L.A., Chicago and Houston

Robert Boyd


Out of Sight: The Los Angeles Art Scene of the Sixties by William Hackman (2015, Other Press)


Creating the Future: Art and Los Angeles in the 1970s by Michael Fallon (2014, Counterpoint)


Hairy Who & the Chicago Imagists by Leslie Buchbinder (2015, Pentimenti Productions)


Pow Wow: Contemporary Artists Working in Houston, 1972-1985, lecture by Pete Gershon with a panel discussion including Lynn Randolph, Marilyn Oshman, Richard Stout, Earl Staley and Kelly Alison

I grew up in Houston and have been interested in art since I was a child, but before I was even aware that Houston had an art scene of its own, I was interested in the scenes in Chicago and L.A. This interest began in the early 80s in college. I was taking a class called "Art Since the 40s," taught by William Camfield. One day, he showed two slides in succession, one showing a painting by Jim Nutt and one a painting by Ed Paschke. This work, shown in passing among hundreds of other slides, grabbed me hard. I ended up writing a paper about the Hairy Who for that class. This artwork was not well known--the research materials I dug up at the library were paltry. But I was able to determine from them that Chicago had a different thing going on than New York, and that thing had been around since Ivan Albright was painting there back in the 30s and 40s. Chicago's art was figurative and grotesque, and it had apparently been written out of contemporary art history, which was often presented (and still is) as a linear path. Chicago wasn't on that path.

While in school, both Edward Keinholz and Robert Irwin came and visited the campus. These were two very different artists, but they had Los Angeles in common. Later I read Lawrence Weschler's biography of Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, and it connected the artists (and many others). That's where I first read about the Ferus Gallery.

Perhaps the final step that cemented my interest in art scenes from the provinces was seeing the mind-blowing Helter Skelter exhibit at MOCA in Los Angeles. It made Los Angeles art feel sexy and dangerous, and suggested that the scene was vital.

I came to realize that Chicago and Los Angeles had their own distinct art histories. This is important because for the most part, I'd been taught that from the 1940 to 1980 or so, the history of art was essentially the same thing as the history of New York art. Now I saw how laughably wrong this was, because while what was happening in New York and Los Angeles overlapped in some aspects with New York and mainstream critical consensus, they were pretty distinct. And it started occurring to me that if Chicago and Los Angeles could have their own art histories, maybe other cities could. Maybe even Houston.

Los Angeles

Fortunately, the art history of Los Angeles is well documented in catalogs of museum exhibits and in other books. The Pacific Standard Time exhibits (organized in 2011 by the Getty Museum but involving the cooperation of 60 art institutions in Southern California) produce quite a few exhibition catalogs covering LA art from 1945 to 1980. Individual L.A. based artists have been well documented in exhibition catalogs and monographs (in my library, I have such books on Mike Kelley, Ed Kienholz, Lari Pittman, Ken Price, Raymond Pettibon, etc.) In addition to Pacific Standard Time, there have been other exhibits devoted to Los Angeles art, with their own attendant catalogs. Time & Place: Los Angeles, 1957-1968 was exhibited in 2008-09 at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and Los Angeles 1955-1985: The birth of an art capital at the Centre Pompidou in 2006. Both of these shows produced excellent catalogs. The Pompidou's, called Catalog L.A.: Birth of an Art Capital 1955-1985, is an obsessively detailed timeline of the entire era.

Beyond catalogs and monographs, there have been biographies (such as the Robert Irwin book mentioned above) and histories, including the excellent Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp and the oral history compiled by Kristine McKenna, The Ferus Gallery: A Place to Begin (as well as the documentary The Cool School: Story of the Ferus Art Gallery by Morgan Neville). With all this, it would seem that another book on the L.A. art scene in the 1960s would be irrelevant. But there are always new details to unearth, and points of view not yet discussed.

So even though I consider myself pretty much an expert on L.A. art in the 60s by now, I went ahead and ordered William Hackman's Out of Sight: The Los Angeles Art Scene of the Sixties. There isn't much here as far as the artists go that you won't find in Rebels in Paradise. But Hackman understood that institutions are important in a way that was only hinted at by Drohojowska-Philp. (That said, I consider Rebels in Paradise to be the superior book.) Obviously the rise and fall of one particular institution, the Ferus Gallery, is central to both books and any book dealing with L.A. in the 60s.


Artists outside the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, 1959. Clockwise from top: Billy Al Bengston, Irving Blum, Ed Moses, and John Altoon. Photo by William Claxton. - See more at: http://blogs.getty.edu/pacificstandardtime/explore-the-era/archives/i126/#sthash.eIk8NWu7.dpuf

To me it's an old story, but I realize my obsessions are not universal, so here's a nutshell history of the Ferus Gallery. In 1957, Walter Hopps and Edward Kienholz, two young men involved in the avant garde of the L.A. art scene, decided to partner up and open a gallery together on La Cienega Blvd., a commercial street in L.A. that already had several art galleries. They showed work by the cutting edge of L.A. and San Francisco art. But the gallery wasn't at all profitable, so in 1958, Irving Blum bought out Kienholz's share, moved the gallery across the street to a nicer space, trimmed the bloated roster and worked hard to turn Ferus into a gallery that made money for its artists and its owners. Blum gave Andy Warhol his first solo show and in general started showing more New York artist, as well as a very choice selection of L.A. artists. It has to be said that Kienholz, Hopps and Blum all had good eyes for art. Among their artists were people like Robert Irwin, Ed Moses, Ken Price, Ed Ruscha and Larry Bell. They really put Los Angeles art on the map at a time when art was utterly dominated by New York. In 1962, Walter Hopps left Ferus to take a job as a curator for the Pasadena Art Museum, and in 1967, Blum closed Ferus Gallery. It was just too hard to get collectors to part with their money for contemporary art in L.A. He moved to New York and started the Irving Blum Gallery. Of course, Hopps, Kienholz and Blum each achieved great success subsequent to the rise and fall of Ferus as an artist, as a curator/museum director, and as a gallerist respectively.


