Art That Moved Me in 2016

Robert Boyd

I included three art things that I saw in 2016 in Houston and vicinity in Glasstire's "Best of 2016" list. To narrow it down to those three, I had to start from a larger list. It was hard to choose the final three--indeed, my top three changed several times.

In the Glasstire list, I included

Various works by JooYoung Choi in various Houston venues
Pat Palermo's Galveston Drawing Diary by Pat Palermo
The Color of Being/ El Color del Ser: Dorothy Hood (1918-2000) at the Art Museum of South Texas

The Glasstire list has a lot of good exhibits that made my long list. I don't want to repeat their work, so here is a brief list of events I liked that Glasstire included in their long list:
Andy Campbell, PoMo Houston Bus Tour
Jamal Cyrus, Untitled, 2010 
Joey Fauerso, A Soft Opening at David Shelton, Houston
As Essential as Dreams: Self-Taught Art from the Collection of Stephanie and John Smither, The Menil Collection

And here are the some more that I liked that did not make the Glasstire list:

Holy Barbarians: Beat Culture on the West Coast at the Menil featuring John Altoon, Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, George Herms and Edward Keinholz.

Part of the reason I was so intrigued by this inventory exhibit was because I recently read Welcome to Painterland: Bruce Conner and the Rat Bastard Protective Association by Anastasia Aukeman. This book dealt with most of the artists in the exhibit--a group of San Francisco artists who mostly lived in the same apartment building, along with beat poet Michael McClure. We don't think of the beat movement has having a visual arts component mainly because for a long time, artists like Jay DeFeo and George Herms were ignored by art history. They were out of the mainstream art-historical narrative that was built up in the 60s and 70s, plus they didn't particularly want to be lumped into the beat category. Connor actively resisted it because in his view, "beat" had become a derogatory term used by the mass media to exploit their thing. Furthermore, few of these artists tried very hard to get noticed. They didn't care about being in museums or high-end galleries. All the galleries in San Francisco where they showed their work were small-scale artist-run spaces that lasted a few years at most then disappeared.


George Herms, Greet the Circus with a Smile, 1961,  mannequin torso, salvaged wood, feathers, tar, cement, cloth, plant material, paint, crayon, ink, paper, photographs, metal, plastic, glass, cord, mirror, electrical light fixture, and phonograph tone-arm, 68 × 28 1/2 × 20 in.

The odd men out in this collection are Kienholz--who really was a beatnik of sorts but much more ambitious than DeFeo or Berman--and Altoon, who lived like a beatnik but never was, as far as I can determine, associated with the movement.

In addition to showing a bunch of extremely choice artworks, it also shows several issues of Wallace Berman's early poetry and art publication Semina. Each issue was printed with letterpress on unbound slips of paper. It was truly a 'zine avant la lettre. 

The exhibit will be up until March 12, 2017.


Jay DeFeo, Untitled (cross), 1953, wood, cloth, plaster, synthetic resin, and nails, 28 1/2 × 16 1/2 × 4 in. 

Earl Staley designs for Faust at the Houston Grand Opera. These designs (sets, backdrops and costumes) were originally created by Staley in 1985. He was traveling in Italy and Greece at the time when the HGO contacted him. All his work for it was done abroad. The painted scrims are done in Staley's expressionist style which works wonderfully for this old warhorse. Every few years these costumes and sets are pulled out of storage and performed somewhere--for example, they were used for an Atlanta production in 2014.

The photo below is of the scrim you see before the opening and between acts. It looks a bit washed out compared to the real thing--it's hard to photograph, apparently. The sets had intense color and deep shadows. This infernal scrim was a remarkable depiction of hell and Satan.


Earl Staley, scrim in the original 1985 production of Faust (courtesy of Earl Staley)

Sharp by Havel+Ruck in Sharpstown.

I wrote about this work in Glasstire. If you haven't seen it, they're tearing it down January 1. (Might be worth a trip to Sharpstown to see it town down.)


Sharp by Havel+Ruck

Faith Wilding at UHCL.

I wrote about this exhibit in Glasstire. Nice show in an unexpected location.


