Craig Stecyk, PopWave, 1974 Digital C-Print 24 x 16 in.
The California vibes roll across the Nyehaus art galley creating a world far from this eastern coast. Radical, bright colors call out to the viewer in an inviting way as endless waves break in an everlasting swell. The Venice beach of the fifties is alive and well.
Tim Nye and Jacqueline Miro are the creative forces orchestrating this assembly of West Coast and California-inspired work: “Swell.” Spaced between three galleries (a literal move from east to west as you travel from Nyehaus to Friedrich Petzel Gallery to Metro Pictures), the show is about a reaction to modernist industry, the call to the ocean, and the tantalizing surfer culture. The works depict the original Venice beach surfers, then travel to a East Coast take on the ocean, and finally arrive at abstract pieces of sculptural expression - the surfboards themselves.
“Swell” tells the story of the California beach surf-world, piled with oiled shortboaders and longboarders, Beatnik poets, graffiti artists, Deadheads, frying surfers, the clicks of flaps slapping the bottom of tan callused feet, and the occasional valley kook greeted with hostility. The counterculture community that banded together to reject normalized society treated the American homogonous ideas like the mung from the offshore oil drilling that stuck to the bottom of their feet—industrial excrement cramping their styles. Miro, originally from the Pacific Ocean’s El Salvador, with a history of shredding a wave or two in her time, took a few moments to guide us through ”Swell”, a display of the endless summer enjoyed by a selection of artists.
“If there is a photograph that tells what this show is about, the dichotomy between urban-industrial and the beach, it would be this image [Jimmy Ganzer, Ferus Artists Photos]. These guys were hanging out with their surfboards making art that was beautifully sublime, but critically didn’t get the acclaim that minimalism got in the East Coast. They’re dealing with things like nuclear tests with the aerospace industry and oil drilling. They grew up in the fifties, which was an era of scare tactics. 1959 [was] a pivotal year because everything started there, the Beatniks, Abstract Expressionism, poetry, music, everything went through such a huge transformation.
The godfathers of the Beat generation, the inspiration of California cool, and the original beach boys, the Venice artists of the 1950s became the epicenter of a new type of aesthetic movement. Their bright colors, graffiti sketches, and derelict taste rebelled against the overbearing weight of the Cold War society.
“The show at Metro Pictures starts with the Beat generation and is about a culture that grew up out of the sea, but in a very different way. It’s not about surfing; it’s about the freeing environment that the beach provided through music, through percussions, through found objects, through being able to stay up with large groups of people doing poetry jams. The Beats wouldn’t have existed without them.”
California cannot take sole ownership of the beach-culture art. The East Coast’s artists and surfers have proven that a badass break is a badass break whether you go out in the Pacific or Atlantic.
“We have a lot of east coast artists. It really does come out of graffiti art and text-based art like Ed Ruscha in a much more aggressive way. They’re taking a position against branding and advertisement. Robert Longo, an East Coast artist and also a surfer, has this kind of view on utopia or the pastoral, which is very edgy. Here you have [either] a naval experiment or space ship, you don’t know, but it is something that is intervening in nature in a very aggressive way [Study for Joe, Russian Bomb Test].
To me, it has to do with lunar cycles, tides, moods, water, evanescence presence of water and light and reflection—the fact that when you surf you leave no trace of yourself when you leave. It’s not an egotistical act, in that sense. When you’re an artist you want to create something and leave it for posterity. When you’re a surfer, you’re dealing with raw elements and then you’re gone. You can say that you’re cutting a line through a wave, but the line disappears. It’s a physical and heroic act in itself and then, there is no trace.”
The unity of the “Swell” artists is mirrored in the collaborative effort of Jacqueline Miro and co-curator Tim Nye. Beginning in their early days at the college preparatory school to surfacing in their current established work, Nye and Miro have been a compatible team.
“We went to Middlesex. We’ve done a lot of projects together since. The reason why we both love these artists, we read the book by Lawrence Weschler, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, which is all about Robert Irwin, in art history class when it came out in 1982.
We do [have a similar aesthetic]. That’s why we’ve been friends for such a long time. It’s not minimalism; it’s not heavy-duty mid-century modernism either. It’s an in-between solution, which is about beautifully crafted materials and creating a sense of space that’s creative but not too edgy. There’s a certain amount of competitiveness and we challenge each other; he certainly challenges me. We started talking about this surf show in January and it was just a passing, fleeing thought. And then in February I reminded him and he said, ‘Let’s do it.’”
The communal aspect of surfing and its lifestyle invigorates the separatist world of the post-modern now: the splintered political views, the rising fear of natural disasters, and the economic strife pits neighbor against neighbor. But in these small moments, in a Jimmy Ganzer photo, we can escape into a world where friendships become family, life is in the pursuit of happiness, and the swells kept setting.
Top: Steve Olson USA Baby, 2010 Found Metal, Aero gages, rattle can, one shot 36 x 13 x 13 in., Middle: Steve Olson Buy Sexual 2004 Wood, leather snake skin, found Marguee letters, price tags 36 x 52 in., Bottom Left: Randall Mesdon Wood Gun 2010 work on paper, 25.5 x 40 in., Bottom Right: Randall Mesdon USA Surfboard 2010 Work on paper 25.5 x 40 in., Photo Credit: Garett Holden
Donald Takayama Surfboard for Mickey Dora (Detail, below), Photo Credit: Jacqueline Miro
Donald Takayama Surfboard for Mickey Dora (Detail), Photo Credit: Jacqueline Miro