The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, 1965–68, Ed Ruscha. Oil on canvas. 53 1/2 x 133 1/2 in.

But what Hackman also covers are some of the other institutions that formed the art ecology of L.A. in the 60s. The Los Angeles County Art Museum, for example, was founded in 1961 and moved into a large modernist structure on Wilshire Blvd. in 1965 (this new structure is the subject of Ed Ruscha's famous painting, The Los Angeles County Art Museum on Fire). The museum's board of directors were so self-serving that almost as soon as the museum was built, they fired museum director Richard Brown after he demanded that the museum be run more professionally (and not as a gallery for the board's art collections). This was followed by years of mediocrity.

Even more pathetic than LACMA was fate of the Pasadena Art Museum. After groundbreaking shows curated by Hopps, the museum board was convinced by Hopps that the museum should move into a custom built structure (it was housed in a leased mansion). Hopps had few allies on the museum board who, it was said by Hopps' predecessor Thomas Leavitt, cared more for "the quality of the parties" than the "quality of the exhibitions." (And that attitude persists in Houston as well, as a casual perusal of CultureMap confirms.) There was a split on the board between the older members (conservative Pasadena WASPS) and the newer members (liberal Westside Jews) about the type of art the museum should be dedicated to (the Westside contingent supporting a more modern approach, following in the success of Hopps' exhibits). Also, because the museum had long run on noblesse oblige, there was no institutional capacity to raise the money necessary to build a new building. Hopps was forced out and left L.A. for good. (He ended his career as director of the Menil.) By 1974, the Pasadena Museum was in such financial trouble that it was taken over by Norton Simon and became the Norton Simon Museum. Considering that it had been the vanguard museum for contemporary art for a few years, this was a terrible loss.

Art galleries also had their troubles. Ferus was just one of many galleries that closed in the late 60s in L.A. Their problem was similar to what Houston galleries face today--their potential customers would prefer to buy art in New York, which is only an airplane ride away. That was the situation at the end of the 70s--no commercial or public institutions could be counted on to support contemporary art in a reliable way in Los Angeles, despite the fact that that it was the third largest city in America.

This is where Creating the Future: Art and Los Angeles in the 1970s comes in. Like artists all over the U.S., by the 70s in Los Angeles, there were serious questions about the institutions. Aside from their failure to support L.A. art, it was dawning on artists that these places were sexist and racist as well. Michael Fallon shows how parallel art worlds developed through alternative subcultures in L.A. First is feminist, and the major catalyst here was Judy Chicago. After developing a feminist art program at Fresno State, she joined up with Miriam Schapiro at CalArts to continue this work. They founded "Womanhouse" in a mansion near downtown (far from CalArts's new Valencia campus).

That this came out of CalArts is not too surprising. It was established in 1961 when the Disney brothers merged the Chouinard Art Institute (where many of the "cool school" 60s generation of LA artists studied and taught) and the L.A. Conservatory of Music. They wanted a school that would churn out the kind of skilled artists, musicians and composers that the entertainment industry needed. CalArts is still a leader for teaching animation. But it really took off in unexpected directions in 1971, when it moved to its new campus in Valencia, a distant northern suburb of Los Angeles. The school hired people like Chicago, John Baldessari and Allen Kaprow to teach. Because of this, L.A. suddenly became a hotbed of both performance art and conceptual art. The artists they taught became some of the most important artists of the 70s and 80s--though few remained in Los Angeles. Baldessari in particular encouraged them to move to New York because he recognized it would be difficult for them to maintain careers in L.A.


Suzanne Lacy, Car Renovation, 1972

Much of the book deals with the spread of performance and conceptual art in L.A., focusing on artists like Chris Burden, Mike Kelley (whose career would blossom in the 80s, but the groundwork for which was laid in the 70s), Suzanne Lacy, Paul McCarthy, Bas Jan Ader and Allen Ruppersberg. This work seems somewhat divorced from the failed institutions of the 60s, but often connected with educational institutions for support. (I've always wondered if artists who wish to decommodify art through performance or ethereality don't see their art school salaries as another form of commodification. I do.)



Llyn Foulkes, Who's on Third?, 1971-73

But Fallon points out that painting continued in Los Angeles. So he pays attention to the heterogeneous painting of Llyn Foulkes, Vija Celmins, Robert Williams, etc., while correctly refusing to identify any school of painting in L.A. When Fallon identifies a trend or tendency, it tends to be self-defining (feminist art or Chicano art), or it is something he made up himself. For example, he names a group of artists "New Romantics"--artists who were attracted in one way or another to the dark side of Los Angeles. He places Paul McCarthy, Kelley, Terry Allen, Bettye Saar and Tony Oursler in this group (and Foulkes on its edge). This seems a little dubious, but many of these artists ended up in Helter Skelter: L.A. Art of the 1990s at MOCA, which had a similarly dark theme, so maybe he's right.

