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Road Trips and Hat Tricks: With Jack Brogan and Larry Bellby John Eden
The story goes that in 1976 Jack was in Amsterdam working on a James Turrell install. After the opening at the Stedelijk Museum, a selected group of insiders ended up at a canal-side outdoor café, during dinner Jack couldn’t help noticing that Konrad was being abusive to the assist-curator’s wife. After asking him several times to knock-it-off, Konrad stepped it up a notch by pouring his glass full of wine into the woman’s purse. For gentleman Jack, that was a bridge too far, so he picked Herr Fischer up by his finely tailored britches and cast him into the canal “to cool him down some.” A good story, right? But, there’s more, a few months later he is sitting at another canal-side outdoor café, this time in Venice, Italy during the 37th Venice Biennale having a conversation with an Amsterdam Gallerist, who tells him about this wild American Cowboy who threw Konrad Fischer into an Amsterdam canal. To which Jack replied; “I am that guy.”
Hanging out at Jack Brogan’s shop back in the day was like being at Robert Johnson’s Crossroads. In short, it was the nitty-gritty real epicenter of the West Coast artworld, where everybody came to make lightning strike.
There was a down-home comradery of most everyone passing through, and, refreshingly enough, there was usually very little artifice involved. You might find yourself rubbing elbows with a curator from the Getty or some guy from the Stedelijk or a retired Postal worker who liked to stop by on his old neighborhood route just to check in, because Jack didn’t play favorites. In short, it was the perfect place to hang—if you had an interest in the art making process or if you just wanted to casually interact. At the beginning of any project, Jack would usually start out by saying something like, “Well…what we’re gonna’ do is,” and a year later—and with no small amount of blood, sweat and tears, you’d have a perfect union of your original intent, intertwined with his encyclopedic input of materials. No, Jack was never fast, but he most often did amazing things. He started the whole fabrication field that we know today. The greatest lessons I learned from Jack, besides patience, is that there are many ways to achieve the same thing. You just have to find your way of getting there. With sculpture, everything is some combination of additive and/or subtractive processes, be it old school techniques or new.
At the end of 2009, I spent a week in Vegas at the new City Center working as a conservator with 79-year-young Jack Brogan on a 7-million-dollar marble sculpture by Henry Moore. Jack and I put the finishing touches on a restoration job that he had done earlier that year at his shop in Inglewood, CA. We spent the week with dental tools filling and abrading gaps between various elements of the piece. I think we surprised each other by how hard we could work, on our knees or on ladders; we blew through about 60 feet of hairline joints in about six days like we were youngsters. However, in the evening we’d hobble over to the hotel bar and nurse a few cool ones, have dinner, fall backwards into beds and repeat the pattern until it was done. The only thing scarier than driving to Vegas with Jack at the wheel in his long-legged Chevrolet Suburban, was driving back from Vegas knowing what was to come. Jack is a car enthusiast, loves Formula One and NASCAR racing, but loves listening to jazz music and going pedal-to-the-metal fast most of all.
Since 2008, I have employed digital scanning technology in my art making process. In 2013, Brogan mentioned to me that there was a very expensive, cutting-edge process, being developed at Pasadena's Caltech that prints 3-D objects in a clear glass metal material. By using that technology as a catalyst for technologies available to me, I asked artist Larry Bell if I could have one of his signature hats to create a digital scan to make my own 3-D prototype of Larry Bell’s hat. That original prototype was used to create an original mold so that I could pour clear resin multiples which cross-references his signature glass cubes. Like most everyone in the period, I grew up listening to vinyl records and studying the album cover art. One of the most iconic covers, was the Sgt. Peppers’ album by the Beatles. I was intrigued by the images of the chosen few on that album. A very young Larry Bell can be seen, front and center, right behind Ringo and Paul, making Larry definitely one of my Cool School candidates. Larry grew up in the San Fernando Valley and has been a long-term talent in the artworld. He is a genuinely nice human being to boot, as unaffected as they come. So, he was the natural choice for me to interact with. If what Motherwell said was true, that “every intelligent artist carries the whole culture of art in their head,” then what they choose to adorn their heads with might be significant as well.
I’ve never seen Larry without his hat. In fact, I can easily conjure an image of Mr. Bell stepping into the shower each morning, chomping on a stogie and wearing only his current fedora. For me, the genesis of that image of Larry grows out of Jan Webb’s famously funny photo (a 60's Rico Mizuno Gallery announcement) of a young, very hairy, Larry Bell fearlessly standing on the beach in profile, supported by an evocative driftwood cane, wearing only white brief underwear, dark sunglasses, and his signature hat. This helped cement his very endearing “Rebel In Paradise” visage. Think Blues Brother—Jake (John Belushi) and you've got it. As in life, rolling with the punches, is most always the best approach. I had Larry’s hat 3-D printed and cast using a resin, glass-like clear material as planned, but it just didn’t hold up visually. So, after discussing my options with Brogan, he suggested sandblasting the hats with baking soda to create an opaque or frosted-like surface treatment. It did the trick. Jack has forgotten more about materials than I’ll ever know. Point of fact, he is a genius in his field and a real treasure to the art world. As decorum dictates, there must be a ceremony for the Changing of the Hats once the work was completed. The conceptual root for this part of the piece involved the 1953 story between artists Robert Rauschenberg and Willem De Kooning. Rauschenberg asked De Kooning for a drawing that he could erase, sign and retitle “Erased de Kooning Drawing.” This transfer between the two artists is what I was after and Larry graciously played along.
In addition to the obvious ‘slight of hand’ meaning, there is more to the title of this article, "Road Trips and Hat Tricks With Jack Brogan and Larry Bell." “The Hat Trick” references multiple art stories; the first between Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg. The next centers on Larry Bell’s inspirational rise to fame, which joins with my story to create a third. A 'Hat Trick', in hockey parlance, references three or more significant achievements during one game. ----------------------------------------------------
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