Triumph of the Visual That Makes Sense : ED MOSES: A Lifelong Quest for Truth Revealed Through Art

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.

Ed Moses lives on Palms Boulevard in an anonymous blue collar residential section. His place is screened by a big stand of diseased eugenia but you can spot it by the beat-up van in the driveway and a peeling olive green studio sticking up over the hedge, barn-style.

Visitors ringing at the gate are liable to be charged by two ferocious-looking Rhodesian ridgebacks that turn out to be amiable beasts just waiting to be petted. Moses comes loping out in a Levi jacket with the sleeves ripped off, jeans and soft leather boots. He has changed remarkably little. The face is lined and leathery, beard full, slightly scraggly and sprinkled with gray, his dark hair waves thickly over a skull that slopes sharply enough to make one wonder idly if there is another piece of his head lying around somewhere.

He could be taken for a kindly Hell’s Angel or a derelict Beat Generation poet. He developed something of a biker mentality as a kid hanging out in Torrance and Compton. Later he inherited the Beats’ interest in Oriental philosophy and is a dedicated student of Buddhism. Some of his friends refer to him affectionately as “Crazy Old Ed Moses” but it’s easy to see why he has had no trouble maintaining a string of attractive young girl friends since separating from his wife in 1975. He’s been between romances for awhile now.

“The last one,” he says solemnly, “turned out to be even more neurotic than I am.”

Moses’ most recent exhibition of 12 paintings at the L.A. Louver Gallery virtually sold out at $40,000 apiece. Moses’ share must have been close to a quarter-million. Yet he claims to own nothing but his house and has neither insurance nor savings.

“Sometimes I’ll get turned on by a fancy car like a BMW and just buy it on the spot but it’s like some sexual infatuation. The minute I get the thing home I lose interest and go back to my old van. The BMW just sits in the driveway or I give it to one of my two sons.”

Moses will not say what happens to the rest of the money but in the Venice art village his generosity to friends and needy artists is legendary. In an overheated art scene where name artists commonly have incomes in six figures, Moses can still lay authentic claim to monk-like dedication to art for its own sake.

“You take Ed Ruscha. He’s always been a chic guy and women adore him. You know lately he’s been doing ads for men’s fashions. He’s going to be the next superstar and he’ll just take it in stride because that kind of thing has always been part of his aesthetic. For a painter of my ilk there’ll just never be a moment when that will happen.”

He prattles endlessly about fellow artists.

“Donald Doe just about rotted out his stomach boozing but now he’s OK. You know that guy really doesn’t care about anything but art. You give him his materials and his jazz records and he’d be happy living in an outhouse.”

Moses suddenly remembers he’s being interviewed. “Don’t quote me on that stuff, OK? I don’t want to get into a gossip mode here.”

He is more forthcoming in his general opinion of current art.

“It talks about our values and culture and gets called art when it’s nothing but a corrupted career product. If that’s art then there’s art and there’s magic .

Simply put, the most surprising thing about Moses’ new art is its looseness. He has been an acknowledged master for three decades. Back in the ‘60s, as a member of the fabled Ferus Gallery, Moses was regarded as something of a character. Ubiquitous at the endless parties of that rather freakish decade, he had only four exhibitions in 10 years. People assumed he worked very little.

Well, good old Ed. He was real preoccupied. In 1959, he married Avilda Peters whom he describes as “a real Southern lady from Duke University. She had a poetic nature. She was wiser than I and always a mystery to me.”

They spent a year each in New York and San Francisco. In 1963 they went to Europe. Moses was fascinated by the old art--especially Cimabue and Goya’s black paintings.

“It was my madness caused our separation. Moodiness is an affliction of people like me who wonder what their participation is on planet Earth. My mother died the same year and it was a double whammy for me.”

In 1976 the Fellows of Contemporary Art presented a survey of his drawings at UCLA that proved Moses had been making art the whole time. In the ‘70s he also launched a series of unframed paintings that were taut grids of colored lines on canvas with liquid resin poured on their backs, partly inspired by Navajo blankets, which Moses discovered through his artist friend Tony Berlant.

Drawings and subsequent paintings established Moses’ artistic image as concerned exclusively with tight dynamic patterns of oblique interlaced strokes. In fact he did numerous other things including carpentry, renovating houses with architect Frank Gehry at least in part because he needed the money. Ever the artist, however, Moses translated this three-dimensional experience into his art. Lines in his resin painting were made by snapping a string soaked in paint exactly as a carpenter makes a chalk line. He also translated his three-dimensional building stint into environmental artistic experiments with space and light. These were widely seen by his peers in a studio he maintained on the Venice Boardwalk but never shown publicly. They formed a largely unacknowledged contribution to the California Light and Space art most closely associated with Doug Wheeler, Robert Irwin and James Turrell. The years went by. Moses made a series of solid-color canvases that laid a critical egg but were important for him.

