VSF VARIOUS SMALL FIRES 812 NORTH HIGHLAND AVENUE LOS ANGELES / Billy Al Bengston Press Packet

Transcription

1 / Billy Al Bengston Press Packet

2 10 / 01 / 2014 Billy Al Bengston by Prudence Peiffer INFO@.LA /

3 /

4 / / 18 / 2001 ART IN REVIEW; Billy Al Bengston -- Dentos and Draculas, 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 wellmannered 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.

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

6 / When the men finally walk out on stage, they re met with vigorous applause from a crowd that s thick with celebrities and art world figures: Frank Gehry, Doug Aitken, Maria Shriver, James Franco, Los Angeles County Museum of Art Director Michael Govan, and philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad, to name a few. The hour-long talk that follows, moderated by art critic Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, touches on the early days of L.A. s contemporary art scene and Ferus Gallery co-founders Walter Hopps and Edward Kienholz, as well as the artists own journeys to Ferus; their mutual respect for watercolor teacher Irwin at the Chouinard Art Institute ( Bob s strength was in conveying a sense of how one trusts oneself, Bell says); and their respective day jobs as aspiring creatives and how those experiences influenced their work. (Bell worked in a frame shop where he learned to cut glass, and Bengston raced motorcycles where he developed an affection for the airbrushing technique.) Ruscha recalls personalizing 300-some gift items a day, things like birdhouses or ceramic false teeth holders called Ma and Pa Chopper Hoppers. ( I just remember painting the name John John many times, he says.) The conversation traverses surprise studio visits, like the day 22-year-old Bell found Marcel Duchamp standing on his doorstep. I sort of threw myself back against the wall. This legend was there in my studio, Bell says. Compliments and affectionate ribbing ensue. You are a great artist, Moses tells Bengston. You have the ability, when something isn t working, to make it worse! They were $100 apiece, he yells out. But Andy would get half of that! What was the draw about working in gallerysparse, collector-thin Los Angeles back in the 50s and 60s? All of us wanted to make a contribution of some kind, Bengston says. We didn t need museums, galleries. We didn t [care] what anyone else said. We thought we were great too, Moses chimes in. Well, we were! Bengston says. I d say everyone sitting here was fantastic. To which the audience erupted in applause. As the crowd files out of the auditorium, Blum stands still, facing the now empty stage. I knew them all when they were in their teens and 20s. And to see them now he says. Wow, they re geriatric now! But so am I. I couldn t be prouder. At a small post-show reception, fellow artist Peter Alexander greets Bell, now snug in a puffy red ski jacket. A little stiff in the beginning, but hey, it got going, Alexander says to him. It was fun, it was fun, Bell says. That s the point, right? 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.

