One summer several years ago, I went to California to talk to the Conceptual artist Stephen Kaltenbach, who lives in Davis, a university town on the edge of the Central Valley.
I’d first heard about Kaltenbach from Bob Nickas, a curator in New York. Bob delivers a lecture, usually in art schools, on the topic of artists who stop working. There’s Cady Noland, a well-regarded New York sculptor in her fifties who has refused to exhibit her work since 1992, and whose main interaction with the professional art world since that time has been to discourage anyone else from exhibiting her work either. And Gary Beydler, an experimental filmmaker from Los Angeles who, in the mid-1970s, painstakingly edited a year of footage into a magnificent sixteen-minute cinematic walk from one end of the Venice Pier to the other. In 1976, Beydler screened the film in a gallery to little interest; nobody wanted to buy it, and nobody wanted to show it anywhere else. Figuring that this was the best film he was capable of making, and if people didn’t like it, well, fuck them, he quit. He was thirty-two.
There’s Lee Lozano, a painter and Conceptual artist active in New York in the late 1960s. In ’71 or ’72, after conducting a series of increasingly drastic “life-art actions,” as she called them, she began to perform her Dropout Piece—her gradual but complete withdrawal from all social and professional interactions with the New York art world. In her notebook, she wrote: “Drop out from world, no calls no work no obligations no guilt no desires, just my mind wandering lazily off its leash. This evidently it [sic] the only way to take a rest.”1 She continued to perform the piece, in private, of course, until her death in 1999. There’s also Lozano’s close friend, Stephen Kaltenbach, who fits halfway into Bob’s dropout canon: he quit, but he never stopped.
The funny thing is, most artists quit working. In fact, if you take into account all the post–art school artists who give it up after a few fruitless years kicking around Silverlake or Bushwick, and the artists who get married and have kids and get a full-time job to pay for them, and the ones who get sick of being poor and go back to school for retraining, and the ones who simply get sick, and/or drop dead, then you realize that, statistically speaking, quitting making art is practically in a heat with starting to make it in the first place.
So for Bob’s audience, art students trying desperately to drop in to the art world, to beat these long odds and thrive in a chancy, often-alienating industry in an era when to be alive is to be networked, the phenomenon of people voluntarily cutting themselves off from art’s social and professional systems is darkly romantic and puzzling.
Kaltenbach was born in Michigan and attended the University of California, Davis, where he was a classmate of pioneering sculptor and video artist Bruce Nauman. When he moved to New York in the late sixties, he was almost instantly absorbed into the downtown art scene. He participated in important shows like “Information” at MoMA and “When Attitude Becomes Form” at the Kunsthalle Bern, watershed moments in the development of Conceptual art. He had a solo show at the Whitney in 1968.
He was known, then, for works he called “time capsules”: steel or aluminum cylinders, contents (if any) unknown, engraved with specific instructions as to when, under what circumstances, and by whom they could be opened. A set of three, one-foot-long milled-steel capsules from 1967 reads:
MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
TO BE OPENED AT THE REQUEST
OR DEATH OF STEPHEN KALTENBACH
BARBARA ROSE
PLEASE OPEN THIS CAPSULE
WHEN IN YOUR OPINION I HAVE
ATTAINED NATIONAL PROMINENCE
AS AN ARTIST
STEPHEN KALTENBACH
BRUCE NAUMAN
RETAIN POSSESSION OF THIS CAPSULE
DO NOT OPEN UNTIL NOTIFIED
“They possibly contain things and possibly they do not contain things,” he told Cindy Nemser in a 1970 Artforum interview. “I don’t say anything about their content, or that there’s any content at all, because I found out the concealment of information is as primary a function of the capsule as preservation.”2 Thus far, all of Kaltenbach’s time capsules have remained sealed. One owned by the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College was supposed to be opened in 2000. But the capsules don’t have rivets or a screw-off lid or any other latch mechanism; they’re welded shut. You’d have to take a hacksaw to them, or more probably a torch, to get at their contents. From an archival standpoint, this is a major drawback, and so, institutions have evidently decided to just leave the things intact.
Kaltenbach was not known for a series of advertisements he placed anonymously in Artforum for one calendar year, 1968–1969. In big, friendly block letters, nestled among the exhibition announcements and art school advertisements, Kaltenbach’s ads offered the reader sage bits of advice like Trip, Smoke, Start a rumor, Tell a lie, Perpetuate a hoax, and Become a legend. Then, in 1970, at a crucial point in what looked like a promising art career, he vanished.
He wasn’t alone—1970 was a banner year for dropping out in America. Artists fled the art world in droves to become activists, academics, or entrepreneurs; rock musicians killed themselves with drugs; hippies left the city to grow vegetables organically in New England. Kaltenbach’s personal version of the void was Sacramento, California, where he moved to teach at the state college. In the early seventies, when even Los Angeles felt like a remote outpost of the art world, Sacramento was about as far from the action as you could get.
When he moved back to Northern California, Kaltenbach become an entirely different kind of artist. He switched from gnomic, barely there Conceptualism to lush paintings and decorative public sculptures, of the type scorned by the international avant-garde he’d recently forsaken and beloved by people who hate that hoity-toity shit. And over the four and a half decades he’s been there, he’s gotten pretty good at it. He has built a substantial reputation as a “regional artist” (as he puts it), to the point that, up until very recently, his public profile in Sacramento wasn’t so much Stephen Kaltenbach, the historically important Conceptual artist, as Steve Kaltenbach, the guy who made the big fountain in the front of the convention center.
But the really interesting thing about Kaltenbach is that all of it (withdrawing from the professional art world, living in obscurity while making the “wrong” kind of art) could be considered, as per those mysterious Artforum ads, something between a lie, a hoax, and a legend—or to put it in terms the artist himself suggests, a life’s work of Conceptual art planned in 1968 or 1969 and executed over the course of nearly half a century.
So in 2010, when a small gallery in Los Angeles put together an exhibition of Kaltenbach’s work that purported to spill the beans on this alleged forty-year meta-masterpiece, people took notice. Around the same time, the artist spoke on camera to an interviewer from a local art magazine about his disappearing act. In the video you see Kaltenbach, who has short gray hair and white stubble and is wearing a blue dress shirt, talking to the off-camera interviewer over the unmistakable golf-crowd murmur of an art opening.
He’s in the middle of describing a piece he did in the late sixties in New York, a “life drama” in which he made a bunch of amateurish paintings and tried to get them shown in the Lord and Taylor department store. This led him in a roundabout way to “go for a big project,” as he says in the video, which was “to duck out of the contemporary art world and move to the boonies” and reinvent himself.3
“This is what I referred to as ‘hyperrealism,’” he continues. “Because this life that I’ve lived for the last forty years is not an artificial life. It’s truly me. It’s expressing a part of my aesthetic that I wasn’t expressing directly in my contemporary art. But I mean, there were things like, I got married and had children—and that wasn’t all just a put-on. It’s a real thing. I became a Christian. And that wasn’t a joke.”
“Really?” blurts the interviewer, clearly caught off guard.
“Yeah. I’m sorry,” he says, laughing. “That actually happened to me.”
Bob told me that Kaltenbach has been getting a lot of curatorial attention lately and strong interest from the museum sphere. After a hiatus from the contemporary art world that Kaltenbach predicted would last one decade, tops, but which went on for over four, he’s being reinstated as a contemporary artist in good standing.
In Los Angeles I stayed with my friends James and Susan, two young arts professionals. James was working on and off in galleries and dealing some art on the side. Susan had just lost her job at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA); she was caught up in a bloody internecine feud between its senior curator, the beloved local hero Paul Schimmel, and its new director, Jeffrey Deitch, the former New York dealer turned aggressive museum re-brander. During the week I was there, LA was awash with unemployed curatorial assistants. They were applying to Ph.D. programs in the morning and going to the beach in the afternoon.
