Interview
Patricia Faure
Any retelling of the history of art in Los Angeles is incomplete without the inclusion of Patricia Faure. Her seminal influence has been felt since the formative days of the Ferus Gallery in the 50s. There are few people who can speak with the authority that she does about historical and contemporary aspects of the art world. Recently she shared some of her thoughts with Mitchell Syrop and Michael Mc Curry.
Patricia Faure: One is inclined, when thinking about art of the 60s, 70s, 80s and today, to think in terms of business, of dollars and cents, and I do think that is a big mistake. I think that has come into the picture and I think that the universities are much to blame for creating an atmosphere for artists in which they imagine that they are going to exist. They issue MFAs without making sure that they've got another way to make a living. I think that is really their responsibility. They keep coming up with these kind of art schools like CalArts. There are millions of them, it seems, and what was once interesting is now kind of a liability. Because here are all these people and there's no place for them to go unless they're industrious and figure out another way of living. I think it's a very difficult end of a prolonged education.
MS: What happened before the universities?
Before the universities, if you go back to the 50s, there was a very viable art scene in New York that was very interesting. De Kooning, Rothko, Pollock...all of those people were there. They hung out together, had adjoining spaces...it was amazing. It was a friendly atmosphere in New York because it was a new school, a situation where philosophy would get tangled up with art. That seemed kind of marvelous to me. To think of it not just in terms of learning how to draw a figure, but of learning how to think. And I don't know if it started then, at all, but that is when it started to attract my attention.
The scene in Los Angeles was slower. Ferus was already here, and Paul Kantor...there were all sorts of people here. It was fine, it was small. There
wasn't this idea of making these products, of making them sell. Such terms as "pre-selling a show" or a "sold-out show," which I think are just horrible terms, bring to mind ideas of wonderful stardom and riches. It's just stupid to equate that with art. And that's ultimately what this country, the whole world, did in the late 80s.
After the war, the universities in the late 40s and 50s turned out engineers. It was total insanity, there were so many engineers. There was nothing to do with them. In no way were they there to satisfy a need. I always think of this in the same way with the art schools and the number of people that are turned out. And it doesn't even speak to who's good and who's not good. It's just that it's more than can be accommodated. I don't know, I think it's kind of sad, but that isn't the worst sadness or the worst tragedy. Maybe there isn't even anything tragic about the art world. It just kind of plods along. I think it's fraught with difficulties on a different level, aside from any financial difficulties that people have. There's a difficulty in trying to make a market, that bad word again, for art that people actually don't want or aren't equipped to understand.
One of my favorite things is minimalism, but it certainly can't enjoy the popularity of expressionism. It's never going to. It's wonderful, and it poses
marvelous philosophical problems from Albers to McLaughlin and beyond. It's filled with information, I believe, but I can't convince other people of that. I don't think the art has really taken hold of the populace. I know that there are some people who are going to love it, and it's going to go on, though I don't know that it ever had a way of being taught. I can't imagine a university teaching minimalism, can you? It's a funny idea isn't it? I think they may have tried in the 60s and 70s, especially in New York with people like Carl Andre and Donald Judd popping up. Younger artists like Joel Shapiro were certainly affected by that. I think the minimalists ruled the roost in New York during the 70s, though they didn't necessarily corner a public.
MS: In the world before the preeminence of school, what was the foundation of social relations of what we are calling the art world?
Well, I was always an outsider, you must remember that. I wasn't an artist, and I wasn't even that involved in collecting. I didn't even think in those terms. I was just very attractive and wore nice clothes and all of the guys in New York would be very attracted to that. And so I was allowed into the art club, allowed to function a little bit in their world. I didn't get too involved. But it was really interesting...I liked the people like Frank O'Hara, the talkier ones. Some were really enmeshed in the art world and others were on the periphery. But they were all open, though I think that it was an openness that included pretty young girls in their twenties. You can go a long way on that.
MM: What are some of your first memories of art in Los Angeles?
In the 40s, Vincent Price and a group of people established this thing called the Beverly Hills Museum on Rodeo Drive. Frank Lloyd Wright's son, I think, built the building. A funny little building with a ramp going up it, and in there was this little museum that they put together. Billy Wilder and a whole bunch of people were involved in it. The art that they showed, since they had no collection, was made up of art that they borrowed from people who lived here, Hollywood people, for the most part. There would be Picasso blue periods and many Ultrillos...too many...and Alexander Calder hanging from the ceiling. All these kind of things, a lot of which one hadn't seen here. It cost a dollar to join it. I worked there as a volunteer on Saturdays when I was in high school. They closed, ultimately, because they just couldn't get enough people to come in. They really did some good things, though. I saw a lot of art for the first time in my life there.
