A Civic Fuck-You

As you drive north on the 110 through downtown LA, a spectacular photo-realistic mural of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (by Kent Twitchell) looks benignly down from the multi-storey side of a very-LA concrete parking structure. It’s every bit as striking and fresh as it was the first time I came to LA. The incongruence between the image and its brutal canvas has always struck me as slightly disturbing, yet at the same time a vision of hope — art dominating the artless.

Twitchell is an artist, so his work gets noticed — rather than just seen — but there are others who plough a furrow that’s not so very different whose work is so transparent as to be practically invisible. Coming eastward through Westwood on Wilshire, a hand-painted hundred-foot Jodie Foster is currently cross-eyed in panic at the prospect of Flightplan not doing very well (seriously, humungous film company, was that really the best image you could have chosen?). It might as well be a poster, but it isn’t. The verisimilitude was painstakingly painted directly onto the wall by a process that I’m very happy to be baffled by. Huge film ads dominate this city, of course, but there are also plenty of car ads, shampoo ads, and so on and so forth, all with the love of Twitchell’s murals, but with obsolescence built in. The layering pleases me: these are works of terrific skill, but no art, directly copying an artfully constructed promotional representation of yet another work, whose aim is occasionally artful, but more often the purest commerce.

Just as typical of LA are the bold but faded murals on the sides of freeway walls (an alien observer would find little difference between LA’s ‘river’ and its freeways). They’re more easily accessible to the defacement of graffiti and carbon monoxide and time than Jodie’s grimace, but they still shine here and there: children bounding playfully around the edge of the 101; marathon runners pounding purposefully along the 10. These have a civic weight to them.

So. Sitting on the Santa Monica bus this morning as it wound its beetle-ish way through the downtown grid, I had a vision of a collision between the proud civic murals of LA and the vast ephemera of the advertising murals, which would play out against the sides of the skyscrapers of financial dullness. The result might be a profound fuck-you civic statement, as drawing of the eye as the Eiffel Tower in Paris, but still pure Los Angeles. Think of that magic half-toning material that’s plastered across the sides of buses more these days, which presents the entire space for advertising imagery, yet doesn’t restrict the view from within. Now imagine it covering each side of a hundred-storey building. Now imagine it covering each building in a vast cityscape. And then let artists of Twitchell’s skill with the grand gesture free to paint. Like those radio-telescopes which are combined by software into a single hyper-telescope, imagery could move patchworkwise from building to building. It’d be unifying, and — that word which a SoCal twang renders somewhat comical — genuinely awesome.

No chance though, obviously. The biggest change to the downtown skyline during the past few years has been the addition of company logos to the glass totems, which draws them even further away from a civic unity.