Fallon also looks at art that almost had no relationship to the art world. The mural movement in L.A. in the 70s was largely Chicano and largely existed outside the heavily theorized world of conceptual and performance art. It was unabashedly populist, for one thing, and highly political. But all art worlds overlap to one degree or another--Asco, the conceptualist Chicano collective was one such overlapping point. Likewise, Fallon includes a chapter on "Lowbrow" art, the art that evolved out of custom car, surf and skateboard culture. In the 70s, this work existed defiantly outside the mainstream artworld, but time heals all breaches--Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw persuaded curator Paul Schimmel to include Robert Williams, the leader of this school of art, in the Helter Skelter exhibit in 1992.

If it sounds like a lot of the artists in this book achieved notoriety after the 70s, that's true. The impression one gets reading Creating the Future is that artists spent the decade laying a groundwork for future success. This is true not only for Mike Kelley and Robert Williams, but for James Turrell, Vija Celmins and even John Baldessari.

Creating the Future is necessarily unfocused. The simple truth is that the number of artists and the variety of artists was going to necessarily be bigger than in the 1960s. That the art scene could be defined by one institution, the Ferus Gallery, in the 1960s was a highly unusual situation. I like that Fallon doesn't try to create any false connections between scenes and artists where none really exist. Los Angeles is a city big enough to contain multitudes, artistic tendencies that are in opposition to or orthogonal to other trends. I see this in Houston today, with cliques and styles that don't really exist for each other.

Chicago

Chicago differs greatly from Los Angeles in one important way. Its artists have never become central or important to contemporary art history in the way that some of Los Angeles' artists finally did. When I think of really well-known Chicago artists, I can only think of a few (for example, Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, Ed Paschke, Kerry James Marshal and Theaster Gates. And Golub and Spero were only rediscovered in the 80s, after long careers painting in Chicago). I think most people conversant with contemporary art might have heard of the Hairy Who without necessarily being able to name the artists involved. If they saw a Roger Brown painting or an H.C. Westermann sculpture, it might seem familiar. Here's a completely unscientific way of stating this imbalance. In my personal book collection, I have 21 books dealing with Los Angeles art and only seven dealing with Chicago art. And none of the seven are a general history like Out of Sight and Creating the Future. I would love to read such a book, if it existed.

That said, a new documentary, Hairy Who and the Chicago Imagists directed by Leslie Buchbinder, does try to fill in a few blanks. Right up front, it admits Chicago's marginality.  "The story of 20th century American art is already written. It is not a story about Chicago." The subject of this film are a group of artists who started exhibiting in the 1960s. Most are completely unknown today, but a few--Jim Nutt, Karl Wirsum, Ed Paschke and Roger Brown have had major solo exhibits. They were all figurative painters. They weren't pop artists exactly, but they were influenced by popular culture, especially things on the fringe of popular culture. Instead of being influenced by shiny new products at the supermarket or mass-market ads, they were more likely to be influenced by the kinds of oddball items they found at flea markets or botanicas, early animated cartoons, pinball machines, carnival sideshows and painted commercial signs. But they were also influenced by outsider art and earlier Chicago artists like H.C. Westermann. Their work was often sexual and impolite--in this way, it seems similar to the contemporaneous art being produced by the underground cartoonists. One subgroup of the Chicago Imagists, the Hairy Who, even produced their own comic books to act as catalogs for their exhibits.

The structure of the film is to focus on one artist at a time, having that artist speak about his or her own work, and having other Imagists artists speak about their work, and then artists who were influenced by them. For instance, Kerry James Marshall and Chris Ware both conment on Jim Nutt's work, and Jeff Koons about Ed Paschke.

If Ferus is central to Out of Sight and CalArts to Creating the Future, the Hyde Park Art Center and the Phyllis Kind Gallery are the important institutions in Hairy Who and the Chicago Imagists. Don Baum was the director of the Hyde Park Art Center, and his stated goal was to give new artists a venue to show their work. Much of this was done through large group shows, but some artists wanted a smaller group show so that each of them could show multiple works. So Nutt, Suellen Rocca, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson and Jim Falconer proposed this to Baum. Baum suggested they include Karl Wirsum, which turned out to be an inspired addition. They brainstormed the name, Hairy Who, and it caught the attention  of the public. (The name for the group makes them sound like a rock band, but they weren't a collective in the sense of making collective artworks--each artist did their own thing.)

They were so successful that they had two more shows together at the Hyde Park Art Center, and Baum realized that he had stumbled onto a good thing. Instead of having shows with dozens of artists, have shows with five or six artists and give them a slightly wacky name. The Nonplussed Some consisted of Ed Paschke, Ed Flood, Sarah Canright, Richard Wetzel, Robert Guinan and Don Baum, and it was followed by the False Image, consisting of Roger Brown, Christina Ramberg, Philip Hanson and Eleanor Dube.


