WE CAN break down the artists and themes in ART NOW: Vol: 2 into various structural compartments, which allow us to see more clearly certain achievements, or concerns of a contemporary medium, or geographic location. One of these compartments concerns artists working in California. There are seven artists in the book living and working there, five of whom work directly in Los Angeles, the other two in Altadena and Hermosa Beach. Yet there are other locations and cities inhabited my much more artists listed in Art Now: Vol: 2.
So, why isolate California for special focus? Because a certain high quality of exciting contemporary art, whether painting, sculpture/assemblage, graphics, video, film, etc, has long emerged from there, and one of its cardinal virtues has been simplicity, but a highly contemplative and compressed simplicity, with benevolent  lessons for the practical enjoyment of life.
The works of these seven artists: Doug Aitken, Mark Grotjahn, Mike Kelley, Won Ju Lim, Paul McCarthy, Jorge Pardo, and Raymond Pettibon carry on a tradition of Californian, or West Coast, tropical aesthetics that is an asset to our human quest for understanding and appreciation of the gift of life.
It is difficult to pin down exactly what is so special about the Californian experience of tropicality, apart from its prized high temperatures, sunlight, beaches, verdancy, agricultural products, organic foodstuff, light fashions, etc.
However, these qualities can be the jump-off point, the springboard and inspiration for a highly creative or productive, innovative, and socially optimistic lifestyle of daily celebration.

Californian culture
Californian culture has shown itself to be a consistently conscious pursuer of such important ideals. This example is also interesting, even vital, for others to tap into, especially those tropical nations with a similar tropical gift of seacoasts, high temperatures, sunlight, verdancy, agricultural fertility etc, which they may, nevertheless, squander by a proliferation of negative stagnant lifestyles, fuelled by unprogressive political and racial conflicts, squabbling over power positions, petty rumour-mongering, uneducated opinions, chronic crime and violence.
California has, for a century at least, shown a valuable and exemplary role in how the arts can improve our lives. These seven contemporary artists from California we will look at find ways to continue that tradition.
What is this Californian tradition, anyway? There seems to have long developed among the overall guides of the various arts in California, an awareness of the region’s integration of art with social practicality and productivity, but of a vivacious educational nature. This goes all the way back to the two major Native Indian tribes of the California coast and valleys, which the Spanish conquistadors first encountered in the mid-16th Century: The Chumash and the Pomo.
The Chumash, a salmon-fishing tribe practically living on a paradisiacal coast of pristine surf on placid beaches below verdant cliffs, were the makers of stunningly designed utilitarian products and quite original canoes made from planks of regional wood held together with tar, which was an unknown substance that bubbled up from the ground back in the early AD centuries of the tribe’s residence.
The Spanish thought the smooth, round Chumash houses made of dry grass looked like oranges cut in half. The Pomo also assembled planks in a circle tied at the top to make conical houses, and their women were known for their powers of concentration, patience, and physical strength.
These tribes were precursors of a later highly inventive, experimental, and exploratory modern Californian culture. That culture is exemplified by the early 20th Century birth of the amazing Hollywood film industry in the hills overlooking the coast, the emergence of some of the best vivacious American novelists like John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, Raymond Chandler, Steve Fisher, Charles Bukowski, Joan Didion and Steve Martin; and equally outstanding beatnik poets, including the unique Afro-American one, Bob Kaufman, re-enforced today by the cool wit of recent Californian poets like Diane Wakoski, Charles Bukowski, Robert Hass, Kay Ryan, Craig Arnold, Krista Benjamin, John Koethe, Ann Gerstler, and Dorianne Laux.
Coolness and wit, yet a serious cultivation of hedonistic contemplative spirituality, linked to uninhibited sexuality, spontaneous creativity, and a relaxed sensitivity. What better voice of such Californian traits exists than in the profoundly expressive, richly textured Jazz that emerged from Gerry Mulligan and the Birth of the Cool, involving Miles Davis and Charlie Parker in a mood that stressed serenity and tropical languidness.
