L.A. STORIES: A ROUNDTABLE

To better survey the manifold sites of postwar art in Los Angeles, Artforum invited art historians THOMAS CROW and ANDREW PERCHUK, curators MAURICE TUCHMAN and ALI SUBOTNICK, and gallerist HELENE WINER to join in conversation with artists JOHN BALDESSARI, HARRY GAMBOA JR., and LIZ LARNER—a group whose experiences span five decades and some of the most vibrant, vital scenes in the city. Critic and scholar RICHARD MEYER and Artforum editor MICHELLE KUO moderate.

Michelle Kuo: We all know the myth: “The Cool School,” coined by Philip Leider himself in these pages [Summer 1964]. Leider was speaking of a “new distance,” a remove, which he saw manifested in the adamantine surfaces of the work of the Ferus Gallery artists and which came to stand for LA culture as a whole. But how might we attend to art in LA now, without reducing it to the same clichés about regional or even outsider production that persist, rather astonishingly, in many exhibitions, in much of the literature, and certainly in the market?

How might we attend to the relationship—if any—between

print April 1966

A Decade of Edward Kienholz

EDWARD KIENHOLZ WAS BORN IN 1927 in Fairfield, Washington, near the Washington-Idaho border. The son of a farming family, Kienholz was expected to become a rancher and was diligently taught the skills of carpentry and plumbing, basic mechanics and engineering. In grade and high school in Fairfield, he was active in the choir, played French horn in the band and won letters in baseball, basketball and football. He attended Eastern Washington College of Education, left after a semester and a half to study for varying but brief periods at a half-dozen colleges in the West. To support himself he