00:00:29
MOON:
This is the first session of an oral history interview with Peter
Plagens. The date is October 14, 2015. The interviewer is Kavior Moon.
We are sitting in a conference room at the San Francisco Art Institute,
where Mr. Plagens is a distinguished visiting professor this quarter,
this semester?
PLAGENS:
Visiting artist. I like “artist” better, and you can leave off the
“distinguished.” That might be in there. My mother would have liked
that.
MOON:
Okay. [laughs] So we can just start from the very beginning. I was
wondering if you could tell me a little bit about your family
background.
PLAGENS:
I was born in 1941 in Dayton, Ohio. My father and mother are from
Cleveland. Their families are from Cleveland. My mother’s name was Mary
Jayne Shields. She’s of Irish extraction, northern, I found out when I
visited Ireland, and they always want to know if you’re looking up
gravestones and so forth, and I wasn’t, and people couldn’t figure out
why I wasn’t. Somehow I think Shields is a northern name, Catholic but
northern. And my father’s name is Plagens, and his family came a few
generations earlier from Germany. The influential thing in terms of
family, general family upbringing and stuff, is that they were clerics.
They were Lutherans. But my grandfather converted to Christian Science,
and my father was a devout Christian Scientist. My mother wasn’t
anything; my mother was a lapsed Catholic. Anyway, at the time of my
birth, my father was working at Wright Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.
00:02:03
MOON:
What was he doing there?
PLAGENS:
He was not a military person. I was born before the war. But he wanted
to be a commercial artist. He wanted to be an illustrator. This figures
in my background. But the Depression and certain things about him, he
wasn’t a real tiger, ambitious kind of guy, but there’s a whole lot of
stuff that I owe to him, and he was doing, I don’t know, graphic design
and whatever publications, I think, at Wright Air Force Base.
MOON:
Mm-hmm.
PLAGENS:
And at the time, I don’t know whether he claimed to have something
directly to do with it or not, but they were working on something called
the Norden bombsight which was a big thing, helped victory in Europe in
World War II, that helped high-altitude bombing. Anyway, in 1942, he was
transferred, I don’t know, War Department, whatever it was, to
California, and we moved to California in 1942, where he worked in
something called FAMPU, Federal Aviation Motion Picture Unit, and they
made training films to train people, help train people to do things
that, fortunately, he didn’t have to do because he was classified as a
vital defense worker, but being thirty-three, thirty-four years old at
the time, he was probably a little too old for the draft. So we moved to
California, and we lived in California from 1942 to 1950. When I was a
little kid, I lived in a suburb of Los Angeles called Alondra Park.
Alondra Park was an unincorporated piece of county territory between
Gardena and Torrence. Basically it’s where El Camino College is, a
community college down there. We lived there when it was built. It was a
big deal when it was built. And we lived in one of those little
ticky-tacky stucco houses. You know, you go down the street, one’s
yellow, one’s mint green, one’s baby blue, one’s light purple, one’s
ochre, and then you start over again, you know.
00:04:36
MOON:
Do you remember what the other families, what the parents did in that
neighborhood?
PLAGENS:
My father was very jealous—“envious” might be the term—because he
considered himself educated. He didn’t have a college degree. He did a
little bit of Cleveland Institute of Art night school, you know, but he
read omnivorously, and he considered himself—and he was always envious
because he was rather—what’s the word I want—not well paid, lowly paid.
I can’t think of the opposite of highly paid. But he worked for these
little small advertising agencies. And a lot of the people around he
always was jealous of, is because they were blue-collar workers, but
they were skilled blue-collar workers and they worked for the aircraft,
they worked in the defense industry. Northrop Aircraft, which is now
Grumman Northrop something something, was right nearby, and so we had a
lot of people around us who were defense workers, guys who would take
their lunch bucket to the factory, and they made a lot of money,
comparatively, in those days. That’s the only thing I remember
specifically about other families’ employment. And I was a little kid. I
played with their little kids. We played on the lawns, etc., etc.
MOON:
Your father, was he an employee of certain design firms or was he
freelancing?
00:07:07
PLAGENS:
He was an employee. He was an employee, and he tended to work—I’m
getting to my father now, and I don’t want to be, you know, cruel. I
mean, there have been times when I’ve referred to him as the Willy Loman
of commercial art, and that’s harsh. He wasn’t. But he wanted to be an
illustrator, but he ended up being a kind of jack-of-all-trades for
small advertising agencies, which meant everything from sales, you know,
selling space and so on and so forth, to doing a little bit of layout
and design and things like that for small operations. If you saw the
television Mad Men, if you think of Mad Men, the big corporation, right?
That’s the big supermarket. And if you think of the little corner store,
a bodega, those are the kind of advertising agencies my father worked
for, and that’s what he did.
But it got me into art because he had wanted to be an illustrator. I
could draw very well, and he would bring me home art supplies, things
that I thought were really cool that other kids didn’t have, like
chisel-tipped pencils, kneaded erasers, one of those lazy Susan kind of
things where you put all your ink bottles here and your pencils and
brushes here, and pieces of illustration board. And I felt—I mean,
that’s what probably got me doing this.
MOON:
Did you teach yourself how to draw or did your father teach you?
00:08:59
PLAGENS:
No, he didn’t teach me. I was pretty—I had a talent for it. I mean, it
sounds immodest, and maybe it is, but I could really draw in that
cartoony—everywhere from academic figure drawing to cartoons. I was
good. And this is jumping ahead, but when I was at USC, I was the
editorial cartoonist. In other words, I did one every Wednesday, I
think, for the Daily Trojan, and I sort of, you know, modeled myself
after Herbert Block or “Herblock,” his signature, and Bill Mauldin and
Paul Conrad. I forget whether he was there at the time, at the L.A.
Times. I have Xeroxes of them all, Daily Trojan. Somebody sent them to
me one time, so I still have them. And I will say without fear or favor
that the drawings, the editorial ink and then litho crayon like
editorial cartoons, the drawings, excellent. The ideas, shallow, callow,
embarrassing. They look like something that an eighteen- or
nineteen-year-old, you know, would have thought up.
But my father pointed me toward commercial artists that he thought were
good. “You ought to look at Robert Fawcett. You ought to look at Austin
Briggs. You ought to look at John Whitcom. You ought to look at—.” And
these are people whose names don’t mean anything to anybody. When I
first came to ‘SC, I was not going to be an artist; I was an English
major, which was in those days what you called yourself if you didn’t
have a major. You know what I mean? People now say “undeclared” or
something like that. In those days, you had to take a bunch of English,
so you called yourself an English major. But when I was a freshman, I
took an Art Appreciation class from a man, a very good man, named
Delmore Scott, and Delmore Scott—and this was in the day when, you know,
people were closeted, and Delmore Scott was the partner of a man named
Curt Opliger, and Curt Opliger may turn up in your research. Curt
Opliger ran the L.A. Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park, and I
think there was a little adjunct in City Hall, a little gallery up in
the tower there someplace. And Scotty taught this Art Appreciation
class. And you had to fill out a form. I mean, this is like I’m
seventeen years old, maybe eighteen. I forget whether it was spring or
fall semester. I was a little young for my grade, not because of
precociousness, but because my mother somehow got me into kindergarten
when I was four. She wanted me out of the house, I think.
00:10:43
MOON:
Wait. Before we leave the family background, we heard about your father,
but can you tell me about your mother? Did she work?
PLAGENS:
Yeah. My mother didn’t work for a long time. My mother was older when
she got married. In those days, twenty-six was considered, you know,
you’re going to be a spinster. She was born in 1911. My father was born
in 1908. They got married in 1937, right in the teeth of the Depression,
okay? And my mother worked. My mother worked for the telephone company.
I used to think she was a telephone operator, but I’ve been told that
that’s not true. She worked for the telephone company and did something.
But then when we moved to California and she had me, I was about a year
and a half old when we made that move in 1942, she didn’t work.
MOON:
She didn’t need to because your father was making enough money?
00:13:5900:15:32
PLAGENS:
Yeah, but women didn’t work in those days, you know. I mean, you lived
on Dad’s salary, whatever it was. And there was a lot of wailing and
gnashing of teeth over finances in my parents’ house, you know. My
mother, one of her qualities was that she was—what’s the word I want—a
pessimist. My father used to say that my mother could always find the
cloud in front of every silver lining, okay? And they would worry. And I
would hear arguments at night. “Oh, my god, George, your salary is down
to—.” And my father would get cut. Salary would get cut when the agency
got into trouble, see. My mother, Irish. But the thing about you said
did she work, okay, and I won’t diverge here because I don’t want to get
ahead, but in 1950, my family went broke. My father was out of a job.
The advertising agency—I forget who it was—Sudler, one of these people
he worked for went bust, and they just couldn’t do it anymore. So they
sold the house for cash—I remember it being counted out on the kitchen
table—and we moved back to Cleveland, and we moved in with my maternal
grandmother and her husband, the Shields. My maternal grandmother was a
hoot. She was an Irish lady who looked like Bette Davis in Whatever
Happened to Baby Jane?, you know, and she smoked unfiltered Camels, and
she had the lipstick that came up over the top. And my grandfather,
everybody used to think there was American Indian blood in the family
because my grandfather looked like an Indian chief. He looked like the
face on the nickel. And he was very brown, tanned. He was a self-taught
highway engineer. In other words, he didn’t go to college, but in those
days you could take an exam, and he worked for the Ohio Department of
Highways.
So we moved in with them, and they had a big old house in East
Cleveland, not a big old like nice house in a street on a row. It’s a
slum now, East Cleveland. But these houses were tightly packed, some
two-, some single-family. Okay. So we moved in there and we were there
for four—not with them, we rented a house, but we were there for four
years. Then we moved back out to California in 1954, so there was an
interregnum in Ohio. My parents, my mother especially, did not like to
be around—and still this is something I picked up from her—it’s a sort
of belief that your relatives should be at least an overnight trip away,
you know. Because they’re out in California, you know. And in those
days, I can remember my grandparents coming to visit and they arrived on
the train, and we went down to Union Station to meet them. You know what
I mean? It was a big deal. It wasn’t like flying is now. Okay. So we
came back and we moved into this little rental house in hipster heaven
now, but it was halfway between Silver Lake Boulevard and Echo Park, off
Sunset, north of Sunset, you know, which is like very cool now. In those
days, it was just a middle-class neighborhood, despite the fact that it
was hilly and stuff.
So you said about my mother. See, my father then, I don’t know, lost
another job or was between, and my mother I’m proud of. Can you be proud
of your mother, in retrospect? I mean, she’s passed away a while back.
She lived to be almost ninety-two. She went to work. She went to the
Board of Education, took a typing test, took a test, became a clerk
typist at age forty-three, and when she retired, she was assistant
registrar. Twenty years later, she was assistant registrar at L.A. City
College. So my mother was like—she could just do it. She was salt of the
earth. She’d pick it up. Basically, she saved our family’s ass a couple
of times, you know, because she had the job and the penchant. You know
what I mean? And my father sort of drifted into freelancing, a little
here, little there, and it was my mother who was like the anchor, you
know, and she just did it. I can remember her getting up when I’m going
to high school, she’s up early. She goes down there to take the bus to
City College. But she loved it. She absolutely loved City College when
she got there, you know. “The girls,” as she used to call them in the
Admissions Office. I mean, she liked to go to work, and I would imagine
for her, as a gregarious Irish woman, it was a very good place to work.
So that’s my mother.
MOON:
Was she also an avid reader? Were you reading a lot as a child?
00:18:58
PLAGENS:
Yeah, I read a lot. My father was an autodidact and he read all the
time. Now, some of the stuff he read, his little religious things, you
know, Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Key to the Scriptures, which that’s
the book, the Christian Science book, and other things. But he was an
avid reader. He read fiction a lot, nonfiction, but he would go to the
Hollywood Library, the L.A. Public Library. I mean, that’s where he—he’d
bring home stacks of books and he would say, “Here. You ought to read
these.” He’d get stuff for me. Science fiction, fiction, novelists that
I would have never otherwise heard about, Olaf Stapledon, the Swedish
science fiction writer in the thirties, Richard Hughes, who wrote four
novels, one they made into a movie called High Wind in Jamaica, a great
novel called The Fox in the Attic, about Hitler in the twenties when
he’s hiding out after a putsch, you know, a book called You Shall Know
Them by a French writer named Vercors. I’m just thinking of all these
things he would bring home, you know, and say, “You ought to read this.”
And he would also go to the Echo Park Library, which was down right near
where the freeway is and by the lake. I think they’ve rebuilt it. But
that’s what he did.
I still read. I mean, this is getting into something else, so I’ll just
make a quick note of it, but I always have to have something to read,
particularly now I live in New York and I take the subway and public
transportation, and out here, so I always have a mystery novel, you
know. Good ones. I’m very particular. And then that’s what I read, that
and the stuff that I have to read for, you know, the art world, which is
like eating your lima beans, you know. It’s necessary, but it’s not a
lot of fun. Anyway, yes, my father did that, and that was the good side
of him. See, he was sort of philosophical and not successful at all in
the business world. My mother was not philosophical, she was very
practical, but she was intelligent. She just wasn’t of that kind that my
father was, but she was real practical and she could get it done. She
was the one who would go out and work. So I had both sides. And my
mother is the ambitious one, you know. She had ambitions for her
children, you know. Not what you’d call a tiger mom, but, yeah, she had
that.
00:20:29
MOON:
And how was school for you? You got into USC, I read, with scholarship,
so you must have done well.
PLAGENS:
One of the lucky breaks of my life—this is a commercial here—I went to a
really good public high school just by luck of the draw, where we lived.
I was almost in the Belmont district, but I went to John Marshall High
School up in Los Feliz, and it was a real interesting place because it
drew upper-middle-class kids from around the reservoir, Silver Lake, you
know, and the white kids were about half Gentiles and half Jews. Then
there were a lot of what you called Chicanos—they didn’t even call them
Chicano kids; they said “Mexicans.” But Mexican American kids, you know,
from places, Toonerville. You used to know them by the kind of
neighborhoods like that. Only a sprinkling of black students. I mean,
very few. And a lot of Japanese Americans. I think when I was at John
Marshall, the valedictorian every semester, because we graduated in
semesters, you know, every semester—it was six semesters because in L.A.
you went tenth, eleventh, twelfth grade. You didn’t start at nine in
high school. Every semester the valedictorian was a Japanese American
girl. That was the way it was, you know. [laughs] I thought, you know,
okay—I didn’t think anything of it. I thought that was the way nature
intended it to be, you know. But it was a really, really good public
high school. I mean, you know, I have one of those lifetime alumni
memberships and I get a bulletin and so on and so forth. In fact,
yesterday I got—not yesterday, but just recently I got a newsletter, an
Alumnus of the Year Award. Not me, but graduated three years before I
did. I graduated in 1958. A 1955 graduated, Don Bachardy. [Moon laughs]
I thought, “I didn’t know that.” I almost wanted to call him up, you
know. And I also thought it was good—I don’t know about the school. I
mean, you know, this is the twenty-first century. But they give the
Alumnus of the Year Award to a gay artist instead of somebody who’s a
CEO of—you know what I mean—Coca-Cola Bottling Company of L.A. or
something like that. I like that. But I didn’t know he went there. But
that was a real lucky break, because I had real good teachers and I got
a wonderful education there.
00:23:19
MOON:
Wait. So are you still in contact with people that you went to school
with there?
PLAGENS:
One person. I’m not sentimental about. I’m sentimental about school, but
not about.
MOON:
But no other artists or people that—
PLAGENS:
No, and I have—
MOON:
—you know in professional circles now?
PLAGENS:
Yeah. If we get into USC, there’s a transition there, but I have one
friend who I met when we first moved back to California in 1954, I had
to go to Thomas Starr King Junior High School, and it was seventh,
eighth, and ninth grades, so I went in the ninth grade, right? One year.
And, you know, the cliques have already been formed, so you come in and
you do one year and you’re—you know. So there was another kind of
outlier kid, his name is Kenneth Suddleson, and he’s still working and
he’s rich and he’s an entertainment lawyer. He used to be Steve Martin’s
lawyer and Marvin Gaye’s lawyer and the guy who directed all those—what
were those movies with Bruce Willis in them about—you know.
00:24:31
MOON:
Oh, the action—
PLAGENS:
Where he sort of doesn’t care if he dies.
MOON:
Die Hard.
00:26:51
PLAGENS:
Die Hard movies. Kenny—and he still works. This is an aside and probably
off the record, but his wife, who passed on, was under experimental
cancer treatment for several years before she died, and that wasn’t
covered and he paid for that. So he kept working. But he worked for
these big entertainment—take his client list. And he’s the only one that
I keep in touch with, somewhat infrequently, but I do. That’s the only
person I know. But it was good, and I did well, but well in those days
was—I’m going to sound like the old guy, you know, things were tougher
in the old—etc., etc. I had a grade average of about 3.45 or 3.43,
something, in high school, and that’s mediocre now, you know. It’s a
little less than halfway between a B and an A, right? You only got whole
grades. And when I went to USC, I ended up—I graduated with almost
exactly the same grade average. But in those days, I got a California
state scholarship. You competed for them, or you applied for them. I got
one, but it was based on need, and they said, “If you go to UCLA—.” And
in my neck of the woods, at John Marshall High School, where a lot of
people went to college, there were basically three places that people
went and then a couple of other places and then, really strange, which I
will say, it was either UCLA, USC, or Los Angeles City College. If you
didn’t have any money at all and you didn’t have any grades, you went to
City, right? And if you were rich or you were one of those richer kids,
you went to ‘SC, right? University of Spoiled Children. You know all
that stuff. Because it’s a private school and it charged tuition.
And UCLA in those days—this is before state funding was cut out—I mean,
UCLA costs $50,000 a year to go to now if you’re an undergraduate,
because these schools only get 10, 12, 15, at most, percent of their
funding from the state anymore, you know. I mean, that’s the way
politics—thank you, Ronald Reagan. But in those days, UCLA was something
like $80 a quarter, and they were on the quarter system. Are they still
on the quarter system?
MOON:
They’re still on the quarter system.
PLAGENS:
And so it cost $250 a year to go there, tuition. ‘SC was a horrendous
$30 a unit, which meant $1,500 a semester, which meant $3,000 a year. So
you’ve got $250, versus $3,000. So the California state scholarship
said, “If you go to UCLA, you don’t need it, so we won’t give it to
you.” And there are two factors. One, ego. Oh, I would have liked to
have gone to college on a scholarship, so I’ll take it. Secondly is we
lived in Echo Park. I had to live at home for a while. I was going to
drive. I had a very dicey car which was breaking down all the time. I
couldn’t get from Echo Park to Westwood, so I went to USC for those two
reasons.
MOON:
Did you ever consider going to one of the art schools, like Chouinard?
00:29:25
PLAGENS:
No. I wanted to go to college. It just didn’t occur to me. It was
college. I read college novels too. I mean, my father brought me
home—there’s one called—it’s by a professor of English at Princeton
named Carlos Baker, and it was a fiction novel about the search for a
new president in a small liberal arts college. I’ve read Howard
Nemerov’s Homecoming. I like those sort of things, okay, and I wanted to
go to college. Basically I would have liked to have gone to—our daughter
went to Kenyon, and I’ve been there. Laurie and I were on the equivalent
of the PTA, you know. I would have given my left arm to have gone to a
place like—I mean, it looks like college. You know what I mean? Columbia
looks like college, too, once you get in off Broadway, right? Yeah.
I mean, I wanted to go to college, but I couldn’t afford any of that.
And halfway through, I tried to get a scholarship to transfer to a place
like, you know, Trinity, Wesleyan, Amherst, one of those places, because
I read a lot of college novels when I was in college, you know. I mean,
all that sort of—it’s not really that corny and it was after my time,
but Love Story, you know, Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw, that kind of
stuff, you know, I wanted that. So, no, I didn’t think about art school.
So anyway, USC, UCLA, or City, right? Then there were a few smart kids
who went to Berkeley or Stanford. If they had money, they went to
Stanford, you know, but you had to be really smart. And then there were
people, a couple of people who we considered from Mars, very nice. I
still remember Ellen Ziskind and Robert Berg, and they were a couple. I
mean, they were sort of—I don’t want to hurt their feelings; they’re
still around now—they were kind of nerdy and bookish, but nice.
Everybody liked them. They went to Harvard together, and we thought, you
know, it was like they’d gone to the moon. [laughter] And they were
really smart. I have no idea what they’re doing now. So that was
basically it, so that’s how I ended up at ‘SC.
00:31:01
MOON:
So you had a scholarship that covered tuition? Did it also give you
money to live on?
PLAGENS:
No, no. When I went there, it covered about $2,000 worth my freshman
year, and there was $1,000 left to pay. My parents had an insurance
policy on me somehow that they cashed in and got $1,000. All right? So I
lived at home most of the time. That’s another college experience I
really missed. I always wanted to have lived in a dormitory. I never
lived in a dormitory, you know. Everybody says, “Oh, gosh, you don’t
forget it,” right? I mean, a big college, dormitories at Kenyon, where
my daughter went, that was different. They were in those old Ivy
League-looking buildings, you know, those Gothic places. And so what I
did when I was in high school, junior, senior year of high school, and
during about three years that I was at ‘SC, I worked for Safeway. I was
a box boy, a sacker, as they call them now, you know, and then when I
went to college, I said, “I need more money,” and I went to the manager
and at the time it was unionized, was retail clerks union, and they had
to pay a premium of ten or fifteen cents an hour for part-time people.
Why? That was keeping the supermarket from hiring the equivalent of
adjuncts. You know what I mean? Because you’d have a supermarket be open
twelve hours a day and union workers work eight hours a day, right? So
the shifting—you know. These were people supporting—and it was a good
wage, okay? So he said yes, and for two years, two and a half, I forget,
I worked in the produce department. Safeway, Third and Vermont, which
was a real interesting neighborhood because it divided one way, Asian
Americans, and we had a real interesting produce department. We had
stuff that you didn’t get out in white neighborhoods. Then we had south
was black. That didn’t affect the produce department so much. Then you
had Latinos. Third and Vermont was like a cross-section right there, and
it was interesting. I didn’t like having to work, you know. It tired me
out. But working in the supermarket was real interesting. I mean, it was
hard, but that’s what paid my living expenses.
00:33:56
MOON:
What was so interesting? Was it meeting people, dealing with people?
PLAGENS:
Yeah. Yeah, it was dealing with people, you know. And I was never in the
military, so there was part of the sort of guy camaraderie of the—there
weren’t any women working in the produce department. The women were all
checkers, you know, cash register operators and some were stock. I mean,
it was fairly sexually segregated. The checkers got as much money as the
produce people, and the butchers were the highest paid. They had their
own separate union. One of my little duties, though, against the rules,
because I was low man on the totem pole in produce, they sent me over to
the meat department and I had to clean the grease trap. The grease trap
is where all the fat and everything goes and decomposes. It’s not
pleasant to clean the grease trap into a slop bucket and seal it so
somebody can take it away. I don’t know what they did with it. Yeah, I
liked it. I didn’t like doing it at the time. I mean, you know, you’re
interviewing me and it’s history and I’ve said before, if you go through
a mountain range and you look back at the mountain range you’ve been
through, you can see the peaks, you can’t see the valleys. So you look
back and you say, “Oh, yeah, that peak, that peak, that was really
interesting.” You don’t remember, right? Like having to get up at
seven-thirty in the morning or seven in the morning because I’ve got an
eight o’clock shift, you know. Actually, you preferred that on the
weekend because then you could go on dates. If you had to work noon to
nine o’clock, right? It was a nine-hour thing, hour off for lunch, but
you didn’t get paid, so they were nine-hour blocks. So, ah, man, twelve
to nine on Saturday, you know, terrible. And I was in a fraternity for a
while at ‘SC.
00:36:03
MOON:
Wait. We can move to the college years. How was college for you?
00:38:51
PLAGENS:
I loved it. I mean, I liked college. That’s probably why I became an art
professor. I mean, I liked college. I still like college, you know. I
like it for all the bullshit reasons, you know. It’s like academe. I
like that sort of atmosphere and I’ve been around it. I was a college
art professor for a long time. My wife, Laurie Fendrich, just retired.
She’s here now with me as a visiting artist, but she retired after
twenty-five years at Hofstra out on Long Island, private university. So,
yeah, I liked it, and so I liked college. But I went in there and I
joined a fraternity. I was seventeen years old and I thought, you know,
it’s all very heady and so on and so forth, and I stayed in it for a
while. I never lived in the house because I couldn’t afford it. I had to
live other places. My college career is sort of—there’s A, B, and C, and
B is this transition-y thing, okay? Start off with I’m a regular college
student and I belonged to this fraternity, and it’s got a house on 28th
Street, Fraternity Row and all that sort of stuff, and I liked it, you
know. I liked it because I didn’t have that in high school. I wasn’t a
real social, you know—okay? So suddenly, you know, at USC somebody asked
me to pledge and I say, “Yeah.” And then there are parties and so forth,
and there are, to be perfectly honest about it, it has nothing to do
with sex, because in those days sex was, as Woody Allen once said, “Sex
and death are two things that happen once in my life.” It was a much
more chaste age, but there were sorority girls to try to go out with,
and they were basically of a higher economic class than I came from, and
I wanted to go steady, get pinned, marry one of them, you know, not so I
could sit on my butt for the rest of my life, but that sort of—you know
what I mean? That was attractive. And then the camaraderie and then the
intramural sports and then all that stuff, okay?
But I did cartoons, and as soon as I got in, I started doing cartoons
for the Daily Trojan. So I went over there and showed them some stuff,
and I thought it would be cool to work for the student paper for the
regular reasons, you know. You’re in college, you’re in a frat, student
paper, right? All that kind of stuff. And that was the sort of
transition, because the Daily Trojan crowd and my friend whom I had a
studio with for a long time—he’ll come up later—Walter Gabrielon, Walter
was not the editor, but when he was at UCLA he was like the features
editor or some editor of the DB.
MOON:
The Daily Bruin.
00:41:03
PLAGENS:
The Bruin. And I got there and it was kind of a halfway house. There
were fraternity people who were the editors and stuff, like Jim “Byline”
Bylin I still remember. His name was Bylin [phonetic], and of course
everybody called him “Byline.” He was a Sigma Chi, which was a real
hotsy, you know, campus hero sort of thing. But these people, the way I
would put it, they didn’t go to Friday night keggers and drink beer out
of kegs. They had bottles in their desks and they’d smoke and they
stayed at the Daily Trojan all hours. And it was that sort of newspaper
life, and it was irreverent. And then there were other people there who
weren’t from the Row, who just wrote political people and stuff like
that. I thought, “I like that.” So that seduced me, A over to sort of B.
And that carried through my life, because one of the things was when I
got the job at Newsweek, it was like the Daily Trojan writ large. You
know what I mean? Hanging around the water cooler, talking with the
sports guy, talking with the—you know what I mean? It was just the whole
thing over again.
But somewhere in the middle, I declared myself an art major because I
had taken art classes, right? And so that was, like, phase three. I
graduated being on inactive status in the fraternity. You don’t quit;
you’re there for life. But I just quit going and I was an inactive
member with no privileges, and I was over in the art department taking
painting and drawing and stuff like that.
MOON:
When did you start taking art classes?
PLAGENS:
I took them pretty early because there was that thing, I thought, you
know, you’d get electives, so I took that Art Appreciation class, I took
this class called Fundamentals of Drawing and Painting from Edgar Ewing.
Does he come up in your little research? He showed with Dalzell
Hatfield, you know. And the two professors there—three that were real
influences: Edgar Ewing; Keith Crown, who showed I forget where; and he
was an adjunct but he was a recent graduate, and it wasn’t like adjuncts
are now, you know, he just taught part-time, Jim Jarvaise, James
Jarvaise. Jarvaise, unbeknownst to me, I mean, was a real hot item. In
1959, he was in Dorothy Miller’s Sixteen Americans show at the Museum of
Modern Art with Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, you
know, like young American sort of thing. Lee Bontecou might have been in
it.
MOON:
That’s when they first gained a certain level of attention?
00:43:4500:46:0700:48:28
PLAGENS:
Yes, when they got sort of museum attraction. And Jim Jarvaise, who
painted these abstract paintings called Hudson River Series, he later
became a kind of Bay Area-ish figure painter and then went back into
abstraction. He never had the career that his talent should have had.
But he taught there. When I was, like, a junior, I took a painting
workshop with Jarvaise, which meant you could come in the studio
whenever classes weren’t being held, and there was a time when there was
class, and you could work on your own project. That was a big deal in
1960 or ’61. You know what I mean? It’s like standard operating
procedure now, but the idea of you got a painting workshop class, not
just advanced painting, where they put up a trickier still-life with a
model in it, you know, and you’re allowed to abstract it a little bit.
This was like you could do what you wanted to.
So it was James Jarvaise, Edgar Ewing, and Keith Crown. And then I
learned just generally. I had a real famous ceramicist, Susan Peterson,
and Susan Peterson, in the history of American ceramics, is like a real
deal. She did me two things. She helped save my scholarship. Oh, I
didn’t say that first year I had that scholarship, I had to pay part of
it. During my freshman year, I applied to USC itself for a full
scholarship and I got one, so I didn’t pay tuition for the last three
years, sophomore, junior, senior. Or no. I still had the California
state scholarship, but I applied to USC for supplemental scholarship
which filled in the rest. Okay. So Susan Peterson did two things. I had
to maintain a “B” average, you know. Nowadays, everybody gets a “B,” you
know. You get a “B” for breathing. Susan Peterson gave me a “B” in
ceramics, right, which you had to take. Absolute gift. I was the worst.
All my things, I used to say they’d start as vases, right, and then you
took that little wire thing, and then they became bowls, and then they
became [demonstrates], and finally they ended up as plates or ashtrays,
right? And she used to tell me, she said, “I don’t understand how you do
it, why your things don’t explode in the kiln,” because I couldn’t make
a thin wall. Your thick walls, you have all that moisture in there, and
when you bisque-fire it, it blows up. You open the kiln and there’s just
shards all over the place. Well, she gave me a “B” for trying, and it
helped. But the other thing she did was she was a very irreverent woman
and she knew about art, you know, a kind of attitudinal thing that she
had.
And there’s one last professor, a really crazy woman named Theresa
Fulton, if you ever encounter her. She taught Art History, and there
were rumors that she was in L.A. because she was in like a witness
protection program from Massachusetts. But she taught this course that I
took as a senior. I’ve got to mention one other professor, too, after
her, and he should be one of the most crucial. Theresa Fulton taught
this course called Bibliography and Criticism. I don’t know why they
called it that. It was basically how to go do research, you know, and we
had to write papers, how to do legitimate art historical research at an
undergraduate level. Right? But we visited people. We visited Peter
Krasnow’s studio; we visited Rico Lebrun’s studio. We went with her. And
I forget who else. I really liked the class. She was a total nutcase,
but I can’t remember why. She didn’t do anything bad. She was just
distracted and frenetic, you know, that kind of thing. But the other
person I forgot to mention is an art historian named Edward Peck, and
Edward Peck was a Harvard guy, silver-haired, and I couldn’t say this
for the record, but it was like one of those where we assumed that he
was gay, those of us who knew about those things. And one of the
differences between the art students and the regular especially frat
students is the art students, there was a certain acceptance of
homosexuality. You had older gay students who were around, and that was
just like part of it. You know what I mean? And it was a real liberating
thing. I had David Seculoff as a T.A. in a drawing class, who became a
handler at the L.A. County Museum. He could draw like a son of a bitch.
Sam—I can’t remember his name. A little circle.
We used to, at lunch break, when I was a senior—I mean, this is the
difference between when I was a freshman, you know, lunch at the
fraternity house, right? When I’m a senior, get out of morning painting
class and we all go over to Sam’s apartment and David would make a salad
and we would drink wine and listen to West Side Story that somebody put
on. You know what I mean? And it was undergraduates and straights and
gays. There were a couple sorority girls in the painting class who liked
to paint. But we all went over as a little—it was the great lunch hour,
you know, and we’d drink red wine. And you have to understand, see, I
was young and I didn’t turn twenty-one until two months before I
graduated, so I went through college sort of surreptitiously, and there
were places where I could get alcohol and places I couldn’t. So we would
have that little clot of art students from Edgar Ewing’s advanced
painting class, which was like four hours long. I think it was like
eight to twelve. Then we’d go have lunch. You know, it was the cliché
thing, putting on a vinyl album from musicals and we’d open the wine,
and David made a salad and Sam puts out plates and everything, you know,
but it was good because it was the kind of thing that a
twenty-one-year-old senior at USC in those days isn’t going to get. It
was a civilizing experience, you know. And I don’t know what happened to
all those people. God bless ‘em. They really helped me along. But
anyway, Ted Peck I took for the required survey, you know. What do they
call it?
MOON:
Art History Survey?
PLAGENS:
Yeah, yeah. Two semesters, right? Cave painting to medieval. The other
one is Renaissance to Modern. I liked him and I took two more classes
with him, Nineteenth Century Art, and the one that really affected me
was Northern Renaissance Art, which gave me my appetite for early
Flemish painting, which has been a big thing in my artistic life. I
mean, I went to live for about a year in Belgium to look at it because
I’d always liked Van Eyck to, I don’t know, Gerard David. In about 1520,
it starts to go bad because they start to get Italian influences and
they start to know perspective and atmospheric.
00:51:13
MOON:
What was it about the Flemish painting that really intrigued you?
00:52:37
PLAGENS:
Well, in retrospect, I look back and it’s the obvious, which is it was
very medieval and the space was all screwed up perspectivally, so it was
very modern, okay? The other thing was the color, you know, the oil
paint on the thing. I mean, that red still goes. And every time I go to
a museum, I go to the Met, I go to the Flemish Room. I go to
Philadelphia, I make a pilgrimage every time I go to Philadelphia.
There’s three works when you go into that museum you see. One of them,
the Duchamp, the Étant Donnés, right? But the other two are the Van der
Weyden Deposition or Crucifixion, the diptych, and the other one is the
Van Eyck Saint Francis. It’s about that big. I got to hold that one
time. It was just incredible. The conservation curator took me down.
They were doing it. Put on the white gloves. “You want to hold this?”
Holding this Van Eyck, and I’m thinking, “If I made a break for it,
could I get away with it if I just bolted and went out the door?” You
know what I mean? Shove it in my coat pocket. It’d almost be worth it to
live as a fugitive for the rest of your life if you had the Van Eyck
Saint Francis.
And the color, you know. They look like Hans Hofmann color blocks to me.
I still like it, you know. Van Eyck, Van der Weyden, Patiner, Petrus
Christus, the Master of Flémalle, who is or is not—I’m trying to think.
Melchior Broederlam. But it’s like eighty years, from about 1430 to
1520, ninety years, that’s what I like, and I go to see it. Any museum I
go into, I go to the Early Flem Room if they’ve got anything. Peck
taught Northern Renaissance Art, and that wasn’t the total of the
course. I mean, we learned about things like The Well of Moses by Claus
Sluter, German sculptor. You know all that carving. I couldn’t care less
about that. And Peck was a real art history professor.
MOON:
What about someone like Bruegel? Is is that a little bit later? Because
just thinking about the social satire or—
PLAGENS:
A little later, and I wasn’t interested in the social satire. I mean, I
like it and I like Bruegel better than Hieronymus Bosch because, I mean,
it’s great. I mean, we get into a thing here. There are works of art
that you absolutely like or you love, and then there are works of art
that you know in your head that are great and they’re genius, but
they’re not your thing, right? So I know, for instance, that Jackson
Pollock is a genius and he’s a better artist in that sense than, say,
Franz Kline is. I’d rather look at a Franz Kline, you know. I know there
are better novelists than Laura Lippman, and she’s good. This is her
first detective novel—and it’s not as good as the later ones. I know
that they’re better. You know what I mean? If I’d read—I’m getting off
on a subject. Every once in a while I dutifully read something in
serious contemporary fiction because I figure I have to.
00:55:21
MOON:
And then there are just people that you’re really drawn to.
PLAGENS:
And then there are people I’m really drawn to, and sometimes they
overlap. Like I really liked Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. I bought, as a
treat for myself when I came down here, I bought Purity, his latest one.
Hmm, it’s okay. And my daughter reads. She and a little group of five or
six women from Kenyon have a book club. One of them works for Penguin as
a publicist, so they read. So we discuss things, you know, when we read.
I read The Goldfinch. Awful. And I’m trying to think. Am I a sexist
because I—no, I like Laura Lippman and I like Ruth Rendell. New York
Times Book Review has this thing by the book where they interview
somebody every week, you know, and they had Mary Karr, the memoirist,
Liar’s Poker and like that.
MOON:
Oh, yeah, she was on NPR.
PLAGENS:
And she said, “Is there anything you don’t like?” And she was very
sarcastic about it. She doesn’t like these—like Franzen. She says, “I
don’t like these big encyclopedic novels where they—.” She had some
disparaging word. She didn’t mention him by name, but you knew she was
talking about that. You know, these big novels with these intellectual
pretentions about—etc. I was thinking, “Have you ever read The
Goldfinch? Because it’s like seven hundred pages and it’s just what
you’re complaining about, only it’s by Donna Tartt.” Anyway, where did
that—
00:57:31
MOON:
Well, actually, maybe we could talk about your writing and how it
develops in college. In the class that you mentioned, the Bibliography
and Criticism, you went to the studios of Rico Lebrun, Peter Krasnow,
she taught you how to do research. Were you also writing criticism in
that class?
PLAGENS:
No, not really. You didn’t write criticism. Maybe we had to write a
review. It’s a little dim. But it was how to write papers and research
them and footnote them and stuff like that, only she made it
interesting. No, the writing thing came from—I’ve got to go back to
freshman. I had a great freshman English professor, Ronald O. Freeman.
And I wrote a novel when I was a freshman. I wrote coming-of-age,
awakening, you know. It was a piece of shit [laughs] written by an
eighteen-year-old, you know, eighteen-, nineteen-year-old. Eighteen, I
was. Seventeen when I started. And I asked him if he would read it,
right? You know, my freshman year.
MOON:
Oh, so you wrote it in your free time.
00:59:1301:01:40
PLAGENS:
I’ve written a few novels, two of them published, several of them
mercifully unpublished, probably. But Ronald O. Freeman, I said, “Will
you read this?” And he said, “Yeah, if you read two books for me.” Okay?
And this is how I was a little behind. One of the books he had me read
was Catcher in the Rye. Everybody reads that at seventh grade or the
eighth grade, right? I’m in college; I haven’t read it. Okay. I really
liked it. I thought it was good. Every boy under the age of twenty
thinks it is—and the other was Vanity Fair, Trollope, which was harder,
but, you know, and it was supposed to teach me something.
Then I took other English classes, you know. I took electives. See, when
I graduated from USC, I was supposed to have 120 credits, whatever they
call it, you know, to graduate. I had 132, but I had to take summer
school class after my senior year because they weren’t in the right
places, the classes. I had to take a painting class, for God’s sakes—I
was supposed to be a painter—because I took all these other things, you
know. And one of them was literature classes. They used to have these
great classes at USC that were one credit instead of your normal three,
and I took one in Faulkner and one in Joyce, and they were only one
credit and met one time a week, right? So that, like, spurred the—you
know, we read Ulysses with—what’s his name? It’s the flip of the guy who
painted George Washington. Who painted George Washington? Gilbert
Stuart, that famous—Stuart Gilbert wrote a guide to Ulysses, so if you
sort of have it over here and then you read Ulysses over here, then you
go—you know what I mean? He tells you how to read it, what the chapter’s
about, what the style is. So I took Faulkner and Joyce, and my taking
Faulkner instead of Hemingway, I used to say, tells everyone everything
you know about my bad prose style, you know, because when I got the job
for Newsweek, that was my big writing break. Sarah Crichton, my editor,
used to call me in and point out a sentence, or she would write on the
thing, she’d say, “Chop this baby up, please. Could you take the one
sentence and make it three?” You know what I mean? Because I never met a
semicolon or an em dash or a parens that I didn’t like. And that came
from taking Faulkner. If I’d have taken Hemingway, I’d have been a
different writer. And in those days, they didn’t offer Virginia Woolf,
okay? So the canon was decidedly white male.
And then I took a short story class with a woman named Katherine
Kuttner, and Katherine Kuttner, with her husband under the name of Lewis
Padgett, wrote science fiction novels that were really pretty good,
okay? Henry Kuttner. And she wrote—I don’t know why she was teaching.
Maybe she just liked to teach. And I sort of fell in love with her, you
know, the handsome older woman and the aspiring young writer. I had a
real crush on her, and she was in her fifties. She lived in—I went one
night over there to discuss stuff with her, and she lived on Rossmore.
Do you know where Rossmore is?
MOON:
Yep.
01:04:34
PLAGENS:
It’s Vine Street after it passes south, and one of those Gothic
apartments with an awning, you know, and you get in, it’s so Hollywood.
Part of me always wanted to be a novelist and live alone in one of those
apartments, you know. Anyway, she also wrote most of the screenplays for
a very popular television program at the time called Maverick with James
Garner. It was a western. I mean, she wrote the screenplays for them.
And I took the short story writing class, and that was the thing
because—you know. A little aside here, you know, I don’t know whether
people would be—but there was a guy in the class, he’s a sculptor now,
he’s shown, showed at Marlborough, Maurice Tuchman liked him, a sculptor
named Bill Tunberg, William Tunberg, and he was an interesting guy in
the art department because he was something like the light heavyweight
weight-lifting champion of Southern California. I mean, he was built
like that. And he wrote this short story—we had to read these aloud.
[laughs] He wrote this short story—I forget what mine was about. Mine
were probably typically mawkish coming-of-age things. He wrote this
short story about a convent that gets overrun by criminals and there’s a
nun who gets raped and she decides that she likes it and she becomes a
nymphomaniac. [laughs] This is Tunberg’s short story. I remember we had
to read them aloud, and he’s reading this aloud in class and all these
women in class are going like this and looking at each other, sort of
moving their chairs away from him. [laughter] But he became a fairly
well-known artist. Time magazine he was in a couple of times, showed at
Marlborough, Tuchman liked him. Nice guy. But I just remember him in
that short story class.
So, anyway, and then when I went to Syracuse for graduate school, we
were required as part of an MFA thesis to write a thesis. I mean, we had
to write like a twenty-page thesis, not like they do now, which is some
little artist statement that’s about that big, you know, and then your
work, which is maybe like it should be, right? So I wrote this real
pretentious thesis called “The Development of Pictorial Meaning,” which
was about—I was an abstract painter, and this was in 1964. The people
around were, you know, people like Leonard Baskin, things like that. So
was justifying abstract painting as not being decorative, that you could
have real emotional meaning in it. Okay?
MOON:
Before we leave USC, we can actually use this as a transition into the
grad school, but how did your interests in art and your own painting
style develop in college? How did that lead you to grad school, wanting
to go to grad school?
01:06:3001:08:53
PLAGENS:
Well, I thought, you know—I don’t remember it being kind of a decision.
It was like, well, it’s what you do if you want to be an artist. You
have to go get an MFA someplace. You have to go to graduate school.
Secondly, I wanted more college. I liked it. I didn’t want to go to an
art school, see. I wanted to go to another university, okay? And the
other thing is, in those days you looked around and I thought, “Yeah,
I’d like to be one those college art professors.” I mean, I can be like
Jim Jarvaise. I can be like—you know, not Theresa Fulton, she’s an art
historian, but I could be like Edgar Ewing and, you know, that kind of
stuff.
And then when I was at ‘SC, I also was aware—when I was at ‘SC, I had
competition, so you were aware of that. David Novros was a contemporary
of mine at USC. He was on the cover of Artnews at twenty-one. He didn’t
go to graduate school; he went right to New York and got a job as a
guard at Museum of Modern Art, that thing. And there was a guy named
Paul Mogensen, and they had careers in New York, right? So there was,
like, people kind of—you know, we’re all going to do something, not as a
team, but, you know. And David—you know the Yale Summer School thing in
Norfolk, Connecticut. Well, each school nominates two people, so David
and I were nominated. He got it; I didn’t. And he deserved it at the
time. Strike that “at the time.” It’s very patronizing. He deserved it
and I didn’t. I was still doing kind of slightly semi-abstract stuff,
okay? And my influences were James Jarvaise, and I was trying to
abstract it up, and the Bay Area figure painters, you know. I mean, sort
of Diebenkorn, you know, Diebenkorn 1957 to 1962. In between—he was
better at either end. In between the New Mexico abstractions, you know,
in the early fifties and “Ocean Park,” in between that, there was that
Bay Area Figurative school, you know, David Park, Bischoff, Diebenkorn,
and then there was like a second string of Roland Petersen and there
were other people who basically—and you could do—here’s what it is. You
could do it in class and your professors, Edgar Ewing and Crown, thought
it was okay because you could slather on the paint, which is what you
wanted to do, at least what I wanted to do, but it was realistic enough,
you know. If you stood back from it and squinted, you could see a woman
on a park bench or something.
And I painted this great big painting, which I never finished, of—my car
was broken, and I used to take the bus to school down Alvarado Street,
and right at the freeway there was this thing where these little
Catholic schoolgirls got on or off the bus, and I did this total Bay
Area figure painting of the freeway on-ramp and the sign and the girls
in their blue sweaters and light blue skirts. You know what I mean. And
I did it up like—it was part Diebenkorn, part Roger Kuntz. Ever heard of
him? A painter who did kind of abstracted freeway on-ramps, real big at
the time, from Laguna Beach. There was a retrospective at Laguna Art
Museum. I wrote something for the catalog. Then there came, during my
senior year, there was a graduate student named John Kish, K-i-s-h, and
he was a small guy, had been in the navy or air force, he was older, he
was small, chain-smoked, was not in good health, as you will see, gay,
and he sort of took me under his wing. And his thing was he had studied
with Hans Hofmann. He’d gone to the Art Institute of Chicago and then
he’d gone to Provincetown. And he’d gotten the dogma, the push-pull
stuff, and he infected me with it. So I was painting, just as I
graduated, I was painting these brushy abstract paintings, and that was
my portfolio, you know, and it wasn’t all that good. And I got accepted
into two places. I didn’t apply to all that many. I got accepted at
Iowa, University of Iowa, but I ended up not wanting to go there because
I was starting to figure things out. Jules—what’s his name—Lasansky, the
printmaker, was there, and it was that kind of printmake-y, semi-modern,
Leonard Baskin, Lasansky kind of stuff. A sculptor there was sort of
interesting, but I wasn’t a sculptor, a guy named Schmidt, Julius
Schmidt, who did these big abstract things that looked like engine
blocks. I didn’t go there, and maybe they didn’t offer me—but Syracuse
gave me a teaching assistantship, so I went there.
01:11:41
MOON:
How did you encounter the painting of the Bay Area figure—like
Diebenkorn, Bischoff? Were they in art magazines?
PLAGENS:
Mm-hmm. They were in art magazines and I seem to recall—I might be wrong
with this, but there were some in local museums. There might have been
some at Pasadena, you know, the old Pasadena Art Museum on—what was it?
MOON:
Los Robles?
PLAGENS:
Los Robles, yeah.
MOON:
Were you going out to see art with some frequency in college at the
County Museum or in Pasadena?
01:13:24
PLAGENS:
Some frequency, mostly—and here I’ll tell you an anecdote, okay? So we
had to go, for part of that Bibliography and Criticism class, we were
supposed to go see and write about—so maybe we did criticism—gallery
shorts. So I go to Felix Landau on a Tuesday afternoon. It’s dead;
nobody’s there. I go in to Felix Landau and they had an exhibition of an
artist named James Gill, sort of academic Pop artist, you know, local.
And nobody’s in the gallery, but it has a couple of rooms. I come around
the corner. There’s a woman there, beautiful camel-hair suit, as I
remember. She even had a pillbox hat on, although I may be imagining
that in retrospect. And she’s looking like this, blonde hair tied back
in a bun, absolutely stunning. It was Eva Marie Saint. And I remember I
thought, “If this is what being an artist gets you, people who look like
that standing there like this, contemplating your paintings, then I want
to do that.”
The end of the anecdote is that a few years ago, ten years ago, maybe,
going on, a friend of mine, an artist friend of mine, his son got
married. His son is an entrepreneur, marries a woman lawyer working for
a judge at that time up in Westchester, right? And one of those big
weddings under a tent, you know, kind of thing, under a tent. Eva Marie
Saint is there. She’s a friend of the bride’s father, something like
that, with this guy named Hayden, Jeffrey Hayden, who collects
California figurative art, and they live in Santa Barbara. And I was
told she was going to be there, and I saw her and I went over there and
I told her that story, and she liked it. She’s a lady in her seventies.
You know what I mean? And I said, “Depending, you either get the credit,
half of the credit for me being an artist, or you get half the blame for
me being an artist. Take your pick.” You know. But I said, “It was you
who did it, because you were like that, looking at James Gill’s
paintings.” So, yeah, I did go—La Cienega, you had the Row, Gallery Row.
MOON:
Yeah, actually, well, that’s funny, because so I guess in terms of the
art world, there’s that half and then there’s the other half, which were
the bohemian circles, like Wallace Berman, George Herms. Were you aware
of what was going on in Venice and Topanga Canyon at all?
01:15:47
PLAGENS:
A little bit. And weird thing is, is that when I went to junior high and
high school, across the street from us was this very strange family. The
father was an emigrant who had been an actor in Poland, Jewish, spoke
eight languages, married to this blonde, strange woman who was
Protestant, and there was a very Tennessee Williams sort of thing,
right? The mother was always in bed with the vapors. And it was weird.
The father worked as a magazine distributor because he couldn’t be an
actor in America—they had three kids. One of them, the oldest one,
became runner-up to Miss California at one point. How’s that?
But the kid that was my age and in my grade was named Richard Birch,
big, tall kid, real interesting, and he went through every phase that
you went through. When I was in high school, he was a juvenile
delinquent with a duck-ass haircut and smoked marijuana, you know. Then
he was a hippie, then he was all those things. He was like that with
George Herms for a while. Every once in a while I would run into George,
and George would say, “How’s Richard Birch?” And I’d say, “I don’t know.
I haven’t seen him.” Richard Birch went to prison for a while. I said,
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him. Have you seen him?” You know. So
there was this funny little thing, right? But, yeah, I sort of knew they
were there, and I’m trying to remember exactly when I might have
seen—because there was a little traffic between Northern CA and Southern
CA with the assemblage, you know, the sort of Llyn Foulkes, Bruce
Conner, you know. Time gets a little fuzzy. Was it graduate school when
I would come home for the summer? Was it when I was at USC? You know.
But I remember that sort of—and I was real attracted to it, and there
was this time when you thought, well, this is another way to make art.
You take an old doll and you break it up and you put the various parts
on something, and you pour tar over it and it looks real gothic and
horrible. You know what I mean? And put it in a highchair and put nylon
stockings as cobwebby stuff on it. You know? And it appealed to a
certain kind of—like goth things appeal to boys, you know. Heavy metal,
skulls, that sort of shit. No, I mean, it was part of that taste. That
was another way to make—and I wasn’t into that. But it was probably more
because I didn’t know that much about it yet, you know. Yeah, but I
mean, it was there.
01:17:52
MOON:
Did you go into Ferus Gallery at all when you were in USC?
PLAGENS:
No. Ferus was—maybe I did. I can’t really remember. I mean, Ferus
Gallery opened in, what, ’57, I think, so it was there. I probably went
to it, but you’ve got to remember my taste was conservative. I think I
was behind people like David Novros. I still am. I still am conservative
compared to, you know—so I probably did, but, probably, David Stuart,
Felix Laundau, Feingarten, all those galleries that were up and down the
Row. Jake Zeitlin’s bookshop in the back.
MOON:
Oh, right. Yeah. At the barn.
PLAGENS:
Yeah, the barn. I can’t remember—no, Riko wasn’t there because Riko
didn’t open till after Ferus closed, because she was—
MOON:
She took over the space.
PLAGENS:
She took over the space.
MOON:
Of another gallerist.
PLAGENS:
Oh, 669 in the back.
MOON:
Yeah.
PLAGENS:
Molly Barnes?
MOON:
I don’t think so.
PLAGENS:
Well, there was a gallery called Gallery 669, and I think she was in the
back, that alley, you know, in there.
01:19:26
MOON:
Yeah.
PLAGENS:
Yeah.
MOON:
Well, that’s later.
PLAGENS:
That’s later.
MOON:
So you go to Syracuse and you want to continue school. [laughs] Being
immersed to that environment, how was the program at Syracuse?
01:21:34
PLAGENS:
Brief. I mean, two years, boom, boom. Merciful and it was real—I mean, I
went in there very dutifully, you know, kind of wanting to be
probably—it was a little bit corrupted because getting to Syracuse was
like partly go getting an MFA and being an artist, and partly it was
[whispers] going to college back east, like I had not been able to do,
with real trees and real fall and real—you know what I mean? And stuff
like that. And I had a thesis advisor. He’s passed on. He was a pretty
good abstract painter named Jim Dwyer. But when I got there, see, I was
a little bit behind. They gave me a T.A., but when I got there, there
were all these guys who had gone to art school. They’d gone to the Art
Institute of Chicago; they’d gone to Mass Art; they’d gone to RISD. And
they were the ones that got to teach Beginning Drawing and stuff by
themselves. The first year, I was Art History teaching assistant, you
know, for the survey course, with the director of the school, Dr.
Laurence J. Schmeckebier, which means “beer taster.” I like that. And he
was a typical tall, stately, three-piece suit, Phi Beta key hanging from
his vest, silver-haired, rigid, and he liked—his idea of modern art was
sort of like WPA Regionalism. He liked Anton Refregier. He liked post
office murals. He liked Thomas Hart Benton. He liked that sort of stuff.
Ben Shahn was about as far as he would go.
So I was his T.A., and I still get emails or Facebook from this awful
painter, but she was a student in the class, you know. And I’m, like,
twenty-one when I get there. 1962? Yeah, I’m twenty-one when I get
there. This painter named Betty Tompkins. You ever heard of her?
MOON:
Nuh-uh.
01:23:36
PLAGENS:
She’s awful. She somehow got—sorry, if this is—I don’t mean it to be
offensive, but she got famous doing this thing called the “Fuck”
paintings, and what they are is this big photorealist paintings of
penises going into vaginas, really close up. You know what I mean? Do
you almost can’t tell what is—it’s done from photographs. Then she’s
done other things. But, you know, she’s in her seventies now and she’s
still pushing that, you know. And she’s out there in the art world and
she’s in museum things, and she’s not stupid, but, still, it’s like, “Do
you remember the first thing? Do you remember me? I was in your class
when you were a T.A. in Survey Art History.” It’s sort of like, “Lord,
save me from Betty Tompkins.” So I came in and I was painting abstract
paintings, and the head printmaker there, they would come around and
they would have these studio visits. The graduates, we had studios down
on, I forget, Erie Boulevard or something, in a former factory building
that was once the Continental Can Company building, and we were on the
second floor. We had second floor. Bottom floor was storage. Third floor
was University Press, Syracuse University Press, okay? So it was one of
those factory buildings where you had all the windows, you know, little
panes, big windows, and then they were separated kind of with a hallway.
So the faculty would come by once in a while, twice a semester, you
know, see what you were doing, you know, the crits. And I got in this
big trouble where they wanted to kick me out because there was a
printmaker there named Robert Marks, who was a disciple of Leonard
Baskin, and he was sort of the most popular teacher and he was
especially popular among women, and he was sort of like handsome and
good-looking and he was always down there in the printmaking shop with
his shirt off and his leather apron, you know, glistening with sweat,
you know. And so I don’t know what—maybe he had gotten on me for
something about, you know, and after a while you discover why they gave
you a T.A. and why they admitted you, you know, and it was probably
because they thought I was, (a), from California and they wanted to
diversify geographically, and, (b), I could write, you know, and that’s
why I got the art history T.A., because I wasn’t one of those art school
guys, you know. I used to say, “Me Krouak. Me sculptor.” They were those
kind of guys, right? Even though they were painters. And you sort of
know why you’re there. He got on me for abstraction, for God’s sakes,
didn’t like it. So before this one crit, I took out my charcoal. I drew
all over my little cubicle walls, like Leonard Baskin. I drew blind
birds and poets and stuff. And it was a very cold night, I remember, and
he came in there and he was absolutely incensed. The cords stood out and
his veins pulsated in his temple, and he left and he went down and stood
in the parking lot in the snow and smoked cigarettes until my crit was
over, and then afterward wanted to have me thrown out of the program.
And I wasn’t. Now, it was sort of a stupid juvenile thing to do. But I’d
sort of had it up to here with abstraction is something a donkey could
do, you know. “My three-year-old can do this.” They still had that, even
though they had abstract painters on the faculty.
01:25:57
MOON:
So did Clement Greenberg not have any weight in that program?
PLAGENS:
No. He had gone there, but a long time ago. No.
MOON:
But just thinking about some of the most powerful champions of
abstraction.
PLAGENS:
No, because Syracuse in those days was kind of backwater. It wasn’t as
big an art school as it is now, you know. One time [laughs] somebody
from Syracuse called me up, and for one of the anniversaries they were
going to have a conversation between two famous Syracuse graduates;
would I moderate it. Clement Greenberg and Hilton Kramer.
MOON:
Oh, wow!
PLAGENS:
And I said, “No.” [laughter] This is a lose-lose situation, you know.
Because here you are in an age of anti-Greenbergianism, right? I mean,
you would have been in this time—I forget, eighties, before Clem died.
MOON:
Yeah, it started to backlash.
PLAGENS:
Yeah, I mean, and it was all non-Greenbergian, but on a conversation
like that, he would be the forces of progress, and Hilton Kramer would
be the—right. So do I want to be there moderating something where I’m
defending Greenberg as the champion of the good stuff, the forces of
progress? I don’t know. So I said no. Anyway, no, there wasn’t, nor was
there—Hilton wasn’t much of a force.
MOON:
What were the other students—how many other students were there in the
program?
01:28:27
PLAGENS:
Probably about fifteen, sixteen all totaled, eight for each year. It was
a two-year program. There were probably eight of us, mostly male. There
were only a couple women, and one of them, she came the second year.
She’s around now. She’s in Santa Fe and has become one of these real
spiritual-type people, but she was the Art History T.A. and she had a
degree in art history. Mostly painters, mostly figurative, but
figurative of that Expressionist. Bent.
There was a show at the Whitney called “The New Humanism” or something
like that in 1959. Was it the Modern? But it was like “return to the
figure,” and it was a backlash against Abstract Expressionism and sort
of caving in—people thought, “We’ve got too much Pollock and De Kooning
and Rothko and stuff. We need to—.” And there were all these painters
like Hiram Johnson and Baskin and things like that. And that was a big
influence because people coming in in 1962, I think there were a lot of
people who were influenced by that sort of stuff. And it was quick, you
know. You’re in in the fall of ’62 and you’re out in May of ’64. Two
things. One was climate shock. I’m from L.A., and I remember going to a
movie one night with a bunch of graduate students. We walked down Erie
Boulevard, we passed the Savings & Loan. It’s in December; there’s
snow. There’s one of those time and temperature signs. It says minus-26.
And I thought, “ My god. Minus-26.” It was like science fiction. There’s
no such temperature as minus-26, you know, and you’re bundled up like
that. And the other thing was—and this didn’t influence me that much as
an artist, but it probably made me think more about art—I went to New
York City. See, one of the reasons I went to Syracuse, the other reason
was I couldn’t read a map, and I thought Syracuse, New York, is just a
stone’s throw from New York City.
01:30:15
MOON:
[laughs] But it’s pretty far north.
PLAGENS:
Two hundred and forty, fifty miles, you know. It’s a long trip, even on
a freeway. So a bunch of us get in a Volkswagen bus, maybe a Volkswagen
Beetle. I think there are four of us, maybe there were five, three in
the back seat, and we go down, and we went down because there was a guy
in the music school, and Syracuse had a really good music school and it
was famous for organ, because they had an organ in Crouse College, which
was one of these old buildings, had the organ in it. So there was a
famous—you know, you’d come and study organ because you could play on
the Crouse College organ. You know, it’s like a big one, built in. And
there was this guy named Calvin Tompkins, but with a “P,” I think, not
like the art writer.
MOON:
Okay.
PLAGENS:
And he was giving a concert at that church that’s on the corner where
MOMA is, 53rd and Fifth. I think it’s Saint John’s or something, an
Episcopal Church.
MOON:
Saint John the Divine, I think.
PLAGENS:
It’s not the Divine.
MOON:
Oh, that’s uptown.
PLAGENS:
Yeah. But they have an organ, and he was giving a concert there. He was
a graduate, and he was really good. So we came down with him, stayed at
the “Y” and everything like that. And the concert was on Sunday before
we went home. It was just—you know. It was some Saint-Saëns organ thing,
you know, something real powerful. But what we saw while we were there,
was in November of ’62, was the “New Realists” at Sidney Janis Gallery,
which was the gallery show of Pop art. It was sort of like its
debutante. The “New Realists,” it was called, but it had Oldenburg and
Warhol and Lichtenstein and Rosenquist and Wesselmann and Thiebaud, who
was considered a Pop artist, and a few other people, you know. And it
was like I happened to be there, you know, happened to come to New York.
We went around to galleries. You know, you went to 57th Street and saw
that, and, you know, I wasn’t knocked over by it, because I had seen it
in magazines. I’d seen Roy Lichtenstein in magazines. But it caused
great argumentation on the drive back in the period of time that we were
there.
01:32:42
MOON:
What was everybody’s reaction to seeing that art?
01:34:23
PLAGENS:
The guy that I went with is a painter who’s retired. His name is Walter
Stomps. He is older. He painted figuratively along the lines of, oh, I
don’t know, kind of early David Hockney, only more academic. He’s very
good. He’s very deft. And he hated the show. And Walter was right next
to me in those studios, and Walter and I and another painter named
Richard Jordan, we sort of debated things. And Walter hated it, and I
remember saying to him, because it was one of those lines where, you
know, I got a straight line—he walked around the show and he wanted to
go out the door. Right? You know. And he wanted to go out the door. And
I kept saying, “Not now. Not now.” And I kept looking. And finally, you
know, finally—oh, and by the way, in New York this time, this was—no,
sorry. Wrong time sequence. So we go out the door and he said, “What did
you think of it?” And I said, “I liked it. I thought Lichtenstein
especially, this is really good. I like that stuff.” And he says, “See,
that’s the trouble with you. You’re young,” he says, “and you make up
your mind like that. I’m still thinking about it.”
So it was this perfect straight line, and I said, “Walter, I look at a
show for an hour and I make up my mind about it in ten minutes. You look
at it for ten minutes and take an hour to make up your mind.” And he
sort of—I forget what he said back, but I thought that was a good
comeback for me. No, he didn’t like it, and nobody else back at
Syracuse—you know, Pop art was considered even more decadent than
Abstract Expressionism.
MOON:
Yeah, I mean, I think historically that show was really divisive, and I
think it’s what caused a break between Sidney Janis and some of—Philip
Guston—
PLAGENS:
Yeah.
MOON:
—and Motherwell, right?
