My MOCA nametag
In September of 1983 I was hired as a member of the installation crew of the not yet opened Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles. Established in 1979, MOCA had been trying for some time to open an exhibition space, and its founding director/curator, Pontus Hultén, had recently resigned. Hultén’s Volvo, crushed into a cube by the French artist Arman, remained in the museum’s Boyd Street offices, and some of his exhibition plans and expansive vision lingered as well. Richard Koshalek, an idea man lured from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, had taken over as Museum Director and things were hopping.
For a dollar a year, the city of Los Angeles had agreed to rent MOCA the building that would be called the “Temporary Contemporary,” a 40,000 square foot industrial building in Little Tokyo. Originally a hardware warehouse, and later an auto body shop, the building was rapidly being cleaned up and sparingly renovated according to plans provided by architect Frank Gehry.
The idea was that MOCA would be open well before the summer 1984 Olympic Games, ready to demonstrate the cultural vitality of Los Angeles to legions of visitors. A permanent building, designed by Arata Isozaki would follow in a few years. There was a building boom going on downtown throughout the 80’s and MOCA was a key element in a surge that was intended to make downtown sparkle.
My first day on the job, Lorraine Gordon, Hultén’s former office manager, took a quick Polaroid photo of me, laminated it into a MOCA security badge, and sent me right to work. For a young painter like me, working at the TC – as we called it -- was going to be a phenomenal opportunity to become exposed to myriad works of art, as well as an opportunity to meet artists, collectors, curators and their hangers-on. What I didn’t anticipate was that my exposure to downtown Los Angeles would leave an equally another set of impressions, many of them disturbing and frightening. MOCA opened up a vivid world to me, but Skid Row, where I would soon rent a loft/studio, was even more eye-opening.
The installation crew, half a dozen or so artists and hands-on types led by the unflappable John Bowsher, was preparing to install “The First Show,” a gigantic exhibition featuring major works of modern and contemporary art borrowed from eight private collections. From the moment I arrived until the “First Show” opened in November, the TC was a beehive of activity. Crated art was arriving from all over the world, including giant canvasses from the Saatchi collection in London that had been inserted into special leaning crates that barely fit into a Boeing 747 cargo jet.
My first glimpse of the museum’s director, Richard Koshalek, came when he ordered that a freestanding display wall intended for a hulking Julian Schnabel painting wall be instantly demolished and then re-erected a few yards away. Koshalek, I would learn, had Pharoahic self-confidence. He was a great guy, but he tended to wear out the people who worked for him. He liked to state that MOCA, with a staff of around 40 people, was mounting exhibitions that were comparable to those of the Whitney in New York which had a staff of over 100. If the museum's top administrator, Sherri Geldin, hadn't been there to provide reality checks, who knows what he would have asked us to do.
The Temporary Contemporary, was a soaring, flexible space, and it wasn’t the last time that I saw walls fall and rise in a matter of days or even hours. My memory of period is a blur, but I remember the fatigue of working long hours interspersed with the excitement of uncrating and installing great works of art. Seeing the vivid lunar blue of Yves Klein’s sponge and pebble “Requiem” as it was uncrated was so moving to me that when the “First Show” was over I took the exhibition label home as a relic and pinned it to my wall.
Installing a Giacometti painting
By the time the “First Show” had opened I had given MOCA my own nickname: “The Museum of Coffee Achievers.” Like myself, most MOCA staff members were young, few had children, and we all understood that the price of working at such a great place was that total dedication was required. It made sense to me that I should try to find a place to live near the museum, and I had the romantic idea – very much in line with the vision of MOCA’s founders – that downtown Los Angeles was going to be the next SoHo. I would be like a New York artist, living in a loft, imbibing culture, and waiting for gentrification to hit.
The "Birdhouse," or Canadian Building: Photo courtesy of www.you-are-here.com
Fearlessly, I rented a two room loft space in “The Birdhouse” the former Canadian Embassy building at 432 S. Main Street, about a fifteen minute walk from the Temporary Contemporary. The building’s nickname, I was told, came from the fact that until a few years before the only tenants had been flocks of pigeons. For about $350 per month I got high ceilings, aged hardwood floors and even a kitchen sink. The shared bathroom was down the hall, and my parking spot was on the roof of the Greyhound Bus terminal a few blocks away. After finishing grad school I had moved back in with my parents in Brentwood, and I was anxious to have my own space, however gnarly it was.
