Exhibition a snapshot of 1970s Los Angeles

The artistic, the banal and the incongruous come together in this exhibition that showcases a bygone era.

John Baldessari’s Throwing three balls in the air to get a straight line (Best of thirty-six attempts) (1973) © John Baldessari

Woody Allen — or more exactly his alter ego in Annie Hall — explained the tidiness of the streets of Los Angeles by the fact “they don’t throw their garbage away, they turn it into television shows”. Somehow this barb seems to epitomise the culture of Los Angeles in the 1970s as surveyed in this curiously eclectic exhibition, which covers everything from Ed Ruscha’s copious and bland semi-conceptual art to softcore porn of gay beefcake magazines.

Incongruous as such a conjunction may seem at first sight, it is perhaps less so when we consider these ostensibly very different images side by side.

Ruscha is the logical place to start, and if one had not already come to the conclusion that he was overrated and ultimately rather vacuous, this exhibition will help to make this clear. Some of his early work stems from pop, conceptualism and minimalism, but the conceptual content is never very strong or consistent and, as this exhibition shows, he soon subsided into producing cool quasi-conceptual decorator pieces for the Los Angeles moneyed class.

Cool, indeed, as the title of the exhibition suggests, is the defining quality of the sensibility that underlies these works, or one might indeed say insensibility, for cool is ultimately an attitude of disengagement and indifference. More exactly, it is a superficial aesthetic response to novelty of design without content, belief or conviction. As I have observed before, this is still one of the most common responses of visitors to exhibitions such as the Biennale: they will glance for a moment at some complex installation, acknowledge it with the word “cool”, then move on to another superficial experience.

Christine Godden’s Betsy’s hands, by the pool (1973).

And what else can one say before the designs of Larry Bell or Ronald Davis and some others? Perhaps in the aftermath of hard-edge abstraction these patterns seemed interesting. Today they look slight and mechanical. But what about a more complex image such as Ruscha’s Sweets, Meats, Sheets (1975)? It’s bright, it’s deliberately loud, it gratingly juxtaposes colour saturation and the suggestion of glamour with the banality of consumer products and most conspicuously steaks on styrofoam trays and wrapped in taut plastic from a supermarket shelf.

This is, however, a much more complex image than those of Bell, for it recalls in colour and composition Tom Kelley’s famous nude of Marilyn Monroe against a red satin background (1949), so we can read it as a deconstruction of the star into the attraction of sweetness (Hershey’s chocolate Kisses), the reality of flesh and the metonym of sheets for sex. But this facile and reductive interpretation of Marilyn is less insightful and especially less humane than the original glamour shot, which at least acknow­ledged the dream of beauty.

Cynicism is not the same as critical thinking; it is, as we saw in the postmodern period that ensued, all too often a lazy and indulgent stance, especially when it becomes an alibi for inaction and indifference, and when, as in this case, the end product is interior decoration with a knowing sneer.

Sex was, ostensibly at least, easy in Los Angeles in the 70s. It was in the middle of the sexual revolution that had begun the decade before with the invention of the pill and would continue until it was brought to an end by the AIDS epidemic of the early 80s. In the meantime, it seemed that there were few boundaries: for better or for worse, this period represented the opposite extreme of the pendulum swing that has brought about today’s surprisingly puritanical attitude to sexuality, ridden with guilt, anxiety and resentment not seen since the later 19th century.

John Divola’s Zuma #25 (1978).

Los Angeles was the capital of what has been called in hindsight the golden age of porno-chic because, in the wake of a series of important legal cases from 1957 onwards, the legal concept of obscenity had been significantly limited: this was a time when full-length adult features were produced with some attempt at narrative coherence, were shown in mainstream cinemas, and helped bring back audiences who had abandoned movies for television.

The most notable American productions of the time included Behind the Green Door (1972), The Devil in Miss Jones (1973), The Opening of Misty Beethoven (1976), Caligula (1979), originally based on a screenplay by Gore Vidal, and, one of the earliest but most notorious, Deep throat (1972), which was a massive hit but whose star, Linda Lovelace, later became a born-again Christian and claimed that she had been forced into the role. It is a rather pathetic tale, deeply American in its alternation of dereliction and repentance, but it reminds us that all was not entirely cool after all in the pornography business.

This is the culture that informs many of the photographic works in the exhibition, most obviously Robert Heinecken’s collaged images made of cut-up photographs of naked girls taken from the erotic magazines that also flourished in this period, well before the age of the internet made such media obsolete. The cutting up and recombination in Heinecken’s work inhibits a straightforward response to the images as erotica, inviting a more complex and dreamlike reading of the experience of sexuality.

