VENICE IN VENICE
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JUNE
1 TO JULY 3 1 , 2 01 1
BIENNALE DI VENEZIA
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ARTISTS
JOSEF ALBERS
WA LL ACE BERM A N
PETER ALEX ANDER
ROBERT IRWIN
CHARLES ARNOLDI
KENNETH PRICE
MICHAEL ASHER
LLY N FOULKES
JOHN BALDESSARI
BRUCE CONNER
ALLAN MCCOLLUM
JOSEPH CORNELL
GIORGIO MOR ANDI
DENNIS HOPPER
LARRY BELL
ED RUSCH A
KARL BENJAMIN
BILLY A L BENGSTON
TONY BERLANT
RON DAV IS
MARY CORSE
JOE GOODE
JAMES TURRELL
ROBERT GR AHAM
JUDY CHICAGO
JOHN MCCR ACKEN
DOUG WHEELER
JOHN MCL AUGHLIN
VIJA CELMINS
GEORGE HERMS
RON COOPER
BRUCE NAUM A N
JOHN A LTOON
LADDIE JOHN DILL
JAY DEFEO
ALEXIS SMITH
CR AIG K AUFFMAN
J I M E VA NS
ED KIENHOLZ
DEAN STOCKWELL
ED MOSES
HELEN PA SHGI A N
JO BAER
DAV I D H A M MONS
A NDY WA RHOL
DAV I D HOCK N E Y
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CONTENTS
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OVERVIEW BY JACQUELINE MIRO
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INTRO BY TIM NYE
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IT CAME FROM THE LAGOON BY PAUL H A SEGAWAOVER ACKER
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CATEGORIES
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VENUE: PA L A ZZO ROCC A
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PRIMARY ATMOSPHERES
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OVERVIEW
VENICE IN VENICE
Venice, California: the grand failed vision of Abbott Kinney. Venice, California: where sunshine, air, horizon and ocean drew thousands of weary veterans to its shores. Refugees from history, they wanted to live in a new, different, safer place, bringing with them a profound need for things to be okay. And beyond the need for reassurance, for things to be okay, came the necessity to be better than just okay: the necessity to be exceptional, to be supernormal, to become super heroes. Venice, California: land of outlaws and accidental artists living science fiction lives in a present filled with starlets and sand. The Venice of the POP (Pacific Ocean Pier): a former amusement park, inhabited by artists who produced the purest, the coolest and vacuum cleanest art ever seen working in Ice cream cones, defunct Chinese brothels and gigantic clown heads. A forerunner and in part the model for Venice in Venice was the show LOS ANGELES 1955-1985, THE BIRTH OF AN ART CAPITAL, at the Pompidou Center (2006). Then representing the US in two Venice Biennales, Ed Ruscha (2005) and Bruce Nauman (2009). The upcoming Biennale di Venezia—with its
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emphasis on Illumination and its subtext of questioning current art practices—is the inspiration and only possible vehicle for:
of intense sunlight refracted by droplets of mist and fog and light). Sun and Moon and Tides. The contradictions—as interesting as the similarities , making the spectacle of Light and Space even more uncanny—are the sense of compact density versus the sense of open horizon, streets and concrete replaced by water, historical monuments inebriated with the spirits and projections of popular culture.
I N V E N I C E , curated by Jacqueline Miro and Tim Nye focuses on the highly experimental art from the late 1950’s to the early 1970’s. Presented as an Homage, a respectful, heartfelt admiration to the art and artists that taught us that it is possible to not only entertain contradictory ideas but to embrace contradictory illusions. In Billy Al Bengston’s words: VENICE
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.
“It's a show. Venice In Venezia. keep it
The main part of the show will take place in central courtyards, piano nobile and exterior façade of the building, and will consist of Light and Space and Finish Fetish artists, accompanied by early conceptual works.
pure is the most important thing. Disregard all popular palabra. It’s about artists in Venice, CA who made things based upon an entirely unique vision—art. Not based on your car, your house, your sky, your woman, your tears, your anguish, your angst, or any other reference to the
Doug Wheeler, Ron Cooper and Laddie John Dill will create site specific installations meant to reverberate from façade to water to opposing façade. Placed near windows and in alcoves near ceilings, argon tubes and fluorescents will change the architecture into visions, chimera, dreams of contained radiance. Sand Paintings will provide the missing alchemical element.
human condition” -Billy
It is a show, but it’s an ode to the experience of a walk among the canals. By day, light on the water yields a constant flicker: beautiful, yet invasive and disorienting nonetheless. In deep shade, the light emanates from beneath; from the water. Water that isn’t just luminous but a phenomenal carrier and disperser of sound, all encompassing.
Laddie John Dill’s “light sentences,” are carefully controlled to keep the work contained to its immediate footprint. Soft and nuanced, they achieve mathematical melodic rhythms, flickering between the evocative and the
Shared between the two Venice(s) are inevitable concerns with water (Acqua Alta and High Tide presaging very different sets of reactions in said cities), a shared unique luminosity (the product
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actual. These installations subtly and unpredictably undulate over the course of the exhibition.
Fetish Finish constitutes the second part of the main exhibit: Artists who worked with poured resin, polyester resin and all forms of plastic, in some cases using techniques carried over from the world of surfboard manufacture.
