Rebels in Paradise

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  Three months after the Irwin show, twenty-nine-year-old Wheeler showed “light encasements,” clear Lucite rectangular boxes that were painted white on the inside front panel and sealed around the edges so that electric light emanated softly around them, “like Mark Rothkos spilling from their frames,” wrote Los Angeles Times critic William Wilson.3 Wheeler was pursuing a curiosity similar to Irwin’s about the nature of seeing, but his was inspired by a lifelong involvement with flying airplanes.

  A native of Globe, Arizona, Wheeler was in a plane from the age of twelve. His father was a surgeon who flew his own plane to get to patients in the remote areas of Arizona; his mother was a pilot as well. By the time Wheeler enrolled at Chouinard in 1962, he had a pilot’s license of his own and legitimately sported the fashionable dark aviator sunglasses. Tall and slender, with curly brown hair and mustache, he had applied to the school in person but without a portfolio. After knocking out a few freehand drawings for the admissions department, he was accepted on the spot. He was initially interested in design and his teacher Don Moore set up interviews with two New York advertising agencies. Both offered him a job but by then he had decided to pursue painting. He was still a student when his all-white paintings with glossy white squares in the four corners won him LACMA’s Young Talent Award. He had married a classmate, Nancy Harrington, and needed the money but didn’t want the award, fearing he would be pigeonholed. “I was idealistic.”4 The following year, Wheeler created a series of light paintings by wrapping neon tubing around the back of a stretched canvas so illumination seeped out from the edges.

  Doug Wheeler with Zero and his Bellanca, ca. 1969

  Photograph courtesy of the artist

  Because he was at Chouinard when Irwin was teaching there, it has been assumed that Wheeler was his student, but that was not the case. He never studied with Irwin but did invite the older artist to his studio to see his light paintings, which were inspired by the subtle changes in the atmosphere that can be seen only when flying. Irwin was enthusiastic about the work and mentioned his name to Arnold Glimcher at New York’s Pace Gallery.

  Glimcher, who already showed Irwin and Bell, gave Wheeler $1,000 with no strings attached in 1967. After a painful divorce from Harrington, Wheeler moved into a vacated dime store in Venice, not far from Irwin’s studio. Wheeler was already bored with his encasements and was using his large studio to create room-sized environments of disorienting homogenous light called ganzfelds. Wheeler was excited to show the results of his research to Glimcher and his director, Frederic Mueller. He recalled, “The main room was three thousand square feet, coved at the floor and ceiling, with a skylight so it looked like a ganzfeld with a line of phosphorous sprayed near eye level. Under UV light, you could feel a fogginess around the perimeter of the walls, like flying through an inversion layer. Anyway, the Pace boys, Glimcher and Fred Mueller, walked right through it to see the encasements. And then they left. I was devastated. They didn’t seem to notice. Later, the meter reader came to the door and had to come through the space to get to the meter. He walked in and said, ‘Oh, Wow!’ He saw it and the Pace boys didn’t see it. I didn’t want to be with those guys. They couldn’t even see it.”5

  * * *

  Before either Irwin or Wheeler had shown at PAM, James Turrell was given a show at the end of 1967. Turrell was a twenty-four-year-old graduate student in studio art for a semester when Coplans was teaching at UC Irvine. (Turrell later completed his master’s degree in art at Claremont Graduate School in 1973.) Coplans had seen Turrell’s first experiment with a slide projector projecting light without an image as well as some rudimentary experiments with the headlights of passing cars in his small studio in the Mendota Hotel in Santa Monica. A native of Pasadena, Turrell had had a scientific inclination when young—his father was an aeronautical engineer who had died when Turrell was ten; his mother had trained to be a doctor. At Pomona College, he majored in mathematics and perceptual psychology but took art history courses from Demetrion, who taught there for a year before going to PAM. A Quaker by faith, the stocky Turrell was a long-haired and bearded conscientious objector throughout the Vietnam War.