Christina Ramberg, Head, 1969-70

Just as Baldessari was a key teacher for many of the 70s era LA artists (and artists who left LA), Ray Yoshida served the same role for 60s era imagists. One of his main messages was to collect things and fill your life with your collections. He wasn't talking about expensive art collections (although perhaps not excluding them), but accumulating objects that obsess you and that collectively come to define you. Ed Paschke had photos of circus freaks; Roger Brown and Karl Wirsum had collections of oddball objects; many of the Imagists collected things from the flea markets of Maxwell Street. Part of the Hairy Who's second exhibit was a glass case full of things they collected. This was for Yoshida the starting point for a person's art. All the Imagists are visual bricoleurs, finding subject matter in the strange stuff they found on the street. For instance, there is a section Christina Ramberg's diary where she talks of finding an old romance comic on Maxwell Street, seeing all these drawings of the protagonist from the rear and being inspired to paint a series based on them.


Ed Paschke, La Chanteuse, 1981

Phyllis Kind Gallery was founded in Chicago in 1967, and she became the primary gallery for many of these artists over the next decade. Jim Nutt remarks in the film that it was probably a mistake for so many of them to put all their eggs in that one basket, but Kind was aggressive in marketing their work. Over the course of the 70s, she was successful in placing the work with collectors and encouraging museums all over the world to show and collect the work. For instance, Walter Hopps curated a show of Chicago Imagists that originated in São Paulo and which traveled throughout Latin America. But like Irving Blum, she saw the writing on the wall and moved her operation to New York, shifting focus to outsider art. She says, "You do what you have to do when you have to do it."

As quickly as they found success, they became the reactionary establishment in the eyes of the younger Chicago artists who were influenced by conceptualism and theory. You could read the hostility towards them in the pages of the New Art Examiner, which started publishing in Chicago in 1973 and for years was another important institution on the local scene. In 1974, Frank Pannier wrote, "Here [in Chicago], through the continual re-hash of the same old tired 'Dada Surrealist' concepts and also through the constant proliferation of simple-minded provincial aesthetics, most 'pictorial' art is reduced to that infectious manifestation of visual gonorrhea most clearly typified by the 'Hairy Who?' and its many offspring." ("A Painter Reviews Chicago, Part 1," Frank Pannier, The New Art Examiner, Summer 1974)

It seemed that the Imagists had gone out of style. The art market rejected them, the critics forgot them, younger artists abjured them. But what comes around goes around and they seem to have come back, with recent exhibits at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (2011) and solo Jim Nutt exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2011). Karl Wirsum and Gladys Nilsson have relatively new gallery representation in New York City, and Philip Hanson's paintings were in the most recent Whitney Biennial (they were my favorite works in the show). The film concludes with a variety of contemporary artists talking about how important the work is to them, so their influence is strong even if these artists are still not well known outside Chicago.

Houston

In these two books and this documentary, one can see similarities to L.A. and Chicago in Houston's art scene. Houston is a younger city, of course. While there were interesting artists in Houston in the 1960s, it wasn't until the 70s that the local art scene took off. So where is a book or documentary film about that era in our city's art history? It's coming. A couple of weeks ago, Pete Gershon, author of Painting the Town Orange, gave a presentation on his work in progress, Pow Wow: Contemporary Artists Working in Houston, 1972-1985. He's been interviewing artists and people involved in Houston's art world for over a year now, since Bert Long's death in early 2013. Gershon had on a volunteer basis been cataloging Long's papers when Long suddenly died. Gershon said that even though he had spent a considerable amount of time with Long, there were still questions he wanted to ask. From there he realized that there are a number of Houston artists in their 60s, 70s and 80s about whom he could say the same thing. One thing lead to another, and this book was born. Rather than review something that doesn't yet exist except as a partially completed manuscript, I want to present a talk that Gershon gave about the work in progress at the Glassell school (filmed and edited by J.J. Avkah).




I believe regional art histories are extremely important. We feel sometimes that the modern world homogenizes culture, but the examples of L.A. and Chicago demonstrate how wrong that is--two cities in the U.S. produced utterly distinct art at exactly the same time. I should say three cities (including Houston). And each was distinct from New York. But this documentary and the two books also show how difficult it is to maintain and nurture a regional art scene. It can all go away and be forgotten, unless writers, archivists, film-makers and other keepers of memory do their work.

Rewriting of Art History, Again

Robert Boyd



Many rock nerds (such as myself) can easily construct an alternate history of rock music, one that foregrounds hitless acts like the Velvet Underground, Love, Big Star and the Ramones, and erases many of the bands you are likely to hear on a classic rock station (AC/DC, Styx, Journey, Dire Straits, etc.). Partly that's because Big Star (for example) is utterly great and Journey (for example) is utterly dreadful. (And if you disagree, well, that's just your opinion, man!) But it's also because we rock nerds tend to excessively value discovering something for ourselves that wasn't easy to find--bands that were never played on the radio, for example. Classic rock, for us, was a metanarrative imposed by a power structure (as described in part by such books as Hit Men--see, we rock nerds are such nerds that were read books about rock music) that seemed arbitrary and unfair. There is a degree of ressentiment here--that can't be denied. But the idea that a metanarrative or a "grand narrative" is an inescapable (and oppressive) system is an idea that has been the source of many alternate histories and systems--including the rock nerds' alternative history of rock.

