“How To Scroll Upon A Continuous Scrawl In All Directions”
by J.
R. Ball
 |
| George Herms performs "The Earful," one of his many Topanga art happenings of the 1970s where he approached art through sound and invited his audience to participate. The Background scenery had been used in "Showdown at Forked Tongue Canyon," a play put on by residents opposing construction of a trailer park in 1968. Photo by Jerry Maybrook. |
It was in 1971 on a glorious Spring morning in the Santa
Monica Mountains and I was not yet thirty. I was doing odd jobs that day in
Topanga Canyon at the home of the actor Dean Stockwell. Dean lived in an old,
secluded, split-level house located in a ravine and enshrouded by bay trees.
The actor was an avid collector of contemporary art pieces. The inner walls of
his house were crammed with the stuff. Very hip, contemporary pieces dominated
by the work of the late Wallace Berman adorned the walls and lay piled on top
of the oak furniture. I found it all fascinating but thoroughly confusing.
*The Pisces Ladder
I need a ladder to get up on the roof and trim the trees back away from the fireplace. The only thing I can find is an assemblage by a local Topanga artist named George Herms. It is a dry, cracked wooden ladder standing up against the side wall of the house. All these old, junkie shoes were tacked to it. Shoes from the 1960’s. High heels…wing tips…zorries….
I grab the ladder and start to climb. An exotic woman charges out of the house. She appears with a flurry of raven hair and dressed in a flowery kimono. “Hey! Don’t use that to climb on the roof. It’s valuable. It’s an art piece!”
It is Toni Basil, who lives with Stockwell. After she goes back inside, I stared at the cracked ladder studded with shoes. “This is art?” I ask myself. I ruminate on this for a minute or two but can’t come up with an answer. I try turning the question around. “This isn’t art?” I think about this for a while or so but still cannot come up with an answer.
That is when I decided to try to do a piece on George Herms. I had seen the man around the canyon and was aware that he had a good deal of work collected by art museums. I had also seen him briefly on the big screen, in the commune scenes shot up on the top of Saddle Peak for the 1969 movie, “Easy Rider.” I knew he was married, had two young daughters and appeared to live close to the poverty line because he tacked shoes on ladders instead of chucking it for a job in aerospace or something.
I wondered what possessed a man to follow such a path? I wondered if by attempting to put together such an article on this man, I might come to some better understanding of the meaning of the abstract material I had encountered on the walls of Dean Stockwell’s home that morning. It was a try at least.
*The wolf has been at the door so often we’re beginning to treat him like a family pet
My first attempt to interview George Herms ended in failure. He was in his early thirties back then. An absolute open book of a guy and someone willing to discuss his work at length, it turned out that George had the ability to fill my head with Mayflies and send me on my way. After going over my notes, I decided I would have to go back and try again.
One afternoon I brought my truck up to a stop in the middle of his dirt driveway which was located just off Topanga Canyon Boulevard on an empty chaparral hillside near the top of the canyon. A cotton rope bars my way. The rope serves as George’s badminton net. One end is connected to a tether ball pole which stands by the front of the house. The other one is tied to an old, blue Studebaker that looks like it hasn’t run for ages. The inside of the Studebaker is crammed with trash. George has been stuffing the car full of trash since the disposal service cut him off for non-payment.
I stand in the middle of the artist’s front yard. It is filled with what Herms calls effluvia. Rusty metal objects dangle on wires. Scrap metal assemblies mounted on rotten plywood sheets are tacked to the outside walls. Herms has propped the dry remains of an enormous blooming Century Plant up against the side of the two-story house. The upper branches of its gigantic stalk tower over the tar paper roof.
The house is very old and made of wood. It sits high on a level, sunny patch of ground. Out beyond the house several large ravines begin to drop away from the house and lead down into the canyon. Both hillside and ravine are covered in chaparral. It is here that artist George Herms taps into the Universal. From this battered castle, he launches his bold art on an unsuspecting world.
Nobody is home.
George arrives in a beat up Ford station wagon. He has just returned from a visit to Allen Ginsberg who is in town for a reading. George is happy. Ginsburg just gave him $50 for a copy of “Thirty-two Palm Songs.” He clutches an overdue light bill. It has just been paid.
“Tape…Tape…I must find tape,” he tells me. “Gotta tape the receipt to the meter. They are supposed to come out today and shut off the lights.”
While George is off looking for tape, I go back to the truck and get out my clipboard, a tape recorder and a bottle of wine. When I get back to the house I see George out relieving himself out in the dry chaparral.