Doug Wheeler’s installations speak of distant places as seen through fog or frosty skies, while Ron Cooper’s Light Boxes capture the light at sundown, returning it in an evening blast.
Artists on view and who will have major installations are Craig Kauffman with biomorphic abstractions made from vacuum-formed plastic in a variety of saturated hues.
Peter Alexander’s molded polyester resin wedges stand like containers of watery color, waves that transcend the notions of Aegean and Pacific, pure meditations on beauty.
John McCracken, whose gleaming planks lean against a wall, speaking of surfboards and unfinished construction, this thought continued and realized by the bare studs of Michael Asher. Billy Al Bengston is here represented by "dentos," sheets of metal pocked with holes and dents (alluding to car culture, car crashes) and highly finished and glossy paintings such as Boris and others with the B.S.A. motorcycle logo painted in the center of a canvas.
Larry Bell’s early geometric paintings and vacuum-coated glass boxes speak to radiant minimalism, contrasting and reflecting its surrounding of stone, centuries old. Robert Irwin’s convex disks, lit from four corners appear to dissolve into the space of the room. James Turrell conjures hidden ghosts, metamorphosing ectoplasm in dusty corners into magnificent geometries of colored light.
Parts of the exhibit proposed by the curators will be concise and chronologically straightforward, and will take into account more intimate spaces of the venue in which the exhibition will take place.
Yes, all these works, in their reflection or radiance, are to deliver back to us the place in which we stand. Context is indeed all: in equal turns irrelevant, and magically significant.
The early Ferus Years: This part of the exhibit testifies to the outpour of radical artwork presented by Ferus Gallery in its seven-year history.
As part of this main exhibit work will be on view by artists whose path reflects that of these major artists, demonstrating a continuum of activity.
Assemblage: The works from this period are to be shown in smaller, more intimate chambers, and consist of works by
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Ed Kienholz, Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, Llyn Foulkes, George Herms and friends such as Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell, who documented their history as they beachcombed for found objects and socialized with starlets and poets at percussion jam sessions. Pop Art: Making the bridge from Assemblage to Pop are artists such as Tony Berlant, Joe Goode, Ed Ruscha and Andy Warhol with Silver Flotations, part of his first solo exhibit at Ferus, 1966. Conceptual Art: The show gives significant attention to the development of Conceptual art in California, notably with John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha and Vija Celmins.
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INTRO
VENICE IN VENICE
On the centennial of the naming of Venice, California, curators Tim Nye and Jacqueline Miro will transport a group of artists whose impossibly “cool” work sprang up from the desolate shores of Venice, California in the early 60s to a sprawling palazzo on the bank of the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy. The iris argon lights of Laddie John dill will ooze from the baroque windows, the sounds of Leonard Cohen will reverberate off the blackness of Venice’s waters and the smells of Venice, California’s best Italian Chefs will mask the smells of these same waters. Venice’s gondolas will be detailed with the psychodelia painted by VC’s best car detailers. In short, Venice, Italy will never be the same; a great duel between Tintoretto and John Altoon will take place at dawn. VinV will exhibit masterpieces of the 60s era traversing the artists of Light and Space, Finish fetish and Assemblage, through a series of installations sculptures and paintings that will adorn the walls floors and ceilings of the exhibition spaces. New installations by these artists as well as subsequent generations of Venitian artists will also be included in the definitive Venice then and now extravaganza. One of VC’s top chef’s will create a pop-up restaurant for the opening days of the 2011Venice Bienale. Regular concerts, readings and performances will be programmed both from the old guard and the new in a cultural cyclone that will flood the streets.
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ESSAY
IT CAME FROM THE LAGOON
They were called “Light and Space” or “Finish Fetish” artists (and not always necessarily in a good way) when these works were made—mostly in the mid to late 60s. The “Primary Atmospheres” and “Swell” exhibitions (Primary Atmospheres, 2010, David Zwirner Gallery and Nyehaus, curated by Tim Nye, NY; Swell, 2010, Metro Pictures, Fredriech Petzel Gallery and Nyehaus, curated by Jacqueline Miro and Tim Nye, NY ) of this core group of painter/ sculptors: Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Laddie John Dill, Craig Kauffman, John McCracken, Helen Pashgian, De Wain Valentine and Doug Wheeler, made it was clear, literally, that these artists knew they were on to some “thing.” Even if the New York art (anti) establishment couldn’t take art made of plastic seriously, the (actual) intelligentsia loved the idea of plasticity. The theoretical joke wasn’t lost on the artists of Venice California—but it didn’t matter, because this was the flowering of the children of the Beat Generation. They came from back East strapped and armored in the restraints of European art theory, and discovered a new tribe of thinkers who were Western, rebellious, and playing in the pure light of the Pacific rim. And the tribe had its own ideas, punctuated by ancient Eastern philosophies. Eastern Western meets Western Eastern.
