Persistence |
Walter Gabrielson Painter |
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Chapter 4 |
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Fourth Life 1961-66
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| I returned to Los Angeles in the fall at 1961 with a cheerful mind, having survived the past three years as an amateur militarist caught up in a serious and dreadful business. All my UCLA friends were busy cranking out babies, careers and getting into serious debt. Nobody said thanks for giving up three years of your life to protect us. Should they? Before joining the ranks of the great corporate army I decided to give myself a treat, take a year off and look at art. I went down to Chouinard Art School and that was the end of me. I signed up for some very expensive classes (about the equivalent of $400 a month today) but what the hell. I had no GI bill but this was my life and I had been diddling around with the power brokers too long, letting them instead of me run my life. The first day in drawing class I discovered who I was. It was a startling, powerful event which launched me into the obsession that I practice to this day. What I discovered was that I could---draw! It was no effort. I could do it, I could easily manipulate images around the page while people around me fumbled and blundered away at it. For the first time in my life I was just not another bright person who could do anything just as well as a thousand other bright people but someone unique. What an astounding thing it is when you find out what you are! I had been searching all this time for what I was and now it finally was revealed to me in a second story ratty old drawing studio. I could hardly drive home that night, holding this knowledge inside me was practically impossible. I told my parents and they were kind of shocked, they had the reaction parents must always have when their children announce that they are going for some outrageous dream that they might have long ago thought of themselves. A blank, wistful look. Of course they put their finger on the heart of the matter immediately. "But, can you make a living at it?" Of course not. That is why you doit. But you don't say things like that in Inglewood. You say, "Well, it will work out somehow." Kind of thing kids depend on to get them over the sticky parts of life. I felt weightless, frivolous, as if I could levitate; no more wallowing around in a world of everybody else's agenda and passion, I was going to make my own movie! I stopped just being content with coping, I left the existential dread of "who am I' behind (I hoped) and I was empowered to face life with a passion and identity all my own instead of hiding behind the door and picking up the leavings. Plus, I liked the dress code. With my discovery I also felt there was a responsibility to push it to the limit, to plumb the depth of myself within this discipline. What did I have? Did I have anything to contribute? Was I any good at it? What was art anyway? More questions than answers. There was only one way to find out. Do it. At least I would have a year in tryouts. I got an apartment up in Laurel Canyon and moved all my life's possessions in one VW beetle load. Last time for that, now I need semi-trailers. The writer Peter Fine and I coexisted up there for two months, it was all right but the apartment had no bathroom so we had to go up to the landlady's for ablutions, she hung out in frilly outfits looking for a friend so I moved on. I left Peter to her thirsty clutches and found an elemental apartment for $35 a month near 21st and Hoover. One room with a hotplate and a shower down the hall but I loved it, my first garret. The woman next door also went to Chouinard, she was running away from her husband and had painted her kitchen floor with big black dots. If you sat in a corner with a glass of Red Mountain the dots appeared to be swarming towards you. I got a job driving cabs for Yellow out of G-1 near Sixth and Lucas. There was a Cooper Donuts around the corner right out of Hopper's "Nighthawks". The place was frequented by cabbies and cops and the counterman was always a temporary ex-drunk. The Cooper people would come by three or four times a night to clean out the cash register before it became too large a temptation for him. Talk about romance! I went to Chouinard from ten in the morning until four, picked up taxi number 1110 at 4:15, washed it off and hit the streets until 12:15 at night, got to bed after one or two, got up the next morning and repeated the cycle. Cab driving is one of those fulcrums on existence, you are immediately an honored and necessary part of society, much like a paperboy. I guess that's why I liked it so much. People will tell you anything, trust you, depend on you. It is a psychiatrist's couch on wheels. My first load was instructive: I picked a couple up at Union Station and took them to the Trailways bus. All the way they were arguing about their sex life, who wasn't up to snuff, I do this and you don't do that, etc. My ears were burning. They didn't cover this at Cab School (an entire day-long course that stressed keeping out of trouble, not servicing hookers, reminding you that you are hauling "live freight" and a driving component mostly focused on how to park on a hill). We stopped for a light, the windows were open. Woman said to man, "Shush, those people on the street will hear you!" They didn't count the driver as real people, and that pretty much defined the job. In cab driving the primary skill is to watch the sidewalk for business while not running into the vehicle in front of you. It is a job for gypsies, writers and artists and that is who is out there at night. You meet the famous, the infamous, the drunk, the hooker, the new people coming into town. One crazy Saturday night I picked an elderly Australian couple up at the airport and drove them to the downtown Hilton. There were wrecks on fire on the freeway, people cutting you off, red lights being run, sirens, shots, people falling into the street, a normal Saturday night. Got to the hotel and looked back, they were huddled together, ashen. They lived in the Outback and had never been on an airplane before, never gone to the big city and now taken a cab ride through hell. I had to peel them out of the cab. Side money was to be made (We needed it, we were guaranteed a munificent $1.10 an hour by the cab company and split the meter anything over that, $25.00 a night was about average.), motels and most of the clubs on the Sunset Strip would tip you to bring in customers (you would follow your party in at a discreet distance, show your cab hat to the doorperson and they would give you a couple of bucks). In cabs you tap into the great sea of loneliness. You go in and out of smelly little rooms with the blue box (no color TV then) ranting, you cut across scenes and bits of intensity at speeds which boggle your complacency. Some people would pay the meter just to talk with you. I had a regular I would drop in on during a slow spell, drop the flag outside and go up and talk with him for an hour, get paid and a tip. Beat driving. At Melrose and Western one night a drunk got in the right front seat, gave me an address and closed the door but evidently didn't latch it well. I pulled out and he disappeared SPLAT out into the street, left his feet sticking up on the seat. I stopped, ran around the front, threw him back into the cab and yelled, "Don't you EVER do that again in my Cab!!! Likely story. He was very apologetic and I got a nice tip. Another time I took three lady drunks from one bar to another, one put her foot into the door crack as I was closing it and complained, I called the cab company from the other bar and a doctor and a lawyer were over in thirty seconds. Another regular was a doctor who couldn't sleep well so he had me come over to the hospital and pick him up and drive him around town for an hour and he would go back to work refreshed, he could sleep like a baby in a moving vehicle. I had a rookie cop try and entrap me, wanted to know where the girls were. Cabdrivers know. He had a boot camp haircut and the slimy, enthusiastic demeanor of an amateur con artist (entrapment 101), "You cab drivers know where all the action is. Heh-heh." I suggested he work on his technique. Dropped him at Alvarado and Sixth, bars all around and he wanted to know which way to go, wouldn't give it up. To Protect and to Serve. I am sitting at a stand and a guy comes by, kneels down near the door andtells me he just got out of the hospital, his wife is sick, he has no money, the manager was throwing him out of his place, what should he do? Reasonable. Cab drivers have all the answers. Once picked up five little kids from Dodger Stadium after the ball game, we must have hit every candy store between the ball park and Beverly Hills. But the job is really endless driving to nowhere, some nights I would pull up to a light and would have to decide whether red or green meant stop or go I was so exhausted. I could sit forever at a stand with nothing going on so I would have a sketch book along and, sometimes I would just take myself out of the action to draw pictures. It was an ideal job for my future profession, I was being paid to be a people observer and it helped break down any inhibitions I had towards total strangers. Everybody wants to be asked a question about themselves. It is a little like being a cop, hours of boredom punctuated by the unknown, the new, the unpredictable to which you reach inside yourself to cope. It is a stretch every night on the road, hundreds of little vignettes of life you want to record and deal with. At the larger stands you meet the other night gypsies and it becomes a brotherhood