Wally Hedrick
Hedrick was also a key figure in the first important public manifestation of the Beat Generation when he helped to organize the Six Gallery Reading, and created the first artistic denunciation of American foreign policy in Vietnam.
He came out of the military and car culture, first glimpsing the liberating promise of San Francisco bohemia in the late 1940s, then moving to the city permanently after seeing combat in the Korean War (1950–1953).
At this time, too, Vesuvio Cafe in San Francisco's North Beach district hired Hedrick as an action painter to work (i.e. 'make paintings') while a jazz combo performed: "That was his job.
"[6] Hedrick began "working out a form of personalized Dada",[5] which led "perhaps to his most influential contribution to the course of Bay Area art: an elaborate kind of punning.
"[7] Hedrick's mature artistic career began with paintings of popular imagery—American flags, radios, television cabinets and refrigerators—years before the rise of New York Pop Art.
"[10] In the early 1950s, Vesuvio Cafe, a popular Beat hangout, employed Hedrick to sit in the window dressed in full beard, turtleneck, and sandals and create improvisational drawings and paintings.
[13] Hedrick made assemblages and sculptures from beer cans, lights, broken radio and television sets, refrigerators, and washing machines he found in junkyards.
The group was founded at the San Francisco Art Institute in the late 1940s by two members of the Bay Area figurative painters David Park and Elmer Bischoff.
Thomas E. Crow contrasts this work with Jasper Johns’s "anonymous stenciling", drawing attention to the way Hedrick mimics the flamboyant calligraphy found in the decoration of hot-rod cars.
[3] Crow sees the work in contrast to Johns's reticence, as a protest aimed against the waste of lives in Korea, and at Cold War adventurism in general.
[12] “Wally taught me that art is not only something you do, but something you are.”[34] As "a genuine beatnik" Hedrick was employed at a 'beatnik' bohemian sitting at the bar at Vesuvio Cafe, a famous hangout in San Francisco's North Beach.
Vesuvio Cafe employed Hedrick to sit in the window dressed in full beard, turtleneck, and sandals and create improvisational drawings and paintings.
As Bruce Conner stated: “I don’t know any artist that would call himself a beat artist…If somebody did, you’d consider him a fake, a fraud running a scam.”[2] "The opening night was the big thing in San Francisco.
[47] An account of the night can be found in Jack Kerouac's novel The Dharma Bums, where he describes collecting change from each audience member to buy jugs of wine with Hedrick.
Hedrick's 'Six Gallery Reading' was the first important public manifestation of the Beat Generation and helped to herald the West Coast artistic revolution that became known as the San Francisco Renaissance.
[48] The three-story building at 2322-24 Fillmore, where Hedrick and Jay DeFeo lived and worked was the unofficial center of the small San Francisco art world in 1955–65.
Jay DeFeo's best-known painting, "The Rose",[50] was made in their Filmore Street apartment, took almost eight years to create and weighs 2,300 pounds, all paid for[51] by her husband, Wally Hedrick.
[52] -- Bruce Conner In 1958 one of his mechanical assemblages "attacked" a woman at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's annual Christmas party and holiday exhibition.
[53] His "Xmas Tree" was "sort of the pinnacle of the kinetic junk sculptures because I'd never attempted anything so complicated",[14] built out of "two radios, two phonographs, flashing lights, electric fans, saw motor--all controlled by timers, hooked so [they] would cycle all these things."
At the opening, which Hedrick refused to attend, he set a timer so that the piece "suddenly began flashing its lights, honking its horns, and playing its records."
[55] Hedrick, knowing full well the importance of being on hand for the opening, gave his plane ticket for the New York museum exhibition and spectacle to friends, rather than participate.
[2] In 1959, again recalling his Asian military experience, Hedrick painted "Anger" (or "Madame Nhu’s Bar-B-Q"), the first artistic denunciation of American policy in Vietnam.
Explosive rage and indignation are symbolized by an atomic cloud serving double duty as the form of male and female genitalia perpetrating the deed.
[2] In December 2008, Christopher Miles, art critic for the LA Weekly, nominated the War Room (exhibited at Mara McCarthy's The Box, March 21 - April 26,[65]) for Best Show of the Year (2008).
[67] In the early 1970s Hedrick was fired from a teaching post at the San Francisco Art Institute,[68] after circulating a petition protesting America's presence in Vietnam.
After the dismissal Hedrick began a period of self-imposed artistic exile, devoting most of his time to operating a home repair business (appropriately named, "Wally's Fix-It Shop") in the town of San Geronimo, California.
"[26] From 1988 to his death, Hedrick lived and worked in Bodega Bay, California, with his long-time companion, Catherine Conlin,[71] for whom, WWW (a.k.a) Wiggy With Wings was painted.
[72] went on to paint and practice conceptual art and continued the tradition of making "bad art" in the form of music, when in the gestation period of nine months, she led her band, Bedtime Story, in releasing Dream Therapy, an album West Coast Performer Magazine dubbed "the worst album of the year", a title Conlin proudly touts to this day.
"[78] Additionally, the subject matter and motifs of his art often included "rough and aggressive imagery,[26] "painted in a fury that gains its edge from the blatant sexual rawness.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link) Paul Karlstrom: I don't want to jump ahead to what's going to be, I hope, another profitable topic, but some of the seeds of so-called funk art could very well be located in the Six Gallery and perhaps some of the exhibitions there.
