Constance Mallinson
Art in America
April, 1985Bee-Bop Da Reebok in L.A.
"Leon," a peripatetic, sometime commentator on the Southern California art scene, recently resurfaced just east of tinsel town, and the author seized the rare opportunity to interview him. Below, Leon's acerbic remarks on L.A. art garb, the art biz, MOCA, and West Coast NeoX--plus a roundup of the season's shows.
by Peter Plagens
Exactly where "Leon" (his middle name only) has been for the six and a half years since "Play It as It L.A.'s" (A.i.A., Sept. 1978) is anybody's guess. The veteran boulevardier evidences enough savvy about the local scene to dispel any notion that he's been completely out of touch, but he also displays a jaundiced perspective foreign to the town that he says he's been watching--at least part-time--from afar. As usual, Leon picked the rendezvous, a little downtown restaurant that he, with his customary aversion to plugs, would let me designate only as "not Gorky's." I arrived early and eavesdropped on conversations among troupes of off-off-Ivar actors, the newest breed on the block. When Leon walked in, I hardly recognized him. He was Brylcreemed and clean-shaven, wearing nylon flight pants, a grommeted denim windbreaker that was eight sizes too big and looked like the hanger was still in it, and aerobics shoes. His face was as grimly determined as it was phlegmatic the last time we lunched. His smile required an effort, but it was a smile. The cane was absent, replaced as a calling card by a fingerless glove on one hand. While the waiter fetched him a jumbo martini--he was back on the sauce--I fumbled with the cassette.
Q: You look well, but I must say you also look a little silly, a mature man dressed like that.
Leon: You mean all the zippers and shoulder cowls that resemble entrances to the Lincoln Tunnel? Everybody wears this garb now. Remember when you were a kid and you wore you space helmet, Roy Rogers fringed vest, and football pants at the same time, in order to look triple bitchin'? That's moved up, to artists and lawyers alike. It's in the art, too, but I don't want to get ahead of you.
Q: Quite all right. I'm going to start by simply asking you about the state of things.
Leon: I'm not as bitter, as you can see by my face. "Wryly amused" is my schtick these days. If the art world is going to traffic wholesale in irony, I'll go with the flow. I'm just a lil' post-modernist baby who knows that outrage over nuclear weapons is a great source for rock band names.
Q: I meant the state of the art world.
Leon: Sameness: no great highs, but no big bummers. Trudging along, aware that Utopia is a mannerism like grand opera, but reluctant to join the Reaganite young entrepreneurs. The Contemporary Arts Forum, an alternative space up in Santa Barbara--which probably has about as much intellectual ferment as does The Big Orange these days--mounted a show of a guy named Richard Allen Morris, who made thousands of objets d'art over 25 years and was allegedly unaffected by art-world fads and fancies. It looked to me, however, like the guy was semi-affected by everything, must be a little out of synch, and had himself a helluva futile time spinning his wheels in the sand of Carpenteria Beach. That's what L.A. is like: artists doing tons of work affected by New York and Europe and telling themselves to pay attention to only their own guts. But before I ramble on, lemme tell you my three favorite quotes of the year.
Q: Favorite quotes?
Leon: Bits of reality overheard on my rounds that you'll never be able to weave into the final tapestry. Just put 'em up front. First, at this studio show a woman in a turquoise jumpsuit loads a wad of Brie onto a cracker and says to her husband, "The artist is so talented. This is just like the French countryside."
Q: Go on.
Leon: There's two artists in a Chinatown bar discussing what dealers to beckon over to look at their work. One confesses, "I'm asking the impossible . . . Daniel Weinberg?"
Q: And the finale.
Leon: This TV leading man is leaning against the wall at a crowded vernissage for some very salable de Chiriquesque sculpture. A baby mogul type in lizard-skin boots, spandex jeans and a tweed jacket ambles over and presses his lips to the thespian's ear. "These are selling fast," he says, "so if you're really interested, you'll have to make a major move now."
Q: Cute, but the point?
