James Doolin Art and Artificiality: Southern California, Architecture California, 14. no. 2, November 1992, p. 9
"One wonders what was here to begin with and what has been done with it? I imagine how the scale would have seemed to the first Europeans on foot or horseback. Dry, scrubby, monotonous flatlands, with not even a tree to relieve the infinite horizontality, with no shelter, no protection-just space to cross as quickly as possible. No reason to settle in, unless, unlike the native peoples, one could deny the reality of the landscape by reconstructing a remembered one of controlling boundaries, gridded roads and temporary structures.
"The majority of Southern Californians still come from somewhere else. Before our first visits, most of us thought we already knew what it looked like here and how it would be. We had all seen fragments of the landscape rendered in a hundred Hollywood films and TV shows. Many of us, I suspect, came here partly because of what we saw. Many of us were unprepared for what we actually found when we arrived.
"As a landscape painter from the East Coast who arrived in Los Angeles twenty-five years ago, stunned, awed, and horrified, I find the landscape of Southern California at once spectacular and outrageous. Those early feelings must have stirred me because I remain, [p. 10] painting away, moved in one breath and cursing with the next. Like many young artists, I loved to paint what I hated. Being here suited my purposes well. "Art thrives in an extreme environment," I would assert when I had to explain why I was here. I still find this true, but not in the way I first thought.
[p. 10] I should have said, "Artificiality thrives in an extreme environment," because my overwhelming impression upon arriving here was that of endless artificiality on a scale not previously noted by my East Coast-conditioned mind.
In this sense, all urban areas are artificial. But Southern California is different. It is one thing to see a completely man-made settlement in the remote desert and another to see one that spreads out as far as the eye can see. Here the level of artificiality goes beyond the usual structures and roads, the water, power, and communications systems required by most cities. Consider a kind of artificiality that is not the accidental result of substitution or mechanical fabrication, but based in conscious simulation and deception. As an artist I know a lot about this subject.
The space is too vast, too horizontal. No wonder we have covered our urban areas with so many low rise, low value buildings-anything to fill the empty expanse of desert. No wonder the roaring freeways are our only real monuments-monuments to the all-important need for mobility in an area too huge to cross without them. No wonder there is no intelligent land-use plan beyond the basic gridded battle-ground of real-estate speculation. When space seems infinite, who would consider an overall plan that limits how much one can take for oneself. When space seems infinite, it seems to have its own vast power and self-contained realities that do not relate to any other place. One feels the need to artificially simulate some reassuring realities from other places or times. Back East, where I come from, people call such substitute realities phony, because in the mass media they function only as images and symbols. It is hard for them to understand their actual function here.
As a painter, I am not supposed to be a rational observer. People expect a more emotional reaction, and the extremes of this very artificial environ- [p. 11] ment provide a lot of emotional-and entertaining-content for my painting. But I find that my rational side is constantly questioning the basis of life as we live it here. The time that I have spent in the streets, the mountains, the deserts-making pictures by hand-has given me certain insights. It takes a lot of looking before one can see clearly. A good landscape painting is not jus an instant mechanical view, like a photograph. My paintings are formed in an almost organic unity, over a period of months, or even years, from eye, as well as brain, heart, and hand, one stroke at a time. The resulting pictures can surprise me with insights about the physical and social character of Southern California beyond what I would otherwise see. [p. 12]
[p. 12] I have made paintings of the most densely layered urban areas and also of the most desolate areas of Southern California desert. In the desert, the difference between natural and artificial is very clear. The abandoned mines, the tacky little shacks and trailers, the roads and bridges, power lines and aqueducts all stand out clearly in their isolation. They actually heighten the natural character of the landscape around them. This is the first level of artificiality that results from practical contrivance.
But in the urban areas, layer upon layer of artificiality covers every square foot of ground, wall, and background space. Greedy dreamers have transformed a boundless, dry, monotonous and lonely space into a land speculator's paradise, utilizing every artifice imaginable-from the most practical constructions to the most useless deceptions, all mixed together.
What confronts us is an immeasurable, three dimensional, larger-than-life assemblage of simulations, illusions, symbols, and images that stretches for miles in every direction. Most of these illusions and deceptions are more closely related to desires than to real lives-they are never real, never tangible.
After many years of observing and then laboring through the process of putting together many hundreds of pictures of this extraordinary landscape, I find that I no longer hate it. I find it to be immensely interesting as a rich source of exotic, paintable forms, full of ideas about our culture and our art. However I remind myself of a basic rule of art making: Do not be fooled by your own illusions. Never conceal from yourself what you are doing, or how and why you do it. Avoid being the fool in your own artificial hall of mirrors.
Does a parallel principle apply to the use of artificiality in the real world? Surely, it is one step to import water to create an artificial oasis, and another to pretend that the oasis is natural. The final step is to enlarge the scale so that there is nothing but oasis as far as one can see, cutting off all awareness of another reality.
"The cliche fool's paradise keeps coming to mind. The changes that have [p. 13] occurred since I arrived a quarter century ago are immense, mostly negative, and probably predictable. What has not changed is the endless cultivation of illusion to feed the continuing denial of where we are, who we are, and what we really need. Wrapped in this expansive, illusionistic, artificial landscape, we have become completely incapable of perceiving the failure of the economics we practice. We are surprised and angered by the symptoms: overcrowding, congestion, water shortages, sewer overloads, polluted air, unemployment, economic polarization, social injustice-and now, actual rioting and rebellion in the streets.
Do we have a plan for the future that can really address the causes? Of course not. But even if there was one, voters, caught up in the illusionism of the largest artificial environment in history, would vote it down. We're just diddling as Los Angeles burns.