Persistence |
Walter Gabrielson Painter |
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Chapter 6 |
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Sixth Life: 1974-80
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| As one life ends another begins but you don't want it that way. You want it to go back to where it was, to be reconstituted, to make it all better, to deny the hurt, to not go forward. Until you can move on you die a little each day. You become in love with stasis, you are a stuck siren of whine. You are glued to a black hole of compressed pain and misery that becomes your loving tarbaby. You are terrified of the future and you can't stand to live in the present. As you sift through your drama you begin to make choices and you discover the edges, the slimy corners of your character. You become aware of disgusting things about yourself and you either climb out of the hole or climb under the covers. It was a time of drifting and nothingness, my life was totally uprooted. I lost my home, my base, something to come back to. I got an answering machine and sometimes I called it up from work so I had someone to listen to when I got home. I noticed how other single people shopped at the market; one man had a half-pint of bourbon, a package of oreos and a steak, all the major food groups. The primal contexts of my life had run out of gas all at the same time. I had hit the wall of the thirtynothings and I was slogging along just being competent. I was faced with the following realities: * I was within the middle but unrealized development of my work, having decided to plumb my personal depths for art. I came to realize it was taking all too much time to produce results that were satisfying. * I couldn't get a show, representation or sales anywhere no matter how hard I tried. (In retrospect that seems proper, I was too much all over the place for a show.) * The teaching job was now eight years old and the better students were no longer coming to Northridge; I had to work harder to encourage the average ones to learn anything. Faculty politics were vicious, demeaning and endless. * I was now cast out into the brave new world of the Seventies, a time ruled by an anti-male, malcontent group of angry women which tended to put the blocks to meaningful relationships. I didn't know where my life was going, when these disasters would end, or when it would get any better. It was awful. The middle game was a gigantic, swamp ooze where my energy didn't seem to work any more. I tried to be optimistic but it was gloom and doom no matter how hard I tried. Of course, the more things got worse, the more I encouraged the descent by my own reactive, negative behavior. At the time you definitely become part of the problem, you participate in your own demise until you find Jesus, die or pull yourself out of it, just one hell of a conundrum. Today I can truly empathize with those in the graveyard spiral because I have been there and it is no fun. I developed cancer, drank too much, and I was a terrible person to be around. I occasionally thought of suicide but I was distracted from its execution by my desire to find a way to just disappear off the earth without a trace. Perhaps I shouldn't have made it so hard to do. I had two plans: (1) the "210" Pasadena Freeway was being poured and I thought of slipping under the forms one night under a tarp and becoming entombed to eternity in a concrete blanket that supported great numbers of unwilling commuters going to work each day, or (2) stealing an airplane, flying it far out to sea as far as the fuel would take it (about 450 miles) and low enough to avoid radar, bringing along refreshments to party along the way, and then crashing into the fishes and that would be that. But both my fantasies had their logistics problems and as I worked on them I guess I got over it or got bored or afraid because I didn't go through with it. Actually, life becomes much brighter when you start planning such things, your depression goesaway, you go from being reactive to proactive, and you become preoccupied and energized by working on the project. I moved out of the house Betty and I had rented, I lived in the studio for a year and then found another funky place to live in around the corner at 35 E. Holly in Pasadena. The place used to be a mortuary and subsequently hosted a series of greasy spoon restaurants and antique stores below me. The rooms down the hall from mine were populated by a series of drunks and dropouts who worked for my landlord, the bombastic Fred C. Clark. I discovered that Fred C. had stolen most of my household goods I had stored in a building nearby the studio and had moved them into the apartment I now rented. " Top quality stove and refrigerator," he said. I agreed. Never did find my accordion though. One of ventures downstairs was a little different: a black gourmet cook opened up a night club that he called "Renaissance of the Holly Strip." He featured gumbos and soul food and Crystal, a songbird from Iowa who was out for the big push in Hollywood. She lasted six months and went back to Dubuque. I would go downstairs and play piano for the late crowd in my pajamas. During the day my cat Clyde would entertain passersby from my upstairs window by yelling down at them. The people would go inside the restaurant and tell them, "He's gonna jump, do something." Cat loved it. Ironically, these spaces have now all turned into gourmet restaurants. I loved the place for I was able to live in the lower depths of Pasadena, existing among the derelicts but still slightly above them. Few people who descend into that life make it out; wallowing with the misery experts grows on you, it is a very a reinforceable lifestyle. I found myself loathing happy, unencumbered people and I discovered a refreshing honesty without artifice among my new friends. Compared with the pompous posturing of faculty at the University or the self-inflated princes and princesses of the art world, the drunks were a pretty solid crew. I could depend on them. For instance, one time my van was broken into and my sleeping bag stolen (it was one of the better Sears models), but two weeks later I saw it draped over the top of my vehicle so I went outside to investigate. "Redface", king of the winos said that he and his cohorts had roundly thrashed the miscreant and run him out of town. "Guys like that give winos a bad name" was the way he put it. I couldn't have agreed more. I washed the bag 45 times and I still have it. We were family. It appears that if you have a significant dream outside the "normalness" of life you must suffer an arduous process of testing yourself to make it work, to bring it to the world past the glue of rejection and inertia. Normalcy abhors change; and anybody's dream is a form of change. Just keeping life afloat financially and emotionally is a full-time job. Add on a dream component and you are asking for trouble. My new definition of art is "unasked for enlightenment." Being an artist is a profession that means asking for trouble. So you get it! You are fooled by the amateur gushings, the great talkathons, the jerkings off and gratuitous lines about the wondrousness of creativity, the spirit, expressing yourself, the entire litany of hope pumped out by those who pay no dues. In the arts it is just so damn easy to talk a good line about anything and then go home and clip your coupons and let someone else charge the barricades. I also believe there are just a few slots or opportunities available in the creative business; at any one time there are just so many museum shows available, so many slots for artists in galleries, so much real money available for the purchase of art, so much grant money, and so forth, and there are thousands and thousands screaming for these opportunities. I once had the bizarre experience of looking at some slides an artist had sent in where I was currently having a show; he claimed to do work just like me and so wouldn't he fitin too? The strange thing was that they were almost copies of my paintings and they had been done in the last month while the show was up. He had come to the show, painted the paintings, photographed them (one-day service can really help a career) and sent them off! That is how fast and tough it is out there. You feel that you're fighting a large battle every day just to keep afloat. So why didn't I quit? Easy enough to do. No one would blame me. I could continue being a faculty member and crank out the illusion of work without the substance of it, make enough work for the faculty show every three years and for little freebie pickup group shows at other colleges whose faculty collude in the "keep other professors' vitae alive" game. Very easy to do. College professors do it all the time and nobody every catches on because how is a chemistry professor sitting on a promotion board going to tell the difference? If I could figure out a way to lie to myself it would work. Why go on with this torture? Why not just give this art thing up and live the illusion or get out entirely? Of course, "success" could solve it all, but that only comes to a few, what about all the rest of us who don't get anything approaching the brass ring? Success can be wonderful medicine, bolstering your confidence, your bank balance, your power balance, your illusions, your delusions, everything. No