Context: Clayton Campbell by 18th Street Arts Center

CONTEXT CLAYTON CAMPBELL

Credits Published blurb Copyright

Clayton Campbell

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Design: Ronald Lopez www.ronaldlopez.com

CONTEXT CLAYTON CAMPBELL

01 FORWARD BY JEAN LUC MONTEROSSO

1 First Years, New York

02 5 Vienna

BIOGRAPHY Context: Clayton Campbell

commentary BY THE ARTIST

03 7 Jumping Star Ranch

TABLE OF CONTENTS

04 12 Santa Fe

44 New York Redux

55 Santa Fe, Slight Return

66 Hollywood and Beyond

08 69 Portfolios 71 77 83 89 95

68 Heroes, 1 Heroine Bullet Train Blues Bomb Makers The Artist Clayton Campbell Referees the Real Deal Evander Holyfield Words My Son Has Learned Since 9-11

106 commentary by Robert Sain 109 Words We Have Learned Since 9-11 120 The Divine Comedy

121 commentary by Zelimir Koscevic 123 After Abu Ghraib

134 commentary by Ciara Ennis 136 Digital Wagner 146 Tableaux Vivant

LIST OF EXHIBITIONS

FORWARD

BIOGRAPHY C layton Campbell is a visual artist whose digital photographic and me-

dia work explores new visual strategies to promote public dialogue through social commentary and engagement. He has been exhibiting his work nationally and internationally since 1983. His seminal 2004 work “Words My Son Has Learned Since 9-11” was exhibited in 2010 Aaran Gallery in Tehran, Iran; the Nam June Paik Art Center, Korea. and previously at the Maison Europeenne de la Photographie, Paris; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Higher Bridges Art Center, Enniskellin, Northern Ireland; the WYSPA Art Institute, Gdansk, Poland; Foto Galerij Lang, Zagreb, Croatia; the University Nevada Las Vegas; and in a café in Kurdestan where the artist appeared at the opening via I-chat. “After Abu Ghraib” an exhibition of large scale digital photographs, premiered at the Pitzer College Art Galleries in 2009 and wasalso exhibited at the Aaran Gallery, Tehran, Iran in June 2010. He most recently completed a 24 image collection, “Digital Wagner” as part of the LA Opera’s the Ring Cycle festival.

Campbell’s work is represented in numerous public and private collections including the Library of Congress Print and Drawing Collection: the Phoenix Fine Art Museum; the Museum of New Mexico; the Maison Europeenne de la Photographie, Paris; the Wiggins Collections of Prints and Drawings, Boston Public Library.

Prior to 18th Street Arts Center, he founded the first not for profit performance art center in the Western United States in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1976; was the Program Director of Kampo Cultural Center, New York City in the 1980’s; and worked in numerous off-Broadway theatres as a production manager and stage designer until the early 1990’s.

A widely published arts writer, he is the Los Angeles Editor, Contemporary Magazine (London), and Los Angeles Correspondent for Flash Art International (Milan). He recently contributed a chapter entitled ‘Networks and Creative Communities’ to the Sage Publication textbook series ‘Culture and Globalization’.

Mr. Campbell is the former President of Res Artis (International Association of Residential Arts Centres), Amsterdam; and a former Trustee of the Alliance of Artist Communities, US. Specializing in cultural exchange programs, he is a consultant to the Sanskriti Foundation, New Delhi; The UCLA Fowler Museum of Art, Los Angeles; United States Artists and the Rasmuson Foundation, Alaska; the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center; and Gyeonggi Creation Center. He has been on numerous arts panels for foundations including the National Endowment for the Arts and the Center for Cultural Innovation.

Since 1996 he has held the position of Co-Executive Director and now Artistic Director at the 18th Street Arts Center in Los Angeles, an internationally known center for multi-cultural contemporary artists. He has curated and organized 50 group and solo exhibitions with an emphasis on photography, video and new media; and organized over 200 artist residencies projects with 26 countries.

In 2002 Mr. Campbell was awarded the distinction of Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for his contributions to the field of cultural exchange. To contact the artist, go to his web site: www.claytoncampbell.com

Clayton Campbell in his studio

CONTEXT: CLAYTON CAM

MPBELL

COMMENTARY BY THE A

ARTIST

“Busboy”, Gouache on paper 24” x 36”, 1979

W hen I think and write about art making, I want to reach a broad audience.

