11 Los Angeles Artists

11 Los Angeles Artists was curated by Maurice Tuchman and Jane Livingston from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The exhibition featured the work of a ‘small diverse group of artists’, many of them only recently out of art school. Some of these younger artists, including Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, John McLaughlin, Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha and William Wegman, were little known in the US outside a small number of alternative galleries and art publications. Nicholas Serota, then a young exhibition organiser with the Arts Council, assisted Tuchman and Livingston with the exhibition. 

11 Los Angeles Artists featured painting, drawing and photography, as well as what the Arts Council’s Norbert Lynton referred to as ‘less easily described sculptures and constructions.’ It presented a cross-section of activities that were taking place in what Lynton referred to as a ‘very lively art centre which many Americans have come to see as a salutary answer to New York’s increasingly pompous and tycoon-ridden art scene’. Curators Tuchman and Livingston hoped that their selection would act as ‘a disclaimer to narrow stereotypes’ about LA and its artists.

The artwork that gained the greatest press coverage in 11 Los Angeles Artists was Newton Harrison’s Portable Fish Farm (1971). The discussion around this piece – which included tanks of live catfish which were to be killed and eaten in a shared supper in the gallery –made its way into parliament, where it was debated by Lord Goodman, and prompted comedian and animal rights activist Spike Milligan to attack the front of the Hayward Gallery in protest. Harrison’s work eventually went ahead, with the understanding that the fish would not be killed or consumed in public.