Faith Wilding, Flow, 2010-2016, chemistry vessels, cheesecloth, water, ink

Statements at MFAH featuring Mequitta Ahuja, Nick Cave, Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker, John Biggers, Elizabeth Catlett, Melvin Edwards, Loretta Pettway, Louise Ozell Martin, Gordon Parks, Ernest C. Withers, Lonnie Holley, Jean Lacy, Thornton Dial, Sr., Jesse Lott, Dawolu Jabari Anderson, Michael Ray Charles, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Robert Pruitt, Mark Bradford,  and Tierney Malone. This inventory exhibit got a certain amount of criticism for not having a very interesting curatorial idea. The only thing the artists necessarily had in common was that they were African American. Sure, you'd like an exhibition to have a stronger theme than "here's a bunch of stuff we had in storage by African American artists", but the pieces they displayed were really exciting. The show might not have been greater than the sum of its parts, but did it need to be when the parts were this good?


Dawolu Jabari Anderson, Twinkle Twinkle Little Tar, 2009, 72 x 48 inches, latex, acrylic, pen and ink on paper

What I especially liked was the inclusion of Houston area artists, like Dawolu Jabari Anderson, Robert Pruitt, Trenton Doyle Hancock and Tierney Malone. In a show like this, you expect a clever Glenn Ligon, a striking Nick Cave, a powerful Thornton Dial, etc. But when it makes me feel good to see the local guys work side by side with such giants.


ILYB, Head

I Love You Baby at GalleryHOMELAND, Gspot and Cardoza Gallery.

I Love You Baby (ILYB) was an artist collective started officially in 2002 but unofficially in 1992. It consisted of Paul Kremer, Rodney Chinelliot, Will Bentsen, Chris Olivier and Dale Stewart and included occasional collaborators. They had a three-venue retrospective called We’ve Made a Huge Mistake at Gallery Homeland, Gspot and Cardoza Gallery. I reviewed it and interviewed the surviving members for Glasstire.


ILYB, Boot Face


Michael Tracy, August #2, 2013-2015, Acrylic on cavas over wood, 54 x 48 

Michael Tracy at Hiram Butler

This was a very small exhibit--four almost monochromatic canvases--two mostly black and two (like the one above) mostly orange. My knowledge of Michael Tracy's work is quite limited--I've seen a catalog from a P.S. 1 show, Terminal Privileges, and a book from 1992 showing images and writings about a 1990 performance, The River Pierce: Sacrifice II. I'd never seen work of his in person until I saw this show. Tracy had done monochromatic canvases before (as seen in Terminal Privileges), so that part wasn't a surprise. And his performances seem ritualistic and shamanistic, not unlike Yves Klein's, so the existence of monochromatic paintings has perhaps a connection to the void or the infinite.

But these paintings, as well as a series of painted drawings that Mr. Butler showed me, feel like very specific objects instead of representations of abstract ideas. It was ultimately that specificity that appealed to me.


Katie Mulholland, Mad Rad, acrylic on canvas, 20 x 20 inches

Kate Mulholland, Apocalypse Dreams at Scott Charmin.

Kate Mulholland's paintings are created by building paint up then sanding it down, over and over, to create images similar to topographic maps.  I saw her show at the Scott Charmin gallery early this year and was so taken by these paintings that I bought the one shown above, Mad Rad. The red and blue parts are so close in value that they vibrate slightly (an effect impossible to capture in a photo). The title made me think of rads as a measure of doses of absorbed radiation. I don't know if that occurred to Mulholland when she titled it Mad Rad, but when I see it, it feels like I am looking at dangerous, radioactive chemicals.


Emily Peacock, Your Middle Class is Showing, 2016, archival inkjet print mounted on aluminum

Emily Peacock, User's Guide to Family Business at Beefhaus.

I was up in Dallas to see Jim Nolan's show Welcome Stranger (which was quite enjoyable), and Beefhaus across the street was showing Peacock's User's Guide to Family Business. The pieces in the show, which were made from a variety of media above and beyond Peacock's signature photography, all dealt with death and mortality--specifically with the death of Peacock's mother.

I you had (as I have) been following her work for years (since at least 2011, when I saw work by her in the UH MFA show), you would have seen Peacock's mother and other family members guest-starring in her photos. Whether recreating Diane Arbus pictures or posing as Mary with Peacock as Jesus in Pieta poses, her mother has been a major subject of Peacock's work, and a major collaborator.