On the drive to their apartment in Culver City from LAX, James and I caught up by cheerfully trashing some of the artists who live in LA: the narcissistic photographer who doesn’t go anywhere without an entourage of graduate students, the sculptor who kicked around for a decade before beginning to show and then getting suddenly, to our eyes unreasonably, famous.
“I heard that guy had a nervous breakdown after grad school, that’s why he waited to have a show,” I said.
James waved this off. “Practically every LA artist has had a nervous breakdown at some point.”
I tried to explain my desire to meet Kaltenbach. Most artists, I said—not just the maladjusted or dyspeptic ones—harbor some desire to drop out of whatever version of the art world they happen to operate in, and they usually have a pretty good idea how they’d do it and what they’d do afterward. These fantasies of career suicide (what else can you call it, really?) allow them to continue working in an occupation that, even in the best of times, is unstable and filled with anxiety. At one point I myself entertained the idea of trying to make a living as a pet portraitist. But after some Internet research, I decided that pet portraiture was probably a more cutthroat industry than contemporary art; there are a lot of seriously good cat painters out there.
So here was a guy, Kaltenbach, who actually carried out this fantasy. He’d ridden into the sunset, gone to the dark side of the moon, entered the black hole—pick your metaphor. But at the same time, he was still in contact, and he seemed willing to talk about his experience. So, he presented a unique opportunity to see what it’s like in the sunset, on the dark side of the moon, or in the black hole. James, whose own professional exit strategy was to quit shilling contemporary art and open a radio-controlled car shop in Oregon, saw the beauty of this and agreed to drive me around for my pre-Kaltenbach warm-up interviews.
The next day, a Saturday, we went to the Pacific Design Center to meet Kaltenbach’s gallerists, David and Cathy Stone. The center (“the ugliest building in LA,” as Susan had pronounced it) was closed for the weekend. A man in a security kiosk directed us to a set of escalators beyond a corridor lined with empty furniture showrooms. The Stones’ gallery, Another Year in LA, was the only illuminated space along a darkened hallway of glass-fronted shops on the second floor.
The Stones are a well-matched couple in their mid-fifties, both dressed that day in art-dealer black shirts and dark jeans. Cathy’s mass of blond hair was tied up in a ponytail; David could be a character-actor playing a gruff but good-natured Los Angeles police detective. Both David and Cathy had studied at Sacramento State in the seventies, where Kaltenbach had been their teacher. They remember him in those days as a nice, somewhat drug-addled guy and a laid-back art instructor.
“He was not a very difficult teacher,” David said. “Anyone could have gotten an A from him. He was just doing his thing.” Though he kept a low profile, every so often Kaltenbach would let slip a surprising pronouncement about his stature as an artist—surprising for a guy teaching at Sac State, a fine institution with a serious art program but by no means the epicenter of the international avant-garde. “I remember one night we had gone to somebody’s party,” David said, “and walking back to his truck, we were just talking about his work, and he says, ‘History will remember me.’”
Cathy stayed on to teach in the art department after she graduated, and over the years the three became close. In 2004, the Stones moved to Los Angeles, first to be artists and later to operate a gallery; one of the first shows they did was a small survey of Kaltenbach’s work.
David said, “One day I was looking at Artforum and somebody had ‘rediscovered’ somebody, and I thought, my God, somebody’s going to do this with Kaltenbach. We might as well be the ones—we know him.”
The Stones led us into the gallery’s storage room, to look at some of the Kaltenbachs—a set of objects so diverse that, if you didn’t know otherwise, you’d assume were the work of five or six different artists. We passed a basketball-size hole excised from a wall about a foot below the ceiling and lined with gold-painted ceramic, and a small trash can filled with crumpled-up drawings—Petit Salon des Refusés proclaimed an inscription on its lid. They showed us a blueprint rendering for one of the artist’s “Room Constructions” and a dollhouse-size wooden model of the same piece: a square room with a smaller cube set inside it, leaving an eighteen-inch-wide space for the viewer to walk around its inner perimeter. The piece had been built at the Whitney Museum in 1968 for Kaltenbach’s show there.
David pointed out a framed paper stencil, the words NOTHING IS REVEALED haloed in blue spray paint. Cathy unwrapped an inkjet-on-canvas reproduction of one of Kaltenbach’s paintings from the Lord and Taylor department store series. He had given away all but one of the originals; this reproduction had been made from a grainy slide. It showed the head of a woman with dark hair reclining on a table behind a vase of flowers, rendered with the clumsy strokes and chalky colors of a dedicated but inept Sunday painter.
“Where’s Blood Money?” David was rummaging around in a cardboard box full of tissue paper for one of Kaltenbach’s early works. He pulled out a ziplock bag with an inkpad and a rubber stamp in the shape of a pair of lips—the artist’s. “He used this on a Fruit of the Loom ad.” Triumphantly, he unwrapped a twist of paper and held up a small, brownish disc in a plastic sleeve. “It’s a Kennedy half dollar cast in his own blood and acrylic medium. He had some doctor friend extract the blood.”
Cathy spotted a sculpture on a shelf in the back of the room, a piece by one of Kaltenbach’s alter egos: Clyde Dillon, an earnest but limited sculptor of abstract bronzes, things you might find in upscale but tragically conservative galleries in shopping malls. Kaltenbach had created the persona in New York and has sporadically made work “as” Dillon throughout the years. The Dillon, which David hoisted with some difficulty, was a lumpy, seventy-pound funnel; it looked like a bronze tornado.
David said, “He did two time capsules regarding Lee Lozano. This is Lozano’s Mind.” He showed us an oblong, highly polished steel box, about the size of a DVD player, with the words LO, AN OZ engraved in block letters into its top face. Next, David produced a smaller, cubic capsule and held it up to us. Its front read “Kleines Kloster,” which in German means “small monastery,” and it had a tiny, tapered hole bored dead center between the two words, like this:
KLEINES
•
KLOSTER
As we talked, I realized that the Stones are not only Kaltenbach’s art dealers but also perhaps the preeminent scholars of his work. David walked us through the artist’s anonymous Artforum ads, which, he said, laid out Kaltenbach’s entire career plan in aphoristic form. “Always go back to the Artforum ads,” he said knowingly. “Think about that largest ad, ‘Become a legend.’ You can become famous, but that might not make you legendary. You become a legend when people have to look back and try to remember things. You have to kind of disappear for that to occur.”
The next day we stopped in on Jon Pylypchuk and Paul Cherwick, two sculptors from Manitoba, Canada, who share a storefront studio in Los Feliz. It was so hot that we all sat in folding chairs between the metal-grille door and a box fan on full speed. Paul and Jon talked about having a pool party for their respective kids and a plan to get a game of art poker started; the participants, all LA artists, would ante with pieces of their work of comparable market value. Afterward we met Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer at a nearby restaurant called Little Dom’s.
Sarah studied criticism and theory at Art Center and was working on a book about Lee Lozano’s Dropout Piece. She had just returned from a morning’s trip to the Orange County Fair and brought us copies of Pep Talk, her self-published art gazette. In 2009 she had devoted an issue to Kaltenbach.
