ARTH 251 Art in the City (Los Angeles)

Los Angeles in recent years has received international media attention as one of the world's new art centers. Schrank places this celebrated arrival in the richer context of art controversies and political contests over modern art and art spaces in the twentieth century.

Conceived as a challenge to long-standing conventional wisdom, Creating the Future is a work of social history/cultural criticism that examines the premise that the progress of art in Los Angeles ceased during the 1970s and didn't resume until sometime around 1984. However, this is far from the reality of the L.A. art scene in the 1970s. Fallon's narrative describes and celebrates, through twelve thematically arranged chapters, the wide range of intriguing artists and the world--not just the objects--they created. Coming into being right before their eyes was an ardent local feminist art movement, which had lasting influence on the direction of art across the nation; an emerging Chicano Art movement, spreading Chicano murals across Los Angeles and to other major cities; a new and more modern vision for the role and look of public art; a slow consolidation of local street sensibilities, car fetishism, gang and punk aesthetics into the earliest version of what would later become the "Lowbrow" art movement.

Through analysis of Ed Ruscha's visionary Streets of Los Angeles Archive, this volume provides new understandings of his artistic practice, the history of L.A., and the innovative role of technology in the archive. In 1966, Ed Ruscha drove a pickup truck rigged with a motorized camera to capture Los Angeles's most iconic street: Sunset Boulevard. Navigating the boulevard, he created a time capsule of its famed facades, beginning an almost sixty-year-long commitment to documenting the changing urban landscape of postwar Los Angeles. The Streets of Los Angeles Archive that comprises these photographs is likely the most comprehensive artistic record of any city, with over 740,000 images of major thoroughfares. The free online edition of this open-access publication is available at www.getty.edu/publications/ruscha/. Also available are free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book.