Peter Selz (24 page)

 

At the opening of the Berkeley Museum when I and Robert Hudson and Jim Melchert, Pete Volkus, Richard Shaw, Brenda Richardson, Bonnie Sherk, Steve Reich, and Carl Dern and Peter Selz—along with many others presented our event the “Impossible Dream” and just before the finale—Peter standing at the swinging doors—me handing him a black cowboy hat with white trim—and strapping on a couple of guns and holsters and telling him to walk to the bar draw his guns and tell the bartender—give me some art!!

Just before Peter pushes through them swingin doors the other afore named involved made a path—from louvered doors to bar—saying— Peter's coming! Peter's coming!! Peter strode forward hat cocked low right up to the bar where Carl Dern waited quivering in fear. Drawing his gun on reaching the bar—Peter said give me some art!! Carl from below the bar brought up an enormous flat—shot glass—with a decaled shop through it—it was wide and an inch or so thick. He proceeded to empty a fifth of 90% proof A.M.S. corn whiskey into the large flat plastic shop glass—Peter holstered his guns and raised the whiskey to his lips—

At that point with Melchert at the piano—all the dance hall girls wear up on the card tables—with song cards and the players and the audience sang—The Impossible Dream.
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In addition, there were poetry readings by Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, and Richard Brautigan. It was, according to curator Lucinda Barnes, a “multidisciplinary contemporary art extravaganza heralding a radical new building and an ambitious cultural enterprise, which within a matter of months would also include the Pacific Film Archive.”
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Over
the course of the three days, Steve Reich did several impromptu pieces; artist Norton Wisdom recalls one vividly. In his recollection, he was one of a dozen students seated on the concrete floor of the main gallery. There was no announcement of the event; somehow the word spread and a few curious individuals showed up to see what was going on. Reich incorporated them into the performance, clustering them together with half a dozen reel-to-reel tape decks placed around them. One long tape snaked through the Sony decks, producing competing but related musical passages. Wisdom remembers that it was beautiful, and it stirred his newfound interest in performance art and music, which became, years later, central elements in his mature art.
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The move from New York to “laid-back” California put Peter in touch with a counterculture that seemed organic and natural to the place rather than invented or imposed. It provided the context for him to realize the full liberation he had sought earlier and that in a fundamental way represented his authentic personal identity. Aligning himself with artists and their natural readiness to step outside the rules of art and society, Selz still likes to think of himself as a sympathetic mediator between artists and the essential institutions—museums, universities—that serve them, or should do so. Each of his books and exhibitions was based on the idea that the creative individual, the artist, was at the center of the whole cultural enterprise, not the scholar or the curator. Peter places himself in the artists' camp.

•    •    •

Selz's exhibition record at Berkeley, whether at the old Powerhouse or in the new Ciampi building, is an impressive one. The kinetic art show, the first with Selz as director, remains the one he generally points to as his most historically significant.
Directions in Kinetic Sculpture
grew out of Selz's encounter with the work of Jean Tinguely and most immediately the 1960 installation at MoMA. Selz was fascinated by the introduction of motion and change into art making, with the subject of the sculpture becoming movement itself. And he saw the issues and ideas involved, especially time and change, as fundamental to modernist thinking.
In his brief but carefully considered catalogue preface, Selz in effect introduced a new subject and did so by suggesting connections to other manifestations of modernism:

 

The Constructivists' point of view was propagated by László Moholy-Nagy who . . . clearly saw into the future and formulated a theory of kinetic art which would not materialize for more than a generation. He advocated the activation of space by means of a dynamic-constructive system of forces and hoped to substitute relationships of energies for the old relationships of form in art. . . . Kinetic sculpture was widely discussed at the Bauhaus and at its offshoot, the Institute of Design in Chicago. There Moholy-Nagy published his influential book,
Vision in Motion
, in which he postulates that kinetic sculpture is the fifth and last of the successive stages in the development of plastic form.
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Selz also knew Buckminster Fuller from the Chicago years, and he quotes him to establish the scientific relevance of kineticism in art, invoking the triumphant image of Einstein “shattering” the Newtonian cosmos: “Einstein realized that all bodies were constantly being affected by other bodies, and this meant their normal condition was not inertia but continuous motion and continuous change. The replacement of the Newtonian static norm . . . really opened the way to modern science and technology, and it's still the biggest thing that is happening at this moment in history.”
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One of Selz's gifts is his ability to syncretize his subjects, whether artists or movements, within a historical context that does not obviate their creative identity outside of that history.

