Persistence |
Walter Gabrielson Painter |
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Chapter 5 |
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Fifth Life: 1966-74
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| Somewhere in all this I got married. We were all in the starting out business, Betty Fiske was a student at Otis, we met and I moved into her apartment and kept the old one for years as a storeroom or a getaway (afraid to commit?), three years later we tied the knot at LA City Hall amidst pregnant Mexican girls, glaring mamacitas and soldiers. The ceremony was slow on drama but good on efficiency: Youfaithfullytakethiswomantobeyour-lawfullyweddedwifeforbetterorworseinsicknessorinhealthsohelpyouGOD? I do. We're now entwined forever or how long we could beat the stats. We were both artists, we travelled, went flying, saw movies, shared a thousand moments for eight and a half years, and one day it was over. Not nicely, the beginning part is much more fun. What can I say? We went as far as our incompetence allowed, we were complementary and good for each other for the first five years, we drifted apart the last three and then it was an effort to get past the increasing negatives of the relationship. Sometimes I think that two people only have a certain amount of communal time in them and when that is used up it is definitely over. We had our great moments and I cherish them and perhaps that is all I wantto or can say. The teaching game started with a call from William Hill, temporary Art Chairman at California State University, Northridge. Bill was an art historian good at the facts and romance of art and probably lousy as an administrator or politician, or maybe he just didn't have the killing instinct for he was soon history at CSUN. So now I had to go to work on time, suck up a bit, learn the faculty game, and learn how to teach the impossible to those who wanted it for free; that is, lazy Valley teenagers, the children of Lockheed whose primary life's ambition was to take over their Pa's pool maintenance route, buy a big Valley house like they just came out of and live there forever in crushed velour splendor. I took the job because I needed it, I was broke again. I didn't have to audition for it, maybe that was the problem, never trust a job that chases after you. But they wanted the skills of a FPW master printer and I was their boy, loyalty pledge and all. The summer part-time turned into a fall part-time, which turned into three years of part-time, which turned into go for the full-time tenure track job you have generated here or we shall fire you. So I went for it and eventually got tenure and taught in the joint for about fifteen years total, way past my limit. How we get sucked in by our ownneeds and addictions. I didn't have a need to teach but I had a need for support and survival. The Sixties faculty job provided me and hundreds of artists a measure of support while we got our careers going. I was having some shows now, was married, thought I really was an artist worthy of support but sales weren't doing it yet, so teaching would suffice, etc. That's the whole story. Actually, I was just another faculty person with an attitude and pretensions, however righteous these pretensions were. The University patronage gave me the time to get off the ground, but the price tag was that I gave them gobs of my time in exchange. The alternative was to become my own benefactor or quit and paint only weekends in my garage and sell the work at swap meets. What I was up against was the simple realities of American contemporary artist support of the Sixties which has changed a little but is still remarkably the same. It operates something like this: # There are ten people at the top (or twenty or thirty but never too many) who either by the force of their images or timing catch a hell of a break and lock into the power-money-reinforcement triangle, bounce to the stratosphere and stay there forever, because once having been anointed they get an investment function behind them which is terrified of being upset and moves heaven and earth to keep the game going. Not to say they don't deserve all this but it is amusing to see the whole thing go on long after some of these people have stopped being creative and hang on being a sad caricature of themselves or court jester to the rich and famous. # Next to the top there is a level of people just as bright and creative but for somereason just don't get the breaks or their timing is off, the territory is too crowded to admit more that those already assigned genius god, whatever. They are always contenders and have to live with it. # The bottom (as some would say). There is hardly any middle ground in fine art. It is developing a little now but for my lifetime you were perceived as being in one or the other, and your VALUE as an imagemaker followed. At the bottom were all us angry, hungry, contenders or players or tryouts with teaching jobs just trying to euchre out enough time and energy and consistency to get our ideas to focus and allow us to function and hopefully, proceed. It is somewhat like starting a small business and never having the extra money or cash flow to get you out of your little mini-mall store. Being underfinanced in money and time you cannot generate escape velocity and you begin to feel stuck in a loop of repetitious stuff. Nothing seems to work for you or make any difference and ultimately you wind up in a hotel conference with 400 other losers paying good money to learn real estate scams that are going to make you a million bucks. # Below the bottom, the dungeon, the pits, the bottomfish of art populated by those just hanging on, artists whose work has plateaued out, their anger and frustration enveloping and crushing all the optimism and cheer they started out with. Also populated by a continual bubble of happy, naive starters charging around cluttering things up, bringing to the table a small tad of something being done right now that is very hot, billions of graduate students putting their pinkies in the water for three years before reality sets in or they get tired of rats in the loft. That is a cynical, external view of the artist hierarchy which belies and does not account for the grandness of the creative act and spirit at all. It is not so much that you believe in this system, but if you want your work to go out into the world beyond a few of your friends you have to function