Judy Chicago, "Car Hood," Sprayed acrylic lacquer on Corvair car hood. 42 15/16 x 49 3/16 x 4 5/16 in. Moderna Museet, Stockholm. © Judy Chicago. Photo: Donald Woodman

Pacific Standard Time, a nearly year-long paean to SoCal art history, has barely begun and, already, I’m experiencing PST fatigue. Funded by the Getty Institute and the result of at least a decade’s worth of scholarship by the Getty researchers and others, PST will include 60 or so exhibitions and more artists than you can count, all of whom were working between 1945-1980. Over 60 institutions are “partnering” with the Getty, which means SoCal galleries and museums will be ablaze in the glory of their own history for much of the foreseeable future. Shows have titles like Greetings from L.A.: Artists and Publics 1950–1980 or Best Kept Secret: UC Irvine and the Development of Contemporary Art, 1964-1971, mouthfuls that would be at home on textbook covers. The draw of the PST initiative is, of course, that some of the work on display will have barely been seen since it was made, and uncovering overlooked gems makes a canonized period of L.A. history feel open and alive again. However, even this draw exacerbates the fatigue. Obscure, surprising gems from the 1950, ‘60s or ‘70s will undoubtedly send you reeling back through history; you’ll want to learn more about the work’s making and reconsider its makers. And how will you ever get through 60-plus exhibitions that way?

One particular work that’s not obscure per se – it’s been reproduced in biographies and other SoCal histories –sent me back through archives and biographies. It’s Judy Chicago’s Car Hood, made in 1964 and scheduled to be on view at the Getty Center. You wouldn’t necessarily recognize it as hers at first. It acrylic lacquer on the hood of an actual Chevy and it looks more like something Billy Al Bengston or Craig Kauffman might have come up with: minimal, flat, metal, bold. But upon closer look, the feminist matron’s characteristically bodily—yes, vaginal—imagery presents itself in the form of a red and pink curve that drips downward. It’s car culture meets mother earth, and it’s also festive, far more folksy than anything Bengston might have done during that period.

Judy Chicago, "The Dinner Party," 1979. Installation.

Chicago, who still went by “Judy Gerowitz” at that point (she was “the first of several women to adopt pseudo-geographical surnames as Feminist gestures,” quipped critic Peter Plagens), made Car Hood around the time she participated in a show of hard-edge abstraction at L.A.’s Rolf Nelson gallery. Earlier the same year, she had enrolled in auto-body school. According to biographer Gail Levin, who also notes the car-painting instructor drove a lavender and candy-apple colored convertible, Chicago was the only women out of 250 students. She learned the craft, though, and after 8 weeks she could manipulate lacquer and spray paint on metal, which meant she too could achieve that “finish fetish” aesthetic the boys in SoCal were becoming known for. Her dabble into this traditionally male world would, seemingly came to an abrupt end when she moved to Fresno in 1970 to start the first Feminist Art Program, dropping all the masculine pretenses she’d adopted to get ahead in the ‘60s art world. After spearheading a number of other feminist ventures — most notably Womanhouse, the month long women-only, live-in  performance piece, and the Woman’s Building, an abandoned art school in downtown L.A. turned into space for women artists — she would begin The Dinner Party, the work for which she’s still most famous.

The team of assistants behind Judy Chicago's "The Dinner Party"

Never before had I considered the slick, overly perfect glazed plates from The Dinner Party an offshoot of car culture. That they might be makes them even more compelling. A massive installation comprised of a triangular dinner table set for an entourage of female ground-breakers all downplayed by history’s canon, The Dinner Party has an explicit theatricality. Each plate is clearly inspired by female anatomy, and this can be overwhelming, even hard-hitting. But see it in light of the unapologetic kitsch of California custom cars and the absurd obsessiveness of the fetish finish aesthetic, and suddenly Chicago’s feminist opus becomes sunnier, a masterful mash-up that’s formal flair should celebrated as much as its message. Screw the institution; women can have fun too, it suggests. After all, the piece is supposed to be a party.

Irving Penn, "Bricklayer," 1950

Irving Penn’s Still Life with Triangle and Red Eraser (1985) currently hangs in a small maroon room in the basement of the Getty Museum’s West Pavilion. It’s part of the In Focus: Still Life exhibition, a charming but uneventful “best of” survey of the Getty’s images of objects. The print is a recent acquisition, and one of which the Getty is proud. As aloofly controlled as any of Penn’s projects, it shows a draftsman’s instruments: a triangle, pencil, ruler, two erasers, and pigment. Penn made Still Life with Triangle as an advertisement for Fugi camera lenses, using new technology to fetishize tried and true symbols of a more archaic craft. Crisp, exquisitely angular, and sleekly finished, the image feels as though it has locked its elements in place, in an unmoving state of geometric perfection.

Thirty-five years earlier, Penn explored tools and trade in an equally composed but far less finished way. His Small Trades series, the subject of a 2009 Getty exhibition, showed various specialized workers wearing the uniforms and carrying the instruments of their vocation. Penn, a modernist to the core, treated these workers like nearly extinct curiosities that he was immortalizing while the chance remained. In the notes he took during Small Trades, he occasionally sounds like he’s working hard to suspend disbelief. The word “apparently” appears often: “The CARVER is a kind of young waiter apparently” or “the BONER is apparently a man in the large markets who hacks away at full carcasses.”

The tools are the series’ most striking aspect. The people make sense, and look basically familiar; while draymen and trouncers may not exist anymore, rough-faced workers in worn aprons certainly do. But the objects they carry seem like relics of long-gone rituals—antiquated horse whips, narrow saws, hoses, tapered ladders. Years later, talking to Getty curators, Penn described the Small Trades photographs as “residual images of enchantment,” making what was functional just fifty years ago sound mystical.

