Fittingly enough, “State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970” made its first appearance in California, as part of the sprawling Pacific Standard Time. That initiative did much to raise awareness of Californian art beyond the borders of the Golden State, and now “State of Mind” is heading to the East Coast, where it will be up at the Bronx Museum of the Artsfrom June 23 to September 8.
What can visitors expect? While a lot of attention is paid to conceptual art in the exhibition, it’s not just a conceptual art show; it includes everything from drawings, sculptures, and artists’ books to installation, video, sound works, and even a painting or two. “State of Mind” is curated by Constance M. Lewallen and Karen Moss, and recently ARTINFO had a chance to talk with Moss about the role of women artists, the challenges of re-creating performance art, and what makes this show uniquely Californian.
There are some big-name artists in this show — such as Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, and Bruce Nauman — as well as other names that are less familiar. Are there any lesser-known artists here who may be surprising discoveries to visitors?
I think there are. We were very conscious when curating the show to try to balance the well-known artists with those whose career is being rekindled. The artist whose work is the signature of the show, appearing on the cover of the catalogue, is Robert Kinmont. He was pretty well-known in the '70s and did these conceptual exercises and photographs. This one is called “Eight Natural Handstands.” He did them starting at a precipice overlooking a canyon and each subsequent piece is in a different topography all the way to the forest. We thought that the piece was particularly interesting because it denotes the edginess of the show, and it’s also humorous. People think it looks impossible but he really did a handstand there.
Another lesser-known artist is Gary Beydler, who does these amazing films that kind of deconstruct the process of filmmaking. One is of the Venice pier. He shows it every day under different circumstances, day and night, with crowds or no crowds. He spliced it together but instead of doing it chronologically he did it according to his position on the pier. It coalesces into a giant sunset into the ocean. Unfortunately he passed away the same year we launched the show. There is another piece where he drove through a tunnel on the 110 freeway. He took photographs at different intervals and then edited them together. They’ve been wildly popular.
We also tried to show some of the women artists who are less well-known. We have well-known figures like Eleanor Antin, Martha Rosler, Lynn Hershman, and Suzanne Lacy, but we also have Susan Mogul, who, along with Suzanne Lacy, studied with Judy Chicago at Cal Arts, and Ilene Segalove, whose work is in a similar vein. Women were just coming into their own — if we had ended in '70 or '72 we would have had about two women artists.
When did you end?
We have one or two works from before or after this period, but it’s essentially 1968 to 1974.
Some of the works on view are documents that serve as traces of performance art or installations. I imagine it must be a curatorial challenge to decide how best to represent art that was tied to a specific place and a specific moment in time. Do you worry that this kind of documentation can’t really capture the power of the original artwork?
Of course that’s an ongoing problem. Some of this documentation, particularly with Chris Burden and Paul McCarthy, has itself taken on an artistic status. We have the original black-and-white tapes showing all Paul McCarthy’s performances from '71 to '74 and also Chris Burden’s documents, which he considers full-on artworks. The show itself is surprisingly lively. One of the comments people make is that they had been expecting to see a bunch of boring black-and-white photographs. There are a lot of very lively and colorful and moving works in the show.
We’re very careful with the installations to try to create vignettes that tell the story of different artists’ works. For instance with Allen Ruppersberg’s “Al’s Grand Hotel,” we have original television coverage from a French television station, we have slides that the artist made, we have the soundtrack from Terry Allen, and we have a cutout from one of the hotel rooms. We also have mock-ups of Lynn Hershman’s Dante Hotel. Thanks to the Getty Foundation’s support, we were able to meet with every artist and poke around their personal archives, so a lot of the documentation came from the artists themselves.
Do you also incorporate live performances?
We try to have as many live performances as we can. When the show was up at Berkeley, Linda Montano slept in the gallery, which was a reenactment of her 1972 piece “Sleeping in Berkeley.” At the Orange County Museum, she Skyped in so we could see her sleeping in her home in upstate New York.
At the open house on June 23, there will be a performance piece on the roof of the Bronx Museum of a work by Darryl Sapien and Michael Hinton. They did these endurance performances where they set up manly tasks for themselves. This one is called “War Games” and it uses wrestling and a chess game. What’s really interesting is that the artists are in their '60s now so their sons are reenacting their roles.
Can you tell me more about “Al’s Grand Hotel,” in which the artist set up a temporary hotel in Los Angeles? Did people actually rent and stay in these rooms?
Yes, they did. It was an old house on Sunset Boulevard, and each room was thematic. Al also had Al’s Café, so he was doing these installations in these kind of quasi-public, quasi-private spaces. Part of it was that there weren’t a lot of artist bars in L.A., unlike New York. So he created these spaces for people to come to as a public gathering.
For her Dante Hotel, Hershman organized that project with Eleanor Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola’s wife, who is an artist, and in their case it was supposed to be up for about a month. You didn’t stay there; it was an installation you visited. They had wax figures in a bed that were supposed to be people. Someone thought they were dead bodies and called the police. The police shut it down and took away the wax figures as evidence!
Couldn’t the cops tell that the figures were made of wax and not evidence of murder?
I think they just thought the whole thing was too bizarre and figured there had to be drugs involved.
One especially powerful piece is a photograph of Chris Burden’s “Shoot,” in which he had a friend shoot him in the arm with a .22 rifle in response to the killings of protesters at Kent State. What were the circumstances of the original performance?
Chris was a grad student at UC Irvine where a number of these artists went to school. They had a student-run gallery called F Space in Santa Ana, and he staged it as part of a series of performances there. He was just supposed to be grazed but the bullet actually penetrated his skin. In the show you see it on a video but you also see a still image.
I teach, and students always say to me, “What’s the difference between Chris Burden getting shot and someone doing that on ‘Jackass?’” My answer is very simple: It’s all about the intent of the artist and the context in which it took place. His intention was to create an endurance performance where he uses his body as the material for the artwork. The whole series of videotapes shows him exposing his body to tasks and endurance tests, and he’s also questioning what constitutes art.
The Bronx Museum is the only East Coast venue for the show, which was previously on view as part of the Pacific Standard Time series. Do you think that there’s a California feel to the works produced there? Will East Coast viewers immediately sense that there’s something different going on here?
One of the things that we wanted to try to do here with this show was to defy some of the stereotypes. Not just about East Coast versus West Coast but about northern California versus southern California. Everyone always says that northern California was more about the body and spiritual issues and very experimental, whereas L.A. was more dominated by the media and popular culture. That’s true in certain artists’ work, but we try to show that both areas have both kinds of art.
I think that the real key to what makes California different is the experimental ethos. Artists were unafraid to experiment with a wide variety of materials. East Coast conceptual art is very language-based and deals with text and images. There is that in California as well, such as in the work of Douglas Huebler, John Baldessari, and Charles Gaines, who work with linguistic conceptualism. But you generally have work that is more visceral, body-oriented, sculptural.
Because it was the site for so much social and political activism, a lot of the work in the show references social and political issues very overtly. The free speech movement at Berkeley, anti-Vietnam, women’s lib, Chicano and African-American groups, labor protests — California was really a hotbed for much of the social and political activism and this is reflected probably to a greater extent than with the East Coast artists. There are also works addressing environmental issues, animal rights issues, and issues of sexuality and freedom of sexuality.
Also, a lot of these artists, such as Baldessari, Huebler, Kaprow, unlike their New York counterparts, taught in the art schools, so they had a lasting influence. It’s really now in its third or fourth generation. A lot of artists today are very much interested in conceptualism, performance art, artists’ books, video, installation. The media that were new genres then are now part of artistic practice in general, and a lot of that began in California.