Buying In - (Page 32) 32 rob walker the more substantial manifestations of that long-ago age of togetherness—things like lifetime employment and pensions and company health care—quietly fade. We’re now told we can expect to change not just jobs, but careers, several times. Most of us couldn’t find a way to be the man in the gray flannel suit even if we wanted to. This brings us back to Ed Templeton. Not long after I first spoke with him in 2005, I went to see some of his artwork and photography at the Orange County Museum of Art in Costa Mesa, California, about forty-five minutes south of Los Angeles. The roads that led to it were superclean and orderly: the controlled environment of suburbia. When I arrived at the museum, it was hard to miss the visual incongruity of this reassuring neatness, and the huge, confrontational mural on the building’s facade, in the unmistakably propaganda-meets- popculture style of the legendary street artist Shepard Fairey. It was about 8:30 p.m., and the sprawling parking lot was almost completely full. It was the opening party for an exhibition called “Beautiful Losers,” and the main hall of the museum was packed. “Beautiful Losers” was a monument to the rejection of mainstream commercial conformity. The front gallery was lined with the album covers of bands like the 1980s American hardcore heroes Black Flag; glass cases displayed dozens of homemade zines. Farther back in the gallery were skateboard decks, easily a hundred, arranged in rows that reached all the way to the thirty-foot ceiling and decorated not just with the work of artists like Fairey, but also the wildcat skateboard companies founded by members of this outsider subculture, from Zoo York to Toy Machine. The fifty or so artists in the show, whose works were produced mostly in the 1990s and early 2000s, are part of a generation of creative people whose primary
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