Rebels in Paradise (31 page)

In 1966, Hopps's amphetamine addiction led to a breakdown and he spent several weeks recovering in the psychiatric ward of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. “From the late fifties until 1966, I was quite thoroughly addicted to speed,” he said. “I've never been an alcoholic. But I'm a night person, and there were all those times I'd have to start early in the morning, going out to earn money, and I began using amphetamines.”
19

Rowan asked for Hopps's resignation, and Demetrion was promoted to acting director but invited Hopps to stay on to install his Cornell retrospective.

Peter Plagens has noted that Hopps always struck him as “the Blanche DuBois of the art world in that he depended on the kindness of strangers and always had the support of some rich person.”
20
After being ousted from PAM, Hopps was awarded a fellowship at the Washington think tank Institute for Policy Studies in 1967 where he wrote a proposal to have the Washington Gallery of Modern Art taken over as the contemporary art wing of the Corcoran Gallery. Within a year, Corcoran director James Harithas resigned and Hopps was named acting director, then director, of the Corcoran. His tardiness became such an issue that his staff made pins stating “Walter Hopps will be here in 20 minutes.” Hopps still found it difficult to work in an institution. In the early 1970s, when he was working at the Smithsonian's National Collection of Fine Arts, his boss, Joshua C. Taylor, was sometimes heard to say, “If I could find him, I'd fire him.”
21

Despite Hopps's many failings, his departure from Los Angeles was felt keenly among his many supporters. It was a further blow to learn that
Artforum
was moving to New York. “There was a tremendous sense of betrayal in the L.A. art world,” recalled Plagens.
22
This abandonment by the magazine that had come to embody all the aspirations of an increasingly self-confident community of artists was seen as traitorous. The artists had been pushing Philip Leider to provide more coverage of Los Angeles and less of New York. Leider recalled that Ruscha “thought that we were basically biased against West Coast artists, that we never gave them the kind of splash that we gave New York artists. He once said to me very readily, ‘Look Phil, I know what you think of me. You think I'm a tenth-rate Pop artist.' And I remember just looking up, we were both at the light table, and I just looked up at him and our eyes met, and he knew and I knew. I couldn't say anything.”
23

Paradoxically, Leider's decision was the direct consequence of taking a trip to New York with Blum, who convinced Leider that he would be able to get better writers there—writers who would be familiar with the New York artists he was representing. Blum introduced Leider to Stella, Rose, Castelli, Kelly, Warhol, and Lichtenstein. “And it was as a consequence of that trip that I just wrote off Los Angeles,” Leider said. “I had no longer any patience with people like Billy Al Bengston and his attitude—very strangely adolescent. If a dealer came to his studio or if a museum person came to his studio and wanted a painting for an exhibition, Billy would want rent.”
24

Such a move was never Blum's intention, and he was deeply disturbed by Leider's decision. “I kind of had the feeling that if it went East that would be the end of it, the end of it for me. As a West Coast dealer.”
25
Charles Cowles accepted the verdict of his editor and moved to New York with the magazine. Ruscha flew out to New York once a month to continue as the publication's art director until 1969.

John Coplans, who had been contributing some of the magazine's more insightful articles, was hired as curator at PAM by Demetrion. “John was very energetic, ambitious, wrote a lot, but there was tension. I think he wanted to become director. When I left he was made acting director.”
26

Coplans clarified the ongoing problem at PAM. “I had a budget of $5,000 a year for West Coast artists, compared to a budget of $40,000 for shows of East Coast artists.”
27
Despite this perpetual poverty, Coplans and Demetrion made a point of exhibiting more young Los Angeles artists than Hopps had done: Neil Williams, Dennis Hopper, Terry Allen, Paul Sarkisian, Billy Al Bengston, Judy Chicago, and the Light and Space triumvirate: Robert Irwin, James Turrell, and Doug Wheeler.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY

Charge of the Light Brigade: Irwin, Wheeler, and Turrell

In January 1968, when Robert Irwin had his show at PAM, he was forty years old. His clean-cut look had given way to a beard and long hair just as his abstract paintings on the covers of jazz albums had given way to experiments with light and perception. By constantly questioning the purpose of painting, in less than a decade he had eliminated the traditional format of a canvas to spray automotive paint in thin, transparent layers of pastel over a silver-white convex spun-aluminum disc. Mounted on a clear cylinder to float some six inches away from the wall, each disc was illuminated by two floodlights on the floor as well as two on the ceiling in a symmetrical arrangement. The lights cast shadows like the petals of a flower behind the glowing disc to create “the effect of a painting with no formal beginning or end, the central area of which had a field density that operated on the eye in much the same way as a ganzfeld,” he said.
1
Another series of clear acrylic discs, sprayed opaque white at the center, gave way to translucency at the rim, “thus achieving an immediate integration of painting and environment.”
2
Irwin spent hours isolated in his studio and came to each aesthetic decision through dedicated intuition and attentiveness to his own perception. An autodidact by nature, Irwin was practicing phenomenology without having undergone any course of study.

Meanwhile, two younger artists, Doug Wheeler and James Turrell, were pursuing these very same notions. The three shows at PAM started the so-called light wars, an internecine tussle over who did what first that would continue for decades to come.

