An illuminating collection of work and early Frank Gehry influences at the Weisman Art Museum. "West! Frank Gehry and the Artists of Venice Beach, 1962-1978:" this show could well be titled "Frank's Friends," because it features paintings, sculpture and inventive constructions by 16 of his West Coast artist pals. The dates mark significant events in his career: the opening in 1962 of his architectural studio in Santa Monica, Calif., and the completion in 1978 of the house that cemented his reputation. StarTribune (regstn reqd) | Event
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Frank Gehry assembles a show of work by his southern-California pals
Mary Abbe, Star Tribune
May 15, 2005 ART0515
Architect Frank Gehry always has credited artists with inspiring his iconoclastic buildings, famous for their exuberant use of mundane materials, odd angles, wild curves and beautiful light.
"I search out the work of artists, and use art as a means of inspiration," he told Architectural Record in 1976. "I want to be open-ended. There are no rules, no right or wrong. I'm confused as to what's ugly and what's pretty."
All that free association is evident in a fascinating show that opened Saturday at the Weisman Art Museum, whose building is one of Gehry's masterpieces. Called "West! Frank Gehry and the Artists of Venice Beach, 1962-1978," the show could well be titled "Frank's Friends," because it features paintings, sculpture and inventive constructions by 16 of his West Coast artist pals. The dates mark significant events in his career: the opening in 1962 of his architectural studio in Santa Monica, Calif., and the completion in 1978 of the house that cemented his reputation.
A word about the house. Long before he became an international superstar, Gehry's second wife, Berta, persuaded him to buy a distressingly ordinary pink Dutch-colonial bungalow in Santa Monica as a canvas for his architectural ideas. He proceeded to tear out walls, expose beams, slice in skylights, add plywood decks and encase the whole thing in corrugated sheet metal and chain-link screening. The broken shapes, common materials, exploded volumes and unfinished look became Gehry trademarks, often to the consternation of neighbors and the bemusement of visitors.
"I didn't know what to make of it because it was so strange," said Minnesota textile artist Nancy MacKenzie, recalling her first 1978 sight of Gehry's house during a preview tour of "West!" this week. "At that time, it was a whole new vocabulary, and I didn't have the resources to understand it."
Many of the forms and ideas in "West!" were equally inventive, and the show's great achievement is to illuminate sources for Gehry's ideas and to reassemble a group of important California artists who interacted so provocatively 30 years ago.
Gehry is, of course, the glue holding all this together, and he was, fittingly, the show's de facto curator. He lent art from his collection and helped Weisman curator Diane Mullin track down pieces that influenced him, many from the artists. Peter Alexander, for example, loaned a 1975 painting on black velvet of a kind of diaphanous sunset abstraction flecked with teal and rose glitter. Among aesthetes, nothing is more offensive and lowbrow than a glittery painting on black velvet -- which is probably just what attracted Gehry's attention.
"Frank said we had to have it," Weisman director Lyndel King said. "I'm kind of getting used to it, but it was a little hard for me."
Artists of the '60s famously threw out the rule book, as this show makes clear. Like Gehry, with his walls of tin or plywood, these guys (all but Vija Celmins are guys) abandoned the traditional materials of sculpture -- carved wood, cast bronze -- in favor of rope, lead and light. They made things hollow, ephemeral and abstract rather than solid, earthbound and representational.
Charles Arnoldi's "Lead Window" and "Television, 1971" are sculptures that look like empty picture frames propped against the walls or floor. Larry Bell contributes a multilevel "Ghost Box" painting, and Ken Price turned in ceramic cups suggesting 3-D paintings or miniature buildings.
The most impressive work is a heavyweight 1971 contraption by Guy Dill that seems to be a 16-foot-long wooden beam. Thick ropes link it to a hook in the wall as if it were a protruding suspension bridge. In fact, it's not a beam, but 16 chunks of wood held together by the tension of the ropes. Surely the raw beams in Gehry's buildings owe something to Dill's invention.
The Weisman's galleries are suffused with lovely natural light from beautifully louvered skylights that might be indebted to Gehry's house and the light-art of Robert Irwin, represented here by a luminous disc and a pointillist canvas. Both play with perception, the disc by evoking an illusion of a 3-D wafer of light hovering in the gallery and the canvas by "representing" myriad, shifting shades of white.
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