  At PAM, Turrell showed Afrum (White), which appeared as a three-dimensional cube hanging in the corner of a darkened room that was created by light beamed from a xenon projector. The floating box of light, neither sculpture nor painting, was, in fact, an entirely new manifestation, but Turrell had no doubts about its legitimacy. “One of the advantages of growing up in California is that you’re not under pressure to repeat the past. I never even had a thought that what I was doing wasn’t art.”6

  John Coplans, who had been a pilot in the Royal Air Force, empathized with these three artists working with the substance and perception of light. He took Jasper Johns to Turrell’s studio. “Much to my embarrassment, Jasper stood in front of a Turrell piece for what seemed to me half an hour looking at it, and I’m sitting there thinking, he’s probably too embarrassed to say that he can’t make anything out or he doesn’t like it. Then he turned around to Turrell and said, ‘Can I buy this piece?’”7

  James Turrell, Afrum (White), 1966

  Collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by David Bohnett and Tom Gregory through the 2008 Collectors Committee;

  Digital Image © 2009 Museum Associates / LACMA / Art Resource, NY

  Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, an Italian collector who went against the prevailing wisdom of the era to buy Los Angeles artists in depth, had bought works by Irwin, and he commissioned one of Wheeler’s light installations for his castle in Varese. A few years later, he commissioned a similar work by Turrell. Count Panza wrote, “Los Angeles is a new city without roots in the past, a place where everything seems temporary and where everything can suddenly change. You have a sense of instability and loss of identity; you feel the need to find something unchangeable and more important than becoming.”8

  With all three artists manipulating the subtle effects of light, a question of precedence came to the fore: Who had had the idea first?

  Jan Butterfield wrote the first general book on the subject, The Art of Light and Space, and summed up the problem: “It is a little-known fact that the all-important 1967–68 Pasadena exhibitions (one-man shows by Irwin, Turrell, and Wheeler) were originally intended to be one three-man show, but it soon became apparent that there simply was not enough room for all of them to exhibit at the same time. Had the one show taken place as originally planned, the ‘who did what first’ battle over dates would have been avoided.”9

  As a result, over the next few years, the younger artists felt competitive with each other and with Irwin. But by then, the field had grown crowded with Laddie John Dill’s neon tubes supported by drifts of sand, Maria Nordman’s work with fire and smoke installations, Hap Tivey’s scrims, Ron Cooper’s resin wall boxes, and Mary Corse’s paintings covered with light reflective white paint. Even Ed Moses got into the act when he had the ceiling removed from Riko Mizuno’s gallery to create a room flooded with light. When the ceiling was to be reinstalled, Irwin volunteered to add a few skylights so that the lovely natural light would be perpetual; it was enjoyed by the subsequent art dealers who rented that space: Larry Gagosian, Timothea Stewart, and Rosamund Felsen.

  Irwin had grown through his earlier friendships with younger artists so he invited Wheeler to join him in the research for the Art and Technology exhibition cooked up by Tuchman at LACMA whereby collaborations were facilitated between artists and various corporate sponsors. (It was conceived on the heels of the Experiments in Art and Technology promulgated by Rauschenberg and Billy Kluver in New York in 1965, an enterprise that was so controversial it was surprising that Tuchman wanted to revisit the idea.) Wheeler refused so Irwin invited Turrell. They were introduced to Dr. Ed Wortz, head of the laboratory monitoring the environmental control systems for NASA’s manned space flights. Though Wortz had no previous interest in art, he was thrilled by the curiosity of the two artists
, calling it “love at first sight.” The threesome spent days in an anechoic chamber depriving themselves of all sensory stimulation for hours. When they emerged, everything that they saw appeared entirely transformed. They experimented with ganzfelds, surrounding themselves with a pure white surface so that the eye could focus on no object, like being inside a giant Ping-Pong ball. They learned to focus each eye independently and to be conscious of the images received separately. They took copious notes and collated documentation, and they were beginning to translate these experiences into some sort of participatory installation when, in August 1969, Turrell stopped showing up for their meetings or returning their calls. He later denied that the sessions had any effect. “I don’t know that anything really startling came out of the whole thing,” he said.10 Turrell maintained that he had not continued because of the project’s focus on technology over the role of spirituality. Yet, his work would come to rely increasingly on technology as he used projected sources of light.