wonder everybody likes it so much. Well, I still believed in myself. I never wavered about that no matter what during those dark days or after or before. I had an unreasonable, perhaps delusional conviction that I was an artist, a "good" artist too. I felt I had something to say to the world but the world wouldn't or couldn't find the place for me to say it. I couldn't quit in the middle of failure either, just a hell of a bad place to quit, better to do it near the beginning or before you ever start. I also wanted to see what images, what pictures I could come up with. If I didn't pursue them I would never know. I did know that I wanted to see some pictures that weren't being made and the only way to see them was to make them. I couldn't make them if I didn't have the block time and facilities available to do it, and I had to have a job or support to do it, so I was back to the old boring dilemma; quitting doesn't solve all the problems that are before you. I guess I also wanted to keep at going towards the arena, the big white room where one day lots of people would come through and see the pictures and make up their own minds, compare them, trash me or praise me but not ignore me because I hadn't stayed with it long enough to make a difference. Just a whole bag of convictions versus the omnipresent, chastening pustule of reality. When you're in this position you go over and over and over it trying to find a lever to move it along. You work like hell at everything, you try everything, you push and shove and use all your energy and nothing seems to work. That was the real surprise. Nothing I did seemed to work for any of my large problems in life. Time to deaccession the Norman Vincent Peale. Of course I was not exactly right for somewhere buried in all your efforts isthe key to making something change, a combination of what you are about and what the world needs, a switch of cosmic valence which makes a tiny, tiny little uptick of your fortunes. Until you resolve the dissonance between your demands and what the worlds needs, you shall be in disfavor and disharmony. Of course fortune, heretofore on vacation in Hawaii decides to come back and help out; positives breed positives just like negatives breed negatives so you're on you way again until...the next time! For me it wasn't God, a midnight Jesus apparition, a trip in a UFO, it wasn't even anything happening that was good or positive for me. It wasn't a friend, or an event, or an airplane, or anything I can define today. What helped me was not quitting. I just persevered. Hence the title for my story. It is my only answer. I guess if you want something bad enough, don't quit. You will always get something from your efforts, not always in the form you would like, but something. An arduous journey creates its own logic and its own enlightenment, perhaps even a switch of values. Later on that happened to me, I moved from more external art values to internal ones. Of course, the hard part is the sheer magnitude of time it takes for all this to happen. I thought it was tough for me until I heard a talk from a woman who had spent fifteen years in a Soviet prison, the first seven without a light in her cell. She persevered by keeping her mind active, going over journeys she had previously made, inventing games, actively working at maintaining her sanity, learning to enjoy each small change or increment of life within her constrained existence. Somewhere within the horror you also have to learn to appreciate and embrace the terror of it for its own experience. After all, you are experiencing it, nobody else is. It is part of your life. Your life is who you are, all of it, not just a part that is warm and wonderful. You can be close to being destroyed by these matters or even choose to destroy yourself. A fascinating choice. Perhaps it all sounds very romantic. The only thing I can say is that within the depths of yourcrucible of despair and misery you come to a place where you really, really know who the hell you are. I don't know of any other way. Not many thought I was an artist, but I did. I continued to take it to them, going around to as many of the venues in LA as I could. One dealer said she would show me in her office and that was my best offer for years. I took trips to New York and slogged my slides through the cement canyons over and over, I must have approached over 300 galleries without a bite. A young artist who had been at it for five years told me that she considered it a success when the dealer instead of just the girl at the desk saw her work. I learned to make friends with rejection, I even sympathized with the problems of dealers who also have to go through all this with you and eventually adopt a somewhat cold persona much like a surgeon to keep themselves sane. Year after year I faithfully applied for the NEA and Guggenheim grants and to this day I have never gotten any of them, not a penny. Most of my friends in the abstract painting business received grants,and some, repeatedly. They would encourage me to keep on applying. "If you don't apply, they can't give you one," they would say. I could not get promoted out of the lesser ranks at CSUN, although I was mistakenly granted tenure by one vote and perhaps that was another bizarre form of torture! By now I depended on the job for my existence so I really feared quitting which made me resent my position and dependency on the system even more. On the positive side I was developing an extended family with very close friends, both men and women, I was pursuing aviation, I was building a sailplane in the studio but my only real salvation came from working at art. No matter how bad my life was I never found it to particularly affect my work. I didn't get into the cutting off the ear thing and then painting it literally or metaphorically. My work seemed to go on patiently at its own pace, as if there were a steady clock ticking away down there somewhere resolving and working with the issues I threw at it. After 41 Airplanes I did one more book which featured more social and political implications, made a series of blueprint works and then moved on to the serious painting, first with acrylic washes and then switching to oil paint which I have used ever since. I used the American masters Hopper and Benton as unpaid consultants. I still admire their work. Hopper developed a very solid way of painting, his color and context is ordered and I feel congruent with it. Benton swings in a more exuberant manner and I learned a great deal from him too. One time during a trip to New York I presented myself to the dealer Alan Frumkin, and later waiting for the elevator I saw he had posted an old review of Benton where the critic had lashed at, humiliated and disdained the man with great fervor and wit. It seemed Benton's crime was not to make New York art. Benton had strong ideas about the direction of painting and he took on the Eastern establishment with relish but there were more of them than him so their ideas eventually won out. Benton also was a teacher of Jackson Pollock; in the Kansas City Museum there is a Pollock that looks just like a Benton. By this time I had my drawing under control, I felt good about the painting and I was about three years away from putting my essential sense of imagery together but I didn't know it at the time. I was also becoming involved in various diversions which ironically and invariably were quite successful and planted more seeds in my mind that I should stop making art and transfer to something else more rewarding. It appears there are always more reasons not to make art then to make it. My first diversion was "writing." I say it like that because I don't perceive myself as much of a writer but I was a lucky writer at best. The first piece I ever turned out was published in Art in America and was called, "Why suck the mainstream if you don't live in New York?", a very snappy title which made the rest of the piece a burden to keep up with. The premise was that since experience in various parts of the country varies, why not use your particular circumstance as your art instead of slavishly following New York ideas which are just as insular as any place else? The only difference is that there is more means for success in New York City so that is why most artists go for it there. Ivan Karp and Castelli aren't going to come down the main street of North Platte looking for somebody doing some terrific New York inspired art that someone in New York hasn't already been doing in variations of thousands. I think it still is a valid concept. I believe that art is about individuality and experience that is unique to the artist; our system of bandwagonitus denies the rich variety and substance of our creative people by forcing them to fall into line behind some temporary, popular idea. Eighteen years after I wrote that piece nothing has changed much but what can you say? The potential for creative self-destruction is practically infinite. Eventually I had some twenty or more little articles published. My writing also seemed to have a Typhoid Mary effect, for soon after an article would appear, the publication would go out of business. From the first little piece of writing (which I rewrote about 12 times to get it right) I received several speaking engagements that were great fun. Once you get on the circuit, you have a