Helen Pashgian sanding a polyester disc during her artist residency at Caltech circa 1971. © Helen Pashgian
The light in Los Angeles is an ephemeral commodity. Crystal clear and warmly cerulean on a good day, a hazy blue-gray on an overcast day, and miraculous at sunset as the crepuscular rays filter through the smog. The light in Southern California has inspired a century of movie making and nostalgic fantasies of paradise. This preternatural illumination has also inspired a group of artists known as the Light and Space movement. At the apex of the technological and aerospace industries of the 1960s, these artists experimented with new forms and new materials. They worked with like glass, neon, cast acrylic, fluorescence, and reactive chemicals to create a new wave of California Minimalism. For the following conversation, we paired two legends of this movement, Helen Pashgian and Larry Bell, to discuss their practice.
Helen Pashgian: Vis-a-vis our work at the very beginning, I was very much in awe of what you were doing. When I became aware of you, I thought our work was very different. But now, both of us are dealing with color in a new way, and in a much more focused way than in the past. I want to know how you feel about this, regarding your big pieces like the ones at Hauser that you showed two years ago: the big pale pink piece and the clear piece. I was really blown away by those.
Larry Bell: Well, I definitely tried to stay away from anything other than interference colors for a long time. In the last few years, I’ve been working with saturated color. There’s a different sense about color.
Pashgian: My current works have disappearing edges, and with yours, the color dissipates to nothing inside the pieces. So, it’s very different, but it’s very similar. For example, there was one corner of the room where you could stand and actually look through all of them. The way the colors meshed was incredible.
Bell: Yeah, it’s one box that surrounds a colored piece and diffuses the lighting.
Pashgian: I remember that they were diffused towards the center, and then they got very pale and disappeared, which was pretty wonderful.
Bell: Wow. Thank you. Yeah.
Pashgian: I feel this affinity with our work at the moment that I didn’t feel in the past. Also, you have always worked with glass, and I have always worked with various resins and casts. So, the techniques were different, but now some of the results seem to be very much akin to each other, although each one is still quite different.
Bell: I would agree with that. I always liked glass because you could buy it anywhere, it was relatively inexpensive, and it did three things that I really liked: it transmitted light, reflected light, and absorbed light all at the same time. By playing around with the surface, or to change any one of those qualities, it affected all of them, and in ways that you couldn’t really predict. So, I get off on looking at things for the first time, and then seeing what happens with the combination of the frosted things, and the colored things, and so on. It’s all part of one piece. These are pieces of evidence from various experiments.
Pashgian: Well, when you’re talking about experiments, it leads me to think that we were all experimenting in the early days. We never thought that anyone would pay any attention to this work. I began as an art historian, and I was artist-in-residence with Peter Alexander for two years at Caltech. It wasn’t a very successful program, but it was all about experimentation. In the past, were you involved with Disney as an animator? Is that correct?
Bell: No, I went to art school after high school because I didn’t really have any credits for anything. The only thing I remember enjoying in high school was drawing cartoons. So, I figured if I went to a school that taught animation, maybe I could get a job with Disney. And so I went to Chouinard, but it didn’t take very long before I dropped out of the quest for employment with Disney and joined the team of painters there. I liked their sense of humor better than anybody else. [Robert] Irwin was my teacher, and his first semester as a teacher was my first semester as a student at Chouinard. I was quite young then, so I didn’t last even two years at art school.
Pashgian: So, that’s how you met?
Bell: Yeah. I was quite unhappy with my accomplishments, and Irwin said, “Look, this is a commercial school. Why get so depressed? You can just go out and get a studio and see what it’s like out there. And then, you can always come back and just pay your tuition.” So, that’s what I did. I just left school and I never went back. The first real studio I had was this long room, and the only thing that was really dramatic were the right angles that made up the corners. So, I started working with things that related to the space in the room, and the paintings that I did were the feelings of the shadows of the space. And then, those paintings became more geometric and started to represent a two-dimensional tessera, or diagram of a three-dimensional shape. And then, one day I just decided to make the shapes instead of making paintings of the shapes.
