Glier’s Art Carried by Little Legs

In artist Mike Glier’s alphabet, A stands for amaryllis, and for atomic bomb and Armageddon. G is for goat, gasoline hose and gun, P for pool and pregnancy and pollution.

More than half of his 26 acrylic and charcoal drawings on fiberglass and aluminum panels at the Santa Monica Museum of Art contain a pair of legs among the multilayered images that illustrate each letter. The legs belong to his 4-year-old daughter, Lili, the inspiration for the series titled “The Alphabet of Lili.”

“The image of the very sturdy legs planted in the middle, with a lot of life things swirling around, is my wishing Lili stability--that she would have firm footing while all this stuff is going on around her,” Glier, 38, said during an interview at the museum.

“Lili has these great little legs. And they’re my mother’s legs. My mother died when I was a kid. I was little, so I remember her legs. That was my height. And I have my mother’s legs. So it was this funny little hereditary thing going from a woman through a man and back into a woman again.”

The alphabet series evolved from time spent reading to his daughter at night and teaching her letters.

“I had wanted to do something about the experience of fatherhood, and I wanted to make work out of love,” Glier said. “A lot of the first 10 years of my work was very critical and Angst- ridden, and it began to feel too easy to make that kind of work.”

“The work that Mike is known by, at least on the West Coast, was from earlier days in New York, when the imagery was more decidedly political,” said Thomas Rhoads, director of the Santa Monica Museum of Art. “I think this show is an update, and it shows his maturation not only as an artist, but as a human being.”

Accompanying the alphabet series is Glier’s beautifully flowing, large-scale wall drawing of running sheep that greets visitors as they enter the museum. He had arrived here a week before the show’s opening June 26 to create it.

“We are an alternative museum that shows contemporary art but also gives our public an insight into the creative process,” Rhoads said. “Mike is almost the perfect artist for that because he has a long history of creating these wall drawings. You never know what you’re going to get. You only know that it’s going to be quite wonderful.”

Political ideas have not fully escaped Glier’s work, not even the wall drawing, which he has titled, “Proposed Wall Decoration for Reagan’s Tomb.”

“I’m just thinking about my next installation, which I think is going to be ‘Reagan’s Tomb,’ ” he said. “I might be using this image in some form, hence the Proposed, because I’m not sure. I’d really like to ceremoniously put ‘80s greed and selfishness in the grave, and the political life that was supposed to be about good feelings and images rather than discourse, which I think was a huge disservice to the nation.

“So I was thinking of doing something that might at first seem reverential, but when you think about it, it’s sort of dark and unsettling. One of the associations with the sheep that you can’t avoid is passive followers, and being led to slaughter.

“The wall drawing fits in this show in a different way, more like lambs are traditional subject matter for kids’ stories, and they’re soft and fuzzy and cute. I threw the title in to spin it off in a different direction.”

Glier’s focus on animals and natural elements stems from his move from New York City to a farm in Upstate New York seven years ago. He and his wife, artist Jenny Holzer--who in 1990 was the first woman to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale--were vacationing near where they live now when, on a whim, they went to a real estate agent to see what was available in the area.

“It was really just for an entertaining afternoon. We had no serious ambitions,” Glier said. But they put a deposit down that day on the first piece of property they had seen.

“The next summer, we went up thinking we were just going to fix it up--it was a mess--and go back to New York in September,” he said. “And we never went back. It wasn’t so much anti-New York as ‘Oh, gee, isn’t this nice.’ ”

When Glier was living in New York, he started dreaming about gardening, even though he had not gardened before. He gardens a lot now, and his life in the country has affected his creative process.

“When I lived in the city, I would know what a picture was going to be before I got started, and I’d spend my time in the studio trying to make the picture look like my mental image,” he said. “When I moved to the country, very slowly the working process started to change. I wound up having no idea what a picture was going to become.

“I would pick something off the ground that I was interested in drawing, and start on it. The picture would then start making its own demands. The image would appear on its own, and I would be completely surprised with what would come. It happened over a course of years, but it had something to do with living in the country and being involved in life processes in a more intimate way.”

Glier developed the alphabet series in this organic way.

