Joe Goode There’s Always Tomorrow
Joe Goode There’s Always Tomorrow February 25–May 1, 2015
Joe Goode’s Rupturing Skies Charles Wylie By the time he was only in his mid-20s, Joe Goode had cemented his place in the history of post–World War II American art with his remarkably assured Milk Bottle paintings. Goode produced this precociously resolved series a few years after he had moved to Los Angeles, in 1959, to study at the Chouinard Art Institute (joining his Oklahoma friend from childhood, Ed Ruscha) and had absorbed and synthesized various avant-garde currents present in Southern California and well beyond.
Joe in front of his studio ca. 1970
To create the Milk Bottle series, Goode painted a glass milk bottle a certain color and then placed it on the floor in front of a large, ground-hugging, primarily monochromatic canvas of that same color. Juxtaposing the real with the implied, these works performed a Jasper Johns–like turn (Johns was an important early influence on Goode [1]) of making an everyday object into an aesthetically talismanic representation, the meanings of which remained elusive despite their hide-nothing tactility. The centrality of Goode and his work to emergent Pop Art aesthetics was recognized by Walter Hopps and Lawrence Alloway, two influential curators who included his work in each of their era-defining Pop Art exhibitions in Los Angeles in 1962 and 1963.
However, as Goode and many others have cited in his literature, even though he was, and is, identified with early Pop, Goode has been as much, if not more, concerned with human perception and experience. As Sue Scott succinctly writes, “Goode’s art explores the process of seeing by looking through what you are looking at” [2]. And artists such as Robert Irwin and James Turrell, whose works have extensively investigated the phenomena of light, vision and cognition, have figured prominently in Goode’s aesthetic and conceptual background. [3] Goode’s paintings in this present exhibition, made in the first half of the 1970s after a decade of progressive innovation, can be seen to bring together many strains of the artist’s earlier work [4]—the sharp charge of real but uncannily changed things, the allure of seductively rendered fields of monochrome-based painting, and the pull of knotty exercises in shifting perception and meaning. Yet these expertly made but verging-on-the-anarchic paintings venture into new territory that makes these images of schismatic nature a signpost in Goode’s career. In making these works, Goode painted versions of a nearly empty sky at various times of day. He then materially altered these painted visions—“altered” being perhaps too polite a word to describe his process of cutting and, in certain works, nearly half-destroying, his canvases’ physical and pictorial core. The materials of both canvas and backing of the Torn Sky and Torn Cloud paintings bring to mind the literalness—the object thingness—of Goode’s earlier actual milk bottles. The less tangible metaphoric possibilities of these arrestingly visceral paintings are virtually as infinite as the thing they portray. This is, of course, a large part of the works’ power, and why they remain germane and remarkably fresh to this day. 2
In traditional literary terms, the paintings can bring to mind the weakness of art’s “pathetic fallacy,” in which we graft our needy subjectivity onto a nature that is utterly oblivious to and incapable of recognizing, let alone returning, our subjectivity, no matter how intensely felt. In an entirely different mode, the works can bring to mind how from the late 1950s onward, NASA had been piercing the sky with its space exploration program, one that reached a kind of apotheosis with the 1969 Moon landings. For those watching the space program unfold at the time on the small-screen universe of television, vivid images of space capsules escaping from and then reentering the membrane of the Earth’s atmosphere may not be far behind in Goode’s often shattered-looking expanses. Given the paintings the artist would create in the following decades based on environmental decay, and based on his own recent comments, Goode’s sky and cloud paintings are part of the artist’s concern with pollution [5] and depict nature as damaged goods. In these ruptured sky and cloud paintings, the very cosmic fabric of our natural world appears to have been laid waste by relentless, and, by now, apparently remorseless, ill treatment and abuse. This, and other profoundly disorienting episodes that took place in the sky before and during the mid-1970s—with some episodes entirely engineered by humans—can also be sensed in the background