Art Utopia

“I think that he’s always kind of reaching or pushing into the different facets of the studio operation to find out what can be accomplished,” says Dani Tull, “and I imagine he’s usually pleasantly surprised.” An artist and musician who has worked for Shaw and Weber for a year and a half, but known them as friends for much longer, Tull is a compact, soft-spoken man in his early 40s. I meet with him in his own studio, in the basement of his Eagle Rock home, where he’s working on the audio component of a prime example: a performance held at the Hammer Museum in August in which Shaw and most of the studio team played a motley assortment of instruments, including many designed by Shaw himself. The Body Organ was there, played by Hannah Keefe (who does most of Shaw’s drawing in the studio) on the back of her boyfriend, Brian Randall (another assistant), as well as a five-necked, nautilus-shaped guitar, and a series of reed instruments fashioned from vacuum cleaners. The footage resembles a scene from some bizarre sacred/psychedelic rite, with the performers dressed in flowing robes and colorful projections rippling overhead — and, indeed, one significant strain in Shaw’s work over the past decade has been the development of a mock religion, called O-ism (“the feminist version of Mormonism,” as he once described it).

Music has always been a central component of Weber’s career, predating her work in collage or film: She’s released three solo albums, four with an art-rock band called the Party Boys (from 1981 to ’87), and one with her current band, the Spirit Girls. (The latter was an outgrowth of Weber’s 2005 rock opera by the same name, which, like her last two films, chronicled the adventures of a gaggle of young ghosts — members of a teenage girl band, killed in their prime — who roam the earth in nightgowns and eerie white masks.) Thanks in part to the presence of people like Tull, who’s had nearly as extensive a musical history as Weber, it’s becoming a prominent fixture in Shaw’s work as well. What he really wants to do, he says, is open a storefront church for noise music, where jam sessions could be open to the public.

Marnie Weber

Jim Shaw, Nose sculpture wall sconce (Latino) (2007) (Photo courtesy artist and Metro Pictures)

Related Content

• Storefront jungle
  February 14, 2013
• Comic book nightmares
  December 6, 2012
• Five Artsy Things to Do This Week, From Dream Drawings to a King Kong Mash-Up
  December 5, 2012
• Now Recording
  August 23, 2012
• But Wait There's LACMA
  December 20, 2012

More About

• Jim Shaw
• Sarah Cromarty
• Salvatore Salamone
• Dani Tull
• Visual Arts

“Something that’s just amazing about the studio,” Tull tells me, as we’re watching the Hammer performance footage, “is that this group of people is so multitalented. The people who work there have the skills that they’re employing at the studio — it may be sculpting, cast making, painting or drawing — but most have all these other talents as well, like music.”

The roster is indeed impressive. Tull, who’s been concentrating primarily on the studio’s musical needs — he performed on Shaw’s five-neck guitar, which he also fabricated, in the Metro Pictures booth at the Miami Basel Art Fair (a slow, hauntingly beautiful stream of sound, deliciously anomalous to the context); composed the score for Shaw’s new film The Hole; co-directed the Hammer performance; plays guitar in the Spirit Girls and co-produced their album — has also been exhibiting throughout the past two decades as a painter. Work from his current series of tie-dyed caveman paintings is featured in this year’s L.A. WeeklyBiennial (as are the Spirit Girls). Cromarty, who considers herself “a worker bee” at the studio (“I push myself into whatever area where I’m needed,” she says), appeared in the first Weekly biennial, in 2004, and was included, more recently, in L.A. Times critic Christopher Knight’s list of “45 Painters Under 45.” Cassidy, one of Shaw and Weber’s earliest assistants, is a classically trained painter with a solo show at the Schmidt Dean Gallery in Philadelphia through January. Christian Cummings, who built the Body Organ, is (along with his wife, Marie Johnston) part of a three-person show now at High Energy Constructs. Tamara Sussman, Weber’s first in command as well as the Spirit Girls’ bass player, is a text-based artist whose installations have appeared at the Colburn School, Beyond Baroque, and across the façade of Art Center’s Wind Tunnel building. Salamone, Claude Collins-Stracensky, Daniel Mendel-Black, Juliana Paciulli, Colin Roberts, Jill Spector, Ayer and Jennifer West are all artists whose names have appeared repeatedly around town (and elsewhere) in recent years, in solo and group shows. Sachi Yashimoto, who handles Shaw’s administration and plays violin in the Spirit Girls, is a classically trained violinist now immersed in Arabic music, and Keefe, Shaw’s doyenne of drawing, makes jewelry.

The hiring process, like most aspects of the studio’s operation, is largely organic, driven by connections, coincidence and word of mouth. Many assistants began as baby sitters, or caring for the artists’ dogs, until their skills found the right fit — as Sussman recounts when I meet her and Cromarty for lunch one afternoon around the corner from the studio. “I was a tomboy growing up,” she says, “and Colette [Shaw] really wanted to play with Barbies and I didn’t know how — I literally just didn’t even know how — so she was just kind of looking at me and Marnie was like, ‘Do you know Photoshop?’ And I was like, ‘Oh yeah, yeah, yeah! I totally know Photoshop!’ ”