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

8 / I happened to be in that circle. He was totally nocturnal. Pete phoned at 11pm and said, come on over, we ll make some clay. He had a huge bread mixer and we started to make a ton of clay around midnight and finished at 4am. Then we took massive loads of clay out to his studio and used about 100 pounds a day to make balls and cups. At 7am we all went to have breakfast across the street and Peter paid. Then school would start and we all went to bed. HUO: What would you consider to be your first mature works? BAB: I don t judge myself. I think I am still very immature. I don t have any favorites. If I don t like it, I throw that shit away. My ego is stupid, sometimes I look around and say, oh shit, I have to throw all this stuff away. HUO: How much has the motorcycling subculture been influential to you? BAB: I made my living racing motorcycles. I went to work one day a week in summer from 7:30-9:30pm and I made enough money to live from it for three weeks. I broke my back just before my 30th birthday and I race quite a bit afterwards, but I wasn t as good, my ego wouldn t take it. There is a big difference between being first and fourth. Ed Ruscha used to ride down Baja, California, all the time. We did books and bikes together. We were asshole buddies form way back. HUO: How did you meet each other? BAB: We met in Los Angeles after he got out of Choinard. HUO: So you had these activities like motorcycle racing and at the same time you did your art, for example your flower paintings. BAB: I started painting the Draculas, the paintings with the centrally placed flower. They are called Draculas because Ken Price walked into my studio and said, hmmm, looks like The Count is flying through the window. Ken and I were fans of Bela Lugosi, who played Count Dracula in the early Dracula movies. He said that because I had boxes around the images, they looked like windows. The main reason for this is a terrible mistake according to my thinking, the box replaced the signature. It s a serious mistake to put signatures on things, unless your name is Salvador Dali or Picasso. They designed their signatures and they look beautiful. HUO: You never sign you work? BAB: I do it on a drawing. On paintings it looks like graffiti. I always figure that the easiest thing to do is copy a signature. HUO: Alex, do you sign your works? AI: On the back. We stamp them too. HUO: Billy, you never signed your works in the past? BAB: I did but it is a mistake. I realized it one day when I was talking to Barnett Newman. He was talking about his monochrome paintings that are painted completely in one color. I asked, what about that squashed lizard in the corner. He said, what do you mean? I replied, well that black thing on the corner, which was his signature. This was the only thing I could see, because it was the only thing that was a different color. HUO: What did Newman say? BAB: He didn t speak to me after that. But he stopped signing them. I think the New Yorkers were so far behind us compared to California. We didn t have to worry about selling things. We couldn t sell anything so it didn t make any difference. HUO: You were free? BAB: The difference is, in New York people would talk to you in the older days and say, what gallery are you with? To me, if you are with a gallery that means that you are a hired hand, just an employee. HUO: You think that was the advantage of California? BAB: Yes, the advantage was, at that time it was a close circle of artists, very competitive and very supportive. Then it became a commercial situation like in New York. HUO: Did that happen when Walter Hopps went out? BAB: Irving Blum changed the game. He was always looking to New York. He didn t know any other system as he was from New York, born in Arizona, with a full

9 / Cary Grant accent. HUO: Frank Gehry said for years I should meet you. AI: Frank Gehry designed an installation for your exhibition at the Lost Angeles County Museum of Art in 1968, right? BAB: He designed the architecture and I modified it, then he redesigned it and I modified it again. I put a couch, chairs, tables and floor lamps in and dismantled the overhead lights. He made everything crooked by deconstructing it. When I told Frank I wanted furniture he went out to one of these places that rent out terrible furniture you can t stand to look at. I had a hissy fit and Frank took it out. I got my truck and went around and borrowed everyone s furniture. I had Ed Ruscha s casting couch and I put another couch in one room that I knew the guards would be in so they could sit on their asses. I put a TV stand in there too. Before black people were being hired by the city, I made friends with the Black Panthers so I put a room full of Black Panthers posters in the show. I even stayed in the museum during the night and slept on the couch. I had access to the museum. AI: Who invited you to do the exhibition? BAB: I curated it, but Maurice Tuchman instigated it. The best thing that came out of the museum was a sideshow from Horace Clifford Westermann from Chicago. Maurice came over and asked me, do you want to meet H.C. Westermann? I ran over to the other room and Westermann looked at me. He had this way of greeting everyone. He stuck his hand straight out and he had this big meet hook. He was just rippling muscles everywhere. I got very close to his hand and then I did a stunt in front of him and fell flat on the floor. He was laughing. At the opening we entered the museum together on our hands. Both of us went up the stairs on our hands. We became good friends. AI: Billy, you designed H.C. Westermann s exhibition at MOCA in 2000, right? BAB: Yes, and I did a damn good job. HUO: Westermann wasn t alive anymore at that time. What did you do for the show? BAB: I did it right that s all. I painted the floor all yellow and blurred the edges so it looked like a shag rug and changed the lights to pink and yellow. That was the only exhibition I designed in its entirety. Most people are afraid of what I do. HUO: Is it true that you met Marcel Duchamp? BAB: Yes. Walter Hopps introduced him to me. I think Duchamp is a total fraud. I liked him as a person. I just think he is a fraud. He did more damage than god damn any other person did to the art world. His work allowed art teachers to be stupid and even stupider people to be stupid. Everybody accepted readymades as art, which I don t believe they are. I think he was a pretty good chess player. HUO: How did you then bring all of these new materials into your work, e.g. in the 60s you worked with Polyurethane. How did that happen? BAB: It happened because I m practical. Oil paint is real shit. It is pigment mixed up in salad dressing. It dries out, cracks and it falls off. The pigments are good but the binder is terrible. At the time I was working at the motorcycle shop [using] spray lacquer and thought this is a much better material I tested it myself, so I painted the tank of my motorcycle one with oil paint, the other one with lacquer. The lacquer painting lasted two seasons; the oil painting lasted for only one race. HUO: In the 80s you made these paintings called Clowns and Mummies. How did that serious come about? BAB: I have always been a stargazer. I looked up to the moon and I thought, what is the corniest thing you could do? So I painted clowns. I was just tired of doing the same old shit, so I changed. I don t have any reason for doing anything. I just do it. HUO: Art happens as the American painter James Whistler said. BAB: I just do it. HUO: Hedi Slimane chose works by you for his 2015 Men s Spring/Summer collection. BAB: They made a publication too. HUO: When you do your paintings do you sketch or

