Ruscha was hired as production designer, using the pseudonym “Eddie Russia,” and in September 1964, placed a full-page ad for his show: a black-and-white portrait of a lovely blonde, with hair swept up and chandelier earrings, pulling a credit card from her cleavage with the artist’s name and the words “Ferus Gallery.” In keeping with Ferus motorcycle and surfing announcements, Ruscha was willing to poke fun at the whole notion of marketing art.
Collector Don Factor and Henry Hopkins contributed articles along with Jane Livingston, who became a curator at L.A. County Museum of Art, and Peter Plagens, a painter who had recently graduated from USC and who had a talent for writing about the complicated issues of the time with a vernacular flair. Plagens recalled his application process. He walked into the office and said, “I want to review for this magazine.”14 Ron Davis’s wife Susan was at the front desk. Plagens’s first article was published in February 1966, and he went on to write features on Larry Bell, Ed Moses, and Michael Asher and, in 1974, the first book on West Coast art, Sunshine Muse: Contemporary Art on the West Coast.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Ascendency of Irwin’s Atmospherics
Marking its relocation to Los Angeles, Artforum devoted considerable coverage to the U.S. segment of the eighth São Paulo Art Biennal in 1965. The United States Information Agency had invited Hopps to be curator and he selected Irwin, Bell, and Bengston to share the glory with Judd, Stella, and Larry Poons. The principal artist, however, was the venerable abstract painter Barnett Newman, known for his wall-sized canvases bearing vertical columns of subdued colors. One wag called it six tugs moving a large liner into port.
Newman went to São Paulo six times to oversee his installation. None of the Los Angeles artists made the trip though art collector Ed Janss’s daughter, Dagny, then eighteen, accompanied Hopps as, she said, “a sort of dogs body,” to São Paulo. “I think my father negotiated with Walter to get me the job, but what was he thinking?” she added. “I think I was to act as interpreter because I could speak a little Portuguese because I’d taken courses in school. Barnett Newman came to install his paintings and his Broken Obelisk sculpture—my job was to pour lemon juice and Coca-Cola on it so it could rust. I was there about six weeks to be an assistant. Walter was taking black beauties all the time. He had to physically install the show and he was out every night with all the artists at every night club. There was an error in the catalog so I had to glue the correction over the paragraph in all of the catalogs. There were discos at night. Then we would take Miltown, the tranquilizer, to go to sleep. It was not regarded as wrong.”1
Robert Irwin
Photograph by Dennis Hopper, © The Dennis Hopper Trust, courtesy of The Dennis Hopper Trust
Irwin’s paintings were the most minimal of his career at that point. He was intuitively paring away extraneous elements. Beginning with paintings of the straight line, since it had “the least possible literate meaning,” Irwin had progressively reduced the marks on his paintings until by 1964, there were only two lines running horizontally across the painted canvas. Along the way, he was taken hostage by his own curiosity and an increasing refinement of perception. What he called “dots” were paintings made between 1964 and 1966 on slightly convex white canvases almost seven feet square and covered with tiny spots of green and red paint. The dots seemed to vibrate against one another, creating what Hopps once described as “a field of color energy.”2
The slightly curved surfaces of the canvases were barely noticeable, but it took Irwin months to build the special struts that supported their gently swelled forms and then cover each back with a veneer of wood. Irwin’s exposure to Zen Buddhist pottery led him to believe that each piece had to be thoroughly finished. “I spent days, weeks, months finishing things no one is ever going to see. But it had much more to do with the fact that I couldn’t leave them unfinished. I just had this conviction that in the sense of tactile awareness, if all those things were consistent, that then the sum total would be greater.”3
Stella took one look at them and asked, “Why do you go to so much trouble in finishing your paintings, for example, in making the edges on your frames so perfectly straight?” Irwin answered, “Why don’t you? How can you not?” Stella was making hexagonal paintings, but the edges of the canvases were often uneven and unfinished in appearance. Stella shrugged. “It’s not important,” he said. Irwin was stunned.4
Irwin’s time-consuming efforts resulted in paintings with no imagery; just a blush of pale color that might not be noticed at all by a casual observer. Certainly such minimal art was not familiar to Brazilian audiences, who were, anyway, hostile toward the United States for political reasons. (There were suspicions, later confirmed, of U.S. involvement in the 1964 ouster of Brazilian president João Goulart.)5 They vented their collective frustration on Irwin’s dot paintings. “People attacked them, they cut them with knives, they threw things at them, they spit on them,” Irwin said.6