Sarah became interested in Kaltenbach through his relationship with Lozano. He’s a recurring character in Lozano’s voluminous notebooks. In them, he’s usually referred to as Kaltenbach—never Stephen or Steve—as in, “I’ll end the Grass Piece with a fanfare: a cap of mescaline Kaltenbach gave me.”4 The two were close friends in New York, and though they never saw each other after the mid-seventies, Lozano remains an important figure in Kaltenbach’s thoughts. In 2009, Sarah visited Kaltenbach in Davis, and, as they were standing and talking outside his house, the artist paused and bent down to remove some bricks from a walkway. “He started digging with his hands, and the Lozano’s Skull time capsule was there, buried in his backyard,” she said.
During the time Kaltenbach lived in New York, Lozano was painting and performing life-art actions: prescribed behaviors carried out for fixed periods of time, recorded as sets of instructions followed by detailed notes. The notes paint a portrait of the downtown art scene as an endless, druggy hangout, in which everyone was constantly showing up in everyone else’s art project. For Real Money Piece (1969), Lozano wrote: “Open jar of real money and offer it to guests like candy.”5 She performed it for ninety-seven days and noted that the painter Ron Kleeman took twenty dollars on April 15, the Minimalist sculptor Robert Morris refused to take any money on May 17, and Kaltenbach’s upstairs neighbor, the painter John Torreano, didn’t take any money on May 22, but he did take the jar.
Lozano mentioned something called a “Dropout Piece” only a few times in a thousand or so of pages of notes—and never in direct relation to any accompanying description. And since dropping out meant, ipso facto, ceasing to make or exhibit artwork, Lozano’s Dropout Piece exists as a historical conjecture: she certainly dropped out—she stopped talking to people, and former acquaintances were later surprised to learn she’d been living with her parents in Dallas since 1982. So it stands to reason that there is such a thing as Lozano’s Dropout Piece—though what is means, in this context, is still up for grabs.
The Lozano hagiography largely attributes her withdrawal to righteous anger toward the New York art world of the late sixties, with its misogyny and clique politics; Kaltenbach’s can’t as easily be chalked up to rejection. He had a steady teaching job and a studio in SoHo. He was in the Rolodex of influential private dealer Seth Siegelaub, and his work was being included in all the right shows. “He says it was extremely difficult for him to leave New York,” Sarah said. “He was in the middle of an intensely active and cerebral community that he’d never had before and would never have again, and he loved it.”
In 2010, Sarah wrote in Artforum about Kaltenbach’s “Elephant Project”: the sum of his art from 1970 onward, made after his departure from the city. The paradoxical idea of the project is that of a unified body of work impossible to grasp as a totality. Kaltenbach has said that it will continue until he has a retrospective at a museum, at which point the game will be up.
The title comes from an Indian parable, in which a group of blind men grope an elephant and compare notes. One takes hold of the animal’s leg and says the animal is like a pillar, one touches its flank and says it’s like a wall, one grabs its trunk and says it’s like a tree, and so on. Sarah wrote, “The work is so utterly convincing and faithfully carried out—like flawless Method acting or a one-to-one scale model—that it is basically imperceptible as art and suggests that being ‘of art’ may be beside the point.”6
The thing about the elephant parable is, you could just as easily imagine that the blind men were standing around in a colonnaded courtyard with a tree in it and, in a kind of shared delusion, talked one another into the idea that it contained an elephant. The elephant must be posited. I asked Sarah if Kaltenbach’s project might involve us in a similar epistemological error: Is there an “Elephant Project?” Did Kaltenbach really plan all of this out, or is he putting us on?
“People are skeptical about considering it intentional—maybe you guys are—and I’m not. There is plenty of material evidence that confirms such intentionality, and that kind of long-term strategy is fundamental to the way he thinks. You’ll see when you meet him; he’s an amazing guy. Seeing him in the flesh answers a lot of questions.”
We left Little Dom’s and headed back to Sarah’s apartment so she could show us something that Kaltenbach made for her as a gift; halfway down the block she realized she didn’t have her keys, so she described the work for us: a dollar bill, on one side of which the artist had drawn the word LOVE, and on the other, LEE.
A week later, I drove up to Northern California to talk to the artist. Kaltenbach and his wife, Mary, live in a Craftsman-style house in a narrow, alphanumeric grid of residential homes between the Amtrak station and the UC Davis campus. He greeted me at the door, enveloped in a radiant cone of pink light.
No he didn’t—but I’ll admit I had high expectations for the meeting, based on the reverential way that his friends in LA had talked about him. In an e-mail, David had told me that “he is a super nice guy and very forthcoming.” Sarah said, “He has a grace about him”; and Cathy, in a transport of admiration, said, “He’s the real deal. He’s the real artist guy. He’s like, it.” So I’d driven from up Salinas, where I’d visited my mother, fantasizing about the idea of a totally elevated, Conceptual art guru living in an agricultural town in the Central Valley—the same exact kind of town I’d left twenty years earlier in snobbish, adolescent horror—amid the foreclosed tract mansions and flooded rice fields, surrounded by separatist ex-hippies, long-commute tech workers, and cattlemen in Range Rovers.
In fact he looked pretty normal. Kaltenbach wore a faded purple T-shirt and a pair of blue jeans. He had short gray hair, which missed the aggressive, older male New York artist’s buzz cut by an inch or so—it looked monastic, not paramilitary—and a lot of stubble. He’s tall and solid and has big hands and ears.
He took me though the house into the narrow backyard, where a couple of chickens pecked the dirt next to a concrete Buddha head as big as a prize-winning pumpkin. We peeked inside his studio, a tall, freestanding shed tucked into the back of the yard, before the afternoon sun made it unbearably hot. Then we went back into the house and talked in the parlor. The walls were hung with drawings of the Kaltenbachs’ two children, Kate and Danny, and a painting of his from the seventies showing an iridescent tree dissolving into a pattern of interlocking circles. Kate’s dachshund watched us from an ottoman in the middle of the room.
This was an August day with temperatures in the mid-nineties, so we began with climate and geography. He said he grew up in the foothills and preferred the coast. “They complain about no summer—great by me,” he said. He told me that he’d ridden through this area in as a child in 1947, on a similarly scorching day at the end of summer, and vowed to himself he’d never live in a place like this; now he loves it. “A nice town. Very conscious. Friendly.” I told him that my whole family had gone to UC Davis to study agriculture. He said, “That’s what it’s for.”
In conversation, Kaltenbach has a habit of changing topics almost in mid-sentence, calmly but without warning, like a driver turning sharply across lanes of highway traffic to take an exit ramp. Usually, after a minute or two, the purpose of the digression became clear and we returned to the main roadway—though occasionally we didn’t and ended up on a completely different route.
For example, after we’d dispensed with the weather, he told me about a sculpture project he’d been working on: simple objects designed to interact with the architecture of a room and animate the space between the walls and the floor. These were inspired by two bodies of work he’d made while in graduate school in Davis, forty-five years ago. Then, he addressed the idea of densification, a city planning philosophy championed in many California towns of the Central Valley. Rather than expanding outward to consume more and more farmland, city planners prefer to build up the centers, filling in gaps between existing structures. Densification, when managed properly, can increase the efficiency of an urban area and reduce the cost of extending infrastructure to outlying zones.
After a beat, in which I must have looked at him blankly, he let me know that this was a metaphor for his current project. The new sculptures represented a densification of his early sculptural work, an effort to fill in the gap between two things he’d done in the sixties. He described this process as “looking at the line of my work, and looking at it sideways.”
Many of the motifs running through Kaltenbach’s art have their origins in his time in art school. He attended junior college in Santa Clara, California, where he met the Bay Area sculptor Bob Arneson and worked primarily in ceramics. He was drafted and spent a few years in military service. When he was discharged, he found Arneson teaching at UC Davis and enrolled in the art program there.
