An Interview with Patssi Valdez, An American Painter

Patssi Valdez, Sunday, 2011,
acrylic on canvas, 72" x 30"
 

Los Angeles artist Patssi Valdez has gained international attention in the last few years, primarily from her early performance work as a member of the group Asco. Asco was recognized in a major exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2011, Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972-1987. Post-Asco, Valdez has had a very successful "second" career as a painter. I sat down with her earlier this week in her studio. 

JC: You've gotten quite a lot of attention in the last few years because of your participation in Asco. Let's talk about how you made the transition from the brassy performance-based political art you did with Asco to becoming a painter more focused on your internal world.

PV: Before I met the men that I worked with in Asco, I had grand ideas about being a great painter. But then I worked around Willie [Herrón] and Gronk and they seemed to paint so effortlessly while I had to struggle. I was not a good colorist at all, I couldn’t mix color properly -- I always say that I made mud paintings. So that’s why I worked in installation, performance, and all these other mediums.

JC: And yet my memory is that as a painter, in your first painting show at Pico House Gallery in 1989, you sprang full blown -- Athena from Zeus’ head -- an accomplished painter right out of the box.

PV: When I got out of art school, where I focused primarily on photography, I started teaching kids at Plaza de la Raza and I had to give lessons. They asked me if I would teach painting, so of course I said yes – I needed the job – then I panicked and went to the library looking up assignments, how to mix primary colors – and along the way I taught myself color theory.

Patssi Valdez, The Crying Tree, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 48" x 60"
 

Then one day I went to the David Hockney Retrospective at LACMA with a friend and I said, “I think I could do that.” My friend thought it was the funniest thing, that I would have the nerve to say that! It was inspiring. It was like Truth or Dare. So I went home and bought all this paint and canvas and started on this body of work. 

After I had finished a few, I thought “Ok. Who’s the harshest critic in the world? Who’s the friend that will tell you the truth and let you have it?” The answer was Gronk.  

So I picked up the phone and called Gronk and told him I had something to show him. He came over and he was real quiet, pensive looking. All he said to me was “you need more paint.” I thought, ok! that means they’re not horrible, that means they passed the Gronk test, I think I can show them to the world.

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ASCO: Elite of the Obscure:
A Retrospective 1972-1987
catalog from 2011
 exhibition at LACMA
 

I had done a lot of collage work and photography but nothing ever sold. I lived very frugally. Then I had that first painting show at Pico House, with no expectations of selling anything, and suddenly I had people coming up and asking how much was this painting? How much was that one? So many people were interested that I finally said “whoever gives me the check first gets the painting,” and I went home with my little purse full of checks! That was the beginning of making money and selling my work. I never looked back. I was no longer in Asco, I was done with art school and I just forged ahead.

JC: What impact have the museum shows have had on you? Do you feel you have become mainstream?

PV: First of all, I feel it has legitimized me as an artist – not as a woman artist or a Latina artist, but as an artist. 

Have I entered the mainstream? I believe I haven’t. Asco, maybe, but me individually as a painter, my real passion -- I’m hoping that someday I can have a major retrospective of my own. People don’t know the whole range of my work. I’m an installation artist, I’ve been a performance artist, I was a photographer for ten years, I make short films, I do iPad drawings, I sculpt and I paint. I have all these bodies of work and my dream is to be able to see them together in one museum space at the same time. That’s my dream. So, to the museum world out there: Can we start working on that, please? [laughing] While I’m still on planet Earth?

In the following video Patssi Valdez and Vyal Reyes transform a Lexus into a work of art.



JC: What's in your immediate future?

PV: I’m ready to start a new body of work. I have these big empty canvases and I’m reevaluating what I want to say and how I want to say it. I want to find a dealer, representation.

I didn’t have to struggle financially for years, but when the economy tanked, and I was no longer with a gallery, that’s when the trouble started. I had been on a roll for years. Now I’m struggling again. Thank god I have a couple of supporters who believe in me, who believe in me 100%. They make all the difference in the world.

My mother always says to me "you have all these angels daughter." And I say "don't I mother?"

