COVER STORY : An Artist and His Roots : Bruce Nauman has always had a talent for commanding attention between objects and the audience. Here, a critic and early colleague celebrates Nauman's human side as MOCA presents a new retrospective.

By PETER PLAGENS

July 17, 1994 12 AM PT

From 1972 until it gradually pooped out sometime in ’78 or ‘79, there was a standing weekly artists’ basketball game. We’d meet every Sunday at 10 a.m. on the Santa Monica High School outdoor courts, 4th Street and Pico. We’d play for about two hours, under the blistering sun, or through puddles left by Saturday night’s rain.

Some of the guys were Westside boys: Bob Smith, Jud Fine, occasionally Doug Wheeler and very occasionally Bill Wegman. (Maybe it was just once: When one of Wegman’s Weimaraners tried to join him on court during a fast break, causing a spill worthy of the Tour de France, Wheeler screamed that if Wegman’s dog ever came back, his German shepherd would eat it.) And some of the participants came all the way from Pasadena: Ron Linden (who’d scoop me up on the way, at the Ventura Freeway and Laurel Canyon), Merwin Belin, Jay Willis, Richard Jackson and, usually, this one other guy.

He wore long pants more often than shorts, sometimes played in work shoes rather than sneakers, favored being a “skin” instead of a “shirt” and had a good build for the sport--a little over 6 feet tall, thin, with wide, coat-hanger shoulders from which his sinewy arms appeared to hang straight down. He also seemed to have that snaky extra vertebra at hip level that competitive swimmers often possess.

The book on Bruce Nauman, conceptual artist and weekend forward, was that he couldn’t go to his left, didn’t penetrate much, had a soft touch from the baseline, didn’t mind the dirty work of rebounding but could get frustrated if closely guarded. (Sometimes I did that, trying to body him out of shooting range with my big ass.) Bruce was a pretty dependable shower-upper, but as the ‘70s gradually slouched toward the ‘80s, this question was heard more and more on Sunday morning: “Where’s Nauman?” And the answer would come back: “Oh, Bruce? He’s in Europe.”

More than a decade before Nauman’s avocational stint as the Happy Hairston of the SaMoHi asphalt, New York painter Frank Owen met Nauman in grad school at UC Davis. As Owen remembers it, Nauman didn’t hang out much, because he’d arrived from Wisconsin already married to his first wife, Judy. (Later she changed her name to Justine Time.) He hadn’t quite given up painting, but he’d already started to make his characteristic odd objects and manifest his laconic, Duchampian personality.

“Bruce wasn’t a wise-ass,” Owen recalls, “but he wasn’t afraid to take charge of a situation and put his stamp on it. Like coming into a crit before everybody else arrived, and dumping a latex sculpture on the floor, then not showing up for the crit. When everybody else came, there was the ominous object on the floor, and people were left asking, ‘Why isn’t the guy here to explain himself?’ The object was all the more ominous for that. Bruce had a talent for figuring out the power equation between objects and the audience.”

Nauman obtained his master of fine arts degree in 1966 and went to San Francisco. He taught at the Art Institute, got a little studio in the Mission District and made art out of what Owen calls “studio messes.” Then Nauman moved down to Pasadena in ‘69, because he could move in with his grad-school buddy Richard Jackson, who’d rented Walter Hopps’ big, old wooden house on North Orange Grove Boulevard.

In those days, Pasadena was the local art world’s second city within the national art world’s second city. Venice was the headquarters of the recently discovered (by the art magazines) “L.A. Look” of Billy Al Bengston, Larry Bell, Craig Kauffman, DeWaine Valentine, et al. But it had become too expensive for many artists. Seekers of big, funky studio spaces at cheap rents looked elsewhere. They often landed in the Temple Street quarter near Beaudry, or Ed Ruscha’s Baby Jane section of Hollywood, or Pasadena.

From 1970 to ‘78, painter Walter Gabrielson and I split a 3,500-square-foot loft, at the corner of Fair Oaks Avenue and Union Street in the Old Town section of Pasadena, as a day studio. I talked on the phone a couple of weeks ago to Gabrielson in his Santa Barbara storefront atelier and asked him to jog my memory. After furnishing his obligatory philosophical nugget (“It’s hotter ‘n sin up here, and sin gets mighty hot”), Gabrielson complied.