MM: What was the Los Angeles art world like at the time of Ferus Gallery?
Well, it was many things. It was fun. You can tell when you look at that book from Craig Krull's show of the art scene. Can't you tell that it was fun? The sense of fun came from the fact that there was no money in the game. You were doing exactly what you wanted to do, because it didn't make any difference. There was no idea that you would really just captivate everybody, get a review this long in the paper, and then go on to stardom. If it got reviewed at all, it was just a mention, and probably a little bit snide.
When I put together the book on the Nicholas Wilder show I did, I sent somebody down to the L.A. Times to get all of the reviews they had written about Nicholas Wilder's shows and it was amazing, it was so bad. It would be five sentences on a show that maybe the artist had waited five years to put together. And it would be dismissed in some haphazard way with no knowledge about what the artist was talking about at all. It's so much better now.
MM: You mean the nature of reviewing?
The nature of the reviewing, the length of time and the thought that goes into every review. I mean you can get angry, differing points of view, but the writing is so much better.
MS: Did it have any impact?
The writing? No. People read it and they would come in to see a show because they had read that it existed. I don't know that it had
any impact. I don't think that it has much impact today, though we seem to put a lot of store by it.
What I was going to say before about having fun is that it was definitely tied into not making a product to market. And I think that's what is happening right now because the market flattened out, not just here but all over the world. In some way you've got to think that the art is somewhat responsible for that flattening out of the market. It's not just related to the economy. It also has to do with the art and the fact that things lost value in the auctions, which created a false market for people who were buying art because it was a good investment. It's always been a terrible investment or the greatest, though it is not something you buy for investment. It's just an absurd and ridiculous idea to do that. Anyway, I think the having fun part is directly related to not having much money. It also brings up this idea of productless art, which seems to have come back very strong, with fluxus and happenings and events. That kind of thing is much stronger than it has been. And I think that it has to do with the fact that you can do what you want, because you're doing it for a different reason. You're doing it because you've got to do it.
MM: It seems that people who went to art school in the last ten, maybe fifteen years, went into it with notions of a career in mind. You go to art school, you graduate, and then, boom, you can get yourself into the system immediately.
I think they really believed it.
MM: I think that's what's responsible, in a large sense, for the great output of MFAs within the last decade...
Also the fact that parents could be convinced to give their kids the money to go to those schools.
It used to be that all the artists had to be architects and at least have a noble profession. That was the only way that their parents would put up with the time wasted and the money involved. To be an artist, nobody was going to allow them to do that until more recently.
MS: Yes, until they could point to a Baldessari and say he did it. I can do it too.
Right. So that part has really changed. I think we are going to separate the men from the boys, a little bit. Or we are doing that.
MM: Well, then, how does the healthy economy play into that? Let's assume we believe some of what we hear these days, that the economy is coming back and it is getting stronger. If you want to extrapolate that and say well, maybe people will buy more art, is that going to change...
A healthy economy means to me that more houses will be built and so there are more empty walls for paintings and more gardens for sculpture. That's what that means to me. But that doesn't involve the kind of art that you're thinking of. That has another way to go that doesn't even depend on the white walls and the gardens. It goes directly to the heart of the matter, when you connect with somebody who understands what you are saying and is intrigued and interested.
But I do feel that this moment right now is when it seems to be more fun. Bergamot Station can be fun. You know, it may be frightening to some people, but it really can be fun. Five thousand people milling around and looking at things creates an atmosphere that's kind of wonderful, because it is a marketplace and not a museum. And there's hope.
MM: Although no matter how much fun or how much hope there might be in a crowd of five thousand people milling about, in order for the system to continue to exist and move forward, some of those five thousand have to open their checkbooks.
Yes, but I think they're beginning to do that. I also think that art right now is in a very, very odd way. I think we pigeonhole things like this museum is really good at figurative art, or this one shows landscapes, and this one shows minimalists, and this one is really only conceptual art. I think you've got to mix the whole thing together, throw out a lot, and then add fashion and music and video and computers, anything, all sorts of things. Lots of different persuasions will make the mix rather than a room full of paintings, for instance. I think that's where it becomes really hard, to keep with that. To decide that that is what your museum is going to be.
For example, I think that the Los Angeles County Museum is in a really difficult state right now, being an encyclopedic kind of
institution, and in some ways adhering to that. They seem to be influenced by what they are, as if they were the Metropolitan, for instance, and their history would determine the contemporary art that they choose to show. The county is a little bit more open than the Met. But I think these great big institutions, maybe even the Guggenheim too, are belabored by all the things that went before, that had created their identities. Maybe they can only be challenged by things that are made today, by art that's created today.
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