going gig. It seems that having something out in print portrays the illusion of credibility to others so I was looking very profound. I did discover that the real reason I was invited to all those colleges was to give absolution to the faculty. The lecture is simply the cover, another ongoing conversation. The faculties are bored out of their skulls and bring in visiting firemen just to keep sane. At the party or the tea or whatever is held afterwards, they gang up on you, telling you all their troubles and how hard it is to make art there and all the rest. You console them with phrases such as "it isn't really so bad" and "studio prices are lots better here" and "the air is clean and the moose don't try and mug you on the way home." You give a couple of Hail Marys and you're out of there. Then they try and press their slides on you, just in case when you are tripping down gallery row you could drag them out and show them to the dealer, huh? I was never tendered, but Peter told me of being offered faculty wives' services for such work. He did a funny piece for Artforum about the phenomenon called "The Visiting Artist." One other side benefit (?) from the writing dodge was requests to judge art competitions. I went up and judged the Butte, Montana Copper Days Art Festival and caused a minor furor by not awarding all the purchase prizes that were available to the works in the show because I felt they weren't good enough. Part of the gig was to give a public lecture so a whole batch of artists who didn't get a prize showed up and were ready to lynch me on the spot saying I didn't know anything about cowboy and western paintings which was not true, I did. I responded that they invited somebody like me from the big city and with a value system that is pretty sophisticated and tough to come up and render judgements about them and now they wanted me to dump all that and become just like them and give out the goodies just because they were there. I went on to say that many of the drawings and paintings were from artists not going out to the ranches or up into the bunkhouses on the mountains but rather they were copies of Remington and Russell and not good ones either. They might be able to get away with it among themselves, but with me? I felt it was my job to render some hard calls so I did, that is how you find something out. I finally asked for the hands of people who had actually gone out and painted these works from real life and how long they had been doing it and the response was tiny enough to make my point so I got out of there fast and hid out in the motel until the flight out the next morning. Another interesting diversion I became involved with was LAICA, the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art. For years we held meetings around town talking about how the County Museum wasn't doing anything to reflect the richness of contemporary art going on so we decided to start ourown alternative space. Spiritual and practical head of the project was Bob Smith who taught 3D Design at CSUN. A great many people set aside their own self interest to give time to the idea and eventually LAICA was born. I was elected (on a platform that I would not make a groveling speech to get elected and I had demonstrated by then enough published articles in failing alternative publications) to head the first Publications Committee and we soon came out with the Journal. We appointed Fidel Danelli as the first editor and cranked up from nothing the entire pre-computer machinery of getting words typeset, laid out and printed and distributed. It was a thoughtful, well written and credible publication. People all over the country read it and for a time the Journal was the only publication exclusively reporting on LA contemporary art to the outside world; I am still proud of having been associated with it. The membership of LAICA was almost all artists or collectors and its Exhibitions Committee created provocative, powerful shows for the first five years, with openings being attended by thousands and hundreds more coming out during the run of the shows. We moved from temporary quarters that were free from ABC in Century City to a "permanent" (never say permanent with art organizations) quarters on Robertson. The entire concept succeeded beyond our wildest expectations, it was an idea ahead of its time which gave visibility to the rich diversity and intensity of LA Art. It became established, the place to go for art, it became an establishment, how swiftly that occurred. One day a dream, the next day you are paying bills and refereeing fights. Therein became its downfall, LAICA existed! The founders of an organization always have it best, they are in on heady, idealistic times and gain the satisfaction of building and creating something. It is all downhill after the honeymoon. LAICA failed (after many years of brilliant success I should add) for two reasons: * Its example created an awareness and an embarrassment of the establishment museum world about what they weren't doing about contemporary art so MOCA was created (millions of dollars) and the LA County Museum responded by building a huge building at their complex (more millions of dollars) and coincidentally destroying the character of their own architecture plan in the process. * LAICA crumbled from within. The founders gradually drifted away and were replaced by a new generation. When I left active participation it was to turn over the Journal Committee to the next Chairman and his new group. At the "transfer of power meeting" I introduced everybody and then I went down a list of all the things that had to be done for the next issue and all the decisions that had been made the past year to make the magazine what it was. I then turned it over to the new group and without a beat, they jumped in and started rehashing all the decisions we had painfully encountered and worried over and come to grips with. It was as if there was no transfer of history; I guess most life in sophisticated societies is like that now. We start from the beginning of everything and reconstitute it to meet our immediate needs. Well, that was that. I got up and prepared to leave, and Peter got up too. Nobody said thanks for a great year, a great publication, they just went on with their discussion. We walked outside and around the edge of the building. There was one light over the table and through the big window we could see the twenty people busy talking, making points, gesticulating. We walked farther and farther away and the meeting was a small glow of light in the middle of a huge sea of black. I was reminded of the last scene from O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey into Night", the movie where the final scene freezes and the camera moves away and the scene dwindles to a small dot at the end. That is how it looked, just a small dot of light as we got farther and farther away and then it disappeared as we went around a corner. Public service is really service. Unfortunately, the membership was never expanded much beyond the artist community so LAICA increasingly became captured by insular, personal and self-serving passions. As the next generation of artist/members came into LAICA, they perceived its function to be there simply to service their needs, something to exploit, to ravish, and to bend towards their own selfish agendas. The host invites a parasite which destroys the host. Most of these people were right out of graduate school, righteous with their causes and fearful of not being recognized right away. The Exhibition Committee was captured by them, and the Journal was taken over by zealots out of Cal Arts. The Journal became practically unreadable gibberish printed on low cost newsprint so they could shovel in more unreadable gibberish. Attendance to shows dropped off, it just wasn't interesting any more, not many could slog through the Journal, and so eventually the entire organization ungraciously collapsed. Ironically, like the unmanned telegraph key in the movie "On the Beach", the Journal continued cranking out art garbage for a year or so after LAICA was a corpse before it too ran out of gas. Maybe it is just me, but I would like to see someone research and write the entire LAICA story, for beyond its small parochial interest is a substantial lesson on how arts organizations rise and fall within our culture. I also believe that Bob Smith did herculean, unrecognized work as the founding leader and ongoing steward of LAICA. When he left the organization it didn't last much longer. Thank you, Bob Smith. "The Ironic LA Artist" series of classes at UCLA was my next big project. Ronnie Rubin of UCLA Extension contacted Peter to see if he would dream up a series on LA art for them; he was busy and asked me since I was continually bending his ear about alternative art outside the mainstream. He was ready for anything to get me off his back. I dreamed up the name and then filled in the blanks. The idea was to bring to the forefront artists in and around town that I thought were doing something with a touch of humor and insight about the world. I came up with Bruce Nauman, Terry Allen, Michael C. McMillen, Karen Carson, Charles Garabedian, Al Ruppersberg, Ed Ruscha, Masami Teraoka, Bill Crutchfield, the LA Artsquad Boys, John Lees, John White, Lowell Darling, etc. etc. All of them would be there right on