of sorts, side money opportunities are exchanged, dangers are talked about, the oral history of the city is open to you. There is constant talk of holdups and you eagerly listen to every story to glean whatever bit of knowledge that might save your ass when it happens, statistically I began to look at the very real possibility it was going to happen to me for it seemed to have happened to everybody else I was talking with. Then one night I came back to G-1 and drivers were huddled around a cab, I walked over and the entire front seat was a puddle of red, splashes on the ceiling, an abattoir for a cabbie; two sailors had slit the guys throat from the back seat, he had staggered out of the vehicle and died on the street. The sailors stole the cab but were caught. I froze. I had been a block away downtown at the same time. It was too much for me and to close to me, it was time to move on, I turned in my hat and key that night. Enough road romance. Chouinard was a private art school, professional, tough. It had the reputation of being the best in town, perhaps west of the Mississippi and I think it was deserved. You paid a lot to go there but you got a lot back. They turned out the best animators, costume designers for the movies, illustrators and fine artists all at the same time. Art Center was the only competition but it was almost all commercial art and very uptight, students had to dress up for presentations or other occasions. Chouinard never felt the corporate game was worth going that far, it just went for quality. In Fine Art there was a range of eclecticism or pluralism as they call it today, you got the skills you needed without the spirit being kicked out of you or some horrible unified field theory being promoted by the school. Its physical plant was a wreck and classes were distributed all around the area in industrial buildings and lofts near Seventh Street. Disney supported the school, he discovered it was the only place to upgrade his animators. Later he took the remnants of Chouinard and made it into Cal Arts in Valencia but he died before his vision of the school could be realized. Now CalArts is some kind of elitist art factory which really does a head job on its graduates, they come out of there arrogant and convinced there is only one kind of cutting edge thing worth doing in life, I feel sorry for them. Chouinard simply juxtaposed the best teachers with the best students and let her rip. You had total access to everything going on,throughout the day you could wander around illustration or fashion design or animation or pottery and sit in if you wanted, catch a critique, hear a visiting artist (Ad Reinhardt, etc.). I was primarily interested in all the drawing and painting I could stuff down my craw but I also found the styles of illustration that were going on intriguing. In Fine Art today there is little difference between the top end of illustration and fine arts, and in some cases I think the better illustrators like Matt Mahurin and Brad Holland surpass the bottom end of Fine Art. I went to Chouinard for two years and most everything I have formally learned about my profession was during that short period. For better or worse, all the rest has been me. The svengalis responsible for my transformation were: WATSON CROSS. Watson has probably taught everybody around LA for the past forty years how to draw. I don't know how he does it. He keeps up his enthusiasm, suffers the endless parade of terrible drawings everybody does starting out (I figured hell would be looking an unending pile of beginning drawing portfolios and trying to find something worthy of more than a C-). Watson's body is a tortured series of angles and turns but he is always cheerful, always on time, always manages to pull himself up and down the hellish stairs to the drawing room. Watson gives us all hope. HERBERT JEPSON. The gray eminence. Jepson was a philosopher who happened to teach drawing. He had his own school during WW II with Rico Lebrun and a small group of other LA artists out of forties. He gave long, rambling dissertations between spates of model drawing, his criticisms were mystical and elliptical, he pushed you beyond the target fascination of model drawing and into the potential of it and everything else. Most drawing teachers, cannot see beyond the specifics of the model, a live model in a class has immense power which is almost impossible to surpass; Jepson drove you to make that leap. BILL MOORE taught design. A very tough son of a bitch. His criticisms were scathing and ruthless, some students left the class in tears. There was an apocryphal story in the halls that one time he had disliked someone's work so much he burned it off the wall. Years later I was reminiscing about Chouinard with Ed Ruscha and he said that he was the culprit, something with old cigarette butts. If you got past Moore you knew design. When I got into the teaching business later on I recalled everything of Moore's class and attempted to replicate it, how wonderful to be on the other side of that experience. Moore hated Rose Parade floats, an observation that resonates with time and one I concur with, he had the ability to FEEL whatever you came up with, he was passionate about his subject and communicated that love and passion for order and 2-D design to his students. Only time I ever saw him flummoxed was when a really poor kid (lived in a hearse on the street outside the school) brought in his problems on a slate done in colored chalk. He couldn't afford any other art supplies. Moore wanted to know how he was supposed to review him for a final grade, kid said, "You're good, you just remember them." GABE KOHN, a Misch Kohn's brother; a good painter and was there only for a short time, one of many painters cycled through the school to give vitality and change to the program. He taught me how to paint bottles, he thought that painting bottles was the way to learn painting. Each teacher has some of these little bromides, little secret problems that they only give and becomes part of their legacy. Albers gave the render the paper bag problem, I have anthropomorphize the embossing seal problem in six steps. Gabe gave good stories about hanging out with novelists who came out to Hollywood in the thirties, and he was a painter's painter. JOHN ALTOON taught night drawing but I never took him, one evening I gatherhe became incensed about the terrible work his students were doing, ripped off his clothes and ran down Wilshire Boulevard screaming. Something we all have wanted to do. BOB IRWIN was teaching but I missed him. BOB CHUEY was the Jepson of painting, famous for gestural, far out stuff like bringing in an armload of branches, lumber and other crap and throwing it on the floor. Here: paint this. Maybe that is where the twig guy got his idea. Chuey was big on inviting his students up to his Sunset Boulevard Hills place overlooking a twinkling LA, his wife would read her poetry, I met Timothy O'Leary there one evening discussing art/politics/litera-ture. There has always been a great deal of talk about the arts cross-pollinating in LA, the Chuey parties are one of the few times I have ever experienced it. He came to a dreadful end, I heard his car broke down on the Hollywood Freeway and he got out and was killed by a car. An artist becomes another LA story. CONNOR EVERTS taught there as well as at every other art school in the universe. Back then Connor was a rising star and made beautiful drawings, he was argumentative, provocative and many times expounded from a prone position on a cabinet. I never took him but he was around, occasionally I would peer in the door to see who he was skewering at the time. EMERSON WOELFFER taught abstract painting. Lately he is enjoying a renaissance and it is good to hear for Emerson is LA art bedrock, no blow dried imitation of a real painter. He is from Chicago, loves and venerates the jazz and blues of his home town. He went to New York and hung out with the crustiest of the AE painters and caught the painting virus, came back to LA and just painted. Emerson's forte is an enthusiastic, gestural, passionate approach to painting, gritty and powerful. He invests you with his enthusiasm, if he could give you a power transfusion on the spot he would try. He is an infectious, fascinating man who brings the stink of the studio to class every day. I took his class with Joe Goode and Doug Wheeler, I caught the abstract fever from him and painted that way until I got over it. It goes to show how influential teachers are, in a way they have too much influence. If you like them and respect their work and premise you are strongly inclined to do their kind of work, after all, yours isn't much at that time. I have seen it happen hundreds of times, sometimes entire schools or art departments get caught up in a stylistic fever and irrevocably sway their naive charges to whatever concept is valid at the moment. As a student, you overvalue the credibility of a message pushed by a strong entity, it is always easier to comply than to try and think for yourself. It is not always bad, strong students need something to bounce off, weaker students just need something to do to get them through the experience. I have no regrets about whatever path I went down with Woelffer, it was a heady ride and a grounding in abstract painting can teach you some good painting and design moves. Later on when I taught design I would use problems that I got out of Motherwell images because I felt they were excellent ways to learn placement of shapes and colors. Emerson is still at it and glory to him. DON GRAHAM. I leave him to the last because he was the best. Graham was the heart and soul of the Chouinard experience. Disney discovered