Patssi's upcoming schedule:

Offramp Gallery, Pasadena, CA
November 18 - December 23, 2012
Patssi Valdez: Mementos (gouaches, ceramics and site-specific installation)
Opening Reception: Sunday, November 18, 2-5pm
 
Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Mexico
ASCO: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972-1987 
03/21/2013 – 09/01/2013

Upcoming at Offramp Gallery


September 16 - October 28, 2012
Anita Bunn: Detour
Opening Reception: Sunday, September 16, 2-5pm










Sunday, October 7, 2012, 4-6pm
PANEL DISCUSSIONContemporary Art Conversations #13
Moderated by Betty Ann Brown
Panelists: Peter Frank, Shana Nys Drambot, Ezrha Jean Black, John O'Brien

 
November 18 - December 23, 2012
Patssi Valdez: Mementos
Opening Reception: Sunday, November 18, 2-5pm


 




 

Duchamp's Urinal? Maybe Not!

Fountain by R. Mutt
Photo: Alfred Stieglitz

I recently read an LA Times article about a public feud between artist Damien Hirst and British art critic Julian Spalding, the latter of whom had written a short book, Con Art - Why you should sell your Damien Hirsts while you can. I thought it might make an interesting blog topic, so I downloaded and began reading Spalding's book, a no-holds-barred polemic on contemporary/conceptual art.

When about half way through I read this:

"[Duchamp's] apotheosis was consummated in 1999 when the Tate Gallery bought his urinal, called Fountain, for $500,000, to celebrate the century of art they thought he'd done so much to create. Unfortunately for the Tate, the urinal wasn't his. The latest research . . . has now proved beyond any shadow of reasonable doubt -- that the urinal wasn't submitted to the Society of Independents exhibition in New York by Duchamp but by the redoubtable Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven." [emphases mine]

Wait . . . What?? Forget the Hirst/Spalding spat! Who the heck was Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven? If what Spalding claimed was true, why wasn't that the headline? I needed to dig deeper.

Spalding cites two sources to back up his claim, Irene Gammel and Dr. Glyn Thompson. I immediately ordered a copy of Gammel's 2002 cultural biography Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity and began to read about this amazing, overlooked artist and poet who was light years ahead of her time.

Born Elsa Plötz in 1874, the future Baroness arrived in Berlin in 1893 ready to experience life in the extreme. Gammel writes:

" In a dazzling odyssey of sexual roles and experimentations she now began to armor her personality, emerging as a tough sexual and artistic warrior in her conquest of the modern city. Her ambivalence as androgyne allowed her to test a stunning range of erotically charged positions -- young ingenue, female flâneur, erotic art worker, priapic traveler, chorus girl cum prostitute, actress, cross-dresser, lesbian, and syphilitic patient -- all in a span of just a few years."


Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven

The flamboyant Elsa eventually follows her second husband to America after faking his suicide to escape creditors. When he leaves her in 1913, she makes her way to New York City, the same year as the Armory Show in which Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase becomes a succès de scandale.

Now 40 years old, Elsa Plötz Endell Greve marries Leopold Karl Friedrich Baron von Freytag-Loringhoven (a short-lived union) and the Baroness is born. On the way to the wedding Elsa finds an iron ring on the street and calls it Enduring Element, her first piece of found-object art. This is a full two years before Duchamp and Picabia arrive in New York and Duchamp coins the term "ready-mades."

Elsa plunged headfirst into New York's avant-garde artistic circles. When she met Duchamp, 13 years her junior, she immediately fell in love and began her pursuit of him. Duchamp resisted her advances, causing her to refer to him as her "platonic lover." The two lived in the same apartment building for a time and were well acquainted.

The key piece of evidence in Gammel's compelling case for why the urinal may have been Elsa's is a letter Duchamp wrote to his sister in April 1917 in which he states:

"One of my female friends who had adopted the pseudonym Richard Mutt sent a porcelain urinal as a sculpture; since there was nothing indecent about it, there was no reason to reject it." (When he speaks of not rejecting the urinal, Duchamp is referring to the fact that he was a board member of the Society of Independent Artists who chose work for the exhibition.)

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Is this the smoking gun? Gammel stops short of saying so, careful to point out that final, conclusive evidence is missing, but "there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence that points to her [Elsa's] artistic fingerprint."