Leon: That what's going on in people's heads is not art but art business. The hot news has been that MOCA spent $11 mil on some of Panza's collection, that ARTCO gave the same Tempo-Contempo another few mil to keep its warehouse open, that the Getty hired Richard Meier to build another big Braun coffee maker up in the Santa Monica mountains, that the local mag Images & Issues went belly-up, that ARCO's contemporary gallery and Cal Tech's Baxter Art Gallery shut down. When all stuffed vermilion dogs and spoofs on Greek art look so much alike, then storeroom intrigues get the headlines. The art world is just following the movie biz, where deals and not the crummy pictures make news. The most interesting thing I've seen in a long time is an announcement for a whole building.
Q: An installation piece?
Leon: Not quite. It's a place called "The Binford Building," right down here on Traction Avenue, just a flip of your Corona cap away. The advert has a full-color architect's rendering and announces that this "legal artist in residence facility" features underground parking, an intercom entry system and an in-building laundry for 34 brand-new live/work lofts. Can you dig it: the prestige address for downtown artists. Imagine, being able to impress your friends: "Me? Why, I live and sculpt at The Binford."
Q: Aren't you a bit cynical over a touch of real estate orthodoxy in the art world?
Leon: I'm old-fashioned. I like artists either pioneering scruffy nabes of staying camouflaged among the faceless middle class, not announcing themselves with space-frame A.I.R. signs over the ceremonial entrance. It's Leisure World come to Tribeca.
Q: Speaking of downtown, how about MOCA?
Leon: It's been the main hype for the last couple of years and it's likely to stay that way for a while. The County Museum's contemporary program is a little . . . uh, dowdy, and the smaller nonprofit spaces such as LAICA, LACE, Otis and the rest seem content with their collective role as a chorus. The main trouble with MOCA is that, with its infancy taking place in a fishbowl, it's almost hysterically affable. It likes everything and everybody and expects everything and everybody to like it. "The First Show" was a gift and illuminating only as a refresher course in modern art and a peek at MOCA's boardful of high rollers. "The Automobile and Culture," or "The Car Show" as it was known in the crosswalk, was an embarrassment, except for the cars themselves. It was another example of taking an obvious premise--that the automobile ahs changed the face of civilization--and doing nothing with it save basking in its self-evidence. You could to "The Phone Show" or "The Indoor Plumbing Show" and still such the folks through the doors to see the shiny, user-friendly hardware. For my money, it didn't touch the old "Oakland Roadster Shows."
Q: Shouldn't MOCA get a little credit for being, shall we say, accessible?
Leon: If you mean printing labels in four different languages, listing the staff alphabetically instead of according to power, and showing art off-premises, you're talking bus tokens. The point is to have a contemporary museum that shows toothy work, displays it with dignity and, maybe even most important, accompanies it with some serious analysis for posterity. "Posterity," by the way, means the next generation of ex-nerds from CalArts who can't remember the Jimmy Carter presidency and look to Eric Fischl for their old master.
Q: Bringing us to one of your favorite topics, neo-Expressionism.
Leon: Can't say I'm glad you asked.
Q: Don't you feel like King Canute, ordering waves of grunt painting to retreat? The number of typewriter ribbons exhausted upon it by Donald Kuspit, if nothing else, prove NeoX to be part of that great upheaval of Western culture called Postmodernism. From rock 'n' roll to architecture, all art forms suffer the dehydration of modernism and, to keep from dying of thirst, have begun to recycle old stand water. You'll agree that there's an energy to it.
Leon: One can stick a pipe 20 feet deep in the mounds at the city dump and get a blue flame from the methane leaking upwards. One might even run all the air conditioners in West Hollywood with the gas. But that don't make it a breeze from the beach. Lemme read you something from Umberto Eco's little Postscript to the Name of the Rose.
But the moment comes when the avant-garde (the modern) can go no further [than Pollock, Burroughs and Cage], because it has produced a metalanguage that speaks of its impossible texts (conceptual art). The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, "I love you madly," because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly." At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along with this, she will have received a declaration of love all the same. Neither of the two speakers will feel innocent, both will have accepted the challenge of the past, of the already said, which cannot be eliminated; both will consciously and with pleasure play the game of irony. . . . But both will have succeeded, once again, in speaking of love.