our stage telling it like it was. The word got out and the enrollment soared enough for UCLA to move it to a larger auditorium. For two months it was the hottest ticket in town. Artweek covered every session as if it was news, Michael C. McMillen covered it as a bogus news cameraman from an upstate cable TV station every night until he was revealed as a real artist (unknown in LA at that point) and he did a turn about his own weird work. It was AN EVENT. My feeling is that art ought to be fun, as well as profound; somewhere you have to take away the pompous shield of arrogance and talking at people as if they are idiots and bring them into the process, instead of pushing them around with didactic announcements. In any case, "Ironic" worked and now I was in charge of another damn success which had little to do with my own work. Some people still talk about it, they think it is the only really good thing that I have ever done. It was my first experience with producing a show and I received a fast education. UCLA didn'twant to pay for bringing a piano down for Terry Allen to play his songs live, they felt a tape recorder would work just fine, cheapskates. I knew better because I had heard him perform. He would kill them in live performance and he did. It was one of his first LA exposures and he brought the house down. He was stomping the pedals so hard the piano started moving around the floor and we had to go behind and hold it down for the duration. UCLA was happy, all their previous series about contemporary art would start with a hard core of 150 people out of the catalog who would come and look at anything cultural the first two weeks and then stay away, about sixty people would be left and they would go to sleep. I started with the 150, went to about 500 and it held. The series started careers, it began a number of subsequent art lecture series at UCLA, it was a pedagogic and popular success at the same time. What I learned from that project is common to most projects, which is, when you coalesce and filter your best ideas within a value system you believe in, you generate a power (some might say a commodity) which can be given to the world. When you find an opportunity to translate that vision outward and if there is a resonance of response you will succeed with it. This all sounds very simplistic, but it has to happen pretty much intact for it to work. The problem lies when you have to filter and process your ideas through an organization or powerful enough people to make things happen. You can be nitpicked and ducklipped to death. You see this in TV shows all the time, what you watch is something left over from a process whereby accountants and incompetents have changed things around so much in their fantasies of what might work and achieve the largest audiences, that the core idea doesn't work anymore and you have a bifurcated, lashed up, dreadful result that resembles just about everything else that is already failing. I watched it happen twice, with "Ironic", and later, "Addictions." Both were successes in their own way but still a percentage of my total vision. As an aside, I know it could be construed from the previous happy events why was I personally having such a bad time? The answer is context. For instance, the evening of the Terry Allen success was tempered with the experience of going through all the garbage of my marital breakup in divorce court that morning and the day before debating Peter at the University of Wisconsin at Madison on personal versus formal art (he thrashed me). I was continually having an emotional whiplash of ups and downs which were very difficult to assimilate or understand. Life was no longer predictable or even. The sideshows were fun but underneath it I knew I was failing to myself within my primary definition of being a functioning artist. Yes, those other endeavors were creative, but I wanted the private creativity to be my action. I was also going to work every other day at the nuthouse where any happiness or success you might have attained in your time off is swiftly and savagely dispatched by your envious faculty brothers. I became a minor celebrity but these events were just a small part of me and I didn't desire definition or popularity through this form of accomplishment. I was looking for fulfillment through the expression of my own unique self. So why do them then? I guess I felt doing something was better than doing nothing. If I did nothing then the sheer weight of despair and indifference could well continue to pull me down. If I at least worked on something I filled the hours, and maybe I could do some good. Eventually I came to realize that whatever your situation is, it might be better to occasionally take on a project outside your own definable self-interest, to do some charity, to get away for a while from your private cesspool for no other reason but to be away for a while and maybe even obtain some perspective. Continuing Glossary of Contemporary Art Terms Commission: Money you give to someone selling your work for prices you could never on this earth demand for yourself. Context: Or, how to fit the tux on the gorilla? Criticism: Savage truths about artists better given to artists other than yourself. Curator: Final arbiter of art until a member of their board calls, final arbiter of what shows get them their next job. Day Job: If you want to be an artist, never let it go. Death Rattle: When a gallery goes out of business and his paintings are locked inside, it is the coda played on the front door by an artist wanting to get the work before the Sheriff. Derivative: A cancer you hope you don't have but suspect everybody else does. Diploma: A piece of paper given in bright sunshine and later consigned to a dark drawer. Diptych: Somebody who gets a grant from the same outfit twice. Docent: A rich lady with time off for art. At Northridge my publicness was causing "grave concerns." They had written my part as being a loser and many could not assimilate the inconsistency I was presenting them. Peter eventually moved over to a job at USC, one day he called and breathlessly told me about USC's program, whereby if you were going to have a show or do anything construed as professional advancement they would give you release time from teaching. At Northridge professional advancement wasperceived as getting too far ahead of the full professors, a class three felony. It was tricky business talking to faculty of other departments, our people were so paranoid they thought you were plotting if you even said "Hi'" to somebody else. It was Huttenback, former Chancellor of UCSB who ultimately defined the academic craziness as being: "The reason faculty politics gets so intense is that ultimately they don't mean anything." One man I encountered quite by accident was different than all the rest, his name was Richard Dehr. He was a big-biker-looking cuss who taught jewelry and metal smithing, looked like a hippy and had been a biker, redeemed himself by becoming involved in politics and spending his summers registering voters and flinging off rednecks in Mississippi and other points south. He had heard somewhere that I had a plane (the Champ) and asked me to give him a ride. On such small turns your whole life changes. I took him up and gave him some basic instruction on how to fly an airplane. A couple of weeks later he took a ride with someone else to Northern California and on the way back, the ultimate passenger horror story struck: the pilot passed out and Richard was flying solo with a half hour instruction under his belt! I think I would have died right there. But Richard was a very cool, coping character, anybody who can ride a motorcycle up and down the stairs and hallways of his high school on a bet has something going. He took over, flew the entire valley of California past Sacramento following 101, got past Bakersfield, was a little too low to get through Gorman Pass but he gave it full power and flew up the freeway practically touching the road (must have excited the truckers a bit), finally got back to LA and thought about landing it but instead whacked on the pilot who finally woke up and landed the plane. Richard told me this story the next Monday and I thought, well, there goes another fine guy who would have loved aviation but. I think he saw it as a challenge and went ahead and got his license. After my divorce Richard came to me with a project that he thought we could both afford, to buy a half-finished homebuilt airplane, finish it out and we would have a plane together. We were partners for five years in building and flying the plane. Later on he became interested in restoring old planes, was infected with Turrell's passion. He bought an old clunker in Wisconsin, Jim and Richard tried to fly it back to California but snowstorms and a sick engine got them to Mustang field in Oklahoma and the beast let them get on the ground and that was it. They took the engine back to LA for rebuilding and a year later returned to hang it on the plane and fly it home. Jim has related this amazing saga to me: they headed west out of Oklahoma and immediately had to land before an oncoming storm. As they stood together on the ground a dead bird fell out of the sky at their feet, which for flying people is not the best of omens. Later, Richard told Jim of death dreams he was having. They kept on going. The