A TEI Project

Interview of Connor Everts

Table of contents

1. Transcript

1.1. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE JANUARY 12, 1976

PALANKER:
Okay, Mr. Everts, want to start with where you were born?
EVERTS:
I was born in Bellingham, Washington, in St. Luke's Hospital, I assume the maternity ward, and that was the twenty-fourth of January, 1928.
PALANKER:
Did your family live there at the time?
EVERTS:
Yes. My father was a Californian but had moved up to Washington, some time before my birth. The majority of my brothers and sisters were born in California. See, I was born of a—it was referred to up in the Pacific Northwest as a Roman Catholic family. I imagine that was some kind of English influence because as I recall, there weren't any other kinds of Catholics up there. It was a small town, a lumbering town, and it was somewhat of a rough town. My father—well, let's see, in the early thirties, which would be probably in the earliest moments in my recollection—was a labor organizer. He was an old Wobbly; he was a member of the IWW, which was quite strong up in the Pacific Northwest, Seattle, and all of the port Aberdeen, Everett, Bellingham.
PALANKER:
When did your family come to Southern California?
EVERTS:
Well, let's see, the way it worked out, my father, before my birth, was heading a cooperative lumbering operation, and lost control of that. And then was a period of time when he was what was known then as a stump farmer. (That was that you cleared some land up in Washington, and they were stump farms; if you left a certain number of stumps or trees on the property, then it didn't classify as completely cleared land, and your tax rate was lower.) So we were still living on the farm in the earliest part of my childhood, and I don't think we moved to a city, the city proper of Bellingham, until I was probably about five years old or so. During this period of time—because of the Depression, labor unrest, and all, then during the period of labor organization—my father was in the longshoremen's union [The International Longshoremen and Warehouse Union (ILWU)]. And we moved, for short periods of time, from Bellingham to Seattle to Portland to San Francisco, depending upon certain conditions in organization of the union, and also in terms of availability of work, because the organizers weren't really paid any money; it was dependent upon work and on work opportunities. And during the strikes, of course, there wasn't any work at all.
PALANKER:
Excuse me. Could you turn off the radio? Okay. You were talking about your father.
EVERTS:
During part of my childhood, of course, he was quite a remote figure, because he was gone a good part of the time, and all I can recall is that we still had the farm, and he had activities in the city. I know that he'd get up and do the chores and all, and then be gone and then be back after I'd gone to bed. So for a period of time, he was a very, very remote figure. But after we moved to the city, I saw quite a bit more of him. And since there wasn't what you would call steady work at all, he was around quite a bit. I don't think, in terms of art, he was a particularly influential figure. I think my mother was probably a more influential figure, because she did sewing and at that time a lot of embroidery work, and she would do the designs for all of that, and she at least encouraged me in my art. During that period of time, even with the most committed Anglos, there was quite a bit of machoism, and boys basically didn't read poetry, they didn't cry, they didn't exhibit any feelings that were basically, for the most part, reserved for women. So it was women that enjoyed poetry; it was women that looked at art; it was women that basically had all the aesthetic experiences, at least in a working-class family. When I went to school, I think that was really the culmination of my beginning interest, if I had any, in art; it was realized, basically, in school.
PALANKER:
Are you talking about grade school, now?
EVERTS:
Basically. Actually in the first grade, where one of my friends was a holdover from the first grade by the name of Richard Anderson. At that time there wasn't kindergarten, and you didn't automatically pass any of the grades, especially first grade, because second grade was predicated on the things that you'd learned in first grade, and so I started in first grade, totally illiterate. I didn't know how to write my own name, or I didn't know how to read word one. And Richard Anderson, who was a holdover, and I imagine would be considered not to intelligent, he at least had skills that I didn't. He was a very poor reader, but he was good at arithmetic. And so he introduced me to an interest in arithmetic, and I helped him with his reading. But the only problem with arithmetic was that the moment you got the problem right, and one and one make two, and you knew that one and one would make two, and you got all the sequences, you were caught forever with those answers. I found that a little bit disturbing, because here you were: once you got the answer, you were stuck for the rest of your life that one and one was two, and there was no chance that it could be two and a half, three, five, or anything else. Whereas when we were drawing, and were asked to draw something—my teacher's name was Charity Nevins—and when once you drew something you could draw basically the same scene, or the same idea, and the barn could be larger or smaller, and there could be three or four cows in the field, or there could be no cows. [telephone rings; tape recorder turned off] Charity Nevins—isn't that a marvelous name? She was my first-grade teacher, and I was taller than she by the time I was, I guess, in the third grade. She was the only—she really fit in those little chairs. You felt like you were just with another person that had some understanding of your problems and all. There was no preparation for a kid to go to first grade at that time. There weren't any nursery schools or anything else, and so when you arrived there were a flock of mothers who were—some kids were absolutely conscious (I hope they were conscious); they were confident. And then [there were] other children who would have not perhaps have been with this many children before. They may have been from a farm or something, from an outlying farm, and not known anyone but their own immediate family, and then to just see such a group of strangers, and the idea of being left alone—some kids kind of whimpering. But of course there were the big men in first grade, the holdovers, like Anderson. I think there was another one, Murphy. And I think it did a tremendous amount for their ego because they knew everything. And then, of course, there was a wide discrepancy or disparity between the amount of preparation. Some of the people, of course, would have been taught to read by their parents and all, so they already knew about libraries, they already knew about books, and so they were—in an advantageous position. So there were culturally disadvantaged people at that time, although they didn't realize it because there wasn't a term for it. It actually didn't take long for the things to equalize, and at that time, Miss Nevins was very generous with her time with those that were behind, and those that needed help. And the biggest problem, I think, that I had in school was basically, along the way—I was left-handed. And although I don't think many people in the neighborhood knew French, it was a disadvantage to be left-handed, so I was left-handed, and there wasn't any concentrated effort to teach me to work with my right hand, though some parents had taken their children and discouraged them from being left-handed. I was still gauche. And I remained so the rest of my life, but I didn't remain left-handed all of my life, because a friend and I happened to be going down a hill on a tricycle and a wagon, and he took a sharp left-hand turn, and I was behind him coming much faster, and I tried to execute the turn, and I spilled the wagon over and got my first encounter with a pine tree. I caught my hand in a pine tree—
PALANKER:
Which hand was this?
EVERTS:
This was my left hand. It tore ligaments and did all kinds of goodies, and I lost the muscular control of my left hand. But if I went to move my little finger, my thumb on my left hand might move. So I had to go to the doctor, and I had to re-learn just the simple motor actions in my fingers, just to make them move when they were supposed to move. So this put me at a little bit of a disadvantage in schoolwork, and so I had to start to learn to write with my right hand. I don't believe that my penmanship was my strong suit in the beginning, anyways, but we were—I think it was the Rice and the Palmer [methods], I think there was a changeover from the Palmer to the Rice, but anyway, you made all these marvelous little circles, and then these diagonal things. And although Miss Nevins's name Charity was certainly well given, as I recall, I was the only person in the first grade who didn't get their penmanship page up on the board. I mean, everybody else did, you know, and they made those strange Qs that I have never seen since grade school, that Q that looked like a big 2—strange-looking things, I've never seen anyone write a Q like that—and those Ss that looked like something from a music sheet. And those strange Gs. All those marvelous letters, and I never got a good circular motion because I was trying to learn with my other hand, and they didn't teach you the letter at that time. Later on, they made a switch, but I was such a poor penmanship student that I was kind of caught in between that transition—I didn't know when to letter or to use script. So I have a hard time, to this day, reading my own handwriting. I have to be kind of very creative when I read my own handwriting because it's absolutely unintelligible. And how I could learn to draw—and I think I possess some drawing skill—and still have such a lousy hand is beyond my understanding. In fact, that attitude carried over when I was at the University of Washington. They had at that time—I imagine it was very popular—a method of teaching art [under which] you had two-dimensional design; there were two different courses in two-dimensional design, and then a three-dimensional design course. One was color theory, and another one was kind of applied attitudes of some of the compositional theories that you'd gotten in the first grade. This might give you some kind of idea about layout, and lettering, and logos, and that sort of thing. And so all of a sudden, after twenty years or something, here again I was faced with the notion of this conflict of mine, of handwriting, penmanship, lettering, the whole thing. And also in the same class was this nisei kid who just was an absolute genius at lettering.
PALANKER:
What is nisei?
EVERTS:
Nisei is first generation born in the United States—issei is a Japanese that immigrated to the United States, and then the first generation is nisei, which is ni, which is two. And we've had sansei and godai—we must be about fourth, fifth generation, now. So I would make trade-offs with Osamo; he would do all my lettering, and I would do everything that had to have a figure in it. I would do the figure, so we had a kind of composite. But I think I got much the better deal because his lettering was much more professional than my figure drawing at the time. And I had to establish a different style. He could do the same damn lettering for me—you know, a letter looks like a letter; it's either well made or poorly made; but a figure, you have to do a figure that's somewhat with in the style of the person you're doing it for, see. So my job was, I think, a little bit larger than his, and I don't think it was actually as well fulfilled. I could draw a figure, and whatever figure I drew served, because that was my style. But then I had to develop a style for Osamo, see, and I had to get some measure of agreement, and he was a kind of a perfectionist. And so I know that he'd whip out my lettering for me in just the time that it took to do it, and I would labor over the figures that I had to do for him. But that, I think, was my first academic setback—basically the fact that I noticed that my penmanship never got up onto the wall. I never held it against Miss Nevins, but I was surprised when I was the last one to graduate from grade school. We had a very progressive school system. We got a junior high system because one of the high schools burned down. They had to build a new high school, and so they decided, well, they wouldn't, since it was so expensive for the district to build, you know, a major high school. So they built one large high school to handle all the students, if they were going to have them all in the smaller high school, and then they built another smaller junior high. So at the sixth grade, one of the requirements to graduate from the sixth grade was a penmanship award, which I still hadn't mastered. But I was a very good student in everything else, an exceptional student in everything else, so it seemed that somehow because I couldn't write—I just couldn't make the letters look the way they were to appear. And every teacher took me aside and showed me how you move the wrist from the elbow, and all these things together, and the way to hold the pencil. They'd even take and push my elbow down against the desk and take me by the wrist. And here I'd be, making these beautiful smooth ovals, and things, see. But the minute they released me from that, I went to this kind of spastic posture, and I had these squared-off circles and these diagonals that none of them had the same tilt; they would—I think that if I'd gone into the State Department that I would have discovered the domino theory long before Kissinger, because mine would be almost vertical, then the diagonal would keep accelerating, till all of a sudden, I had a line parallel to the little blue line, the two blue lines that I was supposed to be between. But there must have been a meeting concerning my case, that since I'd had the accident and all, that that would be the rationale for my not being able to master penmanship, and that it wasn't the fault of the teaching (it didn't reflect on the teaching), and that they could probably pass me on with some kind of annotation in my record—to expect a lot out of me, but not much in the way of penmanship. But by junior high school, though, penmanship was no longer an issue, and I don't think they taught it anymore, or somehow I was able to avoid it. But I must admit I never mastered it. I drew well, and I can remember that there were very few crayons. I mean, there were very few colors in crayons; they didn't have these sets with 172 different colors. And the teachers at that time didn't, to my knowledge, receive any particular training in art, as they do now. Art wasn't considered terribly important, but it was a tool. Basically, art was used to illustrate some other element, you know, like in history. And I can remember the first time—I didn't have any crayons of my own at home, and so I had no experience at all, basically, with art. And I don't recall having pencil or paper, but I recall doing an illustration for some kind of western thing. You couldn't get the right color for a buffalo. You had a choice of red, black, and brown, and that wasn't—I had seen a buffalo in the zoo in Seattle, so I realized that it wasn't any of those colors. And so I made a mess of it, but I remember using the three colors to make yet another color. There wasn't any talk about color theory or anything, or even just the primary colors. And we didn't have paint at that level, so there wasn't any mixing of colors with paint. I think I learned about duplicity very—and it wasn't a terribly successful attempt at duplicity, and I think it backed me off of it the rest of my life. In the class, there was a Doreen Anderson, who was no relation at all to Richard, and an Ernestine Martin. And other than my sisters, it was really one of my early encounters with girls. And I was absolutely enchanted by these two girls. And as soon as I mastered enough of the—and this was left-handed, too—mastered enough of the language, I wrote them mash notes.
PALANKER:
What's a mash note?
EVERTS:
Well, a note saying "I love you" or something like that, see. They were both such lovely girls, it was impossible to favor one over the other. So my skills being as limited as they were, I wrote each girl the same note, and they happened to be friends, and they compared notes. So as a first-grade Lothario, I was very unsuccessful. Actually, girls have been—maybe it was the influence of my mother being the one at home in the earliest part of my life, but that wouldn't have been unlike most persons' lives at that time. Fathers were relatively remote figures, unless, on the farm. On our farm, of course, my father had to get another job to support the farm, and when that job was gone, then we lost the farm. I can remember—this would have been approximately about the fourth grade, and that would have been Miss MacMillan. Everybody was a "Miss." There was only one—the principal was a Mr. Radcliff, and there was one male teacher; he was also the gym teacher. And at that time, if you married, you could no longer be a teacher, and you were out of work. Well, she wasn't one of the teachers that I favored, and she always sat at the back of the room instead of the front of the room, so we couldn't see what she was doing, and she could see what we were doing. And as I recall, somehow, I was in back of her one time, and she had a book, and inside the book, she had something like "True Romances" or something that she was cribbing a look at when we thought she was perhaps preparing some new horror for us. But about the fourth grade, there was this book that had tremendous popularity among the girls, and as I said at that time, there was a tremendous importance placed upon boys being boys, and that meaning not really taking a tremendous interest in schoolwork or showing anything more than a normal or too much promise in being more interested in the playground and other activities. But I found that generally the girls at that level were the ones who were doing the reading and all. And so later on, when the books got a little bit better, the boys got into some adventure stories and westerns and things like that, and then it became reasonable to read. But so I discovered Winnie the Pooh and all—not through guys, but through girls. Girls, you know, read Winnie the Pooh. So there was this book that was called something like The Ruins of Pompeii. And these girls were passing it around, and it was like impossible—and that time the marvelous thing was that every grade school had a library. None of the schools that my children have gone to, grade schools, has possessed a library. If there was a library, it was a library that was run by the parents for the benefit of the children. But our school had a library, and you were able to check out the books, and for a family that basically didn't really own books, this was really an advantage. So there was always this waiting list for this blasted Ruins of Pompeii. And I put my name on the list, and it finally came up my turn. Many books were donated to the school, and so you would get books that really had no right to be in the library. I mean, in terms of content, not in terms of—no, in terms of measure of difficulty, not in terms of content, because I don't think there's anything that should be kept out of a library. But this book was like maybe a supplement to some kind of text or something for someone going into archaeology or something. For reading, it was the toughest logging I'd ever encountered. [laughter] And I guess I have a reestablishing naivete, because my supply of naivete is inexhaustible. I've never managed to become sophisticated. So I went through this book, and I didn't pay a tremendous amount of attention to the illustrations, but it was the nude male statuary and things that the girls were interested in. And I'd missed all of that. So I was going through this whole, God, this perilous thing, and always the admittedly brightest students in the class were always the girls. And I hung in there just behind Jimmy Sepulveda, a boy who I knocked down the stairs the first day of school. And so, you know, it seemed to me that since girls were really the intelligent ones in school, that they were handling this material with no strain at all; but I became rather interested in the statuary and all, and I became interested in—it was a background, because strangely enough, that statuary related very much to Tarzan in the comics. And Tarzan in the comics, as drawn in the comics, he had a much better physique than Johnny Weismuller did in the films. I mean, Johnny Weismuller was a little on the chubby side; he had no muscle definition at all. And as I look back on it, my godfather was a doctor and had a place out near where our farm was. It was adjacent, actually. And he and my father were friends. And he had a very successful operation, you know, he had hired hands and he had sheep, breeding stock, and everything else. And he was a very close friend of my father's, and he had no children, and so he was very, very fond of me. The only book I possessed, and this was given to me when I was just a toddler, was a Gray's Anatomyi. I used to lug that around and look at these incomprehensible things that were inside it. But once I got into Tarzan, I broke out that book again, and that book led me into a lot of things. And one of the things that happened in our school—it was as, I don't know if it'd be called progressive or traditional. We learned, very early on, we learned all of mythology. We learned the Nordic myths; we learned the Persian, Greco-Roman myths, and we learned a tremendous amount of mythology. And at that time, people were given a nationality, and so everyone was given their nationality, and so there was quite a bit of minor mythology, like Russian mythology, got thrown in. In fact, this teaching of mythology was one of the things that took me out for a very short time, took me out of the public school system. That was when after studying the myths and things around Mesopotamia and all, they started relating that mythology into the Judaic-Christian scheme of things. And I used to go home and talk about what I'd been learning in school, because it was absolutely exciting to me, because it was a world that was unlike any world that I experienced. My parents were not unintelligent, but they were quasi-literate. My father had only reached, maybe, the fourth grade or so, and my mother maybe the fifth or sixth. And in my mother's case, I guess, [there was] a need for her to be at home, because of her age and the family, and my grandmother became an invalid. And so as the eldest unmarried daughter, although the sixth grade didn't make her very old, it became her obligation to run the household. And there was only one brother. In my father's case, he was born in Los Angeles, and in this time in history—it would have been over a hundred years ago—there wasn't any transportation available when they moved up to the Ojai Valley when he was very young, to get him to the school, which was a parochial school. And so when there was a horse available, he could ride a horse; he started school. He was much older than a goodly number of kids in the school, but the school was a situation—it just didn't make that much difference, because it was like one school, one room situation.
PALANKER:
You were just going to talk about how they felt about your talking about mythology.
EVERTS:
Oh, well, this kind of relates, because my father's relationship was a parochial school. In that school, punishment, which was administered by the nun. who taught school, was that a cane, of a form of bamboo, was taken and broken. That would give you four pieces out of the round, and then it was split, then it was cut. So you put out your hand, and then as the nun struck you with the bamboo, then you had to grab it close to her hand, and then she pulled it, leaving these slivers in your hand. And that was my father's discipline in school. His reaction to the idea of teaching Christianity and the Catholic faith as mythology, or as a part of a continuation of preexisting mythology and the correlations of the different festivals—although it was very interesting to me, it was shattering to him. So I was enrolled in parochial school, and parochial school was parochial. At that time, it was segregated. Males were, even in first grade, in a room with all boys, and the girls were with girls. And they didn't meet. And so what happened, it developed a behavior that was startling to me in comparison to public school, where we had mix and match. And the boys would put little mirrors in between the laces of their shoes so when they were adjacent to a girl they could look up their skirts. It was really quite strange, having come from a farm, where sex was a pretty open thing, because I became very early in life the rabbit breeder, and because it was too minor of an activity to occupy my father. And my mother was much too busy. And arithmetic was couched in parochial terms. If the priest had a certain number of parishioners and a certain number of missals, how would they be divided and everything. So everything was, as I said, couched in these religious terms. The art we did was concerned with the Virgin Mary, and everything, and it wasn't quite as stilted as Byzantine. I mean, the education was. And there wasn't such a sense of discovery. It was the fact that the church had the answer, and by God, they were going to twist truth to get to that answer. Whereas I had a sensing that in the public school, people didn't always know the answer, but there was a search for truth. And I liked that attitude much better because that fit the attitude that I saw in art that seemed to be a lot more creative than what I'd experienced in arithmetic. So I went to my father, and I told him that I was losing interest in school and that I liked the public school much better. And that's when he related his incident of his schooling, and the fact that he had to leave school, I guess, before he was fourteen, and maybe he started when he was nine. Because he was too much of a Catholic to strike her [the nun], but already too much of a man not to, and it induced such a conflict within him that his own feelings forced him to quit school and just go to work. And at fourteen, if there wasn't a need for you on the farm, then you went basically to work to help support the family. So I imagine it was only a period of months that I was out, and maybe it was only weeks that I was out of public school. The name of the school was the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, which wasn't dogma yet; that was pronounced by Pope Pius, that made the Assumption of the Virgin Mary dogma. That was another thing that was difficult for me to swallow. I think after the experience between school, public school, and even catechism, this whole roteness, and this whole thing in terms of arithmetic—I wasn't unskilled in arithmetic, and all; it was this damned biting thing that once you solved the problem, it became static. And no one ever taught you that this arithmetic was a tool, just as language was a tool, in solving all kinds of problems that were much more adventurous than we were led to believe at the time. I think if my early schooling had one failing, it was the lack of sense of adventure in math. So that rather closed—you know, I went through all the math course, see—a lot of doors to me. We got to that point where the girls and the mythology came together, and then all of a sudden, in teaching the mythology—of course, there weren't any photographs of any of the gods and things, so we were exposed immediately to paintings and sculpture and all of this. And when they talked of what remained, they talked basically of the architecture of the society, the ruins of the society. So basically what you got in studying these societies and the mythology of the societies was more or less the creative element of the society—those things that—I mean, we went through the Odyssey and the Iliad, and I mean, we got this stuff in like third grade, and that's pretty heady stuff. It was a tremendous experience. When we got to junior high school, that ended. That element ended, and we got into more academic things, and we also got the first art that I had received. And we had shop. One of the shops happened to be drafting—and the old bugaboo came up again, because here at the bottom of your drafting, you had to have this lettering that looked—everyone's lettering looked absolutely the same. As I look back on it now, I think some of the early experiences that you get basically give you a lot of attitudinal prejudices, because, as I said, you know about Osamu's doing the lettering for me, that all the lettering could look alike. I think that was perhaps related in part to the fact that at the bottom of our draftings, again discounting skill, all the drafting should have no autographic content whatsoever. That every drafting of this particular tool should look absolutely alike, so the only way that you could tell who had done the drawing, was basically by his name being on it. Now, this was seventh grade, and we were having drafting, and we were taking three-dimensional objects and turning them into a two-dimensional form that was understandable and measurable to a scale and all. That was pretty good stuff. I mean, it was pretty good stuff. I absolutely hated it. It was easy for me to do, but I hated it; it was a chore. And again, the art class—I think we had the richness of calcimine paint. I don't even think they manufacture calcimine paint anymore, but that's what we used. I guess the closest thing that would come to it would be some kind of tempera or something. But the shops, oh, I don't know, I think maybe it's an absolute lack of talent and a certain innate clumsiness about me or something. Woodshop—oh, God, was I awful in woodshop! They gave you this wood, and basically everyone turned out the same projects. It depended upon—well, the kids who were basically Catholic and not going to parochial schools would always do something for their mother. [laughs] I noticed that. The kids who weren't Catholic would perhaps do something for themselves or even maybe make something for their father.

1.2. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO JANUARY 12, 1976

EVERTS:
Okay, we're in the woodshop at Fairhaven Junior High School.
PALANKER:
And we're still in Washington, right?
EVERTS:
And it was about Catholic kids in wood shop making something for their mother. So my first project—they had patterns. That was the nice thing about early on in school, that they didn't have much in the way of mimeographed—this junior high school I attended was a new junior high school, so it was posh. But in the grade school, they didn't hand you out little mimeographed sheets of, you know, "This is a chicken, and now you'll take and draw the chicken and color the chicken." You had to draw your own chickens. So that was creative, when we had to do something at school, and the Halloween stuff and all that. But at junior high school, because this was a new situation, new junior high school, freshly built, they had a mimeograph machine, so this meant they had a pattern for wood shop and they had a pattern for the pig. And again, my farm experience told me that this was no kind of pig. [laughter] At that time, well, let's see, we had Poland Chinas, and you know a Poland China had a certain shape to it. It was much longer, and not so compact. And so I was able to persuade this teacher, the shop teacher, that I should be able to do my own pig, as long as I didn't do it life-size and use up too much material. The choice of material was Honduras—let's see—we had walnut and Honduras mahogany. Honduras mahogany was a light color, a blond color, as opposed to the Philippine mahogany, which was a reddish color. It was a nice wood; I don't know what's happened to Honduras mahogany. So you got the choice. Here it was. So your pig became striped, a horizontally striped pig, which in and of itself was unusual. But he wanted to teach you to make a certain type of joint, and to glue, and other things; that was an experience, I was able to draw my pig, which was more elongated; everybody else's pig looked kind of round. And I tried to put a curly tail on mine, which was terribly unsuccessful. And they just had a cut in theirs so you could hang the thing up. Mine had to be hung up, as I recall, through the snout. So you glued the wood up, and then you learned to cut the pattern on the jigsaw, and you learned to take and plane it down and then sand it and treat it, and the whole schmear. Well, I wasn't terribly skillful on that jigsaw, so by the time I finished mine, mine didn't look like a pig; it looked more like a dachshund. [laughter] It was just an absolute failure. And about the only thing that you could slice on my cutting board was probably salami, and bologna, and liverwurst. It was really pretty damn limited. That was terrible. I had the same amount of success in all of those wood projects. Then we had metal shop, and then we also had electricity shop, or something like that. Now, of course, these things were very important, because school at that time also had the fact that they were going to teach you to function in society, that you were going to be a blue collar. You came from a lower-class family; it basically meant that at best, you might learn a trade. This notion of teaching social attitudes and things was very instilled. At the same time, we were getting all that marvelous stuff about mythology and all, we were also learning to speak the language. We were learning not to use "ain't" and to say "just" instead of "jist." And it was very good at the time. Radio was really superior to television, in that you created. You created people. You would hear these voices. I can remember a program called "Mr. Firstnighter." I loved the names. I mean, these names would put Bob and Ray to shame. Because Olin Soule and Barbara Luddy were always the stars on the dramas on this particular program. And this "Mr. Firstnighter" would start off with this car coming along in New York City traffic. Well, hell, I hadn't seen New York, but I visualized my own New York, or what New York was, gleaned from movies that showed New York which were shot on the back lot of MGM. And so here it was, and he'd pull up in front of the theater, and I always felt that there was a kind of covered walk to keep Mr. First-nighter in his top hat out of the rain (because it rained all the time in Washington, so if it rained all the time in Washington, you assumed it rained all the time in New York). And it wasn't manly to carry an umbrella. I didn't see men carrying an umbrella until I lived in London, nor did I carry one until then, and it was a lark, I think, when I did. So Mr. First-nighter would come down this—obviously there was a carpet or something laid out across the sidewalk for Mr. Firstnighter, and of course he didn't want that getting wet. So he'd say hello to the doorman, the doorman opened the door, and he'd go through. The hat-check girl would take—I had a feeling it wasn't just an overcoat, perhaps a cape, and his top hat, and then he would read the bill of what the play was going to be that night. Always starring Olin Soule and Barbara Luddy. Years later, I saw a picture of Olin Soule and Barbara Luddy, and Olin Soule was a kind of simple perfection of the conceptual man. You know, he had all of the things that one would imagine that this man that you would imagine to be the hero would have. He's a scrawny little guy with a monstrous head. [laughter] And it was just tremendous because, see, I hadn't heard Olin Soule. It was some kind of gathering in the newspaper of old radio actors, and a goodly part of radio at that time came out of Chicago. And so there was Olin Soule—and I seem to have digressed—but the notion of radio was a visual thing; many people experienced this same sort of disappointment that I experienced. And there was very little done with showing the actors and actresses that were on radio, because they were wise enough to realize that they didn't want to destroy anybody's image of Ma Perkins, or whatever it was, that was a certain age, and the actors might be younger. So along with this component was a visual component: that you imagined all these situations. It was absolutely fantastic. The success of Orson Welles's War of the Worlds, and all, was based upon the fact that each person could bring his own fear to that projection of what was going on. And radio was fantastically successful, and very successful writers were doing—I know that radio doesn't seem as exciting to people now, who hear something on radio. But there's a lot more sophistication. There's a lot more, if you saw television, as bad as television is now, if you saw television in its early days—where people couldn't open doors, or the set would move or something; they've solved a lot of problems. The other thing was that since radio was basically emanating from three centers—New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, but for the most part Chicago—there was an attempt to kill the regional language. People in Washington say "Warshington," you know; that's the way they pronounce "Washington." I imagine it's so they won't get it confused with Washington, D.C. But I mean, it's "Warshington" so a broadcast out of Boston would not have a person sounding like a Kennedy, with that quality, that "idear." The person wouldn't speak in that manner. There was a broadcast dictionary that told people how to sound each word, so that there was a leveling of language. There was a break in regionalism at that time because the main source of information was radio, and people would learn how to pronounce words. There was some confusion when—to this day, I'm confused by the Himalyas and the Himalayas; the Caribbean and the Caribbean, because some person in the headquarters of either [network] (there was no ABC; it was the NBC red and blue networks at that time) decided to switch from the Caribbean to the Caribbean, or something, and the Himalyas to the Himalayas. And you know, all of a sudden, you learn to pronounce something, and you're confused when all the ground rules are changed. Basically, radio produced that. That was carried down into the schools, in that there was an attempt to teach you to say "Washington" rather than "Warshington." Teachers were highly respected then because there was a low literacy rate in terms of parents during my period of time. So this was something. You were learning to read. This was magic, to see something, like my Gray's Anatomy book, to see the pictures and not be able to understand the pictures, and one day to be able to understand the words—well, not always [understand] the intent of the words, but to be able to recognize words. But then still not to be able to completely understand the pictures—this was quite a change. I mean, all the art in the Catholic church was based upon illiteracy. To be able to [understand] the Stations of the Cross, to make a person understand—it was really a kind of pre-literate thing, actually the thing that McLuhan thinks that television is taking us back to. So when you went to school, they did all kinds of things to you. They taught you to pare your nails; they taught you to brush your teeth. In a way, they taught you to suspect your parents, in a very funny way, because you knew how to do things. At that time, to save embarrassment, everybody got a free meal; everybody got free milk. Because as I said, I went to a school that, some children were very, very wealthy. There was a dress code at the time, and the dress code was basically meant to protect. It didn't protect the boys too much. But the girls wore a blouse, and they wore a skirt. And on Fridays, they got to wear something else. Some of the girls with money could have worn really nice things every day of the week. So at that time, a dress code was not a discriminatory thing that limited one's freedom? it really was a leveling factor. This was the height of the concept of the melting pot. And we've lost sight of some of these things, and I think they were basically good things. You set at a table—and I mean, a lot of us were really wild kids—with all the other children, and they served us some of the worst things I've ever eaten. I remember this lima bean soup that they served, and I think this was one of the first big movements out of California—that Californians had the good sense to not eat their own lima beans, and they were sent to all other parts of the world, and basically to grade schools. The lima beans were either pure mush or like flat pebbles, and you got this just horrible experience. So you'd eat this, and there would be a lot of maybe taking a bean and flicking it at someone, or elbowing at someone. So you had to learn to eat with your utensils in close. And you learned, since you were only going to cut—if we were lucky enough to have something that you had to cut—you were only going to eat one piece at a time, so you only learned to cut one piece at a time. And this meant that you would hold your fork in your left hand, and your knife in the right. And you would take and cut the one piece, and put your fork down and transfer it to the other hand, and go through that sort of thing. And you would learn to eat—if you didn't keep your elbows in, you would learn to eat with a book under each arm.
PALANKER:
They had teachers patrolling?
EVERTS:
Oh, yes. It was actually pretty regimented. But I mean, it didn't seem at all regimented because the freedom of ideas was so great that it wasn't regimented in comparison to the parochial school. So, getting back to wherever it was we were back into, junior high school and all, there was this fact that they realized that these kids were from culturally disadvantaged homes, and so—in grade school, God, what was it? Every blasted, I forget what it was, Tuesdays, or something, at ten o'clock in the morning we were marched en masse to the auditorium—schools all had an auditorium and gymnasium; they had to have a gymnasium because it rained so damn much—to listen to the Standard Symphony Hour. And we marched in there. We would have discussed the piece of music beforehand, and we'd go in there, and we'd listen to it. And it might be as mundane as Tchaikovsky and the Nutcracker Suite and that kind of stuff, see, but we heard it. And then even in the first grade I can remember that I was the triangle man in this orchestra—"ding!"—you know. And it was sort of nice because, what the hell, with the triangle, you can bring it in at any quiet moment or something; it has some importance. It's not like having the drum and having to maintain a certain beat and all. I think I'm tone-deaf. Actually, I think I was early shunted off of any other cultural activities. I think music was cut off from me very early, because we had singing (I think this was, again, about third grade or so) and I just absolutely loved to sing. I mean, if there was anything that I would like to be, it would probably be a singer. I mean, I don't know of any experience that brings as much pure joy as singing. And to accompany this absolute sense of joy is a total inability to carry a tune. So I was one of the boys. I was pretty good athletically and all, and so I was in the back of the room with the boys, see, and they were all shooting spitwads and raising hell, but I was back there singing. So my voice soon caught the ear of the teacher and brought me right down front. So there I just sang with volume and all right down front. So then I was promoted to the piano, so I would only sound one note to get everyone in key. Because, see, I kept bringing everyone off key and making them flat. [laughter] And so he put me down in front, thinking that since the voice wasn't coming from behind, it might not—but I was still successful. Then I realized in one of those brief flashes that I've had, of pure enlightenment in my life, there was a flash: the reason why I was there was not because I was good but because I was so damn bad. So I went back in the back of the room, and I stopped singing, because that was his wish. But at least I could be in the back of the room with my friends and shooting spitwads. That particular thing haunted me to the point that I could always tell if a girl really cared for me, because if she'd put up with my singing or something, then she really had to care. She had to be head over heels in love with me. I've never had much to do with girls who've had a real interest in music, of course. But when I was going to the University of Washington, they called for volunteers for a thousand-voice choir. So I thought, what the hell can happen in a thousand-voice choir. So we practiced, and I would sit in an area where there were several groupings coming together, so I could switch from section to section. You know, like, he'd say, "There's someone flat in the tenors." Then I could move over, [laughter] and be in another thing. So I was always kind of mouthing it sometimes, at practice, and all. And then finally the highlight was, they had this thing with this thousand-voice choir, see, and I had my triumph and my white shoes and all—that was in the thousand-voice choir. There was this one section that wasn't doing its part, and I think that I probably contributed to the flatness of that area. But back to junior high school. All these things—that's another one of my unresolved things. Penmanship, carrying a tune. [laughter] So that closed off a creative activity that was an attempt for my parents—there was a program in the school that you could learn to play an instrument. These were just absolutely fabulous things because poor kids wouldn't be able to do any of these things. So they wanted me to learn an instrument. I think the thing was a violin. But Gordy Erickson, a friend of mine, played the piano. And we'd be just getting into a baseball game or something, and this call would say, "Gordy! It's time for the piano!" And I mean, whatever it was we were doing—if we were making something, building something, doing something, telling a story, playing a game, whatever it was—that clarion call came just before the climax. And so that music teacher would come to your home and explain what it involved, and all these things. And it was at that time, again, you know, one of those insights I remembered, Gordy and all. I was a kind of tall, gangly kid. The violin he brought must have been for a practicing midget. [laughter] It was kind of like this. And I didn't try to help him any at all. Instead of just down like this, I tried to get my entire head across the strings. He more or less made my parents understand that I was hopeless, and that was just really what I wanted to convey. And they thought, couldn't there be something else? So then I got my real chance, and that was the scale. And since I couldn't even—he figured I was absolutely tone-deaf, you know. And he had some little pitch pipe, and he'd sound something, and I was supposed to tell him where it was and all. And I could tell him where it was, but I sure as hell wasn't going to tell him where it was. [laughter] And so that closed off any career in music. And I think it kept narrowing and narrowing. In junior high school, as I said, they did things that attempted to save you from embarrassment. There was the dress code. The thing was that everybody wore dirty cords. If you could walk in your cords without effort, you tried to avoid your friends, because your cords were either too new or too clean. So it was always a thing that you hid; your mother' would come up after you'd gone to bed and try to find your cords so that she could wash them. I mean, everybody's mother tried to do this. So you wore these cords that were—when they started off they were something near a Naples yellow. And as you got them to their prime condition, they probably—it was protective coloration. If you fell down on the dirt, people would think that you didn't have a lower torso. The pants were absolutely filthy, filthy, that's just terrible. But you did wear a clean shirt. I don't think I had clothes that weren't hand-me-downs until I got in the service. But my mother would take shirts, and she'd remake them, or something. And my mother was a fantastic cook. The masa around her tamales was absolutely unbelievable. Fine, thin and all. But a seamstress! I mean, her crocheting was absolute beauty. Her embroidery—that kind of stuff was really good. My sisters made dresses; I can remember them making dresses. But my mother, a seamstress she wasn't. And those shirts were an embarrassment. And the only thing I would have would be a jacket, and the jacket would be something we'd get at the Goodwill store and all. A lot of poor people have the concept that you always get something that you grow into, and what happens is that you wear it out faster than you grow into it, so it never fits you. So even when you're buying something secondhand, it doesn't fit you, so you have this ill-fitting jacket. But in a cold, wet climate, a jacket that's too big for you, except for the ventilation it provides, isn't too bad because it probably covers your hands and things also. So I found some old sweat shirts. But sweat shirts were not very stylish. They were pretty warm. They were better than my mother's shirts, but they weren't very stylish. So I had a choice of badges of shame, because this is the time when you kind of get sensitive to this kind of crap. And so here I had it. I just didn't want to wear my mother's hand-made shirts. She never got the darn stripes to somehow kind of correlate at all with the other stripe of the shirt. And a lot of them would be men's shirts, my father's shirts, or somebody's shirts that she'd cut down. And so the scale of the design was out of keeping to the size of the shirt, and it'd be kind of like older people would wear. You know, it was just bad news. So by this time—by hook or by crook, or stealth—I had assembled a collection of crayons. And so I drew on the sweat shirts, and then I took—I don't know how I devised the technique. But I wanted to get a kind of a mush to that color, you see, crayons. They're bad news. At best, they're bad news. And so I figured that if you ironed, that would help. I didn't do my mother's iron any good. This was with old, wood stoves. You put an iron on, and there was a kind of handle thing that went in like that, and then you picked up these irons. And so you'd have one iron sitting on the stove heating while you were using another. So I didn't ruin just one. [laughter] I took waxed paper and put it over the top of that, and then it kind of put a patina on them? it was kind of like a waterproofing. And I had these designs, these drawings. And I was drawing quite well at that time. So I went to school, and it was an absolute smash. Pretty soon everybody was asking me to draw on their sweat shirts. They'd get sweat shirts, see. So I'd take home the sweat shirts, and I'd draw on them, and I'd made trades or something for that. And then my mother, who encouraged me in my art, told me that I should just use paper. If I wanted to use the waxed paper, I could go ahead, but to save my sandwich, you know, that she wrapped my sandwiches in because waxed paper cost money. But then I could put a newspaper on top of that, and so—the waxed paper kept the ink at least from transferring to the other. Then, oh, there was another time, earlier—that new kind of inventiveness in drawing. There was a friend of mine, Bob Richmond, and this was when we were maybe third- graders again. Third grade must have been the most momentous grade in my life. We had a friend who was named Bob Underhill. And Robert must have been the world's most popular name, because Robert is even my saint's name. It protects you from locusts. It works; I haven't ever been bothered by grasshoppers, katydids, or anything else. So it's very successful. Don't laugh at it; don't scoff at it. I think the three toughest kids in that grade school were named Bob Agnew, Bob Richmond, and myself. And Connor wasn't a terribly popular kind of name to have. Everybody wanted to be, you know—as I said, it was a time of the great leveling, so nobody wanted unusual names. Like in our class, there was no chance for me to be a Bob, because there was just so damn many Roberts. They laid it on the line, Miss Nevins, right away. We had somebody was called Robin, and another—I mean, that kid must have taken a bad turn. He must have turned out sour, because his name was Robert Hood, and he volunteered to be called Robin. And then there was Robbies and Robs and Roberts and Bobs and Bobbies, and every kind of variation. Even one kid, he was a very submissive kid. He was willing to be called Bert, even to hang onto the last part of his name. Actually a goodly number of the kids that I went through school with, the poorer kids, ended up ne'er-do-wells, in prison, and things like that. There was even, at that time, kind of a high fatality rate. But—where were we? Lost the—
PALANKER:
Third grade.
EVERTS:
Third grade. What happened in the third grade? Oh, yeah. Underhill. I read James Joyce early in life, and I think it ruined me for coherence. So Bob Underhill father was manager of a lumber mill, you know, like a big lumber mill. And so it was relatively well off. I mean, at this period of time, a postal carrier, somebody who worked in a post office, I mean, that was good. So this kid was, he had toy soldiers. He liked to play soldiers, and we liked to play soldiers. He was a very nice kid, and he divided up soldiers and all. But like, there'd be one for him and one for Bob Richmond; one for me and one for him; one for Bob Richmond, one for him; one for me, and one for—I mean, he always ended up having the superior army. And if there was anything left over, it only seemed fair that he should get it. So Bob Richmond's father had kind of a part-time job at the pulp mill. And so every once in a while, he'd bring home a run of paper, you know, newsprint. And it had these wooden plugs in at the end, which we'd use for playing hockey, and then it had the paper. And we used to draw on that paper. Bob and I were really very, very close, and so we shared everything, whatever we had. So we were playing one day, and we were drawing, and we were drawing this big battle scene. And you know, the paper was maybe thirty-six inches or something, and we had it rolled out across a room. So we had this enormous battle scene; we'd been working on it for days. And so I don't know which of us was struck with the idea of cutting out these little figures. But then, we started cutting them out; so then we started creating these armies and saving them. We had some old cigar boxes, and. we had guys with bayonets and machine guns and all these things. And then when Underhill would bring his soldiers over to play, you know, we let him keep his, and we had this absolute flood of soldiers and all. So there were a lot of things along the way that I'd used art as entertainment, and also art as a way of dealing with life, really. Actually, another thing that happened along the way was: my youngest sister is about fifteen years older than I am, and very early on, one of her beaux—I think I was about in the first grade—one of her beaux happened to be a kid who'd taken a cartooning course; he later went on to Southern California to make his fortune. Probably died in Disney studios or something. I was such a pest, and money was at such a premium, there was not a thought that he'd give me a dime or a quarter or a nickel or a penny to go away. So he taught me to draw these little cartoon figures and things, see. And then he would say, "Okay, well, why don't you go now and draw them." And so then I would leave him and my sister alone, and they could slip out and go for a walk or something, and they wouldn't be bothered by me, and I would be busily drawing. I really didn't get wise to that until too late to correct it. He was a very nice person, and he had a certain skill for drawing and all. And he didn't draw in the Disney method. He was very original in the way that he drew it. He drew his own thing. And he had a certain verve, a certain kind of flow to his line. You know, I would try to draw one like his, and he would then try to encourage me to draw one of my own, you know, after I would develop a certain level of skill. And since I was trying to imitate his thing, it ended up coming out like penmanship; it ended up coming out not too good. But then when he encouraged me to do my own things—and then he'd show me how much better the thing was that I had done than the thing that he'd done; he showed me that it could never be any—it stopped, because it could never be better than the thing that it was trying to be, whereas the thing that I was trying to make could get better because I could improve upon it. So that was what I got from his sending me from the room, which was basically a very good thing to glean. Along through my schooling, then, this thing had some kind of value, as it had value in terms of trading with Osamo for lettering, and I do barter, to this day. I bartered for some materials, so I could frame those things that went up in the Barnsdall Park thing. ["Tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr." January 19 76] I didn't have any money for it—some masonite that I needed and materials—and so, you know, I traded off something for it. So I guess it's the thing that's been constant in my life. In high school, a kid by the name of Bill Kessler, we used to play football together, and we used to design comic strips together. We had these grandiose ideas that we were going to sell this thing, but we never did anything to sell it. I think the idea of doing this thing that was going to be so fantastic, and the doing of it was the reward in itself, and I think I long had basically a fine-arts attitude rather than a commercial-art attitude, in terms of, you know—maybe I bartered along the way. But it wasn't a livelihood. So when Bill Kessler and I did these cartoons, you know, these comic strips were basically something that brought us together and gave us an excuse to do something that we enjoyed doing. We enjoyed doing football and all, but this increased our friendship; this increased the depth of our friendship. In high school, I can remember, and even in junior high school, especially up—I left junior high school in Washington, and we came permanently to California about that time. And at that time, I used to go out and draw, sketch from nature. And I remember, that was really a very meaningful experience. I mean, it was a beautiful part of the country. From the area, you could see the only big peninsula and the only big mountains in a very snow covered range. You could see Mt. Baker and Mt. Shuksan, so you'd have all of this forest, and then the mountains up behind it. And when we were in Seattle—as I said, my father traveled to different ports—when we were in Seattle, I went into my first museum, and that was an absolutely fabulous experience. In Volunteer Park, there was the Seattle Art Museum, and in it there is a Chinese sculpture, wooden sculpture, of one of those kind of man-dragon things, and I went to see it again when I was at the university. As I said, I've never been able to become sophisticated. And it still had that absolute magic to it, that I didn't want to be alone in that room with that object because it looked like it was just a moment away from life. It was my own kind of discovery of the Pygmalion myth, you know, that here was this thing, that it was done with such a reality, and yet it was a mythical thing, that it could at a moment have life. And they also had a program up there that was called "Masterpiece of the Month," where they had—they had a find Eastern collection, and they would put a piece of Hindu sculpture or something, and they had some things from Gandhara also. And you know, they'd have that thing there, and it was just absolute beauty. These things that I saw were remote; they weren't what was my first creative experience. They were my first experience in things that I perhaps read about and visualized and sensed, you know, like in photographs and all. But my first real experience with creativity, something that seemed to be outside of the mainstream of art, was basically at the Los Angeles County Museum, in the forties, in the early forties, before I went in the service, and it was a Man Ray exhibit. That was the first time I had really kind of seen something of real imagination. And this was in a period of time when van Gogh was thought of as still being a madman and not a painter. I found van Gogh—in high school, we even had an enlightened teacher who really liked van Gogh, and there was a reproduction of one of his paintings of the fields, around Aries, and all, up in one of the halls. Most people didn't see any art in that at all; it seemed pretty way out at the time in terms of what people were pushing as art. But junior high school, at that particular junior high school, I think—oh, there was a little thing that happened in terms of radio, that I think was important. You know, this was during the Depression—
PALANKER:
There's about a minute left, around there, just to warn you.
EVERTS:
Okay. This was during the Depression. You know, it's such a change, from, say, the Democratic convention [of 1968], where all of a sudden was a culmination of the youth as being enemy, and before, there was always this notion that life was a continuum, with kind of these relay runners in each generation, passing the baton from the next to carry on. Well, at that Democratic convention, it seemed like the generation came up with the baton, and there was the youth waiting to carry on the idealism, and they started beating them over the head with the baton. And the youth was really exalted during this period of time. People did things in terms of the strikes that they realized that they would never earn in their own lifetime, the money that they lost by being on strike if they were employed. But they were making the conditions better for other people. They didn't want people to live and work under the same conditions that they'd worked. So they were forever soliciting the opinions of young people. And one of the polls that was going through was the favorite program of young people, and—well into the point, here in Los Angeles, when I was in high school, I was on several radio programs where like, "Youth Wants to Know," or "Youth Answers," or some Goddamn thing where we'd discuss things that we had no ideas about. And I think that was just about the end of it, into the very, very early forties. But in the thirties, they were still doing this, and so we were asked about the favorite radio program; we were supposed to think about it and then come back with some answers. And there was something, I think it was called something like the NBC Theater of the Air, or something; it was a series of dramatizations. No, I think the NBC thing came on later. It was a series of dramatizations about contemporary novels. And I mean, this was Faulkner, and D. H. Lawrence, and things like Passage to India—all these things. Sometimes short stories, Cather. Things, I mean—they were my introduction to these things. They were dramatizations, and they were really pretty heady stuff. I just loved it. I absolutely loved it. At the same time, maybe like the "Little Orphan Annie" was also on, and "Jack Armstrong," and these things, which were very big, and I enjoyed also But this one was again beyond my imagination, the things that were taking place on Sundays. So we were kind of talking it up in this class, and I think it was for seventh-graders all over the state of Washington or some damn thing. And so we were talking about it kind of informally and all.