PLAGENS:
Yeah. They didn’t like—there was a story—who told it to me? John Coplans
told to me that out in the Hamptons, where the artists went in the
summer—Hamptons were cheap then; I mean, it wasn’t like now—that some of
those painters, those older abstract painters put a sign in the sand
that said “No Pop artists beyond this point.” [laughter] Yeah, it was
very divisive, but, I mean, I happened to be there and see the show, and
it was just—
MOON:
And you found it interesting.
PLAGENS:
I found it interesting and I liked it. I’ve always liked Lichtenstein
and Warhol ever since then. I don’t particularly like—I’ve always been
this way about Rosenquist, and I’ve always thoroughly disliked
Wesselmann.
01:36:06
MOON:
Did you happen to be in L.A. when Warhol had his solo show at the Ferus
Gallery?
PLAGENS:
In June of ’62?
MOON:
It was in ’62, yeah.
PLAGENS:
Yeah, yeah. I saw it. I think I saw it. It’s funny, I don’t have a clear
memory of it. I was in town. I was interested in that. I should have
seen it. I think I saw it. And I’m probably—funny, the memory that I
have is of David Stuart across the street in his big plate-glass window.
He put up a pyramid of soup cans and said, “We have the real thing, 19
cents,” or something like that.
MOON:
[laughs] I heard about that.
PLAGENS:
Yeah. I remember that. Or I think I remember it, but, you know, you read
so many stories about things and you say, “Well, yeah, I was there,” you
know. It’s all that stuff that you think you saw. So, yeah. Okay.
MOON:
Any other trips to New York City?
PLAGENS:
Oh, yeah. We went down a lot after that. You could stay in the “Y,” you
could stay at the Great Northern Hotel. You know, there were these cheap
sort of places, and they were like little student trips. I also got
married in the middle of graduate school, so I had a house and then I
had an apartment. And my ex-wife’s father was a beer importer and he
made trips to Europe, so when they would come from L.A. and stop in New
York, “Could you join us down there and we’ll take you out to dinner?”
You know, that sort of stuff. So I did that.
01:37:54
MOON:
You got married when you were in grad school?
PLAGENS:
Yes.
MOON:
So your wife lived with you in New York or—
PLAGENS:
She lived with me in Syracuse and she came to New York. Then when I
graduated, she wanted to come back to California. She was from
California and she went to USC. There’s one little interesting anecdote.
We went to Castelli, I remember, one time, and Joyce is very
good-looking and she dressed well. Her parents were wealthy. I mean, she
wasn’t real showy, but she dressed well and she had a way of—she wasn’t
a big talker like I am, and she would smile, you know, and kind of be
sort of passive. So we’re in Castelli on 77th Street, right? And we’re
out and she’s dressed up, kind of, to go out in the city, and it’s a
small gallery. I can’t find her. She’s disappeared. I’m looking around.
Where the fuck could she be, you know? And I’m really starting to—and I
happen to go by and there’s an office and the door is open about this
much. She’s sitting in a chair looking very nice, up and smiling, and on
the other side of this desk there’s Leo Castelli trying to sell her
stuff because she looked like she might be able to buy something, right?
You know. [laughter] She got taken off by Leo, and he looked like he was
trying to sell her something. Yes, we made other trips to New York.
MOON:
Were there any memorable shows that you saw at Castelli’s gallery during
that time?
01:40:4101:42:32
PLAGENS:
I think so. I remember I liked—there was probably—see, what I liked,
really liked at the time, you know, sort of in Syracuse and what’s
coming up, Abstract Expressionism, getting a little academic were Johns
and Rauschenberg, and Rauschenberg was real easy to like. And I probably
even saw this, one of my few moments of prescientness, when you’re
prescient, everybody thought, “Oh, Rauschenberg is so radical. He puts
this and that on it. How can you look at that?” And I always thought he
looked like, and he looks like to me now in retrospect, like one of the
world’s great graphic designers. You know the guy’s got a perfect
layout, double-page spread. You know what I mean? In Canyon or whatever
it is, the pillow hangs off that thing at just the right point, and the
crow is up there at the top. You know what I mean? I mean, they’re
perfectly composed.
When he said in that famous quote of his about Black Mountain and Josef
Albers, you know, “Albers was my best teacher. I was his worst student,”
it’s not quite true. I mean, I don’t know what Albers thought. Albers
might have been very dogmatic. But Rauschenberg was [kisses fingers]
compositionally. And there is my dad’s commercial art influence. I mean,
one thing I left out is when I said I took that Art Appreciation class
from Scotty when I was a freshman and you had to fill out the forms, who
were your favorite artists, and it’s just like that Salinger short story
about the woman who takes the correspondence course in art and she says
her favorite artists are Rembrandt and Walt Disney. Who were my favorite
artists? I put down—and Scotty didn’t know what to make of it—my
favorite artists were Saul Bass, the graphic designer, Man with the
Golden Arm, United Airlines. He’s my favorite—he was one of my two
favorite artists. And the other artist was an illustrator that nobody
has hear of—you should look him up—named Austin Briggs, and he was one
of the commercial illustrators. My father says, “You know, this guy is
really good. You should look at him.” And so Scotty in all this,
everybody’s naming, “I like Rembrandt and Van Gogh and Renoir,” and
whatever else, or Mondrian for the advanced ones, and her comes this kid
who says Saul Bass and Austin Briggs. He’s like, “What is this?” I
remember him asking me. He knew who Saul Bass was. Man with the Golden
Arm had been out for a while. But he said, “Who’s Austin?” He thought I
was—it like some really obscure modern artist, you know, like really
hip, maybe. “Who is this?”
So Saul Bass and Austin Briggs to Robert Rauschenberg to me is not that
big a leap. Johns is a little tougher because he gives you a little
less. He’s tighter. And that’s one of the things, by the way—this is not
about me, but when I did—it was at Newsweek. I did pieces on Johns and
Rauschenberg and interviewed them both, and one of the things that came
across was I remember Rauschenberg could never understand why Johns was
thought to be so much more at the top of the historical pile than he is.
I mean, there was a rivalry between them, ex-lovers and in the same
aesthetic bailiwick and so forth. I mean, he just never could figure it
out. “I turn out all this work. I do all this inventive stuff, and
there’s Jasper and he’s—.” He’s real tight. “How does he get all the—why
do you people think he’s such a historical figure?” You know. “Not that
he’s not, but why is he so much more than I am?”
MOON:
Well, I think they’re pretty equal in terms of their position in the
history book.
PLAGENS:
You do?
MOON:
I think so.
PLAGENS:
Well, you’re the historian.
MOON:
Johns’ work is more enigmatic.
PLAGENS:
Yes.
01:43:57
MOON:
Definitely.
PLAGENS:
And he is too. He’s one of the worst interviews. It was like about two
hours and it seemed like it was a week, because he answers questions
with questions, you know, sort of very—doesn’t say much. I said it was
like interviewing a Cheshire cat. And this was fairly late in his
career. He was still in New York and he had a very nice-looking young
boy come and serve me coffee, had these people around, and then he made
his entrance and sat down. But it was like pulling teeth. I mean, he was
just enigmatic with a capital “E.” And if you’re a journalist, which is
what I was, when you’re doing a profile, right, it’s not helpful.
[laughter]
MOON:
Do you want to take a break now?
PLAGENS:
Your call. I talk too much and I’m full of coffee.
MOON:
Okay. I think if we want to do one more full session after this, maybe
it would be a good time to take a ten-minute break.
PLAGENS:
Sure. [End of Session 1, October 14, 2015]
00:00:35
MOON:
So we’re going to start the second session of the oral history interview
with Peter Plagens. When we left off last time, you were still in
Syracuse, MFA student. Maybe we can just wrap up that period. You
mentioned that there was tension between—well, because of your work in
abstraction, Baskin was promoting figurative drawing, and you said that
your M.A. paper had something to do with trying to justify—
PLAGENS:
Yeah.
MOON:
—your interest in abstraction or—
00:02:01
PLAGENS:
Yeah. I mean, Leonard Baskin didn’t teach there, but he was a big
influence in sort of Northeastern printmaking, drawing and kind of
acceptable to a whole lot of people because it combined academic and
modernism. That kind of stuff. And abstract art, even though we’re a
couple of abstract painters, my chairman of my thesis was Jim Dwyer,
there was a guy named George Vander Sluis, there were a couple of other
people, and some abstract painters maybe in the graduate students, but
abstraction was not the favorite style, okay? So when I had to write a
thesis and I write, I wrote twenty-five pages, which is probably twenty
more than you had to, you know. It was called “The Development of
Pictorial Meaning.” I forget what it said. I don’t think I even have a
copy anyplace. And it was a justification of abstraction as, look, it
isn’t just decorative and it isn’t just there to be big and pop your
eyes out and stuff like that. It can really mean something poetically.
That was my idea.
So I did well. I got my degree. I was told by Jim Dwyer they always had
an outsider on your thesis committee, and I had an engineer. This is
what I was told. It’s flattering, so it may not be true. Dwyer told me,
he said the engineer read this paper, my thesis, and he thought it was
the most pretentious bullshit he ever read in his life, and he was
really going to nail me, he said. Called up Jim, they spoke on the phone
the night before my defense. You have to go sit there in your exhibition
and defend it. And he got to the exhibition and he saw the paintings and
he liked the paintings, and he didn’t ask me one question. [laughter]
And that doesn’t mean that he was won over. Maybe he figured, “Well,
look, because this is a statement, I don’t know what it’s about, but the
paintings seem okay to me.” So anyway, I was out of there in June of
’64.
MOON:
And then you chose to go back to Los Angeles.
00:04:06
PLAGENS:
I was married to my first wife at the time, and she didn’t like it back
there. I mean, she actually broke her ankle once, slipped on the ice. It
was a typical graduate student thing where I had the thing and she had a
couple of jobs. She had a day job. You know, it was that graduate
student life. It would have been the same anyplace else. Not nice being
the wife of the graduate student, spouse of a graduate student. But she
also—her family was from California, parents were from California. She’d
been born there, they’d been born there, etc., and she wanted to get
back to Los Angeles. So even though I had one or two teaching job
offers, small colleges upstate New York, we decided to go back, and it
was fine with me.
So we went back to L.A. and I got a job at a company that manufactured,
among other things, beach towels. It was called Barth & Dreyfuss,
and they made little kitchen towel sets and gift sets and beach towels
and so forth, and I got a job with the lofty title of assistant art
director, paid $125 a week, and basically I checked all the colors of
all the samples, and every once in a while I got to design a towel. The
other thing it was good for, and I think I might even—I’ll bet you I’ve
got tubes of paint that are fifty years old, because this is 1964 or
’65, you know, ’65, ’66, whenever, but one room where all the designers
worked and they used to do their designs out of big—what’s the—I can’t
remember it. A kind of paint.
MOON:
Gouache?
PLAGENS:
Yeah, but a brand. Everybody—the English kind of paint.
MOON:
Winsor & Newton?
PLAGENS:
Winsor & Newton. Winsor & Newton gouaches. We had a big
cabinetful of every color, and everybody worked out of a tube so you
could repeat things, okay? I stole a lot of gouaches. I would go home
with a few tubes in my pocket every night. It was like candy. So I went
from there and I would go across the street—this was in East L.A., Santa
Fe and something.
MOON:
Downtown?
00:06:36
PLAGENS:
No, further downtown in the industrial district, like Santa Fe and 20th
Street or something. I’d then go across the street to the factory
building where they silkscreened things and I would check color samples.
See, the thing was, when you did a towel, you did one master design, but
then especially if they were kitchen towels, you also did them in
different color keys for different kind of kitchens. In other words,
you’d have one in kind of yellow ochre and forest greens, then another
in blues and another in reds, you know. So I would do the equivalent
colors and say, “Okay, yeah, that matches. That’s good.”
I used to have this guy that I worked with who was very ironic with me,
because it was all Latinos in the factory, so I’m the white guy in the
shirt and tie that comes across the street, and I used to work with this
guy who supervised the thing, named Enrique Rivas. “Buenos dias, Señor
Plagens.” He called me Señor Plagens. “Buenos dias, Señor Rivas.” And
I’d say, “This is okay.” And he’d always say to me, “Are you sure?
Ciento por ciento?” I’d say, “Yes, Enrique. Si, Enrique.” And that’s
what I did. I did that for about a year.
MOON:
Where were you living?
PLAGENS:
We got an apartment in Mar Vista off Washington Place.
MOON:
On the West Side?
00:09:0100:11:16
PLAGENS:
On the West Side past Centinela, pretty far out. I would drive from
there downtown, you know, a long drive. And I had a son who was born in
March of 1965. And so I did that, and I did that for about a year, maybe
a little short. Then I answered an ad. There was a classified ad
somewhere. I forget where it was. They wanted an assistant curator at
the Long Beach Museum of Art. I applied and I got the job. Assistant
curator. Again, it’s like assistant art director, because the title
sounds better, higher up than the job. It was a staff of five. There was
a director; a curator, a guy named Jason Wong; me, the assistant
curator; a secretary; a custodian; and a half-time semi-volunteer woman
who ran the little gift store, which was just a little desk, not a gift
shop. So I’m in the middle of the—and I used to install exhibitions,
design catalogs. We used to have these shows, a series of them called
“The Arts of Southern California No. 12: Seascapes.” And they were
people like Phil Dike and these people you don’t hear a lot about
anymore, and Roger Kuntz, Southern California artists.
We had a competitive show, one of the last ones, you know, where people
bring their paintings and they get juried and there are prizes and stuff
like that. The best guy at the museum and who was, just like in a lot of
academic departments, the person that you can not do without, you could
fire the whole faculty, but the administrative assistant basically keeps
the place afloat, was the custodian, this black guy named James Wilson.
And later, after I left, Jim, when Long Beach—this is a little
digression—Long Beach used to have their city council was
elected-at-large. In other words, you ran for place number one, place
number two, place number three, and all those places were voted on by
the entire city. Therefore, the city council was always all white,
because the black part of Long Beach—and it was black / white—I don’t
know what the Latino thing was, but they changed to a district system
after a while, maybe under a court case or something. And Jim was
elected city councilman from Long Beach. He became at one point—he’s
passed on now, but he became the longest-serving city council member.
But he was the custodian, but he did more than—he had the tool shop and
everything like that downstairs, and he had a system for installing
paintings. So he and I used to do it together. Those were the best
moments, when there was a show to install and I got to work with Jim,
because he was—I mean, you could have gotten rid of anybody, including
me, at that museum but him, you know. The reason I did that city council
thing was that that’s the kind of guy he was. I mean, he was working way
above his pay grade. You know what I mean? Overqualified. And after
that, he sold real estate and he did things and he got elected city
council. He was real sharp.
So I did that again for about a year, and then—
MOON:
Then you had to live in Long Beach?
00:13:06
PLAGENS:
You had to live in Long Beach. That was part of the thing. So we moved
to Long Beach just inside the city limits, and we rented this little
house on Broadway, not just inside the city limits, but it was on
Broadway and—I forget what the number street was. And it was a house
with a little real estate office attached in the front, old wood house,
and that was my studio, the real estate office, you know. I cleaned it
out and it was like that. What happened then was I got a call from a
woman, Gretchen Hudson. She was the secretary, administrative assistant
to the art department at USC, and she said that Donald Goodall was in
town. And Donald Goodall had been the chairman of the art department
when I was at USC when I was a student, and he was now chairman of the
art department at University of Texas. And somebody had gotten fired in
the middle of the year, a sculptor. His name was Lincoln Eddy, I seem to
remember. I don’t know what he got fired for, but he probably ran afoul
of—it was a real—I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but it was like
there was a big powerful old sculptor named Charles Umlauf, the father
of a painter named Lynn Umlauf, who was married to Michael Goldberg, the
Abstract Expressionist painter. So there’s little connections. Anyway,
he got bounced.
Goodall came into L.A. and said to Gretchen, “Do you know anybody who
would be interested in a teaching job?” It was like a full-time teaching
job, but instructor level, 6,500 bucks a year. This is in 1966,
February. Who could come right away. And she said, “Yeah, Peter Plagens.
He’s in town.” “Oh, I remember Peter from—.” Like that. So I said to my
then-wife, “What do you think?” And she said, “Yeah, we’ll do that.”
Okay. So we moved to Austin, Texas.
MOON:
Before you moved to Texas, you’d already started writing for Artforum?
PLAGENS:
Yes, and the way I started writing for Artforum was I wanted to go to
the galleries. I was having to live in Long Beach. Long Beach was like
twenty-five, twenty-eight miles away from “Gallery Row.” And I had read
Artforum and I could write. At least I thought I could. So I went in to
Artforum’s offices, which was 724-1/2—which meant upstairs—La Cienega,
above—
MOON:
Ferus, I think.
00:15:08
PLAGENS:
Ferus, yeah. And I went in there, and Phil Leider was the editor, and I
said, “Hi. This is me. I can write art reviews. I want to write art
reviews, because I can write these things.” And it wasn’t as much of a
brag as you think it was. One, you got $5 a review, okay? Which was not
a lot of money even for 1966. Number two, they were signed with your
initials at the bottom. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen old Artforums,
but they would say “Reviews by” and then they would put everybody’s name
in alphabetical order. Then as you read the review, it would say “F.D.,”
Fidel Danieli, “P.P.,” Peter Plagens, whoever else.
“Okay, we’ll try you out.” And I remember he gave me—it was a terrible
painter. He said, “I’ll give you two—.” I think it was two. I may be
misremembering this, but one of them was this awful painter named
Russell Cowie, who showed at Dalzell Hatfield, and they didn’t print
that one because it was just—you know, this wasn’t the kind of artist
that Artforum covered. And the other guy showed at Comara, and his name
was Jack Stuck. Have you ever seen the work of Jack Stuck?
MOON:
I don’t think so.
PLAGENS:
Another gay guy, did these pictures of bathers, but they were very
abstract, and like the tile was like that, then you’d see part of a
body, you know. I reviewed that, and that got printed. So I think my
debut was something like December of ’65 or somewhere in there. I forget
when. But it was ’66. I’ve been writing for fifty years. [laughter]
That’s horrible. It did two things. One, what it was supposed to do is
it made me go to the galleries, come down in Long Beach. I could even
sense than that, you know, people—still, like, Long Beach is kind of
like that, like people have their own little circle, because it’s, in
that bastard sort of sense, it’s like 400,000, 500,000 people and it’s
kind of linked to L.A. by a continuous stream of suburbs, but it’s
really a separate place. And then it was very separate because it was
still a port, you know, still a naval port, and it had an amusement
park. I forget what it was. It was closed down. So it made me get out of
Long Beach and go see the galleries in L.A. And the other thing was the
$5 a review. If I did three or four, it paid for the gas. And I started
doing that. Then I was doing that and then all of a sudden this job from
Texas came through.
00:17:24
MOON:
So you moved to—
PLAGENS:
Austin, Texas.
MOON:
What were your impressions of Texas or Austin?
00:19:5700:22:14
PLAGENS:
Well, to quote one of my favorite singers, Jerry Jeff Walker, “I don’t
like in Texas; I live in Austin.” And it’s still there. “Keep Austin
Weird.” I mean, you know. Now they have South by Southwest and Austin
Film Festival. There’s the Ransom Gallery, there’s the—I’m trying to
remember the museum I went to and did a thing for the Wall Street
Journal on that very good Sol Lewitt/Eva Hesse show. You know, it’s
exploded. It’s like the fastest growing city in America or something
now. But then it was 250,000 people, but it was real interesting because
it had the politics, it’s the state capital, that kind of politics. LBJ
was president; Johnson City is right outside. I mean, it’s basically
Austin. Lady Bird Johnson owned the paper, I think. Then there were
hippies, you know. Ken Kasey’s bus used to come park in Austin on its
way from coast to coast. There was a whole long-hair hippie dope
culture. And there were two music scenes. One of them was country and
western, when Willie Nelson had short hair. And there was a great bar
called the Broken Spoke that we used to go to, a blind piano player that
used to cover everything, did this wonderful rendition of “Hey Jude.”
But there was like the country and western people, right? And these were
guys with crewcuts and short hair who drove pickup trucks and worked at
Carrier Air Conditioning. Then there was the rock-n-roll scene,
Armadillo World Headquarters, which became—had some strange name to it.
There was this group. I remember meeting friends of my wife’s family,
her banker’s sister up in Connecticut, and this woman was a banker and
she’d gone to Austin and she had a whole collection of Randy and the
Thirteenth Floor Elevators, which was like the house band at Armadillo
World Headquarters and whatever it was called before that. So there was
this whole rock-n-roll scene, you know.
And later, after I left, the two combined and you had outlaw country,
rock-n-roll, you know, which led to South by Southwest and all that sort
of stuff. But when I was there, it was separate, but it was still
interesting, where you had Ken Kesey hippie scene, and Dave Hickey was
an English graduate student. He was a Ph.D. candidate in English when I
got there, and he had this little gallery called A Clean. Well-Lighted
Place, which was taken from Hemingway because that’s who he was doing
his dissertation. He quit because there was a purge of the English
department, and all the young progressives who were his thing were
fired. See, in those days, Frank Erwin was the chairman of the board.
They just ran things. They weren’t run by the academic rules. I mean,
they could be overrun. If they wanted somebody fired, they were fired.
That’s why Lincoln Eddy probably got fired. There was a guy named Larry
Caroline who got fired for left-wing stuff, you know, Vietnam
protesting, leading a march. And there was a real total—one of the
biggest assholes the world has ever seen, in my opinion, a guy named
John Silber, famous, became president of Boston University. He was an
English professor, and he basically, I always thought, sold out the
students during the thing. He came out during the protests in Vietnam
and Johnson—you know, they were protests and Lyndon was there. I marched
up Congress Avenue in some kind of protest and had the wonderful
experience of a coed, a sorority girl, coed, as you say, you know, an
anti-protestor on the sidelines spit on me as I went past. So there was
a lot going on. And there was a famous bar called Scholz’s Beer Garden,
Scholz Garten. Everybody went there. So it was a real interesting place.
Hickey ran this gallery with his wife Mary Jane, while he was a student,
and he had some faculty people from the thing on him, and this is one of
my missed opportunities. I sort of snobbishly thought, “Well, I’m from
L.A. and I can do better than this,” so I declined to socialize with
Hickey while I was there, you know.
MOON:
Oh, so did you—when did you first start to really get to know Dave
Hickey then?
00:23:33
PLAGENS:
There. But I would go over to these openings and he would have, like, a
graduate student, like this guy named Barry Buxkamper and this geometric
abstract painter, David—somebody showing these things, and I thought,
“Shit. This is real bad.” But he was showing the best of the local
things in this little house, you know. I can’t remember the particulars,
but I talked to him and it wasn’t—I was there ’66, ’67. Sixty-eight, I
got this grant to go to Europe, which is another story, and then I came
back, and then I sort of started hanging around with Hickey a little
bit, saw the light, you know. But those are my impressions of Texas.
And then we have to remember I was a young guy who liked college, and
this was my first full-time teaching job, so, you know, this was like
I’m not that interested in being—except we did have all these offices in
the Art Building, which is a newish Art Building, and there was a guy
that came there with me at the same time, named Howard Smagula. He was
from Yale. He was from New York and he’d gotten an MFA at Yale, and we
shared an office. We used to put little stuff on the outside of our
door, and there were these old professors, some of whom came up through
Regionalism. Remember this was 1966, so there were painters there from
the thirties, you know, Loren Mosley, Everett. What was his name?
Everett, last name was Everett. Kenneth Fiske. There were some other old
guys and they ran everything. They were called the Budget Council.
That’s the way they ran everything. We used to call them the “water
buffalos,” and we called them water buffalos, like out of Vietnam. Water
buffalos were very good when they were calm; they would pull the plow.
But if they were disturbed and made angry, they would destroy the whole
village. They would trample all the huts in the village, right? So they
were the water buffalos, and you had to keep on the good side of them.
Like my friend Howard, while I was in Europe, undergrad, he got bounced.
He didn’t get renewed.
MOON:
What kind of stuff would you put on your door? Was it related to
political—
00:25:55
PLAGENS:
Little cartoons. No, no, art stuff. It was art stuff and Pop art stuff.
We would put stuff with smartass captions and things like that. There
was a cartoon in a recent New Yorker I’ve got on my cell phone. There’s
a cartoonist there that does these very kind of Cubist—they’re very
simplified things, R.E.K. And it’s a cocktail party and there’s one rich
woman saying to the other rich person at the party, “We do amazing work
in bringing the arts to people who don’t want the arts.” That cartoon
would have gone immediately on the door. It was that kind of stuff.
And I remember the old professor Loren Mosley said something at a
faculty meeting about these young people who put—and I still remember
the term—“who plaster little cute noses all over their office doors.”
Because everybody else just had a door with those signs, you know, that
they engrave your name in white, you know, on a little black plastic
thing and it fits into a bracket. Well, we would have that, but we’d
have all cartoons and things taped up there, shows that we liked, hippie
stuff and rock-n-roll posters and things like that. Oh, and the other
thing that was there at the time were the underground comics. They were
really good, you know, the Fuzzy Furry Freak Brothers and Gilbert
Shelton and Robert Crumb, you know. And we would put those things on our
doors. I mean, there was a famous incident where LBJ had his portrait
painted by Peter Hurd, and he said it was the ugliest thing in the
world. He rejected the portrait, right? So there was Gilbert Shelton,
the cartoonist, and he did the Fuzzy Furry Freak Brothers, but he also
had this character called Wonder Warthog, and Wonder Warthog was a
superhero warthog with his ugly big snout and these fangs, you know, and
he did an ink drawing, pen-and-ink drawing of Wonder Warthog in exactly
the same pose, you know, like that portrait, and it said “The second
ugliest thing in the world.” So that went immediately—you know what I
mean? Went immediately on the door. But the teaching was good, you know.
I got to teach Beginning Drawing class. You know who was a student there
at the time? Farrah Fawcett.
00:27:46
MOON:
Really?
00:30:55
PLAGENS:
Yeah. And even then she was known on campus. She was referred to as the
Plastic Fantastic because she had all that hair and she was in all those
ads in the yearbook. The yearbook would have ads in them, like, clothing
stores or anything. She was the model for, you know, whatever clothing
store. And she was very good. I remember a friend of mine taught her in
his Beginning Design class, you know, the color-aid paper, the cutout
things you paste down and do color. Excellent, because she was very
neat, clean, conscientious. And she did art, you know, later in life. I
don’t know what kind. Was there anybody—the one student that was—well,
there were a couple other things that were there, is that one time when
I came back from Europe, I chaperoned the student trip to New York City,
and you all went on a bus. Took thirty-six hours to get there, you know.
They just drove straight through. And ten miles out of Austin, the bus
driver pulled over to the side of the road and said, “Y’all have to quit
smoking marijuana on the bus because the bus is filling up with smoke,”
and I forget whether he used the word or not, but like, “I’m getting a
contact high. You can’t do this.” You know? And we stayed in some sort
of cheap hotel and we went to things. Anyway, there was a student there
named Stephen Mueller, “Stevie” Mueller, but it was spelled Mueller, and
he showed at—became a really good painter. He’s passed away. He was gay
eventually. He didn’t die early of AIDS. But Leonard Weinberg shows him
posthumously. And he was a beautiful boy, I mean just beautiful. And all
the girls were after him. And he got off the bus in New York City and he
disappeared. When the bus was supposed to leave to go back to Austin, he
comes running back with five minutes left to go. He’d spent the entire
time with the Warhol crew at the Factory. But he became this abstract
painter. His stuff is a little sweet for my taste, but really good.
Klaus Kertess collects him. He was probably the best of the students
that were there at the time. I mean, I can’t claim to have taught him
anything because I didn’t know anything myself. I mean, I was
twenty-four years old when I took the job, just about to turn
twenty-five, you know. I didn’t know squat. I would just repeat the
things my teachers taught me and a little bit.
Okay. Europe. I used to go down to the slide library a lot, and I was
one of the few studio people who showed slides in my studio classes, and
this is real embarrassing now, the idea of it, but I thought it was so
hot at the time. I had a lecture on color that I would give to beginning
painting class, design class. Two projectors, right? With lap dissolve.
Where you don’t just go “click” and one fades into the next. And it was
just in sequence and it was all work of art. We would start out with no
color, building up, go through the spectrum, then go through the
separate colors, using works of art from all different periods. The idea
was that it was nonverbal and the students were supposed to deduce it or
induce it, I forget which, you know, visually. About color. But no
words. But I had a soundtrack. You know what the soundtrack was?
“In-A-Gadda-Da-Vidda,” Iron Butterfly, I timed it so it would be like
track of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vidda.” And I never knew this,
“In-A-Gadda-Da-Vidda” was said by one of the band members, in
conversation, and he was drunk and he was trying to say “in the Garden
of Eden,” “in-a-gadda-da-vidda,” do it on YouTube sometime. Look up
“In-A-Gadda-Da-Vidda.” I mean, it’s a cliché, you know, red, red with a
little bit of blue, and then blue going to red, then, you know, in a
Matisse, in a Rothko, in a Flemish painting, you know. I thought it was
so hot, and it was pretty good.
00:33:15
MOON:
How did they respond?
PLAGENS:
Good, yeah. You know, students, they—University of Texas basically
took—students were mostly local, but they were real smart, so what you
got was smart kids from little towns in Texas that hadn’t been around
the block, and even if they did come from a big city like, in those days
in the mid-sixties, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston were very
provincial, okay? So, you know, and I was still sort of full of myself
because I’m from L.A., you know. You know the comedian Andy Kaufman?
Have you ever seen any Andy Kaufman?
MOON:
The—
00:35:17
PLAGENS:
Yeah. “I’m from Hollywood.” I had that sort of attitude. So I used to go
down to the slide library and I would pick slides and give all kinds of
lectures. There was an art historian down there named Donald Weismann,
and he was a nice guy and he was an Americanist, meaning he was an
expert, I think, on George Inness or something like that. And I didn’t
know this, but he was sort of LBJ’s personal art historian because LBJ
collected nineteenth-century American art, as one would imagine that
somebody like LBJ, with Lady Bird’s money, would collect that kind of
stuff, right? Frontier, horses, landscapes. And we used to talk, and he
was a senior professor and I’m this snot-nosed instructor, but he liked
me. And he liked me because I would come down and I had had a lot of art
history in college, not that I’m an expert. I’m not an art historian.
You are. I’m not. But I took more than you needed to take to get your
BFA, and I liked things and I would go through slides and, you know—so I
started talking to Donald Weismann.
And then I forget how it came out, but in those days they didn’t have
regular sabbatical leaves like you do or did. You don’t have them
anymore, do you? You know, when you’ve been seven years, you get a
semester off or something like that. At Texas, you could apply for a
leave from something called the Faculty Research Council, so I applied,
but if you were junior faculty—and I was an instructor. That’s like
bottom. Instructor, assistant professor, associate, full, okay? So you
needed a senior faculty member to sign off on this, so I asked Donald
Weismann. I had this long thing about Flemish painting. “I want to live
for about a year in Europe, in Belgium, in Brussels,” and I had this
whole program. “I’m going to go to here to see this, and there to see
that. I’m going to see the Ghent Altarpiece. I’m going to see the—.” I
mean, Belgium isn’t a big place. And he signed off on it. He was my
reference. Well, little did I know that he was like LBJ’s personal art
historian, the Board of Trustees. [demonstrates]. I was on my way to
Europe for free. Okay?
MOON:
That was in ’68?
00:37:00
PLAGENS:
1968. And my first night in Paris was during the disturbances of the
days of May in 1968 with Danny Cohn-Bendit and all that sort of stuff.
Then the next phase—I just outlined. Then the next phase, you know, was
when I was over there, I came to Belgium with a wife, with a son. We
rented a little apartment. We stayed in a pension to begin with, and he
found this apartment, this woman who ran the pension, Madame Wermbol, I
remember her. Because I couldn’t speak French well enough on the phone
to rent an apartment, and she found us this place on—this is
interesting—on the rue Michel Ange right across from the Cinquantenaire,
which is the big park in Brussels. And the streets along there, there’s
the rue Le Corrège, Corregio Street, and then rue Michel Ange,
Michelangelo Street, and I forget, they went—so it was soixante-quatorze
rue Michel Ange, 74 rue Michel Ange, rez-de-chausée, ground floor, $74 a
month. I liked it. My wife did not like Belgium. I mean, you come from
California, you get dragged to Syracuse, then you get dragged to
Belgium. She used to say that she thought the whole country was indoors
and there was a roof over it, because there was never any sun. It was
always gray.
MOON:
So you knew a little bit of French because [unclear]?
00:39:4800:42:40
PLAGENS:
I’d taken French in college, a couple semesters, and then I tried to
resuscitate it on—we went on a ship. We went from Houston, Texas, to—got
off in Antwerp. Took twenty days. That’s a whole other thing. It was one
of my father-in-law’s ships that imported his beer. He didn’t own the
ship. It was called the Hanau, which is a city, and it was new in ’68.
It was christened in ’67 and they took eight passengers, and there were
the three of us, me, wife, our son—and these five German women,
gray-haired women. It was wonderful accommodations, a little state room,
you had on this freighter. Meals were—you ate with the officers. You ate
at the captain’s table.
One time—we went up to listen to music. This was the big scary thing,
came back to the cabin, which meant—you know when I say scare-quotes
“door,” right? We come in there and our son isn’t there. He’s two years
old. Where is he? He’s not there. Did he go out the port hole, you know?
It was a panic. We went out. He was in the engineer’s quarter, playing
with a globe or something because the engineer had heard him crying,
because we thought he was asleep. He woke up and we weren’t there, and
he started to cry, and the engineer went and got the key, opened the
door, picked him up, too, him to his place, and was showing him, you
know, little two-year-old was playing ship. But the other thing was it
left from Houston—the reason why it took so long is it went to Houston
to Corpus, maybe someplace like that, then up the river to Baton Rouge,
where it picked up a load of Ethyl compound that they used to put in
gasoline, leaded compound, and came back down. New Orleans. And in New
Orleans there was this strike at the port, stevedore strike, so we’re
stuck there for three days and I put “stuck” in scare quotes because
“stuck” was we had a hotel at the waterfront and three days in New
Orleans, and it was right by that place where they serve the beignets,
the coffee place that’s on that coffee—chicory that comes from New
Orleans? Just to go around, walk around the city. Then it went from
there to Miami, and then from Miami diagonally up across the Atlantic to
Le Havre. The first port of call was Le Havre, and I remember it came in
at night and we stayed up at night. I’m twenty-six. I haven’t been to
Europe, never been to Europe before, and to me it was like landing on
the moon. I mean, I was so excited, I couldn’t sleep, and I stayed up
the night looking out the port hole, you know, looking out the window at
the port, and all I could see was this chain-link fence with a sign on
it that said “Défense” something, you know, “Défense de Marcher,” you
know. “Don’t Walk Here.” “You Can’t Come in Here.” And I thought, this
is just magical. Just like I’d landed on the moon.
It turned out my French, I could speak it, and especially if I rehearsed
what I wanted to say, and I had a pretty good accent, but I couldn’t
understand diddly. I would ask for, you know, “Pardon, monsieur.
Peut-être vous me donner les directions au bureau de poste?” Right? And
then they would say [demonstrates], and I would be, “What?” I couldn’t
understand anything. I still have that trouble.
MOON:
They speak very quickly sometimes.
PLAGENS:
Yes, they do. They do. So I lived in—
MOON:
So, wait. So you were in Paris first before you went to—
PLAGENS:
No, no. Went to Le Havre, then stayed there in the ship. Then we got off
in Antwerp and then we took a train to Brussels, and that’s where we
were going to live. We got a pension arranged, you know, in Brussels,
then from there the apartment. If I knew what I was doing, I would have
lived in Antwerp. The main virtue of Brussels in those days was you
could get anywhere in three hours from Brussels. You could be in London;
you could be in Paris; you could be in Amsterdam. No, no, it was like
got there in, I forget, January or whatever, and then in May we got to
go to Paris. We went to Madrid, we went to Barcelona, we went to
Amsterdam, we went to London, and we went to Paris, you know, out from
Brussels, because you could do it easily.
00:44:24
MOON:
And you’d go to visit all the collections in the museums?
PLAGENS:
I’d just go to museums. I didn’t know anything. I didn’t have any
contacts. But the other story is I came in and I had just barely gotten
my head around Minimalism, okay? So I arrived in Brussels thinking that
what I want to do is I want to see European abstract paintings. I think
this is—and I remember I wanted to go to the Gallery Françoise Mayer,
and Françoise Mayer showed Groupe de Recherche Visuel, which was like
Victor Vasarely and Ishmael Soto, the South American. It was all that
geometric stuff, kind of geometric into Op art. I remember asking
somebody, “Who should I go see? Who’s the artist that I should get
acquainted with?” And this was totally—well, they said, “You should go
see somebody named Marcel Broodthaers.” Do you know Marcel Broodthaers?
MOON:
Yes.
PLAGENS:
He was like number two to Beuys, you know. Beuys is Hertz, Marcel was
Avis.
MOON:
Who did you ask, do you remember?
PLAGENS:
No.
MOON:
Was it just in a gallery?
PLAGENS:
Yeah, I was going around and I said, “I want to meet—.” And they
said—and I’m rehearsing this. So they gave me Marcel Broodthaers’
address.
00:45:55
MOON:
He was living in Brussels?
PLAGENS:
Yes, he was living in Brussels, and he was famous, but you have to
remember artists in Europe, not like, you know—I was rich compared to
him, as you will see, and he was poor, even though he was famous. So I
get the address, and I still remember: 30 rue de la Pépinière. I don’t
know what “Pépinière” is to this day. The street of something, 30. So I
knock on the door and it’s a rez-de-chausée like we have, only it’s
beautiful, painted white, beautiful hardwood floors, you know. I think
there was a stairway going up. But there was no furniture. His very
young third wife answered the door, and they had a little girl about
nine years old, and she’s now a fairly well-known dealer in Brussels. I
forget what her name is. Her name was—
MOON:
Marie—
PLAGENS:
Marie-Puck.
MOON:
I think she’s in charge—she might be in charge of the estate.
00:48:1700:50:2400:52:14
PLAGENS:
Okay. Well, she should be. And this has been in print. I wrote a piece
and they let me in Newsweek introduce it with this little anecdote
because it was really good, you know. I said, “Is Marcel Broodthaers
home?” And I introduced myself. I said, “I’m a young American artist and
I’m living in Europe on a bourse,” you know, a grant. So she turns
around, his wife—I forget what her name was—and she said, “Marcel, il y
a un jeune artiste américain avec une bourse.” And in the middle of the
living room there is a mattress covered with blankets, and I even think
that there was some kind of quilt that had hides in it. And there’s a
lump in there. Right in the middle of the floor, there’s a lump in
there. It’s a person. And she says the word “bourse,” “young American
with a bourse,” and all of a sudden blankets go over and this man sits
up with a jacket and tie on, where he’d gone—you know, straightens his
tie. That was Broodthaers.
I became friends with him, a little bit. I was really naïve. I can give
you all the things he said. I said at one point after we’d become—he got
in through poetry. He was not a visual artist, but when he was young, he
did work for the Résistance, you know, distributing leaflets. I would
rehearse these sentences and I would say things to him like, “Ah, so in
the Resistance, you countered the lies from Berlin with the truth,” and
he looked at me like I was crazy, and he said, “No, we countered the
lies from Berlin with lies from Moscow.” [laughs] But he didn’t say,
“You idiot.” And I threw a party at the end, before we went home, for
these people I had met, and I met him and I used to go to Wide White
Space in Antwerp run by Anny de Decker. I might have met people like
Panamarenko and there were these other—but she showed the Minimalists.
The gallery is called Wide White Space because there were language laws
in Brussels that if you had a title in French, it had to be in Flemish,
so you had two things. But if you named it in English, didn’t have to
translate it, so Wide White Space it was, and she didn’t have to do it.
I would go to openings. I was in Antwerp and we would go, but—what was I
going to say? So I threw this party for these people. I don’t think she
came, but in Brussels before—this is another of my naïve—I went out and
I bought all this thing that I thought that Euros would like: Campari,
because they had all the ashtrays and little umbrellas and stuff like
that at all the cafes. And I had brought with me two-fifths of Jack
Daniels, carefully, from the United States, right? Within a half-hour,
the Jack Daniels was gone, and the next morning I had all these full
bodies of Campari. [laughter] “We’re not drinkin’ this shit. We’re
drinkin’ the good stuff.”
But I remember I said to—it was at the party, I said—Broodthaers was
going on about le patois bruxellois, right? And I said, “Oh, so you mean
after all this time I’m going to leave here speaking French with a
Belgian accent?” You know what he said. He said, “No, you’re going to
leave here speaking French with an American accent.” [laughter] I have a
photograph—I don’t know whether—it’s not material to this thing, but
there’s a curator at MoMA—they’re doing a Broodthaers retro early next
year, and I still have the print, I have a couple of prints somewhere,
but I had one of his plastic signs, signed all over the back written to
me and so forth. When I needed money and I moved to New York, I had to
sell it. I sold it through a private dealer and it’s in a museum
someplace, and I’m wondering whether it’s going to turn up in that
retrospective. I remember Laurie said, “We’ve got to sell this because
it’s getting beat up around here and it’s not the kind of thing that
we—.” You know. We needed money, so I sold it. But he gave me some art,
but I used to lend him money because by that time my salary was up to
$7,500 a year, and $7,500 was a king’s ransom, if you were an artist in
Brussels and you were getting the equivalent in franc belge of 7,500
bucks. I mean, you were rich, or not rich, but you were pretty
upper-middle-class.
And there was one night—I’m trying to think of these things. One night
there was all that political stuff and there was a fascist student
organization called Occident, whose symbol was an “O” with one of the
lightning-strike S’s of the SS, but just one through it, and they were
going to try to retake the occupied university, and Marcel said, “You
want to come? We’re going to man the barricades.” So I left my family in
the apartment, I went out there with him, and I had these shoes that I
bought, Florsheim wingtips. You know what they look like?
MOON:
Mm-hmm.
00:54:41
PLAGENS:
Yeah. And they had soles about like that, like very thick—and Marcel
thought they were really funny, and he used to call them les stomping
boots.” He said, “You know, when you come to the university, be sure to
wear—you have to wear les stumbling boots.” Anyway, we went out there
and we stayed up all night and nothing happened. So that was an
education, because that was my first foray into, like, conceptual art,
you know, and that whole Joseph Beuys thing. I did go to Documenta,
1968, and there was a collector there who I met through Broodthaers,
this guy named Isi Fiscman, and he was from one of those diamond-cutting
families in Antwerp. That’s all the Jewish families where it’s like
diamond-cutting headquarters. We went to Kassel from Brussels in his
little two-seat Triumph Herald, which was a small version of a Triumph
sports car. I mean, really little. And he got a hotel, I didn’t, so I
slept in the car until—and there was a guy who I met at one of the
things, a guy named Bates Lowry, who was director of the Museum of
Modern Art for about a year, but he was the director then. I don’t know,
we got talking American, so he invited me to stay in his hotel room. He
had a suite and I could sleep on the couch, which was much better than
sleeping in the back of a car that was about three feet wide.
And so I saw all that stuff, that Joseph Beuys, you know. I can’t
remember all that I saw, but there was Joseph Beuys and there was—I
forget whether Broodthaers had a thing. I still have some slides from—I
took slides of everything. That was the other thing. That was, you know,
film camera and I had a Pentax with Kodachrome or Ektachrome, you know,
so I was just [demonstrates] all over Europe with my little photographs.
MOON:
Going to see Documenta must have been a pretty big deal just in terms of
the scale and the scope of what they would be exhibiting all at once.
PLAGENS:
Yes.
MOON:
International perspective on contemporary art.
PLAGENS:
Yeah. It wasn’t quite the well-financed spectacular that it was, because
it started in 1954, something like that, and it was supposed to help
bring Germany back into the cultural fold after Nazism, but it was still
pretty big, and ’68 was a kind of hot—
MOON:
[unclear].
PLAGENS:
Huh?
MOON:
Oh, yeah. The Szeemann show was later.
PLAGENS:
Later. Sixty-nine was the Attitudes Become Form.
MOON:
Yeah. That was later.
PLAGENS:
Yeah. And, yeah, I can’t remember quite what it was, but I saw all that
stuff and it was really “oooh,” you know. I have a foggy impression of
it, but I got to see all this Euroe-Conceptual art, you know,
Panamarendo. I can’t remember what else was there at the time. Were
there people like Joseph Kosuth and Sol Lewitt? Were they in Documenta
in ’68?
00:56:31
MOON:
Oh, Bruce Nauman—I think you wrote about this later—did you see his
photographs at that time?
PLAGENS:
Yes, yes.
MOON:
But you had not a great impression. [laughs]
PLAGENS:
No, I thought they were the equivalent of that shit that I used to put
up on my faculty office door in Texas. Like here’s this smart-ass guy
doing these little jokey things, you know, Eating My Words, Drill Team,
and then the Fountain, the famous Fountain one that somebody has
recreated. I mean, it’s all that—so somebody goes out and does a sort of
Sherrie Levine on that photograph. And I thought—that was my main thing.
It wasn’t I was outraged, but it was I used to do this for fun, and this
guy’s got a leg up in Europe, you know. How is this fair? That kind of
reaction.
MOON:
Did you know him at all from living in Los Angeles before?
PLAGENS:
No. I met him later. This was ’68. I met Bruce in ’70. But, yes, I had a
bad reaction to those photographs. I mean, I didn’t like them. I thought
they were trivial and jokey, and I thought, “How can—?” It was sort of
like Rodney Dangerfield being sold to me as James Joyce, you know. So it
wasn’t that I didn’t like them; I just thought this is the kind of stuff
I do for fun, you know.
00:58:10
MOON:
What did you think about Marcel Broodthaers’ work at the time?
PLAGENS:
I didn’t understand it at all, but it was one of those things where
slowly—and it could have been this—you know the phrase “Love me, love my
dog”? You know. And there’s always the—if you like the person, you like
the art. But there’s a slow version of that, where you get to know this
person and you think—you know. And the other thing was my wife
thought—and she was right—that he was one of the handsomest things ever.
Have you seen photographs of him?
MOON:
Nuh-uh.
01:00:15
PLAGENS:
Oh, he’s the classic European film leading man. He reminded me of—there
was an Italian actor at the time named Raf Vallone, who was in things.
And there’s a wonderful essay—this is way off the subject, but the move
critic Pauline Kael, about European leading men, she wrote about Robert
Ryan, who’s one of my favorite actors, and she said this is the kind of
leading man they have in Europe that Americans don’t know. We want ours
all clean, well-scrubbed. We want Steve McQueen and Tab Hunter. You know
what I mean? Paul Newman. But in Europe, they know these guys. They’ve
got wrinkles. They’ve got stubble. You know what I mean? They’ve been
through things. And if Robert Ryan had been a European actor, he would
have had a greater career. And I like Robert Ryan. I mean, one of my top
five movies of all time—this is liking, not judging again, you know, but
it’s right up there, if you get a chance to see it, see it—Bad Day at
Black Rock, 1954, John Sturges. Fantastic movie. It’s a “boy” movie,
kind of, and my wife, who doesn’t usually like things like that, she
thought it was great when we first watched it. Very moral movie.
Anyway, Marcel Broodthaers was like that Robert Ryan kind of European
leading man, you know, real craggy and like that. So I got to know him,
and he’s very attractive. And Joyce, my ex-wife’s name, liked him
around, and he was, you know, suave and continental in his rough way. So
I slowly got to like the work, the graphic stuff first, you know, the
things, the black flag and the exclamation points and the revolution and
where it was all going on. Then a little bit because I’d seen people
like Bruce Conner and stuff like that, the asemblages with mussels,
mussel shells in them—
MOON:
Eggshells, yeah.
PLAGENS:
Eggshells and stuff like that. And then I liked jokey stuff, so La Musée
des Aigles, and then I got with it and I was slowly getting to the idea.
I’m thinking this retrospectively now as I think back on it. Maybe that
was where I’m finally getting the idea that the kind of stuff that I—no.
That the mentality behind the kind of stuff that I used to put on my
faculty door could be the basis for making art with some profundity to
it. You see what I mean? Because the Museum of Eagles is Broodthaers
snarking the whole pretentious museum-y sort of thing, and it links to
Bruce Nauman’s little photographs. To this day I like Conceptual art
that has some little—
MOON:
Humor?
PLAGENS:
Yeah.
MOON:
And pointing to the framework?
PLAGENS:
Michael Asher’s point the lions the other way, Michael Asher’s wonderful
exhibition at Claire Copley where he simply took out the wall and redid
everything clean.
01:02:17
MOON:
Uh-huh.
PLAGENS:
It’s not a “ha-ha” joke, but it has a—
MOON:
A bite to it?
PLAGENS:
A bite, a philosophical bite to it, a sort of Samuel Beckett kind of
humor to it. And I finally figured out that that could be pretty good.
Broodthaers didn’t live that much longer. He died in ’75. I didn’t have
any communication with him afterward, you know. But, yeah, it was a
revelation, first revelation probably seeing New Realists in ’62 show in
a certain way, even though it didn’t change my art. Second revelation
was Broodthaers and Wide White Space and Panamarenko and things like
that, and Beuys by extension.
MOON:
What did you think about Joseph Beuys’ work?
PLAGENS:
I didn’t like it. I thought it was too—and I wrote a piece in Artforum,
one of my better pieces, on a relative scale. I’m not saying it’s a
great piece; it’s one of my better pieces. “Peter and the Pressure
Cooker” in Artforum was this first-person going-to-New-York in ’74 and I
saw Beuys do his blackboard thing, yeah. I didn’t like it. I thought it
was pretentious, and I thought the whole thing about the political party
and the diagram and, you know, all that sort of stuff was—now, the
coyote thing, which I Love America and America Loves Me, was different
and then all that stuff—somebody asked me in a seminar, “What do you
think about the whole thing where—?” Somebody wrote a thesis or
something or an article, that whole thing about him being shot down in
the Luftwaffe and covered with fat and things? It was all a lie.
01:04:34
MOON:
A mythology.
PLAGENS:
Yeah. I mean, it’s bullshit. He wasn’t there. There’s no record of that.
The weather wasn’t freezing. Somebody went through everything, and it
was not true, you know. He was in the Luftwaffe and he may have been
shot down, but that whole, the fat and the felt and all that sort of
stuff wasn’t true. On the other hand, look, there are artists that you
think they do great work and they’re artists who do great work, and
because of the great work, they’re very influential, and then there are
artists who are influential beyond, you know—and Beuys is, to me, the
third category. So I’m probably a little bit conservative that I don’t
go with the work, but he changed art single-handedly. So did Andy
Warhol. So did, in a certain way up here and in the seventies, William
Wiley. I mean, there was a whole thing. I think Wiley—I don’t know
whether he’s great, but he’s, I’d like to own a few. But I can remember
in the seventies, I mean, every other graduate student thought this is
what you do. You get a nice piece of deckle-edge paper and you get a
felt-tip pen and you get some Dr. Martin’s watercolors, and you get
stoned and you start from the top and you go to the bottom, and
everything that come into your head, you draw it in there. And it was
like a disease. There were all these graduate students doing Wiley. Of
course, Wiley happened to be good at it. That’s a little art historical
thing my friend Walter Gabrielson, we’ll probably come to subsequently,
but Walter once said, he said profound stuff, my old late friend. He
said, “Modern art is the only form of human endeavor in which subsequent
versions work the bugs in.”
01:06:48
MOON:
Hmm.
PLAGENS:
Meaning the best Cubism is the first Cubism. The best Impressionism is
the first Impressionism. And people who come along later, unlike
automotive engineers where they say, “Oh, gee, that first carburetor,
there’s something bad with that. We’ll fix that.” You don’t want to buy
the first Tesla; you want to buy later ones. But the first Cubism is the
best. The first Abstract Expressionism is the best. And people come
along later and they sort of slick it up or they try to add something
irrelevant to it.
MOON:
Joseph Beuys?
PLAGENS:
Joseph Beuys and William Wiley and anybody else, where the Beuysians
come across and the Wileyians come second, they basically—it’s imitative
and it’s slicked-up and it’s like—you know. Doesn’t mean you can’t have
an influence as an artist, but I don’t want to get into educational
programs for—I don’t know how to run an art school. I don’t know what
artists ought to learn.
MOON:
The work that you’re seeing in—the contemporary art that you were seeing
in Europe, did it seem really different from what was being shown in the
galleries in Los Angeles?
PLAGENS:
Yeah. First of all, unless you went to really sharp places like Wide
White Space, you didn’t really see, you know—it’s a horrible phrase, I
hate it—cutting-edge stuff. So if you were to go around to other
galleries, what you would see would be weak European versions of
Abstract Expressionism and Pop art. Little bit smaller, little bit
French, little bit perfumey. But if you went to the head of the class,
you know, if you went to Beuys and Broodthaers and Panamarenko and a few
other people, you know, I don’t know whether Hannah Wilke was around,
but stuff like that, then it was like stranger and more intellectually
advanced than things in the United States were, but you didn’t see a lot
of it. You really had to work at it.
01:09:31
MOON:
And know where to go.
PLAGENS:
And know where to go, whereas if you were in New York, say, in 1968, and
you went down to—you didn’t even have to go down to SOHO. If you just
went to Castelli and you went, you know, a few other places, you could
see what was going on. Also you could see it in the Whitney and you
could see it to a certain extent at MoMA. In L.A. was a comparative
backwater. You had Robert Irwin and Billy Al Bengston and some Ruscha
shows. LAICA got formed because the County Museum wasn’t doing its job,
wasn’t showing people it should’ve shown. And I wasn’t the most
on-top-of-it guy, so if I didn’t think the County Museum was on the
cutting-edge, they weren’t on the cutting-edge.
PLAGENS:
It’s like is the food better in New York than it is in Los Angeles, and
the answer is yes, but you have to go to La Côte Basque and pay $150 for
lunch to get it.
01:11:05
MOON:
Mm-hmm.
PLAGENS:
But down there on the ground in L.A., you know, you’d rather go to a
food truck or you’d rather go to a good Mexican restaurant or a good
Thai restaurant in L.A. Maybe I’m drawing a false parallel, but if you
were in Europe and you went to the right places, not the most expensive
places, but if you knew where to go and you fell in with somebody, you
would see stuff that really puzzled you, whereas if you went to—when I
would go to these galleries and I would just see this kind of slicked-up
abstract art, and Paris had terrible galleries. I didn’t go to Berlin
then, and Madrid had terrible galleries, but Amsterdam had some things.
The basic thing I went when I was in Brussels, I went to this little
town called Bergeijk, and it was near Eindhoven, and it was where—there
was a Dutch sculptor named Carl Visser or Martin Visser. I can’t
remember. I think it’s Martin Visser is the brother who’s the sculptor,
but his brother Carl ran a factory that manufactured furniture, made
furniture. That’s where a lot of the American Minimalist art was made.
The plans would be sent over there, and he made modern steel furniture.
So they would make Sol Lewitts and Tony Smiths and Donald Judds and
things like that. I don’t know about Judd, don’t want to get in trouble
with his estate. Everything has to be très exacte. But that’s where it
was made. So I made a little pilgrimage to see where it was, because you
had to go from Brussels to Antwerp, to a bus, to, you know, to get to
see it.
01:13:15
MOON:
To see the work being made?
01:16:15
PLAGENS:
Yeah. I don’t remember seeing it being made, but I remember the smell
and being told, you know, “You should go here.” You know, it’s what?
1968? That’s forty-seven years ago. Memory fades. Don’t you have that
trouble? [laughter] There’s the other trouble I used to say, it’s like
with fishermen. Every time they tell the story, the fish gets bigger. I
told somebody in a seminar, I said it was like you listen and hear me
say how many points I scored in a basketball game and it gets more each
time I tell the story, and pretty soon it’s a city record. [laughter] So
I don’t know, you know. I have the memories of the selective things, of
taking the bus and—you know. And I remember going to Antwerp and getting
on the bus to go to Eindhoven, and there’s these buses lined up, and I
get on the bus and there’s these high-school kids in the back, smoking,
these three juvenile delinquents, and I get on the bus and I say
to—because I think I’m in Europe, I’m in Europe, I speak French, and I
say to the bus driver—I forget how you say “l’autobus.” “L’autobus à la
frontier hollandaise?” Something like that. I’m in Antwerp. It’s
Flemish. Not French. They had the Walloons. So the bus driver turns
around to the kids in the back, nods his head, and he points at me like
this, and he says, “Een Franse?” [laughter] You know. So I said, “Do you
prefer English?” And, of course, all the Flemish speak English because
nobody speaks Flemish. It’s like Dutch, and all the Dutch speak English.
You know what I mean. Nobody speaks it. But it was like that. “Een
Franse?” “Look at the boy we have here, speaking French,” you know. They
don’t want to speak French. Once you get to Antwerp, they didn’t like
it. And when I was there—this is just a thing—in ’68, see, the Flems
were on the bottom. They were the manual laborers, the factory workers,
and the Walloons were businessmen, top guys and everything. And now it’s
flipped. The Walloons are the poor people because the Flemish got the
tech industries and that sort of stuff, and English became, you know,
the second language. So the south is real poor, the Walloons and their
more agricultural-based things. It’s changed.
I’ve been—when was I there? Oh, long time ago, eight years since I’ve
been back to Brussels. But then it was, you know, and the animosity was
palpable, you know. We used to get stuff through the mailbox in our
little rez-de-chausée, all this election propaganda, you know, and over
there this is the other thing, I mean, you have parties all the way—we
have Democrats and Republicans and occasionally a third party, right?
And they have things from Maoists, anarchists, all the way over to
Neo-Fascists, and they all have their parties and their literature, and
they all have two, because they have one French and one Flemish, so
during election, I just remember leading up to I don’t know when their
elections were, there used to be like tons of paper came through the
mail slot, and it was all this political propaganda in two sets, one
Flemish, one French, you know.
MOON:
Did you encounter any animosity because you’re an American and the
Vietnam War was going on?
01:17:45
PLAGENS:
There was a thing, “Well, you’re an American and you don’t understand
that you’re on the wrong side.” There was that, but I never encountered
personal animosity.
You have to remember first Martin Luther King was assassinated and then
Robert Kennedy was assassinated, and it was like there was a sort of
“What is wrong with you people?” There was that. But in Europe, as I
said, when I went to Paris, you know, the first night I was there, we
got a pension, my wife and son stayed in, I said, “This is the first
night in Paris. I want to go out and take a walk.” I went out, and
tear-gas smell was in the air, there were these steamrollers out, they
were paving over the streets so protestors couldn’t pick up paving
blocks and throw them. They were asphalting over a lot of the streets.
And there was this cordon around the Théâtre d l’Odéon, and I went and I
walked and I—I don’t know what happened. It’s not clear. A soldier hit
me in the stomach with a rifle butt because I didn’t move away fast
enough, you know. He was standing there, you know, like that, and I said
something, and it was just like really quick, off and [demonstrates],
just a little pop right here, and I fell down and coughed, and I ran to
the end of the street, around the corner, and then I called him a
motherfucker and flipped him the finger and disappeared around the
corner. But what was I going to say? The political demonstrations in the
days of ’68 were partly Vietnam, but they almost had a whole revolution.
In Europe it was overthrowing the whole system.
MOON:
Especially in Paris.
01:20:35
PLAGENS:
Especially in Paris there was—well, and Brussels they had it too. They
didn’t have quite the École Normale, you know, all that sort of
hierarchy that you had they were going to overthrow, but you did have
Rudi Dutschke over here in Germany and you did have Danny Cohn-Bendit in
Paris, and I forget who was in Brussels. That’s what Broodthaers’
exclamation mark, with all the Milan, Bruxelles, Paris, Berlin, you
know, was all about. So the Vietnam War was a secondary thing to them,
because what they cared about was overthrowing the political
establishment where they were because of domestic reasons. That’s my
retroactive forty-seven-year-later memory. Broodthaers never gave me
much trouble about it, and I didn’t get, “Oh, you’re an American,” from
him.
The big thing in Brussels when I moved there, I mean when I went to live
there, was there was economic animosity because SHAFE was there, you
know, S-H-A-F-E, Supreme Headquarters Allied Forces in Europe, which is
a military joint command. It was all staffed by Americans. Americans
moved their families there. They kicked up the rent. It’s just like
anti-Google in San Francisco. So you went out looking for an apartment,
I’d walk around, it would say, “appartement à louer pour une famille
belge,” “an apartment for rent for a Belgian family,” and that basically
meant no Americans, especially in certain high-rise districts. And I
remember you would go around Brussels, and if you walked around Brussels
there were certain streets and you could hear English being spoken down
the street and kids out in the street playing baseball.
MOON:
Yeah.
PLAGENS:
Softball and stuff, because they were the kids of these American
diplomats and military personnel who were in Brussels. It was the start
of the Common Market. So if there was any animosity toward Americans, it
was, “You fuckin’ rich people are coming over here and you’re driving up
the rents.” But I didn’t suffer from that because we got this little
apartment kind of right away.
01:22:15
MOON:
So how was the transition coming back to Austin?
PLAGENS:
It’s sort of culture shock, I mean, in a way, because when we came back
to begin the semester in the fall, and I had bought, when we went over,
there was a charter flight from University of Texas, from Paris to
Houston. They didn’t have Charles de Gaulle; it was Orly, whatever. I
think it was that airport. But it was a 707 and it was a charter flight
and I somehow wheedled my way, because they didn’t quite fill it, so I
could buy one-way fare for the three of us coming back so we came back
from Paris. We left Paris to Houston, and it was full of students and
stuff, and I remember there were Texans with cowboy hats and, you know,
[imitating Texas accent], “Faculty leavin’ Paris here, all coming—.” And
it was, you know, 90 degrees and humid, 100 degrees and 90 percent
humidity, that sort of thing, in Houston, like you’re in a bathtub. That
part of it was—we got a better place to live, rented a house, had a
yard, had more to do with Hickey, and I did that chaperone with the
students trip.
MOON:
To New York.
01:25:11
PLAGENS:
To New York, you know. In all this time either we haven’t talked about
art, I had my first gallery show in ’68 in Houston, you know, at a
pretty good gallery called the New Arts Gallery with my friend Howard
Smagula. I had a studio early on in Austin on Sixth Street, which is
like the center of the music biz now, but I had it for twenty or
twenty-five bucks a month, upstairs from this drugstore before I went to
Europe. I painted up there, painted up there all the time. Then I had a
studio in an old auto parts building, freestanding building. I had the
ground floor, and this old guy, drunk guy, he had the back of the shop.
He lived upstairs and he used to do body repair. His name was Olin Hall,
this old guy [imitates accent] talked like that, and he’d say, “You can
call me Blow-and-Go.” What does that mean? Because he was so fast with
the welding torch, he did his work quick, so people called him
“Blow-and-Go.”
So I had a studio and I made big paintings, and I had this show. I had a
show at this museum in San Antonio called the Witte, of work that I’d
done in Belgium.
MOON:
Oh, you had a studio in Belgium?
PLAGENS:
No, but I drew in the apartment. I had a big table. I just made works on
paper. Then I had a small crate made at the end and shipped it back, you
know. Boy, they could do things, really nice wooden box with a handle.