Three months after the Irwin show, twenty-nine-year-old Wheeler showed “light encasements,” clear Lucite rectangular boxes that were painted white on the inside front panel and sealed around the edges so that electric light emanated softly around them, “like Mark Rothkos spilling from their frames,” wrote
Los Angeles Times
critic William Wilson.
3
Wheeler was pursuing a curiosity similar to Irwin's about the nature of seeing, but his was inspired by a lifelong involvement with flying airplanes.

A native of Globe, Arizona, Wheeler was in a plane from the age of twelve. His father was a surgeon who flew his own plane to get to patients in the remote areas of Arizona; his mother was a pilot as well. By the time Wheeler enrolled at Chouinard in 1962, he had a pilot's license of his own and legitimately sported the fashionable dark aviator sunglasses. Tall and slender, with curly brown hair and mustache, he had applied to the school in person but without a portfolio. After knocking out a few freehand drawings for the admissions department, he was accepted on the spot. He was initially interested in design and his teacher Don Moore set up interviews with two New York advertising agencies. Both offered him a job but by then he had decided to pursue painting. He was still a student when his all-white paintings with glossy white squares in the four corners won him LACMA's Young Talent Award. He had married a classmate, Nancy Harrington, and needed the money but didn't want the award, fearing he would be pigeonholed. “I was idealistic.”
4
The following year, Wheeler created a series of light paintings by wrapping neon tubing around the back of a stretched canvas so illumination seeped out from the edges.

Doug Wheeler with Zero and his Bellanca, ca. 1969

Photograph courtesy of the artist

Because he was at Chouinard when Irwin was teaching there, it has been assumed that Wheeler was his student, but that was not the case. He never studied with Irwin but did invite the older artist to his studio to see his light paintings, which were inspired by the subtle changes in the atmosphere that can be seen only when flying. Irwin was enthusiastic about the work and mentioned his name to Arnold Glimcher at New York's Pace Gallery.

Glimcher, who already showed Irwin and Bell, gave Wheeler $1,000 with no strings attached in 1967. After a painful divorce from Harrington, Wheeler moved into a vacated dime store in Venice, not far from Irwin's studio. Wheeler was already bored with his encasements and was using his large studio to create room-sized environments of disorienting homogenous light called ganzfelds. Wheeler was excited to show the results of his research to Glimcher and his director, Frederic Mueller. He recalled, “The main room was three thousand square feet, coved at the floor and ceiling, with a skylight so it looked like a ganzfeld with a line of phosphorous sprayed near eye level. Under UV light, you could feel a fogginess around the perimeter of the walls, like flying through an inversion layer. Anyway, the Pace boys, Glimcher and Fred Mueller, walked right through it to see the encasements. And then they left. I was devastated. They didn't seem to notice. Later, the meter reader came to the door and had to come through the space to get to the meter. He walked in and said, ‘Oh, Wow!' He saw it and the Pace boys didn't see it. I didn't want to be with those guys. They couldn't even see it.”
5

*   *   *

Before either Irwin or Wheeler had shown at PAM, James Turrell was given a show at the end of 1967. Turrell was a twenty-four-year-old graduate student in studio art for a semester when Coplans was teaching at UC Irvine. (Turrell later completed his master's degree in art at Claremont Graduate School in 1973.) Coplans had seen Turrell's first experiment with a slide projector projecting light without an image as well as some rudimentary experiments with the headlights of passing cars in his small studio in the Mendota Hotel in Santa Monica. A native of Pasadena, Turrell had had a scientific inclination when young—his father was an aeronautical engineer who had died when Turrell was ten; his mother had trained to be a doctor. At Pomona College, he majored in mathematics and perceptual psychology but took art history courses from Demetrion, who taught there for a year before going to PAM. A Quaker by faith, the stocky Turrell was a long-haired and bearded conscientious objector throughout the Vietnam War.

At PAM, Turrell showed
Afrum (White)
, which appeared as a three-dimensional cube hanging in the corner of a darkened room that was created by light beamed from a xenon projector. The floating box of light, neither sculpture nor painting, was, in fact, an entirely new manifestation, but Turrell had no doubts about its legitimacy. “One of the advantages of growing up in California is that you're not under pressure to repeat the past. I never even had a
thought
that what I was doing wasn't art.”
6

John Coplans, who had been a pilot in the Royal Air Force, empathized with these three artists working with the substance and perception of light. He took Jasper Johns to Turrell's studio. “Much to my embarrassment, Jasper stood in front of a Turrell piece for what seemed to me half an hour looking at it, and I'm sitting there thinking, he's probably too embarrassed to say that he can't make anything out or he doesn't like it. Then he turned around to Turrell and said, ‘Can I buy this piece?'”
7

James Turrell,
Afrum (White),
1966

Collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by David Bohnett and Tom Gregory through the 2008 Collectors Committee;

Digital Image © 2009 Museum Associates / LACMA / Art Resource, NY

Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, an Italian collector who went against the prevailing wisdom of the era to buy Los Angeles artists in depth, had bought works by Irwin, and he commissioned one of Wheeler's light installations for his castle in Varese. A few years later, he commissioned a similar work by Turrell. Count Panza wrote, “Los Angeles is a new city without roots in the past, a place where everything seems temporary and where everything can suddenly change. You have a sense of instability and loss of identity; you feel the need to find something unchangeable and more important than becoming.”
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