him early on as the man to teach his animators, everybody since then realized that he was a core repository of drawing from which everyone could learn. Everyone who went to Chouinard still talks of him, they know they owe him almost too much. He taught advanced drawing, a strange amalgamation of model drawing and what I would call functional illustration; that is, to make a representational scene work. He would give you a concept, for example, people in a bus and have you draw it from all different positions, the floor, the side, the front, from the ceiling. It was easy for me to think that way since I found myself in the old paper route days seeing myself from outside my body from various positions. You didn't do it from models or setups, you had to do the problem cold turkey without looking at anything, just dream the whole thing up. Magnificent. He published a book about his technique but it seemed strangely vacant and incomplete to me, Graham the person wasn't in it. I also felt that by that time you had either mastered it or not and no book would help you. When I took drawing Graham was a bit old and creaky but he still did his turn every day in his blue lab coat. We sat enraptured. Nobody who event went to Chouinard forgets Graham. Not a bad legacy, better than a book! Around the corner from the school on Seventh was the art store. It was called Leslies, not there any more, next to the Sergei Bongart studio which offered nude drawing classes painted on a sign in the shape of a French palette, you get the idea. Down the street was McManus Morgan for paper. AcrossSeventh there was the park for free models, the Vagabond Theater was over on Wilshire for foreign films, what else did you need? Art materials were a colossal shock, art isn't like other mediums where you learn one instrument or your body is the instrument, the whole damn art store was the instrument. At first I didn't know what any of it meant, whether I could get by with a couple of things and fudge the rest or go whole hog and buy the entire store. Just might as well buy the whole store and get it over with. But that also implies that the art is only within the official materials sold at the store which can be deceiving. In the Seventies Process Art came along, where an entire generation of artists went into industrial processes for art materials and that got kind of weird, people got into plastics and resin and other toxics, found themselves mixing up huge batches of glop in clean rooms while gowned for the space age and discovering a pubic hair had fallen into the final product and they had to start all over again. I found out about alternative art materials one day when we went out to the Valley to draw carriages and conestogas at a movie rental place that Ed Reep lined up. I was still within the orthodoxy of the art store and learning its catechism in painfully large financial bites and squeezes. This day I was working on a pen with official steel nib and India ink drawing when I glanced over to another student, a Japanese girl who was whipping out gorgeous, flowing P & I drawings with some kind of unexplainable wooden tool I figured to be the Kyoto special and why hadn't I heard of it before? I asked her where she got it and she said that on the way over she had bought an ice cream bar and eaten it, afterwards sharpened the stick and that was it. AHA! The release from the art store. Somewhere you have to do it, break loose and make tools that fit you. Years later I found myself painting entire eight foot pictures with paper towels folded into little squares because they gave me the look and feel I was after. Brawny. I should get an endorsement. I also think that paint brushes are a hard-focus tool unless you work at them, not soft. Eventually I came to the position that nothing about materials is "right", it is really what works for you. Continuing Glossary of Contemporary Art Terms Academe: Somewhere to go to lose oneself, gain units, avoid reality and shop around for identity. Academic Artist: A teacher who evolves his personal art so as to appeal to students. Aesthetician: A vile coward with no sense of responsibility who cons others into doing what he cannot. Anger: Artist way of showing respect. Ant Hill: Appearance of a studio when visited by tour busses. Being an art student was all such damn exciting stuff, it was the Sixties, Kennedy was in, romance was in, it was the time to explore and express yourself. Art had a new credibility in our society that was reflected in the museums and the galleries on La Cienega. Monday evenings we would all boogie over for action and the openings, if I was in a cab I would park and look. Mobs of cognoscenti would throng in and out of the galleries to see the profusion of old and new ideas spread out every week. I saw the first show on Warhol at Irving Blum's, we all laughed. Connor Everts was arrested because of the paintings he exhibited at Zora's. LeBrun had shows. followers of LeBrun had more shows. Norman Zammitt was geometric. John Altoon: what a man! His paintings were never as good as his drawings, in the drawing he got the flow just right, and whether it was non representational or with figures it made no difference for he was inside the drawing, lurking, bobbing, weaving around the most free and unrestrained line I have seen. He was with David Stuart, a rotund, eclectic dealer with a pluralist stable if there ever was one chosen simply on David's eye and sense of humor. Liberace had some strange store at the top of the row. We'd go up to Barney's, shoot pool and have a beer, go outside in the parking lot and get into Kienholz' goopy replica of Barney's with frozen drinkers with clock heads, the rest of the bar immaculately reproduced. Now it is in Holland, wonder what they think of it? Things got white or reflective at Irving Blum's. CeeJee Gallery had all the eccentrics: Lance Richbourg, Garabedian, Louie Lunetta and other crazies. There was a place and a gallery for everyone and an audience that seemed to grow and grow, people tripping over each other, jammed spaces and sidewalks, gawking people and players. I wonder how many people decided to become artists in the Sixties? Thousands I bet. Art schools were expanding, Art departments were being created or expanded in universities, collectors came to art fueled by the fevers that collectors have. The Abstract Expressionist boom came out of New York and expanded throughout the nation. Newer artists like Frank Stella made the point that art and painting was worth doing, you could survive doing it and it was a beautiful and fascinating thing to do. But I truly believe it was Kennedy who broke it loose, his sense of style and respect for intelligence and creativity became an infectious fever that swept the arts. Being creative was no longer illegitimate as the repressive, dull Eisenhower years demanded. The logjam burst and I was in the middle of it. At the old Pasadena Museum I saw the big Duchamp show, the man himself was sitting at a table playing chess; just a thin, aesthetic Frenchman oblivious of his opening, concentrated within his isolation, not the artist but part of the art, he didn't recognize anyone else's existence. What a hell of a show. I was in one room and a Pasadena matron (hefty, arrogant, loud) swept in, looked around and bellowed that this exhibition was a PUBLIC DISGRACE!!! Yeah, but it was our disgrace. Just the thing Duchamp was working for. The old Pasadena was wonderful, I saw the first pop art show there, it was primarily East Coast but with some locals including Phil's (can't remember his last name) money paintings. Later on I met him and he told of the harassment the Treasury Department gave him over the works, as if anybody would cash in a big painting for a ten dollar bill? I saw Harry Partch's strange music with instruments he constructed himself, an Emile Nolde show with tiny watercolors shown on black walls, on and on. The Pasadena was truly cooking until they decided they needed a bigger place and spent all their money on the big brown monster that sucked art dry and went broke and was eventually taken over by Norton Simon and the magic died. When I first enrolled at Chouinard my original thought was to become a political cartoonist. I liked commentary and I liked drawing. But as I became aware of fine art and the endless, expressive potential of paint I moved away from my original goal. I felt that fine art was such a large, embracing stage that it could accept practically anything that was presented to it with intensity and quality. I moved my work from drawing to painting, and after a long time focussed the subject matter on humanist and social concerns and subsequently brought that to the fine arts world. No greater shock I received than making the discovery by now the art world had changed. After Pop Art the religious fundamentalists of Abstraction had closed ranks and decreed that only one kind of art, didactic Abstract Formalism was it, everything else was illegitimate. It appears an egregious (I have waited fourteen years to use this word) statement to make, but it is true. The art world appeared to resemble Iran after the Shaw with mullahs, executions, scathing denunciations and the whole bit. Fortunately, by the Eighties they had run out of steam and good art ideas so pluralism was back in favor and hopefully shall ever continue. Beware the one-idea art time, it shall make Nazis out of schoolgirls. Back then I can't recall artists sitting around and talking about careers or "making it" like they do today. The idea was to become individually the best that you could be and that would do whatever it would do. I guess we threw ourselves on the fates, but that is what it was. However naive and flighty