VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040

Billy Al Bengston Press Packet VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040

10 / 01 / 2014 “Billy Al Bengston” by Prudence Peiffer VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040 VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040

05 / 18 / 2001 “ART IN REVIEW; Billy Al Bengston -- ‘Dentos and Draculas, 1968-1973’ ” by Grace Glueck

Danese

41 East 57th Street, Manhattan

Through next Friday

The painter Billy Al Bengston, one of the Los Angeles ''car culture'' stars of the 1960's and 70's, was among the first to ditch traditional oil paint on canvas, opting instead for sprayed layers of automobile lacquer on aluminum in soft colors, achieving a highly reflective, translucent surface. He was also among the first to assert an artistic identity in terms of the ''low'' pursuit of macho sports. (He was once a semi-professional motorcycle racer.)

His Pop-ish icons combined Color Field abstraction with commonplace and commercial imagery. In his first exhibition in New York in 18 years, Mr. Bengston shows a small group of works from 1968 through 1973 to which he gave the titles ''Dentos'' and ''Draculas.'' In the ''Dentos,'' a military chevron takes dead center place; in the ''Draculas,'' the central motif is the silhouetted shape of an iris, lifted from the logo on Iris brand sugar packets. Its petals, apparently, fancifully evoked the image of Count Dracula in flight.

Some of the paintings bear marks from a hammer beating, a rough touch of the street imposed on the dreamy, shiny surfaces built up of layered colors. In ''Flying Leatherneck'' (1969), for example, a brilliant white chevron sits on a ground composed of glossy diagonal brown bands edged in gray. But the well- mannered surface is roiled by a short row of rivetlike indentations beneath the chevron.

A few of the paintings depart from the rather rigid format of the centered icon: in ''Rio Grande'' (1969), four streamlined orange shapes converge on a cross-shaped delta of watery green. It's a winner. The show reminds you that Mr. Bengston's works, though slightly over the hill, have hung on to their virility. VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040

01 / 19 / 2017 “Moses, Ruscha, Bell, Bengston: Backstage with the Cool School of artists, cooler than ever” by Deborah Vankin

“I know it’s planned a little late, but we could have some vegetable soup in our mouths and then all throw up at the same time,” Ruscha says.

Bengston and Bell unleash a round of comic sound effects. “Blech.” “Cough.” “Blahh.” “Yuuuk.”

It’s the kind of long-simmered camaraderie that comes from six decades of friendship. The men were among the renegade, experimental artists at the storied in the 1950s It’s dark backstage as artists Ed Moses, Ed and ’60s. They were known almost as much for Ruscha, Larry Bell and Billy Al Bengston get their raucous, hard-partying ways as for their miked up to appear before a packed house at the exploration of minimalism, abstraction and Pop Broad Stage in Santa Monica. The glow of house art. Hence the nickname the Cool School. lights seeps in from the stage wings and the audible bustle of audience members settling into The men, who are still prolific and regularly their seats fills the tiny backstage nook. Pre-show attend one another’s openings, have reunited suspense hangs in the air. for “Artists Talk: L.A. Legends,” the inaugural event in a two-year series at the Broad Stage. The The four artists, however, are nothing if not series, co-organized by Sotheby's Institute of Art- relaxed. Moses, now 90, zips around in his Los Angeles and executive produced by gallerist wheelchair sputtering “toot-toot” sounds while William Turner, presents artists discussing the 82-year-old Bengston, in a floral-patterned jeans past and present of the L.A. scene. Robert Irwin, jacket and felt fedora tilted over one eye, cracks a core member of the Cool School, was supposed one-liners: “Gotta have sound effects,” he quips to appear Wednesday night but couldn’t because to Moses. Then: “Don’t step on my feet!” Chit- of a back problem. chatting and ribbing one another, the men more closely resemble a posse of teen boys hanging Backstage, an audio engineer hovers over Bell, on a street corner awaiting a bus rather than art adjusting his headset microphone. legends waiting to address about 500 friends and fans. “Larry, you’re losing your jawline,” Bengston teases, nodding to the mike-wire that now cuts “If you feel like you’re about to throw up, save it across Bell’s face. for the stage,” Ruscha, 79, jokes, leaning back on a folding chair, chuckling. “That’d be so great if we “Jaw?” Bell asks. could all throw up on cue, you know?” “You know, I’ve never thrown up in my life?” says “Line,” Ruscha clarifies, before adding: “Oh, we Bell, 77. “This could be a first.” all shoulda just thrown up.” VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040

When the men finally walk out on stage, they’re “They were $100 apiece,” he yells out. “But Andy met with vigorous applause from a crowd that’s would get half of that!” thick with celebrities and art world figures: Frank Gehry, Doug Aitken, Maria Shriver, James What was the draw about working in gallery- Franco, Los Angeles County Museum of Art sparse, collector-thin Los Angeles back in the ’50s Director Michael Govan, and philanthropists Eli and ’60s? and Edythe Broad, to name a few. “All of us wanted to make a contribution of some The hour-long talk that follows, moderated by kind,” Bengston says. “We didn’t need museums, art critic Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, touches on galleries. … We didn’t [care] what anyone else the early days of L.A.’s contemporary art scene said.” and Ferus Gallery co-founders and , as well as the artists’ “We thought we were great too,” Moses chimes in. own journeys to Ferus; their mutual respect for watercolor teacher Irwin at the Chouinard Art “Well, we were!” Bengston says. “I’d say everyone Institute (“Bob’s strength was in conveying a sitting here was fantastic.” To which the audience sense of how one trusts oneself,” Bell says); and erupted in applause. their respective day jobs as aspiring creatives and how those experiences influenced their work. As the crowd files out of the auditorium, Blum (Bell worked in a frame shop where he learned to stands still, facing the now empty stage. cut glass, and Bengston raced motorcycles where he developed an affection for the airbrushing “I knew them all when they were in their teens technique.) and 20s. And to see them now…” he says. “Wow, they’re geriatric now! But so am I. I couldn’t be Ruscha recalls personalizing 300-some gift items prouder.” a day, things like birdhouses or ceramic false teeth holders called “Ma and Pa Chopper Hoppers.” At a small post-show reception, fellow artist Peter (“I just remember painting the name John John Alexander greets Bell, now snug in a puffy red ski many times,” he says.) The conversation traverses jacket. surprise studio visits, like the day 22-year-old Bell found Marcel Duchamp standing on his doorstep. “A little stiff in the beginning, but hey, it got “I sort of threw myself back against the wall. … going,” Alexander says to him. This legend was there in my studio,” Bell says. “It was fun, it was fun,” Bell says. “That’s the Compliments and affectionate ribbing ensue. “You point, right?” are a great artist,” Moses tells Bengston. “You have the ability, when something isn’t working, to make it worse!”

At one point, the group debates how much Andy Warhol’s soup can prints sold for in a 1962 Ferus exhibition. Twenty-five bucks apiece? $50?