Directions in Kinetic Sculpture
featured the work of fourteen sculptors, only four of whom were American, and boasted several “firsts”: it was not only Peter's first show at Berkeley but also the first show in kinetic sculpture in the United States; it featured the first catalogue essay by kinetic sculptor George Rickey; and it introduced a struggling young San Francisco sculptor, Fletcher Benton, whose career took off thanks to his inclusion in the exhibition. Benton was eager to go on record recalling his fortuitous “discovery” by Selz, at the same time expressing admiration for what Peter contributed in a broader sense to Bay Area art and cultural life:

 

The
word got out that this Museum of Modern Art curator had taken a professorship at Berkeley. And he totally changed, from my point of view, the local atmosphere and the hopes of the artists. . . . So we all felt that this man was a god—that he was going to do great things for the Bay Area. . . . One day I got a phone call: “This is Peter Selz.” And anybody who's talked to Peter knows he has this deep, impressive baritone voice. He had heard that I was making some moving things, wall pieces. And he asked if he could come by to see them. My first thought was, my god, here's this incredible museum man coming to my basement studio.

Well, in a few days he showed up, and he was so friendly. . . . He looked at what I had and asked me if I would be interested in being in the show. I had no idea what he was talking about. I didn't even know there was a [kinetic art] movement. . . . And then . . .
Time
magazine did an article [on the show] . . . and my phone started ringing off the hook. I was in many other kinetic shows, but never such a pioneering group as the one Peter brought here.
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In a similar way, the
Funk
show helped define Selz's career at UAM, and was certainly at least as important for the local scene. But exactly what was Funk? How was it identified as a distinct phenomenon, and how were the artists selected? Selz found this important question difficult to answer.

 

Well, I don't know. In the catalogue to the show I wrote that Funk can't really be defined. When you see it, you know it. But it was a kind of art which was totally irreverent, an art that was loud—I said “unashamed”—in a way that relates to Dada and was very different from the Pop Art. It also came out of the Slant Step show that Bill Wiley and Bruce Nauman had been involved with slightly earlier [1966]. . . . I knew Harold [Paris], I knew Bruce [Conner], I knew Pete [Voulkos]— and I met Wiley, Bob Hudson, and Arlo Acton. And then the ceramic people like [Robert] Arneson and [David] Gilhooly. All of a sudden it seemed to me there was a close relationship [among them] in this kind of art. A casual, irreverent . . . art, art which dealt with bodily functions . . . biomorphic art which was sloppy rather than formal.
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Selz thinks of Jeremy Anderson as “sort of the daddy” of Funk, but looking back, he singled out Wiley and Arneson as the leading exponents. He goes on to say, “There were dozens of people in Berkeley,
Davis, San Francisco, and up in Marin County who were doing this kind of work.” Along with his staff—assistant director Tom Freudenheim and curators Brenda Richardson and Susan Rannells—Selz went to “a great many studios,” and together they picked twenty-seven artists who they felt represented the “movement.” Selz would not use the term
movement
today for funk, even though his exhibition implied some cohesiveness. The artists surely did not feel they were part of a movement; in fact, they resisted the idea. Selz now, if not then, is very much aware of the limitations of the term in regard to individual artists and works.

