Opening at Tiger Strikes Asteroid

 Opening Night at Tiger Strikes Asteroid

Driving into downtown Los Angeles is nobody’s idea of fun. There was once a time when doing it on a weekend was a fairly easy cruise. That time has long passed.

We crawled off the 10 freeway at the exit for San Pedro Street, but the off-ramp actually puts you out on 16^th.. The official Arts District is quite a few blocks away, and rubs elbows with Skid Row. Our destination, The Bendix Building, is in the Garment District.

 Downtown is heartbreaking. 16^th street is lined with derelict mobile homes, sloppy makeshift huts, and lots of tents. Grafitti covers everything. Every square inch of building wall and concrete is vandalized by taggers. It's like seeing an old woman  covered with tattoos. The homeless wander aimlessly in and alongside the filthy street. Bladerunner without the cool futuristic special effects. Parking down there at night is just plain scary.

The Bendix Building was once a hallmark of  Los Angeles’ architecture. Looking up the Bendix Building on Google, one learns:

“A signature visual in the gothic facade of the Bendix building are what are presumed to be Renaissance scholars – accompanied by architectural art forms such as painting and writing, including words like “Progress, Education, and Invention”, written in bold yet austere lettering above each image. Remarkable sculptural ornamentations such as these speak to the designer’s passion for the creative arts and their place within urban architecture. Large windows were also an intentional design element, offering sweeping views of the surrounding downtown skyline.

From 1929 to 1960 it was home to Bendix Aviation Corporation, established by its namesake, Vincent Bendix. In the latter part of the 20th century, the signature occupants of the building included the offices of the Federal Housing Administration, the regional offices of the Boy Scouts of America, and the Wilshire Oil Company.”

The Bendix is now home to numerous art galleries, including Tiger Strikes Asteroid. Tonight was the opening reception for the show, “Pete Hampton’s Lost Era,” hosted by your humble narrator.

 Pete Hampton was a childhood friend, despite being twelve years my senior. He was born in 1940, and spent a lonely, and isolated early childhood in a small house deep in the hills above La Habra. He was  a wildly eccentric guy, the original mad artist. He was also the very definition of a tragic genius. I have always believed that Pete was one of the Greats. The comparisons with Van Gogh are inescapable.

The subject matter of Pete’s work was the Puente Hills in La Habra Heights, and Whittier, California. Long before environmental issues were a popular concern, he launched a passionate one-man crusade to save the hills from development. Pete’s entire life was centered on this Mission.

His artwork was the vehicle. He created thousands of paintings of the pastoral world that once existed in Southern California. He created what would now be called multi-media shows of his work, combining slides of his paintings with narrative, sound effects, and his odd home-made music. He even built a smell machine to recreate the experience of being up in the hills. He put those shows on at various small venues in and around eastern Los Angeles, and  north Orange counties.

Pete died in 2018, and I took on the project of bringing his work to the world. The story of my ongoing project to preserve and promote Pete’s work is just too long, and too involved to go into in this essay. The web of coincidence, and synchronicity is so vastly unlikely that I can conclude only that somehow there has been some Greater Hand that initiated this project in the summer of 1970, and brought me to this opening reception Saturday, March 22, 2018.

That story is posted here

This evening would be the first time his work was ever seen in a gallery setting. Some of the paintings on display had never been seen by anyone other than Pete, myself, and some few of his close friends back in the early 1960's. The photographs of the display are deceptive. It looks like just a bunch of pictures on a stark white wall. But hanging an art show is an art in itself, and Carl Baratta, the curator at TSA, is a pro. Going left to right, the display carries the viewer’s eye from pastoral scenes of the Heights eighty years ago into the dark, and terrifying realm of Pete’s inner world.

above photo credit Gemma Lopez

 My wife and I arrived at the gallery just after 7:00. I had expected that the program here would unfold like the shows at Whittier, or La Habra Art Associations. That is, we would wait until the crowd had gathered, and maybe a half hour or so after the start time, I’d be introduced to the crowd, and be given a few minutes to welcome everyone to the show, and speak briefly about the display. I wrote down notes, and rehearsed the heck of the short introduction.