Suddenly, Irving Blum, who took Kienholz’s place as co-owner at Ferus in 1958, stands up in the crowd. VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040

01 / 15 / 2016 “Pay Attention Motherfuckers —Artist Billy Al Bengston in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Alex Israel”

Because California painter Billy Al Bengston has a AI: It makes you thinner. I stopped eating carbs and passion for motorbikes, he uses spray paint instead sweets. In May, I had to cast my body for a sculpture of oil for his paintings. The pithy painter, who has also that I’m making and I wanted to look fit. worked as a stuntman, has become one of the most HUO: Alex, where is this sculpture now? important West Coast artists of AI: In Walla Walla, Washington. the last decades with his colorful I’m still working on it. I’m not floral paintings. In an interview done. with Hans-Ulrich Obrist and HUO: Billy, do you do all of your artist Alex Israel, he explains why work here in your studio? he considers Marcel Duchamp a BAB: Yes, I do it here and deceiver and how he got Barnett everything with watercolors in Newman to never talk to him Hawaii. I have nothing but a again. good life. HUO: How did it all start? Was A home visit at Bengston’s house in there an epiphany with your art? Venice, California. It is lunchtime. BAB: I just realized that I am Several people are visiting and better than everybody else. No, lunch is about to be served. it really happened with Greek American sculptor Peter Voulkos Hans-Ulrich Obrist: Billy, (1924 - 2002), who was my teacher you were friends with the great in ceramics at the Los Angeles American curator Walter Hopps Art Institute, (now OTIS). I did (1932 - 2005). one year with him and then I was Billy Al Bengston: Yes, of course. confident enough to realize I He was brilliant, so smart. would never be as good as him HUO: Hopps was super at ceramics. But I knew I could important for me as a young be a better painter, so I said, I’m curator; he gave me courage, energy. We spent a day out of this fucking game. Everybody at that time came [together] in Houston, I felt transformed. out of Peter. BAB: When Walter Hopps opened the Ferus Gallery HUO: Peter Voulkos is almost like the prehistory to in Los Angeles in 1957, it was really fun because it was what happened afterwards in L.A. Is he famous here? an artist’s gallery. It was definitely not for money. BAB: Not really. Ceramics was a laughing sport. It was ruled by a group of morons. Pete came in and he was Bengston’s wife enters the room and serves home so intimidating that he had to leave because the only cooked pasta made by Billy. people who could talk to him were his students. HUO: Who else were his students besides you? Alex Israel: Billy, this is delicious I had a really BAB: Ken Price and John Mason. Pete didn’t teach. long no carbs period. Then I went to Rome in June, He just came in and worked everyday and we watched and I couldn’t resist the pasta. him and we stole everything we could from him BAB: Why wouldn’t you eat carbs? I never understood artistically by copying him. He picked a group of this. students who would be in the inner circle, Ken and VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040

I happened to be in that circle. He was totally terrible mistake—according to my thinking, the box nocturnal. Pete phoned at 11pm and said, come on replaced the signature. It’s a serious mistake to put over, we’ll make some clay. He had a huge bread signatures on things, unless your name is Salvador mixer and we started to make a ton of clay around Dali or Picasso. They designed their signatures and midnight and finished at 4am. Then we took massive they look beautiful. loads of clay out to his studio and used about 100 HUO: You never sign you work? pounds a day to make balls and cups. At 7am we BAB: I do it on a drawing. On paintings it looks like all went to have breakfast across the street and Peter graffiti. I always figure that the easiest thing to dois paid. Then school would start and we all went to bed. copy a signature. HUO: What would you consider to be your first mature HUO: Alex, do you sign your works? works? AI: On the back. We stamp them too. BAB: I don’t judge myself. I think I HUO: Billy, you never signed your am still very immature. I don’t have works in the past? any favorites. If I don’t like it, I throw BAB: I did but it is a mistake. I that shit away. My ego is stupid, realized it one day when I was talking sometimes I look around and say, to Barnett Newman. He was talking oh shit, I have to throw all this stuff about his monochrome paintings that away. are painted completely in one color. HUO: How much has the I asked, what about that squashed motorcycling subculture been lizard in the corner. He said, what do influential to you? you mean? I replied, well that black BAB: I made my living racing thing on the corner, which was his motorcycles. I went to work one signature. This was the only thing day a week in summer from 7:30 I could see, because it was the only -9:30pm and I made enough money thing that was a different color. to live from it for three weeks. I broke HUO: What did Newman say? my back just before my 30th birthday BAB: He didn’t speak to me and I race quite a bit afterwards, but I after that. But he stopped signing wasn’t as good, my ego wouldn’t take them. I think the New Yorkers it. There is a big difference between were so far behind us compared to being first and fourth. Ed Ruscha California. We didn’t have to worry used to ride down Baja, California, about selling things. We couldn’t all the time. We did books and bikes sell anything so it didn’t make any together. We were asshole buddies form way back. difference. HUO: How did you meet each other? HUO: You were free? BAB: We met in Los Angeles after he got out of BAB: The difference is, in New York people would talk Choinard. to you in the older days and say, what gallery are you HUO: So you had these activities like motorcycle racing with? To me, if you are with a gallery that means that and at the same time you did your art, for example your you are a hired hand, just an employee. flower paintings. HUO: You think that was the advantage of California? BAB: I started painting the Draculas, the paintings BAB: Yes, the advantage was, at that time it was a close with the centrally placed flower. They are called circle of artists, very competitive and very supportive. Draculas because Ken Price walked into my studio and Then it became a commercial situation like in New said, hmmm, looks like ‘The Count’ is flying through the York. window. Ken and I were fans of Bela Lugosi, who played HUO: Did that happen when Walter Hopps went out? Count Dracula in the early Dracula movies. He said BAB: Irving Blum changed the game. He was always that because I had boxes around the images, they looking to New York. He didn’t know any other system looked like windows. The main reason for this is a as he was from New York, born in Arizona, with a full VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040

