Beer, Art and Philosophy

Image: Drinking at the Hammer Museum, with Ed Ruscha behind the bar and Tom Marioni to the far right. Credit: Michael Robinson Chavez for the LA Times.


‎"The act of drinking beer with friends is the highest form of art." San Francisco artist Tom Marioni, author of a memoir entitled Beer, Art and Philosophy, has put together a series of beer-fuelled art happenings since 1970 which have taken place variously in his own studio, museums, and neighbourhood bars. A show of his work (and five accompanying invitation-only beer salons, at one of which his friend Ed Ruscha tended bar), has just opened at the Hammer Museum in LA.

The public are invited to a performance later in the month called 'The Beer Drinking Sonata for 13 Players', in which players blow into the bottles after each sip, so that the tone -- so to speak -- gets progressively lower and lower. (Have a feeling I might have seen something similar done in a student flat in Christchurch in the 1980s.)

When asked by writer Jori Finkel if he agreed with Marioni that drinking beer was the highest form of art, Ed Ruscha commented: "I don’t know about a form of art; a form of life maybe. But you can call anything art, and that’s Tom’s thing. And I like the beer part of it."

Unhomely

I've written before about the way certain artists come to completely own the landscape they live and work in. I can't see photographs of Long Island, for example, without the view rearranging itself into an Edward Hopper painting: I've had Ed Ruscha moments in L.A., driving past anonymous motels and gas stations; in Christchurch in the spring and summer, there are weeks on end presided over by Bill Sutton skies.

William Sutton, Plantation Series II, c.1985, oil on canvas, Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery

There's such a characteristic feeling of uncanny displacement when you come across a scene in the real world that you already know from an artwork. (Probably the most memorable occasion of this for me was entering New York at night for the first time, riding in the back of a yellow cab with steam rising from vents in the road, having watched Taxi Driver 200 times previously at home in New Zealand.) Less often it can happen with objects: I can't see old road signs or enamel-ware now without thinking of Rosalie Gascoigne, or arrangements of wine glasses on a table without recalling Bill Culbert's photographs taken at his home near the Luberon.

These moments when the real world gives way to the artwork are intensely familiar, yet at the same time out of place, transporting you between the actual and the virtual and back again in the blink of an eye. Not only does an artwork motion you towards a particular way of seeing, it also invites you to focus on the kind of singular detail that gets lost in the maelstom of daily life. I think these experiences are among the most rewarding of the art life.

Walking back from school this morning it happened twice.

First I saw a Gavin Hipkins in the park.

Left: Gavin Hipkins, The Homely: Sydney (Flower), 1999, back cover of catalogue.

And then why, I wondered foolishly as it turned out, are they illustrating a Simon Morris painting on a real estate sign? A house of art collectors?

Left: Simon Morris, Protein, 1993, acrylic on aluminium, Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki. Right: The QR Code on a Harcourts Real Estate sign in Leinster Road, Christchurch.

I'm interested here not only in the way that experiences of the real world are mediated by works of art, but the way in which an encounter with a work of art can be enlarged by seeing its equivalent in everyday life. This traction between the familiar and the strange, the actual and the virtual, is what the experience of a work of art is all about, it seems to me.

They paved paradise and put up a parking lot

Ed Ruscha, Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles, 1967, Detail of Dodgers Stadium, 1000 Elysian Park Ave, from Tate Online

News that Ed Ruscha and his friend Laddie John Dill are battling the City of Los Angeles over the right to keep working in their open-air studio in Venice Beach (cue Joni Mitchell -- yes, the city wants to put up a parking lot) has prompted a flood of op-ed pieces, mostly coming down on the side of the artists. While the New York Times comments: "The project has quickly emerged as a fight between the artistic values that led to the renewal of Venice and the commercial interests that are reshaping the community’s character," the local Venice Paper queries: "Has Venice become a place that values asphalt more than two artists who have made huge contributions in making Venice Venice. Must we rush so quickly to mediocrity?"

The problem, as ever, stems from the gentrification of the district, following the usual scenario in which artists in search of cheap space and interesting architectural character move into a run-down area, inadvertently make it fashionable, push up the property prices and have to deal with new demands for the shabby spaces no one previously gave a second thought to, as well as navigating neighbourhood streets suddenly clogged with MumVees and mobile coffee carts and developers in Porsches. (Like Grey Lynn fifteen years ago, or Mt Victoria ten; though they're still waiting on Linwood...)

Laura Wilson, Ed Ruscha takes a break with Butch in the streets around his Venice studio, 2007, Wallpaper*.

I've been thinking lately about the way in which officialdom treats artists -- which seems to me something of a measuring stick for a society's degree of civilisation. (To this end, I'm keenly anticipating the impending launch of The Complete Written Correspondence between the Rt Hon Richard Meros and Creative New Zealand: Volume One.) With a few honourable exceptions, almost all of them to be found in the capital, NZ's record on bureaucratic artist-friendliness at a local level is pretty woeful. It's not that commercial interests need necessarily always to be pitted against artists: both are important in the lives of communities.

Why, for example, do city councils not work with developers to provide cheap studio space in otherwise unoccupied "land-banked" buildings? Keep the artists happy on the one hand; look at giving the developers a rates rebate on the other: the result being an interesting and attractive place for people to live. It's something that art collector James Wallace used to do with his buildings on the Auckland waterfront, pre the Viaduct development. In particular, the Christchurch City Council would seem to have a few possible sites on its books currently, courtesy of beleaguered property czar Dave Henderson.

Artists, bureaucrats and property developers generally come together, of course, when there's public sculpture in the offing. Lately we've seen the rise of the kind of slightly dubious public sculpture that stands as a memorial to something that's been knocked down in order to make way for the development which commissioned the sculpture. (It's been reported that a public artwork commemorating the historic air force base is on the cards for the new Ngai Tahu-developed subdivision at Wigram.)

Ed Ruscha, Utopian Slumps

The old Arts Bonus Scheme in Wellington, however, resulted in several useful public works being attached to new developments, including the definitive Culbert/Hotere collaboration, Fault, on the exterior of the City Gallery Wellington. Regrettably the Resource Management Act has put paid to this sort of "percent for art" scheme in New Zealand: you're no longer allowed to get away with building an extra floor or two if you also put a decent work of art in the forecourt. National have said that they're looking at reviewing the Resource Management Act in relation to a number of issues, including urban design. I hope whoever's in the government benches come November does; the RMA is endlessly problematic when applied to public sculpture, and a complete minefield for artists to deal with.

Meanwhile, more power to Ed Ruscha's arm in sorting out his real estate problems in Venice Beach. He's not saying anything publicly about it of course: he never does. (If he were a New Zealand artist, the media would call him reclusive.)