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Their work reflected an L.A. psyche, yet they had for the most part been to art school, mostly Chouinard.* So they had been schooled in the practice and ideas of Abstract Expressionist painting, and their early work reflected that Academy’s influence. What I think is, that shortly after school, the acid kicked in. Their minds got loose, and they forgot the fusty dogma of Euro/New York. Billy Al and John Altoon had become the Now. Their art was brand new: plastic fantastic, light, monolithic, air passing as light vibrations bolting down concentrated escape vehicles amidst the chaos of that time, those flexing young minds had somehow corralled the zen concept with simultaneity, refracting reality, seeing through the cosmic rhetoric, going to the base alchemy or ‘not logic’ logic, the thread, sight, eyes roam the clear matter, like cream, those slow sensuous fingers dared us, captured, touched, the sublime gel and solid stars gleam in all particulate manifestations, exquisitely perfect. The objects reflect the shimmering liquid ocean their surf boards carved and the flash machines in which they traveled. L.A. was the center of the aerospace technology that took us to the moon, and the link between inner and outer travel was also a local,
tribal given. Young artists Robert Irwin and James Turrell were recognized early on, and featured in The L A County Museum’s Initiative for Art and Technology in 1967. How did they do it? They bounced off artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Sol LeWitt, and the Fillmore poster artists. They all tried to take on New York, but for most, it just didn’t fit. New York was cold, harsh, and the fix was in. So they went back to Venice and the California sun—while the street cultures of LA and San Francisco took all the drugs and music, martyrs and murderers, enlightenment and paranoia, LSD, FBI, SDS, Bond, James Bond, agent Orange, Hare Hare, and blended them all together, like a bunch of kids’ toys fused together in an overheated dryer. You know that smell? Familiar, isn’t it? This insane street circus also blended in the New Wave of Fellini, Truffaut, and Bertollucci. Hollywood was always in the mix, and they did mix. Here, then, because monsters and angels are tied together by something causal, maybe genetic, certainly chemical, is a small group of beach-based surfer/car/technology artists that invented their own brand of California minimalism amidst the stoned-out clutter of a radicalized national environment, with heavy concentrations in the Beat and Bohemian zones of Venice and San Francisco.
* The Chouinard Art Institute was founded in 1921 in Los Angeles, California, by Nelbert Murphy Chouinard (1879-1969).
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Venezia is glass and Venice is plastic and the past is being carried around with us all the time— carried in clear vessels that vibe with talismanic power and evanescent Pacific light: the sun lighting a curvaceous wave, the glistening sheen of a wet figure, or a raging frothy swell blotting the horizon. It’s not “New Age,” it’s the Connection; it’s the primal admiration of our atomic construction. Always conflicted, as one Ferus artist said; “we were very competitive,” and that has nothing to do with spirit, spirituality (though you see it in every spiritual community; everybody knows the alpha monk, just like a lead dog), yet a team spirit existed for these artists—it was literally a light and space race. A race to the pure nirvana of glorious glory and zipless zen hanging ten, with a cigarette casually drooping out the side of your mouth. They were cool like movie stars (and some of them actually were movie stars) but were very, very butch, and all that ego and ambition would occasionally explode; also like movie stars, sometimes with fatal results.
nia. The Italian Venice had been the center of the world before the Renaissance, and has been with us for a thousand years. From the Middle Ages to the Baroque period, it gave the world Marco Polo, Casanova, the first printed edition of Aristotle, Messina and the Paduan School, the Bellinis, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, and scores of great artists of every type. It has been said many times that it is the most beautiful city ever built, and during that long process of commerce, war, and art it has gone through every kind of phase imaginable, including being in a decline of over 500 years. What may have been Abbott Kinney’s inspiration was the lasting impression of Carnival, that all the Venice experience is that it’s the city that lives in water, the marshland, canals and graceful bridges, the sun dappling aqua reflections, the amazing architectural splendor, and the Adriatic light. It only took a few decades for Venice, CA to descend into a very affordable “Beat” haven, complete with poets, the poor, berets, jazz, artists, writers, sex, drugs, and alcohol. Free-thinking coffee houses operated by such names as “Big Daddy” served as the generators of post-war(s) intellectual transgression. Charlie “Bird’ Parker, then Miles Davis, with that “So What” attitude, set the jazz avatar status for all that followed, the Beat Generation LA style, in the cheap rents and broken ruins of a Venice on the low-down. It was a weird transformation, added to which, the Hawaiian religion of ocean
In 2011 it will be officially one hundred years of Venice, California. A man of means, Abbott Kinney, a Colonel Robert Baker, and railroad baron Henry Hun- tington created their own version of a California style classic reenactment of Venice, Italy complete with canals and gondolas with the added bonus of a permanent party in the form of an amusement park and hundreds of subdivided dwellings to house the thousands flocking to the temperate warmth of southern Califor-
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To quote Dave Hickey in his essay about Primary Atmospheres: “In its initial vogue, these works spoke directly to a new kind of artistic decorum—less aggressive than pop, less ideological than Minimalism, and less maidenly than post-painterly abstraction. It had a kind of gallantrythe cool courtesy of a well-born rake. In a moment when Clement Greenberg was advocating febrile sensibility, and Michael Fried was demanding works of art that ignore our presence, California Minimalism created a gracious, social space in its glow and reflection; it treated us amicably, and made us more beautiful by gathering us into its dance. It still does this today, so I am not amazed by the renewed interest in this work. I am still amazed, however, that my beach-bum pals could have created such a capacious and courtly art, although beach bums, I suppose, have dreams like everybody else.”
