Triumph of the Visual That Makes Sense : JOE GOODE: A Survivor From the End of a Tumultuous Era

The universe of art is awash in words. It has become a sphere that communicates in the accents of advertising.

Except Ed Moses.

At every turn one encounters art that is: (a) all words, like the crawling light signs of Jenny Holzer (b) words-and-pictures like Barbara Kruger’s agitprop posters or (c) signs and images such as those of Matt Mullican. Words, words, words. Even the prevailing critical method grows from the analysis of words. Everybody is into verbal.

Except Joe Goode.

Once modern art was proof that vision is a language unto itself. Today pure painting, like pure poetry, has been capsized by the prosaic. There is still plenty of abstract art around but it most often either lapses into seductive decoration or collapses into scholastic sterility. One is inclined to mournfully pronounce the enterprise defunct.

But dead art is a comatose princess waiting for a hero to snap her out of it. Who would have thought that the magic kiss would have come from two grizzled L.A. princes who might be considered over the hill in some circles ? But there they stand, Ed Moses, 63, and Joe Goode, 53, two scarred veterans from the ‘60s. In two recent exhibitions, their latest works represent such astonishing individual breakthroughs as to breathe new life into the exquisite corpse. Here is what they have to say about their work and their times.

Toward the end of the ‘70s, Joe Goode ran into an art world acquaintance at his dealer, Nick Wilder. He announced he was leaving Los Angeles, moving to a ranch near Springville in the foothills of the Sierras. He was decamping, he said, because he was, “sick of chasing fame and fortune.”

Looking back, Goode sees himself as cynical and bitter on the eve of that old departure. It was the end of an era. The Wilder gallery was about to fold and the art world was in the sterile grip of Minimalism. Lingering ‘60s buoyancy had pretty well flattened out.

“I used to find stimulation in the music but even that was gone.” When he mentions music something makes you think of Roy Orbison.

“There was too much going on I didn’t like. The pursuit of money had become an obsession among the artists. There was a temptation to join that. I decided to reset my priorities.”

He married his girlfriend, a promising young artist named Natalie Bieser, and off they went to the idyllic outback. She has happily taken to raising horses, he has concentrated on the essence of art making and his work has increasingly reflected nature.

“It occurred to me the other day that my art has always been sort of about the environment and now everybody is real concerned with that issue,” he says thoughtfully.

These days he is back in town part-time working in a Venice studio on Electric Avenue. It’s a sparse, unlovely block with three converted industrial buildings walled behind a chain-link fence covered with tennis-court netting. Goode’s flanking neighbors are Sam Francis on one side and Ed Ruscha and Laddie Dill on the other. Goode’s place has a curious, haunted anonymity as if he has never quite decided to either move in or move out. There’s a kind of tentativeness about Joe Goode.

He’s still trim but the face is somewhat careworn under the same old thinning rim of blond hair. Seems like Goode’s hair has been thinning like that forever. He is perfectly polite to a visitor from the old days but now as then he speaks softly and seems to hold something back, something somewhere between simple shyness and secret anger. It’s easy to understand why he’s sometimes called Lonesome Joe.

Elusiveness has always been part of his art. It seems utterly straightforward at first, but then it slips away. To this day his trademark works remain a set of milk bottle paintings that first brought him to notice in the ‘60s. A series of one-color canvases that lie on the floor with an attached step on which rests an ordinary milk bottle painted the color of the rest. Commonplace, but these works are somehow unforgettable. They exist less as objects than as memories. One remembers them as being enveloped in an actual colored atmosphere that is in reality, of course, not there.

His works do such a good job of paralleling the operation of memory that sometimes on second viewing they seem disappointing exactly as do the objects of real cherished memories. Revisited, our childhood homes always seem smaller and shabbier than we remembered because we have changed them in our minds. In a funny way Goode reminds you of Giorgio Morandi.