As for Spalding's other source, Dr. Glyn Thompson, I wasn't able to find anything published except an online PDF of a 2008 doctoral thesis for the History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds School of Fine Art, titled Unwinding Duchamp: Mots et Paroles à Tous les Étages.

It is well beyond the limits of my time to read Thompson's entire thesis, so I tried keyword searches ("urinal," "fountain," "baroness," "elsa," "freytag-loringhoven.") to see if I could find the corroborating evidence Spalding cites. I couldn't.

Given the urinal's enormous influence twentieth-century art, I would very much like to know Spalding's further substantiation that "has now proved beyond any shadow of reasonable doubt" that the Baroness, and not Duchamp, was responsible for the iconic urinal. If you know of this evidence, you can email me at jane@offrampgallery.com and I'll report it in a future column.

Is Spalding right when he claims "Duchamp stole the idea from, of all people, a woman to cement his reputation. He then commissioned a set of replicas to sell -- cast of a copy of a found object! They sit like thrones in the major collections of modern art around the world." If Spalding is right, how does this alter your view of Duchamp and his legacy?

Upcoming at Offramp Gallery

 

May 6 - June 3, 2012
Chuck Feesago: Retention

Opening Reception: Sunday, May 6, 2-5pm

May 6 - June 3, 2012

D. Jean Hester: A Rope Let Down From Heaven

Opening Reception: Sunday, May 6, 2-5pm

May 19, 2012
Joe Santarromana: The Rememberers
Special Screening: 7pm

June 24 - August 5, 2012
Lou Beach: Stories & Pictures

Opening Reception: Sunday, June 24, 2-5pm

How to Conquer Your Creative Demons

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Creative Block. We've all had it. I'm trying to work through it as I write this sentence -- negative thoughts, distractions, rationalizations, avoidance and procrastination all dance before me, trying to get me to do anything but write. It's a beautiful day. I should be outdoors gardening, not hunched over my keyboard. But here I am. I sit down, drink coffee, play with my cats, play a couple of games of Scrabble Blast, and eventually start to write. Everything else melts away and I am magically "in the zone."

In his 2002 book, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles author Steven Pressfield defines the powerful enemy that keeps us from doing what we should be doing, and names it Resistance:

"Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance. . . Resistance is the most toxic force on the planet . . . To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be."

Just how powerful does Pressfield think this enemy is?:

"You know, Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronen, and moved to Vienna to live and study. . . Ever see one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I'll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas."

Pressfield takes the reader on a journey through the many manifestations of Resistance, from self-doubt and procrastination to fear, identifying and offering advice about how to overcome them:

"Grandiose fantasies are a symptom of Resistance. They're the sign of an amateur. The professional has learned that success, like happiness, comes as a by-product of work. The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come. . ."

I found Pressfield's short chapter on Resistance and Fundamentalism particularly interesting. While he may be over-simplifying, I think he's on to something: 

"Fundamentalism and art are mutually exclusive. There is no such thing as fundamentalist art. This does not mean that the fundamentalist is not creative. Rather, his creativity is inverted. He creates destruction. . . To combat the call of sin, i.e., Resistance, the fundamentalist plunges either into action or into the study of sacred texts. He loses himself in these, much as the artist does in the process of creation. The difference is that while the one looks forward, hoping to create a better world, the other looks backward, seeking to return to a purer world from which he and all have fallen. . . When Fundamentalism wins, the world enters a dark age."

The following video shows how one artist got over her creative block.
 


The War of Art is packed with wisdom, wit, humor and advice, and delivers that kick in the pants we all sometimes need to get off the couch and get to work. Whether you're an artist, writer or entrepreneur, whether you read this book cover to cover or pick it up and read random bits, The War of Art will help you recognize and work through your creative demons.

Click here to purchase The War of Art from Amazon.com

Upcoming at Offramp Gallery

March 4 - April 15, 2012:
John M. White: Recent Works
Opening Reception: Sunday, March 4, 2-5pm

May 6 - June 3, 2012
Chuck Feesago: Retention
Opening Reception: Sunday, May 6, 2-5pm

May 6 - June 3, 2012

D. Jean Hester: A Rope Let Down From Heaven

Opening Reception: Sunday, May 6, 2-5pm

June 24 - August 5, 2012
Lou Beach: Stories & Pictures

Opening Reception: Sunday, June 24, 2-5pm

"Strapless:" The Scandal that Rocked the Nineteenth Century Art World

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It was the era of the parisienne, the professional French beauty, famous world-wide for her looks. Whole lives were devoted to it. Some went so far as to have their skin painted or enameled, a practice which sometimes led to facial paralysis, blood poisoning and even death. One social observer noted, "In Paris, half the female population lives off fashion, while the other half lives for fashion."