and foreground of Goode’s splintered screens. [6] Goode’s Torn Sky and Torn Cloud paintings also relate to what can be called an aesthetics of destruction as found in post–World War II art, such as the punctured, drilled and sliced paintings of Lucio Fontana, and the gouged, burnt and distressed paintings of Alberto Burri, to name but two examples. In this vein, Michael Darling’s “Target Practice” exhibition placed a Torn Cloud painting in a larger context of a postwar practice that aggressively challenged, by acts of force and often outright violence, the fundamental factual and theoretical survival of painting—and, by extension, the very idea of art itself. [7] Similarly, the current extensive Goode survey exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, curated by Jeffrey Uslip, makes explicit the role of destruction in his art. [8] While Goode’s works can indeed be seen as damaged, the fact is, these images of violated nature have not been entirely destroyed. Like peeling Renaissance frescoes, they come to us not intact but bearing a powerful presence. Seen together, their aggregate effect is unsettlingly potent, and they suggest far more than things just falling apart. These rips, tears and scars may, in one optimistic (and, one hopes, not too simple) reading of them, denote stoic resilience, even survival, and a sense of disinterested timelessness that is alluded to by this exhibition’s title, which the artist chose himself. Finally, in addition to all of the above, there is perhaps at work here a more subtle, and, ultimately, more challenging facet worth considering. The challenge is to our sense of responsibility. When we see something broken, our first impulse is to determine whether we can fix it—or if it can even be fixed in the first place. When experiencing these paintings, among the very first things we notice is their state of (sometimes severe) decay. If we wanted to, how would we go about fixing these images of disaster, and, by inference, to make right the conditions these seductive yet damaged paintings represent? Or do we simply accept our present enervated state of mind, which is, by all available evidence, utterly incapable of agency; and have we resigned ourselves to just move on from such clear evidence of degradation? Are we, by this point, already well beyond such (naïve? sentimental?) concerns? Painted four decades ago, yet feeling as if they could have been created this morning, Goode’s Torn Cloud and Torn Sky paintings could not be more prescient or more contemporary. 3
My thanks to Nick Naber, John Van Doren and Dorsey Waxter of Van Doren Waxter Gallery, and to Joe Goode, whose art continues to provoke. Notes. 1. See Anne Ayres, “Impure Pop: L.A. Painting in the 1960s,” in LA Pop in the Sixties (Newport Harbor, CA: Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1989). 14-15. 2. Sue Scott, “Basic Elements: Paintings, Drawings and Prints by Joe Goode,” in Joe Goode, Jerry McMillan, Edward Ruscha (Oklahoma City: Oklahoma City Art Museum, 1989). 14. 3. See Julie Joyce, “Wall Reliefs by Joe Goode,” in It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969-1973 (Pomona College Museum of Art, 2011). 199. 4. Henry T. Hopkins makes this point at the end of his essay in the 1972 exhibition catalogue Joe Goode: Work Until Now (Fort Worth, TX: Fort Worth Art Center Museum, 1972). Unpaginated. 5. A February 2015 e-mail message from the artist’s studio confirmed the present paintings’ relationship to pollution; my thanks to Nick Naber at the Van Doren Waxter Gallery for facilitating this information. 6. Further intriguing ideas that place Goode’s art within distinctly Midwestern natural and cultural contexts are mentioned in the brochure produced for Joe Goode, a survey exhibition curated by Chief Curator Jeffrey Uslip at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis from January 16 to April 11, 2015. The exhibition catalogue, including essays by Uslip and Thomas Crow, is forthcoming this spring. See: http://camstl.org/exhibitions/main-gallery/ joe-goode/ 7. See Michael Darling, Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-78 (Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 2009). 65. 8. See note 6 above for further references to Goode’s art and destruction. Charles Wylie is an independent writer, curator and consultant in contemporary art. From 1996 to 2011 he was The Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art at the Dallas Museum of Art, and previously Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at The Saint Louis Art Museum. He received his BA from the University of Notre Dame and his MA from Williams College.
