Quotes from Peter Plagens

LA needs the cleansing of a great disaster or founding of a barricaded commune.

Southern California sunsets, neon, flowers, ocean, desert landscapes, and wide boulevards sifted their ways into the subconsciousnesses (or consciousnesses) of L.A. artists.

If you believe in Modern Art History . . . it follows that the best breeding ground for good art is where competing ideas, esthetics, and artists are thickest and where regional niceties are thinnest — New York. . . . The 'regions'. . . . are short on white-hot overpopulation, edifice complexes, and career fights to the death. . . . Should it be gauged against the 'mainstream' . . . or should it be sized up from exactly the opposite point of view?

They seemed to dispense with the need to represent space in the interests of directly manifesting it.

Exhibitions were experiments.

The characteristics of the region as an art center — geographically remote, overly conscious of regional identity, and desiring not to be another commonsense Midwest or an appendage of New York or California culture — predisposed local artists to domination by the first individual personalities to manifest both independence and exoticism.

Assemblage is the first home-grown California modern art.

For once in California there was an integration of art with avant-garde literature and music.

An argument for the existence of a regionalist art that is fully capable of international acceptance, that is fully capable of operating outside the lineal leapfrog of Europe-to-New-York styles, and yet of adding to them.

Two currents of West Coast art . . . the 'dirties' and the 'cleans'.

The idea that one man's unique personal vision is greater than the importance of fashions in art or mainstream type philosophy.

Kauffman was the first Southern California artist ever to paint an original painting.

Bay Area bric-a-brac sensibility.

Early assemblages pointed up a maniacal (or horrifying) California appetite for conglomerates. Hard Edge arose out of Los Angeles's desert air, youthful cleanliness, spatial expanse, architectural tradition . . . and . . . optimism.

Elegance and simplicity . . . plastic, including polyester resin, which has several attractions: permanence (indoors), an aura of difficulty and technical expertise, and preciousness . . . rivaling bronze or marble. . . . in short, the aroma of Los Angeles in the sixties — newness, postcard sunset color, and intimations oif aerospace profundity.

Non-physicality grew from Los Angeles's geographic/architectural/cultural climate.

Easygoing, nonmilitant Pop, as at home in Southern California as was Impressionism on the banks of the Seine.

In such paces — the Vancouvers, San Diegos, Portlands, Seattles, and, yes, San Franciscos and Los Angeleses — can we hope for anything more than jazzed-up melding of New York styles or self-conscious lampoons that aspire to kift the curse of provincialism?