Rebels in Paradise (34 page)

John Baldessari with a brandy glass in each hand, rifle, and Christmas tree

Photograph courtesy of Klaus Vom Bruch, 1975

Nicholas Wilder and New York dealer Richard Bellamy had come to see these works but, like Coplans, had no idea what to make of them. Fluxus poet and critic David Antin, Baldessari's colleague at UC San Diego, was his sole supporter and recommended him to Molly Barnes.

Barnes had opened a gallery on North La Cienega Boulevard after giving up her pursuit of a bicoastal love affair with Willem de Kooning and, in 1968, she gave Baldessari a two-week slot in October between regularly scheduled shows. Coincidentally, Joseph Kosuth, another budding Conceptual artist from New York, had his first show that same night at Riko Mizuno and Eugenia Butler's Gallery 669 right down the block. Jane Livingston reviewed both shows in
Artforum.
She noted that Kosuth wanted to strip away from his art everything but the idea and that he exhibited dictionary definitions of the word “Nothing,” while Baldessari was also interested in elimination of “aesthetic encumbrances.” Baldessari's gray canvas bore black text stating “Everything is purged from this painting but art, no ideas have entered this work.”
14

Despite their similar pursuits, Baldessari and Kosuth did not bond. Kosuth was irritated that Livingston had compared their work. In his book
Art After Philosophy and After
, he denigrated his Los Angeles counterpart by writing that “the amusing pop paintings of John Baldessari allude to this sort of work by being ‘conceptual' cartoons of actual conceptual art.”
15
Baldessari protested, “I think of humor as going for laughs. I see my work as issuing forth from a view of the world that is slightly askew.”
16

Nonetheless, Baldessari's work was funny. As a riposte to the motorcycle-riding and wave-surfing artists of Ferus, he had himself photographed from the back while wearing a denim jacket bearing a skull over paintbrushes, instead of crossed bones, and the gibe “Born to Paint.” When asked to contribute a work to a show at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1971, he sent an assignment to the students to write on the gallery walls “I will not make any more boring art.”

Baldessari moved up to Los Angeles permanently in 1970. To mark a complete break with the past, he hauled each of his earlier paintings out of a packing case and gleefully kicked his foot through it. Portraits of friends, studies of pine trees, landscapes, still lifes, a few abstractions—thirteen years of accumulated work was destroyed. He took the ruins to a mortuary to be cremated, noting with irony that the young man helping to burn his life's work once had been an art student. The ashes, in a book-shaped urn, were interred behind a bronze plaque: “John Anthony Baldessari, May 1953–March 1966.”

“I stopped painting because I feared I might be painting for the rest of my life,” he said. “After a certain period of time, one knows how to make beautiful things.”
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He hoped to break “the stranglehold of what art is or could be.… I just believed art could be more than painting.”
18

In 1965, Walt Disney began the process of merging Chouinard Art Institute, whose founder's health was failing, with the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music to create what he called an interdisciplinary “Caltech of the arts.” In 1969, California Institute of the Arts opened temporarily in Villa Cabrini Academy, a former Catholic girls school in Burbank. In 1971, the Modernist campus designed by the architectural firm Ladd and Kelsey opened in Valencia, a suburb to the north of Los Angeles.

Baldessari was hired to establish a department of “Post-Studio” art, a term borrowed from Carl Andre, where he made it his business to import guest lecturers from Europe and New York to overcome the dominance of the Ferus-influenced aesthetic. Though Baldessari did not even visit New York until 1970, he strongly encouraged his students to move there. David Salle took that advice. Mike Kelley did not. Both had tremendously successful careers as artists. Those that stayed formed a second-generation nucleus of artists who remained in Los Angeles for reasons similar to their teacher. “A sense of permission,” Baldessari explained. “There's a daffy quality of ‘Why not?'”
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Musing on the difference between New York and Los Angeles, Baldessari added, “I remember taking mescaline with Bob Smithson and Tony Shafrazi and walking around West Broadway and Canal just laughing our heads off. And Bob drank. We all drank enormous amounts.… [It was] very much in the air about who did what first—this really linear sort of art history. I remember one night talking about some idea and everybody looking up and saying, ‘Yes, but how would that fit into art history?' I felt, who the fuck cares, you know, you just do it. But you didn't have that attitude in New York.”
20

