When More Really Is More

This spring, Lari Pittman, the 44-year-old artist whose brash and inimitable paintings are about to be chronicled in a mid-career survey exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, underwent extensive abdominal surgery to repair lingering damage from a near-fatal shooting 11 years ago. The operation was successful. Coming just before his museum retrospective, however, Pittman’s surgery has coincidentally created an unexpected echo of the awful event.

On July 2, 1985, an early morning intruder to the artist’s Silver Lake home pumped two bullets into his stomach, shredding intestines and other viscera in an explosion of sudden violence. Pittman nearly bled to death.

Pittman’s paintings changed dramatically after that. The LACMA survey, which begins previews on Wednesday and opens to the public next Sunday, starts with paintings made in 1982. But the show will demonstrate that in 1985, a new, progressively more rigorous pictorial organization developed in the artist’s work.

That invigorating direction has continued through an extraordinary series of pictures painted over the last 10 years. Is the shooting responsible for the momentous change?

“There are basically two ways to go,” Pittman says now of the metamorphosis that occurred in his work in the aftermath of the attack. “It either completely ruins your life, creating a spiral of self-destruction, or it’s a propellant. My psychological makeup is such that I took this stunning incident of physical violence and somehow, with Roy’s help, was able to turn a liability into an asset. That manifested itself in my work.”

“Roy” is Roy Dowell, also a highly regarded artist, whom Pittman met in 1974 while both were students at the California Institute of the Arts; they have been a couple ever since. Following a painful recovery period, Pittman balked at getting back to painting. It was Dowell who cajoled, nagged and nudged him back into the studio.

The echo of the gunfire can occasionally be seen in Pittman’s images. For example, his first mural-size painting, “An American Place” (1986-87), contains a big, seemingly abstract pink shape adjacent to a domestic picket fence, grimly painted black. The pink shape is actually a stylized silhouette of an automatic weapon.

But “An American Place” is not a veiled or hidden narrative, meant to be decoded for its autobiographical revelations. It’s overrun with popular images of growth and decay, including autumn leaves, spring buds, seedpods, eggs and phalluses, interwoven with a syncopated variety of decorative motifs; all are comprehensible without knowing about the artist’s life. The painting’s layered complexity makes room to accommodate an experience of multiple, even contradictory impulses--violence, joy, radical upheaval, rebirth, sensuality, threat, ugliness, harmony, loss.

“The shooting is not the reason my work went into high gear,” the artist explains, in his typically introspective way. “Meaning for me is created contextually, and there is no intrinsic or essential meaning to anything. The random act of physical violence heightened that [belief].”

In a convoluted period in which the biographical diversity of artists’ lives is often proposed as the central feature of art’s significance, Pittman’s work is an illuminating beacon. Art about ethnicity or race, about class, about gender or sexuality--in short, art about the shifting phantom of human identity--has been advanced by many as the crucial work for our time.

Pittman is prominent among a number of gifted artists who, in the 1980s, made a specifically gay male sensibility a conspicuous artistic ingredient. Far from the first gay men to be artists in the modern era, Nayland Blake, Ross Bleckner, Robert Gober, Jim Isermann, the late Felix Gonzalez-Torres and others took a more open path than most predecessors. Having come to maturity in decades following the Stonewall rebellion, their generational refusal to sublimate their sexuality or relegate gay interests to a subsidiary role was new.

For Pittman, however, one small problem disrupts the commonly held view of such work. “Art is not ‘about’ anything,” the artist says flatly.

Then he sighs, as if he’s as weary of the current, widely held assumption that his work is “about being gay” as he was of suppositions that his pictorial references to mortality were “about being shot.” Having been to the brink, Pittman knows better than most that paintings get trivialized when looked at as scrapbook illustrations of merely personal events.

“Art is not an illustration of a text,” he says.

*

I met Pittman in 1987, when I interviewed him for the now-defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner. Since then, we’ve become good friends. Conducting an interview today is thus a somewhat odd experience, since the formality collides with the casual chat we’re used to. Pittman is unusually articulate, though, and the occasion of the LACMA show seemed opportune for a wide-ranging look back. You don’t often get an excuse to sit down with a friend and ask him to recount, step by step, the particularities of his life.