Cary Grant accent. BAB: I did it right—that’s all. I painted the floor HUO: Frank Gehry said for years I should meet you. all yellow and blurred the edges so it looked like a AI: Frank Gehry designed an installation for your shag rug and changed the lights to pink and yellow. exhibition at the Lost Angeles County Museum of Art That was the only exhibition I designed in its entirety. in 1968, right? Most people are afraid of what I do. BAB: He designed the architecture and I modified it, HUO: Is it true that you met Marcel Duchamp? then he redesigned it and I modified it again. I put a BAB: Yes. Walter Hopps introduced him to me. couch, chairs, tables and floor lamps in and dismantled I think Duchamp is a total fraud. I liked him as a the overhead lights. He made everything crooked by person. I just think he is a fraud. He did more damage “deconstructing” it. When I told Frank I wanted furniture than god damn any other person did to the art world. he went out to one of these places that rent out terrible His work allowed art teachers to be stupid and even furniture you can’t stand to look at. I had a hissy fit stupider people to be stupid. Everybody accepted ready- and Frank took it out. I got my truck and went mades as art, which I don’t believe they are. I think he around and borrowed everyone’s was a pretty good chess player. furniture. I had Ed Ruscha’s casting HUO: How did you then bring all of couch and I put another couch in one these new materials into your work, room that I knew the guards would e.g. in the 60s you worked with be in so they could sit on their asses. Polyurethane. How did that happen? I put a TV stand in there too. Before BAB: It happened because I’m black people were being hired by practical. Oil paint is real shit. the city, I made friends with the It is pigment mixed up in salad Black Panthers so I put a room full dressing. It dries out, cracks and it of Black Panthers posters in the falls off. The pigments are good but show. I even stayed in the museum the binder is terrible. At the time during the night and slept on the I was working at the motorcycle couch. I had access to the museum. shop [using] spray lacquer and AI: Who invited you to do the thought — this is a much better exhibition? material I tested it myself, so I BAB: I curated it, but Maurice painted the tank of my motorcycle Tuchman instigated it. The best thing one with oil paint, the other one with that came out of the museum was lacquer. The lacquer painting lasted a sideshow from Horace Clifford Westermann from two seasons; the oil painting lasted for only one race. Chicago. Maurice came over and asked me, do you HUO: In the 80s you made these paintings called want to meet H.C. Westermann? I ran over to the other “Clowns and Mummies”. How did that serious come room and Westermann looked at me. He had this about? way of greeting everyone. He stuck his hand straight BAB: I have always been a stargazer. I looked up to out and he had this big meet hook. He was just rippling the moon and I thought, what is the corniest thing you muscles everywhere. I got very close to his hand and could do? So I painted clowns. I was just tired of doing then I did a stunt in front of him and fell flat on the the same old shit, so I changed. I don’t have any reason floor. He was laughing. At the opening we entered the for doing anything. I just do it. museum together on our hands. Both of us went up the HUO: Art happens­­— as the American painter James stairs on our hands. We became good friends. Whistler said. AI: Billy, you designed H.C. Westermann’s exhibition BAB: I just do it. at MOCA in 2000, right? HUO: Hedi Slimane chose works by you for his BAB: Yes, and I did a damn good job. 2015 Men’s Spring/Summer collection. HUO: Westermann wasn’t alive anymore at that time. BAB: They made a publication too. What did you do for the show? HUO: When you do your paintings do you sketch or VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040 draw? world of poetry never changes. There is no market:it is BAB: No, never. I know what I am doing. exactly how it always used to be. HUO: What are you working on now? BAB: I always dreaded the fact that my daughter might BAB: I am not doing a damn thing. I haven’t done become a poet, it is the only real fucked profession. anything since I came back from Hawaii two weeks ago. HUO: Did she become one? I don’t know what I am going to do next. I am afraid to BAB: Not [even] close. Fortunately, I have never start because I get involved and I just can’t get out. figured out what she became. Close second was HUO: Did you work there? dancing. I think she is going to work with horses. BAB: Yes, I was there for two months. I don’t have reproductions of the watercolors. I did there. In fact, Hans-Ulrich Obrist and a few others leave the table, to I don’t like reproductions. It is not the real thing. see some of Bengston’s work that is spread throughout It is like talking about fucking. It’s fun but it doesn’t the house. Billy and Alex continue chatting about dogs. work. HUO: Do you have an unrealized project? Dreams, BAB: I don’t like many dogs, only ones with a white utopias, lost competitions? face. BAB: No. I am not interested. AI: You are a dog racist. If somebody volunteers with BAB: Yes, I like to be able to see a great idea, sure, I will play. I the eyes and the mouth. I can live don’t know what I would like to with it, if the face is white with do. If I knew I would do it. For a a bit of brown. I used to get my while I wanted to build a studio, dogs from Perfect Pet Finders. but now I never want to do that. I told them I want a dog that It has to do with age. If I do it fits in a shoebox, it can’t have myself, I will fall of the perch a sloppy face and preferably before I finish. does not shit (laughing). AI: At least you know how to AI: I just need a dog that won’t stunt-fall, safely. give me an allergic reaction. BAB: I will fall quietly and BAB: So you got a poodle type? permanently. AI: Yes, he’s half poodle and HUO: Have you done public art projects? half cocker spaniel. I call him Mr. Brown. BAB: Yes and they are all terrible. BAB: That’s an unfortunate combination. I bred cocker HUO: How can we see them? spaniels for a while. When I was in junior high school I BAB: Drive by. I don’t know what they look like. They bred them for money. are probably faded and fucked up. No, the only person AI: In your hometown in Kansas? who made it halfway successful was Alexander Calder. BAB: No, when I moved to California with my parents That was it. The rest was just commercial art. in 1949, where I went to Manual Arts Senior High HUO: It is fascinating how you clearly distinguish School. commercial art and non. AI: Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston went to Manual BAB: It didn’t used to be like that. 30 years ago it used Arts. to be very clear. Today I don’t think that it is blurred BAB: I know. Everyone wanted to go there because at all. Now everything is commercial. The things it was the only high school in the US that had nude Alex is doing are very successful. It is a different age. models at that time. I was so excited when I walked It is a different thing. The value today is financial. into the classroom that was run by the art teach, HUO: The art world has become an industry. The Mr. Swankowski. Nude models in those days were music world too, the literary world is an industry. The landslides. They wanted to chat with you all the time only world, which is still unchanged and which reminds and I said, take your fucking clothes off. me of the art world is the world of poetry. I think the AI: Was it the same art teacher who taught Pollock and VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040

Guston? life? BAB: Yes. He looked real artistic. He had a grey goatee, HUO: Besides your most recent works, the he was old school. watercolors, there are also two larger paintings, where there is this line. You mentioned it somehow Hans-Ulrich Obrist returns from the tour through the connected to Ken Price. Can you tell me about that? house and is excited about a series of paintings called BAB: Ken was not reductive. I have always said, the “Dentos”. thing that separates a great work of art from another work of art is a stroke of genius “and you only need HUO: How did you invent those images? one”. You can do a thousand of them but it won’t be BAB: It comes out of Abstract Expressionism where better then just one. I’m just an old fashioned painter they talk about things coming and going, when they who is very contemporary. I am really a non-objective discuss that the painting is moving beyond the frame. I painter. I just paint paintings. I don’t do deceptions. painted them in the late 60s. HUO: What would be your advice to a young artist in HUO: They look so fresh. They could have been done 2015? yesterday. BAB: Same thing the Bruce Nauman print from 1973 BAB: That is the advantage of being in a situation said: Pay attention motherfuckers! that’s not commercial. Every time somebody buys something I usually double the price on the net one. What is the rush? Does it look like I am having a bad VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040

02 / 04 / 2016 “Decorative Arts: Billy Al Bengston and Frank Gehry discuss their 1968 collaboration at LACMA” by Aram Moshayedi

On the occasion of a ten-year survey of his paintings at Frank’s exhibition design was dominant and central to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1968, artist the execution of the show. How did the idea for this Billy Al Bengston enlisted the help of architect Frank collaboration come about? Gehry to design the exhibition’s scenography and create an architectural armature upon which the show FRANK GEHRY: To start, there was no budget. We could hang. Complemented by a now rare and coveted had a museum director, Ken Donahue, who was a nice, catalog by Ed Ruscha, Bengston’s presentation at bumbly guy but a dinosaur in terms of the art stuff that LACMA proved to be the most substantial articulation was going on. His curator was none other than Maurice to date of the painter’s commitment to the context Tuchman. I think probably Billy proposed me to them. of display as a form of mediation and experience. BILLY AL BENGSTON: No, I didn’t propose The exhibition design included reused discarded anything. I said, “He’s doing it.” wall fragments from the museum’s past exhibitions, borrowed furniture and home accents, posters from FG: I was a hanger-on to the art scene because the the Black Power movement, and a life-size wax figure architects that I was collegiate with at the time thought made in Bengston’s likeness by the nearby Hollywood I was nuts. Even my friends at the time and those who Wax Museum. In retrospect, the paintings appear to are still my friends—some of them are dead—thought almost be an afterthought in an installation conceived I was weird, but I didn’t know I was weird. And when and executed by two friends and collaborators, one the art guys embraced me, I was declared weird by that privileged the conditions under which pictures are association probably. viewed, and sometimes overlooked, in the conventions of museology. AM: Did the architecture world not offer the same kind of support network that the art world seemed to provide?