10 / draw? BAB: No, never. I know what I am doing. HUO: What are you working on now? BAB: I am not doing a damn thing. I haven t done anything since I came back from Hawaii two weeks ago. I don t know what I am going to do next. I am afraid to start because I get involved and I just can t get out. HUO: Did you work there? BAB: Yes, I was there for two months. I don t have reproductions of the watercolors. I did there. In fact, I don t like reproductions. It is not the real thing. It is like talking about fucking. It s fun but it doesn t work. HUO: Do you have an unrealized project? Dreams, utopias, lost competitions? BAB: No. I am not interested. If somebody volunteers with a great idea, sure, I will play. I don t know what I would like to do. If I knew I would do it. For a while I wanted to build a studio, but now I never want to do that. It has to do with age. If I do it myself, I will fall of the perch before I finish. AI: At least you know how to stunt-fall, safely. BAB: I will fall quietly and permanently. HUO: Have you done public art projects? BAB: Yes and they are all terrible. HUO: How can we see them? BAB: Drive by. I don t know what they look like. They are probably faded and fucked up. No, the only person who made it halfway successful was Alexander Calder. That was it. The rest was just commercial art. HUO: It is fascinating how you clearly distinguish commercial art and non. BAB: It didn t used to be like that. 30 years ago it used to be very clear. Today I don t think that it is blurred at all. Now everything is commercial. The things Alex is doing are very successful. It is a different age. It is a different thing. The value today is financial. HUO: The art world has become an industry. The music world too, the literary world is an industry. The only world, which is still unchanged and which reminds me of the art world is the world of poetry. I think the world of poetry never changes. There is no market:it is exactly how it always used to be. BAB: I always dreaded the fact that my daughter might become a poet, it is the only real fucked profession. HUO: Did she become one? BAB: Not [even] close. Fortunately, I have never figured out what she became. Close second was dancing. I think she is going to work with horses. Hans-Ulrich Obrist and a few others leave the table, to see some of Bengston s work that is spread throughout the house. Billy and Alex continue chatting about dogs. BAB: I don t like many dogs, only ones with a white face. AI: You are a dog racist. BAB: Yes, I like to be able to see the eyes and the mouth. I can live with it, if the face is white with a bit of brown. I used to get my dogs from Perfect Pet Finders. I told them I want a dog that fits in a shoebox, it can t have a sloppy face and preferably does not shit (laughing). AI: I just need a dog that won t give me an allergic reaction. BAB: So you got a poodle type? AI: Yes, he s half poodle and half cocker spaniel. I call him Mr. Brown. BAB: That s an unfortunate combination. I bred cocker spaniels for a while. When I was in junior high school I bred them for money. AI: In your hometown in Kansas? BAB: No, when I moved to California with my parents in 1949, where I went to Manual Arts Senior High School. AI: Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston went to Manual Arts. BAB: I know. Everyone wanted to go there because it was the only high school in the US that had nude models at that time. I was so excited when I walked into the classroom that was run by the art teach, Mr. Swankowski. Nude models in those days were landslides. They wanted to chat with you all the time and I said, take your fucking clothes off. AI: Was it the same art teacher who taught Pollock and

