Pacific Standard Time

I have spent the last few days wishing I was in L.A.... now, or anytime in the next month or two, to catch even a small part of the huge project that is Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945 – 1980.

Pacific Standard Time was jointly initiated by the Getty Foundation and the Getty Research Institute in 2002, and includes exhibitions, performances, screenings and events over 60 institutions in the region. The project 'brings to light the dynamic history of art in Los Angeles from the post-World War II era through the turbulent 1960s and 1970s' and includes exhibitions on perfomance art, experimental film and video, photography, architecture, the Chicano movement, New Black Cinema, queer art and cultre, Mexican modernism and much more.

One of our artists, Fiona Connor, is among a group of CalArts students whose respective research forms the basis of an exhibition, The Experimental Impulse, at REDCAT, L.A. The show explores the historic role of experimentation in artmaking in L.A. from the perspective of artists who currently live and work in the city.

The PST website is great, and you can find all sorts of material online including this video, my favorite, of Ice Cube doing a tour of the Eames house.

image: Lewis Baltz, West Wall, Semicoa, 333 McCormick, Costa Mesa, 1974 (from The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California).