FG: Well, I probably could have found the support, but it probably would have been a disaster for my life if I had gotten it. This way, I became somebody that was freer. They didn’t know they were opening these paths for me, and I didn’t know it at the time. I was like a blotter, and I was just picking up on the kind of willingness to experiment, to go where nobody went, to try things and not be able to explain them.

AM: Billy, for this project at LACMA, what was the attraction you had toward collaborating with an architect, Frank, rather than another artist?

BAB: Well, let’s put this in perspective. I can tell you, ARAM MOSHAYEDI: Let’s talk about your it was a very small world, and Frank is only telling you collaboration at the Los Angeles County Museum of about what happened in his world. In our world at that Art in 1968. Although the exhibition was billed as time, I shared a studio with Ken Price, and we worked a ten-year survey of Billy’s paintings, it’s clear that and we smoked cigarettes and drank black coffee. That VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040 was it. For lunch, he’d have a Heath bar and I’d have AM: Did the success of that project lend some a Snickers bar. That was it. Then we got a ping-pong credibility to the idea of collaborating on Billy’s show? table, so we’d surf, play ping-pong, and work, smoke and drink black coffee. That’s it. That was what we did FG: The curators at LACMA knew I could get it done, for three or four years. That’s all we could afford to but they were worried because at the time I was using do. It was a very small world. At that time, there were plywood, chain-link, corrugated materials, and things so few interesting people that there was a gravitational like that in my designs. They said there was no budget pull, and Frank was part of the interesting people. to buy materials and that I had to work pretty much None of us knew at the time that he thought anything in the norm. So I asked them to take me down to their of us. And we didn’t know that Frank was going to storeroom, where they had piles of plywood with become the foremost artist of our time. AM: Tuchman paint on them. I asked what they were doing with the once mentioned another exhibition that you worked plywood and they didn’t know, so I took it and made on at LACMA called “Art Treasures from Japan.” Did his exhibition. you do exhibition design for many of the shows there? AM: So the colors throughout the installation were entirely inherited from the recycled materials?

BAB: Yes, they were all random and placed randomly. At that time, the museum would put up temporary plywood walls, which would be painted depending on the show. There was a lot of leftover paint in powder blue, as I recall. Quite a bit of rust, a little bit of yellow, and then some natural. So Frank designed this thing, but when the museum started putting up these used walls, they said to me, “Don’t worry, we’re going to paint them.” But I said no, and then Frank showed up.

FG: They thought I was going to want them painted, but I didn’t. The day that [LACMA director] Donahue finally came in to see it, I think he almost had a heart attack.

BAB: He did a lot of exhibitions at LACMA, and they AM: You mentioned Maurice Tuchman before as the were all very conservative until he got to me. curator, but didn’t James Monte also play a part in the curation of the exhibition? FG: I’ve told this story a million times, but the architecture teachers at USC in the 1950s were BAB: Monte was the curator that was called on, but returning GIs—architecture graduates but who had actually Tuchman did it. He was the head curator. But been in the army. They saw Japan and all those as far as I’m concerned, nobody curated the show. beautiful temples in Nara and Kyoto. And the language was transportable, so they had an aesthetic that they FG: No, there was nobody. We did the show ourselves, could transport and build here quickly. Greg Walsh, and it was super. It was serendipitous that I went down, who became my partner, had lived in Japan during his found the goddamn plywood, and pulled it up; and it navy tenure and was totally a Japanophile, so when was cheap so they couldn’t deny it. They didn’t have the LA County Museum was given “Art Treasures any money to do anything new, and I said we would of Japan” to do, they asked us to do the installation. use the old materials. I guess maybe I told them we’d Walsh was close friends with the curator of Asian art. paint it, but then when it got up it looked so great that VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040 we kept it up. It scared Tuchman a bit, but at the time seems that there was an issue about the furniture. Was he was pretty willing to try things. there a disagreement between the two of you about the function of the furniture in the show? BAB: I didn’t have any problem with Tuchman at all. FG: The biggest and only real issue happened with FG: No, he was open to stuff, and he knew artists. the furniture. I assumed Billy would help me get the He knew how artists worked, so he was relatively furniture for the installation, but he didn’t at first. He supportive. said he didn’t want to be any part of it and that he didn’t even want to hang the show. But Tuchman said AM: The idea of creating a space that resembled a that he had to finish the installation, and we still hadn’t studio or a domestic space in the context of a museum brought in the furniture we said we would. I didn’t seemed to be a radical gesture, but also, Billy, in terms know where to find the furniture, so somebody in my of how your paintings are understood and discussed, office suggested that we rent it, and that’s what we the exhibition at LACMA seems to stand out as an did. We called a rental place and asked for four living attempt to control the reception of your paintings, to rooms. I just said to bring whatever kind of furniture define the space in which they were viewed. Did you was popular at the time. consider this gesture as a response to the conventions around the display of paintings within the museum?

BAB: It wasn’t radical at all. The point is that at the time nobody walked around a museum with earphones, and there was no definition of what everything was or meant. Today, everything is spoon-fed, but in those days you had to look. Today, nobody looks. They just listen and walk around and bump into other people. But even then, nobody actually got close enough to see anything. They’ve always just stood back at a certain distance to look at something on the wall. That’s the reason I wanted to install my work in the way that we did. The experience of going to a museum is a totally synthetic situation—walking around, looking at things, standing on your feet. The best a museum does is to put in one these uncomfortable benches in the middle where they don’t belong. BAB: I assumed you said whatever was the cheapest. AM: You mentioned before that there was no real curatorial oversight at any point in the exhibition, FG: I didn’t pick the furniture; they just sent four but it also seems like you were both taking liberties living rooms and put it all in the museum. Tuchman that weren’t necessarily consensual or that Billy, in called me and said that I had made the greatest artwork particular, wasn’t even aware were happening despite ever but by accident and that it wasn’t relevant to the fact that it was his paintings that were the intended this show. At that point, there were still no paintings objects to display. installed, so to take average furniture like that, put it in a museum, and set up living rooms—it looked like FG: It wasn’t that Billy wasn’t in control. If he said some kind of tableau that I don’t know who would’ve no, it wouldn’t have happened. done. By accident it was very powerful but also very irritating. The furniture was in your face. AM: From what I’ve read about the installation, it AM: Would it have potentially outdone the paintings? VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040

FG: It was just this funny plywood environment with FG: He did what we wanted to do in the first place, funny carpet and then this furniture. and it was great. I had spent all those years at Billy’s studio, and every month he would change the decor. The biggest tragedy is that we didn’t photograph all of his stuff. Talk about a decorator— I wouldn’t want him to be considered a decorator, but that’s where I learned a lot about my own aesthetic, by watching him change his studio all the time.

AM: Was the objective of the installation to turn Billy’s paintings into a form of decoration? Billy, do you have problems with your painting practice being described as decoration?