brakes on the plane had given out and it was impossible to find parts so they worked out a way of stopping. I asked Jim, "How did you manage to do that? Did you get out and drag your feet?" Something like that. Actually, when rolling out after landing, the co-pilot would climb out of the cockpit, get on top of the plane and straddle it with his legs, slide down the fuselage to the tail and drag his feet until it was stopped. I guess it worked all right for awhile. Finally they had to leave it in Sedona when the feet-brake system almost got them in trouble. They returned to Orange County airport and were talking with two airline pilots who then went up in a Stearman which immediately stalled and crashed practically at their feet, killing them both. I had just returned from the aforementioned trip across the country in the T-18 and the brakes in that airplane needed relining. I called Richard and we exchanged stories. I offered to go out the next day to do the brakes but Richard said he would rather do them himself and get the feel of the airplane back, so I let him go. A week later he went out to work on it and after he was done called his wife and asked her to go flying but she was busy, he then called Peter Garrison who also couldn't break loose, so he went up himself. He called the tower, sounded normal, took off and at about 600 feet in the air, called the tower and said he was returning to land. This is the last anybody ever heard from him. He turned the airplane around, came back but didn't land downwind but continued the length of the field, as if he were going to come back around and land the same direction as he took off. Witnesses on the ground said the engine sounded okay. When he got to the end of the field the airplane slowly dropped a wing, slid out of the air and crashed about straight into a Christmas tree farm at the entry of runway 16L and caught fire, he was killed instantly. Later that night I got home from an art opening and turned on the TV. On three channels in brilliant color was our plane on fire in a field. They had the wrong name as pilot. I called Richard to see if he had loaned it out to someone, I got Reggie, his wife, who sadly told me that Richard was flying it. It was an immense shock. I later worked with the FAA, the same person who investigated the Gary Powers helicopter crash (no gas) and we went through the airplane and engine entirely, tore everything down. There wasn't anything physically wrong with it. There was even dirt inside the cylinders of the engine which meant that it was developing power when it hit the ground. There just weren't any answers. The airplane never let him down, we learned later from his parents that he had epilepsy as a kid but nobody knew it. All we knew was that Richard had left. He had gone out at the top of his form. He was happy, he was happy flying, he was happy at home, his work in ecology was developing. We got a number of planes together to send him off, flew his ashes out to sea and dropped them, Jim did a roll with the Helio and we all came charging up Topanga Canyon where he had lived and landed back at Van Nuys. We went to his parent's house for a gigantic wake. Richard knew practically everybody in the Canyon. There were bluegrass bands, eats, hundreds of people, artists, canyon denizens from way back. He had cut a large swath with people and he had touched everybody, they loved him dearly. After that all his tools rusted up within weeks and were unusable. There wasn't a single piece of the T-18 to salvage. He took it with him. Jim says that he saw Richard one night as an apparition formed of hundreds of pieces of light but identifiably him. Smiling, waving, assuring us that he was all right. Reggie said that during the attendant paperwork and details after his death she felt his presence. I did not have any such events happen to me, but I do not discount their experiences. I shall always remember Richard though. Occasionally I sit on the railroad tracks at night by the end of the runway where he went in and left us, on to another existence. Richard is one of those persons with whom it is infinitely beautiful to touch for a time. He had been through a lot, he had learned from it, he gave more than he took, he was truly on another plane of goodness and virtue, if that is the right way to put it. He had pushed through the down sides of his life, he was free. I have felt for some time that he really didn't die, he just moved on. For me, the entire Richard experience is still wonderful even though it got tough at the end. Can anybody understand that? The Seventies were a cold time for many of us. Women were casting off traditional forms of relationships, men were confused and wanting. I became aware of the concept of extended family because it was happening to me. I had no family or home to speak of other than my parents and sister, and their lives were so different than mine. Seeking love and relationship outside your first family can be one of life's most risky and frightening experiences. Marriage was supposed to do it but my marriage was over and I didn't want to replicate that form of vulnerability for a long while. Peter was moving to North Carolina with hisnew wife and our relationship was disappearing. Richard had moved on. I met many people in the flying world, Mark Gassaway became a close friend and eventually we shared many adventures and partnership in an airplane, a partnership that binds you or destroys you. I came to know Bari Dreiband and we managed to have gorgeous fights, much like the Bickersons. She loved to be contrary anytime, anywhere. One evening we got into a fight in the middle of the night, I got out of bed and got my clothes on and drove home to Pasadena from North Hollywood, half an hour later she was banging on the door at the studio to finish her point and then drove back home. Was I supposed to follow? Burn up the freeways all night? Another evening we went out for a pizza as a peace gesture but got into another altercation on the way back to the studio. I said I couldn't eat pizza after this,(pizza being defined as one of those warm, fuzzy get-together foods) so I stopped the car and put the damn pizza into a trash container on Colorado. Bari snarled off in her car, immediately called me from her place and said she was worried abut the pizza and would I go back and check on it. I said that I didn't think pizzas had souls or the wanderlust but she was adamant so I got of out bed again and drove back to the trash container but it was gone. Good, she was happy. What the hell did that all mean? I went with one woman for a while but broke up after untangling her life; she was married but separated and going out with me to make her boyfriend mad. She then passed me on to her girlfriend who told me a few months later she was still married and her husband was coming up that weekend. First I'd heard of it.Later on I went with another woman, had a date with her for Sunday evening, she called me from Vegas and said she had just gotten married so would have to cancel but would Tuesday be better? I am not making any of this up. As singles know, you are in the most terrible minority group around because everybody wants to save your ass and they all get it wrong. How many times was I fixed up with somebody's best friend/daughter/cohort and spent one of these grisly evenings, trying to please or connect just to not make your benefactors feel bad even though you would walk across the planet to avoid each other the next day. The Seventies were the decade that rearranged millions of lives, changed all the rules but is it any better now? Many feminists I knew are still single and live alone. A new generation of women has come along to take advantage of all the changes and they are doing quite well. It has been quite a lesson; those who courageously ferment and execute a revolution become it victims, others replace them and catch all the breaks. In 1974 I met another character of whom I had heard about from Peter, a guy he played basketball with in Santa Monica and also flew and was an artist too, I should meet him. Of course, with a recommendation like that I held off for a couple of years until I had the T-18 project going with Richard. We needed some soundproofing tape for the cockpit and heard this Turrell fellow had some extra. I went down to Torrance Airport and bought it from him, he had his Helio Courier hangared there and gave me a flight in it, eventually we became friends through flying---those who have had the dream, conquered their fears and the machine and taken it to some very interesting places---and art and a discussion, dialogue that was about what was going on with people. As the world has discovered in a big way, Jim is a very special individual and has been fortunate to have a spectacular career, although once I accused him of making a big art career to support his flying habit and he didn't deny it too much. Both avocations demand the most intense dedication and we shared that for certain. We discovered that we like flying low to the earth and landing off field; that is, where there isn't an airport. He had mastered this skill and helped me with some pointers, he also brought in flying out to the offshore islands, something that only a few have ever done and experienced Occasionally we would fly in formation out to Flagstaff and then take the