Partly it is ambition to be seen and heard by as many people as possible, but it is also an acquired activist sensibility. I am making a concerted effort to contribute to the collective conversation about what Art can be and do. As an artist working closely with photography and media based projects, work with what I call the ‘POV (point of view) of the passerby’, picking up the truth on the fly and putting it back out there in a new package. It is very much in keeping with my early training to be an observer of matter/ subject as energy/ concept as a transformative process. In my visual art I am a storyteller and commentator, and the anecdotal style will give the reader a different insight into the trajectory of my work since 1970. I also include guest curators whose essays provide a critical stance that offers a further specialized context. To begin believing that I am an artist, I first had to overcome and understand my mother and father’s generational and working class suspicion of modern art. To them, the arts was not considered a way to make a living, yet exposure to ‘high’ culture was considered an essential part of the education necessary to move up into the American middle class. As I was growing up there were few voices who said that being an artist was a legitimate, brave, and important thing to do. Even today, there is a national argument still being waged as to whether being an artist is a legitimate vocation. Yet I was born at an unusual historical moment in a secular location where I have been free to make the work I want and benefit from the Post World War II affluence of Europe and North America. I recall my First grade teacher Miss Mapp. She saw something in me, and instead of teaching me like the other kids, she gave me reams of paper and crayons and let me draw and paint. I made a long paper scroll depicting my stories, inventions and fantasies, which I gave free rein to. She hung it up in the classroom above the chalkboard where it circled the entire room. I was so proud

FIRST YEARS, NEW YORK of this, and did not at all understand my parent’s pique with Miss Mapp when they found out I wasn’t studying reading, writing, and arithmetic. I believe she was reprimanded, but she ‘got’ me, and knew that I understood myself, and my place in the universe, through visual means. This is the earliest art I recall, in which I began making pictures from a literary basis, with a narrative structure and a figurative style. I kept it for many years at my parents’ home, but sadly it was thrown away when I foolishly decided I didn’t want it. I wish now I had it back. For years I was always the only guy in the public school art classes, me and twenty girls. I liked being around the girls because I wanted to have sex with some of them, and because they were interesting to talk to. Meanwhile the other boys were making windshield ice scrapers in the shop class and being trained to work in factories. My brother was a notorious tough school hoodlum, so no one would incur his anger by suggesting I was a ‘fag’ for being in the art classes. This odd form of protection allowed me to pursue my interest in art in the limited means available to me. Later on, in 11th grade, I was given a “preferential placement test” by my High School. This was designed to determine which utilitarian career your personality best suited you for. The whole school took it, and one morning over the classroom public address system I was summoned, along with one other boy (a school troublemaker) to the Principal’s office. We were met by the school Guidance Counselors. It seems we both had the same test results indicating we were best suited to be ballet

dancers. The Counselors urged us to take the test again, saying we must have done it incorrectly because our results indicated we were homosexuals and that dance was not something men did. I looked at the other boy, who said to me, “I am not taking this fucking test over again”, and because of his guts I walked out with him. I graduated early from high school shortly thereafter and enrolled in the Art Students League of New York and migrated from Nassau County to the lower East Village, Manhattan, in 1967. Before this though, there was one family member, Aunt Juanita, a spinster who lived on East 65th Street in Manhattan, who also ‘got’ me. My grandfather’s sister, she was actually close in age to my father, and she loved museums and the theatre. I would spend weekends with her and it was wonderful. She absolutely cultivated a love of art and culture in me. Because of her I first learned of the legitimacy of the arts, that it was not something one couldn’t be an integral part of or make a living from. We saw all of the great and original Broadway musicals together- Camelot, West Side Story, Golden Boy, the Music Man. My great love of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is because Aunt Juanita took me there, and I began to skip school and go the museums on my own. Every time I am in New York I still go to the Met: it is not possible to experience it all, the entire social and cultural milieu it provides, in one lifetime. I always say a little prayer of thanks to Aunt Juanita. I have had several great teachers who shaped my journey (both in art and life) and one was Robert Beverly Hale, Curator