BAB: I don’t have a problem with that.

AM: It’s obvious that you consider the paintings as secondary objects.

BAB: The paintings are secondary until you sit down and look at them. When I was younger, I thought I AM: Ed Ruscha later said that it felt too much like was making something new, but the only thing I was home. doing was reinterpreting the materials and making a decorative object that didn’t have a specific meaning. FG: That was in regard to the installation after. He Paintings are primarily decoration until you sit down didn’t see the first sets of furniture. Nobody saw it and look at them, and most paintings, if you put them except for Tuchman, who was freaked on two levels in the wrong light, don’t look how they were intended. because it did something by accident—I didn’t design If a painting needs a light fixture or if it needs a certain it—and it made a statement other than what we wall or something, then it is another thing entirely. So intended to make. We tried to get it out of there before my thinking was to make something that does not need Billy saw it, but we weren’t so lucky. Billy saw it and any specific kind of light. didn’t get an explanation that it was a mistake, so he thought it was my idea to do the furniture in that way. AM: Where did the idea of including a life-size wax He started yelling at me and calling me all kinds of model of Billy come into the plan for the exhibition? things. It freaked me out because, as you can imagine, I loved Billy. I wanted to make this the best thing ever FG: Just by accident one night at some party in for him. I was worried about bombing in their world Hollywood with John Altoon, I met this guy named because of this thing. If I bombed, they wouldn’t let Spoony Singh, who owned the Hollywood Wax me in anymore. There was a lot riding on it for me. Museum. We all got drunk, and I told him about the It was a heavy thing. And when he came and started show, and I told him about Billy. In my mind, Billy yelling, I just— was a big thing—I thought everybody knew who he was—but this guy didn’t have a clue who Billy was. BAB: I just said, “Get this shit out of here.” He did it anyway, though.

FG: Then he just did it on his own. AM: Did Spoony Singh see any significance to a show BAB: I borrowed all the furniture. at LACMA even if he didn’t know who the artist was? VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040

BAB: They were responsive in part because a little FG: No, not at all. I told him after the show he could section in the exhibition included a lot of Eldridge put it in the Hollywood Wax Museum, but he just Cleaver posters and stuff like that. But I also had full looked at me. I assumed he would be interested, but he run of the museum, which is entirely different from wasn’t. He just made the wax figure, and that was it. today. I could come in at midnight and do everything myself without needing to ask anyone for anything. AM: What was the little figure placed right next to the I would come in at any hour of the day and night wax figure of Billy? because I got access without having to go through the curators or anybody, and I could do damn near anything I wanted to.

AM: Even though it would be contrived to situate this project within the context of institutional critique, it seems as if there was an attempt to address the specific context and conditions of museum display. The exhibition seems inherently antagonistic and self-critical, perhaps even foreshadowing a brand of work that came of age in the 1970s. Would that seem accurate now in retrospect?

BAB: That’s interpretation.

AM: It’s also a historical fact.

BAB: Of course, but really what we were trying to do was to make chicken salad out of chicken shit because we were forced to do so. Studios function that way. A BAB: A friend of mine who was an acolyte racer gave studio is a place where you can take a piece of shit and it to me at the show’s opening, so I put it down there. think of how to fix it. I have no idea what it is. It’s a little sculpture of me going into a turn on a motorcycle; it was his concept. I AM: But, specifically, what you are describing with don’t even think Frank knew about it. this exhibition is an engagement with the conditions of painting, rather than the history of painting itself— FG: That’s the first time I’ve seen it. describing your paintings as though they are almost a byproduct of the way you consider museum lighting, BAB: Frank hasn’t yet mentioned the foremost part for example. of the exhibition—the guards, who inevitably were a pain in the ass in those days. I happened to be very BAB: In a way, they are. involved with the Black Power movement so I made decisions that were based on my relationship with the FG: It seems that they could have been painted guards, who at the time were mostly black. I put in a anywhere because Billy realized at an early moment comfortable couch, a television set, and where some how Hollywood and the media had overpowered the of the walls were not open, I took out the plywood so whole world and changed the lives of everyone. He they could see everything in the exhibition without got into it for a minute and couldn’t take it. He realized having to move off the couch. what it was, so he slammed the door on the whole thing. Some of us knew how to manage it, but Billy AM: And how did the guards respond to this? just wanted to be left alone. He couldn’t deal with it. VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040

AM: Do you think the fact that LACMA had a relatively short history by 1968—that it had been in that location for only three years—had anything to do with your ambivalence? Did this new institution afford you both the opportunity to think about what the display of culture meant in a way that had never existed in the city before then?

FG: Sure, putting the work in LACMA gave it credibility.

BAB: You have to think that way when you walk into a place that looks like that.

AM: Do you mean that it is a place that’s not made for you, not set up, say, how a studio is set up?

AM: Do you think part of this was about undermining FG: In the case of the Guggenheim in Bilbao, I some kind of significance that a ten-year survey was worked with a brilliant director and it was always meant to imply? I remember you once saying that your about making a place with the art in mind. But after original idea was to make your paintings available in it opened, there was a museum directors’ meeting bins for visitors to rummage through, for instance. That in London where they passed a resolution to never idea and what you ended up doing at LACMA seem build museums like that because it was architecture like a withdrawal from participation or an attempt to competing with the art. I didn’t get another museum not play the game. Is it that you weren’t really even for a long time after. People like Glenn Lowry would interested in doing a show with the museum? say publicly: We don’t want another Frank Gehry. But artists like Cy Twombly would call me from BAB: Well, showing didn’t mean anything. It really Bilbao and say that their show there was the best didn’t, I don’t think. The things that mattered to me they’d ever had. Hockney sent me a nice note about was that Ruscha did the catalog and got paid for it and it, and Rauschenberg liked it, so there was a kind of Frank did the installation and got paid for it. disconnect from what the museum directors said. The artists always told me that they didn’t want sterile AM: Frank, do you remember what you were paid?

FG: Maybe $2,000.

AM: And, Billy, did you get paid for your part?

BAB: No, and the museum didn’t buy anything. At the time, there was really nothing to be accomplished in the art world. If you go back and look at the financial records, you’ll see that nobody was making any money and nobody had fancy studios.

FG: I think all of us had tendencies to be self- destructive because of our insecurities about what we were doing. We didn’t know what we were doing. VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040 white rooms; they wanted something to work against. But museum curators and directors just want the white cube because it’s easy to do and they don’t have to think. They just go and put it up and get out, and it’s cheap to change from show to show. Some stuff just dies in that environment.

BAB: The only thing that doesn’t die in that environment is stuff that’s designed for it, and that is no good.

AM: You mean that a kind of work that is made with its presentation in mind?

