Customer Reviews

The Cool School (WS)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I was familiar with the artists and some of the work. I didn't know the bigger picture, however. This doc is informative, inspiring, and entertaining.

Length:: 1:30 Mins

I found this documentary by chance. I'm thrilled that it exists. But it is kind of a disappointment. For a documentary about visual art, it's not particularly easy on the eye. And for a documentary about visual art, it doesn't include much discussion of art or even much art. The cover seems to promise an affectionate look at a handful of "cool" California artists (John Altoon, Craig Kauffman, Allen Lynch, Ed Kienholz, Ed Moses, Robert Irwin & Billy Al Bengston are the ones that appear on the cover photo, but the group also included Larry Bell & Ed Ruscha) that gathered together in the late fifties in Southern California and began creating art before Southern California had an art scene. But instead of foregrounding the half dozen or so "cool" California artists living in a boheme paradise & creating a new kind of art (which explored/incorporated/appropriated car culture & other industrial/commercial forms & contents, exhibited a frank anti-romantic attitude toward sexuality, and displayed an irreverence toward previous art history and toward NY art scene seriousness) the filmmakers foreground Ferus Gallery co-founders Walter Hopps & Irving Blum. These two may have provided the gallery space, but poverty and lack of attention from the outside world is what kept the group together; and the lure of fame & fortune is what tore it apart. That's the real story here, and the essence of their brand of California cool & detachment. If only the documentary had focused less on Hopps & Blum & the Ferus Gallery & more on the actual artists & art work & what relation the work had to Southern California culture/independence/attitude/cool this could have been a real masterpiece. There's a little of that, but not nearly enough.

The doc will be most interesting to those with an interest in the sociology of artistic collectives/movements.

I love art, I love jazz, I love LA -- but I only managed to make it half way through The Cool School before I gave up and hit eject. The art looked abysmal... completely unappealing--actually not that much was shown, and maybe that was a blessing--and most of the artists came across in their interviews as a bunch of self-inflated egos -- so full of themselves that it became insufferable. Nevertheless, that is no fault of the documentary maker, and the film itself is well done. Marcel Duchamp was shown a little, but did the film makers mention Man Ray's presence in LA for a numbers of years before the LA art scene got rolling and that got Duchamp to LA to begin with? No; and Man Ray and was probably the best artist in LA before going back to Paris. If I'd like the art better or could get past the artists who were trying so hard to be somebody, maybe I would have gotten through the entire film. But I simply got fed up watching interviews with people who struck me as inferior talents with an exaggerated sense of self-importance.