that concept appears today I still agree with it. Bringing to the table whatever substance you have committed to is just so much better than biting off little pieces of a current idea and going for thirty seconds of fame. Maybe that is a generational thing, today expedience is current and legitimate. I sound like a damn fool when I talk like this, but that is what I believe in, it comes from my artist generation and I believe the extended history of creative people. We had magnificent students at Chouinard. I had a student friend named Dave Sewell who did wonderful, eccentric stuff. Once he went to a pet store and bought a number of snakes, lizards and other reptiles and put them in a form and poured resin over all of them to make a piece something like a gigantic paperweight (pre-processed art). Dave's quality control got awry and the stuff worked too fast and cracked while cooking all the reptiles and the whole thing smelled terrible, looked worse. Avoidance Art? He had to bury the piece. Later on he got a job in Nova Scotia teaching and running the gallery. About this time he had caught the Conceptual Art bug and became a Jehovah's Witness of Conceptual art, which means truly obnoxious about it. He would invite all the big shots from Gotham to come up and pee their name in the snow and then everybody would go inside and talk about what it meant to them and Dave would write a tract of the event and send it out to everybody in the USA. Dave was alsohot to convert me, I wrote back that Bruce Nauman was really one of my best friends, Dave become more strident with every mail delivery until I got tired of the game and told him to knock it off. Which as you know with Jehovah's Witnesses of anything just pisses them off and makes them work harder and pretty soon you are spending all your free time writing excuses on why you won't, can't, shouldn't, don't, feel like joining up and they keep coming back with more rationales, they learn to use our energy to fuel their addiction and that is what it is all about. Maybe if I was stuck up in Nova Scotia I would be crazy too, it is up near New Foundland and the Canadians refer to them as "Newfies". Finally I wrote Dave that if he didn't desist with the propaganda I would write his boss and turn him in. I probably wouldn't have but I had to do something. When you start avoiding the mailman you are in trouble. Never heard from Dave again. It was about this time I came upon the concept of the conversion. I mention it only because it affects all life in the universe, even art. After leaving cab driving I was searching frantically for something to make money and a friend introduced me to a man looking for people to sell this large, inclusive set of books all about the works of the masters of literature and philosophy. I don't know if they are still around but back then they were a large outfit that advertised in magazines and got leads from people who would write in for more "information". As a salesman you could buy these addresses from the sales manager as leads and go out and call on them door to door. I went out many evenings with him and observed a true artist at work. (At home he purported to be a composer and kept a grand piano with a heating element down below to keep it in tune, I was really impressed.) The scam went like this: you could buy the whole set of books for $400, but nobody ever did. Who buys $400 worth of books from a guy at the door? They were bound in genuine plastic with a typeface you needed a microscope to read but all the big works, your Greeks, your Shakespeare, your Milton, your Thomas Aquinas, yourLincoln, etc. were there. Good to have it around. It also came with a cross reference system so you could crib up papers on your tests with actual quotes from every genius from the beginning of time had to say about incontinence or fenestration or whatever. Every home should have one. The salesman (account executive) made a cold call on the lead and made the pitch for the books for (a) either four hundred clams on the spot, or (b) payments for ten years at something like three bucks a month. You buy the premise, you buy the program. Of course, the customer always went for the ten-year time plan if he went for the books at all. Thing was however, the ten-year plan just wasn't available! Hence, THE CONVERSION. The way it was explained to me was the demands of the business were such that money needed to be coming in fast for it all to work. Ten years was too long. They actually cost $75 a set to print, you as a salesman could receive one in lieu of your commission, which was also $75 per sale. The rest of the $325 went for commissions up the line to local sales mangers, district sales managers, continent and galaxy sales managers and probably on from there. Everybody up the line wanted their money right away. Sounds right. So, after you sold the client (now you saw this poor sucker for the host of your ambitions and survival he ought to be for buying into such an outrageous line) you had to convert him to a three-year plan because that was really the only way he could buy them! You converted him to something from something else you had lied about! What a wonderful system. When I went along with this salesman everybody went for the conversion. It was crazy. He threw in a free bible in white leather with your name embossed in gold, a bookcase (need that), a free paperwriting service (really need that), and so forth. They went for the whole bit. I tried doing it myself and I was a miserable failure. About half way through the presentation (assuming I could talk myself through the front door, the technique was to stand with your back to the door with a clipboard and start off with some gibberish about taking a survey) I would start feeling sorry for the person and as he got more enthusiastic and more hot for the program I would back peddle and would run out the door with the customer chasing me down the street trying to buy the damn thing. I guess I had a terminal case of Scandinavian afraid-to-embarrass-myselfs or maybe I just wasn't cut out for the hustling game so I went on to other pursuits. But from the lips of a salesman of books, I learned one of the more significant concepts of life. It exists everywhere, in politics, in art, in business, in academia, everywhere; and that is, people sell themselves on a dream or impossible criteria and are ripe for conversion by a sweet-talking hustler, be he artist or President of the USA. We all want to believe the dream is available, sweet and pure and when it isn't, we will pay a little more for nirvana to sit on our shoulders. As long as a little bit of the original fantasy is delivered we will live on with it and enrich and empower someone else in the process. Back to Chouinard. I took an animal drawing course held out at the zoo which was also infested with legions of little kids on outings. They would come by in a big line as I was sketching and the first kid would ask, what are you doing, and I would say drawing an elk and they would pass it on from one to another like a cumulative echo. I always wondered how the teacher dealt with their questions during spring mating season. Took a landscape class with Ed Reep (a World WarII combat illustrator) where we went all over town day or night and drew or painted at locations from the produce market to Bunker Hill before they tore the Victorians down (my first sale, $35 for an old house), we would see the noon films in animation and a jive talk from Tee Hee, the instructor from UPA. On the outside I saw "La Dolce Vita", 8-1/2" every Bergman that came out, Kurosawa, Antonioni, and "Dr. Strangelove" the best movie of the Sixties from America. It was revolutionary times as we all began to see, Cassius Clay was the best and he had nothing against the Cong, Martin Luther was taking it to the South, the music was changing, everything was changing. What a passionate, exploring, self-realizing time. We had survived Eisenhower, we didn't know about Nixon yet thank God. Of course, it was all ended too soon, Kennedy was dead and a phenomenal amount of optimism went with him. Today I think we assigned him too much, he opened the door but we put him up on an impossible pedestal. He gave good leader but we gave him too much of our will. Somebody has to embrace and begin a sensibility but it is much too large a concept for one man to be responsible for. We all had to go back and think for ourselves and that is hard.Kennedy's passing reminds me of how today people now venerate Elvis. I think Elvis represents to them a sense of that wild, unfettered, free will, bouncing out and past High School, never caught up with a job, responsibilities, disillusion. He was contemptuous of authority, he howled and sneered at it and made it go away from awhile. Kennedy was on the other extreme, he gave us a sense of quality and excellence, and to some, romance. Ultimately, none of these people can maintain your own needs, your own dream. Sad to say, maybe better to say, you have to grow up and do it all yourself. Thanks, Elvis, Thanks John, Goodby. During the summer of 1962 I was on the job search again and found an offer on the bulletin board about a position at the USC Psychology Department drawing pictures for Psych tests. I went down for an audition and got the job for the summer. It was a snap, the previous artist didn't know about photographic reduction so to make a one-inch-square drawing on the final he would make a one-inch-square drawing for real with tiny pens and it took him forever. I made them four inches square and increased production to boot, actually had to slow down to keep the work going for the summer. One day a fellow wanders in and inquires if the job is available, he had done