New Dealing : Run a Gallery for $250 a Month? Randall Scott Tells How

Showing and selling art by offbeat younger artists has become a guerrilla operation in parts of Los Angeles, thanks to the sharp eyes and innovative methods of a few maverick dealers. Cheaply run short-term commercial galleries have sprung up in unleased offices, private homes and even in shopping-mall store windows.

Randall Scott, a 29-year-old Huntington Beach native who opened and ran Randall Scott/TBA Gallery in a first-floor commercial space in Los Angeles last year, offered a survey of the 1992 crop of here-today-gone-tomorrow galleries at a Laguna Art Museum lecture on Thursday.

Scott, who operated for six months in rent-free space with only a desk, a phone, clamp-on lights and files of artists’ slides, says he kept the gallery’s overhead down to $250 a month, contrasted with the thousands of dollars a traditional commercial gallery would have spent. But then, he got by without a fax machine, computer or security system, which “would have cost $5,000 for a five-year lease.”

“We go free and they struggle day to day,” Scott remarked cheerfully. “It gives us the opportunity to show whatever we want to show.”

Scott sweet-talked the building’s owners into letting him occupy the office space by offering to paint the walls and keep the area clean. In addition, the gallery would provide an amenity to office workers and increase foot traffic to the site.

In his two-page business plan, he also touts media coverage of the shows (“which add free advertisement for the building”) and “the satisfaction of helping a contemporary arts program continue to build and grow.”

The depressed economy has led to a spate of more conservative gallery exhibitions, he said. “Collectors are not buying like they used to, so the (dealers) are scheduling more commercial works” by better-known artists, he said. “That doesn’t give younger artists space to exhibit.”

At TBA (which stands for To Be Announced), Scott represented more than 150 artists working in diverse media--”almost everybody in L.A. who comes in and shows slides to me,” he deadpanned.

Actually, the artists he and fellow nomad gallery owners favor are members of a new generation that “nobody knows quite how to label,” he said. They are postmodern in their interest in language theory, “but they use it in a way that is very aesthetic.”

These young artists are demonstrating a new interest in the look and feel of a work of art, whether they work with paint or photographic emulsion, or devise eccentric alterations to mass-produced objects. Scott illustrated his lecture with slides of works by several of these artists.

Eo Harper makes unnerving works that combine animal body parts such as pig snouts with photos of human body parts. Kathleen Johnson’s white wooden boxes are filled with sculpted pastries and candies. Jack Richardson reworks upholstered furniture into odd new configurations. Michael Arata adds a row of teats under the seat of an otherwise unexceptional piano bench.

Trudie Reiss’s paintings follow the adventures of a cartoonlike colony of black dots. James Higgenson makes serene abstract paintings with dye and jets of water issuing from his garden hose. Laura Precious fills rows of Mason jars with photographs of babies. Kevin Appel fills canvases with disjointed snatches of imagery. Tricia Todd uses an obscure process to make egg-shaped photos on which she superimposes words in vinyl lettering.

In contrast to the ‘70s notion of “alternative” spaces--i.e., nonprofit entities supported by grants--Scott said the new commercial galleries tend to be “alternative” mostly in terms of their untraditional places. Otherwise, they generally keep regular (if somewhat limited) hours and cultivate collectors as diligently as any gallery that stays in business by making sales.

Works at TBA were priced from $100 to $25,000, but most were pegged around $1,000. Scott said his gallery would take the standard 50% cut of sales, although he would make “adjustments” when artists spent a lot of their own money putting together an exhibit.

He said he believes the nomad galleries help foster a type of support system and sense of community that are generally lacking in Los Angeles because these dealers and artists make a point of seeing one another’s shows.

After he provided work by Doris Jew and Jody Zeller to the Laguna Beach museum for “New Evidence”--an exhibit (through Jan. 17) of unconventional photographic works by up-and-coming artists--the two women took him out to dinner.

Scott, a photographer, also mentioned several other nomadic, artist-created galleries, some of which are run as nonprofits, in the Los Angeles area:

* TRI, established last spring by Rory Devine in his home (1140 S. Hayworth Ave. in Los Angeles) generally shows one work by each of three artists. But for “The Laura Show” last fall, Devine rounded up dissimilar conceptual pieces by six artists named Laura.

* Guest House--a gallery organized by Russell Crotty and Laura Greunther in his spare bedroom--suspended operations after 12 shows. Scott said the strain of having viewers constantly underfoot prompted Crotty to take a break.

* Leonard Bravo, Robert Gunderman and Stephen Hartzog opened Food House earlier this year in a huge unused food production warehouse (2220 Colorado Blvd., Building 4, Santa Monica).

* Charles LaBelle’s “Nomadic Sites” have been exactly that--a yearlong series of shows curated by different artists in sites ranging from an office building to the Hollywood branch of the Los Angeles Public Library.

* Home site, organized as a roving series of storefront mall exhibits serving as a link between established artists and members of the community. Small works by the artists and knickknacks lent by the ordinary people were combined into tableaux shown for several weeks in places as disparate as the Sacred Grounds Coffee House in San Pedro and the Westside Pavilion shopping mall in West Los Angeles.

Pending the reopening of TBA next year at a new place he won’t disclose, Scott works out of his L.A. home, concocting such projects as “Spin” (which he describes as “highly political art and performance work” at a 24-hour Hollywood coin laundry) and “One Night Stands,” in which artists will devise hotel-suite installations that will remain on view for a 24-hour period.