wave riding took the local form of eccentric surfers living in shacks. Venice had its own versions of car culture, existentialist thought, and anything but “straight” work, but also germinated young artists like John Altoon, Ed Kienholz, George Herms and other feral mystics of the “intuitive whatever” practice. It was too cool to fade away, like North Beach, into a tourist zone of bongo drums and strippers, but nobody can resist the twin Gods of California, Entertainment and Real Restate, when they work together. Venice the rollercoaster gondola, slid past the coffee house poets by the 1960’s. The “Beats” receded and a new generation of artists found the right space at the right price, and could afford to pour themselves into their work. The past now inverted into a mandala wheel of eastern and western art reduced to a pure reduction of form, color, and retinal pyrotechnics. The over publicized Barney’s Beanery coterie, (West Hollywood) of Jim Morrison, Charles Bukowski, Janis Joplin, Dennis Hopper, Ed Ruscha, and a new conceptual art was championed in 1957 by the visionary eye of Ed Kienholz and Walter Hopps, as they created the Ferus Gallery along with a young Irving Blum, who had a flair for business and showmanship. Ferus Gallery set the standard for fresh originals; shortly after that came the Nicholas Wilder Gallery and the Dwan Gallery, and they charged L.A. art with all the creative intellect and enthusiasm that it took to reach the moon.*
* The Ferus Gallery was started in 1957 by Edward, Keinholz, Walter Hopps and Irving Blum with the idea that this new generation of artists needed a showplace in Los Angeles. It was an almost immediate hit, and gave artists like Andy Warhol their first “Pop” shows, along with had their first solo shows at the gallery included: Wallace Berman (1957), Billy Al Bengston (1958), Ed Moses (1958), Robert Irwin (1959), John Mason (1959), Kenneth Price (1960), Llyn Foulkes (1962), Larry Bell (1962) and Ed Ruscha (1963).
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CATEGORIES
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ASSEMBLAGE
GEORGE HERMS
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ALEXIS SMITH
LLY N FOULKES
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BRUCE CONNER
WA LL ACE BERM A N
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PHOTOGR APHY
DENNIS HOPPER
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DENNIS HOPPER
DENNIS HOPPER
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PA INTING
GIORGIO MOR ANDI
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JOHN A LTOON
JOHN A LTOON
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ED MOSES
ED MOSES
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JOHN MCL AUGHLIN
LIGHT A ND SPACE
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ROBERT IRWIN
MARY CORSE
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LADDIE JOHN DILL
FINISH FETISH
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JUDY CHICAGO
JOHN MCCR ACKEN
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RON DAV IS
LARRY BELL
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BILLY A L BENGSTON
BILLY A L BENGSTON
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POP
ED RUSCH A
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TONY BERLANT
TONY BERLANT
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DAV I D HOCK N E Y
A NDY WA RHOL
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CONCEPTUAL ART
ALLAN MCCOLLUM
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JOHN BALDESSARI
VIJA CELMINS
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BRUCE NAUM A N
JO BAER
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MICHAEL ASHER
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ASCENSORE
2,85
mq 10,98
E S
5,75
2,97
2,94 1,20
2,94 1,20
1,83
DISIMPEGNO mq 5,79 H 3,89
1,99
2,27
1,98
1,90 1,05
1,99
2,14
RIP. mq 4,86 H 3,03 H 7,13
N O
10,90
7,42
7,35
3,09 1,20
2,44 1,20
SALOTTO
mq 41,83
H 5,39
5,56
SALA
mq 40,81
5,53
SALA 5,54
5,58
5,47
5,51
mq 59,81 H 5,51
H 5,43
3,09 1,20
2,44 1,20
7,68
7,32
10,89
20,25
6,16
Corte - Giardino
2,42 1,25
SALA mq 125,67 6,17
mq 37,70
H 6,01 sotto trave
6,13
6,12
SALA
6,12
Canal Grande
3,17 1,30
H 6,28 sotto tavolato
H 5,57
mq 2,72
20,62 0,38
1,99
mq 1,84 1,62
mq 4,28
BAGNO mq 5,77 H 2,30
2,39
RIP. mq 4,02 H 1,93
3,4
1,71
5,86
1,77
2 1,1 8 0,9
4,13
1
0 1,4 0 0,8
6 2,0 5 1,0
1,23
6,82
4,71
6 2,0 5 1,0
2,05 1,16
1,33
1,09
2,44 1,20
BAGNO mq 4,64 H 2,31
2,05 1,13
3,88
1,32 0,69
0
1,94
DISIMPEGNO mq 10,45 H 3,23
7,85
2,6
2 1,1 7 0,9
0,9
RIP. mq 3,45 H 3,04
1 5,9
2,43 1,21
1,34
WC mq 2,34
2,57
H 3,35
6,25
H 3,42
H 5,56
0,85
mq 26,42 5,97
5,91
5,86
STANZA
mq 40,51
0,73
0,88
STANZA
mq 45,38
OFFICE mq 4,05 H 2,80
3,97
0,71
CAMERA
PIANO PRIMO NOBILE
1,32 0,85
Rio S. Trovaso
E S N O
Canal Grande
PARTE NON RILEVATA PER PRESENZA CANTIERE
1,82 4,62 7,71
1,18 1,15
6,70
2,28
2,96
MAGAZZINO
4,76
H 2,76 sotto trave MAGAZZINO
H 2,93 tavolato
5,70
H 2,65 sotto trave
5,92
H 2,78
5,80
5,69
MAGAZZINO
3,62
H 2,89 tavolato
4,51
4,15
H 2,71 sotto trave
H 2,85 tavolato
0 6,4
4,00
1,00
1,26
1,25
1,25
1,05 4,62
4,02
Rio S. Trovaso
1,01 0,95
1,88
1,15
0,94
1 1,0 5 0,9
1,55
1,04
10,34
0,37
1,20
1,69
1 1,0 5 0,9
1,18 1,15
1,21
5,17
1,65
2,44 1,20
1,12
6,82
2,98
3,76
2,49
7,64
1,12 0,95
6,16
1,15
2,42 1,21
1,12 0,95
2,44 1,32
