 I would like to thank a few people to begin with. I'd like to thank Jeannie Gerard for, I don't know, ramrodding, starting this whole ball rolling, whatever it is. I would like to thank UCLA for doing this, and I have something to show you here. I have a friend in the audience, an artist friend named Merlin Bolin, and he gave me this to me just before I came up. It's one of his little works. It says, Trader, as in Trader Joe's. But if you pronounce it with a, you know, it's a pun, and I opened it up, and what's inside? He says he hopes it doesn't throw me off my game, but I'm imperturbable. And I would like to thank the archives, and I would also like to thank everybody in the audience for coming here tonight. I don't know about you, but coming to UCLA is always a pleasant experience, except it's always been to me kind of fortress UCLA if you drive. And for those of you who fought the good fight to get in here and get a seat, I really appreciate your coming. And I'm going to ask Jeannie, because I noticed the time constraint was a little tighter than what I had thought. I tend to be a blow hard. And so just do this when you need to. Okay. I usually write out talks and then read them these days because it makes me feel secure against attack from the audience. I'm not as fast on my feet as I once was and I find it a lot harder to send my improvise from notes, but I'm going to read a kind of a prologue before I go to just notes and throw all the balls into the air. In an email exchange with an old friend, an art dealer in Florida, now decamped for Martha's Vineyard and planning to live most of the time in Santa Barbara, I spoke of my newfound selectivity and what I'd get involved in. He said that kind of choosiness makes me like one of those supermodels who refuses to get out of bed unless it's for something really major, for somebody really important. Here's what I wrote back in an email. My supermodel Ethos, think Fabio aged 75, is really a product of age. I've effing done all those other things. Been on boards and committees of artist-run organizations and magazines, taught students who are now middle-aged cozy-ups who think that commenting on my Facebook page is some sort of credential, lectured at just about every college except Bob Jones University, had shows wherever asked at places from friends non-profits. For example, my artist friend Ron Lindon's Trons Vagrant, his program, which is a nice pun if you know it on Trons Avangard, in San Pedro. I always spell it with about nine E's when I email. As my daughter said, the bushwick of LA. To college galleries good and bad, to fancy places once in a while, to college galleries and galleries good and bad, to fancy places once in a while, and written catalog essays and forwards and afterwards and in-betweens, and screwed myself over by writing published honest-to-god reviews of the rare non-puff variety. In other words, I've paid my dues. I'd like a little positive payback, but the trouble is the people who'd pay me back are now aged or infirmed, or now powerless or dead. And the art world is staffed by silicon-head little appusianials who don't care about much about anything that I care about. I've got maybe ten good productive years left, so there's no time left to piss around. Okay, now we go here and I'm going to wing it. This is my uncle on the left, and my father in probably borrowed clothes. He didn't have two nickels to rub together in 1934, and they're at the Cleveland Air Show. That's a gyrocopter in the back. My father was, got me into art. He was not a terribly successful, wannabe illustrator, commercial artist, whom the Depression may become a jack of all trades. He was a kind of an odd guy in certain ways. He was a devout Christian scientist, but an omnivorous reader who did two things for me. One, he brought me books home from the library. He had really good taste of off things. He got me into novelists like Richard Hughes and I would hear Coors and would say, you know, here you ought to read this. And the other thing he did was he stole some art supplies from the little advertising agencies that he worked with and brought them home to me. I was real proud when I was a kid. I had one of those lazy Susan's, you know, that illustrators have. The Indy Inc and the erasers go here and the pencils go here and it's up, you know. And so my first endeavors were I became a cartoonist in high school. When I went off to college, I went as an English major, which will say something, but English major in those days was the equivalent of non-declared or whatever. You know, you had to take a lot of English so you're an English major. I did cartoons for the gas because I saw a couple of copies of the Daily Bruin being read before this. I became an editorial cartoonist for the Daily Trojan. The drawings are really pretty good. I was pretty good at it. The ideas, forget it. They were very callow and teenage, et cetera, et cetera. But what the Daily Trojan did for me is it took me from being a 17-year-old fraternity pledge into this kind of middle ground that was partly Bohemian. The people on the Daily Trojan didn't drink beer out of kegs. They kept bottles in their desk, you know, adults, I thought. But you have to remember, this is 1958 to 1962, and the radical left organization on campus was Trideltz for JFK. The kind of art that was promulgated and the kind of art that I liked was something like this. This is a Howard Warshaw. It's been cropped. A lot of the illustrations are, you know, these aren't textbook-approved. You know, modern, but you could see drawing in it and so forth. My painting professors were Edgar Ewing and Keith Crown, and a man who would be called an adjunct today, but who was part-time James Jarvez, who really a great painter. And he was in that 1959, one of those Dorothy Miller, you know, I think it was called, 16 Americans or 12 Americans, but Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and Ellsworth Kelly and a bunch of other people were in that. He was probably, you know, the hippest art professor I had. Okay, but I want to go stop here because I'm a kind of an LA boy, and it's, you know, a weird thing with me. I did come here when I was two. My father worked, was sent out here to make training films for the Army Air Corps. I lived here until 1950, then the family sort