Art Review : A Master Stays Cool and True

Both of Billy Al Bengston’s retrospective exhibitions at the County Museum of Art arrived swathed in considerable bunting.

The installation of the 1968 version was designed by Frank Gehry and included both furniture from Bengston’s digs and one of his racing motorcycles complete with a waxworks statue of the artist in a dashing bike-racer’s outfit.

The catalogue, designed by Ed Ruscha, had a sandpaper cover literally bolted to the text with “BILLY” spelled large in pink felt letters, presumably a commentary on Bengston’s personality--the tough guy who is really a pussycat or vice-versa. There is quite a lot of vice-versa in Bengston’s persona.

Inside, in addition to the usual scholarly text, reproductions and checklist, one found memorabilia, snaps of Billy clowning with Ruscha, Billy in a tuxedo sharing a hotel room in Mae West decor with his fellow painter Peter Alexander, Billy racing at Ascot. . . .

The present traveling show--titled “BILLY II”--is making its farewell appearance here, ending Jan. 29. Jointly organized by the Houston and Oakland museums, it is a notably restrained reprise of the original. The installation by architect Brian Murphy features some walls covered in midnight blue paper and others of raw plywood with dropped ceilings. The catalogue, by Dana Levy, is more conventional, but is still big on Billy nostalgia updated to include Billy in Hawaii wearing a tastefully florid shirt and a lei.

All this show biz and engagingly shameless egotism is so entertaining that there is a tendency to just laugh it off. The more respectful option is to take it all seriously. It is either a tactic to place the art in a context that will enhance its expressive effect, or an insecure bit of prestidigitation that tips us off to a lurking fear that the work somehow cannot stand on its own two feet--or however many feet art has.

Since the fancy dancing almost certainly represents a bit of both, let us take each to heart. In sum, all the jokes and elaborate footwork insist that art is intensely personal and cannot be pried loose from the life and temperament of its maker. Bengston, then, not only confirms the idea of art as a personality cult, he insists on it.

Bengston’s position in contemporary art is secure because he was a founding member of a cult of buddies who, in the 1960s, launched Los Angeles into international orbit with exhibitions at the Ferus Gallery.

The chronicle of these activities has long since become the indispensable sine qua non in understanding the emergence of a distinctive Southern California aesthetic. It came to be called The Cool School or The Finish Fetish, despite the fact that the art of the Ferus Studs was as diverse as Ed Kienholz’s goopy manikin tableaux and Larry Bell’s sleek mirrored boxes, as opposed in temperament as John Altoon’s whacky erotic drawings and Robert Irwin’s purist empiricism.

There was, however, a common attitude that glued it all together. The Boys broadcast the aura of a high school gang with its emblem embroidered on the backs of shiny black rayon jackets. They were the kind of guys who did badly in class despite being smarter than everybody else, and were infuriatingly successful with the girls despite postures of holding the female animal in cordial contempt.

They were the guys who were soon outside the fence waiting for the birds at 3:10, lounging by their pristine chopped-and-channeled Mercs. Nonchalance aside, they were as dandified as Bloomsbury exquisites and took longer to dress in the morning than Zsa Zsa Gabor. Their postures, slouching on the fender of the car or lounging along with black hipsters walks, were as stylized as Kabuki actors. Everything was an inside joke to them and they smirked at the world while making their girlfriends pretty talismen hearts of multicolored, layered plastic. These guys made fine art out of the idea of turning your graduation pin into cloisonne with melted crayon.

That rebellious-adolescent aesthetic dominated Bengston’s ’68 retrospective with its sergeant’s chevrons, hearts and the silhouette of an iris that was really Bela Lugosi transmogrifying into Dracula (an inside joke). Compositions were rigidly symmetrical and shiny with auto lacquers. They represented his biggest formal breakthrough--the idea of creating a sense of layered depths of reading by using surface gloss instead of conventional tricks of perspective. Among these, the so-called “Dento” paintings are the richest.

In the end they may well stand as his most distinctive artistic contribution. Today, however, their sublimation of colloquial hot-rod stripping has rejoined the collective from which it emerged, and the paintings appear a little stiff, a little too forced.

Pictures done since then--the update of the retrospective--look precisely like a repudiation of all that effort. They show us the lyric Bengston lightening up in ever larger, ever looser, ever more frankly decorative celebrations of color, ever more autobiographically accessible works like the lush watercolors that croon and cackle at his delight in the discovery of Hawaii.

But in a larger sense the two big chunks of the show represent a pattern of assertion and denial, of doing and undoing, of revelation and concealment that is typical of both his career and of every individual work. The old stuff played toughness, concealed affability. The new stuff reveals sweetness and masks uncertainty.

One of Bengston’s most successful bits of sleight-of-hand is the veiling of his “kleptomania.” Considering his knack for creating inimitable, trademark works, there are an astonishing number of influences at play, hidden behind oblique titles like “Holy Smoke,” “Trevaplinger Draculas” or “Altoonas.” There is Jasper Johns’ deadpan refinement, Joseph Alberse’s didacticism, Frank Stella’s concern with structure and David Hockney’s joie de vivre, not to mention all the Abstract Expressionists, John Chamberlain and hat-tippings to just about every painting movement that’s come along from Pattern Painting to Neo-Expressionism. Ah, the ever-hip Billy.

He’s obviously a master juggler. The paintings are exactly as profound--or dumb--as the viewer, precisely as decorative--or neurotic--as the eye of the beholder. “Garropa de Astillero Draculas” looks like a prelude to your 19th nervous breakdown and “Eagle Reef Draculas” could go in Jean Harlow’s boudoir. But when the balls and dumbbells stop flying and plop to earth, just exactly what is Bengston good at?

Color. He is a superb colorist, capable of using subtle and exotic hues to ravish the eye or setting the mechanics to create movement. He is a master pattern maker, inviting the contemptuous to dismiss, say, “China Point Draculas” as so much yardage for a summer frock and signaling the thoughtful to notice its wonderful hooping dance.

Despite bravura, he is an indifferent free paint handler and he can’t draw for sour apples.

Twenty years later the old gang has broken up. Altoon is dead, Bell and Price have not been heard from in any major way for some years, Kienholz redeemed himself after a bad patch and is an international hero. Irwin became the great formal originator of the mob in his formulation of light-and-space art. Moses is painting like an inspired dervish, Craig Kauffman like an eccentric minor master.

If anybody has stayed true to his school, it’s Bengston. He has wound up on the middle path as something of a contemporary traditionalist, an excellent sunny hedonist and master stylist hanging in there doing his best in his slot as the consummate pro of the Cool School.