FG: I was on Charlie Rose a few years ago with Renzo Piano, and Charlie was trying to figure out the difference between Renzo’s work and mine as far as museums. He said the rap on me is that my museums compete with the art and, of course, the other two architects on the show came to my defense and said, oh no. But Charlie still pressed, so I said the marketplace decides. And he looked at me and he said, “What do you mean?” And I said, “Well, I did Bilbao, and I never got another museum.” So he turns to Renzo, and Renzo kind of shrugs on camera, and I say, “The defense rests.” That’s on camera. Then Charlie asks, “What about the artists? Don’t they weigh in?” And I said, “Look, if you’re an artist and the is going to give you a show, you’re not going to complain.” When the taping of the show ended, guess who is sitting in the front row? Ellsworth Kelly. And he came up to me and said, “You’re goddamn right. I hate MoMA.” VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040

07 / 01 / 2017 “Billy Al Bengston: A Conversation with the legendary Los Angeles-based Finish Fetishist” by Oliver Maxwell Kupper VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040 VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040 VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040 VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040 VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040 VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040 VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040 VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040

10 / 29 / 2016 “Beer with a Painter: Billy Al Bengston” by Jennifer Samet

Bengston, himself, brings a raucous sense of color Beer with a Painter: into the space. He is dressed in one of the snappy ensembles he’s known for — a Hawaiian shirt tucked Billy Al Bengston under a blue V-neck cardigan sweater, layered with an African print fabric jacket. He relishes being off-color, “Practically everything I do takes ten years for too: cussing and telling jokes that push at the limits people to get,” Billy Al Bengston says — perhaps of acceptability. It’s a kind of implicit take-down of a reason why several of his 1950s and ‘60s the preciousness of the white cube, the polished and exhibitions have recently been re-staged. commodified art world.

“Practically everything I do takes ten years for people to get,” Bengston says — perhaps a reason why several of his 1950s and ‘60s exhibitions have recently been re-staged. The 12 paintings from his B.S.A. Motorcycle Series, (1961) currently on view at VENUS, are from the exhibition he staged at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles the year they were made. Bengston was an integral, original member of this scene — the place where the avant-garde lived, at a time when the city was still culturally provincial.

Bengston embodies the California cool aesthetic — his lifestyle (surfer, motorcyle-racer, rule-breaker) is interconnected with his work. His is an aesthetic that fuses Pop and Finish-Fetish with a resolute commitment to hand-craftsmanship. The B.S.A. paintings may depict icons and motorcycle parts, but they have an aura reminiscent of the radiating, centralized geometry found in anonymous Tantra paintings. For him, good art is transportive, an athletic feat, and above all, should never be boring. Billy Al Bengston, “Man from Monterey” (1969) Lacquer and polyester resin on aluminum, 36 x 34 inches Bengston studied at Los Angeles City College; the California College of Arts & Crafts, Oakland, “The world is not monochromatic,” Billy Al Bengston California; and Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles. reminds me, telling me why he won’t make another Between 1958 and 1963, he had five solo shows blue painting anytime soon. We are sitting at a at Ferus Gallery. In 1968, he was given a ten-year table inside VENUS Over Manhattan gallery, where survey exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum Bengston, who lives in Los Angeles, has an exhibition of Art, for which he enlisted Frank Gehry to create of both recent and historic paintings. The recent work an architectural environment where the paintings is a series of monochromatic blue paintings which would be staged. In addition to the chevron, he has incorporate the chevron — a symbol he has been also used the logo of the Iris Sugar Company to make utilizing on and off since the 1960s. VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040 paintings with a centralized flower form. This series BAB: No, and it is getting harder. The more you know, is named Dracula because the silhouetted shape was the harder it gets. But the technique is not a problem said to look like a flying Dracula, as well as a flower. — all that takes is practice and time. You learn that His embrace of motorcycle and car culture led him to from being a musician: you have to build your chops. using enamel and lacquer to create highly reflective surfaces on masonite or metal, some of which are JS: One of your teachers was Peter Voulkos. How did then dented and altered with a hammer (“Dentos” you end up studying with him? paintings). He has been the subject of exhibitions at the ; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas; the Oakland Museum; and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. His work was shown this year at Neuendorf Projects, Berlin; Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York; Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York; Samuel Freeman Gallery, Los Angeles; and Venus Over Manhattan, New York.

* * *

Jennifer Samet: Can you tell me about your background and how you got into painting?

Billy Al Bengston: I was born in Dodge City, Kansas, in 1934. My father pressed the farts out of pants (he was a tailor and had a dry cleaning business), and my mother was a musician. She was a child prodigy. She could sight-read and transpose on the piano when she Billy Al Bengston, “Loika” (1993) Acrylic on canvas, was four years old. She could play every instrument 60 x 74 inches in the orchestra, and she could sing best of all. She came to California to sing in the San Francisco opera for a while. Then we went back to Kansas, and then BAB: I would go back and forth with college, dropping returned to California. My mom started teaching while out and trying to start again, always with pottery. she finished her master’s degree at the University of Then I decided I was going to become an artist. First Southern California, Los Angeles. I went to junior high I went up to the California College of Arts and Crafts school in Los Angeles, and matriculated to Manual in Oakland. Later, I worked with Peter Voulkos. You Arts High School. didn’t “study with” Voulkos; you worked with him. His class was not a class; it was a job. Manual Arts was famous for one thing. It was the first and only high school in the that He would call you around midnight and say, “We’re had nude models in the art department. I was pretty making clay. See you in a half an hour.” I would roll excited about this, until it happened. They were some my car — a 1937 Pontiac convertible with no top of the ugliest people you’ve ever seen. But, Manual — down the hill to get it to start, and then go make Arts had a full-kit ceramics department, as well as clay. We used bread mixers, which were circular and metalworking and woodworking. It was back when eight-feet wide. We made 5000 pounds at a time. Ken people used to make things by themselves. It was a Price and I would take 500 pounds and Peter Voulkos piece of cake for me. I enjoyed it — still do. and Jon Mason would take the rest. They would be done making it before we got started. At the end of JS: Have you always felt that art-making is easy? the session, which was about 7 or 8 in the mornng, we would go have breakfast at the place across the street. VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040

Then we would go home and go to bed. It was a great, had a good life. great time. JS: You were one of the artists who showed in the Voulkos and Mason were mind-boggling. You just legendary Ferus Gallery. How did you become watched to see what you could learn. You stole as involved with that scene? many ideas as you possibly could. That’s how you learned. I couldn’t believe the things Voulkus could do, BAB: In my cruising around I ran into Ed Keinholz, and I still can’t believe it. He was without a doubt one who was up in Echo Park at the time. He opened a of the great wonders of the world, a God-awful great gallery on La Cienega Boulevard. It was a small space talent. inside of the art theater. Then, with Walter Hopps, he opened Ferus Gallery. He would be in the back doing Pete was a butt-breaker; he was so strong. He picked his thing. I’d take him a six-pack and we’d hang out. me up one day and locked me in the kiln because I was He said, “Want to have a show here?” I said, “Sure.” too rowdy. It was so much fun. I lasted a year in the ceramics department until I said, “I’m done with this.” The first show I did there was Abstract Expressionist I knew I was never going to be as good a ceramicist as work, and my second show was the “Valentine” he was. I decided to be a painter, because I thought paintings. Those paintings came about because my I could paint better than Pete. I told Ken Price about show (at the new gallery) was scheduled to open on this. I asked him what he was going to do, how he Valentine’s Day. could continue with ceramics, and he said, “I’m gonna go furthy d’out by going furthy d’in.” There are certain things that teachers say you can’t do in painting. One of them is that you can’t make a I also had the privilege of studying with Richard painting where the forms are in the center. You have Diebenkorn and Saburo Hasegawa. I learned a lot of to have this golden mean or something. It’s art school bad painting habits from Diebenkorn, and I learned stuff. They would diagnose paintings done 600 years a lot of good life habits from Hasegawa. Saburo was ago and say, “That is the perfect composition.” What an amazing guy. He would be fully dressed in his the fuck are you talking about? It doesn’t make any grandfather’s samurai outfit. sense.