of went broke and we went back to the bosom of relatives in Cleveland. We came back in 1954. And I've had this strange relationship with Los Angeles, sort of in me and, well, we'll get to this. It's a kind of an overriding, I don't know whether you'd call it a leitmotif or not, but here's, you know, something about my history with Los Angeles, you know, kind of cliff notes. When I was a kid, I lived near Gardena. I lived, I'm just going to tell you a few of the places. You know, I lived near Gardena in a place called Alondra Park. It's near El Camino College, between Gardena and Torrance High School. I lived in what is now Hipster Heaven, off Sunset Boulevard, whereas the water off Sunset Boulevard between Silver Lake and Echo Park. It was just a regular lower middle class neighborhood there. I lived around USC in apartments and in a frat house. I lived in Mar Vista. I've lived in Studio City, Laurel Canyon, but on the Studio City side. And I was one of those people who, I was a half mile from Ventura Boulevard, but I would always drive all the way up to Mulholland and over to go to the drugstore on the LA side. So I wouldn't be part of the valley. And then I lived downtown in a loft building that's no longer there. And this was in the late 70s into the 80s before there was such a thing as an arts district. Okay, Lady in the Pool. And I have this sort of ambivalent relationship with Los Angeles. I think my favorite TV program of the 70s was the Rockford Files. And I liked it not only because of James Garner, but I liked it because of that he had a sport jacket but an open collar check shirt. So he could go do business with the gangsters in suits and he could also mingle with the hippies. You know, and he was a bit of an outsider to everybody. And that, and I'll give a quote, I think it's from Raymond Chandler, but I'm not sure it might be he borrowed it from somebody down these streets, me, I'm sorry, down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean. Okay, that's the private eye. And I sort of liked that semi-alienated sort of thing where you really don't have roots any place. And in my era, L.A., everybody was from someplace else. I've read zillions of L.A. novels, the old L.A. public library downtown, which I used to haunt in those days in the card files. They actually had a location heading in the fiction section. You go to Los Angeles and there are all the novels that are set in Los Angeles. I had an ambition to read all of them, but a lot of them were intolerable. But I read Nathaniel West and John Fonte and Joan Diddy and probably every private eye there was. The sum thing of all this, this sort of what I call sunny existentialism, I had a little phrase in my head. I used to say mayonnaise days. This was sort of sunny, white bread, mayonnaise, the sun outside, but back to that wide boulevard shot, nothing really happened. Okay, so, and this is out of chronological order. My attitude about this went over the top in an article that I wrote for Art Forum in December of 1972. Reiner Bandem's book on Los Angeles, Four Ecologies, I forget the exact title. He's a British architecture critic who came over here. I mean, he loved the place, like a lot of Brits do. It's not foggy, it's not rainy, it's not cold, it's not dreary, it's sunny, et cetera, et cetera. And there's a whole history of this in the cultural world. Everybody from Christopher Isherwood to all those actors who used to form a cricket league and play out at Will Rogers Park, you know, players in movies. Would you review it? And I reviewed it. And I just lost my mind. And it ended up about 12,000 words. It was the longest article published in Art Forum other than Michael Freed's entire issue taken up with mayonnaise sources. It was probably in something longer than that now since. And it was just a, you know, a kind of a tirade. It ended with, because, you see, in those days, those, you know, that was the height of air pollution. And I had a studio in Pasadena, and you would look out the window and you couldn't see a block and a half before it became opaque cafe au lait. And sometimes, as my friend, Walter Gabrielson, you will see later said that, you know, the scary parts are not those days. It's when you come in around New Year's. It always seemed to clear out for the Rose Bowl. You come in and you look out there and crystal clear, there are mountains, and you think the scenic people moved in these flats during the night, you know, somehow. You know, and it was in that. So I had this kind of, oh, I don't know, but it ended, my thing ended with a tagline, the fashionable son of a bitch doesn't have to live here to Mr. Bannum. Okay, I went to graduate school after I got out of SC. I went to graduate school at Syracuse. Why? Because they accepted me and they gave me a teaching assistantship. I also couldn't read a map and I thought Syracuse was real close to New York City. You know, it was in New York and all those, you know, Connecticut, Vermont, Rhode Island, they're all about the same size. Syracuse was cold. This is what was said to me at the first faculty meeting in September when I came as a teaching assistant and I showed up and there was this old surrealist painter named Frederick Hauke, a disciple of Victor Bronner, if any of you are fans of surrealism, and it was hot. It was September. It was 90% humidity and 85 degrees, so I just came in in a pair of khakis and buttoned down, you know, broadcloth shirt and he said in his Barry Fitzgerald accent, that, a bit facetiously, but nevertheless, and it was cold in Syracuse. I remember going to a movie with other graduate students and we're walking down the street in the middle of December and there's a savings loan with one of those time and temperature things on and it's like minus 27 degrees. I thought they were kidding, you know, this was only the temperature on Mars. But since I was kind of uneducated compared to the older graduate students, they're all older than I was. I was 21, these guys, some of them had been in the service, et cetera, and they all went to art schools like MassArt and RISD and the Chicago Art Institute and they all knew how to do these things and they were just, you know, artists. So my teaching assistantship, I became the discussion leader for a couple of sections of the Survey Art History course