Rebels in Paradise

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  Helen Pashgian, Untitled, 1968–69

  Collection of Pomona College Museum of Art, photograph by Brian Forrest

  Alexander and Pashgian were invited to be artists in residence at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and have a show at Caltech’s gallery. Pashgian had completed a five-foot-diameter sphere of pale resin but couldn’t complete the sanding in time for the opening. She called Brogan. “Jack and his staff picked it up, took it to Venice, and polished it all night and brought it back the next day to be ready for the show,” she recalled.11 The enormous piece was perfect—so perfect that it was stolen out of the gallery and never recovered.

  Plastic may have been anathema to old-guard observers who saw it as being, well, plastic. But within a few years, there were so many exhibitions of artists exploring the use of acrylics and resins that, in 1972, CalArts held The Last Plastics Show, organized by and featuring Judy Chicago, DeWain Valentine, and Doug Edge and including work by Peter Alexander, Helen Pashgian, Vasa, Greg Card, Fred Eversley, Richard Amend, Terry O’Shea, Ron Cooper, and Ed Moses.

  “That whole Light and Space thing,” Plagens said. “From highly tailored plastic and glass and metal objects to phenomenological, altered architectural environments—that was like the whole art world. There was a sense in L.A. of, ‘We got this, and this is what makes us different,’ and ‘We got this and they don’t got this in New York.’”12

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Odd Man In: John Baldessari

  In 1967, when Coplans was arranging shows for the Light and Space artists, as they were being called—a potentially damning term veering a little too close to “lightweight and spacey”—he visited the vacated movie theater that served as a studio for John Baldessari. Leaning against the walls were a number of off-white canvases bearing enlarged grainy black-and-white photographs of dumb suburban streetscapes, each captioned with its equally ordinary location. Though Warhol was silk-screening news photos on canvas and Ruscha was painting words and photographing parking lots, Baldessari’s pictures seemed to Coplans to be uniquely devoid of aesthetic consideration.

  Baldessari had driven around his run-down hometown of National City, a suburb of San Diego, taking photographs at random of stucco buildings, traffic lights, and street signs by aiming his camera out the window of his truck. He developed the pictures directly onto photo-emulsion that he spread on canvas but without any attention to composition. The artist hadn’t even painted the captions but had hired a sign painter to do lettering such as “Looking East on 4th and Chula Vista.” He said, “It seemed more like the truth. Landscape paintings are idealized. Telephone poles, telephone lines—that’s real. I wasn’t traipsing around the woods looking for the perfect spot. I was making art out of where I was.”1

  John Baldessari, Econ-o-wash…, 1966–68

  Courtesy of John Baldessari

  Intentionally mundane and informational, they were the beginning of his involvement in Conceptual art, an inquiry into what might constitute visual art in the age of mass media and capitalist expansion. Coplans was arguably the area’s most progressive critic and curator but, without much preamble, he looked around in utter bewilderment and said, “I can’t show these.”2

  Baldessari accepted this rejection as he had the many that preceded it. A few years earlier, he had loaded his paintings into the back of his father’s pickup truck and driven around to different Los Angeles galleries. “I came back with my tail between my legs,” he recalled. At Ferus, Blum took a look at his paintings and sniffed that they “were not exactly his cup of tea.”3

  Then there was the problem of Baldessari himself. Unlike the artists of the Cool School, Baldessari was painfully shy, slightly stooped to disguise his six-foot, six-inch frame, with shaggy brown hair, beard, and mustache; he wore heavy square-rimmed glasses. Though he was of the same generation as the Ferus gang, he was a late bloomer with none of their bravado.