1.3. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE JANUARY 12, 1976

EVERTS:
So we were discussing the various [radio] programs and all. I think "Jack Armstrong" must have been really one of the tops. And it was a fine program, as I recall. I tried not to miss "Jack Armstrong." So I started talking about the [other] program that I had been listening to, and there was a great deal of interest in it, so I told some of the stories and all, and they were very interesting stories, and a little less predictable in the endings sometimes than a Jack Armstrong adventure because you always had to have Jack Armstrong back the next week. My mother hated "Jack Armstrong," as I recall, because this one particularly long adventure took him into Africa, and there was always the trumpeting of these elephants in the background which somehow got on my mother's nerves. So when we came to the vote, it ended up, somehow, that the most popular program was this one that I had been listening to and spoken about. I didn't feel quite right about that. Some of the kids who really got so high on the program and all, they listened to it the next Sunday, and I think that was the Faulkner Sunday or something, and they complained to me about the nature of the program, and they didn't like it at all. And I thought, "This is really pretty bad," that here I'd influenced these people, and what I'd done was—they'd taken something that they really liked, and they were committed to it, and because my presentation had been such, I had taken away from them something that they liked and filled them with the notion that they would like something else better. And then when they found out, what I'd created was a vacuum. So that made them really ripe for whatever kind of influence. So I thought before that I'd run for school offices and things, and after that I stopped doing that because I felt that, really, if you take and influence a person, you've really probably done, even if you think it's influencing them—and it wasn't my intent to influence them at that time. But even if you think you're doing good with that influence, you're basically doing a harmful thing. If you do a thing by osmosis, if you do it by your simple acts and all, and you influence them into behaving like you, that's one thing. But in terms of either promises or verbiage, or something, wooing them to another attitude is really a very, very dangerous thing. And I think basically the most hurtful situations that I've been in, in my life, involved people who were trying to impose their feelings over other people, or trying to work out their fears, in certain cases, over myself. That was an important thing to happen. As I reflect back upon what does most of this really have to do about art, or especially art, and this period of time in Los Angeles, or even my art, as I look, as I start rambling on like this, some of the images I start thinking about become very, very clear. And those images, as a child, even though they contained other situations and all, are very, very significant images, because one of my earliest images, I remember, is around my grandmother's, an area called Silver Beach, which was really a run-down, miserable kind of shanty town area, and there were these very, very wet steps, wooden steps, because the property was a hill. There was a road? it was cut down the hill. And there were all these blackberry bushes to each side, and that was danger and all. I'm just a little kid; I'm like maybe three years old, and I remember playing on this, and I would sit, because there was a fear of going into these brambles, and the color of the wood—I can't ever remember that wood being any other color than gray black, that faded and weathered fir becomes with exposure and all. Then from that, I remember walking up this road, and the road wasn't paved, and I think it was the Alabama Street hill road; there were these sort of rivulets coming by, and these puddles, and this road was a yellow ochre, a vivid yellow ochre, the blue sky, absolutely cobalt blue sky, and these titanium white clouds, and then in one of these puddles, the same absolute blue, with the white, in this field of yellow ochre. And you know, it's a funny thing that I could show you right now this series, of the "Sursum Corda Series," where I use these squares filled with yellow ochre, and there's passages of blue, and on this blue I took and squeezed out this white and flattened it with my thumb. It was really a very, very strange thing. And all of a sudden when I start looking back, then the pattern of these wooden walks that they had to make to keep you out of the mud and things, the change of height that you got when you walked through this road, and as you got more mud on your feet. The things down on the docks when my father took me down to the docks (again the docks were made out of lumber and timber), the patterns of the piles of lumber, the light coming down, the cast shadows, the mass against the sky (because I can recall the sailing ships, putting into that port there were two sailing ships, lumber schooners; the Mary B and the Katherine D were still sailing under wind power at that time). The period of time when the Old Ironsides came around, after the kids had all given their nickels for the refurbishing of the Old Ironsides and they put into port there, and going down, and they had these waxed figures (that's the first time that I ever saw a waxed figure, a figure that looked more lifelike than the pretty poor mannequins that they had in the department store windows; later, I can recall relating that experience to art, you know, the fact that art has gotten so alienated to life, that it's about as real as Madame Toussaud's or the Hollywood Wax Museum; it has no sense of reality). The things—oh, God, suddenly there comes a flood of things. Living on a farm where there was no electricity, no running water, the shadows and things from the lamp and the playing of—one of the things, of course, was making animals and things with your hands, and you learned all these forms; it was a very instructive thing. I think some of the elements have a very strong structural attitude within my work, not been disposed toward doing sculpture. I can remember on the farm, my room was up in a garret—that's good training for an artist, and it was up in the very peak of this roof, and the house was orientated a little—not parallel to the road but against the road, so that cars coming up over this hill and all, the lights from the automobiles would be chased around the ceiling of my room and would catch the light and make volumes and things. And so I used to go to sleep, watching the movements of these patterns. As I said when I started out, I didn't know any kind of pertinence to these early things, but it made me totally aware that if you look outside in my garden there, it's made basically out of bamboo. And the movement and the light pattern, those things that you get in walking through, you know, the rain forest, up in the Pacific Northwest, where there'll be all this darkness, and then all of a sudden a shaft of light will almost blind you, and then come and light an area totally different from any of the others. And' there was a period of time when I was working in terms of rooms, and I felt that I was dealing with the feeling of people by doing these rooms and the quality of light and the volume of light in the rooms. In fact, I think one of the sensings that you get; there are lots of vacant houses as people move, looking for more jobs, and in my early childhood, only certain ones would become haunted houses. And there was always a sense of someone—the difference of the room was not based upon the design of the room, as a quality of the room, because you have a sense of the way people lived in certain rooms. And so it was very, very interesting, the kind of feelings as a young boy, as I wandered through these situations. I spent a lot of time wandering off at the edge of town and through the woods. And there was also a golf course that I used to take this dog with. I'd lie on my back, and up in that area, the summer storms are tremendous. You'll be in a situation where it's bright and clear, and then all of a sudden, it will just absolutely storm up and get dark. It'll be like in the middle of summer, and it's light well after ten up there, and all of a sudden at two o'clock in the afternoon, it'll be like almost dusk or evening, or something. And the sky will go from this beautiful blue to a slate gray, and then all of a sudden, there'll be the most exciting electrical storm you've ever seen. Absolutely fantastic. And the sound and the fury of it is phenomenal. All these things. At one time, like in the winter up there, the day will start, oh, maybe, the real light of the day will start after eight, and will end by four, and so you have these horrible wet, dark, gray, dismal kinds of days. And I found that as I've traveled around the world, the thing that's the biggest influence in me is adjusting to the weather. I am not a person who can take, and go from one area to another and do art immediately. I'm strongly influenced by the quality of the light and the nature of the day, and I think that it was good for me to have moved from the moroseness of the winters up there, those damp winters. When I was very young, many Christmases, I wouldn't even see a gift for Christmas, but once I got a used sled, and they had a street called Newell Street that they used to always close off. And I had this old wooden sled—my brother had come home one time and then nailed some metal on it for like runners—but then all of a sudden I had a steel sled; it was just going to be absolutely fantastic. Well, I got it something like Christmas, and then it didn't snow again. In fact, it never snowed again all the time that we lived in Washington before we left, so I never got any use out of that sled. But I had the dream. The dream was that that was going to be an absolutely superior sled. And it was very, very strange. The weather cycled, and then it was in one of those cycles where the snow level just pooped out, and there wasn't any more snow that stayed on the ground. So I'd gone from becoming a good sledder on a miserable sled to a non-sledder on a good sled. So a few experiences like that—I can remember another Christmas. I think they temper you as a person. I think it makes you a little more tolerant towards things, and you get to the idea that really, it's like heaven. It's the idea of it is more important than the reality of it. And that reality destroys dreams, so that you want to live in reality, but never give up your dreams. And you never want to dream something so small that it will be satisfied by reality. There was a thing with a bike. And this is a period of time when we moved from house to house. In fact, in terms of houses, it was one of the best periods of life, in terms of room. When things got better—you know, I didn't even have a room for myself. But during this period of time, we were living in these houses, and we were acting more or less like caretakers; I think through my godfather, and people he knew at the bank, we were being continually put into these homes. They didn't want them to deteriorate; they wanted someone to live in them. And so we were acting as caretaker in these homes. And so this one time, I was going into this attic for some reason, and here was a bicycle, and a bicycle was absolutely beyond my wishing for because I just didn't get things for Christmas, and so there was no sense in my wishing for this. And so if I got something, it would be like one of those shirts my mother made. And that's like missing Christmas. So, you know, I never had birthday parties, never had any of those niceties, and things like that. And so here I went all this time, and say it was somewhat like after Thanksgiving, and I lived with this time of just absolutely waiting for Christmas. You know—it's going to have a bike! Now this was a time when kids delivered newspapers in high school, on bikes. I mean, this was really something. Kids rode bikes in high school. Kids do it again now with the ten-speeds, but there was a period of time when kids in high school wouldn't be caught with a bike, right? Well, this was a period of time when a bike was still a status. And so morning came up, and I looked, and there was no bike. Went outside; there's no bike. Went upstairs? there's no bike. And all of a sudden, here comes this neighbor kid, riding my bike. And then again, I realized what had happened was, that this kid was kind of a snoopy, snotty, spoiled sort of kid, and they wouldn't have been able to find a good place to hide it from him—he always knew what he was getting for Christmas. So they asked my parents if they'd hide his bike, so it would be a surprise. And so it was really a surprise, a surprise for him that Christmas although he probably thought he deserved a bike, and was going to get a bike—and it was really a surprise for me because I did think I was going to get a bike, and I didn't get a bike. But anyone who thinks art is about art is wrong; art's about everything else. And any person who makes art just about art is making a tremendous mistake. It's become so insidious; it becomes so ingrained that it's weak. Art has to be about discovery. It can be about discovery in terms of aesthetic attitudes and all, but basically I think art is in the nature of self-discovery and the nature of relationships, and it's certainly in the nature of insights—when all of a sudden I look, I look at the painting, or I have to show you the painting, but all of a sudden, that one little day in my life when I was a very small child, should, it seems to me, be a logical rationale for some of the things that happened in that particular painting. Should we call it a day?
EVERTS:
Okay, we've become pilgrims or something, or at least travelers, when my father was going from port to port. We went from Bellingham (not necessarily in sequence) to Portland, to Seattle, to San Francisco, then finally down to Los Angeles and San Pedro, Wilmington, Long Beach area. And I would have been, by this time, in junior high school. We first moved to Los Angeles; it was around, oh, Slauson and Figueroa, and I attended for a short time the junior high school there. And then we moved down to San Pedro—this was before the Second World War—and San Pedro, and then Redondo Beach, and then we finally settled in Redondo Beach. During this period of time, I guess I was getting art classes and all. As I recall, nothing momentous happened. I think I discussed the fact that I saw that show at the County Museum of Art, the Man Ray show. That was before I went in the service. I imagine I was a high school dropout before they had the term "high school dropout." I was active in athletics, and I was a good enough student, but one spring vacation I said an untoward word to a fellow student, and he picked up a poinsettia cutting and threw it at me, and it penetrated my eye. That was the first day of spring vacation, so I didn't return to—this was in ninth grade? it was a four-year high school. And that year, I didn't return to school, because of operations and all. And so the next year I simply went into the tenth grade and got on through the tenth grade, until, I guess it was again, past spring vacation. And then it was discovered that I hadn't finished the ninth grade. And so I had a man, he was the vice-principal—I don't know what his vices were, but his virtues were rather limited, as I recall. I, in fact, even ran into him again in later life, which is rather amusing. But he told me that I was going to have to repeat the entire year, the ninth grade, over again, and that the tenth grade so far wouldn't count. That would, I imagine, have made me a ninth-grader the following year, instead of a junior. So I just stopped going to school, and then in my junior year, I went to school in Washington, and I did very well there. In fact, I think that's the only year that I completed in high school, and then I returned for my senior year. And at my junior year they kept asking for my transcripts, and so the things kept being sent, and other schools, and there was a person with a name not dissimilar to mine—not at all similar, but not that dissimilar—and so, because my name is always "Evert Connors" or "Connors Evert," it's never quite right. So I realized I wouldn't be able to finish my senior year in the state of Washington, so I returned to California. And I was now into my senior year, and I was doing quite well. I was editor of the school paper; I was on the honors society, and all this nonsense. And then it was time to get all my records together for my impending graduation. So all they could find was that I had finished my junior year, but I had never finished any other schooling except for the eighth grade. So this was presenting a sort of an impasse, so I ended up joining the service. At that time, I'd read extensively and all, and I picked up a liking for writing. And I was also taking art classes along with all the other courses, and there was a bit of ambivalence; I didn't know which I preferred. I went into the service, and I certainly realized that the service wasn't really anyplace where anyone remained of any kind of creative attitudes. I thought the service was a monstrous joke, and I treated it as such. And I think that's the only way that I survived. I couldn't believe that they were serious about some of the things—I mean, the fact that aboard ship you couldn't whistle. And I can recall that I was whistling aboard ship; anytime, you know, when I had a chance to prove my musical capabilities, I tried. And this boatswain said, "You know, only fools and boatswains whistle aboard ship," and I asked how you differentiated between the two. It was a very surreal experience. I enrolled in one of the courses that they had at the time; I forget if it was called the Armed Forces Institute, but you could enroll in a university course. I think I enrolled in one at the University of Minnesota. They sent you all this garbage, and then you were supposed to go to one of the officers, and then he reviewed your lessons, or something. And the officer I was to see was a complete klutz, and it was ridiculous, my even going to him; so that was another course I didn't finish. It was very difficult to try to do anything. I did some sketch-ing in the service and all, but I think that I did quite a bit of writing, and of course it was always letter writing, and that took on a high form. I recall a very close friend of mine I wrote constantly. And I think my fondness for him was based upon the fact that he was the only person I'd ever met with penmanship inferior to mine. He was home from boot camp in Pendleton one time. He bought a car; he didn't know how to drive, and so he learned to drive on his way back from the car lot to Camp Pendleton. And to this day, he's unable to shift and turn at the same time. He's probably one of the worst drivers. But he would write me these long letters, and I would write letters in return. I would just look at his letter, peruse it, because it was just incomprehensible. I was never able to tell one thing that he'd written me. And when we got home on leave at the same time, he asked me why I never answered any of his questions. And of course I didn't want to insult his penmanship because I was rather sensitive towards penmanship, so I just passed on the fact that I thought none of his questions were really worth answering. I guess I didn't save him too much hurt. I was very interested in writing in the service, and I was doing quite a bit of writing, and I was determined to become a writer. But also available in the service were all of these paperbacks. This was at a time that paperbacks hadn't really hit the United States; it wasn't like Europe. They didn't come out with paperback equivalents. The only thing that would be published at that time in a very limited degree were called Pocket Books, and their symbol, as I recall, was a kangaroo with a book out of its pocket. It was a very small operation, and I think they only—I don't know what their issue was, but it wasn't very important. But the thing of the service books were again under the Armed Forces Institute, I think it was called, basically bestsellers and classics, and I recall reading the first book of any extent on the language itself, on the English language itself. And that was a pretty heady book. And then I ran into Huxley and Wells along with a writer that I have a lot of admiration for, for just bizarre writing, and that's John Collier, who's often confused with one of the worst chairmen of the Bureau of Indian Affairs we've ever had, the director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. I did extensive reading and started writing, and also there were books on philosophy. And I felt that I would write until I read that line about Confucius saying about one picture being worth a thousand words, and basically being a lazy sort of person, I decided, well, it'll be a hell of a lot easier just to paint than it is—I didn't realize that he was totally wrong. You're really a lot better off with words than you are with pictures. More or less when I came out of the service, I was determined to write. I think maybe of the experiences that I had in the service, I think, living, being based on an island, which was a reservation—at least, I wouldn't call it a reservation, because the Indians owned the island, the Tsimshian Indians, which along with the Tlingit and the Haida were the best carvers in southeastern Alaska.
PALANKER:
This all happened in Alaska?
EVERTS:
This happened in Alaska. And so I was amazed because I'd encountered the culture before. You can't live up in the Pacific Northwest without being aware of some of the indigenous cultures. And one of the things that I found in the Americas is that the higher the culture of the Indian, the greater the discrimination against the Indian. Point in fact would be in Mexico, with those fantastic indigenous cultures—there's tremendous discrimination against the Indios, to the point where girls, at least when I lived in Mexico, girls would let the hair grow on their legs to prove that they had European blood. Or for the men to all have moustaches and things, an apparent attempt to show—because the Indians, of course, have very little body hair, very little, just a tracery of pubic hair. So hair on your legs is an absolute extravagance. But it was a little disconcerting to see all this hair matter under nylons and things. And up in Washington there's a tremendous discrimination against Indians. And yet some of their cedar carvings and things, and the carvings on the front of their cedar dwellings, are fantastic, beautiful things. Some of the little boxes,, and all were marvelous things. And the imagery—it was total. They didn't have a strong totem culture, but it wasn't to the degree like the Haida. But there was a totem culture among the Lummi, and some of the Indians in that area. And they were basically the Indians—carvings on their canoes and all—that were on Puget Sound and on the straits there. But there was also trips I'd taken to the University of Washington, as a boy, and they had an anthropological museum that had a beautiful collection of Northwest Indian sculpture and all. That was of some importance. So when I was on this island, I met and hunted with and played basketball with—there were some fantastic basketball players—with these people, but this inferiority that they had was in part imposed upon them by the Indian agent, who was a real bastard. And yet these Indians, to the greater part the tribal council, directed their own affairs. They had a fish cannery that was successful. They leased the land to the government for the base that was on it. And later they actually owned and operated—well, the FAA operated the airport, but they owned the airport, which was the airport for Ketchikan. Many of these Indians, of course, left and went to school and all, and unfortunately few of them returned. It was a community that was kept at a level. All of their decisions had to be approved by the agent, and he had a tendency to be paternal. The Russians—as an aside (at least the attitudes towards the Americans and their Indians)—one of the conditions in the sale of Alaska was that any Indian living off of a reservation would have all the rights and privileges of any white man. So it was one of the territories where the Indians were permitted to buy alcoholic beverages in the nineteenth century. Of course, still, alcohol wasn't allowed on the reservation proper, which was the island. I think living among the Indians and finding so much that was admirable, and then hearing—there were so many things that they did well, I mean, things of interest. I think perhaps why I'm dwelling upon this particular time is because this, my latest painting show, the "Sursum Corda Series," contained a great number of photographs from that period of time.
PALANKER:
Were these photographs you took when you were up there?
EVERTS:
Yes, yes, they were. They didn't have a—our base, we were a detached unit. And PB4s and some JRFs, and J4FS, and we didn't have—we had a parachute rigger, but we didn't have an official photographer. So this gunner's mate was a little bit into photography, and then he trained me a little bit, so we kind of spelled each other in doing photography. And that's basically why I guess I had so many badly developed photographs out of this period of time. Actually, it's very strange. It's a period of time when your time is totally determined by other people, and even in your moments of spare time, it's rather limited what you can do and all, and then to find some way that within these tremendous restrictions you can find some sense of freedom. And I think this was a very reflective time for me. I know I used to be able—there were beautiful vistas and things, points to get off to by yourself that you could go off by yourself and all, and so I spent a lot of time again (and I had a dog again) wandering through these forests and things, and going to the edge of the coast, and looking across to distant islands. And it was a time that, perhaps at the time I didn't think I was enjoying it as much as I did. I didn't sit around complaining at all, and we had some good times. I had a lot of close friends at other bases. There was an Air Force base, well, it was the Army Air Corps then. They had a lot of weathermen stationed there and all. The weathermen in general were a little bit—their interests were a little bit better than the others, and I used to hang around with them a lot. And so I established a lot of friends across just the service lines, even there, and they were very helpful to me in later things. I remember when I arrived at the island, I arrived by ship, which is a marvelous way, you know, when you're in the air arm of something, is to arrive by ship, and then you're taken by land transport and all. The fellow who picked me up told me that—it was a beautiful, clear day, and he remarked that "Some days you can't see for weeks." Which was an interesting sentence structure. [laughter] And later, it came true, because no other way to express what it was that he meant, because in that particular area, there's old "Ceiling and Visibility Unlimited*" It was called "CAVU." And when we returned to the States to get some equipment, I couldn't believe what days they wouldn't fly on, because if we could see the runway from the hangar area, that was CAVU for us; that was beautiful. And there was this enormous mountain that you only got to see a few times a year, simply because it was always socked in and all. I can recall one time that we got some instrument landing gear, and so to test it out, the pilots would put this red screening on, and then put another pair of glasses on, so that the pilot would be unable to see out the windows, but the copilot would [be able to see]. He would have the instruments, and he would try to land by these instruments, for aligning this thing up. God, this guy was just awful, because the crew could see and the copilot could see, and he'd always be off, always seemed to be off to the right of the runway about two hundred yards or so, [laughter] and the copilot would take over the controls and go up and all. And then one time we had to come in on the instrument landing service, and he did it. But I can recall from my position as radioman, I could watch these instruments, and I could also see the runway and all, and I was always thinking, Oh, my God, I hope he never has to land the ship. [laughter] It was a very good experience to get along with people that you have nothing in common with. I happened to be stationed with a group in the detached unit who were basically Southerners, and I had absolutely nothing in common with them. And we had this one black guy in the unit, so they determined that on his birthday they were going to give him a birthday party. I had to fly early the next morning, and it was very Germanic because they determined that he was going to enjoy himself. He had no great liking for them or anything, and it was very funny in their treatment of him, because it was—it wasn't benign neglect, but it was just that he was a nonperson, or an unperson. And then they decided that they would use any kind of an excuse to have some kind of celebration. And then that night there was a guy—Joe Spinato—a guy from New York, who'd never been outside of New York, I don't think, until he got into the service. And he had this unreasonable love for opera. The radio was by my bunk, and so during the party—and this is one of the things that the service taught you to do, was to sleep regardless of what was going on—so at the height of this party, Spinato was playing this opera music and refused to change it, and one of the guys got a . 45 and shot up the radio, and I slept through the thing. And I guess it's just as well, because if I had wakened, there was a bullet hole in the wall above my bed, and if I'd popped up, [laughter] there's a good chance I would have gotten a bullet right through me. But there was fantastic gambling there; I could never understand that. I'm willing to bet on anything when there's no element of chance involved in it. And the cards, I couldn't believe the amount of money in some of those pots. But there wasn't anything to do there. There wasn't anything to do with the money; there wasn't anything to do with your time, unless you knew how to basically spend it by yourself.
PALANKER:
You had a sort of conflict about writing and pictures at the time, I guess.
EVERTS:
I don't think I really resolved it until about 19 51 or -2, in Mexico, when all of a sudden I decided to just stop writing.
PALANKER:
Excuse me, let me flip it.

1.4. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE TWO JANUARY 19, 1976

PALANKER:
You were talking about your conflict.
EVERTS:
Well, that was basically when I decided that I wouldn't write. I was writing in Mexico. And I decided that I wouldn't write any longer. But immediately after the service, when I was discharged, I had given up any notion of writing. I enrolled in school, and I went to Chouinard, and at that time there were a great number of guys out of the service, of course. And it was very difficult to get in, so you might start in the evening school, waiting to get admitted in the day school. It was my first experience with opulence. I can remember enrolling in a class and just getting all these brushes and paper. And the thing that most impressed me was that they gave me tracing paper, which I thought was a strange thing to get. I've never really found a good use for the tracing paper; I still have the tracing paper stuck away here somewhere, waiting for the day that tracing paper will mean something to me. You had to take whatever class you could get, which meant that I ended up in kind of a fourth-year composition course with—I think the guy was—oh, I forget who it was at this time. But I was in this class, and there were these fellows from the service who perhaps had a job before, or had gone to school a little before, but I particularly remember this one class. This was basically an illustration class. But it didn't make any difference if you wanted to be a fine arts major; you might find yourself in some other class, so that you'd be in a class, so that you'd be filling space, so that you'd be assured of working up to the full daytime attendance. And this guy was absolutely fantastic, this fellow. He did all of his illustrations containing a man with a blue pinstripe suit. That was still big then. And he just did that thing so absolutely—it was beautiful. It was just a work of art. He was a fantastic illustrator. And I undoubtedly was the worst in the class. I was such a crass amateur. It was embarrassing. It was embarrassing when we had critiques. But it was an enlightening thing, because they were illustrators. They would give out all these magazines, and you were to take a story, see, and there would be some kind of design principle or composition principle, and you were supposed to illustrate that. And I can remember one time I was presented with some kind of western magazine. The guy's name was Brand, or something, that had written the story, Max Brand—was that it? And I read the story. The story was dumb, but somewhere in it, there was a rustling or something and this guy was trying to turn this whole herd of cattle. And what was to happen was that you were supposed to have a large object in the foreground, but it wasn't supposed to be the main element of the composition. So I decided, well, that'd be pretty easy to do. I'd have just some kind of big animal there. So I started to draw a horse. I'd been around horses a goodly part of my life, but all of a sudden I found that although I could identify a horse, I didn't know what a horse really looked like. I wasn't that familiar with how a horse was put together. That was a pretty startling thing. But really, I started at the other end. I started with the saddle and the saddle horn and tried to remember that, and then when it came to drawing the horse under the saddle, that's really where I got into trouble. But I didn't know I'd seen this thing. So all of a sudden I realized that basically what most people are involved with is identification. That they use their vision basically not for information but for identification. So if they're driving along in a car and an elk comes out, without too big a rack, comes out in the field, the person says "cow," and is completely satisfied, because all he wants to do is identify that object. And I couldn't understand, when I was in the service, how certain people couldn't identify aircraft. You know, we'd be given this silhouette and this frontal position, and all these things. That later even popped up in my work. And some people could never tell Betsys from Bettys and all, and I couldn't understand why they couldn't do this. Then all of a sudden I found myself just as guilty, equally as guilty, because I'd ridden horses, been on horses, been around horses, used horses as a work animal on farm, and I couldn't draw the blasted thing. Well, I went on, and every time it was agonizingly embarrassing for the critiques, because my work was so absolutely terrible. It was so amateurish. And here was this guy with his Goddamned pinstripe suits. He was the absolute darling of the class. It was a semester class, and at the final critique, he was there, and he was still right there on top. He was the best; nobody touched him. But I looked at his work from the very beginning; we had to show our entire portfolio. I looked at his work. And nothing much had really happened. He just wasn't that much more accomplished. He was still just on top. I looked at my work, and God, I'd grown. I was so much better. But I was still the worst in the class. [laughter] I was still so much below. Because I found that what it was, it was almost like getting back to some of the problems that I'd had earlier in school: that there was a predetermined look on what the instructors wanted, who offered the best answers to the problem. There was a certain kind of look, and there was a certain sort of slickness and all. And that had a tendency to turn me off. Jepson was in existence at that time.
PALANKER:
What made you pick Chouinard over Jepson?
EVERTS:
Jepson or, let's see—I don't know if Otis was called Otis then, or it was called—I think it was called Otis then, and then it became the Los Angeles County Art Institute. But I think it was the reputation that it had. Jepson's reputation really didn't exist until after it closed. Which sounds pretty strange. But they were probably, at the time, doing more interesting things. Chouinard at the time hadn't moved back to its old building. It may not have been a Chinese laundry, but it was over a laundry, near Lafayette Park, and it was very, very cramped quarters, and all. And let's see—Mike Fry was there. I can't remember all the people, good Christ. It would use one—a long time ago. [laughter] But it had all the reputation. It think it was more commercially orientated than when I taught there, and Jepson was a little bit freer, more experimental. And it had Jepson and Lebrun and at that time, some of the guys who, let's see, like in the late forties, early fifties would be the hotshots—you know, [Howard] Warshaw and Bill Brice and some of those guys were going there. At the same time, UCLA was really kind of starting their program. Their program, I would say in about '54, '55, about in there, when they kind of picked up with John Paul Jones and Oliver Andrews, came out. I guess it would be of interest now to just kind of muse about the schools and the history of schools as I recall it at that time. You must admit that probably most people getting out of the service would be terribly unknowledgeable to what was happening. The schools that I considered at the time were the Chicago Art Institute—I was totally unaware of Moholy-Nagy's Design Institute, or Institute of Design (those names that are so interchangeable always confuse me)—the Art Students' League in New York, and I also wrote off to Parsons for a brochure, but once I saw the brochure I knew I wasn't interested in.
PALANKER:
You were looking at more of a commercial school?
EVERTS:
No, I mean, remember I'm just a dumb kid; I don't know a Goddamn thing. But someone offers a name of a school, and so I write off and find out. And this was a tremendous market for the schools. Any school that was floundering—this was the golden days of the Bill; this was a complete reversal for education in the United States.
PALANKER:
The GI Bill?
EVERTS:
Yes, the GI Bill. I mean, it turned everything around. People who would have never considered going to school all of a sudden became capable of going to school. And a great number of people—remember, this is a period of time out of your life that wasn't years best spent. And a lot of people didn't want to go right to work. The ones who were lucky enough not to be married, or just freshly married, or didn't have a family yet, they'd rather go to school, because school was all of those marvelous films with—Oh, God, what was her—Jane Frazee, or someone like that, some little blond girl nobody ever heard of, in bobby sox, and Desi Arnez, and Ronald Reagan, all those terrible college films where all you did was sing around bonfires and drink beer. I mean, that was where the action was. I mean, good Christ, everybody was starved for almost anything at that period of time, and school was, good God, Nirvana. [laughter] It would be like reliving high school again. That sort of thing. Because before, the university was a thing where you had to work. I mean, you probably had my brother. He was a bit of a jock, but he had to work also. Even the jocks weren't that well off before the Second World War, and they had jobs, you know; they were given things to do. And so this was a chance to capture some of those years. I mean, there was the 52-20 club, and almost everybody was a member of the 52-20 club; and that was, since you were in the service for a period of time, you were entitled to certain unemployment benefits, because the minute you left the service, you were basically unemployed, so they gave you fifty-two weeks of $20 a week. Now, that was pretty good because, let's see, when I went in the service, I was making about $40-some a month. Of course, my rating and overseas pay and hazardous flying pay and flight pay and all that other stuff brought it up. But I also had a couple of ratings. But when you first went in, it was that kind of money, so to come out and get like $80 a month for sitting on your keister—someone was telling you where to sit in the service, but to have 80 bucks a month and tax free—that wasn't too bad. And so if you went to school, you got $75 a month. And so when summer vacation came and your $75 a month stopped, you got $80 a month. And so, you know, it increased attendance at the beaches. It was like something undreamed of. Here you were being paid to go to school. You had up to $500 in addition to your $75 a month, for books, tuition, and everything else. So you could go to Harvard; you could go to any school you chose to go to—things that were just beyond your comprehension. The thing about it was you just simply—it was the good life. It was the good life. I'm talking gener-ally, I mean, discounting the upward mobility and all. But here it put you in a situation that was away from all of the things that you'd been away from. You were there with coeducational parties—that's something. You were dancing, you know. You were studying things of your choice. I mean, you weren't in the service learning to be an aircraft mechanic or learning code, or learning radio repair, or learning to drive a tank. I mean, you were learning to do something that you wanted. And then, in the summer, you got paid more for just being on your own. It was pretty good. And plus the fact that the people, for the most part, used their GI Bill wisely. They studied; they also were able to study overseas. A lot of the Fulbright scholarships were started and all, with monies—a lot of people couldn't pay back in currency, so the currency was frozen, like in England or many of these countries, and all of a sudden, payments were made back educationally, so you could go and you could study overseas. Good Christ, I would hate to think where we would have been, in terms of, you know—we created a brain drain in Europe for our space program, but there were a lot of American engineers and all. And we wouldn't have had them if it hadn't been for the GI Bill. It was fantastic; it was a fantastic service. But I think that many people had no idea of where to go to school. Even today, people I think make questionable choices of what campuses they choose to attend. But then sometimes people would go for a simple fact that it had a good school song or something, you know. But schools in Los Angeles: there was Art Center School, and there were two schools with similar names at that time. There was—oh, I can't recall. I'm not very good at names that can be reversed, or similar, and all. But that was such a crass school that that was completely out of the question. And I think that almost everyone thought that Chouinard was the better school. But to follow the thing—so you had Otis, or the Art Institute, whatever it called itself at the time, and UCLA, USC. USC was doing quite well then. I would say that USC was attracting quite a few people. The people to study with, then—one day's heroes is another day's villains, but I guess USC's big gun was [Francis] DeErdely. And the big gun at Jepson would either be Jepson or Lebrun. Chouinard just was based upon reputation. UCLA, I would say, hit its high spot in the fifties, around '54, '55. Immaculate Heart started up with Sister Magdalen Mary and Sister Mary Corita, who became Corita Kent. And they were big, I would say, around '58, '59, or something. They were attracting students. Pomona started rather slowly, attracted a few good—you know, Pomona-Claremont complex [Claremont Colleges]—and then a couple of people started. Jack Zajac, who hit it very big, very young on the scene, attracted a few people out there. And then an old Chouinard graduate, Richards Ruben, went out there, and then they had a period of some influence. But Chouinard, I think, was the one that had the biggest name. It was the art school that was known as an art school. Jepson, I think, as I said before, Jepson made its name just when it closed its doors, and people started hearing about it and wanted to go to it. I think then the state colleges, the proliferation of state colleges happened, and my God, they just mushroomed like overnight. Long Beach State College [California State University, Long Beach] started off in a two-story apartment building, one of these stucco ones, and had a couple of buildings on the south side of Long Beach. And then all of a sudden they started that campus. And they never developed a staff worth a damn, but they attracted good students, and they got some facilities and all. And since basically the worth of anything is your product, and the product was students and graduates, and they graduated so damn many students, and basically the ones that went on to high schools [to teach] and all; so the only thing the person knew is Long Beach State, and they would recommend more people to Long Beach State. So Long Beach State was able to maintain a lot of students, way beyond, I think, their ability, way beyond the quality of their staff. I taught there once, and I ran into some of the really good students- terrible education, but really, really good students. I don't know if they produced any people of real consequence. They've produced a few good new people. I think that maybe Ralph Corners isn't too bad. But you know, there were some of the students that I thought were really good and had some talent, and something happened to them. Well, Willie Suzuki was out of there; he's not too bad. Vic Smith was out of there, not too bad. So they had, you know, they had some influence. But I would say that anything that happened to a student there was all something that they did on their own, and they would have done it anywhere. I had a student when I was there, a graduate student from Michigan, and there were a lot of people from other places that wanted to come to California, and somehow they'd heard of Long Beach State. And he was a fantastic student. He asked a question one time—I guess he was doing this abstract painting, and he asked if it looked too much like [Chaim] Soutine. Well, there was nothing at all about Soutine in it, and coloration, all that being non-figurative, but in coloration, brushstroke, or anything else. I always referred to him as Soutine, you know, but he was a terribly talented person. And he quit and left before a semester was over because the advisers he was given had no sympathy at all in his work and told him that he'd have to completely change and all to finish school. I tried to get him to hang on and everything, because the people who were judging him were absolute klutzes. But he left. And a lot of good students, unfortunately, left. Other schools that happened was—I was up at the very beginning of San Fernando Valley State [California State University, Northridge]. I think it has gone on to have a pretty good faculty, actually. I think that, unfortunately, when it grows to a certain size, the people have a tendency to think too much of themselves and economic situation, rather than in the situation for the student, because they had an opportunity to hire Emerson Woelffer, and they chose not to hire Emerson Woelffer because they would have to bring him in at an elevated rank, and that would limit their promotions. Whereas previous to that attitude, they hired Hans Burkhardt because they thought he was really pretty good and didn't give a damn if it held up promotions or not. They thought it'd be a good idea to have the man on the faculty. It's really pretty shortsighted, and I think that ends up being the death of the school. The school that was amazing at one time was Pasadena Junior College—Pasadena College, it calls itself. Leonard Edmondson was there; Shiro Ikegawa was there; Dave Elder was there; a guy by the name of John Opie who's out in the South was there; Ben Sakoguchi was there. These guys may not be the best artists in Los Angeles by a lot of attitudes, but they're artists, and they're practicing artists. And to have people at a JC encounter these attitudes right out of high school is a really pretty beautiful thing. I would say at the time they were there, you'd have a hard time finding other schools with that many professionals. And I'm thinking of, you know, like four-year schools. The growth of Cal State was, I think, predicated on Leonard Edmondson taking over the chairmanship, and he did quite a good job. But there was always a tremendous schism between the art educators, which basically I think are art haters, and the creative artists on the staff. And the facilities never grew—I mean the physical facilities, which aren't terribly important, except that there just wasn't room for the numbers of students and things that they took. I think there became a balance heavy to the art education side, and Edmondson was out of his position, and there was much less sympathy towards the creative artists. But I think the state schools have to be supportive of the arts. It's pleasing that some of the state colleges like San Fernando Valley State was able to make an alternate to the universities. Because the universities are basically—if you're not in the higher portion of your class, it may be difficult to get into the university, and the person who isn't in the higher echelon of his class may be a very talented person, but already, if he's committed to art, it means that he's making choices that basically will mean that he's going to shun doing well in some of his other courses. Or he may avoid taking courses that he can perform in, but only perform in it if he works hard at it, and that would mean that he'd take time from his art. So sometimes you have not an unintelligent student who's very interested and committed to art, basically not taking the courses that will make him upward bound; it won't take him and get him into the university. And thank God the state universities really aren't universities, or it would cut off a lot of students from entry in there—the art schools have an ability to pick up these students, but sometimes their fees are prohibitive, and the students can't get in. So you need an inexpensive school, and basically what that school was, was the state college, was Long Beach State, L.A. State [California State University, Los Angeles], and San Fernando Valley State. For the most part, the junior colleges are an absolute waste because what you get, you get the kids who went through art education who really don't have a goddamn commitment to art at all. What they have is a commitment to a job, and so they take art. I think it was a convenient place to hide, because the art that was expected out of the people who were majoring in art education was very, very minor. So. they would go on and get a master's degree right away, and they'd get their teaching credential, and then when the junior colleges mushroomed, they were the ones that went in. And they had a tendency not to hire people, as I pointed out, where a person of real capability wasn't hired because of the fact that it would limit their own economic progression. I think at junior colleges there is a tendency to reflect upon the non-capability of the art-education person. Here is a person all of a sudden who's very caught up in his work, and he's very excited by it and all, and all of a sudden, you're talking about a person who's basically teaching what they've been taught, who learned from a person who was teaching what they'd been taught. So there's a continual distillation, not a distillation that intensifies the product, but actually a distillation that weakens it. So it's not a distillation; it's being adulterated, actually. But I think that basically there are situations that run counter to that; I think that perhaps you have a good situation out at Mt. SAC, Mount San Antonio; they were hiring some painters for a while. [Los Angeles] Valley College, for a short time, I think had some people. I think that's where Fidel Danieli or Daniel Fideli and I think Edie [Danieli] is out there, and Joe Harwood. So there are some little groups at some of these places, but for the most part, they're an absolute waste. And it seems to be they'd be a logical place to hire, to give work to some of the younger people that need—give them a couple of classes or something to keep them alive until they find a means of existing outside of school. I don't particularly think that teaching is a good thing for an artist to do. I don't think, generally speaking, I'd recommend it. I think that they would be better off doing something else that isn't intervening of their art or of their psyche, of their energies, or anything else. But I think art, the teaching of art, is the wrong thing for an artist, generally, to get along.
PALANKER:
I think we're going to get to that later, because I have a comment—
EVERTS:
So the schools were just developing; it was a pretty exciting—figure that there weren't many people that were admired as artists during this period of time. We're talking about a period of time when the galleries—Jimmy Byrnes would lose a job at the County Museum in, say 19—what would be the year? I wouldn't want to say, but I mean, late forties, early fifties, somewhere along. He'd lose a job for buying an Albers. This would be a time when there was an attempt to produce a contemporary museum out here, a modern museum of art, and it would go under. This would be a time that the galleries would be [Dalzell] Hatfield, I guess [Frank] Perls, maybe, [Alexander] Cowie. You'd maybe have five galleries. Of the five galleries, maybe two would be doing a creditable job. Now, one of the older galleries in town would be Esther Robles, regardless of the quality of the work she's showing. But at that time, she was Esther's Alley Gallery, and she had framing. This was when there was no activity; you could count the number of artists. Let's see, who would have been the artists of the time? Well, I guess one of the big artists of the time would have been Francis DeErdely. He was a marvelous, warm man, not much of a painter. Rico Lebrun. What was his name? Ejnar Hansen. Paul Lutz. I mean, people talk about art, they talk about these things happening in Los Angeles, but my God, this was a cultural vacuum. Anyone who got halfway decent left right away. You know, nobody stayed. I can remember in the fifties, let's see, give you some of the marvelous names: Channing Peake. Channing Peake was a gentleman farmer from up near Santa Barbara. Then Howard Warshaw and another guy opened a gallery; I can't think of the guy's name. I don't know what in the world happened to him. At that time, he seemed to be a pretty good artist. There just wasn't anything going on. There wasn't much in the way of a feeling. This was the pre-late fifties. Things started happening in the late fifties, so if things aren't happening in the community at large, it's not much happening in the school. Ernest Freed was brought out from the Midwest to teach printmaking at Otis or something. Guy McCoy, Guy McCoy, my goodness. Guy McCoy, who did a lot of work in the thirties m silk—screening, wanted to call it serigraphy and all, to make it legitimate, because it had just been a commercial thing. He was an area artist of note. Arthur Millier, who became a critic, was a credible etcher. Ken Ross, who's director of the Municipal Art Department, L.A.—took the job and died there. He's still alive, he's walking and all, but as a viable force. He was a critic for the Daily News; we had more newspapers then, and they all had art critics, but there was less to write about.
PALANKER:
He was an art student at one time, or a practicing artist?
EVERTS:
Oh, he was a practicing artist—actually, he was quite a good etcher. I mean in a very traditional way, he was really quite good. Another etcher of note was Lionel Barrymore. We've always had our ties with Hollywood, it's always been strong. There wasn't collections. Edward [G.] Robinson had a fine collection. The Arensberg—you know, that was an insight; that was the brightest collection in Los Angeles, really. It should have remained here. Let's see, what was going on? What kind of shows? What kind of exhibitions were they bringing into the area? These are all the things, because it's out of that environment that many of the students get their ideas. I think this is the time that the real contribution was the idea—Malraux had to come along and define it, and that's the museum without walls. That was the basically—like Life magazine, or Time doing something on Jackson Pollock. You should look in Life magazine, and what they listed as the important young painters of 1950. They did this thing, and those that were chosen—unfortunately, most of history is written by people who didn't live it, and the convenience of their overview and what they seem to think was happening has no relationship to what was actually happening. And even I have a tendency to look back on it with a certain coloration and dismiss what was really going on, what was really truly being presented as important. And the schools, the choices, the reason why people went to schools, many of the things were just very happenstance. I think one of the best things that happened to me—I like jazz—one of the things that happened for me at Chouinard was the fact that some of the guys that worked at Chouinard—Ward Kimball and Harper Goff—also had a little jazz band called Firehouse Five, which got successful and became a Firehouse Five Plus Two and made lots of recordings and things of their kind of dixieland style. And they started playing at some of the parties that would be given at Chouinard.
PALANKER:
And this was while you were there?
EVERTS:
Yes. As I said, there was a tremendous drain. Anyone who was moderately successful—I know a person by the name of Leon Golden—I don't know what in God's name would have happened to him, but he'd heard the siren song of New York. And it's basically the people of my generation that kind of stopped listening, out of dumbness, or something else, that chose to stay, you know. Kienholz wandered down from Washington and didn't go back when he had success. Bengston, who was one of the youngest in the Ferus group, didn't have a desire to go back. John Altoon went back, you know, and returned. Henderson went, and kind of commuted back and forth. I don't know what's happened to him. Dick Ruben—he's living in France now, I understand. He was doing such beautiful work here. And then he went back and just died. Many people just died there. I don't know what happened to Leon Golden; I don't know what happened to a great number, but some of the people who were very good. Of course, you could go somewhere else and die, too. Warshaw went up to Santa Barbara. But then all of a sudden there were people who came in who were sort of underground people who just kept working in a very quiet way that doesn't have anything to do with anything going on. I think of William Dole, who for years—we were in the same gallery, [Bertha] Lewinson Gallery, in about 1958 or something, and I saw his work. And no matter what goes on, vagaries of fashion, he just keeps mining that little treasure trove of his. There were artists, area artists—James Jarvaise, who was the young Turk at one time, who was doing these kind of highly decorative Matisselike things with color and—I don't know if it was asphalt or just the adhesive for putting down floor tile, and you know; it was asphalt and floor tile at that time, but just this troweled on, great globs of very, very pretty stuff. And then, God knows what happened to him. He resurfaced for a show at Jodi Scully last year, so that I haven't seen his work in a good ten years. Gordon Wagner, who lived down in this area, had some notice at the time. And less so now; he's an old assemblage person. But I think that the better people, those who were imagined to have been better at the time, kept going away, leaving the area. And how can any area develop an indigenous art unless the people remain. There was never anything during that period of time that would be called a Los Angeles school. We didn't produce a figurative school like San Francisco, and we didn't produce a kind of bimorphic-aspect group like they did up there. Everybody seemed to—this is the key, and I think the best part of this area, is it's so fractured. I mean, it's fractured geographically; it's fractured in terms of ideology. So that you could get people who would artistically not have anything in common, but their friendship would be out of isolation, just art. I think that's one of the things that's important.
PALANKER:
Let me just change the tape.

