Rebels in Paradise (13 page)

Goode described his father as a “wannabe artist” who worked as a display manager at a department store.
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He taught Goode to draw by walking with him into the woods one day and spending an entire afternoon making a precise rendering of a fallen log. After his parents divorced, Goode and his father sat in front of the television together doing line drawings of Jack Benny. Goode thought his father was trapped by family ties and vowed to avoid such responsibilities. As a teenager, Goode lived with his mother, who had remarried, but he did not get along with his stepfather. He dropped out of high school and earned pocket money by playing cards and shuffleboard in bars. His gloomy future was changed by the return of his two friends from Los Angeles. “By then, I knew I wanted to study art and I thought, ‘If I leave here, no matter where I go, at least I won't embarrass my mother by what I am doing, if I want to gamble or whatever.' As … it started snowing, I thought, ‘I'm going to California.'”
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Goode had never flown before. As his Los Angeles–bound plane banked over the ocean before landing at LAX, he looked down at the vast grid of lights and thought, “Jesus, how am I ever going to find anybody?”
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McMillan and Ruscha were taking classes at Chouinard, but Goode had come to the big city with only sixty-five dollars. Slightly built, with blue eyes and a quick wit, Goode was hired to run a printing machine at a shop on Beverly Boulevard. “Two weeks go by and I'm due to get a check,” Goode recalled. “This guy said, ‘All right, just have a seat there.' He brings a check and sits next to me and puts his hand on my leg and starts rubbing. Oh man, I freaked. I never knew anyone who was gay.… I was twenty-one but mentally much younger.”
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Joe Goode, Jerry McMillan, Ed Ruscha, and Patrick Blackwell in their shared studio, 1959

Photograph by Joe Goode, courtesy of Joe Goode

It was a startling introduction to the city. Goode enrolled at Chouinard in January 1960 and settled in with Ruscha, McMillan, Patrick Blackwell, and Don Moore (also from Oklahoma City), in a rented house at 1818 North New Hampshire Avenue in Hollywood. (Wally Batterton, another student, had moved out.) They took their meals at Norm's restaurant (later the subject of Ruscha paintings) and had one extra room that they shared as a studio. Goode said, “Jerry had a wall, I had a wall, Ed had a wall, and Pat Blackwell had a wall. We could be in there at the same time.”
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Goode had his first revelation about art in Robert Irwin's class that fall. “He's a very engaging talker. So when you are subjected to him as an authority figure and he is telling you in a million different ways you can do anything you want, that was the biggest influence,” Goode said.
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Despite his determination to avoid responsibilities, just one year into his studies, Goode married ceramics student Judy Winans. A few months later, they had a baby daughter. To support his family, Goode worked three part-time jobs while taking classes. Exhausted from the effort of going to school and supporting his family, Goode had to drop out six months later. He threw himself into making art for himself. “When I came home from work, these milk bottles would be sitting out on the steps. That is how I got the idea of the milk bottles with a plane in front of them and a plane in back of them. A way of seeing through something.”
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This homey inspiration led him to create large monochrome canvases each with the outline of a single milk bottle at the base. Instead of hanging them, Goode leaned them against a wall with actual glass milk bottles, also painted, on the floor in front of them. Within a year, this work propelled Goode into the surging realm of Pop art at a time when no one really knew what it meant to be Pop.

*   *   *

Ruscha completed his studies at Chouinard in 1960. Despite his dedication to his own art, he supported himself doing layout and graphics for an advertising agency, Carson-Roberts, housed in a glass and steel modern structure in West Hollywood. He designed the original Baskin-Robbins illustration of the single scoop, double scoop, and triple scoop.

In 1961, he left to join his mother, Dorothy, and brother, Paul, on a spring tour of Europe. His father had died of a stroke, and his enterprising mother bought a Citroen in Paris. The three of them drove through Spain, Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Austria, Germany, England, Scotland, Ireland, and France. After his family returned to Oklahoma, Ruscha stayed in Paris for two months. Visiting museums, he came to the same conclusion held by many of his Los Angeles peers. “I found that I had no scholarly interest in art whatsoever.” he said.
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Not the art produced before the twentieth century, at any rate. He was bowled over by his actual encounter with Rauschenberg's “combines,” however—radical combinations of found objects, images, and painting, on display at the Iris Clert Gallery. And, not surprisingly, he loved the Parisian lifestyle. While there, he transformed foreign words into small oil paintings and took photographs of street signs, harbingers of the art that he would pursue.

