Sex by the pool in California Cool

For as long as we can remember California has been sold as the good life, with LA its self-indulgent heart. Seen as superficial and condemned by many as the home of a singular pursuit of pleasure, it was dismissed by New Yorkers as a cultural backwater. However, photography may be credited with the Golden State’s redemption and LA’s emergence as a cultural centre. Notably, Art in America named photography as a reason for the ‘phenomenal art boom’ occurring in the state during the early to mid-1960s.¹

John Baldessari believed that a principal reason photography came to prominence in California was simply because plentiful labs servicing the film industry made processing film quick and easy, and Hollywood gave photographers easy access to film stills and other found imagery.² He felt that being away from an east coast preoccupation with status importantly gave photographers a precious freedom — a ‘to hell with it’ attitude — which manifested as a lack of concern about mucking things up.³ They were willing to experiment, and were playful with robust conceptual ideas. Whether the east coast elite liked it or not, the photography coming out of LA in the 1960s and 1970s was a force to be reckoned with.

Photography’s vital place in the development of an avant-garde scene in LA included the role it played in the creation of a very particular image of that scene — it could be argued that the idea of the LA artist was created concurrently with the west coast look. A series of images made in the late 1950s and early to mid-1960s by photographers William Claxton, Jerry McMillan and photographer/actor Dennis Hopper, among others, showed the artists associated with the Ferus Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard — Larry Bell, Wallace Berman, Billy Al Bengston, Ed Ruscha et al — in macho set-ups, lounging around on motorbikes and yachts, often accompanied by a hot babe or two.⁴ These artists, essentially a boys’ club, weren’t called the Ferus Studs for nothing, and in many ways the identity of the LA artist was framed around their desirability and sexuality.

Similarly, LA-based print workshop Gemini GEL promoted its work with New York-based Claes Oldenburg with an image of the artist and a beautiful young woman lying on a print bed, pre- or post-coital, we can’t be sure. The caption states ‘Claes Oldenburg is working here now’: even artists from the ‘starched … cold’ east found sex and desirability in LA.⁵

These self-promotional tactics hardly raised an eyebrow until women started using them to speak back. Judy Chicago — who founded the first Feminist Art Program at Fresno State College in 1970 — simultaneously promoted a forthcoming exhibition and responded to the apparent misogyny in images such as those of Ruscha and Oldenburg by representing herself as a boxer, leaning insouciantly against the ropes of a boxing ring and facing off her male counterparts in the December 1970 issue of Artforum.⁶

While many were building a mystique around the desirable male artist, others were drawn to LA by the promise of erotic encounters of a different kind. The cult of the body beautiful had long been part of the Californian dream, born of the promise of an active lifestyle that would promote fitness and health and the association of the Hollywood film industry with glamour and good looks.⁷ The bulging biceps of men working out at the famous open-air gym on Venice Beach were catching the eye of LA-born Bob Mizer, who founded the Athletic Model Guild in 1945 and began publishing the beefcake magazine Physique Pictorial in 1951.

It was these magazines that drew David Hockney to first visit LA in 1963. Critics at the time may have collectively ignored the subject matter of his paintings, prints and photographs,⁸ but Hockney himself did little to disguise what had brought him to the city: the image of ‘a sunny land of movie studios and beautiful semi-naked people’.⁹ This was an image of the city that his experience of the place did little to mitigate: ‘I came on an intuition’, he explained, ‘and it was correct. I came because I thought it would be very sexy’.¹⁰ Hockney used the images of Physique Pictorial as inspiration, infusing his works with a pervading sense of an erotically-charged gay lifestyle so effectively manufactured by these magazines.

The swimming pool looms large in Southern Californian iconography. The pool is the site for Jo Ann Callis’ Black sun series from 1976, which demonstrates her fascination with Surrealism as well as an interest in critically interrogating the female body as it was presented by popular culture. She manipulates the contrast of the sunbathing bodies in the darkroom, reducing the tonal range to blown-out highlights and bodies burnt, it seems, to cinders by the intensity of the light. Looking at these photographs, it is difficult not to recall Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey’s 1972 film Heat. Set in a seedy LA hotel, the film is about little else but the sex appeal that oozes from every pore of Joey Davis (played by Joe Dallesandro) as he lounges by the pool, ogled and lusted over by every woman he meets. Both scenarios track a cracking in the mythology of the perfect Californian dream, revealing the reality behind the fantasy: the women in the Black sun images are marooned in an alien, ugly non-scape of stained and cracked concrete. As Lydia, the hotel manager, says to Joey in Heat, ‘this LA is going to the dogs’.

Along similar lines, Baldessari has argued that ‘California’ might in fact be a state of mind’.¹¹ Perhaps more than other places, the mythological status of Southern California as the builder of dreams and the place where those dreams could be realised, a city reliant on the success of its spectacle, meant that the established beliefs of what LA represented, its ‘luxe et volupté’, had an irresistible effect on all that took place there.

In many ways Southern California was all surface and no substance. Art historian Barbara Rose noted that ‘the most striking aspect of Los Angeles art is its pervasive eroticism’ that grew out of ‘the charged, generalized sexuality of the ambience’ of the city.¹² A profound sensuality infuses the images made in the city during the mid-1970s by Australian photographer Christine Godden. Her luminous, beautifully crafted prints speak primarily to the imagination and are full of an almost startling intimacy. Godden’s delight is in the different textures and qualities of things: skin against sand, water against tiled surround, the soft against the hard, rendered within a rigorous formalism. As poet Robert Gray has noted, Godden ‘makes us more than ever aware, and hungry for tactility’.¹³

Esquire’s conclusion that in LA sexuality was practised as ‘a positive force toward greater intimacy and understanding’ in an atmosphere that was ‘free, open, guiltless’ is one that is found throughout the commentaries of the period. The notion of a lifestyle of sun, surf and days by the pool infiltrated cultural production at every level. Many artists of the period fell under its sway, responding by making work that is notable for its sensual focus on the body and a delight in the textural richness of the world around them. The west coast was hot in every sense. LA was the place to be. As writer Ray Bradbury prophesied in Esquire:

‘America will fall under the bare feet of the Los
Angeles non-belonger, patting the sand-shelves
of Malibu, a flag striping his proud surfboard.
And the flag is Love.’¹⁴

California Cool is on display at the National Gallery 6 Oct 2018 — 24 Feb 2019.