Predator Perspectives: Hilary Baker’s Angeleno Animals In An Imagined City

by Tucker Neel

Catalog essay for Predators and Other LA Stories by Hillary Baker, Rory Devine Fine Art, Los Angeles, 2021

The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County houses a peculiar diorama called "L.A.'s Backyard." At first, it looks like just any other didactic display, populated with taxidermied animals, fake plants, and a hand-painted backdrop, all sealed in a tidy box. The scene replicates the backyard of a Hollywood Hills home with an iconic view of downtown L.A. in the distance; it’s an inversion of the diorama’s name, the city is the backyard. It's all pretty mundane until you come face-to-face with an intimidating coyote holding a dead housecat in its mouth. You and the coyote enter a staring contest. You both have forward-facing eyes of predators, evolutionarily designed to catch prey. Once this shared gaze is established, you are part of the exhibit; you are the homeowner, and that's your cat. Inevitably it's you who must break eye contact, a near-universal sign of animal surrender. The coyote wins.



A similar kind of self-reflective animal encounter occurs frequently in Hilary Baker’s Predators paintings, which depict “wild” animals in urban and suburban settings in and around Los Angeles.  While not all of Baker’s subjects look directly at you, the implied confrontation is always imminent. Like in “L.A.’s Backyard,” you are made aware of your presence as a viewer, as an animal staring at another animal. Baker’s paintings remind me of cultural theorist John Berger’s observation from his essay Why Look At Animals: “The eyes of an animal when they consider a man are attentive and wary. The same animal may well look at other species in the same way. He does not reserve a special look for man. But by no other species except man will the animal’s look be recognized as familiar. Other animals are held by the look. Man becomes aware of himself returning to the look”.[1]Baker’s animals stare back at us, but what is the implication of this gaze?



Most of the animals in Predatorsare isolated in expansive, often sketched out urban scenes. Baker employs a calculated economy of marks to depict recognizable aspects of the sites in her paintings - the ascending circles of The Watts Towers, oil wells in Baldwin Hills, the rotund side of the Griffith Observatory. Human figures are conspicuously missing from these scenes; They are worlds returned to nature. This sense of absence gives the work an unsettling quality that reflects aspects of Angeleno noir fictions; accentuated in many cases with darkened tones, harsh shadows, and visual cues as to the fragility of memory and the instability of representation.



Sometimes Baker's landscapes appear as spectral traces, leaving only subtle clues for interpretation. This is the case in Wilshire Boulevard Looking East, which features two inquisitive crows staring into a manhole. Composed of dark blue and black brushstrokes resembling vaporous faux bois wood grain, the crows stand out against the faintly outlined city around them as if considering a subterranean escape from a disappearing world. There are just enough recognizable features in the scene to make out a conspicuous building, what is now the Oasis Church at Wilshire and Normandie, an impressive landmark built back in 1929 when its 200ft. bell tower was one of the taller structures on the boulevard. Perhaps the vintage car driving away also dates to the inter-war era when automobiles had not yet claimed supremacy over L.A.'s transportation infrastructure. As with any image featuring a city's landmark, the painting makes you aware of your relationship to a place in time; you don't have to knowL.A. and its history to appreciate the painting, but it helps.