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Ferus Fades to Black

Looking back, Blum said, “The artists that were there leaned on the gallery; the gallery leaned on that tight group of artists. We were very much in a vacuum, we were very alone—at least I can remember feeling that.… It had all kinds of problems but it had all kinds of lovely aspects.”
1

In the early years of Ferus, Blum good-naturedly agreed with his artists to hold periodic meetings to discuss the policies of the gallery. The artists held enough sway at that point to give thumbs-down to inviting Richard Diebenkorn to join the gallery. He may have been their friend and neighbor but as far as they were concerned, he represented Northern California figure painting and, therefore, the past.

At another meeting the artists were adamant about not offering discounts to collectors. Blum argued that the gallery would be at a great disadvantage since most dealers offered courtesy discounts of at least 10 percent. The artists held firm. A few weeks later, financier Joseph Hirshhorn, who had sold his uranium-mining interests for $50 million in 1955, strolled into Ferus and offered to buy a number of pieces. Blum calculated the total sum and presented it to Hirshhorn, who asked for the usual discount. Blum said, “‘No, Mr. Hirshhorn, this is essentially a cooperative situation. We very often adhere to the ideas of the artists, and in this instance, their attitude … has to do with stating a figure and maintaining absolutely that figure in the face of any offer.' He said, ‘Well, yes, I understand what you're doing. Good luck!' And out he went.”
2
After that, Blum convinced the artists that their idea wasn't workable.

All along Blum continued to buy works by his artists. They were relatively inexpensive. As late as 1967, Blum said he bought ten Stellas for $10,000. “A lot of people don't realize that … the jump came between 1967 and 1970,” Blum said. “Prior to 1967, all those people … Andy even, could have been bought very cheaply.”
3
After 1967, Blum recalled, “I began to make sums of money that had eluded me up until that time.”
4

By then, Blum had closed Ferus. Arnold Glimcher suggested to Blum that they go into business together since Bell, Irwin, and Kauffman all showed at the Pace Gallery in New York. In 1967, Ferus Pace Gallery opened with great fanfare on North La Cienega Boulevard, but the situation soon proved unworkable. “I discovered that [Glimcher] was really interested in me not so much to buy work by people like Stella, Lichtenstein or Johns—people I was very interested in—but rather to sell people out of his stable like Ernest Trova … and Louise Nevelson. And that didn't interest me enormously.”
5
After several months, Blum dissolved the partnership.

In a despondent mood, Blum was having his usual breakfast at the stone-fronted Schwabs coffee shop on Sunset when Kienholz walked in and asked what he was going to do. Blum told him that he'd been offered a job as an agent at William Morris. Kienholz snorted, “Irving, you're not an agent. You're an art dealer. Open another gallery.” Blum thought, “He's exactly right.”
6

When the Irving Blum Gallery opened just a few doors up from the original Ferus at 811 North La Cienega in January 1968, Blum exhibited Ruscha's monumental and cheeky painting of the new L.A. County Museum being consumed by flames. The announcement, designed to look like a Western Union telegram, called it “the most controversial painting to be shown in Los Angeles in our time.”

Ed Ruscha,
The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire,
1965–1968

Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1972, photograph by Lee Stalsworth

Hirshhorn happened to be in Los Angeles and came by the gallery. He was in negotiations to erect his eponymous museum in Washington, D.C., and offered to buy Ruscha's entire show. This time, Blum added 30 percent when calculating the total. Hirshhorn asked for a bulk discount and he was promptly granted 30 percent off. And that is how one of Ruscha's most distinctively L.A. paintings came to reside in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum when it opened on the National Mall in 1974.

