Deliberate Looseness

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-pst-review-20130516,0,27,2701915.story

Hello Again:

We're back to the subject of Los Angeles architecture with Christopher Hawthorne's review of the aptly named exhibit "Everything Loose Will Land" currently up at the MAK Center in West Hollywood and curated by UCLA architectural historian and critic Sylvia Lavin.  The title is taken from the famous purported Frank Lloyd Wright aphorism, "Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles."  Sort of a dig at the city don't you think or maybe you think L.A. is the land of loose nuts and bolts.  This is coming from a man who built some of his landmark homes in Los Angeles.  The exhibit offers an sly look at the ways Los Angeles-based artists and architects worked with, leaned on, stole from, and influenced each other in the 1970s.  Wasn't it Pablo Picasso that once said "Good artists borrow, great artists steal."  Mr. Hawthorne states, "In a larger sense, it charts the way Southern California architects threw off the influence of establishment Modernism and helped remake the profession in that decade."  True, the notable art and architecture tended to disregard the trends that dominated the East Coast scene in the sixties and seventies in favor of something a bit more-um how to put it-free form-until that became a trope.

The exhibit features mostly small-scale work by artists such as Judy Chicago, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Smithson, Ed Moses and architects such as Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Charles Moor, Cesar Pelli and, of course Frank Gehry.  You know what, I really hate using the word 'artist' and 'architect' to describe two separate professions because in my view, architects are artists as well.  Mr. Hawthorne describes the exhibit as, "...most surprising and opinionated of the exhibitions to open as part of the Getty L.A. architecture series..."  While, the big show at the Getty presents a more encyclopedic rendering of L.A. architecture, the exhibit at the MAK Center provides what Mr. Hawthorne calls a lift on the basis of its content.  This lift comes amid two lesser known shows, "A New Sculpturalism" at the Museum of Contemporary Art (http://www.moca.org) and an earlier PSTP contribution "A Confederacy of Heretics" at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (http://www.sciarc.edu).

In one respect, "Everything Loose" is an example of good curation with its focus on the big issues of the seventies such as feminism and the environment, which have faded to the periphery in the big show.  Personally speaking, I think this is a good approach because one cannot divorce the arts, I use this in the broadest sense, from the issues of the day.  After all, a building or tableau is a mirror of the world around it.  The exhibit fill four rooms of the Schindler House in West Hollywood, home to the L.A. branch of Vienna's MAK Center since 1994.  There are also three large pieces installed in the garden.

Looseness seems to be the operative word in the curatorial approach taken by Professor Lavin.  The concept of looseness and experimentation-by extension-informality and jerry rigged is the engine that drove architecture in the seventies.  I would postulate that the looseness evident in the seventies era work of Frank Gehry and SCI-Arc Director Eric Owen Moss has always been there since the days of Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler in the twenties.  Messers Gehry and Moss as well as their contemporaries were simply continuing the tradition.  However, Professor Lavin also uses looseness as a way to connect the works of Judy Chicago and her contemporaries to a whole redefinition of gender roles that was taking place during the same period.

Mr. Hawthorne states, "Some architectural historians have looked at the 1970s as something of a lost decade, at best transitional at worst full of second-rate-work..."  The architectural landscape was dominated by large and timid public buildings by established firms while the big guns of the eighties: Gehry, Moss, and Thom Mayne were still working on small-scale experimental projects.  It was the lost decade of architecture.  Professor Lavin views the seventies in another context, it was the period when the architecture profession began to find itself.  Remember, I just stated that architecture is a mirror of the world around it.  Modernism was being dismantled and reassembled.  Interesting isn't it?  Modernism dismantled the academic revival styles of the nineteenth century to make something that reflect a world that had undergone the greatest upheaval of the period-the Industrial Revolution.  Now it was Modernism's turn to be taken apart by younger, independent artists who embraced a low-tech approach, finding common ground with Los Angeles' emerging artists.  I would postulate that once again the architecture profession is being disassembled and reassembled to meet the challenges of the digital age.

The overlap between fine art and architecture was one of the forces that gave L.A. architecture that distinctly unorthodox appeal of the seventies, separate from the pastisch that is Postmodernism.  There was little in the way of real interest in the art and architectural history of L.A. in the seventies.  Although, now, at least in preservation circles, there are serious discussions of the work of architects in the seventies.  Where this will go remains to be seen.  In the art history circles, themes of feminist art have gained traction in recent years.  One thing that Professor Lavin does make clear in the show is the idea of "user" as opposed to "viewer/client" gained currency in the seventies, possibly laying the foundation for things such as interactive exhibits that seem to be so popular these days.

The looseness that Professor Lavin charts was not as ad hoc as it appeared to be, rather highly deliberate.  Its deliberateness was an attempt by the practitioners of the period to stake their turf as modernism and American confidence collapsed around them.