But then she died. This show touches on that in various ways. For the Groundbreaking Ceremony is a very black shovel leaning against a wall. Its blackness is achieved by flocking (I suspect that if she could have gotten her hands on some Vantablack, she would have used that instead). In her photo Your Middle Class is Showing, Peacock has taken a picture of her own belly sunburned so that the words "Middle Class" are spelled out in un-sunburned skin. On one hand it's witty--it plays with skin color and by using old English style letters, recalls low-rider lettering. But as I looked at it, I also thought of mortification of the flesh, practices of early Christians to subjugate their sinful flesh. Could deliberately burning herself be a sign of guilt? Whatever the motive, the image is one that stays with you.

Pan Video Parade

Robert Boyd

I found the video below, "Inside the Library of Thomas McEvilley" by Michael Kasino on Vimeo. It wasn't embeddable but it was downloadable. So I hope Mr. Kasino won't be angered that I have copied it and embedded it here. (You can see more videos by Kasino here.)

Unsurprisingly, McEvilley's apartment was overflowing with books. But I see he also does something I do--he hangs art in front of his books. The thing is, if you are an art lover and a book lover, you end up with a dilemma. Books and art both tend to take a lot of wall space. And unless you're quite wealthy, you probably have a somewhat limited quantity of wall space. So the solution for some of us is to put art in front of books.

McEvilley tells us that he has never bought a piece of art or asked an artist for a piece, but that he often gets pieces as gifts. He has a lot of pieces by James Lee Byars and William Anastasi, two artists he was personally very close to. He also has a giant stuffed tiger that he found on the street in a puddle and brought back to his apartment.

Here is an excellent quote from the video: "Antiquity, especially the bronze age... It possesses me. I wake at night thinking about it."



James Kalm walks through the big Jay DeFeo retrospective at the Whitney Museum (there's about of minute of a random brass band playing at the beginning of the video).

What I'm Looking Forward to Seeing in 2013

Robert Boyd


Forrest Bess, Untitled, 1947, oil on canvas

Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible at the Menil Museum, April 19 to August 18, 2013. This is not a full-scale retrospective, apparently--the show will consist of 40 paintings and several works on paper, and will incorporate the Robert Gober-curated Forrest Bess mini-show that was part (the best part) of the most recent Whitney Biennial. I can't wait, but I wish it was bigger.


Ken Price, Underhung, 1997, Fired and painted clay, 23 ½ x 21 ½ x 16 in. 

Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective at the Nasher Sculpture Center from February 9 to May 12, 2013. You can see this show at LACMA for two more days, if you happen to be in L.A. this weekend. Its next stop, at the Nasher Sculpture Center, definitely justifies a road-trip to Dallas.


DeFeo working on what was then titled Deathrose, 1960. Photograph by Burt Glinn

Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective at the Whitney Museum, February 28 to June 2, 2013. I'm definitely taking a trip to New York to see this. I've greatly admired the few Defeo pieces I have seen in person and have longed to see her famous Rose.

 
James Turrell, Acro, Green, 1968, projected light

James Turrell: A Retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, from June 9 to September 22, 2013. Before he became a designer of aggrandizing ziggurats, James Turrell made some pretty compelling artworks. I look forward to wandering through darkened galleries looking at piece like the one above.

What art are you looking forward to seeing in 2012?

Marry in May and You'll Rue the Links

by Robert Boyd



Bad artist statements, part 1329. I saw Stephanie Liner's work at Pulse, and I loved it. The piece I saw (which seems typical of a lot of her pieces) had a girl sitting inside an egg-shaped structure. The egg was an upholstered piece of furniture, basically, with a floral pattern inside and out. You could see into the egg through little porthole-like openings. And the girl inside was wearing a dress with the same floral pattern as the egg itself. So I was kind of thrilled when I saw that Liner was doing a Kickstarter campaign for her performance at the Smithsonian. Thrilled, that is, until I played the video (above). In it, Liner seems to be reading her artist's statement. Like so many artist statements, hers succeeds in removing the mystery and magic from her art. It closes off interpretation by the viewer by telling you what the art is all about.  And it's boring. Obviously it wasn't an impediment--her project is fully funded. (I kicked in $25 despite the video.) I chalk it up to being another horrible example of the world's worst literary genre. Love the artist, hate the artist's statement.


Enrique Gomez de Molina, I Am the Walrus


Artists! Don't make your chimeras out of endangered species! That's what sculptor Enrique Gomez de Molina did, and now he's in jail. His problem was that he was making fanciful taxidermied sculptures by combining animal parts which he bought off of eBay. Little did he know that some eBay dealers were selling illegal animal parts from endangered species. This caught the attention of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services, who apparently warned him multiple times that what he was doing (importing animal parts of endangered species) was, in fact, a crime. He was convicted and is now spending the next 20 months in jail. ["From toast of art world to guest of federal pen" by Lydia Martin, The Miami Herald, May 20, 2012, via Art Market Monitor.]



