LA's maverick painter shows his true colors
by Dorothy Burkhart
In 25 years as a painter, Ed Moses has had his ups and downs. From the beginning, his career has seesawed: More than once he has wowed collectors and viewers, only to slip out of favor, then become hot again.
He's an eccentric, a maverick, full of surprises. Just when it seems this restless artist has a trademark style, he moves on to something else. He's impossible to peg. And that's exactly what he has in mind.
Moses is such an individualist that he has always been out of sync stylistically. In the early 1960's, he made some pretty pictures when the LA art scene was "into" tough and macho work. More recently, after everybody kissed minimalist painting goodbye, there he was making huge, reductivist, monochrome paintings that delivered little the eye could feast upon.
Is it fear of success or rugged individuality that drives Moses to move from one style to another? Whatever the answer, Moses clearly been unwilling to kowtow to those who might have catapulted him to the artistic moon.
"I was difficult with critics and museum people who could have helped me," he says laughing. "In career terms, this almost thumbing-one's-nose attitude was not smart; in terms of doing what I wanted to do, it was great. I burned all the bridges, let's put it that way."
Moses is now in Palo Alto at Smith Anderson Gallery for an exhibition of new paintings and drawings that continues through February 7, and at the adjacent 3 EP, Ltd. Press where he is working on a series of prints through the end of January.
Moses, renowned as the key figure in Los Angeles abstract painting in the early 1970's, works out of a studio in Venice. He is 56, a warm and immediately likable man. His mustache and beard are sprinkled with gray, more pepper than salt. He's slender and stands about 5-foot-6. Darting about the gallery energetically as he oversees the installation, Moses casts out some painterly pearls:
"I look at what I do less as painting in a conventional sense; and more like the past, when there were primitive tribes and certain people that shook rattles to make a connection to gods. I'm interested in magical and primal notions. I've always tried to get that magical thing, that revelation that would knock your head off.
"All of my work has been about different ways of locating a place where, like street art, like Kilroy, I can put a viable mark down to say I was there – marks of a person, hopefully, who is sensitive to what is going on in the world.
"I'm not intrested in entertainment or doing wall decorations or making beautiful paintings – I can go see a Botticelli or a Bellini anytime. I'm after something that affects you in a direct way," Moses says.
Periodically his work does that; certainly it is a dizzying experience to follow his artistic career from 1957 to today. He's created a body of fascinating and sometimes bewildering work. Unlike most artists, Moses hasn't been obsessed by a trademark image, although close scrutiny reveals links if not consistent imagery.
In the late 1950s when he was affiliated with Los Angeles' Ferus Gallery, he was involved with Abstract Expressionism, doing washy de Kooningesque canvases. He also developed a series of lovely cut paper constructions.
About 1967, working with light and space, he built "Sky Piece," a walled structure sans roof on the beach at Malibu, where one could lay on the sand and look up to ever-changing cloud images.
That piece led to a 1968 indoor exhibition in which he ripped off part of the gallery roof so that slanting bands of sunlight entering open slits in the ceiling formed diagonal bands on the wall. This work, in turn, influenced later work based on grids.
In the early '70's he extended the idea of painting to floppy canvases – unstretched and coated with resin – that hung softly on the wall. Covered with horizontal lines and bleeding colors, this beautiful series of work emphasized painting's casualness and subtly, repetitive strokes.
Moses made another big leap in the late '70's, right into the minimalist, reductivist painting pot with canvases, each painted in one primary color, grouped together on the wall. These were distinguished by their ascetic rigor as well as by their tenacity, thus carrying out Moses'' ambition "to create a painting that has nothing to do with me or the three-dimensional world."
1982 brings still another change, and we can see it at Smith Anderson through Feb. 7.
The three wonderful wood paintings here are composed of individually painted panels abutted one against the other along a horizontal stretch. Black, white, and red are the hues Moses uses most often, painting surfaces that are either gestural with free-flowing abstract forms, or flat and marked with crisp, Mondrianesque lines.
These new paintings bring together everything Moses has been doing right along. They focus on the activity of art-making itself: the freedom to choose any forms or marks the painter wishes as well as to make stylistic references to other art. While the panels draw from Moses's past vocabulary, they show something new afoot. They are humorous allusions to altar pieces and, indeed, installed above eye level, insist that viewers look up to see them. To some extent Moses is making icons for his own private religion.
As I admire the work, I think, I think about Alberto Giacometti's reply when someone who praised his drawings asked, "How do you do it?" "It's easy," Giacometti said, " All it takes is a lifetime."
Moses continues to talk non-stop about his philosophy as he directs the installation:
"I'm this guy who sleeps in a different tent outside of the village, who doesn't participate but who is aware of what the rest of the villagers are up to."
Yet he has been caught up by the art business. "I've been totally seduced… and became everything that everybody can become in that situation," he admits. "I made money and yet when I became successful with a group of work I could never manufacture it. Some artists and these people involved with this kind of enterprise look for a handle and once they get it, run with it. If you're going to be a magician you're not going to manufacture things.
"Sure I buy myself cars and things, but the idea that I would do a painting to get money to get a car somehow gets in the way of the nature of the adventure.
"If a series of work sells, OK. But I'm finished with it since it initiates another thing that I want to encounter. Economic success is one thing, but to me the most powerful success is to see that people are affected in some way."
Unlike many, Moses doesn't see a work of art as a commodity, to be bought with future profits in mind. "I would like to extend this thing of painting outside the museum-gallery-collector situation," he continues.
"You go into a museum and they have a Robert Raushenberg next to a Frank Stella next to a Jim Dine, so you see stamp collections. You don't see anything magical; the question is not the art but who has the best stamp collection? Most of them (museum directors, collectors) aren't even good stamp collectors."
But even Moses, mellower today than he was 25 years ago, has learned some lessons of the art business: He's going where the action is. He's planning to leave Los Angeles and buy a loft studio in SoHo, New York City.
|
