Bob and Bob, 1976.
All images courtesy of the artists.
For the last several months, I’ve been doing a bit of volunteer work for the research phase of Los Angeles Goes Live, LACE’s big Getty-funded project exploring the origins of Southern California performance art between the seminal years of 1970–83. In the process of conducting oral history interviews for the project, I was introduced to the work of several important artists from that period, including Dark Bob and Light Bob. Bob and Bob (not their real names, although they prefer to operate solely as such, even today) had an intense period of collaboration in the 1970s and 80s that produced numerous significant works, including drawings, paintings, videos, and performance pieces. In spite of the quality of their oeuvre, however, they remain largely unknown to the current generation of artists and art aficionados—one of those inequities of art history that is begging to be corrected.
As a duo, they adopted the persona of a couple of “idiots, innocents… just in from the Midwest,” all the better to freely stumble and bumble through the sprawling wilderness of this big city, pushing up against social boundaries and evincing a touching sense of earnest humanity along the way. They maintained their studio in Beverly Hills, of all places, and from that home base, they engaged in an ongoing series of spontaneous street actions that included sleeping or sunbathing in front of the Gucci store; barging into all doors marked “Private” or “Do Not Enter”; and dining in expensive restaurants only to discover that they had no money to pay the tab. One of these comedic actions, Rodeo Beach (1976), was the only work of Bob and Bob to be mentioned in the catalog for the Pompidou’s landmark 2006 survey, Los Angeles: Birth of an Art Capital 1955–1985 (it was not included in the actual exhibition).
Rodeo Beach, 1976
Not the Same Old Song and Dance: Recent Encounters with Karen Adelman and Flora Wiegmann
Posted in essays on artists, historical notes, reviews and commentary on February 15, 2011 by Carol ChehFlora Wiegmann performing Wandering (Detail)
at Orange County Museum of Art
On Superbowl Sunday afternoon, February 6, I went to OCMA to catch a Sunday Salon on performative practices, which featured talks with California Biennial artists Micha Cárdenas, Carlee Fernandez, Flora Wiegmann, and David Wilson. I was most struck by Wiegmann’s talk, in which she discussed the evolution of her practice while standing in front of her filmed work, Wandering (Still). The artist comes from a dance background, graduating from Columbia College with a BA in Dance, and practiced as a member of several different dance companies. She eventually grew bored with the repertoire-based world of professional dance, however, and found herself increasingly drawn to the more experimental aspects of the visual arts.
In 2003, she and Drew Heitzler collaborated to open Champion Fine Art, a two-year series of artist-curated shows with spaces in Brooklyn and Culver City. Champion Fine Art ended the year I moved to LA (2005), but its legacy lives on, as I often hear about the great shows that were organized in the Culver City space, and what a great gathering spot it was for artists. At the Brooklyn space, Wiegmann and fellow dancer Felicia Ballos created the De-Installation Series, nine dances that responded to artworks installed in the gallery, on the eve of their de-installation. Most of the artworks would be removed for the performance, but on occasion, some would remain. This series, which has since been recreated for galleries in New York and France, pretty much marked the beginning of Wiegmann’s current practice, which in her own words, “usurps the practice of visual artists… to broaden the platform for dance by making works on film, site-specific dances, endurance pieces, and collaborative performance projects.”
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