Art Is Where You Throw It

Art, as everyone knows, is pretty much whatever you want it to be.

It can be red paint splashed by a monkey on a clean canvas or matchsticks built into a pyramid labeled “Nude Crossing a Bridge.”

Sly old Christo tossed a sheet over a cow pasture once and thousands of aficionados came to stare at an art form no one had thought of before. Even the cows were thrilled.

I’ve gone to shows in L.A. where art was a pile of used tires called “Sex in a Grain Field” and a circle of rocks on the floor without a name.

Think about it. Rocks, maybe a hundred of them, in a circle. Period. In the Marine Corps, we placed white rocks along pathways and in circles around latrines, but we didn’t call it art. We called it keeping busy.

“If you people want to stay alive in a war,” a gunnery sergeant yelled at us, “you’ll keep busy.”

I never understood the man’s logic, but I kept busy and stayed alive so he must have been right.

Which brings me, somewhat circuitously, to the Fish Head Lady of Malibu.

Her name is Sylvia Salazar Simpson. I call her the Fish Head Lady because one of her better known pieces of art involved salmon heads affixed to a chair frame that hung from the ceiling.

I met Sylvia through a friend who had seen an exhibit in El Centro. She’d dangled chicken feet from ropes laced with glitter and called it “Tortilla Curtain.”

Both exhibits were meant to explain that beauty can be found in ordinary objects. I’ll remember that the next time I see a chicken.

This is one artist who doesn’t live in a garret and isn’t sallow-skinned and starving. She’s a handsome woman of 52 with grand gestures and a way of sweeping from room to room like a desert breeze.

She lives in a nice house high on a hill. In the distance, one can see the ocean. Inside, one can see the glassy blue eyes of a doll poked into a rotten grapefruit. It’s the way Sylvia sees George Bush seeing the world.

In the late 1960s, as a student at the California Institute of Art, she was told to make art out of anything she wanted.

“After seven years of marriage I was familiar with food,” she said. “So it became art.”

The most obvious effort was an exhibit in San Diego. She slathered a man and a woman with peanut butter embedded with fig slices and pomegranate seeds and called it “Marriage.” Dead fish separated them.

She likes to create an environment where people can smell her art. “Smell,” she says, “fixes it in memory.”

One of those who smelled her art was her husband, a farm broker. Sylvia used to store her fish heads in the refrigerator. He objected.

“It makes the ice cubes taste like fish,” he said, “and you can’t make a martini with ice cubes that taste like fish.” God keep that man.

She calls her art viscous due to her egg experience. She came home one day and her two daughters were smashing eggs on the ground looking for baby chicks.

“I liked the viscous quality,” she says with remarkable calm. “Raw eggs evoke a different perceptual situation. When things get too stylized, I always go back to eggs.”

Then she added unnecessarily, “Not everyone likes my art. Some find it disgusting.” But she keeps busy and won’t be killed in a war.

As we walk through her house examining various paintings, Sylvia says she doesn’t know what to do with the other glassy blue doll eyes she’s saved. Two are in the dead grapefruit, but others await their place in art.

“Put them in the fish heads,” I say.

She thinks about that for a moment and says, “Fish already have eyes. Maybe I’ll put them in trees.”

Sylvia has moved lately from “installations,” using fish heads, eggs, bones, snails and whatever’s in the fridge, to photographic art.

One picture she showed me featured pomegranates, dog hair, rotting grapefruit and a woman’s behind. Nudity in any form is always a hit.

I favor photographs of little boys fishing off a bridge or sunsets over Bellflower. I do not understand the combination of pomegranates, dog hair, rotting grapefruit and a woman’s behind.

When I ask Sylvia to explain, she simply says she wants people to laugh at her art. She doesn’t want to be taken seriously.

“What’s to understand?” she says, shrugging.

Good question. I have no answer.

Sylvia isn’t famous yet. I’m going to suggest she get there by stringing a glitter-coated rope from L.A. to Long Beach. On it dangle fish heads, chicken feet, dead cats, rotten bananas and pig entrails.

We’ll call it “Nude Keeping Busy.” My gunnery sergeant would love it.