Dan Nadel's exhibit, What Nerve!: Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to the Present, collecting together art by H.C. Westermann, Jim Nutt, Peter Saul, Ken Price, Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, Jim Drain, William Copley, Elizabeth Murray, Jack Kirby, Gary Panter and many more, is an equivalent to the rock nerds' challenge to the accepted history of rock. The grand narrative Nadel is challenging is the canonical history of art from the 60s through the 90s. You might think of this history as appropriation and assemblage paralleled by minimalism, post-minimalism transitioning to conceptualism, installation and performance, heavily undergirded by French theory as filtered through Artforum and October. Establishing a counterhistory to that seems like a worthwhile thing to do, right?

Except that in real life, it's really hard to come up with a cohesive history of art during that period. The idea that there actually is a metanarrative to be in opposition to seems suspect, especially in 2014. This is because the period covered in this exhibit was one in which in which Modernism went off the rails and a thousand flowers bloomed. Modernism was a real metanarrative that was slain (or at least crippled) by Post-Modernism, which is to say by the myriad challenges from many directions to its seeming hegemony. Art history was reclaimed and reframed as women, members of racial minorities, formerly colonized people, and LGBT people asked why art history and Modernism in particular seemed so white, so European/North American and so male? Specifically they were asking if the ideological underpinnings of Modernism, which hitherto had seemed so neutral and formal, masked hidden sexist and racist tendencies.

Compared to issues like those, the ones addressed by Nadel's exhibit seem far less consequential. And I hate the defensive title, What Nerve! The desire to showcase the work of overlooked or undervalued artists is a laudable one, but this title suggests that there was an elite NYC cabal looking down their noses at these provincial artists, saying "How dare they do this?" and holding them back. When an exhibit includes work by Mike Kelly, Elizabeth Murray, Ken Price and Peter Saul, this is a questionable premise.


Jim Falconer, Morbid Sunshine by a Miner Artist, 1966, oil on canvas, 78 x 78 1/4. Falconer was a member of the Hairy Who.

Nadel in his introduction writes, "With the recognition of modernism as the dominant art mode and the critical emphasis on theory, artists who were unable or unwilling to adopt to crisp rationales found themselves at loose ends." I think this can be reasonably said in regard to, say, the Hairy Who, a group of Chicago artists whose manic figurative work is a major part of the show, but is it true of Forcefield, the late 90s collective of RISD art students? They may have been rebellious, but not against Modernism, which was a corpse by the time they became active.


Forcefield (Jim Drain, Mat Brinkman, Ara Peterson and Leif Goldberg), various costumes and objects, 200-2002

Judith Tannenbaum, in her essay for the catalog "Outside the Looking Glass," writes more directly: "By bringing [the artists in What Nerve!] together, we hope to right this wrong, and to flesh out a history of representational art that has largely been submerged by the canon of Minimal and Conceptual art to which it runs parallel in the second half of the twentieth century." One can certainly say that these artists haven't been given their due (although with Mike Kelley and Elizabeth Murray, that is patently untrue), and that alone is a good reason to put them in an exhibit. And to say that they represent a certain tendency running through the past few decades is reasonable. But to posit an alternative art history that exists against the accepted narrative is an over-reach. For one thing, it ignores many figurative artists who were very successful, respected, etc., from the 60s forward. For example, Red Grooms, Alex Katz, Larry Rivers, Alice Neel, Richard Lindner, Mel Ramos, John Wesley, Tom Wesselmann, James Rosenquist, Wayne Theibaud, Philip Guston, Neil Jenney, Malcolm Morley, Ida Applebroog, Jean-Michell Basquiat, Eric Fischl, Leon Golub, David Salle, Julian Schnabel, Robert Colescott, Jacob Lawrence, Kerry James Marshall, Raymond Pettibon and Kiki Smith. Tannenbaum at least makes a nod to them--and to the general pluralism of art starting in the 60s (undermining her own argument about the "canon"). (Ironically, when I saw What Nerve! at RISD, there was a small but choice exhibit called She: Picturing women at the turn of the 21st century up at Brown University's David Winton Bell Gallery, featuring figurative art by Glenn Brown, George Condo, John Currin, Yayoi Kusama, Chris Ofili, Jenny Saville, Lisa Yuskavage and others.)


Jack Kirby, Tribes Trilogy 3, 1976, ink and Dr. Martin's dyes on board, 15 x 20 inches

So if forming a counternarrative to canonical art history isn't a reasonable organizing principle for this show, what is? The work in it appears to have a family relationship, after all. The obvious connection is a kind of cartoon figuration. This is a little more specific than figuration generally. There are elements of caricature in much of the work. There is a good deal of humor. There are direct references to comic strips, comic books, magazine cartoons and animated cartoons. And many of the included artists--Mat Brinkman (of Forcefield), Gary Panter and of course, Jack Kirby--have significant bodies of comics art under their belts. Kirby, of course, is known primarily as a comics artist--Nadel includes in this show nearly all of his "wall art." I wish they had made this--cartoon figuration--the explicit theme of the show. It would have been a smaller statement than the counternarrative to art history idea, but one much more defensible and, to me, more interesting.

The other organizing principal could be "the obsessions of Dan Nadel." Nadel is an editor, publisher and curator. I first became aware of him in 2000 or so when I saw the first issue of his beautiful squarebound journal The Ganzfeld. The Ganzfeld dealt with comics in a new way. It looked at the intersection of comics and art. And within its pages were articles and features on many of the people in this exhibit--Peter Saul, the Hairy Who, Gary Panter, members of Forcefield and maybe some I'm missing. Nadel spun this magazine into a publishing concern, PictureBox (2000 to 2014), which published many art catalogs and comics featuring the artists in this show, including Return of the Repressed: Destroy All Monsters 1973-1977 and Gary Panter, a massive two volume retrospective in book form. As a curator, he has put together shows by Jack Kirby and Hairy Who member Karl Wirsum. And he edited two books of overlooked and underappreciated comics--a counternarrative to the accepted history of comics, if you will-- called Art in Time and Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries, 1900-1969. What Nerve! brings together a lot of artists who have long been objects of fascination for Nadel as well as the idea of an alternate to the canon.