The occasion for our first interview was a solo show at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, where “An American Place” was having its debut (it’s now in the collection of L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art). Fourteen months earlier, I had been knocked out by a group of his paintings that featured strange, biomorphic forms decorated with ghostly images describing aqueous landscapes, at once visionary and decayed. It was obvious then that Pittman’s art had made a decisive leap--even without knowing of the gruesome 1985 encounter that nearly ended his artistic career, before it had even gotten started.

Compared to a lot of current art, much about his new pictures seemed cheerfully wrong. Still unabashedly decorative, they exerted an unfashionable commitment to formal rigor. Gone were the wallpaper sheets and knickknack shelves common in earlier work; these were content to be old-fashioned paintings. Titles played up frankly sentimental ideals, long-since corrupted, of American freedom and democracy: “Plymouth Rock,” “Thanksgiving,” “The New Republic.”

Who could say which of these features ran more against the grain? Art-wise, all were supposed to be dead issues.

Well, death does have a way of sharpening life’s rhythms. I wrote at the time that Pittman’s paintings functioned like haunting memento mori--honoring mortality in an unembarrassed way, while generating unexpected varieties of visual experience. A wide spectrum of artistically illogical, previously unacceptable forms suddenly became possible to enjoy.

Pittman’s art is infused with a distinctive flavor. Traveling once in Mexico, he described to me his abiding interest in that country as a heartfelt attraction to its bittersweet culture.

Bittersweet. The word rejoices in an inherent contradiction, a polymorphousness at once sharp, acrid and sorrowful, yet fused with sugary and agreeable tastes. Pleasure made pungent with overtones of sadness.

Formally, Pittman builds that aura of coexistent contradictions from the influential precedent of German painter Sigmar Polke. His dense, transparent layers of unrelated images create a raucous visual field, in which seemingly incompatible pictorial incidents simultaneously inhabit a single moment in time and space.

Shallow patterns spread like kudzu across the surface of the mahogany panels on which he paints, leaving little breathing room. Occasionally the surface is built up thickly, with inelegant forms rendered in goopy oil paint or densely clotted glue and glitter.

Pittman’s noisy Pop imagery delights in kitschy cliches, deadened by overuse. The long list includes cheesy urban landscapes, Victorian silhouettes of men and women, Baroque curtains with tassled swags, hooting owls, crystalline snowflakes, bejeweled tiaras, computer terminals, dancing puppets and hermaphrodites, brightly colored Mastercard and Visa logos and piously praying hands.

Degradation is a principal motif in images like these. Take the praying hands, whose highly refined source in Albrecht Durer’s famous 1508 drawing has long since been degraded by endless modern reproduction as greeting cards, bookends and desktop knickknacks.

In order to flourish and prosper, our culture’s roaring engine of consumption requires continuous degradation. For how can the fires of perpetual desire, which mass consumption demands, be continually stoked? Pitiless disappointment is its fuel.

Faced with this modern dilemma for humane values and moral character, Pittman’s paintings refreshingly do without typical responses of cynicism and irony. Like the celebrated work of his friend Mike Kelley--albeit with a very different tone--Pittman’s art performs a difficult salvage operation. The paintings go way out on a limb, in a breathtaking effort to counter such common corruptions.

Sometimes the bough breaks. But that’s an occupational hazard for an artist intent on painting sincere pictures of an open-hearted world, which he does not see flourishing around him. Full-bodied experience is rescued from the relentless degradations of modern life.

His is not a mere art of social criticism, though, which has been so dully fashionable in academic circles in recent years. “Critique in that sense for me is a bore,” the artist says of theory-driven work that regards with suspicion the pleasurable uselessness of art. “To this day, making art remains absolutely about pleasure. A polemic alone cannot pull a painting through.”

