Mother Stone: The Vitality of Modern British Sculpture "In Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s, Cécile Whiting proves herself an expert guide to the cultural and artistic landscape of Los Angeles. From hot rods to parking lot Happenings, from the Watts Towers to Womanhouse, the book thrillingly remaps the multiple intersections of Pop art and Southern California in the 1960s and early 70s. Beautifully researched and written, Pop L.A. is a major work of modern art-historical scholarship. It is also one hell of a ride."—Richard Meyer, author of Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art "From the Ferus Gallery to the Woman's Building, Cécile Whiting has fashioned an indispensable book. Thanks to her brilliant remapping, the landscape of art in Los Angeles will never look the same."—Kenneth E. Silver, author of Making Paradise: Art, Modernity, and the Myth of the French Riviera |
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Pop L. A.: art and the city in the 1960s
User Review - Not Available - Book VerdictIn the 1960s, Los Angeles became the physical embodiment of the Pop Art paintings then adorning Manhattan�s art galleries and museums. The western city�s architecture and art brought Pop Art ... Read full review
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Abstract Adams aesthetic American architecture artists Assemblage attention Beach began bodies buildings built canvas catalog Celmins Center century Chicago city's claim Collection color County Museum cover critics cultural Death Valley depicted drawings early emerged environment exhibition facades feminist figure Fire Foulkes Four freeways Gallery Happenings History Hockney Hockney's Hollywood Hood houses images instance Institute John landscape late light living located look Los Angeles magazine male Mount mountain movie Museum Museum of Art nature neighborhood nude objects Oldenburg opening paintings parking past Performance Photograph courtesy photographs planned pool Pop art Press promoting published Purifoy Richard Diebenkorn Robert Rodia's Ruscha scene signs social southern California space Standard station streets structures sublime suburban Sunset surface took transformed turn University urban visual Watts Towers West Womanhouse women York
Bibliographic information
| Title | Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s |
| Author | Cécile Whiting |
| Edition | illustrated, reprint |
| Publisher | University of California Press, 2008 |
| ISBN | 0520256344, 9780520256347 |
| Length | 272 pages |
| Subjects | › › › Art / American / General Art / History / Modern (late 19th Century to 1945) History / United States / State & Local / West (AK, CA, CO, HI, ID, MT, NV, UT, WY) |
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