Studio Visit
When he picks me up in Chinatown, the Artist is leaning his head out the window of his SUV appraising the apartment building that I’m leaving. He has a cigarette between two fingers and he points up at my window—“I swear to God it was either that apartment or the one next to it that I rented in 1995.” He continues squinting his eyes, looking for markers, staring ahead, trying to align the memories of the nineties with the present moment.
“I was born in 1996,” I say as I mount myself into the car. He shakes his head incredulously, “This was my zone; I love it here.”
He slows the car down, reaching across my chest to point out the spots where he used to buy drugs. One is now a wine bar where we are having a drink before going to his studio. “This used to be really shitty… it was basically just a junkie den.” The front of the building has been changed subtly; it still blends in with the neighborhood—the Chinese architectural motifs remain though nothing in there is Chinese anymore. The storefront windows are frosted and bare a hand painted sign with the name of the bar, something Italian. He tells me how he would score here everyday at 10am and then would go home and shoot up and watch the Little House on the Prairie. “I would nod off watching the little girls with braids run through the meadow.” I get a little rush when he tells me he died for eight minutes the first day he moved to Los Angeles.
He’s one of these artists who shot himself in the foot because he had been too high and thus too difficult for dealers or collectors to work with. He prided himself on his irascibility, thinking of himself as a kind of bad boy, combative and untamable. He burned bridges with some powerful people in the art world; he’s had no problem telling people to fuck off. When he had some success he got bored immediately, burdened by the expectations of people who he had little respect for. He went back to doing whatever he wanted and giving away work or trading art with friends. He resented his peers who sold out, who complied with these art world professionals, who started showing with blue chip galleries, who settled down with a family, bought houses in the desert or up north. But there was also a part of him that envied their success and comfort, resenting more, the fact that he was never offered the opportunity to sell out himself.
By now, the Artist is nearly fifty and the audience for these tantrums has dried up and the routine has become dull and predictable. It has ceased to be conducive to having a career in the art world. Those who supported him in his refusal to conform have either died or gotten straight. His aggression lacks the potency it once had, indicative of his failing masculinity and in a way, this is what I like about him—I feel a kind of schadenfreude about his dwindling power.
I first learned of the Artist during a stint as a gallery girl at a mid-level gallery that had been around since the early aughts. I was getting paid fifteen dollars an hour but had recently acquired the lofty title of ‘archivist’. My boss had decided that instead of sitting at the front desk greeting visitors, my working style was better suited to the isolation of the archive. He moved me into the back room which was significantly colder than the rest of the gallery and had essentially been designated for storage and supplies until now. “There’s actually a desk back there and a chair once you move some of those boxes,” my boss assured me.
The first week of my new position, which was presented as a promotion, I spent my days throwing stuff away in the garbage. The metal file cabinets were filled with receipts from 2006 for office supplies or lunches with collectors. The gallery had had so much employee turnover that the project of organizing this room always stopped and started. I was aware of myself within a lineage of gallery girls, the last assistant was able to organize A-K but quit before she could get to L. I picked up where the last left off, knowing I too would soon quit, despite responding affirmatively in my interview that yes, I was interested in “growing with the gallery.” When my boss asked this, I wondered who exactly he imagined would want to do such a thing since the gallery was hardly growing anymore. The piles on his desk were collecting dust. He was becoming bitter, his hair was thinning, his wife had left him, and many of his artists for bigger galleries. He would often end the day with a glass of tequila with no chaser. I always tried to slip out before he could offer me one. There was even a stench in the office that was getting worse every day; I was sure a dead animal was rotting in the wall.
In one of these piles, I nearly trashed a flier and press release for the Artist’s notorious first solo show in LA in 1999 at a gallery in Chinatown on Chung King Road. The flier was xeroxed, faded black and white, with a blurry image of a coyote. I looked up photos of him online from that time: He’s shirtless sitting on the floor of the gallery drawing with a pen and paper or standing up with the muscles in his back flexed drawing on the wall, the top of his Calvin Kleins sticking out of his pants and a set of keys hanging off the belt loop. For a European magazine he gives an interview in which he talks about making a point in his practice to set himself apart from the typical gallery system, that he’s not interested in making art that way for that type of audience. The interview is accompanied with photos of him in his messy studio. His face is thin and shaved, his eyes slightly shot, his hair is tied up in a short greasy ponytail. He’s wearing flip flops slightly leaning back in his chair, his legs spread.
I followed him online and he followed back and then we started flirting a little. He’d fire-react to the pictures I posted of myself. I’d engage with the fire emoji and we’d chat for a bit. Then he started sending me pictures of people he thought I looked like. Ali McGraw, Anjelica Huston, Julia Roberts, women who bore very little resemblance to one another. Each time he sent another one he would follow up with an edit: “Maybe from a different angle, maybe head on, maybe this looks more like you.” Sometimes I would send one back. What about this? “Not quite but maybe a little,” he would respond. We had never met in person but I liked these kinds of hypotheses he had about my likeness. Eventually I asked if we could meet for a studio visit and a drink.
After leaving the bar, we go to his studio which is in a little converted garage behind a mid-century house in Silver Lake. He pours us glasses of whiskey. He empties out his flat files full of drawings, zines, photos, and cassette tapes from the past 25 years. He shows me the drawings he’d made of people in the scene that had surrounded the galleries in Chinatown and Echo Park in the early 2000s.
He speaks to me with a kind of authority of a father or teacher. He begins his sentences with things like: “When you get to be my age…” or “Back in my day.” This doesn’t bother me because I genuinely want to know what it was like back in the day. He has been talking about his “generation” and the artists who had excluded him once they got big. I recline on the couch smoking while he slumps in a chair across from me. “Who are you talking about when you say that? Like, who has really sold out? And who has excluded you?” I ask him to elaborate. He sits up slowly and drunkenly, with a look like he had forgotten what we were talking about, “I don’t really know… it doesn’t matter anymore.”
Before I leave we walk around his neighborhood. I stop occasionally to take pictures: one of a car covered in plastic, the street lined with palm trees, and the glowing strips of freeway at the bottom of the hill. He doesn’t stop walking or talking when I pause to take the photos. He walks ahead continuing the conversation, which often returns to the past.
Gracie Hadland is a writer living in Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in a number of publications, including Frieze, Flash Art, Spike Art Quarterly, Artforum, and Los Angeles Review of Books.
