Lawrence Weschler Vermeer in Bosnia, Pantheon Books: NY, 2004. (The chapter The Light of L.A. appeared as L.A. Glows in the 23 February 1998 The New Yorker.) 1992
The Light of L.A.
"But light is over!" Paul Schimmel, the chief curator at MOCA . . . "There hasn't been light in this city for more than ten years now." [He organized Helter Skelter, a show] . . . to prove precisely that in 1992. On first arriving in L.A., in 1981, Schimmel had half expected to encounter some third- or fourth-generation version of the Light and Space orthodoxies that had come to be so closely identified with the L.A. art scene during the sixties and the early seventies-through the hegemony of masters ranging from Robert Irwin to Richard Diebenkorn. Instead, he found a younger generation of artists-exemplified by the likes of Mike Kelley and Nancy Rubins-who seemed to have rejected the light aesthetic entirely, opting instead for a decidedly darker, seedier, more grimly unsettling and dystopian view of the L.A. reality. "Partly," Schimmel speculated, "this was because by the late seventies and early eighties light in L.A. had been so academicized that it had really become little more than a commercial cliché. There was nowhere else to go with it. In part, too, long before a lot of other people, these artists were onto some of the bleak social transformations that were eroding the city itself. Helter Skelter closed on a Sunday, and the worst riots in the city's history erupted the following Wednesday."
"Of course, in its very title, the Helter Skelter show acknowledged the fact that its countervision of the L.A. reality was itself rooted in a long countertradition -one that wended back from the Manson murders into the noir world of the great crime novelists and filmmakers of the thirties and forties. It's interesting how those noir novelists and filmmakers almost completely inoculated themselves against the blandishments of the light of L.A., in part by setting most of their scenes either at night or indoors-in fact, usually both . . . "