What do you call it? Poignée? A handle. Shipped everything back and then
I made paintings from those. So I had a show at the museum. It was good
because the teaching load was kind of light. I forget what we had. Three
classes, you know. It was a—what do you call it? An R1 university. Yeah.
MOON:
Research.
PLAGENS:
Yeah. I mean, it was the flagship. So the transition back wasn’t so bad,
and I came back, you know, sort of a celebrity because I had gotten this
leave, I’d been off, I’d been to Europe, I come back, I’d had a show at
this gallery, had a show in San Antonio at the museum. Not animosity
among those old water buffalos because they sort of, “We don’t care
about that.” You know what I mean?
01:26:51
MOON:
Mm-hmm.
PLAGENS:
But I wanted to get back to L.A., and my wife wanted to get back to
California. My friend Walter Gabrielson got me a job, like you could in
those days. You could recommend. I got a job; it took me back to L.A.,
San Fernando Valley State College, shortly to become California State
University Northridge. Because I remember when I got back, I was
offered—I forget what. Goodall called me in and offered me this what
seemed like a huge salary increase to, I don’t know, $9,000 or
something. I thought you were there. You know what I mean? It’s like
those days, a millionaire, you know. And I remember saying, “I don’t
know,” because I thought that I might have a teaching job in L.A. And
I’d made a couple of trips to L.A. when I was—we’d go home for the
summer, and I went home once, a quick trip by myself with this other
artist. You know who Karen Carson is.
MOON:
[unclear].
PLAGENS:
Yeah. Well, Karen got Walter and me our studio in Pasadena. We went
looking and we knocked on her door, and Karen—I met Karen. That’s where
I met Karen, when I went out to L.A. in ’69 with this artist named
George Green, who, you know, said, “I’m going to go see my old college
flame.” And Karen and I became friends, and then later, you know, she
and I and Walter Gabrielson were teaching mates and shared an office at
Northridge. But anyway, so it was good in Austin, you know, I mean—
01:29:21
MOON:
Were there any L.A. people in Austin or in Texas? Henry Hopkins—
PLAGENS:
Oh, Henry Hopkins, yes, yeah. I wrote a catalog essay for his big
drawing show. He had a drawing show at—it was called the Fort Worth Art
Center.
MOON:
So you did know him? Did you know him in Los Angeles?
PLAGENS:
I knew of him in Los Angeles. I might have met him when I went up—I
forgot—this part of Texas. Yeah, I mean, Dallas/Fort Worth was 250 miles
north and it was a straight shot on Route 35, Interstate 35. You go up
through Waco. And the thing I remember about Waco was, you know, it’s
the Baylor Bears, right? So it had a big drive-in theater that you would
pass, and it had this bear coming towards you painted on it. It was
really weird because the body of bear, somebody had made like a perfect
circle with the legs—you know what I mean? It was like designed. And the
head and the thing with the claws, but the whole brown thing was this
perfect circle, and it was called something like the Big Bear Drive-In
and it was visible from the highway. But, yes, we used to go up there.
We used to go up there. I remember going to a party at the Murchisons’.
Clint Murchison used to own the Dallas Cowboys originally, and they
owned a lot of, like, Frankenthalers and things like that. There was a
woman named Ann—I can’t remember her last name, Windfore? She had Henry
Hopkins took us. All this art. There was a collector there named Jim
Meeker, who collected, and he and Henry were buddies. And Henry was—you
know what Henry looked like? You’ve seen pictures of him?
01:31:17
MOON:
Actually, no. I just know about his work. I don’t think I’ve—
01:33:43
PLAGENS:
Oh, he was ridiculously handsome. He looked like the British ambassador
as drawn by Roy Lichtenstein, right? He had white hair and a white
mustache and incredibly—and I remember—this is my little
anecdote—driving in Fort Worth with Henry, we were going someplace, and
we’re driving, and Henry gets a flat tire and we’re by the side of the
road, you know, one of those big wide roads, and we’re there and he gets
a flat tire. We’re there waiting for the tow truck, right? There must
have been—I’m overestimating now—I don’t know how many women whom Henry
knew stop, “Henry, are you having trouble?” And they would be driving
Cadillacs and stuff like that, you know. [laughs] It was just
astonishing. “Henry, is there anything we can do?” Yeah, Henry Hopkins
was there and he brought good stuff into the Fort Worth Art Center. But
I remember going to the party at the Murchisons’, and the Murchisons, I
still remember this, we were going to go out on the lawn to see some
sculpture, and it was night and there was like a George Rickey or
something out there. And Mrs. Murchison said, “Wait a minute. I’ll turn
on the steppingstones.” They had electrically heated steppingstones
across the lawn! But they had good stuff. Ann—I can’t remember her last
name, elderly lady. Windfohr. That was her name, W-i-n-d-f-o-h-r, I
think. A big family, you know. She had a house designed by I.M. Pei and
it had these thirty-foot ceilings, and she had the Míros and Mondrians
and stuff like that. And you’ve got to remember I’m a lower-middle-class
boy and I’m real impressed by just these other—I see the art, but then
stuff—you have your drink and the bowl and nuts. It’s like this big and
it’s all cashews, not peanuts. We’re talking cashews. And I’m a
lower-middle-class kid.
Jim Meeker used to let artists stay at his place, you know. He
collected. An oil company heir, kind of homely guy, and he was always
sort of the fifth wheel. I always remember there were pictures around of
like two couples and Meeker in Hawaii, or Europe, but really nice guy.
And everybody stayed there at his house. Dallas I don’t remember so much
because the Dallas Museum of Art wasn’t that big and Dallas wasn’t—and
everybody preferred Houston. Fort Worth was kind of cool and second,
sort of like the Lower East Side. If Dallas is the Upper East Side, Fort
Worth was the Lower East Side and Houston was SOHO. Hip but kind of
establishment, and it was a bigger city and it had a gay community in
Westheimer. The street along there was called Westheimer, like in here
they call it the Castro, you know. I mean now it’s not just the Castro.
But like the West Village in New York, and it was sophisticated, and the
Houston Museum of Fine Arts was designed by Mies van der Rohe, and they
had that big Georgia O’Keeffe show and they had a big Sam Francis show.
And Houston was closer; it’s 170 miles as opposed to 250. And that’s
where the New Arts Gallery was. That’s where the MFA was. They had just
opened the Museum of Contemporary Art, you know.
01:35:39
MOON:
Was the De Menil Collection open at that time?
PLAGENS:
No.
MOON:
That was later.
PLAGENS:
That was later.
MOON:
In the seventies, maybe?
PLAGENS:
Yeah, yeah. One of the really sweet museums. I mean, I don’t think Renzo
Piano has ever built anything better than the De Menil. That’s Piano,
isn’t it?
MOON:
Yeah.
PLAGENS:
Yeah. I mean, it’s just so sweet. And we were there not that long ago. I
mean, I was there last year or 2013, and the Menil has that “off” stuff
that you don’t see. You see Surrealism. You know, it hasn’t got the
Museum of Modern Art Cubism to Abstraction to Minimalism to—it’s got
slightly “off,” eccentric collections, and the galleries are so good and
the building is so good, you know. Houston, yeah, was more of a place.
I’m trying to remember was there anybody in Houston at the time to look
to. Yeah.
MOON:
The reason I was thinking about the De Menil, because Walter Hopps was
there, but that was later.
PLAGENS:
Later.
MOON:
That was after he leaves L.A. to go to Washington, D.C.
PLAGENS:
And then he goes to Houston. He’ll be here in twenty minutes. [Moon
laughs] No, Texas was—there were kind of Texas artists around the time
that they went back and forth. I mean, Terry Allen was a sort of Texas
artist, and there were people like—what was his name? Bob. Oh, Jesus. I
can’t—Bob Wade and Ed somebody. There was that little thing, but it was
kind of later in the sixties. It was just coming to the fore, that sort
of “cowboy modernism,” where you did—it ends up with people like Vernon
Fisher, you know, where you could do kind of caricatures, sort of like
“cowboy William Wiley.” We used to call it “rodeo modernism” or “lariat”
modernism something, because people would do pictures and then they’d
have, you know, the rope around. The border drawn in, like the lasso.
01:38:06
MOON:
The lasso. [laughs]
PLAGENS:
Yeah, the “lasso modernism,” you know. And there were a lot of artists
who did that. Terry Allen was kind of back and forth at the time. You
know, he and Dave were big friends from Lubbock. I mean, Dave’s from
Fort Worth, but Terry’s from Lubbock. But, no, when I came back to
Austin, as I remember, it was pretty good because I had gotten this
leave and I’d been to Europe and—you know. And there was this new guy in
there. George Green had been hired and Howard Smagula had been bounced.
So there I am. I’m, what, twenty-seven. When I went to L.A., I was
assistant professor, which I thought was better, because you had
“professor” in your title instead of “instructor,” which sounded sort of
like “ditch-digger.”
MOON:
Well, did they have the tenure-track system for the art faculty?
PLAGENS:
Where? At Texas?
01:39:30
MOON:
Uh, yeah. Or also at Northridge.
PLAGENS:
Yes, they did, but at Texas it was skewed by the Board of Trustees could
do whatever they wanted, okay? Northridge, it was skewed at my friend
Walter Gabrielson, who was a tenured assistant professor. He got tenure,
he was a little bit thorny. And at Northridge I’m getting ahead. I don’t
know when you want to cut it off. But at Northridge there was a huge art
department, and we were four or five departments in one, and it was
because in those days there was art education was separate, then there
was art history, then there was 2D and 3D. They wouldn’t divide it in
fine art/commercial art because everybody said, well, fine art’s too
powerful. So we had this idiot division where sculpture, jewelry,
industrial design, interior design, they were in one part, and
illustration, drawing, and painting, printmaking were in another, you
know. And then there was a Department of General Studies, and they had
courses for—I hated them—non-art majors, and they were sort of like a
shadow curriculum, you know, like in England they have the shadow
minister. You have a minister who’s the party out of power and he’s
called the shadow minister. They were like the shadow, and they kept
wanting to have special—I get into all this educational shit that—you
know. You’d say, no, non-art majors should take Beginning Drawing and
that would satisfy their electives, and the General Studies people said,
“No, we need a separate course in drawing for non-art majors.” So they
always wanted a separate duplicate thing for what they called general
studies, and they were really candy-ass people. They weren’t any good as
nights. Walter got tenure as an assistant professor and then he never
could get promoted, whereas I, I came in as an assistant professor, and
in 1972 I got a Guggenheim and I was a visiting artist for basically two
quarters and a summer quarter, three quarters, an academic year, but,
you know, quite offset, at Berkeley, and I got that visiting thing and I
had a Guggenheim, and when I came back, I had gotten tenure and I was
promoted to associate professor in absentia. I mean, I got it handed on
a plate, but then I could never get promoted to full professor because I
was a thorn in people’s sides, like Walter.
01:42:35
MOON:
Oh, so you were too.
PLAGENS:
Yeah. But they made the mistake, they gave me tenure and associate
professor because I’d gotten a Guggenheim and because I think I was a
visiting artist at Berkeley, you know. And then when I came back for the
next six years—well, I didn’t try right away, but like for three years
it was “Can I get promoted to full professor? Because I’ve written
Sunshine Muse, I have a Guggenheim, I have a dealer. I show at Jan Baum.
I show. I’m in 24 Young Los Angeles Artists at the L.A. County Museum.
Can I be promoted? And I’m a good teacher,” you know, not the best,
because I was a little selfish. I was always late for class had, make an
entrance. And all the art education types didn’t like me. General
Studies and Art Ed didn’t like me. I got along with the art historians.
MOON:
Wait. Let’s back up for a little bit. So then you leave Texas and settle
back into Los Angeles.
PLAGENS:
Yes.
MOON:
In large part because your friend Walter Gabrielson helped you to land a
teaching job.
PLAGENS:
Yes.
01:43:55
MOON:
Where did you live when you moved back?
PLAGENS:
A rented house in what was called, by the white folk, Arleta,
A-r-l-e-t-a, the City of Los Angeles, Arleta. Actually, Pacoima, but all
these white people in their suburban houses didn’t like to say Pacoima
because Pacoima is Chicano gang territory, etc., etc. So there’s a
little corner of it called Arleta, Nordhoff and I forget what, you know,
fairly far east toward San Fernando.
MOON:
So it wasn’t too far from the college.
01:46:2301:48:24
PLAGENS:
Seven or eight miles, and I used to bicycle because it’s absolutely
flat. And Walter got me a job. Where had I met Walter? I met Walter
between years at graduate school when I came home, and I got my old job
at USC back. Remember I told you I worked at Safeway? Well, for my
senior year I had this job at USC in something called, in the psychology
department, drawing visual stimuli, which were comic-strip copies with
then alternative punch-line-to-the joke panels. There was this little
comic strip called Ferd’nand. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it, a
little guy, pantomime, no dialogue, little guy with a top hat and a
mustache—I mean little funny hat, and they would be Ferd’nand walks down
the street, Ferd’nand sees a banana on the sidewalk, banana peel on the
sidewalk, Ferd’nand sees a guy laughing. I forget how it sequences. And
then Ferd’nand sees a guy falling, slipping on it, and he laughs, and
then the last panel, the joke, there’s another banana peel, because
Ferd’nand isn’t looking, he’s looking at the guy, and he slips on one
too. That’s the joke. So what I would do would be copy that whole comic
strip and then I would draw alternative panels from multiple choice, and
they would be—some, they would be no joke, Ferd’nand just keeps walking.
The main gets up and slips again. And there’d be one that has the joke
and that would be the right answer.
And what that did, it was financed by the Department of Defense and the
Navy and it was to test what they called social intelligence, and it was
basically to give tests to people in the Navy to see if they could get
along on ships, especially submarines, you know, for long periods of
time. Were you aware of what this guy felt? You know what I mean? So I
did that, and when I went off to graduate school and I came back, in
between years I needed money. I went back around and I got part of my
old job back, but the project had grown. Next door to me, like the dog
in the manger, was Walter Gabrielson, who had gotten hired doing the
same thing. So Walter and I became these real friendly rivals and, you
know, did caricatures of each other. We were in separate stalls, you
know, cubicles, and the wall didn’t go quite to the ceiling—so we’d draw
our little cartoons and make paper airplanes and throw them over the
transom. So that’s where I met him. Then after—you know, while I was at
Texas, we corresponded and I’d see him. I saw him when I came back with
that trip with that guy, met Karen Carson, saw Walter, and we did I
forget what. I wanted to come back. I forget how it transpired, but he
said, “There’s a guy, the chairman, German, likes me. You might be able
to get a job at San Fernando Valley State College.” So I applied and I
got in. I don’t know how big a search they did. It was in the days when,
you know, you could still hire like that. So I came back and we rented a
little house, you know, on a street, just like Alondra Park, where I
grew up. Funny how you keep returning to your roots, even if you don’t
think you are.
I had this job at Northridge, and Northridge was a little bit more of a
teaching load because it wasn’t an R1 university and it was a regional
state—it wasn’t even a university. It was a college. You know, Ronald
Reagan was the one who—people forget this. It was Reagan who boosted
everybody’s salary because he declared unilaterally all these places
were universities, you know. Chico State became a university, and when
you’re a university, you have union rules and everybody’s salary went up
and it became California State University Northridge. A few places were
allowed to keep their own name: San Jose State, Fresno State, Humboldt
State. But the rest of them became things like California State
University Fresno, California State University Dominguez Hills. Maybe
that was built later, you know. And the one who reduced salaries and
wanted to cut everything down and said academic people have—and I’m
trying to remember what the phrase was. There was some other kind of
currency we get because our jobs are so pleasant, and that was Jerry
Brown in his first go-round as governor. It was called something like—I
forget what it was. It was—I forget what he said. It was pleasant—so
then the campaign about the union, there was Monopoly money printed with
Jerry Brown on it, and it said “5 Comfort Dollars” or something like
that. But he was the one who said, “We live in an era of lowered
expectations.” Jerry, the former seminarian fresh out of sleeping on a
hard bed with a hair shirt, wanted everybody else to—but Northridge was
good and this is probably—but out of Northridge came Scott Grieger,
Jeffrey Vallance, Patrick Hogan, Peter Lodato, Don Sorenson, who died of
AIDS. It was real good because there were all these really sharp kids
who didn’t get into UCLA because they were not great academic students,
and they couldn’t afford to go to Art Center or Otis or something like
that, so they ended up at Northridge, because Northridge was the most
culture-savvy, middle-class of all the L.A. state colleges.
01:51:13
MOON:
Mm-hmm.
PLAGENS:
There were ambitions at Northridge, you know. So all those people were
there. Denise Gale was a painter. Judy Simonian got a Guggenheim. Judy
Simonian went there. A whole bunch of people. I mean, Northridge was
really good because you had this kind of student—and it was the
seventies.
MOON:
And you had a studio in Pasadena?
01:53:09
PLAGENS:
I worked in my garage first. I mean, I made it into a studio because you
had that 20-foot-by-20-foot standard suburban two-car garage and it
worked. I mean, it was great. You could paint in there and if you wanted
to move something out, you’d just lift up the door and the whole—it’s
like you’ve got a whole moveable wall. But then Walter and I wanted to
get a studio and I wanted to get a day studio. I wanted to have, you
know, a studio away from home. So we got it in 1970. Was there in ’69,
got the studio in ’70 with Walter. I used to have to drive all the way
to Pasadena. Wasn’t that hard in those days. Then when I did the thing
in Berkeley, we came back, we bought a house in Laurel Canyon, and I
would drive to Pasadena. From ’72 to ’79, I drove from Laurel Canyon to
Pasadena, but, yeah, we got the studio then via Karen, because Karen had
a studio on Colorado Boulevard upstairs. She lived in it. Hers was a
live-in.
And Pasadena also had then Hap Tivey, Bruce Nauman, Richard Jackson,
Karen Carson, Helen Pashgian. I’m forgetting—Scott Grieger had a studio
in Pasadena. Pasadena was—the metaphor again—Avis to Venice’s Hertz. We
couldn’t afford Venice. In those days, there was this split between
teaching artists and “real artists,” and the “real artists,” the Ferus
group, they were people who lived off their work. Billy Al was the model
for that, right? De Wain Valentine. They didn’t teach. They might have
worked here and there, but they also worked the collectors. We used to
say Billy Al had his own graduate school, you know, and people like
Church Arnoldi went to Billy and got an “MFA” from Billy Al. He taught
him—
MOON:
How to professionalize?
PLAGENS:
How to professionalize. Ever see that article he wrote?
MOON:
In Art in America?
PLAGENS:
Art in America, artists’ studios, and you have to have a showing room,
you have to have a clean room, you know. Those of us who taught for a
living were considered somewhat, to use the polite term, wusses, because
we had salaried jobs and, you know, and we were people, you know,
married with kids, you know. So there was this split. I wasn’t a Venice
cowboy and I have never been. I have always been kind of economically
chicken-shit because of probably my family background, you know, my
father being out of a job a lot. “Oh, what are we going to do? How are
we going to pay the rent?” sort of thing. So I’ve always had an income,
you know, either a grant or a salary, you know.
01:55:34
MOON:
Was there a lot of interaction between artists who had studios in
Pasadena? Would you talk?
PLAGENS:
Yeah.
MOON:
And do studio visits with one another?
PLAGENS:
Didn’t do studio visits per se. I mean, as I said in the Nauman book, he
was right down the street. He was half a block down, and I said in the
book I was sort of afraid to go up there, not because he was spooky. I
mean, he was in that basketball game. I thought, “My god, what is he
doing up there?” But among Scott Grieger, Karen Carson, Walter, me,
Lodato, yeah, there was communication. Every once in a while I went over
to Hap Tivey’s place. There was a coffee shop called La Dru’s, and we
used to meet for coffee and have breakfast or go to lunch, or there was
a bar across the street called The Club Eleven, which was this real
cheap bar with a coin-operated pool table, and then there was a bar
called The Loch Ness Monster. So it wasn’t like studio visits; it was
more like—
MOON:
Hanging out.
PLAGENS:
Hanging out. And I probably—and I still am a little bit sensitive to
this because even then I was writing for Artforum, so there was always a
kind of, you know, “Peter’s a critic.” If you go to do a studio visit
and you’re looking at work, you’re expected to say something. If you say
something and you’re a critic, there’s a sort of official whatever, you
know, and then there’s, “Well, why don’t you write something about me?”
or, “Why don’t you review my show?” It’s just in the air, and that’s a
general—how do you say it? Is it leitmotif?
01:57:25
MOON:
Like a recurring—
PLAGENS:
Yeah.
MOON:
-motif or—
PLAGENS:
L-e-i-t-m-o-t-
MOON:
Leitmotif, yeah.
PLAGENS:
Leitmotif. Yeah, it’s a recurring thing. Criticism fucks up your career
as an artist. I mean, that’s throughout. So there’s a little of that.
It’s always in the air, you know.
MOON:
Wait. So this whole time you’ve been writing for Artforum?
PLAGENS:
Since end of ’65.
MOON:
Since the end of ’65?
PLAGENS:
When I went to Texas, I would do not—they didn’t want things from
Houston, but I did a piece on the Georgia O’Keeffe retro, on the Sam
Francis show at the MFA. I did the essay on drawing for Henry Hopkins,
which I think ran in Artforum. Artforum would run catalog essays in
advance of the catalog.
MOON:
Features?
PLAGENS:
Yeah. I kept my contact up, you know. From Europe I didn’t do much. So
when I came back to L.A., yeah.
01:58:28
MOON:
You were regularly reviewing shows?
PLAGENS:
There were other people writing early on, and when I first came back, it
was basically boiled down to two people, me and Fidel Danieli. You’d
have to check the record to see. That was my impression. And then Fidel
sort of gave up the ghost. He wanted to be an artist, you know. There
was that whole thing when Fidel finally came out, you know. He was
married to Edie Danieli, and Fidel finally came out, and he came out as
a real sort of heavy leather gay guy. And I think—I’m mooshing all this
together some way, but he sort of quit writing for Artforum. He didn’t
want to do that anymore. So I became the “L.A. Letter,” four to six
reviews every month, ’74 to about ’79 I did it, I think, something like
that.
MOON:
And you were working closely with John Coplans or Phil—
PLAGENS:
It was Coplans because the Artforum moved to New York in what, ’70 or
something like—it was in L.A. from ’67 to ’70 or something like that.
MOON:
Yeah.
PLAGENS:
Yeah. Came down from San Francisco. No, came down from San Francisco in—
MOON:
Sixty-five?
PLAGENS:
Sixty-four, ’65.
MOON:
Yeah. And I think maybe it left in ’67.
PLAGENS:
Left in ’67. And at that point, Phil Leider was still editor there, but
by the time I came back, it’s Coplans, and it’s Coplans, but I’m dealing
with Max Kozloff a lot.
02:00:25
MOON:
Okay. What was that process like? Were you the one who was pitching
shows or did they give you assignments? [laughs]
PLAGENS:
No, I didn’t have to pitch. It was really whatever I thought needed
covering. But you’ve got to remember the menu was rather limited. It
wasn’t like what I do for the Wall Street Journal now. There’s three
hundred shows a month in New York, and I suggest to Eric Gibson, I
suggest five or six, and he says, “Do these three.” That’s the way we
work it. Back then it was, it was pretty obvious—
MOON:
What to cover.
PLAGENS:
Yeah. I mean, there weren’t that many galleries that you wanted to—you
really wanted to—. [laughs] I mean, there was Ferus; there was Eugenia
Butler; there was Riko. There were, you know, a couple of them started
to scatter, I don’t know, into Beverly Hills. There was Margo Leavin,
maybe. There was much more of an orthodoxy of what the important artists
were and what shows you ought to cover, you know. When Alexis Smith had
a show, it should be reviewed. If Grieger has a show, it should be
reviewed. De Wain Valentine has a show at Margot Leavin or wherever, it
should be covered. Corcoran—I forget. Was he in business then? You know.
MOON:
He was a little bit later.
PLAGENS:
Okay. So—
MOON:
Rolf Nelson.
PLAGENS:
Yeah, Nelson.
02:02:05
MOON:
Maybe this is also later, but Doug Chrismas, Ace.
PLAGENS:
There was Ace. Ace took over from De Wain in that place. Ace had its
gallery in Venice in the bank building in ’72. I remember that. They did
the Warhol, Russell Means, American Indian show. So it’s fairly obvious.
So I’d do four to six reviews. It was called “Letter from L.A.” or “L.A.
Letter.”
MOON:
Were your pieces run pretty much as you wrote them or was there some
editing?
PLAGENS:
There was some editing, not much, and sometimes—we didn’t have
back-and-forth because it was through the mail, you have to understand,
in those days. So a lot of times there was sort of—I mean, I had one
horrendous incident, blew up, I threatened to quit, “I’m never going to
do this.” Phil Leider change something. I reviewed Richard Serra show at
Pasadena Art Museum, the one with the logs in it, and I said it was “a
sensational bore,” and Phil Leider changed the first sentence to say
that it was “a sensation.” But Phil would do that sort of thing. I don’t
know what he’s doing. Phil lives in Israel now, if he isn’t dead, and he
became a real passionate Zionist and moved to Israel. He lived for a
while in Berkeley. I saw him when I was visiting artist in ’72, you
know, and he didn’t want to have anything to do with anything to do with
art. He’s a very unpleasant person, real smart and, you know, nice, but,
I mean, you know, he didn’t go out of his way to, you know—I mean, John
actually had more social skills than Phil did.
02:04:32
MOON:
In that instance, do you think that he made that change because in
general he didn’t want the reviews to be too negative, or was it because
it was Richard Serra?
PLAGENS:
Because it was Richard Serra. Oh, yeah, it was because of Richard Serra.
You can’t say that about Richard Serra, you know. And given Richard
Serra, I mean, I was at a Museum of Modern Art opening one time in the
seventies, and I went to the Museum of Modern Art with John Coplans. I
would stay with him when he lived on 86th Street, and I went with him,
and John had a couple of tuxes and he lent me one. He gave it to me,
actually. And I remember there was an altercation between him and
Richard Serra at this opening, and it was sort of comic because John had
a tie on and a jacket, and Richard Serra’s choking him with his tie, you
know. You grab it and you push the knot up and he was stamping on his
foot at the same time, you know.
MOON:
Hmm. What were they fighting about? Art or—
PLAGENS:
I don’t know. It was probably about art. People used to come into
Artforum and demand their cover, why I haven’t had a cover. I mean, no,
it was real—it was all male kind of shit, you know. It was Smithson and
Serra and Bochner and, you know, and other people, painters, you know,
that sort of macho. That was all early seventies in New York. So, yeah,
it wasn’t Richard Serra—you don’t do this to Richard Serra, number one,
and, number two, Richard Serra might come in and, you know, throw you
out the window on Madison Avenue. And there was a little club, you know.
I mean, Phil Leider and the—you know, Artforum magazine was the “house
organ of Minimalism,” used to hear that all the time, it was the company
magazine of Minimalism. No. It was because it was Richard Serra.
MOON:
Would you go to New York with some frequency—
PLAGENS:
Yeah.
02:06:41
MOON:
—to sit—because you move up in terms of your position at Artforum.
PLAGENS:
That’s all, you know, window-dressing. You move up and become a
contributing editor. Doesn’t mean anything.
MOON:
So it doesn’t mean more responsibility or more time—
PLAGENS:
No.
MOON:
—spent in editorial—okay.
PLAGENS:
No. I never edited anything. I just wrote and got edited. But I would
come to New York like once every six months and they would pay for my
TWA red-eye, and that’s what I’d do. I’d stay with John wouldn’t cost
that much, and I’d go to an editorial meeting. And I’ll give you
one—because I think things like this should be talked—I remember walking
into one, and Joe Masheck was there, and he’s a whole other kettle of
fish. But Joe Masheck was there, and I remember Joe was the first guy I
saw that wore a button-down blue shirt and a sport jacket and Levi’s. I
thought that was cool. And that’s like standard uniform now, but I
remember Masheck was the first guy. So I walk in. This is going to be
x-rated. So I walk in, and Robert Pincus-Witten is there, and I come
into the delicatessen, where I’ve ordered a corned beef sandwich or
there’s a corned beef sandwich, I’m sitting around there, and
Pincus-Witten is saying to John Coplans as I sit down, because I
remember starting to take a bite of my corned beef sandwich, and he
says, “John, one of these days you’ll discover that assholes are so much
tighter and better.” I’m sitting there and I’m thinking, “Somehow I
don’t want this corned beef sandwich anymore. I’m not hungry.”
Pincus-Witten is giving it to John for being such an old, you know,
wooly heterosexual. [Moon laughs.] And there was all this stuff I didn’t
know until later. Did you know that John Coplans and Judy Chicago were a
couple for a while?
02:08:45
MOON:
No.
PLAGENS:
Isn’t that frightening to think about? [Moon laughs.] John was the bull
in the china shop. But Pincus-Witten also said things like he and—who
was his longtime partner? He was in the schmata business. Leon, I think
his name is. Very elegant man. I’ve met him only a couple of times. I
don’t know whether anybody’s still alive from these things, because I’m
seventy-five, or going to be, and these people are older than I am. But
Pincus-Witten used to say, “Leon and I live on the Upper East Side in
abject splendor.” I always liked that. Maybe he didn’t say “Leon and I.”
But you’re in the art world, you know. Where do you live? Everybody had
these—“I live on the Upper East Side in abject splendor.” [Moon laughs.]
But I’ve gotten in trouble or hurt Pincus-Witten’s feelings a couple of
times. One time I wrote—this was a long time later. I went to Basel, you
know, Art Basel, before it was Art Basel Miami and all that other stuff,
and we’re having coffee in the middle. You ever been to that place?
MOON:
No.
02:11:04
PLAGENS:
Well, the thing used to be a circular place, like a donut, you know, and
then there’s this space in the middle that’s gravel, and that’s where
they have all the coffee things and you get up. So I’m having coffee in
the middle of that, and in one of those early. And there’s all these
people going back and forth, you know, people who work at the galleries,
and they’re all going back and forth. I remember Pincus-Witten—and I
quoted this in print, see. That’s what pissed him off. And Pincus-Witten
looks at these people going back and forth, he looks at me with his
little espresso, and he says, “Don’t you just hate strivers?” [Moon
laughs.] I mean, he was really wickedly witty, you know. [Moon laughs.]
My friends in L.A. that I knew, they used to—because he didn’t like L.A.
art that much—they used to refer to him as “Pincus-Fuctus,” F-u-c-t-u-s.
[Moon laughs.] Robert Pincus-Fuctus. [Moon laughs.] Because he didn’t
seem to like West Coast art. I don’t think it was Pincus-Witten who said
Venice types—“Dropout types hanging around Venice making baubles for the
rich,” but somebody at Artforum wrote that, you know.
MOON:
Yeah. Well, I guess there must have been a small contingent of editors
at Artforum based in New York who were somewhat against the art scene in
Los Angeles, or, I mean, Rosalind Krauss, for example, has talked about
the kind of superficiality—the seeming superficiality of “L.A. Look” or
Light and Space as a kind of Minimalism, but not without the—
02:13:18
PLAGENS:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it’s true, and even [unclear], I mean, like Bruce
Nauman is hardly an artist of “L.A. Look,” but Pincus-Witten wrote some
really, you know—that Bruce Nauman was this parvenu who didn’t really
understand anything I wrote that negative review of his LACMA
retrospective. Yes, there was that, and I myself have said things like—I
used to say, “In L.A., the phrase ‘no pain, no gain’ applies only from
the neck down,” I’ve said bad things. But I used to think I could say it
because I was from L.A. It’s like, you know, do people who are Italian
say things about Italians, people who are black say things about black
people, and they can because they’re part of the life—you know what I
mean? So I will say things every once in a while about the Teutonic
mentality, German, because of the blood in my veins. I’m entitled to. I
can tell you what’s wrong with Germans.
To me, Minimalism, maybe it was never united, but it took two sort of
paths: the Southern California path and the New York path. And the New
York path, it went into diagrams and blueprints and Conceptual art, and
you ended up with Joseph Kosuth and Mel Bochner doing numbers and all
that sort of stuff. That’s what happened. The cube, the steel thing
became the blueprint, became the idea, became the numbers, became—that’s
what happened in New York. In L.A., the cube got transparent and then it
became—you could see through it and it became experiential and it became
Doug Wheeler and Robert Irwin and Jim Turrell, you know. And I
personally do not see a hierarchical difference in those two branches,
you know. You know, take your choice. I’m in the middle as a painter
between them, you know, so I’m not a hardcore Conceptualist because I
don’t think that diagrammatically, logically. I’m not in favor of it;
It’s second-rate philosophy. There are people who do that sort of thing,
and on the other hand, the experiential thing seems to lack a certain
sort of grit because it ends up sort of like looking at sunsets, you
know. “Oh, boy!” And I’m not Zen enough, you know. I’m not meditative
enough, although certain Irwins and Turrells and Doug Wheelers and Hap
Tiveys and kind of an interesting artist who too—the women are sort of
interesting. They were sort of in the middle, Maria Nordman and Mary
Corse, but Mary Corse, you know, sort of stayed kind of a painter.
02:15:32
MOON:
The canvas.
PLAGENS:
The canvas with those glass beads in there and stuff like that. Yeah.
But, I mean, that was too far over into the airy-fairy kind of cloudy
phenomenological, another part. I’m in the middle. Painters are in the
middle.
MOON:
Well, I believe we talked a little bit about your art before we finish
this session, so—
PLAGENS:
What time we got? Two?
MOON:
Yeah.
PLAGENS:
Okay, that’s fine.
MOON:
Is that okay?
PLAGENS:
Yeah.
MOON:
Okay. And then we can pick up on this tomorrow.
PLAGENS:
Okay, because we got the place rented till one-thirty, but I don’t think
anybody—she’ll knock on the door when the time is up.
MOON:
Okay. So you never deviated from abstraction after the MFA program? Or—
PLAGENS:
Yes, I did.
MOON:
Okay. What did your art look like when you’re working—
PLAGENS:
Well, mostly I’m an abstract painter, and I kept doing that. I had a
show in 1971 at Riko Mizuno, where I did these figurative drawings. I
don’t know why I started doing them. I turned thirty and I decided I
would make a drawing for each year of my life from a photograph. Okay?
02:16:45
MOON:
Mm-hmm.
PLAGENS:
So what I did was I took pencils and I sharpened them, and I had all
different kind of pencils from 6H to 6B, and I’d do a freehand rectangle
and then I would copy from a photograph, only I would copy just without
gridding, without making any proportion, starting from the top down. And
when the pencil got dull, I’d put it over here and pick out another
pencil randomly. So you went from the kind of look of a 3H to a 2B to an
H to a 4. You know what I mean?
MOON:
So, a different—yeah.
PLAGENS:
And everything would get all out of proportion, but it’d end up with
this eerily lookalike. And I don’t know how I showed them to Riko or she
saw them in the studio. She came over one time and she liked them, said,
“I’ll give you a show.” So I had a show of them at Riko Mizuno.
MOON:
And these were personal photographs of—
02:18:46
PLAGENS:
Mm-hmm, from family photographs, and usually I was in them, but
sometimes not. And I got this wonderful review, best review I’ve ever
gotten, probably the only favorable one—well, no, that’s not true. I got
a good review of my retrospective at USC from David Pagel. But William
Wilson gave me this wonderful review of the drawing show at Riko. So I
went off that, and I’ve done figurative drawing and I make collages and
things. I call myself “an impure abstract painter,” but the dealer I
show with from time to time, Texas Gallery in Houston, Fredericka
Hunter, said all abstract painters are impure abstract painters. [Moon
laughs.] Even if they don’t think so. But I did that. That was a little
off the track, but everything else has been abstract painters.
By the way, I just did a drawing like those ones I did in ’71, because
this magazine, I think it’s online only, called Tablet magazine, it’s a
Jewish cultural magazine out of New York, they had a bunch of artists, I
found out, they’re doing a profile on Jerry Saltz, and they said, “Would
you do a portrait of Jerry Saltz? Because you’re of the artists I want
to include.” So I got a photograph of Jerry Saltz off the web and I did
that same thing. They liked it. [Moon laughs.] And I got paid for it. I
got paid, you know, nicely. So I revivified that thing. I said, “What am
I going to do? You know, I could do some collage. No, I’m going to do
that drawing like I used to.” So, no, I’ve always been an abstract
painter pretty consistently. I mean, if you look—I’m German, partly, so
my work is one step at a time, plunkety, plunkety, plunkety, plunkety,
plunk, you know, and if you look back, you see, oh, it changed to that.
I’m not one of those people that makes big breaks.
MOON:
When you got the Guggenheim fellowship, the portfolio that you sent, how
did you represent yourself in terms of your work?
PLAGENS:
Abstract painting. I don’t know whether I sent those drawings along or
not. I got the Guggenheim, I was told by John Coplans, who always liked
to puncture your balloon, he said, “The reason you got the Guggenheim
is— “I told them you were going to be around the art world for a long
time, so they might as well get it over with and give you one now and
get you out of their hair.” [Moon laughs.] That’s what the told me that
he said. I don’t know.
02:21:02
MOON:
Well, so first you’re represented by Jan Baum in L.A.?
PLAGENS:
Yeah. It was called Iris—Baum Silverman, it was called.
MOON:
Baum Silverman.
PLAGENS:
Yeah. Iris Silverman. Because they used to show African art, too, you
know, and Iris Silverman collected, so she was the African—and then it
was Jan Baum.
MOON:
And then so how did you—can you just talk about maybe how you built up
your gallery career as an artist?
PLAGENS:
What gallery career as an artist?
MOON:
Well, for example, how did you start to show and become represented by
Nancy Hoffman in New York?
02:23:49
PLAGENS:
Nancy Hoffman came to L.A. Somebody brought her around. She said she
liked these things, or I took her some things on a trip to New York and
she said—she opened in ’72. I showed with her first in ’74, and she
said, “I like these things and I’ll show you.” And she’s showed me ever
since. She hasn’t gotten rich off of me and I haven’t gotten rich off of
her. It probably bothers her that I write. That’s something that’s
always been a kind of thorn in the side, because Nancy’s a very nice
person and she doesn’t like contentious sort of stuff. There are three,
four, maybe, artists, you know, Frank Owen, Howard Buchwald, Rupert
Deese, and me, maybe, you know, as the kind of gritty old abstract
artists, because Nancy’s taste lies otherwise. But Nancy in the
seventies was one of the first galleries to have a sort of eclectic—or
used to be that, you know, Castelli showed Pop art and Abstract
Expressionism. Bykert showed a certain kind of abstraction. Frumkin’s in
Chicago, but then there were figurative—you know. And Nancy always had
one of each, you know. She had abstract painters, she had Joseph
Raffael, she had Rafael Ferrer, she had Viola Frey, she had Carole—oh,
god, what’s her name? Photorealistic watercolor. And Nancy’s taste tends
toward the pretty, you know, the nice-looking, and my fight as a painter
is to try to make them beautiful ugly. I want them to be good-looking on
my own terms, so sometimes mine aren’t—you know. But she’s stuck with
me, in spite of all this stuff, and doesn’t sell a lot.
But she’s an absolute master of installing a show. If I take the work
in—I mean, I had my lesson one time when she said—I came to New York,
spotted the show. She said, “Why don’t you go to lunch.” So I went off
and had a beer and a hamburger, something like that. Then I came back
and about 30 percent of the show was missing and they were spotted all
differently, and went up on the wall, it was perfect. She knows her
space and she has one of the best, you know, feng shui, feng whatever it
is, you know, senses of what belongs where. But I just took her some
stuff and she said, “Okay, I like this. I’ll show it.” And it’s sort of
stuck, you know. But, you know, I don’t have—you know. I’ve shown with
Texas Gallery a couple of times. I showed with Tim Eaton in Florida.
Joel Bass and I had a show at Berggruen one time in the seventies. But I
don’t sell a lot, so, you know, it gets critical pretty good. I get good
press. I mean, I had a show at Nancy Hoffman that probably one of the
most rave reviews Michael Kimmelman ever wrote, but it doesn’t translate
into—because I think—we’ll get into this subsequently, but, you know,
it’s writing and being an artist at the same time. Don’t do it. I tell
everybody don’t do it, you know. If you’re an artist interested in
writing, write some theoretical essays, keep a journal, but for
crissake, don’t go out and write criticism about other artists’ work.
02:25:44
MOON:
Is it—why not? Or what do you mean by that?
PLAGENS:
Because let’s say a museum is getting up a survey show of, you know,
paintings done with blue, and you do blue paintings. Should they put you
in it? Well, if they don’t, they’re afraid that you’re going to come and
write a bad review because they slighted you. If they do put you in, you
know, they’re afraid that people will think that they only did it to
curry favor with you. Gallery doesn’t want to represent you because, you
know, they live in a network of community of dealers. And what if you’re
out there and you write a bad—you’re with Gallery A, you write a bad
review of an artist in Gallery B, dealer that owns Gallery B is pissed
off at the person, says, “Why do you keep showing that person?” I mean,
it’s pretty clear. It’s like, you know, I’ve seen it. When I was at
Newsweek, David Ansen, the film critic, really good popular magazine
film critic, probably the best by a poll one time, you know, he used to
write screenplays and couldn’t get anywhere with them because there was
always that “If we produce your movie, people will think we’re just
doing it to get good reviews for our other movies from you.” And I used
to have various rote replies. I’d say, “Every artist I know in New York
practices art criticism, only they practice it over pitchers of beer at
Puffy’s Tavern or at Magoo’s,” you know, in the old days. It’s just
putting it into print that—you know. So I would not advise it.
02:27:45
MOON:
And it also made things, you mentioned earlier, uncomfortable with your
friends who were artists.
PLAGENS:
Little bit. There was always that kind of thing in the air, you know,
and if you go to an art opening or a party, it just simply distorts
people’s social dealings with you. They’re either sucking up or they’re
kind of growling at you, you know. They’re kind of looking at you out of
the corner of your eye. And either way, it distorts it. Now, that being
said, for fifteen years at Newsweek, it was kind of okay because nobody
really—Newsweek wasn’t of any consequence in the gallery art world. I
would write—just museums would get pissed off if I said, you know, some
show at the museums, some big show at the Met was terrible. But museums
are institutions that they’re resilient. They take a punch and then they
just, “Okay, fine. We’re on to the next thing.” And their PR department
sends you the catalog and the press kit for the next show. Some dealers
are like that. I mean the big ones are like that. I could write the
worst review in the world for the Wall Street Journal at a show at
Gagosian, and I’d still get all the stuff for the next one. It’s either
the Wall Street Journal doesn’t count that much or, you know, Larry,
it’s such a big operation, but all the ones—
MOON:
Yeah. Impervious.
PLAGENS:
Paula Cooper, Gladstone, Gagosian, Luhring Augustine—
MOON:
David Zwirner.
PLAGENS:
Yeah, Zwirner and who’s the other one? There’s another big one down
there. Zwirner’s on—Hauser & Wirth.
02:29:43
MOON:
Hauser & Wirth. Right.
PLAGENS:
Yeah. There’s a weird one for you, but this is—Hauser Wirth &
Schimmel, you know.
MOON:
Yeah. [laughs]
PLAGENS:
Yeah. Because I like Paul and I’ve been—he, like, lost 100 pounds or
something, didn’t he? Do you see his pictures?
MOON:
No, not recently.
PLAGENS:
Oh, he used to be really heavy, and I’ve seen pictures of him lately.
MOON:
I’ve seen him in that state, but not recently, yeah.
PLAGENS:
Oh, pictures at the gala, he looks—but he’s been very nice, because when
my Bruce Nauman book came out, I did a panel at the Baltimore Museum,
conversation with Paul Schimmel and me about Bruce Nauman, moderated by
a curator, and he came—not out, but did it. He was really friendly and
nice. But it’s sort of the—it’s the Jeffrey Deitch, Paul Schimmel,
people who go back and forth between the world of dealing and the world
of museums. Do you believe—well, now he’s a dealer, so it’s—you know
what I mean? But it’s Hauser Wirth & Schimmel. I think only in L.A.,
right?
MOON:
Yeah, only in L.A.
PLAGENS:
Yeah, and they have that 9,000, 9 million square feet out someplace.
MOON:
Yeah. It’s not open yet, but will be soon.
PLAGENS:
Yeah. So I mean it’s a conflict of interest. I wouldn’t do it. I don’t
know anybody who—I mean, Don Judd did it in the old days.
02:31:22
MOON:
Artist and critic?
PLAGENS:
There are artists who write, you know, but they’ll mostly write
self-promoting things or theoretical things that back up their own
stuff, or if they have an agenda, which is not a bad word with me, if
you’re an LGBTQ artist and you write something about identity artist, if
you’re a fourth- or fifth-wave feminist artist and you write—That kind
of stuff, that doesn’t hurt you. You’re stickin’ up for the team. And
also the other thing is collectors like a nice, smooth world. They like
cocktail parties and everybody being nice to one another. They don’t
like conflict and they don’t like that kind of stuff either. So—
MOON:
To have a real conversation?
PLAGENS:
And this’ll come up. It hasn’t happened to me very often. It happened to
me this last Christmas season. Barbara Haskell and Leon Botstein, who’s
her husband, he’s the president of Bard, you know, and they always have
a big holiday thing I’ve gone to the last two or three years in their
loft, and Barbara’s exceedingly nice. So everybody’s there, and we pass
each other and I’m there and here comes Mel Bochner and Barbara says,
“Oh, Peter, you and Mel Bochner know each other, don’t you?” And I say,
“Yeah. Hi, Mel,” and I stick out my hand. And he says, “I can’t shake
hands with you after that shit review you wrote of my show.” I really
panned it in the Wall Street Journal. He had a show at the Jewish
Museum, “Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah,” you know. Have you seen those?
02:33:22
MOON:
Nuh-uh.
PLAGENS:
Different thicknesses and colors and all that sort of stuff. Obviously I
used the obvious line against it, that the whole body of work is rather
blah. And it was a terrible show, and everybody—most people thought so,
although I don’t need people to back me up, you know. It’s my opinion.
But he said that and he walked on by, and he walked on by, so I said
over my shoulder, “Hurt that much, did it?” [Moon laughs.] And then as
he goes back into the crowd, he said, “You more than me.” And then it
was over. Barbara said, “What was that all about?” I said, “I wrote a
negative review of his show.” And then Barbara said, “Oh, that’s
terrible. If he’s going to be like that, I’m not going to invite him
back next year.” And I said, “Barbara, I don’t want to be the cause of
people not being invited back.” [Moon laughs.] But it doesn’t happen
very often. I mean, scarier thing is there was an artist one time named
Loren Madsen. Do you know him? Sculptor.
MOON:
Nuh-uh.
PLAGENS:
Showed at David McKee in New York, but he used to show with Riko. And I
wrote a review of his work. He had a show at Riko’s when I was still in
L.A., and it was a great piece in the corner, but the rest of it wasn’t
as good, and he had this really good idea, took a long, thin bronze rod
and put a brick on top of it, then he leaned it in the corner so it was
stable. Then he did the same thing outside, so he finally built this
whole plane of bricks held up by bronze rods, but they were leaning. You
see what I mean?
02:35:15
MOON:
Mm-hmm.
PLAGENS:
So it was this wonderful little forest of these thin bronze, brass rods,
glowing, and then this brick thing coming out, I don’t know, to about
here. I said this was really good. Then there were some other pieces in
the show that I said were too tricky by half. So he had this show at
David McKee and I went to it, not to write about it, just to see it, and
he came up to me and he said, “You know that review you wrote of my show
at Riko’s a long time ago?” I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “Really made me
think, and I changed my work on account of it.” And I said, “Oh, my god,
that’s the last thing I want to happen, is somebody changing their work
on account of something I said.” I said, “I don’t even want students
changing their work on account of something I say.” [Moon laughs.]
MOON:
Well, maybe one last question just to follow up on that. When you—well,
maybe it’s changed, but when you do write criticism, who do you think
about being on the other side and reading it? Or do you not really think
about that?
PLAGENS:
No, I do think about it, and that’s one of the things about writing as
opposed to doing art. It’s why writers accept editors and artists don’t.
I mean, a painter doesn’t come along and, you know, those are scandalous
stories about Clement Greenberg telling Morris Louis, “I think you
should take the—.” Right?
02:36:41
MOON:
Mm-hmm.
PLAGENS:
“Just cut that.” But writers accept editors. You have to have another
pair of eyes. I mean, at least Laurie has to read what I write. So
what’s that mean? So the myth of I just write it for myself isn’t there
as it is with art sometimes. I just paint. You have an audience in mind.
And I try to be a pro about it. My audience is the readership of the
publication for whom I’m writing, and I sort of know with Newsweek it
was one thing, with Artforum it was another, although Artforum was as
close because members of the club, so you can kind of express yourself
and use what Sandy Ballatore—you ever heard of her?
MOON:
Nuh-uh.
PLAGENS:
Look her up. She used to be a critic and write and things. She used to
call “artblat” that kind of language. “Transgresses the cultural
hybridity of—.” You know. She used to call it “artblat.” Have you ever
seen this website called Arty Bollocks?
MOON:
Nuh-uh.
PLAGENS:
Well, you’ve got to go to it.
MOON:
[laughs] Arty Bollocks.
02:38:20
PLAGENS:
Yeah. B-o-l-l-o-c-k-s. Arty Bollocks. But it’s basically—it randomly
writes art stuff that basically makes sense. “The hybridity of the
transgression on the reification,” and they’ll put together a sentence
for you. [Moon laughs.] It’s hilarious.
But like for the Wall Street Journal, I know who the reader is. It’s
somebody with money, a little bit, that’s interested, but culturally a
little bit alert, that maybe is a member of the Museum of Modern Art or
the Whitney, and they know a little bit about things, so I can make
references to William Wiley, Jasper Johns, even, I mean, Turrell, Joan
Mitchell, you know. I don’t have to explain those. But I try to keep it
clear and I try to put in a little—I hate this word, I’ll probably
regret saying this to you, but a little lesson, you know. Like, “This
show should teach you something about—.”
MOON:
Yeah.
PLAGENS:
And like with the Mel Bochner thing, with the “Blah Blah Blah,” it’s
like Conceptualism and painting don’t mix. It’s a foot in both camps,
you know. It’s word art, but then it’s got all this juice around it, and
they don’t really—it’s the worst of both worlds rather than the best.
What they call in journalism a takeaway, right? So, yeah, I’m conscious
of that.
MOON:
When you were a critic back in the late sixties and the seventies,
writing for Artforum, did it make you self-conscious knowing that your
friends and all the people around you in the art world would be reading
your—
PLAGENS:
No, I got off on it in my younger days, yeah. It’s cool, you know.
MOON:
[laughs] The little bit of power you have is—
PLAGENS:
The little bit of power you have. It wasn’t so much power as attention,
fame, vanity. You don’t want to have actual power. You just want people
to know who you are and say, “Oh, there he goes.” That kind of thing. It
was fine. It was sort of like, you know, I don’t know, being in a
fraternity and putting on aftershave because you think the girls like
it. [Moon laughs.] And then you get to be mature and—
02:40:24
MOON:
Mm-hmm.
PLAGENS:
It isn’t—that doesn’t count anymore whether you have the right kind of
surfboard or not. No, it didn’t make me self-conscious. It made me a
little bit antsy, though. I was always afraid that there’d be a
fistfight in a gallery or somebody would throw a drink in my face. [Moon
laughs.]
MOON:
Okay. [sighs] Well, we’ll pick up here when we start again tomorrow.
PLAGENS:
Okay. [End of October 14, 2015 interview]
00:00:20
MOON:
Okay. This is the third session with Peter Plagens, and at the end of
the last session, you were recommending that artists not go into art
criticism because of conflicts of interest.
PLAGENS:
Yeah.
MOON:
And, you know, actually something that you mentioned was that Fidel
Danieli was also an artist—
PLAGENS:
Yes, he was.
MOON:
—major art critic in the L.A. area. Did you talk to him about—were you
able to talk about the difficulties of occupying both of those positions
and experiences?
00:02:39
PLAGENS:
I didn’t talk to Fidel much. There was a little bit of—not animosity. We
did not dislike each other, but there was a little bit of
competitiveness, not with me but—yeah, I probably felt it, too, but like
who would get assigned what or, you know, whose reviews would be, etc.,
you know, because there was a time when Fidel’s doing this and I’m doing
that, and we’re the West Coast guys. We’re the L.A. guys for Artforum.
The other thing, there was a little bit of a competitiveness. I don’t
know whether competitiveness—and I don’t want to demean Fidel, and I’m
attributing something to him that might be general. He taught at Valley
College, which is a community college. I taught at Northridge, which was
a state university. There used to be a little kind of what was a kind of
bristliness on the part of some people who taught at Valley College,
that they were teaching in a community college and therefore they were
looked down upon by people who—we had the art majors. Right? The truth
of it was that—remember I said that a lot of these really good kids came
to Northridge because they didn’t have the grades to go to UCLA and they
didn’t have the money to go to Otis or Art Center or, you know, later
Cal Arts, so they ended up at Northridge, and they were good, you know.
I gave you some names. Also a lot of the people who were good at
Northridge came from Valley College. They went to the community college
first and then transferred into Northridge. I can’t give you names, but
I just remembered there were a lot. And there were also some people who
were real—I can’t remember any names beside Fidel, but there were other
people who taught at Valley, as they called it, who were really good.
So but I was never like that, and I always thought that Fidel, who was
really good, you know, Fidel, to me, was a little standoffish, for
whatever his reasons were. I mean, I didn’t take offense at any of this.
I would just notice things about. And I’m sort of overly talkative. I’ll
go up and say hello to somebody and like that, and Fidel, kind of, you
know, sat back. I don’t know whether that had anything to do with his
sexual orientation or not, because for a while, you know, it was Fidel
Danieli and Edie Danieli, and Edie worked—I’m trying to remember what.
She worked for a gallery. That was part of her job, you know. She was at
the desk. I forget, Morgan Freeman, something like that. I forget. And,
you know, then there was that moment, you know, when Fidel was
finally—remember him walking into a show with his what I assumed was
boyfriend, and they were both, you know, totally heavy leather kind of
thing. So maybe there was—Fidel just thought, “This is my writing. My
personal social life is something else.”
00:04:04
MOON:
Mm-hmm. Were there other critics in the city that you were close with
and could talk shop with or—
PLAGENS:
Not really, no, not really, because first thing, see, is I’m an artist.
I did talk to Bill Wilson. I’m really sorry—somebody ought to do
something, you know. He has this zillion-word, 900-page manuscript about
art in Southern California, and he died before it could get published. I
talked to him on the phone a couple of times near the end of his life,
you know, and I didn’t talk to him much, you know. He was the number-two
Times critic after Henry Seldis, but Bill was the critic that everybody
looked to because he did the gallery shows, the contemporary shows. He
was sort of like—it’s not an exact parallel, but he was Roberta Smith
and Seldis was Michael Kimmelman. But Seldis was much more reactionary
or conservative, and he took the gold-plated museum shows, for himself,
and Bill did the shows in the galleries, you know, in the trenches, so
to speak. I did have a drink one time at a pub called The Bull & the
Bear or something like that, that Henry Seldis hang out with, because he
called me up one time and said we had to have a drink and talk things
out. It was sort of like Obama and Putin kind of deal. [Moon laughs.]
Because I wrote for Artforum and I was sort of contentious, and like
that, and also Artforum thought Henry Seldis was full of shit. We
thought he was like the Hilton Kramer of L.A., you know, without knowing
who Hilton Kramer was. He wasn’t quite that conservative. So I forget
what transpired, but I had to meet him. I met him there. It was his
little hangout. It was at the end of the strip just before Doheny,
before it becomes Beverly Hills. I talked to Bill Wilson a bit. Funny
story. I mean, little thing. One time there was a preview of all this
“Art and Technology” stuff, I think before the Art and Technology show
at this hangar down in the naval air base down in Orange County, and
they had all this stuff, Oldenburg’s ice bag and bunch of other things
that there were going to go to the World’s Fair in Osaka. I think that
was 1970 and we—
00:06:43
MOON:
The press were invited to that?
PLAGENS:
Yeah, yeah, and we were down there. It was a big hangar, and it had all
this stuff in it. And somebody, I forget who, drove home. It was a
carful, and it might have had people like Sandy Ballatore and Kristine
McKenna and a few other people in it. It was a big car, and Bill was in
there. And I forget what—I wasn’t driving, and Bill was there, and
everybody was a little drunk. Somebody—I just remember the remark; I
really loved it—somebody said something about a show of Larry Rivers,
“Bill, what do you think of Larry Rivers?” Bill’s back there in the back
seat and pronounces—kind of drunk, he says, “My opinion of Larry Rivers
is a matter of record.” [laughter] That was it, you know, like we all
should know it.
MOON:
Yeah.
00:09:08
PLAGENS:
He’s a likable guy, and he always looks slightly ill because he had dark
circles under his eyes, but he really tried, and he was on the side of
the artist. But you’re asking were there other critics that I, you know,
that I talked to, other art writers. No, because there were—you know,
there were rivalries. Like Jane Livingston wrote for Art in America.
Jane Livingston gave me a somewhat negative review of Sunshine Muse.
That’s another story. You know, Sunshine Muse is—the San Francisco
people reviewed it negatively. Alfred Frankenstein in the Chronicle
reviewed it negatively, basically because, I thought—I mean, you’re
getting my opinion, right—that it said that L.A.’s art was more
important or meaningful or, you know, than San Francisco. And I believe
that. It’s true. I thought and I said it right there in the book, that
the most important stuff, you know, 1972 is when the manuscript was
turned in, the last photograph in the book is Chris Burden, you know,
with his camera hung nude by the rope. That was like the last work,
okay? So it went up to about there.
And I thought, I said, you know, the most important L.A. modern art was
basically the L.A. look. It was Irwin and Turrell and the Minimalism
that led up to it. That was L.A.’s contribution, just like Abstract
Expressionism and Minimalism and—you know what I mean? And I was in that
sort of thing, that influence of Coplans, you know. There’s art that was
important and influential and, you know, etc., etc. Ed Ruscha is a
little underrated because he’s not that influential. He’s just there,
you know. He’s our Andy Warhol, a little bit cleaner, you know. Then in
L.A. it was reviewed negatively by Henry Seldis because it said even
though it was a book about West Coast art, “Look, you know, we’re not
talking New York here. New York is the more important thing.” And then
finally what saved my ass was on the front page of the Sunday Arts and
Leisure section above the fold, you know, the journalistic thing, Hilton
Kramer just praised it to the skies. Now, this was Hilton Kramer in 1974
before he was Hilton Kramer of The New Criterion, you know, he was—
MOON:
In the eighties?
00:10:42
PLAGENS:
Yeah. He wasn’t known as the real conservative, and probably he was
considered something of an improvement over John Canaday.
MOON:
Well, maybe we can actually back up a little bit and talk about how
Sunshine Muse came about. Was this an idea that you brought to a
publisher or were you asked to do this by [unclear]?
PLAGENS:
I was asked. John Coplans funneled it to me and said that University of
California Press wanted a book on West Coast art, and would I write it.
He thought I should write it, and I did, and the first manuscript was a
total failure. It went to Coplans. He was kind of the editor, between
him and—I forget the woman’s name at Praeger. Not University of
California Press.
MOON:
Praeger.
PLAGENS:
Praeger was the original publisher. And they asked him and he funneled
it to me, and I gave them a manuscript. It was vanilla. It was very
dutiful and included everybody, and I even had this little idea that was
sort of, I thought, would solve the problem, and it just made things
worse. You can’t mention all the artists, right, in the book, so I had
these little sections at the end of each chapter that would say “Other
Artists,” and then in smaller type there was just a list of people, like
you should go look up. Now, in the age of the Internet, that would work
a little bit, because you could go look them up. But it was like, I
always thought the, you know, egregious part of Judy Chicago’s The
Dinner Party is there are those women who get a place at the table and
there are those women who are just little tiles on the floor, you know.
I mean, for a work that’s supposed to be anti-hierarchical, this is a
little— And it was a bad idea, and Coplans climbed all over me and said,
“You know, you’ve got to rewrite it.” He was sort of the editor. He was
the editor for Praeger.
00:12:44
MOON:
Right from the beginning, it was West Coast, it was not just Los
Angeles, but Northern California and the Pacific Northwest?
PLAGENS:
Yes, it was West Coast, and the book was called Sunshine Muse: Modern
Art on the West Coast. Credit where due, my ex-wife, Joyce Wisdom,
thought up the title, you know, which is a really good title. The
subsequent book I published, which was an anthology in that series that
Donald Kuspit edited for something called UMI Press, which everybody
thought was University of Michigan but it wasn’t, but it was in Ann
Arbor. It was called American Art Criticism, and there was about twenty
volumes, each one with a different writer, with a little white cover
with your signature, you know. There’s Pincus-Witten, and I came along.
Anyway, I titled that book Moonlight Blues. Sunshine Muse, Moonlight
Blues. I thought this all matched. No. So it came from Praeger, and
Praeger had, as I understood it later, they had an ambition to do a
series of books, you know, kind of modest hardbound and then paperbacks,
mostly.
MOON:
Of surveys?
PLAGENS:
Of geographic slices of American art. There’d be one on like Chicago and
the Midwest, and then there’d be Texas and then southern.
00:14:07
MOON:
Yeah.
PLAGENS:
And it didn’t work out. I don’t know what the problem was, but the idea
never materialized. Now, Praeger sort of changed and, you know, had
publisher troubles and, you know, Praeger was an art-book publisher and
then they weren’t and then they were again. The second thing that
Sunshine Muse suffered was it was meant to be just a kind of a primer,
30,000 words, that’s all it was, that’s half the length of a detective
novel, and get everything in. There was the idea that, okay, this would
be—not your Cliff’s Notes, but slightly. And then people would come in
and fill in, and nobody ever did, at least immediately. Since then, yes,
in museum catalogs, you know. But it sort of got—you know, I used to get
defensive about the book because it was sort of hung out to dry, you
know. “Well, you left out this. You left—you didn’t fully explain this.”
It was like, “Well, dude, it’s—”
MOON:
It wasn’t intended to do that.
PLAGENS:
“thirty-thousand words and it was an introduction, and there were
supposed to be other people.” So other people didn’t come through, you
know. Fidel didn’t write a book. Coplans didn’t write a book. Jane
Livingston didn’t write a book. Seldis, Bill Wilson, you name them—Sandy
Ballatore, Suzanne Muchnic, whom I really love. I thought all those
people were going to kind of write books, you know.
MOON:
But that didn’t happen until later with a different—
PLAGENS:
It didn’t happen till later. I mean, I didn’t keep track after a while,
but no, it didn’t, it didn’t happen until later.
00:16:06
MOON:
Wait. So Coplans tore apart your first draft because there wasn’t enough
narrative and it was too—
PLAGENS:
It wasn’t opinionated enough. It was just vanilla. It was too—if it was
a Newsweek story, they would have called it “list-y.” “It’s too list-y.”
It was like a list. Chapter One, well, there was this thing that took
place, and here are the artists and this is what they did, description.
Chapter Two, there was this thing, here’s the artists, this is what they
did. This is kind of how it came about. He said, “No, it’s got to have a
little oomph to it.” So I completely rewrote it, and it worked.
