Walter Hopps hopps hopps

HUO: Could you talk about the emergence of the assemblage artists of your generation? What were their sources?

WH: Wallace Berman was fascinating - he had a great touch, and great insights about Surrealist art, but he never became some thin carbon copy of Surrealist form, which many artists did. He was crucial to the Beat sensibility. He was one of the serious people. He introduced me to the writings of William Burroughs. And he published his own little journal, Semina.

One of the slightly older intellectuals that affected Beat culture so much on the West Coast was Kenneth Rexroth. He was a very intelligent man, and he was a great translator of some fascinating Chinese poetry. At the same time, he was something of a mentor to people like Ginsberg and Kerouac. So was Phillip Whalen.

But the cultures of San Francisco and Los Angeles were quite distant: the patronage, the infrastructure. The patrons who would spend money were mostly living in Southern California, and most, though not all, of the really interesting art was being created in the north. It was a difficult dialogue, and I felt it was crucial to unite the art from the north and the south.

HUO: In Los Angeles and the West Coast in general the artistic and intellectual circles seem to have been relatively open at the time, not dogmatic but inclusive.

WH: Absolutely. You didn't have to make allegiances the way you would if you were in New York. Ed Kienholz could love Clyfford Still's work and that of his circle - Diebenkorn was fine; he liked Frank Lobdell even better, because he was dark and brooding. But he also liked de Kooning. He had no problem with that. In the world of the New York School, it was very difficult - Greenberg became the champion of all the color-field people; Rosenberg became the champion of de Kooning and Franz Kline. The artists took up their allegiances, also. But on the West Coast, someone like Kienholz could love both de Kooning and Still.

HUO: And Kienholz was linked to Wallace Berman and then to the Beat generation as well?

WH: Kienholz and Berman knew each other, but there was a schism between them. Kienholz was a private, tough realist. Berman was very spiritual, with a kind of cabalistic Judaism and regard for Christianity. Kienholz would not berate him, but he didn't want to have anything to do with him, either. They were very different. Both are represented near one another in the massive "Beat Culture" show curated by Lisa Phillips at the Whitney Museum in New York.

Currently I'm working on a full-scale retrospective of the work of both Ed KienhoLz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, to be presented later this year at the Whitney. Ed's work was considered very controversial even into the '60s, when he had his first retrospective. Today, I suspect much less controversy, but you never know. With this exhibition I hope to reveal the continuity as well as the power of his art and both its origins in an American sense of West Coast culture and its wide range of vital subject matter.