within it. It is a societal value on your time. If you believe that you can exist within your own value system, so much the better. Some people can, they are content. They are mostly supported by someone else, have lesser ambitions for their work, and have discovered the quiet richness of a personal vision kept within the studio walls. Obviously, I was a member behind door no. 3. I had three jobs: art, teaching and being married and always coming up short on one. I found teaching to be an honorable job, still feel that way. I approached it with my best because I wanted to and I felt anything less would reflect on my value system and would affect my work in the studio. As an artist you are how and with what you spend your time. You can't allow a lapse in your integrity or belief system and stay positively creative, it catches up with you and the work will eat away your vitals. A good day of teaching is like or even sometimes better, a good day in the studio. You do sort of the same generic stuff, only you talk about it (generally at a lower profundity level) instead of doing it. Of course if you talk about it too much you leave your game in the locker room at school. In studio work you get highs but they are private and not too transferrable except through the limitations of your work, in teaching you are on stage and interactive with bright students who also worship the ground you walk on. The only trouble with this nice scenario is that you have to survive being a faculty member and hardly any experience save being trained as an assassin or a criminal lawyer can prepare you for the job. More about that later. Continuing Glossary of Contemporary Art Terms Architectonic: A dubious beverage served at some lesser gallery openings. Archival: Not to be confused with arch-rival, somebody who paints like you. Art Collector: An angel whose blind passion is matched only by unlimited funds. Art Dealer: Someone who loves art, wants friends, enjoys parties, and can pay the rent after paying the artists. Art Historian: Duffer who dislikes contemporary art, loves previous art and can never tell you when it all went bad. Art Writer: A juggler of ideas and impressions who can barely make a living. With the heavy bucks I was raking in from part time teaching I purchased a new VW van, an obligatory tool for artists, students or surfers. It was a good vehicle, I drove it 200,000 miles and never had a radio in it so I could think on the freeway. Artists need sturdy proletarian vehicles so their heads don't swell. So I had my van, a wife, a kitty and I moved down to 21st Street near Adams and Arlington, integrated my neighborhood. Rented a big house from a couple named Likki (will never forget his horrified look when I came to the door and introduced myself and called him Leaky by mistake, I didn't know he had an incontinence problem and wore a bag). It had four bathrooms, full basement and enough rooms for studios all over the place for both of us, a backyard and garden and an alley adjacent freeway with nightly crashes, it sounded like a waterfall with an occasional metallic sound going BUNCH! Right after we moved in somebody crushed some eggs on our doorstep (took me two years to figure out the symbology), then they burned the house next door down and then we were robbed twice, but other than that, life down there was fine. I say that because we were in that great starting outness of life and it was magnificent. Time flew, hours whizzed by, it was teach and work, teach and work, see a movie, teach and work, and on and on. You will never recapture that time, that strength of purpose and fantasy and dreams and the youth that make it happen. We went to every art show in LA, travelled the USA and saw every Japanese movie to cross the border. This was the late Sixties and I passed through my abstract period into the void of what now? I had come to two conclusions about abstraction, after doing it for about three years: * It was an idea that could only get thinner and thinner as you used up all the visual gambits in the universe and so where would the excitement be pursuing it like a lost star forever fading? * My gelid conclusion that it really wasn't me. Just a terrible feeling. I know I liked it, but it just wasn't me. I could do it but it became something like doing an assignment, something I did at home to justify being called an artist out at the school. There was no soulful connection between me and the work, I had gone beyond my enthusiasm to the bedrock of asking serious questions about my convictions. You know, when the minister starts asking, "Is there really a God?" Terrible. I was afraid to stay with it and I was afraid to leave it. Being an artist is just one damn crisis after another. The faculty solution would be to stay with it and be safe, the artist solution would be to dump it for something else that was really me. But what was that? I decided to return to the familiar attempt to make art out of something that I was familiar with and really liked, and that was...airplanes. Like every male child I made airplane drawings at school instead of doing my lessons, I liked airplanes and I admired them as form so I began a series of pen and ink airplane drawings, culled them down and published them in a little book called "41 Airplanes". It was the first real art I ever accomplished. What a relief, I could actually do it! It probably isn't great art to anybody else but it was my first electric touch with being able to translate a loveable feeling for something into an image. I knew it was good and it still is. They are nice little drawings and they do what all art should; they affect how people see things, they are in and of themselves exciting and they are a bit of the unknown, a bit risky. It would be years before I could come up with images that were that good or consistently touched that core experience. But, I also perceived that I was in the process of creating a monster; that is, a logo kind of specialty image that could drop me into the airplane guy category from which I would never recover. I did some paintings and sculptures of the images, had a show with them at Weird Comsky Gallery and moved on. The airplane images were now within me and no longer had purpose. So, I went on from there. My next series were primarily line drawings and paintings combined, I added watercolor or stretched aircraft linen and laid it flat like a table and worked with acrylic washes and