MOON:
When did you start writing? The manuscript, you said, was submitted in
’72?
PLAGENS:
Two. By the time it came out—I mean, the first one was ’72. By the time
it came out, it was almost ’75. It came out in December of ’74.
MOON:
How long did you spend writing the—when did you first embark on the
project?
PLAGENS:
Seventy.
MOON:
In ’70?
PLAGENS:
Yeah.
MOON:
And when you were writing it, what sources were you using or did you—I
mean, especially for the contemporary art part, were you talking to
collectors or dealers to get information?
PLAGENS:
No. I wanted to use published sources because I wanted it to have a
certain remove to it. I don’t know. I certainly haven’t read it for a
long time, and I don’t know whether there are any, like, fresh quotes in
there from live people, you know.
00:17:39
MOON:
Not many, if there are any.
PLAGENS:
I didn’t do it like that. I didn’t talk to people. But I’d been writing
criticism in L.A. since I came back. I think the dates I gave you for
that “L.A. Letter,” I mean the reviews I did, I think it was long—it was
like ’69 to ’76, it was like seven years, right? And I’d written stuff
before. So I said, “I don’t really need to go out and talk to people,
because I’ve been out there on the side—.”
MOON:
In the trenches.
PLAGENS:
In the trenches, to use that cliché, yes.
MOON:
[laughs] In Sunshine Muse toward the end, you—
PLAGENS:
You mean the pessimism?
MOON:
Exactly, yeah, the kind of tone that there’s a decline into pluralism.
PLAGENS:
Yeah, yeah. I think there was a chapter titled “Decline and Fallow,”
like decline and fall, you know, and it was, but you have to remember a
couple of things. One, there was a severe economic recession going on.
MOON:
At the beginning of the seventies.
PLAGENS:
It was the beginning of the seventies. It was the gas lines.
MOON:
The oil crisis.
PLAGENS:
It was the—you know, you could only buy gas every other day, depending
on your license plate number. Do you know about that?
MOON:
I read about it.
PLAGENS:
If you had an odd number, it was Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. If it was
an even number, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Gas stations were closed on
Sunday. They were supposed to be. I mean, it was that. There was the
recession, Gerald Ford, you know, and all that stuff, and there was a
lot of, you know, just trouble. I mean, you know, the Pasadena Museum
was collapsing, the Museum of Modern Art. The galleries were—this is all
vague now—galleries moving off of La Cienega, the County Museum not
doing anything, and you had, to begin with in the sixties, you know, you
had the whole Rick Brown fiasco at the County.
00:19:56
MOON:
At LACMA.
PLAGENS:
Yeah. I mean, just think of—it’s like, you know, all the stuff we’re
seeing in the Middle East now and everything, you know, Afghanistan
today, that we’re going to keep 10,000 troops there, and all that sort
of stuff, you know, it started with the idiot decision to invade Iraq in
2003, and people said, “You’re going to reap the whirlwind.” Well, we
are. Okay? Maybe that’s too big a parallel, but when they fired Rick
Brown because of all those—you know, this is one of the things about
L.A. L.A. then did not—there were a few people, you know, there were
like a half a dozen really good collectors, you know, Betty Freeman,
David Bright, Robert—
MOON:
Betty—
PLAGENS:
Huh?
MOON:
Betty Asher.
PLAGENS:
Betty Asher, Robert Rowan.
MOON:
Marcia Weisman.
PLAGENS:
Marcia Weisman, the Weismans. There was like a few, right? But it was
full of all these nouveau riche people that wanted to throw their weight
around. You know what I mean? So one of your hideous decisions was the
firing of Rick Brown, because Rick Brown wanted Mies van der Rohe to
build the County Museum, that was his choice of architect, and they
wanted William Pereira, you know, who’s B or B-minus, at best, on an
international scale. There are some nice Pereira buildings, Luckman and
Pereira, around. And then you had that awful thing. I’m not an
architectural historian, but that whole thing where they wouldn’t put
their names on a building, so each donor, you had to have the Ahmanson
and the Lytton and the—you know.
00:21:50
MOON:
Hammer.
PLAGENS:
And the Hammer, yeah, on that hideous plaza, you know. And ever since
then, they’ve been trying to remove the carbuncle of—that’s what Prince
Charles called something, famously, reactionary of some modern art, was
a carbuncle on the face of London. But they’d been trying to—you know,
when they built the Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer thing, right, it’s to hide
that piece of shit from Wilshire Boulevard, so you don’t see it, right?
Then they decide that thing doesn’t work, so we’re going to get Rem
Koolhaas to build a great big thing over it, and then that’s going to
cost a billion dollars.
MOON:
And never happened.
PLAGENS:
So we’re going to have—
MOON:
Renzo Piano do the new building.
PLAGENS:
Yeah. Then you have some—you know, Renzo Piano, the BCAM, it’s not bad,
you know. I don’t know who did—he did the Resnick Pavilion in back of
it? Who did that other thing?
00:22:53
MOON:
Oh, I don’t remember that one.
PLAGENS:
But the one really interesting thing—I mean, this is off of—my favorite
place in the County Museum is the Japanese Pavilion, the Bruce Goff, who
was a nutcase protégé of Frank Lloyd Wright’s. He built—I’ve been in
that house, you know, those homes in Norman, Oklahoma, that are very
famous around there, and he has that one house that’s a tower—a
drilling, you know, thing that goes all the way down, and it goes up
like that, and then the roof is sort of suspended as it spirals down and
gets wider. It’s called the Bavinger House, and it’s got stone. He’s
goofy. And then that pavilion. You’ve been in there. I think it’s—you
know, that’s where I like to go because it’s interesting. Anyway, now
you got—what’s his name? Zumthor, right?
MOON:
Peter Zumthor.
PLAGENS:
Yes, Peter Zumthor, an architect whom—I’m not an architect, but I have
opinions. I like—I’ve been to those baths in Vals, Switzerland that he
did. Wonderful. I went on a tour. I didn’t get to—we tried to make
reservations and, you know, have a spa, but couldn’t. Anyway, the
County, LACMA has been trying to obliterate that, so they fired Rick
Brown and then they got, I don’t know, Kenneth Donahue in after a while,
and then they had that horrible thing where they—remember they had a
director and a president, you know, who was an academic from UCLA. I
mean, I don’t want to say it’s dysfunctional, but they’ve had totally
fucked, you know, organizational things, everything, and it started with
not having Mies van der Rohe build the thing and we have to have a local
architect, you know. And you had the same thing in Pasadena for which,
you know, the famous lawsuit. You know that. The John Coplans lawsuit,
the Artforum issue where it had the beginning of the article in type on
the cover, and it was basically got sued over. Mrs. Ladd paid the
architect’s commission for the new Pasadena Museum, the one they built
in that park.
00:25:13
MOON:
Ladd & Kelsey.
PLAGENS:
Yeah. If they would hire her son Thornton Ladd, who was a sort of pretty
good hack shopping-center architect. I think there is a shopping center
somewhere out like Del Amo or something, and if you go there, it looks
just like the Pasadena Museum, you know. It’s got the rounded corners
and the burgundy stone and the— So he just took his Macy’s template
and—you know. I don’t want to get sued for this, but that was—and
Artforum lost the suit. She sued for libel and lost. So, anyway, these
problems—
MOON:
Well, it seems—well, it’s happening now in the present in terms of
problems arising with museums trying to have these huge capital
expansion plans primarily to fund architecture problems, which was also
happening in the sixties and seventies. You wrote an article in Artforum
about [Plagens laughs] the Long Beach Museum and how they wanted to
renovate and expand their building, but then you’re also linking it to
other institutions in Southern California.
PLAGENS:
Yeah, well, every—I mean, you know, it’s a problem. I mean, I went last
night to Tom Marione’s little conceptual art, “Drinking Beer is the
Highest Form of Art.” He’s being doing it for four years every
Wednesday. Charles Desmarais invited us. So I did go, and we just sat
around with a bunch of older artists, you know, Robert Bechtle and a few
people whose names I should have recognized but didn’t really old kind
of crowd. But it’s right across from the new SFMOMA. And I’m thinking,
this is part of the trouble with when you have a museum that the
building is a spectacle, you go inside and you want spectacle. It isn’t
you get inside and if you’re supposed to slow down and contemplate
something. You know, it’s a problem. So they’ve always had that problem
with museum expansions, and, you know, the building is a work of art,
etc., etc. Southern California, you know, lacked that sense of noblesse
oblige, meaning what used to be—what is now the Orange County Museum of
Art, right, was called Newport Harbor Art Museum, right?
00:27:42
MOON:
Right.
PLAGENS:
They had eight directors in ten years, seven, but one of them was hired
twice, fired and then a couple hired back, you know. I have a good
friend, older woman, Cathleen Gallander, who now lives in Austin, Texas.
She was the director for a while. There were all these, you know, car
dealers who were on the board of trustees, and that’s all they—you know,
they didn’t really know anything about art and they didn’t really
respect it, and all they want to do is move things around.
MOON:
Mm-hmm.
PLAGENS:
So museum expansion, new museum building, etc., etc., or it’s a
universal problem, or it’s a national, international problem, but I
always thought in those days in Southern California it was more acute
because Southern California was so nouveau riche. Everybody earned their
money last Tuesday opening a series of Ford dealerships, and ruined
things, particularly the County Museum. They didn’t do Mies and they
fired Rick Brown. Now, he might have done other things, you know, to
piss people off, but—
MOON:
Well, yeah, but then the County Museum did put on a number of—in terms
of museums after the demise of the Pasadena Art Museum—
PLAGENS:
Yeah.
00:29:18
MOON:
—was the popular perception that LACMA was doing a decent job in terms
of trying to support programs of contemporary artists, or do you think
that just on the ground, people were pretty dissatisfied?
PLAGENS:
On the ground, people were pretty dissatisfied. The perception was
Maurice Tuchman’s next spectacular, “Art and Technology.” It all started
with “Sculpture of the Sixties” in 1967. I always liked that. How can
you do a show 1967 of sculpture of the ‘60s? “Sculpture of the First
Two-Thirds of the Sixties,” that wouldn’t make a good title. “Sculpture
of the Sixties,” “Art and Technology,” the one about European art I’m
trying to remember, these big anthology shows that he would do. There’d
be a big spectacular. I can’t—there were about five of them. And that
seemed to be—and then, you know, there were a few artists that got—like,
you know, Billy Al Bengston, the famous sandpaper catalog cover, and he
did Irwin with the dot paintings. Turrell was at Pasadena Museum. And
then they would do those twenty-four younger Los Angeles artists.
MOON:
Which you’re in.
PLAGENS:
I was in. And then they had the Young Talent Award in the shows.
00:30:42
MOON:
Oh, right. That was one way in which they tried to build up their
collection because it meant that work would be donated?
PLAGENS:
I don’t know. I mean, I haven’t got a list. If you go back and look over
the Young Talent Award winners, did it really—
MOON:
Make a—
PLAGENS:
Did they get good, great artists early, or are they people that—you
know, I don’t know. I can’t remember. There’s a guy I’m going to have
dinner—I mean, he’ll be at dinner, Ricky Oginz. Did you ever hear of
him? O-g-i-n-z. He won one one time. His wife was the—did publicity at
the Getty, she’s now at the Jewish Museum here, Lori Starr. You know,
how great an artist is Ricky Oginz? I don’t know. The seventies were a
funny time in L.A. I mean, obviously they were a funny time anyplace.
New York, it was all crime and danger and grubby things in SoHo and
people getting mugged, and SoHo was a kind of a wasteland and like that.
L.A., there was this economic sort of thing, and Postmodernism trying
to—or Postminimalism and trying to settle in. I mean, these are all
vague, general impressions, you know. Didn’t settle in that well, you
know, once the L.A. look was kind of old news, Craig Kauffmann plastic
bubbles and Larry Bell cubes and walls and Robert Irwin’s light things
and Turrell’s—you know. Once that’s sort of okay, and the Pop, Ruscha
and Goode and not a whole lot of other people, really.
MOON:
During the seventies, there was the National Endowment and some money
that was—well, the seventies also are seen as a time of alternative art
spaces—
PLAGENS:
Yes.
00:32:46
MOON:
—in New York and also in Los Angeles.
PLAGENS:
Yeah, we had LAICA, which wasn’t, you know, the grubbiest. I mean, I
forget. There were places like LACE and the Women’s Building and—I don’t
remember them all. Yeah.
MOON:
Beyond Baroque?
PLAGENS:
Beyond Baroque. Beyond Baroque did—they had—
MOON:
Literary.
PLAGENS:
I always remember Beyond Baroque was sort of poetry readings and things.
My favorite, Everywoman’s Village, off the—what is the freeway?—the
number 5, you know, just over past, you know, when you first come past
the Ventura Freeway and you went out on the side, there was Everywoman’s
Village, but it was kind of a community place and studios, and a place
where, I guess, women—I never went there; I don’t know who was in
it—went to make art and they had workshops and stuff like that.
MOON:
The Market Street Program for a few years in Venice.
PLAGENS:
Oh, the Market Street Program. I was in that too. I was in a show
with—and this is the guy that’s hosting the dinner, I mean going to have
dinner, a fellow named Peter Gutkin, who’s a sculptor, a custom
furniture maker. That’s how he makes his money now. But you remember the
premise of the Market Street Program.
00:34:15
MOON:
Artists vote to choose who they want to exhibit?
PLAGENS:
The theory was this. And it was Robert Irwin and this computer guy named
Joshua Young. And the idea was that the way shows were chosen, museum
group shows and group shows, you know, there were two biases that always
screwed up things. There was the market bias, you know, these artists
are successful in the market, so we ought to choose them, you know, you
ought to show them. And there was the curatorial bias, which was the
taste of the curator, you know. So how are we going to get around that?
What we’re going to do is this. And this was in the real primitive days
of computers. We get a list of artists to start with. Say we get a
thousand artists and we send them a questionnaire. The questionnaire is
two questions. And we say, “Tell us ten other artists that you know,” or
twenty, I forget, “that you know, beside yourself, just that you know
are out there.” “Also tell us if you were in a group show, like five or
six artists, who would you like to show with?” Those come back and they
collate that. And from the first question they get a master list of all
these artists, right? And they do it a few times till things start to
repeat, right? And then you have a kind of database of here’s your mass
of artists, right? A little fuzzy around the edges because there are
artists that are mentioned by seventeen people, fourteen, thirteen, you
know, one. But you get—and I remember Irwin showing, or someone showing
me, if you print it out, you know, plot it on the paper, it’s basically
a kind of a cloudy sphere made up of dots, a dot for each artist, you
know, and the ones toward the center and then it gets fuzzy. But if you
took a Magic Marker and drew a line, you leave some out, but you get an
idea of here’s the mass of artists, right? Same thing with who would you
like to show with, and after a while these things start to repeat itself
and you get little clots of artists who would like to show with each
other. You just take a Magic Marker and draw a line around those, and
those are your shows. And I showed with Peter Gutkin and I forget who
else, and we were at the Pasadena Art Museum. I had these great big
paintings on paper with a couple little collages. Gutkin had sculpture.
I forget; there were two other artists in the show. There were four of
us, four or five. And that’s the way that it went. The idea was these
shows would select themselves on the basis of artist affinity.
00:37:07
MOON:
Do you think it worked? Do you think that people were—
PLAGENS:
Yeah, I thought the shows were pretty interesting, you know, but it’s
like anything else after a while. “Okay, fine,” you know. Maybe if you
had intervals and you would do it, you know, you would do it sort of
again. Maybe that’s the way they should do “Greater New York” at PS 1,
which is one of those big senior proms of art, you know. All these
people come out and get in them and—you know. But, you know, that’s art
bureaucracy. I don’t know how—there are other people who can figure out
systems and—you know. I personally like somebody really smart and really
sensitive, according to me, but I try to be a little open. Going out and
saying, “Okay, I think these are—.” Let’s take painting. “I think these
are the six best abstract painters working now who haven’t been done to
death because,” and put them up and write a little catalog essay about
them. I mean, if you think about it, and I haven’t thought about it that
deep, it’s a weird sort of thing trying to eliminate human bias in art,
you know. I mean, I guess eliminate human bias in heart surgery,
eliminate human bias in sending a probe to the planet Neptune, but, I
mean, why, for God’s sakes, eliminate human bias in art, which is a
poetic manifestation of human bias in its best form? [00:38:56]
MOON:
Do you think that it was a question of having more representation in
terms of who got to choose which artists were exhibited or given the
chance to exhibit?
00:40:37
PLAGENS:
Yeah, yeah. You know, I mean, my old friend Walter Gabrielson had a
wonderful thing because he didn’t, you know, have the career that he
should have had because he was out of phase with his style and
everything. And he says, “Everybody does shows of emerging artists, but
nobody does shows of submerging artists.” [Moon laughs] And my other
snotty conceptual art friend who’s very funny, Merwin Belin, whom I
think is totally underrated, he used to say sarcastically about things,
“It’s fresh. It’s today. It’s now.” I mean, he’s a guy in the music
business. He used to roadie for the Eagles and Blondie and people like
that. He’s a drummer. He’s sixty-five now, maybe—sixty-four. Sixty-four,
and he’s very irreverent. So there’s always that idea of, oh, there are
young artists, emerging artists, nobody showing them. They should get
shown. They should get—you know. And then essentially what happens is
they all get abandoned after that first thing. Now, you can say that’s
the way it goes. You can show 100 emerging artists, but after a while
you don’t want to show all 100 and some as midcareer surveys, and some
of them all fall away.
And then there’s artists’ interests. When we started LAICA, Billy Al
Bengston said, “You shouldn’t even bother with exhibiting.” He says,
“The filtering system as it exists now is very good. What you should do
is the magazine, the LAICA Journal, because that’s what we need is, you
know, artists written about.” “Well, sure, Billy, you know, you get
shown, right? And so what you want is you want more people writing
praising prose about your work.” So everybody has these little needs and
these things, you know, and so there’s always a great number of people
at the bottom of the pyramid, if you will, or in the entry-level kind of
things, and they want, you know, more artists getting chosen, shown, and
all that kind of stuff, you know.
MOON:
What was your involvement with LAICA?
PLAGENS:
Oh, I was in it from the beginning, because the guy who founded it, Bob
Smith, Robert Smith, taught at Northridge and he was a colleague. He
taught in the 3D department, he taught mainly 3D design, but he got more
and more interested in the art world and he was friends with the people
on the faculty who were. And he was also in our basketball game.
MOON:
At Santa Monica?
00:42:4500:45:04
PLAGENS:
At Santa Monica. Bob was like six-feet-three or six-feet-four and he was
a football player and he played at UCLA. I forget what his career was
like. There were a couple of them. There’s a black artist named Marvin
Harden, and Marvin came to UCLA as a wide receiver from a segregated
school system in Austin, Texas, wiry guy, and he taught at Northridge
all the time I was there. He wasn’t in that game, but Bob was there, and
we knew Bob and knew him—and he had the idea, you know, and “Are you on
board?”
So I was there and Walter was there, I mean, of the people I knew, in
the organizing committee meetings, etc., etc. And I was even on the
board for a while and I was chairman of the board for two years, which
says something bad about LAICA. You’re supposed to have a rich person as
chairman of the board, not some bloody artist. [Moon laughs.] And LAICA
was a sort of, you know, bastard organization, because, on the one hand,
it was an alternative space, nonprofit, you know, and, on the other
hand, given what the County Museum program was, it sort of functioned as
the Whitney Museum of Los Angeles. I mean, it was slick, and we wanted
to do like real shows, you know, not community opportunity shows and
stuff like that. This is where I came away with my feeling that—it’s
funny, I’m talking about everything but art, but I suppose we’ve got to
get this over with. [laughs] And I came away from my experience with
LAICA, which sort of ended in about ’77, ’78—’78, that if you have an
organization, you can be reform in content or reform in structure, but
you can’t do both. In other words, if you’re going to be an art
organization like LAICA and you’re going to show art that nobody else
shows and you’re going to—and we had strange things. I mean, we Stelarc.
We had Gina Pane, you know, cut her lips and bled all over her white
gown. Then the organization itself has to be conventional, traditional.
You have to have top-down leaders, you have to have a director, and a
this and a that, one of those management charts that goes like that.
Okay?
If you’re going to democratize it, like Marcia Tucker tried to do with
the New Museum when she first founded it, everybody got $20,000 a year,
the director, the custodian. Everybody got $20,000 a year. That didn’t
work out, for obvious reasons. I mean, obviously, the other side of that
spectrum is we have to pay CEOs zillions of dollars, because if we
don’t, we can’t compete for executive talent, which is bullshit business
world’s way of rewarding each, you know, each other. But there’s a
certain amount there; that sort of Maoist economic structure doesn’t
work. Okay? The New Museum, I don’t know what they do with Lisa
Phillips, how they’ve—but I remember they still hung onto the one thing
like in the back of the catalog where it’ll tell you, you know, all the
personnel at the museum was alphabetical by the person, so the director,
if the director’s name begins with W, it’s way down at the bottom. It’s
maddening if you’re writing about something and you want to find the
curator of the show. [laughter] So if you’re going to do radical art,
you should have a conservative organization. If you’re going to do a
radical democratic organization, you’re probably not going to be able to
show radical art, artists coming in and doing stuff, because then it
will just—chaos.
MOON:
If you want to show radical art, having a more conventional hierarchical
structure, you think, would be beneficial for why exactly?
00:47:18
PLAGENS:
Because the structure is more coherent, and then you can deal with the
“incoherence,” in quotes, of the art. If you’ve got to deal with
incoherent structure and incoherent art, it’s a double whammy. Now, I
don’t think it’s a black-and-white, either/or situation, you know. I
think you could have a blend, you know, a little reform here, a little
out on the edge here, you know, and you might work it.
MOON:
So one of the characteristics about LAICA was this kind of nobody had a
position permanently, and the idea was, I think, to make it a bit more
democratic.
PLAGENS:
Yeah.
MOON:
From your observations and experiences, did this cause tensions over
time or—
00:50:0900:52:45
PLAGENS:
Oh, yeah. I mean, that’s why the institution eventually—but MOCA came
along and, you know, kind of obviated it. I mean, we went from a
dollar-a-year ground-floor big space in Century City that we were given,
you know what I mean, as a kind of that dollar-a-year, it’ll be good to
have these. You had problems in Century City because nobody could—you
know. It’s like UCLA, your school. [laughs] It’s a fortress to get into.
You’ve got to park, you’ve got to go through kiosks. It isn’t exactly
you could walk in off the street and see shows at UCLA. It’s difficult.
It was difficult to come into Century City, you know, because they have
things in parking garages and all that sort of stuff. And then after a
while, when that lease ran out, they bought that building on Robertson.
It was a problem, but it wasn’t so much the changing thing, as I
remember it; it was the sort of populism. We had our annual board
meetings, and they were open, you know, to the public. We didn’t have
meeting rooms and behind closed doors. We’d have the committees meet.
We’d have the Journal, the LAICA Journal Committee meet, and there were
other things, but we had them out there. I remember trying to preside.
There were all these people out there. Among them one of your more vocal
persons was the brother of the sculptor Mel Edwards. Greg Edwards had
these Watts workshops. That’s the other sort of thing. I mean, my wife,
who studied political philosophy, simplifies and said there’s a tension
between art and democracy. Democracy wants equality, art wants quality,
art wants a hierarchy. So there was always this tension between what
you’re representing, and the populace. And there’s some truth to that in
terms of Latinos and blacks and Asians and women—not so much women at
the time. But it’s an upper-middle-class white institution of you people
dabbling in art. Okay? And we down here in Watts, the black community,
we aren’t getting any—we don’t have any franchise in this. All right?
[sighs] And you have to start speaking some home truths that are only
going to get you in trouble, I mean. I mean, you know, art that comes
out of community workshops and underprivileged and impoverished
neighborhoods isn’t as good as art that comes out of studios in Venice
run by artists who’ve gotten MFAs from art schools and, you know what I
mean, have access to this and that and the other, as a general rule.
Okay? And so we had that. Charles Garabedian once said to Walter, my
friend Walter—and you know who Charles Garabedian is—because he was on
the board. He said the trouble with all those members who could come to
the board meetings, he said, “The trouble with all the members, they
don’t want to see art on the walls; they want to see their art on the
walls.” And there was the tension, was between we’re going to support
LAICA because it’s going to show us really good art, it’s going to bring
it from Europe or New York or California, wherever it is, but it’s going
to be highly selective, and it’s going to be that versus the whole
populist nature of the thing, is, “Oh, boy, we belong to this and we’re
going to get to show here.” And there’s a tension and, you know, the
word “elitism” always came up. And I’m not against elites. I’m against
hereditary elites and financial oligarchy elites, but I don’t think
“elite” is always bad, and I’m a lower-middle-class boy who didn’t come
from a background of privilege, save for being white, you know, which
is, I suppose, worth something. I’m white and male. But I could be one
of those lunch-bucket guys in the Tea Party complaining that the
Confederate flag ought to be able to fly. I mean, if I were true to my
class heritage. But I had literate parents. So it was a problem, and the
tension was between populism and wanting to show good contemporary art
and be sort of the New Museum or the Whitney Museum or being a
kuntsthalle, and a good one. There was always that tension.
And one time Bob Smith had a great idea, and we did a fundraiser, and it
was called “LAICA Sells Out.” That was the name of the show, and we just
gridded off the walls, and artists could buy contiguous square feet of
wall space and then, I think, floor space. But you couldn’t screw it up
like—what’s his name—Gordon Matta-Clark used to buy those little unused
plots of land in between buildings. You could if you were a Daniel
Buren, if you were a disrupter, you’d say, “Okay, I’ll take that square
there, and this square here, and that one there, and then nobody could
do—.” You had to be contiguous. But you could buy wall space and then
put up your art. So I like—it was Bob’s idea, I think, and he sort of
doubled down on this. “Okay, you want to support the museum, you want to
support the place and you want to see your own art up? Okay, here. Buy
some wall space.”
00:53:52
MOON:
[laughs] So it becomes transparent.
PLAGENS:
So it becomes transparent and you also reveal how silly the complaint is
at the time. You end up showing people what a granny’s attic of a show
you get that isn’t going to be much good, you know. I mean, I’m one of
these old-fashioned people. I will—I don’t mention the Q-word a lot.
MOON:
Quality?
PLAGENS:
Quality. And I say it’s good or it’s bad or it’s horrible, and I believe
in that, but I don’t believe like, you know, that anybody’s word is, you
know, final. I believe in judgment, and then what’s interesting is the
argument behind the judgment. Not making—judgments is not good. That’s
me.
MOON:
And the Journal was a good instrument to have a local dialogue about art
and for artists?
PLAGENS:
Yeah.
00:55:06
MOON:
I guess it was important for—one of the desires behind publishing it was
to give more voice to artists in terms of their [unclear]?
PLAGENS:
I don’t know whether that was it. It was the idea that the art
magazines, you know, didn’t cover things. It was just me at Artforum and
Fidel Danieli, and Artforum was in New York. There’s a history—this is a
whole other topic that you could get into—of failed art magazines in
Southern California, you know. Artweek was okay for a while, but then
every review became a puff. It was just every artist got something you
could clip out and send to your mother. They were all—they didn’t have
any teeth to them. Then there was that newsletter that Diana Zlotnick
put out. I forget what it was called. There was a parody of it put out
that was real scandalous at the time. And since this is embargoed for
the time, it was Bob Smith and I who did it. [Moon laughs.] It was the
sort of thing like who did it, who did it?
MOON:
The parody?
PLAGENS:
Yeah, the parody. [Moon laughs.] It was called—I forget what it was
called, but it was vicious, our little satire of it, because she used to
put it out and just leave it for free. She was a collector who lived in
the Valley. So Bob and I, being two, you know—what do you want to call
it—you know, irredeemable college boys. [Moon laughs.] Like the Harvard
Lampoon or something doing the thing, we did a parody of it. It looked
exactly like it, and then we put it—just showed up one time. And then we
took a blood oath that we would never admit it, that we did it. [Moon
laughs.] But we did it.
MOON:
For how many issues?
PLAGENS:
Just one.
00:57:04
MOON:
Just one. Okay.
PLAGENS:
Oh, yeah, just one, but it was—if you can ever get a copy, I still think
it was great, you know. There was an obit of John Coplans and he hadn’t
died, you know. There was a thing about the L.A. County Museum Young
Talent Awards, and they always have—but, no, they never told you who the
losers were, the people who—so we published a list of all the people who
were considered and lost. [Moon laughs.] We did all these things, you
know. I mean, I can’t remember a lot of it. I probably have a copy
someplace. But, no, the Journal was the idea that artists weren’t
getting covered by Art in America and by Artforum, and Artnews nobody
really cared about at that point. And it wasn’t so much—yeah, local
people were supposed to write for it, you know. It started out slick,
and then it went to a kind of newspaper thing after a while.
MOON:
Because of financial reasons?
00:59:36
PLAGENS:
Yeah, it was financial. And I wrote this real scandalous piece. It was
funny, but it was very—there was a fiction author that I liked a whole
lot, named Frederick Exley. Frederick Exley is a real interesting
writer. He’s dead now. But he wrote a book called A Fan’s Notes, and
it’s really an autobio—it’s a memoir disguised as, a work of fiction,
but it’s obviously not. And Frederick Exley is this guy living in New
York state, upstate New York, he’s an alcoholic, he had gone to USC when
Frank Gifford, the football player, went there. So he’s sort of obsessed
with Frank Gifford and going to the bar every Sunday to watch the Giants
games and etc., etc. He then wrote a book called—I forget what it was.
Then the next book was obviously fictionalized, and this is where it
was. It’s about him going to the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop as
a visiting writer, and he gets drunk and tries to—he hits on students
and, you know, just horrible.
So I wrote this piece called “The Visiting Artist,” and it was some of
my experiences as a visiting artist and some of that, but it was the
real reprobate thing. And Peter Alexander did illustrations for it, and
he got this idea that he would do chickens. He did a rooster among all
these chickens, right? You can imagine what Linda Burnham [Moon laughs.]
and whoever else—there were like four of them, you know, really militant
feminists—wrote this really scathing letter [laughs] about how could
LAICA publish something like this. And I thought it was funny and it was
meant to be funny. I will admit it was sexist as all hell, but the thing
that, you know, as an artist—because artists, we’re selfish, right? The
thing I regret that it was so imitative of Frederick Exley. I thought I
could have in the end, you know, I should have made it a little less
referential. Anyway, it was—I’m trying to—was it Merion Estes? Was
she—but it was like four people. Linda Burnham I still remember
[01:00:58], you know, but real militant at the time. Buchanan.
MOON:
Nancy?
PLAGENS:
Nancy Buchanan, and there might have been a Judy somebody. Okay, Nancy
Buchanan, Merion Estates, Linda Burnham, wrote this, signed by the four
of them. [laughs] And it’s probably deserved. And one of the best things
I never did, that I refrained from doing, because Bob said—you know, he
said, “Do you want to write a reply to the edit to the letter?” And I
had this idea to just throw more gasoline on the fire by simply
replying, “Girls, girls, please!” [Moon laughs.] Then several people
told me not to do that, said, “Just let it go.” So I let it go. But I
did that, and we did the parody of Diana Zlotnick’s newsletter. So there
was Artweek. Then when I was in New York, a woman named—come on—Kay
Larson. Do you know who Kay Larson is?
01:02:01
MOON:
Uh—
01:04:01
PLAGENS:
She was art critic at New York Magazine for a while, but she comes from
Southern California, and her father was a football coach, like somewhere
down Orange County. She’s writing a book now on—she was kind of in, then
she dropped out, she was building houses for a while, she was a
contractor, real interesting person. She, by the way, was the second
choice for art critic at Newsweek. Peter Schjeldahl was the first. Peter
Schjeldahl turned down the job, Kay Larson never answered her phone, and
I was the third person they called. So I was number three. If Kay had
answered her phone, she could have had that job. [Moon laughs.] She
could have had the job. I mean, it wasn’t like she wouldn’t pick up. She
just—somehow they never could get a hold of her. But she started a
magazine called Artcoast for a while, and it was backed by somebody, and
it was going to be slick. It was in the days when you had paper art
magazines. Okay. It failed. Like a journal ran its course, Artweek
became—you know, and Artforum left. That was the, you know, beginning
part of it. There are two separate stories, not mutually exclusive,
about why Artforum left, you know. Some people said that—and this is
what I believe, but the Artforum’s version is the most important art was
being done in New York, and we had to be where it was. We had to be
where Robert Morris was and where Carolee Schneemann was and where Eva
Hesse was and where, you know, Frank Stella. That’s where—and Serra.
That’s where it was at. Okay? It was, and we were going to be a national
magazine, we had to be there.
The other story is that L.A. just didn’t understand a magazine with
criticism in it. Galleries thought if they bought an ad, they got a
favorable review, that it was all like that. Coplans used to just—these
people just don’t understand the rough and tumble, you know, things are
critical. But that’s an across-the-board journalism problem. You think
with your advertisers support the magazine over here, and then your
editorial content is—and you have to have that firewall between the
business side and the editorial side. But in Southern California, it was
very acute, so one of the reasons was that it just—you know, people just
didn’t understand, and they wouldn’t support a magazine that was, from
time to time, critical.
MOON:
That’s what Coplans said?
PLAGENS:
That’s what Coplans said, yeah, and he didn’t like—he had a word for all
of people in Southern California. He referred to them as “poodlers.” It
was a neologism, people who just—they dabbled, people just poodling
around in things. They don’t really understand that it’s a blood sport.
01:05:21
MOON:
Do you think he was talking about the artists or also gallery owners,
dealers, collectors?
PLAGENS:
He was talking about gallery owners, dealers, collectors, curators. To
him, the artists just went and made their. I have a thing in the Bruce
Nauman book where Bruce goes to New York, and he hadn’t gone to New York
a lot, but he goes to New York and he’s out to lunch with Sol Lewitt,
and they’re at some bar or something like that, and Dorothea Rockburne
and a couple of other artists come in. And Sol starts talking to them
across the table, and this thing gets really heated, this conversation.
People start yelling back and forth, and they go back out on the
sidewalk. Bruce says, “Wow, that was bad. I thought a fight was going to
break out. That was really terrible.” Lewitt said, “What do you mean?
That’s just New York art conversation.” Okay? John was of that school.
But he would reserve most of that—we’re talking about things in the
seventies, and this is kind of my opinion, a little, too, that L.A. was
less cutthroat, claw your way to the top than New York was, and L.A. was
more claw your way to the top than San Francisco was. And Artforum,
after it moved down to L.A., had fairly big disdain, not for certain
artists but for the Bay Area art scene, because it was all
touchy-feeling organic. Well, organic wasn’t in there. It was, as my
wife used to say, peace, granola, ten-speeds. It was that thing last
night I went to, you know, Tom Marioni’s, you know.
MOON:
Convivial spirit or—
01:07:37
PLAGENS:
Yeah, it’s kind of convivial, but it isn’t bouncy enough to be
convivial. The big thing up here used to be—did you ever hear of—what
was his name? John Fitzgibbon? The art historian who was up here, use to
have the thing out on his property called “Cowboys and Angels” every
year. The women were supposed to come dressed as angels and the men as
cowboys, and you rode horses and you got stoned.
The L.A. people like Coplans and around thought that the Bay Area was
just hopeless because it was too community oriented, you know. Artists
were, you know, “We help each other. We get together. We do this.” No,
no, no, no, no. It’s Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still. So where was I?
That that infected art publications in L.A., and that’s why it failed,
because they were a little bit too community, “We’re all in this
together,” and—you know. They didn’t understand criticism, what it was
supposed to be. It was over here, you bought ads in the magazine, and
that’s as far as it went. So, I’m sorry. Go.
MOON:
But within the community of artists in Los Angeles, was there a
competition and a feeling of animosity towards one another? I mean, just
thinking, for example, from the very beginning with Ferus’ history, how
it transforms when Irving Blum comes on to the scene, and there are
decisions and a whittling-down and a kind of sense of that these people
are better than these other group of artists.
PLAGENS:
Yeah, yes. Yes.
MOON:
Did that feeling grow over time among groups of artists or—
01:09:48
PLAGENS:
Yeah, and then there are obviously reaction against it, because you have
this situation where L.A. as a scene thinks it’s neglected, okay, as
opposed to New York. So we’ve got to get our scene put up there, right?
But then within the scene, somebody days, “Well, these artists represent
the scene better than these artists do,” because these are either more
typical or they’re better, and that causes tension.
See, one of the things about New York—you hear a little now, but you
never heard—nobody used to talk about New York art, and we’ve got to
keep [unclear] New York artists. It was assumed that you’re at the
center of the universe, right, and you take it from there. L.A. always
had this slightly schizophrenic thing. San Francisco didn’t have the
schizophrenia because it was like, “We’re the little art scene that
could.” Like the little engine that could. And L.A. had this
schizophrenia where, “We got something going that’s really different out
here, and we’re doing this, and our artists are going to be competitive
within that,” with the schizophrenia of “We have to get L.A. recognized
as.” As good as New York. And critics suffered from this. Are you
supposed to be—that was my trouble. I wasn’t seen as enough of a
booster, you know, a champion. There’s that whole school of criticism,
you know, that if you’re Dennis Adrian in Chicago, you’re supposed to
champion Chicago artists in the greater national press. If you’re a
critic in L.A., you’re supposed to do that. But, yes, there were things
when things started to whittle down. To me, it’s a sign of health. And
then there started to be little circles, you know, the boys club out in
Venice. Then there were the Women’s Movement. Did you ever see the
calendar with the cars, the artists in their cars? Okay. Then the women
put out an answer calendar with all the women with their cats.
01:11:43
MOON:
I didn’t know about that.
PLAGENS:
It was real lame. It was too nice. “Oh, this is nice because we have our
cats.” There was a thing with the cars, a little bit, not so much, but
it was in the sixties. There was a little bit of self-effacement and
irony in that, like “I know I look like I’m an asshole in my Porsche
with my elbow out the window.” And when the women did it, it’s also a
reactionary thing, you know. When you react and you say, “Well, we can
do this too.” It’d have been another thing if it had been a parody. But
I think those happened in the seventies, artists and their cars. Then
there’s a little kind of Pasadena artist versus Venice artist. There
were stylistic differences, you know, the whole plastic L.A. look, kind
of people versus well, wait a minute, Charles Garabedian, funky
figurative painters, and then later it came along you had people like
Roger Hermann and then— What am I saying yes to? Yes, there was tension.
[interruption]
MOON:
Should we—
PLAGENS:
Should we what?
MOON:
[laughs] Well, I was just thinking, there is another topic, but then
it’d be launching into—
PLAGENS:
We could do it and then cut it off and pick it up next time. Or do you
think the momentum would be—
MOON:
Well, we’ll start and then pick it up next time.
01:13:20
PLAGENS:
Okay.
MOON:
I want to talk about the moments in which you felt that there was a
decline, which you later called the “Decline and Fallow” in Sunshine.
But I guess the Sunshine Muse was in ’74.
PLAGENS:
It came out in ’74.
MOON:
Yeah. But then after that, did you feel that your observations of what
was being shown in galleries and in exhibition spaces, that sort of
confirmed this notion that you had or how you saw things in the mid
seventies?
01:15:2101:17:30
PLAGENS:
That’s a good question. I never thought about it that way. My suspicion
is yes, or my suspicion is kind of, I never thought, “Oh, gee, I was
absolutely wrong. Look at all this wonderful stuff that’s coming out
now, so I ought to go back and apologize, you know, reconsider,” etc.
But this a little side note I’ll make. It’s one of the things I’ve been
asked in several of these things over the years. People always do this.
They have these articles. They poll critics and ask you to write two
hundred words about what were you wrong about. Do you know what I mean?
Have you ever made a mistake? And almost to a person everybody always
says, “I didn’t like something then, but then I learned it was great
later.” Nobody ever says, “I thought, you know, Susie Smith was a
wonderful artist when she first showed, and then I’ve come to the
conclusion that she’s really an empty vessel.” Nobody ever
wants—everybody wants to do that. It always makes you—you gain friends
by saying—and I did that. I didn’t like Nauman’s photographs at work,
you know, but, I mean, this is true. Everybody, “Oh, I underestimated so
forth, and now I—.”
I find that an unfortunate tendency among critics when they do a little
retrospective. So you’re encountering a tendency—and I suffer from it a
little bit, too, that I wouldn’t turn around and say, “Oh, I thought—.”
No, I’m sorry, I’m getting it backwards. I try to avoid that by, “Oh, I
thought everything was terrible in the early seventies, and now after
Sunshine Muse is out and I’m going to the galleries and the museum, I
can see that I was kind of wrong, and it’s really wonderful, and I’ve
overrated it.” And I try to fight against that, but I tend to be—and I
think the opinion, if there is an opinion out there of me as a critic,
and it’s sort of weird, you know, to think of what the opinion is, it’s
kind of egocentric to think that there is some opinion out there about
you, but I think generally I’m regarded as kind of negative. Negative
and glib, those would be the two things. Glib verbal style and a bit
negative in my judgments, and probably by a lot of artists,
conservative, you know. And I still take this—I mean, I’m not taken
with—you know. I have this trouble now with artists when they speak of
their practice, you know, “my studio practice,” and I say, “Look,
gynecologists and lawyers have practices, they have patients, and they
have clients, you know.” This practice, that’s one of my little tics,
and the other is hyphen-based. “He’s an Oakland-based artist.” What?
He’s a multinational? He has branches in Zurich and like that, you know?
So sometimes people ask me and I say, “I’m a White Street-based artist,”
because I live on White Street. [laughter] There’s this inflation of
things. So I’m considered conservative because everybody—I’ve lost that
battle. Everybody talks about here, about their studio practice, like,
“I have this practice.”
I don’t know it doesn’t bothers me. I find it insufferably pretentious.
But there is, on the other hand, a current thing where artists don’t
decline to say this and that. And there’s this fashion, I read, where
some people just say, “I make stuff.” I sort of like that. [Moon
laughs.] But, no, I didn’t do a 180 on thinking things were bad, you
know. And in the eighties, things kind of kicked in again. They built
MOCA, the economy kicked up, you know, object art came back, you know.
In New York you had Neo-Expressionist painting. People started to buy
objects again, you know. And it got—
MOON:
For much more money.
PLAGENS:
Much more money. It got all international. I remember one time being in
SoHo early on when I moved to New York in 19—no.
MOON:
Eighty-five.
01:19:02
PLAGENS:
Yeah, ’85, but I was in New York in ’80. I’d come up from Chapel Hill or
something. And I saw John Baldessari walking down, you know, West
Broadway when all the galleries were there, and he said, “Hey, Peter.”
And I said, “What are you doing, John? What are you doing?” And he says,
“I’m looking for Germans. Have you seen any Germans?” [laughter] And it
was, you know, where are all the, you know, Baselitz and Kippenberger.
“Have you seen any Germans? I’m looking for Germans. Have you seen any
Germans?” [laughter]
MOON:
Okay. Well, I think we’re going to talk about the New York days in the
next session. We’ll get there.
PLAGENS:
Okay. Two weeks?
MOON:
Yes.
PLAGENS:
You come back? Okay. [End of October 15, 2015 interview]
00:00:16
MOON:
Okay. So in a previous session, you talked about—you mentioned Walter
Gabrielson’s idea of emerging and submerging artists.
PLAGENS:
Yeah.
MOON:
And I was wondering if we could start today’s conversation by talking
about some of the best submerging artists in L.A. when you were there.
PLAGENS:
Well, see, you know, he meant it funny, about the opposite of emerging,
meaning, “I’m a guy of a certain age, and I haven’t gotten the
recognition,” blah, blah, blah,” I think I should get, and I’m not going
to get it because I’m getting older, so I’m submerging.” It’s, you know,
a joke thing. But there were—you know, when I was around, a submerging
artist, I mean, the people who aren’t all over the textbooks now, Hap
Tivey. There was a painter that was a student of ours at Northridge
named Don Sorenson, and he’s one of the first people we knew who died of
AIDS. He was a really good abstract painter. He might even have had a
show at Nick Wilder in the eighties. What did I say? Hap Tivey. Tom
Eatherton, my wife really liked his work a whole lot. Tom Eatherton.
There’s a painter, she’s in New York—I mean, out—moved to New York, got
married, got divorced, named Denise Gale, and she’s in—where is she now?
She’s out in the Hamptons. I mean, they moved out to the Island, because
he builds stuff, so it’s not cushy on Long Island. Denise Gale was there
in Pasadena. Who in Venice? Were there people? Let me come back to that.
But there were, yeah, a few people that I thought should have got more
recognition at the time than they did. Some of them eventually did, like
Vija Celmins was sort of upper middle of the pack. She wasn’t Bruce
Nauman, but then her—she just—everything just took off.
00:02:11
MOON:
Her career took off later.
PLAGENS:
Yeah, and not because of her, like, you know, cranking them out and
everything. She’s a very—my experience with her, I liked her a lot. I
still—I mean, I like her, but she’s a surly person, just kind of grumpy,
and she paints very slowly. So it’s not a matter of her career took off,
like she started working the room and going to cocktail parties and
cranking out stuff. People just later said, “Okay, yeah, this is pretty
good.” But anyway—
MOON:
Why do you think those artists didn’t stay visible? Do you think it had
to do with their personalities or as an art—you know, just in terms of
what you’re observing at the time as an artist, did you have to make
sure to be friends with the right dealers or collectors or what?
PLAGENS:
Well, the art world is always like that. I mean, that goes back to
having to suck up whoever was commissioning art for the pharaoh of old
kingdom Egypt, you know. I mean, it’s always been like that.
Economically, fine art is bought by people who have income that they
don’t have to account for strictly, right, like totally rich people and
Dutch burghers and Renaissance princes and popes. So there’s always been
a bit of that. Number two is that, yeah, I think in a smaller art scene,
there was a little bit of, Venice ran things, and you had to go to one
of Betty Freeman’s lawn parties in West L.A., or you had to be invited
to the “Grinnies,” as they called them, the Grinsteins.
00:04:06
MOON:
Grinsteins, mm-hmm.
PLAGENS:
Yeah. And there was that, you know, and also that there were—you know,
you should go to the openings at Nick Wilder and at Ace and at Riko
Mizuno and Ferus when it was around, you know. Irving Blum had his
gallery. There were kind of mandatory things. And it wasn’t like really
oppressive, like you couldn’t get anywhere if you didn’t do it, but
there was that. Also L.A. was kind of a pool, you know, lawn party,
friendly kind of town. I’m contradicting myself as the place as
hierarchical, but it wasn’t hierarchical. Once you got on to the lawn
party, it was fine. There wasn’t a real visible pecking order, as I
remember. But it was good to go to those things, because L.A. was a kind
of sociable—you drive there, once you’re there you’re there, you’re at
somebody’s house, you’re at Marcia Weiseman’s. You’re at Linda Terbell’s
house. Before she was Ed Wortz’s wife, before she was Melinda Wortz, she
was Ed Terbell—Tom Terbell’s wife, the Pasadena Museum. Those kinds of
things, yeah, if Rowan had anything. You wanted to go there because it
was a smallish, smallish scene. The second thing was, there was always a
notion, some of it absolutely true, because Billy Al Bengston wrote that
article on Art in America and whenever it was about artists’ studios and
the way the lights were. I think it was in there that you should have a
showroom, you know, you should have a clean room where you could bring—
00:06:04
MOON:
Where you show the work.
PLAGENS:
—like galleries do, what they call closing room. You put up a picture on
the shelf or a sculpture, and people can sit, you know, and you should
do that. Billy was—there was a famous quote about we should wash our
hands and take the paint, get out of our paint-splattered trousers and
start acting like professionals. Okay? And there was all those guys per
that camera—I mean that calendar, that were put out.
MOON:
The cars?
PLAGENS:
Yeah. De Wain Valentine, Peter Alexander, John McCracken, Billy, Ed
Ruscha—I don’t want to leave anybody out, but I don’t want to—they were
all handsome dudes. They were conventionally attractive males.
MOON:
The “Studs”? [laughs]
PLAGENS:
The “Studs.” And they were. So there was a kind of, you know, movie
star-ish quality about, oh, they’re going to be and there they are, you
know.
MOON:
Were they hanging out with some movie stars? I mean, like Dennis Hopper,
was he a conduit into the Hollywood crowd?
00:08:01
PLAGENS:
Yeah, there was a mixture of show biz. First of all, Ed Ruscha had all
these show-biz girlfriends from Candy Clark from American Graffiti. I’ll
tell you a little story in here. When I was first together with Laurie,
about 1979 or ’80, and she’s in L.A. and we’re supposed to go to Ed
Ruscha’s birthday party. And we go to this place, this house in
Hollywood, and Candy Clark, who was a well-known actress then—she’s sort
of faded from the scene—but she was in American Graffiti. And she said
to Laurie, with this great big smile, she said, “Oh, you know, yeah,
come in.” She says, “I want you to meet ‘Eddy Ru,’ he’s my new beau,”
with a kind of little—lilt.
So then it was Samantha Eggar and it was Lauren Hutton and it was, you
know, Ed had these actresses because Ed was—I mean, my wife thought he
was the handsomest thing in the western hemisphere. And he still is, but
he had this—you know, those baby blues and nice profile. And all those
guys, that sort of surfer thing. So there was a little bit of that
Hollywood lawn party glamor sort of thing, and Billy passed it on to the
next generation in the persona of Chuck Arnoldi. Then there are a few
others of a slightly younger generation, you know.
MOON:
Wait. So a lot of those names, though, seems like they were working in
Venice.
PLAGENS:
Yeah.
MOON:
Was the attitude in Pasadena different? Did you, for example, in your
studio have a showing area? [laughs]
00:10:58
PLAGENS:
No, no. Walter Gabrielson and I had this great big—maybe it was 3,000
square feet, corner of Union and Fair Oaks. It used to be, we were told,
Pasadena City Hall in the old days before they built that nice Spanish
City Hall, Spanish baroque City Hall, which I think it is. It was the
second floor, and then you came up and it was just a great big open
space with a bathroom in the back and a little office at the back, and
everything else was open. And Walter and I built a partial wall. So, no,
in Venice, that’s why we were there partly, because, well, for me living
in Laurel Canyon, it was closer. But Venice was also out of our price
range by then. It had been settled, and it was, you know, for then. And
Pasadena had its own little society. It had Melinda Terbell. It had a
few parties. It had Coplans had his apartment. It had the museum. And
there were a lot of artists there. Okay? But there wasn’t the collector
scene. It wasn’t like West L.A. where Rowan and Terbell and whoever else
had lawn parties, which I would call them. Melinda Terbell, every once
in a while, yeah, had a pool party in Pasadena, but it wasn’t that same
kind of thing. We more or less stuck—you know, I’m not—the work ethic of
the people in Venice was very high, they were always doing stuff, they
cranked out a lot of work, but there wasn’t a—I mean, nobody would have
ever put out a calendar of Pasadena artists, because there wasn’t that
idea that we were the “Venice mafia,” as we used to call them, you know.
No. But I’m not raising it as a virtue. That’s just the way it was, you
know. So, yeah, it was different in Pasadena than it was on the West
Side, I think.
MOON:
So the collectors were very close to the artists socially?
00:12:18
PLAGENS:
I think so. Look, one of the things is that I, when I came back to Los
Angeles in 1969, remember I was gone—my timing was exquisitely bad. I
was gone from ’66 to ’69, which is the sort of the height of the L.A.
Look. Now, I was back in the summers and on a few trips, you know, and
then in ’68, that summer I lived in Europe, you know, most of that year.
So I’m out of it. And when I come back, I go to Pasadena and I’m
teaching at Northridge. So I’m kind of out of it. What kept me around
was writing reviews for Artforum. That sort of kept me informed. The
other thing was, I think, the little bit of a critic, you know, kicked
in, started to kick in, where I was slightly persona non grata,
slightly. “Don’t invite him. He’s a critic. You don’t want to say
anything. You don’t want to do—,” you know. There was also, “Well, we
should invite him because he writes reviews in Artforum, and, you know,
we can suck up and get a good notice.” I don’t think that occurred to
anybody.
MOON:
But you were also known as a critic who wouldn’t write puff pieces to
further careers. [laughs]
PLAGENS:
I think I was. I don’t want to go back and, you know, inflate my own
idea as a negativist or as somebody who calls them like he sees them or
is tough, you know. Like I used to give Cs and Ds. There’s no
gentleman’s B. And I don’t want to inflate that, because if I went back
over all the reviews I wrote for Artforum and in Art in America there
would probably be a lot more temporizing that I thought, you know, a lot
more of that final sentence that says, “We can’t quite tell now, but
we’ll see in the future.” I told you that last time, that there was a
joke around Newsweek that every Newsweek story began with the sentence,
“Some studies suggest,” and ends with “time will tell.” [laughs] So I
probably did that temporizing as much as anybody, but I think I did have
a bit of a reputation as not just being negative but being sort of glib.
I mean, that word was applied, and I was. Because I really liked Gonzo
stuff, you know. I liked Tom Wolfe’s and—you know, by putting yourself
into it kind of thing.
00:13:59
MOON:
“New Journalism”? Was it part—
PLAGENS:
Yeah, the “New Journalism” as they called it at the time. But, you know,
not quite Tom Wolfe, and he became a villain because he’s such a
right-winger. I don’t know, and I just—you know, I couldn’t help myself.
I do this still. I mean, something will pop into my head, and I’ll say,
“Why did that pop into my head? I got to use it, because otherwise I’ll
be a coward.” [Moon laughs.] I wrote this review last week, the last
ones that came out in The Wall Street Journal, my little—and there was a
show of an L.A. artist, Mark Grotjahn. Okay? Do you say “Grotyon” or
“Grotjohn”?
MOON:
What do I say? “Grotyon.”
PLAGENS:
Okay, “Grotyon,” right?
MOON:
I’m not sure, though.
PLAGENS:
And I don’t know whether you saw them. They’ve been around for a couple
years. I probably treated it a little too much like, “Oh, this was new
right now.” He’s been showing this stuff for a few years, you know, but
this was like in New York, right? And I don’t know if you’ve seen those
painted sculptures. They’re like slabs he makes from—bronze casts of
boxes that flat-screen TVs come in, right? And he makes bronze casts of
them and then he paints on them with his oil, with his hands, and it’s
really—and sometimes there’ll be a little writing or something in it,
and then he has these poles sticking in out of them like spears into
African sculpture, you know, accumulation sculpture, looks like ingoing.
Or they look like male genitalia in really abstract, because they’re
very long, like broom handles, right? And I concluded the review of, you
know, this and this and this was good, and the installation was good,
but it was a little too design-y. It didn’t look—felt. It looked like
the reboot of an artistic brand, and then it just comes into my head, I
said, “Call it VeriBold,” like a trademark, you know, VeriBold. And I’m
sure that’ll—I didn’t do it to piss people off, but somebody will say,
“How glib,” and, “What a smartass,” and, “That’s not serious criticism.”
00:16:07
MOON:
But it just comes into your head. [laughs]
PLAGENS:
But it came into my head, and it was one of those things, if I don’t use
this and let the editor take it out and say, “This is too cute. You’re
being too snide,” then I will have been a self-censoring coward, so, you
know, I put it in and it went. And when I thought it over—I mean, I do
think it over—I thought, “This gives the average reader, The Wall Street
Journal reader—.” You know, we talked about who goes to the MOMA two,
three times a year, maybe to Chelsea, knows a little bit, they’ll get
this business of an artist with a kind of brand look. Do you know what I
mean?
MOON:
Mm-hmm.
00:17:4100:19:26
PLAGENS:
And they’ll understand that, and they’ll say, “Okay.” Anyway. [Moon
laughs.] What was I saying? So, yeah, I was probably known as being a
bit of a negativist, but probably also being glib, because I also wrote
these things like for Art in America where I had this—Betsy Baker was a
friend. She used to let me do these things, where I would have this guy
named Leon. Have you ever seen any of those? There was one in the
eighties. The title dates it. It says “Bebop to Reebok in L.A.” And it’s
when everybody was wearing those Reebok shoes with the kind of sausage
high collar. It’s when you did workouts, people wore legwarmers.
Remember those? You wore the spandex thing and then your legwarmers and
then your Reeboks, and they were like shoes for doing aerobics in. It
was called “Bebop to Reebok in L.A.” This is like eighties. It has
eighties written all over it.
And I had this fictional sarcastic character who’d seen it all, named
Leon, and it’s an interview with Leon about what’s been going on in the
L.A. art scene since we last checked in. And so I used this Leon
character, because Leon can say not politically incorrect things, like
we all think now, like race and sex and ethnicity and such. It’s not
that. It’s politically incorrect things about the West Side, about L.A.
collectors, about how flashy the scene is, you know, how thinly
populated it is at a certain level, you know. And I was able to do that.
So I wrote a couple of those, and those probably, you know, didn’t
strike people as—yeah, so I had a little bit of that reputation, and
it’s probably why I didn’t. Who knows? [Moon laughs.] See, I was going
to say, back to your earlier question about those submerging artists,
and say one of the things that is absolutely—you know, I can’t do it,
and if I could, well, where was I at the time giving present-tense
advice, which is to go back over careers of artists who didn’t quite
make it and ask why, you know. Maybe they were drunks. Maybe they got
married and had five kids they had to support right away. Maybe they
threw up on a collector’s rug in the living room at a big party. Maybe
they just were—and I’ve known people who were just, you know, really
surly and couldn’t take the gallery scene. They couldn’t take that
lawn-party stuff. They didn’t like showing their work to dealers, you
know. And so there’s all these reasons.
So you can’t ever say, “Well, you know, why didn’t my old mate Walter
Gabrielson have the career that he really deserved?” You don’t know. You
know, at one point he was—I told you he was friends with Jim Turrell,
and they were pilots. And the old Arco Center for Visual Arts that was
in the basement under the ground of the twin towers down there, the
black, they replaced the old Atlantic Richfield Building. It was one of
the great buildings of L.A., and it was black with gold on it, had a
tower with a blue globe on the top. And Richfield Oil became Atlantic
Richfield, they tore that down, they erected those two things, at the
corner of Fifth and Flower, not Fifth and Fig, right by the freeway
onramp.
MOON:
By the 110?
PLAGENS:
Right across the street from the Public Library. Okay. There was a
gallery there run by Betty Gold. She was the first director called Arco
Center for Visual Arts, and somehow they got it, and there were shows
there, like a nonprofit, kumsthalle. And Walter had one with Jim
Turrell, because they were pilot buddies and they got together and they
decided—so Turrell had his holes in the wall the rectangular holes that
you can’t see the width because it’s [unclear] back with the strange
light. Then Walter had his figurative social-comment paintings kind of
in between. It was sort of nice, really weird pairing.
MOON:
Combination.
PLAGENS:
Later he showed with the gallery at Bergamot. Guy’s here now, has a
branch here, Robert Berman. So, you say, “Well, Walter had something. He
can’t complain. He was just out of phase.” He’d be really good now,
because he liked thirties’ social-comment painting with his own little
twist on it. So he had something. But on the other hand, Walter could
not stand the art world.
00:21:22
MOON:
The people.
PLAGENS:
Yeah. He couldn’t stand those klatches. He was a really great teacher,
okay, better than I was, and I’m not saying I set the bar high. He was
really good. I’m pretty good because I can talk and I can wing it, but
Walter really was good. And one time at a party, some little ex-student
who’s trying to make it in the art world or somebody comes up and says
something, and we’re talking and Walter looks at him and says, “Excuse
me for a minute. I’ve got to go to talk to somebody a little more
important.” [Moon laughs.] I mean, and he just was like that. So who
knows why some people’s career don’t blossom. I mean, who knows why Mary
Corse didn’t get the recognition—she should have. Or Maria Nordman. Was
it because it was too much of a boys’ club? You know, I don’t know. And
I’m tempted to say, well, me, how come—how come I didn’t show at, oh, I
don’t know, at Ace Gallery or Margo Leavin or something like that? I
like Baum, you know, Jan Baum, as far as it went, but she didn’t sell
anything, I didn’t get rich, and I’m still always scuffling to make a
middle-class living, sort of upper-middle-class now that I’ve got
baggage. I don’t know why. But there was a separation between Venice and
Pasadena, and then later, you know, at the same time, up between those
two things comes downtown, when all that starts to happen.
00:23:15
MOON:
By the late seventies?
PLAGENS:
Late seventies, the pioneers are there, yeah. I moved a studio down
there in 1978. I’m not a pioneer. The real pioneers were there earlier,
you know. There was the Brewery and there were buildings and places that
Jon Peterson, the sculptor—did you ever hear of “bum shelters,” his
things? He used to make these little fiberglass sculptures. He had done
a lot of things, and he’s back to painting. He’s a little younger than I
am, lives in Pasadena. But he just got rich doing real estate. He almost
couldn’t help it. He bought a floor and made lofts out of it and rented
it out and then bought a couple of buildings—you know what I mean—back
in the day. Anyway, he used to make these fiberglass sculptures called
“bum shelters,” and he would put them out. And he had various
configurations, but what they were was a homeless person could sleep
under them. It’d be a kind of a tube or a lean-to that you could
put—painted real bright colors, and then he’d photograph them later,
occupied and unoccupied. So anyway, those people were pioneering
downtown, you know, Jon Peterson, Marc Kriesel, Joel Bass, maybe, you
know, and that started to be a third thing.
MOON:
And then LACE opens up downtown.
PLAGENS:
LACE opens up.
MOON:
I think it was around 1980.
PLAGENS:
Yeah, LACE opens up. I think it’s 1980, but I’m not good on—because I
left L.A. in ’80, and ’80 to ’84 I was in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Then I quit, and in ’84 we had our choice between New York or L.A. We
decided to go to New York, but we came back to L.A. to—I had two
children there, older then, not adults. And I had affairs to clean up,
business, art to store, and so forth, but we knew we were going to New
York. And I had really good visiting-artist gig at Cal State Long Beach
for that year, which helped. And then we packed up in ’85, moved to New
York. So I—you know, the downtown, but I had that loft there when I got
divorced, and I had the loft downtown starting in ’78, right?
00:25:49
PLAGENS:
Oh, then you were teaching at USC? You moved schools?
00:26:59
MOON:
Here’s the way it went. I was at Northridge and getting a divorce. I
don’t want to stay around Northridge, for a whole lot of reasons, some
of them personal but some of them just the way the art department was
going. It was all these Art Ed people and this second-rate imitation of
Art Center, meaning—it had some virtues to it, meaning commercial
artists from Art Center would teach night classes at Northridge, and
then they would get more and more of them, you know. And it started to
have the commercial art department, and it was successful because people
who couldn’t afford Art Center could afford Northridge, right? So in ’78
I want to get out, so I went down and there was a guy down there who,
Steven Ostrow, an art historian, he wanted to—he was dean for a while.
He quit, but he quit after I left. And I was there for two years, on
leave from Northridge, like you do in academe, because I didn’t know
whether I’d stay, and I had a hard time at Northridge explaining, “Well,
why should we give you a leave of absence just so you can go teach in
another school?”