On his return, Ruscha stopped in New York City and went to the Leo Castelli Gallery. Ivan Karp, then working for Castelli, took Ruscha into the back room to show him a painting of a tennis shoe by Roy Lichtenstein. “It was completely aggravating and inspirational,” Ruscha recalled, realizing that someone else saw popular culture as a valid antidote to Abstract Expressionism.
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He did not want to stay in New York, however. “I was overwhelmed by the number of people in New York and the impersonality of the place,” he recalled. “I feared being chewed up by the whole machine.”
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Back in Los Angeles, Ruscha made a radical leap by applying his graphic arts skills to a series of large paintings with product names such as “Fisk” in white letters with a white tire on a turquoise ground. Another large canvas has the word “Spam” occupying the top while a rendering of the tinned meat in its actual size—
Actual Size
is the title of the painting—hurtles across the canvas like a rocket with yellow flames trailing behind it. Ruscha said, “The word ‘Spam' is similar to the sound of a bomb. So you have this noisy thing at the top and then this projectile flying after the noise, arcing across the sky like a shooting star.”
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Ruscha's paintings were included in the first Pop art exhibition held in the United States: The New Painting of Common Objects at the Pasadena Art Museum from September 25 to October 19, 1962, just two months after the Ferus show of Warhol's soup-can paintings. Organized by Hopps who, with Blum, had visited the studios of the Pop artists in New York, it included three works each by eight artists: Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Jim Dine from New York, and Ruscha, Goode, Phillip Hefferton, Robert Dowd, and Wayne Thiebaud, all from Northern or Southern California. Hopps considered this group to be “post-Rauschenberg, post-Johns” in their use of everyday objects and, like many others, he was trying to comprehend the significance of this increasingly widespread development. Instead of a catalog, he asked the artists to contribute line drawings that were mimeographed and put in an envelope as a portfolio.
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Hopps asked Ruscha to create the exhibition poster. Thinking it should have the same Pop appearance as the art, Ruscha telephoned a commercial printer who usually ran off announcements for boxing matches. He dictated his copy with only one directive: “Make it loud!” The black and red type on a bright yellow background was the ideal off-the-shelf look. John Coplans was visiting from San Francisco and Hopps said, “Come on, help me hang it—we have no staff.” Coplans recalled, “There we were, the director and the critic, hanging the show I was writing about days later.”
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On the West Coast, at least, the show was a sensation. Ruscha's painting of a smashed box of Sun-Maid raisins rendered in the top half of a canvas with the word “Vicksburg,” site of a Civil War battle, covered in a yellow wash of paint on the bottom, sold for fifty dollars to C. Bagley and Virginia Wright, art collectors from Seattle, where Wright had just funded the building of Space Needle for the 1962 World's Fair. Amazed by this early endorsement of his talent, Ruscha said, “I just couldn't believe that I actually got money through this thing.”
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The show was featured in
Artforum
, a magazine conceived that year in San Francisco with a focus on West Coast art. Goode's painting
Happy Birthday
, a purple monochrome canvas poised behind a glass milk bottle covered in orange paint, was on the cover of the distinctive ten-and-one-half-inch square magazine, a format conceived by a graphic design student in San Francisco.

Coplans, an English painter of geometric abstractions who was then teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute, had started contributing reviews to various magazines. He was instrumental in founding
Artforum
with Oakland printer John Irwin. Reviewing the show, he complimented Goode on making “two of the loneliest paintings imaginable … powerful, deeply moving and mysterious paintings,” and declared that Ruscha had done no less than create a “totally new visual landscape.”
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He concluded his review with a chronology of influences that included Duchamp, Man Ray, Schwitters, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Richard Hamilton, adding that his colleague, English critic Lawrence Alloway, had coined the term “Pop art” in 1954. Like Hopps, Coplans saw the movement of Pop art as evolving out of interest in the printed word and everyday objects as seen in assemblage and Beat poetry. Influenced by the multitalented Los Angeles designer Alvin Lustig, who created graphic book jackets for New Directions, Knopf, and other publishers, Ruscha confidently pursued the appearance as well as the meaning and sound of words without images. His next sale was a large painting of one word from the title of a popular comic strip in curvaceous red letters on yellow above a panel of blue:
Annie.

Ruscha traded
Annie
to Goode in exchange for one of his milk-bottle pictures. Shortly after, Blum asked Ruscha to join Ferus with the enticement that his client Betty Asher would buy
Annie
. Ruscha called Goode and pleaded, “Can I trade it back from you?”

“Sure,” said Goode, adding later, “That is the way we worked. We didn't have any money so that always came first.”
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The following year, Asher rewarded him by buying a milk-bottle painting for $300 and persuading red-haired comic actor Sterling Holloway to buy one as well. Holloway became another important collector.

Ruscha made a small version of
Annie
for his intimate friend Ann Marshall, daughter of actor Herbert Marshall and best friend of Michelle Phillips, the gorgeous nymphet singer of the Mamas and the Papas. Along with Toni Basil, the dancer and choreographer who was dating Dean Stockwell, and Teri Garr, the dancer and actress who was dating Bengston, these adventurous and beautiful young women embodied the essence of California girls. They became regulars at Ferus and Barney's and feckless feminine models for photographs by Dennis Hopper.

Ruscha was stunned to be invited to join the elite Ferus artists who were, to him, “like a collection of altar boys with black eyes,” he said. “There were other progressive galleries operating then, but Ferus was the most progressive, and they had a much sparer approach to showing art. If you wanted to put one tiny painting on a big wall you're welcome to it. The artist is the boss.”
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Rolf and Doreen Nelson's wedding party at his gallery, 1966

Courtesy of Doreen Nelson

Goode, on the other hand, was not asked to join Ferus, despite the critical acclaim for his work. “The great thing about Ed [Ruscha] is that Ed has no enemies,” Goode said. “Everybody could learn a great deal from Ed.”
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Goode held no resentment toward his friend but was bitter toward Blum, despite being invited to join a promising new gallery: Rolf Nelson.