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

12 / / 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 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1968, artist Billy Al Bengston enlisted the help of architect Frank Gehry to design the exhibition s scenography and create an architectural armature upon which the show could hang. Complemented by a now rare and coveted catalog by Ed Ruscha, Bengston s presentation at LACMA proved to be the most substantial articulation to date of the painter s commitment to the context of display as a form of mediation and experience. The exhibition design included reused discarded wall fragments from the museum s past exhibitions, borrowed furniture and home accents, posters from the Black Power movement, and a life-size wax figure made in Bengston s likeness by the nearby Hollywood Wax Museum. In retrospect, the paintings appear to almost be an afterthought in an installation conceived and executed by two friends and collaborators, one that privileged the conditions under which pictures are viewed, and sometimes overlooked, in the conventions of museology. Frank s exhibition design was dominant and central to the execution of the show. How did the idea for this collaboration come about? FRANK GEHRY: To start, there was no budget. We had a museum director, Ken Donahue, who was a nice, bumbly guy but a dinosaur in terms of the art stuff that was going on. His curator was none other than Maurice Tuchman. I think probably Billy proposed me to them. BILLY AL BENGSTON: No, I didn t propose anything. I said, He s doing it. FG: I was a hanger-on to the art scene because the architects that I was collegiate with at the time thought I was nuts. Even my friends at the time and those who are still my friends some of them are dead thought I was weird, but I didn t know I was weird. And when the art guys embraced me, I was declared weird by association probably. 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? ARAM MOSHAYEDI: Let s talk about your collaboration at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Although the exhibition was billed as a ten-year survey of Billy s paintings, it s clear that BAB: Well, let s put this in perspective. I can tell you, it was a very small world, and Frank is only telling you about what happened in his world. In our world at that time, I shared a studio with Ken Price, and we worked and we smoked cigarettes and drank black coffee. That

13 / was it. For lunch, he d have a Heath bar and I d have a Snickers bar. That was it. Then we got a ping-pong table, so we d surf, play ping-pong, and work, smoke and drink black coffee. That s it. That was what we did for three or four years. That s all we could afford to do. It was a very small world. At that time, there were so few interesting people that there was a gravitational pull, and Frank was part of the interesting people. None of us knew at the time that he thought anything of us. And we didn t know that Frank was going to become the foremost artist of our time. AM: Tuchman once mentioned another exhibition that you worked on at LACMA called Art Treasures from Japan. Did you do exhibition design for many of the shows there? AM: Did the success of that project lend some credibility to the idea of collaborating on Billy s show? FG: The curators at LACMA knew I could get it done, but they were worried because at the time I was using plywood, chain-link, corrugated materials, and things like that in my designs. They said there was no budget to buy materials and that I had to work pretty much in the norm. So I asked them to take me down to their storeroom, where they had piles of plywood with paint on them. I asked what they were doing with the plywood and they didn t know, so I took it and made his exhibition. 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 were all very conservative until he got to me. FG: I ve told this story a million times, but the architecture teachers at USC in the 1950s were returning GIs architecture graduates but who had been in the army. They saw Japan and all those beautiful temples in Nara and Kyoto. And the language was transportable, so they had an aesthetic that they could transport and build here quickly. Greg Walsh, who became my partner, had lived in Japan during his navy tenure and was totally a Japanophile, so when the LA County Museum was given Art Treasures of Japan to do, they asked us to do the installation. Walsh was close friends with the curator of Asian art. AM: You mentioned Maurice Tuchman before as the curator, but didn t James Monte also play a part in the curation of the exhibition? BAB: Monte was the curator that was called on, but actually Tuchman did it. He was the head curator. But as far as I m concerned, nobody curated the show. FG: No, there was nobody. We did the show ourselves, and it was super. It was serendipitous that I went down, found the goddamn plywood, and pulled it up; and it was cheap so they couldn t deny it. They didn t have any money to do anything new, and I said we would use the old materials. I guess maybe I told them we d paint it, but then when it got up it looked so great that