of Modern Art at the Met and life drawing teacher at the Art Students League. Hale got in trouble at the Met by being the first to buy a Jackson Pollock, an artist whom I adored and wanted to paint like. Hale pointedly described how, at the Art Students League, Pollock had first studied with Thomas Hart Benton and learned to draw before he was free to paint in the startling manner of his action, drip paintings. Hale was fond of quoting Jean Dominique Ingres’ great academic dictum, ‘drawing is the basis of all art’. I still hold this to be wise advice, as it provides the basic approach about how to “see”. Robert Beverly Hale was older, and very courtly, arriving at the life drawing studio in a suit and bow tie. He delivered the most spirited and inspiring lectures about the human form all the while drawing from behind his back renaissance worthy sketches on the black board with a piece of chalk tied to a stick! It was incredibly intimidating as he drew better than any of could ever hope to, and when he strolled through the room to look over your shoulder at your work, it was quite unnerving. One day, after I struggled with a difficult life pose, and kept ripping up drawing after drawing, and seemed to be getting nowhere, Hale stopped behind me. He looked long and hard at my work, at the pile of discarded drawings on the floor, and nodded his approval, and winked at me! I almost died of surprise! But he ‘got’ me too, like Miss Mapp, and I loved him for that one brilliant moment of affirmation. It kept me going for years, and drawing became my medium, and I was determined to excel. I began to find my interest lay in those artists who could draw and paint in a realistic style, but with a strong degree of fantasy, drama, and narrative. I began to study painters Carravaggio and James Rosenquist, graphic artists MC Escher, Albrecht Durer and Samuel Palmer. William Blake’s work stimulated a keen and abiding interest in the combination of image and text. Each of these artists evoked in their own way a spiritual quality, which I found undeniably powerful and resonated with my own emerging

secular humanism. My trajectory was headed towards a career on the visual arts, yet I missed art school and never benefited from a conventional education, and the networks of artists, curators, and arts professionals which are a big part of academic life. Briefly enrolled at the Boston Museum School, I resisted the Vietnam War in 1969 when I received an impossibly low draft number, 31, and had become immediately eligible for induction in to the army. I became a ‘person of conscience’, and began to study non-violent activism and pay more attention to Gandhi and King, Thoreau and the Dali Lama. Carlos Casteneda, J.R. Tolkien, Carl Jung and Alan Watts books were on my bedstand. I still consult and am guided by the I-Ching. On television the news showed French students rioting and their cultural theorists promoting strategies calling for the end of master narratives. Muhammad Ali became one of my heroes for resisting the draft and calling out US leaders for their hypocrisies. All of this I absorbed, and learned from, and acted upon. It began to show up in my art and established a pattern in which the spiritual and the political are inextricably linked. My college career at an abrupt end, and my military draft woes ended, I found I was already out in the world, living and making art, and did not return to art school. The truth is, I had found the Boston Museum School to be insular and indulgent, where theory meant more than practice. The year I arrived the curriculum changed dramatically; painting and drawing classes were disbanded and replaced by photography and theory classes. Students were not required to attend class, but could make up their own class schedules. My first thought was what am I paying tuition for since I can do this on my own, and secondly I wanted to specialized instruction to learn how to make things, to draw and paint with skill, to respond to my own utilitarian impulses. I still have doubts about the programming

and insular quality current art schools, where students are replicated in the image of their professors, and come to look at art history as something as relevant as the most recent Miami Basel Art Fair or Whitney Biennial. I do not like what has become of the commercial arena in the arts with its emphasis on social networks and art as a commodity. I simply may not be comfortable there, or have the social skills to navigate it. I came to believe in Erik Erikson’s principle of ‘generativity’, when you give back more to your community than you take out of it. I have accomplished much in my career as an arts organizer and cultural producer, promoting values of community and diversity, by facilitating collaborative projects with other artists who offer alternatives for artistic production and distribution of ideas. When I consider notions of art and democracy I would point to the avatar of postmodern practice, Joseph Beuys. One of the extraordinary figures in post WWII art, I encountered his work in Berlin and came away changed. I understand his project as a clarion call for Equity and insight that artists are engaged in a spiritual vocation. He operated from the arena of the contemporary academy, something he sought and failed to break down. His work became part of academic canon, has been co-opted by the art market capitalism, yet work like his richly informs Euro-American critical thinking and art production from 1960 through the late 1990’s. Like Beuys I am an iconoclast who found his way into the art world through the side door. People do not always know what to make of artists like us, and there are many to be sure. To gain some insight into my work, the best method I can employ is to look at my pictures and write anecdotally as a means of teasing out the ideas, motifs and themes I am concerned with. I started working in 1964 at age 13, from which I date my first works that I thought might be works of art. I was obsessed with the sculptures of George Segal and thought I would do my own. Even more interesting than Se-