Helio out to the crater and land. I flew with Jim around Arizona - down to Tucson, Sedona and discovered what a magnificent place it is, still relatively unspoiled. Before the exploitation of the Grand Canyon by hundreds of little airbusses and helicopters we were able to fly down in it with total isolation. Jim had what he called his Grand Canyon entry, which was to fly along the earth very low before you got to it so you couldn't see it coming up, fly over the edge and then roll inverted and dive straight into the Canyon, and roll out at the river bed. Quite spectacular. I introduced Richard to Jim and they became fast friends it was a coming together of alternative agendas by people who had been through a lot in the Sixties. Jim had been a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War and had served alternately as a smoke jumper with the forest service, protested and had been arrested. He could no longer vote and was creating not only a new kind of art but also some new ways of living in Arizona. In 1976 Jim and I decided to have a show together at the ARCO Center for the Visual Arts in downtown LA, we thought that the juxtaposition of two radically but complementary art forms would be fascinating to see, and it was. I took the idea to Betty Gold, who ran the place. She had never met Jim but he was a legend by this time so that was enough to make it go. Jim didn't tell anybody what he was going to do for the show, he eventually decided on one of his space pieces with a simple, large open space in a wall with a larger open space behind it, made up the specs and nailed them to Jack Brogan's (his contractor) door one morning. Jack brought them over to Betty who then went crazy trying to get it constructed. Of course, Jim was the only one who could get the drywall and everything to work immaculately with no process left hanging out. One of the small bits of genius to the piece was in the lip of the opening, he had constructed a triangle out of wood that came up from the 2 x 4 to form the edge the result was that there was no discernable "edge" to the opening and it thus enhanced the illusion of space that it created. On the morning we were to hang the paintings and light the wall piece (the reflection off the walls of the outside gallery were going to "light" Jim's piece) we all went out to Catalina with our planes to have breakfast. Jim took Brogan in the Helio and I went out alone in the T-18. After breakfast the fog started rolling in over the airfield which sits on top of a high spot on the island, much like an aircraft carrier. The middle of the field was open but the ends were white walls going up a couple of hundred feet. Jim could easily get out since the Helio could easily go vertical and has instrumentation if he needed it, I needed a long run and lifted off slowly, but I would run straight into the fog and I had no instrumentation. Jim took off and cackled over the radio about how they were going to go back and hang the show without me, bye, bye. Catalina can be dangerous place for the unwary and there have been a lot of people killed out there because they do not know how to play it. Eventually the fog lifted about thirty feet above the runway to show the sea, so I fired up and flew back to LA. It was a rainy sort of morning and I dodged clouds and scud all the way, flew under the LA TCA below sailboat mast height (no 747's down there), and went over Topanga Canyon towards Van Nuys Airport. The airport was going IFR as I got close, so I called in that I was in the landing pattern when I was really ten miles out. They let me in, and I racked it around and got down all right. I then raced over to the car and steamed down to the gallery, and casually walked in as Jim and Jack were doing their thing. Lot of slack jaws hitting the floor, they expected I would be stuck there all day. What we will do for art. Curators seldom have the courage to create juxtapositions or compositions like this, the orthodoxy of formalism and the fears of keeping one's job serve to keep a timidity of thought on the bottom line. We didn't have that problem for we were our own curators. The show was up for two months and generated a lot of attention for all the reasons we had considered in its inception. It appears the more public you get with institutions, the more reasons there are not to do something than to do something, and I am afraid that situation will never improve. At the ARCO show, I also began a practice, which I have continued to this day when possible, of sitting down some place in the gallery and watching people look at the art and listening to their comments. As mentioned earlier, I learned by watching that out-front, flagrant humor in paintings had a tough row to hoe, and as a result I altered my work significantly. I also felt, as many artists do after a show, that I was ready for a substantial move onwards. There is something so final about a show, it exposes your past and releases you to the future, and almost gives you permission to go onwards. For some, unfortunately, a successful show provides them a license to exploit what they have shown. They view approval as vindication and desire for more of the product, so they go back and crank out more of it the market is saturated. However, at the same time they starve themselves creatively and cease to think freshly anymore because of the huge cooption they have done on their own soul. Hopefully, I have not succumbed to this way of thinking. On the last night of the show, Christmas Eve of 1976, I went down to see it one last time. Betty had let the gallery sitters go home to their families and we sat around and talked for a while. After closing the gallery we got inside Jim's piece and danced; it was wonderful. We were inside the art, a rare experience. I walked her to her car in the vast, empty, concrete garage under the cubic tons of the ARCO towers. She got in the car and closed her door with a CLUNK that reverberated throughout the garage, backed out and squeaked away up the ramp. I walked back up Bunker Hill in the dark to my van and went home. Christmas eve for single people. I took a solid look at myself and my work after the ARCO show. It was getting there but it just wasn't good enough yet, and I was too scattered. I realized that the humanist concern was there, and I had a desire to continue some form of social commentary but with more bite. By this time my influences had changed to Hopper and Benton and Grant Wood. After all, I was an American and I was making art about America and so far, I thought they were the best. I also admiredDaumier, a drawing person who had moved on to painting some of the best little paintings I have ever seen, and the certifiably insane Soutine who got it all down inpaint and yet created some kind of order through his chaos. My greatest European influence was Edvard Munch, not to knock the other German Expressionists but he really did it. I think he invented the 20th Century humanist movement, and look at him, he lived it also. I liked George Segal a bit too. These were my influences that mattered until I saw the Francis Bacon show at the Met. It appears you can't get away with not having a real life to paint about. Certainly I thought that was true with me, the only trouble was, how to distill and get the ideas down and visible before I slit my wrists. It all seems silly to talk about it now. Artists seldom do because the art world demands an illusion that every creative person springs from the head of Zeus with totally original work; don't ever blow the game and say that you aren't the first person on the planet to think up your idea. Currently in New York there is a practice of going back and pre-dating paintings so you look more ahead of your times when the writers come around. Point is: we all evolve and use and take from one another. I am not reluctant to admit what happened to me because it took so damn long; I can't lay claim to much other than what I slowly, painfully evolved as image and style within the constraints and skills I have. And this is all pretty much public so why lie about it. Back to Bacon. I had seen him in reproductions but never for real. When I saw his show at the Met it blew all my synapses, a simultaneous download and overload of information. It is not a pleasant experience. This man had solved just about all the issues I was working on. He had also solved them in a very powerful manner: story, paint, color and techniques were inseparably welded together with such force that you couldn't deny his result, just appreciate the beauty of the act and bang your head on the wall. He had done it. But, if I was primarily involved in a private excursion into myself why should this make so much of a difference? A very good question. I think I wanted at least two things at the same time; first to plumb my soul and come up with something truly powerful, and second, for it to have a character of personal uniqueness in an appropriate form to translate what I was saying. Bacon had done it so well that initially I thought that he had solved the problem for all time; but eventually I came to believe that he was another good example, as Munch was. Bacon does work so specific to himself that you can't learn much from it; if you use him for inspiration you look just like him and you can't get past him and into yourself. It is as if you are looking