He remembers his art training as informal—hardly the professional development curriculum it would become by the time he retired from teaching in 2005. “I was working one day in the studio, and Bob came in and said, ‘Are you going to grad school?’ And I said, ‘Yeah I think so.’ And he said, ‘Well, where are you thinking of going?’ and I said, ‘Well, I thought I’d probably go here.’ And he said, ‘Okay.’”
At Davis, Kaltenbach and his classmate Bruce Nauman synthesized the Minimalist sculpture coming out of New York with the more hands-on approach of their professors, Arneson and the painter William T. Wiley. Kaltenbach remembers the young Nauman as a manic innovator, ripping through material variations on sculptural ideas over the span of months: first constructions out of reflective Plexiglas and aluminum, then oil paint smeared over welded tin forms (all of which the artist destroyed).
“Then he made this—it was probably the ugliest piece of art I ever saw,” Kaltenbach said. “It was a post that basically flared out at the floor, and it was about three feet high and was made out of caramel-colored resin, a little bit drippy.” The two artists picked up extra money by entering work in juried shows. At the Walnut Creek Annual in 1964, Kaltenbach’s piece won second prize, and Nauman’s entry was rejected. “But now, those kinds of works are in museums, and my piece is in the basement,” he said, concluding what I imagined was a well-rehearsed anecdote.
While Kaltenbach was a student, the New York artist Robert Mallary came to UC Davis to teach a class. He gave his students an assignment: make a list of all the pieces of art you’ve ever made, starting with the most recent and working backward. Next to that, in two columns, write a physical description of each piece and a description of what you think it means.
For Kaltenbach, this was revelatory: “The main thing that came out of it,” he said, “was that I was trying to evict data from my work. So there was less and less to look at. By the time I graduated, I was pretty much set to push Minimalism beyond simple sculpture.”
He moved to New York City three months after graduating from Davis and hit the ground running. “When I took a cab into the city, I asked the driver to take me where the artists live,” he said. The cabbie dropped him at Spring and Greene, in the middle of what would soon be SoHo—the neighborhood was still nameless in 1967. “There was a guy standing on a loading platform. He looked at me and he said, ‘You looking for a loft?’”
The late sixties were a legendarily interesting time to be an artist in New York; downtown Manhattan was full of them. The art market was expanding but rents were cheap. “People would just lock themselves in their studio until they got stir-crazy, and then they could go out, do something, visit, whatever,” Kaltenbach said.
John Torreano, Kaltenbach’s upstairs neighbor in a building on Greene Street, described the scene as compact and vibrant: big enough to generate different subcommunities but small enough that everyone still hung out together. “If you were working in the avant-garde tradition, that was five hundred people, maybe,” he told me. “If somebody had a party at a loft, mostly everyone was there: older, younger, dealers, collectors, artists, all dancing. As a result, it was easy to meet and engage with people whose ideas were completely different from your own.”
Kaltenbach met Lozano, who’d been in the city since 1962, and she introduced him around. He met the art critic Barbara Rose and her partner, the prominent Minimalist sculptor Robert Morris. He hung out at Max’s Kansas City. His girlfriend found work with a Quaker organization. An acquaintance from Davis got him a teaching job at the School of Visual Arts.
In New York, Kaltenbach started working by completing projects he’d begun in graduate school. These included his time capsules as well as a series of “Room Constructions,” simple architectural interventions that could be built in any exhibition space. In one, the floor of a room is raised to half the height of its ceiling, leaving the viewer only a narrow entrance to the room at the top of its doorframe. In another, walls are extended from the perimeter of the door to a section of the wall opposite (its height equal to the width of the door), creating a wedgelike space for the viewer to occupy. He built a few; many more simply exist as blueprints.
He made fabric sculptures, first in canvas and then in felt. The idea was to exert less and less creative control over their appearance. First he specified the shape of the piece of fabric and the way it was to be folded for display. Then he specified the shape but gave the exhibitor or collector different options for arranging it. Finally, for the traveling exhibition “Soft Sculpture,” curated by Lucy Lippard, he bought a piece of fabric and told exhibitors to just do whatever they wanted with it. “Why should I impose my California–New York aesthetic on how this thing should be folded when the piece is going to be shown in Vermillion, South Dakota, or Ithaca, New York?” he asked art historian Patricia Norvell in 1969.7
As it happened, Kaltenbach’s early artistic goals—to evict data from his work, to push past the limits set by Minimalism—were shared by a lot of artists working in the mid- to late sixties, in New York and elsewhere. He showed up during a period of rapid general mutation in the art world, manifesting in a plurality of forms but sharing a distinctive orientation. The late fifties and early sixties had seen an explosion of concurrent trends in avant-garde art practice: Pop Art, Minimalism, Color Field painting, the Neo-Dada experimentation of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. In magpie fashion, younger artists picked up certain aspects of these forms and discarded others: Minimalism’s aversion to the handmade minus its premium on physicality; the simple geometries of Color Field without its decorative appeal; the Duchampian linguistic games of Rauschenberg and Johns detached from their investment in painting; Pop’s advertising sheen with no image to advertise. Within a very short time, a cluster of terms were proposed to identify this loose constellation of related tendencies: Process art, Serial art, Anti-Form, Systems art, Idea art, and—ultimately beating out all other contenders as the definitive name for the genre—Conceptual art.
The most noticeable trait of the new art was how little there was to look at. In 1966, Mel Bochner organized an exhibition at the Visual Arts Gallery in New York consisting of Xeroxed artists’ drawings collected in loose-leaf binders set atop pedestals. In 1967, Lawrence Weiner excised thirty-six square inches of plaster from a wall to expose the wooden lathing underneath. In ’68, Robert Barry exhibited a roomful of electromagnetic waves generated by a battery-powered transmitter hidden behind a wall of the gallery.8
In the mid-sixties, New York art discourse was still dominated by the formalist criticism of pioneering Modern Art champion Clement Greenberg and younger disciples like historian Michael Fried. In their opinion—which counted for a lot—the meaning of the work of art should be found in its visual and material properties, with no recourse to other information—biographical, theoretical, or otherwise. The very best art, which in the mid-sixties meant big, simple abstract paintings and geometric sculpture, provided the viewer with a self-contained, self-explanatory aesthetic experience.
Conceptualists pushed against this tendency; the aggressive non-visuality of their art ensured that no one could interpret it formally. If there was nothing to see, viewers would have to look elsewhere for the meaning of the work: toward the idea. The stray bits of stuff on display—the Xeroxes, binders, pedestals, photostats, words, absent plaster, even the electromagnetic waves—weren’t the art. Rather, they were places that art temporarily lived, like shells occupied by a roving, metaphysical hermit crab.
A 1968 article in Art International by Lucy Lippard and John Chandler glossed this phenomenon as “the dematerialization of the art object”: a process by which the physical attributes of the artwork receded in order to foreground its ideational content. They saw this reductive process as the clear historical trajectory for avant-garde art, one that paradoxically generated new possibilities as it approached total self-dissolution. “Has an ultimate zero point been arrived at by black paintings, white paintings, light beams, transparent film, silent concerts, invisible sculpture . . . ? It hardly seems likely,” they concluded.9
Because it wasn’t seeable, Conceptual art wasn’t beautiful. But by that logic, it wasn’t particularly ugly either; in fact, it seemed to have very little to do with aesthetics—art’s usual bailiwick—at all. “From the Conceptual standpoint, material properties and esthetic qualities are secondary and could be dispensed with,” wrote artist Ursula Meyer in her introduction to a paperback anthology of Conceptualist essays and projects.10 Joseph Kosuth, the movement’s most garrulous practitioner-theorist, went so far as to state that art should be completely divorced from aesthetics, full stop. Conceptual art was the inheritor of the legacy of analytical philosophy, he declared in 1969. As such, there was no logical reason why it should concern itself with questions of taste or decoration. Instead, as he put it, “being an artist now means to question the nature of art.”11
When the thingness of art receded from view, what appeared was information—all different kinds of it—and the varying ways it could be documented and presented. Artists exhibited statements, photographs, charts, graphs, books, and architectural renderings, all of which served to indicate something—an action, an event, an idea, a fact about the world—not otherwise presentable by means of the traditional art object. Hanne Darboven generated numerical visualizations of time spans from the permutation of calendar systems. Weiner specified simple activities, like throwing a rubber ball into the sea or pouring a quantity of house paint onto the floor, and insisted that, as works of art, they were identical whether performed or simply written down. Adrian Piper mapped her movements through space in complex arrays of graphic and textual notation, turning quotidian activities—meditating, eating breakfast, reading the newspaper—into data for analysis.