Pittman’s highly decorated paintings luxuriate in ornate schemes, loosely reminiscent of 19th century Victorian culture. Suppressing that applied decoration was synonymous with the revolution of Modern art.

For all their frippery, however, his sexy pictures are both anti-Modern and anti-Victorian. They make hash of a late-19th century spectrum of middle-class values--timid respectability, prudery, bigotry--that are the foundation of so much modern social oppression.

For one: Homosexuality was invented in the Victorian era. Men have loved men and women have loved women for millennia, but the term “homosexual” was coined in 1869 by Hungarian writer Karoly Benkert. Invented to name a perceived pathology, the word didn’t enter the English vocabulary until the 1890s, when Krafft-Ebing’s “Psychopathia Sexualis” was translated from German.

Homosexuality, newly claimed as a disease, was given a visual equivalent in the highly aestheticized ornament of the Victorian age. (Witness the witty deathbed lament supposedly uttered by Oscar Wilde in 1900: “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do!”) Decadence was the mutual code word for homosexuality and for artistic decoration, and Modernism promised to sweep them both away.

The prohibition was stubborn. In 1957, the powerful critic Clement Greenberg was still complaining, “Decoration is the specter that haunts Modernist painting.” As Pittman’s happily florid art gets enshrined in LACMA’s hallowed halls this week, such archaic demonizing passes deeper into the history books.

Pittman wasn’t born into an artistic family. His father, Oscar Alexander Pittman, was an Arkansas native infused with a spirit of wanderlust. After World War II, he found himself in Colombia, working for a lumber company that exported exotic woods to the U.S. On the small, then-undeveloped coastal island of Tumaco, near the Ecuador border, he met and married Ilia Rosasco.

The lumber business temporarily brought the Pittmans to Southern California, where Lari was born. He was 5 when the family headed back to Colombia, first to Cali, then to Tumaco. And when he was 11, they returned north, settling in Whittier; he and his older brother, Oscar, were sent to parochial school in the typically American suburban community of Downey.

These repeated dislocations were coupled with a confusing childhood biculturalism. His father was fluent in Spanish and his mother spoke English, but at home he spoke English to his father and Spanish to his mother. At the American school in Cali, it was English in class and Spanish on the playground.

The contradictions multiply. His Southern father rejected his family’s Presbyterian faith in favor of atheism, yet married a Roman Catholic. Lari’s mother was a traditionally conservative Latin housewife, while her progressive husband worshiped F.D.R. Life in postwar California embodied the American Dream, but the village of Tumaco didn’t even have a school.

“Everyone is always seeing how wonderful it is,” Pittman says of growing up in multiple countries under diverse influences, “but in my case the fractionalization that occurred made it difficult for me to learn how to read.”

When the Pittmans settled in Tumaco, a tutor was hired for the neighborhood kids. For the next four years, their education was marked by individualized attention and hands-on experience.

“That was probably the beginnings of me as an artist,” Pittman remembers, citing the do-it-yourself resourcefulness required of his education. “The tutor was also a painter [of religious art].

“I remember outside the one-room school was a yard, and we all had to tend a garden and learn about horticulture. When we were laying out our gardens, the kids were bickering, and I wanted this one special place and [Prof. Benavidez] said, ‘Fine, you can have it.’ And then he made a big point that he would take the rockiest, ugliest plot for himself, to prove a point. And he did. There’s no mystery why I love to garden now.”

Or why he paints the way he does?

Pittman says, laughing, “People always ask, ‘How does a person become an artist?’ No one ever asks, with that same kind of wonder, ‘How did you become a lawyer?’ Because of course you became a lawyer because the culture says that’s important, so there’s no question. People think that becoming an artist requires this mysterious something, but I think it’s as traceable as any other profession.”

The modest Echo Park home he and Dowell share is, in that regard, an open book. Fronted by a walled garden overflowing with bougainvillea, succulents, fragrant herbs and flowers, it’s a haven. White-walled rooms provide a blankly modern background for sleek Angelo Donghia furniture (Pittman worked in the Donghia showroom for 10 years after art school), upholstered in luxurious fabrics in in-between colors (no primaries allowed).

