Two Schools of Cool

Representing contemporary artists from the last half century, this unique exhibition catalog captures the spirit of a daring experiment to pair California icons with their new millennium comrades. In the 1960s and 1970s a group of aesthetic adventurers transformed L.A. from cultural desert to artistic oasis. These West Coast artists, poets, dancers, filmmakers, and photographers fomented a creative outburst that rivalled New York City's. Nearly four decades later, Southern California...
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Representing contemporary artists from the last half century, this unique exhibition catalog captures the spirit of a daring experiment to pair California icons with their new millennium comrades. In the 1960s and 1970s a group of aesthetic adventurers transformed L.A. from cultural desert to artistic oasis. These West Coast artists, poets, dancers, filmmakers, and photographers fomented a creative outburst that rivalled New York City's. Nearly four decades later, Southern California remains a fertile ground for some of the most exciting and daring art being made today. This fascinating book accompanying an exhibition of the same name explores the two "Schools of Cool" in collaborative, intergenerational pairings between John Baldessari and Shana Lutker; Llyn Foulkes and Stanya Kahn; George Herms and Sarah Cain; Ed Moses and Robert Williams; and Allen Ruppersberg and Amanda Ross-Ho. These pairs have worked together on new, collaborative installations that reveal and transcend the shifts that have taken place in the art world in the past half century--including the increasing prominence of female artists, distinct methodologies and artistic practices, and the use of new technologies. This catalogue features the five installations- including paintings and works on paper, sculptures and assemblages, audio-video and interactive installations--that are the result of these collaborations, as well as insightful interviews with the curator and with the artists, in which the artists offer thoughts on their own work, their collaborative process, and their projects for the exhibition. SARAH C. BANCROFT is Curator at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, California. She is an art historian of post-war American art and the author of Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series and The 2010 California Biennial (both DelMonico Books*Prestel) as well as James Rosenquist: A Retrospective and other publications. ILLUSTRATIONS: 60 colour illustrations