“Where could we go?” he said. “Downtown wasn’t yet on the art map, and the Valley was too far from anything that counted. Pasadena was a nice place, with an interesting circle of decay in the middle. Once a year, you’d have that grotesquerie, the Rose Parade, when all of the wealth of Pasadena would rear its head. And then it’d be gone. The new Pasadena Museum had opened about the time we moved there, and I was surprised at the number of artists who were working around us: Don Sorenson, Shiro Ikegawa, Ben Sakoguchi, Doug Bond, Hap Tivey, Karen Carson, Peter Lodato, Scott Greiger, Helen Pashgian, Denise Gale, Nauman and even Charles White in his weird studio at the Green Hotel. For a while, it was cookin’.”

Nauman had the top floor in a nondescript two-story building a few doors west of Walter and me on Union. (I have a slide somewhere of Nauman leaning out his window taking a picture of me as I was taking a picture of his building.) It contained a desk and a beat-up office chair, a 6-foot stack of old L.A. Times and a lot of empty deli cups. In all the time I knew Nauman in Pasadena, I ventured up there maybe only a couple of times. That wasn’t because (I’m sure) I wrote a negative piece in Artforum on his (I thought) premature retrospective at the L.A. County Museum of Art in 1972 and didn’t want to face his reaction. It was because I was afraid he’d be working on something totally incomprehensible (what, I don’t know--perhaps his name enlarged 100 times, or a blue light corridor) that would make me want to give up abstract painting.

Owen says Nauman once told him that an art idea took almost two weeks of pacing, reading mysteries and boring himself to death. But there was always the chance that real life might interfere. If the two weeks were interrupted, Nauman said, he’d have to start all over.

The biggest change Pasadena wrought on Nauman was his switch from wingtips to the cowboy boots he bought out at Nudie’s in the Valley. “The major conversational topics between us in the 1970s,” Owen says, laughing, “were Paul Bond boots and the relative merits of rhino over elephant. Maybe now if I could get rid of my sneakers and get some wingtips, I could become a rich investment banker.” Whether the wardrobe had anything to do with it or not, Nauman became the neighborhood famous artist. One day I’d see him on Union Street, in his assumed uniform of grubby jeans and white T-shirt, and the next I’d run into him at the airport--me catching a PSA flight for some $300 lecture gig, and Bruce in a 5X felt cowboy hat, just back from a Kunsthalle show in Italy or Germany.

But, Gabrielson says, “I never saw any sign of Bruce wearing his fame. He was very good at not letting you know how good he was. He didn’t have a need to show you that he had a personality that was hip and cool. A lot of artists wear their careers on their sleeves. But Bruce didn’t waste his material on small talk.”

Owen, whose close friendship with Nauman all through the ‘70s survived their being on opposite coasts, concurs as to Nauman’s genuineness: “Every time Bruce came to New York, he’d bring these novel house gifts. For instance, one day in July, 1968, we spent a whole day trying to dam a rivulet up at my place in the country. Afterwards, we spent a couple of hours trying to skip unskippable rocks across a pond. A few years later, Bruce trudged up five flights of stairs to our loft with 40 pounds of perfect Stanislaus River skipping rocks that he’d bagged up and put in the overhead compartment on the plane.”

Consider the difference between Owen’s anecdote, and something that Billy Al Bengston said to me during roughly the same time. I was on my way into Riko Mizuno’s gallery on La Cienega Boulevard. The gallery was in the rear, connected to the street by a narrow driveway, filled to near capacity, in this instance, by Bengston’s big, shiny, bronze Cadillac. As I tried to wedge between it and an exterior gallery wall, Bengston emerged from the gallery. Attempting to make a joke, or something, I nodded at the car and said to Billy, “Sure do keep it up nice.” Bengston answered, “They have men who do that sort of thing.”

The story illustrates not just the difference between Nauman, the democratic Duchampian who became a favorite of European collectors with titles like Count (Panza), and Bengston, the automotive aristocrat whose reputation remained, in the end, firmly local. It also delineates the difference between the two major L.A. artistic sensibilities.

One (the “L.A. Look”) was on the wane--at least as far as techno-crafted art objects were concerned--by the mid-’70s. The other (Nauman’s ur-grunge) was, to borrow the title of one of his early works, “Waxing Hot.” The fading Venice sensibility was all about stylistic consistency, product polish, professional salesmanship (on the part of the artists, not just their dealers) and a quasi-mystical regional pride (artists turning their backs on that all Euro-New York modernist landfill and gazing out instead into the Pacific Rim’s tequila sunsets). Nauman’s take was just the opposite; deliberate inconsistency, avoiding cocktail parties and letting Konrad Fischer or Leo Castelli worry about selling art, and happily rummaging through modernism as if it were a flea market.