When the paintings were returned, Blum and Hopps were afraid to tell Irwin about what had happened. It had taken three years for him to complete ten paintings, so losing two was a significant loss. Yet, when Blum finally worked up the nerve, Irwin was not even upset. He said, “I was really struck by the fact that I had absolutely no emotion about it at all.… From that point on I knew I would no longer be operating or living in that kind of time frame.”7
Brazil was not the only place where the “dot” paintings irritated viewers. When The Responsive Eye, an exhibition organized by the Museum of Modern Art, opened at the Pasadena Art Museum, Irwin’s dots flanked a few Ad Reinhardts. At the reception, Irwin found himself confronted by a museum patron demanding that he not make this kind of art anymore. “She just insisted that the whole thing was absolutely un-Christian, anti-American.… I didn’t react at first.”8 Irwin tried to avoid the attack by drifting away from her, but she continued the harangue, shouting after him. Finally, he turned around, raised his middle finger, and yelled, “Fuck you, lady!” The woman fainted.9
“That’s a big difference between a West Coast artist and a European,” said Irwin. “A European artist really believes in himself as part of that historical tradition, that archive. They see themselves in that way, with a certain amount of importance and self-esteem and so forth.… When I was growing up as an artist there simply wasn’t any stream for you to orient yourself toward. Obviously you think what you do is important, or you wouldn’t be pursuing it with the kind of intensity you do. But the minute I start thinking about making gestures about my historical role, I mean, I can’t do that. I have to start laughing, because there’s a certain humor in that.”10
During the years that Irwin devoted to being in his studio, painting one tiny dot next to another, he retreated from the evenings at Barney’s. His isolation took its toll on his marriage. In 1958, he had married the sister of one of his sister’s friends, a Swedish American woman named Nancy Oberg. They divorced in 1959 but remarried in 1961. As he progressively pursued his quest, however, he was less available for the relationship. Irwin and Oberg divorced for the second time in 1966 and spent their last evening together dividing their few possessions—the toaster, the table, the car—in an all-night game of gin. Irwin was just beginning his voyage into the realm of phenomenology, and he would have to travel solo.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Set the Night on Fire
The Watts Riots forever changed the world’s irresistible dreamy view of Los Angeles. Instead of celebrity and weather reports, television sets were tuned to its black citizens being dragged and beaten by uniformed white policemen while buildings went up in flames to chants of “Burn, baby, burn!” For a searing, smoggy week, from August 11 to 17, 1965, Los Angeles was stripped of her customary disinterest in political engagement. Coincidently, the artist who had spent most of his life constructing the ceramic-encrusted towers in Watts, “Simon” Rodia, had died that summer in San Francisco, having given his spectacular creations to his neighbor and then leaving with n
o forwarding address.
The riots resulted in $40 million of damage to property in the Watts area, but the towers were untouched. They had become home to an art center founded by African American assemblage artist Noah Purifoy with teacher Sue Welsh and musician Judson Powell. (Purifoy, a Chouinard graduate, scavenged the detritus of the riot with others to make assemblage sculptures that went on tour the following year as 66 Signs of Neon.)
Though sparked by the arrest of a black drunk driver, Marquette Frye, by white LAPD officer Lee Minikus, who insisted on impounding the car rather than letting the driver’s brother take it home, the racial and class tension that fueled the riot had been accumulating for years. In the 1940s and ’50s, the area around southeast and central Los Angeles had been home to a thriving community of African Americans, with jazz clubs, hotels, restaurants, and churches. Unemployment and poverty rose dramatically as white veterans returned from World War II and were given any available jobs. After two decades, addiction and alcoholism had contributed to the general neglect. Residents of Watts, like blacks all across the country, had been listening to Martin Luther King Jr. and reading about the marches in Selma, Alabama, and the rise of the civil rights movement. The previous year, Proposition 14, backed by the California Real Estate Association, repealed the state’s Rumford Fair Housing Act, which had prohibited discrimination by landlords who refused to rent to blacks, Latinos, and others. This further inflamed the sense of injustice felt by the community.
