SWELL

№ 50

radical. chic

In 1961, the first year of JFK’s presidency just after washing egg off his handsome mug for the Bay of Pigs, shotgun shrapnel was erasing the face of American literary hero, Ernest Hemingway; Swell magazine with gunpowder smell still in air was launched.

Our little rag, with a pre-natal prescience, in its 50 year history, has, while appearing to examine a microcosm of all that history has dealt us, in actual fact, created a lens to examine culture in its most distilled form, a surrogate for culture at large. Who would have thought that in 1966 Leonard and Felecia Bernstein would be hosting a party for The Black Panthers chronicled with pitch perfect precision by Tom Wolf in 1970. Wolf’s ability to take a description of a dinner party and have it epitomize a rarified world’s social anemia is at the heart of Swell’s editorial ground zero. Yeah we have chronicled some kick ass lives of surfers, skaters, artists, musician, film makers, clothing designers and rabid impresarios, but these revolutionaries were always at the time (and much more so retrospectively) become one giant mother fucking divining rod for locating the essence of culture at large. To celebrate our five decades of cultural stenography we bring you the first of four platinum issues, bringing some of the most titillating moments of our issues from the 60s and 70s.

We hope you enjoy how beautifully symmetrical culture can be presented. With peace and love,

You’ve Gotta Go East To Go West by Jim Evans and Jacqueline Miró Superhero posters by Jim Evans Venice Days by Tibby Rothman

02 05 11

Cover: Greenbough, C.R. Stecyk, Art Director: Jaqueline Miró, Graphic Design: Kyle LaMar, Jim Evans, Editors: Jaqueline Miró & Tim Nye, Writer: Tibby Rothman, Special Thanks: Jim Evans, Photography: Thomas Mueller, C.R. Stecyk, Jim Ganzer.

SWELL Magazine | 358 W 20th Street, #2 | New York, NY 10011

PA M E L A B A R I S H . C O M

FOTO GIORGIO MARCOALDI PANDA PHOTO

finalmente potr贸 respirare

a ve rea dife lagu

enezia ĂŠ in corso di alizzazione il mose per endere la cittĂĄ e la una dalle acque alte

venice days 1965–1975

by tibby rothman

waves—a prologue Shimmied between a suburb-centric city, Los Angeles, and a misnamed body of water, the Pacific, lies Venice—a whole other country.

Its only derivative idea is Venice, California, itself, a faux palazzo’s faux colonnade oriented west. Beyond that single forgiven, placegenerating mark is explosive. The beach, the ghetto, the artists.

John Baldessari, Wallace Berman, Vija Celmins, Ken Price, Ed Ruscha, Barbara Smith, Andy Warhol all established studios, showed, or lived here before taking up in the land of the acronym. MOMA, The Met, The New Tate.

ABOVE: JUAN MARQUEZ MERC, CRAIG STECYK BELOW: POP WAVE, CRAIG STECYK

By the late 1960s and mid-1970s fully two generations of artists occupied Venice territory—a thin strip of land between the besieged ’hood to the east and the riptides to the west. The first group loosely centered around Los Angeles’ legendary Ferus artists, the second— a new crowd about to experience heady early success.

As the sweet promise of the sixties gave way to 1970s America—Vietnam, Richard M. Nixon, and white polyester—they moved through the altered universe of Venice-time.

Swell spoke to six artists who were entrenched in the area, to discover the place of the time. But if you have to go East to go West, to know Venice in the 1960s, you need to begin a decade earlier, so that’s where we started.

Ed Moses: My surfing days were in Hawaii in the early ’40s. Duke Kahanamoku, who was a famous legend in Hawaii, gave me my first surfing lesson—my dad asked him.

My first board was made out of mahogany. I think it was 9 feet long. Weighed about 100 pounds. Didn’t have any skegs on it. And when it pearled—in other words, the nose went down—if you didn’t wrap yourself around it, that thing came up and hit you. It could kill you.

Billy Al Bengston: When I first started racing half-mile, they gave me a motorcycle that was god awful fast, I mean: God-Awful-Fast. And you didn’t have brakes. I had no idea how to do it.

I’d raced other kinds of things—but man, when they take away your “stop” and you’re only “go.”

