Louie Was Right

What set the tone for L.A.’s Third International Contemporary Art Fair was the pile of debris directly across from the entrance to the Convention Center in which the show was being held. About 12 feet high and 20 feet long, it was a random mixture of old automobile tires, chunks of plywood and multi-sized cardboard boxes. Louie Fernandez and I used to shoot rats with a BB gun in just such debris at the Oakland City Dump when we were kids.

Imagine my surprise, then, when upon closer inspection the junk heap turned out to have a name, “Barricade 1988.” It was a display created by Japanese artist Tadashi Tonoshiki to symbolize the world’s growing problem with waste disposal, some of which he obviously managed to dispose of by bringing here. According to a brochure, Mr. Tonoshiki drove home his point to an even greater degree in Tokyo recently by filling an entire art gallery with trash and not allowing anyone to enter.

I remember in our dump-hunting days, Louie Fernandez used to find bits of metal, wheels, springs and coils and say, “Somebody ought to make somethin’ of this stuff.” Well, Louie, I’m pleased to say all these years later that somebody has. It’s called contemporary art.

Louie would have asked, “What’s it do?” and I would have been forced to reply in the argot of the age, “It don’t do nothin’,” but I have learned by attending the Art Fair that indeed it does do something. It brings out enormous crowds of artists, gallery reps, retired intellectuals and unfrocked cosmic sculptors in the kind of attire that can only be described as homeless chic.

Man, Louie, they come from everywhere.

I was at the Art Fair because I feel it my duty to be a part of those events that identify our city and because I took to heart the letters received last week after a column on L.A.’s proposed Gateway Monument. The monument, as you know, will be a symbol of Los Angeles, much as the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of New York, the difference being that the statue would have to be smashed and lying on its side in order to meet our specific requirements.

The letters suggested I probably didn’t know art from artichokes and hinted that my home was filled with pictures of tigers painted on black velvet purchased from street vendors who also hustled sheepskin car seats. Au contraire.

My home is furnished by my wife who is a person of exceptional taste. My job around the house is not to tamper with the artistic accouterments but to feed the dog and bring in the newspaper, although in my work room I can hang anything I desire. My favorite is a cartoon from the New Yorker. A little man is coming down a hill carrying buckets that dangle from either end of a yoke-like device over his shoulders. The caption explains: “In the old days, before the discovery of eruptions, the lava had to be carried by hand down the mountain and thrown on the sleeping villagers. This took a lot of time.”

There was much about the Art Fair I liked, despite my skepticism toward that melange of toothpicks and Popsicle sticks called the L.A. Gateway Monument. There was something, in fact, for everyone among the 1,500 displays of art. Louie would have been amazed, for instance, to discover a collage of nuts, bolts, springs and coils compressed into a multihued hanging of the sort he had in mind when he suggested we ought to do somethin’ with this junk. Louie was right. The collage sold for $8,500.

“There’s a lot of dirty stuff here,” I said to my wife as she walked slightly ahead of me, attempting, I suspect, to disassociate herself from my comments.

“All you do is criticize,” she said.

“I’m not criticizing, I like dirty.”

“There’s nothing dirty about the naked human body.”

“There is when an entire man’s hand is emerging from that area of the human body where a guy’s genitalia ought to be,” I said, referring to a piece of sculpture from London.

“The artist is making a statement,” she said.

“The artist is wacko.”

She sighed. “Try being positive.”

I looked around and found an oil painting of black splotches streaked with red.

“I like that one,” I said. “It’s the way the rats looked when we hit them.”

“There’s no victory. Even when you’re positive you’re negative.”

As we left, a lady in a white satin fairy dress with feathery wings and a tinsel halo sprinkled fairy dust on us with a magic wand in a gesture that emulated the Pope blessing the multitudes in Vatican Square.

“Make a wish!” she said in a voice faintly reminiscent of a cockateel’s chirp.

“I wish for a dry vodka martini, no twist, hold the olive,” I said.

So help me, Louie, within 15 minutes I had one in my hand in a bar called Harry’s just across the street. It’s a wonderful world.