1.5. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE ONE JANUARY 19, 1976

PALANKER:
Okay, you were talking about the art scene as it was, around the time that you first went to school, roughly.
EVERTS:
Roughly, yes, okay, I guess I should edge back a little bit since I've said some of them, edge back a little bit into school. And Chouinard—let's see, I think Dick Ruben was in at the time, and I don't recall because sometimes your friendships were based around how you got your ride to school, how you got to school. So certain people who had digs close to school were around more and were seen more, and I was coming from Redondo so I didn't put in as much time as some of the others. I do remember all of us stayed around the night of the election in '48. That's when I left Chouinard. And I can remember everyone's disbelief, as we were waiting for it to change, for Truman to lose. We didn't particularly want Truman to lose, but we were all waiting for it to happen because everyone said it was going to happen. Just like everyone said we were going to win World War II when we were losing, so we figured that if they could predict these things, world wars, they could certainly predict something like an election. And we were all sitting there with this kind of stunned disbelief. When it was all over, and he'd won—I think that was the most followed election. I mean the electronic hookup, all the things that had happened during the Second World War, all of a sudden, this was a kind of culmination of those techniques, the communication techniques that came about. And now» all of a sudden, it was realized; it was realized in the contradiction of the news media, I mean, of the printed news media. My feelings about Chouinard was that I was a very uneducated person, and I really wasn't getting the bigger part of me educated. All they were doing was educating my hand and my mind, and the rest of it was being somewhat neglected. So I decided to quit art school. You had an option between your GI Bill and your state benefits. State benefits gave you fifty dollars a month, which is somewhat less than seventy-five, but you had a certain amount of money to spend and all, so it seemed foolish for me to use my money. I could go to a couple schools locally and use my state benefits, and then save my GI Bill. Then I'd go somewhere else in the world, like abroad, the university in Paris, and so on. I was thinking I'd go somewhere else. I attended a couple of junior colleges, and the art part of it was really bad.
PALANKER:
That is, you quit Chouinard and you went to—
EVERTS:
—junior college to get some of my undergraduate stuff. And I would say that whatever happened to me was of no import except for a couple of professors in other areas, and a few friends that I met and all. I met a boy by the name of George Thorsen, who—once a prof, a lit prof, asked me if I'd seen George. And I said no, and he said that—I forget just the expression it was that he used—but he said that George was an ethereal body. And George Thorsen was—I don't know of a person who loved writing more than George. And I read some authors that I could have lived without simply on George's excitement over them. I didn't realize at the time that George was just excited by the notion of writing. Did some beautiful critical writing, but never did anything with it. And he opened up a lot of attitudes towards reading, reading people that I hadn't read before, and reading them in depth, like taking a summer and reading all of Tolstoy. Which I hadn't considered before, and after I'd done it, I wondered what made me consider it in the beginning, [laughter] But I had a tremendous appetite for reading during this period of time. And going back and picking up some voids in the people that I hadn't read, like reading all of Thomas Wolfe, reading all of every—all of a number of people. Then I went to the University of Washington, and the University of Washington was really basically a very good experience. I met—there were quite a few attitudes that I wasn't familiar with. There was a potter by the name of Bonifas, but he was at—I never studied pottery, ceramics, but he'd been at the Bauhaus. The chairman of the department was a man by the name of Isaac, who had studied in Paris and had been a friend of Matisse and Picasso, Braque. Then I worked with one of the guys who'd been selected as one of the artists of the future, a person by the name of Edward Milcarth, who wore a maroon corduroy jacket; he must have worn it from his days in the merchant marine. I lovingly called him Dirty Eddie. But he was very generous with his time, and a personal friend of his had been [Salvador] Dali, and some of the surrealists and [Roberto] Matta [Echaurren], and he knew [Robert] Motherwell and some of those people. So it was removed, but at least from these men I gleaned an understanding of some of the really important things that had gone on and were going on and were continuing, and some of the ideas. I think that I didn't realize it at the time; I was very hardworking, very prolific. And I had this one class with Isaac and he completely put me off of my work, but I did more thinking about art and made more personal decisions, and I think almost every decision that I made was a movement against what he thought the decision would be, by what he had exposed me to and all. I also ran into another painter, who was a brother or a cousin or something of [William] Baziotes. And again this kind of contact—and this fellow looked at a lot of artists I wouldn't have looked at. I could look at them and all of a sudden see value in it, but I couldn't see it in my relationship to my own work because I had developed my own kind of metamorphosis. I couldn't do it. For me, I guess I'm such a simple person that I can't profit by another person's activity. I'm related to the experience itself, so if the experience is necessary for me, I can't bypass the experience? I have to just go through it. I mean, sometimes you get burned doing things like this, but that happens to be the way I am. And I can recall his sending me to look at Nicholson, and bringing a couple books that he had, a couple of gallery pamphlets and things that he had of Nicholson's work, and looking at it, and the stuff was so pristine and lovely, and it was very seductive and all, but from where I was at the time, I was more or less kind of educating myself to the whole Goddamn thing of Western art, and so I was just trying at that time to digest Cimabue, let alone Giotto. [laughter] And I found the Renaissance such a hateful place it took me a long time to—not in terms of my work, but in terms of—I couldn't just understand what those Renaissance people were basically up to, you know. I found it a terrible period of time, as far as art. The only thing worse than that would be Boucher and Fragonard, some of those people. Just can't see much of worth, although I find contradictions in that. You know, one of the most memorable paintings I can think of is a Titian, in the National Gallery; that's a beautiful painting. So there was a period of time—now, Chouinard was not a particularly good school to go to in terms of—if you got a good instructor, then you were lucky, but it was rather parochial. The people who were basically in Los Angeles at the time were parochial. Now, this is very funny, to go to Seattle, which is about as parochial, in terms of shows and things and things going on, as you can get. I mean, it's absolutely terrible; I can't think it's much better now. But you meet Mark Tobey; you meet Morris Graves. You talk to Mark Tobey; you see his work in his studio. I mean, I don't know—I think Man Ray had probably left by that time—
PALANKER:
Los Angeles?
EVERTS:
Los Angeles, see. But I mean, here were these people in Seattle, this out-of-the-way [place], doing this kind of really strange work, and it seemed to make—or even this guy [Kenneth] Callahan, who did these strange figures, you know, kind of overwrought. Didn't like it. But I mean, they were more accessible in this little, dinky town, which Seattle is, in comparison to Los Angeles. It's close and all, so that you get—what we had in Los Angeles was a camaraderie of the people who were non-established artists, getting together and having a sense of knowing each other, or even exhibiting, knowing of each other in exhibits. But I didn't meet Leonard Edmondson until I started a printmaking society in—God, what? '61, '62 or something? And yet I've been in innumerable national and local shows [with him] because our names put us next to each other. And yet, I met Llyn Foulkes when he was just out of Chouinard, because he was an emerging person, although I never—that's about all I've ever had to do with Llyn Foulkes, is meeting at the very beginning. But because he was an emerging person, I met him, whereas I wouldn't meet Leonard Edmondson, and Leonard Edmondson wasn't that big, so your Dan Lutzes and those guys were, you know, way out. And yet in Seattle, you met these people because there were so few people interested in art, young or old, that they somehow—you met these people. The situation up there was, well, I guess because it was such a Goddamn outpost. They had a guy, this man in philosophy, that was really good. I used to go to his courses when I didn't even have the class, by the name of [Melvin] Rader. He was big into aesthetics. And so he thought there was a person that I might enjoy taking a class with by the name of Langer, Susanne K. Langer. B, K—Susan B. was somebody else. So that was a pretty good thing to have happen. They have a lot of kind of visiting professorships and lectureships where they bring someone out, see. That's what Dirty Eddie was out on; that's what Langer was out on. They had a guy up there who was pretty important, [Vernon] Parrington, in main currents of American literature. He was out of the University of Washington. And in anthropology there was [Alfred B.] Guthrie; his kid wrote [The] Big Sky, and all that stuff. It was really funny—the intellectual environment was so much more intense up at the University of Washington than it was down here in Los Angeles. But as I said, my own participation was geared to the fact that I had a ride that took me back to Redondo—you know, this kid and I shared rides and all—so it was based upon our classes and getting back. But that very thing that I think is so great about Los Angeles now: the fact that you can remain anonymous, that you can be down in this little hole here, and work your butt off, and then the moment you want to, there's all those plums, and everything that you can get in Los Angeles is really nice. That doesn't exist, really, in Seattle; you have to be a part of it. Or you just, you know, there's no way to replenish yourself; you gotta go to it while it's there because it may not happen again for a long time. Good shows have a tendency to get into Portland, but not into Seattle. You might go to Vancouver to see something rather than Seattle. That's a very, very strange thing. SO as a student, you will meet, like, the gal who was for years the secretary of the Western Association of Art Museums, Ilo Liston. You meet her simply because you're somebody interested in art, and there's so many—she wasn't a tremendously prominent person, but I wouldn't meet the equivalent of that person in Los Angeles. Like, I wouldn't meet Schoenberg; I wouldn't meet Stravinsky; I wouldn't meet those people. Now, if they'd lived in Seattle, I would have met them. So for a young country bumpkin from the big city of Los Angeles, Seattle offered a lot of opportunities. The fact that concerts would be played on campus. There were just a lot of things. The fact that the city was so small. You just took part in a lot of the activities that happened. I told you about that thousand-voice choir, I remember. I would have never made it at UCLA, and it was a big school, it was a large school, very, very large school. Yet I was right up there at the transition from the old—God, there were things there that were so hokey it was unbelievable. They had a neo-Gothic campus at the time, and the gargoyles they built, I guess it was Smith right after the Second World War. So the gargoyles on Smith happened to be air-raid wardens, and things like that. The recent history.
PALANKER:
What do you mean by "Smith"?
EVERTS:
It was a hall, a building.
PALANKER:
I thought you meant the college.
EVERTS:
No, the University of Washington. And they did the administration building; it was kind of baroqueish. And they had the library; it was the most authentic Gothic building, and it made the library almost inoperable. You'd go into these reading rooms, which had these great vaulted kind of ceilings to it; they could have put another layer in there, and they could have had two reading rooms or something. And they were cold and drafty, but the other ones all had central heating. It was a switch. They built the music and the art department at the end of this one quad. We were all kind of anxious to get into them, because in the old Smith, we were up at the top, and every summer they'd clean off the skylights in the building. The situation wasn't too bad. But summer is the decent time up there, so in the summer, all the sea gulls are out to sea. But in the winter, when the weather gets bad and all, they're basically all grounded and all, so they'd be on top of these buildings, and walking, and depositing on the skylights. So as summer got closer, the natural light had a tendency to decrease, as it was buried under this guano. [laughter] So we were getting anxious to get into the other, the new art building. And it was such a contradiction, because the new art building, once you got inside the building, it had no relationship to the exterior, you know. I mean, it was just a nice contemporary building inside, with this not very good job of imitating European architecture on the outside. One of the strange things that I will say about this, like, there's such a big fight presently for the employment of women in the university: I can remember many women professors that I had, like Langer for one. And then there were several others. Oh, another experience I had up at the University of Washington. [Alexander] Archipenko—they brought Archipenko in. He was somewhat bitter at the time because he'd passed his importance and all. He had some of the wildest notions I ever encountered. First of all, he's the first man I'd ever met that spoke English without using verbs.
PALANKER:
Would you care to give an example?
EVERTS:
No, because it was absolutely incomprehensible, and I cannot think of a way of imitating one of his sentences. It was absolutely fantastic. And so, as I said, whenever one of the celebrities came in, you know, like he was taken to the heart of Seattle, so he'd give a lecture or something, and whatever lecture hall he was in would be packed by these Seattlites with pretensions to culture or actual love of things like this. I'd already been in his class, and so I sat in a position up in front, so I could turn around and watch the people, because this was going to be marvelous, to watch these faces, this sea of faces with this marvelous expectation of Archipenko and what he's going to have to say, and then this realization that he spoke only Russian; and then the realization that it wasn't Russian, that it was English, and that they knew all the words and they didn't understand what in the hell it was that he was saying. So taking sculpture: I have the least ability of anyone I know to work with sculpture because I just look; I'm just two-dimensional. A lot of people have mentioned that I should be able to do sculpture. But what happens is, is that I get it, and then I move just about an eighteenth of an inch, and then I have to change some more, and then—somehow, I don't encompass the thing in the round, in the total thing. It's just these minute movements around and all that happens with my work is basically, is either—if it's an additive process, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and if it's a subtractive process, it gets smaller and smaller and smaller. It never gets any better; it just increases or decreases in size, depending upon the technique I'm using. And Archipenko's ideas—and it was really startling because he was one of the people, certainly before the war (which he always told us), that basically punctured sculpture, that basically really made holes in it and through it and all, and worked with those planes. And he had this theory that there was a moment that one was creatively with the cosmos, and for the most part we were unable to tell which moment that was. So if you were going to do a sculpture, you should do from 500 to 750—why the number?—of sketches, these little quick little sketches with no conscious thought at all, so that you'd get in tune with the cosmos. And then within one of these you'd be at tune with the cosmos; then, when you laid out the 500 to 750, you'd look at them, and you'd be able to realize that moment. And then you'd do a piece of sculpture that was based upon that. But I asked him what happened if, at that moment that you were at the most with the cosmos, that you were in between drawings, and that you missed the whole thing. And I could tell that he didn't like the question, not by the answer but by the tone of the answer. And then what happened was—it was really the strangest sculpture class I was in—once you found this thing, this kind of scribble, then you took and you rolled out a slab of clay, and you had it try to, in a kind of bas-relief attitude, imitate that which happened at the moment with the cosmos, which I kept feeling and saying, doesn't this now take you further and further away from the cosmos? So then you had this clay, and then you poured plaster. So the clay served as the mold, and you poured the plaster, and then you took the plaster cast and you painted that, and that was your sculpture—
PALANKER:
This is how he taught the class?
EVERTS:
That's what happened in that class. I don't know if he was getting even with Washington for being rainy or what, or for [Henry] Moore getting all that attention; he was very upset that Moore should have all that attention. And that, basically, was the class. It was a very strange experience, but he spoke on about some of his attitudes and the fact that you kept working no matter what happened in terms of attention, the lack of it, or the fact that you received a lot of attention, or that the attention was taken away. That you had to really basically live through all these things, that they couldn't—and then I found this statement by, I think it was, Lao Tse that said that a person had to be beyond criticism, that you were not moved either by criticism that was favorable or criticism that was critical. And he sort of liked that notion. I think it's very true, and I think that some people are embittered by the fact that when the popularity leaves them or something—and some people, it leaves them not because their work is better, or even if they found it, because their work was good and they worked their way out of it. Other people are absolutely seduced by the favorable thing, and then they run scared trying to stay in the spotlight. The thing that I saw that was hurtful, for Archipenko, was that he was made bitter by his lack of attention. And as I look upon his little things, [they] really were a bit stilted. I mean, after his initial breakthrough, there weren't any more breakthroughs for him; it was just—I don't know what it would be like. He wasn't like [Raoul] Dufy, who just kept on painting the same painting the rest of his life. But like I said, where Dole just keeps getting more and more out of this, seems inexhaustible, this very small and minute thing he's doing, just—it's like the magician who keeps pulling these handkerchiefs out of his hand, keeps doing it and doing it and doing it, and your surprise doesn't decrease, because each one, you think, is the last. But with Archipenko, maybe the vein just was never rich enough, and he didn't realize it or something. Because he should have probably done some of these weird baubles. [laughter] But he was an exciting man. He had a certain verve; he had a certain excitement and conviction about art. And that was really good, that sort of thing. And the madness, the madness of this Goddamn cosmos idea was fun, you know, even when we grumbled and everything, and there was no thought that he could be right. So we had to live with the attitude that we all knew that he was completely wrong. [laughter] But his madness was kind of pleasant. And his total inarticulateness was another thing. Because everyone caught his excitement, and when he was excited about somebody's work, he was very good about it. It was like seeing a film where you don't understand the language, and it doesn't have subtitles, or the subtitles are in a different language, yet another language you don't understand. But somehow it all comes through, the meaning and everything. And you just got to the point where he made sense. Another thing that happened—now, like in Los Angeles, maybe there are two—I think the Vagabond, and the Coronet-Louvre, were the two theaters that showed foreign films, like in the forties, early forties kind of thing, in Los Angeles. That was it. You could see Cocteau. What else could you see? Very little, in the terms of foreign film. Now, at the University of Washington there was a place that showed foreign films. Different language clubs would also show foreign films. So there was more immediate and accessible film activity up there than there was in Los Angeles. I think that was pretty significant. Exhibitions, exhibitions in the area—gosh, I can't think of—let's see. I think they did a Mark Tobey retrospective there, which was pretty nice to see. Mark Tobey has never caught on in the United States? he's never caught on here. And yet he's pretty big in Europe; I mean, he's much more respected in Europe than he is here. I mean, even in Japan you see more than you see here. I don't quite understand it. I mean, he's not my favorite artist, but he was knocking it out when nobody else was knocking it out, and when you see a couple of good Tobeys, you see something worth seeing. They had a tendency to show a lot of bad local artists up there. Who else did they bring in during my. tenure up there? They had a program that I think was very, very good? they had a senior seminar program which the students had a lot to do with, and it brought in the other areas of art. So that you would hear about what was happening in music. I heard John Cage up there, not down here. We immediately developed some kind of affinity for the other arts and all, up there. The project was very good in that it brought a lot of discussion in, and it brought a lot of the instructors up under criticism, in terms of—they'd be up defending their position, and asked why they didn't know more about what was happening like some of the people who didn't really know what in the hell was going on in art. Remember that up as late as this, art history would be taught with black-and-white slides. This is the time that the Skira books had just started to hit the States.
PALANKER:
Those are the European art books?
EVERTS:
Yes, in fact I even still have one that, God, I can remember. It seemed like a momentous thing. I think after I bought the book that I had fifty cents left or something. It broke me away from the idea of buying books, but I felt really I had to have it. It was on contemporary art. It was called The History of Modern Painting; it was a three-volume thing. And I didn't have any money after, but this would be about nineteen—[picks up book]—fifteen dollars. Geneva, Paris, New York. Now, the first one was Baudelaire to Bonnard; the second was—with eighty color plates, whew!—and then Matisse, Munch, Rouault. And the third volume was Picasso to surrealism. That's the one I bought. And I bought it because it had 112. The first one had 80, the second 88, and the third one 112. And I mean, color reproductions. I mean, the color was really pretty good. But at that time, when all you had was black and white, this was a revelation. They had a good art library up there, but at that time there were no color runs. The color runs were on separate paper. And the work had to be placed in each one, placed by hand in the book. [shows print in book] This was true of all the art books at that time. So that brought up the cost appreciably. The majority of the books might have one reproduction in color of an artist's work, and that would be the same one that would be on the cover. And then it would be reproduced again and hand-tipped in the book. So there would be a few large cards that an instructor would take in the art history course that would show the object in color. Now, many times, some of the supplemental work for an art history course would be reproductions taken out of Life magazine and adhered to a piece of cardboard. I mean, there weren't any companies, at that time, putting out color reproductions. It's really a revelation to look at. I mean, can you imagine what it'd be like just sitting in and looking at the Fauves in black and white? [laughter] And the person's talking about the color and talking about these madmen and all, or Kandinsky, even that, for that matter. So you know, this is—yes?
PALANKER:
Well, I was just going to say—if you could wrap up the Washington experience—I think the color thing seems to relate to earlier things you said about Mexico, so maybe next time we can start on why you went to Mexico.
EVERTS:
Well, let's see, what basically happened was that I was about to graduate or something, and I was kicked out of school.
PALANKER:
Why?
EVERTS:
Well, I had a beautiful collection of Library of Congress recordings of Jelly Roll Morton, and I had what then was a very classy—I'd traded a painting or something for a very classy portable record player, which was a Webcor (this was before the real hi-fi craze). And I had a girl friend who was kind of a—I can't remember—graduate student attendant, or whatever you call it, for one wing of the dorms. And the entire campus, at that time, was surrounded by a block of woods. It was really beautiful; it was really lovely. (I think it was Leary Hall, this brick building in there, with these several wings.) And I would go, and I would knock on this window, which I could just reach, and she would hand out this apple crate. And I would get up on the apple crate, and I would crawl into her window and in her room. Not every-one modeled at this time. Basically, at that period in history, to get a model you basically had to seduce a girl. And times were very difficult then. Artists had to put up with more hardships then just to get a model. So I would draw and all, and we would play my Jelly Roll Morton records; I left my record player there, and sometimes we'd even have beer there. And it was the week before the finals, and somehow she didn't lock her door, and this girl knocked and just came in for information, and so there I was. And the girl, I imagine, called the security officers. So I had an option of either leaving and letting the girl figure that she was completely mad or something, just before the finals, or just staying there. So I figured I'd stay. And so they came in, and they escorted me out, took my name and escorted me out, because it was past times when you were supposed to be in the dorm. You were only at that time supposed to be in the foyer, but it was already past that time. So then they had a trial, and she cried and did all kinds of things and all. And I figured it was really kind of ludicrous. So the fellow who was handling it, his name was Seiverts; he kept calling me Eeverts. He was dean of the law school, and he took this whole attitude. And then there were a couple of people who were very straight-backed and stiff-necked and very severe in their look at me, and there was one little sort of short plumpish man, who—I would say something, and he would laugh, and they'd all turn at him. So I thought, well, it's not often you at least get a good audience for something like that. So I decided that I'd just have some fun. Because I'd already finished the course and all; what the hell could they do? They couldn't take what I'd learned away from me, so it didn't make that much difference to me. I went on this whole thing. So they asked me what had happened. And I based my defense upon the archaic nature of the liquor laws in the state of Washington. And he became interested in this. In Washington at that time, you had to have a card, and you could buy hard liquor at a liquor store that was owned by the state. And they kind of kept tabs on how many little things you had. In fact, they only had a certain number under a certain kind of liquor that you could buy. I don't know if you could buy under it if you got another card or what. So in the bars, you could only buy beer and wine. And you had to be seated. You couldn't stand at the bar and order, or you couldn't stand at the bar and drink. You had to be seated. Now, you could at the bar buy a carton—which was twelve, I think, twelve or twenty-four, which was much cheaper, which was about what you would buy at Safeway or something, and you could drink it there, and they wouldn't charge you for drinking it there. Which is really pretty strange. So most students, if they had enough money, they'd pool their money in, and they'd buy either twelve or twenty-four, which was cheaper than buying it by the glass. And they'd sit in the bar in a booth and drink. But at midnight the place closes, and I was found on a Sunday morning in the dorm. And so you had to leave, and the bar wasn't open at all on Sundays. So they said, well, you know, why didn't you take her to your apartment? And I said, well—and I acted surprised, like they were asking me to com-promise her. You know, I mean, this wasn't the thing to do. I was absolutely—so here's this poor guy laughing, and everyone looking at him, and I'm putting up this totally irrational argument of why all of this had happened. And then they wanted to know this raucous music, the idea that dancing and jazz music was sin. And so I went on to explain that Lomax and the Library of Congress thought it was important enough to record these people and get their opinions and things. And then they were kind of trying to ask—they wouldn't ask me right out if the girl had been seduced, but all kinds of activities could be going on there. So I lost credit for that quarter, which meant that I wasn't going to graduate. Isaacs was furious and said that was illegal because it wasn't a constituted committee, the way it was supposed to be and all, and that we could get away with it, and he wanted me to study the next year with him. Well, working with him was a paralyzing experience; I think it was one of the most important experiences that I had in my training, but it was a paralyzing experience. And the whole idea of going back there and spending more time with him was too much. And so I just left and decided to come back and then go to Mexico as an undergraduate. That's Washington.
PALANKER:
We'll start with Mexico next week. Thanks.

1.6. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE TWO FEBRUARY 2, 1976

PALANKER:
Okay, today we're going to talk about your move to Mexico and thereafter.
EVERTS:
Okay. I came back from the University of Washington, and long shored for a period of time, and determined that I'd go to school in Mexico.
PALANKER:
Why?
EVERTS:
I think because of an interest in indigenous art, the art of the Americas and all. As I said previously, I'd been affected by the Northwest Indian sculpture and all, that I wanted to see more of the efforts of Mesoamericans and all, so there was an opportunity to go to Mexico. Went to the city college, and, let's see; it was on the GI Bill, and transferring things were a problem. It was really difficult living there for a short period of time because my GI Bill didn't come through, you know; the payments were long. Since I was a foreigner, I couldn't work and, God, the wages wouldn't have been worth it either. So I sold my blood for a short time and played football.
PALANKER:
Do you mean soccer?
EVERTS:
No, no. American football. The colleges down there also played American football. So I did those things while at school, at the institute; it was in several buildings around Mexico City. And also it was my first encounter with a bidet. I only knew it was a bidet from the writings of Henry Miller. But I met a Chicano student by the name of Frank Gonzales, and he introduced me to a painter by the name of Jose Gutierrez, who was one of the first people to work in plastics, acrylics, and pyroxalyn, which is a Duco synthetic. He came to the United States much as [Jose] Orozco and the others did during the Depression, and he worked with many of those people trying to push the synthetic paints. He introduced Jackson Pollock to pyroxalyn, which was a Duco paint. He was a very strange man, in that he had this idea that most people—he taught at the polytechnic institute, and he felt that most people who were into art were not good enough, or the market wasn't sufficient to support them as artists. So they actually ended up trained to do absolutely nothing, and they became shoe salesmen—not unlike in the United States. So he was determined that that didn't work. So his program at the polytechnic was that you not only trained to be a fine artist and a muralist and all, but you also learned to paint cars and houses and everything else, so that your knowledge and background in painting would serve you later. So Mexico might have some of the world's most erudite automobile painters. Through Gutierrez I met [David] Siqueiros, and Siqueiros was a very decent man. And I was asked to participate as a helper on a mural they were doing at the Social Security Hospital, on the Laredo Road, on the northern outskirts of Mexico City, near Guadalupe. The experience was pretty good. At that particular time I was working in, I guess, what was called a non-objective manner, and the experience was very good. I met a man, I believe an American, and I think his name was Stern, who absolutely idolized Siqueiros and followed him around and did all of his paper work and everything else, but did very little of his own work; he sacrificed everything to Siqueiros, the maestro. And that kind of determined me that it wasn't an attitude that I'd want to encounter in myself. Siqueiros undoubtedly knew more about mural composition, the abstract concepts of it, than any man who ever lived. He was absolutely fantastic. We were working on this foyer to an auditorium in the hospital, and it had doors opening into it which were parallel to the auditorium, and then to your right, there was a rather blue mirrored surface with also doors on it which would reflect the mural and make it seem larger. The roof had a sort of curvilinear form to it. So when we were up putting these chalk lines on this old scaffolding made out of bad one-by-sixes, and we had chalk lines and all, and we'd be drawing these lines under his direction. And then he'd call us down from this rickety thing—it scared the hell out of me, just climbing up and down—he would then explain all of the compositional elements and the change in the spheres in terms of movement, and how he'd plotted all this in terms of movement. The little cartoon he had, which contained what the figures would actually become and all, was really pretty hokey. But the abstract concept of it was absolutely beautiful. I worked, oh, for several months on it. And his art was not of a tremendously political nature; it wasn't as political as, say, Rivera's (and I thought better), but not as good as Orozco's. But he was only a political animal when he stopped functioning as an artist. When we were there working for him, all of his direction was basically that of an artist, and I can't think of any man who would be as caring, to let young students know what it was that he was attempting to do, and why he was making these judgments and things. And he had complete mastery of what he was doing. He was a very enjoyable experience. But I left it because I found it was interfering with my own work. And no matter where my own work was at the time, I felt it was more important to me than Siqueiros's work. So I gave that up. School at that time, except making it to football practices and games, was of not a tremendous amount of import. The school itself was interested in the GI Bill, and I think that for a large part it was set up to take advantage of the GI Bill. There were a lot of people that made it to Mexico City rather than Paris. I think some people went to Paris, but it seemed like Mexico City, after the Second World War, was more of a focal point than Paris. I guess the only writer of any worth, probably, was—The Naked and the Dead, what's his name, who wrote that? An absolute heretic.
PALANKER:
[Norman] Mailer?
EVERTS:
Yes, Mailer was down there. He'd left by the time I got there. But there were people continually dropping down. Of the people that I studied with, there was an old German by the name of Wolf, no, or something. He left Germany, came to the United States first, and then he was at Dartmouth, I guess. He saw the Orozco murals, and then he had a job at Pomona and saw the murals there. And then he thought he wanted to go see Mexico to see what produced it, and he spent the rest of his life. He was one of the prime movers in saving much of the colonial architecture that was being destroyed when I was there, and a goodly part of it is gone. He was an interesting old guy, and made some impression on me in terms of understanding the colonial art. But his understanding of the other art was somewhat restricted. There were some people that were very good in aesthetics down there that I enjoyed working with. But whenever I had any time at all, I made trips to the ruins, to get to, of course, all the easiest ones. But I got into the Bonampak frescoes early on, and I was unfortunately never able to get over to the Yucatan because, as I said, I was a student, and at that time- banana boat and flying was about the only way. I tried making it by bus, but I ended up getting kind of deserted in some little village. I think it was my first really direct encounter in a culture that was really quite different than mine. I can recall even the shock at the way the Catholic church operated, in terms of many Americans in my childhood felt that they were afraid of the pope taking over the United States; and then to go to Mexico and encounter a church that was really exceedingly foreign, because it was made meaningful to some of the Indians that they served and all. And so much of the ritual was main-tained, it almost seemed like the Catholic church was pagan in certain of its rites and all. But the art that was found in there—as I said, some of the finest examples of Spanish baroque are found in the New World, in Mexico. Some of the work in the altar work, some of the—marvelous, like at Ocotlan, the use of the indigenous artisans to make Christian artifacts, and the way that they changed those artifacts into a conglomerate of the pagan and the Christian, and the Christian liturgies is absolutely terrific. Where the cross becomes paramount, and the hands become portions of the cross rather than imposing a figure onto the cross, and just the working of design elements. And to encounter a culture that produced a Mestizo, produced an amalgamation of the European and the indigenous person, which didn't exist in the United States to any extent—all these were very, very impressive to me. On that one little trip that I was telling you about where I got stranded, out in Tabasco, in the jungle out in that area, I ended up getting amoebic hepatitis and a few other little goodies. And so I'd been playing football at, I guess, about 218 or something, and within no time, I found myself weighing 135 pounds, and that was quite a loss. And that was another thing—to find yourself physically so altered. I mean, to move from a rather large person to all of a sudden this kind of scrawny person. My hair was falling out, and I got what I call my Oaxaca haircut; they just shaved my head and all because I had these tremendous fevers. And I understand that I was being given arsenic or something to induce convulsions. It was the only moment in my life where I really wondered if I wanted to keep on living, but even in the hospital I encountered a completely different thing than I had ever encountered in my life. And that was that in every room in a Mexican hospital there's a trundle bed; there's a bed underneath that bed, so family can come and stay with you so you won't be alone in the hospital. So while I was there, there was someone always with me. The woman that I rented my first apartment with, or pension—all these people, they always saw that I was never alone. But I was in and out of delirium with the high fevers and all, and I couldn't put the Spanish together. I was in and out of things, and it really was a foreign language. I just couldn't put time sequences together, but there was always someone there. And I thought that was really a pretty humane way of handling things. So I had no notion of day or night. I wasn't awake x number of hours and then asleep x number of hours. I was in and out of sleep all the time. And so that no matter where it would be that I would be awake, or I'd awake with some kind of thrashing, there'd be someone there that would be taking it and wiping my brow with a cool cloth, and it would be some person from my apartment building that I'd known and spoken to and all. And this kind of concern, I thought, was something that I hadn't encountered, and I thought that this wasn't a bad thing. But I had to get out of Mexico, because all I was allowed to eat was jello and tea—or gelatin, I should say. And Mexican gelatin is rather like chewing on a softened cow horn. It's rubbery and has no taste. It has even a pastel color? it doesn't even really have the beautiful, shimmery transparency of Royal or Jello, or something like that. It's opaque and it's pastelly, and even colorwise I didn't like it. So I left, came back to the States for a brief time to regain a little bit of my health, and then left for Europe, to go to the University of London.
PALANKER:
Why did you pick that place?
EVERTS:
Well, why did I pick London? Well, actually, it was my intention to go on and study in Spain, but there was a girl that I knew that happened to be in London. So I went to London. And I went to the Courtauld Institute, University of London. I found basically most of my friends were Latin Americans at the London School of Economics. And I found that the things at LSE were of more interest than the art history. I found the Courtauld Institute—it was interesting? the whole thing was, to me, kind of an anachronism. It was on Portman Square, in two old buildings, and they'd been donated by a [Samuel] Courtauld, who had made his fortune in textiles, and especially of late in synthetic textiles. They had a doorman; it was one of the few schools I ever attended that had a doorman. And he wore a shirt, tie, and all those sorts of things. He [Courtauld] didn't donate his complete collection to the Tate, and he had an extensive art collection, so you might open a closet in—the secretary, they had sort of a typing pool or something—you might open their closet for their hanging their clothes and all, and there might be a Cézanne drawing of Swimmers in it. And what was the other one? You might go and see, perhaps, an unfinished Murillo painting in one of the waiting rooms. I mean, it had a lot of nice art sitting around it. The main lecture room was basically involved in tutorials. The main lecture room, you came in, and it had what I think is one of the finest examples of industrial art. They'd put in central heating, but it had a fireplace in it, and it had a fireplace of unbelievable reality. It looked like real logs. I'm not easily fooled, but it looked like logs, and it looked like a true fire. It was an absolute masterpiece. I mean, it deceived the eye. First time I was in one of those terrible, miserable late-afternoon fogs, winter fogs, and this is maybe from January '63, or something, when they had that really bad fog, and it's cold, and you know, you're chilled through the bone. And it was the first time that I had a lecture in this particular room, and I lost—
PALANKER:
Excuse me, 1953?
EVERTS:
Fifty-three. I walked in, and that fireplace was the most welcome thing I ever saw. So I rushed over there, and I had my gloves off and I put my hands, and I realized that my hands were receiving no heat whatsoever. So I was terribly disappointed. I wanted that horrible directness that you get from an English hearth, you know: you're frozen on one side and overdone on the other. But I moved away with such a sense of disappointment, and then I found that everyone else that came in, they'd warm themselves, and then they opened the back of their coats and put their backside to it, and they were going through another one of these cultural rituals that had nothing to do with reality. And I'm afraid that many Americans are cut off from these things that you do, you detach yourself from all sense of reality. I think if we have anything that remains close to it, it's the religious experience. You have to divorce yourself from reality if you want to accept the religious experience. And I think that a lot of other cultures enrich their lives by having this sort of nonsense in all kinds of other elements, and this was certainly true in terms of the fireplace. And so I noticed that after that these people didn't give a damn really about the truth of the fire or the heat; they just liked going through that ritual. The thing was that there was always a TA for the prof, and somehow, by some signal that I was never able to understand, he would rap, and we'd all stand up, and then here comes the judge. Because here would be the man in his robes, and he'd come in, and he'd lecture. And you weren't allowed to question or anything. And then all of a sudden—it's much like a presidential news conference—the TA would make a sound, and we'd all stand up, and the man who delivered his lecture would leave, and that was it. And if we had any questions, they were directed towards the TA. But then later, we would get into our tutorials, where there would be maybe eight to ten of us, and then maybe three of these profs would be there. So it was a good system. I liked the system, the fact of their testing, so that if you passed—you only had your tests at the end of the term, so everything was tied up in the term. Now, if you failed the general test, then you took a test again. But this test was more specialized; it was based upon your weaknesses. In all, you had three chances by test to pass the quarter. If you didn't, then you had to take the quarter over again. But they found out where you were weak on the general test, and then they tested you specifically on those areas of weakness. And then if you flunked a second time, then they went into even greater depth in the areas of your weakness. So that by the time you finished, you were really very strong in the area of your weakness, which I thought made a lot of sense. So your second and third tests were tests unlike the tests that other people generally took; if you could get by on the first test, you might not come out as well as if you failed the first time. I think if you failed, you ended up knowing more, perhaps, than you did if you succeeded. This is also true in an art class, where you do something and you're very successful. It may just be happenstance; it may be just pure luck or something. You don't really know why you're successful or anything else. Whereas if it's unsuccessful, then you have to solve—you have to ask yourself some questions. Where is it unsuccessful? Why is it unsuccessful? What constitutes the success of the thing? Whereas if you just have this fantastic success, you may not learn as much. So I always encourage fantastic failures; it's a good learn-ing process. And I think some of it was conditioned, actually, by that English experience. The things that happened, generally speaking, at the Courtauld, was an awareness that art history was really not an area of any kind of interest for me, that art history, at least at that time, for my experience, was that art history was based upon literature and never upon any training, or any dependence upon—or even liability, I would say—your own personal judgment or eye. They were talking one time about El Greco and reading about Browning's statement about his sense of surface. Well, the weakest period in El Greco's painting, I would say, would be the early-on things, which approximated to a degree the Renaissance. And it was only when he got to a very flat painting, what we'd characteristically know El Greco for, in the Metropolitan—and a lot of it was what I guess might be referred to as the high El Greco but wouldn't be the best El Greco. So I found that this was very untrue—it may have been poetic license, but aesthetically it was untrue—and that I was able to only talk a few of them into going because I was just a madman from the colonies. I mean, I was a person that was completely put down because I kept saying "the Renaissance." And at the tutorials, this one prof would say, "Renaissance, Mr. Everts; it's a rebirth, a renaissance." And so then I would go back about the Renaissance. And I took them down to show them that, you know, here's this surface, and he wasn't concerned at all with surface, and that you could see his previous underpainting, how he had changed the form and all. And this wasn't the mark of a man who was concerned with surface enrichment, not at all. But they were caught up in what someone had written about someone, more than anything else. They were perhaps the most qualified students that I had encountered in my education: they all came out. That's one thing: the British system produces people who at fourteen are capable of writing and communicating ideas. They write very well. They're literate. They all read at least one other language, and they read much of their art history in other languages. My other language, being Spanish, gave me not a tremendous amount to read. On one of the breaks between terms, we were going to Assisi, you know, going to the Continent. I was really looking forward to it. Giotto was one of my all-time favorite painters and all, I personally feel the greatest architectural painter that ever lived. So, you know, all of a sudden I'm going to be able to see these things that I'd only seen in black-and-white slides, and I was just filled with this excitement and all. And they're talking about what everyone had written about it, and this, and they were looking for confirmation of what they'd read, i And so I got into this big minority-of-one hassle about this, about that. I felt that they weren't interested in the art, and that they were building everything—all their opinions and all of their concept of art was being built upon the literature surrounding the work rather than the work itself. And I felt that that was really a pretty bad attitude. In the institute itself, there was a lift—it was an old Adam building, had a beautiful Adam staircase in it, and there was this lift. I think the lift at most could perhaps take four people, and it was a wire mesh thing, and so they'd stand around waiting, kind of constricted and all, waiting, and I would bounce up the stairs. And I always felt that if something happened, and we were all upstairs in the library or something and the lift broke, that most of them would crawl across the Adam ceiling and then descend down this little web that they would weave. I felt that they were kind of the spider people. And that's perhaps why most of my friends were Latin Americans from LSE, with a mixture of some Indians and some Africans and some people from the Continent. But they were basically Latin American. I mean that cold kind of dark, drab—London looks its best when it's miserable? it doesn't look good on a nice, sunny day. I can remember a Whitsuntide; it was just unbearably warm, and it was just a miserable, horrible town. That was another thing: to go into a city as large as London and have no sense of city at all. And at that time—figure this is '52, '53—at that time there were no tall buildings. I mean, for real height you had like St. Paul's, you had Parliament Towers. And you know, there was no sense of being—it was very strange. You get up on Golder's Green or something like that and look down, and it was this flat thing. It was a complete, different sort of thing. It was different from Mexico City, which was starting to build some buildings. It was different from the first time I was in New York and was absolutely cramped and contained and dwarfed by the city. For a westerner to go to Chicago, Chicago seemed large, but then when you go into New York, New York seemed absolutely overwhelming. You know the picture—much of New York that I had known was basically set up on the lots of MGM or something. You must remember that there wasn't much done on location. A big location picture was Trader Horn, and the gal died; you know, they went to Africa and the gal died. What you would have would be an establishing shot of somewhere in the harbor, and you would see Manhattan—that might have been shot by a second unit or something—and that told you you were in New York. And then you went to the back lot, and the rest of the thing was shot around the back lot. So the notion of the two-dimensionality of the movie screen and the reality of New York, and then yet another reality, when you go to London, for a western lad—it was a completely different feeling. I'd say another thing that happened in Europe was that all of a sudden, baroque music made sense. I don't think that anything would make sense out of some of the European artists, but I think it was in Europe that I realized that European art was dead. That when I saw some of the things that happened to go on—when I saw a [Pierre] Soulages painting show in Paris, that I realized that he had none of the verve and none of the vitality that [Franz] Kline did, and that it was pretty but it was all sugar. It was all like the importance of the big design houses in Paris; it was a really limited market. And if you thought that you were going to go to Paris and see people wearing Parisian gowns and things—people just didn't dress like that; that wasn't the way that they—and actually, the only people who still looked to those areas were basically the effete. Strangely enough, it's not that I would traditionally tie that with wealth and all, but basically I would say that societies replenish themselves from the bottom, not from the top. And you know, if you want to know of effeteness and a lack of reality, read the society page. I mean, there's no reality there at all. And so the people who still tend to look towards these things, the so-called beautiful people and all, are really the effete people, the people who are even ineffective at making decisions. They' re outside of even the decision-making reality of life. They're not of any importance, really, to government and all» And so however short-lived it was, the start of the American influence; the rise of jeans, of the jean culture, you know, in Europe; the rise of being imitative of American values and all; the funny thing about rock, of listening—and these things may not be directly involved in painting, but they're directly important to an American who is also a painter—and I was very much impressed with the BBC. I think I got a little bit upset with the third program one time, when there was a [Jean] Anouilh play that I wanted to hear, and it was done in French, but that was a little too erudite for my taste. But the notion of having a program where the cultural stocks wouldn't be held, on the light program—they had the home and the light and the third—they had a lot of comedy; they would have good comedy, like Peter Ustinov had a program called "In All Directions, " which came on whenever he was ready, instead of on a weekly basis. There was another one that was "Bedtime with Braden," a Canadian. His program was a weekly program, so it suffered from that. There was also "One of the Lions," which was a person in space and time in the United States. There were a couple of America's expatriates that had things to do on the BBC. But you would hear this kind of Dennis Day kind of character who would be the singer on the show, reading some comedic lines, and then he would speak in the mother tongue. And then all of a sudden when he would sing, he would sing completely as American. The pronunciation of the words would be American, the whole thing. And he would be imitative of Frank Sinatra or something else, which was really a shock to me. And this was the pre rock days, but then of course, these young people were basically getting their exposure to American sounds, be it country singers and all. And I was amazed that the BBC would do this program on the Marx brothers, where there was no reverence at all for the Marx brothers. And then all of a sudden you would see—I saw Citizen Kane when I was very young, which didn't get much distribution, but I was able to see it several times; it was always playing in London somewhere—the seriousness that they took American films, and I mean good American films. There was the popular level, and then there was also the other, the popularity of American authors in a country that produced a hell of a lot of good writers. To all of a sudden see some of the American influences, see authors that—Lincoln Steffens, who was reading material that everybody at LSE knew about; you know, all the muckrakers were. Not very much known about some of the western writers like Frank Norris and Octopus and these things that I had read and all. I think I became more aware, at one level, of the American effort and all, and what Americans were doing, and all of a sudden seeing the sense of the way that Americans did things. I went around London; [Edwin] Maxwell Fry was a very good architect—he and Walter Gropius had an office together at one time over there—and because I'd met the gentleman and all when I was up in Seattle, I went around seeing all the evidence in his buildings. And it was interesting, what there was in contemporary architecture in Britain, and it was just starting to open up. They were just rebuilding London at the time. And then here I encountered something that I'd never seen in the United States, and that was all the plumbing was put on the outside of the buildings. All the vents and the lines for the sewer, for the toilets, and all were put outside. So I asked about that, and they said, "Well, if they're getting frozen up and things, then you can get at them." Of course, it seemed to me that if you put them out where they were really available to the elements, it assured you of having that problem. That old self-fulfilling prophecy again. And why they didn't put them inside the walls, where they could have access to them, you know, and all, was beyond me. The fact that Pimlico project—which was really a kind of a nice, contemporary housing project (big flats) across from the Battersea power station—took and utilized the heat fumes and escape and all from a big coal-burning electricity plant and heated water that was taken under the Thames, and then heated the flats. It was really quite a thing. But they had trouble renting the flats because there were no fireplaces in it. And if you went through any row of apartments, you'd see all these blasted chimneys and all because every room would have a little fireplace in it. And it might have a gas burner in it, no longer burning coal or something, because coal was on ration when I was there. And it produced a room that had heat, maybe eight, seven feet at most out from the heating area itself. But people liked that. That goes back to the lecture room. So all these things, all of a sudden—you never get to judge. In the United States, you don't see what is really American and an American way of problem solving. And the notion that we were relatively free of tradition, the thing that all, in my youth, that all the Americans were complaining about: that we had no tradition. And then to make the realization that the greatest thing to have is to not have tradition, so that you can look at the problem and you can face the future, instead of turning your ass to the future and looking at what's past and making a decision in the future based upon the past. I found that this was really a pretty important period for me, in relationship to ideas. Now, all these things seemingly are non-art ideas, but I think that art's about everything else, and not about art. So all of a sudden, the notion of the accessibility of culture, at that time, as opposed to the cultural institutions on the Continent—and the British are insular. You know, I mean, that's the Continent, and they're the U. K. And the thing was that everything was charged—the Louvre, everything was charged—and in Britain it was free. Then also, being a student allowed you to get into things. The Old Vic—if you gave up the price of two cigarettes, you could go to the Old Vic; that was the price for students. Students didn't have a set price; and so as cigarettes get more expensive, then the student ticket goes up. Whereas, maybe nothing else goes up; just cigarettes happen to go up, because all tobacco had to be imported and all. So it might make theatergoing more expensive for you as a student. But two cigarettes—you were always capable of giving up two cigarettes. The fact that you could queue up for standing room at the Victoria and Albert was an important thing. Another friendship I made while I was there was with this free-lance photographer [Gerald Pudsey] who did photography for Covent Gardens and for Victoria and Albert and for the Houses of Parliament, and so I used to go and carry his bag for him, you know, and seemingly like a helper. And I used to be able to go to Covent Garden, Victoria and Albert, and Exhibition Hall, and a few things like that, so that I developed a closeness to some things that were always very remote, things that deepened my appreciation for some of the other arts, in terms of—I was always exhilarated by a concert, going to a concert—just the way the music fills the auditorium and all, and the activity, and the visualness of it and all. But to be able to go down to rehearsals and things and see the mechanics that produced the perfection, to be in the wings in a ballet, when these girls all of a sudden come off and drop that control that they have, and all of a sudden are just panting like a horse that's been ridden five miles—it gave more dimension to it. Being in some of the halls for which Haydn composed his music made a lot of sense. I could never stand Mozart until I went to Europe, and then Mozart made sense in the kind of compartmentalized ways—

