Love at First Sight: On Scientist Ed Wortz’s Relationship with Artists

Artists Robert Irwin and James Turrell inside the anechoic chamber at UCLA in 1969, as part of the Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) (detail) (1967–71). Image courtesy of LACMA Archives and Getty Research Institute. Photo: Malcom Lubliner.

In the summer of 1969, the scientist Edward Wortz began organizing the first National Symposium  on Habitability, at NASA’s bequest. The goal was to determine how to make foreign environments habitable enough to allow long term space missions. He likely would have taken a different approach before he met the artist Robert Irwin.

But Wortz, a physiological psychologist researching space travel, had spent the last few months collaborating with Irwin and James Turrell as part of LACMA’s Art & Technology project. He had been annoyed when his employers at the Garrett Corporation let him know that two artists were on their way to his laboratory. Then he met them. “It was like love at first sight, Wortz recalled in 1977.¹ He had already been pushing the boundaries of “acceptable procedures and acceptable perception”² within his own field, and here were two people who were also doing that, if from a different vantage. They worked together for two years, using an anechoic chamber at UCLA to explore the effects of sensory deprivation on perception, using an electroencephalogram (EEG) machine to try to measure the consciousness reached when in a meditative state, and developing a number of exercises in meditation. The three of them never produced an actual artwork. As Wortz put it, making any finished product “got more and more irrelevant.”³.

The inaugural National Symposium on Habitability was held in Robert Irwin’s Los Angeles studio in May 1970. The scientists, city planners, physicians, engineers, and other experts in attendance stayed at the International Hotel by the airport and took a bus to the Venice Beach studio. The schedule, made up of lectures and panels, resembled a typical conference. But the environment did not. Irwin had knocked a hole into a brick wall in his space, which participants had to step through before emerging into a pristine room lit ambiently by colored skylights, with pillows on the floor. The red canvas chairs for panelists were set up to face each other, so that the experts would speak directly to one another. During the first day of the symposium, a line of white cardboard columns covered a far wall. The next day, the columns were gone, exposing a window covered in multi-colored translucent film. The third day, the window itself was gone. Irwin’s interventions into the space made participants uncomfortable at first, but so did the diversity of the people in the room—many of the scientists and scholars in attendance weren’t used to thinking alongside people from dramatically different fields. “The first day of the symposium was a very intense situation,” Wortz recalled.⁴ There was no second National Symposium on Habitability,⁵ and Wortz soon left aerospace altogether. “My exploration led me to change my career as well as changing my colleagues, my lifestyle, my family, everything,” Wortz said in a 1986 interview.⁶ I first learned about Wortz in the early 2010s, when I started researching the Art & Technology program, which paired artists with technological corporations to give artists unprecedented resources for artmaking. Within these pairings, conflicts abounded as artists’ sensibilities and politics clashed with corporate culture. Few corporate figures engaged as fully with the artists as Wortz did. I continued to see his name pop up as I did research for my forthcoming book about women-run art galleries in Los Angeles. In his oral history, the artist Tom Wudl mentions the time Wortz handed him a translated copy of the Avatamsaka Sutra, a canonical Buddhist text. When Wudl started reading, he thought, “This is it. This is what I’ve been looking for all my life.”⁷ The book helped him stop comparing his career to others, and he started making ornate, methodical drawings based on lotus flowers.

The collaboration with Irwin and Turrell, two of the most famous artists to emerge from Los Angeles’s 1960s ferment, was sensational, but Wortz’s quieter, constant presence in the local art scene—which began in the 1970s and continued until his death in 2004—compelled me more. His persistent presence in the lives of artists underscored for me the way that art, in its most beautiful and inspiring forms, requires experimental approaches to thinking and living. These approaches are difficult to sustain. Because of this, there is inevitably a tapestry-like support network surrounding artists, and Wortz’s own interests and affections led to his unique role in this network. While the Turrell and Irwin collaboration has been cited in multiple art histories, little in the canonical written history of art in Los Angeles traces Wortz’s role after that. But when stories like Wortz’s fall by the wayside, their absence impoverishes the story of art, reducing it to a myth that props up cults of the individual and glorifies art objects over the energies and possibilities that allowed them to exist.

Artists Robert Irwin and James Turrell meeting with Dr. Ed Wortz of The Garrett Corporation in 1969, as part of the Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) (1967–71). Image courtesy of LACMA Archives and Getty Research Institute. Photo: Malcom Lubliner.