gal were the ‘plaster casters’ in the lower East Village in New York. They had a storefront where you could go in and have your face or parts of your body cast in plaster. A large penis, reputed to be Jimi Hendrix’s, graced the window of their shop. They actually were much more interesting than Segal, whose lumpen figures began to resemble something from an exhibit about Pompeii. But nevertheless, they got me started. My “TV Crucifix” was made without knowledge of Rauschenberg and combines. I too was scavenging junk from stores and flea markets. The detritus of culture was fascinating to me as a young man, and from there I took my inspiration, and still do- from what is immediately around me. Ultimately the camera would become the best means for me to collect what is plainly available and suggests an approach to the ineffable. But “TV Crucifix” foretold how televangelism would engulf us, and Media as the new pulpit for conservation social agendas. Being 13 years old in 8th grade, even I could tell I was different. The “Large Crucifix” was quite brilliant. The only image remains of it existent are a photgraph of it leaning against our family home in Long Island where it horrified the neighbors. Not only was it life size and startling but the noose around its neck made plain the stranglehold religion had on us. After an argument with my parents, I was told to get rid of it. I took this important art work to Long Island sound, and in a night time performance (before I knew about performance) tied it to the back of my small motorboat, towed it out to sea, set it on fire and let it drift away in a ritual cremation. My regret is that I did not document the burning ceremony, it might be in art history books by now. This was in 1965, I was 14 and a bit precocious. The other pieces were absolutely about being a teenager and feeling alienated. I was into the zeitgeist of the 1960’s. The “Headless Man” was cast from my body and head, and the “Backward Glance”, with its glass eye square in the middle of the ass, was a big middle finger to society.

My process can be seen here in its beginnings, self taught and tentative. It is about investigating the human condition through strategies of social commentary, using recognizable imagery to tell stories that are understandable by a broad cross cultural audience. Formally, I am exploring secular meta-narratives, and in a non-linear visual language propose some answers, to provide meaning and hope in an age of anxiety. The work is grounded in the ever-shifting present tense.

“Busboy”, Gouache on paper 24” x 36”, 1979

I find it a bit difficult the exact chronology of my

to recreate wanderings, but suffice it to say that when I received my notice that I was being classified 1A in the military draft, I decided to leave the Boston Museum School. A long period of nomadic behavior ensued and first I departed for Vienna, Austria to study and apprentice with the Viennese Fantastic Realist artist, Herr Professor Ernst Fuchs. Ernst’s etchings and paintings came to my attention through the magazine ‘Avant Garde’ and they blew me away. The magazine lasted a year or two in the late 1960’s, but was quite influential and published besides the work of Fuchs, German and Austrian artists Rudolf Hausner, Mati Klarwein, Wolfgang Hutter, HC Geiger, and many of the US psychedelic artists whose work showed up on posters promoting concert halls like Fillmore East. Popular rock music and the confluence of graphic art had a huge impact on me. Most of the visual art work in that arena was baroque in its styling; incredibly detailed paintings and drawings that were nostalgic in their references to Surrealism, Symbolism and Art nouveau. This curious activity, Fantasy Art, was happening off in its own corner independent of the dominant New York tropes of Minimal-ism, Conceptualism and non-objective painting. Later on I would

“Busboy”, Gouache on paper 24” x 36”, 1979

find that this sensibility was more evident and widespread in California. But meanwhile, even the Pop Art I responded to, obsessed as it was with consumer, urban media culture, did not approximate what was happening in the 1960’s with my generation that dove into consciousness raising, rock music and alternative lifestyles. Fantastic Realism evidenced superb draftsmanship, a great sense of craftsmanship, interest in alternative spirituality, and dramatic figurative narrative work that I found great affinity with. In Fuchs, I found what I thought I needed in a teacher, and set out to Vienna to meet him. It also corresponded with me leaving the US because of the war in Vietnam. Ernst Fuchs turned out to be a very strict, old school mentor. On our first meeting Fuchs took a look at my portfolio of drawings and said, ‘Your drawings are good but you are starting late; you are eighteen. People come to me when they are ten, eleven. I just don’t know if this will work. Give me a few hours to think about, so please sit here.” It was deflating but honest. He did invite me to stay however, and later I came to see that he is a compassionate and generous man, and I still think of Fuchs with some awe and much respect.