The same sort of material is dealt with more subtly in the photographs of Christine Godden, who focuses on glimpses and suggestions rather than physically or psychologically explicit imagery. Godden’s shot of a young woman’s legs, falling open as she drives her car, is thus more subtly provocative, because of the way that it implicates the viewer, than some of Heinecken’s relatively explicit imagery.

Homosexuality was also part of the liberated world of Los Angeles, and the exhibition includes a collection of images of bodybuilders and other young men, all coyly equipped with G-strings, in a variety of mock-athletic poses. These images were produced by an amateur photographer who published them in cheap magazines that could (after the Supreme Court overturned a post office ban) be mailed to subscribers.

Edward Ruscha’s Twentysix gasoline stations (1962). © Ed Ruscha

The sexual freedom, including Hollywood’s tacit tolerance of homosexuality, was one of the things that most appealed to the young David Hockney, who arrived in Los Angeles in 1964. He also liked the weather. The exhibition includes a couple of pictures of a naked young man in the bathroom, one standing in the shower and the other at the hand basin while Hockney himself, with his camera, is reflected in the bathroom mirror.

Water, as a symbol of the ubiquity and fluidity of sexuality, already appears in one of Godden’s pictures, in which the naked pelvis and leg of a girl are set beside shimmering sunlit water.

But it was Hockney who saw in the swimming pools of Los Angeles an image the erotic state into which one can plunge and lose all sense of boundaries and identity. Hence his images of figures diving into a pool or swimming underwater, sometimes watched by others standing on the edge, still outside and in the world of normal social conventions. A painting of this subject, indeed, was sold a few weeks ago for almost $124 million, a record for a living artist.

These themes may be followed in a group of video works from the permanent collection that can be seen a little further on in the modern galleries — and indeed can also be looked up on YouTube. One of these is Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy (1964), an incoherent but spontaneous Dionysiac orgy of nudity, blood and red paint that essentially expresses the spirit of what was then still a very new sense of sexual liberation: young male and female bodies, largely naked, writhe, twist and buck in excitement.

This celebration of primal instinct was what the sexual revolution was meant to be all about, and what the porno-chic films mentioned above thought they were celebrating, even if it is plain enough to see that the reality was not quite as simple as that and that today, a half-century after the sexual revolution, we are still far from having a happy and harmonious relationship with sexuality.

But even during the 70s there were clearly plenty of people who were not having a very good revolution. Eleanor Antin’s video Representational Painting (1971) is a telling document of this phenomenon: the artist films herself brushing her hair and putting on makeup in a desultory way, stopping from time to time to take a drag on her cigarette. Throughout, she manages to look resolutely cross and unhappy yet smug at the same time because clearly she knows better than the people who are enjoying themselves.

All this goes on for 38 interminable minutes, which I sat through out of professional duty or perhaps morbid curiosity, while other visitors to the gallery gave the work the usual 10 to 20 seconds of their attention or ignored it altogether. What is it all about? Well, of course, the usual — the objectification and commodification of women. But the problem with this is that feeling sorry for yourself is not really a useful response. Without the assertion of alternative values, it just becomes cranky self-indulgence.

Much the same criticism can be made of Martha Rosla’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), another humourless expression of angry misery. Rosla’s film is based on the simple conceit of running through the alphabet, selecting some object from the kitchen that starts with each successive letter, then ineffectually thrusting it at the camera. She jabs pans and rolling pins at us, aggressively yet so feebly that one would laugh if the spectacle were not so pathetic.

These two works remind us that self-pity, resentment and a victim mentality have a long history in feminism; they form a poisonous and narcissistic combination.

But the unhappiness of Antin and Rosla, as expressed in these sour and disillusioned videos, also reveals something of the inadequacies of the sexual revolution. The age of the two women is no coincidence. Antin is about 36 and Rosla about 32. This makes them 10 years or so older than the boys and girls cav­orting joyously and spontaneously in Meat Joy. They are old enough to be disappointed with lives going nowhere, with feckless boyfriends unwilling to make a commitment to career or to relationship, while they are staring at the prospect of middle age in a world annually replenished with new young things.

Perhaps after all the sexual revolution, as practised in the 60s and 70s, was not all it seemed.

Free sex turned out to be asymmetrical in the benefits it offered men and women; and the mixture of glamour and cynicism that lay behind the cool culture of Los Angeles was as morally hollow as it was conceptually flimsy.

California Cool

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

Until February