JS: What were the bad painting habits that you felt If people say you can’t do something, that’s what I’m Diebenkorn was encouraging? going to do. And I’ve gotten shit about the center thing all my life. These paintings, and the Valentine BAB: Indecision. The culture of “put it on; take it off.” paintings, had forms in the center. Is there anyplace Now I say, “Make up your mind before you do it.” He else, other than the center, to put the form? I don’t was against that. The beauty of studying with Saburo dive on the edges of the pool, if I can help it. You go for Hasegawa was that he would give you an assignment the sweet center. and he would say, “Take this paper where you want it to, or as many places as you want.” You had to make a Anyway, I was fortunate enough to meet Craig decision. Kauffman at that time, and quite a few of the other artists in town, like John Altoon. Craig Kauffman was Hasegawa and I became friends because I lived in quite an inspiration. He kicked everything off. He was a house with a bunch of unusual people. I cooked brilliant, and he stayed brilliant and still a pain in the dinner for everyone — they would each pay 25 cents. ass. He could see really well. I became friends with the people at the Italian meat market across the street. I asked them if I could have Walter Hopps had a place behind the Ferus gallery and all the bones and leftover bits. I’d go over and collect I had just come back from Europe and I didn’t have the trash and make dinner out of it. Long story short, I a place to live. So, he gave me a room. It had a little VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040 balcony and I painted the Valentines there – all except paintings. You don’t have to look at them. Whenever one. I was an indoor easel painter even though I didn’t I get in trouble, I quote Ken. He said, “The only thing have an easel. you have to do to outrage people is anything.”

So I decided to paint an all Payne’s Grey painting, with JS: Monochromatic painting has been something one type of brush— a number 1 sharp, as I recall. I you’ve done at different points in your life. What painted this nearly-black painting — which is another interests you about monochromatic painting? thing people said you can’t do. Now, of course, you can do anything. I wore out four brushes and three tubes BAB: It is a joke. The show includes a motorcycle I of paint. It was the only painting that sold. The Los raced, which I got from Aub’s shop. At the time, I told Angeles County Museum bought it for $100. I was a him, “I’m going to paint this motorcycle.” He said, happy guy. I was in the hospital at the time because I “You can paint it any color you want to, as long as it’s broke my back motorcycle racing. blue.” Everything he owned was blue.

JS: What got you interested in motorcycle racing? It is a challenge to do everything in monochrome. On view here at Venus is a group of historic paintings You have to do a lot with textural variation — thin from your 1961 “B.S.A. Motorcycle” series, as well as and thick paint. You remove highlights so you have to recent blue monochromes, dedicated to Aub LeBard, build highlights. You remove the center of interest, so an off-road motorcycle racer, and co-owner of the you have to build center of interest. They are all built LeBard & Underwood motorcycle shop. differently.

BAB: I went to Europe in 1958, and rode all around JS: You’ve also been an avid surfer. How is that on a Lambretta. I returned to New York, waiting for connected to your painting? my scooter to come. It finally came, but they managed to drop it off the van, and bend the front forks. I sent it BAB: I started surfing when I was in seventh or back to California but I couldn’t get anyone to fix it. eighth grade at the Oceanside Pier. That is where Phil Edwards, who was easily the most talented surfer of I called around and finally talked to the LeBard shop. my time, lived. He invented the bottom turn, which Even though they were a B.S.A. motorcycle shop, they revolutionized surfing. In 1953, I got lucky enough agreed to fix it. I so admired the motorcycle racers to be a beach attendant, which means I worked at and the people. I said, “I have got to get into this.” It Doheny Beach State Park. I cleaned restrooms, hauled was a thrill and a half. Aub LeBard was an inspiration the garbage, things like that. They gave me a campsite and later became my sponsor. and I got to know every surfer, because they would stay with me at the campsite. Racing motorcycles was supposed to be the most dangerous thing you could do. So I did it to make I moved to Ocean Park with Ken Price. We surfed both a living. I did stunts in movies too. I had done sides of the pier. We haunted Malibu. I bought him gymnastics training. I always tried to take a job that lunch one day and he would buy me lunch the next would pay the most for the least amount of time, so day. He would have a Heath bar and I would have a that I could go back to work quickly. I could jump off a Snicker’s bar. That was lunch. building and make enough to live for a month, without even thinking about it. Sometimes it would be enough JS: You have a studio and live part time in Hawaii. to live for three or four months — rent and food. Can you tell me about adopting imagery from the indigenous culture into your painting? I do what I do. I have no fucking idea why. When I painted these motorcycle paintings, I pissed people BAB: I steal everything I possibly can. There’s nothing off beyond belief. I don’t know why. They are just so sacred you can’t steal it and make an image out of VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040 it. Unfortunately most things aren’t worth stealing. As much as I like eating hotdogs, I don’t paint them. But they look pretty sharp. Hamburgers, on the other hand, don’t look so good.

JS: Oldenberg managed.

BAB: Claes is a different bird. He’s an illustrator. You can do good things with a piece of lettuce if you’re an illustrator. I don’t understand why anyone would do straight representational work. If you are representing something, you might as well take a photograph. A camera is better for that. The only problem is that you lose the texture. That is where paint is better — for its texture and depth. Paint is contiguous, and a camera produces dots. You can see them if you magnify the image.

Also, the paper that photographs are printed on is boring. Or is it just the picture that is boring? I don’t know. Abstraction with a camera — aside from Weegee — is boring. You just don’t quite have the flexibility Billy Al Bengston, “Ideal Exhaust” (1961) Oil on canvas, with the camera. But, photography is a great tool. I 42 x 40 inches certainly would prefer that photography be used for an X-ray. It’s like saying, “What’s better to paint with, a hammer or a brush?” JS: You don’t go back into them?

JS: Although you have painted with a hammer. BAB: I couldn’t. I wish I could. The painting Ideal Exhaust (1961) is so naïve that I could never do it BAB: Well, yes, I’ve used hammers. I’ve destroyed again. I couldn’t do it that good. I don’t think there with hammers. And I’ve modified with hammers. is anything here I could do again. If you get it real Goddamn, you’re gonna pin me down here. realistic, you can do it again. But if you are clumsily making it abstract, it’s very hard to repaint. You don’t JS: Haha. You were telling me what painting can do have the instruments; you don’t think the same way. as opposed to photography. I was thinking maybe it Your hand works differently. had to do with something you’ve said about creating air. There are mistakes in that painting that I can’t believe that I made – three or four things I could point out, BAB: Yes, it goes back to what Kenny Price said, but I won’t. If you look at Barrel & Exhaust Pipe, “You go furthy d’out by going furthy d’in.” In other (1961), the exhaust pipe is incorrectly placed. It don’t words, you breathe it, put air in it, give it life. If you look like that. I don’t know why I did it that way. are lucky, you get it right. A lot of it is luck, and the Maybe because I couldn’t do it right, and I thought rest is standing light and pushing hard. There are a no one else would know the difference. I’m not really lot of starts that never get to a finish. That’s why God anal compulsive. I sorta like zits sometimes. If you invented razor blades. You shave ‘em deep. If they are like perfection, it ain’t gonna look perfect later. You’ve no good, there’s no sense fixing them. gotta learn to love it (or not). VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040