Whether you see this show as dealing with cartoon figuration or if you see it as a gathering of several of Nadel's artistic obsessions, the stated thesis in the catalog doesn't really hold water. Does the mean this is a bad exhibit? No, it just means that you should take its claims, and some of the claims made for it (for instance in the review "Here Is Your Nasty, Glorious, Freewheeling Alternative History Of American Art" by Priscilla Frank), with a grain of salt. Concentrate instead on the art itself. And to be fair, the big claims are only a small part of the scholarship in the catalog--mostly the essays deal with the specific artists and collectives and their work. They are, for the most part, informative, useful and entertaining.


Peter Saul, Dogpatch, 1961, crayon and collage on paper

It was pure pleasure to see early work by Peter Saul. Dogpatch is quite early, before his style tightened up. You can see some expressionist brushstrokes, which would mostly disappear from his painting later. It reminds me a bit of Richard Diebenkorn and Larry Rivers.

 
Peter Saul, Man in Electric Chair, 1966, styrofoam coated with plastic and enamel, 55 x 24 x 42 inches.

Saul's large sculpture, Man in Electric Chair is like a living underground comix image, but the textures and patterns in the paint feel ahead of their time. This is the kind of artwork I think of when I use the phrase "cartoon figuration." Whether Saul was consciously influenced by cartoons or comics, it's impossible to see Man in Electric Chair without thinking about them.


Kenneth Price, Red, 1961, ceramic, paint, wood, 14 7/8 x 17 x 16 3/16

Saul was lumped in with several other artists, including Kenneth Price, in a group called the Funk artists. Unlike the Hairy Who, Destroy All Monsters and Forcefield, these artists didn't call themselves Funk artists. It was the coinage of curator Peter Selz who showed a group of Bay Area artists in a show of the same name at the UC Berkeley museum in 1967. The catalog essay by Nicole Rudick relates the amusing history of the term, including the rejection of it by many of the artists to whom Selz applied it.

But is easy to see a visual relationship between the works. Even though Kenneth Price was never a figurative artist (which begs the question of why he's in the show except one never needs an excuse to include Kenneth Price in an art show), his curvy, colorful ceramics have a cartoony presence that relates them to other "funk" artists like Robert Hudson and Peter Saul.


Robert Arneson, Typewriter, 1965, earthenware with glaze, paint, 6 1/8 x 11 3/8 x 12 1/2 inches

One of the great things about seeing What Nerve! is that I got to see many works I had only seen in photos before, like Typewriter by Robert Arneson. At a time when his peers (including Ken Price) were making work that was sleek and minimal, Arneson was mining a deliberately grungy aesthetic. In a way, he is close stylistically to assemblagists like Wallace Berman, George Herms and Ed Kienholz despite his use of ceramics.

 
Jim Nutt, Now! Hairy Who Makes You Smell Good poster, 1968, offset lithograph, 21 1/4 x 16 5/8 inches

The Hairy Who were more self-directed and self-defined. Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Suellen Rocca, Jim Falconer and Art Green had been classmates at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They proposed a show to Don Baum, director of the Hyde Park Art Center, and he suggested that they add Karl Wirsum to the line up because Wirsum's work seemed similar to what they were doing. It turned out to be a perfect fit--the six artists worked closely together and forged a collective identity for a few years. Not that the work was collective--for the most part, they did solo work. But some aspects were collaborative--the comic-book-style catalogs they produced and the design of the shows.

 
Jim Nutt, Wow, 1968, acrylic on plexiglass, 30 x 25 inches

I have a special affection for the Hairy Who. When I was an undergrad in the early 80s taking an "art since the 1940s" art history class, the professor showed a single slide of Jim Nutt's work one day as representative of what was happening in Chicago. (I think he may have also showed Roger Brown and Ed Paschke.) It immediately grabbed me, and I wrote my paper for the class on the group, scrounging up information from old art magazines. In the early 80s when I wrote that paper they were still underrated, but since that time they have been rediscovered and reevaluated. Nutt always had success as a painter, but recently we've seen major gallery exhibits in New York for Karl Wirsum and Gladys Nilsson, as well as museum shows. Still it's nice to see some of the art from the original group of shows gathered together, as well as the ephemera (posters, comics) that accompanied the original Hairy Who exhibits.

 
Karl Wirsum, Baseball Girl, 1964, acrylic on canvas, 39 x 31 inches

When I wrote that paper back in the early 80s, I fell in love with the above image (reproduced quite small in the glossy pages of a mid-sixties art magazine) by Karl Wirsum. Unlike his later work, in which human figures become quite monstrous, Baseball Girl is an appealing and erotic image.