Untitled, 2018, Cast epoxy, Lens: 25 1/2 inches (64.8 cm) in diameter, Overall: 77 1/2 x 25 1/2 x 5 inches © Helen Pashgian; photo by Joshua White, courtesy the artist and Vito Schnabel Gallery
Pashgian: What’s your take on the light in Los Angeles? Mine is that the light is not more intense than anywhere else, but it’s quite different. For example, I think that the light here is a very harsh kind of a blue light. They always talk about California being the Golden State, and the golden light here, but I don’t think it’s golden at all. I think the real golden light is in the South of France and places on the Mediterranean, where the whole landscape and the seascape is very softly lit. It’s different here because we have so many buildings that are white, with metal, with cars, with freeways. The light itself feels different. Even when you’re on the coast, the light is intense and tends to be cold. But because it’s warm here, we don’t think of it as a cold, bluish light. How do you feel about that and do you think it’s had any effect on your work?
Bell: Given the chance to do something in a room that didn’t require electric lights, I would prefer to work with daylight. But I’ve found that most of my sculptural pieces appreciate natural light better than when I have to go around and light up a room. I don’t have any feelings regarding the natural light here or anywhere else.
Pashgian: I remember once, around ’70 and ’71, there were a lot of shows all over the country. Light and space was becoming known, but particularly right here in Southern California there were fifty or sixty shows, at least. One was at CalArts, and I remember somebody came up to me at the opening and said, you know, all you light people, you’re all doing the same thing. You can’t distinguish one from the other. I’ve thought about that a lot. I think they’re all very different. But they’re different in a subtle way. And I’m reminded of the words of Kirk Varnedoe: “In the Los Angeles aesthetic, reduction does not lead toward pragmatic concreteness, as it does in East Coast minimalism. Instead, it pushes toward a dissolution and disembodiment of experience…it is not an optical style, it is an actual optical experience. It points toward uncertainty, as opposed to anything essential or concrete. West Coast minimalism is all about ambiguity.” 1
Bell: There’s some truth in that.
Pashgian: But in 1969 or 1971, Irwin, Laddie [John Dill], and I all had shows in New York, Jack Brogan came back and mounted the shows, and everyone hated them. The New York Times, or another publication, said, “This is nothing. It’s just atmosphere. There’s nothing there.” And they went on to say a number of disparaging things, like, “they’ve all been in the sun too much, and baked their brains, and too many drugs.”
Bell: I don’t know how to address that at all.
Pashgian: Well, except that things have changed now. They’re paying attention.
Bell: Yeah well, we got older, Helen.
Pashgian: But we’re still doing what we like to do, and it’s still related to what we did way back then.
Bell: I think so. Everything I do now, all the new kinds of activities in the studio are a byproduct of where I came from. The variations over time really are variations of the first corners that I saw in my studio.
Pashgian: I feel exactly the same. The echoes of the very early work are present in everything we’re doing today. We have all played with different materials over the years, and I think one of the most interesting hybrids of what you did was that great fashion show at 72 Market Street. You had models in the dresses that were made with your paintings on them. They were very beautiful, minimal dresses, usually floor length.
Bell: Yeah. They shifted interference colors too, depending on the angle.
Pashgian: And how they moved in them.
Bell: Right. Snakey. Those girls were snakey.
Pashgian: I think, very simply, that Los Angeles is becoming the epicenter. Almost all the major galleries in the world are moving here and the Pacific Rim is extremely important. I would say that the focus of major institutions, like LACMA, has been on countries that border the Pacific Rim. Michael Govan has discussed this a bit, LA is becoming vibrant in a new way.. How do you feel about that, Larry?
Bell: I have almost no feelings about the art world at all. I go to Venice to work in my studio about every three weeks or so, and then I come back to New Mexico and prepare materials to take out there. I got lucky and fell into working with the Hauser & Wirth, and they’ve been so supportive that I’ve been able to do just about everything that I’ve ever wanted. That’s my scene. I have very little feelings about the arts scene of LA because I don’t really live there. I live in a hotel near my studio, and I spend every day in the studio. Going out is the drive from the house in New Mexico to Venice Beach. It takes fifteen hours in my Suburban. I go with my assistant and my dog, we check into the hotel, and then we go into the studio, unload everything, and then we go right to work.
Pashgian: Do you still have Pinkie or do you have a new Pinkie?
Bell: No, Pinkie’s right here next to me and she’s all of sixteen.
Pashgian: Oh great, well give her my best.
Bell: All right, you’ve got it.
1. Kirk Varnedoe, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock (New York: Princeton University Press, 2006), 114
Correction: In our print edition, we attributed the aforementioned referenced quote to Kurt von Meier when it is actually Kirk Varnedoe
Interview published in Autre Volume 2 Issue 8. September 2019
Larry Bell Standing between glass installation, Venice Studio, Photo by Ron Cooper