1.7. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE ONE FEBRUARY 2, 1976

PALANKER:
You were saying about Mozart—
EVERTS:
Well, basically that, again, the way the culture was compartmentalized, the way the people compartmentalized their lives, the shock of the sense of class—you know, because most of my experience was basically in England. You have your Indios in Mexico; you have the girls letting the hair grow on their legs to prove that they had European blood, the moustache, all those sorts of things. The yuchis are very proud of the fact that they're Indian, and they don't particularly want to interbreed, whereas the greatest pride in Mexico is the pre-Columbian cultures and all. So many of the Indians may be cut off from some of the things in society. There are the peons, there are the people and all, but there is the history within the culture; there is the history that they are Mexican, and that they all are Mexicans, and that there have been the revolutions, and that the revolutions have been revolutions supposedly for the people. They have been disruptive of the people who have been—like [Porfirio] Diaz, the revolution against Diaz, the revolution against the French: all these things were basically oriented toward getting the mass of the people behind the movement, and [Benito] Juarez and Aurelios and all these people are basically leaders of the people. But when you get to England you encounter, again, another kind of democracy? like Mexico really having only a one-party system and all is still to a degree a democracy. The United States, with its shortcomings, is a democracy. And in Britain, it is a democracy. But it had more a sense of class than, say, Mexico. Now, Mexico still has its peons, but yet, you get into Britain, and you get where people will step off of the street—at this time, things have changed; there was a big change going on—people would take off their hat because they felt someone was of a better class and things, you know. And like,, an American, he might have had to take some guff from his boss during the day or something, but the minute they got in the parking lot and got into their cars, there was complete equality and he felt he could cut off his boss to get out of the parking lot or anything. You'd certainly not encounter that in Japan, where in the rain the employee would hold the umbrella over his employer and would not think of standing under the umbrella himself. Hopefully he would be smart enough to hold it further off, so that the water from the umbrella would only land on his arm or something, rather than his head. But I was there in the encountering when there was a breakdown of this, in that all of a sudden there were scholarships available for—and the British had traditionally always had their scholarships not based on need. Those people going to public schools, which are the private schools, had enormous backgrounds in Greek and Latin. Well, the tests were heavy on Greek and Latin, so you knew that most of the scholarships would go to students who went to the private schools. So again they knew what they were going to get. Well, some of that was broken down, so that all of a sudden you would get these bright young people from working-class families going to schools, and they would not imitate the BBC English. They would maintain their cockney sounds, and they would maintain their north country sounds and all with a certain sort of pride; it was a badge. They might not have the private school with its little badge, but they had their badge of speech, which was kind of good to see. The Teddy boys were an outgrowth of that. (I think you will never have seen a rock star that's gone to an orthodontist. I've never seen so many bad open mouths as the kids who came out of Liverpool in those working-class districts.) Before, the first thing that a person would have undergone was really basically a means of changing his speech patterns, so you wouldn't be able to tell where he came from. So I was at the point of the breaking down of some of these things. I'd like to go back and see what's happened since. But the Britons lost the Second World War; that was another interesting thing to encounter. Here I was, in '52, '53, studying there, and everything was still rationed; it was austerity. You could buy a candy bar a week and, I think, a cube of butter. Bacon—you could get a pound of bacon. Everything was rationed—sugar, all these things. British lads who were stationed in occupation in Germany would bring home food. There was more food in Germany. As we helped the Germans rebuild their factories, the British had to do with factories that were outdated and all. Then, of course, they lost their whole mercantile system that they'd operated on. All the colonies fell away and then, of course, the Commonwealth. They even went so far in Canada to change the flag. But then some of the more adventurous people started leaving the country, going elsewhere. One of the things I enjoyed was that in every neighborhood I lived in, there was, on a Tuesday or a Wednesday, the Liberal party and the Conservative party and the Labor party would meet, and then they would discuss some issue. And everyone was open to speak. There was one neighborhood I lived in, and this was at the height of the McCarthy nonsense, and I was expected to explain away what it was that was happening in America. I think McCarthyism were some of the things that were, as I look back on it, that encouraged me to leave the country at the time. And to the point that I remember when I was going to Mexico (I think it was Mexico; it may have been to England) and it was about the time of the—what was it called—Peekskill things, where Paul Robeson went, and there were those riots and all because he was singing there or something. And I was going through some books, and one of the books, it showed Times Square in the thirties, and this was a book from the thirties, and it was filled with Communists, which was a big bugaboo at that time, see. These were all Communists, and Times Square was filled to overflowing, and I forget how many thousands of people happened to have been in this for some kind of protest. And they said, "Where else in the world could a militant minority like this protest so freely and openly?" If that many Communists had walked into Times Square that day, they would have machine-gunned them to death. I've no doubt at all. It wasn't a time to be terribly happy with the United States. This was the time of the Rosenbergs, where all over London there were things like "Yanks go home" and everything. I was hard pressed to understand what we were going through. I tried to explain from my own experiences what I thought might be going on in American minds. I happened to have an American mind, but it didn't fit into the American thing. I know that in terms of my own experience, I would have friends who would be resisting everything that was going on. And I would go off to Mexico or something, and I would come back, and they were resisting just as hard, except they were a lot further downstream, and they had accepted the things that they had been resisting before. It seemed like a really kind of frightening time. There were a lot of Americans in Europe at that time who were just basically avoiding things. You know, this was the time of the Hollywood trials and all that nonsense. It was really a pretty bad time. This was the time when Paul Robeson was taken off of the Walter Camp all-American role. I mean, he made ail-American football player—what was it, Rutgers, that he'd gone to? And so when they published the Walter Camp's all-American listing—well, Walter Camp died, but they went on making this all-American list, and then they would list all the people who'd made it before. And to me this was 19 84; it was rewriting history. How could you take the fact away that the guy had been an all-American football player and then suddenly, because you didn't. agree with his political beliefs, make him a nonperson? And that's what they were doing. It seemed to me—this was another awareness—it seemed to me that when you were against something rather than for something, you had a tendency to imitate that thing you were against. When we were against the Nazis and all, one of the first things we did was we set up something we called relocation camps, but it was a concentration camp. It was a concentration of a certain ethnic group, Japanese-American, just as it was [in Germany] a concentration of an ethnic group, Jews, and other political undesirables. So I think that in this period of time, when you stand not a part of anything, and apart from everything, you can really find out what it is you think and feel and all. So it was a tremendous metamorphosis for me as a person. I saw what it meant to be an American. I saw what it was that was desirable about being American, and I saw all of the things that were basically frightening about being American. And my work continued. I was healthier; I was weighing about 195 pounds or so. When I hit the country, one of the things that I found was that because of the high-starch diet, the English seemed to be a little puffier than I expected. And I found that you couldn't get a good meal; you couldn't go out. I mean, I had never gone anywhere in my life to a restaurant and ordered spaghetti and got something that would be, oh, less than a fistful of it. I mean, it was as if it were being served as part of a course, not the meal itself. I never found that I could go out to a restaurant during that period of time and get a meal that was filling. I ended up being in the tropical diseases hospital again because I got a reoccurrence of my hepatitis. My work—it was a very important period of time. I found that I'd been cut off from a lot of things. I'd been cut off from the sun, for one. Mexico had a verve that was not unlike some of what I encountered in my own family. And it also had a nationalism, which—how in the hell the British could have gone out and conquered as much of the world as they did, not being more nationalistic—I mean, they're imperial; that's granted. I came to the United States on this tramp steamer, and I was rooming with this English squire type. There were two lines when you enter the United States; one is for American citizens, and one's for foreigners. I was the only American aboard ship, so I went to the American line, you know. And this guy was right behind me, which I thought was a little bit strange. I'm not one to say anything. I went through, and when they got to him, the guy looked at his passport, and he said, "You're English. You go over to the foreign line. You have to go over to the other line." He didn't say anything about his birth. He said, "I'm not a foreigner. I'm English." This is that other idea that there was kind of a set above—but I didn't encounter any sort of nationalism, any kind of jingoism that I did in Mexico and the United States, which was a little bit strange for me. But the sense of being insular, the reserve of the people, the difficulty of being—I developed a very close friend. Most of my friends were people from Latin America, but I had one English friend, and he remarked the fact that it was difficult for him to understand Americans, he said, because, "You'll know an American, and within an hour, you'll know everything about them, the most intimate thing." And he said, "And then you'll never ever see them again." And he said, "You can know an Englishman all of your life and never know anything about him." And this was true. I mean, I was very close to this person, but there's always this distance, and this was very strange. And so I think the combination of all those things produced a sort of introverted art, this awareness of physical isolation, this awareness again of my body. This change had taken place when I went back to the tropical diseases hospital. And so I started working in a figurative way, which I hadn't worked in for a while. And this damnable thing of not having money. I was drawing on the front page of the London Times because that's where they put their advertising and all, because I couldn't even afford newsprint that didn't have writing on it. It was cheaper! [laughter] And I did this absolutely compulsive thing that took me a long time to break, that I would have so little materials to work on that I would work a thing to absolute death. I'd go on, and I would just keep working and working on a thing. I think it started a period of figurative things that I did that I guess my art fed on for quite a few years, over a decade, at least. I think the most important thing that happened to me' schooling was just a device to get me there; I was more interested in LSE than I was in what was happening in art history—[was that] I found that art history was of no interest to me whatsoever. I found that art history is the worst means in the world of getting information about art. People in art history are the people who are next-dangerous to people with doctorates in education from Columbia University. I think those are the people that really are sort of spooky people. Hopefully they're getting better. After I left Europe I came back to the States. I longshored for a while. Went back to Mexico again, and found that the doctors were right: once you get the bug in you, it's there. You don't get rid of it; all you do is arrest it. You don't ever lose the disease. And so I found that as much as I liked Mexico, Mexico wasn't a place—I periodically go back, hoping that—but I started longshoring. Went to Mexico, saw the mural again that I'd worked on, that had been completely reworked and changed, which was a surprise. Went and saw some of my friends again, and that would have been, oh, I guess we're up to about '54, maybe. I was longshoring nights so I could have the days painting. I had GI Bill left, so I was going to enroll in USC; and I was interested in architecture because I was very much impressed by Le Corbusier when I was over in Europe. And then I really felt there was tremendous building going on, and I was interested in modular construction and all, interested in [B.F.] Skinner. And I talked to USC, and I found that USC really was interested in hand-built little single dwellings, and I didn't think that's where it was at and all. So I didn't—now, let's see. I got back in October, I think, at one time. I had to save my GI Bill; it was a rule. So I went to Long Beach State, because I'd known a chairman of the department, and I found that I really couldn't go to school and study art any longer, because the break that I had when I was in Mexico, where I was pretty much left alone—they wanted you to be there for the money, and I found that my real interest was outside the classroom, seeing the ruins and things and doing my own work. And then in London I found that I wasn't interested at all in the formal literature of art; and then when I wanted to save my GI Bill, because I had some left and all, I realized that I didn't want to study art anymore. So I kind of dropped out of that. Then there was an attempt to save it, to go to USC, and then I just realized that I couldn't study architecture there because somehow, the school has to serve you rather than you serve the school. It has to be offering what you need, rather than that you go there because they have a place for a student, an open space. So I stopped my schooling, completely stopped; it had stopped in terms of art in probably '51, or '52. I met a couple of people at the school that I'd liked, and longshoring, I was cut off a bit from any contact with—working in my studio days and working at night rather limited my social function, since almost everybody operated the different way. They had jobs days and were available socially nights and all. Doug MacFadden, one of the fellows who'd been a student, opened an art store and little gallery sort of thing called The Studio. His was a kind of a schlock shop, and so I decided it'd be good to open a gallery that presented something a little more adventurous in art. During this period of time, this would be, God, when would this be?
PALANKER:
I have 1956.
EVERTS:
It would be 156. I think the idea for the group maybe came about '55, '56. Somewhere in there, I don't know; dates are kind of mixed up. So I talked to Doug about it, and he told me all the pitfalls and how miserable it would be and everything else. So there were six of us meeting at Doug's place. It was Vic Smith, George James, Willie Suzuki, Doug, myself, and I think Ro Zabala. Since it was my idea, I had to sell it to the others. And Doug was against it. I don't know if he thought it was competition or what. Vic couldn't figure out how it would be good for artists to start a gallery. George James was kind of on the fence. So Ro Zabala thought it would be a good idea. So that was two against two with Vic on the fence, and every question that Willie made was just absolutely negative. It was like the worst idea in the world. And so I figured that when I took the vote, I could be Machiavellian enough to include George by putting him right after two positive votes. So I said—I was really forward—"Let's just have a vote. Ro, how do you feel?" And so Ro said yes. And so then George—well, that's two. And so George went, well, what the heck, he'd go along with the majority, which was nonexistent then. And Doug was against it, and then Vic was tentatively against it, but he voted against it. But then I said, "Well, what about you, Willie?" And he said, "Well, I think it's a good idea." I was never so surprised in my life. So that gave us six people who were going to be in it. So we exhibited as a group at a couple of places, and then we decided that we were going to open our gallery. We were quite different in what we did and all, but we were all serious, young, so we each invited to join us someone that we'd worked with, we'd seen. We might not know the person, but we'd have a meeting and see if they'd be interested, and I think that was—Marlyn Prior and Maurice Morales and Maynard Paige, and God, I don't know. Somewhere in there Sandra Coonen, and then we expanded with Joanne Geogleine to dance. And we were kind of getting interested in other things. It started getting larger, and so we decided we were going to find ourselves a space. So we started looking around in different areas for spaces. And from my longshoring days I knew about San Pedro. There was an old district of town that had all moved, and had been the former downtown. And there were all these two-, three-, four-story buildings that were available, and I'd found a really nice one that I really liked. We were looking at all of them, and so I tried to make them keep getting worse and worse and then take them to the one that I liked. And they liked it. To them, it was just as bad as the other ones. And so then there was another one across the street that was really in terrible shape. The door was broken down and winos were sleeping in it; it was just—ecch. It was just basically a flophouse, and it was just filthy—feces, you name it; it was just horrible. And God knows why, but they liked it. [laughter] I mean, the amount of trash and junk and everything else that we took out of that was unbelievable. And we all donated money for the paint and everything else and work, and we somehow cleaned it up. The main room was about a hundred and thirty-five feet long. It's lighting was sky light, and it had an open-beamed ceiling. It was really a nice room. Maurice Morales repaired all the walls and all, and we had two bathrooms, a shower (which we all put in working order), a kitchen, another room for storage, another room for a studio room—so anybody who was there could work, have the studio space, be working while he was in it—and two rooms up in the front. The two rooms up in the front were I would say about 20x40, 42 across or something. And so we put a wall up to hide the doors and all. So Maurice said, "Well, gee, it would be nice if we had just one big gallery space up here in the front, and we could show photographs, we could show other shows and things." Thought it was a good idea, represented a lot of work. He crashed into things, started tearing the thing down. Once we got the thing absolutely immaculate and fixed up—and there was a space downstairs that this guy had never been able to rent and all, so we took over those windows, and we fixed that, and we had a space down there. It was costing us fifty bucks a month, and so we had space down there if somebody wanted another studio space or something. But we kept this window area all fixed up so you could tell what was going on upstairs. So once we did that, the guy tried to sell the building under us, see. And it was really funny. He brought this guy in, and I think this guy was about to buy the building, because he'd shown him the whole thing and everything. And now he had tenants for it and everything else. Until he walked up to the front room, see, and we had this partition behind these two doors. We didn't close off one of the doors; we just left the two doors that were only a foot from each other, and each had opened into a separate room. So we opened—he didn't go himself, and he'd never seen what we'd done to the front, and he said, "And here we have two large rooms." And he opened the door, and the guy looked in and saw this big room. Then he took the next door, and he opened it and said, "Here's the other." And the guy looks into the same room, see. And the guy gave this guy such a look, the real estate man, like "What kind of a fool do you think I am, showing me the same room twice as two rooms?" And he says, "I'm not interested. I don't give a damn about your building." And the guy couldn't understand what's wrong with the guy. The guy starts walking off; the guy's yelling at him, you know. And the day we opened, we opened with a south coast artist, and we opened with all the people that we knew that were painting around from Newport Beach, I think maybe further south, maybe McLaughlin, and then up towards—I guess we only went as far as basically—you had to live adjacent to a kind of beach, and I think we went to Santa Monica. And we had the show, and we got really good publicity; the L.A. Times had about four pictures in it or something. And I guess we had about seventeen hundred people or something the first day of the opening. And someone else from—I forget—Christian Science Monitor or something was coming. We were still just hanging the sign out in front for this, Maurice and I. And I think it was Elyse MacDonald had this person, came in the door. We weren't in a condition to have a show in the front gallery, but we'd ripped out the wall and everything. And she opened the door, and here's this newspaper person behind her. On the wire that I'd had, I'd ripped a big hole in my T-shirt. She said, "Connor, this newspaperman wants to talk to you, interview you." And so I said, "I can't see you right now. Why don't you wait until I change?" So all I did was take my T-shirt and turn it around the other way, but he stood there at the doorway and thought this was an unusual change of habit. But the Exodus Gallery was a good thing, you know. Young artists keep doing it—the Pack in Pasadena is an example of it. And then I guess the Floating Wall was started out that way in Santa Ana. And then there was Inland Empire Gallery in Riverside. It's a good experience. I think it's a necessary experience. I think an alternative's necessary. At the time that we went, started the Exodus Gallery, there was really not much in the way of galleries for younger emerging artists. There were actually only three. Can't think of them—there was one out in the Valley, and we used to always—Jerry Campbell was the guy that had the thing out in the Valley; I can't think of its name. And Ed Kienholz was running Ferus, and myself.Ny And so we'd do whatever we could to seed things, to get things going and all.
PALANKER:
Where does the title come from?
EVERTS:
Exodus? Oh, Christ! You know, any of my ideas never really got across. I may have been the leader of Exodus, but I was continually outvoted. We had to have a name, see. And I thought from my days as a farm boy that Hotbed was a good name for it. A hotbed is basically where you put all this manure and everything, and you put the seedlings and all, and I thought this was the kind of a notion of it and all. I never encountered a name that had as much lack of appeal as that. So we had a meeting at my studio and decided to—well, our group came first, before the gallery. The gallery just took the name of the group. And so we went on and on and on and on, going for hours, and everybody had a pet name, and wouldn't move from their pet name. I forget, all I can remember, I had Hotbed. But we were talking about the fact that we were just beginning, and that we were just going out and all, we had to have some name that implied that, like exodus. And then all of a sudden that seemed to make sense. Since it was really nothing that any of us were committed to, it just came as part of a discussion rather than being anybody's baby. So all of a sudden that's what we became: Exodus. And I will say this about the gallery: we put on shows that basically no one else was interested in. Everything was paid for by us. When we had someone's exhibition, they didn't pay for the mailing; they didn't pay for anything. We underwrote the whole damn thing. It wasn't to make a showcase for ourselves; it was basically to help the art scene in Los Angeles, to make it broader. We would have reject shows from the County Museum. We had the first drawing show in Los Angeles. We had an annual. We scrounged around to get money, and then we donated the winning drawings to the County Museum of Art. We had a collage show. So we did a lot of things. We had the first big Kienholz show, as close to a retrospective as Ed ever had, until he had maybe the L.A. County show. And when Wally Barman's show was broken down—I think we spoke about that before, didn't I?
PALANKER:
I don't think so.
EVERTS:
Well, at Ferus, Wally Berman had a show. And the show was closed by the police, and Chico—Walter Hopps—didn't want to really pursue it and, God, I recall, maybe pleaded guilty or something so that there wouldn't be any more hassle or anything. I was upset; Ed was upset, Ed Kienholz; Gerry Nordland was upset. So we figured that we should have the paintings down at Exodus. And one of the things that I was doing was a show of the prints of Immaculate Heart, because silk screen wasn't thought of as being a very creative thing, and this was an interesting thing in that people exchange screens and there was a kind of a religious revival. It was kind of an offbeat enough thing to do. And so I thought this would be the perfect time to have the Berman show because Berman's show was a very religious show, I thought, in nature and all, and that the juxtaposition of the two would be very good. Wally's show was very small, wasn't a large show, because the Ferus Gallery was a small gallery, so it fit nicely into our front gallery. And then we put all the other things into the back gallery, into the large, main gallery. And we tried to do this. We tried to do things of this nature. So I cornered the guy who was head of Artists Equity at that time. Artists Equity was just about to die, I think, at that time. But I went over and got a hold of them and said that I wanted them to come over and look at the show, and that they really had to support art if they were going to have any credibility in L.A. as an organization offering—and he was a reasonable guy; I think his name was J. Patrick MacLean or something. He used orange and blue together, and if you can trust a man who uses predominantly orange and blue in a painting, I guess, in all of his paintings, I guess: that's a risk. So that he said he was going to be supportive. And then I contacted a person in American Civil Liberties Union, so I figured that if anything happened, we were ready for it, at least. And we talked about it in our group, the Exodus group, because anything that happened in the group, anything that was shown and all, we all did it. We all took turns sitting in the gallery. We did everything. We shared the costs, so all the decisions were shared also. The only control I really had was basically the agenda. So we had the show. Not a damn thing happened. A lot of people who hadn't seen the show in L.A. or something came and saw it. But nothing. We didn't get any trouble, any heat, or anything else. Another time we had the Ed Kienholz show, had Ed in the main gallery and had a man by the name of Emmet Hoskins in the front gallery. Emmet Hoskins was an old man who'd fallen from the mast of a ship, and in the accident he lost his ability to speak. And so he became an artist. But he was a primitive. He did all these things, the watercolors of ships, sailing ships and all, and they were really pretty neat. And at that opening, Ed had his mulled wine. So we had these two crowds, and one crowd couldn't understand the other crowd. And that was basically the nature of all these people coming down to see Ed's work, this real avant-garde thing, the West L.A.-Brentwood thing. And then the people who'd worked in the harbor and old retired sea captains, that stuff, came down to see Emmet Hoskins's things. Just divergent groups. Ed used to be around a lot, because we had a lot of secondhand stores and things. He used to go down and shop. And then across the way, we had El Subarino bar, which was a Chicano bar, which was really a neat place to go, nothing but Mexican—then on hot days I used to go over there—Maurice and I or somebody would go over and drink beer and watch the front of the stairs. We could see anyone who'd go up, so you could always just set in a little more comfortable environment if you didn't feel like painting or something. We offered classes to help pay for the thing, and we'd all take turns teaching painting or drawing classes. We had life classes, and we had dance classes; Joanne did dance recitals and things. We would let the place be used by someone who couldn't find another place for their activity. There was a lot of Trotskyites in the San Pedro area. There was a Wobbly information area up the street, too—IWW. There was a lot of strange groups and all. So they couldn't get a place to give this fund raiser for Morton Sobell—he was a person who'd been kind of illegally brought back to the United States during the fifties; they wanted to raise some money. So it ended up that Vic Smith—it was his turn to represent the gallery at any one of these things, to open up and everything else. Vic's a kind of an esoteric guy, who once said that—we had gotten into a big argument at one of our meetings because he said he took as much pleasure from a new fly in his kitchen as any human being. And I felt that that was a little pretentious because he didn't marry a fly. And he didn't develop any real relationships with flies. And I've even had buttons and not even a zipper on his fly. But it was his night there, and so he opened up and introduced and all, and so they got on about all this terrible hardship and all on Morton Sobell, unjustly locked in prison and all. It was a kind of an open meeting, and so Vic said, "Well, you know, the right type of person could get a lot out of prison. There's a time for introspection." And he went on, and he talked about all these people who spent time in prison. [laughter] I really heard from the people who'd gotten the hall? I'd tried to sabotage their fund raising. I wasn't tremendously interested one way or another? we were apolitical as a group because we were really diverse in our feelings and all, and I wouldn't take any kind of stand on it. I mean, if the John Birch Society wanted to use our place, they could have used it. Because we were basically interested in minority positions, aesthetically or anything else. But I realized that Vic was probably limiting the number of their donations that night. But I think that the fact that out of our original six that—oh, Ray Butcher was another person that came in later, a very good realist now. But even just out of our original six: Willie's still active as a printmaker (he's a lithographer now)? Vic's a very good, underrated painter George James is a good painter that does well in Europe and all as a realist? I'm still hacking away. Two of them, I don't think are doing much work now. One is Ro Zabala, who is assistant director, or whatever they call it, at Barnsdall Park. And Doug MacFadden is the chairman of an art department at a junior college. So only two out of the original six dropped by the wayside, and that's a pretty good percentage. The art scene at the time was meager; God, it was poor. The other gallery activities—what else did we do? Well, we showed. A lot of people can look at this time and they can think that, oh, God, look at what you were doing, what you were showing. Well, we were like Ferus. Ferus was basically interested in showing a particular attitude, and we were more or less interested in showing a broader attitude. We showed photography. And you have to remember that Ferus also showed Hilda Levy, and, you know, I could name a lot of names that you'd probably look at the work and wonder how, but times were different then, and the judgment has to be made at what was going on at that particular time. And we also showed when there seemed to be a coherence, when something seemed to be happening, because we felt that we got a lot of people from schools and things. So that when John Paul Jones had such a big influence, and there were some really good people—
PALANKER:
We're out of tape; let me change it.

1.8. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE TWO FEBRUARY 2, 1976

EVERTS:
Well, under John Paul Jones, there were a group of people who were working. It included James McGarrell, Louis Lunetta, Dave Glines, Ray Brown; that's just a few of them that immediately come to mind because they used to come around the gallery and I got to know them. They were doing really very, very competent work in prints. So we had a show. I think we called it the UCLA workshop or something, because these people were doing very individual work. And I think the work that they were doing changed to a degree the type of work that John Paul Jones was doing. I mean, he was doing very kind of funny, cubistic, geometric things when he came out from Iowa, and these people had softer ideas and all—instead of their work going towards Jacques Villon, which was kind of the thing that Jones was interested in at the time. There was a metamorphosis, and, you know, it was nice to see. And so we felt that that was of interest to see. People had been seen individually, but they hadn't seen the lesser lights in all the things, and if you'd been in print shows at the time, you would have seen some of these names and all. So we did that show. Remember that when the L.A. County show was going on, the people who were getting rejected were the people like Kienholz and [Billy Al] Bengston, and Bengston was at this period of time doing kind of loose, figurative things. I can remember something called—oh, what was it?—Nympho Mama, or something like that. Just a terrible painting. I don't think Billy Al, or Moontang, as he called himself then, would ever admit to have painted that particular bomb, but I mean sometimes when people talk about what was being done at that period of time, they don't really realize what it was that some of the younger artists who were hanging around at that time were doing. John Altoon was rejected at that period of time; when we did the drawing show, we had a beautiful show that ranged from John Altoon, and Rico Lebrun was in it and Dick Ruben and all, and it gave drawing a little bit of prominence. It was an attempt to break up the hierarchy for people that basically see that each medium had something to be respected for, and looked at, and had an intrinsic value; and that one wasn't more important than the other. Well, I guess, [Richard Horton] Campbell and Ed and I basically, because the most central location was Ferus, we'd go there. But La Cienega was just starting to be the gallery row then, and there was a tendency to go up and look at art, much more then; it was a lot more convenient, perhaps. And Ferus was the only place that had any sense of excitement on the street. Landau was in existence then. Esther Robles had just stopped being Esther's Alley Gallery. Ed Primus was just into pre-Columbian art. Harry Franklin was there. Jake Zeitlin had his little gallery. Let's see, who else was in existence? God, they're always coming and going. Several would be open just for a brief time, and Ferus had—what?—three different galleries on the row. There was a back room to Ferus, and Ed was making his little relief collages then, the things that had that kind of Germanic look to them, using those ugly—at that time they seemed ugly; now they seem so kind of neutral and soft and kind now—those ugly cheap enamels from the dime store or something was what he was painting on top of them and all, frantically nailing these things together and painting over them and coming up with something that approximated mud. We traded for something; I got something. And you were more understanding then. He had this show, and I picked this one piece, and then Vincent Price wanted to buy it, so there was no question that Vincent Price would get to buy it. Ed asked me, because a trade's a trade. So I ended up with something called Tick in a Feather Bed, but I had a chance at Leda and the Canadian Honker, and George Washington in Drag, and a whole bunch of things. But we put together a very nice show of Ed's down at Exodus; it was really a nice show. And we were lucky in terms of bringing the critics down at the time. It was at that time that I met Gerry Nordland, and I would say that he was the first critic that ever got together with artists to basically talk about what they thought the role of the critic was, instead of asking critics what they felt their role was about. He did a lot of talking with artists and all, and I think he's always been a very much artist-oriented critic. At the time, Arthur Millier was critic for the L.A. Times. He'd been an etcher, competent man in his area, and he became a very capable drinker and critic. And he was a man that really loved art. I mean, I think it's because of his background in it, that he did it himself. He would come in—and we had no parking, so you had to put pennies in the meter, and he'd always get a ticket. He'd come up, and we'd try to keep watch and run down and put something in for him. Or maybe he'd bring his wife from Los Angeles, and she'd come up and be up for a minute or two and then go down, and then come to the bottom of the stairs and yell for him to leave or something. But he never left until he'd looked at each piece, and he took time looking at it. He had a sort of policy that if he couldn't say anything at all constructive about a show or something, he wouldn't review it. And I don't know if I mentioned about the time that this guy entered all these different pieces?
PALANKER:
No.
EVERTS:
Well, there was a fellow—oh, gosh, I don't know if I could recall his name. Somehow it seems like it was Pollack or something. He never got into the County [Museum] show, exhibition, and he felt that the whole damn thing was rigged. So he entered seventeen different works or something, painted in all the different styles that he could imagine, from nonobjective to realism, or something, see, and when all seventeen were rejected, he knew that the whole ball of wax was rigged. So he wrote this letter to the Times saying that there's a lot of hanky-panky or something going on, because he painted these seventeen different paintings and all, and that he was going to exhibit them at the Coronet-Louvre—that was that foreign film theater, and it had a little lobby gallery or something, so—not much merit. So Millier went over there to do the review, and it was the only really unfavorable review I ever read by him. And he just lays it on the line that the real reason why all seventeen things were rejected was that they were all equally bad. And that's the only unkind one. When he went on vacations or something, Jules Langsner would fill in for him. I always felt that Jules was one of the more thoughtful critics in Los Angeles, and I think the early age that he died was unfortunate for the L.A. scene, though he never had the prominent role that I think he might have deserved. He wrote the little Los Angeles columns for Art News, or something else. He was a thoughtful critic. I think he was a more penetrating critic than Millier. Millier was basically one of love. Basically, he just liked art, anyway. He talked from that position; he didn't talk from a critical position. We also had at this time Jack—what was Jack's name? He was the guy that always wanted to be a sportswriter. He wrote for the Examiner; the Examiner was never heavy in [art]. But at least he'd ask you what it was that the artist was trying to do. I mean, much of what he wrote was basically that of a reporter. He interviewed you as to intent, and he got the number of pictures, and where the person was from, and what the hours were, and all that kind of stuff. And he would have rather been around athletes, but artists—some artists did drink, and that wasn't too bad. And they didn't seem to be terribly presumptuous. Ken Ross, who is now the head of the city art department, was the art critic for the Los Angeles News; this was before the Times created the Mirror; it absorbed the Daily News, became the Mirror-News, and I think the first critic was Alma May Cook for the Mirror. I don't know how interested Alma May was. There was a young girl writing for, what was it? The Canyon Crier. What was her name? Cathy—I'm terrible with names. She was really quite good. You know, there wasn't anyplace for a critic to go. Gerry Nordland was writing for Frontier magazine; he ended up being a critic for the Mirror-News—or the Mirror, I guess, at this point. But there wasn't any up, there wasn't really anything. Henry Seldis was brought from Santa Barbara to be the critic to replace Arthur Millier, and he went over and after his retirement, I think he became critic for a while for the Examiner again, after Jack Massard. Was that his name? I don't know if he went to the sports page or what. Baseball heaven. I don't know what happened to him. Let's see, who else was writing? Criticism was never given much importance. I asked Arthur one time why they didn't increase the amount of space in the Times, and you know, Times circulation was so large that the increase—there wasn't much revenue in terms of advertising. It was like a public service. And if you added a page, you know, in the Sunday edition, that was like a whole other roll of paper or something, and cost analysis would never sit still for something as unproductive as the art page. So we do quite well to have that little thing that's called "Art News," or something, along with the review on Sundays. Jules Langsner, I would say, during that period of time, was the one that most—oh, Pasadena Star-News had a critic; was that Jarvis Barlow? There were two—there was a guy that was head of the Pasadena Art Museum, and they both had names that were kind of like Jarvis Barlow and Marvis Garnison, or something like that. I'm terrible with names. Let's see, what else happened during that period of time? Oh, Art News was about the only organ that had anything. The Arts magazine came to the fore a little bit later. At that time I think it was combined with some other kind of art activity. Art News had a series of things called "The Artist Paints a Painting," and they would have a prominent artist do a painting. I think the last thing they ever did in that line was "Michael Goldberg Paints a Painting." I never had a particular fondness for Michael Goldberg's work. And he painted one of his particularly bad paintings, and I think that ended that whole series. I wasn't a close follower of Art News, because they would have made Archipenko seem eloquent; you could recognize every word,, but the texture of it was incomprehensible. After you understood what it was they said you didn't know what it was they meant. And it was horrible. So at least the "Artist Paints a Painting" thing was a bit better. I was at Ferus when Art News came out, and they were going to have Dick Diebenkorn paint a painting. Ed was there, and I think—oh, who else was there? I don't know, some of the lights were there, at least. And so all of a sudden here is Diebenkorn, and he's painting, you know, he's painting one of his San Francisco figurative paintings. He'd been doing those kind of lyrical abstractions before, and they open it, and he's painting the wrong painting. And so I think the thing was that it really took guts to change his style to do this thing and all. It was really kind of funny because here were a group of artists who were avant-garde artists of Southern California, and here they were, expecting someone to do the expected. When he moved from them, they decided that was gutsy, and it seemed like it would be the normal thing to do, what you'd chose to do rather than what someone expected of you. I don't know—let's see. I think that's about all of it that I can really remember about the period of time. What is it, twenty years ago? Probably later if we talk I'll be able to refer back to things, but there was a tremendous amount of camaraderie. There were so few artists then that the Ferus Gallery used to play hide-and-go-seek. I forget which park it was. But it was kind of fun and games, and it was just an attempt to get artists together and develop some sense of community because there were so few artists at the time. I used to have a football game every year. Two teams of artists would get together and we'd play football and all. There are some artists who are athletically orientated, and some artists who aren't. I can remember one football game that was kind of amusing to me. First play in the game, Willie Suzuki hiked the ball, and Maurice Morales knocked him unconscious. [laughter] That slowed up the game that year. Ed Kienholz, who made a relatively chubby end—we found out that he couldn't catch a ball, that he had, I'm afraid, some kind of problem with depth perception. And then Mel Edwards, who is living in New York now—fine sculptor—he played ball for USC, and these games would not have the normal quarters, halves, or anything like that. We'd just play until we decided that—and then we might drink at half time, and that would shorten or lengthen the second half. But he would always plan it so he would arrive fresh when everybody else was tired. And he always ended up being this phenomenal star, because everybody else would have played half a game, and he would come on, you know. And he was a very good player anyway; he was probably the most talented one. But I mean, nobody would get near him. But then his own quarterback would be so tired that he couldn't throw the ball that far. But these were all things that we did to develop some sense of community. I know that this was again something I mentioned before. This was a time when a lot of the people were leaving and going to New York or going somewhere else. This was also the time at the beginning of Venice. (I probably am the least successful person in making a point.) Venice was available and San Pedro was available. I think that Venice didn't smell from the canneries. Venice was a little closer to the art scene in Los Angeles and all, but there were some beautiful studios available in San Pedro that no one took advantage of; of course, now the buildings are destroyed and all. Of course many of the buildings that were studios in Venice have also been destroyed. Joe Funk had a beautiful press, a place there that was just beautiful, and they tore it down and replaced it with a parking lot. I don't know what they needed the parking for because it was flanked, as I recall, on both sides by a parking lot. But that was the nature of urban renewal, and that was the nature of getting a lot of people who were undesirable out of the area. And at that time, the undesirable were basically artists. Artists hold a better position now than they did then. I mean, artists—this is also at the time of the beat—this was the beat time, the beat thing. I think the only artist that had a strong orientation toward the beat poets and all was basically Wally Berman, who was with—I can't think of the guy's name. They had a little printshop, and they were printing poetry, and they released this thing called Semina, which Wally put out, that had collections of poetry and things. And then Stu Perkoff thought of himself as a bit of an artist. So Lawrence Lipton was over there, and they had their coffeehouse and everything. In fact, even there was a coffeehouse established in that space below our place. This was the time of the coffeehouses. This was also the time that Los Angeles Magazine was getting started. This was the time that, I think, maybe Los Angeles was getting a sense of itself. This was a time when Ed Kienholz could have gone back to New York very easily and made a reputation for himself, but decided to rent a trailer and pull his stuff back for a show and return. I don't know if it was a one- or a two-way trailer. A lot of artists were thought of as being with the beat because some artists had beards at that time, and so all of a sudden there was a reason to equate the two. I know as a longshoreman I always had a beard, a goatee, or something on my face, and this person I'd known for a long time called me a beatnik and all, and I said, "We've longshored off and on together for a long time. You know, before the beatniks came along, I had a beard, and you never thought anything of it. And now all of a sudden the beatniks come along, and you're able to call me a beatnik. Where's the sense in that?" And the beatniks had a certain very strong anti-establishment attitude, where I think the artists who were practicing at that time didn't have an anti-establishment attitude. They weren't even concerned with the environment. They weren't concerned with the rewards of the establishment. They just wanted to be painters. If it meant doing this, this, and this; if it meant driving a truck; if it meant running a gallery; whatever it meant, they did that. Whereas I think the beat generation was a little more pretentious, because they wanted attention. They were defensive about their values and all, and so they renounced the other values, whereas I think most of the artists just weren't even concerned with that sort of public scene. The beats were very interested in publicity, you know. They were very interested in newspaper articles and all. But the low esteem of artists was—and I don't think we mentioned this on tape. One time at a Brentwood party where Ed Kienholz and myself and Emerson Woelffer was there, and we were talking about times before and all, and I remarked that we had been invited because basically we were artists. And I said, "Ed, remember a few years ago that these people wouldn't have had us in their homes because they were afraid that we would have shit on the floor. Now they invite us, hoping that we will." And you know, this was a time when people did invite these people to their—they were rather pretentious times. Self-awareness, I guess, would be better. People would have parties, and they would invite a black because they were black. They would invite a beatnik because he was a beatnik, you know, and that might be the thing that they were invited around, this oddity that they had at their party and all. And I think for the most part artists had a tendency to not go to these parties, even though they had unlimited amounts of scotch and things that one might not have the money to purchase (or at least such good quality or something). But this particular party was a party that was given by collectors and all, so there were some people that we might enjoy talking to, being there. I think that's just about it.

1.9. TAPE NUMBER:: V, SIDE ONE MARCH 8, 1976

EVERTS:
Okay. Exodus. See, the active members, the most active members would have been Vic Smith, Doug MacFadden, Maurice Morales, Willie Suzuki, George James, Ray Dutcher, Marlyn Prior, and myself. About this time, Willie Suzuki, George James, and Maurice Morales went into the service. That left us a little low on active personnel. Let's see, Willie was in Germany, and George was in nearby Fort Huachuca, Arizona. But we'd operated as a group, I guess, for a couple of years, two years, and I was about to leave for Chile. Henry Niska was then taking charge of the gallery, and much of the original drive, because three of the original six were now in the—no, Maurice wasn't one of the original six, but George and Willie were. So there was kind of approval of the idea that we'd just sort of let it die a death, with all of this going on. Sandra Coonen, another member, was going on to Mexico. So I would have said—this was 1959—that Exodus suffered its demise just basically because we'd more or less started going our independent ways. Vic was down in Orange County, and we were quite distant from each other—in a geographical sense, not so much in the emotional sense. A friend of mine by the name of Claudio Veliz Soza—he's a historian who I'd known at the London School of Economics and [who] served as American correspondent for a paper, the English equivalent would have been the Spectator—asked me to come down to Chile, so I decided that I would take him up on it. This was, I guess, 1959; I don't know just where in 1959 it was. But I packed off and left for Chile. I flew down to Panama and then took an Italian Line ship, El Barco Marco Polo, which was a disastrous kind of ship. It had been a troop carrier for the Italian navy, and it had been sunk at Leghorn in I think 1940 and then hadn't been refloated until 1946 or something. And it really hadn't been outfitted with what I would consider the best—well, it was practically troopship quality. It was designed for, I think, taking Italian immigrants to South America, particularly the west coast of South America. But on it, I had the wonder of seeing my first and only Elvis Presley movie, which was crossing the equator in the rain, and Elvis Presley in Italian. And Peru was a nice moment, because it was the first opportunity that I had to see another aspect of pre-Columbian culture, which I said had a great deal of interest to me. So I was able to go to Cuzco and Machu Picchu, and of course the fantas-tic exhibits of Incan and Chilean assorted pottery in Lima. They're all exhibited in vertically rectangular glass cages, and there's a fantastic collection of skulls. The crushed skull was the most prevalent injury in the civil wars of the Incas, and it showed how they replaced the skull and all, and actually did what I imagine would be equivalent to brain surgery and skull repair. And the growth of the bone and all showed that the operation was a success, and this was in pre-Columbian time. And I saw also what remained of some of the weavings and all, and I was very much impressed by the surface decoration of the pottery. We put in Callao, which is the port for Lima, and had a graveyard of naval ships. You know, in South America there was always quite a rivalry between the naval prowess of Chile and Peru, and so you could go into Callao Harbor, and you could see nineteenth-century ships up to the most recent kind of destroyer escorts and things that they'd bought from the British and American navy. It was just an absolute graveyard of these ships; it was quite eerie. Lima itself, which probably has the best examples of colonial architecture on the west coast of South America, but it was so impoverished in comparison to Spain and Guatemala and all. The area itself—you get these fantastic visions of how things work. I think visual people do. They read about a country, and they see that it's so beautiful and all—and of course around Machu Picchu and all it was, but down by Lima you could see the tracery of a previous civilization, and how, through neglect, it faded in the desert and all, that the roads that had once existed. I think I became very interested in the Inca social system, which was quite advanced. And I remember remembering on Reagan's reign in California, his ability and desire to punish those people on welfare, and that the Incas worked on a really strong case of noblesse oblige: that if there was grain in the granary which was held for the people in common by the Inca, that if someone stole from the granary, first it was decided if he stole out of greed or avarice, and if so he was punished. If he stole because he was hungry, then the administrator was punished, because no person should go hungry if there was grain available. And that always seemed to me to be fairly enlightened. I then finally reached Chile. It was of course good to see my friend again, and it was quite a different thing. I'd been working as a longshoreman in the United States, and I arrived in Chile and there was an article in the paper about my arrival. And I met—Salvador Allende had just lost an attempt at president, for the presidency, against [Jorge] Alissandre—Allende, and started going to shadow cabinet meetings, and it was quite a different role from what I played. The art scene—and I think this is the thing that I always notice (the first really strong impression, of course, was when I was in Europe), the validity of American art. And the international scope of American art: to see the Chileans imitating abstract expressionism, or to see the Brazilians or the Argentines imitating abstract expressionism a few years behind the case, and also to see it done so poorly. I think being an American, you have a sense that it wasn't a very difficult thing to do, because the gesture was really a very natural movement for Americans and very much naturally related to the American way of taking space, the availability of space. And then to encounter just as much availability of space in Latin America, specifically in South America, but not at all having that sense of space and the perhaps social ability to it. I mean, the society in South America was much more restricted than it was in the United States or Canada. Also, there wasn't the abject nationalism that existed in Mexico, that produced an art related to its revolution and all, the fact that a party—or even several parties, in Mexico, and even a party that's a total sham—should reconsider itself a revolutionary party, and they still relate to that, and of course their art is related to that, and their art is basically very public. In Chile, I found a country—and you know, we're always bound by our past experiences—with no mestizo population. The Chileans, or the Spaniards, treated the Indians in a very cavalier attitude, almost the same as the Americans treated the Indians. And the Araucanian Indians in the south were the last to be conquered, and all, and they stayed pretty independent, and maintain themselves, to this day, largely a decimated population, whereas you see a mestizo population in Peru, with the existence of the epicanthic fold, and that beautiful hooked nose and all, mixed with the European blood. You see basically European types in Chile. You see people referring to basically being of French or English or German or Yugoslav or some other kind of background, maintaining basically a French school, English school, or something, to maintain some of these ties with something that may have passed two or three generations before, something that wouldn't be prevalent in the United States and would be only for the first-generation people in, perhaps, Mexico. The art scene was basically very tame in Santiago. They had the Bellas Artes—the museum there, in the park, El Parque Forestal—[which] was basically, oh, I would say, a mix of originals and reproductions. There would be a Rembrandt painting that someone had made of a Rembrandt, and there would be an actual Rembrandt. They had some nice indigenous things, but they were rather ashamed of them. They had some things from the Inca period, but very poorly displayed, no sense of a respect for pre-Columbian art. They were still caught in a beaux arts attitude towards teaching. Only there was some folk art going on at a place called Quinchimali. And what was the name of the other place? [Pomaire] The name escapes me now, but what would be equivalent to Oaxaca-type pottery in Mexico was being done in this little area, and it was only now being recognized by the government that it had any sort of importance. Whereas in Lima, in their museum of modern art—they had a true museum of modern art—they were trying to promote contemporary art, and at the same time, in this art, they were showing to very good advantage their indigenous arts, their popular arts, and all. Chile, I think, because of its European attitude and all, had more or less neglected this. You would think that you were in perhaps Madrid or some European city, rather than—it was a quite cosmopolitan city. It's the only city in the world that I've ever gone where I've known a certain number of people, and have been able to go downtown in a city of a million-plus people and always run into someone I knew. It was a phenomenon that never really happened to me in London, never happened to me in Mexico City, Los Angeles, San Francisco: you name it; I've never had that occur. But the commerce was all stratified in one section of town so you could go in this section of town and you'd simply bump into someone you knew. The Chileans have pride in perhaps only one thing, really, and that's the quality of their thieves. They're very proud of the quality of their pickpockets, and Chilean pickpockets have international reknown. There's an independence in the people there; there are all these children that take advantage of the fact that, you know, both rich and poor are entitled to sleep under bridges. And they leave the orphanages when the weather is good, and they run off, and they live quite an independent life in what I would say were the first children's communes. There are oppressive mushroom villages, people who were from rural areas who were more or less tenant farmers, who were kind of discouraged or run off the land by people who bought the land to more or less stabilize their wealth against the tremendous inflation rate. And there was a high crime rate there, high illiteracy rate, high rate of syphilis, so that you would see congenital deformities in terms of the frontal lobes and things, and other characteristic—nose high, and the lip—it's very strange that none of this ever occurred in the art, that none of this—which would have been so vital, perhaps, to Mexican art—that none of it occurred. There was no feeling of any strength at all, or any attention paid at all to Matta, Roberto Matta, the Chilean artist. No one would know his name. Gabriela Mistral and [Pablo] Neruda and the other poets—there was tremendous respect for poets. There was a big attempt to publish good-looking stamps; I don't think they were particularly successful at it, but there was an attempt. There was an attempt to bring up to a certain level the quality of the advertisements, you know, in magazines and things. It wasn't terribly successful. There was an intelligentsia. It was quite small; you could know and meet everyone in it. I met Neruda when I was there; he was at a place in El Quisco, southern part. El Quisco was kind of a socialist enclave that was—everybody went to their own beaches. I unfortunately, somewhere along the line, picked up pneumonia, which slowed me down a bit in terms of my work. But I did mostly drawing. It was the only time in my life where I went anywhere and returned with absolutely nothing I sold everything that I did down there. And I think it was one of the cases where, since I was a foreigner, that meant that my art had more value. Since it wasn't Chilean they had a tendency to discount Chileans. The checks were phenomenal, because I think the rate of exchange was about 140 to 1, so when they wrote out a check it had a lot of zeros on it. It was really pretty impressive. Claudio gave me a party after I'd done a little bit of work, and so the people came over to see it and all, and the people would ask me if it would be perhaps possible to buy one of the things. I'd never had a question like that asked me before. [phone rings? tape recorder turned off] I think basically not only the incidence of pneumonia and all was limiting? I think I'm basically always limited when I move to a new locale. I'm very much affected by the quality of the light and the pace and things, and it takes me a while to get into the work. Even though I don't do anything truly in relationship to the environment that I'm involved in, the environment does have its influences. And walking around trying to find a studio with southern exposure was a different sort of thing to look to after having an orientation of always looking for northern light, and all of a sudden to go and start looking for southern light was something a little bit new. The exposure to a different sky, you know, at night, a different star system—all those things are a little—strangely, we don't think of it, but it's disorientating. Perhaps most people don't in a major city; and like Los Angeles, which is such a vast repository of artificial light, you don't really see much of the sky. But in other cities, you do see sky, and if you do much backpacking or anything else, you see a hell of a lot of sky. And so perhaps you don't know all the constellations and things, but they are recorded in your mind, and they do have a familiarity. And all of a sudden to look at that sky and not see any of the familiar constellations up there—it's pretty startling. It's easy to see the sky in Santiago. It's not a heavily lit city, you know; it's not a city with a lot of candle power. And I spent quite a bit of time near the sea. The experience also is that so much of it is familiar in terms of flora and fauna and all. The idea that old California is just Chile kind of in reverse, from what would be the deserts of Baja California, working on up to a fjord-type environment that you would get on into southeast Alaska or something, you know, it isn't unreasonable that places in Alaska should have names like Valdez and Cordova—some of these things—because the Spaniards were there very early. Looking at the foothills, at times, would be like looking at the Santa Monica Mountains. I would see familiar cactus and things, and also reclamation, which had planted eucalyptus trees, and eucalyptus trees are certainly familiar to Californians and unnatural to both California and Chile. But to see all these things—the vineyards—and yet to have a completely different culture rise out of it was impressive. And I think one of the things that we probably forget is that art isn't about art; it's about everything else. And so these things may not have much to do with an art scene, but they're part of the things that I work from. I think that seeing politics very close to the machinations of the workings of a senate, on a very small scale, you know—the population of Chile was less than the population of California, and yet it had a foreign policy—not a terribly independent foreign policy, but it did have a foreign policy. And it did have a cultural exchange with China. And when they said China, they meant that vastness on the mainland, and not Formosa. (Of course, about that period of time, we did have a foreign policy ourselves. We had a senator, Mr. [William] Knowland, who was from Formosa; at least, he was referred to as the senator from Formosa. So I guess California did have a foreign policy.) But to see a country not at all in control of its own destiny, to see American decisions, to see the shortsightedness of Americans, where there was a display (I may have mentioned this) in the United States Information Service about the goodness of America, the United States being America: that you could get a garbage disposal unit for one day's wages, while it would take you six weeks to earn that much money in the Soviet Union, and then one wouldn't even be available. Now, this was in a country where existed the world's largest nitrate deposits in the north, and yet [where] they were using night soil to fertilize the crops in the south. They were talking to them about the garbage disposal unit—to completely neglect the fantastic thing, it seems to me, when you go to foreign countries: the American educational system, the fact that we have adult education, that we have the community colleges. All these things are completely ignored. But when you get to a country that doesn't have complete literacy, and they have a high illiteracy rate. You know, we were always at the wrong end of the stick. We were always telling things that made no sense at all to the people. Talking about the problems of automation (which was just coming into the fore in the states) in a country that had a labor surplus was shortsighted. To talk about gang-plowing in an area that was still using horses with a wooden plowshare where a steel plowshare would have been more important—these things, all of a sudden, make you aware of yourself and the things that you think are natural, and that (you think) everybody thinks that way. I think one of the most amazing things to me was to go to Chile and see how inadequate their distribution system was, of getting their foodstuffs to market and all. To look at that and all of a sudden immediately realize that the strongest American quality—and I think of myself as a real meshugana—that really the strongest American quality is a sense of organization. I would say I'm one of the least organized people around, I have ingrained in me, through just living in this environment, an ability to organize, an ability to make flow charts. [laughter] I had to do these things! And to look and say, "Good God, all you have to do is this, this, and this"! looking and seeing, the ability to see what is exploitable within a country, to see the things that have a certain measure of uniqueness and all and that they're not taking advantage of. Chileans, as I said, were proud of their pickpockets. But there are two places. There is San Cristobal, which is the large hill in Santiago, which has a funicular that goes up the side with the zoo. You can go up and walk down the hill to the zoo, and then there's a large cross up on the top of the hill and a restaurant and things, and a beautiful view of the valley and of Santiago itself And then also there's Santa Lucia, which was a garbage dump in the center of town, and the mayor of the town created some balustrades and all and created this kind of little park environment which is quite charming, nineteenth-century sort of thing, turn-of-the-century thing in the middle of town. And you mention the charm of these places, and then the person will say, "Well, surely, you haven't seen Montevideo," or "you haven't seen Rio." They're the least nationalistic people I've encountered. The arcades they have through the buildings—every building, you could pass through the building so you don' have to walk around the block to get to another street. And the shopping arcades that are there—at that period of time the films weren't one theater; there were three or four showings going on. They had that at that time there, which was a very European concept. Also they had the fact that if you wanted, there were very few continuous theaters. They felt that since all films in Chile were foreign, that the person had a sense of beginning and end to his film, so that you should respect that So the film was shown in its entirety, and then there would be a break of an hour or two. So you would buy a ticket for a showing, and you'd have to get there for that showing so you could see it from beginning and end, which is quite civilized. The Rank Organization and MGM started dubbing their films, and the Chilean people wouldn't go to those films. They didn't want any dubbing; they wanted the sound of the language and the voices and to read the subtitles. I felt that was really pretty good. One of my experiences on El Barco Marco Polo was to see an Edward G. Robinson film—I don't know what it was; it was kind of surreal in concept—about a detective, or district attorney that he played, and here it was all in Italian; it was all dubbed in Italian. And Edward G. Robinson sounded much like Liberace, which rather killed the film. Even if I hadn't spoken English, I would have rather not been able to understand the language and had trouble with the subtitles than—it was atrocious. It was really bad, sitting there, listening to Liberace-Robinson speaking Italian, and reading Spanish subtitles. I think artwise not really much happened. I went back again. I went around South America and visited Brasilia, which was still being worked on. I took a train to Mendoza and all, and over to Buenos Aires and Montevideo, and so I got around. I got around the continent and all, but I think the most really meaningful place I saw was basically Peru. The art scene in Sao Paulo is much more intense than in Rio. There's a quite active contemporary art scene in both Brazil and Argentina. It's the strongest, I would say, in all of Latin America, much stronger than you'd encounter in Mexico, as I said, because of its more nationalistic attitudes. And strangely enough, the strongest artists in both Argentina and Brazil were the Brazilian-Japanese artist and the Argentine-Japanese artist. I mean, it seemed to me that they were creating some sort of art that was unique from the contemporary art they may have produced in Japan, if they'd remained there, and independent from the art that I would say was basically Brazilian or Argentine. And it seemed that they were creating a nucleus, a new growth that created a more independent Argentine and Brazilian art. Of course, a tremendous amount of the building in Argentina, architecture in Argentina was rather boring, kind of fascist modern. The architecture in Brazil was a hell of a lot better, contemporary and also colonial. And I think that some of the Belem and Manaus and some of that architecture was really quite interesting. Sao Paulo had such a growth that it was like Mexico City: it was destroyed. It was destroying to create, much as Los Angeles. It was eating its own history. I returned. I would say that was basically the main import. There was nothing that happened in my work that was of any significance, I think, in Chile. It was just trying to get back to work, and it was basically of interest. It certainly made, after going around and seeing, say, like Lima—Lima would be the only country on the west coast of South America that had anything that looked like an art scene. But I would say that Los Angeles, at that time, looked very active in comparison to, say, Rio, Buenos Aires, and Lima. So when I returned, basically what lay ahead of me was a one-man show at the Pasadena Art Museum. And so I leased the old Exodus gallery, which was defunct but clean, and started painting. See, this was about the time that I also gave up longshoring, so this would bring us back—let's see, my show was in April of 1960, so I would have at least gotten home before Thanksgiving, I guess, somewhere in there. Let's see, now I'll get to sort of reconstruct what was happening. I got all balled, and flashing through my mind were all sorts of friends and things that I'd made in South America. I guess I should mention in passing that I became very close to Dr. Salvador Allende, that we spent a lot of time together. He was a very busy man, but I mean he always—that's another nice thing, that people had time for the friends; it was a much more relaxed attitude. There was the fact that they still respected the siesta in Santiago, though there was no real reason for it, so that you had a split day, so that you had that time in the early afternoon that you entertained your friends and all; you had approximately three hours. You dined at ten in the evening and all, and so that really made the time for friends. And that would be the period of time, and then, of course, the summer was really a respected thing in the European tradition of things that would be closed. Santiago itself was almost vacated during the summer. Coming back to Los Angeles and getting back, of course, reestablishing friendships and all. Nineteen sixty was, I would say, the beginning of a golden period of L.A. galleries, I guess it would be. I would say that the very late fifties, beginning in the fifties and into the early sixties, I think, was the best period of time. I imagine that right about, oh, about '60—let's see, I would say that the fifties was a time that all of a sudden Los Angeles became aware of itself, became aware of itself in terms of the fact that it could put good artists in its galleries. It was a time that the artists themselves became aware that they didn't have to go to New York to become artists, that they could become bona fide artists by remaining in Los Angeles, and that it was sometimes easier to arrange for a commute to New York and arrange for a show than it was to go to New York. That it was much easier, basically, to exist in this environment than it was in the New York environment. That one could do a lot more work. Mel Edwards, sculptor that lives in New York full time now, been for quite a few years, still, you know, one of the things he mentioned was that it's harder to work in New York than it is in Los Angeles; there's just the ease. There isn't as much hassle about existing in Los Angeles that there is—I mean, it's easier. Food is less expensive; space is less expensive. It's just easier. It's not the most conducive environment; I mean, you're seduced out here. The creature comforts become so easy that one may be seduced. But he was mentioning that perhaps his production of work would have been at least a third as much more than he's produced since he's been in New York, which, for an artist, that's a consideration. But of course there's also those days that you could just go out and stretch out on your back and enjoy yourself and watch the clouds roll by and all, go down to the beach; and so, I mean, there are things to each side. But it was significant in that people did decide to stay, that if they died being anonymous in Los Angeles rather than New York, they did it with a tan, and probably more fresh vegetables, and lettuce on your hamburgers. But other than these niceties, there was a beginning then. I think that when I went to Chile, the number of galleries were very static. When I returned, it was at a dynamic state. Galleries were starting to open. Bertha Lewinson Gallery opened. I went into that particular gallery when I came back. I think she was showing William Dole and Robert Hansen, I think Robert Johnson; I can't recall who all was in it. A gallery seemed to be opening every couple of weeks; or every month, a new gallery would come up. Some of them would close within a year, but it all of a sudden was an opportunity for more people to be seen. Lewinson Gallery, I think that the husband was hoping for a tax job, and Bertha was hoping to meet interesting young men. It became successful, so the tax dodge wasn't there, and perhaps the young men didn't find Bertha as enticing as she hoped, and she wasn't pleased by success. And so she closed a successful gallery, because success made for work and all kinds of things that she hadn't counted on. But she also promoted the work of Morris Broderson. He was a very sweet boy, and probably one of the best deaf and dumb artists around, but he never really grew into being a very, very good artist. He had a lot of promise, and he did some interesting things, but they all got caught up in a certain amount of sweetness. He was quite successful. The thing that people will look back at some of these artists—they'll look, and they'll say, "Well, good God, how can anyone ever look at that work and think that it had any importance, or that anyone has ever looked at it with any degree of seriousness." And I think the problem is, is that they look at it in a very historical sense, and they look at where people are today, where art is today. And they discount that a lot of that had to go on at that period of time. When people look at the work of Gottlieb or Ad Reinhardt or some of these people, they really, when someone puts a book together about Gottlieb, they really don't show much of the stuff that he did early on, and that was it, or Philip Guston, or any of these people. And some of this work that was being done, those were the options that were available. People forget that Monet lived quite a few years into this century and was doing some of his finest painting, that people wouldn't approach that attitude in painting again until abstract expressionism, another twenty years or—or was it thirty years? I don't know, but he lived into this century, and Bonnard, what? lived until 1940. Matisse, you know, was alive into what? '50? So many of these people that people think of now—I mean, I have students that talk about old masterpieces, and they're talking about Jackson Pollock. And you know, when Jackson Pollock started doing that work, a lot of people dismissed it as basically a design concept, you know, as random pattern. And Matisse, in the 1940s, after the Second World War, Matisse was dismissed as being a decorative artist, which was a lesser form of artistry.
PALANKER:
I'll flip the tape.