Earlier this year he unveiled a series of very large cobalt blue canvases at the James Corcoran Gallery. They are arguably the best work he has ever done and join Moses’ new paintings in giving straight abstract art a significant shot in the arm. Wall-size, they appear as nothing more than fields of spongy color that nonetheless make a strong impression of combined silhouettes of foliage, water reflections and dark azure sky. They carry emotional depths at once mature and throbbingly romantic. The quirkiness and Pop surrealism characteristic earlier are completely gone so the paintings feel like the expression of a guy who has outgrown youthful eccentricities and is now simply himself. It is amazing how many years it takes to become oneself and the unforced profundity that comes with it.

He seems vaguely surprised at the impression the new paintings made, even a trifle suspicious. He says he had no sense of making a breakthrough.

“I’ve always worked the same way. One thing just grows out of another. I’m working on something and it suggests another problem and that becomes the next series. It occurred to me recently that almost all my work is about looking up and down at the same time and about looking through something to something else . . . in and out.”

Past work included a series where canvases were sliced with a sharp blade or blasted with shotgun pellets. Observers found overtones of violence in them that Goode himself does not see. He was just trying to create layers of depth. He explains the new paintings--the “Water” paintings.

“I was trying to create the feeling of being submerged under water looking up through it to trees and sky--not the literal image but the literal feeling. I’ve always thought of myself as an abstract painter but not a non-objective painter. I don’t think you can just give the viewer a formal solution, you have to give him something to relate to emotionally.”

He points to some new works leaning against the wall. “These are waterfalls.”

Tall and narrow they are nothing but scrubbed surfaces in dark blues and greens that nonetheless convey the unmistakable impression of falling water.

Goode invites his visitor into living quarters off the two studio rooms. His digs combine bedroom, living room and kitchen like a spartan bachelor apartment. A urinal in the john gives the place an impersonal air. His bed remains unmade and is almost humorously reminiscent of his old drawings of beds. His images often evoke a sense of ordinary peaceful dreaming disturbed.

“Eighty-nine has been my best year. I have never really made much money from my art, far less than anyone else around. I’ve gone as long as five years without a sale.”

Money, or the lack of it, seems to haunt Goode. He was born in Oklahama City in fairly ordinary circumstances. As he describes his childhood the melancholy paintings of Edward Hopper and drift across ones mind. His folks were Catholic and married young. His dad, Bill Goode, was a display manager in a department store and also a painter of conventional portraits. Joe admired him and they often drew together but he didn’t take it seriously at the time. His mother Mary (nee Waters), ambitious and sociable, was the head salesperson in the millinery department.

Joe liked his Catholic grammar school and did pretty well, being athletic and sociable. When was 12, his parents divorced. Joe and his younger brother Dick lived with their mother. She was so busy he became something of a latchkey kid, cut classes constantly, signed his own report cards and composed his absence excuses. He claims he liked the freedom of the life but it gave him a taste for solitude.

By the time he reached high school he had become “the kind of kid mothers don’t want their daughters dating.” He was seen as a schoolyard scrapper even though most of his fights were in defense of his sickly brother. He developed into a serious poker player who spent sleepless weekends playing with the boys. Later, as a poor beginning artist in Los Angeles, he sometimes made ends meet by betting the horses. The revered artist Robert Irwin taught him to handicap.

Having finished with high school (he didn’t graduate), Goode faced the inevitable youthful crisis of deciding what to do with one’s life. His childhood friend Ed Ruscha had come out to Los Angeles to study commercial art at Chouinard Art Institute. Their buddy Jerry McMillan soon followed.

“I remember the night I decided. McMillan was home for Christmas vacation. We sat talking in my car. It got colder and the windows fogged up. When we got out, there was a foot of snow on the ground. I decided right then to go to California.”

He sold his ’55 Ford, came West with $100 and moved into a communal apartment with Ruscha and the gang. He enrolled at Chouinard and did odd jobs. He operated a multigraph and along with his buddies worked lunch hours at Cassel’s Patio, a legendary hamburger joint across from Bullock’s Wilshire.