lines together to make a very sloppy and flowing painting with drawing. I also tried out blocky forms that had a three-dimensional character which turned into a metaphor, for instance, a baseballdiamond put into isometric that resembled a prison. The figures were influenced by technical exploded drawing concepts, I wanted to use the figure but I was loathe to get back into academic figuration because of its expressive limitations and I looked for a way out. I wanted to tell a story but traditional means have a history and baggage I didn't want to drag along. But, unless I kept within a recognizable form I could miss telling my story, so the point became to find a middle ground between form, content and story telling that I felt comfortable with and get away with at the same time. At Otis I had written my thesis on the nature of expressive form now I was out in the trenches for real slogging it out. The thesis didn't help much. What did help was making hundreds and hundreds of "mistakes" or images that didn't work until I eventually evolved a way of doing it which accomplished most of the task I was after. When it felt good I knew I had come to a place that was close and comfortable and I had it. Eventually I evolved a blurry way of drawing by rubbing charcoal on to paper which I found humanistically responsive and visual. It was at the end of years of trying things out and then I was compared to Milton Avery. So I went and looked up Milton Avery and saw there were some similarities but not enough to get me worried. After a while I realized that every artist resembles somebody else after enough history and development has gone on, it is practically impossible to look unique if you are working within a traditional art form so you might as well not worry about it. In addition, art is mistakenly zeroed in on how you do something (form) instead of what you do (content). I have fought this battle for years and I never getany place. It is the art world's problem and short sightedness. Concentrating on form is a way of disenfranchising a content artist, perceiving an artist as a comparison to somebody else is a very thin way seeing. So be it. Another issue I eventually had to confront had to do with humor. I know it is illegal in most states to say this, but I am sometimes a humorous person. Trust me. For a long period I consciously allowed humor to enter my pictures because that is part of what I am. But horrors, I discovered that it is difficult to make fine art with humor be fine art. The way it is dismissed is being "jokey". I am not certain why some people dismiss humor in art, perhaps it confronts the whole pretentious, elitist art world, who knows? I do know you can get away with whimsy but that is about it. There is a small ration for artists with humor and it is about three guys a decade and that's it. No more room. So I was injecting humor into my work and discovering that it was a part of why people rejected the images. At one show I sat in a corner and watched how consistently total strangers reacted to the same pictures, the time they spent with them, how and when they laughed. I eventually decided that humor can be a barrier to further association with an image, a place where someone can stop their dialogue with it and get off on a temporary hit and I did not want this. I felt I would not consciously try for a humorous picture, but if some leaked in that would be all right, I didn't feel like denying myself all that much. H. C. Westermann and Red Grooms are about the only artists in recent history to have it both ways with humor, to be perceived both as amusing and profound. There are a few more but it is a tough area to survive in. If you take the same idea and express it in a painting or a sculpture, you can get away with outrageous humor in sculpture and very little in painting. Life isn't fair. I found myself more fascinated with the narrative. Little stories, bits of business, small acts of people would intrigue me. It just seemed right to match little stories to images, for paintings are shorter than sort stories. We seldom do the big, epic painting any more. It is for movies and TV. But the concise image fascinated me, the image that squeezed together a great deal of life in a simple image. I go back in recent times to Grant Wood's "American Gothic" which has served as a moveable icon for so much cultural focus for us, and it is a very simple picture. How do we do that? Different events tell bigger or smaller stories, for instance, a man walking down the street isn't much, a man sitting down in the street is, a man walking down the street with a boom box is, a man laying down in the street is bigger, a woman laying down in the street is bigger yet. That kind of evolution prompted me to make a painting called "Woman In Jeopardy", a woman sitting-laying down in the street and the legs of men only surrounding her. The colors are an angry yellow to orange to red to black juxtaposition. I began to look for these small stories in the life around me, to make notes of them, sometimes to write them down, to take a picture if I had an opportunity. I was going to make life my life's work, to deal with the human drama and to make images that brought out our humanness. One of the definitions of psychosis is not being able to feel any more. If I could contribute just a little to a reawakening of our sense of feeling, I felt it was worth my total commitment. Some of the word pictures I wrote during that time were: * "Parking lot ranger cruises up and down the rows of his cars summarily issuing tickets, slapping fenders, directing traffic, meeting every passerby and customer with a bold stare and snappy banter. Nobody could traverse the space without being codified, challenged, noticed, dealt with. This man possessed an eighth of a block of gray, white-lined asphalt for his turf." * "Old couple standing at the light trying to cross a very wide ten-lane busy boulevard. Becomes apparent that the time available for them to cross with the light is too short for their creaky bodies to manage. The city, which has been their friend, protector and home for so long is now an impatientalligator." * "On the rain-greased street the motorcyclist didn't have much of a chance as a white car ran a light and launched him into a light pole. Hours after the mess was cleared up a chic young couple came up to their silver car and necked for a while, her hat falls off and gets wet near some