  Irwin chose ever more reductive strategies of eliminating extraneous details from his art. After 1970, he refused to allow his work to be reproduced since photographs could not capture its experiential nature. A couple of years later, he gave up his studio altogether. Wheeler moved in.

  Irwin and Wortz continued their dialogue and their friendship. “The biggest product of the Art and Technology thing is the effect we had on each other. I radically changed Ed’s life, and he radically changed mine,” Irwin mused.11 Soon after, Wortz left the space program and became a gestalt psychotherapist at the Los Angeles Buddhist Meditation Center. Many of his clients were artists. Meanwhile, Irwin’s process of questioning had come to mirror the protocols of science and experimentation. His aesthetic decisions seemed to be based on feeling, not logic. “The critical difference is that the artist measures from his intuition, his feeling. He uses himself as the measure, whereas the scientist measures out of an external logic process.”12

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Fantastic Plastic Lovers: DeWain Valentine, Peter Alexander, and Helen Pashgian

  There is Dustin Hoffman as he stands on the patio of his parents’ tasteless Los Angeles house, anxiously listening to his father’s friend doling out advice. “Plastics,” he says. “There is a great future in plastics.” One of the most memorable and comical scenes of The Graduate, it was a moment that captured the absurdity of postwar Los Angeles prosperity. By-products of the local aerospace industry, plastics did unfortunately become the miracle material of the future. After being declassified by the army and navy, acrylic and polyester resin were suddenly available to hobbyists, surfers, and, of course, artists.

  The phenomenological inquiries of Irwin, Wheeler, Turrell, and others were contiguous to the movement that included the prismatic glass boxes of Bell and the luminous vacuum-formed wall reliefs of Kauffman. John Coplans described it as “finish fetish,” a term highjacked in the most derogatory manner by unfriendly critics. It underscored the fact that these Los Angeles artists were obsessed with precision, something their New York counterparts found risible. As Dave Hickey wrote in his essay “Primary Atmospheres,” “In a moment when Clement Greenberg was advocating febrile sensibility and Michael Fried was demanding that works of art ignore our presence, California Minimalism created a gracious social space in its glow and reflection; it treated us amicably and made us even more beautiful by gathering us into the dance.”1

  When Kauffman and Moses shared a studio, they went to a nearby doughnut stand where Kauffman was fascinated by the appearance of the contained nectarine color. This is exactly how his vacuum-formed plastic wall reliefs appeared, as unorthodox supports for sensual, vibrant fruity colors. In Artforum, Jane Livingston wrote, “In a way that enlarges upon the intelligible illusionistic duality in Larry Bell’s rhodium-coated glass boxes, Kauffman’s works demonstrate that austerity is not necessarily the measure of success in detail-less object art.… His plastic paintings are enormously seductive.”2 The following year, Kauffman’s show at the Pace Gallery was reviewed by Robert Pincus-Witten, who found the exquisiteness of West Coast art, specifically that of Kauffman, to be “really about the flaunting of the most unrepentant narcissism. Lest there be any confusion let me add that I regard this as a positive achievement.”3

  DeWain Valentine, who grew up in Colorado, first encountered plastics in a junior high shop class when a teacher showed him how to polish acrylic scraps. Once he discovered polyester resin, he heated it in his mother’s oven to forge plastic jewels. However, at the University of Colorado art school, where he studied with Richard Diebenkorn and Clyfford Still, he was told “you can’t make art out of plastic.” He got the same response when he went to Yale on scholarship, where he studied with Philip Guston.