it last summer and seems I had stolen it from him. but more work came in that I couldn't possibly handle so they hired him on and we glared at each other from opposite cubicles. He alluded that his name was Peter Plagens. He had been the political cartoonist on the Daily Trojan, had graduated and was going to Syracuse for his MFA. We discovered a sense of humor in each other and wound up having a magnificent summer, drawing pictures back and forth of things going on in the office or out in the galleries. We went to the infamous goodie reel of the USC film school, a collection of outtakes that is still in my top ten most amusing films. The department was in the business (funded by the Navy) of cooking up various tortures in the form of tests and we were among the first ones to try them out, we retaliated by going into the refrigerator and mixing up the worms on some experiment. Peter and I saw that in each other we reflected a sensitivity about the world, a shared awareness as they say now which has been the foundation of a remarkable friendship throughout the years. Now I wonder how such events just seem to happen to you when you are young. You go along and things just fall towards you. Nowadays, I don't run into people like Peter, hardly anything like that occurs. Has the supply run out? I seem to have to make something happen instead, it is a lot of work I don't enjoy. Where did all those Peter people go? They got married, is that it? A puzzlement. After the dream summer I did one more year at Chouinard and decided to change schools. It may have been a magnificent mistake, I still don't know. It profoundly changed my life, I know that. I knew that Chouinard was financially killing me, I had to work so hard at jobs I was almost too exhausted to enjoy or adequately participate in school. I had taken classes from everybody I wanted to and felt that some new teachers would be interesting. Otis Art Institute offered an MFA and Chouinard didn't. At Chouinard I would be taking everybody over again for the next two years and get a BA. On and on. Externally, Otis looked OK. I went over and after some machinations they said I could advance from being a Junior to the last two years of graduate school for the MFA, continue the painting, become a fine artist and pick up the teaching license just in case. A conversion? The contrast between Chouinard and Otis could not have been more stark. Otis gave new meaning to the words boring, smug, insufferable, static, dead, inflated. It turned out to be a finishing school for the spouses of doctors and lawyers, a parking place for money. I shared a studio with Charles Fahlen who went on to a good career in Philadelphia; otherwise, all the interesting people were in the class after me like John White, John Lees and Barry Le Va. I took Ernest Freed for etching and Joe Zirker for lithography and I met and subsequently married Betty Fiske of Cleveland and the Art Institute there. For graduation I rented a set of tails that came with a cane and top hat, I looked like Ernest Borgnine masquerading as Fred Astair. A boozy LA County Supervisor gave the commencement address, something he had canned for the rotary clubs called LOS ANGELES: ON THE MOVE!!! He said it a number of times. We all worked hard not to fall asleep. Soon after the County got out of the Art School business and the Supervisors could rest assured they didn't have to do this kind ofthing any more. The only sign of intelligent life at Otis was Joan Hugo the librarian. She is wise, witty and incredibly bright and knows more about art than the entire Otis faculty. Millard Sheets had been the big light around Otis for years and his passion was to take ideas from the lower end of fine art and put them on bank buildings, a kind of Mesopotamian Home Savings figurative that still exists on the S & L's that haven't already gone out of business. Since Otis was allegedly a fine arts school they craved commercial legitimacy and it played out that the students should do a fine art application to apractical project some time (I did a children's ABC book using animals); I resented this clumsy intrusion, if they really wanted commercial, go over to Chouinard and learn it right. The Otis commercial idea was strictly amateur hour. Their fine arts program tended towards a stylistic safe figure genre, based on what I came to call mailbag figurative. Joe Mugnani and Bently Schaad promoted it, it was a look of sticky little arms and legs coming out of a sack and it really sucked but many students adopted it as their own. It is truly amusing, schools cannot seem to keep their little paws off the student mind, the difference between a dreadful outfit like Otis in the Sixties and Cal Arts in the Nineties is only one of content, not form. The games still goes on. Not that anyone doesn't have influences. I think I was fortunate, in that I found my best mentors out of books and they couldn't talk back. I did the Woelffer bit for a while and that was it. As a student you are formed by your experience and the will of those around you and your own needs. You look at hundreds and thousands of images and books. Slowly a consensus forms within you that certain artists of the past are speaking to you, they are congruent with your feelings and skills and ambitions for image. You study them to see how they did it, they give you confidence and for a while you even resemble them in your work but you evolve out of it as you work on. Eventually, you have a look to your work that is substantially you, even if there are traces of influence that stay with you forever. With artists it is a fact that everybody looks like somebody. Everybody looks like somebody, even Picasso if you study him enough. For my early influences (in chronological order) I admit to a passion for the works of: KATHE KOLLWITZ. The woman could draw. Her husband was a doctor and she would sit in his waiting room and draw his lower class patients. I bought a restrike of her "The Outbreak" and hung it in my doggy apartment for sheer inspiration and the desire to be around some art quality in my squalid surroundings. She had an incredible ability to tune in to the basic human condition. GEORGE GROSZ. Master of line, reflecting his time he translated realty to style and made it swing. PAUL KLEE. I bought his book "Thinking Eye when I couldn't afford it but I needed it. I have read it innumerable times and still can't understand it but I know he somehow tuned into the basics of science and art, he was way ahead of his time. W. KANDINSKY. (Early Work) A master of color and abstracting representation until he created perhaps the first abstract painting. JOSEPH ALBERS. Color, how much can you learn about color? Never enough. He said that color is about relationships between colors not their individual characteristics. Subtleties, the gestalt of total color in a picture, that you truly must study it to use it well. FRANK STELLA. During the late Sixties I was impressed by the manner in which he had solved the flat color problem, and along with Albers as a model I worked the territory for a while. MARK ROTHKO. As a general influence, the only AE who for me discovered the subtlety and profundity of the abstract idea. These were my students influences until about 1968. Not a bad group. They came on my screen, had their day and have sunk inside me somewhere. I took my student work seriously then, I don't think it is as good now. Some artists are good even in art school. They are the fortunate ones for they have already been able to determine what they are about and what their work will look like, school is like passing gas for them. I knew I was most interested in developing some form of ongoing narrative, perhaps even writing it. But, I appeared to have the skills of drawing and painting so I took it there, it is difficult to reconstruct now. I believe I must have been evolving a sense of how my own character could be expressed through art. The medium and statement would follow. I began Chouinard in 1961 and finally came to make an imagery that I really felt good about in 1976 so it took me around fifteen years, including school, to do it. I never expected it would take so long. Your evolution as a maker of image is such a crap shoot. I know of hundreds who have travelled this journey without ever finding themselves so I consider myself very fortunate today. I could have wound up decorating banks. While I was still at Otis I got a job in the summer of 1964 at the FANTASMAGORIC PRINT WORKSHOP as a curator/printer trainee. FPW was intense and professional. The first day on the job I assisted on a Joseph Albers print; he was the pickiest guy in the world about his color, it figured. Other people drew the squares for him because by that time his hand was too shaky. (Later on I related that story to students and they thought he was cheating. Shows why you can't trust student judgements.) A square is a square. Much later I would show the film of Albers, "Homage to the Square" in class and in it he tells the whopper of the century, how he has boxes and boxes of different colors by different manufacturers and they are a little bit different and that is how he chooses his colors for a painting, and then he gets out a palette knife and slathers the pain on masonite, and den de papa und de mama go in and oudt you zee. In reality Uncle Joseph was the most stringent son of a bitch about his color I have every witnessed, he would no more leave that to chance that he would chase girls. The only reasons I can think of why he told a big lie on the film was to obscure his process. Like magicians, artists loathe to have let out their secrets, it deflates the magic and decreases respect for the outcome. Everyone at the shop