The SoCal art exhibit currently at LACMA is kind of a hodgepodge of various “Southern Californian” art styles and art pieces. It’s nothing too in-depth, but it’s part of regular museum admission, which means it’s free after 5pm, and it’s definitely worth seeing at only the cost of time.
I particularly enjoy the exhibit brochure, which begins with something like “The myth of California—and particularly of southern California—looms large in the modern psyche.” I’m not sure if this is overstating the case or not. Growing up in Oklahoma and Texas, I vaguely remember carrying around my own myth of California, particularly Los Angeles. But living here, myths have faded to reality, and it’s hard to imagine what people really think of this place.
At the exhibit my favorites, aesthetically, are the “finish fetish” artists with their shiny, pretty things and the “light and space” artists with their abstract/regular shapes that carefully take into account their own shadows and reflections.
But what I liked most was discovering what is basically an early zine. Wallace Berman (1926-1976) created nine issues of Semina between 1955 and 1964. It is a handmade magazine that he distributed among his friends. Each issue contained poems, drawings, and photographs, including Berman’s collage work and a line-up of the essential Beat poets of the era. In pop culture Berman is one of the faces on the album cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and has a minor appearance in Easy Rider.
At LACMA there is only a display case, but apparently there have been whole exhibits for Berman’s creation. My interest is genuine, but solipsistic, imagining our creations of now, our zines, concert flyers, etc. on display some day as historical and as art. It’s just another example of the tendency to romanticize the present by historicizing it, but maybe there’s nothing wrong with that regardless of whether we are remembered in the future or not.