In the late 1870s a stunningly beautiful parisienne, Amélie Gautreau, dominated the social landscape. Madame Gautreau was born Virginie Amélie Avegno in New Orleans to French Creole parents. After her father was killed in the Battle of Shiloh, Amélie's mother moved her young daughters to live in Paris. Amélie began her ascent into Parisian society after marrying the wealthy Pedro Gautreau in 1878.

Amélie captured the imagination of many young aspiring artists, chief among them John Singer Sargent, who became obsessed with the beauty and pursued her relentlessly in hopes of painting her portrait. He knew a successful portrait of Gautreau would result in future commissions from the rich and famous of Parisian society.

Deborah Davis's 2003 dual biography, Strapless, plots the course of the lives of two people whose stories will be forever woven together in this story of art, celebrity and scandal. The cast of supporting characters includes Richard and Cosima Wagner, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde. Davis vividly paints her own picture of life in nineteenth century Parisian society and the scandal that rocked that world.

After getting her to agree to sit for the portrait, Sargent struggled for months with what he called "the unpaintable beauty and hopeless laziness of Madame Gautreau." Eventually, "he condemned Amélie, who hated remaining motionless, to one of the most tortuous poses in art history. He had her stand with her right arm leaning tensely on a table that was just a little too short to be a comfortable source of support. Her face turned sideways to draw attention to her remarkable profile, while her body pointed to the front. The muscles of her neck strained to keep her head at its awkward angle."

John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau), 1884, oil on canvas, 234.95 × 109.86 cm (92.5 × 43.3 in), Metropolitan Museum of Art

Sargent finished the portrait in time for the 1884 Salon, the most important art show in the world, with thousands attending daily. He had painted the famed beauty in a chic black dress and had no idea of the scandal that was about to erupt over his depiction of a strap dangling off Madame Gautreau's bare white shoulder. 

Nudes were everywhere in the 1884 Salon: "though highly idealized, even the most 'classical' nudes must have seemed erotic to Salon audiences. Women in the nineteenth century tended to cover their flesh in public with layers of clothing, from buttoned-up gloves to floor-length hems. Salon exhibitions provided easy access to sexual images that were not part of daily life. And artist knew that their nudes, however sanitized or decorous, were titillating. they placed them liberally in their paintings, often in such settings as forests and courtrooms where it made no sense for their subjects to be naked."

So why the scandal over a mere fallen strap? According to Davis:

"The public's judgment was loud, quick, and definite. What a horror, people exclaimed. She looked monstrous and decomposed, some said. The painting was indecent. Amélie's exposed white shoulders and décolletage -- without a breast in sight -- disgusted them. And that fallen strap! Was it a prelude to, or the aftermath of, sex?"

John Singer Sargent, in his studio with his painting Portrait of Madame X, black and white photographic print, 21 x 28 cm, circa 1884, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian, photographer unknown.

Sargent's career would go on to survive the scandal, while Amélie's reputation would never fully recover -- she was no longer the "it girl." As soon as the Salon ended, Sargent took his painting back to his studio and repainted the strap in its upright position. Many years later in 1915, when Sargent sold the painting to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, he requested that Amelie's name not be associated with the portrait. That is when it officially came to be known as the infamous Portrait of Madame X.

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Upcoming at Offramp Gallery

March 4 - April 15, 2012:
John M. White: Recent Works
Opening Reception: Sunday, March 4, 2-5pm

May 6 - June 3, 2012
Chuck Feesago: Retention
Opening Reception: Sunday, May 6, 2-5pm

May 6 - June 3, 2012

D. Jean Hester: A Rope Let Down From Heaven

Opening Reception: Sunday, May 6, 2-5pm

June 24 - August 5, 2012

Lou Beach: Stories & Pictures

Opening Reception: Sunday, June 24, 2-5pm

A Photography Book that Captures the Zeitgeist of Los Angeles

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This week I want to spotlight a book that dovetails neatly with the current zeitgeist in the Los Angeles art world, a spirit of time and place that I believe is largely a result of the Getty's city-wide Pacific Standard Time initiative. Taschen's fabulous photography book, Los Angeles, Portrait of a Cityfleshes out the cultural identity of the city, before and after the 1945-1980 focus of Pacific Standard Time, and is nothing less than a joy to own.