I hand Herms the bottle. He takes a swig and hands it back, all the while staring off at a distant ridgeline covered in coastal oak trees. I stare at this wiry, bearded man and wonder where his words will take me today.
“I am still working on the article. I think it is about you,” I tell him.
“Oh.” he says.
“Do you have any idea what I aught to put into it?”
“You are asking me?”
“Yes.”
“About as much as you want.”
*The Pisces Ladder
I need a ladder to get up on the roof and trim the trees back away from the fireplace. The only thing I can find is an assemblage by a local Topanga artist named George Herms. It is a dry, cracked wooden ladder standing up against the side wall of the house. All these old, junkie shoes were tacked to it. Shoes from the 1960’s. High heels…wing tips…zorries….
I grab the ladder and start to climb. An exotic woman charges out of the house. She appears with a flurry of raven hair and dressed in a flowery kimono. “Hey! Don’t use that to climb on the roof. It’s valuable. It’s an art piece!”
It is Toni Basil, who lives with Stockwell. After she goes back inside, I stared at the cracked ladder studded with shoes. “This is art?” I ask myself. I ruminate on this for a minute or two but can’t come up with an answer. I try turning the question around. “This isn’t art?” I think about this for a while or so but still cannot come up with an answer.
That is when I decided to try to do a piece on George Herms. I had seen the man around the canyon and was aware that he had a good deal of work collected by art museums. I had also seen him briefly on the big screen, in the commune scenes shot up on the top of Saddle Peak for the 1969 movie, “Easy Rider.” I knew he was married, had two young daughters and appeared to live close to the poverty line because he tacked shoes on ladders instead of chucking it for a job in aerospace or something.
I wondered what possessed a man to follow such a path? I wondered if by attempting to put together such an article on this man, I might come to some better understanding of the meaning of the abstract material I had encountered on the walls of Dean Stockwell’s home that morning. It was a try at least.
*The wolf has been at the door so often we’re beginning to treat him like a family pet
My first attempt to interview George Herms ended in failure. He was in his early thirties back then. An absolute open book of a guy and someone willing to discuss his work at length, it turned out that George had the ability to fill my head with Mayflies and send me on my way. After going over my notes, I decided I would have to go back and try again.
One afternoon I brought my truck up to a stop in the middle of his dirt driveway which was located just off Topanga Canyon Boulevard on an empty chaparral hillside near the top of the canyon. A cotton rope bars my way. The rope serves as George’s badminton net. One end is connected to a tether ball pole which stands by the front of the house. The other one is tied to an old, blue Studebaker that looks like it hasn’t run for ages. The inside of the Studebaker is crammed with trash. George has been stuffing the car full of trash since the disposal service cut him off for non-payment.
I stand in the middle of the artist’s front yard. It is filled with what Herms calls effluvia. Rusty metal objects dangle on wires. Scrap metal assemblies mounted on rotten plywood sheets are tacked to the outside walls. Herms has propped the dry remains of an enormous blooming Century Plant up against the side of the two-story house. The upper branches of its gigantic stalk tower over the tar paper roof.
The house is very old and made of wood. It sits high on a level, sunny patch of ground. Out beyond the house several large ravines begin to drop away from the house and lead down into the canyon. Both hillside and ravine are covered in chaparral. It is here that artist George Herms taps into the Universal. From this battered castle, he launches his bold art on an unsuspecting world.
Nobody is home.
George arrives in a beat up Ford station wagon. He has just returned from a visit to Allen Ginsberg who is in town for a reading. George is happy. Ginsburg just gave him $50 for a copy of “Thirty-two Palm Songs.” He clutches an overdue light bill. It has just been paid.
“Tape…Tape…I must find tape,” he tells me. “Gotta tape the receipt to the meter. They are supposed to come out today and shut off the lights.”
While George is off looking for tape, I go back to the truck and get out my clipboard, a tape recorder and a bottle of wine. When I get back to the house I see George out relieving himself out in the dry chaparral.
I hand Herms the bottle. He takes a swig and hands it back, all the while staring off at a distant ridgeline covered in coastal oak trees. I stare at this wiry, bearded man and wonder where his words will take me today.
“I am still working on the article. I think it is about you,” I tell him.
“Oh.” he says.
“Do you have any idea what I aught to put into it?”
“You are asking me?”
“Yes.”
