Fandom typically involves frivolous pursuits like Dodger dogs or Comic-Con nerdery, but for artists it's practically a necessity. Try to find an artist who wasn't motivated by the work of someone older, who gave them a glimpse into how provocative, eccentric or sincere art could be, and odds are you'll be stumped. Maybe the best artists make work so well-timed it leaves the past in its wake, but even those pioneers usually start out as big fans.
COPYRIGHT BILLY AL BENGSTON, 1962. MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, SAN DIEGO
Drew Heitzler learned California cool from Billy Al Bengston's painting Buster, above, and Ed Bereal's sculpture American Beauty.
COPYRIGHT ED BEREAL, BETTY & MONTE FACTOR
Ed Bereal's sculpture American Beauty
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For this reason, Pacific Standard Time feels like a Hall of Fame ceremony, or a Justice League of L.A. art superheroes, all back in full force. And it's the young artists they influence who may appreciate this gathering most of all.
Here, five L.A. artists who came of age long after that 1945-1980 PST window talk about the icons who informed their art-making.
Surf Punk Like Me
Drew Heitzler on Billy Al Bengston and Ed Bereal
"Growing up a surf punk on the East Coast in the '80s, Southern California was a magic kingdom," says artist Drew Heitzler, whose video work riffs on the freewheeling SoCal stereotype but also tries to dig beneath the surface of California cool. "Every band I listened to, every video I watched, all the clothes I wore seemed to come from that place. It makes sense, then, that as I got older, and started making art, Los Angeles would be the place where I located my aesthetic." Works from two '60s artists strike Heitzler as particularly evocative of the magic kingdom's light and dark sides.
"Buster by Billy Al Bengston and American Beauty by Ed Bereal operate like history painting for me, even if one is a sculpture," he explains. "It's all there: surfing, cars, motorcycles, jazz, rock & roll, shiny on top and oily underneath." Bengston's sleekly sprayed lacquer painting and Bereal's dustpan-shaped wall piece, which superimposes a swastika over a U.S. flag, also suggest the ominous return of the war technologies that California exported during World War II but kept as a part of its political landscape even after the war ended. In the work of these two artists, "You can see the war coming home to California in the form of choppers in sunset skies and tanks in the streets of Watts."
Ed Bereal's American Beauty (1965) is in "Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture 1950–1970," at the Getty Museum, Oct. 1-Jan. 5. His work also will appear at the Laguna Museum of Art. Billy Al Bengston's works will be at the Getty, Norton Simon and other museums.
How I Invented "Kitbashing"
Glenn Kaino on John Outterbridge
Glenn Kaino began "kitbashing, "a term he coined to describe his distinct assemblage approach, before he knew what it was. He'd take pieces from model-making sets you'd find at hobby shops and mix them up to make unexpected hybrids.
The work of John Outterbridge showed him these model mash-ups could be art. One of the first shows Kaino saw after he arrived here as a student in the early 1990s was an Outterbridge retrospective at the California Afro-American Museum. Outterbridge, a force in the black arts movement in 1970s Los Angeles, had just retired after 17 years as director of the Watts Towers Art Center. "The idea of being so generative with found material, model-mashing and being interested in the form but also having a political energy, all resonated with me," Kaino says.
Jive Ass Bird, an almost anthropological collection of white objects made of metal, cloth and leather straps, is one work from the show Kaino distinctly remembers. "Because I'd seen his work at such a formative moment, Outterbridge spoke to me more than Rauschenberg, for instance. It really set a precedent for my own work."
In the years since, Kaino's kitbashing has become increasingly ambitious, uncanny and mammoth — he's given a taxidermied goat alligator skin and constructed a 20-foot "Transformer" out of fiberglass fragments of iconic bridges. Though impressive as objects, these sculptures exist mainly to alter people's experience of the world, something Outterbridge consistently did through his art and through his infectious persona.
"For Outterbridge and a lot of artists of his generation, the images and objects were secondary" to how they lived, Kaino says. "Spend just five minutes with them, and you'll learn more than you would from any book about their art."
John Outterbridge's Jive Ass Bird (1971) is in "Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980," at the Hammer Museum, Oct. 2-Jan. 8. Work by Outterbridge is on view at LAX Art through Oct. 22 and will be at Watts Towers Art Center, California African American Museum and other venues.
Bowls Aren't Just for Cornflakes
Rebecca Morris on Peter Voulkos
Painter Rebecca Morris was a kid in Connecticut in the 1970s, the daughter of a ceramics teacher in a house where Ceramics Monthly and The Studio Potter were the most readily available reading material. It was in one of those magazines that Morris discovered bold California sculptor Peter Voulkos. "I just remember these forms that weren't functional," she says. "They riffed off traditional vessels, but they were too heavy and awkward to hold."