The clapboard house is packed with a large collection of Latin American retablos and santos--religious paintings and statues of Catholic saints, mostly by self-taught artisans of the 18th and 19th centuries. These are interspersed with contemporary drawings and paintings.

A homely focal point is the living room’s plain brick fireplace. It’s adorned with the Jeffersonian slogan “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,” hand-painted in black script beneath the white mantle, itself lavishly decorated with a variety of small santos, candles, flowers and a framed drawing. Such a fireplace is a kind of secular altar, dedicated to keeping the house warm emotionally, if not physically. A theatrical staging area, it celebrates hearth-and-home.

Theatricality is a mainstay of Pittman’s art. He first began to paint by making theater sets for his high school drama club.

His simultaneous introduction to European cinema, by a progressive nun at his parochial school, was also pivotal. Pittman says that despite his bi-continental upbringing, he had always lived a conventionally sheltered life. “La Dolce Vita,” “Red Desert,” “La Strada” and other such movies showed him there was a bigger world.

“I didn’t know then that I was gay,” he explains. “I couldn’t name it, but I knew something felt different. That polymorphousness about identity was already present in European films, but you never saw it in American popular culture. I saw it in these people acting out much more polymorphous identities than we as Americans were used to.”

A desire to find a bigger world--and his own place within it--led him in 1971 to the urban campus of UCLA, to study painting. With the exception of Lee Mullican and Charles Garabedian, though, he found the faculty short on artists of cosmopolitan bent. One even consistently dismissed his paintings as “faggy.”

Disappointed, he transferred to CalArts, earning a master of fine arts degree in 1976. The new school was both challenging and encouraging. Pittman found special incentive in the Feminist Art Program, where Miriam Schapiro, Ree Morton, Elizabeth Murray and other instructors were turning established assumptions about art inside out. He soon realized that his inclination toward decoration had been derided as faggy not because it was unsuitable for serious art, but because decoration was socially considered a domestic, feminine activity--and thus demeaned.

“Overnight, what I had been doing went from faggy to fabulous,” he recalls. “And contrary to the history that’s been written about CalArts being anti-painting--not while I was there. There was no sentiment against it. The anti-painting mood came later, when CalArts went through its tawdry Marxist period.”

CalArts is also where Pittman fell in love. The 22-year relationship with Dowell that ensued has been a steadying anchor. The two young artists graduated into the deflated, moribund art scene of the late-1970s. Of necessity, they became--and remain--the most avid audience for each other’s art.

Six rather discouraging years later, he got his first solo show--a small 1982 display at the Newport Harbor Art Museum chosen by Paul Schimmel, now chief curator at MOCA and a contributor to the catalog for LACMA’s survey. Pittman has exhibited steadily ever since, in more than 80 group and solo shows in the U.S. and Europe, often at prestigious venues. He is now a tenured professor at UCLA on what has become perhaps the nation’s finest art-school faculty.

Pittman’s art may not be ironic, but one contrariety marks his successful career. The LACMA survey will show how his work gathers into its embrace different experiences marginalized in different corners of contemporary society, from popular disdain for homosexual identity to art-world disrespect for formal artistic values. These Pittman ushers out onto center stage for your viewing pleasure--and for his--and there they have been warmly received.

Pittman’s mature paintings, with their formally astute, energetically ornamented imagery of quotidian decay, cyclical regeneration and surprising new life, perform marvelous reversals. They reflect his identity of Anglo- Colombian- Italian- Catholic- Presbyterian- atheist- feminist- male- middle- class- sexual queerness--which is to say, his typically American heritage. But he is an important artist because his paintings are not just “about” that multicultural richness. Instead, they persuasively embody the pleasurable polymorphousness of authentic human experience, with its resourceful capacity for finding life within simultaneous contradictions.

*

“Lari Pittman” runs next Sunday through Sept. 8 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Tuesdays-Thursdays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Fridays, 10 a.m.-9 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Admission: $6. (213) 857-6000.