09 / 20 / 2011 “Billy Al Bengston: Art Takes Balls” by Billy Al Bengston

For me, the heyday was in 1959. It was before the to go to New York, I said, “Who are you kidding? Ferus Gallery moved across the street, in the days I’m not going to that shit hole.” There’s a scent when Ed Kienholz and Walter Hopps ran it. At here that’s different, and you lose a lot of those that time, art was taken very seriously in terms sensations when you’re put in inclement climates. of being an artist, and not as a profession. We all As a result, the real art of the time became real, worked like sons of bitches. There was nothing nonobjective art. I think John McCracken cracked else to do. We were the beach group, we stayed at through that, Craig Kauffman did, I did. Even Ron the beach, and on break time we’d go surfing. Davis, and Bob Irwin. We made art that was just art. We believed that there’s no such thing as good art or bad art. Art is art. If it’s bad, it’s something —As told to Sophie Duvernoy else. It was a much, much harder line in the ‘50s and ‘60s than it is now, because the idea of art Billy Al Bengston is an artist and sculptor who education didn’t exist — they didn’t have a fine lives and works in Venice. A seminal figure in the arts program when I was a kid. If they did, they 1960s Los Angeles arts scene, he draws much of didn’t have teachers who knew anything. Art is his inspiration from the ocean, motorcycle racing, something you can’t teach, but you can inspire it. surfing and the East.

We were bare-knuckle artists. You got your ass kicked all the time if you didn’t come up to the point — they all tried to kick mine. It was definitely a boy’s club back then. You had to be good, and you had to have balls, and I didn’t know any girls with balls then. In the arts scene there were female artists, but very few of them.

We worked on an extremely reduced financial budget. Every cent went toward the cost of production, and most of our dialogue was about keeping your integrity and your wheels. It was carpool times. It certainly restricted the amount of feminine appeal we could get, although I’ll say we did very well, considering the circumstances.

It took a while for us to acknowledge that our influences, instead of coming from the West, came from the East. We were primarily subtropical- and Oriental-based. The art from the East is influenced by nature and touch. That comes from being more attuned to the environment. It’s pretty Billy Al Bengston’s ‘Sonny’ is in “Crosscurrents simple — you can live out here and not die on the in L.A. Painting and Sculpture 1950-1970” at the streets when it gets cold. When I was romanced Getty. VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040

10 / 14 / 2001 “Riding That Wave Again” by Beverly Beyette

more feature films, three made-for-TV movies and Riding That Wave Again a TV series starring Sally Field. About then Zuckerman began re-reading the The original revisits her past, which dif- girlish diaries she’d kept about daily life at Mal- fered a bit from the beach party that ignited the ibu--”the Bu”--during the summers of 1956 and Malibu coast. 1957, with their notes about the people her father would later fictionalize in his book. They called her Gidget--as in girl midget. Like Barbie, the name found its way into our vocab- On a recent morning at home, she brought out ulary. And, in 1959, “Gidget” the movie set off a those five well-thumbed volumes, the secret tsunami of surf-themed films with wide beaches thoughts of a teenage girl about puppy love, her and thin plots. fixation with being flat-chested and other weighty matters. In those days, she says, “Sex, scandal and Well, she’s back. Berkley Books has reissued drugs, there was none of that.” Leafing through “Gidget” the novel, 44 years after it first inspired the pages, she laughs and says, “It was a lot about the movie. And, if you happen to hit the beach at the boys.” Malibu on a Monday, you might run into Gidget herself sizing up the surf. Those boys were the surfers she hung around with, including Bill Jensen, on whom she had a “For a long time I retreated and didn’t talk about “terrible, terrible crush.” In “Gidget” the book, this,” says the real Gidget, Kathy Kohner Zucker- Jensen is “,” a role re-created in the man, an animated 60-year-old part-time restau- movie by James Darren. rant hostess who grew up in Brentwood and now lives in Pacific Palisades with her husband of 36 In real life, almost all of the surfers, a loose-knit years. group of about 20 guys, had nicknames. There were Bubblehead, the Hawk (known for his prow- Maybe it had something to do with age. “At 60, I ess at spotting babes), Meatloaf, Golden Boy, Bee- have a sense of nostalgia. I want to put my arms tle. Some of the old-time surfers say there was a around everybody and say, ‘From now on in, Moondoggie; others think that was a derivation of we have a lot less of our future and more of our a surfer called Boondoggie. In any event, it wasn’t past.”’ Jensen. The great , as played in the film by Cliff Robertson, was based on Terry-Michael Though some purists feel that Gidgetmania was Tracy, called Tube-steak for the steakhouse he an unfortunate, and exploitative, episode in the worked at, who did live in that shack on the beach. history of surfing--and one with continuing fall- Listening to his daughter’s tales about the surfers, out--most praise Gidget for her part in populariz- screenwriter decided there was ing a cult sport and as a role model for women. a book. He jazzed the story up a bit by adding a wild beach party and a fire set off by wave-riding Zuckerman began thinking about a reissue of the surfers holding torches. The fictional surfers were book in 1999 when Wahine, a women’s surfing a composite of legends of the day such as Mickey magazine, did a cover story on her for the 40th “Da Cat” Dora, Matt Kivlin and Mickey “the Mon- anniversary of the release of the first film, which goose” Munoz. starred Sandra Dee and went on to launch two VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES 90038 VSF [email protected] / 310.426.8040

Those were innocent days, those days of bal- sa-wood longboards. Jensen says, “There weren’t any drugs around. We drank a lot of beer and wine. There were some real mavericks and char- acters, but nobody was doing anything that would put you in jail.”

Through the years, he says, the surfers have em- bellished their stories, and some memories have become hazy. But he remembers clearly that, de- spite Kathy Kohner’s crush on him, “we looked at her more like a little sister. She was about 15 and I was 20. There were plenty of other females on the beach who were older and more in line with what our thinking was.”

So much for the plot line of the movie, in which Gidget and Moondoggie are an item. Jensen thinks the book’s Moondoggie was actually bor- rowed from Boondoggie, so named because he sometimes slept in the boondocks near the beach. But Zuckerman and Tube-steak think Moon- doggie was well-known Venice artist Billy Al Bengston, who used to shake the water out of his long hair and beard like a St. Bernard.

And who coined “Gidget”? Jensen thinks it was a surfer named Jerry Hurst. But Tubesteak, now 66 and living in San Clemente, says it was he who first called her that because, at 5 feet, 1 inch and 105 pounds, she reminded him of a petite girl named Gidget he’d met several years earlier. “I saw this girl skipping down the beach with this paper bag with peanut butter and radish sand- wiches .... I didn’t know what to call her. I wasn’t going to call her ‘babe.”’ Zuckerman says, “The truth is, I didn’t record it in my diary, so it’s up for grabs.”

Tubesteak, who no longer surfs because “peo- ple over 40 who surf look stupid,” bristles at the very notion that, as has been written through the years, Gidget was sort of the surfers’ mascot. “A sacrilege,” he says. But “all these years, I’ve just gone along with that story she and her father contrived.”