The Dash column explores art and its social contexts. The dash separates and the dash joins, it pauses and it moves along. The dash is where the viewer comes to terms with what they’ve seen. Here, Claudia Ross traces the cool blue ripples of the LA swimming pool across the disparities of race and class that define the city.
Henry Taylor. Installation view. September 10–November 5, 2016, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles. © Henry Taylor. Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe. Photo: Joshua White.
Two men jump naked into a swimming pool. In the background: a chaise lounge, a palm tree, and—of course—the hills. This is one scene in the Jack Hazan-directed “improvised docu-drama,” A Bigger Splash (1974), that follows painter David Hockney during his breakup with photographer Peter Schlesinger. The montage is laced with images of Hockney’s painting Two Boys in a Pool, Hollywood (1965), which features the nude backs of two men as they exit a pool with a fantastically painted surface. Hockney’s rippling, stylized water was made concrete in 1988 at Hollywood’s Roosevelt Hotel, where the artist covered the pool’s bottom with curved blue strokes.
60 miles east of Hollywood, on the outskirts of San Bernardino, lies the small city of Rialto. This was the out-of-the-way home of Rodney King, whose videotaped assault by police sparked the 1992 LA uprising. On one wall of his swimming pool—the same pool that he eventually drowned in—King inscribed two dates: 3/31/91, the day of his beating, and 4/29/92, the day of the officers’ acquittal. King’s private suburban pool is curiously incommensurate with Hockney’s playful, erotic Hollywood spa. For King, the pool represented pleasure—he was “by all accounts an avid swimmer”—but also indescribable pain, permanently marked with reminders of Angeleno crisis.
The pool’s position between these two realities makes it a prominent subject in Los Angeles art. From painters Noah Davis and Henry Taylor to musicians Kendrick Lamar and Flying Lotus, artists continue to dip into the pool’s rich cultural imaginary. The collision of luxury and sexual freedom with trenchant inequality and state violence is a persistent paradox this side of the San Gabriel Mountains. The Angeleno pool is joyful and brutal, a space for the continued exploration of American contradiction—the result of long histories of racism and oppression.
The private California pool grew popular during desegregation in the mid-twentieth century, its waters an icon of white enclaves like the San Fernando Valley. Historian Jeff Wiltse writes in Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America (2007) that, where municipal pools had once been bastions of white middle-class leisure, after desegregation in the 1960s and ’70s, they were recast as “emblems of the urban crisis,” justified mostly by their purported ability to “cool down angry black Americans and stop them from rioting.” Public officials in northern states, Wiltse continues, “closed their pools rather than permit interracial swimming. When one-pool communities kept their desegregated pools open, many whites retreated to private pools.” On both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, the pool turned from public asset to private privilege.
There are only 16 year-round public pools left in LA—roughly the same number as there were in 1927, when the city was an eighth of its current size. These pools are austere, cement-girded lap pools often staffed by sheriff’s deputies or private security “to monitor and control unruly crowds.” Accordingly, depictions of municipal pools are sparse compared to those of private ones. Their absence makes Noah Davis’s 1975 (8) (2013) all the more vibrant: in the painting, the artist, who lived in LA the eleven years before his passing in 2015, imagines a municipal pool in full midsummer swing. In the foreground, a Black boy jumps in the water headfirst. The composition of 1975 (8) mirrors Hockney’s A Bigger Splash (1971)—both structure their frames around the sharp line of the pool’s edge, interrupted by a swimmer’s dive. But in Davis’s gestural work, communal Black life triumphs. His painting is an homage to a public utopia, far from Hockney’s persistent, private one.
As public funding for swimming pools lapsed, the swimming pool found new, sensual allure in sunny Los Angeles. One 1960s advertisement for Swan Pools proudly proclaimed its private swimming pools were “Southern Calif. Living At Its Best… A Pool Created For You Exclusively.” Images of backyard pools avoided problematic questions of access and segregation, focusing instead on customizable, individual pleasure. In advertisements from Sears and Doughboy, the pool was an opportunity for nuclear families, usually white ones, to spend time together as a discrete unit. For Hockney, meanwhile, the pool offered a rare space for homosexual freedom—just as, in Hollywood films like Something’s Got to Give (1962), the pool meant teasing nudity and romance, a place to express desires not yet accepted in the world at large. These erotic and wholesome visions both contributed to the pool’s new identity in the West as a space for liberated, private play.
But the freedoms of total privacy depended on a degree of wealth beyond the reach of many LA citizens. Ventura native Henry Taylor presented one fantasy of racial integration—and class-based segregation—at private pools in a 2016 installation at Blum & Poe. In one room, a wrought-iron gate opened onto an Astroturf lawn skirting an opaque blue canvas—the “pool.” On one wall, Taylor’s painting fil’s house (2016) showed two men, one Black, one white, lying on floaties in crystal-clear water. The racial integration of the scene is underscored by a shared class status—one thrown into relief by a contrasting installation in the facing gallery, which included a dirt floor, graffitied cinderblock wall, and a tent replete with an unhoused neighbor’s belongings. Taylor commented on the fallacy of the accessible private swimming pool while still indulging in its luxury, combining both in a single exhibition. This kind of poolside pleasure, the work says, is not offered to everyone—just look outside.
The attraction to the swimming pool, like the drive for a picket-fenced “good life,” is one that Lauren Berlant would call “cruel optimism”: an attachment that “exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” In Kendrick Lamar’s “Swimming Pools (Drank)” (2012), the Centennial High alum sings: “Pool full of liquor I’ma dive in it.” Later, the refrain changes: “Pool full of liquor I’ma die in it.” Jerome D.’s music video for the single shows Lamar drinking and dancing at a neon-drenched LA house party. Temptation surrounds, the kind Lamar already knows is bad for him—and the kind he can’t resist. Away from the red glow of the party, a glass breaks, and Lamar twirls in the darkness of the deep end.
Kahlil Joseph (Noah Davis’s brother) goes further. A year before Davis finished 1975 (8), Joseph directed the film that accompanies the Flying Lotus record “Until the Quiet Comes” (2012). The short video is set in Nickerson Gardens, a public housing complex in Watts. Following a watery title card, the video opens on a young Black boy in a drained pool shaping his fingers into a gun. He shoots, and the invisible “bullet” ricochets off the walls, striking him. If “Swimming Pools (Drank)” imagines the pool as a fatal attraction, “Until the Quiet Comes” is its enchanting funeral. The drained pool murders the boy, a site that enables his self-destruction; his death mirrors the shooting of an older male figure on a project lawn. But violent legacies of segregation, in pools and public housing, are met with a kind of magical resistance: after the older figure is shot, he resurrects, dancing in a bloodstained tank top. The pool’s pernicious fantasy—one that symbolizes West Coast wealth and conspicuous leisure—morphs under Joseph’s lens, turning into a place of death and, briefly, salvation.
The rising stars of California modernism cemented a vision of LA aesthetics that eroticized the private sphere, a place—often poolside—where people could frolic away from the prying eyes of East Coast conservatism. It’s an image deeply entrenched in our cultural memory and one duly shifted and warped by artists from across LA’s basin, a locus for the contentions of contemporary liberalism. From Hockney’s desert dream to Joseph’s beautiful nightmare, art in and around Los Angeles contends with the gnarled fantasies of sex, race, and wealth at the pool’s hard edge. Theirs is a vision as bloody as it is euphoric. Float on. x
Claudia Ross is a writer in Los Angeles.