So get comfortable in your favorite chair and give yourself at least two hours to take in the over 500 photographs that range from the first known photograph of Los Angeles, a largely pastoral scene taken in 1862, to a portrait of the founder of Forest Lawn surrounded by prints of big-eyed Jesuses, to recent landmarks such as Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Hall.

You’ll travel through time with highlights of the city's cultural, political, industrial, and sociological history. A 1927 photograph by Cliff Wesselman shows pistol-packing police chief James “Two-Gun” Davis. The caption reads: “Adopting a tough-on-crime stance, he announced that he would ‘hold court on gunmen in the Los Angeles streets; I want them brought in dead, not alive, and will reprimand any officer who shows the least mercy to a criminal.’” Yikes!

Copyright: University of Southern California/Regional History Center
Caption: 339 Anonymous: Spectators join police at the aftermath of a shootout, 1953.

One photo shows German American Bund picnickers in 1938 raising a large 3-D swastika in La Crescenta’s Hinderburg Park. Another shows the bottom of Marilyn Monroe’s lifeless foot sticking out from a under a blanket in a morgue refrigerator. We see a young Ronald Regan modeling for a sculpture class at USC (hated his politics, but what a bod!), a group of female impersonators arrested in a raid in 1927, and Faye Dunaway posing for a post-Academy Award portrait by the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Copyright: Jim Heimann Collection
Caption: 271 Dick Whittington: Simon’s drive-in, Wilshire Boulevard andFairfax Avenue, c. 1939.

Architecture, from kitsch eateries to Case Study Houses, is abundantly represented. A photo of the Spruce Goose being transported to Long Beach Harbor seems a precursor to the recent media-blitz over LACMA's much ballyhooed rock. I was surprised to learn that there was once an elevated bike path that ran from Pasadena to Los Angeles (Anyone want to start a movement to bring this back? Even I would ride a bike to LA if the path were completely free of cars). 

Copyright: Getty Images
Caption: 336 Slim Aarons: Rita Aarons, wife of the photographer, swimming in a pool festooned with floating baubles
 and a decorated Christmas tree, ca 1955.

Riots, earthquakes, fires and floods, rock stars, movie stars, O.J. Simpson carrying the Olympic torch on Pacific Coast Highway, John Belushi’s lifeless body being removed from the Chateau Marmont, an Angelyne billboard (I spotted her last week in her pink Corvette in Hollywood) and Joni Mitchell leaning out the window of her Laurel Canyon home are all included. 

Essays by Kevin Star, copious captions, blurbs from books and movies about Los Angeles, and maps of the area as it grows, round out this portrait of the city. You don't have to live in Los Angeles to appreciate this book and the huge cultural impact Los Angeles has had on the rest of the world.

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Upcoming at Offramp Gallery

March 4 - April 15, 2012:
John M. White: Recent Works
Opening Reception: Sunday, March 4, 2-5pm

Sunday, March 25, 3pm:
Betty Ann Brown reading & book signing
from her new book, Afternoons with June: Stories of June Wayne’s Art & Life

May 6 - June 3, 2012:
Chuck Feesago: Retention
Opening Reception: Sunday, May 6, 2-5pm

Short Takes: Animated Masterpieces

Heironymous Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights,
El Prado Museum

What happens when Heavy Metal meets Hieronymus Bosch? Watch avant-garde musician and songwriter Buckethead's Spokes for the Wheel of Torment video below and find out. Based on several of Bosch's masterpieces, it's not for the faint of heart.

Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory, 1931.Oil on canvas, 9 1/2 x 13" (24.1 x 33 cm).
© 2007 Salvador Dalí, Gala-Salvador Dalí
Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Destino was originally conceived as a collaboration between Walt Disney and Salvador Dali. It was storyboarded by Disney artist John Hench and Dali for eight months in 1945-46, but the project was shelved due to financial problems. In 1999, Walt Disney's nephew, Roy E. Disney, unearthed the dormant project and decided to bring it back to life. It was subsequently released in 2003.