14 / we kept it up. It scared Tuchman a bit, but at the time he was pretty willing to try things. BAB: I didn t have any problem with Tuchman at all. FG: No, he was open to stuff, and he knew artists. He knew how artists worked, so he was relatively supportive. AM: The idea of creating a space that resembled a studio or a domestic space in the context of a museum seemed to be a radical gesture, but also, Billy, in terms of how your paintings are understood and discussed, the exhibition at LACMA seems to stand out as an attempt to control the reception of your paintings, to define the space in which they were viewed. Did you 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. AM: You mentioned before that there was no real curatorial oversight at any point in the exhibition, but it also seems like you were both taking liberties that weren t necessarily consensual or that Billy, in particular, wasn t even aware were happening despite the fact that it was his paintings that were the intended objects to display. FG: It wasn t that Billy wasn t in control. If he said no, it wouldn t have happened. AM: From what I ve read about the installation, it seems that there was an issue about the furniture. Was there a disagreement between the two of you about the function of the furniture in the show? FG: The biggest and only real issue happened with the furniture. I assumed Billy would help me get the furniture for the installation, but he didn t at first. He 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 that he had to finish the installation, and we still hadn t brought in the furniture we said we would. I didn t know where to find the furniture, so somebody in my office suggested that we rent it, and that s what we did. We called a rental place and asked for four living rooms. I just said to bring whatever kind of furniture was popular at the time. BAB: I assumed you said whatever was the cheapest. FG: I didn t pick the furniture; they just sent four living rooms and put it all in the museum. Tuchman called me and said that I had made the greatest artwork ever but by accident and that it wasn t relevant to this show. At that point, there were still no paintings installed, so to take average furniture like that, put it in a museum, and set up living rooms it looked like some kind of tableau that I don t know who would ve done. By accident it was very powerful but also very irritating. The furniture was in your face. AM: Would it have potentially outdone the paintings?

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

16 / FG: No, not at all. I told him after the show he could put it in the Hollywood Wax Museum, but he just looked at me. I assumed he would be interested, but he wasn t. He just made the wax figure, and that was it. AM: What was the little figure placed right next to the wax figure of Billy? BAB: They were responsive in part because a little section in the exhibition included a lot of Eldridge Cleaver posters and stuff like that. But I also had full run of the museum, which is entirely different from today. I could come in at midnight and do everything myself without needing to ask anyone for anything. I would come in at any hour of the day and night 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: A friend of mine who was an acolyte racer gave it to me at the show s opening, so I put it down there. 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 don t even think Frank knew about it. FG: That s the first time I ve seen it. BAB: Frank hasn t yet mentioned the foremost part of the exhibition the guards, who inevitably were a pain in the ass in those days. I happened to be very involved with the Black Power movement so I made decisions that were based on my relationship with the guards, who at the time were mostly black. I put in a comfortable couch, a television set, and where some of the walls were not open, I took out the plywood so they could see everything in the exhibition without having to move off the couch. AM: And how did the guards respond to this? 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 studio is a place where you can take a piece of shit and think of how to fix it. AM: But, specifically, what you are describing with this exhibition is an engagement with the conditions of painting, rather than the history of painting itself describing your paintings as though they are almost a byproduct of the way you consider museum lighting, for example. BAB: In a way, they are. FG: It seems that they could have been painted anywhere because Billy realized at an early moment how Hollywood and the media had overpowered the whole world and changed the lives of everyone. He got into it for a minute and couldn t take it. He realized what it was, so he slammed the door on the whole thing. Some of us knew how to manage it, but Billy just wanted to be left alone. He couldn t deal with it.

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

18 / 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 Museum of Modern Art 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.

19 / / 01 / 2017 Billy Al Bengston: A Conversation with the legendary Los Angeles-based Finish Fetishist by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