“I heard a lecture by Frank Stella where he said he started painting by asking himself real basic questions like; ‘How big do I want it?’ ‘What color?’ I was just asking myself those same questions in the solid paintings.”

He was represented in a Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition by stunning black and red criss-cross paintings that were the apogee of his controlled manner. Suddenly, last year Moses was up to something radically new for him, paintings of wild, apparently random strokes that look like the work of a Zen ink splash artist thinking about Jackson Pollock. Although apparently spontaneous the strokes arrange themselves structurally so that they seem to move into deep space and sometimes even to float in front of the canvas.

The artist says he vacillates between formalist concerns that he connects to Mondrian or Wittgenstein and emotional feeling he links to Rembrandt or Pollock.

“The collision between modes ignites other possibilities.”

Moses walks his visitor to a concrete pad behind the studio. He works there Pollock-fashion on canvases spread on the ground, sometimes leaping out of bed in the middle of the night in response to a sudden inspiration. He paints with both hands, having developed ambidexterity years back when he had to finish a show in spite of a broken right paw.

“I like painting with the left one because I have less control and that increases the chances of something unexpected happening.”

Characteristically his paintings are mixtures of blacks, whites and tans with occasional eruptions of color. His strokes are blistered and crackled because he combines acrylic and oil paints that repel one another chemically.

“Doing that stuff gives me one less factor of control. I don’t want to be in control, I want to be in tune.” he smiles.

Moses’ aesthetic grows partly out of his understanding of Buddhism and partly from a self-image as an alien to this culture.

He sees Buddhism as nothing more than an attempt to live purely in the Now without either memory of the past or hope for the future.

He recalls a time when his sons were infants.

“They got food poisoning. It really looked like they were dying. I was distraught. Then the doctor said, ‘You’re young, you can have more.’ I was ready to kill him. A long time later what he was trying to say sunk in. It’s not the individual thing that counts, it’s the source and the search. I used to work on one drawing or painting at a time. Now I do many at once. You discover faster that way.

“As a kid I was a displaced person. Nobody thought like I did. I couldn’t read until I was 14. I flunked the IQ test. I was a ‘moron’ with an IQ of about 75. I flunked all these classes but knew I wasn’t stupid.”

Edward Crosby Moses’ vitae says he was born in Long Beach in April 9, 1926 under the adventurous sign of Aries. According to family lore, he was actually born on a steamer bringing his mother, Oliva Branco, from her little village near Hilo, Hawaii. She was from a Portuguese family but since Portuguese were low on the social totem pole she palmed herself off as Spanish. His father, Alphonsus Lemuel Moses, was an English teacher from Yarmouth, Nova Scotia who had a passion for Joseph Conrad and an entrepreneurial urge.

In his late 20s, Moses pere decamped for the Sandwich Islands where he met and married 17-year-old Oliva. Alphonsus established a series of dry goods stores but finally went broke trying to help the natives. He went to Long Beach to import Kona coffee. Troubled times ensued. When the dust settled, Oliva was divorced and living in Long Beach with 2-year-old Ed.

He describes her as “full of beans,” a sharp, attractive Long Beach Flapper who sold clothes in department stores, frequented offshore gambling boats and became embroiled in Democratic politics. She dated a USC economics professor and Moses remembers endless discussions of Roosevelt and Hoover.

He became a “contentious anarchist kid” who rebelled at every turn and focused on the visual world. He loved comics--especially Smoky Stover and the Katzenjammer Kids. Since he couldn’t read them he made up his own stories. In grammar school he was a regular visitor to the principal’s office.

He didn’t see his father again until age 14.

“He was this little-bitty guy with a chest like a sumo wrestler on top of these bandy legs. Looked like Winston Churchill. I was this rebellious, scruffy kid who couldn’t read. We were devastated by each other.”

Either by coincidence or psychological shock, Ed could suddenly read. He enrolled at Long Beach Poly High School where he fought a lot. “I was mad at my size. I had stayed little physically so I got my ass kicked a lot.”

Ed only lasted three semesters in high school. World War II erupted. At 16 he got a growth spurt and the next year joined the Navy and became a surgical technician in the Pacific--part of a team trained to follow invading forces onto beaches and jungles to treat the wounded.

“Things that happened that would have horrific connections for others were a spectacular adventure for me. I responded well in hairy situations and surprised myself that I didn’t freak out when I was faced with having to care for mutilated people.

“I don’t want to talk about this too much. It’s too easy to fall into hero-bull fantasies. Let’s just say I learned that in situations like that you either find out you have good instincts or bad instincts. There’s no time for strategy. It’s all instinct.

“What is a painter if he’s not a professional into it for career or the money? Originally artists were tribal guys who didn’t hunt. They made their masks and rattles and costumes and put them all together to do rituals about death, birth and terror. Terror is the most haunting thing.

“Paranoia goes with the territory. If you develop the sensitivity it takes to be an artist you don’t just respond to the good stuff, you get it all. I get so paranoid I want to go sleep in a tree.”