“It was a great job. I was a waiter so I could make $30-$40 and get a free lunch to boot.”

It was 1959 and a peak moment at Chouinard. Irwin and Emerson Woelffer were on the faculty. Goode’s fellow students included Ruscha, Larry Bell, Llyn Foulkes, Stephan von Huene, Ron Miyashira and Ed Bereal--the first black artist to be taken seriously by the white gang that would become Los Angeles ruling art mafia.

Goode remembers him fondly. He had married Judy Winans, a fellow art student and she was pregnant. They were broke and the hospital threatened to refuse to deliver the baby unless money was forthcoming.

“I was so worried I just sat around fantisizing and drawing these money bags.”

Bereal dropped over and Goode explained his dilemma. Bereal asked to borrow the drawings.

“He was back in a few hours with $300. He’d sold them all in La Cienega galleries.”

His daughter Stephanie was safely delivered. Today she’s a free-lance art-performance film maker in Boston. The marriage, however, was shortly over.

“Financially they were grim times. That contributed to the divorce.”

Irwin encouraged Goode to do his own art his own way and get out of school as soon as possible, so by 1962 the artist was looking for a gallery. He made up a portfolio and was flabbergasted to be accepted by the first place he tried, the short-lived Huysman Gallery directed by Henry Hopkins.

A poster photo for an exhibition called “War Babies” caused a fatal flap for the gallery. The photograph depicted black Bereal eating watermelon, Jewish Larry Bell crunching a bagel, Asian Miyashiro with chopsticks and Catholic Goode with a mackerel. The table was draped with an American flag. At the height of the power of the John Birch society, it caused a scandal. The show went on but Huysman’s backers withdrew and that was that. All the hot young artists were joining the Ferus Gallery but Goode--showing his characteristic streak of recalcitrance--joined the nearby Rolf Nelson Gallery which also introduced Judy Chicago (nee Gerowitz) and Lloyd Hamrol. Nelson’s candle was brief if brilliant. Today he is a florist in New York.

Goode took a studio on Western near Melrose and started building some staircase sculpture. His beginner’s luck seemed to have fizzled out. His only sale had been a milk bottle painting for $300 and his new project seemed years from completion since he had to do odd jobs to live. Then an unknown new dealer in town--Nick Wilder--turned up offering a show. Goode agreed but said it might take two or three years to get ready.

“Would it help,” Wilder asked, “if I gave you $200 a month?”

At the time it seemed like a miracle as the practice of dealers advancing money to artists was virtually unknown here. The move effectively launched Goode’s full-time professional career and boosted him into the heady atmosphere of the ‘60s. There is a conservative streak in Goode--maybe a vestigial scrap of Oklahoma, maybe just temperamental caution. Whatever it is caused him to remain less crazy and less flashy than the decade permitted. He was part of the gang that broadened out beyond the Ferus group to include artists like Ron Davis and Peter Alexander--an altogether colorful bunch who stayed drunk on the decade and an influx of cash. The good times rolled but while others changed lovers as fast as their sequined bellbottoms, Goode had just two steady girls through the whole thing, Julie Wheeler and Mary Agnes Donohue.

He traveled to Europe for the first time and later had exhibitions in England, Germany and Italy. For a while he tooled around in a Mercedes but it didn’t last. Now there’s a modest Toyota parked in the concrete yard and he can hardly wait for the weekend so he can get back up to the ranch--to Natalie, the horses and a place where things grow naturally at their own pace.

“An artist like Jeff Koons may make a big flash today but what he’s doing doesn’t leave him anywhere to grow. It probably says something about me that I like Jasper Johns better than Rauschenberg. I like the art of the past, but I respect it too much to copy it. For me, the two most significant artists are Da Vinci and Duchamp. They weren’t just into themselves. Da Vinci was interested in everything. Duchamp had a perceptive vision that let him pull objects out of life and make art of them.”