And I gave them this blah, blah, blah about downtown and the scene and,
you know, etc., etc. But I did. I wasn’t planning on coming back. And
while I was there, I got this job offer from—somebody put my name up,
and I went fall of 1980—summer of 1980, actually, we moved to North
Carolina, Chapel Hill, and we were there until 1984, okay? Then came
back and I did that year in L.A. to—
MOON:
Long Beach.
PLAGENS:
—at Cal State Long Beach, but we lived in a loft downtown—
MOON:
Oh, I see.
PLAGENS:
—to save up money, save up, you know, put away nuts to go to New York
with.
MOON:
Yeah. During the seventies, where was your energy? I mean, it seems like
you had a lot going on in terms of teaching, you had a full-time
teaching job, you’re doing art criticism consistently. You also had a
family. Was it just—you were also painting?
PLAGENS:
Yeah.
MOON:
And exhibiting? Was it sort of equally—was your attention and energy
equally divided among all of these things, or was there one area that
you were focusing on?
PLAGENS:
Family is a tricky one, because that’s probably why I got divorced, and
my daughter would tell you that I didn’t spend enough time on family
matters, okay? My ex-wife and I get along okay. I mean, everybody’s
older and a lot of stuff—dust settles. So I’ll put that for aside. So
I’ve got teaching—
MOON:
Writing.
00:29:3000:31:0800:33:13
PLAGENS:
—making art in the studio, and writing art criticism. And it was not the
balance I wanted, it was out of balance, and I used to say that teaching
and writing criticism had the same deleterious effect on your art, or
could have, and you had to watch out for it, was if you’re teaching or
you’re writing criticism, you tend to hesitate to do in your art what
you’ve criticized other people either in reviews or students, you know.
So if you say, like, “Oh, what a bunch of crappy washed-out color in
your painting,” you’ve got to spiff up the—it’s a little harder to go
back to the studio and paint with crappy washed-out color, even though
maybe that’s what you should be doing, that’s what your work calls for.
Okay?
And the same thing with criticism, you know. And also there is that
little competition if you’re an artist. If you go see something and
you’re an artist, there’s always a little sense of competition. And you
go see something and it’s heavily technological and engineered and all
that kind of stuff, and you do little paintings, or you do paintings and
scruffy drawings or whatever it is I did, you tend to say—well, you tend
to be a little bit competitive, and so the one way you can say, “Well,
that isn’t really good art because it doesn’t have any soul to it
because it’s not scruffy little drawings and paintings like I’m doing.”
I mean, it’s not conscious, but it can be there. On the other hand, you
can see some art that’s like cleaner and slicker and better made and
somebody has lots of studio assistants, and so you go back to your
crappy little low-budget studio, which is what I’ve always had. I’ve
always built my own stretchers and stretched my own canvas. I don’t sell
enough to have a studio assistant. I’ve only had one in my entire life,
and that was in New York, a kid on assignment, from one of those little
colleges. And I took him because somebody called me and said, “Can you
use a studio assistant?” And I said, “No, not really, but maybe Laurie
and I could split him,” you know, so we did. And he’s a friend. He’s in
his forties now.
So I didn’t have all that, so I could go back and say, “God, I got to
slick up my operation here a little,” you know, because I’d feel
inferior. And I had that quality, you know. I would go on a speaking gig
and I would go to some college town. I did a lot of these in the
seventies and in the eighties. I would go on some, you know,
visiting-artist gig, and there’d be some faculty member there who was
sort of king of the faculty and had a real soft touch—I mean had a
real—had a job that was like he had a great salary and two classes a
semester to teach and a few graduate students to advise and had been
there for forty years. I’m thinking of someone in particular now, and I
don’t want to slip. It’s just recently, you know, a Brit, you know. And
you get all that money, and they have these fantastic studios because
the rent’s real cheap in the boondocks where the state university is,
right, or it’s cheaper. And they get these places and they get these
things and they make 90-foot color field paintings or they’ve got laser
installations and they’ve got all this shit. And I would come home from
these things and I’d say—you know, and Walter would see me cleaning up
and painting the walls white and wanting to change the light. And
Walter, who is merciless, would say, “I know what’s going on.” He says,
“Why don’t you go down the street and visit Nauman,” because Nauman had
his famously ramshackle studio, right? He’d just move in and put some
tarpaper over the windows so he, like, just didn’t care. Because Walter
knew I was a kind of chameleon that way. I’d be influenced, right? So
he’d say, “Why don’t you just go down the street and visit Bruce in his
studio, come back here, and you’ll be just about right, because you’ll
think, ‘Hey, Bruce, he’s a hip, cool artist and look at his studio, it’s
a pile of shit.’” Then I’d go back, see, and I would be right in
between. [Moon laughs.] And he knew. Yeah, he knew that about me. [Moon
laughs.]
So where did we—yeah. So anyway, and to have both of those together,
teaching and writing, with that same tendency to basically, if you want
to put a—to round off the corners of your work, you know, that’s—one of
them is enough. College professors, art professors have enough, you
know, with what they teach creeping into their own work, you know, the
reasonability of it. I mean, if you’re a totally famous artist and
you’re like a big time and you’re a guest, and you can just say to
students, “My way or the highway,” and they’re coming to you to, you
know, do something, that’s one thing. But if you’ve got a teaching job
and you’ve got to—you know, especially as pluralism crept in, I mean,
right here down in my critique seminar I’ve got—well, they signed up for
me. So I’ve got painters, but I’ve got installation artists. I have a
woman who does film and video, using her own body. So you have to relate
to all those people, right? And if you’re teaching beginning classes,
you have to teach them how to do something, beginning design, “spots and
dots,” as they used to call it. And so it tends to round off the
corners. It’s like being polite at a faculty meeting. You wear a jacket
and a tie and you don’t say “motherfucker” at the faculty meeting. And
you could tend to do that to your art.
00:34:59
MOON:
Compromises?
PLAGENS:
Compromises, yeah. And you don’t know them. They’re little things. They
just show up. I mean, I used to have a phrase for a style of art, I
couldn’t my finger on it because it’s faculty art, looks like the art
you see in faculty shows at big state universities. Maybe now it’s not
so much because the whole thing is much more varied, people are
political art, but same problems. And you can see in the art, that the
art is always too well crafted. It has a kind of, you know, PBS quality
to it. It’s like Masterpiece Theatre. It’s high-end, but you know it’s
commercial. It’s meant for somebody—in the memorable phrase, for
“tote-baggers everywhere,” the kind of people who carry tote bags that
say “Channel 13” or “PBS” or “The Morgan Library.” The art can get like
it’s meant for a kind of audience. It’s too well crafted. It’s meant at
some level you can tell that your own students will come in there, and
you want to impress them with what you can do, you know. And it’s got
that. I can’t put my finger on it, but I used to call it “faculty art.”
MOON:
Yeah. Do you think it’s because the audience that they have in mind is
different, so it’s trying to impress, you know, Artforum and that
audience necessarily but—
PLAGENS:
Yeah, sure. Yes, of course. You’re trying to impress the dean—
MOON:
Right.
00:37:1300:39:37
PLAGENS:
—in the faculty show. We can get into a whole thing about the lack of
interface or the difficult interface between art professors and standard
academe. Suffice it to say I used to say when they would do this at
Northridge or anyplace else, but Northridge had such—you’d have people
who don’t know how the art world works, or can’t separate the wheat from
the chaff in the art world, going over your résumé and deciding whether
you should get tenure or promoted.
And as somebody once said—maybe ‘twas I—is that “Honorable Mention, Los
Angeles County Fair,” title of show, juried by so-and-so, “1983, Pomona,
California,” right, that takes up that many lines on your résumé,
whereas “Solo exhibition, 1983, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York,” doesn’t
take up any space at all. And there is a tendency to judge on quantity
when people don’t know. So the interface between academe and artistic,
quote, “publishing,” is—back in that day, anyway, was, you know,
separate. Now, in a way, it isn’t because you can be like the third most
exhibited artist in San Francisco, have a great critical reputation as
an artist, and you’re thirty-eight to forty-one years old, and you can
barely get an adjunct job. So that kind of thing has changed. But,
anyway, the full-time tenured faculty, tenure-track or tenured, and
writing criticism both do have the same possible boulderizing effect on
your work. And maybe that’s why my painting—I mean, maybe there’s a
thread in there why my painting has been fairly unsalable. I don’t sell
a lot. I sell hardly anything. Always have. Why? And I could go. To the
obvious. Well, I’m a critic and people think I’m playing both sides of
the street. Or one possible result is that I might be conscious of what
I just said, and sort of ugly-up my paintings. Like if I see something
pretty coming down the line, I’ll take 90 degrees away from it. Could
be. I don’t know. I just do what I do in the studio, and then the chips
fall where they may. But somebody, who goes over this interview when I’m
long dead can maybe figure something out, why I teetered on the verge of
being a submerging artist and was never really rocket-to-stardom
emerging artist, you know.
MOON:
I wonder if we could about your ambivalence to Los Angeles. So, you
know, I mean, it comes out in Sunshine Muse, but then when I was
revisiting some of your earlier essays, I mean, it’s there definitely
even in “Ecology of Evil,” the review of Banham’s book. I mean, you end
it by saying—
PLAGENS:
“The Fashionable son of a bitch doesn’t have to live here.” [Moon
laughs.] That’s the closing line.
MOON:
Exactly. [laughs]
00:41:3600:43:28
PLAGENS:
A couple of things. You’re absolutely right about this. I mean, this is
a whole—so let’s start back with something. I come from a generation
that came starting in the Depression in the Dust Bowl and then with my
father, defense workers coming to L.A, right? So, everybody, first of
all, everybody from L.A. is at someplace else, is from someplace else.
The only people who were kind of native are Latinos, but everybody was
from, you know, Oklahoma or Ohio or something like that. So that’s
first. Secondly, it may be the way I grew up, my childhood, my parents’
taste. I don’t know what it was. I was taken to a lot of movies when I
was a little kid, with my parents, double features, and they were always
black-and-white kind of film noir things. And I remember wanting to go
to sleep but not being able to go to sleep because the armrest cut into
my ribs. If you were a little kid, you’re just the wrong size. And you
didn’t know how—you couldn’t do this. [demonstrates] You couldn’t just
go to sleep, right? So I saw a lot of these movies, black-and-white film
noir, you know. What was it, the something about The Strange Life of
Martha Ivers, with Van Heflin, Barbara Stanwyck, and I’m trying to
remember who else. 1946. That sort of stuff I really got to like later?
So this is factor number two, which is the film noir detective novel,
you know, the detective who is never of the place, who is always—I read
a book on—it might have even been a doctoral dissertation one time,
because I was really into it, called Down These Mean Streets. And I
forget where it comes from, but it was a dissertation on Raymond
Chandler, right? You know Raymond Chandler. Okay. And the title comes
from “Down These Mean Streets a man must go who is not himself mean.” In
other words, that’s the private-eye, who’s got standards and ethics, but
he goes into the shit pile, you know. It’s like Dante, you know, you get
the guide to—and I just love that. Right. That, to me, was—you can call
it alienation, but you can call it that deliberate feeling of not
wanting to belong. So it goes from like childhood things, and it’s all
the way through. In the seventies, my son, when he was a little kid, one
of the things we liked to do—and I forget how old he was, teenager
maybe, but we watched—we loved The Rockford Files with James Garner, and
he’s a detective. And it got really specific, so I got it into my head
that I would really like to dress like Rockford. And what Rockford
always had was like blue jeans, a sport coat, and an open-collared
shirt. And so, see, he was never—he could always kind of go in with the
crooks in suits and he could kind of go in with the hippies on Sunset
Strip, although he didn’t look like them, but he was just visiting both
sides.
So the concept of alienation, to me, was a good thing. You floated above
this. I have an old Jewish artist friend in the Catskills, a guy in his
eighties, Richard Gubernick, and we were talking one time because he’s
really—he is anti-Hasidim, because we have all the ultra Orthodox up
there, and he’s Jewish. I won’t go into it, but he always says, “I
thought that being at large was the point of being a modern man.” He’s
older, so he would say “man,” “A man could lose all that identity, leave
all that cultural baggage.” You’re just Rockford or you’re Philip
Marlowe or you’re Lew Archer, name all those private-eyes kind of going
through this, right? So that alienation, that ambivalence, it’s there,
okay? And the third factor is that no matter where I go—lived in New
York for thirty years—Los Angeles is my hometown, to the extent it can
be a hometown, and I’m kind of obsessed with it, you know. And right now
what am I doing here? Well, three years from now, this will either be
dead or—you know. What I’m doing up here, I’m not making art because we
don’t get studio space here. Laurie’s making drawings in the apartment.
I don’t draw anymore. I make little collages and stuff like that, but I
haven’t really—it gets messy, and so I’ve just decided for this
semester, I’m going to write. And what am I doing? It’s in a word, it’s
totally impossible, but I’m doing—I’m trying to make one continuous mega
novel out of four unpublished novels, you know. Two are sequels to Time
for Robo. Another is a real strange thing about—it’s really weird. It’s
about a kamikaze pilot who doesn’t die, ends up in Los Angeles and
becomes a hasher in a sorority house. It’s called Lieutenant Kao,
because it’s K-a-o, but the “o” is the Theta. It’s Kappa Alpha Theta,
because he becomes a hasher in the thing, and everybody just calls him
“Lieutenant K-a-o,” Theta. So he’s Lieutenant. So there’s that. And then
there’s another novel that I wrote way back in the early seventies that
sort of takes place 1947, and 1972, twenty-five years apart. It has the
late forties, and the Black Dahlia murder is in it. Then 1972 when it
finishes, it’s about kind of like hippies, but not quite, people living
in Topanga Canyon, you know, sort of Drop City, but that much about art.
And there are consequences in 1947 that show up in 1972, and then
there’s a climax. All right. So I got those two and then the two sequels
to Time for Robo. So that’s what I’m doing.
00:46:51
MOON:
Does L.A. play a role?
PLAGENS:
Oh, I’ve called it—that early novel, ’47-’72, was called Merciful Brief,
and I’ve kept the title for the big one, and it’s called Merciful Brief
(A History of Los Angeles), A Novel. I might ditch that, because you
can’t have a subtitle and then have “A Novel.” No, it’s all about L.A.
because the sequels Time for Robo are about a preacher in L.A., you
know, and the sorority houses at USC. And what was the other one? In the
1947 to 1972, the two-parter one, it all takes place in L.A.
MOON:
I see. And it’s Los Angeles in terms of your lived experiences there but
then also representations of the city and culture since starting from
when you were a kid and—
PLAGENS:
Yes.
00:47:46
MOON:
—what you’ve been ingesting since then.
PLAGENS:
Yes, what I’ve been ingested in. Look, I had a project at one time, I
think when I lived in L.A. or when I came home, that I was going to read
every novel at the Main Branch of the L.A. Public Library in the
location file that’s under Los Angeles. In the old days when they had
the card catalogs, those wonderful things, the smell of those things,
and those oak drawers, they’d just come out and then they’d go—and those
beautiful card catalog things. I don’t know what you’d do with them,
because you’ve got to pull that spike out, you know, so the drawers are
kind of—you know. Things will fall through the trough. But they’re just—
MOON:
Yeah. I’m old enough that I used those as a kid. [laughs] The card
catalogs.
00:50:15
PLAGENS:
Well, I’m old enough so that I used them as an adult. [Moon laughs].
Anyway, in the fiction department they used to have at the downtown L.A.
Public Library a location file. So you had books by title, but author,
and by location. There was a drawer and a half full of Los Angeles, so
my goal was to read every novel in the location file under Los Angeles.
And, I mean, I even read the—there was the famous ones, John Fante, you
know, all the detective novels. What’s his name? Day of the Locust.
Nathaniel West. You know, I read all them, even novels I forget by Kay
somebody in the seventies and was called The Valley. [Moon laughs.] You
can imagine what it’s like, sort of Jacqueline Susann novel for the—for
the Valley. You know, and in a certain way, I’m obsessed with it. I
don’t know why. Little boy from Ohio, and it’s not as if I were doing
this on television or something, and people had access to it, I would
probably look at the camera right now and say, “I don’t want all you
asshole artists out there to think that, oh, old Plagens is languishing
in New York and he really wishes he was part of the L.A. scene.” No,
it’s not that. The art world is there. I’m talking about L.A., and
especially since, you know, it’s so changing, you know.
So the L.A. in my thing is this kind of 1950 L.A. Times. It’s all run by
white people. It’s real corrupt. The police department is violent.
You’ve seen the movies. You know, that kind of thing, going into the
sixties in Beverly Hills and then in the seventies there’s a big sea
change with drugs and rock and roll and stuff like that. And now there’s
been another sea change where, you know, it’s the multinational city on
the Pacific Rim, it’s Latin America’s northernmost city, and all that
sort of stuff. I go there so I get that, and I’m interested in it
because I do it, but I’m really interested in more the first two, and
especially the first one. It’s a cliché thing, though. L.A. is this city
of alienated people that don’t really belong there anywhere. They’ve got
the sun. It’s straight Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald. But that’s
what I’m working on. It’s got 150 chapters to it right now. [laughter]
MOON:
Saga.
00:52:10
PLAGENS:
I’ve taken the books apart and put the chapters in chronological order.
It’s like they did The Godfather. Have you ever seen The Godfather, edit
of Godfather I and Godfather II, which Godfather II was an even better
movie than The Godfather. But it bookended. It went to Sicily and showed
you how things started and then came back to the end, and so what
somebody did was this edit, and there’s a few scenes that have to be
filtered in where it works chronologically. I mean, you can see the
whole thing double-length movie, starts in Sicily in the nineteenth
century and ends in the seventies or whenever Mario Puzo wrote this
thing. That’s what I’m doing.
MOON:
Back in the seventies, you know, just thinking about the relationship of
the artists and the city, do you think that—I think that in retrospect,
you know, it’s easier to see the connections between what is going on in
the city, developments in the city, the economics of certain
neighborhoods, and the presence of certain kinds of industry and how it
affected art production. Like, for example, Light and Space—
PLAGENS:
Yes.
MOON:
—you know, the connection with the aerospace industry in Southern
California and the real sort of optimism and exploration,
experimentation with technology, but then also, you know, thinking about
a certain kind of way of making art in Venice when it was still this,
you know, neglected area that was cheap and filled with junk, and also
Watts, in terms of also the kind of, you know, assemblage work that was
just using junk, or, in Noah Purifoy’s case, debris from the Watts
Riots.
PLAGENS:
Yeah, yeah.
MOON:
Do you think that artists were more sort of—in general, right, what you
remember this decade, that the artists were more sort of myopic and not
really thinking about this city, you know, in terms of this larger
historical and economic and conflict-driven site? Do you know what I
mean?
PLAGENS:
Yeah.
00:53:59
MOON:
Like the kind of perspective that you begin to see with someone like
Mike Davis, for example. Well, that’s later, I guess, when he publishes
City of Quartz.
PLAGENS:
I met Mike Davis a couple times, and he—I’m trying to remember the name
of the first book, the big one—
MOON:
City of Quartz.
00:56:20
PLAGENS:
City of Quartz. Well, City of Quartz, he quotes me all over the place,
especially from Sunshine Muse, and it’s like I never meant—they were
meant to be little statements about the art world, and he would apply
them to these great big things. [Moon laughs.] He made me look good,
profound. The answer—well, the premise of your question is right. I
mean, there is a split, okay, aesthetically. There are people who just
kind of—if they don’t hang around the aerospace industry, they’re
interested in it, you know. The perception of aerospace stuff gets in
the air, new materials, plastics, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Second
thing, there is a direct connection with a couple of artists, which is
Ed Wortz working for Garrett Laboratories, trying to figure out what an
astronaut will go thorough in a weightless, lightless tin can floating
out there in space, sensory deprivation. So he and Irwin and Turrell,
right? And he eventually marries Melinda Terbell after she’s divorced
from Tom Terbell and she becomes Melinda Wortz, and they had the house,
and then they were the big collectors. I’ll give you a little—I mean, I
stop because this is a cute little anecdote, and I’ll get right back on
track, was when I came back to L.A. with Laurie in the eighties in the
summer, it was like one summer in between Chapel Hill, right? My friend
Walter Gabrielson, who had been divorced, had a girlfriend who had a
high-paying job, relatively high-paying job with the county board of
supervisors. She was like the head administrative assistant. She had a
house up in Mount Washington. She had a hot tub in it. She invited
Walter and me, and my friend Walter Gabrielson, was an ongoing patient
of Ed Wortz, and he credits Ed for saving his life, you know, because
Walter just had a lot of—he had cancer, his wife divorced him, and he’d
never gotten promoted at CSUN.
So we go over there. We’re invited up there for a little dip in the hot
tub, not nude, suits. So we go up there, and I’m coming down the walk
and Ed is already in—and you know who Ed Wortz is. So I’m coming down,
and I think Laurie’s behind me, and Ed is like, you know, like you do,
with your elbows on the side of the Jacuzzi or the hot tub, and he’s got
his glass of wine. And as I come down the stairs, he looks up at me and
he says, “Peter, why haven’t you been to see me?” And his attitude, was
like, “Every other artist in the art world, in the L.A. art world, is my
patient. Why aren’t you?” Okay? But it was said just so casually. [Moon
laughs.] Like, “You haven’t got your driver’s license renewed, you know.
You need to do that.” [Moon laughs.] And I’m just using that as a retro
example of the smallness in size of the L.A. art world in certain
respects in the eighties. There was a focal point. There was Ed Wortz.
Everybody went to him. So I got off. Where did I get off? It was—oh, I
know what it was. So there was this perception that it was just in the
air that the Light and Space people had, all the way over from, you
know, the way I see it now, oversimplified, there is something called
the L.A. Look. And under the L.A. Look you have two branches: Light and
Space. Michael Asher for a while, Jim Turrell, Robert Irwin, those are
the ones, right? And then over here you have the “fantastic object”
people—
MOON:
De Wain Valentine.
PLAGENS:
—Craig Kauffman—
MOON:
Peter Alexander?
PLAGENS:
Peter Alexander, the resin casters, these fantastic—oh, Larry Bell.
00:58:07
MOON:
Right.
PLAGENS:
You have these fantastic objects, and it leaks over a little bit
into—just a little bit into some kinds of Pop, because some of Ed
Ruscha’s things are just physically, you know, not a hair out of place.
MOON:
Yeah.
PLAGENS:
Okay. So you had those two branches of what you would call the L.A.
Look. But move that over here, and then you had another general
perception, and that’s the assemblages, who you could say everybody over
here is utopian and everybody over here is dystopian. And I’m talking
about Bruce Conner’s assemblages, although he’s from Llyn Foulkes when
he first started out, George Hermes, you know. And there was even for a
while—I might be transposing things from later, giving it credit for
being earlier, but some of used to refer to the “broken doll” school.
You get an old doll that was broken, you nail it to a board, you pour
some tar on it, and it has this real gothic horror movie kind of—you
know. Bruce Connor’s things of the child in the highchair. It might be
northern California, but you had that. Okay. Hermes is much more—what do
you call it? He’s not actively dystopian. He’s just—
00:59:28
MOON:
More nostalgic, maybe?
PLAGENS:
Yeah, nostalgic a little bit. But there is a sort of general dystopian,
putting all this stuff, nailing things together, and rust. You like
rust. Oh, I forgot. How could I? Hit me over the head. Kienholz.
MOON:
Right.
PLAGENS:
It’s the whole Kienholz aesthetic.
MOON:
Although he took it into like a political dimension.
PLAGENS:
But if you’ll look at Roxy’s, the tableau, and you look at one of the
great works of art ever made with a political point of view, The Illegal
Operation, that’s one of the—I mean, if that doesn’t make a feminist
pro-Planned Parenthood person out of you, you know, I don’t know what
artwork will. It’s just, as they say, all over the Internet. AOL likes
the word “chilling,” a chilling effect. So there’s Kienholz, and he’s
like the big daddy of all this, you know, and he takes it in a political
vein, but it’s still basically negative. It’s critical. It isn’t onward
and upward. The Wait, the woman waiting for the kid to come home for
war, she’s got bottles, a handful of bottles, the granny who’s waiting.
The Wait, The War Memorial, and Barney’s with the soldiers doing the Iwo
Jima flag, you know, The Illegal Operation. It’s all nasty, you know.
And then, yeah, well, the political things, the later stuff, you know,
the guy, the scene out of Faulkner, the black guy being castrated.
01:01:07
MOON:
Five Card Stud.
PLAGENS:
Five Card Stud, you know, it’s a little later, and that’s when Nancy
Reddin starts to get coauthor credit. You’ve got these two basic
outlooks. You’ve got the dystopian one and the utopian one. I was
aesthetically much more attracted to Kienholz because I’m a painter and
I’m an existentialist and, “Don’t worry, nothing will turn out all
right,” you know, that kind of attitude. And over here is, “Oh, boy,
look what happens in resin. Whew! Sci-fi.” [Moon laughs.] And I’m being
glib, but all the work that was put in there. I mean, nobody put in more
work on a piece than De Wain Valentine, you know. But I’m just talking
about my temperament is over here. So there were these two outlooks,
yeah. Now, Venice, you’re right. See, it goes from the late fifties when
I first went down there. I was a senior in high school and I went to the
Gashouse to hear some poetry with some people, and I was scared shitless
down there. It was all foggy and—you know. It was like some set out of a
movie, “Meet me at Pier 12 at midnight,” that kind of thing. But from
that point, the Gashouse, it sort of started to morph, and by the mid
sixties and certainly by 1970 it was pricey. People had those
storefronts. It wasn’t like it is now, but you know what I mean? And we
couldn’t afford it, those of us in Pasadena.
MOON:
Yeah, and it was because of the presence of the artists, do you think?
PLAGENS:
Yeah, it started to get—I mean, the artists. It’s the same old story.
The artists homestead a neighborhood.
01:03:01
MOON:
Gentrification.
PLAGENS:
Little bars and sometimes galleries start. Then other people say, “Hey,
this isn’t so bad.” They move in. Then a grocery store and a couple of
restaurants open, and then it goes, and then lawyers and doctors and
architects and designers move in, partly because they discover that they
like living in New York lofts made from old sweatshops, or in L.A.
storefronts at the beach, your standard twenty-by-sixty California
storefront. And, yeah, I think it started. Nothing like it is now.
MOON:
Wait. So you were talking about, you know, the assemblage art and then,
you know, the sort of high point when, you know, the L.A. Look and the
different spectrums of that aesthetic become really visible and really
associated with Los Angeles. Then what happens in the seventies, you
know, conceptual art, performance art, really come to the fore, and this
is when the pluralism sets in for you or when it becomes palpable,
visible?
01:05:12
PLAGENS:
Yes, yeah. I mean, as somebody once said—I forget who described
it—Minimalism was the last of the court styles, and you can throw some
L.A. art in with that if you make Minimalism. Like in New York it meant
simple objects and Tony Smith and cubes and stuff like that, Don Judd.
In L.A. it was more—I think I said this the last time, it was more
phenomenological. The “Minimal” experience, you just look at this glass
box or this—you know. But that Minimalism was the last of the court
styles, and I’m trying to remember who said that. Maybe Coplans said it.
But the court style meant you had to deal with it. You could go the
other way, but it was there. It was a thing like Abstract Expressionism
isn’t Pop art what had been, and it was there. So you had to deal with
it.
Seventies, that kind of melted away. In New York, Minimalism became
Process Art or Postminimalism, Richard Serra throws things, and people
start digging holes and— Basically, the cube falls apart and we go right
to the act of welding, you know, all the detritus and stuff, that. And
in L.A. maybe there’s a kind of reaction of “We got the experience. Now
we’ll just do the performance of it.” But anyway, the court style thing
goes away, you don’t have to deal with Minimalism anymore, and things
become on the finger of one hand. And Realism makes a comeback with
Photorealism. The Women’s Movement comes up, you know, maybe mid
seventies, late seventies. The Women’s Movement comes up and says, well,
it doesn’t have to be all slick and male. You know the clichés, the
cantilevered phallic beams of Franz Kline on a white background, that’s
“old boy” art, and things that horror vacui that radiate out from the
naval or the womb.
MOON:
Or the female imagery of Schapiro and Judy Chicago. [laughs]
PLAGENS:
Female imagery, right. So that comes up. So you got—what did I say
first? You have Postminimalism, deconstructing the object. Then you
have—
MOON:
Process Art.
PLAGENS:
Then you have the feminist consciousness of imagery coming up. Then you
have a return of Realism in Photorealism, which was been lurking around.
The two best are not in L.A. The two best are—my favorite is Bob
Bechtle, and he’s down here, met him finally, nice old guy, and Richard
Estes in New York. I always thought those were the best ones. You had
them in L.A. Then you have the dystopian, the assemblage people.
01:07:20
MOON:
You have Land Art, but maybe that’s not so present in L.A.
PLAGENS:
It’s not in L.A., because they’ve got to go someplace. Somebody said
Land Art was more Turrell’s, that was the exception were all these city
boys from New York who were all cooped up and they wanted to go out in
the desert and do something—
MOON:
West.
PLAGENS:
—out West. [Moon laughs.] Then I forget what else, but you had these
fingers on it. You could do performance and video. Other media come in.
So it’s like all these fingers on the hand are equal you can do, and
that sets in in the seventies. So, yeah, that’s when Greenberg falls
into total disrepute.
MOON:
Yeah. Well, you know, again, I think that this becomes more clear in
hindsight, but it seems to be linked with a lack of consensus about
criteria, and it seemed like if you just even take Artforum, for
example, and the upheavals in the seventies in terms of the editors and
what kind of approach is appropriate, or not even appropriate but should
dominate or, you know, that would—
PLAGENS:
Should what?
01:09:06
MOON:
Should dominate, or how one should even think about art, you know. Like,
for example, you had, you know, Michelson and Rosalind Krauss, who are
frustrated with the lack of theory, or Artforum and how it doesn’t just
want to do theory-motivated art criticism or, you know, a way of writing
about art, as opposed to an approach that maybe someone like Max Kozloff
represented that was more about sort of the social history.
01:10:57
PLAGENS:
There’s also a third point there, which is it’s not quite a formalist
sort of thing, but it’s Coplans is sort of contained Marxist dialectic:
There’s a generation of artists and they come along and they make
certain work, right? And this work answers certain questions from the
previous generation, like what is a sculpture, where does it fit in a
room, can it go on a—right? And so they do their work and then they
leave a bunch of questions on the table. And the next generation of
artists comes long and deals with those issues, and if you’re going to
be a significant artist, you have to deal with those issues. I remember
Coplans once said you cannot run for president in whenever it was, on
the slogan of “54o 40 or Fight.” “54o 40 or Fight” was a campaign slogan
in the nineteenth century, I forget whose campaign, when there was
militancy over the border with Canada, and we wanted it to be at 54
degrees, 50 minutes latitude, and so there was this slogan, “54o 40 or
Fight.” John says you can’t run for president on that in ’72, because
that issue has been settled, and we have a very nice peaceful border
with Canada, thank you very much. It’s been that way for 100 years, so
thank you, you’re irrelevant. He said that’s the same thing with
artists. Artists come along and [unclear], you know, he’s very—he hated
Photorealism. Artists come along and, “I want to paint from photographs
and I want to do this.” And he’d say, “Well, you can do whatever you
want, but it’s about as relevant as ‘54o 40 or Fight.’”
You have to deal with these issues. Now, the issues with Coplans and
around Artforum were theoretical issues about the nature of art that had
been derived from Greenberg. What does a painting consist of? What are
those sculptures supposed to do? So they were interested in Richard
Serra and molten lead and earthworks and stuff like that, but they
weren’t interested in the social history of things. And even though
there was a Marxist bent in that Coplans issues, dealing with issues, it
wasn’t politically full enough for, you know, the people who resigned
and founded October, whose namesake is obvious. Did you ever see the
parody called November? It’s kind of funny.
MOON:
No.
PLAGENS:
Somebody put out a parody for a few issue called November.
MOON:
Oh, you mean the magazine?
PLAGENS:
Yeah.
MOON:
Yeah, I read an issue of that, yeah.
PLAGENS:
Yeah. It looks just like October. Okay. So there were those people. And
the final straw that broke the camel’s back was the Lynda Benglis dildo
ad. I mean, that was—
MOON:
Right, as a riposte to Robert Morris.
PLAGENS:
Robert Morris and a kind of a chain with the Wehrmacht helmet?
01:12:15
MOON:
Yeah.
PLAGENS:
Yeah, and that preceded that ad. Linda’s was in 1974, okay? And that
Robert Morris thing was earlier. But that was the straw that broke the
camel’s back, but as I remember it—and I was sort of there, but I wasn’t
there, I was back in New York. I wrote a satirical humorous letter to
the editor about art and it probably pissed everybody, because all these
angry people, Rosalind Kraus and Annette Michelson and etc., etc., wrote
this, you know, kind of “Fuck you, we’re outta here,” and they published
it. But mine was at the end, you know, where I said this woman had been
to our house for dinner and talked to my nine-year-old son, and now how
am I going to explain this to him? And then I made a joke out of it,
about the dildo being made in Japan and depressing the American plastics
industry, who might have otherwise made it, you know. [Moon laughs.] And
I was just real cute, and it sort of was intended to take the wind out
of it—because I thought they were posturing—anyway that, the reason why
they resigned over that ad was not because of the sexual content of it,
that there was Linda nude with a double-ended dildo; the objection was
that the way the ad was set up was it had—it was either an article on
her, a profile, one of those things, earlier in the same magazine or had
been in an issue or came later or what, but they thought the way the ad
was presented, it looked like editorial content because it was just the
picture and then little type, as I remember over the photograph. And
that was the thing, that we’re too market-driven, you know. Linda
Benglis is selling these ribbons and so is Richard Serra selling his big
shell ellipses, and so are all these other people, and it’s, you know,
this whole kind of thing where we’re not talking about what Benjamin
H.D. Buchloh wants to talk about. He comes later. But it was that, the
editorial content, that ad showed that they were just selling stuff and
doing show-biz reputations and shit like that, art stars. And that more
caused the break and the founding of October.
01:15:11
MOON:
And it did go in that direction? I mean, with Artforum, it became—I
mean, up to a certain point it seemed really about, you know, there are
a lot of fights or a lot of very sort of vocal criticism that you would
read, but then becomes sort of more known as a glossy magazine by the
eighties.
PLAGENS:
Oh, entirely, and it’s still like that now. It weighs nine pounds. I
used to do a couple things. I did—“I used to do a couple things.” That’s
terrible. My wife says I’m always saying, “thing” lately as a sort of
filler. Along with: “Do you know what I mean?” “Yadda, yadda, yadda.”
“He’s working with the thing.” [Moon laughs.] I did a piece in New York,
probably in the nineties, maybe when I was still at Newsweek, and I did
a thing where it was just stream-of-consciousness sentences about what I
thought when I came to each page. “Page 126, oh, god, not another ad
about him. I thought he was a has-been in the art world.” [Moon laughs.]
Page 143, some theoretical sludge, by, oh, I don’t know, those people
who place articles on academe.edu, you know. There’s one guy that comes
up, and I think his name is Joshua, but I can’t—you know, and I’d have
the little comment, “173, the semiotics of basements,” or something, you
know, “in the new Taiwan art scene.” And my comment would be, “Oh,
Jesus, do I have to read this? I don’t want to. Probably I will. All
right.” And I went through this whole stream of consciousness, and it
was a dig at Artforum because every other one was about publicity and
slickness in a page. And it is now. Yeah, even though it’s got real
dense stuff in it, if you take the time to read a thousand words on this
or the polemics or the reviews, it’s in there, but it’s—and I still get
a free copy with a card from—come on—the publisher. Where’s the red
suits all the time? I’m forgetting his name.
01:17:16
MOON:
Oh, Landesman? No.
PLAGENS:
Yeah, Knight. I got a little card, “With my compliments, Knight.” It’s
like Town & County used to be. It’s like the biggest issue that
Vogue used to put out at the beginning of the fashion season. September
issue was always like a phone book. And then the only thing that
Artforum ad lacks is you don’t have perfume ads, so it doesn’t smell
good. You know those ads where they put the perfume in the page? And,
no, it’s just I never read it anymore. [Moon laughs.] Every once in a
while there will be an article that comes to my attention because
somebody recommended it or argues with it on Facebook or something, so
I’ll go read it. But, no, it went entirely, you know, that way. And, I
don’t know, does anybody read October anymore?
MOON:
Good question. I mean, yes, but maybe it’s shrunk. [laughs]
PLAGENS:
Yeah, I would think it would.
MOON:
The readership. [laughs]
PLAGENS:
So where were we? I guess we’re at Artforum?
01:19:00
MOON:
Yeah, Artforum. Maybe we can bring it back to Los Angeles in terms of
the end of the seventies and you’re downtown, visiting professor at USC,
you have a loft, you’ve moved downtown. What were your thoughts about
MOCA? Did you see it as a positive development for the city back then?
PLAGENS:
Oh, yeah, everybody did, because that was the reason for LAICA’s birth
and death, you know. I mean, LAICA was born out of a dissatisfaction
with the County Museum, Maurice Tuchman’s program, etc. Like the County
Museum was sort of the Met and MoMA rolled together, and what we didn’t
have was a Whitney Museum, you know, with a kind of biennial—you know
what I mean, all that sort of stuff. And so LAICA was founded in the
seventies as a kunsthalle. It went in with a dollar a year rent in
Century City for, you know, a while. And then MOCA came along. They
actually, “Okay, we got to do a contemporary art museum,” instead of
just a program, because we didn’t have a MoMA. So MOCA is kind of MoMA
plus the Whitney sort of put together for L.A. just the—
MOON:
Was that a permanent collection but then also trying to revive—or trying
to be a serious platform for New York?
01:20:32
PLAGENS:
Yeah. This is then, because in those days the L.A. County Museum was the
all-purpose museum like the Met, and the Met had a contemporary art
program. Henry Geldzahler, Henry’s show in 1970, so it had one, and it
was kind of like that. And it was inadequate, you know, just like the
Met would be inadequate for New York if MoMA, the Whitney, the
Guggenheim weren’t around. Okay.
So L.A. didn’t have that, so LAICA was started and it was just a little
kunsthalle. Then they finally got the wherewithal to say, “Okay, we need
a modern art museum,” meaning contemporary art museum in L.A. And all
that stuff happened, with Count Panza and the site downtown and getting
Isozaki to do it, and the Artists Committee, you know, who had this
big—that was the big reformist thing of MOCA. It had this committee with
Sam Francis and Robert Irwin on it, who would decide stuff. Now it’s got
artists on the board. And that’s the way it was back then. Now, of
course, you have BCAM on the campus of L.A. County, and you have the
Broad Museum, and you have MOCA. So it’s changed, but back then it was,
“We don’t have a Whitney Museum, Modern, MoMA type , so we’ve got to
have one.” Yes, it was welcomed.
MOON:
But then you left right around—
PLAGENS:
Yeah, well, my timing has always been good. [Moon laughs.] I got this
job in Chapel Hill, and I thought I had to take it because I thought
Laurie and I needed—
MOON:
She was also teaching then in Los Angeles?
PLAGENS:
Yeah. Well, I got her—during the eighties when we were in North Carolina
just before she left, Richard Hertz hired her to teach a couple classes.
MOON:
At Art Center?
01:22:29
PLAGENS:
At Art Center. And so she was teaching up there. And when we would come
back, we always had this thing where they were on a trimester system, so
her summer semester went into like the first of October, and I had to
get back to Chapel Hill because the semester began before Labor Day,
okay? So a little bit of that, yeah, she was teaching there.
And then we had our child, our daughter, and that phase was—you know,
she’d have to come home from Artforum to breastfeed her, you know, our
infant daughter, and then when we did the back-and-forth one time,
because she had to stay, I took our daughter by myself to her mother’s
in New Jersey, which was all good. Her grandmother doted on her. And
then I went back to work at Chapel Hill, and Laurie got to stay out
there, and our daughter formed a wonderful bond with her grandmother
during that time. The funny thing was, though, is that—this is just an
aside—is that all the suspicious looks that a single man gets on getting
on a plane with a four- or five-month-old infant. Everybody thinks it’s
a custody case and you’re splitting, you know. [Moon laughs.] “Should we
tell the cops there’s a man there with a—?” But, yeah, I thought MoCA
was a good thing, and I left, but I used to come back in the middle of
it. And then the County Museum, you know, they got Rusty Powell as
director for a while, and they build that other building, the Hardy
Holzman Pfeiffer thing, in front of it—we went through this—to cut off
the view of that perfectly awful William Pereira Building. “Let’s hide
it behind a wall.” And they’ve been going through that ever since. And
now it’s Peter Zumthor. Before that, it was Rem Koolhaas, trying to
figure out what to do with that. So, yes, I left, but MOCA was a good
development, you know. I know the shit started, as it always does, right
after, you know, Count Panza and Richard Koshalek, and who’s really
running this place and who’s on the board, and—you know. And then it
went through various recessions. So MOCA was a good thing.
01:25:00
MOON:
And we can move to your time in North Carolina. You got offered a job
that you felt you couldn’t refuse.
01:27:4401:29:10
PLAGENS:
Well, yeah, in a nut, yes. It was too much money. I mean, I was
living—yeah, I was teaching a little bit. Laurie was staying home. She
wasn’t teaching right yet. I had child support. There’s a whole bunch of
things, you know. And 239 South Los Angeles Street was kind of scruffy.
First, it didn’t have heat or air conditioning in it, so you just
went—the worst part was the heat. It should be 90 degrees in there, you
know. And it was real minimal. The building was eventually torn down. It
was unreinforced brick, would have been a pile on the next earthquake.
And after ’91, Sue Iwaksaki, who owned the building, she was very good
with artists, she was very nice. So, anyway, yeah. So a friend of mine
who was a visiting art historian at Duke was a guy I knew who was a
graduate student when I was an undergraduate at USC named John Connolly,
he was at Duke, and he said, “You know, they’re looking for a chair. You
mind if I put your name in?” And I said, “No,” Just cast your bread upon
the waters, deal. And then I got an interview, so Laurie and I went
back, and she visited her parents and came down with me, and I had an
interview with the dean, and I got the job. Why did I get the job? You
never know why you got the job until you’re there and it’s too late.
Then you find out kind of why you really got the job. And why I got the
job was at Chapel Hill the art historians and the studio people
absolutely hated each other, and the art historians ran the place. They
were the better nationally known part of the department. Their Ph.D.
program was ranked, I think, fifteenth, okay, for Ph.D.’s in art
history. When I left, it was like ten or eleven. Might have even been in
the top ten. I don’t know, you have to check with however they ranked
those things. And the art historians, but they treated the artists like
shit, and the artists didn’t get leaves, they didn’t get this, they
didn’t get the kind of raises they wanted, etc., etc. And the truth be
told, the artists were screwed over, but the artists weren’t like the
art historians. The art historians had national or international
reputations, especially the older ones, you know. They were expert in
this and expert in that. And artists tend to be, because you’ve got to
move your shit around with you, at least in those days, you tend to, at
best, get regional reputations.
And when I came there, my announced desire, which I did not—because I’m
not a great administrator, you know—what I wanted to do was I wanted to
make it the best MFA program south of the Mason-Dixon and east of the
Mississippi, in that southeast quadrant. So to anybody in Florida, we
were going to have the better MFA program. I don’t want to go into North
Carolina, but the university system used to be bifurcated and it would
only allow certain things in certain of its campuses. Greensboro, which
had been the women’s university in the old days, UNC-Greensboro, that’s
where you got MFAs, and there were good people that came out of there.
North Carolina State in Raleigh was where you had an architecture
school. In Chapel Hill, which was the flagship university, an old art
historian who was also a southern minister and taught in their religion
department said to me soon after I got there, “You understand, of
course, that there is a difference between a state university and the
university of the state.” [Moon laughs.] And that’s what we were. See,
we were the university of the state. Everybody else was one of the seven
dwarfs or something. [Moon laughs.] So architecture was at North
Carolina State in Raleigh, right?
So, anyway, the MFA came late to Chapel Hill, but it was pretty good. We
had fourteen or fifteen students every semester, and I started a
visiting artist program where we had like—come on—we had Harmony
Hammond, an old guy named Julius—what was his name?—and Andrea Blum from
New York, and some other people. I did that. That was probably the best
thing I did. I don’t know what [unclear]. I said, “No, I’m going to take
a position for the visiting artist.” And they were always afraid, “Oh,
it’s soft money. They’ll take it back. If it isn’t a tenured-track line,
they’ll take it back.” And I said, “Well, you know, you have to roll the
dice on this if we’re going to attract anybody.” So it was good. Anyway,
they hated each other, so they wouldn’t approve of any of it. It had
always been an art historian, and the artists finally said, “We will not
work under another art history chairman. We’re not going to vote.” And
the art historian said, “We will not have this illustrious school
chaired by somebody who doesn’t have a Ph.D.” So I got the job because
the dean said, “I’m tired of this shit.” I liked him. He was a guy named
Sam Williamson, a historian who wanted to be president of Tulane. That
was his big ambition. [Moon laughs.] That’s, I think, where he went. And
I got along with him, I got along with him, but it wasn’t a good time to
be there, because it was—I’m trying to be fast about this. What time is
it?
MOON:
It’s 10:45.
PLAGENS:
Okay. A few minutes, five minutes, ten minutes? I want to get a cup of
coffee?
MOON:
Sure.
PLAGENS:
And then we’ll resume?
01:30:58
MOON:
Yeah.
PLAGENS:
Okay. It was in a—I didn’t realize it later, you know, until you look
back and you can see it, it was a recession, and what was happening in
North Carolina was the tobacco money was running out, you know. Nobody
was selling enough cigarettes and tobacco to make—because, you know,
this is when the anti-smoking starts. And Durham, where we lived, I
bought this Jehovah’s Witness church and turned it into a living space
and a studio. Durham, where we lived—this is a marker—when we came
there, the city seal on the side of the cop cars and everything had two
tobacco leaves. Durham was where Lucky Strike was made. It was a city of
tobacco. When we left, Durham was the city of medicine, and on the side
of the police cars was the—you know that logo with the two snakes—
MOON:
Yeah.
PLAGENS:
—the symbol for medicine, because it had all these things. So all I did
as chairman was take things away from people. I took away their private
phone lines. I took away their—you know, those that didn’t already have
the—remember those IBM typewriters with balls in them?
01:32:14
MOON:
Yeah, actually.
PLAGENS:
Yeah. Everybody wanted one. That was top of the line.
MOON:
Uh-huh, because you had to economize expenses? That’s why you’re taking—
PLAGENS:
Yeah. And I said, “No, you can’t have one. You didn’t get your old one
last year, you can’t have it.” And that’s all I did was cut, cut, cut.
So it wasn’t particularly pleasant. So the art historians didn’t like
me, probably, because I was glib and I didn’t have a Ph.D. They thought
that would make them a laughingstock of the CAA or something. [Moon
laughs.] And I wasn’t particularly good. I was fairly naïve, and I had
this idea that if you just told the truth, you were open and accessible,
had open office hours and stuff, I didn’t want to do any Machiavellian
The Prince sort of—I didn’t want to do that. [Moon laughs.] But you
can’t. You can’t be a Know-Nothing, if you know American political
history. You know the Know-Nothings?
MOON:
No.
PLAGENS:
Capital K, Capital N, a nineteenth-century political party, sort of like
the Tea Party Movement, and it was basically. We’re uncorrupted by
outside influences from foreigners. Know-Nothing was proud. So it’s like
“owe-nothing” too. Anyway, that’s how I got the job, and I stayed there
for three years doing it. I could live there. It was very nice salary.
It’s real easy to live. I tend to live between my ears, as I say. I
don’t—the circumstances where I—you know. Doesn’t bother me that much,
because it’s all here and in my little computer and on my little mobile
devices, you know. And I didn’t care, but Laurie—we left after four
years there, and it cost a lot of money to do that, because if I’d have
stayed five, I’d have been able to keep the state’s contribution to my
pension plan. But if you leave before five years, you’re not “invested,”
so you only get what you put in, you don’t get the—
01:34:23
MOON:
The matching?
PLAGENS:
Yeah. So you lose half for that, you know, for that four years. But
Laurie said, “If we stay here another year, we will spend on my
psychiatrist what you’d gain.”
MOON:
So she wasn’t happy?
PLAGENS:
She didn’t like the mid South, and you got to remember this was the
early eighties, and there was that “the university of the state,” you
know. And I remember we went to a dinner party, a little lunch party.
There were two things that bothered her about it. She says, “You know,
we get there, they serve all us ladies out here this tiny little glass
of sherry. I walk by and the kitchen door is open, and I can see the
guys out there with their jackets off and they’ve got a bottle of Jack
Daniels, you know, and they’re drinking it down.” She said, “What is
this?”
MOON:
[laughs] It’s the South.
01:35:57
PLAGENS:
It was real. It was southern, you know, in those days. And I remember
one time we were at this dinner party and this wife said—and I remember
her saying it, and I’m looking at Laurie and biting my tongue, trying
not to laugh. Said, “Well, how have you been?” “Well, we just returned
from Princeton, New Jersey, where our daughter graduated from Princeton,
just as her father had done twenty-five years before, summa cum laude.”
And Laurie and I looked at each other, “Is she reading from a card?”
[Moon laughs.]
There used to be a sculptor on the faculty, I’d go for coffee with him,
and it was this easy thing. He was probably a bit of a skirt-chaser you
know. This was the eighties. But he’d address the waitress as “Shug,”
for “Sugar.” He’d say, “Hey, Shug, a little refill over here,” you know.
It was that. It had that element to it. She said, “If I have to stay
here one more—you know, I’m going to—.” Anyway, she couldn’t find a
teaching job back there. That was part of it. She would liked to have
taught at a little liberal arts school around, you know, something like
that. I couldn’t have her teach at Chapel Hill because it would have
been nepotism, you know. So she didn’t like it. It was five hundred
miles to the tenth from our house to the driveway of her parents’ house
in Wayne, New Jersey, which was then you could get a bus to New York,
you know. That’s where we’d stay. Five hundred miles, I could drive
that. That’s a ten-hour day, you know, with stops, everything included.
Leave at ten in the morning, you get there at eight at night. So will we
go back to L.A.? So we said, “No, we’ll go to New York,” but we did that
year in L.A. Okay. So, anyway, Chapel Hill.
MOON:
Okay. Let’s take a—okay. [End of Session 4, October 28, 2015]
MOON:
Okay.
PLAGENS:
We ready to go?
00:00:19
MOON:
Yeah. So perhaps we can start this session by talking about your
decision to move to New York City. Oh, right, your wife Laurie wanted
to—she needed to get out. [laughs]
PLAGENS:
Needed to get out of the mid-South.
MOON:
That was one big reason. [laughs]
PLAGENS:
Out of the mid South, and she is somewhat irreverent and she is just
forceful and thought that that wasn’t quite her place, okay? I did want
to put in one thing. I know it’s out of chronological order, but I
forgot about this, okay, about living. In 1972, I got a visiting-artist
thing for about a year in Berkeley. It was three quarters, you know, it
wasn’t the standard full winter, spring quarter. It was something like
fall, spring, summer quarter, okay? And while I was there, or shortly
before going, I told you I got tenure in absentia in Northridge, because
I had a Guggenheim and I went off, and they tenured me and promoted me
to an associate, I think, okay? And when I came back, my former wife and
I bought a house in Laurel Canyon, etc., etc. I think it was 1975. This
is one of these things that things turned on. I was friends with some of
the people at UC San Diego, and at that time it had this really hot art
department with Manny Farber, with Newton and Helen Harrison.
00:01:51
MOON:
Yeah. Allan Kaprow was there?
00:03:46
PLAGENS:
Kaprow was there. There was a guy who’s probably faded from memory,
named Bernard Cohen, an English painter who used to have a first
computer thing to make drawings. He had like a little Roomba-like device
that went around the canvas with a little pencil poking out of it or
something. It would make a drawing, and he would color it in. But the
teaching load was a lot less than Northridge. My wife had a sister who
lived in Seal Beach. La Jolla is really—but basically it was that UC
system, you know, you only have to teach two classes, they have graduate
students, you know, big-time faculty. Everybody—I don’t think Baldessari
was there. But you know what I mean? We’re all trying to make it in New
York, okay? And they offered me a job and I turned it down, and I turned
it down at the last minute just before they were going to go into their
faculty meeting. I thought and thought and thought about it. Part of it
had to do with my ex-wife, and it was a reasonable thing, that we had
just gotten back from Berkeley and we bought this house, and she says,
“It’s really nice here in Laurel Canyon. I like this. I don’t want to
move to San Diego.” And it wasn’t like a fight. I thought, “I don’t
either. I want to be in Los Angeles.” But I called them up at the last
minute, just before they were about to go into their meeting, and Manny
Farber wasn’t too happy with me after that, because there were some
people who lobbied for me, “Hey, the guy writes for Artforum.” That was
partly it. You know what I mean? “He’s connected, he’s ambitious, he’s a
painter, he’s—.” You know. And they sold me. And then I turned it down.
The reason I just bring that up is somehow it came up between Laurie and
me that we would have never met or what would my life had been had I
done that, and I think what I would have done—forget what about art—but
I would have retired a professor after forty years at UC San Diego.
MOON:
Mm-hmm. [laughs]
PLAGENS:
Because, you know what I mean, nobody leaves from there. It’s friggin’
paradise when you get there, the job, the school. You can talk yourself
into, “Yeah, I’ll go up to L.A. every once in a while.”
MOON:
Yeah.
PLAGENS:
Graduate students and a real—the student body is real select, you know.
It’s one of the more popular campuses after Berkeley and UCLA, probably
the third, you know. So anyway, I turned that down and my life didn’t
take that fork in the road.
MOON:
You eventually moved east.
PLAGENS:
Yes, eventually, yeah, yeah. I mean, five years later, I moved. I moved
east. Sort of weird when you think about it. Why would I go to—
MOON:
Chapel Hill.
PLAGENS:
Why would I go to Chapel Hill and not go to San Diego? But my personal
life was different. I was with Laurie then, and if that job had come in
1979 and we’re downtown L.A., I’d have been there in—we’d have been
there in a shot. So it’s one of those things, that’s all, you know.
00:05:21
MOON:
Could have been different.
PLAGENS:
It could have been different. I liked the way it turned out but you
never know what would have happened. But it’s just—also to point out in
the seventies there was a little consciousness of that down there, that
down in San Diego and in Irvine—
MOON:
There was a lot of energy in terms of who they’re hiring, their
programs?
PLAGENS:
Energy in who they’re hiring and all these hotshot students they’re
turning out, you know. I mean, Chris Burden and Alexis Smith, they’re
all coming out of Irvine, and Irvine has Irwin teaching there. Then San
Diego had Allan Kaprow. I think Baldessari was there for a while, but
maybe not. Newton and Helen Harrison.
MOON:
Before CalArts, Baldessari.
PLAGENS:
Yeah. And Newton and Helen Harrison, filmmakers. Oh, David and Eleanor
Antin, you know?
MOON:
Right, yeah.
PLAGENS:
I mean, it was a—
MOON:
Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, Frank [unclear]?
PLAGENS:
They’re later, I think. I think.
MOON:
Uh-huh.
PLAGENS:
I don’t think Martha Rosler would have voted to appoint me anyway.
00:06:50
MOON:
Maybe not. [laughs] So the joint and happy decision to move to New York
City after a few years in Chapel Hill, Durham, yeah?
PLAGENS:
Yeah, lived in Durham, worked at Chapel Hill. First year we were there,
we sublet somebody’s house, a faculty who was on leave on sabbatical.
Then we had your typical Chapel Hill kind of house, surrounded by woods,
a custom-built, you know, sort of Colorado ski chalet kind of look to
it, you know. Not peaked roofs, but slanted, you know. And then I bought
that church. So, yes, after living there, working there, decided to
leave and to go to New York, but it took a year, go home to L.A. first,
do your affairs, make some money, you know, load up the van and then go
to New York.
MOON:
Did you and Laurie have jobs lined up in New York City?
00:09:11
PLAGENS:
No, not really. The only thing I had was the kind of promise of a couple
of classes at Hofstra University out on the Island. I did have a place
rented and we did have $10,000, you know. I had loft rented on Lispenard
Street, which is right below Canal, which was right out the back door of
Pearl Paint. It was a real crappy, grungy loft, especially when you have
a two-year-old kid. But it was there and I rented that first. I rented
it long distance, but I had a friend go over who was in Brooklyn, a
German guy, go over and check it out, that it existed. Because some
people I knew had moved to New York and they’d put a deposit down and
everything, and they’d been swindled because the address did not exist.
First, last, and security deposit. And so it was there. And, no, we
didn’t have jobs. And then I did get the two classes at Hofstra. But
when I arrived, I got off the plane, and the first thing, I bought a New
York Times, and there was a story in there about how there was probably
going to be a faculty strike at Hofstra. Oh, boy. But we did have a
place to land, and I came first and cleaned up the place, and then
Laurie came in August, something like that.
But I did get the job. Laurie got a job eventually. She worked for an
art consultant. She had a couple of jobs, but she worked for an art
consultant in the end, named Barbara Blum—Barbara Berger, sorry. And I
taught. And then the way it went was 1989, the Newsweek job came in over
the transom, I left, Laurie got a part-time job at Hofstra—my friend who
had a part-time job moved into my what had become a full-time job at
Hofstra. It wasn’t tenure-track, but I was teaching three classes,
right, and he got that job. And then somehow Laurie got in his old job
of being an adjunct and—then somebody retired, he became tenure-track,
Laurie got a full-time job. This May she retired twenty-five years there
as a professor. So it’s like we followed each other in a little bit.
But, no, I didn’t have—we didn’t have jobs lined up when we got there.
MOON:
Did you have close friends? What was your life like when you first moved
to New York City? Were there other people that you were close with that
you knew from before that you’d hang out with?
PLAGENS:
I didn’t do a lot of hang—
MOON:
John Coplans? Did you hang out with John Coplans?
00:11:11
PLAGENS:
I didn’t do a lot of hanging out, but I did have friends that I would go
visit. One of them was John Coplans, who was now a photographer and
wasn’t doing writing. He was doing his photography. You know his
photography: the bodies and so on. And he was living down on Hudson
Street. He lived there until September 11th, and his place was, right
down there, and he had to get out. 250 Liberty, was that the street he
lived on? And then he moved to the Bowery. So I saw John.
I had his German artist friend who lived in Brooklyn. He eventually
broke up with his long-time girlfriend. Her name is Liz Christiansen.
She’s now the curator for Deutsche Bank. She used to be a painter, but
she’s out of that, I think, and she travels a lot. And I used to go see
them. And there were a couple of artists that I had known, a guy named
Marvin Coats, who had taught up in Humboldt, had moved to New York, and
I did have a few Artforum friends. And I was going to write criticism,
but mostly for Art in America by then. But I didn’t have a job, no, so
it was a little scary.
MOON:
Allan McCollum, were you friends with him?
PLAGENS:
I knew Allan McCollum. I knew Allan McCollum in L.A., and I had one
interesting night with him with my ex-wife when we had the house in
Laurel Canyon. Allan McCollum was then going out with Carole Caroompas;
they came over after some party, and we just started talking and
drinking wine, and the sun came up. We stayed up all night. I just
reconnected a little bit with him in New York, had coffee. He used to go
out with my editor—I didn’t know that—at Newsweek, Cathleen McGuigan,
who’s the editor of Architectural Record now. When she first came to New
York, she dated Allen McCollum. Allen is, and always has been, quite
good-looking. I always thought of him as looking like Warren Beatty a
little bit. But I knew him, but I didn’t connect up with him. I probably
tried not to go back to L.A., my L.A. friends. Alienation and not
belonging: and I feel best when I don’t quite belong. I like that. So
when I got to New York, I wasn’t going to look up people. But I wasn’t a
recluse: Artforum and Art in America and Betsy Baker, went to parties at
her place, you know, an Artforum crowd, Pincus-Witten. We went over to
dinner with Peter Schjeldahl a couple of times, maybe only once. Oh, and
the other thing was I’ve had the same dealer for forty years—
00:13:49
MOON:
Nancy Hoffman.
PLAGENS:
—Nancy Hoffman. So I would go to Nancy Hoffman, but I don’t hang out. I
wasn’t one of those artists who would drop by. Nancy’s very hospitable
and very nice, and she sort of likes that. It’s not like she requires
it. But, you know, people come by and they have a cappuccino machine
and— But I don’t hang out.
MOON:
Were you friends with Helene Winer, the woman who was at Pomona and then
she founds Metro Pictures?
PLAGENS:
Metro Pictures. No. I couldn’t—as they say, I probably couldn’t pick her
out of a police lineup.
MOON:
[laughs] Okay.
PLAGENS:
I must have met her, but, no. And I would go to artists’ openings if
they had something sometimes, just to show the flag. But, no, I’m not a
hanger-outer. I’m always over-busy. Like now I’ve got this idiot fiction
project. [Moon laughs.] I’ve got my teaching, and I got my Wall Street
Journal things to go back and forth for. I’m always overscheduled, and
it’s not good, and it’s partly my psyche. I mean, Laurie has said it—I
have the concentration span of a toddler. I play with my blocks for five
minutes, and I want something else. [Moon laughs.] I’ll come back to the
blocks.
00:15:36
MOON:
Were you going out into galleries and art spaces and looking at art
frequently, regularly?
PLAGENS:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yes. One of the people that I did meet was this
guy—and I forget how I met him—Doug Hilson, who’s a painter. He retired
from Hofstra too. He has a retrospective at their museum right now. Doug
is sort of my oldest, dearest art friend in New York. He’s a painter,
used to show with Bernice Steinbaum, but his work and she took different
turns and he’s out. He got a part-time job at Hofstra, that’s how I met
him, and we realized we lived close downtown New York, so we’d take the
train out to Long Island together. And we tried, Doug and I—I don’t know
how long it went on—every other Saturday we would do the galleries in
SoHo. I remember I would get the map, the Art Guide, the magazine, and
it had that gray map in SoHo, you turned it vertically. And I would
actually make a little plan, because I would highlight the galleries we
were going to go to. And then the question was always do we do this up
and down—it was more like this, up and down the little streets, Greene
Street, Mercer Street, all those galleries, and go back and forth, or do
we do Broadway, because there were a whole bunch of galleries up on
Broadway, and those were things where you would go in one building and
you’d go to four or five floors with a different gallery. I used to make
this little map with a path on it, with markers, take out the map and
tape it. Then we’d follow it, and we would look at thirty, thirty-five
galleries on a Saturday, which I can’t—it just seems so idiotic. I
couldn’t do that. It’s not physical movement, it’s that I cannot—
00:17:40
MOON:
Keep seeing?
PLAGENS:
I said this before. There’s an old joke about shopping for perfume.
After the first three, they all smell the same. Well, you go see more
than eight shows, they blend in your memory, at least to me. Jerry
[Sarte] and Roberta [Smith], you know, God bless them, I think, still do
that, where they go on a real gallery crawl.
MOON:
Were there any shows that really stood out to you, where you had to sort
of—you know, like the New Realists at the Sidney Janis Gallery, that
made you think like, “Oh, this is the moment. This is [unclear]”?