Before signing my rental agreement, I hadn’t thought too much about the neighborhood. Getting to know it was a reality check. On the first floor was an adult theater, and also a pathetic little market that sold dollar wine. My loft was on the third floor of the building, over the alley in back, so at least I didn’t have to listen to the sad, grinding soundtracks of the porno movies as those living on the second floor did. Of course, that might have been preferable to living over the alley. As I soon learned, the building behind the Birdhouse was a shelter for American Indians, and I soon became accustomed to the screams of the angry drunks who pounded at the locked front doors late at night. The other tenants of the Birdhouse were artists and architects, but the Union Rescue Mission was just a block or so away. Flophouses and wholesale toy stores lined the nearby streets, which were peopled with clueless immigrants, ex-cons, transients, mentally ill Viet Nam veterans, and drug addicts.
The desk in my loft, with poster of MOCA's planned Isozaki building pinned to the wall.
I moved into my new loft quickly, as I had little furniture except for a particle board desk and a used sofa provided by my parent’s next door neighbors. Soon I had a routine, leaving the building at 8AM to make the 15 minute walk to MOCA. Often there were drunks passed out by the entrance, and the same two tough looking women flanking the front door. I was innocent enough that I had lived in the building perhaps a month before I realized that the women -- whose features resembled those of ancient Olmec heads --were prostitutes. The front steps always smelled of state urine, and were often littered with shards of broken glass. It was weird to walk by all the beer and wine bottles in the gutter and then arrive at work where Jasper’s John’s bronze “Ale Cans,” insured for a quarter of a million dollars, were secured in the plexiglass box where I had placed them with white gloves.
On weekends, I would explore the nearby streets, sometimes taking in a movie on one of the dilapidated movie palaces on Broadway. Panhandlers were everywhere, so I took a practical approach and carried quarters every morning to give away. When I ran out I learned that if I stared at my feet and strode with purpose I would be mostly left alone. I should have been more scared of my neighborhood, but naivete protected me. The streets surrounding the missions on Los Angeles Street teemed with homeless men, and bag ladies, and it was common to see men stretched out on blankets on the sidewalk, or peering out of cardboard boxes. One day a frustrated panhandler approached me while I was carrying a Coke away from McDonalds and grabbed it out of my hand. He slammed it into the sidewalk and glared at me. “I want some,” he muttered, and walked away.
Once, when leaving the birdhouse through the side gate, I managed to be a hero. Noticing a man running up Winston Street with a purse under his arm, I found my deepest voice and yelled “DROP IT!” The man followed my direction, and then scrambled down the alley behind my building. Moments later a grateful elderly lady told me, as I handed her purse to her: “Good cop voice." I used the same voice a few days later when a man opened the passenger door of my truck at a stoplight and asked for a dollar. It was scary, but a strong "NO" sent him packing.
Getting to know downtown had wasn't all about fear: downtown food could be a pleasant surprise. The omelettes at Gorky’s, a faux-Socialist café near the downtown flower market, were topped with sour cream and caviar. I don’t think Stalin would have approved. On Second Street there was a Mexican seafood place where I would order a single deep-friend fish, served surrealistically atop a mountain of fries. Best of all, right around the corner from the TC was the Far East Café, an archaic Chinese restaurant hanging on in Little Tokyo, where the Black Mushroom Chow Mein had an unforgettable, smoky flavor.
At the TC I soon had a new job. I became the supervisor of the information counter where volunteers greeted visitors and sold exhibition catalogs. As I gradually learned, many of the volunteers were themselves art collectors, and most were quite wealthy. They tended to be the wives and ex-wives of some of the richest men in Southern California. It was a very pleasant job, and I genuinely came to like many of the volunteers. I remember one of them, Yvonne Segerstrom, offering me a ride home one day: she was ashen when she saw where I lived. More and more I was realizing that MOCA was a kind of gated community. The exception tended to be the guards: African-American and Hispanic men and women who lived nearby and found their place of work as weird as a newly landed spaceship.