Ed Moses: After World War II, that was the last time I surfed. Later on I met Bengston and Kenny Price—who was actually the best surfer in the bunch.

Billy Al Bengston: Ken Price and I, when we both started, [there] was a code of honor— you definitely didn’t drop in on somebody.

It was a no-leash, heavy-board situation. At that time we were riding “light” boards, which were about 45 or 50 pounds. [In] big surf [they] could definitely take them out. You Did Not Do That [drop in]. Unless, it was a friend of yours and you’d drop in and step on his board and you’d have a few laughs.

Ed Moses: Irwin did a little surfing, but by that time he was finished with it. Larry was not a surfer, Larry Bell.

Larry Bell: I came [to Venice], essentially, in 1959. It was a whole other world. It was sort of Appalachia by the Sea. Little wooden shacks and, every block or so, there was another oil tower. You could buy one of those shacks on a lot for $2,000. Nobody wanted them. Nobody wanted to live down there.

Ed Moses: I rented a little house down on the speedway in 1950 or 1951, that was among the oil derricks, all pumping up and down. And I know I went to the city to see if I could buy one.

I thought, it would be great to live up in one. But the city would not give me the green light. They had to plug them all off and take them down.

But people had little shacks all around.

Peter Alexander: The first experience I ever had in Venice was when it was still all oil rigs, there were beat poets but there wasn’t much else—well, there was a lot of else, but it was different than what it changed into.

Billy Al Bengston: I wouldn’t move to Venice because it was full of Beatniks. I never wanted to be associated with the dope-smoking slackers, let’s put it that way. It was serious prejudice on my part. I shouldn’t have been that way, but I was that way. It’s Midwestern morality bullshit. Then when Venice West closed [the poets’ coffee house] I could move down here.

I would say 30 to 40 percent of the houses were vacant. The canals—25, 30 percent empty. I had the only car on the block when I moved here. I’d sit up on the roof and count cars and maybe see one or two an hour.

Ed Moses: I don’t think that anybody thought it was romantic at the time. It was hindsight— certain writers go back.

Billy Al Bengston: It was a dive. It was cheap rent. You had your choice. There were two places that were cheap. If you were a surfer, you went to Venice. If not, you went to Pasadena.

Ed Moses: It was just funky for us and [about] survival and we all had part-time jobs.

Billy Al Bengston: Restaurants? Oh, God, what’s his name?—he was really great, [he had] a barbeque restaurant on the corner of Main and Windward, it was primarily a closet— Murray’s Barbeque! He kept a big 6-shooter behind the counter. Baby, that was it!

Peter Alexander: Nobody wanted to live down here for so long because it was Venice, because of the smell of the oil rigs. You get the sulfur in the air and all this stuff. But then the artists started coming in—this was before my time—and they started taking buildings. And everybody wound up here.

Larry Bell: Bob Irwin, who was a teacher of mine at art school, had a studio on Pier Avenue. Bengston and Kenny Price shared a studio together. And I found a building on Marine Street, the next street over. It was seventy-five bucks a month.

Peter Alexander: [Larry Bell] was established. He was a known figure when I entered the deal, as was Billy and Ruscha and Kauffman and Irwin.

Laddie John Dill: The senior guys here were Billy Al and Ed Moses and Turrell. Ed Ruscha [who moved his studio to Venice later] was still living in Hollywood.

Ron Cooper: And there was a second group, a younger group…

—

—

I always refer back to Altoon, who said probably the most important thing that I ever heard from an artist.

He came and looked at one of my Dentos when I first started doing [them]. I’d just put a piece of dented aluminum on the wall that I’d primered, and I was looking at it, trying to figure what I was going to do with it.

And he came in and said [drops into a low voice to imitate Altoon] “Albert—that’s really fine.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?

[As Altoon] “That’s reeeally good.”

“Goddamn, John, I just primered a piece of aluminum.”

[As Altoon] “Albert, I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, but you’re coming through loud and clear.”

BILLY AL BENGSTON, Alamo, 1968

was around a year for me, I think, we all rode bicycles around. There was virtually no one in Venice other than the artists, junkies and retired Jewish ladies sitting on benches.

