Junk Artist George Herms is Hot

By STEPHEN MOTIKA Palisadian-Post Contributor George Herms is radiant. Currently a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute investigating the theme of ‘duration,’ he is being celebrated by a 45-piece, 45-year survey of his career in an exhibit at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. ‘The show, ‘George Herms: Hot Set,’ was curated by the legendary Walter Hopps, who died last month, and presents one of the most distinctive careers of the post-war Los Angeles art scene. ‘While Herms describes himself as a junk artist, his art is not junk. His assemblages are created out of the trash and waste of our industrialized, consumer-driven society. He collects scrap metal from the highway, scavenges abandoned cars and buildings, and assumes ownership of the discarded and forgotten. He spoke of his artmaking process in a recent interview with the Palisadian-Post. ”I combine raw materials that so often show the passage of time, the duration of erosion. These are objects that can become alchemically transformed.’ Herms is the alchemist. He intervenes, moving the objects and pieces around in space, over time, until they take shape. Herms sees this as the ‘dancing of objects before they settle down into a composition.’ He often adds his own drawings or letterpress type. The artist Marcel Duchamp called this type of work’ found objects altered by an artist’s intervention”the assisted readymade.’ ‘ ‘ Herms started the assemblage work while living in Hermosa Beach in 1956. ‘I began to beachcomb and put together small tableaux of found objects,’ he says. He was influenced by Robert Motherwell’s book on the Dada movement as well as the other artists he was meeting, most importantly Topanga-based Wallace Berman (1926-1976), considered to be the ‘father’ of the California assemblage movement. ‘He was 22 years old. It was through Berman that Herms first met Hopps, who, with Edward Kienholz, founded and directed the Ferus Gallery on La Cienega, which exhibited many important Los Angeles artists during the late 1950s and early 1960s. ‘Hopps went on to direct the Pasadena Art Museum during the 1960s, where he curated the exhibitions that made him famous, shows dedicated to the work of Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, and Joseph Cornell. During the Schwitters exhibition, Hopps displayed 13 of Herms’ collages in another gallery. ‘The previous year, Herms had been included in the Museum of Modern Art’s ‘The Art of Assemblage’ in New York. By 1961, he had joined the annals of art history. ‘Herms is now the last California artist from that period still creating assemblage. A big, new work in the Santa Monica Museum show, ‘Thelonious Sphere Monk,’ was completed late last year. The piece is a salute to the jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, whose music is the one thing Herms would take with him if forced to live on a desert island. The tableau comprises of an upright piano in which an unrolled, coffee-stained lampshade serves as the sheet music; a stained bumper rests on the keys; a large, rusted metal sphere stands on top; and about a dozen other pieces of found and assembled objects are included. ‘Herms doesn’t like to explain the work of art in total; he might share a bit about the inspiration or its formal aspects, but he wants the viewer to consider the work on his own. He will tell you that many of his pieces are homages to individuals, especially the poets, musicians, and artists who have influenced him. He calls this work his ‘homagery.’ ”Donuts for Duncan’ was made after the San Francisco poet Robert Duncan died in 1988. Herms took the piece to Duncan’s memorial and shook it so that it made a huge noise; it is both a work of art and a musical instrument. The circle appears in much of Herms’ work, as does the cross. In ‘Southwest Photo Opportunity,’ Herms mounted a rusted bicycle wheel and a cruciform on a piece of weathered newsprint. The assemblage represents his travels through the Southwest and ‘faded browns and silvered woods’ of the land. ‘Herms, who turns 70 in July, was born and raised in Northern California. He enrolled in the College of Engineering at UC Berkeley, but lasted only six weeks. After reading Beat poet Philip Lamantia’s (1927-2005) ‘Erotic Poems,’ he started writing and soon after, making art. He moved around a lot before settling in Topanga Canyon in the 1960s to raise his daughters. (He also has two sons, ages 15 and 20, who live with their mother.) He taught at Cal State Fullerton, UCLA and Santa Monica College, and spent much of the last two decades living in downtown Los Angeles, where Elsa Longhauser, executive director of the Santa Monica Museum, first encountered his work. She described it for the Post: ”I walked into a cacophony of stuff, the space of an inveterate collector with every kind of castoff: cars, machines, books,’ she says. ‘Longhauser, who arrived at the museum (and in Los Angeles), five years ago, is committed to showcasing local artists who might not be widely known. She met Herms, visited his studio, and was convinced that he needed a show. When he mentioned Hopps’ name, she knew that he was the key. ‘She invited Hopps to curate, he said ‘yes,’ and they were on their way. They all agreed that they wanted the exhibition to distill the cacophony of the mass of Herms’ work. Both Herms and Longhauser talked a lot on the phone with Hopps, who was living in Houston, where he had been a curator at the Menil Collection for 20 years. For Herms, it was a time to reconnect to his friend of years past, talk about his art, and swap stories about the jazz clubs. For Longhauser, it was the chance to work with the legendary curator whom she had read so much about. She was also going to gave Hopps a chance to curate his first show in L. A. in two decades’an exhibition that ended up being his last. His career started and ended with the Los Angeles artists of the 1950s. ‘Hopps was too ill to participate in a preview party for the exhibition, so the actors Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell substituted. Longhauser considers their participation to be ‘a tribute to Walter.’ For an event on March 8, a conversation with Herms, Hopps ‘showed up looking completely handsome,’ she recalls. ‘He spoke for about an hour and was completely brilliant and scintillating. He commanded the stage in a very powerful and profound way. The last thing I could imagine was that he wouldn’t be with us a week later.’ Hopps died at Cedars-Sinai on March 20. On May 3, on what would have been his 73rd birthday, the museum will host an artists’ tribute to him, which Herms is organizing. Herms, who still speaks about his late friend in the present tense, sees Hopps’curatorial method ‘like the recipe for a good highball. The taste experience is always clear and unmuddied.’ While the other Getty scholars have presented academic papers during a weekly seminar, Herms took them for a tour of his exhibition. Being among scholars has given Herms the chance to reflect on his work in a historical context. He believes that art needs to ‘further the humanist tradition’ and to break down boundaries between people. He asks himself: ‘What is it beyond the work of art that will sustain the race?’ There is no answer, but Herms believes that working with junk and ‘raw materials’ represents something that might encourage a viewer to think about not only what is beautiful and important in art, but in life as well Longhauser sees Herms as a ‘romantic,’ and he stamps all of his work with the word ‘LOVE (with the ‘e’ backward),’ but it doesn’t keep him from dealing with the harsh realities of the world around him. He may be one of the few artists to have lived through the ’60s who still believes in peace, love and freedom. ‘George Herms: Hot Set,’ curated by Walter Hopps, is on view at the Santa Monica Museum of Art through May 14. Contact: 586-6488 or visit http://www.smmoa.org.