It would be convenient to be able to extend the point, and say that Nauman’s sensibility (which, blended with Andy Warhol’s and Joseph Beuys’, has carried the day in the art world during the past 20 years) represented Pasadena as a whole. But, truth be told, there was probably a lot more Venice-aping in the rickety lofts of Crown City than Nauman-imitating. But indirectly, Bruce did give Walter and me spiritual sustenance in our internal battle with the prevailing dichotomous distinction of art world legitimacy, that between “real” artists and “teaching” artists.

From the mid-’60s to the mid-’70s, teaching jobs were easier to come by than sales. Demographics, you-gotta-have-art liberalism and the proliferation of state college art departments were on the side of the young artist who wanted the security of a teaching job. Consequently, there seemed to be more artists of that bent than ambitious tyros who wanted the fleeting glamour of an affiliation with a hot gallery. “Real” artists--while they might have had what Owen calls a “scut” job (art hauling, drywalling, etc.), or might have taken a visiting artist’s gig for an infrequent semester at most--lived mostly or entirely from selling their work. “Real” artists lived mostly in Venice, and aspiring “real” artists tried to come up with the scratch to move to Venice to be around them.

Walter and I, however, were teaching artists, at Cal State Northridge. Often, talking to some silk-shirt, suede-jacket Venetian at one opening or another, we’d get hit with, “Oh, that’s right. You teach, don’t you?”

Although Walter and I (and Karen Carson, who shared a Northridge office with us) were pretty good teachers, we also had enough art world ambition to know that the teaching job could suck us dry. Inquiring young minds wanted blood, and administrative old minds wanted lesson-plan automatons. We fought like hell to keep the system from bogging us down. We did defiant little things like labeling every drawer of our file cabinets “Job Security,” and telling students sardonically that letters of recommendation to grad schools had to be purchased from a catalogue of standard models. We knew that the only way for our artistic spirits to survive was, as Gabrielson puts it, “to teach yourself.”

In that respect, Nauman was a low-frequency inspiration, a constant buzz in Pasadena that reminded us that an artist could not only pry himself free from teaching but actually prosper, worldwide, by being himself as much as it was humanly possible.

Gabrielson remembers the role model: “Nauman was that weird thing, a humanist artist and a formalist at the same time. He made art jokes that didn’t get by on just being funny, which is what too many artists do today--they have only the gag, and that’s it. Nauman figured it out early, nailed it down and got on with it. Very few people have that, and that’s the whole game; finding out who you are, what part of yourself you can make art out of, and doing it with confidence.”

A few years ago, Nauman had what seemed like nine simultaneous shows in New York, a handful of them downtown. I told Bruce that there should have been a banner across West Broadway proclaiming “Bruce Nauman Days in SoHo.”

I went to the opening of one of those shows, at 65 Thompson Street, with Merwin Belin, who was visiting from Washington, D.C., where his version of a “scut” job had taken him. The place was packed to the rafters with stubbled gentlemen with moussed ponytails and Armani suits, willowy blond ladies with Italian accents and famous artists of all stripes. (Everybody comes out for Nauman.) “Bruce is at Leo’s. He’ll be here in about 20 minutes. Bruce’ll be here in five.” Well, when Nauman walked in, he immediately spotted Merwin, an old basketball buddy and conceptual artist whose career hasn’t yet propelled him beyond the American Gallery at Al’s Bar in downtown L.A. Hovering suits and blondes be damned; Bruce spent the first 20 minutes of his opening talking to Merwin.

Owen says incidents like that aren’t charity on Nauman’s part. “Bruce knows Merwin,” he says. “Bruce likes Merwin. Bruce is comfortable with Merwin. He’s kept things that way, so he can be just who he is, so he can be clear about that, and clear about making art.” Right, but I’ll bet he still can’t go to his left.

* “Bruce Nauman” opens today and runs through Sept. 25 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., (213) 621-6222). Tuesdays to Sundays, 11 a.m.- 5 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Admission is $6, free on Thursdays after 5 p.m. The show was organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in association with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

The Cast of Characters

American Gallery: a funky downtown L.A. gallery

Merwin Belin: Pasadena humorous conceptual artist in the ‘70s-’80s

Billy Al Bengston: a kingpin of L.A. art in the ‘60s

Doug Bond: photo-realist painter

Karen Carson: painter

Leo Castelli: preeminent New York art dealer

Jud Fine: sculptor

Konrad Fischer: German art dealer

Walter Gabrielson: painter, Plagen’s Pasadena loftmate in the ‘70s

Denise Gale: abstract painter

Scott Greiger: conceptual artist-painter