Larry Bell: Cooper was the most mysterious guy I’ve ever met. He just had a style about him. He had a big, long moustache, rode a bike with high handlebars. And you know, he’s a little guy, but he was obviously the leader of the group.

Laddie John Dill: You have to remember, it was in the late ’60s and the early ’70s, so there were a lot of drugs prevalent in Los Angeles.

People were still taking psychedelics. There was a lot of acid around, a lot of mushrooms, so something as bizarre as living in an amusement park seemed normal. It fit into the aesthetic genre of the way things were, at least with people living alternative lifestyles. I don’t know what was going on east of Lincoln.

Ron Cooper: There were all these abandoned buildings, and no one bothered you. I had to take off for Europe and lost my space because the landlord had it demolished.

Laddie John Dill: We were all out of there by then. At the end of the pier, there was this fiberglass volcano with fake smoke coming out of it and it caught fire and the whole thing just burned down in one night.

POP PIER, CR STECYK

Laddie John Dill: There was an amusement park that rivaled Disneyland. It had its own radio station, and it was called P.O.P., Pacific Ocean Park.

And suddenly one year, after four or five years, it went bankrupt. And all of a sudden, right at the Venice/Santa Monica border, there was this amusement park that was totally abandoned.

And some of the guys found the owner…

Ron Cooper: A group of us moved down there and inhabited P.O.P., which was 1968, ’69, maybe it was ’69. And I got two spaces on the boardwalk in the great oriental building.

Peter Alexander: People took up studios there in this fanciful street that was kind of like a Disneyland street with imitation Chinese Gables and an English Tudor over here. It was sort of a decaying, dark town.

Laddie John Dill: You could get into the park from the back entrances of these restaurants, and it was like World War III or something. It was completely intact, with octopus rides and “Mission to Mars,” and there were people living in the rides.

Peter Alexander: I remember Cooper’s studio. He was in a Chinese restaurant. It was all black and red lacquer, and the lights didn’t work very well. You had these kind of red lacquer gargoyles disappearing into this darkness—with a bottle of tequila on the table.

Ron Cooper: During the P.O.P. time, which

billy al bengston

the pier

Glass Box With Ellipses, LARRY BELL, 1964

larry bell

shotguns + garages When I started actually making the cubes, I was living at 124 Marine Street, then I moved to a little upstairs apartment. Behind was a little brick garage, which they rented me, and that was my studio before I went to New York. The first sculpture was a very complicated piece made up of a lot of layers of glass that were glued together over a wooden frame.

It was made from mirrors—I scraped away the mirroring in certain areas and either left it clear, or painted it black on the backside of the glass.

So it would be mirror, black, mirror, black, mirror, black as if it was a series of bars, or something like that. To get the glass to be reflective on both sides—the only way I could do it was to scrape away the pattern exactly the same on two parts and put them back-to-back.

It took too long and things kept breaking—the first cubes were made of as many as 80 pieces of glass, little pieces, big pieces, all glued together and the son-of-a-bitches weighed a ton. They were inherently fragile, but they were very interesting to look at.

I was fascinated because I’m working close to this piece, all of the sculpture was within my peripheral vision and I’m taking these head trips into the spaces being created. It was a very addictive thing.

Ron Cooper: After Europe I was living as a hermit in Truchas, New Mexico, and got a message from Jim Ganzer that he needed my help to get a building together in Venice. So I took an airplane out to L.A. from Santa Fe, New Mexico. And I remember it really clearly because my luggage was: a chainsaw, a toolbox and a sawed-off 1800 octagon barrel lever-action rifle—all of which were allowable to go on the airplane.

I flew out and rented a Mustang convertible and drove up to this building on Westminster and Main, which Ganzer had gotten, and honked the horn. This building was the old gondola warehouse and the door flies open, and out run about three or four junkies, and Ganzer’s chasing them with a baseball bat.

And that began my residence in Venice proper.

Peter Alexander: We bought a building over on Westminster and Main Street—Ron Cooper, Jim Ganzer and I—and the down payment was Cooper’s pickup truck.

Ron Cooper: [The building] was in condemnation. So we had to go downtown to the L.A. Board of Commissioners and beg approval to get it out of condemnation. And they said, “Okay, boys, Michelangelo started out in a garage. You guys clean that place up, and put white-picket fences around it. And paint it up, you’re okay with us.”