I don't have anything new to say about The Rose. But I wanted to share this video about Jay DeFeo's The Rose. This painting is the masterpiece of beatnik visual art. A ton (literally) of paint, obsessively worked on for years. Beautiful. [via wrapit-tapeit-walkit-placeit]


Daniel Clowes, Enid from Ghost World, 1996, gouache, 8.5" x 11"

If you missed my birthday... It's not too late to give me a present. This gouache by Daniel Clowes, being sold right now on eBay, would make an excellent birthday present, for example. [via danielclowes.com]
 
Droit de suite overturned in California. A federal court overturned a California law that requires resale royalties for works of art sold.

Under the California law, auction houses and dealers, wherever located throughout the country, were directed to "withhold 5 percent of the amount of the sale, locate the artist and pay the artist," whenever the sold work was created by a California-based artist or was sold by a California resident. ["Federal Court Finds California Resale Royalties Act Unconstitutional" by Lee Rosenbaum, Culturegrrl, May 20, 2012]

The court found that this violated the commerce clause because it interfered in interstate commerce. For instance, the seller might be in Iowa and the buyer in Georgia, but if the artist was in California, the law would apply. I have no legal knowledge, but I can see the court's point. What this says is that droit de suite needs to be a national law, not a state law. Speculators should not be the sole beneficiaries of selling art at a profit. Artists should benefit as well.

Note on The Ferus Gallery by Kristine McKenna

by Robert Boyd

Regular readers know I have a small obsession with the Ferus Gallery, which operated in Los Angeles between 1957 and 1967. Part of the reason for the obsession is that Ferus shows how an art scene can develop outside the artistic capital(s)--New York being the capital of the art world at that time. As someone who lives in Houston and is interested in art, I have to believe things like that can happen--that great art scenes can develop far from art capitals. But another reason for my obsession with Ferus is that Ferus has in the past and continues to this very day to impinge on my artistic life--and, it must be added, on the artistic life of Houston, Texas. Why is that?

I think it largely comes down to Walter Hopps. Hopps and Edward Kienholz were the cofounders of the Ferus Gallery. In 1979, Hopps became a consultant for the Menil Foundation, and then director of the Foundation in 1980. He was also the founding director of the Menil Museum when it opened in 1987. So Hopps had a big influence on art in Houston for a long time, and has an influence even now, years after his death. I'm fairly sure he was responsible for bringing Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz to Houston (I and a few fellow students spent a life-changing afternoon with them watching old Kienholz documentaries at the Rice Media Center), as well as Robert Irwin (who was an artist in residence at Rice while I was a student there). The Menil Museum has shown lots of the Ferus artists over the years--solo shows for Ken Price, Ed Kienholz, Jay DeFeo and Andy Warhol, and in group shows, work by Price, Kienholz, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, DeFeo, Ed Moses, Ed Ruscha, and Warhol. Many (if not most) of these artists have work in the Menil's permanent collection. There is a show up right now, "Earth Paint Paper Wood: Recent Acquisitions," that includes pieces by Ken Price and Jay DeFeo. So five years after Hopps death, the Menil is still acquiring work by Ferus artists. And tomorrow (October 23, 2010) a gallery show of Larry Bell work is opening at The New Gallery (this show, however, has nothing to do with Hopps, as far as I can tell).



Ferus continues to fascinate me, so I snatched up THE FERUS GALLERY by Kristine McKenna. McKenna is a Los Angeles-based journalist best-known for her interviews. In this book, she tried to talk to a constellation of people associated with the Ferus Gallery--artists, Irving Blum, various collectors, spouses and siblings of key players, etc. For those who died before she could interview them (Hopps and Kienholz especially), she drew from other interviews. Out of this material, she constructed an oral history of the gallery, full of Rashomon-like contradictions. She also borrowed photographs from her subjects, including tons of casual snapshots. The book leads off with biographies of the major characters in the story, then launches into the chronologically arranged oral history.

The book is absolutely gorgeous. The design (by Lorraine Wild) is beautiful, mixing the casual photos of artists and hangers-on with color photos of the art. This is not an approach you see often in art books. If the book is strongly narrative, it usually is all text with a few illustrations of work and a few photos of the subject(s). If it's a monograph, the photos will be pretty much all artwork. McKenna and Wild realized that the snapshots of the artists were part of the story (part of the history) and were generous in reproducing them, along with images of the artwork itself.


