Page 49 - Studio International - July August 1974
P. 49
(Below bottom) Billy Al Bengston
(Below top) Carlos Villa
Cloak Sonoyta Dracula 1972
Mixed media Acrylic on canvas, 8 x 8 ft.
Photo: Frank J. Thomas
Coll: Mr and Mrs D. Robinson, California
Painting in Los Angeles has never carried
the ethical load Still imposed on San
Francisco's; even something of the reverse is
true, like Billy Al Bengston's continual
insistence that the artist should stitch together
a decent entrepreneurial lifestyle, keeping his
own books, hustling his own stuff, watching
the craftsmanship, and getting photographed
with other Beautiful People; in a society
filled with the success of the most tacky,
fly-by-night real estate enterprises and the
fortnightly appearance of another new major
religion, it's difficult for the artist to stand as a
paragon of virtue through reticence or
poverty. But, simultaneously, painting has
never carried the aesthetic necessity it does
in New York; the presence of heroes and
issues isn't felt so much in Venice, where most
of the studio talk is strategy, market and a
coating of phenomenological research. Since
1965-66 there hasn't been much reason to
paint abstractly in Los Angeles; most of the
advanced options (which, without history,
consist of opportunities for visual/
psychological effect) lie with fancy objects and
whole, manufactured environments
(witness LA's most important art, the
minimal, nuanced, strangely lighted rooms of
Irwin and his proteges.
What abstract painting there is (deprived of
intense concern for formalist issues) tends to
rest in opportunistic process — searching for the
right combination of two-dimensional
laminations which will yield a more or less
monochromatic, mottled, patina'd
`rightness' (primarily Moses's ex-students at
Newspace Gallery, Jerry Byrd and Charles
Hill) or in semi-sculpture, like Charles
Arnoldi's twig configurations (which, painted,
deal with figure-ground relationships and
some colour). There's a layer of more or less
straight painters — Joel Bass, Jerrold
Bruchman, Guy Williams, James de France,
myself — but the work stands or falls, nakedly,
on its own eccentricities, at present
unconnected to a local history. Up against the
business of digging out a sense of mattering
from an art mode at the moment outflanked in
both spectacle and narrative, the temptations
are to give it up (ie update your stuff into
something else, since nobody cares about
defining painting as such) or move to New
York (as did Bill Fares and Carol Lindsley
up north, and Michael Balog and Joel Bass
down south) where the linkage is intact.
Otherwise, especially in LA, there's an
almost exhilarating ennui in realizing
that, freed from continual harangue, abstract
painting here is perhaps the paradoxical,
cyclical, existential loner's pastime it
ought to be. q
PETER PLAGENS
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