Venice’s Island of Whimsy : Billy Al Bengston still believes in self-contradiction

At 54, Billy Al Bengston looks like he’s got it all. He lives in a walled estate in Venice with his resident lady, 26-year-old Christi Bach, a spat of Latino functionaries and a pair of purebred Manchester terriers. He still retains his old place--Artists Studio--down on Windward and rents digs in Hawaii, where he passes large chunks of the year. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is holding an unprecedented second full-dress retrospective of his work.

He is rumored to be the richest artist in Venice along with his best friend, sculptor Robert Graham. Admitting to an income in six figures, he thinks Graham may have the largest annual gross but is pretty sure his younger contemporaries Charles Arnoldi and Laddie Dill are wealthier. They tend to keep track of things like that at the beach.

By any measure he is not doing badly for a guy from Dodge City, Kan., who went to Manual Arts High and was so rebellious he managed to get booted out of Los Angeles City College and Otis Art Institute. That was before he and his mates put L.A. Cool School art on the map in the ‘60s as members of Walter Hopps’ Ferus Gallery.

Everybody remembers that most of the L.A. artists who went on the make to make a name for themselves and the town showed at Ferus--Ed Kienholz, Craig Kauffman, Larry Bell, Ken Price, John Altoon, Robert Irwin, Ed Ruscha. They were cult figures, but Bengston still had to race motorcycles to make ends meet and would sell a painting for whatever bucks the buyer had.

He has come a long way. The trouble is the retrospective has given him the visual version of writer’s block. He has been unable to paint during the exhibition’s tour of museums in Houston and Oakland. Before it opened here Thursday he was still fussing over the installation, cranky because gallery walls are only 16 feet high instead of 18. He went home for a break and to show an old acquaintance the new place.

“Since I can’t work I putter around here. I do a few watercolors and some public commissions but they ain’t real painting. Exhibitions ain’t painting either; they’re show biz. You notice how people go around the galleries these days with those audio tours stuck in their ears? That’s right. They don’t look at the art--they listen to it. Next thing the museums will issue little video monitors so they can walk around and watch it on television.”

A Mellow Air

Charming as ever and as effortlessly stylish in a cobalt-blue sweater, jeans and running shoes with Day-Glo tartan laces, Bengston has nonetheless weathered and mellowed. The old mustache is long gone, and you would no longer cast Burt Reynolds to play him--there is an admixture of Clint Eastwood gauntness.

“Arnoldi and I bought the place together about three years ago. It was a miniature ghetto of seven of these little clapboard houses with literally a hundred Latinos living in them. I love immigrants. That’s Manuel over there working. He’s been with me five years. He speaks pretty good English now and can more or less read.

“Arnoldi and I shared the place for a while. We turned the seven houses into studios and living quarters. Then we decided it was too much like art school, so we divided it up. That’s his place on the other side of the wall. It looks like a factory because Chuck is in into manufacturing. I’m too old for that. I just do what I feel like.”

The warren of buildings is divided from its run-down quarter of Venice by a 10-foot fence topped by loops of barbed wire. Life at the beach. Inside the place is a melange of styles imposed on quaint old craftsmen cottages, a lexicon of Post-Modern hybridization. One studio has a circular Chinese portal appended. In a black sitting-room Bengston is designing an Art-Deco carpet by having his workmen inset colored pieces. The yard features Technicolor lattice in the artist’s wonderful pastel palette, gurgling Japanese fountains and a 40-foot lap pool where Bengston works out.

Christi appears looking like a teen-ager and as freshly pretty as a high school athlete. She announces the housekeeper is leaving and wants to be paid. “Tell her I’ll give her a bonus if she waits until next week. Listen, how’s the the coffee coming?”

She trots off to check.

“We’ve been together about two years,” Bengston says. “She’s going to be in the next Olympics if I can help it. She has the potential of a great middle-distance runner. Most kids can’t afford to be athletes--it’s too expensive. I get her what she needs. She needs a trainer, I get one. She needs shoes, I get them. And brassieres. I’m a Little League pop.”

One of the Manchester terriers trots out, moving like a high-strung thoroughbred and looking like a miniature, bat-eared Doberman.

“That’s Spike. It’s the other one that wins prizes in shows. Named Dodger. The people I bought her from show her and she wins everything. So does Christi. Come on in and see the trophies.

“That last retrospective of mine was 20 years ago. After that one I couldn’t work for a year. Did a lot of drugs. No dope this time. I never thought it would be like this, that artists would become celebrities, stars who could have everything they want. I just wanted to make good art.”

Bengston concedes he has had a sense of himself as “some kind of entertainer.”

“I guess I did want to be a celebrity. I just never thought it would happen. Besides I don’t do all that anymore. I live quietly and if I manage to stay up until 10 it’s a big event.”

“In a way it’s perfectly logical that art would become a commodity. I’m not against high prices for art. That Jasper Johns that sold for $17 mil just got what it deserved. Art is the only thing that’s irreplaceable. You can get a new car but you can’t even reproduce art, and if you do, it turns into something else.”

He leads his guest into a cozy old living room with a stained-glass window, a Ruscha over the mantle and a small Kienholz on it. Christi brings coffee.

“He knows everything,” Christi says with a moan. “Every time I try to do something he already knows about it. My name for him is The Expert.”

Bengston has always been a maven. He remembers the time in Baja when some friends drove their car on the beach against his advice. It got stuck and he refused to help get it out, loping off to a seaside cantina to sip tequila sunrises. A girl in the party chewed him out for not helping.

“It’s not time,” the artist said.

Just as the tide was lapping at the wheels, Bengston returned, let the air out of the tires and drove the car to safety.

“I just wanted to teach them a lesson. In art it’s not easy to make a decision when you know everything. I know when it’s right and when it’s wrong. I can do anything and I hate myself for it. But retrospectives are confusing because you don’t know really what path you’re on till you look back.

“To make 100%-pure decision on a piece you have to blind yourself to what you’re doing. You know the answer but you have to stop before you get to it. You have to leave the question open.

“I used to consciously make breaks in my life. I’d get to a place where I was doing it right and I’d have to stop and do it wrong. I’d think, ‘Well, time to ruin your career.’

“I believe in self-contradiction and whimsy.”

Bengston’s detractors say he vacillates between making good, tough art and high-level decoration.

“Art is decorative. If you hang something on the wall it’s decorative. My soft stuff is a lot more serious than it looks and my serious stuff is a lot more whimsical. It takes nerve to be light-hearted. You know you’re going to get dinged for it. A lot of people thought my most recent paintings were about big stuff like the moon and the cosmos. They were but they were also just clowns with their noses against the window.

“All great artists have painted clowns--Watteau and Picasso. My new hero is Red Skelton.

“Retrospectives make you realize there is a continuity of thought in the work you didn’t recognize. You see where you’ve deluded yourself. You realize you’re stuck with what you are.

“Look carefully at Picasso. He only painted five paintings in his life: There were the down-and-outers, the bullfight, still life, women and Velasquez. He just kept doing them over in every imaginable style. People thought he was doing it all but it was just those five pictures over and over.

“What bothers me today is the way artists just come and go. There are artists today who make a lot of money who couldn’t have gotten a show at the Ferus. It makes me heartsick that there is no one out there on the other side of the line to respect, no dealers like Frank Perls, no delineation of quality outside of artists themselves.

“I went without a dealer for 10 years. They told me it couldn’t be done, so I just had to try it. I’m ready to get out again. I’m ready to quit show biz.”