West by Midwest at the Museum of Contemporary Arts circles around two ironies. First, many of the artists we’ve come to associate with California came from the Midwest. Second, many of the artists we’ve come to associate with the Midwest spent formative time in California. We learn, for example, that the “Chicago Imagists” Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, and Karl Wirsum moved to Sacramento in 1968, where they exhibited together at Adeliza McHugh’s Candy Store Gallery, which began selling art when McHugh couldn’t secure a food permit. We also hear of how Californian titan Ed Ruscha and his childhood friend took Route 66 from their hometown of Oklahoma City to Los Angeles in 1956. West by Midwest is expansive in its scope, ranging from Senga Nengudi’s pantyhose sculptures to Andrea Bowers’s activist art to an entire room dedicated to Mike Kelley’s quasi-archeological stuffed animal installation Craft Morphology Flow Chart (1991).
Drawn in large part from the MCA’s collections, West by Midwest provides welcome respite from the blockbuster exhibitions that have become ever more common in the art world, as museums interpret each broken attendance record as a new challenge. The regional focus of West by Midwest has forced the MCA to move away from artists like John McCracken, whose impossibly smooth “finish fetish” planks are par for the course in showcases of mid-century Californian art. Nevertheless, the MCA continues to traffic in well-worn tropes, whether connecting Judy Chicago’s airbrush paintings to her time as an autobody student, or explaining Billy Al Bengston through surf and motorcycle culture. While these artists certainly had such experiences, their constant reference in discussions of Californian art reinforces stereotypes of the West Coast as the casual, anti-intellectual little brother of the serious, rarefied New York.
But if West by Midwest fails to breathe new life in Californian art history, this is only because it has a bigger goal in mind. As the introductory text puts it: “Western art history is often viewed as a neat succession of individual artists and their singular masterpieces. This narrative runs parallel to the American story of westward expansion, propelled by the idea of individualism and independence.” The radicality of West by Midwest lies in how it refuses this conventional paradigm; by foregrounding the network, curators Charlotte Ickes and Michael Darling trouble the very notion of artistic “genius” upon which the museum is predicated. If the discipline of Western art history has more or less progressed from one great white man to the next, a focus instead on the networks out of which these artists arise suggests the idea of genius itself might be more a reflection of our presuppositions than an accurate depiction of historical reality.
Perhaps the most interesting question raised by West by Midwest, however, is how the similar geographical origins of these artists affected how they approached California, a topic the exhibition doesn’t fully explore. Although the show explores movement in both directions between California and the Midwest, the lion’s share of attention is devoted to the artists who left their small towns for Los Angeles, fascinated by its colors and light, as well as its culture and politics, fixations that surface in their work. Consider, for example, the light play in Chicago-born Melanie Schiff’s Spit Rainbow (2006), complete with backyard orange tree.
To speculate on some Midwestern “essence” becomes dicey rather quickly, of course, but it’s unavoidable in West by Midwest. We tend to think of the Midwest as the wholesome core of America, its breadbasket, its cornfields. We could easily imagine that such a vision of the Midwest could stifle the artist, drawn to the coasts as surely as iron filings to a magnet. One can acclimate but never truly shrug off the past: a permanent outsider, the quintessential artist. But if these outsiders were true artistic geniuses, there would be no need for them to uproot, at least insofar as we think of geniuses as self-sufficient, self-contained, self-reliant. The fact that these artists nevertheless felt the need to be around their kind shows that more is going on, that talent lies dormant without conditions in which it can flourish.
February 2018