These ideas and tendencies had different political or ideological valences depending on whom you talked to. Critic Gregory Battcock saw in the dematerialization of the art object “a rejection of the ‘bourgeois’ aspects of traditional art” in line with the anti-establishment tenor of contemporary leftist movements (the student rebellions of May 1968, anti-Vietnam activism).12 Meyer noted Conceptualism’s “disdain for the notion of commodities” and suggested an anti-capitalist agenda at work in artists’ refusal to make aesthetic goods.13 John Perreault, a critic for the Village Voice, read the work more neutrally, as a reflection of a changing mode of production: “Is it so surprising that in a time when postindustrial ephemeralization is rampant, when information bits are speedier and more important than heavy matter or face-to-face contact . . . that artists everywhere should come up with Conceptual Art?”14
Despite the strongly anti-aesthetic stance of much Conceptual art, it had an unmistakable look and feel. Its vibe was generic, ascetic, clinical, neutral. Its artists wore black and looked pensive and rigorous in press photographs—not like they were crazy or drunk or suffering. Personal expression was out; polemics and propositions were in. Existentialism and phenomenology were out; linguistic philosophy and the history of the sciences were in. Graph paper and tape recorders were in. Marshall McLuhan’s media theory was kind of in.
Writing was also in—way in. An art of neutral documentation and abstract content required a lot of explanation; the first thing advocates needed to get across to a general public was why nothing looked like art anymore. The artists themselves produced most of it, to the joy of some and the consternation of others. “The dematerialization of the object might eventually lead to the disintegration of criticism as it is known today,” Lippard and Chandler wrote somewhat ambivalently.15 The British group Art & Language worked almost exclusively in text, publishing a journal devoted to an articulation of its complex position. Kosuth took on a pseudonym—Arthur Rose—and published interviews with leading Conceptual artists, including himself. (“Being an artist now means to question the nature of art” first appeared in one of these auto-journalistic exercises; he later quoted himself interviewing himself in his seminal essay “Art After Philosophy I.”) Conceptualism produced far fewer things than art movements usually did, but it generated more text in six years than the entire Académie des Beaux-Arts did in the nineteenth century.
Lippard was as quick as anyone to point out the fact that “dematerialization,” or any such term trumpeting the ephemeralizing qualities of Conceptual art, could be misleading. (Kaltenbach’s time capsules, for example, are certainly material objects: they’re heavy, they have color and texture, and one of them currently displaces a certain volume of air somewhere deep within the storage facilities of the Museum of Modern Art.) Dematerialization was also an expansion of artistic media. Rather than limiting themselves to paint, clay, or wood, artists could work in anything: radio waves, mathematical equations, conversations, dinners, political actions, clouds of smoke, trees, telegrams, sociological surveys, nature walks, secrets, hoaxes. In 1968, Agnes Denes planted rice and buried a tablet engraved with haiku in a field in Sullivan County, New York. In 1969, Robert Barry submitted an idea to an exhibition through the medium of telepathy.
For Kaltenbach and others, these new forms of art required new ways to get it to an audience; the question of art’s place in the world became inseparable from the question of what it meant or could do. “I had an epiphany that the gallery-museum atmosphere put a barrier between the viewer and the art,” he told me. He participated in a series of exhibitions of “Street Art,” which involved a bunch of artists running amok in SoHo on specified evenings, trying to break down the fourth wall between the gallery space and the audience. Kaltenbach’s interventions were characteristically droll and minimal. He had a series of bronze plaques fabricated bearing single words—FIRE, WATER, BLOOD, FLESH—and set them into the sidewalk. They were meant to resemble normal street hardware, like hydrant markers or dedication plaques for buildings, or the paperweights holding down stacks of magazines at a newsstand.
One day, Kaltenbach walked to work at the School of Visual Arts and saw a little glyph drawn on the side of a building, in black ink or paint—“like hobo graffiti,” he said—and decided to get his art completely out of the gallery situation. He started spray-painting walls with cryptic phrases (like NOTHING IS REVEALED, the stencil for which I’d see forty-four years later in Los Angeles), or rubber-stamping his lips onto the legs of a model in a Fruit of the Loom ad on the subway. He made circular badges with rainbows on them, thinking of them as insignias for nonexistent movements (the gay pride flag was years in the future), and handed them out to people.
Such dispersals of the aesthetic into the everyday responded to a nagging condition of the art experience: despite having been smeared across a spectrum of material possibilities, from conversations to Xeroxes to shots fired at a wall with a pellet gun, the work of art was still held firmly together by its institutional and discursive matrix. In other words even if art was no longer something you could see, you still knew it was art because you did the not-seeing in a gallery. Whereas, Kaltenbach said, “when you were out on the town, you could see something and it could operate with your consciousness in a more free way.”
Kaltenbach’s inspiration for the bronze sidewalk plaques was an early Bruce Nauman piece, he told Cindy Nemser in 1970. “I like Bruce’s thinking and use a lot of his ideas,” he said. “Usually it’s pretty much unconscious.”16 In previous formations of the avant-garde, this kind of admission would have been a form of career suicide: the premium on originality was too high to go around proclaiming yourself a follower. Picasso and Braque weren’t important because they were the best Cubist painters, but because they were the first Cubist painters. And even in the context of late-sixties art practice, in which the Modernist ethos of the pioneering individual artist was giving way to a hipper, more nuanced attitude toward innovation, Kaltenbach’s candor was disarming. But it also signaled what would become a career-long theme in his work: the idea that influence could be a mode of art-making.
In the same interview, he discussed his relationship to Robert Morris. Both he and Morris had been making fabric pieces, and both were interested in the idea that fabric lent itself—unlike steel or ceramic—to potential reconfiguration by a viewer, exhibitor, or collector. The problem was that Morris was an older, more-established artist whose work Kaltenbach, the new kid on the block, was inadvertently repeating:
Bob Morris has been a large part of my art ego. It started in California. We were duplicating each other’s work a lot. I was hearing a lot about him, and seeing his work constantly in Artforum made me feel very ineffectual and I was very much concerned with that kind of thing.17
As a late-arriving, provincial transplant to the world capital of contemporary art, Kaltenbach may have felt the anxiety of influence more keenly than most. But it’s also true that the perennial problem of originality was good grist for his Conceptual art mill—and that many artists at this time were also grinding it up along with other once-sacred aesthetic qualities. Originality, like visuality, was now an optional feature of the work of art.
Conditions were ripe for tweaking the Modernist model: a type of art emphasizing generic forms over unique personal styles is inherently likely to create repetitions. A checklist for “955,000,” a Lippard-curated exhibition, notes that the show included, by different artists: two books on a table, eight books on a table, two books on a stand and one book on the wall, forty feet of rope on the floor, and fifty feet of rope on the floor. This led to the attendant problem of differentiation: how do you tell one artist’s length of rope on the floor from another’s? Is there a point at which you give up trying?