twisted bit of metal. They get in the car but it won't start. Nothing but trouble tonight." * "Man is seen pedalling this adult tricycle through the busy streets, swimming through the intense traffic armed only with a little yellow flag on apole. He even drives it into the supermarket, parks by the cart area and shuffles around doing his shopping. He is wizened, bent over with a large hump to his back. He appears to be self-contained and oblivious to the fast, capable life which surges about him. He is living within his burden and coping." * "Too close for comfort. On a New York subway a newcomer slides into an urbane New Yorker reading a newspaper as the train shrieks to a station stop. This offended being turns to the miscreant and transmits a substantial glare. At that exact instant, a rancher in Arizona notices a blue camper stopped near his fence line a mile away and gets concerned about somebody being too close to him!" Peter and I renewed our friendship, which almost went on the rocks after our marvelous summer working at USC, after he moved back to LA in the late Sixties. Returning to Syracuse that fall he wrote me one of these personal improvement letters that I seem to attract which went something like, "Gosh, Wally, you are such a terrific guy but you have the following things wrong with you which I really think you need to work on..." In the clutch he turns out to be another Jehovah's Witness. We shared an office at CSUN which we kept for years in the most barren condition possible, it looked something like an interrogation room in Zagreb. We didn't want to get too comfortable out there. Our fellow faculty would balefully observe our four- draw file that had every drawer labelled "job security." We first shared a studio off Alvarado and Temple and later found a big space in Pasadena. Our studio at 16 W. Union in Pasadena was at the corner of Fair Oaks, a block up from Colorado. The surrounding area was infested with bums, old book stores, the Salvation Army, the Free Press Book store, thrift stores, etc. In short, it was magnificent. Now the area is called "Olde Towne" and all our buildings all gussied up for Cineplexes and designer ice cream, giving people the illusion of some bizarre form of reality quite different from what we experienced. We had names for all the bums, they were a changeable, amenable lot and they knew us and used our downstairs doorway as a combination facility for sleeping, oozing liquids, passing out or passing on, whichever came first. Bruce Nauman was down the street, Karen Carson had her studio on Colorado, Peter Lodoto and Scott Greiger shared a building, Richard Jackson was nearby, Ron Linden and Merwyn Belin were around the corner, Gale Green, Don Sorenson and Denise Gale shared a studio over on Mentor (firsthaving to scrape the brains of the previous artist off the walls; he was a graduate from Long Beach who came out into the world and waited to be discovered, he wasn't, and became despondent and shot himself), Ed and Marsha Nunnery had a gallery by the railroad tracks that showed Ben Sakoguchi. We took breakfast at LeDru's, a Forties greasy dive and played pool at Club Eleven across the street from us. We were on the second floor of an unreinforced green brick building marked by the grease spots of sewing machines from previous sweatshops days. The roof leaked badly on my side and I would have a serious lake with any rain, the landlord said not to worry about it. It was over 2,000 feet and the previous tenant used to shoot archery in there. We had loft shows, parties, a wedding reception for Peter's sister, I even lived up there for a year in a small room at the end. We had a multitude of visitors who would come by to try their luck at table tennis or talk, try to thrash Peter for something he had written or just hang out. "The Sting" was filmed outside our door on Union and in our alley for three months, and the whole street was painted up to look like Chicago in the twenties. The local bums were incensed at being upstaged by extras playing bums for the movie, they thought they were better at it. One bum came up with a white turtleneck and shades that he thought might get him a part but I think his vomit stains didn't carry the day. A waitress from Club Eleven made servicing the crew a major project but she didn't make it into fantasyland either. There is a scene at the beginning of the movie where Redford is coming into the alley (ours) when he first arrives in Chicago and interrupts a robbery, a man run towards him and Redford upsets him by throwing his suitcase. I watched them shoot this scene all day long. At the end of each take, Director George Roy Hill would ponder it, everybody would be silent as he replayed it in his head and then he would pronounce something like, "No, when you threw the suitcase he was anticipating it so it didn't look real so let's do it over," and the actor would have to fall down on the bricks again. He must have done it sixty times that day. This ended any ambitions I had about the movie business, it is too slow, too out of control and too expensive for all but a handful of artists to get to the place where it is interesting. Peter and I were having some luck with shows, he got in the LA County Museum, I had a show in Austin, Texas which sold nothing and the dealer ran off with all my work and married an alligator farmer. I had two shows (of which I had paid one-half the tab) with Cynthia Comsky but she kicked me out when I asked for the addresses from the guest book of those who had signed in at the opening. John Doyle, an ex-Caterpillar tractor salesman opened a gallery in Chicago and came to LA looking for artists, Karen Carson turned him on to Peter and I, he sold some drawings for me and eventually went under, I think the Cook County Sheriff enjoys my work now. But what the hell, I was getting out there. Some called Peter and myself the "Pete and Wally Show." We were probably very obnoxious. We developed a repartee that was insufferable and very funny, few could get in it but were welcome to try. If you have ever had someone who replicated your outlook on life you know what I mean. It was a great joy to share a studio for ten years, I guess we have known each other for thirty years by now. There was just so much material to be digested, resolved and opined at the beginning of our lives and career, the teaching job, art, media, philosophy, everything. Everyone should have such an