20 /

21 /

22 /

23 /

24 /

25 /

26 /

27 / / 29 / 2016 Beer with a Painter: Billy Al Bengston by Jennifer Samet Beer with a Painter: Billy Al Bengston Practically everything I do takes ten years for people to get, Billy Al Bengston says perhaps a reason why several of his 1950s and 60s exhibitions have recently been re-staged. Bengston, himself, brings a raucous sense of color into the space. He is dressed in one of the snappy ensembles he s known for a Hawaiian shirt tucked under a blue V-neck cardigan sweater, layered with an African print fabric jacket. He relishes being off-color, too: cussing and telling jokes that push at the limits of acceptability. It s a kind of implicit take-down of the preciousness of the white cube, the polished and 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. Billy Al Bengston, Man from Monterey (1969) Lacquer and polyester resin on aluminum, 36 x 34 inches The world is not monochromatic, Billy Al Bengston reminds me, telling me why he won t make another blue painting anytime soon. We are sitting at a table inside VENUS Over Manhattan gallery, where Bengston, who lives in Los Angeles, has an exhibition of both recent and historic paintings. The recent work is a series of monochromatic blue paintings which incorporate the chevron a symbol he has been utilizing on and off since the 1960s. 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. Bengston studied at Los Angeles City College; the California College of Arts & Crafts, Oakland, California; and Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles. Between 1958 and 1963, he had five solo shows at Ferus Gallery. In 1968, he was given a ten-year survey exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, for which he enlisted Frank Gehry to create an architectural environment where the paintings would be staged. In addition to the chevron, he has also used the logo of the Iris Sugar Company to make

28 / paintings with a centralized flower form. This series is named Dracula because the silhouetted shape was said to look like a flying Dracula, as well as a flower. His embrace of motorcycle and car culture led him to using enamel and lacquer to create highly reflective surfaces on masonite or metal, some of which are then dented and altered with a hammer ( Dentos paintings). He has been the subject of exhibitions at the Honolulu Museum of Art; 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. BAB: No, and it is getting harder. The more you know, the harder it gets. But the technique is not a problem all that takes is practice and time. You learn that from being a musician: you have to build your chops. JS: One of your teachers was Peter Voulkos. How did you end up studying with him? * * * 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 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 was four years old. She could play every instrument 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 returned to California. My mom started teaching while she finished her master s degree at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. I went to junior high school in Los Angeles, and matriculated to Manual Arts High School. Manual Arts was famous for one thing. It was the first and only high school in the United States that had nude models in the art department. I was pretty excited about this, until it happened. They were some of the ugliest people you ve ever seen. But, Manual Arts had a full-kit ceramics department, as well as metalworking and woodworking. It was back when people used to make things by themselves. It was a piece of cake for me. I enjoyed it still do. JS: Have you always felt that art-making is easy? Billy Al Bengston, Loika (1993) Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 74 inches BAB: I would go back and forth with college, dropping out and trying to start again, always with pottery. Then I decided I was going to become an artist. First I went up to the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. Later, I worked with Peter Voulkos. You didn t study with Voulkos; you worked with him. His class was not a class; it was a job. He would call you around midnight and say, We re making clay. See you in a half an hour. I would roll my car a 1937 Pontiac convertible with no top down the hill to get it to start, and then go make clay. We used bread mixers, which were circular and eight-feet wide. We made 5000 pounds at a time. Ken Price and I would take 500 pounds and Peter Voulkos and Jon Mason would take the rest. They would be done making it before we got started. At the end of the session, which was about 7 or 8 in the mornng, we would go have breakfast at the place across the street.