1.10. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE TWO MARCH 8, 1976

EVERTS:
I think that some of the attitudes that were abroad in Los Angeles at this time would be of some importance. Later on, it became more aware of itself as an art center in the United States—and not, you know, something called West Coast art, that meant Seattle with Northwest regional artists and God, forget Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Whereas Chicago tried to regain some sense of itself by finding some sort of group that they could say, okay, this is Chicago's sort of funky, comic attitude—you know, the Red Grooms and all those guys. Or San Francisco: first the San Francisco abstract artists, and then the San Francisco figurative school, and all. Los Angeles was always just basically individual artists, which I think was a good thing. I mean, if you start looking at abstract expressionism, and New York, and the New York school, and all that, it was a great group of individuals; for the convenience of art history or art critics, or the salability of items, they linked a great number of people together that really didn't have a hell of a lot in common, except a certain amount of feigned, or real-feigned, or imagined, camaraderie. They met in a certain couple of restaurants, and they did have meetings, and they did try to spell out their goals and all. And as I think about Exodus, we got together because we felt that a certain—the art that was being shown was art that photographed well. We objected to that, and [to the fact] that there might be a spectrum in the art that they showed, but it was basically that it really would photograph well, that it would reproduce well. So the people in Exodus were really quite diverse. There's a show now down in Newport Beach, which I hope to see within the week, called "I Remember Ferus," and they're going to exclude a lot of people from that show. I saw that Streeter Blair was included, but, what the hell, he owned the building, or at least he rented it to them, and then he also made another space available to them. But there were a lot of people: Hilda Levy comes to mind. Ed [Kienholz] asked me if I'd like to exhibit, but I just didn't see that I fit into that format. There were some people that had sympathies as Ferus did; they tried to look and encompass people that were broad enough to fit into what, basically, their attitude was. Billy Al Bengston was working in what would be a figurative muse at the time, called himself Moontang. But I remember an atrocious painting with a big yellow figurative girl, kind of childlike thing with a great yellow background, and something about nymphomania, or something. But it was hard for me to understand de Kooning's women series as really being part of abstract expressionism. But it was a convenient blanket; it embodied a lot of people. And I think they were basically modernist in attitude. They were more or less autographic in their approach to painting, and I would think that was the strongest tie: the kinesthetic element in their work. When you look at what was happening, you know, Ed was working in a kind of a Merz attitude, of what's his name?
PALANKER:
Schwitters.
EVERTS:
Yes, Kurt Schwitters. Those things were very much in that genre. Richards Ruben was doing just some beautiful paintings, absolutely beautiful paintings. And of course he was one of the artists that was seduced away. He went to New York, and God, there was a tremendous drop in his work when he went back there. He started doing what seemed to me these awful little flower lines, which had lost the complete big scale of the Claremont series of paintings that he did. As I mentioned before, the reviewing scene wasn't terribly strong. There was just very little happening. There was a small section that Arts and Artweek did, but it was just about this time that Artforum started in San Francisco. That was before it came south, and so it had a Los Angeles section, and it started training some people to, perhaps, write. The growth of the galleries—just all of a sudden, I don't know what happened. It was one of those Topsy cases: it just simply grew. I would say that Ferus would be the important Los Angeles gallery for indigenous art, and I would say that Dilexi was, up in San Francisco. There was a big exchange. People thought nothing of going up to San Francisco to see an exhibit. The "Assemblage" show that happened—oh, I wouldn't know just what the date would be—at San Francisco. Lots of guys would pile into a car and drive up together. And you'd have friends who were artists in San Francisco. I think there's perhaps less of that now; I think there's less of going up to San Francisco to see shows. San Francisco at one time had more galleries than Los Angeles. This was a time when there was perhaps more wealth—or, let's say, old wealth—in San Francisco. And San Francisco was very conscious of itself being different than, and superior to, Los Angeles. This was the sprawling community, this was the nouveau riche, the lotus land, the Hollywood syndrome, the businessman controlling aesthetics. But then the other thing that started happening that was a little strange was that the young people that wanted to do graduate work from the Tokyo University, the art school there, the class place in Japan, they didn't go to San Francisco to study art; they came to Los Angeles. The Englishman, the young Englishman, the to-be artist, didn't go to New York but came to Los Angeles. And I don't know if it's that they saw Los Angeles in the films, or because the New York that many people saw in the films was, of course, the backlot New York, with an establishing shot of Manhattan Island or something, or the Statue of Liberty or something, and then off to the back-lot for all the rest of New York. This was just the beginning of the big locations and things, and I think this—you can't mention Los Angeles without thinking also of Hollywood, that there is, in parts of the United States still to this day, with all the media sophistication, an idea that Hollywood does exist and that this affects the artists, that there is a quality of light that an artist sees in San Francisco that makes what the San Francisco figurative painters did very real. And then there's a quality of the light in Los Angeles, a certain harshness, that doesn't allow you to see detail, that affects the work of Los Angeles artists, and that has a quality that runs in the work. I think to really understand the quality of that light, you have to see it through the eyes of a foreigner, and I think it was best shown by [Michelangelo] Antonioni, in Zabriskie Point. Just that quality that takes the color—we paint our houses colors, but the color is diffused by the quality of light. There's a certain inherent madness in Los Angeles, a certain thing that happens when you drive on the freeway, a certain frenetic quality. There's the love of the car; the car may be created somewhere else, but most of the designers, you know, came from Southern California, went through Art Center. And Art Center had never trained any artists, but this finish fetish that the young person got in terms of chroming his exhaust manifold, the candy apple painting, the fact that a guy like Van Dutch had come out of Southern California? all of this creates a kind of finish fetish that some Los Angeles artists naturally move to. The fact that we live on the edge of an ocean and turn our backs quite naturally to the rest of the United States, that we do have our backs to a wall that happens not to be the Sierra Nevadas, but the San Gabriels and the Santa Monica Mountains, and then for the people who live in the Valley, yet another mountain range. But those people in the Valley long to get to the shore, and we sit there and we sometimes, not really quite consciously, dream of it. But, you know, cafes all the way across there, and that there is a very strong—and that the largest Oriental populations happen to be in California. In Los Angeles, let's say that you can go in, and you can go into a section of town and find a large number of Korean restaurants, of Thai restaurants, of Japanese restaurants, of Chinese restaurants. They are not directed, say, in New York, towards Thais and Koreans and things, but are directed, you know, towards our self-conscious restaurants that are restaurants for the Caucasian. Here these restaurants—you know, like if you try to think of a Korean restaurant that is for Caucasians—I can't think of one. Or a Thai restaurant. You go there, and you see the occasional Caucasian, but it's not directed that way. And these influences come in. I think that Pete Voulkos would have to admit the strong influence of Japanese ceramics in the development of his art. On the West Coast of the United States—that's maybe a little bit broad—we find ourselves in [something] like the Roman position, in terms of the Roman-Greco culture, that Rome may have conquered Greece but became Hellenized. And there's been a very strong influence of the Orient in the West Coast, I'd say, and there's quite a respect for it. I mean, I would think that if you went to Dallas, Texas, or Houston, you would have less of a sense of knowing about no play and kabuki, and you know, there would just be less of awareness of the cultural attributes of the East. And in New York, it seems to me like when I was there last, there was a real kind of rush, all of a sudden, to have Chinese restaurants of western China and all. Well, they've been around here simply because some people came from western China, and that's how they knew how to cook, and they did it, and the people who ate that were basically Chinese. And then some Cantonese would be mixed in with it simply because they married into a family that cooked that way, and there was those kinds of counter influences and all. But I'm talking about influences that I basically would feel would be underground influences, not a conscious influence. The fact that almost everybody out here has seen Japanese photography magazines, and the compositions; and that people live with bamboo, and they live with bamboo products. It's just the same sort of thing that Mexican food is very natural out here, because of the size of the community. And these influences are strong; these influences actually modify your behavior patterns. The fact that we don't really carry umbrellas and that we don't wear raincoats and that we're more open to the environment—that we don't wear ties and all, that there's a certain lack of formality. And even though some people go in for this kind of finish fetish, you know, this attitude, at the same time, other people relate to another element of it and have a very unfinished quality in their work. And so these things that are operating, people, without knowing the reason why their choices, these choices—you know, if you're a fish, you learn to swim. And there are different ways. You either learn to swim very fast, or you take protective coloration. So you either hide—you still know how to swim, but you either hide or you swim. You either run from your predator, the person chasing you, or you hide from him, so that what happens underwater is determined by the way your movement is, and so whichever way you go, whether you're enthralled by the finish of the automobile and the turning of the chrome, and you work with it, or you go another way. And whichever way it is, you're influenced by your environment? you're not independent of it. So what I think happened in Los Angeles has been a reaction, or an interaction with the environment, which has taken many directions, but it's basically always taken individual directions. I find it hard really to be able to think of a particular look, a particular style that Los Angeles has offered, or an attempt of anyone in Los Angeles to create a style. This geographic separation that we have you know, there are people who are hill dwellers; there are canyon dwellers; there are beach dwellers; there's Venice; there's another group of people that have studios in Pasadena. But whether you have a studio in Pasadena or Venice doesn't mean that that determines the way you're going to work. Maybe you're very akin to a person living in Venice, but just the fact that it's easier, you get a better studio or something that determines where you reside, and so your friends are sometimes the people who live in that same building and all. And individuality I think seems to be the mark of the Los Angeles artist, a certain openness. In San Francisco, artists would have a tendency to be protective about their work, like someone was going to take it, that they might take and turn away a new work that they were working with and not show you what they're doing; whereas Los Angeles, an artist immediately shows you what he's working on, and that's what you're kind of interested in, seeing where he's going, you know, because you're interested in art and you're interested in him as a person. You're not interested in him as a source. Whereas if you have a group of people who are working in the San Francisco figurative, right, that they're all working in the same general genre, and so there is a certain amount of plagiarism that is available. You know, in later years, when one of the New York critics came up with something called—what was it?—postpainterly something-or-other, you know, it was something again, trying to get a vehicle that might move. The only thing that happened similar to that was the abstract classicism, which was Lorser Feitelson and Karl Benjamin and John McLaughlin. I don't know how they rotated into it. And Fred Hammersley. It was just an attempt to find five or six guys who happened to be painting in Los Angeles at the same time and group them together, you know. You could just as well get a show together called "Freckles and Her Friends"? I mean, it would have as much meaning as abstract classicism. The things that happened in the galleries, I think, were kind of important. It had influences. There were lots of painters. And I think to a greater degree then than now that you would be reading about an artist, and he was bound to show up in Los Angeles. If you read about Jasper Johns, then Jasper Johns would be seen localally. Like, there was a Jasper Johns show—this would have to be about 1961—at the Pasadena Art Museum. And you would have a Time; you would see the art magazines talk about the targets or the flag or something, and some collector might go back and buy one, to be very chic. But there was not a tremendous amount of opportunity sometimes for the artist to see it. But all of a sudden, as I said, with the growth of the galleries, this would happen. Before, the only galleries really doing any kind of a job would have been basically Frank Perls and Paul Kantor. And you would see local artists mixed in—you know what I mean. You got to see de Kooning; you'd see some people. But then the museums and the galleries started doing jobs that served a purpose. I think the community of artists were best served during this period of time. I can remember the county museum doing Philip Guston and doing [Reuben] Nakian and then the Clyfford Stills that were hanging in the permanent galleries on loan. The fact that Joe Goode was hanging around the printshop that I was running at Chouinard, and that there was a lithograph by Jasper Johns at Pasadena. And I forget what it was, but Joe came back and thought he'd made a discovery by doing the same lithograph, except I think Joe did a screwdriver, or Jasper Johns did a screwdriver and Joe did a hammer. But sometimes, for an artist, that's a sense of discovery. But it was the first lithograph Joe ever made, and it was a nice lithograph. And I can remember in a conversation with John Coplans, when John was at Chouinard, he was kind of pushing a little bit of pop art at the time, and he was pushing [Edward] Dowd and [Philip] Hefferton and some of those. Quite a few people were doing money at that time, kind of pop art of five-dollar bills and put Lincoln in it badly drawn or something. And I was congratulating him on them, because at a time in international art when magazines are such an immediacy, the magazine is in the guy's studio while he's painting it, and it's published, and then the magazine is sold around the world; and so the painting may be less than a month old, and it's already in circulation and all. But I said with pop art, and this interest in money and all, at the same time art is international, it also doesn't lose its national flavor. And John mused on quite what I meant by that. And I said, well, look, here Hefferton's doing a five-dollar bill, and now it means that in Japan someone can be doing a yen note and a franc note, and I mean, it just brings national character back in, you know, and I would hate to see some of that lost. He didn't find it terribly funny. But the fact that young people in school could see viewing all art is a vicarious activity, of course, as opposed to creating it, but [Andre] Malraux said if man didn't have a pastiche, then he'd have a composite of his own viewing of art that created a sense of art for him to use as a springboard to go on to create his own art. Then he'd have to make up the whole concept of art, which would be pretty damn onerous. So these shows were terribly important, I think, for the artists themselves to see in a less vicarious but more directly and rather than a reproduction, that museum without walls (Malraux again), but to go and actually see the work itself, to see it to scale, to see it to color, because processed color is never as good as the color itself or the lack of color. And then for the people, the student, the younger artist to see these things, to see Larry Rivers in—to dislike Larry Rivers in reproduction, to think that perhaps there's something more, and then to see Larry Rivers at Dwan is to realize in true fact they're just god-awful, is a revelation, is an aesthetic revelation that shouldn't be missed. [laughter] And to see Philip Guston, to see that beautiful series of paintings, to have a happening in Los Angeles, the noon series that we had at Chouinard, where Ad Reinhardt would come in the patio, where Nakian, where all these people would speak in a very informal way about what they're doing and what's up, and to make themself available to the questioning of students was really a pretty damn good experience. And this is a time when some of the better younger artists were passing through Chouinard, you know. And to have had contact in terms of not only the class basis but a less formal basis with people like John Altoon and Bob Irwin and Emerson Woelffer and some of these people—it was a good experience. The thing that happened then is that this is about the time of the demise of the Los Angeles Artists and Vicinity exhibition, which may have outlived its usefulness, but there's a certain need for the young artist to pit himself against the established artist, to see himself up there on the wall, next to the established artist, or rejected from that and exhibited elsewhere, as we did at Exodus, or going to the show and saying, where in the hell did they get off, you know, rejecting me? The fact that the impressionists did start that way, as a reaction to the establishment. That if there isn't this sort of a review going on, then there isn't this reaction, and there isn't this focal point for reaction and what is being shown; there isn't this kind of dialogue—because I know that we used to get together and we used to talk. You'd go to Ferus or something, and the guys would say, well, Jesus, did you see that show? Look at the crap they're putting in. Because it was very heavy towards establishment galleries at one time. The thing that I think that was important was that hokey Monday night, that Art Walk, where we were so Goddamn provincial and unsophisticated, we'd do something like that. But you know, you saw everybody there. You saw—artists didn't boycott it. You name the artist; he was there. You'd see everybody on the streets, and you'd go and you have your own show, and you'd go over and you'd see somebody else's show. You'd leave the gallery that you were showing in. You'd go and you'd catch the other shows, and you'd be talking to the people, and it was—my only thing is that I thought they should have closed down the whole damn street. You know, I thought they should have just roped the damn thing off and let the traffic go around and made a real kind of a gala out of it. I think David Stuart was the first one to pull out, you know. I have a very proletarian attitude about art; I think that it should never be removed. I liked the old museum [at Exposition Park], with the stuffed animals and all and the bones down below; and I liked the fact that people who were there to get to a football game, who got there early so they wouldn't have to pay five bucks to park or something, and they'd have maybe a picnic on the grass, and then they'd wander into the museum, and then they'd use up all their time looking at the elephants and things in their habitat; and they'd be forced to look at the art because there was nothing else to do, and they'd look, and then all of a sudden—as I said, that's how I arrived at it. I went to look at the animals, and I saw something else. And it's not a bad way to get into art, through the back door, and find you love it, the way I found I loved ballet, [rather] than to go to it and say, "Now, this is good, and by God, you're going to like it," the way I was pushed into classical music, when we were all marched down to the Standard Symphony and set there and listened to the Goddamn stuff. It took me a long time to really enjoy it for itself. And I think that when you get people going and it's kind of festive, and you go there, and you're carried along; and you look at the thing, and then you realize that you really didn't get to see it because nobody ever sees a work of art at an opening—and so you go back because you want to see it, and you go back out of love. I don't give—what the hell, the thing was that got you there, the hook that got you there first, but that it got you there. But it wasn't there because your arm was twisted and you started looking at it for the wrong motives. You go to the Goddamn museum today, and you plug something into your ear, and somebody gives you literature; and so you don't even have your eyes, you know. I may have mentioned that my whole idea—I think it would be a great movie bit—there's always going to be a piece that's been removed for restoration or something, and you've got this thing going on and it's not updated. You come, and you look at this blank piece of wall, and it says it was a Matisse; and next to it, maybe, is a Gauguin or something with a cow in it or something? and one is a nude, and then the next piece is a Feininger, see. So you come along, and the Matisse nude is gone. And so you either sit there and stare at the wall or stand there and stare at the wall until speech is gone, or you kind of become a little more adventurous and move on. And then now you're at the Gauguin, and it says, "And if you'll look at the breasts," you know. And so you're looking, and saying, then, talking about the arm. And so it can't be the cow. And all of a sudden you're starting to look, and then the next thing, all of a sudden, all of these things are out of sync, and you're all of a sudden having to confront and look at the picture rather than getting a confirmation of the verbal. I can't stand art as literature, and I studied art history at Courtauld. I can't stand it as literature. I can't stand the idea of the prejudice of going to art without having that confrontation, that visual confrontation, that finding that thing for yourself. And I think if you give no explanation at all, or chronological order—I don't think museums should be set up on a chronological thing. It should just be a hodgepodge, so that all of a sudden, the visual elements are the unifying factor. You just have to free people of this. And if you take a person that grew up in his early life on Saturday Evening Post covers? and that has reproductions of things that should have been on the old-time story magazines and things on their walls, and calendar art, and whatever it is; and you take them with no explanation of art, and you put them in the museum, and you show them a contemporary thing, they're not going to relate it to the other thing. They're going to renounce it. But then the next time you show them another show, and they stop relating to what they've seen, and all of a sudden they take and they relate it to their experience, their direct, contemporary exposure, experience. And they may hate it, but all of a sudden they're going to see it, and they're going to see it differently. I took a class from San Fernando Valley State College, a very homogeneous group of students, to downtown Los Angeles, and they really hadn't been there. I took them at night, and I took them to Pershing Square, and I took them to the bus depot, and I took them to the rescue missions, and then I took them to burlesque. This would have been 1960, and this was really kind of risque. So this Chinese-American girl, really kind of lovely girl, she's very embarrassed by what was going on. But then all of a sudden, she started noticing that this gal, whatever it was she was about—and it certainly wasn't classical Chinese dancing and it wasn't ballroom dancing—but she had better movements than this other gal. You know? So all of a sudden, she's talking to me on a critical attitude towards burlesque dancing. Now, she was into the basis of aesthetics, and that's what happens when you take the person and you don't give them background, and you don't give them literature, and you only give them exposure. You give them bewilderment. But all of a sudden, they're going to start making a value scheme that makes sense to them—within a frame reference that they'll basically reject, but all of a sudden they'll start looking, and they'll start seeing that there's still more value."I like this better than that, " and they're making comparisons, and they're making comparisons basically on the levels that they should; and that's within their vision, and what they're getting back from that thing. And I think education gets in the way. Anytime that education gets in the way of experience, you're in for trouble, and I think our educational system does that too well; whereas education at a primitive level was to deal with experience, you know. Education showed the kid what plants were edible; showed him how to shoot a bow; showed the girl how to chew leather, to soften it; showed her how to gather this, whatever it is. (Forget the sexist concept; the roles had to be played.) So this kiddie was learning about bows with his little bow, and he went and he shot at the dead animal, and he did this thing, or he shot his—you know, all these things. Education was not getting in the way of direct experience. It was a directed experience. It was directed only to the degree as it was limited to being a direct experience. The little kid couldn't go out and hunt and get trampled or something. But he could be directed as close to the direct experience as possible, you know. They rubbed blood on them and all kinds of things, you know. That's kind of good, but when it's two or three times removed, you know, it's a shock to the art student when you tell them that you're only there for the means of convenience. But as soon as art has any meaning, you're going to stop doing it in the classroom situation and you're going to do it in the real situation. But I digress. And I guess this is a nice place to stop.

1.11. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE ONE MARCH 15, 1976

PALANKER:
Okay, we're going to change the format a little, with more question and answers. We're starting with the year 1960, and I think we were going to talk about the Pasadena Art Museum.
EVERTS:
Okay. I don't recall just the year that Tom Leavitt took over at the Pasadena Art Museum, but it had a rather dilettante attitude before his arrival. I know _ that as a relatively young man and out of New England and all, he just wasn't ready for sari-wrapped women making demands on what should be happening at the museum and all. His attitude was a little bit perhaps of confusion at first, because he didn't know how to react to this, because I think he'd worked in the Fogg Museum or something before this, and the attitude at the Fogg Museum was quite different. Of course, he was totally accustomed to wearing a tie and a jacket, which was a little bit different than the West Coast also. And I had had some meetings with him, before I'd gone to Chile, because a show had been planned of my work. So when I went to see him about it and all, I talked to him and—very nice man, and very gentle man, but at that time he was accustomed to things being a lot straighter than they were in California, and he was beginning finally to get a little bit annoyed with some of the demands that the women were making upon him. And I mean, these were women of some means that didn't have a hell of a lot more to do with their lives than just sort of try to run the museum or vie for the director's attention with another woman in a like situation. Tom started bringing better people onto the board and all, and bringing, I would say, certainly better exhibitions in. I recall with my show, there was a Braque exhibition.
PALANKER:
Georges or Paul [Brach]?
EVERTS:
Well, no, this was before the New York exodus. And it was Georges, the guy from the other art center, the old art center. I can remember for my exhibition, I did a series of large drawings, some 8 feet x 20 feet and all, and bringing them in, and he was quite solicitous. He was a very nice man to work with. At one point—I think it was the last week of the exhibition—I called, and I said, "Is anything sold?" He said, you know, he was really very regretful in saying no, "but this happens many times in museums and all, Connor." And I said, "Well," I said, "listen. Let's mark everything down one-half." [laughter] And I said, "I'll put a sale on in the newspaper." And of course, I was joking, but he didn't even realize it at the time. And then all of a sudden he was kind of confronted with another obscenity, and that would be an advertisement in the local newspaper saying that all these paintings were on half-price sale at the museum, and he was trying to assure me that it wasn't really the kind of thing that I should be doing. It wasn't museum policy; it wasn't a thing that an artist would think of his work as a commodity. And then it came over him that perhaps I was joking. He was a very firm person in a very gentle way, and I think he was the ideal man for the museum at the time. I think that a totally autocratic person would not have accomplished what Tom did. And a totally autocratic person would probably have not brought in Walter Hopps as a curator or something. It was during this period of time that they had the [Alberto] Burri show. They had the John Ferren show, which certainly wouldn't have been a popular show to do. Had Emerson Woelffer's show. There was a variety. I think that the Pasadena Art Museum was a very lively place under the activity of Tom Leavitt, and followed by Walter Hopps. Walter Hopps brought in more of a contemporary American attitude and all. But I would say it was more contemporary in its attitude than the County Museum. And it was certainly more sympathetic toward local artists, because at that time, they had two galleries, which were available to a one-man exhibition of a local artist. Then they had the large galleries, which would be a review of a more prominent artist, like a European artist, or an American artist, or a group show, showing a certain attitude or something. And then they had two other small galleries for minor shows. And I would say that perhaps there was more of a friendship, and kinship, with contemporary art in Pasadena than anywhere else. As I said, the sixties were really a time of activity, and I had a lot of optimism about what was going to happen during the sixties.
PALANKER:
Okay. Also at this time you were teaching at Northridge.
EVERTS:
No, actually I was longshoring. Let's see, my show was in April, and I think it was just a brief time after my exhibition that I was longshoring and really enjoying it. It gave me a kind of freedom that I needed, that I could work when I wanted to. I worked nights. At that time longshoring was from—you went down to pick up the job at five, so it was from six in the evening till, I guess it was five in the morning or something. Something like that, four or five in the morning. It was a nine-hour stretch, anyway, with an hour off for lunch, or a nap, or whatever you could grab. And I was working on an oar boat, a bulkloader, and I slipped and fell on deck and compacted some vertebrae and all, so that made longshoring almost impossible. I kept getting these terrible muscle spasms when I tried to paint. I was still heavy into painting at that time, and I would get these muscle spasms, so it was difficult to hold a brush up. I was so accustomed to working in an autographic manner, that at that time I didn't think of using sprays or just floating the paint or doing any of the things that I would consider doing now. So that left me without employment, and it was just about at this time that I got a chance to work as a guest artist at Tamarind and did a number of prints. I think the reason—June Wayne had seen my exhibition at Pasadena and was rather taken by it, and she invited me to go over there. And longshoring at that time was rather feast and famine, and so I might have a bit of money, and I might have none at all. And no kind of a bank account, so I had to borrow a car to get to my interview at Tamarind. And I hadn't really done a lithograph since 1950, '51 at the University of Washington. I hadn't really done any amount of lithog-raphy, and I was a little bit anxious. I wanted to do some lithographs, and June was telling me about the opportunity and all, because she had just opened Tamarind. I think Romas Viesulas was there or something, and then coming up was either Adja Yunkers or—I can't think of his name [Aubrey E. Schwartz], little short guy that did dwarfed figures and all. At the moment, the name escapes me. So I would have been one of the earliest persons in there. And she was telling me what a hardship it was that to make a lithograph, she had to go all the way to Paris, when I had borrowed a car to get there. And it seemed, you know, like going to Paris to make a lithograph was a kind of a marvelous hardship, but the way the place was run was so different from the normal artist's experience—with someone to grind your stone, and someone to print your stone, and handmade papers, and air-conditioned. It was just beautiful. I'd never encountered so much respect extended an artist, and I think that's all of June's doing. At the time, Clinton, squinting Clinton, Adams was the shop director, and Joe Funk and Garo Antreasian were the printers. Joe became quite a close friend; he's a nice, warm human being. June taught me a lot of things. She taught me a real attitude of respect toward my work. She taught me to put my work on better paper. As I said before, I used to draw on the front page of the Times, the London Times, because I didn't have enough money to buy a decent paper. A decent piece of paper to me was like sugar paper, which was the cheapest imaginable. I was offered a position in 1960 out at Northridge, California State University, Northridge.
PALANKER:
When did that happen, just to get the sequence.
EVERTS:
September of '60 or so. It was in the summer, around summer or something, I started at Tamarind. My show at Pasadena was in April.
PALANKER:
And when was the accident?
EVERTS:
The accident was probably May. I spent some time in traction or something. But maybe Tamarind was August; I'm not certain.
PALANKER:
So you were just there for a couple months?
EVERTS:
A couple months, and that was it. And then I started teaching—and that was only part time that semester—at Northridge. So it was very, very lean; and I believe my wife was pregnant, and I believe my youngest child, Tamura, was born right in there somewhere.
PALANKER:
Just to backtrack a little, how long had you been married at that point? That hasn't been mentioned.
EVERTS:
Let's see. I married in 1956, early in 1956, so I had been married four years. And anyway, something happened—we were really short on money, really very, very short on money. And I think around Christmastime the car that we had, had blown up, and we had about twenty-three cents and a couple of children and didn't know quite what to do. And then a man by the name of Dr. Harland Goldwater came by. That time he'd been buying work, and I can recall that he had an unusual attitude towards things, because one of those drawings that was on that sugar paper, that period of work that sustained me quite a few years that I started in London—that was the drawing. And he said, "How much would you like for this work?" I sensed that he liked it, and so I didn't want to set a very high price on it, because I really needed the money; I was desperate for money and would have sold it for about anything. But it was like one of the two drawings I did in London that started a period of work that lasted for about a decade, I think. So I said, "Well, maybe perhaps," kind of feeling him out, "$60?" He said, "No, no." He said, "No." He said, "No, no. Not $60." He said, "You shouldn't take less than $100 for that." And he said, "It's worth $125 to me." [laughter] And so he bought several things that day, which was quite different than a [Joseph] Hirshhorn encounter, where he felt it'd be cheaper by the dozen, and that the things would be, you know, "If I bought three of these, how much would it be," and "If I bought four like this, or if I bought six like this," where the interchange was something like—and I didn't really think of them as a commodity, and that they had a certain amount of value, and that since I didn't have a dealer at the time, that there could be no dealer's fee or something, but that's more or less what I was thinking in terms of pricing it. And then I was told what it would mean for me as an artist to be in a collection as important as that, and then—and I was quite young then—what it would do for his collection to have me in it. And of course, I never found out what it would be like to be in his collection after that remark. Did his collection find out what it would be like to have one of my works? But it was quite different than—so I wasn't prepared. I mean, the Goldwater experience came before the other experience, so I wasn't prepared for the second experience. I was amazed by the first, and I kind of cherished it, and he became a close personal friend. I very much liked his attitude. And I've always been able, if I ever needed any money or anything, I could always convince him without much trouble that he should probably buy one of my newest works. I mean, it was very nice. I mean, he liked my work, and he understood my need. In fact, later on, when I'd been setting up the print department for—Richards Ruben had done it before, and he was basically interested in silk screen, and they did a little etching—
PALANKER:
Where was this?
EVERTS:
This was at Chouinard; this would be one or two years later, that Gerry Nordland wanted a larger experience than that for the students. He wanted more heavy experience in intaglio, which was very light under Dick. And he wanted lithography, and he wanted the whole thing, woodcut—the entire experience. So I did a lot of work trying to locate presses and stones and things. Jules Heller was going back East at the time, so I was able to buy a press from Jules. And so I had a press, and I had gone through all this work; and then finally when I spent the budget and didn't have any more money left, a woman called and said that she had a thirteen-stone litho press for sale, would I be interested? And I knew for myself I'd be interested, but I didn't know what thirteen stone was. Was it weight or what? And she said, "Well, no, a litho press and thirteen stones and some roller and some paper," and this and that. And I said, "Well, how much are you thinking?" And she said, "Well, I understand it might be worth as much as $500." And I said, "Well, I'd be very much interested. I'm an artist, and I don't have much money. In fact, I don't even have that much money now." But I said, "I have to be honest in that I paid $825 for a press." I'd come over and look at her press, what condition it was in and all, but I'd already paid that—no, she said, she could get $300 for it, and I said I paid $800 for one. "I'd like to come over and see it," but I'd paid that much. And she said, "Well, I was only really expecting $300. Why don't you come over and see it?" So I went over and saw it. And I don't know how these things get out, but [Lynton] Kistler, the old printer, who used to print for June Wayne and Clinton Adams and a lot of other people, had sold his press. In fact, it was his press that Jules Heller had that I ended up with at Chouinard. And he somehow found out about the existence of this press and called her and offered her $500 (that's where the $500 figure came), and she said, no, she'd already promised—this young artist was going to come by. So I went by to see her and introduced myself and all, and she told me about the Kistler thing. And I said, "Well, that's a much better deal. That way you could get even more than that for it." And she said, "Well, no." She said, "If you really want it," you know. A friend of hers, an older woman, had gotten it [in order] to print and hadn't been able to, and so she left it in her garage and had died and all. It was hers. She really felt it should go to an artist and all, because the woman had always wanted to be an artist. It was in pristine condition; it was a beautiful press. So she said, "That's an unusual name." She said, "You know, I saw an Everts. I saw an exhibition at Pasadena of an artist, you know." And she said, "He was born up in Washington," she said, you know, "Bellingham." And she said, "I was born in Nooksack, which was a little one-horse town in the same county. I enjoyed his work very much," she said, "but it was awfully risque." And then I told her it was one and the same person. She was really kind of surprised. And so she said, "Well, I'd like you to have—I don't need—" It was up in Berendo [Street], right near Barnsdall Park. And she said, "I was thinking that the $300 was enough money for me for the thing. I'd love you to have it." So it was the most marvelous—again, it was just a beautiful encounter with a person. And so I said, "Well," I said, "I really want it, but I don't have any money." She said, "That's all right." She said, "You'll probably find a way of getting it." So driving back I was thinking, "Well, now how in the world am I going to get $300?" And I couldn't think of a way I was going to get $300. So I thought, well, gee, if I took and could find six people who would subscribe fifty dollars to me, and then I would give them the first five prints that I did off the press (that'd be ten dollars a print, which is pretty inexpensive), and then I'd be able to go into lithography and continue what I had found very sympathetic towards me at Tamarind. So I was thinking, "Well, how could I do it?" and so on. I thought, "Well, I'll call Goldwater." And he said, "Why don't you come down, and I'll buy you lunch." So I went down, and I was telling him about it, and he said, "Well, you know, except for Tamarind, you hadn't done lithos for ten years." And I said, "Well, you know, there just wasn't opportunity." And so he said, "Well, I thought you wouldn't want to do it unless it was important to you." So he said, "I went to the bank, and I have a cashier's check for the $300." And he said, "Now you go up and you give that to that woman, so she doesn't change her mind, because" he said, "that other person may put pressure on her to have the money right away, and give her more money and all." And I said I didn't think that was the case. And I said, "Okay, and I'll give you the money back when I get the rest of the subscriptions." He said, "Well, don't worry about that now. You just go up there and get the press." So I went back. I gave her the check and all. Joe Funk had a truck, so we were going to take his camper off and put the press in the truck and bring it back. So I went into Gerry Nordland, and I told Gerry (I think I was working for Gerry at the time), "Who do you think might be interested?" And he said, "Oh, I'll talk to a few people." Then all of a sudden, I found that twenty-six people wanted to buy these subscriptions, and I didn't want to start making big editions. So I said, "That's it." So I had the money, and I went down, and I had enough money to get also an etching press. So I talked it over with my wife, and she said, "Well, we didn't have any money anyway, and this is kind of a windfall. So why don't you just go ahead and put it all into the printmaking." At that time, she had a lot of confidence that she thought I was just going to be this famous artist that people were going to break down the door to buy my work. Never worked out that way. But so I saved the $250 to take back to Dr. Goldwater. And so I went in and was talking to him, you know; I was going to give him the money back. And he said, "You know, I'm very lucky. I do something that I really enjoy doing. And people need my services, and they're willing to pay for it." He said, "You're doing something that you really enjoy doing, and people need it. They don't realize it, so they're unwilling to pay for it." He said, "So it behooves a person in my situation to help a person in your situation," he said. "I'm sure that you can find something that you can use that money for." He said, "Those papers you were telling me about—they cost a lot of money." So you know, something beyond my dreams: I went out and I bought a ream of Arches and of Rives, and German copperplate, you know—I mean, mix of that with copperplate. I bought some Japanese papers and all. And I never thought I'd ever have that much paper and all. And my experience with Harland Goldwater has been nothing but just good. I mean, when I started the printmaking society and started a gallery and started a competitive exhibition, a juried exhibition, he immediately gave the money for a prize, and he gave money to the printmaking society long after I left it, and to their national show and all. And started a collection in his office of work and of prints and things, and he has Ikegawa, and he has [Tom] Fricano, and he has Edmonson, and he has Emerson Woelffer, and he has Mike Kanemitsu, and he has a lot of local artists who also make prints; his walls are filled with things. And Ben Sakoguchi. You know, all the good printmakers and things are up on his wall. And it's rather nice to see. It's an education for the people who go into his office to be confronted by real art. And he has it in a section where he has children's books and things like that. He has a beautiful big old silk screen of Paul Darrow's of a rhinoceros's nose, you know, just this big part of the nose and all, coming out of the—children love it, you know. And also, during this period of hard times of mine, he had me do this drawing for his one wall, that the painting contractor had done a sort of Chinese mural or something on, you know. He wanted to get rid of it, so he had me do this 8 foot x 9 foot collage painting thing, about, well, it was called The Continuance of Life Is a Painful Process, and it was about the birth cycle. And I think within a month, he'd lost $10,000 worth of business. That people were so repulsed by this thing. Women for the first time pregnant or something were really kind of upset. And so with a great deal of trepidation, he put a panel over it for a while, just to let it rest, you know. And then when he took it off, it had a completely different reaction. Times had changed enough in that period of time that there were no bad feelings at all. But at this period of time, people—I don't know, maybe it was the fact that the Vietnamese War and all the assassinations passed on in the interim, that maybe people became calloused to pain or something. I don't know. Maybe it isn't as good as I thought. [laughter] Maybe—but that particular piece, I know he drove up to Eric Locke, the gallery in San Francisco. I was having a one-man show, and this piece was going to be in it.
PALANKER:
You were having a one-man—
EVERTS:
—show at Eric Locke. I don't know quite what year that was.
PALANKER:
Sixty-two.
EVERTS:
We were driving up north with this piece and every thing else, and had the top of his station wagon; and it was tied down with nylon rope. And we hit a place called—oh, I can't think of its name, a little town with a Spanish name (can't think of anything today—today's a bad day)—oh, Soledad, "solitude." And we hit a gusting wind that must have been about fifty miles an hour. And it went right through. It was a Masonite, large Masonite panels, and tempered, and a three-quarter-inch board; and the wind raised the nylon cord so that it cut right on through. It actually wore into the wood and into the Masonite before it went through the nylon cord. And it was heavy nylon cord that he'd used on his boat. And so it was lined; it was heavy lined. And a piece just went sailing off the car—fortunately nothing was behind—hit a telephone pole and shattered, you know, just broke. So there was a man in a barn, and I asked if we could put it together and get it when we returned from San Francisco. So I thought, "Well, it'll be easier to put it inside his station wagon." So I turned the face of it away and sawed the panel in half, and it was really kind of painful. I didn't finish it for I put it away in my studio so I could only see the back of it, and then I repaired it and finished it. I guess it was over a year later before I could turn it around and look at it objectively. We went up to San Francisco? I saw the show installed. It so took the edge off, I don't believe I stayed for the opening. We drove back, picked up the pieces in the gentleman's barn, and then put them in my studio—that was it. So the title is rather fitting because it was even painful for me to have finished a work, and I was very thankful that anyone—if a car had been behind, those Masonite panels just sailing like that, it would have just gone into the windshield, or if anybody'd been walking along the road, it would have decapitated them. Soledad.
PALANKER:
Strange.
EVERTS:
Let's see, where are we?
PALANKER:
Okay, we're in the fall of 1960, round and about, and you were teaching at Northridge part time, and I guess from here you went on to Chouinard. When did that happen?
EVERTS:
Well, let's see. I went on part time at Chouinard, so I maintained my position at—Gerry really wanted—I felt obligated, because before I started teaching there, Nordland gave me the job to help me through because we were in such desperate straits. I knew about presses and things, and so I was hired by the school basically to set up the department, though I wasn't teaching there at that time. So I had spent some time, and I got all of the things. And I think Gerry's real intent was to get me to teach printmaking, because he would have rather had Richards Ruben teaching painting, which I think was his forte. And about this time, Dick also just went out to Pomona. So at that time, Chouinard went on the term system, which was eight weeks, and my job at Chouinard wouldn't have begun until, I think, the spring, so I stayed on. I thought I would do it for a short period, both of the jobs, because it wouldn't be too onerous, because I would be at—I was somewhat in debt, but I would do both of them, and I arranged the schedule so it was not much of a problem. And in that time that I was there, I was asked to set up this exhibition, which was "Art at Mid-Century." I felt that mid-century was like 19 50, and here we were in the sixties. Perhaps the title was a little misleading, but it was catchy and they liked it. So I set up an exhibition, and in that exhibition, let's see, I had Paul Wonner, and I had a Japanese artist by the name of Ono that did beautiful work. I had a fellow I'd known in Mexico, gone to school with in Mexico—terrible, terrible at names, escapes me now [Jack Hooper]. But he was doing with the kind of flotation foam and a blowtorch and all. He was doing really handsome work. And Emerson Woelffer, Ed Kienholz, Joe Goode, I don't recall. It was a very balanced show. And there was a piece in it by Ed Kienholz which was called Bunny, Bunny, You're So Funny. It was a mannequin, and the top half of the mannequin, as I recall, was missing. And I would say it was below the chest cavity, so that you could see into what would constitute the stomach area. I would never say Ed was too cool about anatomy. And so around the navel somewhere, there would have been a little crank, and when you turned this, a little doll, which represented the baby, would be turning. I don't think there was feet on it, but as I recall the leg was painted up like as high as a stocking was, perhaps painted red, and vaguely I recall maybe chicken wire approximating stockings; I think that mesh stockings were popular and maybe even colors had come in, I'm not certain (a little before the body stocking). And in the pubic area, there was, I believe, some steel wool. Rather innocuous piece. And there were several pieces by each artist. But the division chairman was a gentleman by the name of Donald Sudlow, and while I was setting up the show, and I was hanging the show with the help of several of my students, he said, "I think that's obscene. What do you think?" And I told them, I really didn't think of art as being obscene, since it wasn't the role of art to be obscene, and that obscene was basically to titillate. And that if one was sexually aroused by something of that nature, then you had to be of a depraved nature. And I felt that had settled that, you know. So the next thing that happened was that Tom Tramel, who was the department chairman was on a sabbatical, and Ernie Velardi was the chairman, who's not a bad little painter. And so he went to see Ernie, and Ernie was very supportive of me (and I think Ernie missed a professorship by a couple of years because of his stand). I was rather unsure of Ernie's support. And I have a tendency to—maybe it's a ghetto instinct or something that when I look at a person, I generally picture them at about seven years old, and that generally tells me a lot about them. And I saw Ernie in knickers, carrying a violin case. And you know, his mother had brushed his hair and it. was still immaculate. And I felt, don't expect a lot of balls; but I'll say Ernie Velardi stood up stronger than any other person in the department. Harold Schwarm, Ernie Velardi, and myself were the ones that stood up. So when Ernie wasn't supportive, Sudlow wanted a meeting of the entire art department. And Ernie said, "Why don't you just cool it and not come to the meeting? You know, he's not going to get anywhere with this." And so since I couldn't believe what was going to happen, I felt I just didn't want to get involved with it. I couldn't believe anything could come of it, one man's fiat. So they went to the meeting, and Ernie was quite right. The art department said that they couldn't support censorship and that they were behind Ernie, who was behind me, and they would support him. A couple of them had had reservations about the strength of the work, but they had deeper feelings about censorship. I was quite happy with it. So then, the next thing Mr. Sudlow did was—and I had always gotten along well with him until this point—he went to some kind of committee of chairmen—or something like that, I don't know the hierarchy and they said that they felt that they weren't qualified to pass a decision that was basically an aesthetic decision. So he's not getting much support. So then he went to the president of the college [Ralph Prator], who looked like a midwesterner, who looked like the villain in a Dick Tracy thriller, the serial on Saturday. I had once met him, and he wasn't my idea of an intellect. As I said, I met G. D. H. Cole in London, and he was a nice human being and a hell of a bright man, and this one didn't strike me as much of anything. And so this time, Sudlow said, "What's going to happen? Children are going to be in the gallery, and the university is going to be embarrassed," and all this stuff, see. And so the president said—and he was basically an honest and a humble man? and believe me, he had enough to be humble about—that he didn't know anything about art, and that if a decision was going to be made, it had to be Sudlow's. In other words, if he wanted to do it, he could do it, but the president wasn't going to do it. So now this is the time, the gallery is about to open the show. A week has been used up. So I'm told that the piece is going to go out of the show. And I said, "Well, that may be, but do you want to tell the artist?" And he said, "No." He said, "You selected the artist." And so I said I felt it was really strange to delegate authority and then take the authority back, and then give it back when it becomes responsible for telling the person. So I said, "I feel that if I had the responsibility of telling the artist, then I also have the responsibility to tell the other artists." And he seemed to think that was a reasonable thing. And so I told Ed, and of course, Ed didn't want any of his pieces in. And then I told the gallery people I dealt with, and I told him. It was some kind of a fine arts festival, and they were going to have speakers like Nordland and Hopps and everybody else, and so I told everybody. And everybody removed their work, canceled their things, except Chico [Walter Hopps]. Walter said he was going to come out, because he wanted to talk about it.
PALANKER:
Let me just flip the tape.