experience with a friend for so long. (I don't think our spouses would have agreed at the time.) In that critical time of our lives we used each other to define a life there isn't any definitions for, to resolve the complexities of artmaking and career, and to learn how to remain fresh, optimistic and creative within the grind of making a living. Peter can be overpowering for he is literate, witty, intelligent and loves to proactively dominate a conversation, he intimidates some. It can be tough being around someone like him but I enjoyed it, we had a reciprocity of pleasure and pain, we enjoyed the game of each other. For a brief time we created a consensus about what life in our profession is, should be, could be. Like many, Peter started out as an artist, got his teaching job, switched the job to Northridge, but hungered to carve into and be influential within (affect the dialogue) the art world so he began to write reviews for ARTFORUM magazine on the side (I happened to be along on the first one, Max Hendler, whose early work was very photorealist and presented a challenge for a formalist, abstract painter like Peter to dissect first time out). He went from reviews to writing about the phenomenology of art or larger "think" pieces, and blossomed into a career of writing art analysis, commentary, books and finally at present, the Art Critic of NEWSWEEK. From the beginning he took a lot of heat from his writing, he insisted on being opinionated and "took no prisoners"; when I got briefly into the art writing dodge he advised me to do the same, to advocate my position and let the other side present its side later. To attempt to tell both sides adequately waters down the intensity and clarity of a piece. Many would disagree, but I think I still would go along with that advice. With art there are so many directions you can come upon it, there is little "fact" about art, it is mostly opinion. Most people give their opinion the legitimacy of "fact", so being contrary to their position makes you a heretic, a communist or something equally despicable. Going public with your opinions brings all this to a head and from the beginning Peter jumped into the fray and really enjoyed the battle. Somehow, ARTFORUM despite being one of the more pedantic, righteous, windy and formalist magazines accepted and ran Peter's more heretical hits on official doctrine. John Coplans was the editor then and he and Peter hit it off and I think John liked the contrasts Peter would draw. The result was that as a writer Peter became a star and since has had to suffer comparisons between his writing and his painting, but I guess he is used to it by now. Another side effect of becoming popularized is to suffer the whines and grovels of legions of artists and/or their dealers and wives trooping out to 16 W. Union to moan about what he did or did not do with a particular review, or just plain hustle for more of the same. I must have witnessed a hundred hustles; of which one stands out - Scott Greiger and his first wife came over and we were all at Peter's end of the loft talking when she turned to him and laid the blocks only as a "good wife" can; she said in dulcet tones, "You know, Peter, Scott is so under-appreciated as an artist, don't you think somebody should do something about this?" Peter and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes. I started looking under tables and chairs to see if there was anybody hanging out to take on this monumental task. Greiger's ears were bright red. Peter sucked on his lower lip and looked at the floor. There it was, hustle your friends who get into high places and hate them if they don't deliver on what you want. Peter was in an intolerable position, anything he said would hurt. Somehow, we all disengaged. Years later I heard a line which topped this; during dinner an artist's wife turned and offered as a question and topic for conversation the following about her husband, "Don't you think his work has so much inherent art to it?" What a wonderful way to spend dinner, talking about all his inherent art. Take that to the bank. Across the street from the studio, Club 11 sold beer, beer nuts and bad burgers to the winos and anybody else unlucky enough to wander in. Club 11 was painted a light yellow with red splotches made by the end of a three-inch brush wielded in a fit of passionate interior decorating by its owner and monosyllabic muse, Rudy. Rudy sported khaki shorts which somehow stayed on a rotund body, tended bar and all business with practically no conversation at all and liked to stand out front and look up the street one way or the other for vast periods of time. He looked like a guy who had spent his whole life auditioning to get the part of running a down and out bar. One day Peter and I came over to Rudy's for a game of pool. Rudy had taken sick that week and was in the hospital. The bar was being run by his sister, a blousey woman who looked like she had been auditioning for the part of a female running a down and out bar. We get to playing and Peter was lining up an interesting shot that could win the game. The pay phone rang and Rudy's sister answered. We were zeroed in on the game. Rudy's sister gave a huge shriek, dropped the phone, staggered over to a bar stool, draped herself over the bar sobbing. "Rudy," she said, "he's dead." Time froze. Guys at the bar stopped with their beers halfway to their mouths. Peter was frozen in mid shot. I stood there like a bozo. Peter had a good crack at the eight ball and the game, but the timing and outside events were becoming terrible. Peterlooked at me and said, "You think we oughta finish the game?" "Yeah," I said, "Rudy would have wanted it that way." Just a killer of a sick line. Peter looked at me. Smoke came out of his ears. He had just given me the setup of a lifetime and without restraint, I had hit it out of the park. You have to understand, Peter simply hates to lose...anything. In some way, Pasadena was as big as anything we had done before or had going at the time. It became a form of institution and a creative act for us just to be there, for people to come to, for things to happen, to resolve. Fortunately, the busses of cognoscenti from UCLA and other promoters hadn't yet begun to happen. We played incessant table tennis until we discovered that in playing games to win you play more conservatively and lose the fun of the game so we switched to playing for "art shots" instead, hotdogging