29 / Then we would go home and go to bed. It was a great, great time. Voulkos and Mason were mind-boggling. You just watched to see what you could learn. You stole as many ideas as you possibly could. That s how you learned. I couldn t believe the things Voulkus could do, and I still can t believe it. He was without a doubt one of the great wonders of the world, a God-awful great talent. Pete was a butt-breaker; he was so strong. He picked me up one day and locked me in the kiln because I was too rowdy. It was so much fun. I lasted a year in the ceramics department until I said, I m done with this. I knew I was never going to be as good a ceramicist as he was. I decided to be a painter, because I thought I could paint better than Pete. I told Ken Price about this. I asked him what he was going to do, how he could continue with ceramics, and he said, I m gonna go furthy d out by going furthy d in. I also had the privilege of studying with Richard Diebenkorn and Saburo Hasegawa. I learned a lot of bad painting habits from Diebenkorn, and I learned a lot of good life habits from Hasegawa. Saburo was an amazing guy. He would be fully dressed in his grandfather s samurai outfit. JS: What were the bad painting habits that you felt Diebenkorn was encouraging? BAB: Indecision. The culture of put it on; take it off. Now I say, Make up your mind before you do it. He was against that. The beauty of studying with Saburo Hasegawa was that he would give you an assignment and he would say, Take this paper where you want it to, or as many places as you want. You had to make a decision. Hasegawa and I became friends because I lived in a house with a bunch of unusual people. I cooked dinner for everyone they would each pay 25 cents. I became friends with the people at the Italian meat market across the street. I asked them if I could have all the bones and leftover bits. I d go over and collect the trash and make dinner out of it. Long story short, I had a good life. JS: You were one of the artists who showed in the legendary Ferus Gallery. How did you become involved with that scene? BAB: In my cruising around I ran into Ed Keinholz, who was up in Echo Park at the time. He opened a gallery on La Cienega Boulevard. It was a small space inside of the art theater. Then, with Walter Hopps, he opened Ferus Gallery. He would be in the back doing his thing. I d take him a six-pack and we d hang out. He said, Want to have a show here? I said, Sure. The first show I did there was Abstract Expressionist work, and my second show was the Valentine paintings. Those paintings came about because my show (at the new gallery) was scheduled to open on Valentine s Day. There are certain things that teachers say you can t do in painting. One of them is that you can t make a painting where the forms are in the center. You have to have this golden mean or something. It s art school stuff. They would diagnose paintings done 600 years ago and say, That is the perfect composition. What the fuck are you talking about? It doesn t make any sense. If people say you can t do something, that s what I m going to do. And I ve gotten shit about the center thing all my life. These paintings, and the Valentine paintings, had forms in the center. Is there anyplace else, other than the center, to put the form? I don t dive on the edges of the pool, if I can help it. You go for the sweet center. Anyway, I was fortunate enough to meet Craig Kauffman at that time, and quite a few of the other artists in town, like John Altoon. Craig Kauffman was quite an inspiration. He kicked everything off. He was brilliant, and he stayed brilliant and still a pain in the ass. He could see really well. Walter Hopps had a place behind the Ferus gallery and I had just come back from Europe and I didn t have a place to live. So, he gave me a room. It had a little

30 / balcony and I painted the Valentines there all except one. I was an indoor easel painter even though I didn t have an easel. So I decided to paint an all Payne s Grey painting, with one type of brush a number 1 sharp, as I recall. I painted this nearly-black painting which is another thing people said you can t do. Now, of course, you can do anything. I wore out four brushes and three tubes of paint. It was the only painting that sold. The Los Angeles County Museum bought it for $100. I was a happy guy. I was in the hospital at the time because I broke my back motorcycle racing. JS: What got you interested in motorcycle racing? On view here at Venus is a group of historic paintings from your 1961 B.S.A. Motorcycle series, as well as recent blue monochromes, dedicated to Aub LeBard, an off-road motorcycle racer, and co-owner of the LeBard & Underwood motorcycle shop. BAB: I went to Europe in 1958, and rode all around on a Lambretta. I returned to New York, waiting for my scooter to come. It finally came, but they managed to drop it off the van, and bend the front forks. I sent it back to California but I couldn t get anyone to fix it. I called around and finally talked to the LeBard shop. Even though they were a B.S.A. motorcycle shop, they agreed to fix it. I so admired the motorcycle racers and the people. I said, I have got to get into this. It was a thrill and a half. Aub LeBard was an inspiration and later became my sponsor. Racing motorcycles was supposed to be the most dangerous thing you could do. So I did it to make a living. I did stunts in movies too. I had done gymnastics training. I always tried to take a job that would pay the most for the least amount of time, so that I could go back to work quickly. I could jump off a building and make enough to live for a month, without even thinking about it. Sometimes it would be enough to live for three or four months rent and food. I do what I do. I have no fucking idea why. When I painted these motorcycle paintings, I pissed people off beyond belief. I don t know why. They are just paintings. You don t have to look at them. Whenever I get in trouble, I quote Ken. He said, The only thing you have to do to outrage people is anything. JS: Monochromatic painting has been something you ve done at different points in your life. What interests you about monochromatic painting? BAB: It is a joke. The show includes a motorcycle I raced, which I got from Aub s shop. At the time, I told him, I m going to paint this motorcycle. He said, You can paint it any color you want to, as long as it s blue. Everything he owned was blue. It is a challenge to do everything in monochrome. You have to do a lot with textural variation thin and thick paint. You remove highlights so you have to build highlights. You remove the center of interest, so you have to build center of interest. They are all built differently. JS: You ve also been an avid surfer. How is that connected to your painting? BAB: I started surfing when I was in seventh or eighth grade at the Oceanside Pier. That is where Phil Edwards, who was easily the most talented surfer of my time, lived. He invented the bottom turn, which revolutionized surfing. In 1953, I got lucky enough to be a beach attendant, which means I worked at Doheny Beach State Park. I cleaned restrooms, hauled the garbage, things like that. They gave me a campsite and I got to know every surfer, because they would stay with me at the campsite. I moved to Ocean Park with Ken Price. We surfed both sides of the pier. We haunted Malibu. I bought him lunch one day and he would buy me lunch the next day. He would have a Heath bar and I would have a Snicker s bar. That was lunch. JS: You have a studio and live part time in Hawaii. Can you tell me about adopting imagery from the indigenous culture into your painting? BAB: I steal everything I possibly can. There s nothing so sacred you can t steal it and make an image out of