Furthermore, L.A. police chief William Parker was perceived as biased against blacks, a feeling not lessened by his characterization of the rioters as monkeys in a zoo. His justification of the use of extreme force, along with the deployment of National Guard troops, was met with anger and exasperation.
Opinion throughout the city was polarized, but artists were on the side of the black community. Dennis Hopper powered his Corvair convertible, with the top down, through the flames and smoke to take photographs. Rudi Gernreich staged a fashion shoot with his models posing in front of the Watts Towers to draw attention to their surreal beauty. Ed Bereal, the African American artist included in the 1961 War Babies show, had just returned to Los Angeles after three years in San Francisco. Dwan had put him on retainer for a show at her gallery. All that changed when he opened his door on August 14, 1965, at nine in the morning and found himself surrounded by nine National Guardsmen with guns. He was not harmed, but he was scared. Speculating on what might have happened if any of them had pulled the trigger, Bereal wrote, “My current series of sculptures is suddenly questionable. If I could put all the articles written about my work between me and that bullet … none of it would have stopped that bullet!”1 A traumatized Bereal stopped making sculptures in order to pursue performance art and drama to better express his increasingly politicized outlook.
Up until the midsixties, the contemporary art scene in Los Angeles, as elsewhere, was largely the realm of white men. A handful of African American artists struggled to find places to show apart from the Watts Towers summer arts festival. In 1967, Alonzo and Dale Davis opened Brockman Gallery for African American artists, and two years later, Suzanne Jackson opened Gallery 32 in her apartment in the Granada Building near MacArthur Park. David Hammons, Betye Saar, Melvin Edwards, and John Outterbridge were among those who started to get attention.
Female artists were being taken more seriously, but not at Ferus, where the previous year’s group show was unapologetically titled Studs. The gallery was, as Price put it, “the all kings stable.”2 Bengston and others jeered at aspiring female artists but, in truth, other galleries were not much better.
Shirley Hopps said, “I think a lot of that role-playing and machoness and complimenting each other came from the fact that what they were doing was so far-out, not working from the past, just working from themselves and avoiding confrontation with nothingness. There was competitiveness but mostly loneliness and fear.”3
Nonetheless, it was a square-jawed woman of twenty-seven named Vija Celmins who addressed the riots most directly in her black-and-white painting Time Magazine Cover, which reproduced the magazine’s headline and photographs of fire, an overturned car, and black men running in the street. A war refugee from Latvia whose family had immigrated to the United States in 1948, Celmins understood fighting in the streets quite a bit more than the average student at UCLA, where she had just graduated with a master’s degree. She had been raised in Indiana where, unable to speak English at first, she had taken refuge in her extraordinary drawing skills. After graduating from the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, she had earned a grant to enroll at UCLA in 1962, the same year that Hopps organized the first Pop art exhibition. Her precise drawings and paintings of utilitarian objects, such as toasters and fans in tones of gray, black, and white, got her roped into the beginning Pop art movement, though her concerns were considerably more mordant. She copied photographs from books to make detailed drawings and paintings of World War II–era airplanes, zeppelins, and war disasters, both revisiting her past and eliciting admiration from even the most hardened of her male colleagues, who were her neighbors in Venice. She broke through the barrier against women to show with the David Stuart Gallery in 1966.