Q: Sounds like a good deal for all concerned.
Leon: Would you want to make love to somebody who reads Barbara Cartland? If she's hip to Umberto Eco, too, you have to say, "As Umberto Eco would have a guy like me saying, 'As Barbara Cartland would put it . . .'" and so on, into infinity. Pretty soon you're so concerned with being correctly ironic you've forgotten about love. That's what's happened to artists. They're so afraid of being corny (that is, of not remembering to quote the corny) they've forgotten about art. And when somebody calls 'em on it, they say, "I'm just reflecting the state of my culture," like Charlie Manson copping a plea. It's tough to be original in 1985 but, hey, times are tough all over.
Q: You diehard Greenbergian modernists should be aware that St. Clement said on more than one occasion that works of art must be considered one at a time. You can't condemn whole styles out of hand.
Leon: You're right. Within Postmodernism, Julian Schnabel is better than Bryan Hunt who is better than Jedd Garet who is better than Richard Oginz who is better than George Rodart who is better than Joe Fay, and so on. It may be that a particular painting by Joe Fay is better than a particular one by Julian Schnabel. But that's like saying that a certain speech by George Bush is better than one by Dwight Eisenhower that is better than one by Teddy Roosevelt . . . while the ghosts of Abe Lincoln and George Washington roll over with laughter. Besides, we're into late NeoX, if that makes any sense. And, may I remind you, we're in Los Angeles.
Q: Meaning?
Leon: How can you have an art about the unbearable weight of history when there is none? Whatever you think about Enzo Cucchi's paintings, you can empathize with his trying to throw off the dust of centuries of classical, medieval, renaissance and baroque art. Whatever you think about Bill Jensen's work, you can feel him trying to crawl out from under the soot of Abstract Expressionism. But what are Jim Morphesis and Judy Simonian rebelling against, the tyranny of cast resin? Out here, crises are all made up. If Artpark were in L.A., it'd have rides like "Rollercoaster of Style" and "Pirates of Postmodernism." A coupla thrills, but ultimately about feelin' good.
Q: Such talk puts you in the same boat with William Wilson of the Times (of Los Angeles), who is sounding like the '80s version of John Canaday complaining that the AbExers were laughing all the way to the bank. He says, "Neo-Ex sneers a lot. Neo-Ex worships the second-rate. . . . It likes clichés about profundity. . . . All its freedom from style attendant to Neo-Expressionism really says is that artists are just clever fellows without particular convictions who will play any part on demand like actors. If that is true, we have wasted a lot of time giving artists credit for integrity."
Leon: When you're hot, you're hot. But he doesn't pick viciously on specific artists, which is what this place need sot get it out of the doldrums. Since I've got some axes to grind, I'm thinking of trying my hand at criticism, especially regarding talented artists who cave in to the times. Let me try this out on you.
Ned Evans at Roy Boyd: Deliberately corny formalism (shifting, underbutting planes; exploratory charcoal gray working-out; housebrush strokes) is problematic enough in the hands of New Yorkers like Dennis Ashbaugh and Frances Barth, who at least believe in old-fashioned struggle-on-the-picture-plane, but it's deadly to Southern Californians like Evans who know only "look." What replaces the hand-to-hand combat of the East is a fey dance with interior decoration: identically sized paintings, one in red, one green, one blue, ready for the executive suite at The Golden Nugget, and a few references to palm trees to stamp it "Made in L.A." Evans isn't really doing room-service art, but he expects too much credit for coming close, then veering away. The result is the same old semitropical backwater: a confusion of plastic with "plastic."
Q: Heavyhanded. But since you bring up the local flora, what about the new interest in landscape. Is it, too, a gully of Neo-Expressionism?