What’s more, ideas were often unwittingly shared between artists; Robert Barry’s interest in the telepathic transmission of ideas seemed to have some evidentiary merit. In New York in 1968, Kaltenbach did a series called “Personal Appearance Manipulations”; for one of these, he walked around the city wearing mirrored contact lenses. Later, he learned that an Italian artist, Giuseppe Penone, had done the same thing in Turin in 1970. “A lot of the art thinking that was happening worldwide was sort of growing together,” Kaltenbach said. “The same things were happening all over the world.”
The utopian angle here was that Conceptual art could reconfigure the relationship between uniqueness, originality, and value—that the economy of ideas would turn out to have different rules than the economy of objects. It also presented a critique to the methodology of art history, that vast ledger of credits and debts by which we assign value to artists and their works. It just didn’t make sense to chart the transmission of ideas in the same way one traced the development of perspective in Renaissance painting. “The art historian’s problem of who did what first is almost getting to the point of having to date by the hour,” wrote MoMA curator Kynaston McShine in 1970.18
Lippard and Chandler hoped that Conceptual art would call forth a critical response based on “creative originality” rather than “explanatory historicism.”19 In such a situation, one might move from the rigorous accounting of historical analysis to a more fluid mapping of intellectual affinities based on the principles of reciprocity and free exchange. “Pass on ideas. Never mind who gets the credit for them, you rival rabbits. Give away your ideas,” Lozano wrote in 1970.20 Or as Kaltenbach summed it up for Nemser, “I’m influenced, others are influenced by me, and I in turn am influenced by them—groovy.” For the 1969 “Art by Telephone” exhibition at the Chicago Museum of Art, he gave the museum preparators instructions to make a piece identical to one made a year earlier by Walter de Maria.
Kaltenbach found the physics of influence to be an even groovier field of study than its economics. How do ideas propagate in the first place? How is it that their transmission sometimes seems to violate the laws of time, space, and causality? Kaltenbach wondered if this process could actually be a form of art itself.
When he arrived in New York and showed his slides to Barbara Rose, who told him that he and Robert Morris were barking up the same tree, ideawise (“She kept saying, ‘Bob did this. You gotta meet Bob!’”), he arranged to exchange studio visits with the Minimalist sculptor. As a kind of subtext to the encounter, he tried to see if he could get Morris to change his art: to plant an idea in his head and wait for it to germinate in an artwork. Whatever resulted from the experiment would, in a sense, be both a Robert Morris sculpture and a Stephen Kaltenbach piece—something he named a “Causal Work”: an artwork consisting only of the transmission of an idea between two subjects, with no material substrate whatsoever: a perfect piece of Conceptual art.
If it isn’t abundantly clear yet, Kaltenbach and his colleagues were also into drugs. They used drugs both recreationally and as a creative tool, and usually in some combination of the two. This was nothing exceptional—drugs were to the art world as wigs are to the opera—but the procedures of Conceptualism provided a new basis for their incorporation into artistic practice. The taking of drugs could be treated as an action to be documented, analyzed, and presented within the work of art. From 1965 to 1967, Adrian Piper made a suite of paintings about, and sometimes while on, LSD. In 1966, Dan Graham produced Side Effects/Common Drugs, an infographic table listing everything from phenobarbital to Dexedrine and what it did to you. In 1969, Lozano performed several dope-centric life-art actions: SDS Piece (“Do three identical paintings: stoned, drunk, sober”), Grass Piece (“Stay high all day, every day. See what happens”), and No Grass Piece (you can guess).21 The unique contribution of Conceptualism to the practice of drug use was to subject it to a critical self-assessment, a clinical-aesthetic trial. Many Conceptualists got stoned, but they got rigorously stoned.
To preemptively counter the idea that Conceptual art, in its very far-outness, was simply an epiphenomenon of the drug culture (and thus easily dismissed), Siegelaub mounted an aggressive image-management campaign. Conceptual art was a movement of future-oriented thinkers who jettisoned the baggage of the past and embraced an ideology of progress. The Conceptual artist was a serious young man: his beard was the dignified beard of the intellectual or the research scientist, not the ragged scruff of a dope fiend.22
This characterization of the movement, in line with the self-image of an emerging technocratic elite, was brilliantly pragmatic: Siegelaub had accurately pegged the emerging technocratic elite as an untapped reservoir of potential art collectors. He cultivated individual and institutional patrons in the corporate world, at one point founding a public relations firm that encouraged companies to collect and display contemporary art in order to capitalize on its associations with youth and vibrancy.23 In the mid- to late sixties, the art market expanded to an unprecedented size as mainstream media and the business world responded to this and other overtures. “When Attitude Becomes Form,” the landmark 1969 Conceptual art survey at the Kunsthalle Bern, was proudly sponsored by Phillip Morris Europe.
This campaign was so successful that by the time I was in school, the History of Modern Art textbook version of Conceptualism had for the most part been shorn of its psychedelic fringe. It was all Bertrand Russell and no Timothy Leary. A picture of Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs typically represented the entire movement (itself lumped in with kinetic sculpture, photorealism, and other unclassified tail-end-of-Modernism phenomena): a plain wooden chair, a photograph of the same chair, and an enlarged copy of the dictionary entry for chair, circling one another in endless, self-reflexive ennui. And looking back over the austere documentary legacy of the movement—its innumerable black-and-white photographs of notebooks on tables, copious sheets of graph paper marked with cryptic notations, and punitively dry artists’ statements—it’s possible to imagine Conceptual art, as art historian Benjamin Buchloh did in 1990, as a reflection of the protocols of a “totally administered world,” a term he borrowed from Adorno: a bean counter’s art, an art for the managerial class, void of emancipatory purpose or utopian aspiration, heralding the numbing blandness of the information society to come.24
In many ways this reading of Conceptual art hinges on the idea of tedium—a commonality in the experience of both postwar office culture and many landmark works of Conceptual art. In “Dematerialization,” Lippard and Chandler praised the “unbearable” slowness of Michael Snow’s landmark structuralist film Wavelength.25 Dan Graham’s early performances, such as Lax/Relax (he says the word “relax” while a taped female voice says the word “lax,” over and over, for thirty minutes), were aggressively tedious. On Kawara’s One Million Years (Past), a ten-volume set of hardbound books enumerating the years 998,031 B.C. to A.D. 1969, is lousy with the stuff. Kaltenbach’s work escapes tedium only by virtue of the relative brevity of its reception: you didn’t spend enough time with it to get bored.
But of all human experiences, tedium is the one most radically reconfigured by the practice of taking drugs; drugs can turn experiential poverty into experiential plenitude, in life or in art. It’s possible to be in a state in which you read page after page of typewritten lists of years, or rearrange a piece of fabric on the floor of a gallery, or listen to Dan Graham say “relax” while at the same time a taped voice says “lax” over and over, and never want it to end. Similarly, exchanges like the one between critic Michel Claura and Lawrence Weiner from 1971,
M.C.: In what way do you concern yourself with color?
L.W.: In terms of color.26
can be interpreted differently whether you imagine them emanating from a rigorous framework of analytical philosophy or from the center of a dense cloud of pot smoke.
Kaltenbach, however, had no qualms about presenting himself as a head. In his 1969 interview with Patricia Norvell, he linked his shift to a more rationalized form of art-making with—surprisingly—the decision to start smoking marijuana. “I began to trust the feelings I had on grass because I found that, for the most part, they were more logical than I would normally come up with,” he told her.27 He credited the inspiration for his fabric works to the experience of being stoned in a friend’s figure drawing class and watching the models pose with a bolt of patterned cloth.