taught by the director of the art school a man named Dr. Lawrence Schmeckebier. Nice name, means beer taster. Whose favorite artist was Anton Refregier, a muralist of the kind of WPA 30s. Schmeckebier, roomless glasses, straight back silver hair, three-piece suit, he might have been educated in the states because he had, I think, a five-bait fob in his vest. We had a seminar where all the graduate, studio graduate students had to come together, you know, get them out of that studio building or wherever they are and get them together in the building for once a week. And he announced that the term project for the seminar would be a 25-page paper at which there was an audible gas from all these big hairy guys that were older and tougher than I was, and I just sat there crying with me. And they all looked, and he looked up, and Schmeckebier said, I still remember this, he looked up at them and smiled and said, life is a rich and unfolding pageant. That phrase has become a household phrase with Laurie and me. Whenever something goes wrong, look at each other and we say life is a rich and unfolding pageant. This is me on the roof of the graduate studio in 1964. Why am I standing there? I'm staying there because it's kind of windy and I'm supposed to reach out and grab the painting in case it's going to blow off. And those were in, this was not a single lens reflex and the idea was, you know, you had that, remember that silver tape that you put on slides to crop them? That's what you would, you know, that's what you would do with that. Big thing that happened to me beside Hauke and his little thing was a trip to New York in November of 1962. It just so happened, it was coincidence. You know, these things happen. It's like our daughter graduated from Kenyon College in 2005. We went to her graduation. The greatest commencement speech ever. It's Water by David Foster Wallace, which is all over the internet and I saw it live just because our daughter wasn't a year older or a year younger. But I went to, we went to New York. Five graduate students in a Vokes Beetle and we went to see the show called The New Realists at Sydney Janice Gallery, which was like the pop art coming out sort of show with Warhol and Wesselman and Oldenburg and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and Wayne Tebow, who was, you know, a new realist or pop artist then. Little anecdote, one of those older guys, 35, older graduate student, kept saying, come on, come on, come on, let's go. No, no, I want to look a little more, because he hated this stuff. Come on, I want to look a little bit more. We get out on the sidewalk and he said, well, what's your opinion? I said, well, I kind of liked it. I wasn't trying to be, you know, progressive. I liked Warhol and Lichtenstein particularly. I said, I kind of liked it. He said, oh, you see a show and you have an opinion in five minutes. I said, aha. I said, the differences between you and me is I look at a show for an hour and I have an opinion in five minutes. You look at the show for five minutes and take an hour to make up your mind. By the way, that 25-page paper became my thesis paper, which was pretentiously called the development of pictorial meaning and I know it sounds really, you know, haughty and arrogant, but that's been my problem, my task, my thing ever since. How do you get some kind of meaning into an abstract painting so that it's not decoration? Not just cheerful eye candy decoration, but kind of morose calming, et cetera, decoration. I want paintings to move you like a novel does or a good piece of music, et cetera, et cetera. So it was called that. First teaching job was in 1966 in Austin, Texas. Somebody got fired in the middle of the school year for probably just speaking out of turn because that's the way things were done in these days. No, there was nothing sexual involved in it. Did I want to replace it? I asked my then spouse, do you want to go to Austin? Okay, maybe went there. The department was run by the old tenured professors who were all kind of 1930s social realist artists. We called them the water buffaloes, us young Turks. Why? Because water buffaloes are very good in a village. They harness, they plow, they, you know, the rice paddies, et cetera. But if they're disturbed and go on a rampage, they can trample whole villages. And the water buffaloes used to refer to little cute noses. I remember that one phrase of a painter named Lauren Mosley, who it somehow got back to him that I said to somebody that his paintings look like saison done on a typewriter. And because he had this little system of saison-esque stuff, they called them little cute noses that we put on our doors, you know, little New Yorker cartoons and pop art things and, you know, rock and roll stuff, et cetera, et cetera. This is something I did for a newspaper called The Rag in Austin. It was the alternative newspaper. There were much better cartoonists than I was who did things for it. Gilbert Shelton, you know, Wonder Wardhog and the Fuzzy Furry Freak Brothers, Robert Crum. And I did this cover one time. You can't see it up here, but this one character here is a kind of frat boy who talks to this guy and he's told to take this thing called, I don't know, sense or something, and it basically turns you into, you know, turns you into a left winger, or turns you from a left winger into a right winger. That was the deal. But that was kind of the... And then I also picked up a few bucks because they didn't pay you very much. There was a guy who ran a one-horse advertising agency out of his house and he said, for $5 an hour would you do stuff for me? So I did stuff and I did this, you know, two billboards for the local country station, nighttime country music. I couldn't find a slide of the good one. The good one, I made cowboy boots out of the two Ks and in the middle of the O is the moon. You know, it's much better than this one, but that's the only one I could find. I got a leave of absence. They didn't have sabbaticals, an organized sabbatical sort of thing, so you had to apply for things. I used to show a lot of slides to my classes. People didn't do that a whole lot. I love to go down the slide, Larry Berry, show slides to my classes. Larry raises staunts, was a two-projector thing on color with lap dissolves, starting with the spectrum