  Baldessari’s introspective nature was partly the result of being raised by European immigrants in a conservative small town near the Mexican border. His Austrian father was a laborer who had met his Danish mother in San Diego, where she was working as a private nurse to a wealthy couple. Educated and interested in culture, she read, played the piano, and insisted that her son take music lessons. His parents grew vegetables and fruit trees in the large backyard of the house they bought with money earned by salvaging old building materials to sell. Born in 1931, Baldessari was enlisted to help his father. “I remember as a child … taking apart faucets and reconditioning them, painting them, and taking nails out of lumber.… I sometimes think that has a lot of bearing on the art I would do. Looking at maybe two hundred different kinds of faucets, all generically the same, but seeing all the variations. Always looking at things like, ‘Why is this faucet better than that faucet?’”4

  After graduating from Sweetwater High School in National City, where his classmate was singer Tom Waits, he enrolled at San Diego State College and got his undergraduate degree in art education so that he would have a teaching credential. Thinking he might have a future in art history, he enrolled at UC Berkeley for a year, but they had no program on contemporary art. He learned how to use the library and returned to San Diego State.

  In 1954, he got his first break. An instructor had him enter his still life in the National Orange Show at the San Bernardino State Fair. His painting was reviewed in ARTNews by critic Jules Langsner. “I was floored,” Baldessari recalled.5 He joined the legions of high school art teachers who painted in their spare time. “My life consisted of sending in slides, then sending in paintings, then getting the paintings back. I did reasonably well. Artists from Southern California, Artists from California, Artists from the Southwest, Artists from the Northwest, Artists from the Western States: I was in all of those shows. But I didn’t know how paintings got into galleries or museums, because none of my models—my teachers—were showing in galleries or museums. I knew there was information I didn’t have, but I didn’t know how to get access to that information.”6

  In 1957, Baldessari enrolled in a UCLA summer course taught by Los Angeles’s most celebrated artist, Rico Lebrun. At the end of the class, Lebrun had everyone look at Baldessari’s nonobjective painting collaged with paper and asked, “Have you ever thought about being an artist?”

  Baldessari answered, “No. Not really.”

  Lebrun continued, “What do you do?”

  Baldessari said, “Teach.”

  Lebrun insisted, “Well, you really ought to think about it.”7

  With that, he introduced Baldessari to Herbert Jepson, who taught drawing at Otis. “He was really inspirational to a lot of artists—and to me. I mean, he was limited, but I didn’t know he was limited until later. I mean it was enough for me at the time,” Baldessari said.8

  He also met Voulkos but was interested in the fact that Voulkos brought European art magazines for his students to read. Even at that stage, Baldessari sought answers in books and magazines. “All my art information was imported,” Baldessari recalled. “I’ve always had this theory that a lot of … changes in art history come about from misinformation. Reproduction, and not understanding somebody’s work and spinning off from there in a completely oblique fashion that probably wouldn’t have happened if he or she saw the original work.”9 Certainly, this wound up being a force in Baldessari’s own art.

  Jepson’s training paid off when Baldessari’s painting was included in a group show where it was singled out by a critic who wrote, “It’s nice to know that someone in L.A. knows how to draw.”

  “That was it,” said Baldessari. “I stopped drawing and dropped out of school.”10

  He went back to National City in 1961, married a schoolteacher, Carol Wixom, had two children, and taught art. While accepting of what seemed to be his destiny, he started taking photographs as notes for his paintings. He also made his way to the 1963 Warhol show at Ferus and the Duchamp retrospective in Pasadena. “I was very impressed by that. A
big impact. I mean, actually seeing that stuff instead of, you know, reading about it.”11

  In 1964, he was selected, along with Voulkos and Irwin, to be a member of a jury for the Fourth Annual California Painting and Sculpture awards. These rather amateur operations had been considered the substance of culture in the area for decades, but these three artists felt it was time to instill a measure of professionalism. Together, they rejected every single work so that none of the applicants received an award.

  After years of showing slides to galleries, Baldessari was finally scheduled for a solo show in 1965, but the gallery went bankrupt. Suddenly, he felt liberated: “I gave up all hope of showing and thought, ‘What the hell? Since nobody cares, why do I have to cosmeticize everything by translating it into painting? Why can’t I use straight information? Straight photography?”12 This was the epiphany that changed his career and his life.