Leon: A couple of recent landscape shows, one at Janus Gallery and one at Cal State L.A., featuring grab bags of indigenous and imported artists, haven't shown me much apropos landscape as a significant new entity. First, it's hard to distort a landscape into an emotional body blow, like you can with figures. Leonardo knew long ago that you could "make" perfectly good landscapes by looking at the stains on a wall. Second, all you need is one horizontal division and--bingo!--you've got a landscape. Third, none of the new landscape painters commune with nature like the other NeoXers do with the human face, which, after all, you can't avoid even in a life consisting entirely of art bars and openings. Fourth, the art sources for landscape are pretty polite: Ruisdael, Poussin, Constable and Corot. Perfectly fine artists, but the people who really understand them have been doing relatively straight landscapes all along. Finally, nobody has thought through the problem of landscape and, in particular, what isn't one. We live in a time when an artist's saying, "I don't see much essential difference between a bowl of noodles and a landscape, so I incorporate both into my work," is thought to be transcendently hip. One critic said, "National Geographic meets the patchwork quilt meets pop art," about Constance Mallinson's painting, and that meant he liked it.
Q: Still, recent art emphasizes "content," and some of that content actually goes to the mat on tough political issues, like arms control, Yankee intervention in El Salvador and Nicaragua, the worsening plight of the poor, violence against women, and so on. Isn't that an improvement on artists decorating bank lobbies with big, clean abstractions and letting the world go on its self-destructive way?
Leon: Yes and no. "Yes," because the world can use any help it can get and because lots of art about, say, helicopter-gunship diplomacy is better than no art at all about it. But then the turf gets tricky. To begin with, there's a hegemony of the tepid left in the art world. When you say "political art" to the cognoscenti it's assumed you're talking about anti-Reagan, pro-Sandinista, pro-freeze, anti-domestic-budget-cut art. I haven't seen any serious gallery art that says, for instance, the Moskito Indians are getting as raw a deal as any minority group around, that the freeze might be 1938's "Peace in Our Time" all over again, or that 13 percent inflation was killing poor people faster than shrinking HUD is. When a maverick like Roger Brown comes along he's nailed as (sarcastic quote) patriotic (sarcastic unquote) and "petulant" in these very pages [see A.iA., Jan. '85, p. 100]. Even if the right-wingers are totally out to lunch, the art world is still a large case of preaching to the converted. Then, with "political" painting and sculpture, there are problems of the right mix of looking good and saying something, and which one the artist gives lip service to. With art that assumes an unconventional form to operate more effectively politically, you've got problems of esthetic negligibility. A good artist doing something sincere for a righteous cause usually comes up with a celebrity testimonial rather than interesting art.
Q: Roger Brown is a Chicago artist; what's he to do with L.A.?
Leon: So is Leon Golub, once removed. Golub's traveling horror show has gotten more attentions out here than anything since MOCA's "Car Show" opened. The guy has touched a nerve and--you heard it here first--will affect art in Southern California more than any individual work since Diebenkorn's retrospective in 1977 made L.A. painters run back to their studios and subdivide their color fields. I'll betcha a lot of these dancing Greeks, cuddly cowboys, and neon stick figures you see around now will soon take on pained expressions and guerilla flesh. How much depends on the general political climate. Southern California artists are, with the exception of the usual pockets of radicalized semioticians, notoriously unpolitical. Most people here thought :Artists' Call" was a juried show at Saddleback College.
Q: Pretty grim.
Leon: Keep in mind that Southern California is a land of insouciant melding. Politics, wit, color, material, light, space, show biz and money sort of slide in and out of one another. The best art with any "content" is usually offhanded, like Michael McMillen's or Jeffrey Vallance's.
Q: I've never been able to get behind the program of either one. What do you like about 'em?
Leon: It's difficult to come up with something in conversation, but I do happen to have the typescript of my review on hand.
Michael McMillen at Asher-Faure: Anyone can like Michael McMillen's work for all the wrong reasons: the mindless appeal of miniatures (you loved your Uncle Harry's HO gauge railroad layout, didn't you?), the spooky psuedo-profundity of "old," and the hoary, Daliesque cleverness of the double image (facade=skull, window=eye, door=mouth, etc.). And a few people so principled about modern art that they never, ever have fun in a gallery, can dislike the same stuff for the ostensibly right reasons: it's cute, it's achingly well-crated, and it's all Deep Hidden Meaning. The truth is that McMillen does exploit an adolescent's favorite art devices and that he does indulge himself in whimsy, meticulousness and facile narration. Nevertheless, he does these things better than anyone else around--he makes Charles Simonds look as hokey as Chariots of the Gods and the Poiriers as overproduced as a Lord & Taylor Christmas window--and he gets, well, art out of it.