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VENUE
PALAZZO ROCCA
PA L A ZZO FORTUNY
G I A R DI N I >>
PA L A ZZO GRASSI
PA L A ZZO ROCCA PUNTA DELLA DOGANA
ZATTERE
Palazzo Rocca was built in 1765 by Baron La Rocca. It sits on the Gran Canale in the Dorsoduro section of Venice. Located near the Accademia, the Zattere, Palazzo Fortuny, Palazzo Grazzi and the Dogana, it is particularly well placed for a highly visible and publicized venture during the Biennale. Unveiled for the first time after a renovation of 10 years, Venice in Venice will be the Palazzo's inaugural exhibit
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“ W E A R E A LL A MUSEMENT PA R KS. THE TEMPTATIONS WE OFFER DIFFER WITH WHOM WE ENCOUNTER. ARE WE ACQUAINTANCES OR FRIENDS? FRIENDS OR ROMANTICS? DO W E KNOW EACH OTHER AT A LL?”
UNKNOWN
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“FA NTA STIC A RCHITECTURE WHICH THE REPUBLIC PRESENTED TO THE REVERENT GAZE OF A PPROACHING SE A FA RERS: THE WEIGHTLESS SPLENDOR OF T HE PA L ACE...”
THOMAS MANN, DEATH IN VENICE
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MARCO
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POLO
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“A N A PPE A R A NCE OF T H E DE V I L ON A VENICE CANAL. RUNNING, I SAW A SATA N OR SATYR, MOVING BESIDE ME.....”
JIM MORRISON
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“CREA KING W HERE A HOUSE WAS BURNED: DUST AND ASHES, DEAD AND DONE WITH, VENICE SPENT W HAT VENICE EARNED. THE SOUL, DOUBTLESS, IS IMMORTAL —W HER E A SOU L C A N BE DISCER NED.”
ROBERT BROWNING
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EDWA RD RUSCH A
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EDOARDO ROCCA
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PAST SHOWS
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PRIMARY ATMOSPHERES CURATED BY TIM NYE W INNER OF ROB PRUITT'S
2010
A RT AWA RDS
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SWELL CURATED BY TIM NYE & JACQUELINE MIEO
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PRESS
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NEW YORK TIMES
ARTIST AND SURFER AS BEST BUDDIES BY ROBERTA SMITH
The exuberant three-gallery exhibition “Swell” is one of the Big Kahunas of the season’s group shows. Its requisite summertime theme is surfing, which runs wider and deeper than most, encompassing an array of visual material and several familiar characters, namely the American male as renegade and good buddy. The show, which sprawls throughout the Chelsea spaces of Nyehaus, the Friedrich Petzel Gallery and Metro Pictures, spans more than half a century, from the 1950s to the present. In addition to scores of artworks it contains about two dozen surf boards, along with photographs, posters and other artifacts. Of the nearly 80 individuals whose efforts are represented here, fewer than 10 are women. This statistic reflects a significant lack of imagination, considering that a lot of the work here is merely vaguely oceanic. Nonetheless the show, which has been organized by Tim Nye of Nyehaus and Jacqueline Miro, an architect, urbanist and surfer, in concert with the staffs at Petzel and Metro Pictures, is ecumenical in other ways. At the core of “Swell” is an excellent show that helpfully sets postwar Los Angeles art against a broader canvas of surfing, beachcombing and car and drug culture. But the key was surfing, with which art at that time shared both a rebel spirit and certain technologies borrowed from the airplane industry.
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It adds both the Beat Generation assemblage of the 1950s and works by lesser-known artists to the more canonical history of the seductive highgloss Finish Fetish sculptures and reliefs and the environmental “Light and Space” installation pieces that flourished in Los Angeles in the 1960s and ’70s. These last two movements were shown off this year in splendid isolation in “Primary Atmospheres,” a pristine show at Nyehaus and the David Zwirner Gallery; 7 of the 10 artists in that show are represented here, sometimes by the same work.
tus, including copies of the magazine for which it is named. It suggests a suite of boxes by a beachcombing Joseph Cornell. On the opposite wall Ashley Bickerton (a serious surfer who forsook New York—and the Neo-Geo style for which he was known—for Bali in 1993) combines assemblage with his own version of finish fetish. The result is “Jack Blaylock” (2001), a hyper-real portrait of what appears to be an aging, drug-ravaged surfer rendered on a giant piece of gorgeously finished wood that is festooned with bits of driftwood and surf-tossed footwear. The Los Angeles painter Ed Moses offers a palmtreed and beaded folding screen from this year, while works from the 1960s show Tony Berlant using painted tin to more or less obliterate the lines separating collage, assemblage and quilting. Recent works by Fred Tomaselli, a Brooklyn artist who kayaks the waters of the New York region, build images from cut-up magazines, marijuana leaves and pills. Works from the ’60s by Wallace Berman and from the last decade by Robert Dean Stockwell and David Lloyd, another surfer-artist, contribute to the recycling effect, while Ed Ruscha chills everything out with a 1984 field of saffron vapors on which the words “Polynesian Sickness” float.
