"Independence: Art in the Public Eye"
Brett Goldstone, a 25-year survey
at Dangerous Curve
an Experimental Exhibition and
Live Art/Visual Art Performance Space
Exhibit Dates
July 4--August 5, 2006
Wednesday through Saturday
1:00 to 6:00 p.m.
Activations every Saturday
a casual Independence Day
Tuesday, July 4, 2006
~4:00 to 10:00 p.m.
the exhibition celebration
Saturday, July 29, 2006
7:00 to 11:00 p.m.
all free
1020 East Fourth Place
(500 Molino Street #102)
Los Angeles, CA, U.S.A.
For those of you lucky enough to remember Brett Goldstone's Fourth of July celebrations, you're in for a nostalgic treat. This25-year survey of his work is an unprecedented and rare opportunity to see a survey of the legendary art autodidact and prankster's work.
We will be having several events associated with the exhibit: a casual Independence Day celebration on Tuesday, July 4, 2006, from around 4:00 to 10:00 p.m., "activations" (see below for the history of such) each Saturday of the exhibit (July 8, 15, 22, 29, and August 5) between 1:00 and 6:00 p.m., and the exhibition celebration on Saturday, July 29, 2006, from 7:00 to 11:00 p.m. All the events are free.
We're located at 1020 East Fourth Place, between Molino and Mateo Streets, in the back of the 500 Molino Street Lofts, #102, between the Fourth Street Bridge's (on the LA River side of downtown) two on/off ramps. The exhibit is up until August 5, 2006. See our website <http://dangerouscurve.org> for directions, pictures, and updates.
Goldstone started in LA by drawing cartoons and covers for The LA Reader. He was a cofounder of LA Experimental Works and organizer of the infamous Fourth of July shows, the illegal LA Steamworks shows, and the uninsured LA River Festivals. Brett Goldstone is now a master ironworker, which you know if you've seen his Great Heron Gate and his "Water with Rocks" gate, both on Fletcher Drive in Silver Lake.
Stemming from impressive upper-class New Zealand cultural roots, Goldstone has always turned his back on the pretentious. From a Friedensreich Hundertwasser exhibit in his birthplace, Auckland, he learned how art, architecture, and performance could reduce social alienation. In 1979, he went from attending law school at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch to stacking wood in a Los Angeles lumberyard. He then went from touring European museums to observing the poverty of South America, often sleeping on the side of the road. He returned to Los Angeles, getting a job pushing a submarine sandwich cart up and down Sherman Way and Ventura Boulevard. By 1981, he leased 945 North Main in Chinatown. It was near The Women's Building on North Spring so, in typical form, Goldstone dubbed it The Boy's Building.
In 1983, in Auckland, Goldstone began crafting his notoriety as art provocateur with his headline-generating show "Art in the Burner," which he mounted in an abandoned municipal incinerator station so dimly lit that the paintings on the walls could barely be seen. All the paintings were stolen. The city, however, was inspired to clean up the place and turn it into a still popular shopping mall and tourist destination. Back in Los Angeles, Goldstone dubbed himself "Art Attack" and began hacking the Los Angeles art world. At the black-tie MOCA gala, he hurled insults down onto arriving guests from surrounding trees, where he had also hung some of his sculptures made of Coke cans. He used his own sandwich boards and map to redirect hundreds of people on a Los Angeles Visual Arts Festival (LAVA) art walk to pieces he'd built on Skid Row.
Goldstone worked with Survival Research Laboratories (SRL, who showed at Dangerous Curve in 2005) for two years starting in 1985, but sees his work as fundamentally different, in that his machinery is "delicate and tentative"---which is anything but Mark Pauline's (founder of SRL) approach. Also in the mid-80s, since he was too poor to pay for art school, he audited at UCLA. That was when Chris Burden headed the New Forms and Concepts (now New Genres) department. In Paul McCarthy's class, he ended up giving a lecture in life experience, publishing a 32-page booklet, and doing a performance with Kim Jones and McCarthy. Through Burden, Goldstone met future collaborators Tim Quinn, Skip Arnold, and Chico MacMurtrie. In 1987, he started publishing EMIT ("TIME" spelled backwards), accepting any submissions slipped under his door, including those from Monique Prieto, Skip Arnold, Tim Quinn, Brad Hwang, and Paul McCarthy.
He cites as his most important influence Hero of Alexandria, an Ancient Greek who described a theory for the steam engine and a robot <http://www.history.rochester.edu/steam/thurston/1878/Chapter1.html>. In 1987, Goldstone, Quinn, MacMurtrie, Nault, and Hwang founded the kinetic sculpture cooperative LA Experimental Works. Prieto, Lauren Tawa and others were also part of the group. They started the LA Steamworks shows, which also included Jack Nault, Steve Hurd, Arnold, and others. Goldstone called what they did "activiations." The shows were at such places as the river end of The Cornfield (July 4, 1987), next to Al's Bar (Labor Day weekend, 1987), and Highland Park's King Wire factory (July 4, 1992 and 1993). The Fourth of July shows drew upwards of 400 people. Goldstone was the one who made them happen, from organizing them to tweaking the machines to keep them running. On the surface," Quinn says in the online Lewis MacAdams piece "Life and Art" on Goldstone, "it was about sculpture, but with Brett it was about theater. The shows were sculpture and performance art." <http://theojac1.tempdomainname.com/brettgoldstone/bio.html The unpermitted shows could never be legal, as the steam engines were built by the artists, not commercial companies. At the 1991 Fourth of July show, Goldstone was handcuffed in front of 100 people for driving one of his homemade handcars on unused track under the North Broadway bridge. He ended up merely getting a ticket, which the judge then laughed out of court.
There were three LA River Shows, all unpermitted. The police wouldn't show for two hours, which was enough time to get a show up. At this point, Goldstone wanted to make art that was more socially useful. For the one show, on the Avenue 64 Bridge over the Arroyo Seco, Goldstone built a turbine, driven by the river, to light up the bridge. For another at his North Avenue 21 compound, he rocked a rusty yacht as if it were on stormy waters, using steam. For yet another, he used junk to build a 40-foot miniature suspension bridge across the river. It was called "Crossing the Bridge is an Act of Faith." As with his other work, there was no line between the art and the audience. It was, however, his last artwork, by his definition.
Almost immediately, Goldstone was commissioned by Soundeluxe Postproduction Sound Studios to design a gate. In it, skyscrapers morph into cactii, the New Zealand landscape morphs into that of Los Angeles, North morphs into South, East into West. Next came the two gates on either side of the Fletcher Drive Bridge between Silverlake and Atwater Village. "The Great Heron Gate" was an instant landmark. "Water with Rocks" won him an award from the state assembly. A third public gate, for Ballona Creek at Centinela, is yet uninstalled. They, and numerous privately commissioned gates, are not art to Goldstone. "They are decorative art," he says, simply.
Since the gates, Goldstone's built a 20-foot-high ferris wheel, never finished or shown. His biggest dream, however, is to build a 1000-foot-high Great Blue Heron with one foot on one bank of the LA River and the other on the other. He intends visitors to go through the neck to view the watershed from the giant heron's eyes. That project is a life-long one that we hope gets finished in ours.