Shortly after this show, Ruscha and Joe Goode were shown together at the Balboa Pavilion Gallery in Newport Beach, from March 27 to April 21, 1968. Though neither had even a passing acquaintance with a horse, they dressed up as cowboys and were photographed on horseback for the exhibition announcement. Ruscha's mother, Dorothy, described them in the catalog as “masters of the evasive,” but it did underscore their status as artists of the West.

The year 1968 seemed to be the pinnacle of international curiosity about Los Angeles contemporary art, with The Los Angeles 6 exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery that spring featuring Bell, Irwin, Kauffman, Kienholz, and Davis, who all went to Factors clothing store and got Borsalino fedoras to wear on their trip. The prestigious summer international exhibition Documenta IV in Kassel, Germany, featured Bell, Irwin, Davis, Hockney, and Kienholz. It was Kienholz's first trip to the country where he would come to live after 1973. It was a time of ubiquitous protests, and a few weeks after the opening, students staged a sit-in and used his
Roxy's
installation as a lounge for drinking red wine, an endorsement of its veritable closeness to real life. Meanwhile, in Dusseldorf, Konrad Fischer Gallery showed Bruce Nauman.

The success was made more poignant for them after hearing that Marcel Duchamp, the artist who had been so inspirational, had died at eighty-one on October 2, 1968. A month later, in
Artforum
, Jasper Johns wrote that Duchamp “moved his work through the retinal boundaries which had been established with Impressionism into a field where language, thought and vision act upon one another … heralding many of the technical, mental and visual details to be found in more recent art.”
7

Meanwhile, LACMA had organized three more exhibitions of Ferus artists, beginning with Wallace Berman's collages, from April 30 to June 2, 1968. Though he refused gallery representation, Berman continued to make art using a Verifax machine, the forerunner of a photocopier, to print a photograph of a hand holding a transistor radio, repeated in the pattern of a grid, each appearing to be transmitting a different image. Some were funny, some erotic, some mystic. Compared to the serial prints of Warhol, Berman's work was heralded as the link between Beat and Pop, and the show traveled to the Jewish Museum in New York.
8

Though Ferus had ceased to exist, the gallery's role in the city's history was celebrated further in a November 1968 LACMA exhibition: Late Fifties at Ferus. It featured the abstract painting that most of the artists had rejected in pursuit of their radically streamlined aesthetics. Despite the fact that he was having a show of his own at LACMA, the ever blunt Bengston wrote a critical article for
Artforum
citing all the works that were missing and those that were included improperly in the show.

Two weeks later, Bengston's retrospective opened at LACMA with a catalog designed by Ruscha. The sandpaper cover referred to Bengston's notoriously abrasive personality while Don Bachardy's drawing of the mustachioed artist graced the frontispiece. Frank Gehry agreed to design the exhibition, and since the museum had very little money for materials, he asked to see what they had lying around in storage. A pile of dirty old plywood was converted into the framing of Bengston's exhibition—though the museum director Kenneth Donohue later made him paint the wood—and Gehry bought a dummy of a motorcycle rider, dressed him in Bengston's clothes, and placed him with his motorcycle at the entrance to the show. LACMA curator James Monte organized the show, which traveled to the Corcoran Gallery, where Hopps then reigned.

All of these shows canonized an era that seemed to be slipping away at warp speed, a feeling that had come about, literally, with a bang. On June 3, 1968, just six years after his debut at Ferus, Andy Warhol was talking with friends at the Factory when a radical named Valerie Solanas walked over, pulled a gun out of a paper bag, and shot him in the abdomen. Though she had had few dealings with Warhol, the mentally disturbed author of the SCUM manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men) claimed that “he had too much control of my life.”
9
She also wounded critic Mario Amaya and aimed at a few others before walking calmly into the elevator and leaving the building. Warhol was rushed to New York's Columbus Hospital and underwent a five-hour surgery to save his life, though he wasn't entirely certain about that at first. He could hear a television playing and the words “Kennedy” and “assassin.” “I just thought that maybe after you die, they rerun things for you, like President Kennedy's assassination,” he recalled.
10
He couldn't imagine that, in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, U.S. senator and aspiring presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy had just been gunned down, clearing the way for Richard Nixon's election in November.