and then going through each color via works of art, old master, contemporary, contemporary being color field painting at the time, but no words, but the soundtrack was In a God of David by Iron Butterfly. So what happened was I met this art historian named Donald Wiseman. We used to talk. He said, what are you doing? I said, well, I'm filling out one of these applications for a leave. I want to go to Belgium and look at Flemish painting. One of the best classes I ever took at USC was from Professor Edward Peck, Northern Renaissance. It just drilled into my head, Northern Renaissance. After that, no Italianate stuff, no perspective. I liked the semi-medieval quality that the Northerners kept going. He said, oh, all right. I was an instructor, the lowest rank on the associate professor, assistant professor instructor at the bottom. I'd just been there. He said, well, I'll sign. You needed a senior faculty member to sign. Well, I didn't know this, but he was basically LBJ's private art historian because he was what they call an Americanist, which meant George Innes and things like that. 19th century American paintings. So when he signed off on it, it went through. I had most of a year on the university's tab in Brussels. And this is where I lived. The ground floor. The red show say it. 46 Rue Le Corège. And yes, it is Corregio Street. And next to it was Rue Michelin. And on the other side was Rue Rembrandt. And et cetera, et cetera. It was right kind of down from, if any of you know, Brussels, the Saint-Cantanere, which is the big park, you know, and had all these, I don't know whether it was fortuitous or not. And the other thing that happened out of this was when I came to Brussels, I had barely gotten my head around minimal art, you know, Donald Judd, Tony Smith. And when I got there, where I wanted to go was I wanted to go to the gallery Francoise Maillet, you know, because she had the group de Rocher's Visuel, which were all those Victor Vassarelli, Jaco Vagam, all these fancy geometric painters. And I thought that was the height of everything. I asked somebody, who should I meet? You know, who's a good artist in Brussels? And they said Marcel Brotas. Marcel Brotas just had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. He died in 1975. So I went over, knocked on his door. Somebody gave me his address. I knocked on the door. Woman opened the door. It was his wife, third. And I rehearsed my French. And I said, hi, I would like to meet Marcel Brotas. I'm an American art instructor, and I'm over here on a grant. In French, a grant is a bourse, which means a purse, and it also means the stock market. And basically it means money. And she turned around, and she said to this room that I could see, totally empty, beautiful, you know, apartment. But nice wood floors, nice white walls, there's white walls, nothing on it. But in the middle is, underneath, I can make out a rectangle, there's a mattress with a pile of blankets on it. And she said, Marcel, you know, and in French, there is a young American here who's on a bourse who would like to meet you. Suddenly the blankets flew back and this man sits up, and you can't see from this back photograph, but Brotas was really handsome guy and he met European leading man like Ralph Valone and like that. And he sat up and he's wearing a suit and a white shirt and a tie, and he went, you know, bonjour, and came over. He became kind of my friend when I was in Brussels and ushered me through to things like the art of Panamarenko and Joseph Boyce and this gallery called Wide White Space in Antwerp, run by a woman named Annie de Dekker. Little Belgian thing was it's a dual language country. If you, your enterprise had a French name, it had to have a sign with the Flemish on it. But you could get around that by just being foreign in the first place. So Wide White Space didn't have to be translated. What all of that did was it reinforced in me that whole thing about abstraction with kind of meaning. Now this is the van der Weiden diptych crucifixions in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I didn't get a slide of something that was in Belgium. I make a little pilgrimage if I go to Philadelphia. I go see this, I go see the Van Eyck little five inch square, St. Francis in the Wilderness. It's like this big and then I go see the Duchamp when we look through the door. But there's something about, you might see, I hope, when we get to some paintings, this connection, it all sort of formed in me from, believe it or not, Flemish painting. Okay, now we're going to step aside for a minute and talk about criticism. When I was, I'm going to go back, when I was in LA, I had my first art world job was assistant curator at the Long Beach Museum of Art. Staff of five. So the assistant curator is like in the middle. The two people allegedly below me on the organizational chart are the custodian and the part-time person who ran the little bookstore booth. Custodian, by the way, a man named Jim Wilson, a black man, was the one person that if you took him out of the museum it would have collapsed. And he knew where everything was. He had the most organizing. And later in life, after I left, I only worked there for a year or so before the Texas thing came through. They changed the political system in Long Beach City Council from everybody running at large which meant that no minority could ever get elected because everybody had to run for a place city-wide. They changed you a district system and Jim became the city councilman for that area and I think held the office for about 30 years and the longest serving guy there. So anyway, I'm in Long Beach. I have to live within the city limits of Long Beach by law. It was a civil service job. So how am I going to make myself go to the galleries? I went into art forms offices which were on Lassianic Boulevard at the time above Ferris Gallery as I remember and I spoke to Phil Leder who was the editor. Very strange, rigid kind of guy. Very severe. Leder became very devoutly religious and moved to Israel but I said, you know, I can write as good a review as you're getting. Give me a chance. The arrogance of that sort of goes out when you understand that you got five bucks a review and they were signed with your initials. Now, there was a little key at the top of the authors in