Karl Wirsum, Gilateen, 1968, oil on canvas, 24 1/2 x 21 1/2 inches

More typical of where Wirsum's art would go is Gilateen from 1968. The way Wirsum outlines flat areas of color may remind viewers of comic books, but the images themselves seem completely original. They have more the idea of a cartoon rather than a specific reference to a comics or cartoon image. And they anticipate what cartoonists from the 80s to the present would be doing. Wirsum was an artist who fell through the cracks for a while before being rediscovered, but it's easy to see why his work was dismissed (wrongly, I might add!). It seemed wacky and low brow and adolescent and just not serious. I think the lack of apparent seriousness was what kept many of these artists from getting their due. Maybe 60s and 70s-era critics like Michael Fried or Rosalind Krauss have exceptional senses of humor in private, but their public critical posture was dead serious. But as we've seen (and will continue to see), much of the art in What Nerve! was meant to be funny. And "funny" was hard for certain important critics to process.


Art Green, Double Exposure, 1969, oil on canvas, 36 x 24 inches.

In retrospect, much of the work of the Hairy Who appears dated. There is something inherently "60s" about Art Green's work, particularly paintings like Double Exposure. But the psychedelic colors and juxtapositions shouldn't prevent us from enjoying it today any more than they do with work by, say, James Rosenquist, whose work Green reminds me of.


Gladys Nilsson, Phantom Plus, 1966, watercolor on paper, 21 5/8 x 14 1/2.

Gladys Nilsson's soft forms remind me of any number of somewhat psychedelic 60s-era cartoons, ranging from Tom Wilson's Ziggy or the Heinz Edelmann-designed movie, Yellow Submarine. Her choice of watercolor is unusual for its time and lends her work a somewhat whimsical air. (Her more recent work, some of which is on view through December 6 at Garth Greenan Gallery in New York, has more sharp edges.)


H.C. Westermann, See America First plate 8, 1968, 18 lithographs, 21 3/4 x 30 inches each.

The Hairy Who were from Chicago, which had a long tradition of figuration while New York artists and critics championed abstraction. New York tastemakers seemed disdainful of the Second City's art scene; Chicago said "so what?" and went its own way. What appeals to me about this local history is that there is a continuity--older artists influenced and taught younger artists. I think this kind of lineage can be found in any sufficiently large and robust local scene. What Nerve! featured not only the Hairy Who, but three other artists with roots in the Chicago scene, including H.C. Westermann (above). Westermann is best known for his three-dimensional works, but See America First, a cheeky series of satirical lithographs, is quite nice. It shows Westermann, a blue-collar war veteran, approaching the somewhat more genteel territory of Saul Steinberg.


Christina Ramberg, Probed Cinch, 1971, acrylic on masonite in painted artist's frame, 13 x 13 inches.

Christina Ramberg was one artist in the show with whom I was almost completely unfamiliar. The name was familiar--it is often mentioned when people write of Chicago artists of the 60s and 70s (along with Philip Hanson and Roger Brown). Like Hanson and Brown, it has an appealing combination of precision and mystery. In the three paintings included in the show, we see these women's bodies in somewhat old-fashioned lingerie but no faces (facelessness was also a feature of most of Brown's paintings). The viewer is pushed right up close to these bodies.


Elizabeth Murray, Truth, Justice and the Comics #1, 1990, oil on canvas on wood, 50 x 53 x 4 inches.

Elizabeth Murray was born in Chicago and studied at the School of the Art Institute in the late fifties and early sixties. She seems to have picked up some of that town's attitude toward figuration and humor. She spent most of her career in New York, and that fact might account for her relative success compared to many of the Chicago artists. She got lumped in with the neo-expressionists in the late 70s and 80s, which was apt. But she avoided most of those painters' bombast and pretension. One thing she is well known for are her elaborate shaped canvases, such as Truth, Justice and the Comics #1 above. Her work always has a slightly grungy, hand-made physicality. Her work, like Philip Guston's, embodied a kind of expressionist approach to cartoon figuration. It recalled in its way the old comics of the 20s and 30s like Barney Google and the Bungle Family--comics that, to paraphrase Robert Crumb, smelled of boiled cabbage. Her own tough Chicago childhood (which included periods of homelessness) might have fed into that, but her work never feels morose. In any case, she doesn't qualify as overlooked artist like Christina Ramberg might--I just saw an enormous Elizabeth Murray hanging over the ticket table on the ground floor of MOMA two weeks ago.


Cary Loren, Jim Shaw as a Spaceman, God's Oasis, 1975/2011, photograph, 24 x 20 inches.

Destroy All Monsters was a band/commune in Ann Arbor in the mid-70s. It consisted of four members, Cary Loren, Niagara, Jim Shaw and Mike Kelley.  Kelley and Shaw left to study and CalArts and became very well-known contemporary artists. Indeed, Kelley is considered one of the key artists of his age.

The four of them did a lot of art while they lived together but perhaps more important is that they embodied their art in the way they lived. Their house, God's Oasis, was mostly a reflection of Jim Shaw's scuzzy collection of the lowest-brow pop culture possible.


Mike Kelley (foreground) and Jim Shaw in Shaw's bedroom at God's Oasis.