He housed me on Getreidemarkt (the food market street) in a coldwater flat with no heat. I lived there and went to his exotic studio for long work days. The first four hours were devoted to still life drawing and they went like this: I am sitting in a room, usually by myself but sometimes with a couple of other apprentices, most of whom didn’t last very long. Fuchs brings in a dime store plaster Madonna and Child sculpture and places it on a sculpture stand. I am instructed to draw it over and over again. He rarely comes in, and then only to peek through the door to see if we are still there. After about a month, and hundreds of drawings of the now hated object in front of me, he said, ‘I think you’re getting it’, and turned it about twenty degrees to be seen from a slightly new angle. It took many more months for the Madonna to go full circle and then it mercifully came to an end. The whole exercise, while ostensibly about drawing, was really about seeing and how to look at an inanimate object and find energetic life in it. I’ve never forgotten the lesson and it reminds me of many stories I have heard of persons studying Buddhism caught up in something mindless until they just finally let go and something authentic happens. After other studio chores including lessons in

painting in the mixed technique of “the masters” (a mix of egg tempera and oil), I worked on my own pictures and began my first experiments with drawing and combinations of text and photo-based images. My interest in media and photography was not consistent with Fuchs practice that placed a high premium on drawing from life, and I would resolve to return to New York when I was able. Yet what I learned from him was essential to my development as a media artist. In particular the technique of painting in thin layers is exactly the same process in Photo Shop and when that software with its emphasis on layers appeared it made complete sense to me. I would concentrate on drawings for the next decade, many of them made by using photographs as references for the imagery, but not yet incorporating them into the surface of the work. Most of my early drawings entered the John Merriam Collection in Boston, and then upon his passing were willed to the Wiggins Collection of Prints and Drawings at the Boston Public Library. I have since added to this collection so a full representation of my early work can be found there.

VIENNA 06

M y return from Vienna to the United States culminated in settling between

1972-76 in a small town in Northern Colorado. Before I migrated to the Southwestern Us which I have a deep affinity for, I stopped briefly in New Hampshire at a farmhouse which was loaned to me. I made several significant works there, including “Mandragonora” and “Seed Pod”, which came to the attention of Mr. John Merriam of Boston. Merriam would be an important person in my life. An avid collector of prints, drawings and artist books from the 1800 to present day, he purchased at reasonable prices all of the work I would make for the next five years. He was a patron to a group of artists, and some of them became my dearest friends and still are. “Mandragonora” is important for several reasons. One, it is big, and in the future I would move towards life size scale to give my work a power and presence that is immediate. It has a painterly feel in its extensive use of smudged charcoal, and introduced the use of figures in a landscape as a pictorial device I would visit many times over my career. The composition references medieval illumination, in the use of multiple perspectives. Some areas jump out in 3D, others flatten out with a forced perspective; multiple scenes occur in the same picture plane that create a narrative by depicting elements, or fragments of a total ‘storyline.

The title comes from my reading of Carl Jung’s collected works and researching his ideas of transference, archetypes, and alchemical symbolism. During my European sojourn I had gone to the British Museum in London and studied in the rare book room “Splendor Solis” (Splendor of the Sun) by Solomon Trismosin. The imagery in this illuminated alchemical manuscript, which had influenced Jung also influenced me, particularly the compositional devices being used to convey a narrative. I still use these devices and see them appearing throughout the next forty years in more sophisticated ways. I found the symbolic, alchemical images to be arcane and a ‘secret’ language resonant with the scene I had left in Vienna and which still had a strong hold on me. Looking back, this fascination with ‘secrets of the masters’ was about wanting to have something of my own to hold on to in a turbulent world. I had read Martin Heidegger, whose thoughts were appropriate, suggesting that being in the world permeated by a “mood” of anxiety prompts one to “flee” and attach oneself to particular things in the world in a desperate attempt to find something stable and secure to hold on to. Death is not an event among other events, but an ever present possibility. This is certainly how I was feeling during my Vietnam years. In “Mandragonora”, two figurative images appear that will reappear in var-

