Rebels in Paradise (32 page)

With all three artists manipulating the subtle effects of light, a question of precedence came to the fore: Who had had the idea first?

Jan Butterfield wrote the first general book on the subject,
The Art of Light and Space
, and summed up the problem: “It is a little-known fact that the all-important 1967–68 Pasadena exhibitions (one-man shows by Irwin, Turrell, and Wheeler) were originally intended to be one three-man show, but it soon became apparent that there simply was not enough room for all of them to exhibit at the same time. Had the one show taken place as originally planned, the ‘who did what first' battle over dates would have been avoided.”
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As a result, over the next few years, the younger artists felt competitive with each other and with Irwin. But by then, the field had grown crowded with Laddie John Dill's neon tubes supported by drifts of sand, Maria Nordman's work with fire and smoke installations, Hap Tivey's scrims, Ron Cooper's resin wall boxes, and Mary Corse's paintings covered with light reflective white paint. Even Ed Moses got into the act when he had the ceiling removed from Riko Mizuno's gallery to create a room flooded with light. When the ceiling was to be reinstalled, Irwin volunteered to add a few skylights so that the lovely natural light would be perpetual; it was enjoyed by the subsequent art dealers who rented that space: Larry Gagosian, Timothea Stewart, and Rosamund Felsen.

Irwin had grown through his earlier friendships with younger artists so he invited Wheeler to join him in the research for the Art and Technology exhibition cooked up by Tuchman at LACMA whereby collaborations were facilitated between artists and various corporate sponsors. (It was conceived on the heels of the Experiments in Art and Technology promulgated by Rauschenberg and Billy Kluver in New York in 1965, an enterprise that was so controversial it was surprising that Tuchman wanted to revisit the idea.) Wheeler refused so Irwin invited Turrell. They were introduced to Dr. Ed Wortz, head of the laboratory monitoring the environmental control systems for NASA's manned space flights. Though Wortz had no previous interest in art, he was thrilled by the curiosity of the two artists, calling it “love at first sight.” The threesome spent days in an anechoic chamber depriving themselves of all sensory stimulation for hours. When they emerged, everything that they saw appeared entirely transformed. They experimented with ganzfelds, surrounding themselves with a pure white surface so that the eye could focus on no object, like being inside a giant Ping-Pong ball. They learned to focus each eye independently and to be conscious of the images received separately. They took copious notes and collated documentation, and they were beginning to translate these experiences into some sort of participatory installation when, in August 1969, Turrell stopped showing up for their meetings or returning their calls. He later denied that the sessions had any effect. “I don't know that anything really startling came out of the whole thing,” he said.
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Turrell maintained that he had not continued because of the project's focus on technology over the role of spirituality. Yet, his work would come to rely increasingly on technology as he used projected sources of light.

Irwin chose ever more reductive strategies of eliminating extraneous details from his art. After 1970, he refused to allow his work to be reproduced since photographs could not capture its experiential nature. A couple of years later, he gave up his studio altogether. Wheeler moved in.

Irwin and Wortz continued their dialogue and their friendship. “The biggest product of the Art and Technology thing is the effect we had on each other. I radically changed Ed's life, and he radically changed mine,” Irwin mused.
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Soon after, Wortz left the space program and became a gestalt psychotherapist at the Los Angeles Buddhist Meditation Center. Many of his clients were artists. Meanwhile, Irwin's process of questioning had come to mirror the protocols of science and experimentation. His aesthetic decisions seemed to be based on feeling, not logic. “The critical difference is that the artist measures from his intuition, his feeling. He uses himself as the measure, whereas the scientist measures out of an external logic process.”
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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Fantastic Plastic Lovers: DeWain Valentine, Peter Alexander, and Helen Pashgian

There is Dustin Hoffman as he stands on the patio of his parents' tasteless Los Angeles house, anxiously listening to his father's friend doling out advice. “Plastics,” he says. “There is a great future in plastics.” One of the most memorable and comical scenes of
The Graduate
, it was a moment that captured the absurdity of postwar Los Angeles prosperity. By-products of the local aerospace industry, plastics did unfortunately become the miracle material of the future. After being declassified by the army and navy, acrylic and polyester resin were suddenly available to hobbyists, surfers, and, of course, artists.