4
Plates
Torn Cloud Painting 33, 1971 Oil on canvas 48 x 48 inches (121.9 x 121.9 cm) JGo 104
6
Torn Sky Painting, 1971 Oil on canvas board 18 x 72 inches (45.7 x 182.9 cm) JGo 107
8
Torn Cloud Painting 27, 1971 Oil on canvas 16 x 20 inches (40.6 x 50.8 cm) JGo 105
10
Torn Cloud Painting 2A, 1975 Oil on canvas board 24 x 30 inches (61 x 76.2 cm) JGo 110
12
Torn Cloud Painting, 1973 Oil on canvas board 22 1/2 x 29 1/4 inches (57.2 x 74.3 cm) JGo 109
14
Untitled (GO #4), 1973 Oil on board 24 x 36 inches (61 x 91.4 cm) JGo 108
16
Torn Cloud Painting 83, 1975 Oil on canvas board 24 x 30 inches (61 x 76.2 cm) JGo 111
18
Untitled, 1973 Oil on canvas board 24 x 36 inches (61 x 91.4 cm) JGo 112
20
Torn Cloud "Vandalized", 1973 Oil on canvas board 24 x 30 inches (76.2 x 61 cm) JGo 113
22
Torn Cloud Painting 79, 1975 Oil on canvas board 24 x 36 inches (61 x 91.4 cm) JGo 114
24
Torn Cloud Painting, 1975 Oil on canvas 12 x 15 3/4 inches (30.5 x 40 cm) JGo 106
26
Joe Goode Biography
Downtown Los Angeles Studio
Joe Goode was born in Oklahoma City, OK in 1937. In 1959 he moved to Los Angeles, CA where he attended the Chouinard Art Institute until 1961. First recognized for his "Pop Art" milk bottle paintings and cloud imagery, Goode's work was included along with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, Phillip Hefferton, Robert Dowd, Edward Ruscha, and Wayne Thiebaud, in the 1962 historically important and ground-breaking exhibit New Painting of Common Objects, curated by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum (now Norton Simon Museum). This historical exhibition was the first "Pop Art" museum exhibition in the United States. Through the years, Joe Goode has combined various traditional and non-traditional media in the creation of his artwork. He has explored images which project a way of seeing “in and out” and “up and down” as well as things that can be seen through: milk bottles, oceans, waterfalls, clouds and torn skies. While his subject matter has remained relatively consistent over the years, he has revisited each theme using different media, aiding him in finding unique ways in which he continues to work. Over the past fifty years, Goode’s work has been shown in hundreds of gallery and museum exhibitions worldwide. His work is included in many major museum collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Menil Collection, The Smithsonian Institution, The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art New York. Joe Goode currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. 28
SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2015 2014 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008
2007 2005 2004 2003 2002
2001 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 1995 1994
There’s Always Tomorrow, Van Doren Waxter, New York, NY Joe Goode, Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO Joe Goode, Texas Gallery, Houston, TX (Dec. 4, 2014-Jan. 10, 2015) Flat Screen Nature, Kohn Gallery, Hollywood, CA Joe Goode, Texas Gallery, Houston, TX Air Tears, Texas Gallery at Art Platform, Los Angeles, CA Nighttime, Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Joe Goode, Texas Gallery, Houston, TX Joe Goode, Cache Restaurant and Lounge, Santa Monica, CA Golden Dreams, Greenfield Sacks Gallery, Santa Monica, CA Joe Goode: Clouds, Paintings and Drawings from the 60’s and 70’s, Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York, NY JOEDONTNO, Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London, England Ashes, DNJ Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Paint IS Nature, Seiler & Mosseri-Marlio Gallerie, Zurich, Switzerland No Bed of Roses, Imago Gallery, Palm Desert, CA New Work, Texas Gallery, Houston, TX X-RAY DRAWINGS, Manny Silverman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA BURN OUT!, Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica, CA Surface Paintings, Texas Gallery, Houston, TX New Paintings, Shoshana Wayne, Santa Monica, CA Cloud Paintings from 1965 to Present, Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco, CA Texas Gallery, Houston, TX LA Louver, Venice, CA Peter Blake Gallery, Laguna, CA Plain Air, Bobbie Greenfield Gallery, Santa Monica, CA Manny Silverman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Peter Blake Gallery, Laguna, CA Recent Paintings, Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York, NY Joe Goode, LA Louver, Venice, CA Peter Blake Gallery, Laguna, CA Joe Goode: Cause and Effect Paintings, Frederick Spratt Gallery, San Jose, CA Joe Goode: New Paintings, Takada Gallery, San Francisco, CA Suns of Bitches, Moons of Dogs, LA Louver, Venice, CA Joe Goode, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA Peter Blake Gallery, Laguna, CA Manny Silverman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Joe Goode, LA Louver, Venice, CA OCHI Fine Art, Ketchum, ID Nantenshi Gallery, Tokyo, Japan Space Sawada, Tokyo, Japan Joe Goode: Pollution Paintings, LA Louver, Venice, CA Joe Goode: Pollution Collages, Bobbie Greenfield Gallery, Venice, CA Shasta College, Redding, CA 29
1993 1992
1991 1990 1988 1987 1986 1985 1984 1983 1982 1981 1980 1979 1978 1977 1976 1975
1974
1973
