‘Slipperiness’ of Reality
In the early 1960s, Lewis Baltz was a precocious teenager who detested the genteel conservatism of his Newport Beach family. He cut school to talk about art with a photographer who ran a camera shop.
Fred Tomaselli was a happy kid in Santa Ana who loved to draw and to visit Disneyland, where he could wander from one perfectly-thought-out unreal world to another in a few minutes.
Today, Baltz is an internationally renowned photographer living in Paris, and Tomaselli is a widely praised painter living in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Different as they are--in temperament and artistic styles--both found the seeds of their art in suburban Orange County. In the raw, new communities of the 1950s and 1960s, they watched open fields and orange groves yield to anonymous rows of tract houses, witnessing firsthand the tension between nature and development.
These artists learned to live with uncertainty and change, which would become key themes in contemporary art. And they managed--consciously or not--to find what they needed to nurture their abilities, whether that was a special mentor or total immersion in the trippy world of pop culture.
Orange County’s mix of pop culture, conservatism and social upheaval ultimately became a lodestone for original work by artists in many mediums. In a three-part series beginning today, we explore how growing up in the suburbs affected the artistic lives of six visual artists and performers.
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Lewis Baltz’s family built one of the first homes on Pacific Coast Highway in Corona del Mar when his parents moved from Chicago in the early 1940s, a few years before he was born.
“You can imagine what [the town] looked like,” he said in an interview. “Bean fields, a couple of restaurants, a couple of gas stations, a grocery and a mortuary. Cradle to grave.”
That last part struck close to home, since Baltz’s parents ran the mortuary. His ailing father, who would die at 46 of cirrhosis of the liver, was deputy coroner for Newport Beach.
“It was impressed on me that I had to behave with more dignity because my family was in a so-called dignified profession,” he said.
Baltz remembers people in his community as being “paranoid as hell. . . . Everybody I knew were supporters of almost any loony right-wing agenda that some crypto-fascist would present. Ever since I was old enough to be preached to, I was preached to about politics.”
For a man whose own politics are very different, in retrospect, Baltz said, “It made me aware that was an important element in life.”
On the threshold of adolescence, Baltz discovered two other important things: photography and the cultural life of Laguna Beach, where, he said, “independent thinking wasn’t penalized to the extent it was in Newport.”
The town had a small group of sympatico abstract artists, a coffee shop and the James Dilley Bookstore--which stocked books on existential philosophy and beat poetry published by City Lights in San Francisco. It also had a camera store run by landscape photographer William Current, who had been a protege of William Outerbridge, an internationally noted photographer who experimented with new color processes.
“Current became a sort of father figure to me,” Baltz said. “He was completely different from the kind of people I knew. . . . He never taught me to do any technical things, but I would bring [my photographs] to him, and he’d say, ‘Change this. Change that.’
“I would say, ‘What’s wrong with the composition?’ And he’d give me a book on [early 20th century abstract artist Wassily] Kandinsky.”
By age 15 or so, Baltz was cutting school to work at the store and talk to Current.
“It was a real education, one that didn’t exist in the schools,” Baltz said of his informal apprenticeship. “You’d take art courses at Newport Harbor High School, and people would teach you to draw and do watercolor. They weren’t talking about the history of art. They weren’t talking about ideas.
“I didn’t like to draw. I wasn’t good at it. [But] I wanted to be an artist because it seemed to me, [even] at a young age, to be the most autonomous thing a person could be. . . . Photography had everything to do with being an artist except that it wasn’t handmade.”
After high school--which he remembers as “the worst regimentation, the biggest bloody waste of time”--Baltz decamped to Big Sur.
A decade later, he revisited Orange County to photograph the bland, unrevealing facades of the new industrial parks in Irvine for his Claremont College graduate school thesis.
The project, startlingly novel in its pristine treatment of an aspect of landscape normally ignored by art photography, “seemed so logical to me,” Baltz said. “It was a world I knew. Change was its permanence.”
The persistent sense of anxiety underlying life in the late 20th century is at the heart of all Baltz’s work. He remembers how, in the 1970s, he drove from San Francisco to see his family and “got lost about 10 or 12 houses from where I was born.”
His billboard-like groupings of Cibachrome photographs shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles last year--part of his “New Technologies” series--mirror the eerie dislocations of high technology. Figures are isolated, their bodies often lopped off at the neck, their privacy invaded by machines.