  Valentine, who wore boots and a Stetson like a Western cowboy, then moved to Los Angeles “specifically because of Kauffman, Bell, and Price.” He had left a more lucrative job teaching in Colorado to teach a plastics course at UCLA extension. “I got fired twice,” he remembered.4 Learning from trial and error, he became the consummate technician, experimenting with polyester resin formulas in order to cast clear, clean sculpture on a massive scale, such as a perfect ten-foot disc the color of the sky. Built like a wrestler, with wavy blond hair, blue eyes, and a turned-up nose, Valentine had the physical strength to control the large quantities of heavy liquid resin. Keeping meticulous notes on formulas, he gained such renown for his accuracy and color that the Santa Monica firm Hastings Plastics actually produced a DeWain Valentine resin. “All sculpture is exterior,” he said. “I wanted to make pieces you could see through to the other side. I wanted the most perfect surface so you didn’t get hung up on the surface, or on any scratch that might catch your eye.”5

  Craig Kauffman, Untitled, 1968

  Photograph courtesy of Frank Lloyd Gallery, Santa Monica

  The ocean was a powerful draw for Valentine, who set up his studio next to Bell’s in Venice. Polyester resin was used by surfers to coat their boards, which is how Peter Alexander discovered its potential. An art student at UCLA, Alexander recalled looking at the resin in a Dixie cup while glazing his surfboard. He cast the resin as a transparent cube about the size of a hat box and containing puffy white clouds. When Bengston saw it, he advised some collector friends to buy it, and Alexander’s career was launched. From a well-to-do family in Newport Beach, Alexander had a mop of brown hair and patrician features. He had studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and worked for Richard Neutra, the architect known for his glass-walled houses, as well as for architect William Pereira. After weeks of work on his first project for Pereira, Alexander was told that the client had changed his mind and the design would not be used. Exasperated, Alexander decided that he could not continue to work under such conditions and returned to school to study fine art. Yet, his earlier training remained evident as he cast architectural wedges and pillars of polyester resin in grades of oceanic color. He captured the experience of translucency—what he saw while surfing inside a swell. “It was not an art material,” Alexander said. “One benefit of being in L.A. was that nobody took anybody out here very seriously so you could enjoy those materials because you were free.”6

  Peter Alexander, Green Wedge, 1970

  Courtesy of Peter Alexander

  Alexander’s brother, Brooke, had moved to New York and become an art dealer. “Not being in New York was a disadvantage from the point of view of commerce but an advantage in terms of having a good time,” he said. “I remember Minimalism vividly. I had trouble with the rhetoric that went along with it. We are not Minimalists, though there may be a similarity in geometry. Disappearance was the most appealing part to me.”7

  Helen Pashgian was a third-generation Pasadenean, but her parents rented a house during the summers at Crystal Cove near Laguna Beach, not far from Alexander’s house, and the two met as children. Her initial interest in the quality of light came, she believed, from the hours she spent as a small child looking at tide pools popul
ated by small abalone and other sea creatures. A handsome, athletic woman, she surfed on large balsa wood boards around San Onofre State Beach by crawling under the fence around Camp Pendleton.

  After finishing her undergraduate degree at Pomona College, she went east to study art history at Columbia University and Boston University. A distant relative of Oliver Wendell Holmes, she felt a connection to her East Coast family, but after seven years, she returned to Pasadena to become an artist. She tried to capture the liquid light in translucent washes of paint on canvas but it was her discovery of polyester resin that made her transition to sculpture possible. Through trial and error, she learned to pour resin in the forms of balls, boxes, and spheres and she exhibited them at the Felix Landau Gallery.

  All of these artists created polyester resin sculpture that appeared to be made by machine, an art in keeping with the futuristic reputation of Los Angeles. In fact, each piece was handcrafted with extreme care, and the work was meant to be experiential, erasing boundaries between painting and sculpture.

  One challenge was faced by all. When the resin came out of the mold, it had to be sanded by hand for hours and hours to achieve an unblemished surface. “It is about finish fetish,” Pashgian emphasized. “If there is a scratch that is all you see. The point isn’t that I want to see through it but to see into it, but that is why we have to deal with finish!”8

  Enter Jack Brogan, who had had experience working for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in Knoxville, Tennessee. “I knew how to machine resin,” he said.9 Irwin met Brogan by chance at the Lucky You Mexican restaurant in West Los Angeles. Brogan was a jack-of-all-trades who suited perfectly the needs of artists trying to use complicated new technologies and materials. The word got out, and Brogan was soon on call for most of the Venice artists. “It gave you the freedom to do things you had no idea of until you tried doing them because you could always call Jack,” Alexander admitted.10