Peter Alexander: [My studio] was maybe 2,500 feet. It had been an auto repair [shop] when they still had grease pits, before they had the jacks that lift cars up. So you’d drive the car in the grease pit and then you’d fit underneath and fiddle with it. So there was a big grease pit in it—about 20 feet by 4 feet by 4 feet. So I turned it into a pool.

Larry Bell: I was envious of a style they had, which was a helluva lot more relaxed than my studio style. All of them. They were all dead serious about what they did, you know, but I felt sort of withdrawn, mostly because I didn’t go out very much. But when those guys moved down there, I would go over there a lot. [To Cooper, Alexander and Ganzer’s building.]

I don’t remember if Laddie ever was in there.

He was up on Wavecrest. And [his] roof view was so great, I mean, people would cut their nuts off for that apartment. He had the whole roof and this sculpture garden and this little apartment faced the ocean. And I bet you he didn’t pay $100 a month.

Laddie John Dill: The building that I had was actually the original tram building. So that was pretty bizarre in itself. Apparently, the building was a brothel before it was a tram company.

Ron Cooper: During that time, there was lot of intentional, regional ignoring of the L.A. scene back East. Simultaneous was the birth of minimalism and conceptualism East and West. We had all these cool conceptual artists coming out from New York and hanging out with us.

Among the conceptualists and minimalists, we had a lot of respect and interaction.

Peter Alexander: Either we’d spend time together as this sort of art thing or else we did it with people we thought might buy something.

[He laughs.] There were very few collectors.

So everybody used to hang out. It was a much cozier kind of a place.

Ron Cooper: Larry and I have been really close friends. [He] has always been an inspiration to me due to his humor, gentleness, generosity and always doing anything on a grand scale without compromise.

Laddie, Chuck, Larry, Peter—we were all brothers. Irwin was a friend, Wheeler, Kenny, Allen Ruppersberg was a really cool friend from art school.

But there were so few artists that you could really respect in L.A. at that time and so few collectors that we were just a fraternity—I mean Guy Dill, Ruppersberg, Michael Balog. There was just a group of us, and we were brothers and sisters.

Billy Al Bengston: I was jurying a show, a Los Angeles Sculpture and Painting invitational, or something like that, with William Wilson and I looked at everything and just went, “Oh, man, this is shit man.”

And there was a piece of Peter’s there and I said, “This is good…let’s give him all the prizes, I don’t need anything else.” And I said, “Do you know where he lives? Let’s go see him.”

Laddie John Dill: Billy was kind of like a father figure then around here. He drove a black Cadillac with a red leather interior, with plastic green grapes on the dashboard. And he used to take us all to movies in the daytime. I remember a couple of times he loaned me rent money.

Billy Al Bengston: I had a thing—when I used to loan people money, I said, “I’ll loan it to you, if you’ll sign a waiver that says you’ll continue to talk to me. I don’t care if you pay me back, but you have to continue to talk to me.”

Ed Moses: I had a little house up in Beverly Glen Canyon. And that’s where I first met Frank Gehry because I wanted to build a studio there or convert part of the house. And Lilly Fenichel told me about this architect, Frank Gehry, and I should meet him, so I invited him up. He had worked for Victor Gruen and now he was on his own. He came up with some idea, but I had no money to do it. And we became friends, and I started introducing him around.

Bengston said, “Who is that little putz you keep bringing around?’ I said, “Well, I think this guy’s really got something, he’s an architect and we’ll see.” And we sure did.

­—

MONA AND FRIENDS #1, ED MOSES, 2010

place right across Main Street from that building, on the corner of Westminster and Main. It was called Murray’s Blue Goose. And it was fried chicken and barbeque.

One guy I met in there became a real close friend. A guy named J.C. Hodges, who rode a garbage truck and they called him JC the Canman. He had been a heavyweight boxer, big giant of a guy, and he was a garbage guy.

This was one of the things that endeared me to Venice. In spite of the danger and all that, there were some incredibly wonderful people that were part of the scene, that had been here forever.

Laddie John Dill: There were [also] a lot of genuinely crazy people. Real nutcases. Really sweet kind of guys. But eventually the street caught up with them and they kind of faded out or were killed. It was a genuinely dangerous place to be.