PLAGENS:
No, nothing like that, and it’s a good thing to bring up, because there
was a sort of, you know, sea change, you know. But, no, it was—you could
feel it. It was the slow rise of installation art, where instead of
objects on the wall or on the floor, not that installations were
invented in the eighties. Do you know what I mean? Then it was a lot
more time-based art. It was video and films and installations, and it
was like a slow sea rising. It was a media thing. It wasn’t a stylistic
or a philosophical thing, although you could probably connect them. It
wasn’t like all of a sudden there’s Pop art and “What happened to
Abstract Expressionism?” If you look at Pop art paintings from the side,
they look exactly like Abstract Expressionist paintings. [Moon laughs.]
They’re flat rectangles hanging on the wall. But now the change was more
morphological, inspired by these anchor works like the De Maria, you
know, the Broken Kilometer and the Earth Room. It slowly rose. I started
getting an inkling of that when I was in my forties, “Oh, wait a minute,
it’s passing me by,” because you see artists who are ten years younger
than you, and you realize there’s a generation of kids coming up. And
that probably hit my consciousness for the first time.
00:19:57
MOON:
Installation art, new media.
PLAGENS:
Yeah, installation art, new media, and the fact—I mean, I don’t know
what did I think, duh, is that when you’re forty, there are going to be
thirty-year-old artists. They’re going to be a semi-generation. That’s
another generation. Then when you’re fifty, there’s going to be
forty-year-old artists and thirty-year-old artists and
twenty-five-year-old artists. It was the first time that you’re sort of
conscious of people coming up behind.
MOON:
Well, what about painting? I mean, painting makes a really big sort of
comeback in the eighties as well, but different style of painting.
PLAGENS:
Different style of painting, and it did. I told you I saw John
Baldessari one time—
MOON:
Looking for Germans. [laughs]
00:21:4500:23:06
PLAGENS:
Looking for Germans. “What are you doing?” “I’m looking for Germans.”
[Moon laughs.] You know, yeah, there are things in the art world, styles
in the art world. There’s been an old joke like if—I forget what the
number of years is, but if you do the same thing for twenty years,
you’ll get three chances at the gold ring. You know what I mean? Your
style will come up every seven years, you know. And so painting came
back, but it never comes back in quite the way that people think it
ought to come back. I mean, the object lesson in that was Abstract
Expressionism and everybody saying, oh, where’s the figure; painting is
so vacant, it’s anti-humanist, because there are no people in these
pictures. And then figuration came back, both in terms of—probably the
closest thing was at the Bay Area Figurative school, closest thing to
something that an Abstract Expressionist, you know, could respect—I
mean, or these other people.
But it came back in Pop art, in people like Leonard Baskin, and The New
Figuration, or whatever it was called that ’59 Whitney show about the
return to the figure, the new human figure. And it’s sort of like,
“Yeah, we wanted it to come back, but not like this.” In the eighties,
painting came back, but it was Schnabel with broken plates, it was David
Salle with his multipart canvases that had soft-core porn in them and
looking very art-director-like, and Robert Longo’s “Men in the City.”
And then the Italians, the three Cs. Remember them? Clemente, Cucchi,
and Chia, the three Cs. So painting came back, but for me, an abstract
painter, it was all kind of, “Oh, Jesus, I have to deal with this
again,” which is figurative stuff. It brought back my early years,
California, when there were people like Jack Zajac and James Strombotne
and John Paul Jones, those people, you know, and Rico Lebrun. You’ve got
to fight this off all over again.
The dust is all settled now, and I think that Julian Schnabel, when he
hits one, he can hit one out of the park. He’s like one of those batters
I equate, and he swings and misses. He either strikes out or he hits a
home run, no in between. And so his like nautical drawings with some
splash of paint over big nautical maps, they’re terrible, but every once
in a while, a painting—you know what I mean—he hits it. And David Salle,
to me, is one of the world’s greatest art directors. He should have been
an art director. He’s perfect for a two-page magazine spread. And he’s
got all those “transgressions” in there that seem polite now. Robert
Longo doesn’t float my boat, but he puts a lot into it. So, yes,
painting made a comeback, but it wasn’t quite to my taste. How’s that? I
would have preferred the ascendance of Terry Winters and Marden and
Susan Rothenberg, to some extent, because her figuration is—
MOON:
The horses?
PLAGENS:
There’s something gritty about it. But, yes, painting did make a
comeback. Didn’t help me. [Moon laughs.] Well, I think I might have said
last time that the only show I ever sold out was Betty Gold in L.A.,
works on paper. But I did have one that except for a couple of works on
paper, all the paintings went, and that was at Nancy Hoffman in 1984,
you know, so maybe something did happen.
00:25:14
MOON:
And you said that you got the Newsweek job because Schjeldahl said no,
Kay Larson didn’t pick up her phone, and you’re next on the list?
PLAGENS:
That’s the way I heard it told. [Moon laughs.] And I heard it told by
the woman who hired me, who, you know, she probably has more reason to
lie about that and say, “Oh, no, you were our first choice,” because of
morale, right? But, no, that’s what she said. [Moon laughs.] And I
believed it, because I thought Kay Larson was writing for New York
Magazine at the time, and I don’t remember whether she left or not, and
I always liked her reviews. I thought she was really readable.
Schjeldahl is a great writer. Schjeldahl’s wordsmithing leaves me in the
dust. I mean, the guy used to be a poet, you know. What was it? He wrote
a review of—it was the same show that I reviewed—oh, Christ—and it was
somebody who had some abject things. Oh, I know. It was the new Whitney,
in the new Whitney, and his thing on the new Whitney was that the new
Whitney was in the former “tatterdemalion” meat district. So immediately
you go up. “Tatterdemalion” means “rundown,” but it’s a wonderful word
and it sounds tattered, you know, and “demalion” sounds like well,
that’s the way the style is, right? So it’s the tatterdemalion meat
market, and it’s a beautiful word, “tatterdemalion.” It sounds—it’s just
lovely. Schjeldahl pulled that out of his nose or someplace, and he’s
not the kind of writer who goes to the thesaurus looking for fancy
words. And Laurie said, “That’s a word you can only use—.” I said,
“Yeah, he can never use that again in his whole career.” But he was at
Seven Days [phonetic], and Newsweek was probably not the kind of job
that Peter would have liked. Peter’s perfect for the New Yorker.
00:27:26
MOON:
The New Yorker, mm-hmm.
PLAGENS:
I only wrote every other week, if that. But you had to do interviews,
you had to do profiles, you had to do reported stories, like when Alfred
Taubman got indicted, I had to cover that stuff. It was a news magazine.
If there was a scandal, if there was a—is the Michelangelo at the French
consulate really a Michelangelo, that little cupid that that art
historian thought. I had to go write about these things. But on the
other hand, I got to go to about eight Venice Biennales. Anyway, Peter
probably wouldn’t have liked that news sort of thing.
MOON:
Sort of critic and journalist?
PLAGENS:
Yeah, yeah. They paid you to be a journalist, and it was okay by me,
because Newsweek was like the Daily Trojan writ large. It’s like being
back at the DT, only with real pros who got real paychecks and—
MOON:
And what you mean by that is sort of the division between the writers
and the—well, at USC was sort of like the frat-boy editorial types who
were—
00:30:25
PLAGENS:
Yeah, they’re—but I mean at USC I liked the Daily Trojan because the
frat-boy types, of which I was one, and out of which I was coming were
only part of it. They cared about the social page and who got on it.
There was a party page, like on Tuesday, after the weekend parties,
there’d be a photograph and there’d be a list of “Bobby Smith came with
Susie Jones.” It was like the engagements, and it was real important to
those people. And there was this little guy a year ahead of me, who was
a minor figure in Watergate, Donald Segretti, he was one of the
ones—Dwight Chapin and Segretti were at USC at that time, and Segretti,
as I remembered him, had a bad complexion and he wore a high-school
haircut. Because we all, when you got out of high school, you got rid of
what they used to call flattop with fenders. The flattop was the flat
top and fenders were long on the sides. And maybe even you had a duck
ass in the back, you know, ducktail. But when you went to college, I
immediately got my hair cut, so I could barely put a part in it. They
referred to it as an Ivy League haircut in the late fifties. But
Segretti still had his flattop with fenders, as I recall, and he was in
some middling fraternity, and he used to always show up complaining
about why his fraternity didn’t get covered on the party page. I don’t
mean he would always show up. He probably showed up once or twice.
So they were over here, and then there was the sports people, and I
liked sports, and then there was the sort of just cynical journalists’
side. I liked it at USC because it put the frat thing in a compartment
over there. It was separation that I liked, and needed. Newsweek I liked
because you go up to the cafeteria to have lunch, and there was maybe
the Paris bureau chief was in town. He did all the sports stories. And
you’d get these other people, “Hey, come on over, pull up a table,”
because the cafeteria was on a different floor. And I liked it, and it
was part of my job. It was, “Oh, shit, I’ve got a lit class at two
o’clock. I can’t stay around and talk.” I’m having fun but I’ve got to
go to class. There, if you didn’t have to go to class, you might have a
story, but if it was a day—if it wasn’t when the day it was due, you
just stayed later that night. It was wonderful. It was this little
water-cooler society of the sports people, and not just men. The women
who wrote about—you know, what was her name, the redhead, Sharon Begley,
Sharon Bechtle, redhead with freckles, and she wrote about education,
right? One of the two best writers at Newsweek, I thought. So I’m a
formalist. I was not interested in education, but I could read her, and
she was really good, she and David Gates, who was in my department. He
was a book reviewer, novelist, music writer.
00:32:37
MOON:
It was also—is this the first time that your criticism and the money you
made from it could be used as your working—or you could live off of
that?
00:34:33
PLAGENS:
I was totally overpaid by the time I left. [Moon laughs.] When I left in
2003—2003, that’s a long time—I was probably making 120, you know, for a
forty-eight-week year. The only trouble with vacations was you couldn’t
take them all at once, because they didn’t want the art critic or
anybody else gone for four weeks running. And the pension plan was
great. They matched 125 percent, the Wash Post company did, and I got a
pension. It was a very progressive company. Laurie started teaching when
I got the job. And there was one semester when we were rolling in it.
When I got the job and it was in the middle of the school year and I was
teaching three classes at Hofstra, I said to the guy who had to sign off
on the hire. That it’s be okay for me to start at half-time at Newsweek.
He said, no, it’ll be full-time and you’ll have a light story load to
start. (Sarah Crichton hired me. She was the culture editor, now has her
imprinted for Farrar Straus, and she’s a literary person. She was the
art section editor, and she picked me.) I had to go to lunch at the Four
Seasons with Steve Smith, one of the managing editors, right? He
arrived, you know three-piece suit, bow tie, rimless glasses, tall guy,
young, backpack, squash racket handle sticking out of the backpack,
because he probably had to go to the Princeton Club to play squash,
right? So I have to prove that I can eat with a fork and spoon. [Moon
laughs.] He said, “This is the hardest hire we have at the magazine is
the art critic, because if you’re too straight, you don’t fit in the art
world. If you fit in the art world, you don’t know how to work for a
corporation.”
My predecessors, there were two. Mark Stevens resigned, and he was real
good. Mark Stevens resigned to work on his De Kooning bio. And I took a
buyout and left Newsweek before his book was published, so that’s how
long it took him. The previous was a guy named Douglas Davis, Art and
the Future. Did you ever read Douglas Davis?
MOON:
No.
PLAGENS:
Well, he’s a big sort of hero of the seventies. He was one of these
people who would do those first…. There’s a gallery in Zagreb and
there’s a gallery in New York, and they have a video hookup and the
artists talk to each other, all this sort of stuff, grainy
black-and-white hookup. He served into being the design critic. Both of
them left. So, yeah. No, it was quite good. Oh, but I told Steve Smith,
I said, “Look, I’m in the middle of a school year, I’ll work for half
salary, and you just do—I’ll just do half.” He said, “Oh, no, we need
you now. Just keep working. We’ll work around your schedule.” So I was
still getting my adjunct thing at Hofstra, plus a full-time salary as
art critic, for this one semester. That was probably my most money
worry-free times of my life. [laughter]
00:36:17
MOON:
Did you have to go the office every day except for when you’re traveling
for things?
PLAGENS:
No. There were times when you didn’t—and we didn’t have cell phones like
you do now. People used to check out portable computers and portable
phones to take to Europe with them when they went. Portable computer was
horrible, weighed a ton. It wasn’t like laptops and cell phones. So
there was a chance you could miss an important meeting unless you called
in. The day ran late –about 10 AM to 7 PM. And what I did my last years
there is that I moved my studio out of our loft in New York, my studio,
and Laurie had an outside studio, and so I got this one just below Canal
Street in this building that had a bunch of artists in it. I would get
up, I’d be in the studio at seven o’clock in the morning and would come
through the door at Newsweek at ten-thirty, because nothing ever
happened in the morning. So that’s how I did my job. And if nothing was
happening, and I came through at ten-thirty, I’d go home at four or five
o’clock. You didn’t have to work an eight-hour day. I wouldn’t go in
every day. But you had to be there on Friday if you had a late-form
story close. The magazine closed in two things, early form, which was
certain, and late form, the space could always be taken away if there
was a big event, some big news thing happened. But if you were there
late form, you were there pretty late on Friday night, because things
changed around and your space would get cut or a story would fall
through and you’d get enlarged.
00:38:04
MOON:
How often were the editorial meetings? Weekly then?
00:39:22
PLAGENS:
You had a section meeting every week, Tuesday, and the way it would
happen is you’d have a short one at the end of the week. This is the
section meeting, the culture section. And it’s, “What’s anybody got for
next week?” “Well, next week I’d like to do—.” And so whoever was
culture editor would kind of write that down. Then on Tuesday, either
Monday or Tuesday, there was the big editorial meeting in the conference
room with one of those conference tables, little flat end and then it
bows out and then it has another little flat end so everybody can see
each other, and they’re all seated around it. And that was the big
meeting, and you didn’t go to that. Technically you were allowed to, you
know. Writers could go to everything, but they didn’t really want to—and
it was boring to watch. And your editor, they’d come around and say,
“What do you have, Sarah?” or, “What do you have, Kathleen?” “Well,
Peter would like to do three columns, which is a page, on this Malcolm
Morley show at Marlborough, and then there’s the new Stars Wars movie is
out,” and blah, blah, blah. They would say, “This is what we want. We
would like twenty-one columns.” That’s seven pages, three columns to a
page. “We want twenty-one columns,” and then there’s be blah, blah,
blah.
They’d come back and the editor would say, “I’m sorry. We’ve only got
seventeen, because of this space. So, Peter, your Malcolm Morley review
is going to be only two columns.” It’s going to be six hundred words,
basically, but we said things in terms of columns. That’s all it’s going
to be, and then you would go do it. And then sometimes they would say,
“Peter, your story isn’t going to go. We’ll go next week,” and I was
off. You wouldn’t see me for the rest of the week. I might call in, you
know. [laughs] As one of my colleagues, Malcolm Jones, a book reviewer,
once said, who still writes for the Daily Beast, Malcolm’s a literary
guy, he says, “What do you mean I’ve got to write a story this week?
I’ve got websites to visit!” [Moon laughs.] That was when computers
first came in and we first had the websites, and that’s all you wanted
to do, because you found—Jesus, I can read the Times of London for free.
I can just sit here and read it. It wasn’t videos and all the stuff you
have now. And, yes, there were people watching things on their computer
that they shouldn’t have been watching at the office.
MOON:
[laughs] The writers in the culture section, did people get territorial
about how many columns they wanted and—
PLAGENS:
No, it was pretty good. Every once in a while there’d be a little
overlap, I remember Jack Kroll, the theater critic, sometimes did opera
when Laura Shapiro, who did classical music, ballet, and dance a lot,
was off. When she didn’t do it, Jack liked to do that. And I remember in
La Jolla there was the debut of a Randy Newman opera. Do you know Randy
Newman the singer?
MOON:
No. [00:41:30]
PLAGENS:
Good Old Boys and like that? Nephew of Lionel Newman, the movie score
composer. Well, Randy Newman had this opera, and Malcolm Jones, my
friend, went out to see it in La Jolla, because he was big on southern
literature. He’s a southerner. Jack, who had seniority, I mean, he got
pissed. He said, “It’s an opera. It’s not a musical. I should have been
sent to La Jolla, not Malcolm.” That was one of the few times I thought
I ever saw somebody get exercised, because Jack brought it up openly at
the next meeting, and people wouldn’t do that. I had an odd position
because I was in this schizophrenic position where the subject that I
covered, people were of two minds about it. One the one hand, they
thought it was bullshit, modern art is bullshit. Sometimes I’d go to
exhibitions with David Gates, my novelist friend; we’d go to some of the
galleries were still on 57th Street, 24 West 57th, and David McKee is
around the corner, and Mary Boone was there—and we’d walk in and it’d be
some installation. David would immediately say, “It’s a fraud.” [Moon
laughs.] Just like that, “It’s a fraud,” and want to pivot and go out.
So they were half of that mind, right? But then half of it was they were
intimidated by it and, therefore, me, because I could understand it. In
other words, they thought those two guys in fur hats over there speaking
Croatian and eating weird lamb things totally negligible. But then if I
go over and start speaking Croat to them, they say, “Wait a minute.
Plagens speaks Croat.” They thought there was like a secret language
that I understood, even though they thought it was a fraud.
00:43:41
MOON:
When you say “they,” were you talking about the people at the magazine
or sort of the larger public and the readership of the—
PLAGENS:
The people at the magazine. But they had professional respect. I mean,
nobody ever—I mean, that’s why David would say, “It’s a fraud.” But then
there were people who kind of wanted to do it. Cathleen McGuigan had
done the art criticism for a while, and she’s art-hip. She used to go
out with Allan McCollum. It was all in kind of respectful. Then there
was another thing was I used to say I was the third domino from the end
of the table. When space got crunched up front, you went like that, and
the dominos started to fall. Well, the first thing that would be cut
would be serious music: symphony, opera, ballet. Second thing, poetry.
[Moon laughs.] Maybe poetry would be the review of a new volume of
poetry by someone famous, because we did it every once in a while. Then
serious theater, serious theater, then me, right along with it, because
nobody understands this modern art bullshit anyway. They wouldn’t do
that to a Rembrandt show at the Met. If we’ve got to cut something,
we’ll cut modern art. On the other hand, it did look good on the page,
because art is nicely illustrated. So a lot of times I would get
spreads. I’d get big space, because, you know, we want to put this—
MOON:
The image.
PLAGENS:
You know what I mean? So, yeah, it was respected, but modern art
particularly, they didn’t know. The only other thing was Maynard Parker
and I think was Rick Smith, they were the two editors-in-chiefs for a
while. They had connections on boards of trustees at museums.
00:45:39
MOON:
Oh, who wanted to see art.
PLAGENS:
—They liked me to cover oh, a big Cy Twombly retrospective at MoMA, even
though most people at the magazine, when they looked at a Cy Twombly,
they’d just see a bunch of scribbles, “What’s this?” MoMA and the Met, a
certain extent the Guggenheim, but MoMA, the Met, “Could you go and
cover that?” Especially Maynard Parker—I forget what his wife did, but
I’d see him in a tux every once in a while, leaving the magazine for a
theatre premiere or Lincoln Center or a MoMA dinner.
MOON:
Were there any times where you felt like there was a conflict in terms
of what was suggested or told that you should or that you should cover a
show that you didn’t want to or think was good to cover in comparison to
this other thing that should get space?
00:47:28
PLAGENS:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s the real world and that’s journalism. Most
of the time it would be something I want to cover but nobody’s going to
give me any space for because it’s just too arcane. Then there’d be
things about where this is getting a lot of play in the art world, I
think it’s more or less full of shit, and I would like to write a
negative review of this. I’ve seen the show. I wouldn’t do this before
seeing it. And then the thing would be, “Well, our readers don’t really
know about this. This is very—,” there used to be an expression at
Newsweek, “inside baseball.” “This is too inside baseball for us,”
meaning for baseball fans, right? So why bring it up, something that our
readers wouldn’t hear about to begin with? Why bring it up just to be
negative about it? Best to leave it alone.
Now, taking down a Jeff Koons or a big Frank Stella show or, you know,
having some doubts, that’s okay. Okay? But there would be things I
wouldn’t get to cover. Then there were journalistic stuff I didn’t like
doing. I remember to Cathleen saying—because market stories were always
good. People liked those. People like money stories.
MOON:
Auctions?
00:49:01
PLAGENS:
Yeah, yeah. When something happened, like records and stuff, and I went,
and I hated going to the auctions. I liked looking at the work, but I
didn’t like going to the auctions. I didn’t like the people, was not my
crowd. I’m still this little middle-class boy with a chip on my shoulder
about people that my mother used to call the “ipsies pipsies.” A little
class resentment, okay? And you can take the boy out of the
lower-middle-class, but you can’t take the lower-middle-class out of the
boy. So I didn’t like market stories. I used to tell Cathleen, I told
her maybe once, used to tell her, “Look, people are either paying too
much or people are paying too little because the market is spread, or
people are paying just about what they probably ought to pay. Those are
your three stories. Why don’t you just run one of those sentences and
forget about the rest?” But, oh, no, no, you know, the Irises sold
for—Van Gogh’s Irises.
Then sometimes there were, you know, interviews-with-bureaucrat stories
I never liked. I never liked doing a story that had a big interview with
Glen Lowry or Thomas Krens or Maxwell Anderson. I did like him. He’s a
little bit later. But everybody got, you know, pissed off at him with
his actress wife, you know that—ever seen the pictures with his wife?
MOON:
No.
PLAGENS:
Oh, my god, she’s in a tight dress and blonde. What is she doing there?
She’s an actress. And it was weird, they sort of announced they were
splitting up on Facebook, and then they took it back. He’s director
either at Indianapolis or at Dallas. But I admired him because I was at
a dinner at the Whitney, sitting at a table with Helen Frankenthaler,
and I was asking her when that whole thing came down about Sensation and
Giuliani was going to jerk the funding.
MOON:
At the Brooklyn Museum.
00:51:30
PLAGENS:
Yeah, at the Brooklyn Museum. And Anderson made this real brave speech.
It was basically—and he’s in the Whitney, you know—basically “Fuck
Giuliani. We’re not going to put up with this.” And it was real “to the
barricades!” when some other people were still hedging. But he was right
there real fast, and I was impressed, because I wasn’t. I had, you know,
as a journalist with my little Newsweek idea on, I’m supposed to wait
until the dust settles and, you know, that, but I was on the side of
noncensorship, and I thought he was really good. But I never got
censored like, “You can’t say this about that.” I mean, Newsweek had a
family magazine. Policy. You had policies about nudity, and sometimes
you could have basically, we’re talking, bare female breasts, you could
have them in an old master where people just wouldn’t notice them. I
mean, Peter Paul Rubens. But if you had a contemporary photographer, you
know, you’re taking Catherine Opie, you know, she’s more recent.
And then there were certain words you couldn’t use, and we used to have
to asterisk-out—you know, certainly couldn’t use the F-word, but you
probably couldn’t use “goddamn” either. There were certain strictures
like that, but nobody ever censored my opinion on anything. It was just
these news stories that you had to cover, and you understood that as
part of the job because it was a news magazine and these things were
news.
MOON:
You never had another Phil Leider done on you?
PLAGENS:
No. Oh, god, no.
MOON:
Did he do that—do you think that happened to other writers at Artforum,
where—
00:53:09
PLAGENS:
I do not know. [Moon laughs.] Let me put it to you this way. I wouldn’t
have put it past Phil, because Phil was one of the more intellectually
arrogant people who’s ever lived, and he may have—the arrogance might
have been justified, because he’s an awfully smart guy, English
literature person from Berkeley, you know, and he was probably smarter
than—not smarter. Artists are real smart, you know, in terms of—I make
this distinction. My wife is more intelligent than I am, but I’m smarter
than she is, which means she can understand deep things and Immanuel
Kent and pursue ideas further than I can, but I’m better at political
operations, you know, and saying, “This isn’t a wise thing to do. This
would be bad—,” that sort of art political stuff. You say, “Well, you
can’t prove it, because if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” The old
saying.
Phil Leider is very smart, very intelligent, and he’s more intelligent
than probably a lot of the art world, and I wouldn’t put it past him.
But, no, they never did that at Newsweek, and there are even union rules
if you refused to sign a story as edited. They couldn’t have a vacant
space in their magazine. They would run your story with a byline. You
were on a salary, right? So you were doing what they called work for
hire, just like a gardener. “Come and do my flowerbeds.” Okay. You’re
doing work for hire. So Newsweek owned it, owned the piece. They could
print it over your objections, but you could take your name off of it.
And the magazine never wanted to do that because all the media watchers,
you know, writing their little columns in The New York Times—
MOON:
Would notice.
00:54:45
PLAGENS:
—they would notice. They would say, “Why does this theater review not
have Jack Kroll’s name on it?” There was obviously a little scuffle and
Jack said, “You can’t put my name on that.” Then they would nose around
and start calling people up, “Well, what happened?” And one time Jack
got suspended. I forget what he did. He got suspended for like eight
weeks, his stories did not appear, because he did—I forget what he did
wrong. [Moon laughs.] It wasn’t the cardinal thing of reviewing a play
without having gone to see it, you know. It wasn’t that. People have
done that, you know, with art exhibitions. If you read all the thing,
I’ve got the catalog.
This is another Phil Leider arrogant thing. I mean, this is when I said
he was arrogant. This is famous. One time somebody caught him out
reviewing a show that he hadn’t seen, and it was praiseworthy. It was in
New York. I think it was in New York. It was a Minimalist show. And he
said, “I’m acquainted with the artist and I’m familiar with the space
and I can predict the work.”
MOON:
Ooh. Yeah.
00:57:15
PLAGENS:
I mean, he just doubled down on it. You know what I mean? All right.
There’s Phil. Yeah, so I probably think he might have done that. But at
Newsweek, no, I never had one of those—the biggest dispute I ever had at
Newsweek was a two-column review, which is small, of the book called
Naked by the Window by Robert Katz about Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta,
the Ana Mendieta death. Okay? And I read it, it was a long book, and I
had one sentence at the end, you know, because Carl Andre had the
presence of mind or the smarts to have himself—tried before a judge
instead of a jury. And the judge, letter of the law, and the judge had
to let him off, you know, not guilty, right? And the judge later said,
he said in the book, had this been in Scotland, they have a verdict that
amounts to the same thing as acquittal, but it’s not not guilty, it’s
“Not Proven.” And they sort of let you go, meaning the state couldn’t
quite prove its case. Okay. So I had this last sentence that said, “He
walked.” Colloquially, “walked” means he got away with it. He walked, he
did commit the crime, but he got away with it. I was there for two hours
with fucking Newsweek lawyers, and I eventually lost the battle, because
they said, “We’ll get sued, because what you’re saying is that he did it
but he got off on a technicality.” And I said, “No, no, no. It’s just a
punchy kicker!” In the end, I lost, usually did. It was called “being
lawyered,” and certain articles were lawyered either in the editing or,
in this one, art things never worked. But this one, two guys came up to
my office and one stayed, and I was there for a long time.
MOON:
Wow. So this is really different from Artforum in the seventies, which
seemed so much scrappier, just trying to not be in the red. [laughs]
PLAGENS:
What do you mean? Moneywise?
MOON:
Yeah, or just trying to not be in debt. And I guess after a while—I
guess starting with Coplans, it starts to make a little bit of money.
PLAGENS:
John did some things that—I mean, the secret about Artforum, it was
founded by this guy and then it was bought by Look magazine, by Cowles
Communications. So Charlie Cowles, a dealer, afterward, right, Charlie
Cowles was the publisher of it, and he used to write a check at the end
of every year for, I don’t know, let’s say $200,000 that the magazine
was in the rep and he would make up the deficit. After a while—this is
what my history is from Coplans, you know. After a while, Charlie got
tired of doing that and maybe the family got tired of doing that, and he
used to always be made fun of, anyway. I mean, Charlie was not treated
well by Phil and John. They didn’t treat him with the respect to what he
thought he deserved and he probably should have had as publisher. See,
Knight Landesman is much more of a pro, you know. He’s from that family.
You ever heard of Rocco Landesman, the big theater producer in New York?
You know, he’s from that family. So one day Charlie Cowles stood up on
his hind legs and fired Coplans as editor. Leider had gone, you know.
John, previous to that, had done some good things. He did two things
mechanically. He got the right paper. This is long after, you know,
“Forum.” Artforum originally had that oatmeal insert, that oatmeal paper
insert—
MOON:
With the reviews.
01:00:05
PLAGENS:
Reviews on it. And it was called “Forum.” So there was “art” and
“forum,” there were two different parts, but the whole magazine was
Artforum. Well, that oatmeal thing had long gone, you know, that paper.
But the white paper was still too thick. And John did two things. He was
very good about this. He reduced the weight of the paper just to the
point where you couldn’t see through and see the other side, because you
get it too thin, you get an image coming through, especially when it was
two dark illustrations. He got it just to the right thickness.
And the other thing is Artforum used to come in envelopes. Now it does
again. But John got butcher paper put around the front, like a cover,
just an extra cover over the magazine in brown paper with—that’s where
all the subscription and stuff would go, and that saved tons of money
and put Artforum in the black. But after a while, you know, the magazine
starts to get more expensive and people don’t like it getting all beat
up like that, and they want it to come in an envelope again. But Charlie
fired him.
01:00:44
MOON:
Yeah. Well, the firing was related to the lawsuit?
PLAGENS:
The firing was probably related to the lawsuit about the Pasadena Art
Museum.
MOON:
Yeah. So they didn’t lawyer-up. I mean, John Coplans was the
editor-in-chief when that article ran, right?
PLAGENS:
Yeah, John Coplans was the editor, yeah. Yeah, Phil was gone. And he got
fired, and that was what probably did him in. It was the famous
typographic cover, with the beginning of the article printed right on
the cover of Artforum. And you know what the libel thing was that they
lost on?
MOON:
Well, there was the insinuation that there was a condition that the son
be hired for the architecture job.
PLAGENS:
As I understood it, Mrs. Ladd, who was a wealthy lady, essentially said,
“If you hire my son Thornton Ladd, I will make a contribution to the
museum equal to his fee. So if you choose my son, you get a free
architect. You choose somebody else, you don’t.”
MOON:
Right. Oh, right, yeah. So libel, if it’s true, if it’s actual, if
someone can prove that it’s true, you can’t get sued but you couldn’t—
PLAGENS:
The best defense against libel was the truth. That’s the old lawyer’s
thing. But they couldn’t prove she’d done that deal. This was just one
of these things, and it was right there, and—you know, and they lost.
All right. The magazine lost, and I think John was out after that.
MOON:
Well, anyway, so at Newsweek, it’s just a different operation and so—
PLAGENS:
It’s a news magazine, yeah.
01:02:38
MOON:
Yeah. Well, you know—okay, before, you mentioned—you talked about a
firewall between the business side and the editorial in the magazine.
How was the health of the firewall at Newsweek then? Was it—
01:05:1001:06:43
PLAGENS:
Oh, it was fine. The problems, the financial problems came when certain
advertisers couldn’t advertise anymore. You make your money on
cigarettes and cars, cigarettes, alcohol, and cars. And you couldn’t
advertise cigarettes after a while. And then alcohol and then when the
mileage rules kicked in, you started to lose in big cars. It’s all one
hand unwashes the other. Advertising goes down, circulation goes down.
Circulation goes down, advertisers say, “I don’t want to buy ads in here
anymore. It’s not reaching anybody.” And so you don’t have any ads, so
you put out a thinner magazine. Newsweek at the end when I used to say
it looked like a vacation brochure from Des Moines. It would be thin.
You could feel it. But the firewall, yes. I never had—no, the firewall
was good. The biggest person on the front, and it wasn’t because of
advertising, would be David Ansen, the movie critic, because the
Hollywood studios are the ones who depend on reviews, and he’s a popular
magazine critic, probably his best of his time of all the people writing
in mass magazines. He really knew his film. They get all pissed off if a
big studio movie is panned. He got death threats over panning when Star
Wars came back, after the six, seven, and eight movies. And he used to
get angry calls from publicists and so forth. Sometimes book reviewers
did. The magazine didn’t have any art advertising, so the complaints
were only from publicists directly to me. And I always liked publicists.
I always thought I had a rather enlightened attitude compared to some of
my colleagues. Publicists bring you information while you sit on your
butt, that you would otherwise have to go out and get, so why are you
complaining? Just because they call you up and say, “You could have
written something nicer?” It goes with the territory.
Plus, there’s a little selfishness there, art being—see, this was the
one thing where if you’re the movie critic, you don’t get sent anyplace,
because a movie can come to a theater. David was always based in Los
Angeles. He didn’t work in New York. He would come and stay for a week
once in a while. And the only place he—well, he got to go to Sundance,
and he got to go to Cannes, you know. That’s pretty good. But other than
theater, which wasn’t much, Jack Kroll would go to London to see the new
season on the West End, and he always stayed at the Strand. I told you I
was always a cheap date. I’d stay at the Rodeway Inn on Washington Place
and walk to wherever I’m going. Art was the one thing you had to see in
the flesh, so I got sent around a lot. I went to New Orleans and Boston
and Chicago and like that, and then practically every year I would go to
Europe. I probably went to London once every eighteen months, Paris once
every couple years, because there’d be a show that they would think was
good enough to cover. But there was never any art advertising.
The firewall between editorial and advertising was pretty good at
Newsweek. You had these journalistic rules. I mean, you know, your
quotes were checked. You couldn’t pipe quotes, to use that verb. (Making
up quotes is “piping” quotes.) You tweak them a little bit so that what
the person said fit into Newsweek style. You could take two quotes and
put them together just for flow, if the truth of the matter wasn’t—but
the magazine did not give quote approval. I always liked that. Somebody
would say, “Could I see your interview before you print it?” And I’d
say, “No, you can’t.” “Can I tape?” And if I can’t tape, I’ll take notes
as best I can. But we don’t give quote approval, because people get cold
feet, “Well, I didn’t really say that.” I mean, you can imagine the
politicians don’t want that. So a news magazine doesn’t give quote
approval. Everything was fact-checked. And I was there at the O.J.
trial, and I remember—do you remember Time magazine darkening O.J.? It
was a huge scandal. Newsweek and Time both had O.J. Simpson’s face on
the cover when he was on trial. Time darkened the face, Photoshopped it
to make him more menacing—and they got caught at it. I was always amazed
that nobody knew what the other person’s cover was going to be. [Moon
laughs.] I always thought that there were spies. I mean, why don’t you
know this? But they would come out, you know and there was—you know. And
I got to Newsweek just after the huge scandal of the Hitler diaries. Do
you remember that?
01:08:37
MOON:
No.
PLAGENS:
Newsweek bought the Hitler diaries that were published in a German
magazine. Somebody had “discovered” Hitler’s diaries. Well, it was a
total fraud. It was like the biography of Howard Hughes by Clifford
Irving. It was a huge scandal. I mean, it was still hovering over
everything. “We cannot get caught in another Hitler diary disaster.” So
everything was checked and rechecked.
MOON:
Do you think that your writing changed a lot when you were working at
Newsweek?
PLAGENS:
Yes.
MOON:
Well, right. You said before that Sarah Crichton, your editor, said,
“Cut this baby up.” [laughs]
PLAGENS:
“Chop this baby up, please.” That would be her marginalia after one of
my sentences with em-dashes and parens and semicolons and all within the
same sentence! I teach this now, this sort of practical art writing. I’m
probably considered an ignoramus in terms of all this theory. “Look, you
buried your lead. Your third paragraph should be your first paragraph.
You can’t have dangling participial phrases.” “I saw a mountain walking
down the street,” or something like that. “Walking down the street, a
mountain came into view.” Was the mountain walking down the street?
01:10:21
MOON:
Dangling modifiers.
PLAGENS:
Yeah. You can’t do that. First mention of names, we have to have the
whole thing and after that, you can say “Twombly.” But the first time it
has to be “Cy Twombly.” Just these basic sort of things. You have to
have a paragraph break here. You have to have a kicker. You have to have
something powerful. Don’t—I’m going through all these rules I’ve just
been telling people as they come up. [Moon laughs.] Kicker quotes,
that’s a no-no to me. Kicker quotes are when the last words of your
piece are a quote from somebody else. “This is your piece, goddamn it.
It should end with your words.” And too many people always want to say,
“As the Bible says,” and then they quote and they think they’re going
out on something profound. “As Franklin Delano Roosevelt put it—.” No,
no, no, no. You own this. You’re giving away your voice—I learned to
write shorter sentences and to track things better between “it” and
“they” and like that. I asked David Gates, “Where did you learn to
write?” He was a lifer, started as a researcher, and he says, “Newsweek.
It wasn’t graduate school, wasn’t undergraduate school. I learned to
write here.” Because you took a real editorial beating when you did it.
You say, “Why?” No, the clarity and the tracking. “We don’t understand
what this means,” you know, sometimes to the point of absurdity. I
remember I had something like—blah, blah, blah, “like a Holbein,” and it
sort of made a nice rhythm, “like a Holbein.” If the reader didn’t know
who Holbein was by the context of the piece, you got that it was an Old
Master painting that we were talking about, probably one that was fairly
clear and linear, right? So you would get edited by your section—you
know, culture editor, and that’s where the real editing came in. That
was always Sarah Crichton, you know, “Type that.”
01:12:41
MOON:
Mm-hmm.
01:14:05
PLAGENS:
“What do you mean by this?” And I’d tell her. “What do you mean by
this?” she’d repeat. And I’d get so frustrated, I’d finally say, “That’s
what I mean.” And she’d say, “Go type that,” meaning say it directly.
This is a news magazine. We had short space. So then you would get
edited by the back of the book, assistant managing editor, and then if
you were late forum, the editor-in-chief, Maynard Parker, Rick Smith,
would go over it, just give it a quick read. If it was good, you always
wanted these congrats at the end, what we called a wet kiss. It would
be, “Sharp take, Peter. Glad to have it in the magazine.” And he didn’t
say that to all the girls, necessarily, but you weren’t the only one.
That middle editing, between to culture section and the top, was the
moat. There was a back-of-the-book editor who shall remain nameless who
would—that Holbein thing, I fought with her over it. She wanted me to
put in “Hans.” I had to put in Hans, because our readers don’t know who
Holbein is. I said, “They’re not going to know if I say ‘Hans Holbein,’
either. The Younger is this going to help?” [Moon laughs.] It’s not
going to help. It’s a figure of speech. It’s like an Old Master, only
it’s more concrete and punchy if you put a name in, right? [Moon
laughs.]
My favorite Newsweek story is real late in the morning we’re up there
waiting for the stories to come back. Jack Kroll’s in his office,
theater critic, and he’s got some story, and I don’t know what it’s
about, about a play or something like that. And he always locks his
office. He’s got his door closed. Mine is always open. The reception
area is out there. The offices were around it. And I have mine open. And
all of a sudden, the door of Jack’s office flies open and he steps out.
And there’s nobody there, except maybe somebody else over here is still
writing. But the receptionist has long gone home. There’s nobody there.
And Jack, this portly little guy with buck teeth and a little white
beard, bald head, you know, he’s real cherubic, is what I always think.
And Jack steps out and yells at nobody in particularly, he yells, “Why,
of course! Chuck Stalin and Fred Hitler.” Goes back into his office and
slams the door. And I knew what had happened. Somebody had asked him for
the first names of Stalin and Hitler. Like this, blah, blah, the history
of World War II, including Stalin and Hitler, Jack had probably written,
and some idiot managing editor probably said, “Could we have the first
names, please?” [Moon laughs.] And he’s out there, “First names?” [Moon
laughs.] And he just did that, he’s so frustrated, and he goes back in
and he slams his door, and I knew exactly what had taken place. [Moon
laughs.] My little Hans Holbein was small, you know, esoteric, compared
to that.
01:15:46
MOON:
Compared to Stalin. [laughs]
PLAGENS:
Compared to Stalin. Do we need a first name on Adolf Hitler? Do we
really? [Moon laughs.] Every once in a while something like that.
MOON:
You mentioned before, I think it was when you were working for Newsweek,
that you had this really tough interview with Robert Rauschenberg, and
he was just not really giving answers, like a Cheshire cat.
PLAGENS:
Johns.
MOON:
Oh, was that Jasper Johns or Robert Rauschenberg?
PLAGENS:
It was Johns. Johns was like that. I had an interview with Rauschenberg
where Rauschenberg was in his cups and it was hard to get anything.
MOON:
Oh, okay.
PLAGENS:
It was his big dual retrospective, Guggenheim SoHo when they had it, and
I’m down in the—there’s a restaurant underneath, and he was, not to put
too fine a point on it, drunk. [Moon laughs.] And I’m looking for
quotes, and he’s talking, but he’s worse than I am now. [Moon laughs.]
No, Johns was the one that was like interviewing the Cheshire cat, I
thought.
MOON:
I see. Okay. Oh, so maybe it was a personality thing. I was just
thinking about how it could be—for some artists it might be—what am I
trying to get at here? Your status as someone who is a writer for a very
mainstream magazine, as compared to Artforum.
PLAGENS:
Yeah.
01:17:42
MOON:
And sort of, you know, thinking about how they will be represented and
also thinking about, you know, the kind of brevity and almost like—not
caricature of the person when you do a feature, but, you know, the—did
you feel that, the way that people sort of interacted with you, that
they were sort of more wary of the—
PLAGENS:
The artists that I would interview or somebody [unclear]?
MOON:
Or just people you meet, people in the [unclear]. Well, maybe—
PLAGENS:
A little, a little bit. I mean, there’s a couple parts to that question.
One is, yes, being a critic distorts your social relationships with
artists. They’re either wary or looking at you out of the side of their
eyes, or they’ve got some grudge against you because something you wrote
about them or a friend of yours. You know what I mean. They’re—you know.
You know, I’m not going to get a lot of hugs and kisses from Mark
Grotjahn after that “VeriBold” thing in the Wall Street Journal. There
was that. Then there would be a feature or a profile or there’s an
interview part and it’s in a mainstream magazine, artists have an idea
of themselves and what they do is very subtle, nuanced, mysterious,
complex, and that nobody else will be able to capture in a 600-word
little profile about them what it’s about. Now, I know that. I mean, I
don’t have a solution for it, but I know that. The map (the story)
cannot equal the territory (the subject). And in this case, a little
magazine piece, the map, in no way compares to the life and entire
career of the artist. So that’s a hard thing, and then so you want to
try to boil it down. And I’m not a real good interviewer. I’m a terrible
interviewer, because I talk too much. So you take that out when you
write. You just care about the answers. That’s all you care about. It’s
all you care about when you’re doing an interview for a mainstream
magazine is—
01:19:32
MOON:
You want to get the quote.
PLAGENS:
I want to get a fresh quote that says something, not a scandalous
something, but just says something in a way. And one of the things you
could do at Newsweek was there are certain house-style things that you
couldn’t do in your own writing, and I could see it. They don’t like it.
But if an interviewee said it and it added to the color, that bad way of
saying it, they would leave that. I can’t give you an example off the
top of my head. They would leave it. So you had disadvantage vs.
advantage. The artists would think, “Oh, this is going out to two
million people,” 2.5 million, which was the circulation of Newsweek at
its peak when I was there. Not that I caused the peak, you know. On the
other hand, these people would never understand me anyway, because the
demographic is Des Moines, Iowa, 2.2 years of college, 2.2 kids, median
income $58,500, you know, that sort of stuff. They’re not going to
understand this anyway. So they would be of two minds about it. And I
used to think of myself as the stealth critic. I mean, it was part of my
thing because—
MOON:
What do you mean by that?
01:21:4301:23:42
PLAGENS:
Well, Frank Stella once said The New York Times is the only thing that
counts because it comes out both while the show is on and people give it
some credibility. That’s true. People go to see what Roberta Smith or
Holland Cotter or Michael Kimmelman, back a little bit, would write, or
Ken Johnson or Martha Schwendener or Karen Rosenberg. So it comes out.
That’s over here, you know. And another place they might go are the art
magazines for later, but they come out way late, because they still have
the six-weeks’ deadline. To be in the April issue, your piece goes in
the file the fifteenth of February. That’s ridiculous in this day and
age.
What was I going to say? And one other thing they might have paid
attention to was if Robert Hughes did something, because Robert Hughes
was so individually famous, much more famous than I was. So, you know, I
never got nailed on a lot of things, except for factual errors, which I
made my share of, and they’d have to print a correction and etc., etc.
So I didn’t get angry letters and stuff like that. So I used to say, “I
don’t know who reads this shit out there.” Somebody told me about The
Wall Street Journal, they said, “Even though you don’t get comments—.” I
don’t get a lot of comments on my stories, hardly any, and when I do,
it’s that idiot in New York who’s an Ayn Rand person and wrote a book
about objectivism in art and what Ayn Randians are all about, realism,
Bouguereau would be their favorite artist. [Moon laughs.] Maybe not as
sweet as Boug, but, you know, that’s what they like. And so he writes a
comment about, “Once again, fooled by this horseshit,” if I review some
assemblagist. But I don’t get any comments. But somebody told me, “No,
you should know,” an artist told me, “that people do read what you write
in The Wall Street Journal.” Now, that happens because my reviews in
Wall Street Journal come out in the Greater New York section, so it’s
for New York. It’s only in that edition from up in Connecticut to down
into New Jersey someplace, you know, Greater New York, that section
gets. So they said, “No, no, no, people do write,” but I don’t have any
direct proof about it.
But while I was at Newsweek, I used to say, “Yeah, I’m the stealth
critic,” and the only thing that people really would pay attention to
when I get things are like big museum exhibitions. MoMA and the Met and
the Guggenheim and the Whitney would pay attention, or L.A. County, if I
went, would pay attention, because they want mainstream non-art-magazine
coverage, you know. They want ordinary people. As we say over here, “Joe
Six-Pack.” As the English say over there, “your average punter.” They
want them to come through the doors, and they would like a nice review
in a magazine like Newsweek.
MOON:
Right. I guess at Newsweek you’re responsible for any kind of major art
exhibition, not necessarily just contemporary art.
PLAGENS:
I’ve covered the waterfront. I wrote about Old Kingdom Egypt. You had to
be a quick study. There was a show at Cleveland of Old Kingdom, somebody
the third, I forget who it was. It was Amenhotep III. So I went to
Cleveland. I did a—you know. Yeah, Rembrandt in Berlin. Franz Hals in
the National Gallery. Yeah, I did a lot of stuff, old stuff. Yeah, I had
to. [laughs] I mean, they have two art critics, you know, so you did
those things, and you were, quote, “a quick study.”
01:25:14
MOON:
Well, did you get sent around to contemporary art biennales? Because
that starts to become a big thing in the nineties.
PLAGENS:
Yeah, I said, I went to eight Venice Biennales, I think probably three
Documentas. Didn’t go anyplace else. Those were the ones. I mean, this
was sort of before Istanbul and Gwangju. Is that the third city in
[unclear]?
MOON:
Gwangju, yeah.
PLAGENS:
Gwangju, has a biennial Johannesburg has one. Everybody started to have
one. It was before that, but, yes, I got sent around a lot. People noted
that at the magazine. I mean, people, my colleagues, would say, “You got
a job, Plagens,” you know. [Moon laughs.] And in [unclear], I’d call up
to the travel office on the eighth floor—we had an in-house Thomas
Cook—“Could I have two tickets? I need to go to Paris next week for four
days.” Then I would come up. She’d say they’re ready or the mailperson
would bring them by and drop them on my desk. How’s that? And when you
flew over the Atlantic in those days, you went business. The old union
rule was you went business. Man, nothing like kicking back on a flight
to Frankfurt on Lufthansa business. [Moon laughs.] I used to tell
people, “That’s about it.” I said, “That’s about as good as I want it to
be. I don’t want it to be any more. I don’t want to know what first
class on Air France is like. Business class on British or Lufthansa,
that’s fine.”
MOON:
Well, what about your observations of class in the art world? I mean, it
must have been pretty, in some ways, different in New York as opposed to
Los Angeles?
PLAGENS:
Economic class?
01:27:18
MOON:
Yeah, and just the people who you were dealing with, what you were
seeing, who was involved.
PLAGENS:
Probably I dealt with a wealthier group of people in New York than I did
in L.A. In L.A. I was very much, you know, in my studio in Pasadena, in
old junky Old Town, and occasionally going to the galleries in the west
side. You live in Manhattan, there is a black-tie dinner for everything,
and you get thrown in with people like that, you know, Ron Perelman,
Kitty Carlisle Hart, Krens, you know, the chairman of the board,
Philippe de Montebello, the chairman or the president of the
Metropolitan, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then wealthy artists,
because artists who are successful are wealthy, you know. Jasper Johns
had a lot of money. Schnabel had a lot of money. Cindy Sherman had a lot
of money. So, generally speaking, now it’s all packed in there, and you
have to go looking for—this is in retrospect. I’m making it up now. It
might not be correct. But if you wanted to see real kind of struggling
artists in New York, you had to go to neighborhoods that maybe you
didn’t want to go to in 1985. Do you know what I mean? You got to search
them out. In L.A., it’s all spread out, so there’d be little pockets of
people living in middle-class surroundings, you know. There was an L.A.
artist named Greg Card, I remember, who showed at Riko Mizuno. He lived
near my little rented house in Pacoima. But it was a couple of kids in a
house. If you went to see the Greg Card of New York and like that, you’d
probably be going to some sketchy neighborhood in Brooklyn that you
really didn’t want to go to and that would include Williamsburg at the
time.
01:29:17
MOON:
And now it’s Bushwick, maybe.
01:31:43
PLAGENS:
It’s hardly even Bed-Stuy anymore, you know. [Moon laughs.] It’s just
everything’s been gentrified. Maybe now, yeah, in L.A., because you have
to go up into Glassell Park, and maybe there are some gangbangers in
Glassell Park. But in New York, it’s all packed in, you know, and the
money is right there in front of you. Part of it has to do with public
transport, with the size of the city. It’s vertical, not horizontal. And
the other part has to do with public transportation. You’re on the
subway with people who take the subway to million-dollar-a-year Wall
Street jobs. In L.A., they’re in their Audi 8s with the blue-tinted
windows with the stereo system and all the electronics and with the
window rolled up, and they’re in their own little world. They never
smell another human being on the way to work. In New York there is that
throwing together of, you know, the classes on public transportation.
It’s not kumbaya. I mean, it’s not some sort of classless paradise. So
probably I get in that and I get pushed up and I’m dealing with
editor-in-chief of Newsweek who’s got friends on the board, and I go to
the black-tie dinners at MoMA, and I meet a collector and etc., etc.,
etc., and I interview Rauschenberg and Cindy Sherman and Jasper Johns
and like that. So, yeah, probably I’m—but I’m not a politically inclined
person anyway. That’s where I probably have my—or my students in the
writing-about-art seminar, probably a lot of them depart from me, and
I’m probably an old stick-in-the-mud who doesn’t do society any good,
because they’re all into social practice. Not all of them into, but
social practice. I can’t stand the word “practice” to begin with. I said
that last time. And then social practice is all that, you know, and
you’re just being a half-assed social worker. Why don’t you leave the
art out of it and go do good, like Médecins Sans Frontières? If you did
that as an art piece, do you know what I mean?
So I’m a kind of a formalist, so I had never cared that much about
people who were excluded from the art elite getting their fair share
politically, and the older I get, probably the more I get that way,
because what I want to see is I want to see a work of art that moves me.
If it’s going to convince me of anything, it’s through the work of art.
I don’t want to go, “Oh, the homeless problem in San Francisco, I think
the artists should go out and investigate that and they should do this
and then come back into it.” So I’m probably seen as somebody who
fiddles while Rome burns, you know.
MOON:
What was the Whitney Biennial that—was it 1993?
PLAGENS:
1993, yeah.
MOON:
Identity Politics?
PLAGENS:
“I Can’t Imagine Wanting to be White,” yeah. I wrote about that one,
then I got negatively—yeah. But we get into a whole other thing about
art that’s probably not worth taking about, which is the whole business
of part of art being you as a brand-name semi-scandalous personal
identity, instead of the author of this object over here. So, you know,
Daniel J. Martinez made himself into something, I mean, really big, and
ever since then he’s gone around doing various provocations as works of
art, and that is part of what is a work of art now, you know.
01:33:19
MOON:
The image?
PLAGENS:
The persona of the artist. You curate a big group show, and what you do,
you don’t go to Malcolm Morley’s studio—I don’t know why I’m naming
him—and say, “I like that painting and that painting and maybe those two
drawings. Send those to my show.” No. You go to Rikrik Tiravanija or you
go to—I don’t know whether I’m pronouncing that right, or you go to, you
know, Maria Abramovic or Sehgal. What’s the guy’s name, you know, the
walking up the stairs of the Guggenheim?
MOON:
Tino Sehgal.
PLAGENS:
Tino Sehgal. You go to somebody like that and you say, “I’m inviting
you, and you come and you do what you want, or you do what you want
within these spatial budgetary parameters.” And that started to come in,
and that’s real much part of the art world now. I would prefer that it
weren’t, makes things easier, you know, but it’s there and you deal with
it. Because being a critic, it’s a reaction. It’s a reactionary
occupation in the literal sense of that term. Someone puts out
something, you react to it. Where am I going? Anyway, so, yeah, you
know, there’s that performance aspect to installation performance, blah,
blah, blah, stuff that—I don’t say it’s not art, like it falls through
the floor and it’s not good enough to be art. I see things in a circle,
you know, and I see Karen Finley as in the—why can’t the theater critic
go write about her standing up on a proscenium? Why can’t an
architecture critic go write about Jon Peterson’s bum shelters or
somebody else who does things that you can live in? You know what I
mean? It’s that sort of thing. It’s just there’s divisions of the arts
that are sort of fuzzy, and it’s the convention of the late twentieth
and early twenty-first centuries that boundaries be blurred, if not
actually nonexistent, you know.
01:35:47
MOON:
And for you, that’s not necessarily a good thing?
PLAGENS:
For me it’s not necessarily a good thing, because I will jokingly tell
classes when I teach or something, I say, “I am one of those small minds
for whom a foolish consistency is a bugaboo,” and I don’t know the
original, who made the quote. It’s one of the—it’s Dr. Johnson or
something. “A foolish consistency is the bugaboo of small minds.” Well,
I’m one of those people who likes things consistent, and so, yeah,
temperamentally I’m probably still back in the Greenburg temperament of
this is what paintings does. Color and flatness, this is what it does
best. And sculpture is over here; it does these things best. And
photography is over here, and theater, you know. And they should all
concentrate on the things they do best.
MOON:
The medium.
01:37:57
PLAGENS:
“The medium is the massage,” you know. I’m probably temperamentally set
that way, but I live in the real world and I have to deal with it
otherwise. I’m probably going off where you don’t really care to go, but
then there’s always a question, “Well, you’re an artist and you paint.
You’re temperamentally set that way. Doesn’t that make you biased in
covering video film performance, things like that, in the Whitney
Biennial?” And I say, well, kind of it does, but, you see, it works both
ways. Because I’m not familiar with that stuff as much, I tend to like
too much. I’ve almost never been to a modern dance performance that I
didn’t like, because it’s better than what I could do. And I’m
open-minded, I can see the aesthetics. And the thing I’m really hard on
is abstract painting because that’s my bailiwick, and I say, “Oh, no,
that’s superficial, corrupt. Shouldn’t do that.” Not just little spatial
things, like you should put orange down there. So it can work both ways.
And another thing is I don’t know an art critic who doesn’t come from
somewhere. I argued when I argued race with people, sometimes they would
say, “Well, you know, you’re a white guy. How can you go out and look at
Mickalene Thomas” or, you know, Mel Edwards, or Andres Serrano, et al.
And sort of the un-PC thing would be the Hilton Alses of the world are
very few and far between, it seems. The theater critic for New Yorker is
Hilton Als. He’s a black guy, who writes [unclear]. He’s a theater
critic. He does Shakespeare, okay? The thing is, is find me a black art
critic who can do Old Kingdom Egypt, who can do Franz Hals, who can do
Rembrandt, who can do Mary Cassatt. Might be able to do McArthur Binion
or—I keep saying Mickalene Thomas or Glenn—.
MOON:
Glenn Ligon?
PLAGENS:
Glenn Ligon. Better than I can. In twenty-five years, it might be
different. It’s easier to find a white guy who can stretch into what
black artists do than to find a black art critic that can stretch into
what white artists do, with the exception of the fact that, well, if you
went through undergraduate art education, the black art critic probably
got, you know, enough dead white European males to last him for the rest
of several lifetimes. [laughs] So I’m getting on to all these things,
because I’ve had this said to me before, “How can you cover—you’re a
white guy. How can you do this? You’re straight. How can you write about
queer art? How can you write about feminist art when you’re not a
woman?” Well, I’ve got to be somebody. I don’t think you’re going to get
anybody dropped down from a flying saucer who’s all of those things.
01:40:23
MOON:
Anyway, so this whole time, you keep painting?
PLAGENS:
Yes. Yeah, I do. That’s what I do and so it—you know. I probably, you
know, always think I’m a painter first and foremost and always, you
know. And I remember when I told Max Kozloff I wasn’t—I didn’t want to
do the “New York Letter” anymore. “I just don’t want to do it. I just
want to paint.” But Max was kind of cruel. He said it in a nice way, he
says, “But really, you realize, you know, you’re a first-rate critic and
everybody reads your stuff, really likes it, and you’re really a
second-tier artist in terms of the art world.” And I just took it full
on. I said, “Well, Max, I’d rather be a second-tier artist than a
first-tier art critic,” you know. I don’t think it’s quite as honorable
a [unclear]. Peter Schjeldahl said, and it was good, he said one time
that art criticism is like standup comedy. In other words, you don’t
branch out much from standout comedy. You do that. You don’t go to
Shakespeare. You might get a sitcom. You know what I mean? It’s a well
defined but secondary thing. You’re not Kenneth Branagh and you’re not
Meryl Streep and you’re not Anne Hathaway and you’re not Jonathan
Franzen. You know what I mean? It’s this little thing, but it has a real
essence to it and nobody else does it. There are standups. Well, that’s
what I said. I’d rather be—you know. I’d rather be a second-rate actor
than first-rate standup, in essence. But your byline travels further and
farther faster than your signature on a work of art if you’re not one of
the household names. But I can’t stop doing it. I mean, I’m a painter
first and foremost. I said that. I wanted to call an anthology that I
was trying to sell to publishers that I thought the Bruce Nauman book
would get me a ticket to do. They’d say, “Oh, he did that. Now we’ll do
this.” And it was a bastard. All my things are kind of hybrids. It would
be a history of abstract painting in L.A. and New York during the
seventies and the eighties and up into the nineties, but as seen by me
through the eyes of somebody who did abstract paintings, a sort of
personal memoir, art history kind of thing. And the title I wanted for
it was A Simple Country Painter.
MOON:
Oh, that’s the title of a lecture you gave later.
PLAGENS:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s where it came from. I’m just a simple country
painter, you know. Like politicians, “I’m just a simple dairy farmer
from Nebraska.” No, you’re not. You’re a senator, you know. So I was
going to drape myself somewhat ironically, simple country painter. Yeah,
that’s what I am, that’s what my degrees are in, and that’s what I am.
But I got sucked into the writing thing and I like to write and I’m good
at it. Not all forms of it, but certain things I’m really good at. I
said to you, you know, immodestly, I think I’m about as good as it gets
with a short review, a brief review, 250, 300 words, of a gallery show
of something for a mass audience, not for an art magazine audience.
MOON:
Kind of boil it down into—
PLAGENS:
It’s just, I mean, you know, nothing is exactly parallel, but I would
put my reviews up against somebody’s on a blog, put them up against
things of an equal length in The New York Times, you know, and I think
mine are sharper and better and have a more of a point to them. And
partly, I want to get back to things, Wall Street Journal doesn’t care
who I offend. Art magazines rely on—it’s a terrible thing. They don’t
have that firewall. They have—
01:45:03
MOON:
They rely on the advertisements from galleries.
PLAGENS:
Advertising from galleries and museums. Artforum tried to break that up
a little, and then there was all that protesting. “Well, what do you
mean, you know, Breitling watches and Bentleys and, you know, Armani and
all these clothes people looking like Town & Country. That’s
terrible. We’re just baubles for the rich.” Well, no, how you—it’s much
better. Jaguar doesn’t care whose gallery—if you gave Elizabeth Peyton,
to name an artist that I don’t care for very much, whose work I don’t
care for, never met her, they don’t care if you review it negatively,
because their advertisements are based on Cisco Systems and Jaguars and
condo developments, you know. They don’t care. But the art magazines do.
MOON:
Was it a relief to not have to teach when you’re a full-time critic at
Newsweek?
01:47:57
PLAGENS:
Yes, yeah, yeah. And my wife taught, and it was—I would much rather deal
with artwork where I just see it, you know. It’s the old Heisenberg
principle, you know. I see its position. I don’t see its trajectory,
okay? And I’ve been on these critical panels before. I always seem to
see it that way, but even, you know, there’s this thing in New York
called Art Critical [phonetic] that David Cohen [phonetic] does, the
review panel, and he does it at the National Academy, and you sit up at
a table and you review three exhibitions or four. You go and see them,
then you talk about them on the panel, and they open it up, you know.
And I’ve been on with Roberta Smith a couple times, you know. What was I
going to say? Oh, yeah, so every time I’ve been on with Roberta a couple
of times, and now just, okay, and we’re going to talk about—I can’t name
anybody. I can’t think of anybody. And Roberta always knows where the
work has come from. “Well, this is much better than her less fully
realized show, her first show in 1998, you know, but 2001 she shifted
the emphasis.” Roberta will talk about this, and I’m thinking, “I don’t
know anything about this artist.” I could do a little Googling and so
forth, but I’m just taking it: what does this stuff look like?
And one of the things I don’t like about teaching that much is you’re
dealing with artists as trajectories. You’re dealing with students, not
the work of art. And after a while, I get a little tired of that. And in
the new art world that we’re in now, especially out here in San
Francisco, there’s such a lot of naval-gazing. I’ve got students who
purport to be serving a real larger cause, usually identity-connected,
in their art. They’re addressing issues of cisgendering and nomadism and
the refugee. They’re all doing this because of what they are or where
they come from. There are a lot of noses in a lot of bellybuttons, and I
would prefer not to be dealing with that. There’s a certain un-openness
that’s not good, but I would—. That’s why it’s so nice to be a celebrity
or something, which I kind of was here, you know, was you know who I am,
you know what my prejudices and preferences are, so you’re in my class
for a reason, so I don’t have to cater to everything. You come to me
because I paint colored stripes, and you want to paint geometric
paintings, so, you know, let’s get down to it. But that’s one of the
things, like when my wife, when she came here, Laurie opted to teach a
beginning painting class, and she likes it, other than her philosophy
seminar for graduate students, the political philosophy one. She teaches
beginning painting, and she says, “I like it because they want meat and
potatoes. They want you to teach them how to do stuff.” In this new era
when everything costs so much, and everybody’s in so much student debt,
the beginning students don’t want you to indulge all their little
fantasies. They says, “It’s costing me forty-thousand bucks a year at
least to go here. I want to be taught something.”
01:50:28
MOON:
Hard skills.
