DROPPING NAMES

            The past few days have been a time of reconnection with the art world. I stopped writing articles and reviews for national magazines several years ago, in part because I had become more engaged with my own work, my own vision, my own ideas. I started looking at the world through the prism of what I was learning from my meditation practice and the Buddhist dharma. What for years had been blog posts turned into essays, and essays into collections that came out in the form of books. “Persist” was the first of them, followed by “Mind Work”, “A Serious Conversation With Myself,” and “Slow Looking.” I was discovering, too, that what I was seeing in the galleries I frequented no longer engaged me in the way it used to. There was, in my judgment, a kind of art school sameness to it all, a display of competence and adequacy that seemed to me no longer accompanied by the passion, curiosity, and commitment to the new that had excited me in my art writing days.

            Then the coronavirus came along, and I no longer ventured out to the galleries at all.

            I say this because I ran into my old friend Peter Shelton a while back, at the memorial for Roland Reiss, an artist and friend who had affected both our lives. The two of us, Peter and I, two Peters, were among the speakers at the memorial, and I was moved by what the other Peter had to say. We talked afterwards. I said I’d like to get together again one day, perhaps for a studio visit; it had been twenty years since the last time we’d had that opportunity.

            There followed a few months of silence from both sides, as tends to happen after such a meeting. Promises get made and no matter how well intended remain unfulfilled. But then a couple of weeks ago an email arrived from Peter with an invitation, and I emailed back with a suggested date. I was pleased to have something finally on the books and looked forward to my visit. Ellie, too, was keen to join me, to see the latest developments in his work. The day arrived, and we set out.

            It proved to be a long trek to Peter’s new studio. Well, “new” since twenty years ago. He relocated to Boyle Heights, a community to the east of the city of Los Angeles, once a Jewish, now a Latino enclave. New territory for us. Trusting to the car’s navigation system, we got lost. Took the long way around. A very long way. But in compensation we got to see parts of our city we had never seen before, so the detour was not without its interests. Plazas, streets crowded with pedestrians—you don’t see much of that in our great city sprawl—shops and cafes spilling out onto the sidewalks, every sign and advertisement in Spanish. A bustling, almost festive atmosphere, with diminishing fears of the coronavirus epidemic. A welcome return to human intercourse.

            When we finally found it, Peter’s studio looked like an immense warehouse, protected by a security gate which his assistant, Veronica, came to open for us. A sculptor of expansive vision who makes often massive works, he needs the workspace. But stepping inside, I was surprised. I’d have expected a huge open space. But no, it’s something of a rabbit warren, with rather narrow passageways between clusters of quite small rooms, almost claustrophobic. A clutter of machinery and hoists, art works in process, molds and models everywhere. The first room we come to is dominated by a massive “donut” anchored to the walls above our heads. Other finished art works set out, in so far as possible for display in a relatively confined space. Peter has it set up for a few days to invite people in. I’m attracted to a number of big framed drawings on the walls, along with a plethora of other, less formal and less finished drawings, ideas for sculptures sketched out in visual form… In drawings you can often glimpse the artist’s mind at work.

            But I intend to write about the work another day. It’s work I have always felt attracted to for reasons I’ll explore when the time comes. In the meantime, the studio visit proved important to me in a quite different way. We talked. Talked about the art world and its fickle ways, its fads and fancies, its callous narcissism and its occasional cruelty, its forgetfulness of dedicated artists in the rush to keep moving on and, more and more in recent years, its heartless commercialism. Peter is well-known, well-connected, and has an endless supply of anecdotes and friends—many of whom we share in common. So our conversation was a welcome reminder of the privilege and pleasure of my having known so many of the studio (and post-studio!) artists who, since the late 1960s, have been the living beating heart of the world in which I’ve lived and worked.

            We dropped names. Dozens of them. Too many to count, still less remember. Dropped them in a good way, not to impress each other but to share memories. Though I knew none of them well, I had the good fortune to meet and write about many of that generation of young Turks who arrived on the scene in the 1960s, seizing the reins from the first great wave of specifically Southern California artists: John McLaughlin, Lorser Feitelson, Karl Benjamin, Frederick Hammersley, Helen Lundeberg. The new generation, born like myself in the 1930s, included the so-called Light/Space artists, the likes of Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Helen Pashgian, DeWain Valentine, Peter Alexander, Billy Al Bengston, Craig Kauffman, Fred Eversley and others; but also painters, Ed Moses, Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode, Ron Davis prominent amongst them. Sculptors Michael Todd, Lloyd Hamrol, Roland Reiss. And Tony Berlant, painter in scraps of colored metal. Some of them I came to know. I visited their studios, wrote about their work, held them in awe. I myself also visited, as many of them did, the “couch” of that extraordinary therapist/guru whom many of them shared, the late Dr. Ed Wortz, whose understanding of the workings of human consciousness and perception was an important philosophical and aesthetic source of inspiration to a generation. 