Tornado Paintings and Works on Paper, Takada Gallery, San Francisco, CA Tornadoes, Soma Gallery, San Diego, CA Joe Goode: New Paintings and Drawings, James Corcoran Gallery, Santa Monica, CA Joe Goode, Karsten Greve Gallery, Paris, France Laboratory: Joe Goode Tornado Triptych, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA Joe Goode, Jack Tilton Gallery, New York, NY Joe Goode: From Blue and Black Series, Takada Gallery, San Francisco, CA Joe Goode: New Paintings and Drawings, Takada Gallery, San Francisco, CA Joe Goode: Waterfall Paintings, James Corcoran Gallery, Santa Monica, CA Night Time Paintings from 1977, James Corcoran Gallery, Santa Monica ,CA Joe Goode: The Ocean Blues, Compass Rose Gallery, Chicago, IL New Paintings: The Ocean Blue Series, James Corcoran Gallery, Santa Monica, CA Joe Goode: Milk Bottle Paintings 1961-1962, Pence Gallery, Santa Monica, CA James Corcoran Gallery, Santa Monica, California. Joe Goode, Thomas Babeor Gallery, La Jolla, CA Joe Goode: Paintings and Drawings, Braunstein Gallery, San Francisco, CA Joe Goode: Forest Fire Impressions, Asher/Faure Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Charles Cowles Gallery, New York, NY Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Paintings: Environmental Impact Series, ARCO Center for Visual Art, Atlantic Richfield Company, Los Angeles, CA Joe Goode: Paintings, Prints, Works on Paper, Gallery One, Fort Worth, TX Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Drawings 81, Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Joe Goode, Charles Cowles Gallery, New York, NY Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Texas Gallery, Houston, TX Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles, CA A Selection of Paintings and Drawings, Mount Saint Mary’s College Art Gallery, Los Angeles, CA X-Ray Drawings, James Corcoran Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Joe Goode: Recent Work, Washington University Gallery of Art, St. Louis, MO Galerie Neuendorf, Hamburg, Germany Felicity Samuel Gallery, London, England Texas Gallery, Houston, TX Seder Creigh Gallery, San Jose, CA Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles, CA California State University, Northridge, CA Vandalism Series, Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Texas Gallery, Houston, TX Contract Graphic, Houston, TX Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Felicity Samuel Gallery, London, England Joe Goode: Work Until Now, Fort Worth Art Center, Fort Worth, TX 30
1972
1971
1970 1969 1968 1967 1966 1964 1963
Galerie Neuendorf, Hamburg, Germany Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Texas Gallery, Houston, TX Joe Goode, Felicity Samuel Gallery, London, England Fort Worth Art Center, Fort Worth, TX Galerie Neuendorf, Cologne, Germany Joe Goode: Lithographs 1962-1972, Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, Minneapolis, MN Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Joe Goode: Recent Paintings, Corcoran and Corcoran, Coral Gables, FL Galerie Neuendorf, Hamburg, Germany Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles, CA La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, CA Mueller Gallery, Dusseldorf, Germany Wall Reliefs, Pomona College Art Gallery, Montgomery Art Center, Claremont, CA Galleria Milano, Milan, Italy Galerie Neuendorf, Cologne, Germany Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Kornblee Gallery, New York, NY English Still Life on White Tablecloth, Rowan Gallery, London, England Exhibition, Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Exhibition of Paintings by Joe Goode, Rolf Nelson Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Dilexi Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
SELECTED COLLECTIONS American Federation of Arts, New York, New York Azzurra, Marina Del Rey, California The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois Donald Bren Foundation, Los Angeles, California Executive Life Insurance Company, Los Angeles, California Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles, California Fort Worth Art Center, Fort Worth, Texas Henry Art Gallery Collection, Seattle, Washington Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, Stanford, California Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, Minnesota Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California Museum of Modern Art, Jerusalem, Israel Museum of Modern Art, New York New York Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, California Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California The Oakland Museum, Oakland, California 31
Oklahoma Arts Foundation, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Oklahoma State Art Collection, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, Florida Pomona College Art Museum, Claremont, California Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, California San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California The Saint Louis Museum of Art, St. Louis, Missouri Stanford University, Palo Alto, California Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC Taubman Museum, Roanoke, Virginia Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York
32
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Joe Goode There’s Always Tomorrow February 25–May 1, 2015 Essay © 2015 by Charles Wylie Edited by Dorsey Waxter, Elizabeth Sadeghi, Sophia Jackson Designed by Nick Naber Artwork photography by Charles Benton Photograph of Joe Goode in the window of his studio ca. mid 1970’s photographer unknown (title page), Joe Goode in front of his studio ca. 1970 photo by Jerry McMillan (page 2), Downtown Los Angeles Studio (Willow St) ca. 1978–79 photo by Joe Goode (page 28) With special thanks to Kristina Simonsen, Mark McKnight, and Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles. Van Doren Waxter 23 East 73rd Street New York, NY 10021 tel: 212 444 0444 fax: 212 445 0442 email: info@vandorenwaxter.com www.vandorenwaxter.com © Van Doren Waxter All rights reserved. No Part of the contents of this catalogue may be reproduced without permission of the publisher.