Ken Price, B.G. Red, clay with acrylic and lacquer, 1963

The basic story of the gallery is that Kienholz and Hopps had tried to have their own galleries in the 50s, but were not notably successful. They teamed up to found Ferus. Early on, Ferus showed a lot of San Francisco artists--San Francisco had a better-developed contemporary art scene at the time--along with the youngest, most cutting edge L.A. artists they could find. At some point, Hopps bought out Kienholz's share and brought in Irving Blum as a partner in late 1958. It's unclear if Kienholz left because Blum was coming in or what. It is clear that Kienholz hated Blum and Blum didn't like Kienholz's work. It is funny that both men were partners for Hopps because they seem like complete opposites. In any case, Blum was what the gallery needed--he was suave and could chat up collectors in a way that Kienholz couldn't. Ferus kept exhibiting Kienholz's work until after Hopps left the gallery. At that point, Kienholz's animosity towards Blum caused him to jump ship to the Virginia Dwan Gallery.

In the early 60s, Hopps began curating exhibits for the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum). In 1960, he got a full-time job with the museum and left Ferus (he would become director of the museum in 1963). In a way, The Pasadena Art Museum can be seen as a non-profit Ferus outpost. Hopps displayed a lot of the same artists there. Meanwhile, Ferus displayed more and more of the new New York artists, including Andy Warhol's first solo exhibit in 1962. In that year, Hopps put together the first museum show of pop art--before it had been named--called New Paintings of Common Objects. In 1966, Hopps was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown caused by amphetamine addiction. The Pasadena Art Museum, evidently not wanting a speed freak as a director, fired him. He divorced his wife Shirley (from whom he had been separated for about a year) who then went on to marry Irving Blum the following year! And Ferus closed that year.

This book captures the personal and political dynamics pretty well. There was definitely a group who hated Blum--partly because he came in and brutally cut down the gallery's roster, and partly because he was such a slick rick. Sonia Gechtoff out-and-out accuses him of theft (and adds that she could never understand why Shirley Hopps would leave Walter for Irving).

Among the artists, there is camaraderie but also competition. All of the Ferus artists started as more-or-less abstract expressionists (except maybe Ken Price) and quickly moved away from it. Kienholz moved one direction (grungy, socially-aware assemblage), and most of the others moved a different direction (a direction sometimes called "finish fetish" for their use of high-tech manufacturing techniques). They were a bunch of macho sexists who hung out at Barney's Beanery (and, according to Judy Chicago, bragged about their "joints").  Billy Al Bengston was the self-appointed ring-leader and apparently the most competitive of the bunch (it is not surprising that he was also a professional motorcycle racer). Larry Bell remarks that when he started adding industrial glass to his work, Bengston tried to discourage him. Bell realized he had done something that Bengston wished he had done. Perhaps Bengston could see that in the end, he was not going to be top dog. (In my view, the ones art history will remember are Ruscha, Kienholz, Bell, Price, DeFeo and Irwin. And maybe Wallace Berman.)


Larry Bell in his studio, 1961

As I said, there are amazing photos in the book. I want to end with one totally insane one:


Jay DeFeo nude in front of The Rose, 1959

No other artist in the book poses nude with one of their artworks (although there are photos of Robert Irwin naked in a bathtub). So you can wonder about a double standard regarding male nudity and female nudity, etc. But I think this photo is awesome. If I were a photographer, I'd try to imitate it and get artists to pose nude in front of their work. I like the concept. Of course, there are some artists here in Houston who I'd very much enjoy seeing nude before their work--for thoroughly dishonorable reasons. But beyond the voyeuristic thrill of it, I like the idea of the artist stripped bare before the world and the work. The work, in many ways, exposes the artist already. Being nude reflects that.

The Cool School

Robert Boyd

In 1992, I saw an art exhibit in Los Angeles called "Helter Skelter," which was devoted to Los Angeles art. From that moment, I became interested in art from L.A., an interest that deepened when I lived in L.A. for a couple of years. And I already had a long-standing interest in the work of Edward Kienholz, dating back to when he had a show at the late, lamented Rice Art Gallery, where a bunch of us film class students saw a couple of films with him and Nancy Reddin dating from the early and mid-60s, one a television documentary about him and one an incredible documentary of the reception of his show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1966. Of course, Kienholz had started the Ferus Gallery with Walter Hopps, who was the founding director of the Menil Museum and an important person in the art scene in Houston in the 1980s. All this is just to say that the L.A. art scene has long been a fascination of mine. So when I heard about Ferus Gallery documentary, The Cool School (2007), I had to check it out.




