L.A.’s Working Face Exhibits Grit and Unexpected Beauty

The Getty Center presents its first exhibition devoted to photographs of L.A. by contemporary local artists. “Port and Corridor: Working Sites in Los Angeles” shows differing views of the subject by Robbert Flick and Allan Sekula. On view in the little gallery of the Getty Research Institute, the show is as puzzling as it is compelling.

The sort of visitor who peruses art before reading labels will probably find Flick’s pictures gentle, distant and ruminative. His subject is the “Corridor” part of the title--Alameda Street, all of it. The road runs 30 miles from the east side of downtown Los Angeles to the harbor. For decades it’s served truckers as the central industrial surface route.

Flick depicts it with an unusual if not wholly unprecedented format. There are four works totaling eight panels, each roughly 4 by 3 feet. Each shows a segment of what appears to be a mini-mosaic of the corridor, as if it were on movie film standing still.

For one five-panel work, Flick photographed Alameda Street with a digital video camera mounted on a moving auto. The video is also on view, postcard-sized, broadcast from a CD-ROM disc. The still composites, edited from the video, aren’t frame by frame but close. Each panel has 400 images, adding up to 2,000 total and a heckuva lotta work.

Flick’s format is sufficiently unusual to cause some confusion about his expressive intent. The closest prototype I can think of is Ed Ruscha’s 1966 fold-out book “Every Building on the Sunset Strip.” Similarly constructed, Ruscha’s work was clearly a malevolently funny attempt to de-mythify the strip’s then-glamorous nighttime image in comparison to tacky daylight reality in boring black and white.

If Flick is up to anything similar, his use of color suggests a more tolerant reading. As we cruise down Alameda, there are encounters with amusing dinosaur big-rigs festooned with chrome, glimpses of picturesque railway tank cars, lovable old brick warehouses and comfortably run-down residential districts. The weather changes from L.A. bland to a nice cloudy rainstorm and winds up suggesting the bracing brackish odor of salt water. Flick’s working aesthetic bespeaks benign neutrality.

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Sekula’s images are larger and more emotive. Compositions use conventional single frames, sometimes combined into diptychs and triptychs. He concentrates on the working heart of San Pedro harbor with its huge red cranes and workers in blue hard hats. A wall label suggests his own stylistic definition of his work as combining Minimalism and Pop. It leaves out the self-evident, if slightly muffled, romanticism Sekula brings to his art.

Individual portraits like “Mason Davis, welder and shipbuilders’ union shop steward on the Teal/Pier 300 project” give the subject heroic scale heightened by saturated hues. At the same time, Sekula insists that global economics have drained the sea-going life of the scruffy glamour it once possessed, a culture for free spirits.

As I understand the artist’s writing, he fingers huge cargo containers, massive ships and robotic cranes as the technological villains that speed transportation, dehumanize work and destroy jobs. Yet his “Container cranes welded and braced aboard the Teal” seems more reverently awed than disgusted.

A container ship christened the Columbus Canada is shown at anchor off Long Beach Harbor. A caption explains that it’s there because local union dockworkers blockaded its unloading in support of their Australian counterparts. The photograph, however, is ravishingly beautiful. It doesn’t illustrate the text.

The Getty Research Institute’s Moira Kenney acted as exhibition curator. Her catalog essay brings together the Flick and Sekula photos under an umbrella theme. Her writing emphasizes pictorial content that bears on the deindustrialization of the Alameda strip and its resulting physical and economic blight. Given her background as an urban planner, that makes perfectly good sense.

Although elements of the project don’t seem to gel as intended, the exhibition is not a bust. A certain philosophical balance is drawn between the natural beauty captured by the pictures and the worried prospect presented by the text.

We find ourselves involved in globe-girdling problems. Is their ambiguity beyond the capacity of clear artistic expression? Is the vision that made Timothy O’Sullivan’s Civil War images so trenchant or Dorothea Lange’s Depression-era pictures so moving inappropriate in an epoch when the individual is ever more diminished?

* “Port and Corridor: Working Sites in Los Angeles,” Getty Center, Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1200 Getty Center Drive; through Oct. 18. Parking reservations: (310) 440-7300. Closed Mondays.