“With all its color and . . . irreverence,” Selz recalled, “it seemed like a marvelous show, [which] put its finger on a certain pulse of this land of funk . . . this bohemian kind of art.”
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It had a somewhat mixed response, however. The public “loved it, almost as much as they loved the kinetic show. They thought it was a delight. . . . That was a popular response. The art critical response was slightly different:
Artforum
tore it to pieces.
Artforum
[founded in San Francisco, then moved to Los Angeles] had moved from California to New York and was taken over by the Greenberg contingent, so they hated it. But in general the response was very, very positive.”
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From the moment of his arrival in Berkeley, Selz had been interested in the “totally different . . . local kind of thing” he observed in the art being made in Northern California. He and his museum colleagues, as well as some of the artists themselves, soon began talking about the idea that became the
Funk
show. And Peter says it was at his suggestion that his best artist friend and UC Berkeley colleague, Harold Paris, had published an essay on the subject in
Art in America
a month before the show opened.
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Selz was attuned to what was original in reflecting a peculiarly Californian sensibility, and the selection of artists presents a similar attitude and aesthetic: much of the work looks the same. Among the artists, Selz particularly admired one: Bruce Conner. In his opinion, in fact, Conner was possibly the most important artist working in California, from the standpoint of pure creative originality and power of statement. And there was an even more fundamental quality that Selz believed Conner shared with another of his favorites, despite the great differences in their work:

 

The
reason I think Mark Rothko is such a great painter is because of the internal look—his are all emotional paintings. They are paintings of the soul. I think there is a tremendous distinction between this kind of internalized abstraction and what Greenberg called color field painting, which is nothing but color design on a flat plane. It has nothing to do with the human soul. . . . Well, form and style don't matter when I see quality that I respond to. In 1960 I saw this child in a black box by Bruce [Conner]. And I had never seen anything like it. It was true that Rauschenberg was doing assemblages in New York. But, wonderful as they were, they didn't have quite the power of Bruce's work.
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On other occasions Peter has invoked these two names together as representing what he looks for when thinking of greatness. Although he may not put it as directly in connection with Conner, there is no question that the shared quality is a spiritual search for the soul through art. This is the quality that Selz has consistently sought, beginning with his study of German Expressionism, throughout his long career. And when he encounters the work that exhibits these expressionist qualities, he does his best to encourage the artist and promote his or her work.

Several of the artists in the
Funk
show received this preferential attention, but none more than Bruce Conner (see
Fig. 23
). Even Harold Paris and Pete Voulkos did not seem to ignite Selz's passion to the same degree.
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But in a phone conversation a year before he died in July 2008, Conner was unexpectedly withholding—one might even say ungrateful—in his comments.
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Then again, he was notoriously difficult to work with, especially in the later years, marked as they were by a long illness that limited his activity, and he seemed to blame almost every part of the art world—and virtually every individual—for his perceived lack of success. This despite the critical acclaim he received almost from the beginning of his career and to which Peter contributed. Selz would certainly agree with the judgment of curator Peter Boswell, who, comparing Conner favorably to Rauschenberg and Warhol, suggested that the San Franciscan “will eventually be recognized as one of—perhaps
the
—most important West Coast artist of his time.”
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Conner did reluctantly allow that Selz was “a great supporter. But I'd rather not say more.”
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His main complaint, in general but in this
case clearly directed at Peter, was that the support he'd received had little influence on sales. He further claimed that he'd had no income for the past five years. Peter was understandably disappointed by this criticism, but he also understood that Bruce was in a sense a perpetual outsider, challenging the art establishment and especially the market, despite his being represented by devoted dealers such as San Francisco's Paule Anglim. In particular, Paula Kirkeby remembers Bruce as a unique artistic force. She thinks of him not only as the artist she represented but as her mentor. “It was, above all, Bruce's spirituality and the Jewish mystical Kabbalah”—they were for her the “key” to Bruce. Paula admired that Bruce's interests were based, but not slavishly dependent, on Eastern philosophy. Among art professionals in the Bay Area who understood Bruce in this respect were Peter Selz and de Young Museum curator Tom Garver. Peter especially “got it,” and Bruce recognized and appreciated that fact. Kirkeby thinks of Bruce and Selz, and Garver, as connected by mutual understanding.
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Selz's opinion of Conner's importance remains unchanged. Furthermore, his presence in the
Funk
show was essential: “More than the other artists, many of whose work did not go much deeper than a blasé surface irreverence, Conner was profoundly engaging the major issues of the human condition.”
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