PLAGENS:
Hard skills. And not just how to mix paint or how to put a glaze or how
to bisque-fire something, but hard skills as is this is the way you look
at something and you do this, the zone system in photography
composition, the local color, and making space on a painting. They want
to be taught that. That’s good, but I couldn’t deal with—I couldn’t deal
with the advanced or graduate students over the course of a semester.
It’s just too much—it’s not babysitting, because they’re older, but
there’s a kind of nursing things along.
MOON:
So for artworks, is what you were looking for the kind of aesthetic
effect that of your [unclear] and not to have this didactic address but—
01:52:24
PLAGENS:
Yeah, I’d start from there. In other words, it’s what door do you go
into. I don’t want to get to the work of art from the didactic content.
In other words, this is about some noble cause, and if you know about
this noble cause, you’ll see this work of art expresses it, so it’s a
good work of art. No. I want to come in and say, “My god, that thing,
there’s just something about it that’s moving,” not just abstractly,
formalistically, but there can be graphic art that grabs you and the
words and—you know. And I say, “That really pulls me in. I’m more
interested in that.” And then you come to the greater content or the
noble cause behind it, and that’s what I would rather do because I’m an
art critic, I’m not the political commissar of culture going around
grading works of art on how socially or politically noble they are. MOON
Is that the pull of abstraction, then?
PLAGENS:
Sure, yeah, but I’m—none of us are naïve anymore. That went out in
1920-whatever it was in the Russian Revolution when it was still thought
that maybe if we send a train with Constructivism around with all these
universal kinds of things of black rectangles on white canvases, the red
and the black, everybody will understand them because they’re universal.
And they sent that train around the Soviet Union, what, mid-twenties,
something like that, the peasants said, “Fuck you. We don’t want this.
What we want are nineteenth-century paintings like The Wanderers.”
MOON:
“We want Ilya Repin.”
PLAGENS:
“We like Ilya Repin. We want The Wanderers.” Only you can change the
content. You can have—and this is later. Remember that famous painting
Khrushchev Greeting the Dockworkers in New York? It’s one of my favorite
paintings, you know. Remember when he came to New York, and it was the
Soviet Socialist Realism had it—there was a big painting of Khrushchev,
like all the American dockworkers were so impressed over here. “Mr.
Khrushchev, come on, save us,” you know. It was that tone, big
heroic—you know. That’s what they wanted. And so all those Modernists
got either thrown out, had to leave the country, Malevich got broken on
the rack, ended up doing those little puppet paintings that he did late
in his life. After Constructivism, he sort of—
01:54:00
MOON:
Went back.
PLAGENS:
He went back, yeah, he painted folk imagery kind of things. And that’s
what happened. So we all know that. We all know that Piet Mondrian and
Kazimir Malevich and Goncharova. Goncharova and Larionov and all those
people. I probably don’t pronounce the names right. It’s not a universal
language that’s going to transcend all this stuff, that Abstraction is a
culturally conditioned language, and I understand that. And now we’re
getting into, you know, philosophy of art of mine. I know that right now
it’s like, “What are we going to get out of looking at your pictures,
Peter? Because it’s not where painting’s going now.” It’s not David
Salle. It’s not who’s back. It’s not Dana Schutz. It’s not Nicole
Eisenman, whom I really do like. I mean, her work—it’s not—you know what
I mean? It’s not “zombie formalism.” It’s not Josh Smith. It’s not all
that. It’s not. You’re still doing that, and it does. And on the other
hand, it’s not Kehinde Wiley. It doesn’t give you pictures of anything.
And on the other hand, it’s not Jennifer Steinkamp. It doesn’t give you,
“Oh, look at that. Wow. How did they do that?” It’s this friggin’ little
low-tech stuff that’s not too big, not too small, and it’s kind of
downbeat, because I’m an existentialist. What is that? Why should we pay
attention to that? What are we going to get out of it? Not much, baby.
01:55:46
MOON:
Why do you do it?
01:57:55
PLAGENS:
Because that’s how I express myself. That’s myself; I’m like that, and
when I paint a picture, it’s me. I make it visually clear what it’s
about, and I construct it properly so it will last and be big and all
like that. But it’s—you know, it is what it is. I can’t change. But I
know historically, you know, the surf has washed over me. I used to say
this when people get—I said I never ever, given when I came into my
life, when I became an abstract painter circa 1960 or ’61 at the
University of Southern California, I paint my first abstract paintings
in my senior year, and go off to graduate school then, I never was an
abstract painter because I thought it was the cutting edge of anything.
Like “I’m more advanced than you figurative, Diebenkorn,” you know. I
never thought that. So I never felt horribly liable to the idea of, “Oh,
that’s passé.” I said of course it was. It was passé when I picked it
up. It’s always passé. That’s the whole point about it. This is
existential. This is Waiting for Godot. This is Sisyphus rolling up the
stone up the hill, you know. That’s what this is all about. One of the
great essays on painting ever written, short essay, is called “Piero
della Francesca and the Impossibility of Painting,” I think it’s called.
It’s about how nothing is permanent visually. And it’s a short article,
Artnews maybe, 1960 or ’61, written by Philip Guston in very plain
English. And it was always my touchstone, that the painting is never
finished and it’s always provisional and it has that existential—you
know.
So that’s where I am. In the opposite end from me would be somebody like
Lari Pittman, who’s old guard now, you know, but Lari Pittman gives you
everything. You get words, you get pictures, you get sex, you get
masking tape, you get spray, you get this effect, that effect. You get
all these stuff, and sort of there’s so many wows in it, you know. Part
of it is there for a philosophical political purpose. But, you know, I
don’t think abstract painting gives anybody that anymore. If it does,
it’s corrupt, you know. It relies on effects. I’ve never been a big—you
know. There’s certain abstract painters like parts of Helen
Frankenthaler I can barely tolerate. Paul Jenkins is off the charts, you
know. There’s lots of real zippy abstract painting that’s big and
splashy, and that leaves behind a sort of downer existential element of
it, which is what attracts me, I suppose. So anyway, yeah, I mean, I
accept I’m a painter, but I’ve devoted too much of my life to words,
probably.
MOON:
Is this sort of the impossibility of painting or the sort of the fact
that potentially the experience of the painting never quite ends?
PLAGENS:
Yes.
MOON:
Is that maybe part of the resistance to something like installation art?
PLAGENS:
Yeah, yes. I mean, that’s one of the things about paintings and
sculptures, any sort of fixed thing, is you come back to them. You
change. It doesn’t. You know what I mean? You go see—you know, one I
make a pilgrimage to each time, the—
MOON:
Oh, the Philadelphia Museum?
02:01:17
PLAGENS:
Yeah, the Van der Weyden, you know, the big Van der Weyden. I come back
and it’s different every time because I’ve changed a little. You go
back. You step into that stream. But you’re the stream, you know. You
can do the same thing with anything else. You can reread a novel. You
can see a movie again. It isn’t quite the same, though. It’s always
there, you know. Its staticness. Its devices. To some people, it’s
boring. It’s standing still. It doesn’t make any noise. It doesn’t
create its own light. It doesn’t have any electricity, literally, in it.
It’s really boring. It’s just a rectangle on a wall. It’s got this
convention. It won’t break out of the sides. All those things that are
boring to a lot of people are virtues to me. I mean, I’m not into
boredom, but convention is fine with me. I like to do what you can do
only within four sides and flat, more or less, and the fact that it
doesn’t wink and blink and nod, you know. It’s still. You can always
come back to it. I like that.
Now, we don’t which is the chicken and which is the egg, because as
Laurie, my wife, would say—she’s a big believer in one of the great
forces of life is habit. You get in the habit of making paintings, and
you start to think that paintings are the best things, which leads you
to make more, which gets you into the habit. Do you know what I mean? So
my habits are all a painter’s habits.
MOON:
Yeah. Just thinking about how—
PLAGENS:
Get me back on the track if we’ve gone off, if I’ve gone off too far.
MOON:
Yeah. Well, okay, so I mean, we’re talking about Newsweek and you
traveling around.
PLAGENS:
Yeah.
MOON:
You’re painting this whole time. And Newsweek gets thinner over time.
PLAGENS:
Well, yeah, it loses advertisers and the magazine starts to lose money.
MOON:
Is that, in part, because of the economy or was it towards the end of
your tenure, well, when you were working there, was there already the
threat of online digital media?
PLAGENS:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
02:02:33
MOON:
And that cutting into the industry?
PLAGENS:
Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, I can remember when it started to—“Well, we
don’t have room for this piece. It’s going to be in the online edition
only,” and we always thought that was the dumping ground, you know, and
that ink and paper was the expense of real estate, and nobody could
replace us. Every once in a while they’d come in and they’d replace the
computer system, and at the end you had these nice flat screens. They’re
really nice, and it’s like didn’t dawn on anybody that this new thing
they’re giving you that makes your journalism much better, like you
haven’t noticed that the researcher has been laid off or took early
retirement, because we don’t have fact checkers and anything like that
anymore? You’re supposed to do this on your own on Google. So the same
thing that was, “Oh, boy, look, this can make journalism much better
because now we don’t have to do this.”
MOON:
Changing everything.
02:03:52
PLAGENS:
Yeah. It’s taking your—cutting the foundation out from under you on the
other end. That was one of it, and part of it was the economy, but most
of it was ink-and-paper magazines, you know, going down the tubes, and
things going online, you know, and other things coming up, you know.
Newsweek was always a not very profitable thing for the Washington Post
company. It only made, I remember hearing, like 5 or 6 percent profit,
and that was not good in those days. But it was kept, and the Washington
Post wouldn’t get rid of it because it was their sort of flagship. It
was like it wasn’t a loss leader, but it was barely making money. But
they kept it because it was a class act. It was the flagship. Well, if
you turn around now, 60 percent of it would—Washington Post doesn’t own
Newsweek anymore. It sold it to Mr. Harman, and then it got sold, and
now then somebody bought it again, and it’s back in print as a print
edition. I don’t know who or what the circulation is. Time is still
going. But—what was I saying? I lost it. [Moon laughs.] Online. Online
killing things. Yeah, I mean, you’d see people get laid off, and you
knew it was, and you could see the writing, you know, on the wall. Oh, I
know what it is. Newsweek is no longer at the Washington Post company,
but I read somewhere the Washington Post company now derives 67 percent
of its income from Kaplan, you know, the SAT company and then they have
now for-profit ed. They’re huge, Kaplan University and all these places.
And as a former professor and somebody who writes for—who has written
occasionally for Chronicle for Higher Ed, you know, I abhor it. I can’t
stand for-profit. I think they’re—a few of them are good, but—you know.
So things changed. The Washington Post company got out of it. But for a
while, it was flagship. We don’t make a lot of money, but we’re a class
act.
02:05:56
MOON:
Wait. So then how did you leave Newsweek or—
PLAGENS:
I took a buyout, 2003. I came up for it, I was eligible, and you go in
and you talk to somebody, and they say, “This is what you would get in
your pension and this is what you would get in a lump-sum payout,” which
you’d have to sign something. You could never work for the Washington
Post company again, which I’ve always thought sounded strange. Well, now
that Newsweek isn’t owned by the Washington Post company, could I go
back to work for it if I wanted to? [Moon laughs.] And you weren’t
allowed to be talked out—nobody was supposed to—I had a wonderful editor
at the time, who came to me and said, “I’m not allowed to say anything
to you, but I think you know what my position would be on whether I
would like you to leave or not.” She really didn’t want me to leave. I
mean, we really liked each other. Her name was Sarah Pettit. She had
been the editor of Out magazine. And I always thought it was feather in
Newsweek’s cap when Mark—oh, fuck. Alexis Gelber and Mark Whitaker was
the editor of Newsweek, “America’s highest-ranking black journalist.”
And we needed a new culture editor—somebody else quit, and he hired
Sarah Pettit, who was an out lesbian, and she had been editor of Out
magazine. I just thought I was so proud of that, you know. This is
where—you know. You think it’s arcane, but this is 2000.
MOON:
It’s a big deal?
02:08:26
PLAGENS:
Well, it’s a mainstream magazine, you know, Des Moines, 2.2 children,
etc., etc. But I did it anyway, because I knew—and Sarah, I mean, I
don’t want to—this is awful to say, but for whatever reasons where Sarah
died at age thirty-seven of cancer, so she didn’t have too much longer,
you know. And she’s the best editor—I think she’s the best. Sarah
Crichton taught me the most, because I was—and she was also awful, I
mean really severe when she wanted to be. Not terrible as a person, you
know, but she could—she didn’t mince words when she thought your story
sucked. And so I took a buyout and—
MOON:
Wait. Actually, can I ask you a question about Sarah Pettit, was her
name?
PLAGENS:
Yeah.
MOON:
I think this was in the text of the talk you gave, “A Simple Country
Painter,” where she told you, “You have to be in the shit”? She—a piece
of advice?
PLAGENS:
Yeah, well, “in the shit” was her phrase. It’s a sort of a cruder way of
saying “in the trenches.” You can’t be pure and chaste from afar. You
can’t be aloof. You have to be in the shit. In other words, I have to be
going around and—
MOON:
Talking to people.
PLAGENS:
—talking to artists and seeing shows and like that. I can’t come down
from the mount every once in a while. And that was a popular
journalistic phrase. You know, these things that go through like “duh”
and people saying, “You know, he’s the nicest person I’ve ever met;
not.” Remember that, when people would do that?
MOON:
Yeah.
PLAGENS:
All those kinds of things they go through, and “in the shit” was—it had
a little moment.
MOON:
One of the things.
PLAGENS:
—a little currency to it. So I took a buyout and—
02:09:28
MOON:
You didn’t want to write criticism anymore, or what was the reason?
PLAGENS:
I saw the writing on the wall at Newsweek, and I got real panicked, I
mean, after I did it, because it came—no, it came right at this horrible
juncture of our lives when Laurie was up for tenure at Hofstra and she
had a guy who hated her just because he’s really weird, and I had gotten
him the job, Joe Masheck, who used to editor of Artforum.
MOON:
Oh, editor at Artforum.
02:11:2402:13:46
PLAGENS:
Yeah. Well, Laurie did something to him one time. He’s a jerk—you know,
I don’t want to get sued for libel. [laughs] But he has—you know, he has
problems. And she used to teach the Contemporary Art course because
nobody else would teach it, and he was aghast because she didn’t have a
Ph.D. and this was an art history course. Of course, he wouldn’t teach
it, because he wanted to teach his own little things, and he was pissed
because he didn’t have any graduate students. And he’d also been fucked
over at Columbia where he came up for tenure, and the way I understand
it is Ros Krauss who’d sunk him. And so he was real good. He was a good
teacher for students who liked esoterics. While he was on leave one
time, Laurie was chairman of the Curriculum Committee, and she sent out
a memo about a meeting and left his name off of it, presuming that a guy
who lived in Manhattan who was on a sabbatical wouldn’t want to come all
the fucking way out to Hempstead for a Curriculum Committee meeting. And
he got ballistic and accused her of wanting to take over the Curriculum
Committee. And she was sort of, “No, nobody wants to take over the
committee. Everybody wants to hand it off.”
Anyway, so she’s coming up, and it was a little bit—and I was at the “Do
I take a buyout?” Okay? So if I had taken the buyout and had given up my
job and Laurie had not gotten tenure, we’d have been in the shit
economically. But she got tenure and a promotion to full professor at
the same time, which was sort of audacious. She asked for that. And
forever after, there’s an older art historian woman who’s still an
associate professor at age, you know, 132 or whatever she is. But we
didn’t know. It could have gone no, and I could have taken the buyout.
Or I could have stayed and she could have gotten tenure and then I
wouldn’t have had that offer. You see what I mean? So it was real
touch-and-go, and as it worked out, the timing was good because she got
tenure and promotion to full professor, and I took this buyout in 2003,
and we took the lump-sum payout that they gave, you know. They gave me a
chunk, and that bought most of our house in the Catskills. And that’s
what it was. It was getaway money. I like to say, “Newsweek paid me to
go away.” [Moon laughs] But they would do that every once in a while,
and there’s been a buyout since, you know, now the magazine—but they
used to do that, cut payroll, get people who had been there. You get x
amount in your pension for every year you’ve been and blah, blah, blah.
There’s a formula, and it was just too good to refuse. As coincidence
would have it, my wife is retired from Hofstra University because five
years ago or so, she signed an irrevocable—let me put that in
there—agreement to retire in five years, in return for which she would
get this raise right away, and a year-and-a-half salary chopped up and
put into her paycheck at however many paychecks she still had to go in
five years. But basically, it was a year-and-a-half salary added on, and
they started giving it to you right away. So she’s benefitted from the
same thing.
But after I took that buyout, it was, “Oh, my god, what are we going to
do? We got our daughter in college.” Well, we had that put away, but
she’s at college, and there are things. And so I did—you know. I taught
a class at Brown, Contemporary Art class. I did a couple classes for my
friend at—class meetings at the Sotheby’s Institute for Andras Szanto.
And I started writing for Artforum—I mean Art in America. I wanted—they
called up and said, “Would you take over Dave Hickey’s column?” what
used to be called “Revisions” or something like that, and mine was “Eye
Level.” That was their title. I forget what mine was. It was too
esoteric; they didn’t like it. So I did it for about a year and a
quarter, something like that, fourteen, fifteen issues, and then Lindsay
Pollock became editor and didn’t want to do it anymore.” That’s all
right. One of the things you learn in journalism is these things that
they institute will eventually cease. I learned that at Newsweek, that
now we’re going to have a special section called “On the Spot,” and it
will be a critic writing a review, and people will come in and comment
or write their comments as part of the review, you know. I’m making this
up, this thing. But then it would run for a few months, and then it
would disappear.
02:15:36
MOON:
That’s how it went?
PLAGENS:
Yeah. Things had a shelf life. The only thing that kept on all the time
was that graph they used to have called “Conventional Wisdom,” little
arrow up, little arrow down, basic little—because people like graphs,
you know. What was I going to say? So it was about—
MOON:
“Eye Level” and corporate America?
PLAGENS:
Oh, yeah. So I wrote that column for a while, and I wasn’t surprised
when it went out. And then I was sitting at home one time, and Eric
Gibson called me up four, four and a half years ago or something like
that, said, “Could we have lunch? I want you to write something for Wall
Street Journal, and then, oh, by the way, Lance Esplund,” who’s another
critic—(I think I’m better, but that’s me.) [laughs] “He quit.” He was
quitting to go write for Bloomberg, and it was whatever he wanted to do.
It was Peter Schjeldahl stayed at 7 Days. I don’t know whether it was a
good move or not, whether he’s still there, Bloomberg has cut back or
not. He says, “Oh, by the way, would you be interested in doing—.” And I
remember he made it sound so easy. He said, “It’s real easy. You review
three shows every other week. Just pick three shows, and every other
week, every other week you go review. You get eight hundred words
total.”
MOON:
Contemporary art?
02:18:03
PLAGENS:
Yeah, yeah. I’ve done a couple of historical things, and then there was
the modification, which was fine. In other words, Eric—“Peter, you pick
five or six and email them to me, and I’ll tell you which three I want
you to do.” That seemed fair to me. There’s what—you know, let’s say
there’s 100, 150 serious art exhibitions in New York. There’s probably
500 galleries, but you know what I mean, that would be potential. So out
of those—I go through my announcements, I go online, I look at things,
so out of those I pick five or six, and then he says, “Do these three,”
and that’s what I do. And he said, “Would you be interested in doing
that?” And I said, “Okay,” and I thought for a while. But four years
later, here I am still doing them.
MOON:
[laughs] How do you choose which shows you want to review? How do you
put together the list? What do you think about?
02:19:5802:21:33
PLAGENS:
The first thing I think about is what can I write something about that a
reader of The Wall Street Journal would want to read. I think about my
audience first, okay? So that doubles, that splits into what would be
good for the reader and then what would I like to write about. And there
are a lot of things that maybe strictly meritocratically—is that an
adverb?—they’re better, but I say, “I can’t write anything about that. I
just don’t want to. It doesn’t interest me.” Do you know what I mean?
There’s got to be something, okay? So that’s where it comes. Can I write
something interesting and would the reader like to read it, okay? That
can—I don’t like to get overly didactic, but can I put something in the
review that’s a little bit of a lesson for an interested layperson? And
by “lesson” I mean something like—let me think. I put something—it
doesn’t have to be a line in the review. I reviewed this thing by
Teresita Fernández in Madison Square Park, and the Madison Square Park
has outdoor installations, and they pick an artist. Jaume Plensa has
been there, I think—I don’t know if that’s how you pronounce it—the
sculptor who does the big elongated faces. He’s Chilean or something, I
think. Mel Kendrick has done something. People do these things, you
know.
And I had a sentence in there at the end of the first paragraph, blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah, “and it’s a failure.” And so one of the reasons
that I wanted to review that after I’d seen it—I wasn’t expecting it
really to be that much, but there’s a lesson here, as you can pick a
famous artist who has a MacArthur, and you can have all these resources
available and you can have this idea that sounds nice on paper, okay? I
won’t say what it is, but it was an overhead thing, a [unclear]. It’s a
failure because the unadorned park is so much better than you feel
under—you know. Anyway, so there was supposed to be a lesson in there
that sometimes you can have the personnel, you can have a MacArthur
grant, you can have budget, you can have open-minded patrons, you can do
this, and it can still fail. It’s like a musical on Broadway, right?
Okay, a little line like that. The thing about Mark Grotjahn, which is
probably a little glib about “VeriBold” is to say this happens
occasionally, people—you get these famous artists who are going great
guns like Mark Grotjahn, like the head painter of L.A. right now. And I
didn’t say that, but all these things can go, and then you got to keep
it fresh and new and you got to have these things, and sometimes an
artist will do this, and it will seem like a little too much of a
reinvention, not something that’s soulful. Okay? So I do that because I
think there’s a little lesson about that in there.
Dana Schutz, that I just did rather favorably, was she used to do German
Expressionism but now she does Cubism, but it’s okay to rehash these
things and bring them back in because she brings something real
different to it, and the fact that you can say analytical Cubism with
brighter colors, which is what it does, you know. So some little point,
better than lesson, okay? Then after that, I do try to move it around a
little. I am conscious not so much of ethnicity, because, frankly, black
and Latino and Asian artists are still a little few and far between, and
the ones you know you ought to do, the Glenn Ligons and the Ai Weiweis,
and the, you know, Daniel J. Martinezes or the— You know that you ought
to do these. And this goes back to a little point at Newsweek. There
were things you had to do. Yeah, there were certain things. I remember
Rick Smith saying, “These are our Super Bowls.” In other words, Museum
of Modern Art does a Matisse retrospective, you’ve got to cover it. It’s
the kind of thing where our readers might be saying, “Oh, isn’t there a
big Matisse show in New York? How come we didn’t hear about it?” You
know, we have to do those things. So I do a little bit of that. “This
ought to be paid attention to,” you know. And I do think about women,
and maybe I’ve been scarred by the fact that when I moved to New York,
you know, on our building, I remember it seems like the morning after I
moved in, I come out and there’s that famous Guerrilla Girl’s poster
wheat-pasted to the side of the front of the building that says “These
art critics have devoted less than 20 percent of their reviews—”
MOON:
To women.
PLAGENS:
“—to women, and the ones with an asterisk are only 10 percent.” I got an
asterisk—
02:23:56
MOON:
Oh, uh-huh.
02:25:59
PLAGENS:
—because, yeah, I’d been in L.A., and, I remember—there’s a little
anecdote, really quick. I went—this was early on in the eighties. I
think it was still in the eighties. And I got asked to Rutgers, come
down give a talk, get money, and I’m doing things for money in the
eighties. So I get down there and I talk about something, and from the
back of the room comes this question. A woman with a kind of Laurie
Anderson haircut, blonde, black at the roots, t-shirt rolled up,
presented herself as a gay woman, right, that’s, to me, an angry gay
woman I would say the visual cues were. And she mentioned the Guerilla
Girl thing. “And why are you only like that?” And I said, “Well,” I
said, “I’m not going to defend—I can’t defend myself fully, but you have
to understand when I was reviewing art for Artforum shortly before I got
here,” I said, “I review ‘published’ art. I didn’t go around to studios
trying to discover people or right injustices,” I said. “So I reviewed
what was in the galleries, and what was in the galleries that was sort
of deemed that I thought was important was a sort of a boys’ club,” and
I used that phrase. So afterward, lecture’s over, fine, fine, we’re
going out to dinner or coffee or something, we’re coming down these
stairs, I’m coming down this, but my person who asked me, we’re talking,
and the woman who asked the question in the t-shirt—and she goes across
and she doesn’t see us and she’s talking to a friend, and just as we
pass, she looks at her friend, and she’s talking, and she says, “Boys’
club? Fuck him.” [laughs] And then she went her way, and I kept going my
way. And she didn’t say it to me, you know. She didn’t see that I was
over here.
So you might say I’ve been scarred by that or I’ve learned a bit of a
lesson, but I don’t like to have—there’s two things I try to watch out
for. One, too many men, because it is kind of—it’s not quite 50/50, but
the artists, if you look through the lists, it’s 65/35 at the worst,
probably 60/40, maybe on some weeks 55/45, men, you know. The other
thing is I try not to do too much painting, which is really weird
because now it’s paintings all over the place. If I go through—and I’ll
tell you where one of my sources is that I go to look. I go to Artforum,
the Art Guide, and I go to “New York,” “All” galleries, and I go through
alphabetically all those friggin’ galleries. And it’s like painting show
after painting show. It’s hard to stay away from it. So I do women, not
too few women and not too much painting. Then there’s a neighborhood
thing. I don’t want to do Chelsea every week. I don’t want to do the
Lower East Side, which is the next populous thing. So there are
galleries on the Upper East Side and there are galleries in Brooklyn,
and I hate Brooklyn, what it’s done to—because the hours are so shitty.
I want to see the shows a lot of time on Tuesday and Wednesday and file
on Thursday, and a lot of galleries in Brooklyn are Friday, Saturday,
and Sunday by appointment only or— Because the people who run them are
doing it on a shoestring. You know, some galleries at 56 Bogart Street,
you know, is another old—like the 420 building used to be, full
galleries. But I try to move it around a little. So that’s how I pick
the shows. Once I’ve decided how I can write something interesting
about—no, I go through the things searching first to just come down. Oh,
is this too many men? Is this too much painting? But the big decision
that makes the cut is, can I write anything that I think is interesting
that will make a—“interesting” is a bad word. Can I write a nice little
250-word piece of prose that somebody will want to read out of this, and
is there a point that my reader would like that would be instructive to
that person to know? And that’s the way I try to do it.
MOON:
Yeah, I mean, the sheer number of artists and galleries out there now,
the scale has completely changed.
PLAGENS:
Yes, it has.
02:28:57
MOON:
Yeah.
PLAGENS:
There’s a friend of mine in New York named Mario Naves, who’s a painter,
and he has a blog that’s pretty good, and he’s fairly negative, because
he’s fairly conservative, used to write for the New Criterion. But his
blog is called “Too Much Art.” [laughter] That says it. But that’s how
we work. I mean, I’m not big on my thing, but theories of cultural
surplus, you know. There are a hundred times as many novels published
than anybody needs to read, but our idea is we have cultural excess, a
surplus, the other ones get remaindered and pulped and that writer
doesn’t have a career, and these other people come up and have—you know
what I mean? Same thing with artists, artists and galleries. They get a
five-year lease. You get five years from the IRS before they declare it
a hobby, you know, used to be the rule of thumb. That’s why so many
galleries closed after five years. Somebody would get an inheritance or
a divorce settlement, and they’d open a gallery, and they’d run it in
the red. But five years comes, the IRS said, “No, this is just your
hobby. This isn’t a business.” You have rising rents. I mean, all they
talk about around here is San Francisco being a city with all these
museums and it’s got some galleries and artists can’t afford to live
here anymore. That’s what they talk about.
02:30:47
MOON:
Well, it must be fatiguing to have to see so much art and cover so much
ground. Is it also confusing, I mean?
02:32:0102:35:02
PLAGENS:
No, it’s not confusing, probably because I’m an old—you know. I’ve
narrowed down, I’m an old “get off my lawn” guy. No, I’ve said this
before. If you can keep your wits about you, there is a certain thing
that happens. If you’ve been in the art world for five years, there are
certain things that are going to strike you as, “Oh, wait a minute. I
think I’ve seen a version of that before.” You’re in ten years, you’re
in fifteen, you’re in twenty, those same things start to happen. You
don’t see things as, “Oh, wow, this is new and hard to deal with, and
this really upsets my whole apple cart.” You don’t see that, and
especially if you’re older. This is the opposite side of being an old
fogey and a stick-in-the-mud and the artist being new and young and
open. Sometimes you’ve seen it before, and the artists are sort of naïve
and they think that—it’s a parallel to this truism that somebody once
said, every generation thinks that it’s invented sex. Okay? Every
generation thinks that their parents don’t know anything about sex, and
that we’re the ones who discovered it, because you went through puberty
and discovered it.
There’s a sense with artists, too, every generation thinks they’ve
discovered this new social practice. We should be watching out for the
poor people and the homeless and the working man or racial minorities.
Every generation thinks it’s discovered, oh, this is the end of
painting, boy. It’s all going to be, you’ll press a button, there will
be a chip in your head, and the work of art will suddenly surround you.
I mean, every generation thinks that it’s into the technology, you know.
And when you’ve been around a while, you don’t fall for it all the time.
You don’t. You’ve said, “I’ve been here, I’ve seen that.” It’s like the
difference between teenage puppy love and somebody who’s fifty years old
and been married twice already falling in love again. Now, it can be
desperation, that’s the other thing, but there’s a mature, a little bit
pickier, whereas when you’re, you know, a love-struck seventeen-,
eighteen-year-old boy or girl, you think everything is new. I used to
have when—my friend Walter Gabrielson and I were at Northridge, we used
to watch TV, and we would come in to teach the next day and we’d discuss
the monologue on Johnny Carson. That was our favorite. We didn’t wait
for the guests. We just liked the monologue. We used to watch this show
in the seventies—this is the point—called Hee Haw, which was country
music. It was network television having this show called Hee Haw. It was
like a hootenanny, and they’d make fun of it, but it was Buck Owens and
Roy Clark. And they used to have this guy, and it was part of their bit.
It was a variety show, right, with a guest, and you know, so on, so
forth. They’d have this guy, Charlie Farquharson, give the news, sort of
like Saturday Night Live gave the news. It was country, so the set was
like this cabin or this shack, and he had all the egg cartons nailed to
the wall, the papier mâché egg cartons, because it’s cheap sound
baffling, if you nail those to the wall. And there’d be hay coming out,
and he’d have his glasses on, and his rimless glasses and his sweater,
and reading the news like this old country guy. But he was a Canadian
actor who’d done Shakespeare. His opening line, you know, “Good
evening,” and then he’d say, “It’s the same old news, only it’s
happening to different people.” [Moon laughs.]
That’s really profound to me philosophically, and it says a lot about
art. It’s the same old new discoveries, only there’s another group of
artists that think they’re making them. Do you know what I mean? So
there’s a little bit of that when you get seen here. And on the other
hand, though, the joys are really great. The best thing that can happen
to an older art critic is seeing something that really takes your breath
away, that cuts through everything that you’ve seen before, and
especially if it’s something that you really don’t approve of. [Moon
laughs.] Like, to me, it would be a video installation. I come in and I
see a video, and I say, “Oh, my god. I got to go back and see that
again,” you know, that kind of thing. And it very rarely happens.
MOON:
How often does it happen?
02:36:4102:39:48
PLAGENS:
[laughs] I don’t know. Not often enough, you know. Or just if you see
something. I forget names, but there was a sculptor who showed at Paula
Cooper across the street. Vincent Fecteau, tabletop pieces,
semi-deflated balloons cast in plaster, and then he painted them. Young
guy. Sculpture, I’m not big on [unclear], and it was tabletop sculpture
[unclear]. And they were absolutely, absolutely wonderful.
I’m trying to think of some nineteen-year-old artist that I’ve seen. I
remember when Sadie Benning first came out. But I remember I saw the
first show at—Elizabeth Dee gallery where Ryan Trecartin had the dealer.
I walked in and I was wearing my Mount Holyoke baseball cap, and Laurie
had gone to Mount Holyoke, and this dealer, who’s still around, good
dealer, had gone to Mount Holyoke. Anyway, she had a show of Ryan
Trecartin, you know, the video artist. And at Ryan Trecartin, and it was
the first show. The only thing I had trouble with was going back in
there and sitting on the mattress and watching it in a black box, the
same thing showed on a monitor on top of a mattress in front of a bunch
of junk, you know, like he would have. And it was much easier there
because I almost got sick to my stomach in the black box, because—you
know. Anyway, I saw that, and I just came home, and I said, “I’ve just
seen something that’s really—.” You know. And that’s been a while. It
might even have been ten years. It’s like seven years or something. But
I remember that, you know. Now he’s in every biennale that there is. I’m
just saying, you know, and there will be like little surprises where—I
mean, one of the things I did for The Wall Street Journal one time, I
reviewed a show at one of those co-ops at Prince Street Gallery. Well,
they’re the ones you have to belong to, they’re memberships, and they
all tend to be in this one building in one floor in Chelsea on 25th
Street. There’s Pleiades, Bowery Gallery, Prince Street Gallery, Phoenix
Gallery, and they tend to be real second, third echelon, and they have a
lot of—pardon the expression—doctors’ wives in New Jersey who paint and
who have a lot of money, and they belong, and they’re passable. And
there’s a lot of exhibitions of Tuscan landscapes painted during the
summer with entirely too much Naples yellow in them. [Moon laughs.] But
there was a woman who did collages, and I really liked it. So it was one
of my little, “Let’s do a co-op gallery.” Okay? But where were we
besides how to move around and—
MOON:
Well, coming—how often it happens when you see work that really—
PLAGENS:
Oh, when I see something that’s really nice.
MOON:
Yeah.
02:41:12
PLAGENS:
Not very often. Once or twice a season there’s something that really
knocks you out. And it could be the other—you know, the other way, where
you say, “I didn’t realize this would be this good,” you know. I’m going
to do the Jim Shaw exhibition at the new museum as a single exhibition
in my “Fine Art” column. It’s called “Fine Art.” I inherited that, the
gallery exhibitions, because my editor has very kindly taken pity on me
because that’s the week that Phoebe gets married. So I have to file the
story. The wedding’s on Saturday. I have to file on Wednesday night or
Thursday, and I won’t get to see the show until Wednesday. So he said,
“Just do that.” I’ve done it before. “Just do that as your whole column,
just one show.” I’m inclined not to like it to begin with, from the Jim
Shaw stuff I’ve seen before. It’s that everything-but-the-kitchen-sink
school maybe this will be a revelation. Maybe I’ll go in there and say,
“Man,” you know. You never know.
So all I’m saying is sometimes it can come from some thing you thought
you were familiar with, but doesn’t happen, doesn’t happen very often,
and part of it is you get cranky and jaded and it’s your fault, and then
sometimes it’s the art’s fault because you’re much more selective, and
only one out of ten things gets an “A” anymore, because you’ve kind of
seen it before.
MOON:
Does it happen less—does that moment of that feeling that freshness from
the work, does that happen less often with retrospectives, or not
necessarily?
PLAGENS:
Less often. I think the best context for something is like a gallery
show by an artist that you thought you knew a little bit but it’s kind
of revelatory, or somebody coming out with something different, you
know. Their new work is something different. Partly it’s better than
that, because the retrospective will give you the whole lead-up, but I
have to say probably the best contemporary art exhibition I’ve seen in
the last twenty years—I’ll go out on a limb because you could come back
and you’d say, “Well, what about this exhibition?” But it was the Lee
Bontecou retrospective as staged at Hammer, not at MoMA in Exile. We
talked about that. And I wept in that last room, with those flying
saucer, outer-space-looking things, because I didn’t know quite how good
those were. And it was just astonishing. It took my breath away. And I
had always liked her with the things that had the [unclear], the holes
in them, the canvas.
02:43:16
MOON:
They were shown at Castelli, I think.
02:45:13
PLAGENS:
Yeah, she was shown at Castelli, then she moved away from the scene. But
she taught at Brooklyn College for twenty years. She moved. The thing
was [unclear] Bontecou moved out to Pennsylvania in that barn somewhere
out there, and that was—you know, she worked in seclusion. Well, yes and
no. She came in, taught at Brooklyn College for twenty years. But, I
mean, so a retrospective, that was an eye-opener, you know, just I
hadn’t realized that she was one of the greatest American artists of the
twentieth century. And you might even kick her way up there because she
was sort of sui generis. I mean, you can take Pollock and Kline and De
Kooning and put them in Abstract Expressionism. Where do you put
Bontecou with the wall reliefs that we all know about, but as the work
developed later? What do you do with that? Sometimes I have the opinion
that the two greatest artists of the post-war era are Francis Bacon and
Lee Bontecou, because they don’t—there’s no school of them. Every once
in a while you get—there’s a Brit painter named Derek Boshier, who shows
in Houston and used to be around and was a kind of second Francis Bacon.
There is that—what did they use to call it? Not Chicago, the “Monster”
school, but there were people who—the “School of London,” that Lucian
Freud and R.B. Kitaj and Francis Bacon and a few other people—I want to
say Frank Auerbach, some other people are like—no, they’re not. Too far
apart.
And there was another sort of—I’ll just throw this in. The Bacon
retrospective that was at the Met, you know, I really liked it, and
there was a certain kind of criticism that I don’t like. Jed Perl, who
writes very well, very mellifluously, but I think is—I praised his last
book, but his, you know, taste is off. He’s more conservative, and he
thinks that Jean Hélion is great. Come on. Anyway, he wrote a review of
that Bacon show, which—and I still remember this. I learned something
from it. I learned something. “Oh, Peter, this is something you don’t
want to do,” which is, he negatively reviewed Bacon by disparaging the
audience that likes Bacon. In other words, people in Park Avenue
apartments who are elevated above everything and they’re so filthy rich,
they’ll like all these [demonstrates] paintings, because it gives them
this—they think they’re being very smart and existential and they’re
looking at all that sort of stuff. And they are these terribly
superficial people who don’t know what the horror of addiction is. And
I’m thinking as I read this, no, this is full of shit. You don’t review
an artist on the basis of what kind of people like him or her.
MOON:
You do it based on the work.
PLAGENS:
You do it based on the work. It might be an interesting little sidebar,
and it might be a thing if you say, “Oh, I think this person is
overrated,” or underrated a little bit, but his whole thing was about
the audience for Francis Bacon and, you know, contemporary hipsters who
have a lot of money and everything, and they still want to feel in touch
with these dark side of [unclear]. Francis Bacon gives them the
fashionable, because they’re brightly colored and they look good. They
look like old French wine posters from the thirties, those big
[demonstrates] curvy shapes that he’ll have in there, and— And I thought
it was terrible, and that’s why I made up my mind, don’t do that, don’t.
And art reviewers don’t do it much. Popular music critics do it all the
time, because, you know, certain subgenres of music, “This is the kind
of thing that meth heads who live in Tulsa, Oklahoma, like.” [laughs]
Don’t do that. Anyway, Francis Bacon and Lee Bontecou sometimes I think
they’re sui generis, if that’s the way you pronounce that.
MOON:
Before, you said that when you were writing criticism in the late
sixties, seventies, you were doing it because you—it was not so much
about power but about getting attention.
PLAGENS:
Did I say that, probably recklessly? [Moon laughs.] I mean, I probably
enjoyed the attention I got, you know.
MOON:
Or just getting your name out—your name and your voice out there, let’s
say.
PLAGENS:
You get your name and your voice out there, yes. I mean, part of it is
that. I used to have a friend who’s a fiction writer who used to say,
“There are no great American novels in bureau drawers,” meaning that
anybody who’s trying to do it is flogging it. It’s out there. Anybody
who writes art criticism doesn’t do my little diary and then tuck it
away. If it’s any—you know, you’re trying to get it out there. So, yeah,
I’d like the idea that people would read it and they would know who I
was and they would say, “Oh, that was a good opinion. Did you see what
he wrote about such-and-such and the way that was?” I liked that.
Everybody does.
02:49:29
MOON:
Well, have your motivations changed over the years?
PLAGENS:
Yeah. [laughs] It’s like, “What are you going to pay me for this?”
[laughter]
MOON:
Now is it the job part of it or—
PLAGENS:
I mean, it’s not that I’ll write anything that I’ll write anything for
two dollars or two-fifty a word. [Moon laughs.] I told you I had dinner
at the Bohemian Club with this illustrator who does New Yorker covers,
Mark Ulriksen, 1975 or something, forty years ago, full-page color
illustration for a mass magazine, $1,500. 2015, full-page color
illustration for a mass magazine, $1,200. It’s gone down—
MOON:
Wow.
02:51:38
PLAGENS:
—over forty years, because of print and all that sort of stuff. So, you
know, people don’t get a dollar-a-word nowadays. But if somebody paid me
two-fifty a word, doesn’t mean I’ll write anything. It means if I’m
interested in writing it at all, and they’re going to say, “What do you
want?” I will say, “$2.50 a word.” Not like—you know how you do it. In
other words, you want a thousand-word little thing from me, it’ll be
$2,500, and that’s not a whole lot. No, because people that have heard
of me and know my byline or something like that, it’s fairly drawn now.
I’m not going to get sensational—I’m not going to—and I don’t think the
time is there. There’s no more Robert Hughes, there’s no more, you know,
big-time art critic who’s, “Did you see what so-and-so said about
so-and-so?” That’s gone. Used to be when Robert Hughes was around, and
it still is to an extent with Roberta in the Times, and maybe Chris,
Chris Knight in the L.A. Times, still a little bit of that, but not
much, that authoritative voice.
MOON:
Well, you’ve talked about different types of critics, you know. You were
saying that, you know, there’s the goalie type, there’s—
PLAGENS:
The goalie, the cartographer, and the evangelist.
MOON:
I mean, do you see yourself as the goalie type—
PLAGENS:
Goalie type.
MOON:
—in trying to keep things in check?
PLAGENS:
Yeah, with a little bit of every once in a while if my brain is up to
it, I can write a cartographic essay on the model of Ros Krauss’
“Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” That’s the greatest one I’ve ever
read. She explains earthworks, architecture, sculpture, landscape,
right? And it was a little dry. Once in a while I want to do something
like that. [laughter] Now I’m just thinking of that term, “mansplain.”
You’ve heard that.
MOON:
Oh, yeah. [laughs]
PLAGENS:
“Mansplaining.” It’s like “manspreading” on the subway. Have you heard
about that?
MOON:
No. Take up too much space?
PLAGENS:
Oh, it just means—yeah, guys that sit like this. It’s got a little
racial element to it because it’s a style among black guys, like wearing
your pants, your belt, below where you think your pants can stay up.
You’ve seen it.
02:53:12
MOON:
Yeah.
PLAGENS:
Well, it’s spreading out, you know, that kind of thing. There’s a little
bit of homeboy culture in there. Sometimes you—look, white folk do their
thing, too, and there’s probably—but I thought it was so funny. The
Onion had a story that Bobby Jindal has lied to his parents about
getting the Republican nomination. He sort of—his mother thinks he
already has it. [Moon laughs.] Well, there’s a whole real racial element
in there about Indian Americans being ambitious, and the mother, you
know, saying—my wife just saw this film about the Patels. Have you seen
that documentary?
MOON:
Oh, no, but I’ve heard about it.
PLAGENS:
Yeah, she said it was great. I didn’t want to—she went with a woman
friend here. I didn’t want to go see it. I said, “It sounds like a chick
flick to me. But she said it was really good. But the documentary about
the Indian family wants the son to marry a good Indian, even though
they’re Americans, and they try all this arranging and so forth. And
finally, he’s gone out with this white girl named—I forget what her name
is, Veronica or something, and finally tells his mother, and they hit
the ceiling, “You can’t do this.” But the movie ends with, Laurie said,
Veronica being taught by the Indian mother how to do Indian cooking, you
know. They’ve come to terms with it. But the Bobby Jindal thing, I mean,
I shouldn’t do a [unclear], but it just hit me where I could see because
I’ve known—there used to be a Patel who worked at Newsweek. It’s very
common. It’s like Smith in India, right. So mom is saying, “You know,
oh, my son, Bobby, he has the Republican nomination.” And he says,
“Well, mom, there’s still a little paperwork to be done. It’s not
quite—.” Do you know what I mean? And I can just see it, because I’ve
known East Indians and that ambition. You know what I mean? “I’ve got a
job at Google, Mom.” “Oh, they’ve made you vice president.” “No . Well,
not quite vice president,” you know. Anyway, “mansplaining,”
“manspreading,” we were in something about—
02:55:43
MOON:
Roles of the critic.
PLAGENS:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, the—good, you’re very good at keeping this on
track. Yeah, so every once in a while I do a little cartographic essay
where I want to explain something. I used to do that a lot with Newsweek
when they would send me to write a story on the Venice Biennale or
Documenta, because the back to the reader would be, “Look, reader of
Newsweek out there in Des Moines, this is the way these big
international things work.” I remember I did the first Document a I did
for Newsweek, I used to try to write my own headlines, but sometimes I
couldn’t, and they would take something out of the story, and the
headline was, “A County Fair for Art.” And I had somewhere in there that
these big invite-‘ems, when you invite artists like Documenta, you don’t
invite the work; you invite the artist. There is a whole lot of that, to
do something in front of the Fridericianum or do something on the lawn
at the Kunstmuseum or whatever in Basel. It was like a county fair more
than an exhibition. So I would write a little piece about this is how
these things work. This is how the curator is chosen. This is what then
the curator does. You invite these people. This is how it ends up like
this, a little bit, not as masterful as Krauss’ essay on—
02:57:13
MOON:
Sculpture [unclear].
02:59:00
PLAGENS:
Yeah, because she didn’t have an occasion for it. I had a built in
subject: this is the Biennale, this is how it works. Okay. And, so,
yeah, I’m a [unclear], and I’m definitely not an evangelist. [Moon
laughs.] Well, it’s not my—see, that’s just—it’s I just—I don’t—there
are other people to do that. One of the things you learn as you get
older, it’s a big wide wonderful world. There are a bunch of people who
do all kinds of things. So quit arguing with everything, Peter, that
comes out because it isn’t what you would have done. There’s a known
flaw in negative book reviews where people say, “You’re criticizing that
because the author didn’t write the book that you would have written,”
you know. Take the book, you know, on its own terms. Try to. So there is
a tendency to argue with everything, but when you get older you say,
“Okay, there are lots of other people who do lots of other kinds of
things, and I’m not the evangelist.” And for a long time when I first
got that term when I was teaching in Texas, and Jonas Mekas came to
lecture on underground film, and he was an evangelist because nobody
would show underground films. He wanted these things to see the light of
day. Okay. I understand more now than—I liked it then because I didn’t
know anything about underground film, but then I went into a period
where I don’t, you know, think it’s critic’s job to be going doing
studio visits with painters and then writing them up.
There was an article one time in The New Yorker about the art scene. I
think it was about Ingrid Sischy, and there was a scene where they’re
all in a café and there’s a critic named Rene Ricard. And I just
remember in The New Yorker story he leans back with a drink and he says,
“Why, everyone wants a Rene Ricard write-up.” And it was so nice, “Rene
Ricard write-up.” And it was like everybody wants this service, right?
I’d be horrified, I used to be horrified, that anybody would do that,
like, you know, you’re a PR writer for hire. [Moon laughs.] And I don’t
want to do that. And that’s why I don’t do commercial gallery essays.
MOON:
Catalog essays.
PLAGENS:
I don’t do commercial catalogs. I will do public institution catalog
essays.
MOON:
Mm-hmm, museums.
PLAGENS:
But it’s not like I think they’re dirty. I just want to keep that—
MOON:
Clean.
PLAGENS:
Clean, because I am an artist. That’s the other thing. And I have my own
dealings with dealers and stuff. So I’m not an evangelist, nor would I
be. It’s just not temperamentally for me. But there are people who are,
you know. San Francisco has more of them than L.A. or New York does
because of their art community. “Our purpose is to be boosting one
another up. You write about me. I’ll write about you.” It’s what’s wrong
with The New York Times Book Review on Sunday. I much prefer the daily
ones where they have Michiko Kakutani, Janet Maslin, Dwight Garner,
staff reviewers. But in the Sunday Book Review, they farm them out, and
there’s always some novelist who’s reviewing somebody else’s novel in
more tender terms than it deserves, because you can feel the author
saying, “It’s my turn in the chopping block next, so I don’t want
anybody after me,” you know. [Moon laughs.] It’s much better when
they’re staff, I think.
MOON:
Before, you mentioned that—
03:01:12
PLAGENS:
What time are we at now?
MOON:
It’s 2:05.
PLAGENS:
Oh, we probably should go pretty quickly.
MOON:
Okay. Last question.
PLAGENS:
Yeah.
MOON:
John Coplans called people in Los Angeles, you know, back in the day,
’67 days, “poodlers.” Do you think “poodlers” still exist now, or do you
think that people are now so—people are more savvy because the
infrastructure for everything is there?
03:02:20
PLAGENS:
Yeah. I think it costs too much to be a “poodler,” so that’s much of
them out, but they still are around, you know. [Moon laughs.] I mean, I
get an awful lot of junk email, and I leave myself open for it, so I get
things from, you know, somebody’s sculpture studio announcing their new
show or a new critic or somebody who writes for—you know, does a blog in
Phoenix, Arizona. I get all this sort of stuff. And I can see that a lot
of it is either really amateur hour, that’s okay, but a lot of it is
this mutual admiration society and sort of civic booster stuff. So it’s
still out there.
John used to refer to it as “poodlers” were dealers who really didn’t
have to make a living and didn’t go after clients, you know, and
collectors who just wanted to buy a work here and there in order to get
artists to come and hang around. But those people have been kind of
priced out now because the art world is so expensive, you know. You got
to devote a lot of time and a lot of money in it if you’re going to be a
dealer or collector. And writers, I’d have to think, because what you
don’t have anymore, the big change—and this will be the last thing I
say—is the loss of the authoritative figure. The chief art critic for
the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the art critic for Newsweek, the art critic
for Time magazine, the art critic for Vogue—Barbara Rose used to be,
that was her thing. There would always be art criticism—that’s gone
because of economics. And what’s taken its place is—if I use the word
“cacophony,” it will sound—it won’t be, because it will sound like
saying, “Oh, there are just too many voices. It’s a cacophony,” but it
is a whole lot of voices from everybody who wants to put up a blog, you
know. You go to Blogspot and you can have a blog. Now, there are some
people that think, oh, this is good. It just starts all over again, and
those things will filter out, and there will be people who pay attention
to Two Coats of Paint, Geoform, Port, The Stranger, Art Fag City, Art F
City, Paddy Johnson’s thing—I should read it more often than I
do—Williams Poundstone’s blog, The L.A. County Museum on Fire. There’s
all those, and they’re not as selective, so the general—the criticism
isn’t as good. And the one thing that’s missing, in case somebody says,
“Well, you’re just prejudiced against the new,” they don’t have editors.
03:04:54
MOON:
Editors, yeah.
PLAGENS:
You have to have an editor. Somebody has to edit. I mean, Laurie edits
my stuff before I send it to The Wall Street Journal. I edit her stuff
before she sends it to wherever, The Chronicle of Higher Education, but
that’s not an edit. I’m sure people run it by their spouses or
significant others.
MOON:
Okay. Well, we’ll continue tomorrow. [End Session 5, October 28, 2015]
00:00:18
MOON:
Okay. I thought I’d begin this session by asking you, you made a comment
before in conversation with me about feeling like a twentieth-century
person in the twenty-first century. Can you talk about what you meant by
the twentieth century and twenty-first century?
00:02:18
PLAGENS:
Obviously, the big divide is sort of digital, not that digital wasn’t in
the twentieth century, but, you know, now everybody’s totally mobile
with one of these phones like I just got and all that sort of stuff.
Everybody is available in the Cloud on the Internet, etc., etc., etc.
But twentieth century, I’ll go back, it’s that sort of film noir, L.A.
private-eye, a trench coat and a turned-down hat, that kind of feeling,
cars, telephone, cigarettes, black-and-white movies, basically a sort of
existential outlook on things, because the twentieth century was also,
the century of death and destruction, all the people killed in World War
I, all the people killed in World War II, all the people killed in Mao’s
China, all the people killed in the Russian Revolution in the Gulag, all
that twentieth-century stuff. There’s a kind of darkness. Who was it?
It’s—who was it? Was it Stephen Spender, the poet? Referred to the
thirties as “a low mean decade.” Well, in certain respects, the
twentieth century is kind of a low mean century, right? All right.
That’s part of it. But the other thing is that—I thought about this
walking home yesterday. I said, Well, what if I had been born in 1841
and I were alive in 1915? Do you see what I mean? Would I say, well, I’m
kind of a nineteenth-century guy, who’s drifted into the twentieth
century, you know? Does it work like that?
But twentieth century. I’m rambling here. I’m a painter. I still deal
with a kind of physical object. And that’s kind of something from the
industrial age, which reaches its peak in the twentieth century, you
know, automobiles, battleships, skyscrapers, you know, just everything
heavy, everything material. And the other thing is, my writing
sensibility is sort of ink on paper, you know, open the newspaper and
how long is it, how many pages is it.
MOON:
As opposed to—
PLAGENS:
Just reading on the web where it can go on and on and on, and you can
clip and cut and paste and go back and forth and all that sort of stuff.
MOON:
The hyperlinks?
00:04:37
PLAGENS:
The hyperlinks, yeah. And my general sense of things, just my general
sensibility is, you know, is twentieth century. And if I look back, I
see artists from Martin Puryear to R.B. Kitaj to Joan Mitchell to Cindy
Sherman. I just wrote something in The Wall Street Journal about
Archibald Motley. It’s sort of my reference, and it all lies solidly in
the twentieth century. What happened to art in L.A., what happened to
art in San Francisco, basically what happened to art in New York is a
twentieth-century story, right? You’ve got the WPA and the Abstract
Expressionists and the Pop art and the Minimalists. I mean, it’s all
that’s in the twentieth century. So there I am, and now I find myself in
this other age where people want to do more participatory artwork. They
want to do time-based artwork. They want to do installations. They want
immersive environments. They want sound not music but sound.
I do this AICA mentoring thing every year, where you—they have
people—they have twenty finalists, and they have some critics—mentors is
what you’re supposed to be—and they match you up with somebody. You give
them three names. And I had this one guy, and I was thinking, “Well,
he’s really in my top three,” and then I bumped him down because he’s a
Ph.D. candidate at I forget what university, and his area of interest is
sound in sound in contemporary art. So he’s not talking about music,
right? He’s just talking about—
MOON:
Sound.
00:06:5200:09:05
PLAGENS:
Like the Whitney Biennial one year. Remember when they had that room and
you went in there, and there were benches, and you put on earphones, and
you could listen to the various sound pieces? That’s not my thing. And
there’s the other strange thing. This off the subject, but, you know,
when you were a little kid in the middle of the twentieth century, when
the twenty-first century got here, it was supposed to look like the
Jetsons. Streamlined buildings and everybody flying around in little
helicopters and wearing kind of spandex uniforms. Twenty-first century
is all going to be kind of cleaned up, right? And what it turns out to
be is like Blade Runner. It’s got this real mix-and-match dystopian
thing, and especially in an environment like the San Francisco Art
Institute, you know. I’m probably—you know. Nobody under fifty doesn’t
have a tattoo, or seven or eight or— So I’m going around here amidst all
these kind of tribal characters, who look like anything but the
twentieth century. And I go back to the other thing, The Rockford Files,
that sort of—the alienated southern California detective, a man who
himself is not mean down these mean streets must go.
Like I said, my friend, eighty-year-old artist friend up in the
Catskills, an old Jewish guy who doesn’t like the ultra-orthodox and all
that sort of stuff up there, people, you know, dressed in their
prescribed ways because that’s the way they dressed in wherever shtetl
they were on in the nineteenth century. Anyway, Richard and I lean back,
because I don’t—you know. Richard says, “I don’t like all that stuff. I
thought that was the whole point of being modern.” So that’s a real
twentieth-century idea. He doesn’t want any particular identity. He just
wants to be a modern man, like that private-eye. But he’s not going to
say, “Yeah, I’m German Jewish and my family were Reform, and then they
come over here and they found this such-and-such synagogue and the
relatives,” etc., etc. Now, you know, Jews, special case, Holocaust, you
might want to remember because it’s your social duty to remember and
have an identity. I know an art critic who is an observant Jew for
social reasons, not religious reasons. “It’s because I should do this,
because my people have been beleaguered and scattered and everything
throughout the twentieth century.” But that idea that Richard has, he
says, “I thought this was what being modern was all about,” and I’m that
way. It’s not a utopian universalist being modern, but I don’t want
bloody identities and I don’t want bloody tattoos and I don’t want a
funny haircut and I don’t want to dress to be noticed.
MOON:
So in your life, in terms of over all these years where you’ve been
looking at art, is there a particular moment where you sense that there
was a break between artwork, let’s say, of a kind of a modernist
philosophy, almost, right, like this kind of the way in which you
perceive it, the kind of subject—
00:10:38
PLAGENS:
I don’t think there’s been a sudden break. There’s been a few moments.
Bill Viola in one of the Venice Biennales, you know, the piece he had
called The Greeting, which is an animation of a painting, which was
the—when—because, to me, what happened is—you say was there a break?
It’s not quite a break, but the old joke used to be in the—before I was
around, Irving Sandler will say this. In the late forties, early
fifties, the New York art world consisted of two hundred people below
14th Street. And it steadily—and probably the big break was Pop art—it
steadily lost that little protective covering. Here are a bunch of
little Bohemians painting their paintings and smoking their cigarettes
and getting drunk, and Pop art came along, and the art world branched
out, okay?
But when I started to see things like Bill Viola’s video works and other
things where the technical facility and the crews that work on things
started to approach sort of, Hollywood quality, everything was high-def,
everything was produced, everything was like that. So there is a kind
of, in the twenty-first century, the art world blends with the
entertainment industry, with the fashion industry. And then art fairs
have totally changed the psychology, the flavor of it. I open my
computer every day, and there’s news about Frieze and Basel, and it’s
become a real kind of quicker who’s doing what to whom gossipy People
magazine-y kind of art world. So I don’t think there was a break, but I
started to become with, you know, some obvious figures, you know, Koons
and Marina Abramovic and Yinka Shonibare and Bill Viola, the bleeding
over into industrial-quality entertainment and fashion. But I
don’t—there wasn’t, you know, an Aha! moment sort of when it happened. I
mean, I’m the proverbial frog in the water that’s heated, heated one
degree at a time, and the frog doesn’t know enough until it’s cooked—
MOON:
Until it feels the—well, yeah, till the water’s boiling.
PLAGENS:
And by that time, it’s too late, and he’s cooked. I’m one of those
frogs. The art world has been changing a degree at a time.
00:12:51
MOON:
Do you think that, you know, the system—well, you name, for example, the
proliferation and also the importance given to art shown at things like
art fairs. Do you think it’s actually changed the works or—
PLAGENS:
Oh, sure. Oh, sure. Way back in the seventies, there’s a big object
lesson artists started to learn. Guggenheim used to have this thing
called the Guggenheim International Exhibition, and they would invite
artists, and it was Edward Fry’s thing. And they’d invite artists, and
you’d do your piece. It was one of those first kind of things, right? So
Daniel Buren was one of these artists.
MOON:
Oh, right.
PLAGENS:
So what did Daniel Buren do? Daniel Buren hung a banner of his patented
stripes from the skylight all the way down almost to the floor. What did
that do? That fucked all the other artists, because the sightline, every
sightline was interrupted. And there were people—I forget how it turned
out.
MOON:
Well, they signed a petition, [unclear] the other artists.
PLAGENS:
They signed a petition, and they were going threaten to withdraw. Okay.
Why did I bring that up? Has this art fair stuff—yeah, because everybody
knows if isn’t that you have to fuck the other artists, but everybody
knows you’re in competition for that quick hit. People go down those
things with their head on a swivel, and they go like this, and then they
go, “Oh.” And that’s always been there. Did you see Mr. Turner, the
movie?
MOON:
Mr. Turner?
00:15:1100:17:02
PLAGENS:
It’s really good. It’s about Turner, with Timothy Phal as J.M.W. Turner.
Anyway, but that kind of thing has always been there where you wanted
your painting in the big spot in the Royal Academy exhibition, right?
And you would do little things to sabotage other people. But now it’s a
whole industrial thing. I suppose there might be something, but I don’t
know about this, and probably the data wouldn’t back me up. “Data,” I
hate that, using that too. Like have things like Cannes Film Festival
and all the film festivals changed films, you know? Probably not, but
there’s always this desire, and if you go to a film festival, to see
some weird little indie film from a country you never heard of before
that gets the Palme d’Or, you know.
Art fairs have changed art in the sense that, yeah, artists play for the
art fair and so do galleries, right? And there are two things that have
probably changed the art world. The first one were the international
exhibitions, all the biennials and things, because that became, like I
alluded to before, the county fair for art where you tried to do
something that would out-spectacular somebody else. I remember the
first—one of the Documentas I went to, not the first one, but the
Jonathan Borofsky guy walking up a pole, you know. It was huge. It was
like 100 feet long with this figure, you know, and everybody notices
that. And somebody doing something, you know, a painting the size of
this isn’t going to get noticed because people aren’t going to go in
anything and contemplate anything. So if you want to oversimplify, not
that you would want it overly simplified, but to oversimplify, one of
the things that’s evaporated or is evaporating from the art world is
contemplation, the idea that it takes place in quiet. You contemplate an
art object, and you do that. Now it’s all flash and filigree and noise
and spectacular and stuff like that, and any contemplation is not done,
you know—and I’m exaggerating here. I’m caricaturing. Any contemplating
is not done by the letting the visual thing wash over you, it’s by going
into the explanatory heavily footnoted text that explains what the art
is all about and what issues it addresses and blah, blah, blah, blah,
blah, like that. So that’s probably gone.
The art world is quicker, faster, less tolerance, less tolerance, bigger
sums of money involved in what you do. There was an article a couple
days ago. I forget where it was, maybe on Artnet news or something like
that. And it was about the perhaps coming demise of the single location
gallery, the sort of—
MOON:
Now they’re becoming multinationals. [laughs]
PLAGENS:
Yeah. I mean, the sort of the Christopher Grimes of the world and—
MOON:
Gagosian.
PLAGENS:
—and midlevel. No, they’re the—Christopher Grimes doesn’t have branches,
does he?
MOON:
I don’t think so. I’m not sure.
PLAGENS:
No, but just like that. Like Patrick Painter and Christopher Grimes for
just like in L.A., the single-venue galleries. Now, like, you either got
to be Gagosian or you got to be a pop-up, or you’ve got to be a
traveling representative. It just economically isn’t going to pay off
anymore for—who was the dealer? Nicole Klagsbrun was one of the dealers
that talked, “I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t have my single rented
space with my artists and people come in.” It’s over. You either got to
be—have nine galleries. Isn’t that what Gagosian has, something like
that?
00:18:27
MOON:
Something like that.
PLAGENS:
Seven or eight or nine? Or you have to be a gallery almost in name only,
not much brick and mortar, and what you do is you go to every art fair.