1.12. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE TWO MARCH 15, 1976

PALANKER:
You were talking about the censorship of the art show at Northridge.
EVERTS:
All right. We're—
PALANKER:
Walter Hopps.
EVERTS:
Oh, Walter Hopps going to come over; he's going to talk at his scheduled time. Everybody else has cancelled out. Aurelio de la Vega, the Cuban composer, marvelous man, and quite volatile—and God, so many things that he wanted to do, which were great fun to consider—and even to write and things—but I mean, they were libelous, absolute disasters, and it was kind of fun. And Ernie Velardi, one night after one of these sessions, went home kind of blanching that Aurelio would do some of the things that he was threatening to do. At that time, television wasn't as strong as it is now, and a guy by the name of Carroll Alcott, a local broadcaster, picked up the thing and did a pretty humorous thing on Bunny, Bunny, You're So Funny. The school newspaper was outraged. Gerry Nordland did an article for Artforum; in place of his talk he did an article in Artforum. There was quite a bit going on. So now, they were confronted with the fact that you had this big opening that was advertised and all, and nothing was going to exhibit. So then Sudlow appealed to our better senses, and he said, "I'm appealing to your better senses." And I said, "You really had the reaction of our better senses when we refused to go along with censorship." And he said, "Well, now the school's going to be embarrassed." And I said, "Well, you know, it's your embarrassment." And so some of the people started thinking it over, and the head think was a guy by the name of Saul Bernstein. And he went down to his gallery, which was Paul Rivas, and he got his work and his wife's work, a few other artists' work, and put together a show. And then Dolores Yonker, an art historian—there must be all kinds of marks around that term—put her work in. And they had something of an exhibition, which the students boycotted. But before the show was taken down, I had all the students who wished to see go in and see the exhibition, so that at least they saw what wasn't going to be there, and then they could see—oh, and drapes were drawn, during this period of time; drapes were drawn over the doors and things, so people couldn't see in this horrible thing that was going in. Now, the work that was under question was not even in an area that could be seen by anyone, if they peered in. They missed a really good show. There was enough embarrassment caused by the censorship and enough outrage in the community itself that there was a faculty senate meeting, and I was invited to appear. And Aurelio gave a heated presentation, which was so emotional that no one couldn't rise to the absolute emotion of it. But he still had a relatively heavy accent at the time, and I think he was also smoking a cigar at the time, and couldn't decide if he should have the cigar in or out of his mouth while he was giving this impassioned moment, so I don't know if anyone followed completely the reasoning, because there were really big absences of logic. But I mean, all the feelings were good and genuine. By this time Tom Tramel I guess was back, and so I was asked to present what my feelings were. And by that time I was rather calm and detached, and very resentful that it had happened: that the students had been robbed of a show, the artists had been robbed of an opportunity to be seen by students who didn't get to see much art, and that the community itself was rather limited in their exposure to art, and that the students had worked hard to put the show together, you know, all the effort and everything, and by one man's attitude and all. And I talked about censorship, you know, and what it meant and everything, and I guess the depth of my feeling got through my general ineloquence, because there was applause, see. And I didn't think much of it, but later, I was told that that was the only time that they had applause at a faculty senate meeting, see. And with all this applause and everything, when the moment quieted down, Sudlow jumped up and said, "But if you could have been there, if you could have seen it just staring you in the face." (I think it was the Brillo pad that got to him.) And everybody just broke out in laughter. Because, you know, the whole thing was just sort of—he exposed himself. And that's what he was doing all the way along, see. And as I recall, Aurelio jumped up and said something terribly nasty, succinct—[laughter] he had such a damning tongue, you know. But that went on, and then it came up time for my review, and now Tramel was in on this, and Ernie Velardi wanted to sit in. Ernie had kind of grown to be a kind of rather thorn in their sides, and I can't think of anybody performing any nobler in this whole thing than Ernie. Ernie wasn't going to touch any show in there, wasn't going to see any show in there, wasn't going to recommend students to see any show. And Harold Schwarm—I expected him to behave well, but Ernie was—you know, Ernie was no longer acting chairman, but he said, "You're not going to go into that meeting alone. I'm going to go in there with you." So I went in, and so they were talking to me about it, and they weren't going to fault me on my teaching or any of these things, but said my institutional image was weak, and what they were thinking of was the whole censorship thing. So I said, "Well, what constitutes an insti-tutional image?" And they said, basically, what it boiled out to was reflecting the attitudes of my immediate administrators. And I said it's really kind of amusing to hear the term institutional image, because this was the time that Khrushchev had attacked [Yevgeny] Yevtushenko about the weakness of his institutional image. And I said, "Perhaps mine doesn't agree with yours, because I thought an institutional image was basically that given by the sum total of the institution, starting first with the students, because there were so many of them, and then the professors, the faculty, and then perhaps the administrators, and then the secretarial staff, and then perhaps the custodians and the gardeners." And I said, "But they all contribute and agree to what I would think would be the institutional image. But I would first of all say that students were paramount in this." I said, "But say that I'm wrong in my attitude, and that I follow your attitude, and that yours is the institutional image, and that I should basically project that. And so I do, even though my feelings aren't the same as yours, but I follow it." And I said, "There's a lot of mobility now, job mobility for university people. And you may take jobs, both of you gentlemen take jobs, and you go somewhere else, and so two more people come in, and their views are diametrically opposed." I said, "So then I go, you know, and turn 180 degrees and represent another position, because I have a good institutional image?" I said, "No job pays me that much money." I said, "I think that I offer the best service when you ask me a question, and I give you an honest answer. That's when you're getting what you're paying me for, it seems to me." I said, "No job pays me that much money. I'll gladly resign." And they said, "Oh, no, no, no. We don't want you to do that, because everybody will think it's in relationship to the censorship, arid all." I think they had some other word for it: the incident, or some-thing. And the incident, I never saw as bad as they did, because it really cohesed, in the beginning. It brought people in the art department, the art educators and all those people, really close; they were all against censorship. It was the exerted pressure and his following that really created the schism in the department. So I said, "Well, look, it doesn't mean anything to me, because, you know, I have a job"—Gerry was getting me on full time at Chouinard. "I can go to Chouinard or CalArts." And they said, "Well, why don't you take a leave of absence, and then after the year, just don't come back?" And I said, "Well, okay." You know, I didn't want to cause any trouble. I was doing my best. I was putting together the best exhibition possible with the monies available when I put the exhibition together; there was no intention to embarrass anyone. So I did. And then, when I was on my leave of absence, then they went through this thing and put on my record a failure to rehire. And so I think that was kind of an indication of what I was really dealing with. And this person who was responsible for my hiring—and of course Sudlow approved of my hiring—Tramel, was one of these fellows who wants to be loved more than anything in life, I think if he has a weakness, it's that he really wants to be a nice guy and he wants to be loved. And if you want to be a nice guy, you really don't end up being a nice guy. You end up being a nebbish. And so he called me from his home, apologizing for what had happened and everything, and he was really trying to have me expiate his sin, or his sense of guilt, or something. So I was doing some drawing and all, so I was able to keep the phone and draw; let him run up his bill. But he was basically a decent guy, who I guess didn't believe enough in the things he should have believed in. I think the problem sometimes with administrators is that they take expediency to their job rather than commitment, that all of a sudden they feel, when they have the job, that they have to give up those priorities that they had before, which were maybe decency and belief in academic freedom, some of those things; and then they get worried about it. Then all of a sudden they see the problems, they see the problems that a piece of art might cause in the community, the problem that it might cause at the level of administrators behind them; and then all of a sudden, they don't see that they're really causing a problem that's greater than the problem that initiates, and it exists in their mind and all, and that if nobody had said anything, then nothing would have happened. Nothing would have happened. Just like with the Wally Berman show. You know, we had the show, and nothing happened. And a lot of people were afraid. So those men, of course, undoubtedly lost favor with their peer group. And it's a shame, because they weren't evil men, they weren't bad men; they were just weak men. They were worriers. Sudlow tried to put his fear onto other people, and then he tried to use administrative leverage to take and do it. He tried to intimidate the art department in supporting that personal position. But he kept going on, trying to get everybody else to approve of what he was going to do, and then he ultimately did what he had to do, which was sure as hell the wrong thing to do. That was a kind of a tragedy, and I understand that they still talk about the disruptive influence of this thing after all these years. But the thing was that that thing of censorship allowed them to get in a Juan O'Gorman exhibition out there, which was terribly tame, but he was a communist, and it was—you know, these were still post- McCarthy times, and things were kind of spooky and all. So they felt fine and brave, but if they hadn't had the censorship thing—you know, I mean, what the hell, they fired [Angela] Davis for only one reason, and that was she was a member of the Communist party. Not because of her teaching, not because she tried to influence her students into becoming communists, or anything else. I understand in classes she's quite apolitical, and they couldn't fire her for any of the other reasons, and so they fired her basically for that, and then they tried to convict her of a crime that she wasn't guilty of. So I mean there's this absolute underlying fear in a lot of Americans. And those Americans seem to gravitate toward administrative positions. I don't know why. Okay. So where are we?
PALANKER:
Well, that's 1961. [laughter]
EVERTS:
That gets me through my first academic position. My first real moment of academia. And may I say, in passing, that—and I should have known, having been a student—one of the things I felt as a student, I felt totally impotent. It was very difficult to take and get students' support, and it was impossible to move against administration when I was in school in the fifties. And so I thought that if I ever got into a position where I had any sense of power that I'd certainly use it to favor the students, because the students were powerless. So in my first run-in with administration as a non-student, I also found that I was powerless and lost position. And of course I imagine that Saul Bernstein—dear, sweet, lovable little do anything for the school Saul Bernstein—is still at that school, and he's still probably making a lot of money, and he's a full professor. But I haven't seen a piece of work out of him in God knows how many years. And he was a kind of an embarrassment. I know he had [Mauricio] Lasansky out, you know, and he said, "You're a master, and I'd like to sit at your feet and pick your brains," and all. You know, I mean, terrible embarrassment for one man to say to another man, and I figure that after puberty you got to count yourself as being a man. The amusing incident during the Cuban crisis, when we had cruisers in the Caribbean, and the Russian ship with the missiles was getting close to Cuba, and there was this big thing, and people thought it was going to be the Third World War. And we taught next to each other. I had a large studio in painting, and my people were busy, and I said, "Well, you know, if it's going to come, what better way of going than doing something you really enjoy doing?" And his place was like a tomb. And we happened to have a radio, and we had music on, as I recall, and then there'd be bulletins occasionally, and his students would come over there. And so every once in a while, he'd pop in and ask what was happening. And so I said, "Listen, Saul, I'll tell you. Don't bother us. If anything comes up, I'll tell you." So I went into his room, and all of his students are just sitting there, they looked like they were waiting for death, and I said, "They've done it. My God, they've done it." He said, "What? What? Russians?" And I said, "No, the Americans." I said, "They've sunk the Queen Mary." And I said, "It was on a Caribbean cruise and by mistake we sunk the Queen Mary." He said, "My God, what does it mean?" And I said, "War with Great Britain!" His students are kind of looking like this, and he goes—. [laughter] But he's so upset that he sends them all home, and he goes home himself, I guess, to make peace with Sally. And of course then he found out that we didn't sink the Queen Mary, and that it wasn't war with Great Britain, and he'd sent his students home. So I guess rightfully he didn't speak to me after that. [laughter] But it's kind of indicative of the way the guy was. He was a real creep. But over the years, I've seen that there's a tendency for guys of that nature to keep their jobs. You know, they're just very good at keeping their jobs. I mean, at UCLA—give the institution credit that UCLA should put pressures and things, and that Diebenkorn should be forced out of his job. And that [Jan] Stussy stayed on. I don't place myself in the same category as a Diebenkorn, but he's a person you want around young people. I don't think some of the people that I've encountered over the years that have resentment towards students—Ed Reep and some of these people—are the people you want around. Think what you want. I mean, the people that have meant the most to me are the people who really care about what they're doing. I've met people like that, and I think we all have. When you meet a person like that, then you really have a sense of what it's about, and then you want to do it, too. I don't know if on this I mentioned this old professor emeritus in astronomy that I just happened on one rainy night at the University of Washington, but if I had met [earlier] that man, who told me (and this Canadian friend of mine) I didn't want to see something as old hat as Mars, that we could see Kruger 60 (in the sense that, my Christ, I was going to see Kruger 60, a typical red dwarf). All of a sudden, I caught this man's sense of excitement, and then after that, Vogel and I always went back to see that old man. And if either of us had—I was in my senior year, and Vogel, I think, was in about the same position—if we'd met this man younger, there's no doubt we'd be looking at stars now, for Christ's sake. And that's what you need to do. You need to meet these guys. They're a little bit, maybe, like heretics or something, but they're in touch with something that becomes their modus operandi: that everything else is less important, you know, and that they just see things, and you catch this excitement. You get something that lasts you a lifetime rather than an assignment that doesn't do you any good. You start hearing about what the man has learned, and he's not teaching what he's been taught, but he's teaching a way of dealing with a whole number of things. It is significant. But they don't seem to hold their jobs. I'm surprised that Bill Brice—you know, he's still around UCLA because he's a very good person with young people. They take a lot from him. But I think sometimes with Brice, maybe they take too much from him, and there's not enough left for his work or something. But that's a big danger. George Bernard Shaw said a couple of interesting things, but I think what he was really saying, when he was saying about "those who can't teach," is that something happens that burns you out, and that the maternal woman destroys the creative man. And basically, woman is our teacher. And where we get into trouble as a man is that we can't all of a sudden make that identity switch that we have to, when all of a sudden we lose the feminine influence and try to relate at puberty to a remote father figure. It was a lot easier when we were hunters and they were smearing blood on our faces. But there is a danger, there is a terrible danger in teaching, but there's also a reward. The young, the better of the young, are always iconoclastic and idealistic, and those are two awfully nice characteristics. I think the most significant men that I've met in my life were those people that were without dogma, those people who were iconoclastic and still idealistic. I would say that Allende was one of those. He was not a dogmatic person. And those people [for whom] dogma replaces idealism—just general acceptance of life as it is, that it can't be changed (I'm not thinking of accepting life in terms of maybe the Eastern philosopher, but you know, that's the way it is and you can't change it; you can't fight city hall, that kind of thing)—you know, if you tell the student, "Well, look, you can't do this because of this rule," or you tell a student, "Remember, there are these things that you have to get around," there's a hell of a lot of difference in those instructions. One thing saying, "Look, kid, forget it, you can't do it." And the other one says, "You can try." You know, you try, but these are the hurdles. In one, you're helping; in the other, you're really discouraging. And you know, the kid's going to get knocked down; let him go out there and get knocked down. Let him know who the enemies are, what's going to knock at him, but don't tell him he can't even try. And these people, these survivors—there's a couple of different survivors in that [movie]; it wasn't her latest movie, but that movie by the gal that worked with [Fellini], what's her/name—?
PALANKER:
[Lina] Wertmuller.
EVERTS:
Yes.
PALANKER:
Swept Away?
EVERTS:
No, no, no. The one where the guy who plays—you know, she uses him. I think it has the number seven in it.
PALANKER:
Seven Beauties.
EVERTS:
The Seven Beauties, yes. That's a survivor. But if you survive, and nothing remains, what have you saved? And that's what these guys—they give away everything to survive? they give away everything. So they haven't survived. I mean, the real survivor to me is the guy who remains intact. He survives; he's gone through all the crap, and he's still there. He's the survivor. But the person who gives away everything to remain alive—that's a good film to see. Have you seen it?
PALANKER:
No, not yet.
EVERTS:
That's a good film to see, because that's what it's really about. Of course, he didn't start with a hell of a lot. [laughter] There's The Confession—there's been a lot of films, and I think maybe that's the part about our times. Rennie Davis, hasn't Rennie Davis taken on, isn't he into TM—transcendental meditation—and hasn't he taken a foreign name, and his brother calls him "Rammed Ass," or something? But The Confession, you know, the thing with Yves Montand, where he goes through the Czechoslovakian thing, and then he's reinstated, and all of this—
PALANKER:
I didn't see it.
EVERTS:
Well, that's a pretty good film. The Conformist is another film of that nature of things. I think sometimes the young get things by osmosis. I mean, their parents went through the fifties and kept their mouths shut, you know, during the McCarthy things and all, and somehow maybe the instructions that they got from their parents, that they were able to sense this thing, and they see with more of a clarity than sometimes the people who experienced it. Because we're basically talking about films by relatively young filmmakers, people who wouldn't have experienced World War II itself, and all. Because look at what Fellini does when he talks about it, you know, Amarcord. Does he really deal with what comes out in fascism? Like the father's little clash with it and all really isn't of the pathos and all. Look at the thing that De Sica did with the garden [The Garden of the Finzi-Continis] the isolation thing. You really don't see the thing itself. Where his last film, the film with the vacation thing—
PALANKER:
A Brief Vacation.
EVERTS:
That's much more poignant. I mean, that deals with a lesser degree, actually something that would be much more remote from De Sica than the whole thing of fascism. Both those gentlemen lived under fascism and functioned under fascism. It's away from things, but I don't know, you have to have some kind of fantastic self-belief or delusion to teach in as many places and lose as many jobs as I have and not want to accept any of the blame.
PALANKER:
It all seems to relate to your comment in the [Donald] Brewer interview at USC—"Well, if you can't longshore, what else can you do?" It seems as though up to this point, you avoided it [teaching] completely.
EVERTS:
Yes, I did. There was that show thing, and there was—well, I felt that basically, when I got out of school (and that's when most people teach), I didn't have anything to teach, because I'd only been taught. I thought that becomes a distillation, because many times the people that I encountered were people who were teaching what they'd been taught, and it was about two or three times removed, and it was so Goddamned weak and so closed and not open to question, because you find that the only people you can really question are the people who believe. I mean, if a person is talking about a thing that he has doubted himself, and then has suffered that doubt, and then come back and realized that he did, in true fact, believe that, you can argue forever with that, and that person never gets to personal terms. But if you argue with a person who is talking about something that they really don't have deep-seated feelings about, that they haven't questioned ever, and you question that, then what you're doing is you're questioning them. Because they don't have anything to support it. And then all of a sudden, they're upset, and they're finding ways of turning you down, of quieting you and doing things. Grade, pay; you name it. Longshoring, it was just porkchoppish. All you had to do was have enough strength to pick up a 135-pound sack. And all the things that they talked about weren't terribly abstract, you know. As abstract as they'd get was that they were trying to figure out what was North America and what was South America. And so, as the resident intellectual on the waterfront, I was asked—and I always gave them unsettling answers. And so I said, "I have no idea where North America ends, and I would say that it would be some geographical location, like the Isthmus of Tehauntepec, or the Isthmus of Panama—a very narrow moment," you know. And so I said, "I don't know, but I'll find out, and I'll tell you." So I went to the library, did a little research, came back the next day, and I said, "South America begins at the northern boundary of Colombia, which means it was about 175 or more miles north of where it was in 1913." I think it was 1915 that the whole thing—but I wanted to give a few years, you know. So they kept arguing and all, and that was a hell of an answer. Because it didn't make any sense. It was a very arbitrary answer, but that's the answer. So many times I would come up with these answers, and they weren't really as good as answers that they had. I mean, they had more logical things, and they had better places, and they thought Mexico should be in South America because that would make—with the exception of Honduras and the Guianas and Brazil—it'd make it all Spanish. But then Brazil would make it a Romance language, and it would also include France. You know, I mean, they'd go on with these things, and then someone would say, "Well, no, maybe it should be Central—." They'd go on; they had all these things. And then they would say, well, you can't have it north of the equator. They were trying to find relatively logical things, but the northern border was dissatisfying. If a person disliked you, he didn't pretend to like you. I mean, you knew he disliked you, so you avoided each other. If you had to do things together, you did it with a minimum amount of conversation, and that was it. There wasn't anyone pretending that he liked you, and I think the shock was—and as I said, I had had experience, but I thought it was experience because I wasn't a member of the peer group, that I felt that when I was forced to go to the university and go to college teaching that I would have more in common with my peer group, and I felt that talk about sports and talk about politics and talk about union politics, and talking about women, talking about prostitution, talking about whores, and drinking, and gambling was a hell of a lot more exciting than when I got to school. They talked about their lawns, and they talked about crabgrass, and they talked about some of their weekends, and they talked about their children. There was even a plan at one time—I was living down here in the South Bay, and they were going to have a picnic in this park in Las Virgenes, which is on out and becomes Topanga Canyon if you go on through. And they wanted me to come to this art department picnic. And so I said, "Well, I don't enjoy driving." I tried to be tactful. I don't enjoy driving, but Sunday was one of the days that I really devoted to my family. It was a day of real rest; I didn't try to do much art on it. I just spent it with the family, and it was relaxed, and friends came over, and they couldn't believe that I didn't want to spend a Sunday with them, because it was going to make the department close. There wasn't anything that was going to make the department close, really. Adversity did for a brief time. But so there was another faculty meeting, in which part of the faculty—faculty meetings were marvelous. We were going to put the extra drawing tables in room 135 or room 134. There was going to be another faculty meeting before the picnic, and we'd talk about it then and divide up who was going to bring what and all. So there was a little thing announcing the meeting and all, and so Tramel said that Connor promises to be there and have the fires going; it was like a breakfast. And so I felt that I couldn't let this pass, because it was a moment of pres-sure to get me to go to this meeting, see, because I was the only person that wasn't going to go to this Goddamned breakfast. So I said, "None of you have been in my home, so you don't know its orientation. But," I said, "basically, it has a north and a south orientation. Now, in my bedroom, which is on the west side, on the southwest side of my home, that is to get the nice, warm southern sun through the bamboo." I said that "the head of my bed is on the north side of that wall, and north side of that room. Now, it has the kitchen as a common wall, and that's on the north of my bedroom wall. Now, I sleep on the easternly side of the bed. Now, if I get up to—say if I did start breakfast on Sunday, I would have to get up on the easternly side, and then I would progress south to the end of my bed, and then east, and then I'd go back north, and then I would reach the stove in my kitchen, which is again on a northern wall, the northern wall of my bedroom, being the southern wall of the kitchen." They're all sitting there, looking." And I would say that to accomplish that I would have walked perhaps at the most, twenty-six feet." I said, "Now that would get me to the stove to start breakfast, but to the table to eat breakfast would be no more than three more feet. The time would be less than a minute. Now, if you think that if I can get breakfast—and my wife makes a fantastic breakfast—I can get to the breakfast table in less than a minute and walk only thirty feet, if you think I'm going to drive an hour and a half," I said, "you must think I'm crazy. I am having breakfast thirty feet from my bed, walking distance. It's only probably nine feet in sleeping distance." [laughter] And they're all there like that. And I didn't go. And I didn't join the bowling team. You know, this was Saul Bernstein's thing to bring the department together. Now, talking about some issues in art and all, that was my first real teaching job. I found that Dolores Yonker—I studied art history at Courtauld Institute, and I found she would always, if there was going to be a big critique (and you know, I demanded a lot of work in my classes)—somehow the kids that would be in her art history class would have a paper due at the same time. And we at one time had an office together, and I got this big crit coming up. All of a sudden they'd have a test or something. And so one day, I said, "What are you doing, Dolores?" She was looking up the answers to her test. And I said, "I'm so naive. All I've ever been is a longshoreman, and I had a problem. I thought that a teacher gave a test to find how effective they were as a teacher, that the person understood the information." I said, "I didn't realize it was to punish the student." I said, "It's easy to make a test that nobody can pass." I said, "Obviously, I can give you a test in art history that you can't pass, but," I said, "I find it unconscionable that you have to look up the answers to your test." I said, "If you don't know it, how in the hell do you expect the students to know?" I said, "But of course, some of your students could be brighter than you are." And I said, "That is a danger." I would say that my first teaching experience in terms of faculty and administration wasn't totally enjoyable, but moving to Chouinard, where Mitch Wilder and Gerry Nordland were the administrators to begin with, and Emerson Woelffer and Si Steiner were a couple of the people that I was dealing with, or another really good person, Herb Jepson. I mean, that was a big cut above; it was a lot better. [Harry] Diamond. And you know, they had some really good people at Chouinard at that period. You know, maybe we should call it a day.
PALANKER:
Okay, let's stop.

1.13. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE ONE APRIL 5, 1976

EVERTS:
I don't know if I mentioned it, but some of the things that happened for me at Tamarind were kind of important. You know, as I say, getting back into lithography [was one], and another was, of course, friendship that's lasted over the years with Joe Funk and June Wayne. Joe was a very good person. He was at that time an inspector for McCulloch Tool Company and [?] for a while, and had previously worked with Lynton Kistler in a shop; it was the last shop in Los Angeles. And while there, my place became a sort of place where a lot of artists who were in town to work at Tamarind or something would come down, and we'd have a few afternoons, on Sunday afternoons, of some fun and all. There were some conversations of importance that were kind of overheard during that period of time. Even after I left Tamarind, I was back, and met [Jose Luis] Cuevas, who I'd known as a young man in Mexico. He'd been befriended at that time by a person who headed the American school down there—God, names escape me. But he'd taken him under his wing, and he was in this—didn't speak English—and was in this class that I had at the school, and he was a very young boy, very talented, very skilled. Morele Wachter was the gentleman's name who'd taken him under his wing. He seemed very skillful, and it was amazing to see him all these years afterwards, because this would have been about 1951, '52 or something, I met him, and now it was 1960. At that period of time, in Lola Cueto's class, he was making etchings, and he was grousing about the fact that his popularity—and this was something that Thomas Hess once talked about—that popularity is one of the things that has a chance of destroying an artist. Not the popularity that basically goes to one's head and changes their attitudes and their relationships with their friends and that, but rather the demands of popularity in terms of the amount of work, and the lack of reflection, and the lack of the chance of developing your own attitudes towards your work. And Cuevas was complaining that it took so long to do the lithograph—I mean, in the time to master the technique, although the printing and the preparation was done by someone else—that the execution of the work on the unfamiliar stone was taxing and less productive than working, just on paper and doing some of the little sketches, watercolors, and things that he did moved much quicker than his work on stone. And he said that he'd totally given up the notion of painting, simply because his popularity made demands that he turn out these wash drawings and line drawings and all. The things that he was doing—I think the things that he did at Kanthos, which was the first outgrowth of Tamarind (and Tamarind was basically designed to turn out artisans), that that suite of prints, recollections and reflections on his childhood, were some of the nicest prints he's done, I think. The prints that he's done past that time were much weaker than those. Adja Yunkers was there during that period of time, and he was a quarrelsome old guy. He was difficult to get along with and cantankerous and all. I never had any difficulty with him; he was very sympathetic towards artists. I think he was unsympathetic towards the idea that I think a whole lot of New York people have a feeling against coming West to do this, and they had that press out on Long Island that was less affluent and more to their liking and all. Oh, I can't think of it—Esteban Vicente and all the people who were out. Mike Kanemitsu came out, and I established a friendship with Mike that's lasted through the years. I think Mike particularly had the New York attitude, though he's now become a Los Angeles artist. I mean—I think the idea of Tamarind was perhaps a little suspect. The book that was published for the show at the Museum of Modern Art was—are you familiar with that book? [Tamarind: Homage to Lithography]
PALANKER:
No.
EVERTS:
It was a little strange, in the way that they juxtapose certain people as if it were a commentary on their creative attitudes and abilities. I think Tamarind itself was a terribly significant thing. I think it really fostered a rebirth or a renaissance in terms of lithography of the United States, but something that [Stanley] Hayter did for printmaking, I think that June Wayne really did a job for—what is that woman's name, Tanya [Tatyana Grosman] or something, the gal on Long Island that was the publisher of the Jasper Johns prints and all.
PALANKER:
I can't think of it.
EVERTS:
Well, I would feel that her operation, though it produced a lot of prints, did really nothing to further the training of the people necessary to print the prints, or to really revitalize or reactivate an interest. And the things that came out—Joseph Press, the Collectors Press, Gemini [G.E.L.]—all these things that have come basically out of Tamarind—and Irwin [Hollander] had a shop in New York. The number of schools now that teach lithography—the University of Washington and I think San Francisco Art Institute were about the only ones teaching it for a while, and then Chouinard, when I went there. And I think Tamarind never made a boast of the fact that what was important was the production of artists' work. What their real importance was what they did. The fact that people like Bohuslav Horak, who came to Tamarind from France, who went on to Texas and established a litho workshop—I think he went to the University of Texas; I'm not certain. But all of a sudden, as I said before, June had to suffer the hardship of going to Europe to make prints. Now it was available, and available in a great number of places; the training was available to a great number of people in the schools. So I think it was germinal more than productive in terms of art prints. There were some nice prints there, but it was good that it happened, and I think that it was a good operation that June kept here. And now that it carries on at a place as obscure as the University of New Mexico, I think it's basically healthy for art in America that it is happening at more than at one space, and, as we spoke before, that people aren't just gravitating to New York, that they're staying where they are, and that the provinces aren't really producing provincial art. And that [Tom] Hess, with his idea, and his writing at some length about what happened to change the market from Paris to New York, that now we live in a world where production becomes perhaps more important than the sale of the work. And that there are those who want to play the game of career boosting, which seems to be more significant than when I was young and in professional art, that that can be carried on in the marketplaces. But people who are serious about art as a means of dealing with things broader than just the latitude of one's career want people that have a sense of being part of a tradition, a part of a continuum that is life and culture. I don't think that they buy so much the thing, the art establishment idea, that of course Hess is a major part of. Well, I digressed. My arrival at Chouinard was—I don't know how redundant this is—[when] Chouinard was under the operation of Mitchell Wilder. And Gerry Nordland was the dean, Emerson Woelffer was there, and I would say that Emerson and Richards Ruben were the two guys. Dick's leaving to another area. The school, while I was there, passed from the hands of Mrs. Chouinard, who was in her declining years and looked like the mummy's friend had come unwrapped. She was a marvelous old lady; I'd known her when I'd gone to school some years earlier. But she was in her dotage, and there had to be a way of finding some funding to keep the school solvent. It was in an ideal location; it was in downtown Los Angeles, near Westlake Park. (It always strikes me strange. If they could take the name away from the Nixon Freeway and make it the Marina Freeway, why in the world they couldn't take MacArthur Park and name it again back to its original name of Westlake Park?) So an attempt was to find some funding, and one of the things that happened that—Walt Disney, who I think justifiably was not content to be only a man who discovered the mouse, as it is, to wealth, wanted to create something more lasting than mousedom and Disneyland and a few other things. And you know, I think a lot of people who are in things like animation and advertising—and I certainly wouldn't call them lesser arts and all—I think during their training, or associating through people who have been around that training, feel that they fulfill in the art hierarchy than the so-called fine artist. I don't know if they have guilts about all the money they're able to make, but somehow they feel that what they're playing is a lesser role, and that no matter all of the accolades that he received—and I'd say that some of them were justifiably received because some of the things that he did in animation were really terribly important—but I think that somewhere in the man he wanted something more than that. And it wasn't just basically a means of securing the training of some people to fill his studios because that could be done with the dumbest kids coming out of high school; it's pretty rote. But I think that he had a certain fondness for the school, and for Mrs. Chouinard and some of the things he'd had a hand from time to time in the school before. So there was an attempt—and it's more than tax write-off, too. I mean, any man in business—I think all these things are a consideration. But he was at best a little on the tyrannical side, and he developed around him a group of people who were competent. The ones who were closest to him seemed to be, in my meetings with him, a little on the yes-man side. The person that he selected to replace Nordland at the time it became the California Institute of the Arts was unfortunately a man by the name of [James] Jackson, who if he was not a complete ass, he came close enough to deserve the title. And my first meeting with the gentleman was at a fitting place, I guess: it was the Elks Lodge, and they were having a general meeting. It was the first time that the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music staff and the faculty from Chouinard met together. And what's his name? Enesco, the composer, was on the staff. Grand old guy. And out of this we had a few talks, because we were kind of kindred souls in relationship to Mr. Jackson. So I guess he [Jackson] couldn't make a popular comparison for the people in music, but he said that it must give us great pleasure to know—the combined faculties—that we were working for one of the, if not the creative genius of our time, Walt Disney. Artists generally, and I'm including in that general term the people on the music faculty, artists generally have strong stomachs. So a few people blanched, but no one regurgitated. It was hard to take, and I couldn't sit still for it, and made some statement to the effect that I didn't really feel this. I didn't feel any great goodness or any of the warmth that he spoke of, nor did I really think that Walt Disney was really one of the creative giants of our time. Actually Jackson wasn't so inept? he could probably work very well for Nixon, and he was very immediately interested in securing my name. And I had a habit, one that I picked up from I don't know where, but when a thing didn't function properly, somewhere in my youth, I'd heard the expression mickey mouse. When it didn't function really well, it was really mickey mouse. And around the WED [Walter E. Disney] employees, the wrong thing to say when something wasn't functioning, that it was mickey mouse. And I really wasn't thinking of Walt Disney when I was saying that, but this man was an impossibility. He was a disaster for the school; he was really, truly a disaster. He had no sensitivity. Lou Danzinger, a very competent man in design, Si Steiner—and I think Lou's back at Cal Arts, and Si Steiner is the chairman of the department at Chicago Circle, University of Illinois—and myself, in a lesser light, went to Jackson and offered to rewrite the catalog, to put some sort of sense in it (because there was no sequential, no numbering sense in the courses), and to design a catalog that would be reflective of what we felt the views, the fine arts and advertising and the industrial arts happened to be. And he stated that he'd been involved with publications or something for some twenty years, and he felt quite adequate, that he'd be able to decide what it was, and of course they turned it over to WED. WED is Walter E. Disney Enterprises, and it was something the school could be ashamed of. But he said he'd been working for something for twenty years, and I told him that I felt that longevity on the job didn't necessarily mean competent performance, that you could be wrong for twenty years as well as right. And you know, I just thought he was an arrogant bastard, to tell you the truth, and I really didn't find much of a basis for his arrogance, other than the fact that he'd been appointed by Disney for the job. And he chose as his underlings basically people who were—I wouldn't say incompetent, but I would say the person that he chose to replace Gerry Nordland's job as dean was the night registrar, which was a job that you held in addition to another job that you had, a very sweet gentle-man by the name of Al Cruse, who was cast into a job that he was basically not competent to and realized that he didn't deserve the job. So he was really beholden to those who provided the opportunity for him, and it was unfortunate because I think that in the situation that developed at Chouinard. Al Cruse was used, and he was very badly used, and he was really a decent man. After Nordland's leaving, some of the things that went on at the school that were worthwhile ceased. The students were not very excited about the thought of a new campus, out in the planned town of Valencia, which is hardly, one would say, right in the heart of things. The idea of the campus at Valencia was real hype. It was basically to give a cultural veneer to the new community of Valencia, which was near what I would describe as being the asshole of creation. I mean, it's not a very pleasant place. It had that little town, used to have garbage dumps and pig farms there. What's the name of that little town?
PALANKER:
Newhall.
EVERTS:
Newhall, yes. Now, Newhall had been there for years. It had the honor farm, which I think was a dishonor more than an honor. [laughter] It had the honor farm out there, and they had Newhall. And that's about it. And to recommend people to buy homes out in the pig-farming capital of California and near the correctional institution isn't really to sell much. But then all of a sudden, when you put the California Institute of the Arts—and if you remember that Pomona College exists in Claremont because a developer, and California is the land of the developer, started this resort community of Claremont, and he wanted something as an attraction, and he thought, "Okay, we will make this a college town." And so he said, "If you'll move your Pomona College here to Claremont, we'll give you x number of lots, like every fourth lot in every block in the town." So the college having this tremendous loyalty to Pomona, immediately moved to Claremont, which at that time didn't seem close enough to Pomona to carry its name of Pomona, but it had a lot of stationery, so it kept its name. The students were a little worried; I can remember hearing Terry Allen, who was married, asking what kind of housing would there be for married students, because they were talking about dorms and things. And the man said, "Well, my God, there'll be housing from $27,000 up." Now, $27,000 then, that kind of housing would be probably over $50, [000] now, or something, see. But this is how unreal this is: a guy scraping together to go to school with a wife who was probably working to keep the kid in school, and here he was having him buy a house in—I imagine if people have things, they must have things in Newhall or something. They must have a little sky over there; they're renting out skies or something. The things that went on in the school—actually, infringement on academic freedom. There were things that went on that I found absolutely unbearable. I don't know if I spoke on about the school being a real hotbed of activity and all, prior to Walter's taking over, that the labs were open all night, all times of night, when [Harry] Diamond was in charge of the place, you know. The kids would be in there in advertising, working all night. And one of the things that Jackson did was to close the building down, because you couldn't have people there; the janitors couldn't do their job. After all, I mean, the activity of the students is secondary to the activity of the janitors. They made the janitors lonely, if nothing else. I don't know if it made them more productive. I know that they went to the expense of putting in an entire burglar alarm system, so that none of the doors could be opened without setting off all the burglar alarms. The kids were immediately there, figuring out ways to subvert the alarm system, and so it was a hard thing for them to do, to work a way that they could subvert it. But they'd ask questions of the guy installing the alarm, so that when he checked the alarm working, they'd know how to subvert the alarm. I had a girl, Kathy Cross, they called her "Lois Strongarm, the strong woman." She is now dead; she died of some sort of disease. She was about—body was about as big around as my arm. And she was a very conscientious student, in every class that she had. It was a class that was pitted over in Emerson's classes; things started falling into place. She and Karen McLaughlin were—kids would complain, because every time they'd get into the studio to get on the litho press, these two would be there printing. I arrived at school one morning, and there was a note for me to go to the office, and there they had Lois, with—I don't know if they had a detective down there or what. They'd found her in the studio, working before it was open. I guess they'd called the police, and they were down there deciding if they should file charges, you know. And so I said, "Well, what was she doing?" I mean, he discovered her while she was printing. And you know, I imagine that they really thought that I was going to support them on this particular thing, see, and how horrendous it was that she had obviously broken into the room and all, and said, was there anything broken or gone, vandalized, or anything? No, everything was in perfect order and all. It was just that I didn't allow the janitors in my room; we did our own janitorial services. And I said, "This is horrible, terrible." And I said, "I find it quite flattering that my students will break into the place to do work." And I asked the detective was there any evidence of break-in, or anything? And he said, "No, we could find no evidence, no window broken, no door jammed, or anything like that." And I said, "It's going to be a hard thing to do." He said, "Well, then how could she have gotten in?" I said, "The place is kind of drafty," I said. "I wouldn't be surprised if she was just walking by, slipped, slid under the door, found herself locked in the place with no one around, and felt that the reasonable thing to do was to do a little work." And I said, "I'd be amazed if she didn't take out a suit against us for having a hazardous condition." Well, the detective this time realized that we probably weren't going to press charges, since one of the persons sinned against really didn't feel terribly sinned against. But I was not thought of too highly for not supporting them. But under his regime, I would say that he did everything he could to discourage the students from really being involved in their work. Another case, in fact, was a drawing course that I was teaching, and we did all kinds of things in terms of examining the motions of drawing and attitudes toward drawing. And we went a week without food and all to see how it worked on our sensibilities, and we got some of these [?] glasses, which affect your perception and also the fact that you can stand on a staircase and put on these glasses and you're unable to walk down the stairs; it so disorientates you that you're fearful of taking a step. Yet you could close your eyes, and you can walk down those stairs or up those stairs. We tried going up because I didn't want anybody to break their neck. So we were talking about drawing, and maybe how we could work, in terms of just the most simplistic ways, without going into other concepts, in terms of arresting one person's attention span and controlling that, and perhaps with this kind of thing that one would be really involved in an environmental labyrinth or something of that nature, as it were. "Why don't you people work out the ideas, figure out as a group, of what might be happening, and then I'll come back on Friday, and see what you've done, or what you've come up with in terms of concepts, and then we'll just see how these concepts have further ramifications that you haven't thought of." So I went down and told Al Cruse just what we were going to do. It was going to involve—it was one little night class that took place in that, but it could be arranged to take place in another room. Oh, gosh, I think Doug Wheeler was in the class, Bill Pettet, Terry Allen—a lot of people that have done quite well. And so they all got busy with it, and then something like a Thursday or something, the janitor looked in there and said, well, he was going to have to clean all that up. So he went down, and I guess he got Jackson's support, and said that night it was going to be cleaned up. So the students were really angry, because this meant that I wouldn't even see it. And you know, this was their whole—it's an eight-week—they spent that time we spent in the class—we spent five hours a day, five days a week, and the term lasted eight weeks, so this was one-eighth of their class time—and, you know, it was going to be lost to them, and the whole experience, and the discussion, and what was up and all was going to be lost, and I was off somewhere, so they weren't able to reach me. So this made them a little angry. So they went inside, and they nailed the door shut and all, and then through a skylight they brought in all th is debris and stuff and all, and they just filled up the room, all the way to the point where they could get out the skylight. So the doors had stuck with junk and everything, so when it came time to clear up the place, they couldn't get to the place. The only way they could get to it—they had truckloads of junk. I mean, it probably did a tremendous thing of bringing the students in the class together. There was a Chinese boy in class who always was talking to me. He was a Chinese-American boy from Hawaii, and [he told] how he was at USC in architecture and changed his major and gone to Chouinard, and he felt that he was disgracing his family by it and all. And Barbara Smith was in this class. And there was an old gal, a judge's wife or something, that was in the class, a gal about sixty-five years old or so. So I arrived at school in the morning, and there were three drawing classes in session. Herb Jepson had seven in his, I had forty-eight in mine, and I think Don Graham had two or three in his (because most of the people who were supposed to take drawing had to be in my class). There were lots of visitors and things. They had a lot of bodies to get all this trash in there. And I came and found that basically a large percentage of the school had been kicked out. All these kids who were enrolled had been expelled from school. And they were just fuming, and I think rightfully so. They may have overreacted, but I mean, what was there left to them but some kind of protest, some kind of reaction? Christ, if an artist can't exhibit some sort of reaction to something—an injustice—I don't know. Here was this poor kid, this kid from Hawaii. He was contemplating suicide? this was the absolute disgrace. Not only had he gone against his parents' wishes and taken himself out of architecture and a legitimate university like USC,. but now he was expelled from school. And this woman, she was going to get on to the judge and get an injunction, and oh, God, it was really upsetting. And so I went in there angry, and here again I disappointed them because I was supposed to be on their side, and I found that it was unconscionable, what they'd done. I didn't think they should have done that. I thought they overreacted in terras of the—they must have thought there was going to be some kind of reaction when they made a janitorial decision rather than an academic decision. Well, everybody was reinstated, but the place was just filled with these foolish things that would never have occurred under Nordland's administration. I remember when I was told one day to come over—Cruse was always given the dirty end of the stick, and he always was the one who had to handle something—was told to, if I had time, if I wanted to drop by before lunch, to come by the office. And I dropped by, and that was that they were buying up my contract, that they were letting me go. And the thing was, that I guess the next issue would be the censorship trial and that I had sullied the name of Walt Disney, because everybody knew that he had an interest in California Institute of the Arts—CIA—and that the taint was still there, even if I hadn't been exonerated and all. That takes us to nineteen sixty-, sixty-what? sixty—
PALANKER:
—four?
EVERTS:
-three or -four? Yes, sixty-four. The thing that happened was that I had an exhibition at Zora Gallery. I had done a series called "Studies in Desperation" that was concerned with the death of Kennedy, the assassination of Kennedy, the assassination of [Lee Harvey] Oswald, and if he had lived longer, the assassination of [Jack] Ruby by the sovereign state of Texas. And it concerned basically a rather hackneyed, hokey concept: that if life has any dignity, then it has it wherever it may reside, whether it be in the body of a saint or the most depraved person. I had a tremendous disappointment with the state of Israel when it found that the only thing it could do with [Adolf] Eichmann was to kill him. And I would think that as a group of people who had suffered more concerted injury than any group of people outside of the Carthaginians, Trojans, I would think that perhaps with all the time they had to think it over, that they could have come up with a better answer. Now, people who perhaps suffered in some of the injustices might come up with different answers, but to me it was one of disappointment. And so the series concerned itself with the notion of birth, that if one had an a priori concept of how difficult life is, that one would perhaps, if he had his druthers, if he had a choice, would choose not to be born—a kind of a perversion of the thought of [Albert] Camus that the real affirmation of life is that suicide exists but so few choose it. Although maybe Camus chose it, in a masked sense, himself. So that you would get from this vaginal orifice, that you would get a figure looking out and seeing if the world was really safe enough—not for democracy, but for the person's birth. The idea that assassination is the ultimate censorship—and it seems kind of fitting that I should become involved in censorship then—but assassination is the ultimate form of censorship, where the person's existence is so dangerous, is so frightening, that you must take that person's life. And I sometimes wonder. I did a series on imprisonment around the [Caryl] Chessman case, that his crimes were not that horrendous. He didn't kill anyone, supposedly, and I think there was a question about if it were true, and the validity of the witness that testified against him, that it was kind of a forced oral sex or something like that. But take a man's life for that—but the thing is that Caryl Chessman was, to a degree, arrogant, and the person they executed was not the man that they convicted, and that he never let them forget that. But this was such a threatful thing. I think that the people who are the most vehement about the death penalty, the people who are the most vehement about antisocial acts and things, I think they must sense that there's a thin line between them and the offender, and that the presence of the offender is an effrontery to them, basically because they are reminded, not by the grace of God, but by maybe just luck or circumstance or position. But they're not in that very same thing. I would think of myself as a pacifist. I can't think of myself being able to take a life, because in terms of saving my own life, if I took a life, it would so alter my life, that I would be in the opposite position of Caryl Chessman. I would have saved something quite different from what I was initially. But that doesn't mean that I wouldn't fight like holy hell to save my life, you know. I mean, if a guy came at me with a gun, I would do everything in my power to convince him that he shouldn't shoot me, which might be hitting him over the head with a stick. But I would have no desire to take a person's life. And I think that the idea of taking a life produces conflicts that when I was younger that I didn't possess: in terms of abortion, in terms of euthanasia, and things. I believe that a person is entitled to determine whether they want their life saved and all. I think that's a determination every person should have. I think that we get into complexities and all, when all of a sudden we think that only one person is involved in the decision. I think it's a decision that basically should not be left to the courts. I think the courts and the laws and all those things are intermediaries that really allow us not to make up our own minds, as a convenient thing. What does the law say to do? But then, when all of a sudden the burden of decision is placed upon you, I think it becomes a lot tougher. And I think basically that's where morality really rests. It's a personal issue; it's not a public issue. It's not an issue of law; it's not an issue of culture. It's a personal issue. And I think that's where it's tough. I think it's where, if we were capable of making personal decisions, I don't think you'd get your Hitlers, I don't think you'd get your Nazi Germanies. It's easy to run with the pack.
PALANKER:
I'll change the tape now.

1.14. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE TWO APRIL 5, 1976

PALANKER:
Okay, we were—
EVERTS:
We were in Chouinard, and we were around the time of the "Studies in Desperation," which was a reaction to the entire thing around Kennedy. A lot of momentous things had happened in terms of—I can recall the death of Roosevelt, the death of Stalin was a bit of a shocker, I think to a lesser degree, Churchill (he'd passed from power and things). But somehow Kennedy touched a very, very sympathetic nerve in a great number of people, I don't know if I mentioned this thing, but there was a line of Mort Sahl's that was at a time when Kennedy—it was a crucial moment in the primaries. Hubert Humphrey looked like the man to beat, and Hubert Humphrey was traveling around West Virginia in a bus. And West Virginia is hilly and there's a lot of curves in the roads, and it's wet, and all kinds of things, and it doesn't make for keeping schedules very easy, and it makes for tiredness. And Kennedy was jetting about, and there was really quite a difference between the style of the two campaigns, and lots of media was available to Kennedy and all. And Mort Sahl said that maybe Kennedy's father had said, "Jack, I don't want you to buy more boats than you need." As a sense of economy. Kennedy's name was on that [Landrum-] Griffin Act. Kennedy was not a very favorite politician of mine; he had a tendency to compromise before the compromise was needed, so it strengthened his opponents and weakened his position. He was an ineffectual president. Lyndon Johnson was very effective, but he didn't set the same tone to the country. Kennedy got us into the Bay of Pigs; Kennedy got us into Vietnam; Kennedy did a lot of things wrong. But I think the thing that he really touched, and this is with all the crassness and materialism and everything that people think of in terms of Americans, there is a strange counter-movement that is one of idealism and boyish enthusiasm. It's part of the American culture. If you think of Americans, and if you're abroad, you don't think of someone being jaded; you don't think of sophistication; you don't think of those things. You think of this enthusiasm, this thing that you can change your destiny; you think of this thing that somehow you're going to make things better. And Kennedy touched this nerve. And Nixon comes along, and he tells us that we should do for ourselves, and somehow when you think, when he says do for yourself, it's not really to be self-sufficient, but you just go ahead and get something for yourself and not worry about the other guy. But Kennedy touched this nerve that somehow, there wasn't a "they"; that we were the "they," and that we had a desired power, that we could change our destiny, and that we weren't the "they" that was making decisions that everybody else talked about. "You can't do that, because they won't let you." It wasn't always "they"; that we would become the they. And the notion of having a Peace Corps and a war corps, the notion of sending all these terribly inept and ill-trained young people abroad, was that sort of thing. I mean, the people would meet Americans, even though they were incompetent, they needed them at least for better reasons. And when he was killed, it was almost like someone was trying to kill a very important part of us, our naivete, our right to be somewhat noble. With FDR, for a lot of people, there was dancing in the streets when FDR died. I mean, they were happy. You'd have to have seen the editorials and the editorial cartoons about FDR. There were people who felt that FDR turned the country over to the Reds. FDR was a meekly mild-mannered president. There were things about—a lot of people didn't really realize that FDR was a cripple; I mean, he was referred to as a cripple, but people thought it was a vitriolic statement, not one of his physical capabilities. It was very well masked, that whole thing. I think that the presidents were always fair game. I mean, some of the things written about Jefferson were even unconscionable today, and I think the new book on Jefferson [Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History by Fawn Brodie] with the excerpts I've read of it, I don't know there's a tremendous need to go in for some of the detail and all—but I guess we were visually naive. There was no attempt to show FDR in a position where you could see he had to use canes to keep himself erect, and the cameras were always positioned. George Wallace, of course, is always—they're parking his plane further off the ramps now to get him into his wheelchair, because they were showing him being moved. And you can say that that's a significant thing, but the visual image has a tendency to distort all the other images, and I would say that if you present the man as a cripple, it has a crippling effect on his ideas. I don't approve of his ideas—I think they're pretty weak—but the man's physical condition is based upon a continuing act that's gained a lot of popularity since the death of Kennedy, and it's an extension of the syndrome. I mean, the fellow who shot him could have shot Hubert Humphrey, could have shot anybody, because he really didn't even have a political bias. The Kennedy thing—I don't know, maybe it was a first occurrence when we became kind of an extension of McLuhan's idea, that all of a sudden we became this immediate image, that all of a sudden we see the execution of Oswald on the screen itself. There they're doing the transfer of him, and then it comes on. All of a sudden horror becomes no longer horror. We have the Vietnamese war with our dinners. All of a sudden, there's such an immediacy. And the first time you get this sense of immediacy, I think you get all of the revulsion and all. I think after a while, it becomes remote. I think that we need this distance. I don't think that we can deal—we have to insulate ourselves. It's much the same that happens in terms of our nostrils if all of a sudden, you were given this very strong scent, that within minutes, you become insensitive to that scent. If it's an all-pervading scent, all of a sudden you can no longer smell the damn thing. And I think this is what happens in terms of what happened to Kennedy. The first time, it was just such a very strong thing. And those things happened all the time. The immediate thing that here was this young president—it was like the knight doing duty against the dragon of Nixon, and they referred to his reign as Camelot, and he had this rather innocuous but lovely lady, which was a change after Bess Truman, and a change after Eleanor Roosevelt, and a change after Mamie Eisenhower. The thing is that Eleanor Roosevelt was a person, was a true person of stature, was a woman of note, and all. But it was difficult, and this is one of the things that I think that the only value there is in living any length of time is an ability to, in some moment of lucidity, remember how people thought and felt then, and be able to know how people think and feel now, that there are many people that had misgivings about Roosevelt because he'd married a cousin. I mean, in this day and age, it doesn't seem like anything that a lot of people would have a prejudice against Eleanor Roosevelt because of this. We're only now understanding some of the measure of the woman, in terms of what their life together was, her strength, her fighting the mother-in-law, and all these things. Eleanor Roosevelt was a personality—she was a person beyond—and hard to accept. There were all kinds of awful jokes about Eleanor Roosevelt, especially during the war and all, simply because she was a very, very strong woman, and that she didn't remain in the home, and that she was a woman of ideas, and that she was outspoken. Some people think that Betty Ford is outspoken, but there's no comparison between Eleanor Roosevelt and Betty Ford, even though Betty Ford may have danced at one time with Martha Graham. Culture won't see you through everything. [laughter 3 But so here is this mannequin that's—they make a young couple. This is when the youth was still accepted in America. She had a certain amount of elegance. She dressed better than Mamie Eisenhower. And I think one of her strongest features was the fact that her eyes were spaced far enough apart that there was room for a third eye there, which would have made her really an unusual woman. One couldn't help seeing the self-preservation in the woman as she moves away from her husband rather than towards her husband, when it happened. One could say she was going back for help; but the fastest way of getting help isn't to leave the scene, you know that the help is there, and you cry out. One of the nice things that one sees when people react, depending on their own sense of self-preservation, rather than their sense of empathy—and they get themselves in trouble a lot of times—when a person is in danger, a person has a tendency to forget the danger, but immediately react to the need of help. That's a nice human reaction, not the careful one of "maybe somebody else can help," or "I'd better get myself out of this dangerous situation." So that you will find a person of complete prejudice jumping in a river to save a black kid, because for that moment, all he sees is someone in danger, and he doesn't read what color the person is until after the danger's over. That, I think that perhaps many people didn't want to read that reaction, but there was that, and there was the death of a lot in that particular thing. There was a death of an old reality, I think, tied up with that. It wasn't just that reaction—it was Martin Luther King; it was Robert Kennedy; it was Lincoln what's-his-name [George Lincoln Rockwell], American Nazi Party; it was George Wallace; it was just this thing that started carrying on. I think that perhaps lesser lights got involved as things went along. But the marriage of Jacqueline Kennedy to [Aristotle] Onassis, I think was more of a destruction of the myth. I think a lot of people thought that Jacqueline Kennedy looked good in black and should have stayed in black. And a lot of things died with Kennedy; I think the sense of nobleness in our acts, the fact that we could no longer describe some of the things that we were doing as being noble. No one looks upon the Bay of Pigs as a noble act now. No one looks upon Vietnam as a noble act. Nobody thinks that those two things were basically an attempt to make the world safe for democracy. But at that time—and I think this is one of the things, that one can be sold a bill of goods, that we all like to think that we behave nobly, that we really did. It's the old thing that George Bernard Shaw said that he felt that it was better to be a hunter than it was to be a parent (you know, the hunter of the hounds and all), because no hunter ever told a fox that he was doing this for the fox's good, never told the fox that it was going to hurt him more than it did the fox. And I think that maybe we're in that position now. But when a misconception dies (and it is a myth that we have about ourselves and about our nobility), it hurts. And so I think that more than a man died with Kennedy. As I said, with my reticence about him as a president—I used to listen to his press conferences. They had wit; they had intelligence. There was a certain gentlemanness; there was a certain dignity; there was a certain gentleness; there was, to a degree, some role playing. But it wasn't a bad thing to happen. And so I did this body of work, and it concerned, as I said, the notion of birth, and the rejection of birth, and allowing yourself to be born. The works went on display at—shortly after, John Altoon was having a show up the street at David Stuart, and that was when he did his parodies on advertising, and they were a bunch of visual puns. This was at a time when John was just kind of coming around again. This is a good example of the mentality of the school, what was happening in the school when Walter E. Disney Enterprises was helping to staff some of the offices and giving a business manager and a few things. John was quite ill; he suffered the disappointment of Fay Spain leaving him and all, and he was under heavy sedation and all. John didn't have a tremendous amount of money, and he was working at Chouinard, so someone had to take over his class because he wasn't in a condition to take it. I had a fondness for John, real delight in his work, so I volunteered to take over his classes. But I didn't want to get paid for it, because his income stopped, but his expenses were incredibly greater than before. So I just would take the class, and he'd get paid for it. I had a hassle with the bursar, in that they wanted to pay me rather than John, and they said, "Well, if you want Altoon to have the money, you can give him the money." Well, that's not quite the same as getting your own paycheck, you know. And so I couldn't understand why they couldn't pay him. And they said, "Well, you know, he's not doing the work, and you're doing the work, and you should get paid, and all." And so I thought it over, and I thought, "I'm going to have to make an appeal that will be understandable in their terms." So I said, "Well, listen, I give John the money. I'm paying taxes on that money, and the money I earn I'm paying taxes, and I'm just giving it to him. He's not tax deductible; I'm not getting any credit and all." And they thought that certainly wasn't fair, to pay taxes on money that John Altoon was going to receive. So they paid John Altoon. This is the kind of nonsense I was getting with the WED people. I was teaching John's class. It was the worst thing that ever happened, taking over a class from John Altoon. Everybody just loved John; and my attitude—I couldn't teach like John. I had to teach like myself. The people really figured that no matter how ill John was, they were better off with John than they were with me. And John appeared in class one night, and you know, he was really spaced out, and he said, "Hello, Connor, what are you doing here?" You know, and he was just kind of like, he didn't have anything that looked like John Altoon. He was just kind of [speaks slowly], "Oh, Connor, what are you doing here?" And so I had to get on the horn and have them pick him up, because he'd kind of gone off; he was out of his room. But the notion that he still had this sense of obligation and would appear. There were things that were strange during that period of time. John at one time took a class, and he had a beard. He took a class at Art Center, and he had to shave his beard off to have the job. I'm surprised that he did it, you know. Every once in a while we get awfully hungry, and there's not a not a hell of a lot of idealism in a beard. So John had had his show, and his had closed, and I guess some people were upset thinking of the taboos and things that existed at that time. I had my exhibition, and I had a poster in the window that was just kind of innocuous, and so all of a sudden the vice squad—supposedly it all started because there was a traffic problem, that people were slowing down to look at the poster in the window. The poster belongs now to Dick Sherwood, who was my lawyer on the case, and I guess he's on the board of trustees at the County Museum. But really awfully kind of mild thing. And this is what initially they said—I don't know if there's truth in it, but it's really neat of you to make a poster, not terribly large in a shop window on La Cienega near—what is it?—Rodeo down there or something? Melrose? And it was slowing up traffic when people looked in the window. So the vice squad went out and checked it out. So they told the Pinneys [Zora and Edward] or something, that ran the Zora Gallery, that they would have to take down the—fourteen things were obscene, but they were going to have to take down thirteen of them because one seemed too large to take down, and it was something I think that was 12 feet [x] 12 feet that belonged to a Unitarian Church up in the Valley. Then they came down to talk to me, and I was in my studio. And they were saying that—so I was interested in knowing which pieces were obscene. And they said "Well, all the oval ones." And the shape was kind of vaginal, and I don't know, maybe it's oval. It never struck me as being particularly oval. So I went on questioning them, and I said, "Well, that presents a kind of a danger, because then every time you have any kind of an orifice, you know, like a door there," or God, I mean, perhaps it's one way of getting all of the utilities under ground, because those telephone poles, you know, I mean, they're going to get us. I mean, I couldn't believe that they were saying, "Well, we've found that we've been very unsuccessful." This case, the decision on the Tropic of Cancer that Jake Zeitlin had pursued, had come down basically in favor of the book, and so the new tack was to go after the producer rather than the purveyor of it, so that they would so intimidate the artist and the writer that he wouldn't produce this stuff. So the idea was not to—the Pinneys were willing to take the work down. I didn't even go to the opening. This all occurred before the opening. But see, there was a preview—now let's see if I can get this straight. There was a preview on Sunday, and I went to that; and then there was the normal Monday night opening, where they had the whole street scene. Well, I didn't even go to that, because by that time I think the release was in the paper or something. But they were—I can't recall the sequence of events. My God—what was it, over twelve years ago? And they lied to me, you know. They said, well, they could get five years, and that if I tried to show it somewhere else, they'd pursue me throughout the state, you know. There was a lot of liaison between the various local law enforcement. And so I said, "I don't believe in censorship, and this constitutes precensorship"—I mean, the people don't even get to see it—and I said, "This is a tremendous threat, and I don't feel it's legal. I'm no t at all certain what I can do, but," I said, "it's their property, the Pinneys' property, and what they choose to do is their business, and there is nothing at all that I can do to influence their judgment. But," I said, "I just don't think that this is fair. And if they don't choose to exhibit it, since I don't feel it's obscene, I'll find some other place that will exhibit it." So although it was not a fait accompli, it seemed like the things were either going to be taken down, or I was going to be arrested. And this would be the first time, you know, like they went after the person rather than—like with the things of—
PALANKER:
Wallace Berman?
EVERTS:
—Wallace Berman. They went after the gallery; they didn't go after Wally. And then when we had the show down in Exodus, they didn't do anything at all. And they went after the bookseller, not after [Henry] Miller, the author. I was in a quandary, what in the hell to do. One was, I wanted to find [if there] was going to [be] some kind of support behind me for it—I guess at the opening they had the works down—and also to find a place to exhibit. But who I called first—I got on the horn to Paul Darrow, who was at Scripps at the time (and Claremont wasn't that divorced from Scripps, in terms of the art department; they were one and the same). I talked to Paul, and he said, "We'll have your show here at the gallery." And everybody out there was unanimous about it. So no matter what happened at Zora, the work was going to go immediately from Zora out to the gallery at Scripps. It was going to be shown. It was going to be the next show.
PALANKER:
Where is Scripps?
EVERTS:
Scripps is a college, Scripps College, out at Pomona, Claremont, Harvey Mudd, Pitzer, whatever.
PALANKER:
It's one of the Claremont—
EVERTS:
It's one of the colleges out there. And that was the main gallery in that complex of colleges. The next thing I did, I called Jules Langsner. Jules taught at Chouinard, and he said, "Jesus, Connor, I'm about to go to Japan, but," he said, "I'm going to see that something gets done before I leave." So he got out, and one of the things that he did was, he went by the gallery and he told them that if they didn't put the work back up, they'd just be laughed out of that town. And then he got in contact with Dick Sherwood, I believe it was, about it, and Henry Seldis did a review concerning it. And I'm not too clear on the sequence of events, but I think it was on the Tuesday, I think, the police came down to school, two vice squadders, and they were talking to me about the offense of what I was doing and all that kind of nonsense. And so I felt that since freedom of speech is freedom of expression and all, since I'm one of these dumb guys that really believes in the basic ideas of this country and that democracy makes a lot of sense to me, if you have privileges within a democracy, then you have to accept your obligations. And so that if you have the privilege of expressing yourself—although I think freedom of expression in the United States is as free as it is because people who exhibit power in the United States really don't (the government, let's say) feel that art's important, whereas in the Soviet Union, they feel it's important, so they want to control it. But I think if the people who are concerned with power brokerage in the United States really felt it was important, I think they'd want to control it more than they do now. But it's just a kind of a masturbational activity, so they really don't care that much about it. I felt differently. I know my students were very upset about what was happening. I mean, I went out? I didn't want to talk in the room. There was no privacy in the lab and all, so I went to talk to these people. I felt that I had the obligation to pursue it, because I pursued it with the thing of Kienholz, as I pursued it with the thing with Wally Berman. I pursued it with some even lesser artists. And I really didn't think I had a choice, I mean, if choices exhibit, in this life, lots of times, we don't know what's right or wrong. I mean, if we know what's right and wrong, we choose to do the wrong thing, we're really behaving in a stupid manner. But a lot of times, if we don't know what's right and what's wrong, I would say that the difficult decision would be the better decision to make. In this case, this was the more difficult decision, but it was the only decision. There wasn't really a choice. I mean, even if they threatened me with five years at court, I had no desire to go to prison for five years, but it's the thing I said previously: we get to make up who we are in this lifetime, and we make a lot of hard choices, and maybe we make wrong choices. But you can't give up your notion of who you are for convenience. I mean, then what do you end up with? You have nothing. So I received a call from Dick Sherwood. He said we should get together because the law firm of O'Melveny and Myers, which was a corporation law firm, was going to handle my case. I guess Dick practices before the Supreme Court on corporate issues or something, but this was going to be his first criminal case. I was a fledgling criminal, and he was a fledgling criminal lawyer, so I guess we got along very well. He's a very sweet man. And so we went out to talk to the Pinneys. Now, the Pinneys are wonderful, warm liberals, and I have great admiration for the mister, who was frightened, but who was willing to overcome his fright. His wife was less willing to overcome her fright. And I think it's like a lot of liberalism. As long as it's remote, it's just a fine proposition, but when it crawls in bed with you, or if it moves next door, or if it does almost any of those things you're sometimes frightened by it. And Dick Sherwood had to do a lot of coaxing, and doing all kinds of things. He made a statement to the press about what the gallery was going to do and all. And of course Zora got very brave once I was indicted and it had nothing to do with her and the gallery. So if anybody was going to go to jail, I was going to be the one. Then it became a worthwhile cause. I think his name was Albert—was it Albert? Edwin, Edward. That's it, Edward. I'm not very good at names. Edward was a kind of a mensch, you know. And sometimes mensches can sometimes be weakened, you know. I mean, everybody's frightened, everybody's intimidated, but if you care for a person, you never feed their fears, you know. And he's a decent man in a tough situation. And there wasn't anything wrong with being frightened. Hell, I was scared. Jesus, I had no desire to spend any time in jail. I wouldn't volunteer for jail. So things are going on. There's newspaper reports and things. The first newspaper report—and I guess it was carried on the wire services, too—something from San Francisco carried the report from Los Angeles and this thing, along with a girl going topless or something in a public park, adjacent, or something. And the person, a friend, was surprised that I would get the same coverage as two tits, two bare tits. That was the reaction of my friends. But it didn't show the breasts or my work in public. This was about the time that my son was to have a birthday party, and seventeen kids were coming to the party. And the article maybe appeared on a Tuesday, and the party was on Saturday; and the day of the party there was one child showed up. This really kind of hurt, that parents would have this kind of an idea. You know, everybody has his self-image, and obviously one's self-image is a hell of a lot better than everybody else has of him or her. And it was a shock to me when we went finally into the courtroom and it said—and I didn't get to set at that table; I set over at the one that the People of California were against. That's a pretty heavy thing, to stand against all the people of California. Then all of a sudden Jack—oh, God, what is Jack's name? A poet, a real good poet; he teaches at UCLA.
PALANKER:
Hirschman?
EVERTS:
Yes, Jack called. And God, it was after midnight, and I go and I say, "Hello," and he said, "Connor!" I said, "Yeah, Jack." And he said, "What are you doing answering the telephone?" "Well," I said, "You called me, Jack. I mean, I always answer the telephone." He said, "No, I just heard over the radio you'd been arrested. And so I was calling to talk to Chizuko and find out what had happened." And so I thought, Jesus, here I am, he called me just steps ahead. There's going to be a knocking at the door, and I'm going to be arrested and dragged off to the police station, and the kids'll wake up and all this stuff. And I thought, "God, this is horrendous." So I called Dick Sherwood. I didn't ask him what he was doing answering the telephone, because he was about as sleepy and as muddleheaded as I was when it happened. And I told him what had happened, and that it'd been on the news and all that I'd been arrested, and he felt that was a silly thing, that he could get it so that there'd just be a simple arraignment. So I guess he called some judge he knew, and so I wasn't arrested in the middle of the night. So I was treated, I guess, as an uncommon criminal. And so we went to arraignment. And so Dr. Goldwater had taken off and gotten a considerable amount of cash money or something out of the bank so that he would be able to pay whatever it cost to get me out of jail, because they were going to set bail and put me on my own recognizance, and he felt that since I was innocent, I shouldn't even pay the bail bondsman a cent. So he got some money available sending a fat envelope to pay what bond was needed. So there was a big argument. But anyway, Sherwood got me off on my own recognizance—or not quite. I was in charge of the law firm of O'Melveny and Myers—I don't know how it worked out. But when we got to the point of arraignment, the works remained up. There was one compromise, in that they took the poster that was in the window down, so it wouldn't harm the traffic patterns. And so the work inside would remain up, even though I had been arraigned and I was going to stand trial. The public support was phenomenal. I mean, it was the art community support—all those things were unbeliev able. I mean, I would have absolutely nothing but pride in the sense of community that artists and collectors and general gallery people and all. Jake Zeitlin—and there was an article about Jake a few weeks ago, and I feel terribly remiss, because I thought that someone else would write about it, and it would be too late to do it now. They were talking about him as a book dealer, but they didn't mention Jake's real belief in First Amendment freedom, and that Jake immediately started a fund for my defense.
PALANKER:
We have to stop.