for no score. The studio created its own rules, for instance, we started something called "Crown City Lectures", a group of artist friends that included Nauman, Carson, Terry Allen and others to go out and talk about their art without embarrassing everybody but the lectures never got a bite. Peter and I came up with a dubious concept called the Lightweight Dinner, which would be an invitation list for all the lightweight artists in LA (including ourselves) and it would cost you to get off the published list. We would have lightweight foods and Michael C. McMillen would do a lightweight movie. I also thought of the idea of having a "roast" of Peter, people would come to a banquet and kick his tail for charity but then it was a problem of finding a big enough hall and Peter wasn't too hot about it either. I concocted the Pop Dawson story, a curmudgeonly character who ran an obscure aerospace firm called Dawson Aircraft (Betty made patches, we had stationery, I published a book of drawings under this aegis, Richard Dehr made some wings). It really got out of hand. Bob Smith, then part time curator at the Brand Library suggested that I put a bunch of this Pop Dawson detritus in a glass case during a group show he had going, Bill Wilson of the Times came by and dumped all over me, said I was worse than the tie-dyer in the show, he was right. Never get cute and public about in-house, studio rambling. It wouldn't go away. Later on I got an invitation to be in a show in San Jose called A.K.A., or Also Known As, artists who had created surrogate characters as art. I wrote back andblasted the idea, said that it was something that I didn't feel good about any more, that it was all a bit too cute. They wrote back and asked if they could use my letter in the show. I think that conceptualists also have a lot of Jehovah's Witness in them too. We co-wrote a couple of pieces for publication, best was about Leroy Neiman who was making a running painting during the Olympics, Jim McCay would check in with the artist and Leroy in jumpsuit and cigar would do shtick on how it was going, who he was putting in or leaving out as he saw it, the implication being that history was now part of an event with the inclusion of "documentary" painting. I think we resented the private and difficult act of art being so perverted and exploited (of course, ABC never asked US) so we really dumped on him. Many years later I found out that he was quite miffed about the piece, but Neiman had made so much money by now he should be somewhat insulated from the sticks and stones of the cynics. We were also being hit with a lot of dreadful conceptual art by guys just out of Cal Arts or SF Art Institute asking for junk from the studio, such as sweepings, blood samples, penis molds, semen samples, on and on. I have come to loathe art about art about art. It is clear and present evidence of paucity of imagination, rampant careerism and provides no contribution to anything save the general level of horseshit that art is hopefully beyond. My own contribution to this loony form of inquiry came when I decided to write a serious inquiry about the LA art scene in the form of a spoof on something around at the time called the "Diana Zlotnik Newsletter on the Arts." To give an idea form, is always a problem. I was impressed with the National Lampoon's use of TIME and other magazines to reveal significant social happenings. Diana has been putting this publication out for years that purported to be something like the Kiplinger letter but seldom got that good, for unintentionally it was hilarious. It was an effort by her to be in on things, but with all seriousness aside, she overdid it by championing her heroes, bragging about her collection, misspelling words, calling and interpreting it just her way. By the time I got around to it, it had already been hoaxed once and since mine I think there have been at least four more. Trouble is, it is hard to tell a real one from a bogus one so in a way Diana created a strange provocation of an art form all by herself with her newsletter. My premise was that Zlotnik, angry about the idea of somebody playing with her beloved publication (previous hoax) got really angry and inadvertently hacked out and published a more severe and distracted version than usual. Here in its entirety is my version of what that might be: In retrospect her newsletter is a curious accent, part history and insight to the LA art world of the time. I noticed that mine includes many players I have since forgotten, an indication of how rapid change is within this volatile business. I probably used too many cuss words. But it brings back interesting times. Now I would not be interested in doing something like that, for I really don't care much about what goes on in the LA scene, it is a possession of the players there now trying to survive and understand the quicksand in which they are caught. You tend to believe when you are a part of it that all these events have importance; you try and make some sense of its significance, but you always fail for it is like trying to make sense of "The Jetsons." Loft life continued on into the Seventies. We saw Club 11 torn down and the colossal Ralph Parsons empire built, a Scottish bar came in across the street (Loch Ness Monster) with drunks playing bagpipes late at night. We had an earthquake and a month later I was standing next to a weakened building listening to a rock band reverberate within an enclosed parking area when the roof fell in and the wall crashed outwards almost burying us music lovers. The rock band was in a confused state, they couldn't figure out whether or not to lay claim to knocking the building down but decided to congratulate themselves anyway, high fives all around. What an awful thing that would have been, to be killed by rock music. Out of the loft I saw car wrecks of all description, saw a drunk weave across the street with a bottle, three cars crashing to avoid him, he rolls over and comes up with his bottle intact, didn't lose a drop and staggers off. I also witnessed two bums down below auction off a lady bum for a pint of Thunderbird. Living in a loft, in and amongst your work in the center of a noisy, smelly, polluted, industrial area filled with crime, grime and tears is every artist's dream of heaven. It sure as hell gives you identity, the look on a dealer or collector's face is almost worth it. Saucer-eyed, they feel they are slumming for