Place in the Sun

In the Southern California landscape, there has sprung up like desert flowers a new variety of artists. They talk of a new esthetic ("art as a symbolic medium is dead"), but these young Angelenos are basically united only by a determination to prove that creativity and innovation can flourish outside New York's hegemony. "They are just isolated, friendly, ambitious young people who share a fierce outlook," says James Monte, a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "Because they live in a backwater, they had to remake the whole scene."

That they have. A decade ago there were no more than a handful of West Coast painters of note. Today, California embraces the vast, variegated range of op, pop and minimal, not to .mention such homegrown mutations as the weird, surrealistic offshoot known as funk centered around San Francisco. Los Angeles' particular contribution is an array of bright young individualists who espouse the belief that the object is what is important, not what it represents. "We are going beyond abstraction," argues Robert Irwin, who at 40 is something of a guru to the group. Irwin's own works are illuminated disks set against a white wall. Others in the group vary widely but are united by a common dedication to "cool" materials far divorced from the conventions of oil paint and bronze--plastics, neon, acrylics, Plexiglas, aluminum. They also share a preoccupation with a visual illusionism that plays with space and color to make the eye see beyond the surface of the work, perhaps inspired by the clear, bright light of Southern California (on its non-smog-gy days). The result, if not so divergent from similar work in the New York orbit as the Californians like to think, nevertheless offers a wide cornucopia of shapes, colors and visual sensations that display genuine individuality and vitality (see color pages). > Craig Kauffman, 36, studied architecture at the University of Southern California, went on to get a master's degree in painting at U.C.L.A. Tiring of abstract expressionism, he tried painting on Plexiglas, got the idea of doing rectangular wall pieces when vacuum-molded plastic came into wide commercial use as a sealed wrapping for all kinds of merchandise. Finding no literature on the process, he sought out craftsmen at the commercial factories to learn the technique. Now he himself makes the wood molds in his studio, takes them to a factory, where he supervises the casting process. -- Douglas Wheeler, 29, studied at Los Angeles' Chouinard Art Institute, and was strongly influenced by Irwin. In 1964 he began experimenting with lights cast onto an easel painting, soon found the canvas format constricting. He rented an old department store in the rundown beach town of Venice, and began transforming entire rooms into oases of light. Today he mounts large, square sheets of Plexiglas on the wall, paints them white, attaches neon tubes behind the edges. By some alchemy of optical illusion, this does funny things to the viewer's physical orientation--as Wheeler plans. "I want the spectator to stand in the middle of the room and look at the painting and feel that if you walk into it, you'll be in another world," says he.

-- Robert Graham, 29, a graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute, makes teeny-weeny wax nudes that look like slightly sexier versions of the Barbie doll and sets them in teeny glass houses. He does his own photography of nude models, scales them down to five-inch size, insists that he is not interested in the sex but in the effect. "What I do is create an illusion," he says. "Like the small pictures in Playboy. They work better than the big foldout."

> Billy Al Bengston, 34, arrived in Los Angeles from Dodge City, Kans., when he was 13. A motorcycle and racing buff who enjoys getting away from the "artistic environment," he declares that he has painted on practically every material with a flat surface--"paper, velvet, Formica, steel, grass, glass, ceramics--you name it." Naturally, he got around to aluminum one day, and started banging it up. He found that he liked the way reflections danced and glittered off its rumpled facets. -- William Pettet, 25, a native of Los Angeles, also studied at Chouinard Art Institute where, in typical art school fashion, he learned "what not to do." Discarding paint, brush and palette, he relies solely on a spray gun filled with acrylics to take the eye up, out and away into a feeling of infinity. "I want to create an illusion of something."

What that illusion might be, most of the young Californians would be unable to articulate. But to a man, they agree that pictorial form, including its abstract variations, is worn out. In playing with illusions, reflections, glass and metal, they question the validity even of the human eye, suggesting that what you see may not necessarily be the way it is. As one of them put it last week, "We're unloading the labels."

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