Forty-one years later, in an essay in the catalog to Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer’s exhibition in Los Angeles, he described a formative mescaline trip taken with John Torreano in his loft on Greene Street. “That single time John and I shared an experience of spectacular beauty,” he wrote. “For the next decade I attempted to recapture that amazing experience by dropping LSD every few months while I tried to come to an understanding of how to portray that vision in paint.”28
Torreano, for his part, seems to have been unmoved by the experience. When I interviewed him in New York, he recalled the whole drug thing in a less than glowing light. People hurt themselves, he told me, and relationships were irrevocably harmed. Lee Lozano ended up severely damaged by her commitment to drug use as a component of her art; according to Torreano, it contributed greatly to her eventual withdrawal from the art world. “Steve had a more spiritual connection to it,” he said.
I said, “Steve remembers that you and he went on a mescaline trip that was very important—”
“To him,” he said.
Causal Work, the attempt to produce a work of art by influencing another artist, turned out to be kind of a dud. The problem, as Kaltenbach found out, was a matter of both etiquette and verification. “I wasn’t comfortable with it. It was pretty invasive, and right away I realized I couldn’t talk about specifics.” In the case of Robert Morris, he could report on how the older artist had influenced him (he walked away from the studio visit having decided to make his fabric pieces out of felt rather than canvas), but he couldn’t say what, if anything, he had imparted to Morris. The same was true for the other artists he attempted to influence in New York—a group whose membership he never divulges for the reasons listed above. “There was really no way of telling what I had given them,” he told me. “I don’t have a list. I remember it, but when I’m gone, it’s gone.”
Causal Work also marked an asymptote in Kaltenbach’s New York trajectory; it’s hard to imagine a more minimal or data-evicted form of art than this. Other artists arrived at similarly absurd reductions around the same time. For a 1969 exhibition in Seattle organized by Lippard, Robert Barry submitted an untitled work comprising the phrase:
All the things I know but I am not at the moment thinking—1:36 PM; June 15, 1969, New York.
Bernar Venet decreed that, for the duration of “Art of the Mind” at Oberlin College in Ohio, “any extra effort by the students of Oberlin College, in all disciplines” would constitute his artwork. No sooner had artists commenced the programmatic testing of art’s ontological minimum than they arrived at the conclusion that it probably didn’t have one: either the “ultimate zero point” anticipated in 1968 by Lippard and Chandler had been reached almost immediately, or else it never would be. Facing this paradox, artists were left to decide what to do after art had swallowed its own tail.
What’s more, the initial utopian thrust of Conceptual art was rapidly fizzling out. Attempts to lay the groundwork for an open-source economy of ideas had been quickly enclosed by innovative strategies to stabilize, privatize, and monetize even the most ephemeral of artistic gestures. In 1970 came the “Information” show at MoMA, Kynaston McShine’s seminal survey of Conceptual art devoted to the expansion of art’s audience via technology and the mass media, and the birth of the United Nation’s World Intellectual Property Organization, a committee devoted to policing the international transmission of technical knowledge through worldwide copyright accords. In 1973, only five years after “The Dematerialization of Art,” Lippard noted with chagrin, “Hopes that ‘conceptual art’ would be able to avoid the general commercialization, the destructively ‘progressive’ approach of modernism were for the most part unfounded.”29
In its first phase, the aggressive anti-object stance of Conceptualism promised to liberate artists from the commodification of their work, whether they wanted it or not. But nothing spoils an avant-garde like success: “Three years later,” Lippard continued, “the major conceptualists are selling work for substantial sums here and in Europe.”30
In the 1969 Open Hearing of the Arts’ Workers Coalition, an activist group devoted to the reform of financial and exhibition practices in New York museums, Dan Graham expressed a frustration shared by many artists: that a transformation of the work of art, however thorough, did nothing to change the system in which it existed. In a rambling statement, Graham opined: “It’s time to leave all this shit behind; the art world is poisoned; get out to the country or take a radical stance.”31
Before I met Kaltenbach in Davis, I made three stops in Sacramento, about fifteen miles to the east. The first was to see Time to Cast Away Stones, a monumental public sculpture he completed in 1998 for the Sacramento Convention Center.
The piece, the largest of the commissioned outdoor works Kaltenbach has been making since the eighties, is a bisected fountain, sixty-eight feet across, set into a diamond-shaped traffic island where K Street meets 13th Street at the center’s entrance. Water spills over the edges of two rectangular platforms into larger, triangular pools. On each platform float rafts of concrete heads, torsos, hands, and feet, representing figures from different world sculptural traditions. There are chunks of Buddhas, bits of Bodhisattvas, dismembered Greek kouroi and Qin dynasty Chinese warriors, and, facing southward down the street, the head of Kaltenbach’s former teacher and the presiding deity of Northern California art, Bob Arneson.
Visible beneath the falling water are four poetic questions (“What have we thought?” “Where are we going?” “What have we wrought?” “How are we loving?”) engraved into the vertical faces of the platforms—though I missed them entirely on my visit and saw them only later, in pictures of the sculpture on a blog about Sacramento cultural life. Completing the work, two sets of concrete benches run north and south from the fountain on the sidewalks of 13th Street, beneath lines of tall, leafy trees. On one side of the street, engravings along the bottom of the benches read
HEARTHEARTHEARTHEARTHEART
On the other, they read
HEAR THE ART HEAR THE ART HEAR THE ART
The fountain is one of four public Kaltenbach sculptures in the city. The other three occupy, respectively, a lawn on the Sacramento State campus (Ozymandias, a pair of seven-foot-tall bronze legs); a pool at the capitol building (Peace, two dismembered hands shaking each other); and the plaza of a shopping center (Matter Contemplates Spirit, a neoclassical head of a woman). Kaltenbach has placed other sculptures in Napa, California, Los Angeles, and Tucson.
Richard Haley, a young Detroit-based artist who grew up in Sacramento and studied with Kaltenbach at Sacramento State in the mid-2000s, came to Kaltenbach through his public sculptures. “I knew of Steve, but only knew of him as the guy who had made the great big fountain in Sacramento,” he told me. Only when he started digging around in the annals of Conceptual art did he notice his professor’s name popping up here and there in the literature.
At the School of Visual Arts in New York, Kaltenbach had spent most of his time as a teacher trying to get out of the classroom. He took a group of students on a field trip to the Metropolitan Museum in garish costumes and face-paint. He instructed another group to track down the elusive mail-art artist Ray Johnson, who by the late sixties had left the city for a town on the north shore of Long Island.
But in Sacramento, Kaltenbach’s teaching style was more traditional. He taught mold making and figure sculpting classes, preferably in long stretches on Saturdays, from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon. “He was very approachable. His style of teaching was to sit and talk with you about your ideas and try to understand them . . . He didn’t really give criticism, he just wanted to help you work through them and see where you might be able to take them,” Richard said. (Kaltenbach said, wistfully: “I was a much better teacher in my first decade than in my last two decades. But I never lost sight of the fact that one of the worst things I could do was to teach someone how to do art.”) Sculpture classes at Sacramento State took place in a corrugated metal hut with an enclosed yard in the back. Kaltenbach had filled it up with bits and pieces of his sculptures—molds, test casts of concrete heads, hands, bodies, and pillars—either discarded as failures or left outdoors to age, Richard wasn’t sure.
