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December 1996
Tracking Ed Moses
Over the nearly 50 years of his career, Moses has continually reinvented his working process--knifing, staining, splashing and mopping the paint into place. The result, a recent retrospective suggests, is a kind of abstract pilgrim's progress.
BY Frances Colpitt
Art in America
A recent retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, showed Ed Moses to be, at 70, a vigorous experimental artist whose energetic vision has rarely flagged during the last five decades. His concerns shift, his materials and method of paint application change, but the artist's drive and expressive rigor remain consistent.
Ed Moses: A Retrospective of the Paintings and Drawings, 1951-1996 was organized by John Yan, poet, critic and curator, whose selections from Moses's extensive body of work were arrived at in consultation with the artist. The exhibition included 60 works, representing most of Moses's major series. Each series is distinguished by its mediums, format or imagery, which is predominantly abstract. Conspicuously absent from the show were the late-1970s Mutations —multi-paneled horizontal paintings with flat or painterly rectangles of red, green and black--and the red grids of the mid-'80s, some of which include stenciled spiders.
The show was installed in reverse chronological order, from the front to the back of the building, so that the typical visitor entered the spacious J. Paul Getty Gallery first and was faced with a series of monumental, brand-new works painted specifically for the space. From these toweringly extravagant paintings, one progressed through a maze of smaller galleries eventually to arrive at The Court, a small graphite-and-casein drawing from 1951-52. Most of Moses's early work, in fact, was drawing, his preferred medium during the first half of the 1950s. Overall, the show included 14 works from the '50s and '60s, 29 from the '70s and '80s, and 17 from the last six years. This weighting of the show in favor of the more recent work was glaringly obvious, but also typical of most retrospectives devoted to artists who are still active.
In the course of his career, as the show made clear, Moses has only infrequently used a brush. His favored techniques of paint application have been knifing, staining, splashing and mopping, usually in conjunction with tape, snap-lines and makeshift straightedges. The artist's interest in mechanical drawing, often evident, was strongly reinforced by his experience as a technical illustrator in an aircraft factory while he was a student at UCLA in the mid-'50s. During the same period Moses produced a series of architectural renderings of constructions he had seen on the Southern California coast----perspectives and elevations characterized by precision and a graceful light-handed touch. Already apparent in these works is his affinity for the grid and its rigors; Moses has done battle with this compositional device throughout his career.
By contrast, the phallic and floral forms of the 1957-58 paintings are made up of loose, lyrical gestures reminiscent of Gorky and John Altoon, Moses's stablemate at Ferus Gallery, where these paintings were originally shown. The two tendencies----grid and gesture---coalesce in a series that remains one of Moses's best: the Rose drawings. Five feet tall and just over 3 feet wide, the drawings are made up of repeated strokes of graphite that accrete to form a shimmering silver field. Scattered across the surface is a random pattern, also in graphite, of flowers copied from a printed Mexican tablecloth. The traditional interpretation of the Rose drawings holds that the rose pattern merely supplies a compositional structure for the handmade marks. In the catalogue essay, Yau's citation of Johns's Number paintings and Stella's Black paintings--contemporaneous work that takes a similar approach to allover composition--reaffirms this formalist reading of the drawings. There has not yet been a serious analysis of the works' content, particularly as it reflects the prevailing attitudes in the Los Angeles art scene of the early '60s. Despite the pervasively masculine nature of that scene, hearts and flowers were not uncommon motifs, figuring most notably in the work of Billy Al Bengsten. Moses's "Rose" drawings raised issues of feminine imagery and domestic source materials in an era whose art was mostly defined by Pop.
The Resin paintings of the early '7Os are unstretched lengths of canvas marked with masking tape and snapped chalk lines, which suggest a return to the artist's early interest in architecture. Translucent resin is used to coat these paintings and preserve the delicate, mostly geometric imagery; by extending the resin several inches beyond the canvas, Moses is also able to 'frame" the painting with a ragged plastic edge. The resin itself is a mottled caramel in color, its surface glossy but of uneven texture. The grungy, antique appearance of the paintings is in stark contrast to the Finish Fetish idiom that predominated in LA. during the '60s, when Moses's colleagues, such as John McCracken, Craig Kauffman and Ron Davis, used plastics to give their work a slick, space-age appearance. The hardened surfaces of Moses's Resin paintings are belied by their seemingly pliable, fleshy undulations, which convey a corporeality rare in Moses's work. Displayed without frames on the gallery walls, the paintings were reminiscent of blankets, and, in fact, they were inspired by Navaho Indian blanket patterns, as their diagonal, weavelike imagery suggests. In titles like Ill. Hegemann 107B (1972), Moses acknowledges his debt to Navaho Trading Days, Elizabeth Hegemann's influential 1963 book on the subject. (1)
In the subsequent acrylic-on-canvas Trac paintings, the woven diagonal grid is tightened into a pattern of overlapping bands of black and fresh, bright colors reminiscent of Matisse. The Trac series derives from Moses's much-remarked 1969 exhibition at Riko Mizuno Gallery, for which he removed part of the roof and ceiling to expose the joists, allowing a grid of light to cast diagonal bands on the gallery walls. (This important work was not reconstructed for the MOCA retrospective.) As Moses explained in 1981, "When I took the first layer of tar paper off (at Ricko Mizuno), the light came through these slots and set up and described the space in a totally weird way. It was filled with light. I threw rice Structurally similar to the Trac paintings are the willfully reductive "Cubist" and Abstract paintings of 1975-76. In black, red or institutional green (a signature color Moses encountered in the aircraft plant where he worked in the '50s), the monochrome "Cubist" paintings are composed of overlapping strokes that form a diagonal grid, barely visible in the light reflected by the multidirectional lines. Mindful of the end point implicit in Cubism and in Mondrian's work, Moses offered Abstract Painting (1975) as an alternative. Its taut, silky smooth plane of uninflected red---acrylic paint poured and sanded--is both impenetrable and sumptuous.
