For the uninitiated, Wikipedia says that polyester resins are unsaturated resins formed by the reaction of dibasic organic acids and polyhydric alcohols. That means it’s plastic, I think.

Art lovers know polyester resin as one of the key enabling materials of light-and-space art. Available for cheap from local suppliers, Los Angeles-based artists used vats and vats of the stuff in the 1960s and 1970s. De Wain Valentine, Helen Pashgian, John McCracken and Peter Alexander all used it to make the works that helped give light-and-space its catchy moniker.

Today’s Pacific Standard Time spotlight is a polyester resin piece made by Alexander: Cloud Box (1966, at right). It’s on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum as part of “Crosscurrents in LA Painting and Sculpture, 1950-70,” the Getty’s survey of mostly blue-chip southern California art. The exhibition was curated by a team of Getty-ites that was led by Andrew Perchuk and Rani Singh.

While most light-and-spacers used polyester resins and other plastics to create luminous abstract sculptures, here Alexander introduced a little bit of water vapor to the resin during the casting process. The result was this cube, a sculpture that references landscape, minus the land. Think of it as Alexander’s way of pointing out that the new Los Angeles-based art of the 1960s had moved beyond landscape and into the sky, that one of its subjects and inspirations was the incredible, unique light of the (polluted) Southland.

The sculpture also drives by the American tradition of trompe l’oeil (in its own way Alexander’s system is every bit as closed as is a Harnett or a Peto), with a nod at Larry Bell’s glowing boxes on the way. When I first saw the piece I looked down on it from above. I thought it also recalled the clouds created by atomic testing, images that were particularly present in the American West in the 1950s and ’60s. I’m less sure of that than I was a few days ago (perhaps because the JPEG above doesn’t re-create my initial view), but having seen a week’s worth of mushroom clouds and The Bomb references in PST shows, I think it would have been hard for a West-based artist to make a cloud in 1966 and not be thinking about mushroom clouds.

Related: MCASD’s Peter Alexander page.

Previously: DeWain Valentine, Robert Heinecken.