The main room of my Birdhouse loft, with a window that looked out over the alleyway
Sometimes, living downtown could be funny, in a very dark way. At night I would close my windows but could still hear arguments and tantrums in the alleyway three floors below. There was one man whose distinctive complaint caused me to nickname him “Mr. Nobody Fucks With.” Late in the evening I would hear him in the alley, howling a variation on the same sentence, sometimes for hours.
“NOBODY FUCKS WITH MY STUFF!”
“N-O-O-O-O-BODY FUCKS WITH MY LADY!”
“NOBODY FUCKS WITH MY BROTHER-IN-LAW!!!”
I swear, I heard him scream “Brother-in-law” one night.
One evening I heard the wails of a blitzed couple, shut out of the Indian mission, who were having sex on an abandoned sofa in the alley. They weren’t screaming out of passion: another drunk had set the sofa on fire. After some scuffling and yelping the fire was put out. Another disconcerting thing about the alleyway is that it was sometimes used for movie and TV shoots. When I heard sirens, screams and racing motors I never quite knew if it was a real cop chase or a crew shooting “Starsky and Hutch.” When I heard gunshots, as I did from time to time, I told myself that it must be a TV crew shooting blanks. When I played Italian operas on my phonograph to mask the sounds outside, the screams outside sometimes blended in oddly with the cries of the opera singers.
Work had a touch of Hollywood as well. I remember, for example, seeing George Lucas with his friend Linda Ronstadt admiring Doug Wheeler’s light installation. Along with other members of the MOCA staff I was invited to the lavish homes of some of the museum’s patrons including those of Eli and Edye Broad and Marsha Weisman. It was a very schizoid way of living, attending a holiday party at a billionaire’s house, then driving back downtown, parking my truck on the roof of the Greyhound bus terminal, and watching the rats dart in and out of the gutters as I walked apprehensively to my loft.
Standing in front of the T.C. bookstore while collector Frederick Weisman shops
The “First Show” closed in February of 1984, to be followed by an installation by Michael Heizer and a small show by Robert Therrien. A blockbuster conceived by Pontus Hultén, “Automobile and Culture,” ran for six months beginning in July, entertaining and sometimes perplexing crowds of visitors to the Summer Olympics. My duties shifted once more, as a new bookstore had opened in the front of the TC and I became the manager. We did very well selling “Automobile and Culture” t-shirts with the ignition of a ‘56 Ford silk-screened on to them but could hardly give away the fancy auto posters designed by Ivan Chermayeff.
One thing I often remember Richard Koshalek saying was that MOCA was meant to “extend itself out into the street." This was literally true during the “Automobile and Culture” when exotic cars would be parked under the TC’s steel canopy for weekend “Street Shows.” The weekends brought impressive attendance figures, sometimes over 2,500 visitors, but I have to wonder if they came to see the Lamborghini Countach more than they came to see the art. I thought that the most impressive fusion of art and the auto was Rachel Rosenthal’s mesmerizing “KabbaLAmobile.” On a podium rising from the downtown Department of Water and Power parking lot, Rosenthal chanted amplified 12th century Kabbalistic poetry while a seven car precision driver team, known for their work on James Bond films, traced patterns around her with eerie symmetry. The sounds of the performance -- Rosenthal’s incantations, along with the racing motors and squealing tires – were like the sounds I heard in the alley at night, refined into culture and transformed into a prayer.
Rachel Rosenthal dressed for KabbaLAmobile - Photo by Basia Kenton
It was during this period that I had my first one-person painting exhibition at Newspace Gallery in Los Angeles. My paintings, which featured traditional subject matter charged by heavy brushwork had nothing to say about where I lived. Kitty Morgan, who reviewed my show for ArtWeek interviewed me in my studio, and then brought up the following question in her review:
“…how can a contemporary artist living in downtown Los Angeles, who each morning picks his way through empty Night Train bottles on his way to MOCA, paint lovely pictures?”