1.15. TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE ONE APRIL 5, 1976

PALANKER:
You were talking about Jake Zeitlin.
EVERTS:
Well, Jake was very incidental in terms of making a fund to defray some of the expenses and things that the defense incurred. The Contemporary Art Council of the L.A. County Museum got involved, and I would say that Dick Sherwood really got them involved, but Monte Factor was down at the trials and Betty Asher, and they flew Gerry Nordland out, brought Tom Leavitt down from Santa Barbara, Kate Steinitz testified; she was there. Oh, God, as I think back, I remember all the times that the thing happened with Ed [Kienholz]—it happened with Wally [Berman] and happened with lesser artists and maybe we should talk about that. I don't know if I mentioned it, but there was a coffeehouse in San Pedro, not far from the Exodus Gallery, and this guy ran this coffeehouse, and he was a well- intentioned person. I mean, he wanted to be involved in art, is really what he wanted to be, and I would say that he didn't have the background. So he exhibited people in his coffeehouse that were not terribly talented. And he had this Glen—that's his name? He came forward and donated some money to my defense, but this was during the period of time of the beat generation and the coffeehouse craze, so he had this coffeehouse and showed these works. And all of a sudden the police came down on this exhibition he had. And the art was bad. The intention wasn't obscenity. I mean if there was anything that the art should have been prosecuted for it was probably just innate badness, rather than the other. [laughter] And I could not talk about the aesthetics of it as being important art and all, but here was a person attempting to make art, but [I want to talk about] the competence. I don't think art is always about competence because one's competence can improve, hopefully. And here are the police saying that this person shouldn't be permitted to attempt to make art. I think about these things, so I testified in favor of this artist, and talked about the art and where the person—it was really funny? I wish I could remember some of the things because somehow a person in prosecution, in prosecuting this art, they bring their own prejudices. And the prejudice, you know, by definition means that you've made this prior judgment, so this disallows you from seeing the article with any freshness, with the eyes of Others. And so you cannot see it for itself? you can only see it as a reflection of your own views. And this guy was actually seeing things—the work—if it had a real missing thing, it was so literary and so apparent, and well intentioned. It was actually not, in terms of hokiness, in terms of attitude, wasn't too far from my own work, but this was years before. And so it was really pretty easy to deal with the art on its terms and its literary attitudes and what it was really going at. And it was not going after obscenity. But there had been a trepidation in terms of testifying for this, because the caliber of the art was much lower than Ed's or Wally's or someone else's. But there was no question of not doing it. And the effrontery that one feels when really you want to stop a person from exploring his own attitudes, his own feelings, when you want to still a voice: there's the John Stuart Mill. I'll have to paraphrase it because I couldn't quote it verbatim, but basically he said that you can never be certain that the thing that you wish to stifle is evil, but even if it were evil, the stifling of it would be a greater evil. That made a lot of sense to me very early in life, and so there was never a thought of keeping my mouth shut when I saw something unjust occurring. And I wonder—as you were changing the tape, I wonder what in the hell could my defense have been if I'd kept still at those other opportunities, but then wanted to open my mouth when it happened to me? You know, how indefensible my position would have been, no matter its merits, if I'd kept my mouth shut for convenience; if I'd been concerned about keeping my job at Northridge, if I'd been concerned in keeping the Exodus Gallery open in San Pedro, if my concern would have been not bothering to get involved with a guy who was never going to really be an artist, how could I have defended myself? What could I have used as the basis for my defense, because how would I have been intrinsically different than, say, that klutzy artist that was in the coffee shop? So I don't know that I had a tremendous amount to do with it; all these things started once it got into the hands of Dick Sherwood. The most I did was go up there and tell what was happening, what my thoughts were. Or he'd tell me what they were thinking of doing and all. If you could have selected an adversary, a better—it was like the stuff movies are made out of, here he is: James B. Clancy. He was an assistant district attorney for the county of Los Angeles, but he donated his time for the Citizens of Decency in Literature, which is a Catholic censorship group. And so here he is, an Irish Catholic, I've seen these kind of people all my life, you know. [laughter] He's there and a district attorney is retiring or this guy has retired, another guy is running for office, it's just all these side issues, and what was the guy's name? Manley J. Bowler. I mean, even the names were marvelous. And he was all down on filth and smut and children smoking cigarettes or something. I mean, that's where it all was in those days. The lines were drawn early, and I don't recall if I had to make a deposition to James B. Clancy. No, I think just the two vice squadders. I will say that these two people behaved like gentlemen. They didn't really try to coerce me. Plus the kind of subtle coercion of threatening to throw me in prison and throw the key away; there was no physical intimidation, there was no mistreatment of me like I was a moral degenerate or something like that. One even had a friend who owned a work by Dick Swift—which may not be a recommendation; Dick Swift's a real sweet person. But it didn't prepare me for my next relationship with the police department. I felt that maybe some of the thing was a little bit of an embarrassment to see me at the school—that was maybe not too good—but basically it was a very gentlemanly relationship; I mean, they were anti-art, and I was pro-art, and it wasn't much worse than that. And you know, they obviously had their ideas of what art looked like, and I didn't have any idea of what art should look like. Trial, the trial. The first person that was to be heard was a man by the name of [Samuel] Greenfield, and that would have been fortunate, because my very close friend, Si Steiner—I think he was Si Steiner's cousin. We didn't get him. [laughter] We got this judge, what was his name? God gave me this tremendous gift not to clutter my mind with important names. [laughter] He made it very clear very early on—I think we had him for the arraignment but the arraigning judge may not be the judge that you end up with, so there was a chance we would have gotten Greenfield or Judge Whoever-it-is; we'll find out. And so Dick Sherwood was saying at the arraignment, this was quite clear in the Supreme Court, quite clear in the Roth case and all, and the judge said, "I just don't happen to believe that the Supreme Court is correct in this issue." Which, you know, is kind of marvelous. [laughter] So it turns out that the people in lower courts can be completely autocratic. They can operate almost at any level they choose, because it's at the appellate court that the judges have to start really being responsive to the law. But at the lower courts they can almost make any kind of a ruling. They'll be overturned, but they can almost make any kind of judgment. That's what the appellate court is for, and then the Supreme Court, I guess, is really to make sure people understand what the law really is in the interpretation of the law, and they make the real rules, if it gets that far. So the first time I got to really experience James B. Clancy was when we went into chambers. I was really shocked because all of a sudden I realized that I wasn't a resource, because here is James B. Clancy saying, "Well, the artist is this, this, and this," and Dick is saying, "Well, the law reads this, and this, and this, " and I said, "Well, what about my intention? What about what I was trying to do?" "Well, you know," the judge said, "that isn't germane. [laughter] The issue here is law." So all of a sudden I found out that law is something that happens between lawyers, and sometimes citizens get chewed up by it. But the picking of the jury was kind of strange. Each had a group of questions that they asked, and it's like throwing things into a hat, unless you have a certain number of peremptory choice, some kind of a choice, you can throw the person out—exemptions, I guess it would be. So Dick threw a couple out, and we had a couple left, and he said, you know, "Are there any people you just don't like the looks of?" or something. [laughter] I don't know, I've never gone through life dealing with people on those terms, so I had to think about if someone said something that was suspect, and I figured each side is working so that nobody gets what they want. So you take what you get. You look, and you think, "Okay, what's his reaction?" The trial had some high spots in it, I'd say. Felix Landau, the crocodile, loaned a Gaston Lachaise called Dynamo Mother. I personally didn't really like the work, and it Is a female figure, and I don't recall I f there's a head related to it at all, you know. I was even prejudiced by the position of Mr. Sherwood on this, but it has a very dynamic vaginal area, orifice opened, kind of opened or parted or something, and breasts with rigid nipples, and it's cast in dark; it's dark and all. It had something like arms or legs, but every morning it was placed on this table before the jury as one of the things in evidence, and he would take it—he always reminded me of a submarine sailor; I wanted him to have a cap on backwards—and he'd grab, I guess, these legs, and position the vagina towards certain members of the jury so that they'd get this shock whenever they came in. And then there was a Rembrandt print of a woman urinating, and then there was a Picasso figure of fornication and all. And at one point the judge asked me about this Picasso and these figures, well, you know, just screwing—and that wasn't really what was important; it was the line that was important. And he was asking me something like if I felt this was something germane to an artist, that he should do things like this, and it wasn't obscene or something. And I felt that it wasn't, and I said, "Well, the important thing to remember, your honor, is that there's a world of difference between love and lust, though both at times may assume the same physiological position." And that, I think, is the only thing I've ever said in my lifetime that makes sense. He kind of mulled over that, and I noticed that it became understandable to a few people in the jury. Another thing that occurred; Clancy was making this big thing about reality and the abstract, and that if you put a picture of a nude in the window, it was the same as if you had an actual nude in the window. God, that's a powerful thing; that makes symbols. Well, that's really powerful in the Catholic church; that's a powerful concept, you know. And so when I was questioned, I said—and I was a little Machiavellian because I had heard two female jurors talking (are those jurors or juresses), well, anyway, they were in the hall, and they were complaining about the mass in the vernacular, that they liked it better in Latin because they had this German priest and he was totally unintelligible and it just ruined mass for them; it was this nice abstract thing before. So I knew that there were two Catholics, which would basically probably take a position that would be against me. James B. Clancy would appeal to them. So, my remarks were basically directed to them, and I said, "It's a fantastic thought. An artist would love to have that kind of power." I said, "But in reality it doesn't exist." I said, "But if it did exist, it would take and change something like the Holy Eucharist, Communion, and the wafer and the wine, and it would turn it into a cannibalistic ritual, because you'd be eating God." And I mean, the two gals just blanched, because all of a sudden Communion, which is this abstract, where you take the host and the wafer, you know—and all of a sudden it would be cannibalism. And so when I went back, I told Dick, I said, "At worst, we've got a hung jury." It's a terrible position because Clancy was in a terrible position, because he didn't know a Goddamned thing about art. [When June Wayne was on the stand], he displayed one of my works, one of my obscene works, and he said, "How long would you think it would take to make a work like this?" And June looked at me, and the jury looked at me, and she'd say, "Just about thirty-some years." And that was a pretty strong statement. Gerry Nordland talked on about—and it was actually a pretty good art lecture. And June talked all about basically what it means to be an artist: and one brings all their collective consciousness and their years of endeavoring to a work, and that basically the time it took to execute it was not the time it took to make it. And Clancy put on a little old man from Sanity in Art, which was a movement that at the same time Ed Keinholz and his boys were picketing the art museum in about 19 55, so was Sanity in Art. And poor old guy, he wasn't ready for impressionism. And the problem was that even Clancy made him look like a fool. And it was such a shame because here is another well-intentioned person that is being used. I mean, his prejudices were his own prejudices, and he wasn't a cruel, evil man or anything else, he just thought that all people that did modern art were depraved. He may have been right, actually, but Dick's a kind man, and I think it hurt him to discredit him, because in a way that man shouldn't have come out a loser, and he lost. And I felt tremendous sorrow to see that man ridiculed because he was sincere, he was honest, he was well-intentioned, he was talking on about. He was no more wrong for himself than I was wrong for what I felt and thought. And it seemed terrible to me what happened to him. And I thought that Clancy was remiss, was at fault in terms of the witness that he chose and all. The poor old guy condemned himself. It was a shame. It was put to the jury. Let's see, Maurice Tuchman showed up at times at the trial; he was new in town. Henry Seldis, when he couldn't be there, sent a reporter so that there would be some coverage and all. The reaction was terrific. There were always students there. The night that the decision was about to come in, there were a great number of people sitting around waiting for the jury to come in. June Wayne was there; Seldis dropped in; lots of students, you know, artists. It was really a lot of community support. That part of it was very good. We came in with a hung jury. It was to our favor. There Were some surprising people who voted for us. There was one guy that I never thought of and I was kind of doubtful of for a while that, you know, when Dick said, "Is there anybody you want to throw out because you just don't like his looks?" He came in right away, right when the thing opened up, and he said, "Basically, I don't see any reason why we're even here." And I mean, if I would have been a person given to prejudice, I would have thrown him out. [laughter] So much for how acute my judgment is. [laugh-ter] So, you know, as Iago said, "I am not what I seem," but I don't think I was thinking of Othello when I chose not to. The effects on me as an artist were disastrous. They were horrendous. It was six months before I even went into my studio. Totally unproductive. I wrote during that period of time. I did a lot of searching in terms of if I wanted to even continue in drawing and painted images. I felt that and, as I said, did writing, and did a little film and all. I felt that I wanted to get involved with a medium basically that you could arrest a person, that you would have their attention for a specific amount of time. Like in film, you're talking about a real time. I mean, there's two times: there's a time in the film within the film, and then there's the time of the film. The time of the film is a reality relationship that you have with the viewer and then the other—film still fascinates me. And so there was a good chance that I'd move away. There was some person interested in pornography that wanted to come over to my studio to see some things, to buy some things, and you know, that wasn't my gig, so I was repulsed by that. Someone bought something to destroy; I think the Kinsey Institute bought something. I mean, just the public, some of the thing was just so bizarre that it was unbelievable. I don't know if I've told the story of Walter Hopps's calling me over to the Pasadena Art Museum to have lunch with him and stating that it couldn't happen to a better person. "Connor," he said, "it couldn't have happened to a better person. You had to come to grips with this censorship thing." And he said, "You know, your work is strong enough—" I don't think he used the word eloquent, but he said that at least I was competent in my speech patterns, that I could at least express myself. And he said, "Besides, you know, you're tough. It will just roll off your back. It won't affect you. Other persons it will really affect. It affected Wally," he said. "You know, some people might not even produce work." But he said, "You'll take it in stride." Here I was practically demolished] [laughter] It was a tough period. The notion of me being at the other table when the People of California are all behind one table, the table, the good table, the good guys as opposed to the bad guys. The idea of trying to create something beautiful and something eloquent and something that would convey the depth of feeling that you had experi-enced, and then for someone to come along and say it was filth—that's pretty tough to take. You know, you have a tendency sometimes to think that you're wrong, to say, well, if I try to communicate this idea, and then it wasn't communicated, that somehow that you're at fault. If you're not at fault in terms of intent, then you're at fault in terms of ability, that you've failed at just the simple level of communication, discounting totally the notion of aesthetics. As to the real reasons why I didn't work, I don't know; something just kind of goes out of you. There's a fantastic deflation. The hurt that I felt in terms of my son, that all of a sudden that sense that you felt that you've created some work that had some sense of meaning or power or something, and then for that to be taken and totally misunderstood, not unlike what Upton Sinclair said when he wrote The Jungle. He said, "I found that I aimed at their hearts and hit their stomachs." Because he was talking about the terrible conditions that the workers suffered in the slaughterhouses and all, and all that happened was not any labor reforms, but the Pure Food and Drug Act was enacted, to make the food, the meat more palatable. They didn't give a Goddamn about the people. And so here I thought I was making a statement concerned about questioning the right to take a human life, and here everybody saw it as some kind of sexual assault. I wrote about the inability of people to communicate their ideas, the imposition of people. Well, I wrote this novel basically concerning the autobiography of Samuel McJunken. And it concerned a person who was a nebbish, who was like a mannequin that everybody hung their ideas upon, so Samuel McJunken was a reflection of the prejudices or the hopes or whatever it may be of the person seeing him. So each person created a Samuel McJunken. So when this biographer went to recreate Samuel McJunken he got all these conflicting ideas of who he was because Samuel McJunken was not any real entity of himself, in and of himself. But he was just almost like a mirror. He was what that person needed at that time that he was a part of that person's life, and he was an absolute kind of nothing, a nonperson. And his death was brought about one time when he all of a sudden remembered something of the spirit and self that was him when he was a child, and how he ran from his first conflict with being a person. And he remembered the day, as he walked on this kind of yellow ochre mud, and in one of the puddles, the bright blue sky reflected in the puddles, and this was in his mind as he opened this exit from this matinee he'd gone to, and he was struck by this bright sunlight and stepped off the curb and was struck by a car. So in the moment of his revelation of the loss of self so long ago, he brought about his own destruction, which I guess I spoke about today in the fact that we make up who we are, and if we ever deny that, or give away or sell that which we are, then we become nothing. And so these were the kinds of things I couldn't deal with making pictures. That studio of mine was the very substance of my life, and I had no desire to be there, to be in that. You know I taught, I did the things, I went through the trials, doing all those things, but I didn't function as an artist, and yet there was this need to function as an artist. So I was dealing with a mechanical object each time. I didn't write in longhand; I wrote with a typewriter. And I learned to write in the service, taking code, so everything was uppercase. There was no upper-lower case, there was no punctuation or any of those things, and the camera was again a mechanical thing. And as I said before, I'd worked previously in a very kinesthetic manner and that had been taken away from me in the waterfront accident. So in terms of this I even had a machine between me. It's only with a kind of hindsight that I can see some of the things that I did. We had the hung jury. I thought that nothing more would come of it. And then when Evelle J. Younger became the district attorney instead of Manley J. Bowler—a wonderful name—with Clancy to support him, Clancy didn't retain his job. They decided to retry me, which came as a surprise. I would later hear from Evelle J. again, and I would also have an experience with James B. Clancy. You might ask me about that. It will be when I come back from San Francisco and I'm at L.A. State. So we get permission to have it tried by the transcripts rather than testimony. And we get a judge [Andrew J.] Weisz, which I think is W-e-i-z [sic] but it should have been W-i-s-e, because he finds in our favor, and I'll locate an excerpt from his little judgment which I think would be worth reading into the record because it should be somewhere. So a great number of students and, again, the interested people and all went, and television [covered it]. We went to hear the verdict, and it was delivered. It was in our favor, everybody was happy, and right after that, Walter E. fired me for the effrontery of embarrassing Disneyland, for the little fairy in the flimsy gown. The students had a party at one of the students' homes, and I went. for a little while before going home, and what happened there I think was one of the most fitting endings to the story. There were two students, one named Leo Germano and another by the name of Charles Milligan. Charles Milligan was an unforgettable sort of student. He had some problems. As I said before, Chouinard had these Fridays, and we'd bring either Emerson Woelffer or Si Steiner. I'd bring a person we thought would be of interest to the students, and this one time Si brought in this structural engineer who was very good at problem solving. He was talking about what a different period of time—before, we had problems, and we'd have natural materials, and we'd try to take and make these natural materials work and serve the purpose. But now we had these needs like space, and we developed materials to fulfill the needs, and this was a completely different concept. And he said, "So now we can approach problems that would be unthinkable before." And he said, "And we can solve them." And he said, "Who has just any kind of an idea, no matter how bizarre it may seem to you, and I'll show you how this system works and how we go about this problem solving." And Charlie, who had kind of a voice like, [high voice] "Hello, my name is Charles Milligan," very sweet-faced, very round, and kind of Little Orphan Annie eyes—the worse you could say was that it was innocuous—and that little baby grin, puppy fat, everything, you know. So several people raised their hands, and Charles's hand was kind of wiggling, and so he called on Charles, and he said, "What would you like to do?" And Charles said, "I'd like to repeal the law of gravity." [laughter] Just the phrasing of it. And he said, "Well, why would you want to do that?" And Charles said—and Charles was serious—he said, "Then I could make it to school in one hop instead of two." Well, there was a pool at this house in Beverly Hills, and there was a shortage of bathing suits—and this wasn't at this period of time, in period of history, in the period of the party. Nobody was ready to go in, in the buff. Charles didn't know how to swim—he was the only one who didn't know how to swim—so Leo Germano said he'd teach him. So he got Charles into a normal bathing suit, and Leo had to get into this girl's mother's bathing suit. And so he was showing Charles how to swim and do this, and so he started Charles. And so when Charles started swimming in what would be close to an Australian crawl, and kicking, he moved backwards. Now, I don't think if anyone tried to swim backwards, they'd be able to do it, but somehow that seemed to be at the right time to leave that particular party, and that really kind of ended that whole period of my life.

1.16. TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE TWO MAY 24, 1976

PALANKER:
Okay, today we're going to talk about you and printmaking, Mr. Everts. Would you like to tell me when you first became interested in making prints?
EVERTS:
I was, as I said before, a relatively naive young man. I'd seen prints a bit, and I think I made my own first print, a woodcut, after reading Goethe; and it was a self-portrait in 1949. And it was about this time that I became aware of prints. It was Jake Zeitlin—I think he was in the barn by then—had exhibitions, I think the late forties, early fifties when he was attempting to sell [Kathe] Kollwitz's work for prices like fifteen dollars and not being terribly successful. Also there was an article in the old Daily News around '49, by Ken Ross, who was the art critic, later to become chairman of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Department, on Lynton Kistler's studio, his printshop. He was an artisan, and he had one of the hotshots of Los Angeles art then, Jean Chariot—who was out of France, out of Mexico, and a few years later on his way to Hawaii, where I believe he is now enshrined. Joe Funk was an apprentice there who later became incidental in setting up the department at USC, and then [became] one of the first printers at Tamarind; [he] helped set up Tamarind and the first offshoot of that, the Kanthos Press, and then the Joseph Press. And June Wayne also worked with Kistler, so I would say that Kistler's shop was a very significant shop for the area. Artists of all persuasions worked with him—Phil Dike—oh, right now names escape me, but that's the first. The scene was rather meager. There wouldn't have been any shop dealing to my knowledge, and I wouldn't say that I was terribly knowledgeable at the time. There wasn't anything in the way of galleries specializing in prints of quality, at least. And there was then, as there still is, a confusion between reproductions and prints. It wasn't until quite a few years later O.P. Reed broke off from the Landau Gallery, stopped painting completely, I believe, and opened a print gallery. Very sweet and knowledgeable man. Zeitlin, of course, was selling books then, as he is now. He was a bookseller first, and I think the first thing he sold other than books I would think would be in his old place downtown, and I think that would have been photographs rather than prints. He still has prints. That would be into the early fifties. I would say that O.P. didn't open his gallery until early sixties, or late fifties, just about in there. Let's see, immediately after the Second World War there would have been some prints being done. Clinton Adams worked at Kistler's, and Clinton Adams was somewhat incidental in the printshop at UCLA, but it wasn't terribly active. Probably USC's was a little more active because the people themselves were setting up the shop, guys like Funk and [Joe] Zirker and all of them. Jules Heller was the person that came along and had the title of teacher of the class, but I think he did much of his learning from the students. The best thing that probably happened for printmaking in the area would have been about 1953, I would say, probably fall of '53, when UCLA hired John Paul Jones, who was out of—sounds like the breeding of a horse or something—was out of [Mauricio] Lasansky in Iowa. And he came out to UCLA doing very hard-edged things, and did quite a bit to enliven printmaking, had some good students that went through at the time, James McGarrell and Ray Brown, and Louis Lunetta. I think it was probably the first attempt to set up something like a print department in Southern California. A lot of students rolled through the place; a lot of students started doing a creditable job. There were other artists working around. In prints, of course, there was Leonard Edmondson, who'd been over at L.A. County Art Institute, got very interested in etching under Ernest Freed at the L.A. County Art Institute. And he went to Pasadena, and in those years he wasn't exclusively interested in prints, but got very interested, and I would say that most of his output now is in prints. Leonard went to Pasadena City College and later on, in something like the early sixties, had a department at Pasadena that had John Opie, who was a very fine printmaker, who went, I think, to Tulane or Louisiana State University, I believe it was. Had Shiro Ikegawa and Ben Sakoguchi and himself, who I would say were four printmakers of national significance. John Paul brought an enormous English press. I remember when it arrived; it was the first really kind of large press in the area. There wasn't a tremendous amount of interest in printmaking in the fifties, and I would think that if the interest in printmaking was established, it would have been established by two schools. There would have been UCLA, under John Paul Jones, and Immaculate Heart, under Sister Mary Corita (I guess Corita Kent now). But that was purely silk screen, and they got a tremendous amount of attention. I think the first significant attention they received was from John Entenza of Arts and Architecture (and later of the Graham Foundation); he was the publisher of Arts and Architecture, gave them a bit of a spread. I had worked basically on my own, and then went up to the University of Washington in 1950, worked under Glen Alps, and was introduced to lithography, etching, and silk screen, did a bit in all of them. So what was happening in the area was a little—I can't tell just what was happening, because I was in and out of the area in 1950, '51; I was up in the University of Washington, then down into Mexico, where I worked with Lola Cueto and did quite a bit of work in etching. I'd say I basically worked in etching at that period of time. Then I was off to England and worked again in relief prints. Then I went back to Mexico, and when I returned I found that it was very difficult to get—Lynton was printing a few prints (it was about 1954, I guess), and he was more into a commercial offset situation, where he actually did commercial work, calendars, and things like that, and maybe would do for a few people for friends like—oh, God, I can't think of his name; he teaches drawing at Otis [Joseph Mugnaini]. Terrible kind of hacky stuff, but they were very close friends and he did quite a bit of work for them, and then he eased out of it. Takes us up to about into the fifties. In '54 I returned, I guess, by then from England, and that's when I met John Paul and was invited up to make prints on the weekends. So I did a few etchings during this period of time. And then into the fifties when I started Exodus, and Sister Mary Corita had a show of their work—I had a show of the workshop out at UCLA with a lot of those people at Exodus. So I started trying to promote prints, did a print exhibition. During this period of time every two years the Pasadena Art Museum did a national print exhibition. Prints were always included in prints and drawing shows; the Los Angeles artists and vicinity show had a section that was always very minor, and it was prints and drawings. And prints were not given much of a section. The San Francisco Art Museum is annuals—they had one in painting, in sculpture, and one in prints and drawings, probably the most significant show. There was a tremendous amount of national exhibitions coming up, and most Los Angeles artists entered them and did quite well—I mean the printmakers. There was quite a few printmakers in the area, but unless they were classmates or something, there wasn't any sense of community, I don't know just when it was that Dick Swift, as far as I'd heard of, was teaching at Occidental. He was teaching a print class over there, and they've maintained a fairly low profile in their print program (I think in their art program totally). They did have an exhibition when there was very little happening in exhibitions, the exhibitions they did have under Connie Perkins, I think was her name; they were rather significant to the L.A. scene because so little was being done in contemporary work. Dick moved to Long Beach State and built a very large department, I don't know if it's been a productive department. I think in the first year that John Paul was at UCLA and had a little D-roller press; it was just a half-moon press, so you'd go a ways through your print, and then it would release, and then you had to crank on around until you came—it was basically a press that was used for printing business cards. And the only press that they had was a litho press under Clinton Adams, and that was closed up when John Paul Jones came to UCLA; that was put away in the closet or a room because one of the prejudices that Lasansky had was that he didn't think that lithography had any validity at all. So John Paul had no experience in it, so that wasn't even considered being an area that should have been taught. That takes us, I guess, through the fifties. Let's see what else would have happened in the fifties. Not too much. All of a sudden you started seeing the prints of other people. The most important event for Los Angeles probably was, of course, the Tamarind Lithography Workshop. It brought the most amount of notice and all. And it certainly brought lithography into a little bit higher estate. There was, of course, the printing being done on Long Island, all the printing being done in France, so one saw the shows and the works of major artists in prints, but not in terms of printmaking as I am speaking in terms of the fact that it was an art where the artist printed the things. Tamarind brought along the artisan concept, where there would be a man who serviced the artist and of course out of Tamarind came Kanthos, the Joseph Press, Ken Tyler's Gemini, and Cirrus, and also it promoted the idea that something like that might be a feasible way. And so I would say the Triad Press is something which came out of that. And then there is another, over in Venice—I can't think of its name; it's initials, another kind of cooperative press that happens over there. About 1960 I went out to Cal State Northridge and was teaching painting and drawing, and they'd hired Ernest Freed—who was also working, as I said before, at Otis, and was moonlighting out there, and did the etching pro-gram. And since he had also been out of Lasansky, he knew nothing about lithography. So I took a class to teach a little bit of lithography, got the lithography program started, and then Tom S. Fricano came out from Chicago {I guess he was at Bradley), came out from the Midwest and took over after I left there. I went to Chouinard, where I took over the printmaking department from Dick Ruben, and we probably had the most extensive lithography program of the schools at that time. And, because we were better equipped, we had a couple of presses for litho and were able to do basically the whole thing, offering the symposium with Ikegawa and Edmondson and Fricano—and summer sessions I'd bring in several other artists—engendered quite a bit of interest. At the same time I set up the L.A. Printmaking Society I was serving on a jury with Paul Darrow, and during this period of time I was exhibiting a lot in juried exhibitions And I'd run across all these names of Los Angeles area people, talked to, when we were jurying, and on a break, I'd talk to him about—you know, he'd been in a lot of these exhibitions, and it seemed strange that L.A. artists were exhibiting prints all over the nation and winning all these prizes, but there wasn't any kind of showplace or anything to promote the prints. Ebria Feinblatt had the print department at L.A. County, in the old building, but it was pretty much of a second-string operation, and it didn't have much to do with contemporary—there was no print council. That only came about when they moved to the new museum; they were still in Exposition Park. So when I started the printmaking society, I was still out at Northridge. So I wrote a lot of letters and all, and let's see, I went over to Pasadena Art Museum and went through all of the people from Los Angeles who had submitted to the annuals that they had, and took this group of names, and wrote to all these people saying that I was trying to find if there was any interest in starting a printmaking society in the area. And so then had a meeting, and at the meeting we talked about it, and everyone seemed to be in favor. Leonard Edmondson was there, and Shiro Ikegawa, and, you know, most of the major printmakers, plus a lot of people I hadn't heard of. And so after we started working on bylaws and all, we were putting down what it was that would be required of a person to get admission, so the better printmakers wanted to make it very difficult, juried entries and all. I thought that was completely fair, but I felt that we couldn't jury out the people who'd already expressed an interest in it and who attended the five or six meetings that had been necessary to set up the place. And actually the weakest members ended up, at least in my presidency, the most difficult ones to work with. It wasn't difficult to work with Ynez Johnston, Leonard Edmondson, and those people; but some of the others, best left unnamed, were almost—I mean they had fantastic egos and a very low level of work. At this time there was an Australian gal in my class by the name of Molly Brendell who did kind of charming and naive things. And she met this woman by the name of Esther Lewis. Esther Lewis's husband was a lawyer and in charge of his own surplus income, and they bought a building on Broadway in speculation that somehow since—I guess it was Broadway, Spring, and that was the old financial district, and that it was going to have to move south, and that this particular building site, because the building wasn't that much, was going to have a fantastic value. But in the interim, since she was a printmaker and attended the meetings, and even loaned us her house for a couple of the meetings, she thought it would be nice if we took and we could have a workshop there or a printshop or something, so we voted to have a gallery. (June Wayne was a member of the organization at the time.) And so we tore out walls, and covered them with burlap, and did all this work, and set up a really nice gallery. And we had exhibitions, and we had the first major juried print show in Los Angeles, which later became a national exhibition. And we had print sales, and we had a Christmas show for young collectors and all. And where people like Ynez and Leonard had prints selling for twelve and fifteen dollars, and they were such good buys that I think it was John Opie and Leonard and Ynez and I decided that I would take a couple of the walls for each of them and just cover it with their prints and all. I was very careful; I only put in one print of my own, and I saw that every member had one print in the show. And God, at the next meeting' all these—as I said, the worst artists and all were just incensed that these people had gotten all these prints in. And the reaction was as if I put my own prints up. I only had put up one of my own, but it was as if somehow I committed this terrible sin. And I thought their work themselves was the best defense; some of the nicest works in—the prices were some of the lowest prices, and it was an opportunity to do just what we wanted to, and that was to promote prints. Not promote personal sales, but to get the notion over to the public that you could go in and you could buy original works of art, of quality, by contemporary artists, and this wasn't a thing much thought of. I mean, we were very incidental in pushing the sales of prints. Later, of course, Comsky and a lot of other people opened up. But we were nonprofit, and some people did quite well. I mean, we had several hundred dollars worth of sales a month, and that startled me. And we had people come in and we would have—the time Tamarind would be open—we'd have, oh, Jake Landau, or whoever happened to be in, Esteban Vicente or whoever was in making prints over there; we'd have him come down and give a talk at the society, so we'd have it open. And then this particular time, 3M—Minnesota Mining [and Manufacturing]—was thinking of making a press, and so they put on loan to me a press, to test it and write some critiques of it and all. So I thought the logical place to take it would be down to the printmaking society. So Paul Darrow and I started to put the thing up there, so that we would have a workshop and all. I was not terribly interested in pursuing that part of it. Bob Freimark, who now teaches at San Jose State, was in the area, and he handled it, and it was an heroic effort. He boxed and shipped all of the prints as one unit, because one of the idiosyncrasies of the thing is if you've got a print in the show, then the exhibiting institution would pay for the shipping back, you see. So if we, as a society, sent sixty prints off in one box and only fifteen of the prints got in, all sixty of them would be prepaid returning, see. Bob got all this information—it was just a fantastic effort—and sent them off to the shows. And we'd have these dates. And we had the first buying cooperative. We bought paper together, and materials. We also had print cabinets down the room, just for looking at prints and so everybody had a biography and a series of prints available, so any print collector in town could come in, peruse the prints and see them and make sales. I don't know if I've mentioned it, but Esther Lewis was a well-intentioned gal, but she's a real pain in the ass. I don't, know if she was really talking through her nose —Paul Darrow knew she was talking through her hat—but always, if things didn't go well or something—she was threatening to take the building away from us, or this or that. She'd call me in the middle of the night, and she'd gone down to the building, and someone hadn't flushed the toilet, and "What are we going to do about this?" And the only thing I could suggest was that she flush the toilet. I didn't think she should call up the entire membership to decide what to do about an unflushed toilet. Intelligent gal, but somehow I wasn't able to make the connections sometimes in her speech patterns. It wasn't that she was into Joycean stream of consciousness; it's just that—well, I remember one time she was discussing her daughter and she said about her daughter, "She has such large breasts, you wouldn't think she had a brain in her head." And it was difficult for me to correlate the two, you know. [laughter] Unless, somehow—well, I guess there must be some kind of rationale in there, but it's scientifically unprovable, I would assume. Then there was a gal I referred to as "Mother Russia," who had been, I guess, if not a member of the CP [Communist party] during the twenties and all, I mean she just had strong indoctrination and thought that everything that should be done concerning the human figure should be somehow endearing and showing the struggle and all. Which didn't bother me, but the two didn't get along, and Esther was forever wanting to get her—as a capitalist—was forever wanting to get "Mother Russia" thrown out of the organization. And all these things that were going on. The meetings were absolute madness, and to get an organization where we all had to sit in the gallery, and we had to do all this work and all, that it was some orchestration to get the business done because many times the remarks were not germane, but you just couldn't gavel them out of order; that was just not understandable to the group. And when we were building the place, I can remember Leonard Edmondson—I was trying to hand out the duties, and I said to Leonard, "Well, what do you do pretty well?" "Oh," he said, "I'm good with a hammer and saw and all." So I gave Leonard this kind of hallway that was a kind of complex sort of. thing, and after he finished, if it didn't make you seasick to look at it—. [laughter] So when we came to a real crucial point, I was always skeptical with them about how good they were with a hammer and nails. But I think it was tremendous fun. We had great times. The time Jake Landau gave his talk to the provincials—I don't know how anyone living in New Jersey can think of a person living in Los Angeles as being a provincial, but Jake was out there telling us about what the real world was like and all, and so afterwards it was Tom Fricano, Harold Schwarm, Bob Freimark, Paul Darrow, and myself, and we went to a bar on the way that we'd never gone to there before or since, called the Golden Gopher. And here we were talking about how we were just kind of fed up with the Eastern artists referring to themselves in the third person and all. And there was a woman sitting at this bar, and she was sitting on two stools, and a part of her buttocks just kind of went around each stool, and she was sitting on these two stools. And then there was a guy we called the "Gray Man" who was this kind of lean, kind of hard-looking, really cold eyes, and he was carrying a gun. She was drinking beer, and he was taking something straight and very neat, and every time she'd get up to go to the bathroom, the jukebox would be playing "Shangri-La," you know. And she'd start walking. And she was not only immense, but she was tall, you know, and she'd just kind of walk out, just kind of put her legs out like a horse, you know, just putting them out very carefully, just high and out, just the kind of—. [hums "Shangri-La"; laughter] And then periodically this black guy would come in and yell some totally unintelligible thing into the room and then go back out, from outside. All of this was going on while we were having this conversation. And then a person called "Meshuggenah Jack" came over, see. We thought he was trying to cadge drinks or something, but he wasn't. He had his own drink, wasn't doing anything. He was totally unintelligible, and he'd keep entering the conversation just absolutely soused. Freimark would try to get on his good side, and he just couldn't stand Freimark, somehow. It was just a very, very bizarre evening. The Million Dollar Theater, I think it was, which ran nothing but Mexican pictures, was by the gallery, and there was a Mexican restaurant that had very, very good food there. All these times were very, very pleasant times, and I think it made sort of a unity between the printmakers. There were a great number of us printmakers in the area; we didn't know each other. We'd see each other alphabetically in these catalogs from other exhibitions, we all lived in Los Angeles, and we didn't know each other. Shiro, Ben Sakoguchi, and Leonard Edmondson all became very close friends of mine. June, I'd known before. And out of that grouping came the Pioneer Press, with Leonard Edmondson and Shiro Ikegawa and Gordon Thorpe and Jerry Avesian and Corwin Clairmont (or Clairmont Corwin—I call him Corky, so I'm not sure what his name is). And they did a lot of significant work in photographic, in four-color process, in etching, which is broadcast pretty widely. And out of the experience—well, of course, a lot more experience than just the Pioneer Press—came the book on etching that Leonard Edmondson wrote. Talked about O.P. Reed opening his shop on La Cienega after breaking out of Landau. Very honest, direct guy. Made trips to Europe and all to bring back prints from there. Let's see, Triad Press has been the latest one, that went out to Riverside. It set up the department out there in the Riverside hand press. Claremont was very active under Paul Darrow; he went out there and set up the printmaking department out at Claremont. So I would say that the sixties, fifties are with people working; the fifties and sixties just saw an absolute explosion of printmaking in the area. I would say that. I taught up at San Francisco Art Institute also, but that was basically painting, but I did do a printmaking class there. But the only real lithography that was going on before Tamarind on the West Coast was at the University of Washington, and not very active at San Francisco Art Institute. I would say that the most active work was being done up at the University of Washington, and then the Chouinard thing opened up lithography, as far as the schools. And I would say that my working at Tamarind rekindled my interest in lithography, because in 19 50, when I'd done those lithographs up at the University of Washington, the opportunities were very, very minor to do any more. And when I was at Long Beach State in '53, I guess it was, '54, they asked me to set up a department, but at that period of time in history, I wasn't terribly interested in teaching, and I didn't get into teaching until the accident in 1959-60—'60, I guess it was. Our California art print shows were not national in the beginning, but they were in all of California. We had in the beginning, Gerry Nordland, Nate Oliviera, we had Nordland one year, and then the next year we had Nate; he was Northern California, so we had kind of a balance. And Josine Ianco-Starrels did an exhibition that handled one of our shows and also did two shows. One was a traditional show with old prints, and then with a printmaker recommending a young and up-and-coming young printmaker. And that was a pretty interesting show, a very, very good show. The printmaking society got one of its first moves towards the big-time sort of thing at Barnsdall Park, when we got one of our all-California print shows there. But there was not much respect for prints until the late fifties, early sixties. [phone rings; tape recorder turned off] Then I think everybody jumped on the bandwagon, like there were groups out of Baltimore—what's the name of that print dealer [Ferdinand Roten] that moves out of Baltimore and sells things? He has some plates, and so he does re-strikes and all, and some of them are pretty bad quality. Then one of his salesmen [John Wilson] started the Lakeside Press; then just a lot of people got into the act, and there were a lot of people going around selling prints. Sam Francis, of course, when he moved down, was making prints at the Joseph Press; and then, of course, one of the big operations was the Collectors Press up in San Francisco, which used, I think, first Joe Zirker, and then [Ernest] De Soto, who were both Tamarind-trained artisans. I don't think there are many schools, even junior colleges now, that don't teach printmaking. Printmaking, I think, is undergoing a tremendous change right now, some of the attitudes.; I think there are more attitudes now that go into the more photographic things. Rauschenberg has his own press now, and I think that he brought people out. Ponce de Leon came out. Leonard Edmondson brought him out from New York. Lee Chesney, who was a very important printmaker, came through from Illinois, and took over USC, but really made no impression because he was an associate dean, and he really didn't teach printmaking—which was a shame because it was an opportunity for a lot of students to come in with a pretty vital guy in terms of printmaking. Well, [University of California, Riverside, was] a small school when I went there, a staff of two in the art department, just starting, and one of the first things they did was printmaking, built a new building 40 x 60 feet and set up quite a few presses. Then Stanislaus State College [California State College, Stanislaus] in the [San Joaquin] Valley, there is a poster—it's the greatest travesty I've ever seen. They have eight litho presses, eight etching presses—I mean, to utilize eight etching presses, it takes, I would say, a minimum of ten minutes to wipe a plate to print it—ten minutes, the preparation and all, then it only takes twenty seconds of use of the press. So do you know how many students eight etching presses could serve? Tremendous waste. Now, at a litho press, it takes approximately five minutes to pull a print, and then you do no less than ten, I would think. So one person would be at a litho press for an hour to get an edition. So it's very difficult to handle lithography; I mean, the students have to come in day and night to be able to get their editions off, and you may only allow proofing or something during class time. The eight litho presses seems like a reasonable number to have, but the eight etching presses—obviously whoever set up the department, it looks like a giant mill or something; it's really ludicrous. And there they are out in the middle of God knows where, and they probably don't have anybody who's very knowledgeable, and they probably have kids who have a hard time not leaning too far over the stone because they're still wearing their cowboy boots or something. I think it's one of those few schools that has a rodeo as a sport. You know, you can letter in roping and wrestling and all that kind of stuff. But it's very strange that you see a place like that, you see this enormous amount of expense; I mean, each one of those etching presses constitutes $4,000. So they have $30,000, $32,000 dollars of something in etching presses, plus shipping, plus crating. And it's just a tremendous thing, and whoever did it didn't know a damn thing about setting up a program and thought he'd have a program if he had a lot of presses. And it's a big thing. I mean, you go to schools, and your major schools will have several people teaching printmaking. And before, you were lucky to find several places that taught printmaking. The problem is, I think, one of philosophy. And that is the whole thing, the merit of printmaking, is basically that you're getting something; you're doing a multiple, and you're producing something that's beautiful, and it should be of a low cost. And when you sell the thing, you should think of what you're going to get for the edition. So the prints should be very inexpensive, and they should sell for twenty-five, thirty, forty dollars. And if you've got ten of them—$450, you've got twenty of them, you know, you'd be getting a pretty piece of money for not a tremendous amount of work. I don't like big editions simply because I get bored with reproducing the damn thing. It becomes like a reproduction after a while. What I find of more interest to me—and I would have been appalled probably twenty years ago at the idea—is basically to produce the print as a format upon which I can work out ideas, so that my edition might be totally different, that each one in the edition might end up being a unique print, although there are other times that they're just straight drawings or something, straight attitude that I'll do, and I'll just crank them out. But, as I go to Cranbrook [Academy of Art], I think that the notion of an artist this day and age coming in and getting an MFA in basically printmaking (and that's what these people do; they go in, and they work with me, and after two years, they have an MFA), I think it's very limiting. I'd like to all of a sudden reexamine the whole idea of printmaking, expand it and make it broader. All of a sudden, just look at it a hell of a lot differently: get ourselves a couple of Xerox machines and, you know, start doing something. So all we're producing are really not prints but just art. That's what it's really about.
PALANKER:
Thank you.