In “Ronde de Nuit” (Night Watch), images come from a group of surveillance cameras spying on a depressed industrial suburb in France. “Docile Bodies” mingles images of hospital patients, coldly detached doctors and unfathomable medical data.
Living now in the center of Paris, with projects that frequently take him elsewhere in Europe, Baltz looks back at his angry youth in Orange County with a measure of middle-aged forbearance.
“One good thing is that the rest of the world looks really good afterward.”
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Fred Tomaselli was one of those kids who loved to draw--and got gold stars and happy faces at school for his realistic renderings.
Drawing was a social activity too. The 41-year-old remembers how he and his young friends would labor over scenes of warfare while “making killing . . . and gunshot noises,” then show their work to each other.
When he moved with his Swiss-born parents from the San Gabriel Valley to Santa Ana in the mid-1960s, his family lived in a cookie-cutter tract of 70 homes. It was surrounded by orange groves “as far as you could see,” he said.
Tomaselli hunted for lizards and tadpoles in Santiago Creek (“I had a little zoo going in my garage”) and sketched on paper towels supplied by his frugal draftsman father.
Original art on public view in the county was sparse and wildly varied--from Spanish colonial paintings at the Bowers Museum to shows at 58-F, an avant-garde gallery in Orange. As a teenager, Tomaselli drove to Los Angeles, where he was strongly influenced by the 1973 Bruce Nauman retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
But the ever-present visual treat was Disneyland.
“You could see the fireworks and Tinkerbell from my house,” he said. “At home, there would always be [free] tickets around . . . and you could hang out there.”
Tomaselli, who has lived in Brooklyn since 1985, has become known in recent years for rapturously patterned paintings made with actual drugs--both legal and illegal (pills, marijuana leaves)--that visually evoke a decentered, free-floating mental experience he calls “immersive reality.”
This feeling was perfected in and around Orange County’s theme parks, he said, where it was “available to us in a banal, everyday way.”
“When you can go to a Frontierland and walk over to Tomorrowland--when that’s the menu of everyday life--it makes everything unreal, or a little surreal. . . . It created a slipperiness about reality that’s been a part of my work.”
For Tomaselli, this “slipperiness” describes a huge difference between the lives of his parents--who had radio, books and movies--and young people who today can so easily “switch channels” with such tools as TV, computers, rock music, theme parks and drugs.
The drugs--pot and hallucinogens--were part of his teenage life too, he said.
“We grew up in the ‘70s, after the collapse of idealism. By the time I was in high school, drugs had become such a banal part of adolescence. The football team [members] were all snorting PCP. It seemed like everyone was doing it.
“There was also this party culture: huge tract homes where parents would leave for the weekend and there would be hundreds and hundreds of stoner kids, with some girl on Quaaludes vomiting in a corner.”
Tomaselli said he hated the parties and the “swinish” youth culture that sustained them. He was focused on being an artist (“I never wanted to be anything else”). After a couple of years hitchhiking around the country, he enrolled in Santa Ana College, and later transferred to Cal State Fullerton.
Supporting himself with a part-time job at Sears’ automotive department at the Orange Mall, Tomaselli kept in mind something one of his professors had told him: that art was an avocation, not a vocation.
“There was something like a vow of poverty I was taking, and I didn’t really mind living like a college student the rest of my life. . . . So it’s really shocking and a surprise to me that I am making money now.”
The money and popularity--his 1998 show at Christopher Grimes Gallery in Santa Monica sold out, with prices of individual works ranging as high as $20,000--have been accompanied by gratifying recognition. In New York, several of his works have been acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art, and his work will be in a four-person show this summer at the Museum of Modern Art.
City life became increasingly important to Tomaselli as a teenager, when the Los Angeles punk rock scene was as much of a lure as its art museums. So after graduating from college in 1982, he quit Sears, rented a loft in downtown Los Angeles and started working the night shift at Gorky’s Cafe.
For the first time, he said, he met “kindred spirits in the art scene,” people interested--unlike his Orange County pals--in “a life of the mind.”
Tomorrow: How growing up in suburban Orange County, where older standards of femininity clashed with new ideas about identity and self-empowerment, affected the artistic lives of painter Carolyn Caroompas and rock musician Kim Shattuck.
Editor’s note: Cathy Curtis was The Times visual arts critic from 1988 through March of this year.