The documentary starts with a description of the Watts Towers (which was one of the first things I went to see when I moved to L.A. the first time). This struck me as a bit contrived, but at the same time typical. Advanced, alternative art scenes always reach out and try to include outsider or vernacular arts. Look at Picasso and his gang bringing Henri Rousseau into their fold, or here in Houston, the way the recently closed show "No Zoning" included Cleveland "The Flower Man" Turner as part of the show. I am really torn by this because it seems to have a touch of slumming about it, but at the same time I love these outsider, vernacular works. It is often the alternative arts community that finds and embraces these works and recognizes their creators. (Think of how Henry Darger's work was saved, for example.) Anyway, this has little to do with the documentary--it's in my mind because of a conversation I had Saturday night with Matthew Guest (who is, not surprisingly, also interested in outsider art). The filmmakers seem to be suggesting that artistically, L.A. was kind of barren except for the Watts Towers, which were decidedly out of the mainstream.

There were a few collectors who were into modern art, and a few artists who were trying things here and there, but no art infrastructure. Edward Kienholz and Walter Hopps had each tried to start galleries without much success. So the decided to join forces. They were definitely an odd couple. Kienholz was a burly, working-class beatnik rebel, Hopps a skinny nervous egghead with thick glasses. They founded the Ferus gallery on La Cienega. The problem was that they really weren't great partners. But they both had a great vision for art in L.A. and a recognition that cutting edge artists needed a place to display their work.They founded the gallery in 1957, opening with a group show of abstract expressionist painting by San Francisco and L.A. artists. This is something the movie underscores--the early days of Ferus were somewhat dominated by San Franciscans, because San Francisco had a much better developed art scene than L.A. Obviously Clyfford Still was the biggest name there--he was one of the most important abstract expressionist artists. But it seems that there was a whole beatnik art scene there that was vital and healthy. It is also my impression that only in San Francisco was the visual art scene dominated by beatniks. The beats were literary and a lifestyle, and the only artists that I think of part of that subculture were San Franciscans like Jay DeFeo (who had a solo show at Ferus in 1960).

But the presence of Ferus really energized L.A. artists. Many of them lived in Venice, which was a slum at the time. They mostly came out of abstract expressionism, but moved towards other styles in the late 50s and early 60s. For example, Robert Irwin (another artist who visited Rice while I was there--I wonder if Walter Hopps was involved in bringing him and Kienholz to the campus?) started off as an abstract expressionist, but apparently decided his paintings were no damn good after seeing some Philip Guston abstract paintings. So he pared back the expression to some very simple geometric paintings, that evolved into nearly invisible painted objects that were all about light.

This move away from abstract expressionism to minimalism was happening in New York, too. Ditto with the Pop idea, which at Ferus was exemplified by Edward Ruscha's paintings and photos. Ditto with assemblage, with Kienholz as a leader. I think this may have led New Yorkers to look on L.A. as just a bunch of copycats (this point of view was represented by Ivan Karp in the movie). But I think it was in the air--the L.A. artists were working their way out of abstract expressionism just as the New York artists were, and these routes were logical reactions to that older style.

And there were also things in L.A. that really had no counterpart in New York, like Ken Price's ceramic pieces. Clay just wasn't taken seriously in most places as a legitimate medium for a fine artist.

The first year of Ferus had its first controversy--a Wallace Berman show that was busted for being pornographic. Berman was one of those shamanic figures in art who is better known as an influence than as an artist--but his art is astounding. Unfortunately, the experience of being busted made him swear off working with commercial galleries.

What happened next is unclear. The movie suggests that Hoops convinced Kienholz to spend more time on his art and bought him out, and that later Irving Blum entered the picture as a new partner. But the book Ferus says that Kienholz was getting burned out and that Blum was brought in to buy him out. Either way, the net result was that the rough-hewn Kienholz was out and the suave Blum was in. (Whatever the reason, Kienholz started exhibiting at the Dwan Gallery in the early 60s. Did he harbor a grudge against Ferus?)