LACMA staff Maurice Tuchman and Gail Scott with artists Robert Irwin and James Turrell at The Garrett Corporation, as part of the Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) (1967–71). Image courtesy of LACMA Archives and Getty Research Institute. Photo: Malcom Lubliner.

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Wortz was born in 1930 and grew up near San Antonio, Texas. He spent three years serving on the USS Rochester in Korea before finishing his PhD research at the University of Texas, Austin in 1957. Since he had begun working in aerospace in graduate school, he continued. He took contract work for NASA and eventually landed at the Garrett Corporation in Los Angeles, where he lived with his wife Sue Nelson and his twin daughters. By the time he met Irwin and Turrell, Wortz was the director of the Life Sciences Department at Garrett. He met the critic and art historian Melinda Wortz (née Farris) through Turrell and Irwin, artists associated with the L.A. Light and Space movement about which Melinda wrote avidly. She and Wortz married in the early 1970s, after both of their first marriages ended (Melinda had three daughters with her first husband, former Pasadena Museum of Art director Thomas Terbell).

Wortz’s encounter with art coincided with other shifts: Before he left the Garrett Corporation, he began working with the Buddhist monk Ven. Dr. Thich Thien-An, who would eventually ordain Wortz. Together, they founded the International Buddhist Meditation Center in Koreatown, an exceptionally interdisciplinary and interfaith center. It opened in 1970, shortly before Wortz enrolled at the newly-founded Gestalt Therapy Institute of Los Angeles. He enrolled hoping to become a better scientist. In his research, he had been using EEG biofeedback, a technique meant to increase mind-body awareness by connecting electric pads to a person’s body. The pads read brain waves and emit a sound to indicateincreased anxiety or increased heart rate. This way, someone can learn to better regulate their own energy, a skill essential for astronauts in alien environments. “The people I was working with…were having profound experiences and having some difficulty integrating those experiences into their lives,” he explained in 1986.⁸ He felt a responsibility to help his subjects navigate the effects of his research. He didn’t intend to become a therapist, but by 1973 he was licensed and practicing the process-based Gestalt method, which privileges presence and awareness in the moment over mining the past.

This was an unusual trajectory for a scientist, but for Wortz, it all felt connected. He had already been looking at the relationship among physiology, emotions, and intellect, and he had used meditation techniques to help train astronauts to cope with the environment of space shuttles; therapy involved using the same strategies, but with different applications. He left the corporate world gradually, staying on at Garrett until 1976, dropping his workload to four days a week, then three, and then one. In Melinda and Ed’s Pasadena home, the boundaries between art, spirituality, and exploration were fluid. While Ed practiced Buddhism, Melinda was on the vestry at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena. The artist Barbara T. Smith, who attended weekly group Gestalt therapy meetings at the Wortzes’ home, used to babysit their daughters. Smith had met Wortz through Irwin and she would visit him to talk about her ideas and he “would walk me right over to a laboratory where the people working would listen and begin to fantasize a solution.”⁹ She felt validated by the access Wortz gave her as a scientist, and then as a therapist—he embraced as serious ideas that others in the art world treated as outlandish. When she was unhappy, separated from her children following her divorce, Wortz asked her, “Barbara, why don’t you do just one thing to make yourself happier?”¹⁰ So, she took a lover.

For his therapy sessions, Wortz practiced out of a home office. He had a “greeter cat,” as the artist Scott Grieger recalled, who would walk clients back to meet him. His approach to therapy was practical, problem-oriented. “He was interested in your sad story,” Grieger said, “but his take on things was ‘let’s not dwell on it.’”¹¹ Or as Wortz himself put it in the Buddhist publication he edited, Dharma Family Journal, “I like to train my clients to construct and deconstruct the experiences that are causing them difficulty.”¹² Many of his clients were artists, writers, or filmmakers. At one point, he was seeing so many Los Angeles artists that it was a running joke. “Why haven’t you come to see me yet?” Wortz shouted across the yard to the artist and critic Peter Plagens, at a party.¹³ Sometimes Wortz accepted art in lieu of payment, though he referred to his own visual sensibility as “clumsy”: “I usually appreciate [the artists] far more than I do the things that they make,” he said.¹⁴ Visual acuity did not matter much to him—it mattered more that he understood and shared the impulse to push the limits of perception and to experiment with materials and ideas. “It’s really exciting to have one foot on a banana peel and the other hanging over an abyss,” Wortz said in 1977, when asked about Robert Irwin’s penchant for repeatedly reinventing his approach to art making.¹⁵ As a therapist attuned to the peculiarities of artists, and also deeply embedded in the city’s nascent, evolving art scene, he offered something unique—emotional and psychological support—to a class of people whose work required emotional intelligence. “I think he helped a lot of people keep going with their art,” Karen Comegys-Wortz, who was married to Wortz when he passed in 2004, told me of her late husband’s influence on artists.