So what that’s done is it’s quickened the pace and it’s taken
contemplation out of it, and, you know, art has become like real
high-end fast food in a way.
MOON:
What about—okay, let’s take Bruce Nauman, his more recent work. Do you
think that it’s as effective as his earlier work?
PLAGENS:
You’re talking about the balancing pencil things?
MOON:
Well, I’m talking about the big video projections and—you know, but
there’s also a kind of demand, like, for example, the Venice Biennale,
that you have to take up so much space, you know—
PLAGENS:
Yes, that’s what I’m [unclear].
MOON:
—and have a certain—yeah, this kind of spectacular [unclear].
PLAGENS:
Yeah, there is. I don’t know quite where, you know, where Bruce would
fit, because, I mean, first place, I’ve got a dog in this fight because
I did the book that came out last year on Bruce Nauman from Phaidon, you
know, and it left off with basically For Children, I think, was that
thing he did with the hands, the piano exercises for children, and there
was a—
MOON:
Oh, Bartók, referencing Bartók?
PLAGENS:
Yeah. And there are his hands, you know, and he recites them. He doesn’t
play. And then in the elevator there was those chords being played by
Terry Allen, I think, a real high-def video and projected, you know, in
various—so that’s what it left off with. So, first of all, you know, I
will probably be semi-hemi-demi-quasi-hagiographic with Bruce. Is it
hajiographic or hagiographic?
00:20:27
MOON:
Hagiography.
PLAGENS:
Hagiographic. Okay. But it’s the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. [Moon
laughs.] Which I’ve never seen. It’s on my bucket list. So, you know,
I’m going to think that he continues to be this sort of atypical genius
who can defy stereotypes and typicalities, okay? And I do think there is
a kind of—I mean, Bruce has been very good at negotiating, as they say,
in his recent works. This demand for the spectacle and stuff like that
was his kind of—you know, I’m going to misstate it. He wouldn’t like it,
you know, if I said, “Oh, fuck it.” Because he’ll think and think and
think and think for a long time, then something will hit him, like that
new thing with the balancing the pencils on the pencil tip, you know. He
balances that very nicely, that sort of operating out of the seat of his
pants with picking up technical help, getting people to do it, you know,
all that, the one in Venice with the chorus where the Giorni (The Days),
you know, he got actors, students for the Italian ones, I think actors
for the American ones, to, you know, do the days of the week. He’s got a
real steep learning curve, and he will get technical help, and so
everything will be real tight, right? But in conceptually, he’s against
that sort of that spectacle outlook where “I’m going to take on this
issue and I’m going to deal with this and it’s going to get all these
people involved and it’s going to be a big production.” He does it sort
of through the back door. So I would say I’m going to plead Bruce more
or less not guilty to this, but also you have to realize I’ve got a dog
in the fight and I’m biased toward the ongoing genius of Bruce Nauman.
But what you were talking about, the need for spectacle and stuff like
that—
MOON:
Well, it puts a certain demand on the artist, I think—
PLAGENS:
Yes, it does. Yeah.
00:22:51
MOON:
—even that invitation, you know.
PLAGENS:
Yeah, it does. And, yeah, I mean, and it comes way back from way back,
maybe, Harald, even before. But, you know, one point that’s often
referred to is Harald Szeemann’s show When Attitudes Become Form, where
you invited these artists to do these weird things, and it all comes
from that. And what happened was that you used—artists in the sixties
and seventies used to do weird things of a kind of low budget sort of
almost stupid things. Michael Asher taking the wall out of Claire
Copley’s gallery or wanting to switch the lions at the Art Institute,
things like that, have become multi-million-dollar occasions for other
artists to do similar work. Probably the indicator of it is the 67th
Street Armory in New York where every summer, you know, there’s
something in the Armory. It was Ann Hamilton one year. It was Paul
McCarthy one year. And you’d take this whole bloody Armory, and you’ve
got to fill it with some kind of spectacle, or participatory. And the
art world is going that way. It’s just like, to me, it’s just parallel
with digital effects in movies that started with car chases and
fireballs and gunfire, and now, you know, CGI for everything. I probably
sound like an old guy saying, “Hey, you kids, get off of my lawn.” It’s
just changed. And what I like, abstract painting, has become a niche.
And I have a little lecture I give about, you know, painting in a niche
in the twenty-first century, and I don’t mind that. I mean, I’m rambling
here, again, but, you know, painting used to be queen of the arts.
That’s what it was called. Well, it’s not anymore.
00:25:07
MOON:
It’s one of the arts.
PLAGENS:
It’s one of the arts, individual arts. Even though I said yesterday, you
can go around and see a bunch of painting exhibitions, but it’s now it’s
a niche thing. For those of you who like static objects within a
rectangle with alluding to a certain traditions, and you like the
convention, this is for you. Otherwise, it’s sort of like it was at Yale
for a long time. I don’t know what it is like now. But the MFA in
painting was all sort of William Bailey and cohort, and it was very
narrow and dry and dessicated. And then there was the sculpture
department, which was de facto the department of everything else. So it
was the department where if you really wanted to do something strange
and weird starting with the seventies in art, that’s where you did it,
and painting was kind of—you know, it was corralled itself off. And
that’s sort of the situation in the art world. I don’t mind that, you
know. It changes. I mean, you know, the—one of the things, I gave a
lecture once where—where was I? Yeah, I mean, it was last year, I
remarked in a lecture that I got my MFA in 1964. It was now 2014. It was
fifty years later. And of course I should expect the art world not to be
any different. [Moon laughs.] I mean, I should expect the art world to
be very different from the one I entered. Why? Because I said, go back
fifty years from when I got my MFA, and that’s right about the time of
the Armory show. So from the Armory show to Pop art and James
Rosenquist, you know, F-16—
00:27:18
MOON:
From Duchamp’s Nude Descending Down the Staircase to Rosenquist.
[laughs]
PLAGENS:
From when I got my MFA, there’s that distance, the art world had
changed. So why shouldn’t it have changed much from the day I got my MFA
to 2014 to when Tino Sehgal is greeting people walking up the ramps and
Marina Abramovic is staring at people across a table and “relational
aesthetics?”
MOON:
Why did you choose to do the Bruce Nauman book? Was it an easy decision
for you?
PLAGENS:
I was asked. And it seemed like a good idea at the time. [Moon laughs.]
Here’s the way it happened. It’s not real complicated. I had an idea for
a book, and it was that one I told you about, A Simple Country Painter.
MOON:
A history of art through the lens of—
PLAGENS:
Me.
MOON:
—an abstract painter, who was you.
PLAGENS:
Yeah, but the history of abstract painting, not just art.
MOON:
Oh, right, history of abstract painting.
00:29:1500:31:45
PLAGENS:
It would be abstract painting in L.A., and then I moved to New York, and
with context, you know, with context. [laughs] It’s like a couple years
ago we went to see Eddie Izzard, the British comedian. You said you
didn’t know who he was. And we went to see him at a big show at Madison
Square Garden, was a Christmas present for Laurie. He improvises. He
just comes out and he starts talking. But the background was all
Egyptian tombs and everything, and it was ancient. And he comes out and
he said, you know, “Tonight’s show is going to cover the entire history
of civilization,” and then he pauses and he says, “With gaps, with
gaps.” [Moon laughs.] Okay.
So I’m telling you this with—I was going to have gaps in my history
of—you know what I mean? It would be abstract painting from the time I
was a student in 1962, ’61, ’62 in L.A., and then moving to New York
going to graduate school, blah, blah, blah, back and forth and then
ending up in New York, as an abstract painter and seeing what I saw
with—and like Eddie Izzard said, with gaps, with context, with a little
context. Okay? So I proposed it. I sent out pitches, because I don’t
have an agent, because agents don’t handle things like art books.
There’s not enough money in it. Maybe some people do. And I pitched it.
I sent pitches to Thames & Hudson, Abbeville, Hudson Hill, some
trade houses like Random House and Knopf,—not just art book publishers.
I got nothing. Yeah, I guess a few form letters, “Thank you very much,”
you know, where they hadn’t read it, right? And one day I got a call
from this woman, Nancy Grubb. But she was a wonderful woman in the cause
of the thing. So she calls me up and she says, “I am the new American
editor for Phaidon,” and this is when it was still owned by Richard
Schlagman, very eccentric Englishman, lives in Switzerland, doesn’t
speak Italian or French or anything like that, and he’s the one who
bought Phaidon in the fifties and took it out of the doldrums and made
it into that, you know, art book publisher. This is when he still owned
it. It was sold midway through my Nauman book to Leon Black, the venture
capitalist, you know, big-time venture capitalist, and it’s now his sort
of wife’s—I was going to say plaything, but apparently she’s pretty
serious about it, and it’s like a trophy thing. He’ll pour money into it
and doesn’t care all that much how much it makes. Okay. That’s
background.
So she said, “I’m the new American editor. We’re up here on 180 Varick.
When I came in as new editor, I was going through the—,” what do they
call it? The slush pile or slag heap or something like that, meaning all
these projects that have been in. And she says, “Do you want to talk
about yours?” I said, “Sure.” I thought, “Oh, fuck, man, you know who
Phaidon is!” “Do you want to come up and have a cup of coffee?” So I
came up, had a cup of coffee at Jacques Torres, that chocolate place
that also serves coffee.
MOON:
Yeah. Isn’t that in Brooklyn in Dumbo?
PLAGENS:
No, this one is on King Street in—it’s up in the Village, a little over
towards—
MOON:
[unclear].
00:32:4800:35:36
PLAGENS:
Jacques Torres. So we talk about, you know, this book, and then all of a
sudden she says, “By the way, would you be interested in doing a book on
Bruce Nauman?”
And I thought about it, and I thought, “Yeah, I’d do that.” And at the
time I was trying to be nice, figuring if I say yes to that, then after
they do this, then I’ll do the Nauman book, right? Sometimes I’m not a
very ballsy person, you know. I figured I’d be nice and that’s going to
get my—and so I said, “Sure.” So I forget how the thing went, but
basically that blew my little memoir out of the water because Phaidon
wanted a Nauman book. When Amanda Renshaw came in as publisher—and I
think she might have been Schlagman’s girlfriend—she came to New York
and I talked to her at one time. I have a weakness for English women,
and somebody with a name like Amanda Renshaw, there I go. So suddenly
the Nauman book blew the other thing out of the water, because when
Amanda Renshaw came in, I think it was she, she said, “You know, here’s
a short list of a dozen artists that we have to have monographs on.”
That was number one. Factor number two was they had kept
proposing—Phaidon kept trying to contact Bruce and proposing writers,
and he kept saying no, and Bruce’s reason was he didn’t want to be
totalized. There’s a zillion things on Bruce Nauman, from early work to
videos to the neons to—you know. And the only one kind of soup-to-nuts
book is that 25 Years Old book by Coosje van Bruggen, the Bruce Nauman
thing. So they wanted that, and Bruce said yes to me because, I guess,
you know, he trusted me, liked me. We were sort of friends, you know. We
had studios a half block apart in Pasadena. I used to know him. He
played in that basketball game. Bruce was pretty regular. I’d seen him
in New York, I’d see him, and I just kind of got along with him. And,
you know, he’s not pretentious, no bullshit. I remember I asked him one
time, you know, when we’re doing this, “Well, you did all this sort of
stuff and you were there, you know, what did you think I was?” He says,
“Oh, I always thought of you as that painter down the block.” I liked
that. I mean, that’s Bruce.
And so it just—“Would you sign a contract? Bruce agrees. You agree.
Would you do it?” So they wanted a monograph on Bruce, and I was the
writer he finally said yes to.
MOON:
Did you speak with him at all about how you were going to approach the
writing of his work?
PLAGENS:
No.
MOON:
He left it completely up to you?
00:36:4900:39:27
PLAGENS:
Yeah. Oh, Bruce was very good. I visited him a couple of time in New
Mexico, once in New York. You know how—one of the things I thought about
was, “Oh, you know, my book is going to look terrible.” You have these
doubts about, “I’m going to get killed in the reviews, and stuff,”
because you always read these things like, you know—when you do a book
on somebody, we did 130 interviews over a period of six years. I saw him
four times, you know, twice in New Mexico, once in New York, and one
during Venice 2009, you know, when he got the Golden Lion and he was all
over Venice, you know that, and the Philadelphia Museum show.
And, no, I didn’t—I might have said something to him like, “Bruce, you
know I’m not a scholar, and I’m a journalist.” And I said probably—I
can’t remember—and then when I started writing it, I did my library
work, and I start writing it in 2009 when Laurie and I both had
fellowships to the Dora Maar House in the south of France that the
Houston MFA runs, you know. You should do that. [Moon laughs.] It’s
really neat, you know. May in Provence, you know, and she had this
wonderful studio that was Dora Maar’s, you know, the house that Picasso
gave her when he dumped her. The French call those “Le Cadeau de la
Rupture.” This rich woman from Texas, Nancy Brown Nagley from the Brown
of Brown and Root family, you know, all that sort of—it’s bad, you don’t
want to think about it. It’s Halliburton oil defense contracts. But
she’s one of the four Brown sisters, older lady, and she bought the
house after Dora Maar died and lived in it for fifty years as a kind of
semi-recluse artist, photographer. And then she’s from Houston, so she
leased it for a buck a year, one of those things, to the MFA for this
program, you know, the Dora Maar House, and they entertained up to four
or five, maybe, residents. When we were there, Laurie and I, and there
was one other writer, and that was all who was there. So I started there
in 2009 and then went to the Venice Biennale afterward, because I
wanted—I got the first third of it written. When I was there and
starting to write it, I thought—that’s when it finally occurred to me
that, “You know what, Peter? This is going to be a real bastard
approach.” Hybrid would be the nice word, you know. But it’s going to be
partly library work, because it has to satisfy all these picky art
historians who are going to go over it. [Moon laughs.] Okay? It has to
be partly personal journalist, because I have the living flesh-and-blood
connection to Bruce. Part of it will then have to be critical
evaluation, and that will encompass, you know, things that are solid,
you know, and stand up, and also things that are my little bit of glib
phrasemaking, you know.
And when it was edited and I turned it in, and I had to go back—and
that’s one of the things I had to do was shore up the sort of academic
part of it, you know, by going into things. The commissioning editor, as
they called them, is the person who is like David Anfam—do you know who
David is? An English art historian whose expertise is Abstract
Expressionism, and he’s big in the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver.
MOON:
Yeah, uh-huh.
PLAGENS:
Well, David was my editor. In other words, he got the manuscript first
and said, “We need to—.” And then I redid it and then I sent it back.
Bruce also read it, and I met with him in New York, and we sat down, and
we just each had a copy. But he was real good, I mean, he just corrected
facts.
MOON:
Fact checking?
PLAGENS:
Yeah. This wasn’t 1967, it was really ’68, before I—you know, little
things like that. His assistant Juliet Myers went over it. She had a
whole lot of items to correct. But the little anecdote is, the only
thing Bruce asked me to change like in terms of his mother’s still
alive, and I said that she was in something like a senior citizens’ home
or something like that, and he asked me if I could change that because
that would hurt her feelings if she read this. And my mother was passed
on at the time, but I understood that I was born in Dayton, Ohio, in
1941. Bruce was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1941. So there’s a
couple of seventy-year-old Midwestern white guys, right? I understood
that. My mother, could you change that? I forget what we arrived at, you
know. So that’s how the book came about.
00:41:37
MOON:
What about your retrospective at USC? How did that come about?
PLAGENS:
That came about from the other end, the Butler Institute of American Art
in Youngstown, Ohio. There’s a guy there, who’s still there—maybe he
retired now—Lou Zona, and Lou Zona asked me one time if I would like to
do a retrospective at his—and I forget. It was, “Yeah, well, could we
travel it?” you know. And “Well, yes, and let’s talk to some people.”
I’m a little vague on this, you know. I tend to save emails on things,
you know, it little folders. I have a million folders on AOL, it’s my
vice. So it’s probably all in there, but recollection is that it was
that, and then it was going to go to USC and then it was going to go to
Columbia College in Chicago. And what happened was Lou either got sick,
got a lot of—didn’t have the budget, something, something, something,
and so finally Selma Holo at USC said, “Why don’t I do this? Why don’t I
organize it? And it will go from here to the Butler.”
MOON:
To Columbia College.
PLAGENS:
Columbia College. And there were one or two other things, but it got
caught in a—you know. I’m not a household name. So it ended up being at
Fisher Gallery, now Fisher Museum. That’s how it came about.
00:43:17
MOON:
How did you feel after you saw all the work put up and—
PLAGENS:
Why am I fumbling? Now I have a little bit of sympathy for any artist
who steps into a mid-career survey or a retrospective.
MOON:
Yeah.
PLAGENS:
It’s like getting out old love letters or old short stories you wrote in
college and going, “Oh, my god, did I do that?” [Moon laughs.] How did
I—so I was sort of shocked, that was one, when I saw it.
MOON:
Seeing it all together in the same space?
PLAGENS:
I mean, I was shocked, about the first thought was, “Did I do all that?”
See, I tend to be very insecure as an artist, and I’ll meet somebody
like at a lecture, and I’ll say, “Oh, yeah, I know who this artist is.”
And then I go home and I feel real insignificant, you know, and in my
head I’m comparing that whole artist’s whole oeuvre or what I know about
it in my head with the last ten little collages that I did. [Moon
laughs.] And I say I’m just a, you know, a fly speck on the wall. So the
shock is, “My god, did I do all that? I must have been working hard.”
[Moon laughs.] The other thing is that I didn’t think it was all that
bad. I was surprised. I said, “And there is a commonality to it.”
MOON:
Among all the bodies of works.
00:45:2400:47:26
PLAGENS:
Among all the different separate series of work and stuff like that, I
can see a commonality to it. The other aspect of it is, is that I
probably have something that other artists who have retrospectives don’t
when I step into the room, and that it may be a good thing, it may be a
bad thing. I’m a critic, and all of a sudden I see, and part of my mind
says, “Oh, this is another exhibition to review.” [Moon laughs.] What am
I going to say about this, and I’m already starting to take notes,
“Well, early period and then he goes downhill,” you know.
And what else? I don’t know. I thought it was—and then you have
these—look, between you and me and the gatepost and whoever sees this in
x amount of years, Tom Hess, editor of Artnews in the old days, once
said, “Every artist wants the review of their exhibition to begin with
the phrase, ‘Not since Michelangelo.’” [Moon laughs.] This is one of the
things that is peculiar to modern artists, and I include contemporary,
you know, of all kinds in there—it’s what you were talking about
earlier. When you write something, you write for thirty years down the
road and what somebody might think of it. Well, artists can play history
like that, and they tend do that. In other words, say, pop musicians
don’t say, “Well, nobody’s buying my CDs or listening to my music now,
but in thirty years, they will.” [Moon laughs.] That’s not the name of
the game in pop music. Artists tend to think that if only a few little
criteria were tweaked in the history of modern and contemporary art,
then would come out in the top ten. If you just tweaked it, it wouldn’t
be Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman. It
would you. I’d be in there if only a few things were tweaked. And when
you have a big exhibition, you tend to think, “Yeah, this is the thing
that should do the tweak that.” That’s the general principle.
Now, I will come to the unabashed thing. I think that art historically
in that narrow range of, you know, the past thirty, forty years to right
now, kind of, art historically critically—not critically. But art
historically marketwise and so forth, I think I’m a terribly underrated
artist. I think, you know, I’m a terribly underrated painter, and I did
it to myself by writing criticism, because the people tend to see
the—and I’ve had that said to me, you know. I forget which way it
worked. I mean, I’ve had some insulting reviews where somebody says,
“Well, you know, now that I’ve seen Plagens’ paintings, how can I
believe anything he writes?” [Moon laughs.] “Or now that I’ve read his
writings, how can I take seriously anything he paints?” I mean, somebody
has said that kind of thing. Critically, I’ve usually been treated very
well. I mean, I get—my exhibitions get good reviews. But I don’t get
collected, my prices are still way down at the bottom, and, you know,
Nancy Hoffman hasn’t got rich off me nor me off her. And partly I’ve
done it to myself, mostly by writing, and I’m not a smooth my way
through a Betty Freeman lawn party in Beverly Hills kind of guy. But I
say artists tend to do this, but I will do it, too, and say that, you
know, yeah, I think my paintings especially are real chewy and they
really have something to offer in the history and blah, blah, blah,
blah, blah, and maybe when I’m dead and gone and people are listening to
this recording or looking at my stuff, they’ll say, “No, these paintings
over here are the product of a very complex mind,” and if not complex,
at least complicated, mind and artistic temperament, which is evidenced
in all these papers and this interview.
00:50:04
MOON:
In your artwork and your paintings, but also in other artworks that
aren’t necessarily paintings, what is it that you think you’re after? Or
what is it that you saw sort of linking everything when you saw all of
your works in the same space?
PLAGENS:
Well, my quixotic, you know, pursuit is, you know, I still mean the
title of my graduate, my MFA dissertation, which had the pretentious
title of “The Development of Pictorial Meaning,” and it’s always been my
quixotic sort of thing, perhaps a little old-fashioned and misplaced,
that an abstract painting ought to be able to move you in the same way
that a novel or a poem or a piece of music does. In other words, it’s
not meaning in the literal sense, the narrative sense, like you can take
a figurative painting, you can take Dana Schutz’s Fight in an Elevator,
and you can. There’s a story there. There’s a whole comment on [unclear]
not that. And on the other hand, not just meaningless decorative
meaning, like, “Oh, boy. Wow.” So I do tend to like abstract paintings
with some sort of—like them, not judge them, with some sort of little
hint of meaning. An example would be—although I don’t think they’re the
greatest paintings in the world and maybe they’re a little too easy, but
there’s a sort of comeback because there was a show at the De
Young—Robert Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic.
MOON:
Oh, yeah, it’s up right now.
PLAGENS:
Yeah.
MOON:
I saw it yesterday.
00:52:3000:53:48
PLAGENS:
And there’s Dominique Levy’s having a show in New York, and I wondered
are some of the same paintings going back and forth. That wasn’t the
greatest show and the greatest selection of those things, but you get
what it means. They’re abstract paintings, but they have some
references. You say, well, sure, it does, because it’s basically the
genitals of the testicle and the penis of a bull, and it’s got the
colors of Spain, which is black and white and the yellow ochre that all
the ground seems to be in Spain. Well, of course it kind of means
something, but I would it to mean something—my paintings to mean
something in that respect, but not from narrative and not being merely
decorative and lovely to look at. Okay. And what is it trying to mean?
Well, something a little less specific than Elegy to the Spanish
Republic, some existential truth.
And sometimes I’ve even gone so far when I’ve been pushed, and then I
regret it, you know. I say, look, you know, a whole existentialist take
on the world is sort of like oil and vinegar in salad dressing. You
shake it up and it all goes together and it coheres and it has meaning.
But if you let it settle, vinegar goes up to the top, and the oil goes
to the bottom, and these things don’t mix. And the world is full of
incompatible, absurd kind of things. Okay. I go over here to my
painting. You’ve got this big mushy, smash-y thing, you know, all around
the expression part, and then you have what Nancy Hoffman called at one
point—she made up the term—the “color badge.” And they’ve gotten bigger,
my little hard-edged element, and you can take that to be the oil and
vinegar in the salad dressing, where it’s forced apart, you know.
There’s this part to the painting and there’s that part of the painting,
and they can’t possibly exist. But in some kind of very uneasy balance,
they do for a while, okay, in terms of meaning and sort of psychological
mindset.
The other part of it is visual, which is I want them to be good-looking
on my terms, you know, and, in other words, I’m trying to make something
that is beautiful but on my terms. What are my terms? I like painters
like Frank Lobdell, and I like painters like a little bit like Hassel
Smith, where there is a certain sort of clumsiness and awkwardness, but
it becomes beauty, right? You know. My taste in music tends to run that
way, too, not slick but a little more funky, but funky where you can
actually get your teeth into something. So I’m talking around all the
whole things, but that’s what I think I’m trying to do.
MOON:
Do you see any connection between your artwork and your fictional
writing?
00:55:31
PLAGENS:
Yeah. [laughter] Both are horribly underrated. I don’t know why. Well,
the question would be, why do I persist in doing that? When I was in
college, I was an English major. That’s what you called yourself when
you were undecided. And I was from a family that didn’t go to college. I
had an uncle who did, went to Case Tech in Cleveland. It’s now Case
Western Reserve, it’s one university. But it used to be Western Reserve
University, Case Institute of Technology. And they used to have a
Thanksgiving football game that we used to go to every Thanksgiving
morning, little schools in a high school stadium.
Anyway, nobody went to college. I went to college. I was an English
major. And I said, “When I was a freshman, I wrote a novel.” It was a
perfectly terrible coming-of-age, everything that I was going through,
poor boy in a fraternity and girls. It was typical, what they call
“coming of age” awakening. And it wasn’t all that bad, and it was
written by a seventeen-, eighteen-year-old. And I asked my freshman
English professor to read it. I think I said this.
MOON:
Yeah, you did.
PLAGENS:
Yeah.
MOON:
The first session, mm-hmm.
00:57:50
PLAGENS:
Yeah. If you read Vanity Fair and Catcher in the Rye, I’ll read yours.
So that’s what started—you know. I started doing it, and I always had
this idea. I’ve always liked novels and novelists, and I had that idea
to read every novel in the L.A. location file at the public library. And
so, you know, I don’t know, I wanted to do that, you know. In a way,
there’s a certain irrelevance, but in a way it’s connected. It’s like,
let’s say, those artists in Venice who wanted to be really good surfers
and they would devote a lot of time and expertise and expense. Why? What
connection does it have to do with their art? Well, it does. Kenny Price
and Billy Bengston and Du Wain were real good surfers, and some of it
comes in to their art. So I like to—I try to write, you know, fiction.
And I told you, right now I’m taking four unpublished novels, one of
them even reaching back to that college-boy novel that I sort of took
and later made it a novel that somebody else had written, and I’m trying
to put it together into this great big—who was that writer that’s out? I
can’t pronounce his name. He’s foreign, he’s either German or French,
and he has that autobiographical novel that six volumes long and
it’s—you know. He’s the sort of Michael Houellebecq of 2015, you know.
Knausgaard.
Anyway, I have this impossible project. And I told Laurie, I said, you
know, I said I have this really little fantasy of mine of a lot of
artists get famous and they get big budgets to do work, right, to do a
museum. Why couldn’t the next time I have a show, if I got a museum
show—because it’s been 2003, it’s been twelve years, so it will go on
fifteen. I should have another institutional show. And if I had a
budget, why couldn’t they publish five hundred copies of this mega novel
as a conceptual part of my show? [Moon laughs.] I could have them
stacked like what’s-his-name, you know.
MOON:
Oh, Felix Gonzalez-Torres.
PLAGENS:
Yeah, Gonzalez-Torres’ [unclear], and you could take one home. We’ll
print five hundred of them, and it will be part of the artwork. [Moon
laughs.] And that’s the way, you know, because, you know, Alfred Knopf
is going to say, “Jesus, I mean, 1,300 pages and—.” [laughter]
MOON:
Wait. Are you thinking about the one called “Merciful Brief” or—
PLAGENS:
Yes, yeah. “Merciful Brief” was the title of one—
MOON:
Which is supposed to be—
PLAGENS:
—of the four when I had started, the 1947-’72 one, that’s two parts, and
very conventional novel with a plot in it, make a good movie.
00:59:25
MOON:
And you said that it was—oh, but then the one you’re working on now
where that’s just one of four—
PLAGENS:
Yeah, but I took the title “Merciful Brief,” and I decided I would call
the whole thing “Merciful Brief (A History of Los Angeles),” then, “a
Novel.”
MOON:
A novel, uh-huh. So in the history, in terms of that book, how does
it—where does it begin and where does it end? Yeah, like the history of
Los Angeles for you, how are you portraying that?
PLAGENS:
Well, it’s sort of strange, because Los Angeles, see, looms as this
overall character.
MOON:
Yeah.
PLAGENS:
Here’s where it goes. It goes from the mid nineteenth century with a
fictitious version, or fictional—is that what you say? You say
fictional? Version of Mary Baker Eddy. My father—
MOON:
Oh, the Christian Scientist.
01:01:0301:03:16
PLAGENS:
—was a Christian Scientist. Mary Baker Eddy intertwined with whatever
happened to the golden plates that Joseph Smith discovered in upstate
New York, the founder of Mormonism, the golden plates. So there’s a kind
of golden whatever that lands in the hands of Mary Baker Eddy, and
that’s how it starts. Then the person that goes all the way through this
is somebody who was in Time for Robo, the thing that was published, is
this preacher that I have, who comes from Louisiana, and he arrives in
Los Angeles having run away from his abusive father, who’s also a
preacher. In the twenties, he—he comes to L.A.
And, see, I have this thing where all the characters in that part of all
the Time for Robo things have these terribly pun-y names, the
characters, like this preacher’s name is Noam Sain, N-o-a-m, like Noam,
and Sain, S-a-i-n. You know, it’s a name around, used to be a baseball
pitcher named Johnny Sain. But it’s a pun. It’s like black guys say,
“Know what I’m saying? Know what I’m saying? Noam Sain.” So I’ve got a
character named “Noam Sain.” The villain of the piece, his first name is
Creighton, C-r-e-i-g-h-t-o-n. There’s a school called Creighton. His
last name is Beryl, as in B-e-r-y-l. So his name is Creighton Beryl.
Okay? I’ve got a lot of that. There’s a character named—it’s
B-y-u-r-m-a-n, and his first name is Stan, “stand by your man,” Stan
Byurman, right? A German philosopher named Herman Newdick, right? There
is—but what happens, what I did was I took that preacher thing, and he
lives to be a hundred. So he starts and he’s the alpha and the omega of
this thing, and then in between I’ve stitched chapters and sections from
this other thing, and I’m trying to unify the writing a little bit. So
he’s there, twenties and thirties. Then there’s the kamikaze pilot at
the end of World War II, then there’s the sorority thing and the
coming-of-age novel in the fifties. Then you’ll come back to Noam Sain
in his trials and tribulations in the fifties and the sixties. Then
there’s the other novel, the original Merciful Brief, 1947-1972.
And when like it comes time, like, after the kamikaze pilot in 1945,
then we get to 19—and it switches to this other thing, right? And it
goes all the way through, and you’ll end up with Noam Sain. And
originally I had a subtitle for the fourth novel, which was entirely too
long, taken from Dylan Thomas. “Among Those Killed in the Dawn Raid was
Noam Sain, Aged One-Hundred.” And there’s a Dylan Thomas poem called
“Among Those Killed in the Dawn Raid was a Man Aged One-Hundred.” But I
sort of gave that up. But I don’t know what it proves. So what you have
is the preacher comes to Los Angeles, the kamikaze pilot ends up in Los
Angeles, the little collegiate story coming-of-age thing in more or less
USC, the Black Dahlia murder in the forties, that part, the Topanga
Canyon hippies in the seventies, and then Noam Sain. It’s all Los
Angeles.
MOON:
So it would end around 1980?
PLAGENS:
No, it ends around like now.
MOON:
Around now.
01:05:1101:07:57
PLAGENS:
How can—you know, or when it gets published. He keeps getting older.
He’s going to have to be 110 by the time I— And it’s all Los Angeles,
and there is these ingredients in it, religious stuff, you know, all the
crackpot religious organizations, you know. Was it—[unclear] of a few
people, but Frank Lloyd Wright, the continent of the United States is
tilted from east to west and anything not nailed down ends up in Los
Angeles. All the crackpot religious things that are around.
I was explaining to Laurie, you know, there was the Christian Science,
but then out in L.A. there was the Church of Religious Science and then
there was Science of Mind, and all these were break-offs of the
Christian Science church that became increasingly less church-y, more
secular mystic. So I got all of that’s in there with Noam Sain, and the
people he meets at Scientology, you know, so that religious aspect of
Los Angeles as a place of cults is there. There is the melting pot of
race, you know, so the kamikaze pilot ends up in Chinatown and then he
ends up in Little Tokyo. There is a scene involving Zoot Suiters, and
then Noam, in one part of it, goes downtown Los Angeles and he’s
fascinated with Central Avenue, so there’s a thing about post-war black
culture, sort of like Devil in a Blue Dress sort of thing. And, yeah,
and then the hippies in Topanga Canyon, blah, blah, blah. So it’s all
under the umbrella of Los Angeles with these aspects of religion, race,
crime, melding of cultures, etc., etc. But the thing that runs all the
way through it is the preacher Noam Sain and the sort of, “Is this is or
is this not a whole bunch of bullshit?” And it’s sort of like Mike
Davis’ Los Angeles City of Quartz. I might have it Los Angeles City of
Bullshit, because it’s my—you know. I’m a sort of 97.6 percent atheist.
I keep a little agnostic back over here. I used to say before I go to
sleep every night, I pray for the strength to remain an atheist. So the
thread that runs through it is all this, you know, preaching, and Noam
is an interesting character because he’s a womanizer, after people in
his congregation, he doesn’t really mention Jesus, he’s a sort of a
slightly New Age self-help guy, as he goes through, and he’s just—his
ambition is to have one of those big to preach in the Mayan Theater in
downtown L.A. to 3,300 people or something like that. That’s what he
wants to do, and have a television program.
A little of him is modeled after a guy named Dr. Gene Scott. You ought
to look him up sometimes. He’s come out of Glendale. Dave Hickey wanted
to do a piece on him one time, on preachers. But Gene Scott, he’s passed
on now, really charismatic nutcase, and I used to listen to him on radio
all the time. [Moon laughs.] And he started out as Christian preacher,
and he ended up with some sort of, you know, the Giants Who Walked the
Earth and who built the pyramids came down from flying saucers , etc.
And he’d do the whole thing on whiteboard, but he was real good-looking
with this white beard. His father was a preacher. But he had a Ph.D. in
philosophy from Stanford, Gene Scott, and he slid over into that. And
then sometimes whole things, he’d be on the radio for a couple of hours,
would just be fulminating against his ex-wife and the divorce
settlement. [Moon laughs.] I love crazy preachers. And I don’t love
them. I think they’re horrible, but I have a strange fascination for
everybody from, you know, Jimmy Swaggart to Reverend Ike to Tammy Faye
Baker to—I’ve always liked them. And to me, that’s some—I’m boiling this
down as I talk. It’s somehow, to me, Los Angeles. Los Angeles is like a
crazy preacher. Oh, and then the other guy, remember he just went out of
business and he died, the Crystal Cathedral down in Garden Grove,
designed by—
MOON:
Lloyd Wright?
PLAGENS:
Is it Lloyd Wright?
MOON:
The son, I think [unclear].
PLAGENS:
Yeah. The Crystal Cathedral.
MOON:
Yeah. Oh, no, no. You’re talking about the mega church, the really huge
one?
01:09:52
PLAGENS:
Yeah. It’s a famous architect.
MOON:
Yes, Philip. Was it Philip Johnson?
PLAGENS:
Philip Johnson, yeah, the Crystal Cathedral.
MOON:
Yeah, okay, that one, yeah.
PLAGENS:
And he used to be—did you ever see—what was his name, the preacher from
the Crystal Cathedral? Robert? But he was that real pseudo progressive
face of Christianity, and he had a doctorate from UCLA, and he used to
preach in his robes, his Ph.D. robes from UCLA, which were sort of
spiffy. They’ve got the light blue stripes on the black billowy sleeves.
MOON:
You know, it’s so funny. I was just thinking about your comment in
“Ecology of Evil,” that the worst problem with L.A. is—or the problem
with L.A. is this spiritual disease.
PLAGENS:
Yes. Yeah. But now, see, mine is back to something we talked about. Mine
is a twentieth-century take on L.A., I’m writing. And I’m fascinated. It
looms large, obviously, in my life. I used to say that there’s no such
thing as a bad movie about L.A. in the late forties, early fifties, even
all those bad movies with Dick Powell in them where he gets out of the
war, he’s a Marine and he becomes a private detective. I’ve seen them
all. I love them all.
01:11:29
MOON:
What do you think are the problems, the historical problems—or not even
historic, what the problems, you know, at a city level, that define Los
Angeles?
PLAGENS:
Well, I mean, one is this—it’s at the locus of these places. Latin
America moving north, Asia coming over across the Pacific, you know, and
everybody from the Dust Bowl migrating there. Okay? That’s one. So
you’ve had this clash of—sort of clash of civilizations in a small way.
I told you when I was in high school and college I worked—
MOON:
Oh, at the Safeway.
01:14:00
PLAGENS:
—at the Safeway at Third and Vermont. This way were the Asians, this way
were the blacks, this way were Latinos, this way the Jews. And they all
came in, you know. And I was produce man, and we had like a really big
produce section because everybody wanted something different. I mean,
the Asian clientele wanted live ginger, you know what I mean, like real
ginger, and you had to have that. Various things, collard greens and
stuff for the black population. To the west were then—not now, but to
the west was the Jewish population, so we had a big like kosher food
section, not so much in the produce. Maybe that was a formative
experience. And there was also a nutcase church called the Church of the
Superet Light with a little glowing sign of a heart that glowed purple
with a cross in it. And there were these really nice people who came in
and shopped at that, and they would hand me buttons and stuff. They were
like Jehovah’s Witnesses, very polite. So problems of L.A. in terms
of—well, it’s not so much problem. There’s an intersection of
civilizations, number one. Number two, there’s the weather where you
don’t have to worry about a lot of stuff that other people have to worry
about. That was one of the things. And so there is a bit of a mañana
attitude that comes with the weather in L.A., a little bit of “We’ll
take care of it tomorrow,” a lack of urgency that you get in New York.
Took a long time in L.A. to convince people, “This really matters. What
you do now will be in the historical record and it will be looked back
on in twenty, twenty-five years.”
And I remember a lot of attitude in the art world was, “We’re different
out here, we’re kind of surfer dudes, and screw all that stuff, because
that’s just New York. They’re all about libraries and recordkeeping and
history, and we’re not about history. We’re about phenomenology and the
experience and being in the moment.” It took a long time to convince
L.A. that there was a record to be kept of its—you know. You know, I
mean, look at how long it took them to get around to PST. So that might
be one of the things, you know, the ahistorical quality of Los Angeles,
plus the clash of the things. Then there’s the geography of the thing is
just that everything is so bloody spread out, and it’s not getting any
better, you know. I’ll come from New York, and I’ll land—I like an early
morning flight, and I’ll land at, let’s say, ten minutes after eleven in
the morning on a Tuesday, and I get a Rent-A-Car, and I’ve got to see
somebody in Mount Washington, it’s like three hours to get there, you
know. And the whole—you know, there are two movies that are really true.
They’re—you don’t think about it, but they’re practically documentaries.
One of them is Chinatown. Chinatown is true, about the Owens Valley and
the Owens River and all the water and all that sort of stuff. It’s all
true. And the other one that’s true, believe it or not, is Who Killed
Roger Rabbit.
01:15:42
MOON:
Oh, yeah, the electric—killing the electric cars.
PLAGENS:
Those things are true. You get the geography of the place, you know,
these strange things that happen. For instance, there’s no reason in the
world in common sense why the San Fernando Valley should be part of the
city of Los Angeles. It’s over a mountain range. It’s an entirely
different thing out there. Why is it part of the city of L.A.? Part of
the city of L.A. was “Chinatown,” because they built the aqueduct and
the federal government said, “We’re only going to build it, help build
it, if it goes to the city of Los Angeles.” “We’re not going to build
it.” Because the people who wanted it built were people like Colonel
Lankershim. All these guys have names.
MOON:
Chandler.
PLAGENS:
Not Chandler.
MOON:
Oh, no, that was [unclear].
PLAGENS:
But Lankershim, Nordhoff, Van Nuys, they were people.
MOON:
Right, because they’re boulevards in the Valley, yeah.
01:17:14
PLAGENS:
Yeah. But they were people and they owned big tracts of land, and what
they wanted was to be able to carve it up and sell it for homes and
everything like that. What they needed was water. What they didn’t have
was water. Let’s get the water from the Owens River, but we need the
federal government to help finance this aqueduct. The federal government
says, “We’re not going to do it just to water your lawns. It has to go
all the way to the city of Los Angeles.”
So what did they do? The City of Los Angeles annexed the San Fernando
Valley and it became part of the city of L.A. so that that aqueduct
actually came to Los Angeles and thus the San Fernando Valley was born
because you had water to build all those tacky little stucco homes with
cinderblock walls around them and swimming pools and smog and four
million people and no major cultural institutions. Used to be. Maybe
they’ve got things at Northridge now, you know. But that’s—I remember
when I taught at Northridge, four million people out here, and we don’t
have one major cultural institution. We don’t have one major theater, we
don’t have one major—there was Valley Musical Theater or something like
that. We don’t have an art museum, you know. So, anyway, those things
are true. Geography is part of L.A. The fact that you can—you know,
Laurie, when she first came to be with me, she had a nice saying. She
said, “I cried when I got off the plane when I arrived in Los Angeles,”
because she’s an easterner. “Where’s my little New Jersey? Where’s Mount
Holyoke? Where’s Connecticut?” You know, that kind of closeness, the big
city you can get to. “I cried when I got off the plane,” when she came
here, like, “What have I gotten myself into?” And she says—you know,
when we left to go to [unclear], she says, “When we left, I cried when I
got on the plane, because it took me a year or two to make friends in
these different little pockets,” from Don Bachardy and Christopher
Isherwood to Pamela Hertz and Richard Hertz, to artists down in Venice
to Selma Holo in Mount Washington, to the downtown artists. And it takes
you a long time. And she said, “I cried when I got back on the plane,
because all this sort of stuff. I realized Los Angeles was a wonderful
city in certain respects, and now I had to leave it.”
MOON:
It just takes a while.
PLAGENS:
It takes a while, you know.
01:19:19
MOON:
Yeah, to set up a life there.
PLAGENS:
It takes a while to set up a life and to have friends and all your
friends are scattered.
MOON:
Yeah.
01:21:17
PLAGENS:
So the geography, that crackpot religious aspect, the mixing of
civilization is much more than in the East, you know. In the East and in
the American South it was always New York’s different, you know. But it
was always just—you know. I remember those emblems [unclear] race,
“Let’s all get along racially,” and it was always a black hand shaking a
white hand. Right? Some little logo would have a black hand shaking
a—it’s not like that in L.A. It’s not black and white. I mean, Los
Angeles had used to have a surprisingly small black population compared
to other major American cities, you know. So it wasn’t black and white,
you know. It was Latino, Asian, black, white, different kinds of people,
etc., etc., etc. Those kinds of things and—you know. And there was a
sense that L.A.—that’s the last aspect of it, is L.A. was always kind of
the city of the future. I don’t think anybody thinks so anymore because
of the drought. [laughter] But it used to be. It used to be. “No, it’s
the city of the future. Europe is behind, we’re looking to the Pacific
now, it’s the Pacific Rim that’s going to count. It’s going to be L.A.,
Portland, and Seattle around to northern parts of Japan down to blah,
blah, blah—and that’s what it will be.” No. Pacific Rim’s too big.
[laughs] But it was going to be the city of the future, and that’s why,
to get—I think that’s probably why I went apoplectic on poor old Reyner
Banham.
MOON:
Well, what about the Los Angeles after, you know, the early 1980s, like
after MOCA and kind of what that symbolizes in terms of the—it’s going
on, but the revitalization of downtown and, you know, a whole sort of
level of money that comes into this city? What’s your relationship to
that, to Los Angeles now?
PLAGENS:
No, I don’t have much. I mean, it’s a place I go to write about art if
somebody sends me there. It’s a place where I have a daughter and a
sister and her husband. Her son lives in San Francisco now. It’s a place
that I—it’s my hometown I go back to, but I don’t have any relation with
the L.A. art world. I don’t show in it. I don’t have a gallery in L.A. I
don’t write anything for L.A.—
MOON:
Publications.
PLAGENS:
—publications, you know. I’m a parachute critic if I go back. You know
what I mean? The times that I’ve gone back to L.A., except to see
somebody, personal reasons, have been, The Wall Street Journal sent me.
I’m trying to think of the things I’ve gone out there for. Ken Price
retrospective, the Jim Turrell exhibition—
MOON:
Both at LACMA.
01:23:15
PLAGENS:
Both at LACMA. What at MOCA? Oh, PST, you know. I spent four or five
days out there and went to fifteen or sixteen shows, my little
Rent-A-Car. It was fun. You don’t drive like that in New York.
MOON:
What was it like to see—well, let’s leave aside PST for—but, for
example, these huge, you know, really sort of—there’s like a lot of work
in the Ken Price retrospective with the Frank Gehry installation design,
and also the James Turrell, I mean, you know that incredible sort of
amount of sophistication behind the production of that exhibition.
PLAGENS:
Right.
MOON:
What did you think about those shows, I mean, having known these people
back in the day when the work was smaller and shown in these spaces that
weren’t like that at all?
01:25:03
PLAGENS:
I thought the Ken Price thing was beautiful. I mean, credit where due.
Frank Gehry didn’t go to school just to eat his lunch, as they say.
[Moon laughs.] And he might be overrated on some things. Everybody, “Oh,
Frank Gehry, oh, Frank Gehry, let us celebrate Frank Gehry now,” right?
And there’s just a book review in The New York Times Book Review of
somebody wrote a bio of Frank Gehry, and the book reviewer—I’m trying to
forget who it was; it might have even been Joseph Giovannini—that I just
read the teaser quotes. They thought Frank Gehry was, you know, an
overrated showoff. Okay. So let’s say there is a backlash. “Oh, we’ve
had too many frigging Frank Gehrys,” right? But every once in a while,
you get a thing with an artist of whatever sort. This is why they’re
famous, because they can really do this stuff. And his installation of
Alexander Calder and Kenny Price: absolutely top drawer.
Turrell I don’t know about. I did the phenomenon of those Turrell shows
and the one at the Guggenheim, etc., etc. I thought he suffered in a
way. There was a kind of cheesiness about them. It was like, you know,
1953 indirect lighting in Bullocks Wilshire. Ken Price never got all
that big, and he survives his elevation from little tiny things in Ferus
Gallery or, you know, his pots and his cups and stuff like that. He
looked really good. That’s a common problem in the art world, you know,
like it is other places where on the basis of exhibition A, B, and C,
the artist will be discovered and given unlimited budget and opportunity
to do mega-exhibition D, which turns out to be not very good. This
happens in Hollywood all the time. Heaven’s Gate is the famous case on
the basis of what the Deer Hunter. Michael Cimino got unlimited budget
to do this western, you know, with, you know, total failure, critical
and popula. I never saw it. And you have that in the art world.
So-and-so, you know, nice little paintings and then you have the big
show, and, okay, now we’re going to evaluate it, and what? And sometimes
it’s just visual, like there’s a danger in an artist like Kenny Price,
who does these kind of art objects that [unclear]. You don’t stand back
from. You put your nose into them. You go up there and you go like that,
that kind of looking as opposed to Clyfford Still, you know, where you
go like that. [Plagens leans back] There’s a danger sometimes in that
scale, that you’ll blow up the balloon and it will pop. And then
sometimes there’s the amount of money that comes into town. We’re back
to the art world as spectacle. It’s got to be an absolute, take over the
whole museum, paint the walls green, make a lot of black boxes for this
to be shown and that to be shown. Quality of the artist is supposedly
proportionate to the inconvenience that he can cause the exhibition
institution. [laughs] The more trouble you are, the better you must be.
The more demands you have. That’s not just L.A.; that’s universal. I
mean it’s universal, ubiquitous, and museums giving in to that.
MOON:
Earlier you said that every writer needs a good editor.
01:28:23
PLAGENS:
Yes.
MOON:
What would be the equivalent for an artist, or is there one? You know,
like every good artist needs a good somebody else?
01:29:26
PLAGENS:
Yeah, if we’re talking about traditional artists who make objects, like
painters or sculptors or something like that. I mean, the kind of editor
you need isn’t—because the tradition isn’t there. You don’t need Clement
Greenberg telling Morris Louis exactly where to stretch his canvases, to
crop them, in effect. You don’t need that. But an artist needs an editor
in the sense of, “Don’t show that, show that.” And then when you get to
the exhibition, if we’re talking paintings or sculpture, like I said,
Nancy Hoffman, go to lunch, and I come back and 35 percent of the show
is gone. [Moon laughs.] She’s cleaned it out. And then she hangs it and
it looks wonderful. You need an editor like that. Okay?
Within the work of art, you probably don’t. I mean, people might, but
the tradition isn’t there. Do you know what I mean? Writers are
conditioned and educated to tolerate and expect and to even crave
editors. But artists aren’t, you know. Nobody comes in and says, “Look,
restretch that thing, take off five inches on the side of that big
painting. It’ll be much better.” MOONS: So it’s an editor of the
presentation of the artwork?
PLAGENS:
An editor of the presentation. You probably aren’t going to get an
editor within it, but then there are all kinds of weird, you know,
collaborations with poets and text and so on and so forth where you
might do, “Take this out,” kind of thing. I don’t think Bruce Nauman
uses—has an editor. He may talk with people, but that’s another thing
kind of outside my bailiwick. I said before, I can dish it out, but I
can’t take it. I don’t have artists over to my studio. I mean, I have a
few friends up in the Catskills, and that’s where the studio is, but I
don’t have them come in. And I know they do. They say, “Peter, you and
Laurie come over,” or, “Laurie, could you come over for a studio visit,”
and, well, you know, “have a cup of coffee or a beer.” I don’t drink.
“And we’ll talk about painting.” I don’t do that. I don’t like it. I
mean, you can attribute it to whatever.
MOON:
Is the only person that you really talk about your work with Laurie,
your wife?
PLAGENS:
Yeah. Well, we’re side by side in the studio spatially. We tend to not
be there at the same time. She’s a sort of—I’m an absurdly
early-in-the-morning person, and then
try-to-salvage-something-at-the-end-of-the-day person, and she’s a
middle-of-the-day person, I mean civilized, you know, has her coffee,
has breakfast, does some things, takes care of business, pays some bills
or whatever you do, and then goes down to the studio at one-thirty and
stays till six. And I’m the one who’ll get up real early and grab—have
my first cup of coffee and then, you know, down there to do it, and then
toward the end, you know. “You coming back up for dinner?” Because the
studio’s a separate building. But I don’t like people—no, I don’t
have—that’s just the way I am, and I’ve said to people—they say, “Why?”
And I say, “Well, you know, I can dish it out, but I can’t take it.
How’s that?” You know? [laughter] And that usually ends the conversation
if I admit that.
01:32:36
MOON:
What do you think are some of the biggest problems facing artists?
01:34:0701:36:38
PLAGENS:
Well, in a word, for people who make art objects, rent, okay? Because
art for most people is in-the-flesh sort of thing. I have my work on my
phone. I have it on the computer, just for me and a friend over a drink.
But, you know, people will go around with iPads, and “Here’s my work.”
They go like that, and they’ll take you right—you know. It’s not quite
right. It’s an in-the-flesh thing if you make paintings or sculpture or
objets d’art, right? So you have to have a place to work. You have to
rent that. And also because it’s an in-the-flesh business, you’ve got to
get people to come and see your work, and that’s hard to do if they have
to travel distances. I mean, there’s still a thing in New York where
dealers and curators really don’t want to go to Brooklyn. It’s easier
than hell. It’s like shorter on the subway sometimes than going up from
downtown to the Upper East Side. But there’s that psychological thing,
oh—or if your studio’s in Jersey City, you know, right across the
friggin’ river. I know people with studios over there, and it’s one stop
on the New Jersey Transit train, and people still don’t want to go over
there.
So artists want to be around where the people who deal with the work
are, not necessarily rich collectors, but dealers and critics and things
like that, and then they need a workspace. And since it’s a sort of
urban business, unless you’re a university art professor and you have
that—I told you, some of them get—you know, if I visit places, I end up
resenting. Professor Jones has been here for thirty-five years and he’s
got this salary and teaching assistants and great big studio out near a
farm. But most artists, urban deal, they want that, and it’s
economically unfeasible for a lot of artists, and that’s partly because
rents in cities have gone up, but partly because it’s the other side of
artists being hip. People want to be where the artists are. They want to
rent apartments right next to the artists. It used to be the artist went
down to those crime-ridden neighborhoods where nobody would go. So
that’s the first thing, you know, to practice economically. The second
thing is—I’m going to sound like the old man, “Hey, kids, get off of my
lawn,” but there is a general confusion that’s caused by the great
opening up of anything and everything can be art as long as it’s
spectacular and grabby. So you have all these people, “Well, what do I
take? What do I do? What do I do as an artist, a young artist? Do I go
off and set off gunpowder explosions in the desert and do that? Or do I
do a Paul McCarthy-like performance? Will I be too old-fashioned if I
just go into my room and paint?” And we hear this all the time the myth
of the romantic genius alone in the garret is not the way artists are
going to work in the twenty-first century. They’re all going to be
interconnected electronically, and they’re going to work in little
groups, and you see that now, you know. So young artists coming up,
“Well, what do I do? It’s all over the place.” That’s a problem, is
finding some kind of focus and—
MOON:
But, to you it’s clear sort of what are the issues that are important to
art, I mean outside of painting, but just in terms of art, or is that
something that’s tested?
01:38:43
PLAGENS:
It’s tested, you know. It’s tested. I mean, there’s cynical views. My
old friend Walter Gabrielson used to say, “If you haven’t got the talent
to do anything else, you can always expand the boundaries of art.” [Moon
laughs.] There’s that cynical side of it. But it has opened up
tremendously, and both in terms of media and meaning and what art is
supposed to do. And I’m still probably at bottom, something of a kind of
Greenbergian formalist in the sense of Greenberg used to say the only
thing that matters in art is quality.” And, of course, then you get the
argument, well, what does quality mean, right? And it got so debunked.
What is this quality? Is this some kind of Q factor? I mean, you know,
what’s quality for Paul McCarthy is not quality for Piet Mondrian which
is not quality for Cindy Sherman which is not quality for Patti Smith.
But on the other hand, how can they put all that stuff in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art under one roof? What does it have in common?
And the answer is, it’s all pretty good, you know. The Maori canoe or
outrigger is as good as the Greek statue which is as good as the big
Stuart Davis painting. So they must have something that unites them,
right? Quality.
I go back and forth on this, you know. It’s the old thing. Is there some
universal thing? Is there eventually an objective like there is quality
or is it all totally relative? And stylistically, intellectual style is
totally relative, you know. We don’t have any more [unclear] narratives.
We have these various narratives. But the people who are relativists
don’t take it all the way. If your opinion is as good as mine and his
because it’s all relative, then that third-grader over there ought to be
able to pick the artists in the Venice Biennale. Do you see what I mean?
MOON:
Yes, so then nothing matters, or it’s all the same.
01:41:12
PLAGENS:
If it’s all the same, and it’s all, you know, like that. But that’s the
intellectual fashion now, is diversity, multi this and multi that,
different narratives, different art, you know. But that can even obtain
back in academe. The guy who invited me to USC, Steven Ostrow, he used
to say—and I forget—he went to one of those, you know, like Ivy League
schools for a Ph.D. art history, and he said—he used to say, “Where I
went to school, the word ‘beautiful’ was always followed by the word
‘example.’” Isn’t that nice? He never said anything was beautiful. It’s
only a beautiful example of—and then name it, you know. Maori outriggers
for fishing, Greek temple structure, neo-plasticism modern painting,
body art performance sort of something. I can’t—I can’t solve that
question. The only thing I can solve is I tell everybody that I teach
and everything, it’s like a little Bible thing with me, “You have to
read David Hume “Of the Standard of Taste,” 1757, the great
Enlightenment essay of is there an absolute or is it all relative? How
do you know? And I said, “This man laid it all out for you. Didn’t solve
it, but he laid it all out for you.”
And that, by the way, is one of the things I got from being with Laurie,
because her background is political philosophy, and her philosopher is
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as you know, it’s about, so we’re in the
Enlightenment, and that’s where I first read “Of the Standard of Taste,”
by David Hume. He’s not a Frenchman, but he’s in that historical time.
I’d say you absolutely shouldn’t get out of art school, without having
read that. And it’s on over the Internet, for free.
MOON:
Well, for example, when you saw Ryan Trecartin, the first exhibition,
Elizabeth Dee, did you—would you walk away thinking, “That is art”? Or
was that, “That was an experience”?
01:44:0401:45:38
PLAGENS:
No, it was art. And that’s one of things you can’t prove. When I did
this gig at Middlebury, I was whatever mucky-muck, visiting artist for a
semester. It had “distinguished” in the title, which, obviously, would
have made my mother happy. My mother would have liked “distinguished.” I
just wanted to know how much are they going to pay me. And there was a
guy there as art historian, who was—again, the name will slip—but he—you
know. Middlebury didn’t have a big studio program. It had an art history
program, right? And I was teaching the Modern Art class. I only had one
class to teach, it was a real good gig, and I taught this one class,
went to a few critiques, and I was going to do Andy Warhol. And this art
historian, this older man, gay man, senior professor, was basically
Classical, that was his field, but then he had added on one other thing,
which was Andy Warhol. He’d become a Warhol scholar. So for political
reasons, I just thought—his name is Robert something. And I said, “You
know, Robert, I’m going to lecture on Andy Warhol in the Modern Art
class in a couple of weeks. Could we have a cup of coffee and talk about
what you talk about Andy Warhol?” And under the guise of, you know, “I
don’t want it to be entirely out of phase with other things.” I like to
defuse those things before you start. Here you are, visiting person,
coming in and pissing on my territory. I didn’t want—I wanted to get rid
of that feeling.
Anyway, long story. So I asked him, I said, “You’re a Classical art
historian. What caused—?” And what caused it was the 1980 whatever, the
Warhol retrospective, the one with the cows on the cover. And I said,
“What convinced you, all of a sudden?” And he said—and it’s funny; I
understood him. And he said, “It was just these were major works, like
you see in museums.” And I understood what he meant. He meant on the
Marilyns and some of the bigger Disasters, the big silkscreen paintings,
this was like art that belonged in museums. It just had a presence about
it, right? And you didn’t—you know, just as Potter Stewart’s famous
thing about, you know, pornography, “I can’t define it, but I know it
when I see it.” It’s the same. He said, “I know this museum art with
gravitas when I see it.” Okay? Same thing for me with Ryan Trecartin. I
just came out of there thinking, “I don’t know what this thing was, but,
man, this is it. This is art. It’s video art, but it’s really great
video art.” But if I had to testify in court, you know, with a
prosecutor saying—cross-examining me, “Now why is this?” you know, you
can’t do it.
It’s one of the terrible things about, you know, art as both science.
After a while, you say, “Look, this isn’t very good.” “Well, why?” “Just
take my word for it,” you know. [Moon laughs.] Or “This is great.”
“Why?” “Just take my word for it.”
MOON:
Wait. So this is going to be my last question for you, because we have
to leave soon. But I wanted to ask you about a—you mentioned this notion
of beautiful in relation to an artwork, and I wanted to ask you if
beauty has a role in how you—or the defining art or good art and
quality, and also, I mean, but beauty in a larger sense, not that it’s
just pleasing, but then I’m also thinking about someone like Dave Hickey
who—
PLAGENS:
Yes.
MOON:
—who came out with that, but then he also got a lot of flak.
PLAGENS:
Yeah, The Invisible Dragon. It is. It goes all the way over here from
the guy I told you about, “And where I went to school the word
‘beautiful’ was always followed by the word ‘example.’”
MOON:
Example.
01:47:07
PLAGENS:
Okay. Then you have the difference between beautiful and pretty, where
pretty is good-looking, you know, is pretty, is good-looking by received
taste, no challenge, right? That’s pretty.
Then you have these other things, like this was Laurie from political
philosophy, and the Greek charm. Charm is beauty in motion. All right.
And then you have this other aspect of beauty as in the platonic sense,
that the highest orders of beauty mirror some universal harmony, right,
you know, Fibonacci sequence, the Golden Rectangle, that kind of stuff.
And Clement Greenberg used to say, and I think it is true, you know,
that it’s not very human philosophy, it’s very abstract and kind of
cold, but there is that—those people who believe that at the upper,
upper, upper levels—upper, upper, upper levels, beautiful and morality
and ethics come together, those philosophical things. The beautiful and
the good come together up in some stratosphere.
MOON:
Like Immanuel Kant.
PLAGENS:
Yeah, yeah. My philosophy is a little weak, so don’t go there literally.
[laughter] So when I say “beautiful,” yes, it’s something—sometimes I
have, in frustration, I like to say “good-looking,” because that puts it
down on ground level and takes the highfalutin quality of beauty out of
it. People will say, “Well, what do you mean by beautiful?” But they
won’t challenge you on good-looking. Okay. They accept that. I’m talking
around this, but I understand exactly what you mean. I want my paintings
to be beautiful in the sense of there’s something attractive about their
looks that once you look at them a little bit longer, there’s something
of philosophical or psychological consequence that comes out of looking
at that thing that’s beautiful enough to get you to look at it.
01:49:06
MOON:
And keep looking.
01:51:07
PLAGENS:
And keep looking at it. But I like a certain—I think beauty has a range.
I’m not totally Fibonacci sequence, Golden Rectangle, guy. I think there
can be different kinds of beauties, and it a range. Last thing, close
this off, is I used to show this all the time in classes at Northridge,
when you used to—in the days when you used to get a projector and show
your students films, and Northridge had this huge film library with
these educational films. One I used to show all the time was Donald Duck
in Mathmagic Land. [Moon laughs.] It’s a twenty-minute Disney
educational film to try to get kids interested in math. [Moon laughs.]
Where Donald—it’s got all that stuff about how you take a string and you
pluck it and you cut it in half, and you pluck it and it’s the same note
one octave higher. If you cut it in half, it’s octaves, it’s all
connected, you know, the pentagram and all this sort of stuff, you know,
and it’s done cartoon. And Donald Duck is the, “What do you mean?”
[demonstrates] Like that. And the narrator is now Donald.
So, yes, beauty. It is in there. It’s an elusive sort of thing that I
trail after. I’m trying to catch it, but I won’t let go of meaning. And
maybe if I drop that meaning, whatever that is, that existential meaning
that it’s supposed to mean something, like a Jean-Paul Sartre novel, or
it’s supposed to mean something like a Beckett play. Maybe if I dropped
that, I could catch up with beauty, but I insist on dragging those
things along with me. Nobody’s ever going to make the work of art that
causes everybody to say, “Well, now they’ve done it. It’s been made.
Pure beauty. We can shut up shop now.” “It’s been done, you know, let’s
forget about it.” It’s just not going to happen. It’s always sort of—
MOON:
Keeps going.
PLAGENS:
—open-ended.
MOON:
Okay. Well, thank you. Is there anything else actually that you wanted
to say before we end?
PLAGENS:
No, other than David Geffen should buy the entire inventory of my
studio.
MOON:
Okay. [laughter] Yeah.
PLAGENS:
And turn over the Geffen Contemporary to it, because I’m so underrated.
[laughs]
01:52:54
MOON:
Okay. Well, now that’s on the record. [laughs]
PLAGENS:
But by the time it’s reap—he won’t be in the collecting business
anymore. [Moon laughs.] Well, thank you for all this attention.
MOON:
Well, yes, thank you for speaking so at length about your life. [laughs]
[End Session 6, October 29, 2015 interview]