It was a good question. The painting that appeared on the invitation to my show did in fact feature empty wine bottles, but they had once held Chardonnay and Merlot bought at Trader Joe's in Pasadena, not Night Train. I had tried painting downtown, but the results weren't strong. The one "Los Angeles" painting that I still have a photo of is chaotic and cartoony.
John Seed "Downtown Los Angeles," Oil on Canvas, 1984
Increasingly, the schizoid situation of being around both poverty and privilege every day began to wear me down. I rarely brought friends to my loft: it made them too nervous. When art dealers Blair Archambault and Mark Moore dropped by my loft they barely glanced at my paintings. Blair was looking out my windows the entire time, making sure that his Mercedes parked across the street wasn’t being broken into. Mostly, I made the effort to disconnect from downtown in my life and my art, but sometimes this was difficult to do. My birdhouse neighbor, Michael Tolleson, was an architect who had transformed his loft next door into a gleaming showcase. He and his girlfriend, Jan Rowton, introduced me to Pioneertown, a high desert town 2 hours from downtown, and I remember loving the quiet and solitude.
One morning, on my way to work, I had an experience so powerful, that I still can’t entirely deal with it. Walking along Los Angeles Street, I saw a blur falling from a second story window maybe forty feet away from me. It was a baby. In a rush of adrenaline I averted my eyes and heard a sickening thud on the sidewalk. The street was crowded and as I tried to keep from vomiting I remember thinking how glazed everyone looked. The people on the street were barely reacting. A cop pulled up, the crowd grew larger, and I asked myself if I had really seen what I thought I saw. To this day I still can’t call up the details in my mind, but I know what I saw.
In the spring of 1985 Marc O’Carroll, a sculptor who worked on the installation crew, told me that I could lease an upstairs apartment in a small industrial building that he owned at 37th and Main. The neighborhood was an improvement, although the backyard fence did have razor wire around the top. It was great to have a full kitchen and my own bathroom, and the backyard made it possible to have a dog. I named my mixed-breed puppy “Turrell” after James Turrell who would have a memorable exhibition at MOCA in the Fall of 1985. I would walk my dog over to a shopping center near the USC campus, and pick up an ice cream cone at 31 Flavors. It was still downtown, but I was now 30 blocks from Skid Row.
Rothkos of the Panza Collection, installed at the Temporary Contemporary, Spring 1985
Photo by Squidds and Nunn, MOCA Archive
Photo by Squidds and Nunn, MOCA Archive
As my living situation became more conventional, MOCA was also edging in a more conservative direction. In early 1985 the museum exhibited a group of works, purchased for 11 million dollars from the collection of Count Panza di Biumo. I remember at the time wondering why modern works by New York artists belonged at MOCA when there were living California artists well worth collecting. In my mind, the Panza collection featured works that would have fit in better at another museum devoted to modern art. That said, once the Panza show was hung my reservations faded. Before work I would sip coffee in front of the magnificent room of Rothko paintings that were the centerpiece of the Panza collection. The emptiness of Rothko was another escape from the wilderness of downtown life.
The dining room at my new loft, with an Eric Orr painting and a table by Michael Tolleson
Inside, my apartment at 37th at Main showed the influence of working at MOCA. All the walls were gallery white, and in my dining room hung an emerald green Eric Orr painting: a kind of cousin to the blue Rothkos I admired at work. When I walked Turrell there were no more broken Night Train bottles in the gutter, and the panhandlers had almost entirely vanished. That’s not to say that I didn’t still come across drunks.
My place wasn’t too far from the USC Campus, and one early morning while walking my dog Turrell I saw a bus pull up in front of Sorority Row. As the passengers spilled out, I saw that they were young men in tuxedos and girls in formal dresses, just back from an event that must have gone all night. One girl tripped on the curb leaving the bus and began to vomit. Then, in a kind of chain reaction half a dozen of the young, beautiful USC students began to vomit onto the manicured lawn of he sorority house. If you were to ask me what I remember about the Reagan years, I would tell you that there was heavy drinking on Skid Row and Sorority Row. Of course, I would also tell you that it was a very exciting period in the art world.