respected his intensity and we went all out to give him what he wanted. Ken Tyler was the shop foreman and practically drooled over the great one's feet. FANTASMAGORIC was a tight ship, almost military. You worked your way up from curatorial to grinding rocks, to assisting at the press to printing, to being the foreman of the Shop where your learned to debate and fall short of the Supreme Leader's expectations. Supreme leader was a wealthy lady from Chicago who moved to LA and had a career going as a artist, found herself travelling to France to make lithos and wondered why there weren't any adequate shops in this country. She got a large foundation to come up with a million bucks to start a workshop trainee program that also included money to bring artists in to work for two months. The artists kept everything they made during the stay but gave nine copies for the workshop. The foundation got its money's worth: artists came from all over for the freebies, young artists dumped their careers and became printers and learned how to be overworked and underpaid. Eventually other workshops spun off the mother ship and lithography got back on the map. If fact, the first one dramatically altered the economics of American art in the early Seventies. After starting slowly and almost going broke (an Oldenberg Chrysler Airflow bas-relief done in untested plastic never dried and stayed sticky--entire edition had to be recalled) the shop took a survey of collectors and discovered that people would rather put down cash in the $500-$1,000 range for a multiple of a big name artist rather than buy a real original painting by an unknown or slightly known young artist. The shop then invited out the seven big names from New York to make prints in LA, and the subsequent huge output cut the entire bottom of the art market for emerging and lesser known artists. We were all devastated as the flood of Oldenbergs, Stellas, Johns, Rauschenbergs et al. cluttered the art market. The shop piled up the bucks everybody else ate it until the prices of the big guys prints began rising above grand a piece and the bottom end of the market opened up again. But for about five years none of us could hardly make a sale. The irony was that even young artists would buy the prints in a continuing homage more naive creative people have for the stars, thus helping the big guys cut them out of making a living and surviving. Some FANTASMAGORIC war stories: BRUCE CONNORS did some work that made fun of the place, did an edition of cancellation proofs (he made an image, then scratched a big X through it and we printed the whole edition that way), did an edition of a thumbprint only on the largest paper we had because one of our rules was don't get your greasy paws on the merchandise (or show imperfection or flaws), did a print of the supreme leader's parking place that said, "This space reserved for....." The sum total of Connors' whimsy so incensed the shop director that he shut down production on the pieces, kicked him out. Supreme Leader was out at the time, she came back and read out the shop foreman and we printers were dispatched to the streets to run down Connors and get him back, which we did. He finished his stay and continued the humor. WALLACE TING once got so angry about something that he walked to the main door all the way around and slammed it shut so hard that it broke. Felt guilty about it and next day bought beer for everybody. H.C. WESTERMAN came to a party at my house, had a few too many and spent the rest of the party walking around on his hands smoking a vile cigar. MIKE KANIMITSU did an image of a Samurai, the robe being formed by the shape of Curator Gloria Cortella's bare bottom which had been rolled up in transfer ink by the print staff and then sat on a rock, transferring tushi to stone. Supreme Leader said the image was porno and stopped the edition half way through. JOHN ALTOON was so shy he couldn't work around the printers and the bustleof the shop. He found a building close by to work in and would dash in for a look during proofing and then run out again. I did an entire four color print for him but my printer's proof was appropriated by the shop foreman in some greed sequence I couldn't figure out. I got another, lesser proof which I later sold to buy an airplane. RUFINO TAMAYO was an elegant gentlemen who got ruffled one day when somebody called up and demanded that he buy back one of his paintings. He was commercially hot at the time, we found it hard not to realize that we were printing $800 bills with each print, more like five grand by now. It was a kind of perversion to take an image and repeat it so the market could be exploited but that was part of the print ethics that developed in the sixties and FPW was part ofit. ALFRED JENSEN'S hands shook with age so his writing and lines were squiggly and messy. Supreme Leader suggested that we clean them up but Al said that no, he was an old man and that is how old men write. He also got his back up when SL wanted to deny him purple ink for a color because it was somewhat fugitive. I was doing the testing so I got in the middle of this one and watched them have it out. Al won, he wouldn't be intimidated. HERBERT BAYER was very interesting to me for he had been at the bauhaus and personally knew Klee and all the rest and had many stories of those days. Another elegant, confident man who knew who to turn a buck as well as make an image. Later on, he sold the ARCO people a ton of his paintings for their collection as a consultant to them on buying paintings. Guess he thought he had the best stuff they ought to buy. RUTH ASAWA was the most loved and supported by us all. She did more editions than anybody ever did during their two month stay. She was curious and supportive, all of us printers dragged out our secret processes and let her have them for her work. She stayed late at night, brought us food and challenged everyone to do their best. She had many children and had them all organized at home so she could have her career. What an amazing woman. Other artists were not so pleasant. One LA art professor just back from India had discovered the concept of untouchable and treated us printers in a very haughty, imperious way. Curiously, his work ground slowly through the process and he didn't get much done. We would occasionally do one print for an artist, I did one with Claire Falkenstein and several for Inez Johnston. The most fun I had with printing was with Cuevas. I liked his work a lot and he also presented larger technical issues with his use of washes which are very delicate and hard to hold during an edition run. We also introduced him to color, he had never really used it before. It was a case where the capacities and interests of the process actually expanded an artist's sensibility and it was great fun to be in on that and watch him tentatively move his image into this risky new territory. The entire shop got involved in a large project with Cuevas, a fundraiser print for the LA Music Society which went into hundreds and on different papers which changed everything as we printed. It was a bath of handwringing and screaming but we got the job out. Just about this time a serious legal art issue erupted within the LA scene, Connor Everts had been arrested for displaying pornography. The LAPD had confiscated all the paintings he exhibited at Zora on La Cienega, alleging that school children on the street would be harmed beyond repair by Evert's flagrant pictures. The facts were quite different. Connor had painted a series of images featuring a fetus peering out of the womb through the vagina, trying to decide whether or not to enter the world. It was valid, serious commentary and with no prurient value at all. Conservative forces in LA government thought otherwise so he and Zora were busted and the whole thing went to trial. Supreme Leader and the creme of the LA art world testified in defense of Connor and it wound up as a hung jury. A later trial before a judge only resulted in favor of Connor Everts. But his trials were only beginning. He thinks that the police community were humiliated by his vindication. Later on he was badly beaten by the Long Beach Police, his studio broken into and ravaged. He later sued for violation of his civil rights. At the workshop we avidly followed these events, for it appeared that fundamental artists rights, civil rights were seriously at risk, and all of us felt affected by his travails. Connor Everts life was destroyed for the time. His wife left him, he lost his job (actually, Connor is exceptionally good at losing jobs for he has no respect for authority and pomposity and no restraint on an active, testing voice; fortunately, he is also skillful at finding jobs too but he winds up living all over the country.) He lost his health, his work was affected and had to leave town, all over one show of a few...little...paintings. Makes you pause. His story is worth publishing and I hope someone will do it one day. I tried it and nobody was interested.If they could go after and destroy him, couldn't they go after us too? I have always felt that one positive function that artists serve for society is a kind of litmus, early warning function when government veers to the crazy and becomes out of control. A writer is sentenced to death by a religious state, writers rebutting the lies of history in the Soviet Union are jailed and repressed, artists in this country are condemned and made into incendiary straw dogs by the ultra-conservative to serve their own partisan ends, school books are leached of "provocative" content, it still goes on today and will go on forever. When you want to become absolutist and tyrannical to the people, start first stifling