The phenomenological inquiries of Irwin, Wheeler, Turrell, and others were contiguous to the movement that included the prismatic glass boxes of Bell and the luminous vacuum-formed wall reliefs of Kauffman. John Coplans described it as “finish fetish,” a term highjacked in the most derogatory manner by unfriendly critics. It underscored the fact that these Los Angeles artists were obsessed with precision, something their New York counterparts found risible. As Dave Hickey wrote in his essay “Primary Atmospheres,” “In a moment when Clement Greenberg was advocating febrile sensibility and Michael Fried was demanding that works of art ignore our presence, California Minimalism created a gracious social space in its glow and reflection; it treated us amicably and made us even more beautiful by gathering us into the dance.”
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When Kauffman and Moses shared a studio, they went to a nearby doughnut stand where Kauffman was fascinated by the appearance of the contained nectarine color. This is exactly how his vacuum-formed plastic wall reliefs appeared, as unorthodox supports for sensual, vibrant fruity colors. In
Artforum
, Jane Livingston wrote, “In a way that enlarges upon the intelligible illusionistic duality in Larry Bell's rhodium-coated glass boxes, Kauffman's works demonstrate that austerity is not necessarily the measure of success in detail-less object art.… His plastic paintings are enormously seductive.”
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The following year, Kauffman's show at the Pace Gallery was reviewed by Robert Pincus-Witten, who found the exquisiteness of West Coast art, specifically that of Kauffman, to be “really about the flaunting of the most unrepentant narcissism. Lest there be any confusion let me add that I regard this as a positive achievement.”
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DeWain Valentine, who grew up in Colorado, first encountered plastics in a junior high shop class when a teacher showed him how to polish acrylic scraps. Once he discovered polyester resin, he heated it in his mother's oven to forge plastic jewels. However, at the University of Colorado art school, where he studied with Richard Diebenkorn and Clyfford Still, he was told “you can't make art out of plastic.” He got the same response when he went to Yale on scholarship, where he studied with Philip Guston.

Valentine, who wore boots and a Stetson like a Western cowboy, then moved to Los Angeles “specifically because of Kauffman, Bell, and Price.” He had left a more lucrative job teaching in Colorado to teach a plastics course at UCLA extension. “I got fired twice,” he remembered.
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Learning from trial and error, he became the consummate technician, experimenting with polyester resin formulas in order to cast clear, clean sculpture on a massive scale, such as a perfect ten-foot disc the color of the sky. Built like a wrestler, with wavy blond hair, blue eyes, and a turned-up nose, Valentine had the physical strength to control the large quantities of heavy liquid resin. Keeping meticulous notes on formulas, he gained such renown for his accuracy and color that the Santa Monica firm Hastings Plastics actually produced a DeWain Valentine resin. “All sculpture is exterior,” he said. “I wanted to make pieces you could see through to the other side. I wanted the most perfect surface so you didn't get hung up on the surface, or on any scratch that might catch your eye.”
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Craig Kauffman,
Untitled,
1968

Photograph courtesy of Frank Lloyd Gallery, Santa Monica

The ocean was a powerful draw for Valentine, who set up his studio next to Bell's in Venice. Polyester resin was used by surfers to coat their boards, which is how Peter Alexander discovered its potential. An art student at UCLA, Alexander recalled looking at the resin in a Dixie cup while glazing his surfboard. He cast the resin as a transparent cube about the size of a hat box and containing puffy white clouds. When Bengston saw it, he advised some collector friends to buy it, and Alexander's career was launched. From a well-to-do family in Newport Beach, Alexander had a mop of brown hair and patrician features. He had studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and worked for Richard Neutra, the architect known for his glass-walled houses, as well as for architect William Pereira. After weeks of work on his first project for Pereira, Alexander was told that the client had changed his mind and the design would not be used. Exasperated, Alexander decided that he could not continue to work under such conditions and returned to school to study fine art. Yet, his earlier training remained evident as he cast architectural wedges and pillars of polyester resin in grades of oceanic color. He captured the experience of translucency—what he saw while surfing inside a swell. “It was not an art material,” Alexander said. “One benefit of being in L.A. was that nobody took anybody out here very seriously so you could enjoy those materials because you were free.”
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Peter Alexander,
Green Wedge,
1970

Courtesy of Peter Alexander

Alexander's brother, Brooke, had moved to New York and become an art dealer. “Not being in New York was a disadvantage from the point of view of commerce but an advantage in terms of having a good time,” he said. “I remember Minimalism vividly. I had trouble with the rhetoric that went along with it. We are not Minimalists, though there may be a similarity in geometry. Disappearance was the most appealing part to me.”
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Helen Pashgian was a third-generation Pasadenean, but her parents rented a house during the summers at Crystal Cove near Laguna Beach, not far from Alexander's house, and the two met as children. Her initial interest in the quality of light came, she believed, from the hours she spent as a small child looking at tide pools populated by small abalone and other sea creatures. A handsome, athletic woman, she surfed on large balsa wood boards around San Onofre State Beach by crawling under the fence around Camp Pendleton.

After finishing her undergraduate degree at Pomona College, she went east to study art history at Columbia University and Boston University. A distant relative of Oliver Wendell Holmes, she felt a connection to her East Coast family, but after seven years, she returned to Pasadena to become an artist. She tried to capture the liquid light in translucent washes of paint on canvas but it was her discovery of polyester resin that made her transition to sculpture possible. Through trial and error, she learned to pour resin in the forms of balls, boxes, and spheres and she exhibited them at the Felix Landau Gallery.

All of these artists created polyester resin sculpture that appeared to be made by machine, an art in keeping with the futuristic reputation of Los Angeles. In fact, each piece was handcrafted with extreme care, and the work was meant to be experiential, erasing boundaries between painting and sculpture.

One challenge was faced by all. When the resin came out of the mold, it had to be sanded by hand for hours and hours to achieve an unblemished surface. “It
is
about finish fetish,” Pashgian emphasized. “If there is a scratch that is all you see. The point isn't that I want to see through it but to see into it, but that is why we have to deal with finish!”
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