sure (always in bright daylight with the limo still running). These places are invariably dangerous, they are falling down, under-repaired spaces that legitimate businesses avoid so artists can rent them on the cheap. They abound in industrial waste and chemicals (one space I almost rented later on had a storage space next to a wall that exuded strange smells, I discovered they came from extremely toxic pesticides used to spray for small vertebrates (rats). The resident tenant had lived there for five years and had burned incense continually to mask the smell and ease his headaches. At night the areas thrive with crime and intruders, for this reason the higher floors go for a premium. The distance from the parking area to the front door is critical, windows and access doors have to be like vaults. Other than that, loft living can be great fun. You confront realities you cannot experience in suburban, middle class life. You live near the bottom of society, better off than the rest of the street people but not too far from them. Almost every space has to be reworked to make it somewhat liveable, just getting supplies in and out can be back breaking work, some areas are so remote from normal civilization you must drive miles to find grocery stores or laundromats. But when you have gotten your car somewhat secured, survived the journey to the front door, lugged your daily load up four flights of stairs, unlocked the 28 dead bolts securing your door, wrestled yourself inside you realize you forgot to pick up the mail and you have to go downstairs and come all the way back up again, close the steel door with a big WHUMP and lean against it (after throwing home the 28 deadbolts), you come out with an immense feeling of peace. The sheer size of loft space acts as if your mind is expanding infinitely outwards and doesn't touch the walls or anything. All your earthly goods and tools are spread out before you (an eerie look, you never see them altogether like this anywhere), urging you to get to work. The work space is vast, there is storage, a showing/photography wall, a living room space, kitchen, toilet and a tub on a raised stand. You have to put the tub up on a stand making it almost impossible to get in and out of, I don't know why but everybody does it. It is also better if you paint the exterior of the tub a dark blue or red. Tub art. But there you are. All of this space is before you, all your comfort and facilities and your dreams in one big open space. You luxuriate, you revel, you exhilarate in this space, it becomes your will. It is nothing at all like your past, all fractionated off into tiny rooms as is a house or apartment. In a loft you are presented with an endless sea of opportunity and sometimes you feel you would almost kill to keep it. Anything is possible there, large paintings, small works, industrial processes, anything. One other dramatic difference is sounds. In small rooms sound is contained and suppressed. In a loft any sound whacks out into space and bounces off a wall way out there and comes back to you echoed and amplified. My cats loved loft living, they would holler and the echo would sound like another cat had gotten in and they would run off in search for it. Cats love to scare themselves. It takes some getting used to, you think that someone else is in there but they aren't, has somebody just started shooting hoops at the other end? Is somebody else in the room? Now you are starting to act like a cat. Get out the binoculars and take a look. Outside sounds are ongoing, persistent and muted, or loud depending on how close you are to an impossible neighbor running a body shop night and day, a plant stamping something out or the whizzing of sewing machines downstairs. I know one loft liver who was so bothered by the sounds that she had to have therapy for it, a special therapy where she imagined herself as a pane of glass and the sounds passing through her without her attaching to them. Walking around a loft makes special sounds, the toilet flushing can sound like water is coming into the room, an elevator clanks away like a freight switching engine. At night, life shrieks out in the street with sirens, the screams of victims shots, and footsteps running until it gets late, and finally it is quiet and the outside show is limited to switching traffic lights or other patterns played on the ceiling. A New York friend related how one night she heard the shots and somehow the person got in the bottom door and ran up her stairs and collapsed at her door with a "whump" and then a puddle of blood came in across the sill. Bad enough, she had to clean it up later. Just like the movies. There are minor aggravations that turn into major ones, for instance garbage. Where to put it? Answer, in somebody else's dumpster. But then you have to walk the streets at night to find one because during the day somebody will catch you and yell. The trash problem can grow until you have it worked out, some people wait until they can't live any more with their mess and then they export it to a secure area. Or, parking. Sometimes street parking is limited during the day so you set a timer and run out and rub off the marks or drive back on them or move to another spot ten times a day, or go back and forth across the street on opposing days and miss it of course, the parking lady isnot your friend. Sometimes the neighborhood is in cahoots, the alert goes out, "She's coming, she's coming!" and everybody runs out, jumps in their cars and drives around the block in their underwear, pajamas, bathing suits or whatever could be thrown on at the moment. Getting rid of "things" is easy. If you need to dispose of any tired out, broken, impossible lamp, washing machine, dead typewriter, couch, mattress, lumber, pieces of drywall, clothes, whatever, just simply take them outside and lean them on your building and the next morning ---- everything will be gone, it is raw material for the street people who use it for God knows what. Loft social life is communal and close. You have more in common with a group of total strangers on the next floor than you have with your entire former high school class which is now out in the Valley raising kids and overseeing the pool boys. It is a collective of hardship and becoming a part of what goes on around you is both reinforcement and survival of common everyday hazards. Loners don't do too well. You have to work out schedules for playing loud