Erika Vogt, "Armors for Chorus and Players", sticks: celastic, acrylic latex, oil enamel, and tempera on wood, objects: military trench shovel, scale part, hooks, chimes, weights, celastic, and acrylic latex, dimensions variable, installation view, 2010. Courtesy Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles, CA.

I thought of Penn’s tools when I saw Erika Vogt’s installation at Overduin and Kite two weeks ago. Vogt makes functionality mystical too. Called Geometric Persecution, a title that hovers between severity and romance, the installation is quiet and open, but also rigorously controlled. Colored, rectangular rods that resemble yard sticks lean against the wall of the first exhibition space. Chimes, picks, weights, and hooks lay intentionally scattered on the floor nearby. These, like the sticks, have stiff celastic handles protruding from them.

Erica Vogt, "Geometric Persecution", 16mm film and digital video on digital video painted screen, oil enamel, wooden stand and acrylic latex 15 min, color, sound, installation view, 2010. Courtesy Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles, CA.

The tools are props in the exhibition’s centerpiece, a video also called “Geometric Persecution.” Projected onto a gray “screen,” a square within a square that Vogt has painted onto the otherwise white wall,  the video shows a wanderer moving through various familiar but abstracted landscapes–green bluffs near water, fields, dirt roads. She occasionally walks backwards, or is projected upside down, and the colored yard sticks, picks, and chimes fleetingly appear, as does a compass and other geometric instruments that would be as familiar in the Renaissance as today. The objects become part of the wanderer’s almost spiritual movement, relics of what could be cultist rituals.

Visitors are welcome to handle the tools in Vogt’s show, though I didn’t realize this until the second time I visited, after I’d read Aram Moshayedi’s ArtForum pick. They looked so carefully placed; moving them hadn’t occurred to me. When I returned, I did pick up a stick and chime, but only quickly, and, since I had been told they would be returned to their original location the next morning anyway, I was careful to put them back more or less where I’d found them. Like Penn’s Still Life with Triangle, there’s a certain completeness to Vogt’s show, as if the tools have already lived the life they were meant to live, and have now reached the end of their narrative, settling into carefully scripted, honorary resting places. Disturbing them felt uncomfortable.

The Pretenders, 2008

Chrissie Hynde met her soul mate at a party hosted by Damien Hirst’s wife. Hynde, not a party person, had gone with a girlfriend out of a sense of obligation. When she realized she’d dropped in on a Congolese Art themed festival, replete with a Congolese barbecue, she headed straight to the bar. “Anyone who knows me knows exactly what I would think about that,” Hynde said in a recent interview. She proceeded to get “wrecked” and while getting wrecked met JP Jones, a young Welsh musician who would become her band mate and muse. “It was some sort of wanky arty party,” Jones later said when asked where he first encountered Hynde.

While Hynde’s anti-diva diplomacy has always attracted me, I certainly don’t know her. Nor do I know much about The Pretenders—beyond the opening verses to Private Life and rumors of members’ drug induced downfalls. But I can imagine why someone like Hynde might resent a Congolese Art party, especially one hosted by a few wealthy Brits and frequented by a hand-picked assortment of artists and intellectuals.

Circle of Charles Marville (French, 1816-ca.1879), Women of Algiers, 1858, Salted-paper print, Ken and Jenny Jacobson orientalist photography collection, The Getty Research Institute

I spent yesterday, Thursday, May 6^th, at The Getty Museum, attending a different sort of art party, one at which the option of getting wrecked did not present itself. But opportunities to over-indulge in freshly brewed coffee and gaze out at sunny green vistas more than sufficed. Called Zoom Out: The Making and Unmaking of the “Orient” Through Photography, this party had a guest list of people who read Edward Said and write papers with titles like The Prosthetic Eye: Photography as Cure and Poison. This sort of guest has symmetrically styled hair (even the man with Einstein-worthy, sandy-colored tufts made an effort to balance his mop), sports silk scarves and wears tastefully unobtrusive eyeglasses. As my companion, a hip, inquisitive specialist in Vietnam War era photography, assured me, art historians are the best looking academics around—far superior to, say, those working in Early Modern Studies.

“The sight of a Greek head depresses most people, strikes an un-liberated chord, reminds them of books in their grandmother’s parlor and of all they were supposed to learn and never did,” wrote Joan Didion in The White Album, published soon after The Getty opened to the public. “This note of ‘learning’ pervades the entire Getty collection.”  It pervaded yesterday’s panels and talks too. The talks, which continue today, focused on two photographic archives from The Getty Collection: The Ken and Jenny Jacobson Orientalist Photography Collection and the Pierre de Gigord Collection. But if the sight of sightly blurred, romantically composed photos from the 19th Century Middle East and North Africa depressed anyone there, they hid it well.

Pierre de Gigord Collection, The Getty Research Institute

What seems reprehensible about a Congolese Art party is that it uses limited knowledge of another culture as the premise for fun, possibly mindless fun. Academic conferences about how images taken in the Orient changed the course of photography’s history also take limited knowledge of another culture as the premise. But the overarching goal is not fun and what does take place is rarely mindless, even if you genuinely enjoy probing the politics of representation–and, of course, most art historians do.

Nancy Micklewright, The Getty Foundation’s Senior Program Officer and yesterday’s closing speaker, showed a series of photographs from the Gigord Collection, probably taken by a box camera. A group of Turkish women and one man act out different stereotypes. In one image, they play Harem; in another, they play aristocratic family; in yet another, they play tea party. In all, they’ve donned genre-specific costumes and masked the identity of their surroundings, though a painting above the fire place gives them away.  They’re having their own art party, maybe even their own mindless fun, while half-knowingly, half-unknowingly probing the strange ways in which the photograph has turned their culture into myth.