I was amused to come across the photo of Kelley in Shaw's bedroom standing by Shaw's comic spinner rack. You can see a copy of Katy Keene, a comic that featured paper dolls for its titular model protagonist, in the bottom left. The one time I met Mike Kelley was during the 90s at San Diego Comic-Con. He had just come from the auction, clutching his prize and grinning with pleasure. I asked him what he got, and he pulled out an original Bill Woggon Katy Keene paper doll page. In other words, the things that obsessed them as undergraduate weirdos continued to be an important part of their work as mature artists. For Kelley, it was abjection, as seen in his quasi-sexual installations and performances using well-used stuffed animals. It was also almost worshipful depictions of Kandor, the bottled city from Krypton in old Superman comics. For Shaw, it was his endless explorations of adolescence and cults. It all started here.


Mike Kelley, Political Cartoon (In the Clutches of Evil), 1976/2011, pigment print on paper, 32 x 45 3/4 inches

But that doesn't mean that the work done by these four artists in God's Oasis was all that good. Kelley's underground comix-influenced Political Cartoon, for example, looks like the work of an ambitious, snarky college student, but doesn't compare in power with Kelley's mature work.


Niagara, The Key, 1974, watercolor on paper, 17 x 14 inches.

The same is true of Niagara's drawings and watercolors, which was among the least interesting art in the show. The life they lead at God's Oasis and in the "band" Destroy All Monsters (which at the time existed to deliberately annoy its listener/victims by making godawful noise) was the real art--art as life. What we have left in this exhibit are relics of that life, but they are far less interesting than the personal accounts in the catalog by Cary Loren and Niagara. (After Kelley and Shaw headed west, Destroy All Monsters became more of a "real" rock band.)


Forcefield, Slice Print, 2001, silkscreen print

Forcefield was similar to Destroy All Monsters in that it was a collective, a band, and a group of people whose life was as much a work of art as was their music, graphic art and costumes. But compared to Destroy All Monsters, the relics of Forcefield's existence are much more interesting. Forcefield consisted of four members, Jim Drain, Ara Peterson, Mat Brinkman and Lief Goldberg. Drain, Brinkman and Goldberg lived with several other artists in Providence, Rhode Island, in a warehouse structure they called Fort Thunder. Fort Thunder was packed with stuff--even the high ceiling was hung with random garbage. The walls were all made of slapped-together plywood, and every inch was covered with drawings, graffiti, stickers and glued-objects. The artists who lived there had bands (in addition to Forcefield there was Lightning Bolt), put on shows for other bands, made costumes, had a silk-screen studio (Fort Thunder silkscreens are highly prized), produced comics, etc.

Nadel could have chosen any aspect of Fort Thunder to include in this show, but chose Forcefield, which was perhaps the most focused part of the sprawling activities associated with Fort Thunder. But what is ironic is that he includes this band/performance group in a show devoted to figurative art. Outside of their Forcefield work, Leif Goldberg and Mat Brinkman have done tons of figurative work in drawings, comics and animation. Drain and Peterson's non Forcefield work has been mostly abstract and installation-based. The only aspect of Forcefield that could be considered figurative (and this stretches the term) are the knit costumes they made.

 
Forcefield (Jim Drain, Mat Brinkman, Ara Peterson and Leif Goldberg), various costumes and objects, 200-2002

But even if calling them "figurative" stretches the definition of the word, so what? They're amazing. Initially the costumes were pieced together out of old afghans found in local thrift stores, but when Jim Drain joined, he started knitting them from scratch. (Knitting has remained a part of Drain's artistic practice.) The patterns and the way they cover the wearer's face give them an alien, slightly threatening appearance, but the fact that they're knit makes them simultaneously seem cozy and inviting. 


Jack Kirby, Dream Machine, 1970-1975, ink and watercolor on board, 18 x 52 inches.

In 2003, the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston mounted a show called Splat Boom Pow! The Influence of Cartoons in Contemporary Art. It was notable in that among 34 artists included in the show (which included Elizabeth Murray and Peter Saul), only one had actually produced comics. Thankfully, What Nerve! avoids this. Perhaps Nadel's most radical curatorial move is to include several works by Jack Kirby. Kirby wasn't a fine artist who dabbled with comics on the side. He was a lifelong comics practitioner who did a small number of stand-alone painted artworks. Nadel collects almost all of them. They each reflect Kirby's unique techno-psychedelia that characterizes some of his finest comic book work.


Jack Kirby, Dream Machine detail, 1970-1975, ink and watercolor on board, 18 x 52 inches.
 
This is the key to the exhibit in my view--the idea of cartoon figuration and its possibilities. Unlike much Pop Art which was holding a kind of mirror to pop culture (and comics and cartoons were a part of that), these artists were attempting to work within that vocabulary--and were willing to show that that vocabulary permits a wide variety of expression. Jack Kirby, working for hire in what was widely considered one of the cheapest, most low-brow forms of pop culture, came up with a highly personal form of expression.

It's not about "influence" (as in Splat Bang Pow!) or appropriation--it's ultimately about expression. That's what connects all the artists in What Nerve!, whether they practiced any sort of cartoon figuration or not. And despite the somewhat overblown claims made for the art here, the work here adds up to something greater than the sum of its parts. It's an interesting, unexpected show.

What Nerve! runs at the RISD through January 4, 2015.


Gary Panter, Austin Corbin from the series The Near Extinction and Salvation of the American Buffalo, 1981, acrylic on paper, 22 x 30 inches.

Jim Drain, untitled (bench), 2010, powder coated stainless steel and aluminum. These weren't part of the exhibit--they were right outside the gallery. 


William Copley, The Seven Year Itch, 1973, acrylic on linen, 58 x 45 inches.