Basketball Diaries
by Catherine G. Wagley
The influential conceptual artist Bruce Nauman made the video “Revolving Upside Down” in his Old Town Pasadena studio in 1969. In it, he moves his body slowly in a circle, while standing on one foot. He looks like he is hanging from the ceiling, because he inverted the camera when he shot it. The video, one of many such experiments, plays in Nauman’s current exhibition, Pasadena Years, at Marian Goodman Gallery’s new Hollywood location. Long before, it also appeared in Nauman’s 1972 retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), a big deal for a young local artist (he was just 31). “He was kind of an art star at the time,” recalled the artist and critic Peter Plagens, who had a nearby studio in Pasadena in those years.
One big problem with Nauman’s rising star was that he sometimes didn’t show up for his regular basketball games with other artists on Saturday mornings. “Where’s Bruce?” they would ask. He might be in New York or Europe opening a new show.
Bruce Nauman, "Studies for Holograms," 1970. (Elon Schoenholz / Marian Goodman Gallery)
I have been intermittently hearing about these basketball games for years. Nauman’s current exhibition, pegged as it is to the 1970s in Pasadena, gives me a chance to finally write about them. The players represented a cross-section of cultural figures who coexisted in a version of Los Angeles that was actively changing, becoming a chosen home to younger artists who were experimenting with different materials or idea-driven ways of working — whereas before, “serious” artists tended to decamp for New York. “In the midst of all of that,” the sculptor Jud Fine told me, “this basketball game started.”
No one remembers exactly how it began. There was a Pasadena contingent of artists and a Venice one, because those were two places where artists found cheap, big studios. Fine recalled the earliest game happening on a court on Ocean Park Boulevard. He and light, space, and sound artist Doug Wheeler — both based in Venice — played the Pasadena-based painter Richard Jackson and Nauman. They met again the following weekend — this time at Santa Monica High School — jumping the locked fence to get to the court.
The artists didn’t know each other well at first. Fine had just returned from the East Coast; Nauman had come from the Midwest via Northern California; painter Ron Linden, who carpooled to the games with Plagens, had done his graduate work at University of Illinois, just like William Wegman, who moved in down the street from Santa Monica High in 1972, and had begun making videos and drawings in addition to photographs. “The people from the outside thought that we were all a community. I don't think we really were,” Fine recalled, explaining that LA artists had long been bigger loners than their East Coast counterparts. “But on the basketball court, we were, and the communal part of it was the way a basketball team works, the way you cooperate with each other to make something happen.”
"Untitled (Corridor Study with Red, Yellow, Blue)," 1983 by Bruce Nauman. (Elon Schoenholz / Marian Goodman Gallery)
Each weekend, the first players to make free throws would be on one team. “None of us were very good at free throws,” said Linden. Robert Smith, who founded the artist-run Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, was tall; he’d play center. Jackson, also tall, refused to play center. James Turrell, who is also associated with the light and space group in Venice (and had his own retrospective at LACMA in 2014), didn’t move as quickly as the others, but, according to Nauman, he always made the shot. Painter and collagist Merwin Belin could make jump shots from a distance.
Fine was “a terrific athlete,” Plagens recalled, but “he couldn't hit the broad side of a barn door with a handful of sand.” Nauman, also athletic — with “shoulders that looked like the coat hanger was still in the jacket,” in Plagens’ words — couldn’t shoot either. Fine remembers guarding Wegman, who would be just “uncoordinated and falling all over himself” before seamlessly, unnervingly, sinking the shot. Said Wegman: “I was a terrible basketball player.”
Once, according to Nauman, a group of women from Pasadena City College showed up wanting to play. “The artists didn’t stand a chance,” said Nauman. Another time, according to Plagens, Wegman’s dog, Man Ray, the charming Weimaraner who regularly appeared in the artist’s work, ran out onto the court during a break, and Wheeler got “red-faced incensed” — although Wegman is sure this didn’t happen; Man Ray knew better.
They didn’t talk about art, not even afterwards when they might sit under a tree drinking beers or sodas. Sometimes they talked about the Lakers. “It was a way to just hang out with people that you liked,” said Fine, “but you couldn't really get to know in the same way as long as you had your art suit on.”
Pasadena Years at Marian Goodman presents Nauman's work from the '70s. (Elon Schoenholz)
By the end of the 1970s, the games had ended, and so had the “Pasadena Years.” “The urban renewal happened,” said Linden. Preservation efforts made Old Town Pasadena attractive to developers, and Linden and Plagens moved downtown. Nauman moved to New Mexico. Friendships, however, lasted. In a 1994 essay for the Los Angeles Times, Plagens recalled attending one of Nauman’s New York City openings with Belin. The gallery was “packed to the rafters with stubbled gentlemen with moussed ponytails and Armani suits … and famous artists of all stripes,” but Nauman beelined it for Belin, his “old basketball buddy.”
The games had existed outside the competition and careerism that could sometimes make art, an already-precarious profession, feel smothering, and they still offered an escape hatch from that version of the world.
🏀 🏀 🏀
Bruce Nauman, Pasadena Years, is on view at Marian Goodman Gallery through April 26; mariangoodman.com.
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