Davis would use this Californian lesson to flavour some of his greatest later compositions, beginning with ‘In a Silent Way’, based on tropical moods and vibrations from Africa and South America.
To this stock we must add Chet Baker’s cool trumpet and voice, the exceptional Charles Lloyd Quartet, perhaps the best sustained exploration of a wide-angled tropicality explored by this master of the tenor sax and flute, and whose unforgettable albums, ‘Love In’ and ‘Forest Flower’ are classic staples for any truly experienced Jazz lover.
John Handy joins Lloyd as an incomparable master of swinging tropical passion via the alto sax, expressing the captured nuance and flowing vivacity of the Californian identity. To these jazzmen, we can add the exciting and infectious romantic rhythms of guitarist and vocalist, George Benson, and top-quality Pop bands like Steely Dan and Toto.
If we pay attention to just this collection of Californian creativity, an awareness of its benign potency by Californians en masse is sufficient to influence a better approach and vision of life in that American State alone, not to mention life in other parts of the USA, and the world at large, that is open to knowing and appreciating such cultural achievement.
So far, we seem to have strayed from the topic of the seven Californian visual artists in question. But here we come to the specific West Coast visual arts tradition which precedes them.
The originality and universal worth of this tradition can be traced to an atmospheric experience of tropical light, spatial geography, primitive sensuality, and the widespread influence of Zen Buddhism and Taoism among the Californian intelligentsia, who tap into the best-selling texts of a West Coast Zen advocate like Alan Watts, especially his early popular book, ‘This Is It’. Also David Suzuki and others, including the wealth of critical texts on literature, linguistics, philosophy, aesthetics, film and art, put out by the University of California  Press at Berkeley, or Stanford University, some of the best universities of contemporary creative studies in the world today.

Pace and style
It is from such an educational background that the three towering internationally renowned Californian abstract painters emerged: Clifford Still, Sam Francis, and Richard Diebenkorn. These are the painters who set the pace and style of spiritually uplifting and liberating lightheartedness. Also a difficult simplicity that does not conform to what the ‘art market’ decides is ‘in’, but stands up for itself with what West Coast jazz and beatnik slang calls the ‘far-out’ and ‘hip’.
Other West Coast visual artists like Bruce Conner and Robert Hudson, whose assemblages opened the door to totally surprising painted hardedge Pop sculpture, far more imaginative and thought provoking than Wahrol’s serial technique reproductions, provided the vital stimulus for a liberating Californian aesthetic that Jonathan Fineberg in his book, ‘Art Since 1940’, in describing Conner’s shocking style, wrote: “The intuitive process of making the object takes precedence over any preconception of a final product.”

McCarthy et al
Nevertheless, a contemporary Californian artist like 65-year-old Paul McCarthy quite deliberately makes grotesque parodies of humans with huge heads (space aliens?), exaggerated features and bloody wounds, as in horror movies.
Often, these figurative sculptures, or prints of them, are based on well known cartoon or celebrity figures, since California is the location of a capitalistic entertainment industry which has influenced obsessions via magazines and TV programmes on celebrity lifestyles.
McCarthy shows us absurd examples of our debased and confused identification with unreal, fantasy values. His is an art of physical presence, but mental subtraction from it. We see what we do not like or want to be. This throws us back on the original Californian dream of a life of sunny paradisiacal pleasures, organic farming,  beach life etc. In short, an ecstatic culture rather than one of violent youth gangs, drug addiction, sexual perversity, etc.
In fact, the exceptional drive of West Coast culture towards pleasure and contemplative ‘coolness’ is quite paradoxically stimulated by its existence on an earthquake fault of daily small tremors, and extensive industrial pollution.
In an artistic statement, McCarthy is quoted as saying: “It is my belief that our culture has lost a true perception of existence. For the most part we do not know we are alive.” His shocking negative ‘black humour’ and theatrics chase us back to being our better selves.
