August 22/29, 2011 Double Issue, Featured Articles, Pacific Standard Time

It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles, 1969-1973

Tue, Aug 23, 2011

Hal Glicksman at Pomona from Pomona College on Vimeo.

From 1969 to 1973, a series of radical art projects took place at the far eastern edge of Los Angeles County at the Pomona College Museum of Art. Here, Hal Glicksman, a pioneering curator of Light and Space art, and Helene Winer, later the director of Artists Space and Metro Pictures in New York, curated landmark exhibitions by young local artists who bridged the gap between Conceptual art and postminimalism, and presaged the development of postmodernism in the later 1970s. Artists such as Michael Asher, Lewis Baltz, Jack Goldstein, and Allen Ruppersberg, among others, formed the educational backdrop for a generation of artists who spent their formative years at Pomona College, including alumni Mowry Baden, Chris Burden, and James Turrell.

“Part 1: Hal Glicksman at Pomona”, curated by Rebecca McGrew and Glenn Phillips, examines the period of ground-breaking artwork and intense intellectual ferment that commenced in the fall of 1969, when Mowry Baden, Pomona’s newly-arrived chair of the art department hired Hal Glicksman as gallery director and curator. Glicksman left a preparator’s position assisting legendary curator Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum. Today Glicksman jokes that Pomona hired him because he had a good toolbox and he knew how to put things together, but this project argues that Glicksman recognized a profound shift in artists’ approach to creating work, and the potential that this process held for transforming how art functioned in the museum.  

During the academic year of 1969-1970, Glicksman established one of the first museum residency programs—the Artist’s Gallery—in which artists used the museum gallery as a studio space to create unique environments directly in the museum. The exhibition brings together re-creations of the site-specific works shown at Pomona College during Glicksman’s tenure, along with artworks and documentation of other projects shown at the museum during this era. The highlights of this exhibition will be the creation of a new work by Michael Asher in response to his landmark 1970 installation at Pomona College, the re-creations of seminal installations by Lloyd Hamrol and Tom Eatherton, and formative works by Lewis Baltz, Judy Chicago, Ron Cooper, and Robert Irwin.  

Asher’s 1970 architectural intervention dramatically altered two of the museum’s adjacent galleries, transforming them into two triangular spaces joined by a narrow opening that severely restricted the flow of light into one space while keeping the other space open to the street outside, day and night. The modulations of light, air pressure, and sound within this work place it squarely in dialog with Light and Space art and other forms of phenomenology-based postminimalism. However, by preventing the museum from closing its doors, the work is also widely seen as a key work in the Conceptual Art practice known as institutional critique and one of the most important artworks produced in the United States during this period. For “Part 1: Hal Glicksman at Pomona” Asher presents a new work that distills concerns from his original piece into an altered contemporary discourse. Proposed to Pomona in 2009 and first presented at the 2010 Whitney Biennial, Asher’s new work will consist of having the Museum open twenty-four hours a day for ten weeks, the full exhibition run of “Part I: Hal Glicksman at Pomona.”  

The exhibition will also present the reconstruction of two dramatic large-scale installations originally presented at Pomona in 1969-70. Tom Eatherton’s 1970 Rise, recreated in full, is a room-sized, immersive installation that creates perceptual effects with each viewer as he or she walks through a glowing and seemingly indeterminate, Ganzfeld-like space. Lloyd Hamrol’s Situational Construction for Pomona also creates an immersive environment in which the viewer gazes through a window into a luminous, water-filled room that simulates an abstraction of a landscape at sunset. Similarly, Ron Cooper’s 1969 film Ball Drop documents in dramatic slow motion the shattering of a massive glass panel for Cooper’s 1969 Pomona installation, creating an abstraction of movement and allowing viewers to actually feel the movement of the image in their bodies.  