“About as much as you want.”
 |
| All I Wanna Do Is Swing and Nail, 1960. |
*This instant bird croaks prophetic and I flee in peace knowing nothing loving all
It’s later and we are upstairs in the fantastic clutter of George’s studio which takes up the whole top floor of the house. The walls ooze and drip with George’s art. Strange objects dangle on wires from the ceiling. There is an old popcorn vending machine over in the corner. Its clear plastic bubble top is stuffed full of silver-coated Milar. Next to the popcorn machine, an assemblage hangs on a wall. It is an old, cracked guitar attached to a rusty circular saw blade.
Another wall is dominated by a giant 6X8 foot canvas. For weeks now George has been painting it white. Painting and sanding. Painting and sanding. He tells me he doesn’t have the slightest idea what he is going to do with it, but for now he is content to just use the large canvas as a screen for late night shadow shows.
There is a partition running halfway down the center of the studio. Against this partition, George has hung a piece of plexiglass about as big as the large white canvas. He was currently warping the plexiglass with a blow torch. He tells me it is a light piece.
“Why do you call it a light piece?” I ask him.
“Come closer and take a look.”
I step up close and study the warped plexiglass for a time. Sure enough, the warp in the material casts beautifully delicate shadows on the wall directly behind it.
“Amazing,” I tell him.
“It’s not finished.”
“Tell me, what prompted you to start warping it with the blow torch.”
“Oh, I have done a great many things with it. I have flown with it in the wind, squirted people through it at the Waffle, photographed people through it. I even set it on fire and burned a hole through it which is pretty irrational. I shut off the lights and watched this little blue flame….”
True enough, there is a round hole in the middle of the sheet of plexiglass. George has stuck a seal skin belt through the hole. He wanders over to his desk by the window and drops into a stuffed swivel chair while I take a turn around his studio. On the other side of the partition is a small hand printing press. It is the nerve center LOVE Press. George’s answer to Random House. He has used this press to illustrate two books of Jack Hirschman poems, Idell’s “Zen Love Poems,” Hai Ku” by Diane di Prima, and two books of his own—“Clearspring” and “Thirty-two Palm Songs.”
There is a card sitting on a table next to the press. I pick it up. It has black borders, a drawing of rain clouds made of flowers, and the words from an ancient magic square. It is a Latin palindrome and reads:
S A T O R
A R E P O
T E N E T
O P E R A
R O T A S
Strange indeed. I put the card back down and start leafing through the cardboard box filled with stacks of something George tells me is effluvia—
I go back out into the other room. “O.K. George, just exactly what is effluvia?”
“Effluvia is something that flows. It’s what’s left over when the printing gets done, the painter takes over and has a ball cleaning the press. Exploring the press as medium. Sometimes I paint with the rollers. It is a ridiculously beautiful art form.“
I set the tape recorder on the desk and plug it in. “For an artist, you seem to spend a lot of time working with words. Combining them with your visual art.”
George sits up straight in his chair. “I don’t draw a line between the two. There is just my work. It ranges from sculpture to poetry. It is the total expression of my experience on this planet.”
“So, you really don’t call yourself anything in particular?”
“No…not really…an artist if they ask. I just tell them I am an artist.”
We talked about his first book, “Clearspring,” a collection of poems and wood carvings served up in a manila envelope. He tells me that “Clearspring” was a clearing of his throat. A collection of lines, imagery and words that have sustained him through the years.
Sustained him through 10 years as ringmaster of the Tap City Circus: peddling art out of a suitcase on La Cienega Boulevard, holding a Roofle which was a raffle to put a roof on the pad, then following the Roofle with a Baffle, a Waffle then a Rawful which always embarrassed him because he felt like it was begging for money, of sending out notices that his mailbox was a recycling center for dollar bills, and not having enough money to even get the trash hauled away….
There is a table in the center of the room. On it are several dozen round, clear plastic containers. They are copies of his book, “Thirty-two Palms Songs.” I pick up a container and open it. The pages of his book are not bound, they are round and have no definitive order. Each page is filled with graffiti, visual imagery, wood cuts and words set in design.
George tells me that each circular page is a song meant to sing in your hand. It can be read from any direction since the pages are circular rather than rectilinear.
I select a page out of “Thirty-two Palm Songs.” It is a six-pointed star made out of words. “Read it to me, George.”
Herms places the page in his palm and begins: “KISS SHADE ABLAIZING BEAUTY ART FETISH CONFUSIO” he recites.
Oh, George. You truly absolutely beautiful crazy!
“And that’s reading it backwards,” he adds with a smile.