alphabetical order so you could connect up P.P. if you wanted to or F.D. for Fidel Danielli. And he said, okay. And I think my first review, I'm not sure but there was a gallery on Melrose Place, I think, Kamara, Bob Kamara Gallery and there was an artist named Jack Stuck who did strange charcoal drawings and black and white paintings of men and swimming pools. And I kept at it from 1969 to 74 after I came back from Texas I contributed something called the Los Angeles Letter every month to Art Forum four to six reviews. The trouble is, and I'll just say this and leave the evidence elsewhere, is that when you get into something, maybe not some of you who are more well adjusted, but ambition rears its ugly little head. If I'm going to do a little review, why can't I do the lead review? If I'm going to do the lead review, why can't I do a feature story? If I'm going to do the feature story, why can't I do a cover? And you start to, you know, you want. So I'm doing this. But I'm still an artist. This is from a show, I think it's back there, 24 young Los Angeles artists, some of whom you may recognize up there, Pat Hogan, Scott Greiger, Mary Kors, et cetera. That's moi on your right down there, low down on the steps. My foot is the lowest thing down in the picture. It was a show that the County Museum did. And I'm just going to put this in here. Don't do this. You know, this is like Dorothy Parker's advice to all you young people out there who are thinking of getting married. Don't. Don't do it. The scene has changed now. There are not authoritative outlets. You have an exception in LA. You have The Times and you have several critics. And there's New York has The Times. They have several critics. Time Magazine doesn't really have an art critic anymore. Newsweek certainly doesn't. Chicago doesn't have an art critic on their daily paper. St. Louis doesn't. They go on and on and on. It's all disappeared. And there's a different kind of thing with blogs and a kind of, you know, plethora of smaller voices. Still, there are reasons. And I said in the beginning, I've screwed myself over, but it's my bad. Galleries and curators don't want to deal with you, i.e. put you in exhibitions or deal with you because it will look like they're cousining up to you so that you will treat them favorably in print. Secondly, excuse your relationship with artists because everything you say, even in casual conversation, is sort of taken well, this is kind of on the record, you know, by the artist. You diss on, you know, zombie formalism to somebody and then they go back and, you know, Peter hates that kind of art. He isn't going to be fair toward it. Or they flatter you and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And lastly, there is a pressure to be part of, and this is where I become kind of cranky, to be part of the art community. I don't like community. I think that everybody should do as best as they can and let the chips fall where they may. I don't feel a kind of responsibility unless somebody wants me to pay me a retainer, you know, to do something like that. And I've done my little civil service, you know, civic service, like in things like that. So my advice to any of you young people out there who are thinking of not only getting married, but doing criticism in addition to your art, don't. This is a studio that Walter and I had in Pasadena and that's what I looked like when I had hair. Artists in the 70s. I'm going to skip a couple of things here and just talk about it. There was another seminal thing which you may hear talked about every once in a while. There's a veteran of that in here and that was the artist's basketball game. Pretty regularly. Every Sunday morning, 10 o'clock, outdoor courts, Santa Monica High School, 4th and Pico, we took it fairly seriously. And we played from 10 to noon and then went and had beer and stuff like that. My friend Merwin Belin who's back there was, you know, one of the stalwarts and one of the people that was unfortunately better than I was. And Bruce Nauman used to come to it with Richard Jackson. They came from Pasadena and we played skins and shirts. Bruce used to suggest that we play skins and pants. And this is kind of art that I was doing then. This is a big oil painting about, I don't know, well it says 79 inches across. I was reading Merleau-Ponty's Humanism and Terror. I was interested in some politics things about the Stalin trials. And Kamenev I think was, I named them after the Russian political people who I think were executed, convicted and executed. Didn't mean anything more than just to put a name on it and the Russian Kamenev, it sort of fits the character of the painting. It's not, doesn't have any political content to it. Throwing here something just, you know, which would take a whole thing. This is my kind of feeling, this existential thing coming in. If you go back to that Roger van der Weiden, not that this holds a candle to it, but it sort of flipped. Those red blankets, you know, those red blankets on the crucifixion, and now they come over and it's flipped and it's the background and there's a green thing. Friend of mine just came in. Dwayne Valentine, artist friend of mine, great artist. You know, and I didn't like at the time what I think it was a Marsha Tucker called large area small piece abstract painting. Meaning a large area covered with a lot of small pieces, sometimes arranged in a grid and I thought it was sort of gutless and decisionless so I was emphatically figure ground which sort of stays with me. I'm going to skip over some things, but this is a collage from 1991. I've done a zillion collages. They've got boxes full of them. And you can see it's like nine inches by five inches. This is criticism creeping back into the thing again. This is called brotherhood of artists and there's a part right here that goes up. It's from an announcement for a group show and I would cut off the last names and just use the first names, okay? And I got a bunch of them. They run up into that particular series. And there was a pun in there, you know, that artists are kind of a brotherhood compared to the regular bourgeoisie. You know, I don't know, none of my artist friends are voting for Trump. There was a kind of brotherhood in the union sense because there's always the brotherhood of Teamsters, the