Fifty-six-year-old Mike Kelley is a similar artist. First inspired by California’s famous underground comic-book art, he now combines drawing, painting, sculpture, music, videos, and book publishing. Unlike McCarthy, Kelley’s interest is where a desire to act out second-hand behaviour consumed from popular ‘bad-taste’ culture, especially by youths, leads to cults glorifying symbolic emblems for fascistic group identification, supported by songs, fashion etc.
In one of Kelley’s brilliant art installations representing such ‘aping’ behaviour, a male figure covered in and surrounded by industrial rubbish like broken wares, plastic container covers, bottle caps etc, stands facing his alter ego, a huge multi-coloured ape, like King Kong, projected on a large TV screen.
53-year-old Raymond Pettibon is a master of the graphic image, but a loose, intuitively soft-edged one, reminiscent of certain old 1940s and 50s comic-books; his light flashing touch with the ink-wash and watercolour brush makes him an epitome of the original Californian aesthetic of cool detachment, though fiercely anti-war and anti-racial and religious dogmatisms.
His expressive off-hand fluid graphic style and visual wit blends with quotations from great individualistic writers like James Joyce or Mickey Spillane. Pettibon rose from doing flyers and covers for rock and punk bands to some of the best black-and-white and coloured graphics now exhibited on gallery walls internationally.
Obviously, the West Coast is a haven for out-of-state and foreign-born artists who want to contribute to a pleasure-oriented society or place in which a relaxed lifestyle is reinforced by a specific ideal direction shared by fiction, poetry, film, architecture, painting, sculpture, graphics, video, installations etc.
Jorge Pardo, born in Havana, Cuba in 1963 has become and LA artist/designer who, with that special Latin American flair for making avant-garde art a public pleasure, modernizes Baroque lines into functional yet ‘far-out’ lamps in tropical avocado and lemon citrus colours, also  sculptural architecture hinting at Mayan structures with coloured Plexiglas walls. The result is a perfect fit for Californian tropicality. It reminds us of the house that the San Francisco detective, Nash Bridges, played by Don Johnson in the TV programme, lives on in Frisco’s waterfront.
Pardo says of his works: “You come to a sculpture and get a house, or you go to a painting and get a sculpture. Everything is something playing with something else.”
Won Ju Lim, a cute 42-year-old South Korean artist also working with Plexiglas and architectural structures, is another plus for the California arts scene; her imaginative video collages of remembered Californian scenes are unique; as in her miniature Plexiglas city ‘California Dreamin’, where the viewer is given to contemplate a colourful transparent creative microcosm of the very city it exists in.
The first artistic medium emphasizing California’s and LA’s and San Fancisco’s special beauty and lifestyle is, of course, certain movies. 1988’s ‘TEQUILA SUNRISE’ is one of the most beautifully made recent ones; it is a total work of art by the all-round talented director/writer Robert Towne. In this film, backyards, wooden houses and fences, latticework walls, gardens etc, filmed from a structural viewpoint, show Towne’s local knack.
The final two artists are both California-born and quite outstanding. The 42-year-olds, Doug Aitken and Mark Grotjahn’s mirror sculptures are mindboggling, and seem to take off from absorbing intense tropical reflections on modern environments. But their video projections are profoundly beautiful and meaningful in the best projection of California’s ‘cool’ attitudes.
Aitken’s empathy for capturing black people in their everyday normality, such as sleeping couples, is simply a plus for projecting a proper relationship between art and  often socially stereotyped people. His down-to-earth capturing of young hip individuals asleep on bare wooden floors is a simple yet profound jolt into suggestive contemplation.
Aitken has taken those great black-and-white close-ups of faces and bodies in Jean –Luc Godard’s New Wave films and made them a living social value.
Grotjahn’s paintings, on the other hand, are like runways to that Zen-like desire for hedonistic tranquility, which is a constant in the best Californian art. Grotjahn’s minimal skill is not technical, but rather a brilliant show of meticulous manual technique. The published exposure of the physical and spiritual blend of creativity in these seven Californian artists is an asset to ART NOW: Vol: 2.