*Once you get it together forget where you put it
For the next few weeks, I made sporadic visits to the home of George Herms, always wondering what I would eventually put together about this man. How do you write about a persons work when you really don’t have a firm grasp of just where that work is taking you. Don’t get me wrong. I was fascinated by the way George’s art just bubbles out of him but I was having trouble formalizing my feelings about it.
One morning I arrived at the kitchen door at 10 am. George’s two daughters, Nalota, who was ten at the time, and Lily Belle, who was seven, answered the door. They told me their father was just getting up. George’s wife, Louise, was in the kitchen finishing up the morning dishes and we chatted for a while. George finally stumbled in wearing a rumpled blue work shirt with a white goat embroidered on the back. His long hair and beard were gnarled from sleep. He greeted me with the smile but looked like a tired Chinaman. Coffee was poured and we went upstairs to the studio.
The clutter in the studio was the same but different. George seemed to spend a lot of time moving things around. New objects had been introduced to the room. Several familiar objects were missing. A half finished work that was out in the yard last time I came now dominated the center of the room. It was a sort of mobile made from an old umbrella and a glimmering configuration made from sheets of thick gold plastic. George calls these configurations “Birds of Chaos.” He has hung them all over his house.
Most of the copies of “Thirty-two Palm Songs” are still stacked on the table in the same spot as they were at my last visit. “Doesn’t look like they are moving like hot cakes,” I wise crack.
“What I need is an impresario. Maybe when Lilly Bell gets old enough—“ George muses, heading out onto the front porch to drink his coffee amid the splendid Topanga morning light. We sit on the front steps. I pull out a joint and we smoke it with our coffee.
We begin talking about his art and I bring up something that had been bothering me. It appeared to me that George didn’t seem to be concerned about end result of his sketching. I am surely no art critic, but his drawings often appeared rather crude. “It’s something about the inept,” he tells me. “The Master of the Inept.”
“What do you mean?”
“In other words, the adept gets really good at something. When I get really good at something, I lost interest in it and want to try something else. You see, I start back in the cave every time I approach a work. I’m like the first idiot sitting in the dirt trying to draw a picture and wondering what he should grab to do it.”
“Do you find yourself using the same tools over again?” I ask him.
George thinks for a moment. “Let me see, I use pen and ink sometimes …scissors…my fingers and hands…my balls…just about everything. No, I’d say the tools keep changing. Sometimes I do it with my left hand instead of my right.”
“Your left hand?”
“Yes, because if you use your right hand long enough it will get so adept that it is a good thing to switch over to your left hand just to remember what it was like when you first picked up the tool.”
“You do left hand paintings?”
“Many times. Sometimes I paint with both hands. I drum paint with both hands. You know, dipping my hands into the paint”
I ask him about a particular painting. The first one of George’s pieces that I had ever seen. It had a crudely sketched goat in the foreground, some hills in the background and a rotten piece of lace curtain covering the top third of the painting.
“That one was mostly done with my right. Ginsberg took one look at it, smiled and told me I was the eternal optimist. That was years ago when things were really shitty!”
“You really are a romantic, aren’t you?”
“Oh, yes…I am hopelessly romantic, but there is another strain in me—that of the classical master. Those old boys didn’t take any shit off anybody…and it is a funny kind of romanticism. I think of myself more as lyrical.”
“Do you think you will make much money at it in your life?”
“All I can do is make beautiful things, he sobs, he sobs,” George tells me wistfully.
 |
| Exhibit A, 1966. |
*I scroll upon a continuous scrawl in all directions
The reel of the tape recorder goes round and round, but nothing much is being said. George stands across the room, bending over some cardboard boxes filled with art works and notes. “These are my brains poured into boxes,” he says, letting a handful of papers slip from his fingers. They spill across the hardwood floor of the studio.
George decides he can carry on the interview and still get work done, so he picks up the blow torch and starts warming up the big sheet of plexiglass.
“What were we talking about?” he asks.
“Art.”
“Oh yah, you were asking me how I work,” he says, hunching over the Plexiglas sheet with the hissing blowtorch in his hand. “Well, I have no order to my day. There is no program which I follow—which is the way to get work done. You set up certain hours and just blow whether you feel like it or not, but I just don’t work that way. I cannot put two days together that are the same.”
“Well, what gets done?” I ask him.
“I don’t seem to get anything done as far as I am concerned. It is just one interruption after another, and so I try to fit that interruption with the truck’s honking out on the street, the sound of the children’s voices coming home from school, all blended into a live concert performance. My work is close to live jazz.”
“I never do studies. I don’t sketch. I like to just do it…and I like to stay in bed until the idea obsesses me so much I have to get out of bed and go to work to manifest it!