But “Swell” has more grit, broader margins, more mess. And it evokes more fully the lost innocence of the time before the art world got big and before surfing—the beautiful sport, if not game—became wildly popular and then turned professional. Unfortunately the show often loses its focus as approaches the present, adding recent works by some of the older artists and several more by younger ones—including a few from New York and Europe— that are only tangentially pertinent. Each gallery’s presentation is different in terms of arrangement, clarity and ratio of older to newer work. A good place to start is Metro Pictures, where the past holds sway, and the historical progression is laid out in distinct segments. In the first space various forms of assemblage dominate, most forthrightly in George Herms’s 1973 “Scientific American,” a large grid of old shelves filled with all manner of detri-
The overlap of art and surfing is most evident in the style and craft that permeates the second gallery at Metro, where one wall is lined with gleaming surfboards made over the last 50 years.
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The more austere are the work of wellknown surfers who also excelled at the aerodynamic art of board shaping like Herbie Fletcher, Joel Tudor, Matt Kivlin and Donald Takayama.
whose work was largely unknown until recently. She contributes a smoky blue sphere inset with clear polyester resin that conjures up the tube, or interior volume, of a giant wave. Recent photographs by Roe Ethridge and Catherine Opie capture real surfaces in action and on the beach.
The gaudier boards have been decorated by artists like Peter Alexander, Raymond Pettibon and Charles Arnoldi, although Jim Ganzer contributes a relatively sinister gray board that resembles a hammerhead shark. A 2004 board decorated by the street artist Barry McGee’s reminds us that surfing spawned a landlocked cousin, skateboarding.
In the upstairs space contemporary works by Mary Heilmann, Jay Batlle, Ned Evans, Blake Rayne and Thaddeus Strode harmonize one way or another with earlier pieces by Mr. McCracken, Mr. Goode and Sister Mary Corita. At Petzel things tilt toward contemporary with appropriately watery or druggy paintings and drawings from the last decade by Bill Komoski, Jeff Lewis, Cameron Martin, Wolfgang Bloch and Robert Longo, and a 2009-10 chunk of black (oil-tinted?) ocean in cast polyester resin by Alex Weinstein. A late-’80s video by Gary Hill provides intermittent surf sounds.
Several Finish Fetish paintings, wall reliefs and sculptures from the 1960s and ’70s attest to the absorption of surf-board materials and techniques —cast fiberglass, resins, high-gloss finishes, and luminous monochromes— by art. Note the fabulous confluence of streamlined forms in various shades of red and egg-yolk yellow by DeWain Valentine, Billy Al Bengston, John McCracken and Craig Kauffman. Especially striking is a yellow surfboard from 2006, shaped by the surfer Mike Hynson with a cherry red fin in translucent resin provided by Mr. Tudor.
Blasts from the past include an edgeto-edge drawing of waves from 1970 by Vija Celmins; a marvelous “painting” of grafted sticks from 1974 by Mr. Arnoldi that is the ultimate in driftwood elegance; surfing cartoons from the late ’60s by Robert Williams, Jim Evans and R. Crumb. A 2001 greenish flourish in painted ceramic by Ken Price, one of the more accomplished artist-surfers, evokes both a hand and a wave represents the Finish Fetish generation, as do a cluster of surfboards by Mr. Fletcher from around 1970.
Things turn atmospheric in the third space at Metro, where various examples of ’60s-era Light and Space art include the glass boxes of Larry Bell, a wedge of cast polyester by Mr. Alexander, an odd canvas-on-canvas collage by Joe Goode and cast-resin reliefs and sculptures in shades of blue by Helen Pashgian,
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The three largest replicate the shapes boards used by Hawaiian kings: surfing was originally a royal sport. But the boards’ red, black and gold militaristic designs reflects the fact that G.I.’s stationed in the Pacific during World War II were among the first Americans to surf. Mr. Bickerton is represented by a transitional nonNeo-Geo sculpture from 1993: a tall sinuous pedestal of Bali coral with a miniature tent on top. A series of color photographs by Rob Reynolds in the last two years pays tribute to the customized cars of Los Angeles in a dead-pan manner of Mr. Ruscha’s 1960s images of things L.A.
Elsewhere five drawings by Mr. Pettibon iterate the obsession with waves signaled by his wave-covered surfboard at Metro Pictures. Peter Dayton turns the stripes typical of surfboards into a large painting on paper (2008), where they make for a slightly eccentric form of Pop-abstraction. And John Van Hamersveld’s 2003 silkscreen of his well-known poster for Bruce Brown’s 1966 surfing documentary “The Endless Summer” recalls the moment when the sport truly went global. This exhibition demonstrates the rich and complicated entwining of art and surfing—two physically demanding disciplines with both fetishistic and mystical aspects. In general it affirms that art is always a reflection of the environment that produces it. In particular, it demonstrates once again that where postwar art is concerned, the East Coast still has much to learn about the West.