VENICE STUDIOS, JIM GANZER

looked down and I see a guy sitting in his car.

Just sitting. So, I went about my business and I looked out about a half an hour later. Except now, there are a couple of people standing around, detectives. Well, it turned out the guy was murdered that night and just left in his car.

Larry Bell: There were no retail businesses because it was too dangerous to come down.

Laddie John Dill: One time Larry Bell threw a barbeque out on the beach, so we were all out there. And all of a sudden we see this guy driving an old Oldsmobile, one of these giant cars, down the Boardwalk. And he’s chasing another guy and he’s trying to squish him against the buildings. He’s running into the buildings and just barely missing the guy, and the guy is hauling ass. And there are no cops around. It was just unbelievable! Stuff like that happened all the time.

Larry Bell: There was a little fried chicken

Somewhere in the late ’60s I became interested in light as a subject. Along with Wheeler, Irwin, Craig Kauffman, Larry Bell and Turrell.

In talking about Riko [Mizuno] one day, I said you could do anything in her gallery, including taking the roof off.

And it came to me that that was great idea.

That I would take a section off the roof and reveal the sky as a blue roof, like a flat plane, and the plane was interrupted if a bird or a cloud came across it.

So the first step of this process was removing a section of the asphalt roofing paper—the next would be to remove the ceiling support for the roofing paper. But when I removed the tarpaper, it revealed light rays from the sun’s projection on the existing walls. These printed out as diagonal bands because the roofing boards are set diagonally, with a nail’s space as a gap between them. The rays started out on one wall and would come down on the floor, go up the other wall and slip out at the end of the day.

I put drywall up to the ceiling around the tarpaper removal but as a larger rectangle.

To identify the light suspended in space, I threw rice polishings in the air, and the particles of dust reflected and identified the rays.

The final step was to remove the roof decking to reveal a rectangle of light-blue light. The sky roof. In fact I called it the Sky Piece.

Riko was nervous about that because she thought she’d lose her lease. So I slipped in one weekend with a crew and did it.

a visit from the g-men

Untitled (WEDGE), PETER ALEXANDER, 1968-1969 Being raised here surfing and resins were familiar territory. When in graduate school, I had an idea to cast resin for a project.

I started out with sort of a little piece just to see how the material worked. I made a wax head, sort of a self-portrait, that was dimensional and put it inside a mold and cast resin around it and then melted the wax out. So what happened is, you got an image that was inside, but it was a hollow, it was only the outside that was being described. But you put your hand up inside the head. It’s not interesting, but it’s where it started.

I remember it as being really excited. I was thrilled by the fact that, even though at the time the object was not very successful, you could sense that there were things that could be done.

Peter Alexander: Jane Fonda was hooked up loosely with Larry Bell and a few others—that’s when Jane Fonda did her North Vietnam deal.

So what happened is that everybody even loosely associated with this group became suspect. And some people got really paranoid, like, they started carrying guns and things like that.

This was the late ’60s—’68 I remember, because my youngest daughter was born in ’68.

Larry Bell: There were a lot of radicals in the area. There’s always been that edge to this place.

There was some talk about Bernardine Dohrn [of the Weather Underground] being in Venice, somewhere around Venice, you know. I wouldn’t even know what she looked like, but I certainly knew the name, I knew the FBI was after her.

We used to show films here, right next door [to his current studio], when I had next door. We showed Cuban and North Vietnamese films.

There were these guys that came around with shiny shoes and strange haircuts but dressed in jeans and shirts—they were obviously not from here.

Peter Alexander: I got a visit at the house from these two guys in suits and briefcases. They said they were from the Treasury Department.

They said, “Can we talk?” And I said, “Sure.”

So they came in and formally sat with their briefcases on their laps and started asking me questions about did I know so and so, and so and so, and so and so. And then they told me everything that I’d done for the past two weeks—every move I’d made, including going to the hospital where my daughter was born.

That’s how paranoid both sides got.

I said, “What is this?” And they said, “You’re a suspected shooter,” as in “assassination sharpshooter.”

Where did that come from?—I have no idea.