JUMPING STAR RANCH 07

ious guises throughout my work: the baby or young child (innocence), the stunted dwarf or autistic juvenile (adolescence or resistance to growth). I love the way the circular sun floats over a beautiful landscape, and I find myself often composing pictures that have an element in flight, unmoored from the earth, the landscape pointing to a horizon point leading to the golden mean. Nature and the landscape represent the unconscious mind, while those things of mankind, the conscious mind. “Seedpod” is the companion piece to “Mandragonora”, creating a diptych. The same composition of sun over landscape appears, yet there are no figures. It is barren, where the other is fertile. The play of oppositions is central to my work and ideas, and finds parallel in psychotherapy, science, religion, nature, and image making with a literary basis. A woman’s naked torso is emerging from the elegant seen, hovering over a circular lake below with a volcanic cone in the middle. This highly sexualized picture is about the body, whereas “Mandragonora” is so much about the mind. The bring-

Opposite page: “Mandragonora”, Gouache on paper 24” x 36”, 1979

ing together of both these tensions, and to be fully mindful of the present, is something I am still working on. I was adopting a back to the land’ sensibility, a movement which some in my generation embraced. It was a rejection of the city, materialism, technology coupled with a longing for the ‘purer’ life of the rural citizen. I took off for Colorado and would be there for four years. I knew nothing about how to take care of myself outside of an artificial environment like New York, so my life in the tiny town of Allenspark was a steep learning curve. I had left Europe and New York for a town of 200 persons. I built my own house that was named Jumping Star Ranch because of the way the stars seemed to move in the rarified night sky. My home was at the end of a 7 mile road deep in the forst by itself, 8500 feet above sea level in the Rocky Mountains. I hunted for food, spent weeks without seeing anyone, and chopped mountains of firewood for my wood stove so I wouldn’t freeze to death. At night I worked on drawings by kerosene lights and listened to NPR radio for one hour a day, carefully rationing my precious batteries for my radio. This self imposed monasticism was a reaction to the tension of Vietnam, and reflected my deep need to be on retreat, to regroup and recover from the shock and tension of the past years, and to just find out more about myself. It was a very different path than the one I had imagined just a few years before in New York, and represented a radical rethinking of my role and work as a young artist. Since that time I have always needed a degree of quiet and contemplation, but it has been balanced by being an extremely public person, a world traveler, and a fierce advocate for the arts.

Image above: “Seedpod”, Gouache on paper 24” x 36”, 1979

The first drawings from this period “Totem” and “The Fox” are examples of polished pencil drawings I considered finished works of art. The “Totem” is autobiographical, and for the first of many times I use myself as the model. Still steeped in Fantastic Realism, Jung and Symbolism, I view this picture as my understanding of the artist being engaged in a profound process of individuation. In the image, I kneel with my back to the viewer, holding an axe (I was chopping a lot of wood in Colorado to stay warm!) while touching a large object I call the “totem.” Am I about to chop the totem down, cut into this umbilical cord tying me to the complexities of the received world? Or am I protecting myself as I gingerly touch an object (the unconscious mind) that now resembles something like the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”? The tension of what may happen is central to the picture. The motif of the hero’s journey appears throughout my work in different guises. In the 1980’s during my return to New York, I came to know Joseph Campbell and would have several discussions with him about the meaning of the hero, and how it manifests in art. “The Fox” is another hero story, depicting me from the front and looking off the picture frame. My hair is quite long, as it was then, but I appear as an older man. I am swinging pendulums (items of divination which I know how to use) over a scroll that depicts my symbolic journey. Like Beuys, I was delving deeply into the artist’s role as a shaman, and rather than evocative use of atypical materials such as Beuys felt and fat, I was making small jewel like drawings that only a handful of practitioners could pull off. In Colorado I developed a pencil technique employing glazing with hard pencils over soft, and would spend months on each work. This absorption in one work, over a long period of time, was consistent with the contemplative retreat I had created for myself at Jumping Star Ranch.

CLAYTON CAMPBELL