into the headlights of his brilliance, it becomes difficult to stay on your own side of the road. It confused my thinking for about five years. I gradually came to realize that he really was painting the bestBacon's he could, that his concerns were personal, and that the work reflected all those specific things about his life that weren't about mine. Along the way, he also evolved terrific formal painting and compositional solutions that are most admired, but I believe they came after the fact rather than from any real desire to be intentionally formalist. In an interview with David Sylvester, he did say very profoundly that in contemporary figurative painting you have to get "beyond illustration." He believed that the literal reality of illustrators was a hinderance to a truly expressive image that talked about real people. Who should care whether all the bone and muscles and all of the academic stuff lined up? On the other hand, I know artists today who are very successful with these kinds of paintings because they satisfy some form of primal realistic need. At the time, I talked about these issues with other artists in New York but they didn't know what I was running on about. They were all knocked out about the Olitsky show running concurrently at the Met. I thought Olitsky was thin. I began to lose all respect for New York art judgements, until then, I considered New York to be the capitol of art ideas as well as product, however they might vary. But now I could see that the richness of the AE artists and the evolution of the new York School had waned, inexorably bled out by the thirsty demands of too many artists crowding into Manhattan and the paucity of art ideas to go around. Each one has to accept a smaller slice of the salami and/or make more art about art and that became very thin after awhile. Presently, New York is in creative disarray because its successful legacy of art connected to money has generated immense power, and power invariably corrupts. Continuing Glossary of Contemporary Art Terms Easel: A device to hold a blank canvas up to an empty mind. Effusive: Praise so intense you can stand it all day long. Embouchure: The form lips take when they are about to kiss ass. Embrace: At art openings, a hugging gesture best performed without lethal weapons. Existential: A marvelous semantic invention allowing anything to mean anything or nothing at the same time, giving an artist or a wordslinger fantastic leeway in describing art. Flop: A show so bad people can't get it up to even put it down. Gallery: A white room where expectations meet reality. Galleryperson: An underpaid sitter who with no compassion fends off galleryless artists with no compassion, practices a great stone face and has an attitude. Ghoul: Fellow you know from art school who shows up ten years later at your big opening and says you stole everything from him. Eventually I had to face my own work within the jitters of Bacon trauma; I decided to go backwards to black, to retreat to charcoal on paper. Sitting around talking about art or mumbling to myself was killing me. This simple medium had the right feel and it was right for me at the time. I decided to tell very simple stories, simpler than a short-short story; two people in a simplified space, perhaps a room with a table or a bed, all executed within infinite grays to black in charcoal which was rubbed in and repeated several times to get it truly black black. Repeated rubbing created images with fuzzy edges that gave the images an undefined, mysterious look. Although I didn't use color, there was almost a color to the charcoal. The process allowed me to reacquaint myself with myself and my experiences in life and emerge visually without the intrusion of the physical and technical problems caused by paint. I have subsequently heard that "going to black" has been used by other artists in the same creative hole. Going back to fundamentals cleans up the mental palette. The Bacon episode was the last time I have been shaken by another artist. Now I am down in the trenches far enough to not much care what goes on outside. For better or worse I have given up the love affair with the outside world and learned to dwell inward no matter how provincial that makes me look. After I had done about a hundred of the charcoal drawings an opportunity came along to show just one: LAICA had a "100 plus" artists show, a grand, salon-style free-for-all of artists invited of all persuasions. I put my best one in and it accomplished a great deal. Dick Baum purchased the drawing, Lucy Adelman of Artspace became interested and subsequently gave me a show of them. I experienced a very powerful feeling in making these works. I had stumbled or evolved into a territory that finally described my outlook on life and art, and this was the first time since the airplane book that I had this feeling but it was even more than that. 41 Airplanes was clever, this work appeared to go beyond my skills or plans. I was startled and overjoyed by these images and I could not see where their limitations were. It was a series I could live with and play with and push my boundaries with. They reflected my passion and my conservatism of form. I haven't ever wanted to be a cutting-edge radical anyway, that is a moth and a light bulb business that eats up its adherents. The charcoal drawings were the culmination of a fifteen-year search for an image. It took me eleven years from art school, not the average three years most young artists take. I guess I am just slow; but whatever I am, this was a major turning point. I wasn't just yet out of the woods. The cumulative effect of my misery within the Seventies was still nagging at me and the last straw came when I had to put one of my cats to death from old age. I went and saw Ed Wortz whom I had heard about from Turrell (Jim had worked with him at Garrett for the Art & Technology Show at LACMA.) and from Hap Tivey, a former student of Jim's who made marvelous light and space pieces down the street from me in Pasadena. I had taken Hap on a glider flight and talked of my problems and he strongly urged me to try Ed who was now practicing Gestalt and Biofeedback therapy nearby. Like many who consider themselves bright and coping it is a substantial humiliation to admit you can't keep up with your miseries and you need outside help. The admission appears as another misery that you don't need to go along with your current ration. But I soon discovered that I should have done this years past, I would have saved myself much pain. I was also reluctant to seek help because I thought psychologists practiced some form of mind control which would kill me off as a creative person and replace me with some cheery, bubbly Toyota salesman. What we do to ourselves. Everyone who goes through therapy that works for them thinks the therapist is the greatest thing since sliced bread. This phenomenon can result in all kinds of transference and obsessions about the therapist which they have to guard against. Fortunately, I am quite rational about it and simply think Ed is a genius. OK, I said it, it's out. I have since gotten to know others in the shrink profession and I would not feel good going to many of them. It is a job where the art of the practitioner is perhaps more important that the degrees on the wall. It is a business of healing the mind, and there are few healers around. Ed is one. I took individual and group therapy from him including some biofeedback training at the end. I have never had a cold or the flu since. The group included eleven other women, most of them involved in and around the arts. We all had the same problems and few of them were about art. With Ed, you go until you pronounce yourself cured and that is the program. He doesn't want you hanging around. He gives you homework to do between sessions and they are quite fruitful. It gets you past that certain "feel good in the office feeling" and to the place where you are working on yourself every day. I won't go into all the kinds of things I had to do, but one of them was amusing - I had to reject one artist every day to their face or on the phone. By actually practicing rejection you discover what is occurring on the other side of the equation, it is a fundamental precept of Gestalt. Eventually you begin to realize that all the games that people play on you and themselves are very funny. There is no reason for people to run around and reject people, or be crazy and nasty. This kind of behavior comes from feeling bad and being out of control. Therefore when somebody is doing it to you, it becomes very funny. "Why is somebody bothering to do this?" you ask yourself. Their comments and actions are stripped of credibility. You know they are out of control, you can't trust them and they look silly. This is just one of the things I learned from Ed's fingers running through my mind. This is not a book about Gestalt therapy. There is no reason to continue this discussion other than to say how much it truly helped me, I became focused on the concept and myself for a year until I had it fairly straight. Then one day I told Ed it was over and we went to lunch. We still hang out whenever I can get out there; he easily converts to being a friend and is one hell of an interesting friend to have because he has in his lifetime just about seen it all. During the Seventies as I