  A year later, Baldessari had himself photographed standing in front of a palm tree by a suburban tract home. He processed the negative on a large stretched canvas and beneath the blurry black-and-white photograph added the word “Wrong.” The palm tree appeared to be growing out of his head so it was the wrong sort of composition. Living in the suburbs was wrong. Compared to the “studs,” he was wrong.13 Acceptance of his status as total outsider had led him to question the very nature of what might constitute a work of art.

  His work was conceived in the context of the obsession with craft that characterized the pristine wall reliefs of Kauffman, the glass boxes of Bell, and the minuscule dots of color painstakingly painted on white panels by Irwin. Nothing could be further from finish fetish than Baldessari’s decision in 1966 to hire a sign painter to letter texts in black capitals on off-color canvases. The simplest of these stated “Pure Beauty,” an astute choice for a work entirely divorced from the artist’s hand. No craft went into the making of this art—and, furthermore, Baldessari was confronting his viewers with an outrageous demand. It was down to them to decide the meaning since this assertion of “pure beauty” was absent from the painting while being the putative goal of much artistic effort over the centuries.

  John Baldessari with a brandy glass in each hand, rifle, and Christmas tree

  Photograph courtesy of Klaus Vom Bruch, 1975

  Nicholas Wilder and New York dealer Richard Bellamy had come to see these works but, like Coplans, had no idea what to make of them. Fluxus poet and critic David Antin, Baldessari’s colleague at UC San Diego, was his sole supporter and recommended him to Molly Barnes.

  Barnes had opened a gallery on North La Cienega Boulevard after giving up her pursuit of a bicoastal love affair with Willem de Kooning and, in 1968, she gave Baldessari a two-week slot in October between regularly scheduled shows. Coincidentally, Joseph Kosuth, another budding Conceptual artist from New York, had his first show that same night at Riko Mizuno and Eugenia Butler’s Gallery 669 right down the block. Jane Livingston reviewed both shows in Artforum. She noted that Kosuth wanted to strip away from his art everything but the idea and that he exhibited dictionary definitions of the word “Nothing,” while Baldessari was also interested in elimination of “aesthetic encumbrances.” Baldessari’s gray canvas bore black text stating “Everything is purged from this painting but art, no ideas have entered this work.”14

  Despite their similar pursuits, Baldessari and Kosuth did not bond. Kosuth was irritated that Livingston had compared their work. In his book Art After Philosophy and After, he denigrated his Los Angeles counterpart by writing that “the amusing pop paintings of John Baldessari allude to this sort of work by being ‘conceptual’ cartoons of actual conceptual art.”15 Baldessari protested, “I think of humor as going for laughs. I see my work as issuing forth from a view of the world that is slightly askew.”16

  Nonetheless, Baldessari’s work was funny. As a riposte to the motorcycle-riding and wave-surfing artists of Ferus, he had himself photographed from the back while wearing a denim jacket bearing a skull over paintbrushes, instead of crossed bones, and the gibe “Born to Paint.” When asked to contribute a work to a show at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1971, he sent an assignment to the students to write on the gallery walls “I will not make any more boring art.”

  Baldessari moved up to Los Angeles permanently in 1970. To mark a complete break with the past, he hauled each of his earlier paintings out of a packing case and gleefully kicked his foot through it. Portraits of friends, studies of pine trees, landscapes, still lifes, a few abstractions—thirteen years of accumulated work was destroyed. He took the ruins to a mortuary to be cremated, noting with irony that the young man helping to burn his life’s work once had been an art student. The ashes, in a book-shaped urn, were interred behind a bronze plaque: “John Anthony Baldessari, May 1953–March 1966.”

  “I stopped painting because I feared I might be painting for the rest of my life,” he said. “After a certain period of time, one knows how to make beautiful things.”17 He hoped to break “the stranglehold of what art is or could be.… I just believed art could be more than painting.”18

  In 1965, Walt Disney began the process of merging Chouinard Art Institute, whose founder’s health was failing, with the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music to create what he called an interdisciplinary “Caltech of the arts.” In 1969, California Institute of the Arts opened temporarily in Villa Cabrini Academy, a former Catholic girls school in Burbank. In 1971, the Modernist campus designed by the architectural firm Ladd and Kelsey opened in Valencia, a suburb to the north of Los Angeles.