As Wortz made his transition from scientist to therapist, the L.A. art scene was itself changing. A robust feminist art movement was emerging alongside a surge in experimental, conceptual, and performance art practices. Wortz’s interdisciplinary, exploratory approach to his own life and work felt right on time. Perhaps he knew this when, in 1973, right as he was becoming a therapist, he made his second attempt at a convening around habitability, but this time without the concerns of the space race hanging over them. One of his takeaways from the NASA-sponsored symposium had been that “largely people weren’t aware of how environments affected their behavior.”¹⁶ Once again, he pulled in artists alongside city planners, policymakers and aerospace engineers for a conference held in Monterey and sponsored by the California Council of the American Institute of Architects.

Sheila Levrant de Bretteville— the artist and designer who helped found the Woman’s Building, which opened in 1973 in downtown Los Angeles—gave a talk at the symposium. She argued that before they could address strategies for improving “life quality” or executing “good design,” those very terms required interrogation. Whose quality of life? Good for whom? For de Bretteville, generalized assumptions about “good” design and its effects on people became a form of control, one which “inevitably operates through oversimplification, enforcing a single reading or use.”¹⁷ This was exactly what Wortz invited by bringing a designer like de Bretteville into this conversation: to push the boundaries of how he and others understood the “habitability” of our world, still an urgent question best answered by the kind of interdisciplinary collaboration that remains elusive today.

Ed Wortz applying electrodes to seated woman (1969). Image courtesy of LACMA Archives and Getty Research Institute. Photo: Malcom Lubliner.

Caron Colvin, Therapist Ed Wortz and Melinda (1980). Image courtesy of the Hudson County Community College Foundation. © Hudson County Community College Foundation. All Rights Reserved.

In the years that followed, as Wortz’s involvement in the arts also continued through his friendships and his therapy practice, he also intermittently collaborated with artists. In 1976, he helped plan a public sculpture project along the Northern Waterfront area of San Francisco. In 1991, he co-curated an exhibition called and about Addictions at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, with the artist Walter Gabrielson. Gabrielson explained in the catalogue for the show that he wanted the benefit of Wortz’s wide-ranging expertise as someone who understood Buddhism, artists, substance abuse, and biofeedback.

When he became ill with prostate cancer in the early 2000s, Wortz had already spent over a decade caring for Melinda, who had received an Alzheimer’s diagnosis right before she turned 50 and passed in 2002. He stayed in constant conversation with his friends and his doctors about his experience with his illness. Irwin believed Wortz kept cancer at bay through his curiosity. “He researched it and got into the whole process,” Irwin told the writer Lawrence Weschler. “The doctors…loved him because he was the best feedback candidate they ever could have had.”¹⁸ Wortz would get tired in the afternoons and have to lie down. Sometimes, during visits, Irwin would lay beside him. “We’d actually hold hands,” Irwin recalled, “and he would talk about this whole process of dying.”¹⁹

Irwin said that Wortz had given him a lesson in how to die. But they had both already been teaching each other how to live for decades. Wortz had developed, through the time he spent with artists, an inclusive theory of art’s value that pivoted away from capital: “The profession of art provides the individual with a lot of options. It’s a very wealthy profession,” he said, acknowledging that this “wealth” was not typically monetary. “The options have to do with behavior, lifestyles, dress, environment, and all sorts of things society lets the artist get away with. This makes the artist very rich.”²⁰ Others have recognized this potential richness, but Wortz found a way to keep helping the people around him access the possibilities that living experimentally and open-mindedly invited. I stumbled recently upon an exuberant 1980 painting by the L.A. artist Caron Colvin, a portrait of Ed and Melinda Wortz. They both smile warmly. Ed holds a plant in his right hand and a finger growing out of his head reaches out to touch a plant growing out of Melinda’s head. Red block letters next to him read, “being as existence manifests only through relationship,” a precept Ed likely articulated, and the painting itself —with the plants, the words, the kind eyes of both subjects, Colvin’s gestural vivacity—makes this statement resonate.

This essay was originally published in Carla issue 40.

Catherine Wagley writes about art and visual culture in Los Angeles.

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