thrashed and slashed at my work I was slowly developing my aesthetics, my artist outlook. What you experience becomes what you believe, what you don't know becomes the next challenge. At the time, there were few artists in LA I could talk with about these issues; one was Joyce Treiman who passed away a few years ago. Joyce was a delightful person because she had the confidence of her own accomplishments instead of the arrogance of getting it for free. She lived out in the Palisades in a grand house with a tiny studio that was one half of a two-car garage. She made huge paintings, and used a reducing glass to see them (the first time I had every come upon such a device). A luncheon visit with Joyce would feature her famous tuna fish sandwiches with a pickle, all wrapped in plastic wrap and ready to go with a can of soda. Joyce carefully purchased art during her life and had a marvelous collection of works, drawings and paintings by figurative people she admired. One evening at her house I met Raphael Soyer, a tiny, frail man who made gutty paintings in the Thirties in New York. Joyce was prefeminist and much like O'Keefe she eschewed jumping on the bandwagon or allowing herself to be used by the cause and she grumped a lot about certain people who wanted her to. Joyce had gone through the traditional school of figure drawing and painting in the Midwest and was a master in all its moves. I was able to talk conceptually, formally and technically with her. Like flying, art resides largely within a specific oral history at any one time; you must seek out those who have the knowledge you need that you can't find in books. Artists like Joyce gladly give themselves to questions along the way; it is a wonderful way to transfer the legacy of art and painting from one to another and down the generations for all who want to know. Another colleague around at this time was Charles Garabedian, and although I cannot say I know him well, I discovered every visit with him to be rich and elliptical. Garabedian is an original thinker, he invariably comes up with ideas or ways of perceiving things you haven't yet thought of or already combined in your own mind. One day I brought along a young art historian named Charles Kesler and he became quite enamored of Chazz' whole act. Charles dropped art history and became an artist, curated a show of Garabedian's work and became his acolyte. You have to watch Garabedian carefully because he is known to upset you with one-liners about your work. At one of my shows he said, "Aha, I see the horizon line is your friend." Once Peter, looking at a strange abstract painting about China Chazz had come up with, said, "Damn, he's got order without composition." We were able to get a one-man show of Garabedian out at CSUN which was magnificent but most of the students and faculty hated it. They couldn't believe we would give the show to someone who draws so "bad". Ironically Chazz considers himself an excellent draftsman and in a profoundly expressionist manner, he is. Later on Chazz had a show at a small space near Western and Santa Monica featuring his works in resin, with bourbon and chicken wings for hors d'oeuvres. A drunk from across the street came in and knocked apiece on to the floor, breaking it. Chazz remained calm, somewhat philosophical, very amused. Not much you could do about it anyway. My good fortune of the Seventies was to finally find myself within my art and to discover great friends like Noni, Jim, Ed, and Mark. Turrell and I were closer in the Seventies. We owned and airplane together, I would go out to Flagstaff and visit the crater, he would come into town for logistics and diversions. It is difficult to speak of the specifics of your friends for the fabric of the relationship is an intimate, shared series of confidences and it should stay that way; we need each other more than we need to display the secrets of our experience. Anyone who attempts a journey into something as undefinable as art needs friends as much as he needs air and sustenance. We need tough friends who keep us straight, who, although they sympathize with our problems, don't participate by wallowing in them and becoming a chorus of "ain't it terrible, let's have another round over herebartender." We need friends to give us balance, to whom we can display our weaknesses without fear of retribution, to try out new ideas with, and to "understand" (a strange word for artists, a misunderstood word). One time I was asked by an artist friend to help her out by asking an art consultant friend over to see her work. Afterwards I called and asked how it went. "Terrible," the artist said, "she didn't understand the work at all." I followed up and discovered that the nonunderstanding issue was more about sympathy for the artist's strategic market position than anything else. The consultant focused on being able to place the work into the world; the artist wanted art talk, jargon and "understanding" of her work. Two separate constituencies not talking the same language. Friendship is slow to evolve with artists because you don't know whom to trust. Some time ago, John White told me that because other artists dropping by his studio in Venice would appropriate his ideas, he eventually adopted a policy of only seeing them on his back porch, not letting them inside. This may appear absurd, but there are desperate people out there who will cheerfully steal everything you have to get ahead. I still despise the Seventies, even developed a comic strip about the times. I went through too damn much and I was too miserable to enjoy much of it. In art the Seventies was an exploitative rather than an innovative time. Art was getting thinner and thinner, nothing at all like the Sixties. Artists just seemed to fade, become more bland and corporate. There wasn't the divergence and excess of characters like Kienholz or Altoon, there were just more and more game players and conceptualists running around accomplishing very little. It wasn't until the 1980's that the idea of "pluralism" or more than one kind of art coexisting at became legitimate, which was really a poison pill for the absolutist gang. Howard Rosenberg, who was so obsessed by the AE artists he couldn't think straight, probably turned over in his grave. I recall one piece he wrote about Frank Stella, whom he considered a third-rate painter who would never measure up to his guys. This way of thinking reminds me a lot of the old sportscaster Red Barber who used to have a Friday morning slot on NPR. "Morning Edition" would call him up to talk about basketball or what was going on in football, and Red would respond with a story about Pee Wee Reese while he played for the Yankees. He had a baseball story for every sport's issue and didn't understand the foggiest about anything else. Art gets like that, people take their opinions, convert them to fact, and then run it at you as long as they can get away with it. The best thing that ever happened to art in the past thirty years has been the pluralism concept. (What is this getting to be, an editorial?) I caught another break at the tail end of the decade. In 1979 I received my first sabbatical after ten years of teaching; Northridge only sprung for half a year at full pay or a whole year at half pay, so I got a semester job at the University of Hawaii for a term and I was gone. I had a good time. I met Les Biller (He was out of the Richbourg-Ceejee Gallery-Garabedian generation from UCLA.) who became a wonderful friend. I couldn't afford an apartment and to save money I lived in my office the entire semester. It had a great big steel door to keep out the world and a print cabinet (One visiting faculty member was horrified to see my socks leaking out a drawer.) on which I put down a door blank and a foam cushion for a bed, right next to a magnificent window facing the mountains and nightly fresh rain storms. I painted every minute I could spare from teaching and was able to return with enough work for my next show at Artspace. In Hawaii I kept a journal and mailed back pages to friends on the mainland. I went around looking at the artists of the islands and eventually produced a piece of writing published there and in Artweek in two installments. Hawaii is incredibly fresh with intense color; I had to paint almost in the dark to keep my color balance straight. Since then I have returned many times with Nancy to experience its peculiar delights. It reminds me of how Paul Klee reacted to Morocco in 1930's, a total change and color alternative. I was offered a job at the University but I had no desire to stay on. It would have been creatively the end of that road for me. Who wants to work hard out there? It is just too nice and too far away. I was overjoyed to be coming up with good paintings. Finally I was coming into fruition and I wanted to see where it would take me. I was older and wiser and weaker and doing better work. I was past my illusions, my marriage, and had unloaded most of the baggage I had been carrying. Whatever judgements there were to come I was ready for them because I had come into touch with the greatest power I could ever feel, my own. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ © Walter Gabrielson 1993 All Rights Reserved || Home || Persistence || http://www.waltergabrielson.com/persistence |
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