  Baldessari was hired to establish a department of “Post-Studio” art, a term borrowed from Carl Andre, where he made it his business to import guest lecturers from Europe and New York to overcome the dominance of the Ferus-influenced aesthetic. Though Baldessari did not even visit New York until 1970, he strongly encouraged his students to move there. David Salle took that advice. Mike Kelley did not. Both had tremendously successful careers as artists. Those that stayed formed a second-generation nucleus of artists who remained in Los Angeles for reasons similar to their teacher. “A sense of permission,” Baldessari explained. “There’s a daffy quality of ‘Why not?’”19

  Musing on the difference between New York and Los Angeles, Baldessari added, “I remember taking mescaline with Bob Smithson and Tony Shafrazi and walking around West Broadway and Canal just laughing our heads off. And Bob drank. We all drank enormous amounts.… [It was] very much in the air about who did what first—this really linear sort of art history. I remember one night talking about some idea and everybody looking up and saying, ‘Yes, but how would that fit into art history?’ I felt, who the fuck cares, you know, you just do it. But you didn’t have that attitude in New York.”20

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Ferus Fades to Black

  Looking back, Blum said, “The artists that were there leaned on the gallery; the gallery leaned on that tight group of artists. We were very much in a vacuum, we were very alone—at least I can remember feeling that.… It had all kinds of problems but it had all kinds of lovely aspects.”1

  In the early years of Ferus, Blum good-naturedly agreed with his artists to hold periodic meetings to discuss the policies of the gallery. The artists held enough sway at that point to give thumbs-down to inviting Richard Diebenkorn to join the gallery. He may have been their friend and neighbor but as far as they were concerned, he represented Northern California figure painting and, therefore, the past.

  At another meeting the artists were adamant about not offering discounts to collectors. Blum argued that the gallery would be at a great disadvantage since most dealers offered courtesy discounts of at least 10 percent. The artists held firm. A few weeks later, financier Joseph Hirshhorn, who had sold his uranium-mining interests for $50 million in 1955, strolled into Ferus and offered to buy a number of pieces. Blum calculated the total sum and presented it to Hirshhorn, who asked for the usual discount. Blum said, “‘No, Mr. Hirshhorn, this is essentially a cooperative situation. W
e very often adhere to the ideas of the artists, and in this instance, their attitude … has to do with stating a figure and maintaining absolutely that figure in the face of any offer.’ He said, ‘Well, yes, I understand what you’re doing. Good luck!’ And out he went.”2 After that, Blum convinced the artists that their idea wasn’t workable.

  All along Blum continued to buy works by his artists. They were relatively inexpensive. As late as 1967, Blum said he bought ten Stellas for $10,000. “A lot of people don’t realize that … the jump came between 1967 and 1970,” Blum said. “Prior to 1967, all those people … Andy even, could have been bought very cheaply.”3 After 1967, Blum recalled, “I began to make sums of money that had eluded me up until that time.”4

  By then, Blum had closed Ferus. Arnold Glimcher suggested to Blum that they go into business together since Bell, Irwin, and Kauffman all showed at the Pace Gallery in New York. In 1967, Ferus Pace Gallery opened with great fanfare on North La Cienega Boulevard, but the situation soon proved unworkable. “I discovered that [Glimcher] was really interested in me not so much to buy work by people like Stella, Lichtenstein or Johns—people I was very interested in—but rather to sell people out of his stable like Ernest Trova … and Louise Nevelson. And that didn’t interest me enormously.”5 After several months, Blum dissolved the partnership.

  In a despondent mood, Blum was having his usual breakfast at the stone-fronted Schwabs coffee shop on Sunset when Kienholz walked in and asked what he was going to do. Blum told him that he’d been offered a job as an agent at William Morris. Kienholz snorted, “Irving, you’re not an agent. You’re an art dealer. Open another gallery.” Blum thought, “He’s exactly right.”6