Larry Bell: I decided that I needed to interface with other people. Some of my pals had jobs down in Irvine and were really enthusiastic about the young people that were involved in the school. Alexis Smith was one of those people, Bob Wilhite, Barbara Smith.

I told them I would do a quarter or a semester and was hired. But there was a loyalty oath you had to sign, I didn’t know about that, so I didn’t sign it.

Whoever it was working at the school, said, “Well, then we can’t pay you, we can’t issue a paycheck.”

And I said, that’s okay—and I worked for the semester and wasn’t paid, or the quarter, or whatever it was.

ron cooper

peter alexander

Laddie John Dill: We coexisted with this other element that was in Venice, which was a gang element, you know, it was a high crime thing. It was a kind of place that the police kind of wrote off.

Larry Bell: Jim Corcoran came to visit me one day.

The way I remember it, he banged on the front door, I opened it, and he said, “Did you see that?”

And he’s pointing at the car right in front of my place. And there’s a guy in it, asleep—that was not uncommon. And I said, “Yeah, so what?”

And he said, “He’s dead.”

And I walked over to the front and there was a bullet hole in the windscreen.

Laddie John Dill: My first studio in Venice in ’69 on Windward Avenue was above a bar. And I remember the first morning, I was so glad to be out of downtown L.A. I woke up and I thought “Great!: there’s the ocean—right there.” And I

ed moses

rough grain

WEIS, RON COOPER, 2010 Westminster Studio, sometime around 1970-71, I was making transparent resin pieces, called Light Traps that were the closest thing to painting on air. I took this one step further and closed the doorway to a large space in my studio (where I hung and looked at finished works) with a sheet of glass.

All the light in the space was trapped by the glass and appeared as normal white light. On the floor against the wall adjacent to the doorway I placed a two-tube fluorescent fixture with intense green lights. As you stood there the green light influenced your perception, and the “sealed volume” all the light in the sealed room turned pinkish red—the complement of the green fluorescents.

friendly competitors Just about all of them had feet, and the ones that I remember that didn’t have feet had a very kind, credible tension to the form, which did something in common with the ones that had feet.

And some of them had, what he called, pants on them. They had a ruffled thing. And, then each shape was distinctly different. Distinctly subtle within its own composition—maybe not subtle compared to the one next to it—but the little details that he had very carefully considered for each one, within that structure, they were very subtle relationships. That kind of stuff really comes from the gut.

But the thing that was so outstanding about how they affected me, I realized later, is they had such a profound stance. The way they sat, the pride that they exhibited in just being there as these little things. And I think that it’s what made me present my cubes. I wanted that same feeling—that the [cubes] stood unique with pride.

So that they had the feeling, the presence of Kenny’s little cups.

Ed Moses: I remember seeing a show down at Irvine of Chuck Arnoldi—he was part of that [second generation] group. Chuck was doing some amazing things, where he put these wood armatures on the wall and then hung polyethylene plastic over that and then poured paint over the top so it ran down and made patterns on the wall. They were fantastic things! And Laddie’s brother [Guy Dill] was doing some really interesting sculptures at that time—things under tension, and they were very radical. They were pretty fine. And Laddie was doing these light pieces, by putting neon light, neon tubes through sand. They were pretty terrific pieces.

I think he showed them at Illeana Sonnaband in New York.

Peter Alexander: I remember Ed from when he had a studio on Speedway, it was in a garage of a house that he’d designed for somebody. It was right on the beach, right on the Boardwalk.

That’s when he started doing the lines with the resin around the edges; he did this very loose pour of resin, and he did these wonderful soft— they were not stretched—they were loose canvas, they were beautiful paintings.

Ed Moses: [Larry’s cubes] First I said, wow!, tiffany jewel box—gorgonzola. Engaging telepathy through light particle transmission and reflection—where’s gorgonzola?

Peter Alexander: There was a time in which that sort of camaraderie was more in evidence, and then it became less in evidence. And I don’t

LADDIE JOHN DILL, JIM GANZER really remember when that was, when it started to change. Probably the mid-’70s. Vietnam had a lot to do with it. And also all that stuff, that political stuff that I had mentioned, started to get people kind of paranoid and distant.

