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Los Angeles Look(ing)

其他書名	Process, Perception, and Popular Culture in the Art of Larry Bell, Craig Kauffman, and John McCracken
出版	University of Delaware, 2008
ISBN	05498117619780549811763
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=2KFPswEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋In the 1960s, New York artists were paring objects down to the minimum in order to maximize viewer experience. Such objects, as Robert Morris and others argued, necessarily possessed a "gestalt clarity"--A sense of wholeness and totality that could not be broken down into individual parts. Nearly all of the traditional formal elements of sculpture (i.e. shape, texture, a distinction between positive/negative space, color, etc.) were reduced or rejected in favor of this gestalt. In short, Minimalists claimed: "simplicity of shape does not necessarily equate with simplicity of experience." Meanwhile, Los Angeles artists were also making forms that were minimal, but not as an end goal in and of itself. Instead, they often employed materials like glass or fiberglass, which tended to yield glossy, reflective, and even colorful surfaces. These not-so-simple objects offered a more particular, almost transcendental experience for the viewer. Larry Bell's smoky glass cubes of the mid to late 1960s, for example, were variously described as "atmospheric" and as resembling "halations of breath." Craig Kauffman's plastic bubbles of the mid-1960s were seemingly inspired by the "brilliantly sunny, palm-studded, DayGlo-spangled Los Angeles landscape." John McCracken's colorful, fiberglass-coated planks of the same time were compared to custom cars and surfboards. Why was the perceptual experience of art objects from New York explained with words like "gestalt" and "objecthood," while Los Angeles art was consistently described in terms of LA-ness? If the Southern California landscape has truly inspired the works made there, then how different is the experience of these objects? Is it the implicitly placeless phenomenological one as described by Robert Morris, or, do these objects require an LA-infused theoretical lens through which to view them? This dissertation investigates precisely that. It analyzes the LA Look as a separate and unique art movement, consisting of some characteristics shared with New York Minimalism and many that are not. It offers an historical understanding of what it means to talk of LA-ness; such that, when the Los Angeles Look is inevitably compared to plastic, Disneyland, or car culture, it means something more than falsity, fantasy, or fetishism. This dissertation constructs an ideational framework out of these stereotypes that both elucidates and supports the art of the LA Look as being something much more substantial and historically grounded than its present status as second-rate Minimalism