I don’t care about the materials I use. All the materials rot and decay, anyway. It is the spirit you imbue into it. That lives forever.”
George continued talking as he worked. “You see, there are things that we all have…we all share…the ordinary guy with a wife and a couple of kids…maybe there is something in his life that is really beautiful that he has been tossing out into the garbage. That is a lot of what my work has been: taking the garbage of the world, holding it up to the light and making beautiful compositions of things and hanging it in a museum.”
“So how should I describe you work?” I ask.
“I have been wondering that myself. After all, how do you write about that—“Herms says, pointing to one of his collages on the wall.
We both study the piece which contains half a dozen different images, all heading in different directions at once. “It is interruptions…my work is a series of interruptions,” he tells me.
Just then, Nalota and Lilly Belle burst into the living room laughing. They inform us the toilet downstairs has just overflowed.
“Oh, you think that is funny, do you?” George tells his children. “Well, who did I borrow a plunger from last time?”
The two young girls decide they want to stick around and begin hanging all over their father. Lily Belle spots the tape recorder and asks him what we are doing. “Oh, he is just asking me some questions about my work that you girls could probably answer just as well as I do,” George tells her.
“O.K.,” I say, “Let me try that”
I take 10-year-old Nalota over to one of the found art assemblies. “Look, Your father takes this piece of rusty junk and mounts it here. He takes this scrap of paper and glues it there. He takes an old, brass doorknob and puts it here and calls it art. Now, I take this piece to somebody else and show it to them. They look at it and say, ‘That’s not art. Anybody could do that!’”
I look closely at Nalota. She is a willowy child with a beautiful face. “Well, what do you think? Is that art? Could anyone do it?”
Nalota gathers her thoughts for a moment. “Well, is it art?”
“Yes.”
“Can anybody do that?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because they probably wouldn’t know it is an art piece and they probably wouldn’t know when to stop,” she tells me.
“Ah, knowing when to stop,” George chimes in, smiling approvingly.
*Worship at the source
My series of interviews at the home of George Herms had come to an end. I felt I definitely had gathered enough material to put something together. On my last afternoon at his studio, George asked me if I wanted to hike out to a waterfall about a half a mile away before I headed back to Los Angeles.
“Sure,” I told him, happy to be back in the Santa Monica Mountains for a time and away from LA where all those tall buildings squatted in the own fart.
We headed out across the backyard, past two white ducks paddling nervously around the upturned half of a big aluminum pontoon filled with water, then on past Louise Herms vegetable garden, picking up a dirt trail that led off into the chaparral-covered hills.
“Out here is where I get most of my work done anyway,” Herms remarks.
We followed the dirt trail for nearly half a mile, then headed up a steep canyon until we came upon first a creek and then a waterfall coming down off the broad face of an immense slab of sedimentary rock. The broad, wet face of the rock completely blanketed in a soft brown moss. There wasn’t much water coming down from above. It’s was late in the year and the Southern California coastal mountains are very dry at that time. What little water coming down from the rocks above dripped like cords. Twenty foot dripping cords of crystal light, making gentle plunking sounds as it intermittently struck the rocks below.
I sat down on a boulder. George disrobed and stepped under this gentle waterfall for a cold shower. During the trek out to the waterfall, George had told me a story about his youth.
“I was 12-years-old when I decided I wanted to be an artist,” he said. “I remember once I was riding a bike and I had this long thing in my hand. I remember setting it like a lance and charging down the street like a knight after what I considered the two great foes of my life—Tradition and The Impossible.”
Coming back from the waterfall, neither one of us said much. We moved along a trail
That ran alongside the small creek. George finally broke the silence. “Just look at the bed of this stream. The light is so great today!”
“It’s the overcast.”
George stopped in his tracks. “Hold up a minute! If I can show you nothing else, let me show you this.”
Herms stepped up to the bank of the small stream and knelt down. “It is something I learned from the legs of the water bug.”
The artist extended his hand, placing the tip of his index finger just above the surface of the water. “Now, if you watch the shadow of my finger in the bed of the stream, when I touch the surface, a star will appear on the tip of the shadow”
The very tip of George Herms’ finger broke the surface of the water. When it did, a golden star suddenly began dancing on the tip of his finger shadow. That was George Herms in 1971. Nearly half a century ago. George just kept on going. He never did stop being the consummate artists and eventually became the Godfather of West Coast Assemblage Art.
George is simple man. Not much different than you or I. A bright golden star dancing on the tip of his finger.