But it didn’t work that way. By 7:30 the other galleries in the building were closing up shop, and the people began wandering in. By 8:00 we had a big crowd. Carl sort of retreated into the background, and left me on the floor to play host to the guests.

 **(footnote)

Me in black tryin' to look all cool.

The guests at a downtown gallery opening were exactly what you  would expect. Diversity may, or may not be our strength, but it has always been a fact of life in Los Angeles. People of all shapes, sizes, colors, and genders came in. Every stripe in the rainbow flag had its representatives. The show on the walls was not at all what they expected.

 For me, the best part of the evening was watching these folks come in, probably expecting the sort of contemporary art that we all too often see: incomprehensible, ugly, and lacking anything that resembles even a rudimentary level of craftsmanship. Suddenly they were confronted with beauty, power, and an other-worldly, and intimate relationship between the creator, and the subject matter of his creation.

I’ve been to my share of art shows as a creator, and I’ve spent a lot of time watching the people attending the displays. Mostly they’ll walk slowly along, scanning the various works, only occasionally stopping for a few seconds at something that catches their interest. This was different. People hit that wall of paintings and it was like seeing someone grab hold of a powerline. Pete's stuff is so intense, and so compelling that they could not look away. They simply were not used to seeing that combination of transcendent beauty, insanely detailed execution, and sheer power that comes through in the work.

I talked to people almost non-stop, pointing out that the work on the walls was completed fifty or more years ago, and briefly telling them both Pete’s story and mine. Of course, not everyone was interested in the stories. I’ve done this kind of thing before, and I’ve learned how to read a crowd pretty well. Surprisingly, only a very few gave me that cool vibe, of uninterest. Carl had set up a monitor, and had The Lost Era Film (link to Vimeo) running on loop with two sets of headphones available for people to listen in. Every time I looked over there someone was watching and listening. Of course no one stood there for the entire forty minute production, but no one just walked off either. 

For me  the take-away lesson from the evening was this: Regardless of what may be trendy, regardless of where people are coming from, they are hungry for beauty. Silly ideas may impress critics, but every band in the human spectrum is inspired by the light.

I enjoy doing this, but it is high energy work. The adrenaline runs low quickly, and after two hours I needed a break. My wife was chatting with a few of our friends who came out to the show, so I went with our friend Holly to check out the other openings. We headed up to the 8^th floor to  get a peek at the Gallery of Degenerate Art to see Degenerate Art in the Age of DOGE

(*Advisory*)

Do you really want to hear this? Of course you do.

Some vaguely obscene looking blob of soft sculpture with an erection. 

A little wooden rack of little bottles full of pills, each labelled with the title of a banned book:Ulysses, Catcher in the Rye, The Handmaid’s Tale, Captain Underpants (seriously?) 

(Did you know that Moustache Guy banned books?!)

 A huge photograph of some naked dude lying on his back and urinating into his own open mouth. 

Another giant photo of a quadriplegic in one of those elaborate mobility devices performing fellatio on a guy standing at his side. 

Some video of dumpy women writhing around in revealing clothing, and eating food and being gross.

It was all sort of sad. They were trying so very, very hard to upset the squares. Apparently no one told them that the squares they were trying to upset have been extinct for a generation. Even Boomers like Holly and me got bored with that kind of stuff before most these guys were born. We both kind of rolled our eyes. "This the best you got?” *yawn*

We returned to the fifth floor and The Lost Era show.

The crowd had thinned out. At last there were only a couple guys left, and we were all just talked out and ready to close it all up. The show was a hit, and I could not have been happier. We  left the Bendix building, hurried down the dark and dirty streets to our cars, found our way to the Westbound 10 freeway onramp, and punched it. 

 You know what’s worse than crawling through LA traffic? Going seventy miles an hour, bumper to bumper in the middle of the night. Life in So Cal. 

We made it home OK.

** footnote**

I did not mean to imply that Carl abandoned me to the crowd, or something. Hosting an opening takes a lot of running about, and making sure everything is in order. Carl was busy as all getout and I was more than a little hyper at being in a real downtown venue for the first time. My apologies to our host.