CABINET OF CURIOSITIES
Steven Arnold, Untitled (Gloves), 1987. (Del Vaz Projects / ONE Archives at the USC Libraries)
If sometime in the 1980s you had pulled up to the stretch of Beverly Boulevard between Hoover and Virgil, you would have found a dilapidated Victorian home attached to an old pretzel factory. “The building on the outside, really looked like something that should be torched — it was just a wreck,” LA author Michael Gregg Michaud told a documentary crew many years later. “Then you’d go through these doors and it was like something you’d never seen before.”
That something was Zanzabar (spelled in that way), the now mythical studio of visual artist Steven Arnold. The walls were painted a deep shade of Diana Vreeland red, and the space was cluttered with altars of the artist’s invention: on platforms upholstered in striped fabric rested elaborate wooden totems, porcelain figurines, miniature pagodas, and censers bearing incense. And that was just the living area. In the industrial spaces, Arnold built elaborate sets that served as backdrops for his fantastical photographic tableaux, elaborate black and white images that depicted dreamily costumed figures in ornate settings.
If you’re bummed that you never got to see this wondrous space when Arnold was alive — he died from AIDS-related complications in 1994 at the age of 51 — the team at Del Vaz Projects, a not-for-profit art space located in a private home in Santa Monica, has thankfully brought it back to flamboyant life. Steven Arnold: Cocktails in Heaven, as the exhibition is titled, not only gathers the artist’s intricate drawings and photographs, it presents them in an environment that recreates his fabled Zanzabar — an intensiveprocess led by LA painter and sculptor Orrin Whalen, who served as the exhibition’s designer.
An installation view of Steven Arnold: Cocktails in Heaven. (Paul Salveson / Del Vaz Projects)
It was worth the effort. Gallery walls have been stained red. Tables hold some of the artist's elaborate totemic sculptures, imaginatively crafted out of scraps of old twigs, popsicle sticks, clothespins, architectural trim, and dime store bric-a-brac — painted in deeply saturated shades of red, gold, and black. (Arnold was an artist who could make humble materials feel wildly extravagant.) In between, you’ll find the jewelry he wore and the elaborate ensembles he crafted for himself and his models. One corner of the exhibition features a slideshow of his photographs in a space built to resemble one of his celestial sets: a swirl of otherworldly clouds. “This re-creation is like a conjuring of an artist — an artist who died of HIV/AIDS,” says Del Vaz founder Jay Ezra Nayssan. “It’s a conjuring of him and the hundreds and thousands of others lost to the sheer destruction of AIDS and the devastation it had on the creative community.”
In doing so, Del Vaz conjures the work of a singular figure whose art straddled filmmaking, painting, sculpture, design, and photography, and who never adhered to the artistic trends of the day. Born in Oakland in 1943, the son of a hardware clerk and a seamstress, Arnold was drawing obsessively by the time he was 14, and later went on to study at the San Francisco Art Institute and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. One of his early passions was filmmaking, and by the early ‘70s, he had made a pair of experimental films: Messages, Messages (1968), inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and Luminous Procuress (1971), a trippy, queer sex film — both of which got him invited to Cannes. The latter, in fact, drew the attention of Spanish painter Salvador Dalí, who became an important friend and mentor. “He influenced me more than anyone,” Arnold later said. “I loved him very much.”
A wooden totem by Arnold (at left) is presented alongside photographs and a costume.
(Paul Salveson / Del Vaz Projects)
By the early 1980s, the artist was firmly ensconced in Los Angeles — but Hollywood was not receptive to his moviemaking ideas, so Arnold turned his attention to other art forms, like drawing and photography. He would place his subjects in elaborate settings that seemed to borrow from the distortions of German Expressionism and the crude special effects of turn-of-the-20th-century filmmaker George Méliès. In his images, you’ll find ethereal people surrounded by cosmic arrangements of objects. His drawings were just as complex, featuring bodies that meld with landscapes and genders that merge with one another. In all of his work, you’ll find a strong sense of the mystical.
In 2012, Arnold was the subject of an exhibition organized by the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries (which holds much of his work). And in 2019, he was the subject of a documentary titled Heavenly Bodies — which is available for viewing on Vimeo. But the show at Del Vaz, while small, offers the rare opportunity to see the artist’s work as he might have presented it in his own space. Zanzabar is an extraordinary piece of LA that is now gone. But it lives on thanks to the friends and colleagues who have devoted themselves to preserving the memory of Arnold’s incomparable art and life.
🍸☁️🍸
Steven Arnold: Cocktails in Heaven is on view at Del Vaz Projects through April 25th. Public hours are on Saturdays from 1-4 PM. Contact the gallery for the address via their website, delvazprojects.org.
Del Vaz has also created a remarkable artist’s book that features images of Arnold’s work, as well as photographs of Zanzabar taken by Tim Street-Porter.
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