Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Art on the Fault Lines

2011; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 39; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/rah.2011.0072

1080-6628

Brian Lloyd,

Latin American and Latino Studies

Art on the Fault Lines Brian Lloyd (bio) Sarah Schrank. Art and the City: Civic Imagination and Cultural Authority in Los Angeles. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. 216 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $39.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). Today in Los Angeles, torrential rains churned up the ground left bare by last season's wildfires, propelling rivers of mud in the direction of homes and highways. High surf pounded residences along the Pacific Coast Highway, rising water swamped cars on the 710 Freeway, and a tornado tossed boats around in an Orange County harbor. Local coverage featured grim citizens in rubber boots and parkas—the "good people of the world" in Sheryl Crow's song about daily life in L.A.—filling sandbags and cleaning up in a spirit of neighborly property maintenance. With these events as backdrop, I sat at my desk on the westside trying to figure out what I might say about a book devoted to battles over murals and statues in the public spaces of the city. I did not at that moment feel like one of the good people, but rather identified with the guy in the same song who, as the more industrious washed their cars during their lunch break, sat at a bar on Santa Monica Boulevard methodically shredding the labels that he peeled off of his empty beer bottles, leaving the whole mess for the bartender to clean up.1 Live disasters have a way of bringing out the traditionalist in those who study the past. As someone who lectures regularly on Bob Dylan and the Beatles and tells students that what goes on in the recording studio or on the stage can be "as important, historically speaking" as what goes on in the voting booth or on the battlefield, I still wonder, when the earth is shaking under me, whether this is really true. Do the internal wranglings within L.A.'s Municipal Art Commission or the whitewashing of a David Siqueiros mural on Olvera Street merit the sort of scrutiny that we expect from a scholar investigating the New Deal in California or Japanese-American internment? Should we worry that the meticulous attention scholars from two succeeding generations now have devoted to every aspect of culture—high and low, commercial and "counterhegemonic"—might have left unattended more important goings on in the realm of politics and society? Sarah Schrank's very fine book on art in Los Angeles gives comfort to those [End Page 360] who would answer "yes" and "no," respectively, to these two questions. In Art in the City, she proposes to unravel the "complicated relationship between art, public space, and cultural authority" in L.A. from the beginning of the twentieth century through the 1960s. This work is important, she tells us, for three reasons. First, one can see dramatized in the realm of the arts the "daunting social issues" (p. 2) that defined public life in the city and thus can get a fresh angle on how racism, poverty, anticommunism, and urban renewal were addressed in the nation's second largest city. Second, at stake in battles over art in L.A. was the power to visually and symbolically represent a city where the business of civic representation was taken very seriously. No American city invested more than L.A. in "controlling its public imagery"; successive struggles among various groups to exert control over public space and artistic content literally "shap[ed] the contours of urban culture" (p. 4). Third, and more narrowly, Schrank hopes to add to our understanding of "the lesser-known history of visual culture" (p. 3) in Los Angeles before protest artists like Judith Baca and Judy Chicago captured the imagination of the art world and of a sizable public audience in the 1970s. Where other scholars have praised the integrity with which the city's pop artists avoided aesthetic and commercial cliches, she presents a pop world during this period "perfectly poised for appropriation by elite art collectors and business interests" (p. 8). As she explores these three sets of issues, Schrank proves she can get around quite easily in L.A., navigating the snarled intersection of social conflict...