The Artful Experience

And so, as Hegel says about art, “The keynote is good humour, assured and careless gaiety, despite all failure and misfortune, exuberance and the audacity of a fundamentally happy craziness, folly and idiosyncrasy in general.”

Today, the tribe will celebrate Larry McLaughlin’s “Finissage at Bareiss” from 4—6 pm and Bill Gersh from 5—8 pm at 203 Fine Art. The spring began with Hank Saxe’s inimitable ceramic sculptures and burst into bloom with Wagner and Warm Day last week at Rancho Milagro Productions on Bent St—where more than 500 aficionados of the arts gathered as if in a homecoming celebration of the lyrical and impish practitioners of the arts in Taos.

And what could make one feel more at home than revisiting the wild visions and assemblages of El Gersh, junk man and painter, whose conceptual icons embodied an era of exuberant aversion to conformity. Perhaps the era of consideration began last fall at LACMA with the Ken Price show, where Frank Gehry remarked on the exhibition and gathering of LA—Taos souls, saying, “This is so fucking great.” And one senses, regardless of dullards and regressive politics, that the artful experience inspires us, whether the artists are alive or dead because the spirit lingers in anecdotes and in their own objects of desire, which memorialize our friends forevermore.

Ah, Gersh, the image-maker–image-breaker. His wild eyes stare out at you from Paul O’Connor’s Taos Portraits above, a photo that catches not him but you in the headlights of his eyes. Is there an artist who has more visceral impact on the viewer than Wild Bill? Even the ladies, his light o’ loves, will tell you no.

We don’t know if this moment in the merry month of May will last but next week the Harwood’s curator, Jina Brenneman, will bring us more, including Wagner redux, Fritz Sholder, and the Navajo magician, R. C. Gorman, who wore a headband to keep his hair from falling out like the white man, and who made the bumper sticker—Who is R.C. Gorman?” famous and made memorable those El Patio seminars–lo’ these many yeas ago.

And so we miss the Saturday doings and the days when we were young enough to drink, and smoke, fight and shoot, while participating in the feuds among the realists and modernists, the struggles among the Hollyhockers and the denizens of the Stables. But still, thanks to luck, a good constitution, some of us, like Wagner live . We gather together today not to bury but to honor Gersh, as we have Ken Price and will R.C., all of whom were friends first, and artists second. In the greater scheme of things it doesn’t make a dime’s worth of difference what line is drawn between art and life– except for whose buying the drinks and surely that’s when we miss R.C., generous soul, the most. And so Fine Arts 203 carries on in the memory of lovely Tally Richards’ Gallery of Contemporary Art, once again, her photo on the right appears, thanks to Paul O’Connor.