brotherhood of scenic artists, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Gender included and inclusive in brotherhood. But there was also a little bit of irony in the title and then you heard me say before I didn't really think that much about community. So there wasn't any brotherhood. But the effect of criticism, and I use this analogy once in a while, somebody says you're writing criticism and your art affect each other. And I say the art doesn't really affect the criticism, you know, because you have to be kind of Catholic small C with the criticism to go out there and see things and try to take them on their own terms. On the other hand, when you go into the studio, sometimes it's like there's a little tape recorder in your head playing at very high speed, very high pitch, and very fast. And it goes... And it's all the other art that you've seen and you want it to shut off. And sometimes you can shut it off, sometimes you have difficulty with it. Now I know that artists go see other art. That's not the point that you should hole up and not see other art. But there's a difference between seeing it because you want to see it, because it's a front of yours, seeing it because you've heard about It Show and you might check it out and seeing about it because there's some sort of journalistic responsibility to cover the waterfront, you know? And that's it. Now, this was said to me by a professor at Chapel Hill when I was chairman of the art department. You got this thing yet? We're getting close. Seven minutes. You do books. There are two books that I've written that have maybe some kind of impact. One of them was Sunshine Muse, published in late 1974 by Prager. The book came about like this. Prager was an art publisher then of... there's some in the vitrines out there. Minimum, medium-sized books. And they were going to do a whole series on geographical slices of art. They were going to do maybe art from the Midwest, art from the South, you know, Texas. And the first one was going to be art from the West Coast. Somebody asked John Copeland, the editor of Artform Who We Recommend, he recommended me. John liked my writing. So I did it on a deadline. And I had an assignment of only 30,000 words. You think that's a lot? A very short detective novel is 30,000 words. I had a deadline and I thought there would be others. I thought it would be followed immediately. You know, I was the guy in World War I who was going to throw myself on the barbed wire and everybody else was going to come running over my back. And it didn't really happen. And so Sunshine Muse stayed out there for a while and tied to my tail for about 40 years. I'm not ashamed of it. It's been reissued a couple of times. But it is not supposed to be the definitive text. And sometimes, you know, the Getty's PST series of exhibitions made that sort of very clear. Okay, Bruce Nauman came about because I wanted to do a kind of personal autobiography as a painter and as a critic. I was going to do painting, particularly abstract painting as I had seen it in LA and New York through the years with my own work and looking at other stuff. And it was going to be called a simple country painter. And one of the solicitations went to Fiden, the big art book publisher, coffee table books. And it went into what the editor told me called the slush pile. The publisher term for things that come in unsolicited. And some editor was looking through it and happened to find it. Said, do you want to have coffee and talk about it? I said, sure. And while we were having coffee, she said, by the way, there are some artists about whom we would like to have monographs. Top of the list is Bruce Nauman. We can't get anybody because Bruce won't approve anybody. Aha. I'm shortening this wall over simplifying it. Basketball game, OK? I used to let Bruce make shots. And he said, fine. So I found myself writing that book. I did interviews with him. I went to New Mexico. I wrote part of it when Lori and I had a residence in France in the Dora Mar House. Then went to the Biennale to see the whole big thing where he got the golden line, et cetera, et cetera. Turned in the manuscript, fine. Nice little thing with Bruce. I met him in a hotel in downtown Manhattan where he had his manuscript with his pencil marks on it. And he was going to correct me on certain things. Didn't have, had hardly anything except he said, and I was very touched by it. He said, would you please say that, not say that my mother lives in an old age home? And so we arrived at assisted living facility. And it was very nice and very kind. And it was kind of insensitive of me not to have seen that. The book came out in 2014. Got great reviews. One in your hometown paper, the LA Times. Really good one in the New York Times. And I counted as a twofer because the guy who wrote the review was the editor of Book Forum, Art Forum's literary supplement. So that counts as two to me. But it didn't sell very well. Hasn't sold very well. Okay. And if you look at the book, it's out there. And I was thinking, is it me? Because I thought it was written pretty well. People who read it thought it was written pretty well. They fight and just design the shit out of it. And I said, fine, go ahead and do whatever you do. So you'll find there's a tri-fold cover. There's this little conceit of things that aren't Bruce's works, just things that are relative, have a little horizontal diagonal black bar. Because Bruce puts things up on his wall with black tape, you know, to look at them. And the fluorescent threads on the open binding are supposed to allude to his neons. Maybe that. Okay. We're going to wrap this up here. This is Bruce. I should have done this first. This is Bruce. When I knew him in Pasadena, knocked on his door. He came to the window, saw me with a camera around my neck, and then came back with that camera. This is my favorite shot. And this is what I started to work on the book. Juliet Myers is his assistant, not studio assistant. Just, you know, she runs his office in correspondence and stuff like that. Anyway, those two books are probably, probably it. Now I'm going to go, I think I'm going to end with this. I'm going to talk about two crucial people in my life. The first one is Walter Gabrielson of the Pete and Wally show. We taught Northridge for eight