One of the things that happened is: the ’60s were so optimistic. And then going into the ’70s and the state of the economy—it got pretty heavy. I mean, I remember it as being difficult.

And I think that was a time that people started to separate. The economy sucked, and all the high pleasures of the ’60s were gone.

Ron Cooper: Let me describe what I think we all had compared to the East Coast. The East Coast was still Eurocentric. They looked back at Paris, which was the previous art capital of the world. New York looked back to Europe. [But] we were outlaws, we were the pioneers, we were out on the frontier, right on the edge of the American continent—looking west to the Orient, Zen Buddhism, Asia. So it was a combination of the open space and incredible light.

—

LIGHT SENTENCE, LADDIE JOHN DILL, 1973

laddie john dill

Ron Cooper: There was no competition, which was another thing that was different from the East Coast, you know. We weren’t battling each other for supremacy or for clientele. There was no hope to sell art in those days. It was a miracle if you sold a piece.

Peter Alexander: I think that people go further, perhaps, in a group like that than they would alone. It wasn’t as if everybody was trying to get on the top of the pile. It had more to do with an aesthetic competition, an internal aesthetic competition amongst each other, meaning, in terms of the kind of work we were doing. A lot of it was about invention based on materials, based on translucency, transparency, brilliance—all kinds of qualities. And so, for example, John McCracken was working with resin on wood, and Turrell was doing projected light, and Bengston was doing these incredible Dentos, and Chuck was doing stick pieces, and Laddie was doing his sand pieces and so everybody was doing different things.

And it was very competitive. But everybody seemed to get along real well, it was remarkably close. And it felt real good, it was a very good time.

Larry Bell: That’s what you hope for in life, that kind of camaraderie, that sharing.

One of the things that was most critical about my group and that [younger group] was that nobody’s stuff looked like the other guy’s stuff.

Everybody was doing something distinctly different. If there was a competition [in his own generation of artists], it was simply to keep it different, to find your own identity.

Peter Alexander: Somebody would do something, and eventually others would see it, either going to a studio or whatever. And I’m looking at a Craig Kauffman or a Larry Bell and saying “My God! That’s fabulous, but I can do better!”

It was that sensibility that everyone fed off each other—in the most positive of ways. There are a lot of mutual interests in the sense that “I wonder what so and so is up to now.” What’s Ron Davis doing? What’s McCracken doing? And you’d always be curious to see what’s next. And it all fed our stuff.

Larry Bell: Let’s take Ken Price, for example.

He and Bengston shared a studio on Pier Avenue. Kenny was working on beautiful little cups. And they were sort of hand-formed, very thin-walled, glazed with strange kind of moldygreen colors and stuff like that, with beautiful mottled surfaces.

lands’ end—a postscript A few years after the turn of the millennium, the gang wars had pretty much dissipated, and violence was no more a problem in the area than any other place in America, but a new inhospitableness crept into the Venice landscape: the value of land over art. Philistines, politicians and mercantiles prioritized parking for a handful of automobiles over an outside workspace for Ed Ruscha. He had used it for decades.

Smart move, Venice.

Yet, four of our interviewees remain here, dugin, committed, still defining the place. Bengston, Dill, Moses and Bell. Though the latter commutes back and forth between Taos, he glides between Venice populations so richly we’ll leave the last words to him.

“A lot people think that Venice is a weird place— in fact, it’s not a weird place at all. I think it may be the most real place of LA,” he told us.

“You have the ionized air from the sea, the

ocean. Then, there are all the forces that have to do with being at lands’ end. There’s no place else to go. There’s such a huge homeless pressure here that it’s palpable—part of the soup.

“And you have that incredible energy that has come from the decades of people who pound the Boardwalk just for the joy of being in the place.

“Those are the kinds of things to me that are powerful forces. I’ve sacrificed a lot of proper judicious decisions about business to keep this place. But I never really thought of myself as being in business anyway. It’s just what it takes.”

[To be continued…]

[Interviews for Venice Days, 1965 – 1975, were condensed and edited.]

LEFT: UNTITLED, VIJA CELMINS, 1970 RIGHT ABOVE: OLD CROW, ED RUsCHA, 1979 RIGHT BELOW: MIMI, KEN PRICE, 2001

I was working with neon light and argon light and helium—different gases I had been experimenting with. And I was also interested in projection and ways of carrying light. The idea of sand was actually originally suggested by Chuck Arnoldi.