            I knew the next wave of artists better—not really separated by a full a generation, but those who came along five or ten years later, inspired not only by the artwork of their elders but by their ethic, their dedication to the studio, to their individual vision, to their work. When I started writing there was a flourishing community of these artists. Ellie opened the Ellie Blankfort Gallery to offer exhibition space to some, because galleries for contemporary artists were few, exclusive, and hard to interest in untested work. She showed Gary Lloyd, Lita Albuquerque, John Lees (now super successful in New York), Martha Alf, Colleen Sterritt, Jim Morphesis, Scott Grieger, Daniel Cytron, Carole Caroompas, Masami Teraoka… Los Angeles was teeming with brilliant artists whose studios I’d visit and whose work I’d write about for national magazines: Gwynn Murrill, Guy Dill and Laddie John Dill, Carlos Almaraz, Ron Cooper, Michael Brewster, Ulysses Jenkins, Jon Peterson—and the Peters! Peter Lodato, Peter Erskine, Peter Shire and of course Peter Shelton; I always had a soft for anyone who shared my name! Peter Plagens, too, artist and long time author and art critic, who remains to this day a frequent visitor on my Facebook page, holding my feet to the fire for my frequent lapses of logic in matters social and political. His friend, teaching colleague and one-time studio mate, the brilliant Walter Gabrielson, was another artist whose work Ellie showed in her gallery days. And I’d be remiss in failing to include that host of women rebelling at the time against the hitherto male-dominated culture of museums and galleries: Judy Chicago, Nancy Buchanan, Eleanor Antin, Erika Rothenberg, Suzanne Lacey, Wanda Westcoast. Some of these pioneers I knew in person, some of them I was glad to write about. Their successors in today’s art world are legion, and many of them I’m happy to count among my personal friends.

            I was privileged, too, in the late 1970s, to receive a Rockefeller Foundation for a study of the life and work of one of the leading African American artists of his time, Charles White. He was a trusted ally in difficult times while I was Dean at Otis Art Institute, and became my friend and mentor in the year before he died. It was in the course of my study of Charlie’s work that I discovered for myself the shameful reality of (my own!) and institutional racism in America—in this instance in the academic world as well as in the art world: I soon found out that the traditional means of research (in previous studies, articles in academic journals and reviews in newspapers and magazines) were inadequate; my study had to be supplemented by travel for first-hand interviews with people I had barely heard of, if at all. I felt honored to be warmly welcomed by Black artists and art professionals throughout America, on Chicago’s South Side, in Harlem, Jackson, Mississippi, New Orleans. I was introduced to a world I never knew existed—a world that is only now, in the past couple of years, gaining the long overdue attention of the American “art world” at large. Along the way I met Harry Belafonte, spoke to Sidney Poitier and Romare Bearden, and visited Jacob Lawrence in his Seattle home. What an adventure! What a privilege! My own world expanded, immeasurably. (While I'm dropping names, the now deservedly famous Kerry James Marshall was among my favorite students while at Otis--a protegé of my friend Charlie.)

            Over the years I also met and sometimes worked with artists whose names are internationally celebrated and whose place in the history of art is secured: Claes Oldenburg, R.B. Kitaj, Betye Saar, David Hockney. Also Ed Kienholz, one of only a handful of Southern California artists who earned international acclaim. I never met the pivotal French artist, Yves Klein, who died so young back in the early 1960s; but Ellie did, and I felt I knew him because we lived for years with his gift to her of a small painting in his famous IKB (International Klein Blue); we connected years later with Rotraut, the artist to whom Yves was married in the years before his death, and I worked with her on a catalogue text for her own art.

            I drop all these names—and there are so many others that passed between us as we toured Peter’s studio—not to boast but to remind myself of my privilege, my good fortune, and to express my gratitude. So many artists touched my life. Their vision enriched my way of looking at the world, they gifted me with their friendship. Some of that older generation, the ones in their eighties like myself, have already left this planet on their next great adventure: Peter Alexander, DeWain Valentine, Ed Moses… Others, sadly, are showing the ravages of age with memory loss, even dementia. Others, like Peter, ten or so years younger than myself, are still producing some of their best work.

            I feel an affinity with so many of these brilliantly creative people. Some continue to show their work in noted galleries, their names respected, their stature undisputed. Some of them have fallen victim along the way to the unkind vagaries of the art world, achieving moments of immense success, then falling back into relative obscurity. Still others, no less brilliant as artists, in my view, have struggled to achieve or maintain a measure of visibility, vying for gallery exhibition that is hard to come by especially now, some thirty or forty years later, when art schools have been churning out their MFAs for decades into an overcrowded art scene hungry for next marketable talent—chewing them up and spitting them out as soon as collector interest fades. I sympathize with their predicament; the publishing world is no different. But still I count myself amongst the most privileged, amongst the very fortunate, to have been able to indulge my compulsion to keep writing, as they to keep returning to the studio to realize their vision in such a multitude of ways.