Moses devoted the early '80s to a series of large wooden-panel paintings, whose uneven lower edges were inspired by architectural design; on the wall they were reminiscent of kimonos displayed similarly. These were followed, in the mid-'80s, by the "Spider" series--which, as mentioned earlier, was not represented at MOCA--and, in 1987, by the Worm. The title of this latter series refers to the wiggly paint strokes, made with rag mops, that characterize these paintings. Working outdoors on his deck, with oil, acrylic and asphaltum, Moses stained the canvas from both sides, allowing "ghosts" to bleed through. Against this grimy background, the dynamic gestures of the "Worms" take on an almost figurative quality. With mopped strokes of black, dull institutional green, brown and pink, an untitled 1987 work suggests a figure running to the right with legs churning cartoonishly. Rather than using gesture to describe a figure, like de Kooning, or to avoid figuration altogether, like Pollock, Moses allows the gesture to be the figure.
In the '90s Moses's gestures are even bolder and less controlled, with high-intensity color turned up to match. One of the most seductive paintings in the exhibition was Turn-too (1991), a large diptych with fluorescent orange swaths of paint, transparent green streaks, washes of pearlescent Murano and dark oily stains of asphaltum. Curdled pools and pathways of paint, resulting from the physical incompatibility of oil- and water-based mediums, contribute to a compelling distastefulness, as Moses negotiates the dialectic of beauty and ugliness.
In the Wagu paintings of 1992-93, Moses adopts a deliberately feeble hand to inscribe their pale coagulated grounds with shaky black contour drawings of talking and smoking heads. Inspired by a visit to the Lascaux caves in 1990, Wagu #2 and #3 convincingly modernize the prehistoric imagery and surfaces of cave paintings, as well as the magic of the rituals that inspired them. The past few years have seen Moses's work grow more expansive in scale, and broader and less calligraphic in gesture. The most recent paintings in the exhibition are 11 or 12 feet high and 16 feet wide. Colorful orbs are scattered across their stained surfaces, suggesting random constellations in the night sky.
Concurrently with the MOCA show, a second group of these "Polka-Dot" paintings was exhibited at L.A. Louver under the title "Elpoep Ebolg," ("Globe People" spelled backwards). In Louver's rooftop gallery known as the Sky Room, Moses also prepared an architectural installation, as he has done periodically throughout his career. V.R.O.T. (titled with the initials of Moses's Buddhist teacher's name) required the closing in of the normally open-air Sky Room with a plywood ceiling and clerestory in which round holes were cut. In the center of the room stood a silver gazing ball on a pedestal. A theatrical fog machine periodically filled the space with smoke, which, like the rice polishings at Mizuno, caught the beams of sunlight projected through the holes. The effect of V.R.O.T. was manifold: ethereal and transcendental in its own right, it was also a gleefully goofy take on New Age mysticism and its props.
For a period of six weeks, Moses's retrospective ran concurrently at MOCA with that of Ed Kienholz--a show organized by Walter Hopps for the Whitney Museum [see A.i.A., Oct. '96]. The juxtaposition of these two Ferus artists revealed not only their divergent paths, but the two main directions taken by artists in Los Angeles since the '50s. Despite their fundamental rebelliousness, Kienholz's assemblages and tableaux appeared surprisingly comfortable in a contemporary art museum. By contrast, Moses's youthful exuberance and dogged perseverance in testing--and adding to--the practice of painting effectively rekindle the medium's potent allure.
1. Elizabeth Hegemann, Navaho Trading Days, Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1963.
2. Quoted in Howard Singerman, "Ed Moses: An Investigation of the Painter and His Mark," Arts + Architecture, vol. 1, no. 3 (1981), p. 32.
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