31 / 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 with the camera. But, photography is a great tool. I 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: Although you have painted with a hammer. BAB: Well, yes, I ve used hammers. I ve destroyed with hammers. And I ve modified with hammers. Goddamn, you re gonna pin me down here. JS: Haha. You were telling me what painting can do as opposed to photography. I was thinking maybe it had to do with something you ve said about creating air. BAB: Yes, it goes back to what Kenny Price said, You go furthy d out by going furthy d in. In other words, you breathe it, put air in it, give it life. If you are lucky, you get it right. A lot of it is luck, and the rest is standing light and pushing hard. There are a lot of starts that never get to a finish. That s why God invented razor blades. You shave em deep. If they are no good, there s no sense fixing them. Billy Al Bengston, Ideal Exhaust (1961) Oil on canvas, 42 x 40 inches JS: You don t go back into them? BAB: I couldn t. I wish I could. The painting Ideal Exhaust (1961) is so naïve that I could never do it again. I couldn t do it that good. I don t think there is anything here I could do again. If you get it real realistic, you can do it again. But if you are clumsily making it abstract, it s very hard to repaint. You don t have the instruments; you don t think the same way. Your hand works differently. There are mistakes in that painting that I can t believe that I made three or four things I could point out, but I won t. If you look at Barrel & Exhaust Pipe, (1961), the exhaust pipe is incorrectly placed. It don t look like that. I don t know why I did it that way. Maybe because I couldn t do it right, and I thought no one else would know the difference. I m not really anal compulsive. I sorta like zits sometimes. If you like perfection, it ain t gonna look perfect later. You ve gotta learn to love it (or not).

32 / / 20 / 2011 Billy Al Bengston: Art Takes Balls by Billy Al Bengston For me, the heyday was in It was before the Ferus Gallery moved across the street, in the days when Ed Kienholz and Walter Hopps ran it. At that time, art was taken very seriously in terms of being an artist, and not as a profession. We all worked like sons of bitches. There was nothing else to do. We were the beach group, we stayed at the beach, and on break time we d go surfing. We believed that there s no such thing as good art or bad art. Art is art. If it s bad, it s something else. It was a much, much harder line in the 50s and 60s than it is now, because the idea of art education didn t exist they didn t have a fine arts program when I was a kid. If they did, they didn t have teachers who knew anything. Art is something you can t teach, but you can inspire it. to go to New York, I said, Who are you kidding? I m not going to that shit hole. There s a scent here that s different, and you lose a lot of those sensations when you re put in inclement climates. As a result, the real art of the time became real, nonobjective art. I think John McCracken cracked through that, Craig Kauffman did, I did. Even Ron Davis, Kenneth Price and Bob Irwin. We made art that was just art. As told to Sophie Duvernoy Billy Al Bengston is an artist and sculptor who lives and works in Venice. A seminal figure in the 1960s Los Angeles arts scene, he draws much of his inspiration from the ocean, motorcycle racing, 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 subtropicaland 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 simple you can live out here and not die on the streets when it gets cold. When I was romanced Billy Al Bengston s Sonny is in Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture at the Getty.