years. We met in 1963, nicely alluded to in the introduction. So I won't, you know, do that. Walter passed away in 2008, I think. And he was my best friend. Dearly loved him. We had the studio together in Pasadena. And I find him quoting him all the time. You saw that lead quote about, you know, art is the only form of human endeavor, where successive versions work, the bugs in, you know. The best cubism is the first cubism. He, when we taught together, he said things like, the least harm you can do at a faculty meeting is to extend the meeting only by the time it took you to say what you said. Okay? A couple of works that I own by Walter. This one is called Cheerleader. No, she has no hands and no head. But it's that thing, it's a really nice canvas. It's about five feet tall, maybe. I took this on the wall. That's why there's a shadow down there. And this is a little watercolor that I got. This is called The Critic. Walter was always, Walter was always out of step. He liked Thomas Hart Benton, Joe Jones, all that WPA stuff. And he's a figurative artist. Go to his website. It's still up. And he distilled it down into something. And we were going to do a book together. I think some evidence of it in the vitrine. Never got off the ground. I would write and he would do these watercolor illustrations and that's the text. The other person who's here is Lori Fenrick, my wife. And this is her in a very good mood coming out of her office door. She's coming out of her office door at Hofstra University on Long Island on the last day when she then retired. She's now a professor emerita. And what can I say? Lori, this is one of her paintings. And a little out of, it squeezed vertically somehow in this shot. But while this image is up there, I believe that when she went to college at Mount Holyoke, she was a political science or with a kind of political philosophy bent major. And that's what she did. And then she went off to graduate school for a while in Berkeley and not shortly there into deciding that she wasn't going to, just wasn't in here to spend 20 years working on the great book on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, probably her favorite philosopher other than the Greeks. And so she returned to painting which she had done a little bit in school. So she came kind of late to art, another painting. And I give you a little commercial for everybody. Lori has an exhibition opening Thursday night, 5 to 8 or 6 to 8. 5 to 8 at Louis Stern Fine Arts. If you know Louis Stern, it's on Melrose, you know, they're just past Robertson on the south side of the street. Big show of drawings and paintings, the whole gallery. So you're all invited, free whatever they give away at openings. And she's also continues to write for a long time. She blogged and wrote essays for the Chronicle of Higher Education. We edit each other's writing all the time. Before I send anything, I give it to her. Before she does anything, you know, she gives it to me. I'm going to cut this a little short. And I'm going to say is that we share a studio. We have a studio building in a house that we own up in the Catskills where we do large things, small things in New York for various and sundry reasons that you don't want to hear about. And we never argue about art. We don't argue about art. Sometimes we've gotten into terrible arguments and they have been over something that was said on NPR, something that was said on all things considered, which degenerated then into, you know, things. So that's about seven minutes. I think I'm going to cut it short there with just Walter and Lori, the most important people in my life. Walter, unfortunately, is not with us. And again, I thank you all for coming and I thank you for listening to me talk so fast. So, thank you. The question was, have you written any review of the New San Francisco Museum of Modern Art? It's actually an addition, but it's really a whole new museum. The answer is yes. Have you written anything on The New Broad downtown? And I said no. And there was a bit of laughter. And that is that my editor at the Wall Street Journal said, would you go out and do a piece on the San Francisco Museum? And I did the art in the museum and then there's another writer named Caroli Anone, who's the architecture writer, and she goes out and does something on the building. We've done that before. I wasn't asked to do anything. Brown, don't ask me. I don't make the editorial decisions. Maybe Uncle Roopy, as my editor refers to him, does. Mr. Murdock. No, I haven't taken a selfie in front of the Jeff Koons, but there's a really weird sensation that I get when I go up that escalator into that thing. Did any of you see the remake of War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise? You remember that thing that came down and sucked people up it? I get that feeling when I go up that, you know, sort of, I won't describe it where you think you're going up, but that escalator, it's one of the weirdest things I've ever seen. The question was essentially, you know, could you trace a little bit about that, you know, pretentious stuff about development of pictorial meaning from graduate school? This is the last slide. And this is the last, the most recent painting of size that I've done. And my concluding line after all this stuff was, if there's any meaning, I hope that everything I've said is somehow all in here, you know? Now, that's a hope. It's not a claim. I think I'm fairly consistent, you know? I try to do non-eye candy abstract paintings that maybe have some literary meaning that you would get if you read a good poem or you heard a perfectly good, you know, piece of music that maybe, and I had a little line in there about when I go out to look at works of art, what I want to be, it happened to me now, this is just seeing other people's art galleries in the museum. I want to be moved. I want to have a little water gatherer in my eyes and preferably surprise, you know? I wasn't suspecting this from that, you know, kind of thing. I suppose if I turned it around, I would hope to provide that. But, you know, that's not for me to decide. Is that good? Okay. It's a good question. It was, how do you get anything done if you're a critic as an artist when you're going to be, are you going to be hypercritical about your own art? One of them