“I wanted the drawings to be about process, and not quite settled. I started with one image that begins with A and put it down, and then let the thing mutate and grow to become whatever it was going to become,” he said.

“I went to B, and then down the line. I was usually working on about five things at once. If I was working on E, I would make sure that D and F were on either side of it. I was trying to also be responsive to the color and the movement of the pieces next to it, so there would be some sort of flow around the room from A to Z.”

Glier and Holzer keep about 10 acres around the house for horses and his garden. Their nearest neighbor, a retired jai alai player who raises sheep, lives half a mile away.

“The only thing I really miss about the way we’re living is our community of artist friends in New York,” he said. “We were part of this group called Collaborative Projects. It was a loose organization of about 40 artists. We would put on exhibitions, do publications. We had a cable program, and generally did some guerrilla shows.

“We did something called the ‘Real Estate Show.’ All these city buildings on the Lower East Side were lying dormant when there was a great need for housing and for community centers. The city was just ignoring this area, so we broke into one of these buildings and turned it into a community center and an art show. It was open for four days before the city came out and shut it down, but it made the point.”

There were other shows, including the “Times Square Show.” The group rented four floors of an abandoned massage parlor and kept it open for about six weeks to any artist who wanted to exhibit.

Glier’s work over the past 10 years often addressed the dominant power structure.

“One of my first mature bodies of work was called ‘White Male Power’--senators, game show hosts, national monuments, popes, et cetera. It lampooned the white male power structure from within, because I’m this able-bodied, white Christian male who went to a good school and had all the advantages.

“But I always found the expectations of being an able-bodied white Christian male overwhelming and repressive, and I never particularly fit in, so I started making fun of it. And after complaining and lampooning, I decided, ‘What can I suggest as an alternative?’ So I think one of the subtexts of this show is that nurturing is actually a very satisfying possibility for men.”

Being a parent has given Glier the chance to be not just a theorist, but a hands-on caretaker for his daughter.

“My wife’s career went nuts at the same time we had the baby,” he said. “Lili was just born when Venice Biennale was announced, and Jenny had also accepted shows at the Guggenheim and the Dia Art Foundation, all at once. I was the primary parent because Jenny was so busy.

“Child rearing needs to be given more appreciation. It’s not all that much fun all the time, and you give up a lot. But what could be more important than giving a good foundation to the next generation? I think our culture needs to respect the man or the woman who is raising the kid. People don’t think it’s very interesting; they only want to hear about your careers and your achievements.

“As a man, I keep thinking I want special attention for doing this, right? I haven’t really gotten it,” he said with a laugh, “which is justified. But I still want it.”

Glier said Lili is very critical of the series.

“Basically she likes it because she knows it’s about her, so she’s very flattered,” he said. “She came into the studio once, and there was this whole long line of leg drawings. She literally paced up and down in front of them, and then turned to me very seriously and said, ‘But Daddy, this girl has a head.’ I said, ‘Well, you’re right.’ ”

Her favorites include the B picture with the baby in the bath, and the bugs.

“She liked the one with the seal, but I put skulls in it and then she didn’t like it,” Glier said.

“The Alphabet of Lili” debuted in April at The Drawing Center in New York, which had commissioned the series.

“Kids a little older than my daughter, more like 7 or 8, really responded to it,” he said. “On its simplest level, it’s a game where you go up to the picture and try to find all the things that start with the letter.

“The students there really responded to some of the tougher images like the king and the Ku Klux Klan member. A lot of inner-city kids really understood the image. It spoke to them. That was thrilling. The woman who did the education program at The Drawing Center would have them come in, look at the show, pick a letter and do their own pictures. They sent me some pictures.

“For people who have kids, it’s hard to find something to do that you all like to do.”

Glier also sees his wall drawing as “a great hook,” he said.

“When you draw on the walls, it’s very surprising. There’s this little transgression left over from childhood when you weren’t supposed to draw on the walls, and here’s somebody who’s drawing all over the walls. When it’s on the wall, it’s in your place and time, and it has an immediate visceral impact. All of that makes it entertaining. I want to grab my audience, bring them in, and then maybe suggest some subject matter they have to think about.”