McMillen's small wall-reliefs (the facades that look like faces about twice head size) and one big man (the former with a staircase and pillar "body" added) are oddly notable for their avoidance of too much painstakingness. Small balusters suffice for entrance pillars, the broken ends of old boards suggest architectural ruin, and a coat of thinned enamel is the patina of age. Miraculously, the work is still Los Angeles; without palm trees, tinfoil, "Hollywood" signs and swimming pool ripples, McMillen conveys the specter of a haunted city that died when they tore down Clifton's cafeteria, and which rises from the dead every time an old Marine dreams of the girl he met at the USO.
Q: It'd take more to convince me about Vallance.
Leon: I can understand why. Since he quit making complicated machines, Vallance's objects aren't much in themselves. You tire of drawings that look like what George herms must have done in the fifth grade, and I, too, suspect the profundity of an artists who rents himself out to Late Night with David Letterman and trades on the name of Anwar Sadat. (The latter is the flip side of Golub. I mean, shouldn't those political prisoners get royalties?) But it's his attitude that's fascinating; he may be the only artist to, as they say, "do something" with Warhol. His last show--some folderol about trips to Iceland and Switzerland--was accompanied by a mimeographed essay, "Iceland: The Gate to Hell," which is, among other things, excruciatingly funny.
Whatever hardships Iceland bears with her extremes of nature, they are counter-balanced by the extreme beauty of the her girls. I've never seen such clear complexions coupled with almost white-blond hair. I don't know exactly what factors produce such nymphets, but they may be the most beautiful women in the world.
Q: Sounds pretty sexist to me.
Leon: That's just it. On one level, you're repelled; the word "nymphet" is a slap in the face from Humbert Humbert and kidporn. On the next level, only a real bozo would write in that style; on the next level, the author obviously intends both of those qualities to be obvious. On the next level, there's a weird beauty to juxtapositions like "factors" and "nymphets," or "counter-balanced" and "beauty of her girls." And so on, until you're dizzy.
Q: We'll see. I'm a little concerned, however, for the state of your consciousness. Not only did you use to like art that really grabbed you as opposed to sophomore frolics tiptoeing around the edges, but you're a little hooked on words as opposed to the visual art of your former favor. What's happened?
Leon: The stridency of most "political" art makes me run for the refuge of humorous indirection. I'm probably just an incurable boojie, like most of the art audience, whatever their class contortions of the moment. On the horizon, however, is something called "ArtEx: New Art New Audiences," which promises to instruct in social attitudes: the centerpiece "The Artist as Social Designer: Aspects of Public Urban Art Today," which is the County's triennial spectacular, and some satellite servings of the Harrisons on "natural water systems," Judy Chicago's The Birth Project, some video by the very political Antonio Muntadas, and the like. If I can get myself in the mood to be scolded, I'll go. ["Interview" was conducted in January. The author will cover the complex of events in a forthcoming issue.] As for words, the visual culture is simply in a bad state, what with the pervasiveness of the Mickey Spillane school of painting and treehouse sculpture.
Q: What about the "Divisions" show at LAICA?1 That was a restrained, dignified and mysterious show--quite to your taste, I should think.
Leon: That was certainly an interesting show, but probably nor for the reasons the organizers would have preferred. In terms of context, Don Judd had a gallery show and it demonstrated, if nothing else, the near impossibility of keeping air in the lungs of Minimalism, even for the champ of "fining it down." Let me consult my notes.