Back from the wars, Moses enrolled in Long Beach City College where he studied premed, psychology and philosophy. “My brain finally just kicked into gear.”

Instead, he wound up at UCLA studying art to the disappointment of both parents. He cordially detested UCLA but kept drifting back after leaving in disgust. At the University of Oregon he hashed in a sorority and haunted a coffee house called The Duck where he soaked up girls, wine, Satie and Picasso. Back to UCLA. Off to Monterey. Back to UCLA. Off to Las Vegas with a particularly hip girl where he wound up as a lifeguard at the Flamingo Hotel and earned a fortune for giving swimming lessons: $20.

These were the searching years. He tried everything to earn a living but he hated teaching and was rotten at mechanical drafting. Ed Moses had no choice but to do the impossible and become an artist.

In a way the rest is history.

He met painter Craig Kaufman at UCLA. Kaufman, generally acknowledged as the most artistically sophisticated of the budding artistic generation, introduced Moses to Abstract Expressionism and joined him as a general trouble-maker in the department. Both met the fabled curator Walter Hopps and participated in an exhibition at the merry-go-round on Santa Monica Pier that included Bay Area artists like Richard Diebenkorn and Clyfford Still.

Moses talks of a distinct and often overlooked connection between his generation of L.A. artists and the San Francisco Beats. While he is quick to point out that he did not wear the Beats’ “weird clothes,” he did rub elbows with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Michael McClure through Wallace Berman, an L.A. artist dedicated to poetry. In many ways Moses’ recent art carrys the northern spirit.

He talks of faded names like the Syndell Gallery in Brentwood, the first Ferus Gallery behind the studio of folk painter Streeter Blair. His first show at the Ferus in 1958 was also his master’s degree graduate exhibition.

He recalls the ‘60s when the scene jelled as a time of “real aggressive competitiveness. Everybody was into one-upmanship. We all hung out and talked painting or women. It was a big stimulator. We’d meet at different studios with everybody striving for the better insight.

“I’d see some great Billy Bengston’s at his place and think, ‘I’ll cut his ass.’ but it all happened in a basic atmosphere of mutual respect.

“Nobody had any money except Craig, who had this little trust fund. It was us against the world. We were the cool ones with a special connection to the truth.”

Although the Ferus was founded by Ed Kienholz and Walter Hopps, “Bengston made the rules for the gallery. He had big opinions and a cutting wit. It was just easier to go along with him. He brought in Kenny Price, Bob Irwin and maybe John Altoon. The whole group resisted showing Diebenkorn. He was painting the figure then and we found that inaccurate.

“Everybody resisted later when Hopps and Irving Blum (a later gallery director) brought in Ruscha. For a year everybody shunned him and called him ‘The Water Boy.’ ”

Bengston and Larry Bell, stylish and personable, formed the public image of the Ferus and of West Coast art as slick, finish-festish hedonism but Moses points to other sensibilities in the gallery.

“Price was the most genuine guy around. He just loved the magic of the enterprise. There are two kinds of artist-magicians. One does sleight of hand like a stage magician. The other is a magic-man like a tribal shaman.

“There are princes and monks. Robert Graham is a prince and he lives like one, which he deserves. Everything in his life is directed to work, even women. He’s the hardest worker in L.A. I’m a monk but we talk together a lot.”

“My only connection to planet Earth is this formless quest. There’s no genetic code for that in this culture. To find the connection you have to go back to the ancient and the prehistoric. I used to ask myself, ‘What are all these aliens doing on the planet?’ until I realized the alien is me.

“Sometimes I have this fantasy of owning a big old craftsman house where a Portuguese woman is always cooking and all my friends drop in to eat and talk. I have two or three women who come and go.”

He chuckles, “The feminists are going to hate me for that but frankly I think they’d all like to have two or three guys coming and going. In the end, I just stay alone and live the way I want.”

The walls of the studio are bare. Dozens of big paintings stand in racks. Moses hauls out examples from several series. He wishes he didn’t have to put them on stretcher bars but he does to satisfy convention. He would prefer to show them one at a time as objects of meditation.

But the groups are fascinating. Each is distinct as if a fleeting mood had been captured on the wing--a moment in time compressed and sustained over hours. Facets of Moses that flash through his conversation come out in the work. Here comes a group that is at once the spawn of a self-elected crackpot and and the creation of an intense intelligence that keeps art history at its fingertips. Sometimes he goes into orbit with slashing works like a philosophical samurai in the firmament describing new groups of stars with the tip of his sword.

Moses makes sketches and reworks compositions but basically, as far as he is concerned, he is just letting it all hang out, acting as a conduit for work that just happens. If most of us tried it the results would be a messy doodle. How come Moses’ mess comes out art?

“I guess you just have to go through the wrestling match of 30 years. If you are a genius you can do it at once. I’m just a fool so I have to go through it. . . . “