I started projecting images on the sand. Mundane images from a slide projector, like family shots, and the effect was incredible. I realized that sand, especially light grain sand, was like a movie screen. It picked up every grain and illuminated it.

I was interested in setting up some kind of complex structure that reflected light and also could give the illusion of piercing through a solid object, so I started working with plate glass.

I was used to working with glass with the neon art and knew how plate glass could light up. I had worked with this glass blower who would put these things together for me. I’d literally be over his shoulder, “Pull it here, pull it there, this link, that link.” I’d write them [out] like a script; I ended up calling a lot of the pieces light sentences because they were like scripted things.

The sand is what held these architectural structures [made of plate glass] up. It appeared like an arbitrary mass—but it was actually very carefully poured and used the weight of it so that the whole structure would work. That piece was recently purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

venice in venice Foundation 20 21 in celebration of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980, an unprecedented collaboration of more than sixty cultural institutions across Southern California coming together to tell the story of the birth of the L.A. art scene, is mounting Venice in Venice, an ambitious exhibition during the upcoming La Biennale di Venezia.

Curated by Tim Nye and Jacqueline Miro, Venice in Venice has been selected by the Venice Biennale as one of its Collateral Events where it will transport a group of revolutionary artists from the 1960s in Venice, California to the city of Venice, Italy for the 54th international Venice Biennale. Artists include Peter Alexander, John Altoon, Charles Arnoldi, Billy Al Bengston, Larry Bell, Tony Berlant, Wallace Berman, Vija Celmins, Bruce Conner, Ron Cooper, Mary Corse, Laddie John Dill, Joe Goode, Robert Graham, George Herms, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, John McCracken, Ed Moses, Kenneth Price, Ed Ruscha, and James Turrell.

These artists will travel significant metaphoric waters from their roots squatting in an abandoned amusement park—which housed many of their studios as they first began their phenomenological experiments in the mid 1960s—to the opulent Palazzo Contarini Dagli Scrigni on the Grand Canal.

As the Academia Bridge unites the two banks of the Canal Grande, a fleet of psychedelic gondolas designed by Billy Al Bengston will unite Venice in Venice to Palazzo Grassi, creating a space time continuum of Venetian tradition with 1960s surf culture.

Another aspect of this cultural exchange will include the installation of two quarter pipes in Campo San Polo, which will be used to create a piece of unique contemporary art by two of Venice, California’s most beloved Gods in skate culture; Steve and Alex Olson.

Linking the two cities of Venice is an inevitable concern with water, a shared unique luminosity (the product of intense sunlight refracted by droplets of mist and fog and light). Sun and Moon and Tides. Either/ or, in Goethe’s word: “Venice(s), like everything else which has a phenomenal existence, is subject to Time…” to Light and Space. And Fetish.

Once the event touches down in Venice, Italy, the art world will never be quite the same. As the drivers of Light and Space art embrace the edges of urban pop culture, surfers, skaters, and new technology buffs will gravitate to the heat of a single source of energy— the Biennale. On the evening of June 4 at Campo San Polo, the surrealism of Fellini and the noir of Robert Altman film scores will receive tribute with a concert

featuring today’s most revered musicians interpreting Nino Rota and John Williams, a mash-up worthy of the happenings of the 1960’s.

Venice in Venice will be unified by a revolutionary interactive program. Its goal is to not only offer experience which allows the user to actively view read and listen to content but to engage visitors and viewers to ignite their creative energies. A powerful arsenal of tools will be launched to excite the most reluctant of technophobes.

Venice in Venice is not a re-creation, but an homage—an event that only the art, p olitics, and technical progress of the last 50 years can bring to life at a single event.

The painting of the hulls of Venetian gondolas any color other than black is blasphemy. Wheels are forbidden to roll in her. On June 1st, 2011 the battle cry from a Venice far West of Italy will sound.

FREE PUBLIC EVENTS: Symposium & Guided Tour: June 2nd at 2PM La Cava Del Maguey: June 3rd at 8PM Skateboarding Gala: June 4th at 8PM, Campo San Polo