dissent and creativity. When that happens, a society should know it is in trouble, for it is. The rabid true believer is threatened by alternative points of view, the freedom of the artist defines their own repression paranoia and insanity. Years after the Everts saga Jim Turrell innocently provoked a somewhat different but similar free speech issue when two separate ladies fell into his hole in the wall piece at the Whitney Museum in 1977, one breaking her wrist and another her elbow in the process. The first lady's husband was a retired State Supreme Court Judge who brought suit against the Whitney and Turrell for "altering his wife's mind" to such a degree that she hurt herself. I always thought that was the whole idea. We are supposed to alter people's perception and state of mind and now somebody wants to sue you for doing just that? The Judge also said that he had been denied his wife's sexual services by the incident. A strange admission of private practices. Finally, the insurance company settled but the Whitney was then about to sue Jim. But if they did, what artist in his right mind would exhibit there again except the most benign, timid or afraid. Intimidation of another sort. He was able to talk them out of it but had a year's grief with lawyers and a large bill over the whole affair. At FPW we became artist watchers. All the printers were art students or beginning artists or contenders, observing how the real artists responded to pressure and simply how they functioned day to day was important to us, not only for the job, but also as potential creative people. We wanted to know how it is done in real life, beyond school. I was able to observe around forty or more artists with varying experience, imagery and credibility at work. Aside from their personal work habits which varied all over the place, I became aware of two consistent attitudes that all of them had which could be described as artist power and artist anger. The anger component is the most visible, it seems to come with the territory of being a contemporary artist in a culture that wants or needs art very little. Artists also do their work in a context that is sometimes with and most times not connected to "normal" values of society, so they simply don't know where they are much of the time. A definition of anything like a job, starting time, quitting time, value of work, behavior, goals, success, failure is all hypothetical, nebulous or artist-specific so knowing where you are relative to anything is difficult to impossible. I think anger is cranked up over frustration about these issues, and the simple fact that there is never enough to go around for everybody. You always come up short in a job you created for yourself. We also live a life of contradictions: success can be failure, incompetence can be called genius, skills can be inhibiting, failure can be righteous, fame can be counterproductive. Anger becomes one of those comforts you learn to depend upon. It gets you through the day, it is your friend for a long time until it turns around and becomes your enemy. You feel it intensely, you can crank it up at will. It is free and the supply is unlimited. With anger you can justify your lack of accomplishment or deal with someone else whom you feel is getting your slice of the pie. You can trade it socially as a personality gambit. Men, women, minorities catch it, love it and exploit it. Anger becomes an income supplement to sustain you through the younger years. The only artists who don't appear to have anger are those lucky few granted a pass through life giving them most of the benefits of the job, those having gone through anger and come to grips with it, or those amateurs or dilettantes who haven't penetrated far enough into the intensity of the profession yet. Even having a ton of money doesn't seem to help. I knew an artist who was very rich but also very angry because he couldn't get respect, all his peers were suffering and he wasn't, if he got any career advantage there was always the suspicion that he could or did buy it. He could afford to buy an entire gallery or a city block if he wanted and everybody knew it. Anger is the basis of most humor so you have to watch how funny you get. Anger gets you so far and then it wears out, an angry young man makes a silly angry middle-aged man. Anger is a seething fire within that gives you temporary power, you can work with it and forge a kind of art from it (some do), it will get you a long way until it eventually consumes you and there isn't much doubt about that. That is the price tag. Anger gets inside and kills you off in some way or another if you eventually do not come to grips with it, exorcise it, understand it, comprehend how you generate it, disengage from the provocations that make you create it. This is necessary before you drive into a telephone pole, a bridge abutment, hang yourself, drink yourself to death, to name just a few of the methods artists have come to, anger-related causes for their own demise. Artist power. Empowerment. Creative power, sustaining power, survival power. In its bare essence, the creative act is an investment and exploitation of yourself, a search and an act of survival while you are up on the high wire just keeping enough balance not to fall off. It demands your total concentration and energy. But life around you appears to conspire to take you out of yourself, off the high wire and back to the mud. It sounds paranoid but you have to be careful in this business. The artist act is not exactly nurtured here. We can say it is, but that is only in a few little spots. Most artists work a lonely street of self-advocacy on a non-existent budget and everything counts for you or against you. It comes down to the reciprocity of the world with you, its support or non support. You cannot drive a car if you don't have any gas. You obtain power from a resonance with the world and its reciprocity of support. If that happens, all is well, then creativity becomes more a business of managing the whole thing. If not, then it becomes hell. You are sitting on a dime spinning around doing all the right creative things and the world doesn't respond for whatever reasons, and you don't receive "earnings" from your work. Therefore, it becomes harder to make it every hour, every day as the support runs out. Making art creates a power within yourself which is incredibly sustaining; assuming one would never want to or need to bring it outside the studio it can suffice for a lifetime. But, if you are dependent on your art for your existence and continued art exploration you run right up against the power thorium. I learned about it when my physical power got to a very low level, after my heart attack and I was back in a downtown LA studio with just enough energy to breathe, walk a little bit, paint for a while, digest some food and all around me in the street outside was a teeming, thrusting collision of power sources that I could actually, palpably feel. I had a power budget that I could spend any way I wanted but during any given day I could run out or make the end of the day, my choice. All the forces around me had much more than they could ever use. The result was that I began to investigate my power, limited as it was, and to use it the best way I could. As a youth you never realize considerations like this because you are power rich, later on you come to power deficit. I was maximizing on creative power on a minimum physical power basis and a reasonable support power system. I learned to play power like a Stradavarius. If I didn't, I would fall off the high wire and perish, simple as that. Sometimes life becomes absolutely elegant in the choices and possibilities it presents to you. By the nature of my dilemma I was able to focus myself on everything interlocking that I needed to do and eventually I survived it. At the present time I notice that I am prone to dropping out of my profession, in some sense, to give my power away. I still have plenty for my work and collateral efforts for survival but paying a whole lot of attention to other artists, which I used to enjoy during power-rich days, I cannot. My "cost/benefit" as the doctor says, is out of balance. I find it a power drain. I know it sounds bizarre but it is true. You use up energy going around to other artists' studios, seeing all their shows, even acknowledging their power and accomplishments. Not that I don't respect them or like their work because I do. There is another problem with very successful artists, they represent a hierarchal power that implies competition and status within creativity that is hard to be around. The implication is that because you have not gotten as far as you are not as good an artist. Of course, you know you are but the facts appear to contradict you. Best thing is to leave it, back off, don't allow it to intrude and affect your thinking. If you are living with cockroaches you can live with them, or try and kill them off, or move away. Diminished energy or power allows you to function more efficiently because with a focus on yourself and your work you make the right choices instead of emotional or fearful ones. I don't have to worry about the career game because I am more involved at all levels on a survival game, one that is particular to only me and with rules I can set and deal with. At the workshop the power games would abound, in normal administrative byplay up and down the ladder to us printers to horizontal stuff between artists in competition for support or status. To mention Ruth Asawa again, I think as an artist she manipulated the entire experience the best I have ever seen, she made us voluntarily give ourselves up to her curiosity and support; in a way, she worked our