Today, the group of artists shown by Glicksman might not be seen as a cohesive group, but during the time their work was featured at Pomona College, all of these artists shared a phenomenological sensibility that overlapped with the concerns of the Light and Space work that emerged at the end of the 1960s in Southern California. In this sense, Robert Irwin’s untitled disc painting, on view throughout Glicksman’s tenure at Pomona, was a touchstone for Glicksman’s “Artists Gallery” series. The Irwin disc painting holds a central place in “Part 1: Hal Glicksman at Pomona,” which aims to place Irwin’s work within a much broader range of practices related to performance, sound, and other forms of sculpture that were focused on perception as a physical, bodily activity.  

In her seminal “Atmosphere” performances of the 1970s, for instance, Judy Chicago combined commercial fireworks and road flares in ephemeral “paintings” of colored smoke that hovered and dissipated in air currents. Chicago explained the work as a way to soften and feminize the environment, and she presented Atmospheres at sites such as Brookside Park in Pasadena, the Pasadena Art Museum, beaches in Trancas and Santa Barbara, and the desert around Joshua Tree. In 1970, Glicksman invited Chicago to create an Atmosphere for Pomona College. She launched Snow Atmosphere on February 22, 1970, with all white flares on Mount Baldy, a short drive from the Pomona College campus. “Part 1: Hal Glicksman at Pomona” will include large-scale, never-before-exhibited photographs documenting the Snow Atmosphere, and Chicago will be creating a new pyrotechnic performance, A Butterfly for Pomona, on January 21, 2012 as part of Pomona College’s presentation for the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival .   

Also on view will be a selection of Lewis Baltz’s Prototype Series photographs from the Pomona College Collection. Baltz arrived in Claremont in 1969 to attend Claremont Graduate University (then Claremont Graduate School) for an MFA. Glicksman quickly recognized his extraordinary abilities, and invited him to teach photography at Pomona College, where Baltz taught from 1970-1973. Glicksman followed that with an invitation to show his photographs in the Pomona College Museum of Art, the final exhibition of Glicksman’s tenure at Pomona, and Baltz’s first solo exhibition.

The Prototypes established Baltz’s characteristic approach: crisp, quiet, luminescent, black-and-white photographs of urban and suburban locales. Baltz’s photographs echoed the Minimalist aesthetic but transposed it into photographic and sub-industrial space, retaining traces of human influence. In the Prototypes, Baltz helped build an important bridge between divergent art practices; his photographs were among the first works to combine the Minimalist aesthetic with the vernacular landscape.

Premiering to the public on August 30, and in conjunction with the full exhibition It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969-1973, is 1969 Pomona alumnus Chris Burden’s newly fabricated 1967 untitled sculpture. On view for all three exhibitions, Burden’s six-foot cubic sculpture is located in the courtyard adjacent to the Pomona College Museum of Art. The simple but irregular yellow and black pattern covering the surface of this sculpture causes the structure to appear either as a cube or as a series of columns depending on the angle from which it is approached. Created during Burden’s undergraduate years at Pomona, this work will act as a conceptual preface to the project, and will provide productive juxtapositions with all three exhibitions.

Significantly, as Burden has attested, this piece had a seminal influence on his decision to expand his artistic practice into the realm of performance art. In part, this insight developed because of the manner in which the piece physically unfolds for viewers through their actual encounter with it. As such, the sculpture embodies many of the concerns of Minimalism and functions as an historical gateway for the concerns developed through the It Happened at Pomona project. The perceptual effect of this sculpture is very much in line with the sculptural installations shown at Pomona by Glicksman, and featured in “Part 1: Hal Glicksman at Pomona.”

These works all provide an important reconsideration of how the distinct concerns of Southern California artists in the late sixties were informing each other and moving toward other insights beyond those developed in the postminimalist discourses of the East Coast. Unlike the more formal explorations in New York Minimalism, in Southern California there was both an acute sense of the ethereal appeal of affect to the body, and a focus on phenomenologically-oriented sculptures, installations, and performances that were fueling Los Angeles artists’ investigations of postminimalist concerns. This project will build on the insights suggested in “Part 1: Hal Glicksman at Pomona” to demonstrate in “Part 2: Helene Winer at Pomona” (opening December 3, 2011) how these concerns specifically intersect with and develop differently in the post-Conceptual work of a second group of Southern California artists working in the early seventies.

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