Vija Celmins, Time Magazine Cover, 1965
Collection of Hauser and Wirth
The politicization of students and young people around the world was gaining velocity. Protests against the Vietnam War were taking place around the country. That April, fifteen thousand students marched on Washington, D.C. The Artists Protest Committee was formed by painters Irving Petlin and Arnold Mesches, both then living in Los Angeles. Petlin, a visiting artist at UCLA, completed a vast canvas called The Burning of Los Angeles; his figurative and abstract paintings were shown in 1966 at the Rolf Nelson Gallery. A few years earlier, he had lived in Paris during the Algerian War of Independence and observed the repression of demonstrations in France. He saw similar government crackdowns against the Vietnam War protests. Though he initially believed Los Angeles artists to be apolitical, he decided to try and mobilize them. Petlin, who had shared an apartment in Paris with Kauffman, said to Mesches, “Let’s do an experiment. Let’s call Craig Kauffman, who was the most non-political person I could think of in Los Angeles, and let’s call Ed Kienholz, and see how they feel about some form of coordinated political activism.”4 To his surprise, Kauffman answered, “Yeah, I would be interested in joining that.” Stunned, he then called Kienholz, who said, “You guys are letting our troops down.” Petlin thought, “It’s impossible to predict what’s going to happen here.… Let’s call a meeting and see.”5
The meeting at Dwan Gallery attracted Hopps, Coplans, Leider, and dozens of willing artists. The group decided to protest the RAND Corporation, perceived to be a liberal think tank but one that was advocating protected zones for Vietnamese civilians to allow greater free fire in other areas of the country. The group contrived a debate with RAND officials that attracted an overflow crowd of eight hundred to the Warner Theater. After this action was ignored by the press, Petlin called antiwar activist and sculptor Mark di Suvero to build a “Peace Tower” on a rented vacant lot on the corner of Sunset and North La Cienega boulevards.
Di Suvero had been in a wheelchair since 1960 after he was crushed brutally in an elevator accident. He had determinedly pursued rehabilitation and just as determinedly pursued sculpture on a massive scale. He designed a sixty-foot-tall pile of polyhedrons, a yellow and purple armature that was erected with the help of Melvin Edwards, Lloyd Hamrol, and Judy Gerowitz, as well as a few of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. Inspired by the spindly height of Watts Towers, it was di Suvero’s first sculpture of architectural scale and it transformed his subsequent work. His huge sculptures made of timbers were being shown at Dwan Gallery, though he did not feel accepted by the Los Angeles artists who were perfecting pristine surfaces. “They used to put me down saying, ‘Oh, you’re A/E, meaning Abstract Expressionist,” he said later. “They didn’t believe in this grungy work I w
as doing.”6
The tower supported 418 individual paintings of protest, each measuring two feet square, that were donated by artists from all over the world: Rauschenberg, Stella, Reinhardt, Lichtenstein, and others from New York, as well as countless Los Angeles artists. After three months, the works of art were auctioned and the proceeds were used to subsidize continued protests against the war.
A chain-link fence was erected around the tower to keep out vandals and bore a sign declaring “Artists Protest Vietnam War.” Petlin and other artists were attacked by conservatives and outraged members of the military. African American supporters from Watts volunteered to stand guard. When Petlin had to defend himself and the tower with nothing more than the broken end of a lightbulb, Stella sent him a check for $1,000 with a note saying, “Anybody who puts their life on the line defending a work of art of mine, I’m going to send a thousand bucks to.”7
Di Suvero, despite his disability, was harassed and beaten by police. To get rid of the tower, city officials claimed it was structurally unsound. To prove them wrong, the artists suspended a Buick from the armature. When there was no buckling or leaning, city officials had to relent. (The city’s Department of Building and Safety was defeated previously by Watts Towers when, in 1959, they proposed to demolish it as unsafe. Supporters demanded a stress test and found that a crane applying ten thousand pounds of pressure could not budge any part of Rodia’s creation. The Watts Towers remained.)
The Peace Tower grabbed attention from the press, but the Los Angeles Times and other papers and television stations were editorially conservative, and nearly all of the coverage was negative. On February 26, 1966, the day of a massive protest at the tower, Petlin received a telegram of support from Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, André Breton, Michel Leiris, André Masson, Matta, and other artists and intellectuals. Ironically, the Los Angeles war protest took place four years before an equivalent action in the theoretically more politicized art community in New York, where the Art Workers Coalition was formed in 1969.
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