music, having parties, sometimes making "play dates" for the kids. In all my days of loft living I have seldom witnessed the perversions and dramatic excesses attributed to this life. Movies want to portray a dissolute life but the reality is a lot more boring, probably closer to lower middle class tenement life: a very interdependent existence, scratching for every buck to keep afloat, living in a place you don't always like but is the best combination for what you have to do, relating to others in the same boat as you and finding that you are all experiencing a very unique and beautiful existence for a brief moment until it changes, the rents become so high you have to move out and the gentrifiers move in to suck on the romance. Ron Linden's idea of a highly debauched party was to invite three guys over and on a bare kitchen table plunk down a bottle of tequila, two lemons, some Cheezits and a six pack (for the non-serious drinker) had have at it, professional sports being the debate of the evening, art talk forbidden or seriously trashed if it was brought up. It isn't necessarily cheap either, in New York a loft will run from $250,000 on up (used to be $350,000) and then you have "improvements" like replacing the entireelevator system to look at down the road, 40 to 80 cents a foot is the going price for LA "affordable" rentals which means that for 2,000 foot space you are looking at from $800 to $1600 a month nut before food and supplies which normally translates to sharing the space with someone else to just make the rent for most beginning to sustaining artists. In New York everyone has at least two jobs to keep the whole act afloat which leaves about one and a half days a week to work for yourself. Artists are always paying immense sums to be somewhere they can barely afford to be, and in some cases, can't afford to leave. Artists living in and converting industrial spaces have revolutionized and altered the decaying downtowns of major cities. It began in New York but goes on everywhere now. In LA it started but is now somewhat moribund because the cost of earthquake proofing old structures is so huge it almost isn't worth what you wind up with when you finish with it. Loft life also means you live with your work 24 hours a day, you can get up in the middle of the night to hit a troublesome spot on a painting or just sit and look and think to all hours. You get very, very close to the work and more possessive as you realize the cost of this lifestyle. The downside of lofts is that if the space is kept open and undivided, which is one of the reasons you have a loft in the first place, you also can't get away from the attendant smells and other residue from you work which invades your bed, your couch and just about everything. Showing your work in your loft to someone else gives you a lot of power, collectors like the grittiness of being that close to the work and being near the context or where it is made. The most dreadful part is art tours coming by and gawking at things, making you look like a monkey in the zoo, and of course, not buying everything and mostly ruining your day. Sometimes they bring you a sandwich or fifty bucks. One artist had a good idea, he said that if you visited him you had to buy something, could be big or small but no tire kickers please. Sounds venal but I sympathize. Perhaps it isn't fair but those who have lived and worked in these places for any amount of time truly feel they have paid hard dues to be an artist and resent anyone who hasn't or is somehow going along with a free pass by reason of family money or spousal support. It is a ritual by experience that in their minds excludes those not having faced the fire. The other side of this attitude implies that within the suffering of the lifestyle comes the great art and they have to be allowed a special dispensation, the fantasy that the gritty artist down in the trenches is a better artist. Perhaps. It is a searing experience that forces some to reach deeply within themselves, to come up with the tough stuff. At the very least, loft living places a clarity on your work and yourself that the suburbs just can't get near. You really know why you are doing it and how much it is taking out of you. I know I felt all of this at one time, it was my exhilaration and fear all wrapped together in 1982 which pushed me within and past any civility or tolerance of my mediocrity and finally got me out of there. For those who do it there is no experience to compare it to, for those who haven't they will never, ever know. Continuing Glossary of Contemporary Art Terms Belly Up: State of a gallery when optimism meets incompetence. Boonies: Art venues that are so far out you have to bus in rented cognoscenti. Career: A Zen concept best understood by asking, "What career?" Cavort: An artist dance performed after making a sale, receiving a grant or anyother good news, for instance, the judge doesn't consider your paintings good enough to be considered community property. College Art Association: A strange outfit that holds conventions for people who don't have jobs and listens to papers from people who are afraid of losing theirs. In 1974 it was also over with Betty and I. The last two years were grim. Getting together is a dream, coming apart is the nightmare. It became bitter, protracted and terrible and that is the best thing you can say about it. I was surprised how a marriage could fall apart so easily, I watched it as I was a part of it. Within its disintegration I realized what a large part of our existence has been transferred to someone else. I could not just go out and be myself again because after eight and a half years, I didn't know what the solo me was, I was still a couple in my mind. Home was gone, I was vulnerable to someone who knew all my buttons. I was financially wiped out, death seemed easier. I think I made my misery last too long but that is the way it played out. Having descended into and lived with misery for so long I now have a wonderful appreciation for the alternative. That is the best thing I can say for the entire experience, and perhaps if we can learn just that one thing, something like divorce can be instructive and enlightening. © Walter Gabrielson 1993 All Rights Reserved ------------------------------------------------------------------------ || Home || Persistence || http://www.waltergabrielson.com/persistence |
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