At Nyehaus, where the show is ensconced in the gallery’s somewhat decrepit town house, funkiness reigns, as does a certain documentary aesthetic. Black-and-white photographs by Bud Browne and Craig Stecyk fully convey the solitude, skill and risk of surfing. One by Mr. Stecyk, from around 1968, shows Miki Dora nonchalantly upright on a speeding board. Mr. Ganzer contributes some equally relaxed photographs of artists like Mr. Bell, Mr. Price and Laddie John Dill, who is represented at Nyehaus by a recent example of the sand and neon installation pieces he has made since the late 1960s. This work shares a darkened gallery with iridescent paintings on velvet from 1975 and 1984 by Mr. Alexander and a decidedly non-fetish-finish wall piece in banged-up aluminum by Mr. Bengston, from 1970-71.
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NEW YORK TIMES
AFTER THE INTERNET, THERE’S ALWAYS ART BY ALEX WILLIAMS
T I M N Y E,
the bon vivant, Park Avenue heir and Chelsea gallery owner, has a theory about art openings. “You’ve got to do something that makes them say ‘Wow.’” By that standard, the festivities for Swell, a three-gallery exhibition on surfinginspired art that opened last month, lived up to expectations. This was no typical art opening, in a windowless white box with chablis in plastic cups. Instead, the post-opening party crammed 250 scruffy artists, well-dressed buyers and art world insiders onto a 108-foot wooden Turkish sailing yacht moored on the Hudson River. A live band thundered funk-inflected free jams, while kegs flowed. The artist Norton Wisdom created a “live painting” on a sheet of translucent vellum illuminated by stage lights. Always near the center of the action, sporting a broad mustache and chin puff, was Mr. Nye. “People are so jaded,” he said, shouting over the band while he leaned against the port railing. “You have to make it a happening.” That seems to be his specialty. But Mr. Nye is not your usual scion of a New York real estate fortune, going about town, quietly sprinkling money around art fairs and museum
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boards. He has always tended to make big professional statements. In the 1990s, he earned millions of his own, as a high- flying dot-com entrepreneur, when the Web was in its unprofitable infancy.
ist John Altoon featured an Armenian feast—a nod to Mr. Altoon’s origins— and belly dancers. “It’s much more a whole evening built around art,” Mr. Nye, who is now 44, said the other day, sprawled across a sofa in his West Village town house, which he also moved to last year. He wore pink corduroy pants and a T-shirt, taking drags on an American Spirit cigarette amid halfempty wine and cognac bottles from a dinner party the night before.
And when it comes to the arts, Mr. Nye is more interested in nurturing an art scene, and creating a space for artists and benefactors to intermingle, than in just amassing a collection. In 1991, he founded the Thread Waxing Space, a contemporary-art gallery and performance site in SoHo that once featured a collaboration between Beck and his grandfather Al Hansen, a noted Fluxus artist.
“I was always interested in showing art in a more domestic environment,” he added. “It’s more fun to see art in a way you might live with it if you bought it.” As he spoke, a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig, Wally, which belongs to his 9-year-old daughter, Moppy, tapped its hooves across the floor, which was “painted” with colored vinyl tape in a rainbow pop-art geometric pattern by the artist Jim Lambie.
These days, however, he is focusing his considerable resources on Nyehaus, a gallery he started in 2002 at the venerable National Arts Club, in a Gothic Revival mansion in Gramercy Park where Mr. Nye also maintained a duplex apartment. In addition to showcasing mid-career artists, Mr. Nye incorporated live music. Past performers include Rufus Wainwright and Laurie Anderson.
Life seems good for Mr. Nye these days, but it’s a far cry from his high-tech days, when he seemed poised to become one of Silicon Alley’s breakout moguls, a Mark Cuban of the city’s very own.
Mr. Nye left the club last year to be closer to the Chelsea art scene and moved the gallery to a four-story brownstone on West 20th Street, which functions as much as a clubhouse for art friends as a commercial gallery.
His most promising venture was SonicNet, a pioneering online bulletin board that grew into a kind of one-stop shopping site for all things alt-rock, offering music news, chats with artists, CDs for sale, Internet radio, and even some downloadable music, years before iTunes.
Nyehaus events are usually invitationonly, rare for the art world. Many are thematic sit-down dinners for up to 100 guests, including serious collectors. A dinner in May in honor of the late art-
Even then, he never veered far from the arts. Among his many side projects,
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he leased a former vaudeville house on Houston Street with plans to open it as the Sunshine Theater and stream live shows there over SonicNet. (When his company failed to secure a liquor license, the concert hall became a cineplex, which Mr. Nye maintains a stake in today.)
rather than cultivating a stable of artists. During the last year, he has narrowed his curatorial focus to a collection of California minimalists and assemblage artists from the 1960s, including Larry Bell, Ed Moses and Billy Al Bengston, who coalesced around the legendary Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles.
In 1998, he started Alltrue.com, a Web site that allowed users to freely upload any videos—seven years before YouTube. “I wanted to create Nye-a-com,” Mr. Nye said.