Guernica by Pablo Picasso. 1937.
Oil on canvas. 349 cm × 776 cm.

This next video is an animated sequence from the rarely-seen 1969 film The Picasso Summer, starring Albert Finney and Yvette Mimieux, and based on a short story by Ray Bradbury. A young couple strolls through what appears to be an underground grotto, illuminating Picasso paintings on the walls and ceiling by candlelight. The actual animation begins at 2:05.

M.C. Escher, Ascending and Descending, 1960
lithograph, 35.5 cm × 28.5 cm

Ending things on a lighter note is this animation based on M.C. Escher's endless staircase from his work Ascending and Descending. A lesson in frustration.





Upcoming at Offramp Gallery

March 4 - April 15, 2012:
John M. White: Recent Works
Opening Reception: Sunday, March 4, 2-5pm









Sunday, March 25, 3pm:
Betty Ann Brown reading & book signing
from her new book, Afternoons with June: Stories of June Wayne’s Art & Life

May 6 - June 3, 2012:
Chuck Feesago: Retention
Opening Reception: Sunday, May 6, 2-5pm

Pacific Standard Time Shines the Spotlight on a Veteran Artist: An Interview with John M. White

John M. White has been making art for a long time. A fixture on the Los Angeles art scene since the early 70's, and honored last year by a retrospective at the Armory Center for the Arts, John M. White's considerable contribution to contemporary art in Los Angeles is further acknowledged by being included in four of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time exhibitions.

Throughout his career, White has focused on three major areas of work: performance art, installations, and drawing and painting. White's work has always been cross-disciplinary, seamlessly blending object-making and performance. In today's art world, there's nothing unusual about that, but when White was getting his MFA at Otis Art Institute in the late 60's, it was almost unheard of.
 

John M. White, Performance Guide, 1969, Ink on Paper, 28" x 32", courtesy of Sylvia White Gallery

I spoke to White earlier this week about those early days.

JC: How did you initially become interested in performance art?

JW: I was a student at Otis and I met Joan Hugo, who was a librarian there, and she was quite hip for Otis. She was connected to a lot of performance work that was going on in New York.

JC: When was this?

JW: I was at Otis from 1965-69. She would take one or two students under her wing every year. I was warned about her, in a nice way. If you really wanted to find out what was going on in the contemporary art world, you went to Joan. So I introduced myself to her and we became friends. She realized that I was looking at different things, other than painting and making objects, and that I was also interested in doing things live. One day she posted a flyer on the school bulletin board saying that performance artist Yvonne Rainer was in town, that she was a dancer and was looking for helpers. I didn't respond because I'm not a dancer. But then Joan asked me why my name wasn't on the list. She said "it's not dance, but it's called dance."

So I signed up and went down to this abandoned Cadillac showroom. Yvonne was very interested in common movement, and wanted a bunch of people to follow her around and emulate what she was doing. Very simple instructions. We met a couple of times, about 50 of us, and I began to really fall in love with the idea of just walking, then getting on the ground and rolling around and getting back up and just doing common things. That to me was very acceptable.

John M. White, Performance Guide: Boulder Delivery, 1970, Ink on Paper, 28" x 32", courtesy of Sylvia White Gallery

Next I went up to Dwan Gallery with Steve Paxton and he said he'd like to use me in a piece. "Just hold on to my body and as I walk around the audience, talking to the audience, you just hold on to my sweater." I said ok, so we did that and the audience went crazy, they went nuts, they were clapping -- there were about 200 or 300 people in the audience. Then he took me outside, we walked around the block and then came in the back way, did the same thing again and the audience went absolutely crazy again. I kept saying to myself "What is this?" It was wonderful.

So I took both Steve's and Yvonne's workshops at an abandoned warehouse in Venice when they came back in town a year later. This was my sophomore year at Otis. We tried lots of different things. I remember a really break-through piece when Steve asked me where I worked. I told him I worked in a brewery in Azusa from midnight until 6:30 in the morning. He then asked me what I did there. I said "well I do a lot of hard labor until about three in the morning and then I come into a room and I take a newspaper and I put it over my face and I fall asleep for a couple of hours on a bench." He suggested I make a piece out of it.