1.17. TAPE NUMBER: IX, SIDE ONE DECEMBER 14, 1982

TIDWELL:
Today is December 14, 1982, and this is Sylvia Tidwell interviewing Connor Everts. Connor, we'd like to go back to the time after your trials for obscenity—late 1965, early 1966—and find out about the beating injury that happened then. Can you tell us about it?
EVERTS:
A few years ago, when we were last recording, I had quite a bit of confusion in terms of imagery and all. During this period, right after the trial, I did this series called "The Misunderstanding," which is basically about if a person tries to do a work that purports to be about something and then everyone else misunderstands it, perhaps the artist himself is at fault. I did this series of works where the figures were enclosed in balloons and were not communicating. They were shown at the Silvan Simone Gallery. Which I think produced another kind of misunderstanding, because it was the only exhibition I've ever had where all the works were sold out. I think it was not based upon the work itself, but based upon the previous notoriety. Because at the trial before, everyone had come to see the dirty pictures, and, after seeing the work, they couldn't find them. This time, they bought the work not because of perhaps what it was about but simply because it was there. They thought that had value. I was still very much questioning my role. I was involved in films, and I took a job at Long Beach State [California State University, Long Beach]. Disney had chosen not to have a practicing pornographer on his staff. I went to Long Beach State, and I was teaching graduate painting and a couple of drawing classes. It was going quite well. I enjoyed the classes. The semester was over, and the students in the graduate painting class—because I had a guest-artist shot at the San Francisco Art Institute starting in January [1966], they all wanted to go to this little neighborhood bar and have a few drinks and talk about it. So I went with two instructors, and we were down there talking. The students were well received in this neighborhood bar. Some of the older [people] (I mean by older, people in their sixties) started showing some of the younger students, some of the young women in the class, how to play pool. It was very, very jovial. We were all just drinking beer, and the bartender liked having us there. When there were a certain number of dimes left over from the purchase of the pitcher, [when it] would get to a certain point somewhat short of the cost of the pitcher, he'd just automatically pour another pitcher and put it out. It was very jovial. And then, all of a sudden, into this came two very aggressive-looking men [who] started confronting the students and basically behaving in a very belligerent manner and asking for their identification. I noticed that one student—tall, rather reddish hair—a person by the name of Ralph Corners, was saying, "You're next, big mouth," (Ralph had just received his draft notice, and he and a couple of other of people in the class ended up in Vietnam.) I didn't know how well Ralph could control his temper; so at that moment I asked to see their identification.
TIDWELL:
You asked the two men to see their identification?
EVERTS:
Yes. They identified themselves as Long Beach police, and obviously on the vice squad. So then they asked to see [mine], and I handed over my driver's license and my university identification card. And they asked me to step outside. I thought it was simply an opportunity for them to save face and then just. to say not to let the students get too noisy and all. I felt that giving my identification as a professor also showed that there was someone more mature in charge of the group.
TIDWELL:
Were they perhaps suspicious that the students were underage?
EVERTS:
No. There was some kind of checking of ID, but there was no one that was under [age]—they were all graduate students, and so that would put them overage. There wasn't anyone underage. So I went out. Then, all of a sudden, they started really jostling me around. I realized that this was—I didn't think this was par for the course. At that time, Willie Suzuki, who was another prof, came out and asked what was happening. They said that he could read about it in the paper, and they immediately put cuffs on me and put me in the back [of their patrol-car]. wanted to know the charges, and they said, "Don't worry, we'll think up something." They asked me at that point if the cuffs were too tight. I said, no. The person in the back said, "Well, we'll fix that," and tightened it to the point where it was uncomfortable, painful. In fact, I suffered nerve damage. To this day, I don't have feeling in my right hand—and I'm right-handed. Then they simply beat me for about a half an hour or so in the car and told me that I'd be one of those that wouldn't walk from the car. And [they said] things of a nature about professors and about artists and the nature of artists, and telling me that they knew why I had a beard and a moustache—to make it look like a cunt when I was fucked in the mouth. They seemed to have really a lot of sexual disorientation. I hadn't even heard remarks like that on the waterfront. So when we got into the station, I was determined that I was going to walk in. I got a chance to get ray head down between my legs and get some of my blood back. Then they put me in the elevator. They stopped at each floor and beat me all the way up. They were really quite anxious to both beat me. So instead of holding me up by the handcuffs with my cuffs behind me, they just got in each other's way, and, obviously somewhere along the way, one kind of scuffed the other one across the knuckles. They were beating me with saps, with truncheons, which is lead covered with leather. This person said, "Well, good. It'll look good in the report; I'll say that he bit me." It was all rather strange, because in the squad car when I was being carried, the person would beat me across the leg. Then when I'd try to protect [myself] and put my back down, I'd be hit across the back. Then I was rolling with the punch, and I said, "Why don't you hit me on the other leg?" He says, "It hurts, does it?" He says, "That's when I get my kicks." So at that moment I was determined not to make another sound. Then later on, I heard this moaning. And all of a sudden I realized that even though I was willing myself not to make a sound, the pain was so great that each blow was producing a moan in pain. And another time, because I was rolling with the punches and trying to hot get all the force of the blow, they stopped the car and held the sap right up to my face and told me that if I didn't stop making it difficult, the officer in front would lay my nose open across my face. All of a sudden, I realized that I would need surgery, plastic surgery. I pictured myself in an office, looking at noses in a book filled with noses. (This was predicated on my teaching at Cal State Northridge, where many of my students had had nose jobs. It was something that a working-class kid would've never considered.) I was thinking, how in God's name do you make a choice of something as insignificant as a nose? What is a good nose? How do you choose a nose? And then all of a sudden I had a moment of terror, because I realized that of all the good noses in the world, mine wouldn't qualify, so my nose wouldn't be in that book. So I wouldn't be able to get nose back. So I looked at that officer with this background, and I said, "You know, I've never liked my nose, but I think I'll keep it the way it is." He didn't know what the remark was predicated on! But all. of this stuff about the beating is in a book by Henry Cohen called Brutal Justice [New York: John Day]. There were many people that felt that the notoriety received on the censorship trial made my name known—I don't know that it was. I think there was so much hostility towards professors, because this was the height of the Vietnam War, and the intelligentsia was very much against the war. I think that that was it, and there were a lot of feelings against students at that time. I think that more or less was what predicated it. The hostility towards artists was very, very great. This case was pursued under [a] civil rights act by two presidents and three attorney generals. They were very, very upset about unlawful acts on the part of police departments, because there was a tremendous amount of that going on at the time.
TIDWELL:
Did you at the time of the incident believe that you had been sought out because of the obscenity trial?
EVERTS:
No, not at all. I think it was just an incident. These people were simply cruising. They came into this bar. It was a bar undoubtedly that they'd been into before. This was a totally new crowd. They were all young people, and they were having a good time. The whole set of their [the police officers'] feeling was basically, what were those people doing in this bar? Why weren't they in their own bar, and why weren't the young men in Vietnam?
TIDWELL:
Oh, I see.
EVERTS:
I just was an authority figure. Also, at that time, I [was] around six-two and 210, 215 pounds and very masculine. I had a chance to think about a lot of things during the period of time when I was going through rehabilitation, and if you look at the most basic way of looking at the species being on this planet, using man as a collective noun—it's basically to reproduce itself. It's to continue the species. If you look at the relationship and the nature of a relationship between a man and a woman or a male and a female, [it] would basically be sexual in nature. Between male and male, [it] would be competitive in nature, for the opportunity to impregnate the available female. So, if you take people who are somewhat insecure about their masculinity, and, if you have a society that basically doesn't allow violence towards members—because couldn't go out and beat up another person without danger. Without danger to myself that the person might beat me up, plus the fact that society would punish me for it. But with these two people, I didn't have the option to run. I didn't have the option to call for help. I didn't have the option to fight back. I was even handcuffed. So, If you have a person with sexual insecurity, then the way one can prove one's masculinity is through violence. You engage in one of the only things that allows for violence. Unfortunately, in our society, the only avenue for day-to-day violence (unnecessary to survival, because there is violence in ghetto scenes which is necessary for survival) is actually the police force. It's an unfortunate commentary, but it's true. The whole thing of all these sexual remarks and the look and the kind of pleasures that they were getting when they were beating me together in the elevator—it was revolting. Not only was it painful, but it was psychologically revolting.
TIDWELL:
So this went to trial—two different trials?
EVERTS:
Yes, it was the federal government under—the attorney general of this area was Matt [William Matthew] Byrne, who is now a federal judge. He was basically the deciding factor ultimately, because we used to have what they called [a] credibility test: They knew that I was telling the truth, but how believable was I? Because they wanted to win a case and have a case where a person was alive. During the early portion of this, of course, it was physically impossible for me to do any art at all. We went to trial, and we had a hung jury. The judge was very prejudicial and very much against it. The government wanted to have a new trial. One of the persons on the jury was a security guard, and, of course, that's part of law enforcement in a way. He would have been able to have been dismissed from the jury—a preemptive decision. My work was nonexistent during that period of time for several months.
TIDWELL:
Could you describe the extent of the injuries to your hand?
EVERTS:
Well, it wasn't anything really in terms of appearance, except the rawness of where the cuffs were. But it severed the nerves right around the wrist. I had no feeling at all. To the point where I got myself into trouble later on. About six months later, I was working with Willie Suzuki on a press, on a print. He started to crank something through. I had my hand on the gears, and it took my fingers through the gears. I didn't feel it until it was all bloody. It was the hand that I drew with. So when I went up to San Francisco, I stayed with a couple of former students, and—
TIDWELL:
Is this your teaching stint at the San Francisco Art Institute?
EVERTS:
Yes.
TIDWELL:
When did that happen?
EVERTS:
That would have been in early 1966, probably late January or something. And I did a series of pastels, which I hadn't done for a number of years, since the early forties. I all of a sudden realized that they were smearing because I was rubbing them. [Having] no feeling in my hand, I was getting the work bloodied, simply because I had rubbed the hand raw to the point where it was bleeding. That was a very strange period of time. At that period of time I did a series that was basically—these young men I was staying with, one was an avid collector of Playboy magazine, and I looked at those things, and I looked at the whole notion of woman as object rather than participant or an equal. Then also, we lived on the corner of Grand [Avenue] and Lombard [Street], which is in the North Beach area, and I used to walk by Big Al's, where Carol Doda was, and saw all this stuff. It was just all so strange to me; as if the world had been improperly weaned or something. So I did this series—
TIDWELL:
Improperly weaned?
EVERTS:
Improperly. weaned. I couldn't understand this absolute fixation on the breast. In fact, one of the students I had, her husband was Carol Doda's psychiatrist. I was invited as the extra male at a dinner, and Carol Doda was there. She started massaging her breasts, because I guess the silicone was lumping or something. I didn't know if she was going to drop it in her soup or not. But I realized that the bowl was certainly not large enough to accommodate it.
TIDWELL:
Who is Carol Doda?
EVERTS:
Carol Doda was a tragic—most people would not think she was tragic, but she was a moderately attractive young woman who probably had a thirty-four-A breast or something. Then with silicone, she was one of the first topless dancers. She went to probably a forty-eight Z or something. She felt, in the beginning, that men didn't like her because she didn't have large breasts. Then when she had these silicone breasts, the men may have gathered around her. But, of course, she realized that the only thing that attracted [them] was the part of her that wasn't real. So she wasn't really any better off. She was much worse off. It was a very bizarre evening. So that and the beating and all these things realized themselves in these works, which had [titles] like Silicone Baby, Are You Coming Out Tonight, Coming Out Tonight, to Dance by the Light of the Moon? and Truman's Capote and all kinds of things that were basically kind of humorous and sexual—the great American Girl as trained seal [the "American Girlscape Series"]—this was just the beginnings of women's lib at the time. I thought I was making some really strong points, but they were completely [misunderstood]—the humor in it. Instead of seeing it as a ridiculing [of] woman-as-object, it seemed that I was being supportive of it.
TIDWELL:
So again you felt that your work was being misunderstood?
EVERTS:
I long had grown accustomed to my work not being appreciated [laughter], but at least it had been somewhat understood. My daughter, at least, enjoyed the work. She thought it was funny. She thought it was kind of amusing. I had the American Girl, which was kind of flying and all—because I remembered all the barrage balloons. And these women, of course, had no hands, no feet, and no head. They were kind of like Venus di Milos with these enormous breasts. It seemed to me that it should be appropriate that they would fly, because it was like being confronted by two Goodyear blimps at the same time. One series had the American Girl visiting the various monuments around the country, like Cooperstown [New York]. But no one really saw the humor in it. During this period of time I had to come back for grand jury trials, in terms of indicting the police. There wasn't a tremendous amount of local support for it. I ran into Evelle J. Younger again—after the two prosecutions. The district attorney's office was not zealous in the notion of prosecuting the police. The case that they had [of] me disturbing the peace, they immediately dropped without allowing it [to] come to trial. They didn't want any of this information to come forth, in terms of the beating. And Evelle Younger—I think my name was known to him as a person that he tried to put in prison once in terms of my art, so he wasn't particularly that anxious to be on the supportive side. I will say this about the police: they're very good at prosecuting their members in terms of corruption and that. The police do not allow their own members to shake down the community. They do not allow them to take unsolicited bribes. But they're willing to think that one of the occupational perks is the right to somewhat beat up the citizenry. I think that's very unfortunate. If you look, [at] the papers and all, very seldom are police members dismissed for brutality. But they're dismissed for dishonesty. [tape interrupted] Actually during this period of time, all of these things were dovetailing, because I also came back to Los Angeles, to [the] Fine Arts Festival at Cal State [Los Angeles]. Supposedly, I was going to debate James B. Clancey, who'd been the attorney on the obscenity trial—
TIDWELL:
Was he the district attorney?
EVERTS:
He was in the district attorney's office. You know, the district attorney doesn't really prosecute any cases. He basically is the administrative officer. So I was really very, very anxious to confront him, without the weight of being sent to jail about his ideas [on] the limitation of the arts. Unfortunately, at the last minute he didn't show up. He sent someone else from the Decency in Literature group.
TIDWELL:
So did you debate the other fellow?
EVERTS:
I debated with the other fellow. Nina Foch was the middle person. It was a disappointment. It was a letdown. Also, when I returned home and finally got back within my work—
TIDWELL:
When you returned to San Francisco?
EVERTS:
No, when I returned from that—it was only one semester. I came back, and then that summer, I was found by my wife in the garden. I was bleeding from an ulcer that I had gotten. In some way, you always question, as I questioned with the misunderstanding of my work; I questioned myself. Then when nothing was happening in relationship to the trial, then I questioned that I perhaps was in some way guilty. We always want to find something that explains what is happening, that it's not some kind of irrational act.
TIDWELL:
Some way guilty in the obscenity trial, or later?
EVERTS:
No, guilty in the other thing. That something in my demeanor—you know, you just want to have an "in" to it, so that somehow the whole thing is resolved. And I was trying to find this in my work. My work during this period of time contained a tremendous amount of questioning. During the time of the trial, I did a portrait, every day of the trial. Which is an interesting document, the way it looks.
TIDWELL:
A self-portrait?
EVERTS:
A self-portrait, yes. Later that was included in that exhibition that Gerald Nordland put together for the Western Association of Museums [which] traveled for a couple of years. Since that, we found that I had a protrait from 1949 to 1969, and after that, at least once a year, on my birthday, I do at least one self-portrait just to continue this thing. So I have gone from a young collegiate type to a doddering old man. I was looking at my relationship to art. I had in the past done all of this [subject of] man's inhumanity to man, sociological issues. Since all of society had come down so heavily on me, I started to question my own work. And none of my work had changed anything. My work was becoming more and more misunderstood. I was trying to find some kind of sense, for myself, in terms of my own relationship to these things. I think [because of this] my work started to become more abstract. The elements started flattening out. The figure was more abstracted.
TIDWELL:
We're around 1967, aren't we?
EVERTS:
Yes, we're '67, '68. I did a series—I got a thing in the mail from Ultra-Brite; it was a tube of toothpaste, you know. And God, it just about made your gums separate from your teeth! But I've always been big on free samples. And I did this series called the "Ultra-Brite Series." Their whole theme was, "Ultra-Brite gives you sex appeal." Kind of a strange idea, so you can imagine. I did all these abstract sexual—making the tube a kind of cornucopia for genitalia. At this time, I started painting, or trying to paint with enamel. Since I'd lost the feeling in my hand, and I'd basically worked in a very kinesthetic way, knowing how a thing was going to look by the way it felt, I then regrouped and started working flat. With my work flat and using enameling, which is self-leveling. So I was using enamel. I was limiting it to primary colors and playing that as a foil against the drawing. It was flat color areas against' this kind of modeled drawing. That show was later shown at L.A. State.
TIDWELL:
At Cal State L.A.?
EVERTS:
Yes. I was in the hospital from the bleeding ulcer. That really questioned my own—. It came as a surprise to me. It came as a surprise to the doctor; he was asking me how I couldn't tell that I had an ulcer. It must have been painful. Of course, all the other pain—the pain in my legs was so great. I just told him, "If you had an elephant standing on your foot and someone came by and pricked you with a pin, you'd have a tendency not to notice it." And that was it. I didn't feel well that day I was found in the garden, but I didn't know I chanced bleeding to death. I can remember when that sort of vulnerability affected me.
TIDWELL:
Was the anxiety that precipitated the ulcer connected—
EVERTS:
Oh yes, if you've lived a life based upon some sense of ideals and idealism and trying to be a decent, honest, upright person, and all that kind of stuff, and buying the American melting-pot theory, and trying to take that sense of idealism into your art and wanting the world to be a better place and all of that stuff, it's a little shocking. It was shocking for my wife to find the same sort of feeling. That probably was the incident that contributed to the breakup of our marriage. She had somehow thought she'd married Superman and found out that she ended up with Clark Kent in a country without a telephone. It presented a lot of problems. So that takes us to about 19 71 or so, when the marriage was broken up, and I started teaching at UCR [University of California, Riverside].
TIDWELL:
Now, how about your work at this time? We had the "Ultra-Brite Series"—
EVERTS:
I had the "Ultra-Brite Series," and I did the "Chicken Little Series." I moved into my new studio, which is presently where I live. I was really looking—the seventies were going to be—I remember looking at the seventies. I thought this was going to be my decade. I couldn't think that anything more could happen to me. So the seventies: I've got a brand-new studio. In the sixties, I had had my life threatened, that I was going to be shot in relationship to prosecuting the police. I had my studio broken into; it was done in such a way that obviously [it was done by] someone who knew, who was trying to look like an amateur. It was broken into in such a way that no person, even a child wouldn't break into it that way. There was an easier way, because it was all glass. You just have to break this one little pane right next to the doorknob and turn it. But the work was destroyed, and all the glass in the frames was broken by taking a stick and sticking through it, and the work was ripped and torn. A great period—
TIDWELL:
It was simply destroyed, not taken?
EVERTS:
No, it was just destroyed, vandalized.
TIDWELL:
Do you have any idea who targeted your art that way?
EVERTS:
Oh, I would think that the police did, just simply by the way it was done, to make it look like an amateur thing. They made such a move to make it look like an amateur thing that no person in their right mind would ever break into a building in that way.
TIDWELL:
And where was this in relationship to the trials for police brutality?
EVERTS:
It was right about the same time. Just right around this time of the trial. I turned all that stuff over to the FBI, because the government was in charge of that trial. So with all that stuff behind me in the sixties, I really looked forward to the seventies. Of course, the first thing that happened in the seventies was that my wife left me. So this studio, that I was simply going to have as a separate studio as I'd always had, this nice new studio also became a place where I had to live. It was a deep period of time of questioning the worth of what I was doing. I remember waking up one time at about three o'clock in the morning. I woke up, and I was thinking, "Good God, you've spent all this time of your life working so very hard, and nobody cares about your work. Nobody really gives a goddamn about it." You know, I'm an abject optimist, because all of a sudden I realized—I do. I care about it. I care deeply about it. So that was about the lowest spot. That was about the low ebb. After that I determined, since I hadn't painted, really painted, since the injury to my hand, or I hadn't really truly painted since that whole censorship thing, that I was determined to paint again. I did a series called "Sursum Corda," which is the first words in the Latin mass, which means to lift up your heart, or open up your heart to God. I decided that I was going to paint again. I felt really good about it. By God, I was going to force my way through it regardless. I'm going to do it! Some friends came over, and they said, "God, it's so ugly!" Then I all of a sudden looked at it, and by God, they were right. It was ugly. It was really ugly painting. So I went up—some former student of mine asked me to come up to his place, a studio in downtown L.A.—it was before downtown L.A. was popular. I went up and looked at it: God, this stuff was so beautiful, just so lovely. I was driving back, and I was kind of envious. I was thinking, gosh, it would be so good to be able to do that beautiful, lovely stuff, and here I am doing that ugly stuff. Then I realized that if it wasn't for me, probably nobody else would be doing this particular ugly stuff, so I took some heart in that. That's part of my meshuggenesque character. I just went ahead. Now, I look at the stuff, and it doesn't really seem that ugly to me. It doesn't seem quite as homely as it did then. I was doing this [indicates painting from the "Sursum Corda Series"] just the period of time at the end of—that show, that work, "Sursum Corda Series," was shown at USC.
TIDWELL:
Now, that was your first painting show in quite some years, wasn't it?
EVERTS:
Yes, quite a few years. Was that 1967, or—no, that was 1965. ["Sursum Corda" actual date is 1975—ed.]
TIDWELL:
That's when you showed the "Sursum Corda Series."
EVERTS:
Yes. At USC. Don [Donald] Brewer was the director then. At this period of time, the dean at UCR, a person by the name of [Ed] Beardsley, suggested that if I was on full-time and if I wanted to be tenured, it might not be a bad idea if I had an M. F. A. [master of fine arts degree], since I didn't even have an M. A. So, I had taught out at Claremont [Graduate School], and I knew some people there. I talked to Roland Reiss, and Roland said, "Well, it'll be no problem. Just go through all the formalities; you have to do all the paperwork; you have to do everything like everybody else, but," he said, "there's no question you can get an M.F.A." So I had to think about people asking—I mentioned to Don that I was thinking about it. I said, "I don't know. It's kind of stupid."
TIDWELL:
To Don who?
EVERTS:
Don Brewer, who was director of the museum. And so I said, "I don't know; I don't know if I'll do it or not. It's kind of a dumb way of keeping a job if you're not—you know, if you don't have any—if you have to be like a piece of meat, and the agricultural department has to come through and stamp your worth on your ass, I don't know if I want to do that." So the show opened, and Henry Seldis came by to review it.
TIDWELL:
This was the show at USC.
EVERTS:
At USC. Somewhere along the way, Don mentioned about my maybe having to go back to school and my reluctance, so Henry Seldis mentioned in his article how stupid he thought it was that I should be required to go do something like that. And, of course, the dean—I walked in, and I didn't know anything about it, and the dean was absolutely furious that I'd somehow—
TIDWELL:
Was this Beardsley?
EVERTS:
Yes—that I'd put Seldis up to this. Of course, I had no part in it, and he should've known me better than that.
TIDWELL:
What was the upshot of it?
EVERTS:
The upshot of it was I took a job at Cranbrook [Academy of Art] the next year. [tape interrupted]
TIDWELL:
You mentioned that you were one of the last people to spend time with Henry Seldis before his suicide. Can you talk about that?
EVERTS:
Yes. Well, Henry and I were never what you'd really call terribly close, because we're quite diverse personalities, but we saw each other. I didn't see him that much socially, but we'd see each other occasionally socially. He had been very, very helpful to me in relationship to the censorship trial. He was there every day during the censorship trial. He helped getting witnesses and getting people interested. He'd been very helpful, and he'd been writing about ray work for years. So we knew each other actually quite well. But I was just a little bit too much of a wild man for his tastes, I think. I got a call from Josine—
TIDWELL:
Josine Ianco-Starrels.
EVERTS:
Yes, and she told me that Henry had been very, very ill and was now out of hospitalization and that he was in real depression and that she had mentioned that I was in town, and he said, he'd like to see me. So I called and really had to insist that I was just going to come over, because I think my time was relatively short. I was in town not for a terribly long time. I just insisted on going over, because instead of that—it's hard to say; I didn't realize that—Henry had a tendency to be a little bit pompous, but all that pomposity was gone. Josine said that he needed to be with someone, so I just forced myself on [him] and went over there.
TIDWELL:
Did he know that you knew what his condition was?
EVERTS:
No. No, he didn't know that. So I went over, and I think I spent the most harrowing few hours. I was never so tired in my life [as] after that period of time. I'd never seen a person so totally altered, because I hadn't seen him for some time.
TIDWELL:
Could you describe his previous character?
EVERTS:
Well, Henry was not a terribly secure person, and so he would've—sometimes it's helpful, if you want to get a fix on a person, sometimes it's helpful to think of them when they were maybe six or seven years old, about in that [time period] somewhere, and just try to take the way they're behaving right at that moment [and decide] how it would fit into a situation of a six- or a seven-year-old. Henry had a degree of aloofness that was based upon his fear of not being included. So he excluded himself from a lot of things. So he became to the side of being pompous and authoritarian—no, not authoritarian, no, I wouldn't accuse him of that. He was never a bad person, but he was not a terribly comfortable person with people. During that day I found out that he only loved two people, probably, past his parents—and you don't get a choice about loving your parents; you're stuck with them. It was probably his wife [Anna Bruni] and his son [Mark]. And what he felt for artists was basically an admiration that at times made him feel inadequate. So it wasn't always a comfortable relationship.

1.18. TAPE NUMBER: IX, SIDE TWO DECEMBER 14, 1982

TIDWELL:
We were talking about Henry Seldis, his character, a few minutes ago.
EVERTS:
Well, he was decent. He wasn't a mean-spirited man. He was aloof, and a lot of people didn't understand that. Most artists are generally—at least some are—moderately warm characters. But I was not in any way prepared for the Henry Seldis that I was going to meet that day, with all the insecurities so apparent. He came in and kind of shooshed me into the room. He was living in this little apartment—not that little. But the apartment [was] in Beverly Hills. He was saying all of the things that he had to do and what they were. It was absolutely insurmountable.
TIDWELL:
What sort of things did he have to do?
EVERTS:
Take some shirts to the laundry. The fact that his landlady was trying to get rid of him, because she knew he was cooking. And I said, "Well, Henry, do you think she got her first hint, perhaps, from the fact that there's a fully equipped kitchen in the apartment?" He says, "She doesn't like my cooking." I said, "Well, I've never eaten [anything] you cooked; maybe there's a reason for it. Maybe it's the quality of your cooking." He said, "No, no, no, not that." Usually, where you could get maybe a bit of a smile out of Henry, it was totally hopeless. He was worried that William Wilson—that Bill was after his job, that there was a big plot, that they didn't like him at the [Los Angeles] Times. At that particular time, I happened to be—young Norman [Chandler] was married to the sister of the woman that I was living with [Susan Yeager]. And he had some quasi-flunky job down there. So I said, "Well, Henry, I'm just going to phone down to the Times and find out just what their feelings are about you down there." I said, "I'll call Norman Chandler." (Norman was being prepared to be the heir apparent, but he was certainly not ready.) And so they searched him out, on the excuse that I had misplaced the sister's number, that I was just going to give her some messages from Susan. I was talking to Norman, and I said, "Well, you certainly must miss Henry Seldis down there not writing and all." Norman didn't know what in the world I was up to. But there were no bad feelings about him.
TIDWELL:
Had Henry not written recently?
EVERTS:
No, he hadn't written. He would maybe write an article, and then not. He was in bad shape. He'd been in the hospital, and he was now out of the hospital and under the supervision of a doctor. He also had to go see the psychiatrist that day. The laundry was very close, and I said, "Well, let's get those shirts down there, Henry." It took us hours to get really ready so we could go through and decide which shirts were the ones that were going. We walked down to the laundry; it wasn't that far away—the dry-cleaners—and so the person was quite—[He] said, "Oh, good afternoon, Mr. Seldis," and Henry just got a little bit smaller and said hello. And he said, "Oh, you have some shirts." He had two piles. He had the colored and he had the whites. And he said, "Do you want them on hangers or boxes?" And Henry was absolutely terrorized! I'd never seen that kind of fright. He looked and he looked like he was going to bolt to. the door, and he looked at me. I said, "Henry, you know, just think, why don't you get the colored ones on hangers and the white ones in boxes? Just think how nice that'll look in your closet, to have those colored ones in there." And he said, "We'll do that." And he said, "Well, when would you like them?" Each question made Henry diminish in size, so I said, "Mr. Seldis is playing it fast and loose." Now I said, "He really isn't in any big hurry for those things." We got the ticket and we went back. And he says, "I'm going to have to go—" I think we got a bite to eat, then we went back. He was going to have to go to the psychiatrist. I forget just where it was, but it was a drive away. I said, "We can go in my car, Henry." "No," he said, "The doctor said he wanted me to be more self-sufficient. He wants me to drive myself." I said, "Well, fine. I'll just ride along with you, Henry." So we went out, and the Times had given him a rather large car. I think it was a Chrysler product. And the small alley, the single-car garage, as I recall, and the alley had—it was just at an angle where the alley turned. I would have hated to try to back a car out for the first time out of that thing. It was an overly large car for that particular space that was allotted to him. So I was back there kind of directing. It was just very, very upsetting. But he got it out, and I think he did a much better job than I would have done. We drove on up there, and so I went up with him. So the nurse was—If you read [Ken Kesey's] One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, you would have pictured a much more substantial nurse than the one that finally took the role [in the movie], though she did a good job—but this was a substantial lady, that would put the fear of God into almost anybody. And she immediately got on to the doctor, and she said, "Mr. Seldis is here, and he has someone with him!" And Henry said, "But I drove myself!" in this really frightened voice. God, she was just—he was cringing from her. I didn't blame him. I felt kind of the same way, and I was, I hope, perfectly healthy that day. He went in, and he came out the worse for wear after seeing the doctor. I went back, and I spent some more time with him. He was very, very frightened about this and about that and about all the other things and about his wife not wanting him to see his son—just everything—the whole boy and what the son was going to think of him, especially if he lost his job. It was such a traumatic experience, and, of course, it was a hell of a lot worse for Henry than it was for me. About that time Josine called and said that she'd be over in a short time and would fix dinner for him, and then I left. I think I had two more days in town. I think it was the day after that or something, Josine called and said that he'd committed suicide. Then we were waiting around, and the wife didn't have any kind of ceremony or anything, any kind of thing, because I was willing to stay in town for it. It just went without—
TIDWELL:
There was no funeral of any sort?
EVERTS:
There was nothing that I knew of. The only person who would have been notified would have been undoubtedly his wife. If there's such a term as a tragic person, that day Henry was as tragic as any person that I ever saw, a person with no comfort at all in their life, no security, no belief. Everything had gone. He'd forgotten all of the things that he'd done. I don't think he ever knew how to wear friendship. I think he felt [as if] some of the gallery people—there was some other reason that the gallery knew him; that there was nothing that he brought to a situation himself. All of that somehow had been stripped away when his wife left him and took the son. It was very bad, and I think as a person, Henry deserved much more than that, and as a contributor in his own way to the Los Angeles art scene. You know, there are a lot of people who would quarrel about his writing and everything else, but I don't think you would quarrel with anything at least in terms of his motives. I knew Millier quite well when I was running the old Exodus Group, and he used to come down—
TIDWELL:
Who is this person?
EVERTS:
Arthur Millier. He was the previous writer for the [Los Angeles] Times. Henry had come down from Santa Barbara. Everybody thought that Jules Langsner was going to get the job. I would have said that Jules was probably a more perceptive critic, simply because, as it turned out, he had a hell of a lot more belief in himself, and ultimately his judgments. Millier was interesting, because he just loved the stuff. He just loved to look at the stuff. And, of course, he had started off as an artist and been an old etcher and all. But he just wanted to see what was going on. He just wanted to look and see the things. I think any exuberance that Henry had, he had to restrain it because he didn't have anyone to display it to. There was in Henry the contra-dictions that a significant story or a movie could be made of. There was some substance to the tragedy—just how frail we hold onto that thread that allows us to function in this time. So I went back with not only the loss of Henry but the loss of any kind of recording of that loss. You know, when John Altoon died, there was a funeral, there was. You know, there needs to be a wake. There needs to be some recognition other than just you're here one day and not the other, I think; a bringing together and a tying up of those loose ends. And it was totally—Henry just passed without people knowing it. Most people didn't know that he was ill, or what the nature of it was. And to this day, I don't know how he took his life. I only know that he committed suicide. But my own—Henry had something to do with my leaving the area, and I guess we could talk a little bit about the time back at Cranbrook. It was a nice job. It was a place where you—you know, [there were] a certain number of graduate students. You accept them and you're the one that chooses them, and they work exclusively with you.
TIDWELL:
Now, this was in '76 that you went back to Cranbrook?
EVERTS:
'Seventy-six I went back there.
TIDWELL:
Before we go on to Cranbrook, you had mentioned the first show, in '75, of the "Sursum Corda Series," and those were all abstract works. And you mentioned that there was a transition between your figurative work and your abstract work. I wondered, had you shown this work? What was recorded of that?
EVERTS:
That work was at the Brand [Library, Glendale] in '73. I believe it was. That was arranged by [Robert] Smith, who later was incidental in the founding of LAICA.
TIDWELL:
Bob Smith?
EVERTS:
Bob Smith, yes. That was in the spring of '73
TIDWELL:
He was the head of the Brand at that time, wasn't he?
EVERTS:
Yes he and—what's her name?
TIDWELL:
Judith Hoffberg?
EVERTS:
Yes. They made a beautiful team, actually. That's such a nice exhibition space, but unfortunately it was a space—Ben Sakoguchi had a marvelous exhibition there, and people didn't see it. And I had, I felt, a good exhibition there, and it was studies of my work. My work—I was in transition, and I did a lot of—just little notions would come into my head, and I would pursue it. I was putting together a new imagery, and it was going back and forth. There were lithographs and watercolors and drawings and things, ranging in size from—nothing of tremendous size was in it. I think the largest things were probably about thirty-five by forty-five and the smallest, eleven by fourteen [inches],
TIDWELL:
Were those the last lithographs, the last prints that you've done?
EVERTS:
That was basically the last prints, I think, that I did. I did some in Michigan. (Well, I was invited.) I started doing prints again in 1960, when I was at Tamarind [Lithography Workshop], and then I set up my own shop and did quite a few prints. Then just about that period, I stopped making prints, about '73 or so, '72—I forget what it was, about in there I stopped doing prints. Then I did some prints at Black Dolphin [Workshop], and I did at Black Box in Chicago and Chicago Art Institute, and then some—you know, I did a few guest shots and some prints around. But I had lost my interest. I did one print a day for a year, and that pretty well did in any interest that I had. But the work had turned abstract before I went to [Cranbrook], and I was concerned with edge. I did a group of collages that had edge concerns that I exhibited at [Los Angeles] Harbor College. And I went back and was flabbergasted by the flatness of the Midwest and the sameness of it.
TIDWELL:
Is this your going back to Michigan, to Cranbrook?
EVERTS:
Yes. I started dealing with basically white painting with some abstract—some wedges and things changing. An implication of change of the shape, taking the square; these were all squares, and they were basically four feet by four feet—
TIDWELL:
Were they acrylic paintings?
EVERTS:
Yes, acrylic and gesso. Some watercolor. They would have a tendency to throw away the right angle, so that it would look out of square. It was very much about mark and then the erasure of the mark and then the reading of the mark and then sometimes reinforcing it. It was almost like a dialogue. It was almost like a conversation with myself, where I would make the mark and it would reflect. And I would then look and see if I wanted to quiet it or if I wanted more of a response from it. The work was very, very quiet—the tracery of branches upon the ground, in terms of the white and the height and level. And so the color was basically very fugitive in nature. You would see it, but the closer you got, you would look at it and you would lose it. Concentration took it away. It almost got to the point where I thought the stuff was pretty! Without intention, I was doing something I'd always coveted to do, and here I was out in what was hell's half-acre. It was beautiful—the place was unconscionably beautiful. It was so planned and so—for a person from the West, where you have all these wild forests and you have the mountains, and I had spent time in Alaska and in the wilds and in Mexico and all this, and then I go back to this absolutely pruned environment that was supposed to suggest a wilderness. It was a school for 156 students, and it was on 350 acres. A couple of lakes—
TIDWELL:
Are these all graduate students?
EVERTS:
Yes. They were all graduate students. There was something like nine members of the faculty or something at that time. They'd cut it back. That isolation was absolutely fabulous. The quiet, the fact that you didn't have to drive an automobile. I used to cross-country ski to class in the winter. They gave you a place to live. They gave you a home, and they paid the utilities and all. It was a lot of noblesse oblige. It was un-American. It was just unnatural.
TIDWELL:
Did you find you got soft in your art?
EVERTS:
No, I don't think—it was rather nice. It was kind of like being cared for. It was nice. It was a nice change. You know, the worst thing about the food is when you get to feeling better and you get hungry, and there' nothing worth eating! But it had a very nice quietude to it. It was a very nice, reflective—the staccato was gone out of my life. It was very, very peaceful, and the work got very, very peaceful. And I got to reflect quite a bit on what it was that I was interested in. And so actually I had a period of time where I was isolated from my work. I think it was a very important time for me because it—the divorce had been very painful for me. You know, you spend around twenty years with another human being, and they're your best friend and your lover and all of those things. It's very difficult. And the separation, when you're in the familiar terrain, and you're seeing the same sort of people—I think for me, the break wasn't really totally complete until I was there and absolutely away from seeing familiar people, seeing all of that. Though my daughter was with me, and I was living with that young lady that I mentioned.
TIDWELL:
Was she the one whose sister was married to Norman Chandler [Susan Yeager]?
EVERTS:
Yes. It was just idyllic. It was very nice. It wasn't so idyllic for her to be about twenty-three years old and [be in the household with] a teenage daughter. But it was a chance where all of a sudden I was able to look at my work with a tremendous amount of detachment, because it wasn't there. So I had to look at it in terms of what I remembered of it, and what I remembered of it would only be the things that I was maybe concerned with with those particular works. So I saw them without the confusion of the totality of the work, but only that which I felt was significant in it. It would have been more difficult with a real confrontation. I would have been confused by the facts. So I was able to really find out what my interests were, and I found out that my interests were basically going back to when I was a very young man—not even a man, just a lad, in an attic—you know, I was bound to be an artist, because on this farm we lived in, I lived in a garret. And it was on a hill, and the cars would come over and chase these shadows around the room. It was absolutely frightening but fascinating at the same time. When I put on the addition onto my studio, I was all interested—the studio is presently all about the light, the living areas, and about the trapping of light and the volume that the light makes in corners, and all those things that I had. I was also taken back in terms of my longshoring days, and annotation—the messages that happened to be on the boxes. That was a code that I didn't understand, because I didn't understand the language. I didn't understand the shorthand of that particular group of people that happened to send out that material. I remember an experience that was not unlike that when I was in the service, and we were up in Alaska. There was a plane crash, and we hiked up onto this mountain to rescue these bodies—rescue of any life, if there had been anyone alive, taking these bodies down. And they had dropped food from an airplane for survival (they were all dead), but we were short on supplies because the weather was in and there wasn't any way that we could go back down the mountain. So some kid in civilian times before the war had worked in a Safeway [supermarket], and he said he could tell what was in all of these cans by the numbers that they had on the top of them. I can remember, he said that this one number was something like Vienna sausages. And so I went around collecting all of these with that number. I went down back to our base camp, that was still up, miserable and cold and all. I slipped on the side and almost fell off this cliff. I got hit in the head with this sack filled with these cans of canned goods and slashed my head open. But I still made it back to camp, because, boy, this was going to be good to have some meat, right? We opened the cans—and it was asparagus. That was one of life's little disappointments. But all this I'd confronted earlier, this sense of coding. I confronted it when I was a child, and I was the only one that didn't learn to speak Spanish early on. I had this great-great aunt, who lived to be over a hundred, who spoke this absolutely beautiful Spanish, and I didn't get to know her until later, when I learned to speak Spanish. She had a beautiful sense of humor, spoke this absolutely beautiful archaic kind of Spanish. So we're closed off of all these experiences. Even when we speak the language, we don't even communicate that well. And so the notion of the writing and the fact that having had feeling in my hand taken away from me—I had had that sense of stroke taken away from me, and understanding through stroke—the fact that I was probably—I remember that I was the only kid that graduated from grade school that never had their penmanship put up on the wall. And this was at the time when they encouraged everybody. But I had started off left-handed, and I had to re-learn to be right-handed because of an injury to my left hand. Everyone thought it was the best thing that happened to me, that accident, because they did try at that time to break people who were left-handed and teach them to be right-handed. They find out now that it makes you wrong-headed, but too late. All of these things that were incidents that I wouldn't have thought were important. The important ones seem less important, but these small things—the rubbing of cargo against the bulkhead and the shaving of the color and all those things—all of a sudden the experiences that I'd taken by nature—I'd always been interested in terms of what was left by the act of making the work of art. You know, when your paint ran over the side, and it was on the easel. The—I wouldn't say accident, but the incident of the act of painting became terribly important, the recording of that. And that more and more important in my work was the fact that it was the process and not the product. And that the process—if you came and imitated and replicated the skein, the top layer of my painting, it wouldn't look like my painting, because my painting was basically about all of those things that reach to the surface. It went and followed that direction to the point. One difficult thing—I used to come home every summer. I would come home—we had a couple of months off around Christmas, and I would come home that time also. One summer I—
TIDWELL:
Come home from?—
EVERTS:
[To] California, from Michigan, yes. I spent at least five months of the year in California. But I worked very hard in the studio. I didn't see many people, in fact to the point where just last summer, I was down at an opening at Kirk deGooyer Gallery. And I was looking, and I didn't know a person there. Except for Kirk, who'd been a former student of mine. All of a sudden, I looked across the room, and I see a familiar face, and I know that he got the same look as I did. It was Craig Kauffman. Craig and I had never been that close, and we just immediately walked across this vast space to say hello to each other. And he said, "God, Everts, do you know anybody here?" And I said, "Craig, I don't know a soul; it's like I'm on another planet." He said, "I thought maybe I was the only one that felt that way." It was a strange thing. I thought that I probably felt that way because, even though I was going away, I had been away for five years or something. But then I guess he does stay down in Orange County quite a bit of the time. But here was someone who had been here all that time, and I think that the scene is growing so damn much, that it just doesn't have that camaraderie that it had before. The work basically had the same concerns and basically edge concerns, and then towards—
TIDWELL:
Which work is this?
EVERTS:
The work which was called the "E.P. Series," which was like easel paintings. It was the notion—they were on a wedge, and they were interested in not having such a flat projection in relationship to light. Then all of a sudden I started leaving the edge concern and working towards the middle, and I had—the only time in my life I resigned from a school. And the director, the president, tore up the letter of resignation—
TIDWELL:
This is the director of Cranbrook?
EVERTS:
Yes, the president of Cranbrook, Roy Slade. He gave me a new contract and a new house. That wasn't the reason that I'd quit. I'd quit because I wanted to come back to California. I was so shocked by it. And I had had an offer to do a guest shot up at the University of Washington, my old alma mater that had kicked me out of school about the time I was about to graduate, the quarter I was about to graduate. So I thought that'd be nice to go back, because I hadn't been there in thirty years. I didn't realize it! I hadn't been there in thirty years; I hadn't been on campus since I was kicked out. So I was kind of anxious to go back there. And I'd said I was going to go back. I said, "Well, if I do that, if I come back, during the fall I want to go to Europe for a few weeks, and then I want to teach January, February, and March in Washington—" And he said, "Well, that's fine." I thought when I told him all of that, that I wouldn't do it. He said, "Just so you come back for the reviews in February." I said, "Well, OK." So I was kind of fleschimmeled. I was surprised by the whole thing, and devastated. I didn't know quite how to react. I didn't realize that you couldn't even quit.
TIDWELL:
After being let go from so many different institutions!
EVERTS:
So I went [to] Seattle, I went back. They had what they called the California winter that year—they never had winter. It was absolutely beautiful. It didn't rain much at all; only on my birthday, as I recall. And when I was back for the reviews, it snowed in the mountains one day. But the snow line was down to about 8,000 feet—it was way up there. My work really changed radically, the whole color. I'm very much influenced by the local color.
TIDWELL:
Your trip back to the West had changed your work already.
EVERTS:
The work up in Washington, that work that I told [about], where I worked for two summers. I worked one summer on the paintings and then came back the next summer and then finished them. That work was shown at the Mekler Gallery in 1978, I think it was, I'm not certain. The work—the color started getting heavier. Instead of going from light, the color started getting heavier, because it started reflecting—and then the more singular—the graffiti started getting heavier, the singular letters. I started creating a kind of alphabet based on rhythm of my own.
TIDWELL:
This is the work that I've seen downstairs, that you are doing now.
EVERTS:
Yes, and that was the work that I did up at—and work that I'm doing now, that I did up at Washington. I went back with the intention of resigning again and being more forceful. I went and resigned. Then the person said that there was a chance, if I wanted to, I could go to Scotland and teach part of the year. I also had a sabbatical coming up. I'd never, ever even thought of a sabbatical before. I said, "No, because if I take the sabbatical, I have to come back next year, and I really just honestly want to go back to California." My kids were out of university. My daughter was out of medical school, and there wasn't any reason for me to be back there. I didn't need that much money. So I came back determined to build a living space. I could no longer afford to have a studio and a house. The place that—[Eero] Saarinen had designed all of the buildings back at Cranbrook, so I was accustomed to something a little more commodious and not quite as spartan, and I was a bit older. So I had designed my addition to the place based upon—I had worked on it for several years while I was back at Cranbrook and thinking about what I would like to do with the place. It was based upon that series of paintings and what I was interested [in] in terms of light. So I came, and, for nine months, I did nothing but build this place. A few ex-students and artist friends, like Sakoguchi and Gordon Thorpe and Corwin Clairmont and Leonard Edmondson and Tom Fricano and a few other people—I wouldn't want to slight anybody, but a great number [of artists] and old students came down and helped me from time to time. In fact, the room that we're sitting in looked like the front of a Chicago tuxedo, you know, where they moved the buttons or had been machine-gunned in the thing. They were having a great time, and they were making holes in the wall board. They had never hammered over their heads, I don't think! But you can cover all those ills. In fact, the wall doesn't look that bad. It was a lot of fun seeing old friends again. It was good to be back in California. But it was hell for nine months. I knew that I would lose a lot of concerns in terms of finishing the studio, if I didn't—
TIDWELL:
You didn't work during that period.
EVERTS:
I didn't work then, so one full pregnancy, nine months passed without doing one bit of artwork. I just had to stop. I had to go back to work. It was the longest in my entire life that I'd ever been without working. It was really worse, because it was self-exile. It wasn't something that had happened to me.
TIDWELL:
And when did you, in fact, stop working full-time on the studio and get back to work?
EVERTS:
I did a couple of little drawings in February [1982], but March the fifteenth was the day I started the "Catharsis Series." And I've been working since then. And I'm now preparing for a show at Barnsdall Park [Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery], which will be about ten years' work, which will be basically the work that nobody's seen. That's the work that I did out in Michigan and all.
TIDWELL:
Will that be a retrospective or a survey?
EVERTS:
It'll be more of a survey.
TIDWELL:
Next year sometime?
EVERTS:
It'll be in 1983—next year. So it's looking back—you know, with that break, I was again another distance in seeing what it was that I'm interested in. I think it's becoming clearer and clearer, I'm not interested, generally, in what most people are interested in. The work hasn't gotten as homely as it has been in previous times, but it still maintains a certain considered ugliness.


Date: 2011-08-22
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