subject: Pacific Standard Time It Happened At Pomona By Hunter Drohojowska-philp [print this page] Pomona is only a small town at the eastern edge of Los Angeles County, yet the contemporary art exhibited at the Pomona College Museum of Art between 1969 and 1973 was as radical as any in the country. This magical confluence of minor institutional oversight and major curatorial ambition is being revisited in a three-part exhibition, It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969-1973. Part one is on view through Nov. 6, 2011. Funded by the Getty Foundation initiative Pacific Standard Time, the exhibitions were organized by Pomona gallery curator Rebecca McGrew with Getty curator Glenn Phillips.
The chronicle begins with sculptor Mowry Baden, the art department chair, offering the position of gallery director to Hal Glicksman, who had worked with Walter Hopps and John Coplans as preparator at the Pasadena Art Museum. Having collaborated with everyone from Marcel Duchamp to Robert Irwin, Glicksman was emboldened to establish an artists gallery, and to let the creative types use the space as they chose. It was a time of great experimentation in materials and concepts, in L.A. as elsewhere, and the show documents some of what occurred during his brief one-year tenure.
Glicksman had no formal selection process. Artists came to him with ideas and he facilitated them. The resulting artworks often lived on only as documentation, at least until now. For this exhibition, Glicksman helped the curators and artists recreate pieces such as Lloyd Hamrols Situational Construction (1969): balloons inflated with helium cover the ceiling of a red room, while the floor is flooded with still, black water that reflects the round balloon shapes, like clouds hanging over the sea at sunset. Hanging rods of wire look vaguely like falling rain. This enticing scene is only visible through a small window, which distances yet intensifies the impression.
These were peak years for artists experimenting with the very nature of perception. The show includes a sensitively installed white aluminum disc by Robert Irwin, but the exhibitions big wow is a little known installation by Tom Eatherton called Rise (1970). I walked into a room where a pair of long concave walls emanated an otherworldly pale-blue light, which had a rather soothing effect. Considered a ganzfeld of sorts, the longer I stayed, the more disorienting the sensation, until I felt as though Id been beamed up into a UFO.
Chris Burden was a student at Pomona in 1967 when he built a tool-shed-sized yellow cube with tall black recesses in the center of each side. The metal recreation stands on the lawn in front of the gallery, and the grass is worn away where people have stood within those recessed areas. I did the same thing. The sculpture invites this sort of participation and now seems a harbinger of Burdens future in performance art.
Ron Cooper was influenced by Robert Smithson, who attended Coopers Ball Drop (1969), a performance in which a wrecking ball smashed a series of glass windshields. Coopers mesmerizing slow-motion film of the event is shown along with some cracked automotive glass relics. Lewis Baltzs black-and-white photographs, Prototypes, of suburban tract houses, and documentation of Judy Chicagos Atmospheres, colored flares of smoke set off in the rugged terrain of nearby Mount Baldy, are also in the show.