About a month later Steve and I went down to Del Mar to this huge factory and warehouse. I got about 15 stacks of left-over newspapers and put them in a big circle and went to the audience said I needed about 20 people to work in the piece. I pulled them aside and said I was going to cover them with newspapers and they were to count to 1000 and get up and leave. So they laid down in a circle and I asked the rest of the audience to take the newspapers, crinkle them up into a ball and throw them on top of the performers. We made this gigantic stack of crinkled newspaper, lit by one light from above which made it look very dramatic and then we all sat down and waited. One by one the performers got up and left.

We thought it was over when someone said "my husband's still in there!" We called for him and nothing happened. He had fallen asleep! So we woke him up and it was really a nice way to end the piece. Everybody laughed. It was a good audience participation piece as well as a sculptural form, and also live. It was called Paper Pile. It looked very good, it was very beautiful. So that was my initiation to performance art.

John M. White, Mind Field III, 2009, Ink on Paper, 23" x 36", courtesy of Sylvia White Gallery

JC: So from then on you did performance as well as drawing and painting?

JW: Yes. While I was still at Otis I started making paintings called Floor Plans for Performances, but when I titled them that way, Otis wouldn't let me graduate. They said they weren't a dance school and they weren't a theater school. They loved the paintings, but they hated the titles. So I changed the titles temporarily -- I called them untitled painting #14, things like that, and then I was able to graduate!

I realized that I was a little bit different. The feeling in LA at the time was that you were either a performance artist and you did live things, or you were an object-maker and you did drawings, paintings or sculpture, and the two camps didn't get along with each other. That was completely foreign to me. I'd do a performance and then I'd do some drawings based on the performance and I'd go back and forth. They fed each other.

I had major problems with it, getting gigs and things like that. I was actually disallowed from a show I was going to have in a nice gallery on La Cienega because the other artists said I was a performance artist and warned the gallery to be careful about showing me. I got a call from the owner of the gallery and he said "I'm sorry, we've decided not to show you." I found out a few years later that all the other artists had gotten together to push me out.

JC: Fast forward to the last couple of years. You've had a retrospective at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena and you are represented in four Pacific Standard Time shows around LA. What has this meant to you?

JW: With Pacific Standard Time, I think they were trying to highlight a lot of artists like me who were under the radar. I think the older you get, the further under the radar you get if you haven't established yourself early on. So for me Pacific Standard Time has really been a godsend in terms of my public career, but I always work anyway. I don't care if it's public or not. But it has given me a chance to do a lot of things I wouldn't have career-wise.

John M. White, Solimar Beach Elements, #3, 2010, Acrylic on Panel, 23"x36". courtesy of Sylvia White Gallery

JC: One of the four shows you're represented in was the performance you did for It Happened At Pomona: Art of the Edge of Los Angeles 1963-1973 at the Pomona College of Art Museum in January. The other performances were by Judy Chicago and James Turrell. You received a glowing review in the LA Times.

JW: That was very interesting. They called me up about redoing a performance from 1971. It was a group of football players. I had 34 people in the audience and six football players and I choreographed their movements.

JC: That was Preparation F?

JW: Yes. I've never done a re-do of a performance, so when they called I told them I didn't think that it was viable. But then they called back and told me they had forgotten to tell me about the budget -- a very healthy budget. My response was "you're kidding?!" And then I said yes. They had found my price!

I came down one night for rehearsal and I asked where the football players and the coach were. I was told they were upstairs waiting for me. So I went up the elevator and I went into this room and these kids went crazy, cheering me, jumping up and down. I had just gotten out of the hospital and I was on a cane, so I went limping in and it was very dramatic. The coach had whipped them into a frenzy. We did a rehearsal and I saw that these guys were ready to go. They had studied the piece from the 70's, from the notes and photos, and they were ready to do it in a big way. It was a match made in art heaven. It has inspired me to get back into performance. I've made a couple of drawings and paintings based on that performance in Pomona already.



JC: The LA Times review must have been very validating.