is, you know, as Walder said, his uncle who was a carpenter in Englewood School District when he came out here from Minnesota to go to UCLA, his carpenter uncle used to say, close enough for government work. There is a kind of bit of that if you're an artist. In other words, at a certain point, I say, let it say what it's going to say. The painting wants to say this. And I pull back, it's not my temperament anyway, it's being a perfectionist, you know? Because I'm not going to hone it and tru it and whatever it and all that, until it's absolutely, you know what I mean? No complaints. And one of my things as an existentialist is that it's always incomplete anyway. So it's really a seat of the pan's decision about when are you going to let it go. Now, when I paint now, the last thing that goes on there is that, this painting's about five and a half feet, no, it's six feet tall, 72 by 66. I paint it in a way so that I can't turn around. I could. It's basically bastardized acrylic and I can paint over it, but I don't. I work it up, I kind of know where I'm going and I say, okay, that one is it. There's a little bit of performative aspect to it, you know, if you're a musician, I was my solo, one of my best, but I certainly can't, you know, pull it back out of the sound, back out of the air. Maybe I'm more permissive with myself because I do look critically at other people's art. So I give myself a little more leeway, but says what it says. There was one more. Yeah, but some of it will be anti. I mean, there is sometimes a little bit of a kind of siege mentality among painters, which I don't like. I don't like to hang around with, you know, painters huddled together against the technological onslaught, you know. I don't particularly go for that, but there is a kind of thing where I'm going to keep it handmade, a little bit awkward, one person, I don't have help, et cetera, et cetera, you know, and I used to have a little reproduction of a Paul Clay, tiny little watercolor, just a grid, colored grid. And I just thought, there's the biggest bang for the buck in terms of an emotional statement, pictorial meaning, movingness, relative to the amount of hardware material lavished upon it, you know. Doesn't weigh anything, it's not very big, et cetera, et cetera. And I sort of, I kind of cling to that against a lot of what Walter Gabrielson used to call produced art. And the art in the criticism, I don't know, I try real hard not to, but, and here's an unfortunate thing, is I'm probably harder in my mind, maybe I'm sanded down a little when it comes out in the writing, on painting and abstract painting, because I know it so well, you know. I remember once Billy Bankston went into it, Billy on Bankston went into a show of a very good painter, now deceased, named Don Sorenson, who went to Northridge. And Billy supposedly, Don told me, Billy walked in there and he did these great big lightning stroke, you know, zig-zaggy abstractions, and Billy walked in and took a look and he said, there's seven mistakes in that painting. As a kind of a Billy performance, but if you're a painter, you know, you go in there and you say, no, you know, that isn't the way you should handle Elizabethan Crimson or mask over that kind of thing, you know, so that, I gotta watch. You're a little more critical of your own kind than you are of exotica that comes from the outside. So. We have one more question and then we're good. Hi, thank you so much for your talk. I'm sorry to stretch it out. I'm a first-year MFA student here and I'm wondering if, in addition to not getting married and not getting up to an artist, you don't have any other advice for a non-marist. Okay, depends on what you want. Walter used to say, the thing he used to have to do, the most important thing an artist has to do is find out who you are. Really, you know, and that's not superficial identity politics. It's not stylistic preferences. It's really plugging deep. You know, I used to argue with Walter and say, well, what if you don't like who you are when you find out? What do you do then? But it depends. If we're talking about what do you do in order to make yourself grounded in your art, that's probably, you know, put on the blinkers, the blinders, you know, like race horses do. Don't look too much to the outside and in the old Disney program, Davey Crockett, you know, be sure you're right then go ahead. Okay, that's what you do interior. How you navigate the art world, which includes the art market, which includes reputation, which includes critical battles back and forth and stuff like that, I don't really know. Two of the slides I had in there were that picture of me on the roof with the graduate painting. When I did that, it was about 50 years removed from the Armory show, but the frightening thing is that that same moment on the roof of the graduate studio is about 50 years removed from that painting there. So I do not know what the art world in 2030 is going to look like and how you navigate it. You know, it may be, I don't know what kind of art you do, it may be that, you know, if you do any kind of traditional stuff, ceramics, painting, sculpture in that sense, it may be just these little, like Paul Brock said, he thought that painting was going to be the cloisonnay of the 21st century, you know, that it'll just be this little, you know, conservative, you know, this kind of conservative thing. You have hopes that it will, you know, that kind of thing. The other thing is my cynical outlook is that, and you go to one of the hot schools, you know, everything should be taken care of, is that I said that since I went to school, the MFA degree now stands for my fat Rolodex, meaning you go to certain schools and you have professors who are connected out there and you make contacts, and once you're out there, it's like going to, you know, Pasadena Playhouse was for a film actor in the 40s. I don't know how to navigate that, but you're in a good place and you're going to have a lot of people to talk to, and I'm not going to tell you something, you know, pay attention to your own inner self, et cetera, et cetera, because, you know, you're not a Buddhist monk in a grotto, you're out there in the art world and there's a little bit of flesh and blood to this. Sorry that was a wandering answer, but best I can do. Thank you.