Don Judd at Margo Leavin: When a ballplayer starts bellyaching that they just don't make his sort anymore, you can be sure that he's feeling the pain of an arm that's gone rubbery, a gut hanging over his belt buckle, and legs that crumble every time an overpaid rookie blows by him on the training track. Judd has been complaining for a few years now that the moneyed young punks of the new art scene just don't have the steely standards of the Minimalists and that the culture ought to ignore them and start putting up permanent works (in hardened silos?) by the best of the old-timers. But it's evident from his newer work that Judd's talents, even as a designated hitter, have diminished. The attributed author of the great line, "Soul is the bottom of the barrel," has come up with some pretty lame small modular boxes: sheet metal, fastened together with conspicuous double-headed chrome rivets whose out-frontness is as convincing as the rips in the clothes of Calvin Klein models trudging through a roughwear desert. The boxes' hues are red, black, yellow, brown and an awful dusty pink, and they're combined with no discernible panache. In fact, almost everything--size, material, surface, color, weight and placement--is wrong. It's amazing that an artist capable of making truly lyric sculpture from simple configurations of plywood and galvanized steel (a few such items are on hand for comparison), is also able to fashion trinkets so painful to the eye and mind.
Q: Sometimes you sound like the John Simon of art. You must live on Di-Gel and Albert Pinkham Ryder. Anyway, what's Judd got to do with a few roomfuls of monochromatic--or thereabouts--painting?
Leon: The point is that the fewer the elements in a work of art the more right they have to be. But too much worry about "getting it right" shows up in the work as fastidiousness or gimmickry. Genuine genuineness is crucial and it's the most unevenly distributed commodity among artists except money. Consequently, there was a greater range of (and you know how I hate to use this word) quality among the painters in "Divisions" than anything I saw this season. Penny Krebs, whose paintings were most like Mondrian's, was easily the best, the most original and painterly, historical familiarity notwithstanding, and Rick La Fleur totally out of place, attempting to gild the lily, as it were, with some Mexican-restaurant-plaster-type appliqué. The other five assigned themselves places in the middle, depending on how much they understood handling edges, combining panels, varying blacks, and resisting diagonals. Neither Jim Hayward nor John Miller should feel threatened, but it's nice to see that you can't make masterpieces in this kind of painting the first couple of times out. It shows there's something to the whole mode. LAICA should hold a reunion show every ten years, to see who toughed it out.
Q: Personally, I doubt such painting can survive in Los Angeles.
Leon: Oh, it'll survive all right, it just won't prosper as a whole. It isn't happy in groups and it doesn't make interesting copy. The critics got the show all wrong, and treated it by perfunctorily describing some of the work and then saying things such as, "Fascinating, huh?"
Q: Speaking of critics, how are things in the educating-oneself-in-public department?
Leon: You know how difficult it is for me to talk about that subject, having dropped out of UC San Diego's program because I insisted on justified left-hand margins. Mostly, it's the same too. The Times (of Los Angeles) has four writers, including Suzanne Muchnic, who threw herself in front of the Golub bandwagon the same way she did with The Dinner Party years ago. Only she used the wrong bomb; she tried to get him on his drawing, of all things. The other, smaller paper ha the by-consensus most readable critic, Christopher Knight, but the Herald-Examiner is a bushel basket for lights like his. The big diff in the dailies seems to be that Knight likes NeoX and the great gray Times is off-put by it. There are two freebie weeklies, but they by and large treat art as an extension of the club scene (who's hot and who's not), which, along with the spread of tanning parlors, is the purpose of the papers. Some people are making a morality lesson out of the demise of Images & Issues but, besides the impropriety of dancing on graves, there isn't that much drama in it. The magazine merely suffered from the two diseases of regional art publications: too small a support base and a confusion of the job of editor with that of the president of the Jaycees. It's funny that two that muddle through, LAICA's Journal and the infamously hilarious Newsletter on the Arts, are, respectively, a publication where no one's ever sure who's in charge and a mailer that, in both form and content, is the art world equivalent of a Santa Anita tout sheet.
Q: Well, I see that the check has arrived. You've been more than accommodating, as usual. Any last words?
Leon: All you young artists: any good tax lawyer can get you a deduction on those English Jane Fonda shoes. Indispensable part of the uniform, you know.
1. "Divisions," at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (Dec. '84-Jan. '85) was a show of seven emerging L.A. artists, all of whose work was very reductive. Some of the paintings were monochromatic and others Mondrianesque.