The Ferus artists already have their place in art history, the subject of a recent documentary, “The Cool School,” and were featured in a 2006 retrospective at the Pompidou Center in Paris. But the scene was largely ignored by East Coast critics and collectors in its heyday, Mr. Nye said, so he is working to advance their reputation by collecting their work, organizing shows and spreading the word among his wellheeled and plugged-in circle of friends.
He wasn’t completely joking. His grandfather, Harold Uris, and great-uncle Percy amassed one of the city’s great postwar real estate fortunes, building skyscrapers in the 1950s and ’60s. Mr. Nye’s own empire, however, never quite came together, in part because many of his ideas were premature.
That also means more boozy, laughterfilled dinner parties. He started renting a small complex of cottages on Electric Avenue in Los Angeles, which he travels to twice a month, and invites artists affiliated with Ferus, now in their 70s, to socialize in his garden. “It became a whole project to rebuild a community and relaunch a movement,” he said.
To be fair, some of his ventures did end up making a fortune—just not for him. In 1997, Mr. Nye and his partners sold SonicNet for $35 million, he said. Not bad, until you consider that two years later, SonicNet was a centerpiece of a deal between a subsequent buyer and MTV Networks that some analysts at the time valued at more than 10 times that amount. The prince of the city’s tech geeks looked like the King of Coulda.
Yes, the stakes are lower than they were in the tech world. “It’s not a billiondollar idea, like SonicNet,” he said. But so is the pressure.
Looking back, Mr. Nye said that he spread himself too thin—a lesson he is now trying to apply to his gallery. Until recently, for example, he curated each show as a oneoff, reflecting his enthusiasm of the day,
Mr. Nye, after all, missed out on multimillions in his tech career, thanks largely to bad timing. But in the art world, he said, you “create your own timing.”
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THE NEW YORKER
WAY OUT WEST BY PETER SCHJELDAHL
about “Primary Atmospheres: Works from California 1960-1970” at the David Zwirner gallery. A splendid show at the David Zwirner gallery, of California minimalism, mostly from the late nineteen-sixties, revisits an apotheosis of the continental divide. A tiny art community in L.A. absorbed influences of triumphant New York minimalism—the stringent simplicities of Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, et al.—and responded with forms and ideas that were so distinctive it was as if the movement had been reborn to more indulgent parents. Most of the four-decade-old works at Zwirner feel as fresh as this morning. Discusses Larry Bell’s glass boxes. They are as obvious as furniture and as dreamy as whatever mood you’re in. Not only elegant, they precipitate a feeling of elegance: ease, suavity, cool. Discusses work by Craig Kauffman, Peter Alexander, John McCracken, and Laddie John Dill. This brings us to Robert Irwin, James Turrell, and Doug Wheeler. Turrell is famous, and much beloved, for installations that induce sublime spatial illusions with colored light alone. All three men can seem as much pragmatic neuroscientists as conventional artists. They play with visual precepts—the fleeting formations in the brain that summarize vision on the verge of consciousness. A B S T R AC T: T H E A R T W OR L D
(Excerpt from The New Yorker)
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BIOGRAPHIES
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BIOGR APHY
TIMOTHY U. NYE
Tim Nye’s first commercial venture into media was the music web site SonicNet, which he founded in 1994. Now owned by MTV, the award-winning SonicNet became synonymous with online music. Earlier in his career, Nye set out to create a venue for a diverse network of artists and founded Tread Waxing Space, a leading art gallery and performance space in NYC. Under its new name, Foundation 20 21, Nye continues as its Chairman and directs its mission to build a world-class collection of contemporary art. In 1994, Nye secured the real estate rights to a defunct Yiddish Vaudeville Theater on Houston Street and turned it into a 5 screen art-house cinema. Landmark's Sunshine theater has been one of the most successful art-house cinemas in the country. Nye founded Sunshine Amalgamedia, Inc. in 1995, a multi-disciplined entertainment company that developed and produced feature films and TV and provided award winning technology and web development services to a distinguished clientele. Sunshine Amalgamedia, Inc. still has many active investments in the entertainment and media industries. Nye sits on the board of The New Museum, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Bomb Magazine. Additionally, he serves on the New Technology Committee of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Nye received a BA in art history in 1988 from Cornell University and was a Whitney Fellow in the Independent Curatorial Study Program at the Whitney Museum in New York City. In 1991, he received an MBA from Columbia University.
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BIOGR APHY
JACQUELINE MIRO
Jacqueline Miro was born in San Salvador, El Salvador. After attending Middlesex Boarding School—with Swell co-curator and Nyehaus owner Tim Nye—she studied architecture at Tulane University in New Orleans, La., where she obtained a Masters in architecture. She moved back to El Salvador and worked for the ministry of public works. In 1995, Miro moved to Paris where she got her Masters in urban policies at the Ecole Nationale des Ponds et Chaussees and joined Association Peripheriques. Upon returning to New York, she completed the Whitney Independent Studies Program and opened her design and architecture firm. Amongst her clients are a variety of restaurants, galleries and residences. Miro co-curates and continues to host the popular lecture series "Engaging the City," which focuses on urban issues around the world. Guests speakers have included Antony Vidler, Manuel de Landa, Vito Acconci, and many others. She has now joined forces with friend Tim Nye in recreating a brand for Nyehaus, editing books and catalogues, and most importantly, curating larger shows.
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