The still above in the movie was actually taken from the T.V. show at the time about Kienholz. It's worth mentioning that Kienholz wasn't chosen because the producers necessarily thought he was a great artist, but because he was sort of a living embodiment of the cliches that viewers might have about "beatnik artists." The TV series itself focused each week on a different profession (this week, and artist, next week, a hotel chef).


Barney's Beanery was their hangout--it was located right around the corner pretty much. I ate there a lot when I lived in L.A. (It was founded in 1920 and is still there.)



sign on the outside of the Beanery

Irving Blum was exactly what the gallery needed. He was seriously into avant garde art and had a great eye, but he was also the kind of personable, sophisticated fellow who could chat up well-to-do collectors. A gallery is a commercial enterprise, and while history (if you're lucky) remembers the artists, the collectors are every bit as important.



(Walter Hoops is the second from the left, and Irving Blum is the smiling man with the crew cut standing to Hopp's right.)

Hopp's story of how he met Blum and brought him on board is amusing but a little hard to believe. As Hopps would have it, Blum comes into the gallery one day with a group of swell friends and starts explaining the art as if he owns the joint. Hopps pulls him aside and says, hey buddy, I think you and I should go have a drink. I couple of drinks later at the Beanery, and Blum is officially on board.

Blum brought a fundamentally more professional outlook to the enterprise. Hopps and Kienholz had exhibited something like 70 artists year (lots of group shows), but Blum cut it down to a core group of L.A. artists, which would be supplemented by the occasional New York artist and group shows. The key Ferus artists were John Altoon, Craig Kaufman, Ken Price, Ed Kienholz, Ed Moses, Robert Irwin, Billy Al Bengston, Larry Bell, and Ed Ruscha. The interesting thing is that many of these artists are not particularly well-known today. The only ones who I'd say are part of the standard art history of the '60s onward are Kienholz, Irwin, Ruscha, and maybe Bell. (Your mileage may vary, however.) This may be a result of the lingering bias against non-New York artists, or may be because art by, say,  Craig Kaufman wasn't as interesting as, say, Donald Judd's art. On different days, I can lean to different explanations.

But what is important is that while Ferus was there, these artists had a leg to stand on and were able to develop (which they did--a lot). That period in L.A., from 1957 to 1967 saw an explosion of modern art. Hopps left Ferus in 1962 to become curator and director of the Pasadena Art Museum--where he put on a bunch of cutting edge shows. The L.A. County Museum was opened (next to the tar pits!) and it had some important shows, including the controversial Kienholz show. Other galleries opened. Artforum moved from San Francisco to L.A. But as John Baldessari comments in the film, it all wound down in the late '60s. Ferus closed, Artforum moved away to New York. Despite Blum's best efforts in cultivating collectors (including Hollywood types like Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell, both of whom are in the documentary), he apparently wasn't doing that great. He eventually moved to New York. (He did make one absolutely amazing art purchase in L.A.--he gave Andy Warhol his first gallery show--a bunch of painted Campbell's Soup cans. A few people, including Dennis Hopper, bought individual paintings for $100 each. But Blum decided at the end of the show that he wanted them all as a set--so he asked his collectors if he could return their money, and paid Warhol $1000--in installments--for all of them.) Baldessari describes modern art in L.A. as a boom and bust phenomenon--although he adds hopefully that it seems like the scene in L.A. now is fully self-sustaining.



Dennis Hopper and Irving Blum

One thing that killed the Ferus vibe for everyone, apparently, was the death of John Altoon in 1968. The Ferus guys had more or less been a bunch of buddies hanging out together, and at a reunion filmed for this documentary, they seem to say that Altoon's death ended that. Irwin doesn't totally agree--he thinks that they were all evolving as artists in different directions and moving out of Venice and even out of L.A. But Altoon's death certainly provides a sense of finality to the Ferus era.



Surviving Ferus artists posing for a photo

Indeed, this film is haunted by death. The one guy you would like to hear from most, Ed Kienholz, had died in 1994. There is some archival footage of him, but not enough. And Walter Hopps died while this film was being made.



Kienholz being buried in his classic Packard--even his funeral was a work of art

Because you can see how important Ferus was to the ecology of art in L.A., it is kind of an exemplar for any provincial city that is growing an art scene. Houston lucked out a bit by having two very sophisticated collectors, John and Dominique De Menil, who were also really into social engagement. What Ferus (and Hopps, Kienholz, and Blum) were to L.A., the Menils were to Houston. The Cool School is a good way to experience a fascinating bit of American art history.