The Rat Bastard Protective Association at The Landing

Rat Bastard Protective Association (2016) (Installation view). Image courtesy of the Landing, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua White/JW Pictures.

Energetic, close-knit, and radical (long before it was chic), a group of San Francisco artists came to call themselves Rat Bastards. They lived and worked together in “Painterland,” a building in the Fillmore District, during the late 1950s. Many of them are now well-known—Jay DeFeo, Bruce Conner, and Wally Hedrick among them—while others remain largely under-appreciated, despite the quality of their work. The Landing’s exhibition, The Rat Bastard Protective Association (RBPA), brought the work of those 13 artists together for the first time since 1958.

Curated by Anastasia Aukeman, author of Welcome to Painterland: Bruce Conner and the Rat Bastard Protective Association (UC Press, 2016), RBPA paid historical allegiance to these artists and their work, though fell short of capturing an adequate sense of the work itself. In contrast to a cohort known to be socially rebellious, wildly creative, and intellectually engaged, the show paled and was surprisingly staid in its layout. Works were grouped together by artist and were essentially segregated, offering zones of contact but minimal cross-pollination and dynamism across bodies of work. The “choasmotic” nature, to use Felix Guattari’s word for osmosis in an environment of perpetual change, of Painterland was merely alluded to but not vibrantly represented as a result.

Sequestered in the furthest back lot of the gallery and having little direct physical relation to the majority of work in this show, Wallace Berman’s lithographs and collage mailers were largely muted. Despite that fact, his Untitled (Parchment Piece) (1956-57), one of the show’s gems, shone through with tattered parchment and hand-inked Hebrew char-
acters. Berman’s collage mailers are multifaceted aesthetic objects used as practical modes of communication that served to engage Berman’s friends in a broader creative dialogue. Highly influential, they made their way through the cultural fabric of the artistic and literary underground and permeated mainstream society, making significant impact on American culture at large in their own off-kilter way. A reliance on the convenience of vitrines for the presentation of the mailers did little to articulate to the vim and vigor of their vision.

Berman’s mailers are emblematic of the broader discussion that many of these RBPA artists were engaged in—a dialogue not simply about aesthetics but one concerned with mobilizing new modes of dialogue as an aesthetic in and of itself. Poet Michael McClure’s illustrated poems embody this sense of engagement and collaboration, as do the mixed media assemblages of George Herms. Herms’ assemblages speak to the inclusive orientation of the collective, and are characteristic of Lévi-Strauss’ notion of the bricolage, wherein not only is the overall composition of a work cobbled together from varied materials and methods of construction, but those very materials are constitutive of the bricoleur’s immediate locality. Bricolage, according to Lévi-Strauss, reveals an intimacy as it makes an artist’s environment legible and concrete, and the product, assemblage in the case of Herms, is the ultimate manifestation of the production. Herms’ Pisces Box (1965-66 ) offers a bizarrely imaginative rendering of the zodiac that extends Herms’ collage technique into the sculptural realm.

Bruce Connor’s paintings drew initial interest perhaps most for the fact that they predate his later, and formidable, film works. Venus (1954) is an intellectually vibrant oil-on-can- vas rendering of a female nude in gauzy black and white strokes. The subject’s posture is self-contemplative—head bowed, not in deference to a viewer’s gaze but rather in consideration of her own sex. In that contemplation, the life of her mind is made to appear stimulated and enlarged as billows of paint emanate from the figure and across the expanse of the canvas.

Radicality, in the case of these artists, is active, gestural, and collaborative, so much so that it resists conventional presentation, and that resistance is the fundamental challenge of a curator. As a snapshot of Painterland, the show satisfied, but in a narrow way. The work on display in RBPA was representative of the radical attitudes and lifestyle of these artists, as well as the living space that brought them together, but the show’s lack of curatorial imagination did little to capture that spirit. As a historical show with a practical theme, RBPA succeeded in documenting the work of those involved, but as a show about self-proclaimed Rat Bastard artists, hell-bent on making art and affecting culture in profound ways, it failed to meet the challenges these many artists laid out against posterity.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 7.

Works by Jay DeFeo and Jean Conner in Rat Bastard Protective Association (2016) (installation view). Courtesy of the Jay DeFeo Trust, Conner Family Trust, and the Landing. Photo: Joshua White/JW Pictures.

Works by Wally Hedrick and Alvin Light in Rat Bastard Protective Association (2016) (installation view). Image courtesy of the Box, the Wally Hedrick Estate, the Alvin Light Estate, and the Landing. Photo: Joshua White/JW Pictures.

Joan Brown, Rats Laughing at Manuel’s Sculptures (1960). Image courtesy of George Adams Gallery, the Joan Brown Estate, and the Landing. Photo: Joshua White, JW Pictures.

Manuel Neri, Carla IV (1958-60). Plaster, wood, wire, burlap, 63” x 13” x 10.” Image courtesy of George Adams Gallery and the Landing. Photo: Joshua White/JW Pictures.

Rat Bastard Protective Association (2016) (installation view). Image courtesy of the Landing, works by Jay DeFeo courtesy of the Jay DeFeo Trust. Photo: Joshua White/JW Pictures.