JW: I was sitting here in the studio and someone called and said "bravo, John!" I said "bravo what?" He asked me if I had seen the LA Times. I hadn't, so I stopped painting and went and got one, and here's this big beautiful color photograph from my performance on the front of the Calendar section. It was not exactly validation, that's not what I'm looking for, but it was wonderful.

JC: Where does your self-validation, for lack of a better term, come from? What has kept you working all these years regardless of how your public career was going?

JW: That came from my first teacher -- he ran a private art school in his house in San Francisco and that's what he taught. I lived there for three years. He was a very strong figure.

JC: That was Giacomo Patri?

JW: Right, the Patri School of Art Fundamentals. He was a consummate teacher, an extraordinary person. He taught us to work our way through things, to do it ourselves and not to worry about getting famous or discovered. He said it was a blessing to be able to enjoy what you're doing.

I was going to become a brewmaster like my dad, and I just stumbled into his school, started taking a class, and before I knew it, I had moved in. I stopped working at the brewery and learned how to exist on almost nothing. I lived there like a monk. I've been making art ever since.

Click here for more information on John M. White


Upcoming at Offramp Gallery

March 4 - April 15, 2012:
John M. White: Recent Works
Opening Reception: Sunday, March 4, 2-5pm









Sunday, March 25, 3pm:
Betty Ann Brown reading & book signing
from her new book, Afternoons with June: Stories of June Wayne’s Art & Life

May 6 - June 3, 2012:
Chuck Feesago: Retention
Opening Reception: Sunday, May 6, 2-5pm

Lou Beach's "420 Characters," a Perfect Marriage of Creativity and Media for the 21st Century

Click here to buy from Amazon.com 

Lou Beach's 420 Characters is the perfect book for today's multi-tasking, time- and attention-challenged, media-gorging, art and literature lover (like me). Limited to 420 characters (including punctuation), each of Beach's very short stories started life as a Facebook status update. Vividly distilling experience into a haiku-like framework, Beach's stories are narrative gems -- evocative, surreal and dreamlike -- the opening scene of a movie by your favorite director as you sink into your seat in the darkened theater:

"We were on a tour boat in Boston Harbor. A candy wrapper escaped from some kid's hand, scuttled our way across the deck. Russell pinned it with his boot, bent over, picked it up. A gust of wind snatched it from him, sent it out over the water. An old woman said: 'Shame on you, littering.' My brother's neck went red. He got that look that could clear a barroom in Quincy. He sighed, winked at me. 'Yes, ma'am,' he said."

Infused with atmospheric depth and populated with myriad characters, Beach's stories range from comedy to irony, tragedy and surreal montage:

"Shot by a monkey, Elsa leaned against the banyan, held a bandage to the wound. They'd entered camp just before dawn, made off with a pistol, some candy bars, and a Desmond Morris book. We counted as six shots rang out, one of them finding poor Elsa's arm. Relieved that the simian was out of ammunition, we packed up. On the way out of camp we noticed a monkey on the riverbank, hammering at a snake with the gun."

The handsome hardcover book is in and of itself a small treasure. Designed after a vintage volume in Beach's personal collection, the red cover is embossed with a gold leaf monogram, the stories printed on heavy paper and illustrated with surreal collages by Beach, also a well known artist and illustrator.

Lou Beach, The Fall, collage

Lou Beach, World of Men C, collage

Audio recordings of the stories by Beach's friends, actors Jeff Bridges, Ian McShane and musician Dave Alvin, are available on the book's website.

The book was chosen as one of Amazon Best Books of the Month, December 2011. In the following video, Beach is interviewed about 420 Characters for the series, Author Interviews @ amazon:

Don't hesitate to buy this book! Whether you read it all in one sitting or pick it up occasionally to savor a story or two, 420 Characters fires on all cylinders -- fine writing, fine art, beautiful design -- and will not disappoint.

Click here to buy 420 Characters from Amazon.com

Upcoming at Offramp Gallery

March 4 - April 15, 2012:
John M. White: Recent Works
Opening Reception: Sunday, March 4, 2-5pm









Sunday, March 25, 3pm:
Betty Ann Brown reading & book signing
from her new book, Afternoons with June: Stories of June Wayne’s Art & Life

May 6 - June 3, 2012:
Chuck Feesago: Retention
Opening Reception: Sunday, May 6, 2-5pm