Managing the Temporary Contemporary bookstore was an education. One interesting person after another would lean on the counter and chat about art with me and the bookstore clerks. Count Panza, a gracious soft-spoken man explained to me that site specific works had a natural appeal to an Italian, as he had grown up contemplating frescoes embedded in the walls of buildings. Francesco Clemente came in and signed my copy of the "First Show" catalog, and before someone walked away with it one day, the book had been signed by over 15 of the artist's whose works had been in the show. David Hockney, wearing mis-matched socks bought a book on late Picasso which he was very pleased to find in our inventory. Speaking of Picasso, his daughter Paloma toured the TC with her husband one day, and I found her to be exquisitely, exotically beautiful.
One day a sharp-featured older woman dragged in an elderly gentleman and practically grabbed me. "This is Rufino Tamayo, the Mexican master," she told me, "and he must have a retrospective here!" I explained that I was only the bookstore manager, but that didn't slow her down. Tamayo looked at me and winked: he didn't mind being her toy poodle, and was used to her speeches.
Wonderful small exhibitions complemented the major ones, and during the summer of 1985 I found Bill Viola's "Theater of Memory" mesmerizing. John Bowsher's crew managed to drag a thirty foot tall, uprooted magnolia tree into one of the rooms in the upstairs display area, where it was hung with lanterns and hundreds of silver wind chimes. A fan activated the chimes while a large video projection crackled, and bristled with fragmentary images. It blew my mind. Why, I wondered, did the museum need a fancy new building on Grand Avenue, when the TC could facilitate installations like this one?
L to R: Richard Koshalek, Senior Curator Julia Brown and James Turrell
During my final months working at MOCA, the TC was the site of a memorable show and installation by James Turrell, an artist who works with light, space and perception. I was in awe of Turrell's work, and felt that his show was exactly the kind of show that could only be presented in a place like the Temporary Contemporary. Exhibitions like Turrell's were one reason why working at MOCA was just wonderful. Another reason was the supportive atmosphere: when Richard Koshalek came in to a staff meeting one morning, and read part of an LA Times review praising one of my paintings, it made my week.
The museum’s new Grand Avenue building was nearly completed, but I felt ambivalent about the possibility of working there: I had bonded with the “Temporary.” Add to that, Stuart Buchalter, a trustee who was helping with the development of the new bookstore, was an expert in cost control. He decided that a whopping $17,500 would be the perfect annual salary for the Grand Avenue bookstore manager, and I choked on that figure. Despite all the benefits of working at MOCA, it was time for me to move on.
I gave my notice in December, and by January of 1986 I had my first part-time teaching job. By the Fall of 1986, I had a full-time teaching job at Mt. San Jacinto College where I still teach today.
Downtown Los Angeles, seen from the Getty
Recently I stood at the edge of another Los Angeles museum, the Getty Center in Brentwood. The Getty, which opened in 1997, is a serene place that offers expansive views, both of the nearby sky-line of Westwood, and also of downtown, further towards the horizon. Looking south, I thought to myself: “This is how I like to experience downtown now: from a distance."
In the years since leaving MOCA I have gone back enough times to enjoy the splendid but fastidious Isozaki MOCA on Grand Avenue, and also to stare at its neighbor, Disney Hall. I will always prefer the "TC,"now the Geffen Contemporary, as I think it is a space that is more about art than it is about architecture. I haven't been back to the "Birdhouse"-- although I did get a glimpse of it when I watched the movie "Devil in a Blue Dress -- but it wouldn't surprise me a bit to find that is now filled with expensive condos. Maybe some of the areas that were full of trouble when I lived downtown are cleaned up now. Of course, when you "clean up" an area, the people have to go somewhere, right? You can re-develop Skid Row, but the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq seem to be producing a new generation of young people with maimed bodies and minds. If one Skid Row has been improved, impoverished, damaged people will create another one if society doesn't offer them anything better.
We certainly need art museums, and I owe a personal debt of thanks to the visionaries who established, funded, and opened MOCA. It was a very original museum with an idealistic, ambitious set of values, and it still is. I am very pleased that Eli Broad and others stepped up when the museum experienced a recent financial crisis.
That said, whenever I think of MOCA I think of the problems I saw when I lived downtown. I admire MOCA as an institution, but I think I admire the Union Rescue Mission even more.
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