In Rooster, Angels Flight Baker uses a similar outline technique to construct a background rich with historical resonance. The painting features a bright red rooster giving us the side-eye as we gaze downwards, following the tracks of Angels Flight, a pair of little funicular railroad cars that have ferried passengers up and down Bunker Hill in downtown L.A. off and on for over a century. The scene is delineated by a chalky white line on a black background, a dark unknown. Constructed in 1901, Angels Flight served practical purposes for pedestrians who needed to travel up the steep hill between Hill and Olive Streets. For years it made its journey as the surrounding neighborhood slowly changed character, from fancy Victorian mansions housing wealthy Angelenos to a working-class neighborhood, to a place an L.A.P.D. designated a vice district. Caricatured in crime novels and noir movies, the actual Bunker Hill, filled with a mixture of Mexican immigrants, elderly residents, artists, and low-income renters, became an imagined phantom, a stand-in for a fictional, seedy, exotic Los Angeles. By 1928 developers were itching to erase the whole place and start anew.[2]This reconstruction of the urban landscape driven by confabulated, collective narratives exemplifies what Norman M. Klein, in his book The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and The Erasure of Memory, defines as the social imaginary: "A collective memory of an event or place that never occurred, but is built anyway."[3]In the end, developers and their political cronies exploited the imagined reality of Bunker Hill as a way to justify its classification as a blighted zone. Klein notes, "... the very popular dark side of L.A. tourism, using images of urban blight, has sold real estate. The "noir image" has glamorized, quite unintentionally, the need to destroy downtown communities. That is the ironic genius of social imaginaries as cities, either of the sunshine variety or shady: they always wind up selling products, in a culture well adapted to promotion - and I speak not only of Los Angeles, of course."[4] Bunker Hill was "cleansed" of its houses and residents starting in the 1950s. Angels Flight closed in 1969 and was re-built 27 years later, a half-block away, and it's been plagued with mechanical problems - some fatal - ever since.



In light of Bunker Hill's story, I'm left to think of Baker's preening red rooster as a stand-in for predatory real estate developers, cocky and suspicious. After all, Los Angeles has always been beholden to the demands of real estate developers, a sentiment summed up perfectly by the historian Carey McWilliams, in his indispensable book Southern California: An Island on the Land: "In Los Angeles, it was said that the word "real" was synonymous with "real estate."[5]



Another Predators painting, Union Bank (The Castle and the Saltbox), provides a different but related image of Bunker Hill's place within the social imaginary. In the painting a lone red dog faces the viewer, but stares back at two Victorian houses and a skyscraper on the not-too-distant horizon. These dull, grey buildings reference a photo of Bunker Hill taken by William Reagh in 1968 before the two mansions were moved to Heritage Park in Montecito, re-contextualized as oddities, spots on tourist maps. Baker's painting reminds me of a quote Klein references from a 1954 story in the Los Angeles Herald: "Bunker Hill is a land Los Angeles forgot. A strange place the city moved around, chipped at, went under and through, but hardly ever over."[6]



The same dog from Union Bank reappears grey-haired, red-eyed, and a bit malnourished in Gone. The creature looks backward at The Art of The Americas building, one of four structures comprising the original Los Angeles County Museum of Art. A black circle hangs in the sky, the sun and moon, an ominous sign of impending doom. By the time you read this essay, the real-life building will be demolished along with most of L.A.C.M.A.'s eastern campus to make room for a new, sleeker, blob-like architectural experiment that may or may not prove an adequate replacement. The social imaginary carries on. Out with the old, in with the new.  



Gone is a contemporary echo of Ed Ruscha's painting The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, 1965–68, which pictures the corner of the museum's Ahmanson building in flames. Ruscha began his painting when L.A.C.M.A. first opened, and Baker completed hers just after the museum's first buildings met their fate in 2020. Ruscha and Baker’s paintings bookend our imagination of L.A.C.M.A. as L.A. landmark. It’s our imagination of the museum's destruction that animates each work, but we do so from different perspectives. Ruscha's L.A.C.M.A. is seen from above as a master architectural plan, a totalizing vision recently set ablaze, destruction contained by distance. But Baker puts us in the street, on the dog's level, experiencing not the moment of structural obliteration, but the anticipation of its inevitability. The experience is fleeting but meaningful, already shaped by the memory of its absence, maintained by stories that were never entirely true, the distillation of a quintessential L.A. moment that was and shall be, a perception made and remade over and over again.  

---

[1]   Berger, John. Why Look at Animals? From About Looking. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. Print. pages 4-5.

[2] Klein, Norman M. The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and The Erasure of Memory. New York: Verso, 2008. p.52.

[3] Ibid, p.10.

[4] Ibid, p.55.

[5] McWilliams, Carey. Southern California: An Island on the Land. Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1973. p.123.

[6] Klein, The History of Forgetting, p.56