strength against ourselves and for her. Being a printer was exhausting and exhilarating. The physical demands were tough, for you rolled up and hand printed every piece of paper through a cranky old press all day long. Some developed physical ailments from it. At night you were so tired that it was impossible to work any more on your own images even if you desired to. Lunch was great, artists would tell stories, Paul Brach was the best storyteller of all, rolling his eyes and puffing on a Marsh-Wheeling he would recall his days as a GI in Europe where he was among the first to liberate Paris. Thought he would look Picasso up so he did and had a magnificent visit, although initially Picasso thought Brach's knock on the door was the German's coming to get him on the way out of town. AAAUG, and your name is Braque too? FPW was a sweatshop in the form of an idea, all day long visitors would come and look at us perform as we did our turns. We rolled, we cranked, we threw rollers up in the air. The French press had a board to jump on to get the pressure down on the stone, one day Ernst Rosenthal who was a tiny little guy forgot about the back pressure at the end of a print sequence and got tossed into a row of visitors when he took it off. Collaborating with artists gave you a front row seat on how they made decisions, how close or distant they felt about their work. Many hated the idea of somebody else touching their image; I can understand it better now. You stood with the artist and watched them go down the road, many times we had technical problems that had to be modified in the image before we could go further. Sometimes they couldn't make a decision and everything stopped. On some occasions, we scrapped the whole thing and started over. Mostly, it was about keeping in touch with the artist as the image developed through drawing and processing and proofing and color registration, not building up their expectations too much. When you said you could do something and failed, you lost their trust and that was the end of you and them. Artists looked at you with the puppy dog lock. Can I trust this total stranger or are you gonna suck me into this thing and then kick me in the balls? When things went bad you had to face the music fast and tell the artist. Bringing in the shop foreman early was critical, because his expertise could sometimes save the day. Most problems we had came from printer overconfidence and failure to recognize they were in trouble before it got out of hand. Lithography can be technically a one way street. When a stone or plate goes bad, it is going to keep on going unless you do something fast, so it was all back to trust and maturity. For a long time the printers were not able to print for themselves, it was said that the paper was only sufficient for the artists' works. Eventually they let us experiment on the backs of failed editions. A printer from New York discovered how to scam this, he printed an edition of his work on the back of Tamayo rejects and took them back home and sold them as Tamayos. Art version of the old smugglers trick. Supreme Leader hit the ceiling and went back to New York and got it stopped but not before some were sold. Eventually we got to print editions for ourselves but most of the work was pretty terrible. Printers make images (even though we were all ex-art students or new artists) to impress other printers, so the prints that came out were big on technical riffs and low on aesthetic merit. I did no editions there on my own. After printing for innumerable artists I moved into the technical side doing tests on inks, papers and the process, writing papers and thinking up projects to do. Although most of my papers were published I never got my name on a single one of them. Supreme Leader took it all. She also represented the distaff side of the concept. She was a dynamic and capable organizer who conceived and ran one of the most successful art organizations on the West Coast. It gave her immense confidence and arrogance as it went along. Without going into the details which are always fascinating when you are in them but insufferably boring when you are past them, she came to epitomize the eventual corruption and perversion that power gives to people. You seldom learn anything by success other than you really like success and you want to keep it going no matter what. She became a soapboxer, disputatious, a micro-manager. Artists began to have reservations about coming after the other workshops began springing up as spinoffs of FPW. The place did run for ten years, did its job and then closed down. She started a private shop of her own but hardly any artists would come to work there so it closed its doors. At the end it was about lawsuits and anger and unfulfilled promises, none of what you want to see. I developed a friendship with Cuevas, discovered he was a great movie fan so we went to movies together. He went to Gilbert Roland's funeral, and still wears the leather wristbands that Roland gave him. Cuevas was becoming so famous at home he had to come to the USA to get any work done. At the end of his stay I decided to leave FANTASMAGORIC, it was time to leave. I had done it and done it well but it was getting old. I had also come to the crossroads, my dream of being an artist was coming into jeopardy for I was offered a job at the other print shop in LA, it was good money but I would become a wonk instead of an artist. I quit among a great wailing and gashing of teeth but I was out of there, on the road, on a bus to Mexico to see Cuevas. Three days and three nights and it was Guadalajara for a week, looked at all the Orozcos I could find and then down to Mexico City looking for the murals. And, they are magnificent. I would go down to Cuevas' place for afternoon drinks. Fifteen to twenty artists from South America would be there hanging on his every word. He was the superstar of South American Art, and every artist in the continent made the pilgrimage to see him. He had an opening of the prints he had done with the workshop with searchlights, fans behind barriers, coverage in all thenews magazines, caricatures of him in the magazines, artist as rock star. It was unbelievable. Later we went to a TV studio for a debate with Siqueros. On the way over Cuevas said to watch out for Siqueros' brothers because they all had guns; sure enough, the big, shiny .45 automatics kind that drag down your pockets or glint out of holsters. Siqueros was a presence of a presence, the most fascinating face with a prominent nose and dark eyes that seemed to look through you. At the time there was only one TV station or network in all Mexico so this was a big time event. It was about whether artists should be dedicated to work to support the suffering of the people (Siqueros) or the artist had a responsibility to pull out his own vision (Cuevas). They really went at it. Maybe our side should have had guns too. I was asked to be in it but my Spanish wasn't that good and I felt like an interloper in a particularly Mexican drama, it was their show and who needed a Yankee to muddy things up? They often referred to art books on stands near them. It went on for about two hours. I don't know who won. They looked like boxers going fifteen rounds after the event, eyes glazed, weary, punches lacking real power. It dribbled on to the end with them still standing, proud, arrogant, sweating under the lights. Somebody coughed, it was over. Never heard what the reaction was, later on I would go into small Mexican villages and the whole town would be glued to the one set in town. Like most art events, we are fiercely stunned by the issues and the rhetoric and everybody else is saying, "what's for dinner?" But it was fun to watch and after all, nothing else was on. || Home || Persistence || ------------------------------------------------------------------------ © Walter Gabrielson 1993 All Rights Reserved I decided to keep on going south in Mexico and took a train to Oaxaca, stayed two weeks. Met a retired LA PR guy who took me around to local markets and churches. I would walk up to Monte Alban in the morning and watch the sun come up and bathe the blood drenched stone in light. One day I saw a small French car trundle up the hill, guy got out and wandered around, eventually we met up. He was Dutch and a friend of Charles Fahlen from Otis. Invited me to come along with him to San Cristobal Las Casas which is 60 kilometers north of Guatemala. We drove out to huge churches built in places with no roads, Indians sitting around getting loaded on the local stuff, we tried it out and weren't much for getting back after that. Such beautiful people though, silent, elegant as they came out of the mountains to trade, they are the survivors of the great Mayan civilization. I stayed there a week and bussed back to Oaxaca and then over to Vera Cruz where I sat alone on the pier and felt very romantic, took trolley cars out to the cemetery because that is what everybody did. Eventually got sick, some suspect street food I think. Then a terrible odyssey back to Mexico City and three days and three nights on the bus to TJ with crying kids and not much space to throw up in. Staggered back across the border. Greyhound was on strike so I had to hitch to San Diego, take a train to LA and walk all the way back home because I was totally broke. The next day I got a call from Cal State Northridge. Would I like a part time job teaching a summer print class? Who, me teach? Fifteen years later I finally broke loose but now I was looking my next life square in the face: the artist as a teacher. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ || Home || Persistence || |
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