It’s tempting to imagine Kaltenbach’s move from New York back to California as a gesture made in resentment, disappointment, or anger, in keeping with Lee Lozano’s own passive-aggressive withdrawal, or as a response to the general darkening of the mood in the city: Dan Graham’s sense that the art world had become “poisoned” and that it was time for some fresh air. Nixon was in office and the United States had just entered Cambodia; the School of Visual Arts was in a turmoil following the Kent State Shootings; the city was heading into a decade-long recession. The revolutions of Conceptual art weren’t liberating anyone from anything.32
In Davis, I mentioned this to get Kaltenbach onto the topic of why he left. Was he bummed out in 1970? “I never did own up to any angst,” he told me, “and I don’t believe that it would be honest for me to.” For him, the decision to leave New York was dictated entirely by the demands of his work; it followed logically from ideas he’d been pursuing in the years leading up to it. A big part of Kaltenbach’s tendency as an artist had been to try to get outside: of the object, of the gallery, of the category of art that imposed itself between himself and the viewer. Getting out of New York was the inevitable next step.
In addition to the work he made for public exhibition, Kaltenbach had also been doing projects on the sly—surreptitious art actions that extended his interest in concealment and influence. His first “life drama” began in 1968, on a trip to the Lord and Taylor department store with his girlfriend. “There was a gallery of couch paintings on the furniture floor that had paintings hanging on the wall and furniture related to it,” he told me. The paintings were competent, attractive, and utterly boring: floral still lives, pretty portraits, brushy decorative abstractions. The artists who made them operated within a totally different system of art than Kaltenbach and his peers did; they had as much to do with Conceptual art as Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass had to do with La Monte Young. Standing in the Lord and Taylor furniture showroom, Kaltenbach decided he would like to have a show there.
Painting was very much on his mind, and so was something he calls “the protocol of opposites”: the idea that to be innovative as an artist, you could usually just observe what everyone else was doing and then do the reverse. “People were talking about ‘good painting,’ and how this artist was good, and how this artist didn’t make ‘good paintings,’” he said. “And I thought, how could I guarantee that I would make ‘bad’ paintings?”
Over the next month, he made nine. He painted flowers and women. The work was excruciating; he hadn’t painted in years. “They had to be professional. Bad, but professional.” At the end of the month he made an appointment and brought his work to Lord and Taylor for review.
“The woman that ran the gallery was very encouraging,” he remembered. “She said, ‘You’ve got it—I just think you need to work more. Just come back next year and show me what you’ve done, and I bet we can give you a show.’” Chagrined, Kaltenbach went home and gave the paintings away, most of them to his landlord.
Next, he turned his attention to sculpture. He imagined a young artist who, instead of aspiring to get his work into one of Seth Siegelaub’s or Lucy Lippard’s shows, dreamed of exhibiting in the fancy uptown galleries specializing in conservative abstract sculpture à la Henry Moore. He had a little money (the art dealer Gian Enzo Sperone had just purchased a wall drawing and some sidewalk plaques) that he allocated to this project. He gave the artist a name, Clyde Dillon, bought him a wardrobe—a false mustache, a wig, and a sports coat—and started making bronzes. (He had been unfamiliar with Marcel Duchamp’s own pseudonymous artistic identity, Rrose Sélavy. “I was sort of disappointed to read about that,” he told Sarah.)33 Unlike the couch paintings, Kaltenbach didn’t give away his Dillon works; after a flood, they were thrown out by an ex-girlfriend’s father, who had been storing them in a box in his basement in Scarsdale.
Kaltenbach based these two personae on an inversion of his own. “I saw myself as an international avant-garde artist. That sounds like a pretty high opinion, but actually it was only based on the fact that I was, on a monthly basis, getting invited to do this or that, a lot of it in Europe,” he said. The protocol of opposites dictated that, as an international avant-garde artist, he should stop making international avant-garde art, and retreat back into convention.
If these life dramas had a genre it would be tragicomedy: their protagonists—the anonymous, sad-sack, couch-painting painter, and the earnest sculptor Clyde Dillon—were fated by their author to stumble through the business of being artists but fail to grasp the essentials. “I felt the couch painter didn’t understand the potential of art,” he said.
These pieces led him directly from SoHo to Sacramento. Kaltenbach had kept strong ties to the Northern California art scene, returning to teach in the summers after he moved to New York. In 1970, he got a job offer to teach at Sacramento State.
“I realized I could do this really huge project,” he said. “I decided I wanted to create a regional artist. I wanted to make him as good as possible, but have his concerns be off enough that it wouldn’t really be received by the avant-garde world.”
He paused. “And that has worked for a long time. But I think in many ways it’s beginning to fail. Because some of the work I’ve done is now being taken seriously.”
My second stop in Sacramento was to see Kaltenbach’s Portrait of My Father at the Crocker Museum, a first-rate art institution in a city with little interest in art. A trim nineteenth-century California-Victorian mansion with an enormous Modernist appendage, the Crocker sits beside the Sacramento River a few miles west of downtown; Kaltenbach’s painting hangs in a gallery of photorealist art on the third floor.
David and Cathy Stone had made sure I was planning to visit Portrait when I headed north. Kaltenbach had spent most of the seventies making it, and it was some kind of masterpiece; they weren’t sure what kind.
“There’s nothing like seeing it in person,” Cathy said.
“There’s this LSD quality to the color,” said David.
“He was taking psychedelics when he was painting this stuff—he was a big acid head, pot smoker—”
“He might have started it at that point, and maybe finished it when he wasn’t.”
“I think he had his religious epiphany in that period. I remember being in school, about how he was doing drugs, and then he was wearing this little leather cross.”
The painting is fifteen feet long and ten feet tall, and most of the canvas is taken up by the reclining head of its subject, who stares upward out of small eyes nearly hidden in the shadows of bushy eyebrows and folds of wrinkled flesh. His white hair and beard form a stringy frame around his face and disappear into an expanse of pillow beyond his nose and forehead. The light source in the painting, and in the photograph on which the image is based, is somewhere behind and above the figure, so that it outlines his profile and catches a few strands of his beard, while leaving most of his face in half-shadow. In the two bottom corners of the canvas, tangles of hair fade nearly into complete darkness.
From all the way across the room, the painting has a faint, iridescent sheen, like the colors floating on the surface of an oil slick. From twenty paces, you realize that all the color in the painting is coming from a pattern, an arabesque that hovers in front of the black-and-white image of the man’s head. From five, you can see that the arabesque is composed of translucent, interlocking shapes floating in pictorial space like an impossible glass sculpture. The artist has rendered each one, and each strand of beard or fold of aged skin, with acrylic paint sprayed through an airbrush, inch by painstaking inch.
If Kaltenbach’s Conceptual works operate through concealment and eviction, offering the viewer less and less until the work of art achieves total invisibility, Portrait of My Father represents the complete inversion of this method; it couldn’t be more maximal. Art-historically speaking, it sits uneasily between the visionary paintings of the Russian Surrealist Pavel Tchelitchew, who depicted heads and bodies dissolving into luminous filigrees of radiant color, and something you might see painted on the side of a VW van in the parking lot of a Dead show. Its photomechanical cool—recalling Chuck Close’s outsize airbrushed portraits of the late sixties, of which Kaltenbach might have been aware—is completely negated by the obsessive, illusionistic fervor with which the painting is made: each nodule of its latticelike overlay is rendered with a tiny white starburst of reflected light.
In other words, Portrait of My Father disregards every precept and injunction laid down by the theorists of advanced art from Greenburg to Kosuth. This is the point, said Kaltenbach. Just as his Lord and Taylor paintings were meant to be seen in one place only—the furniture showroom of Lord and Taylor—Portrait of My Father is a work designed with a specific audience in mind: one for whom the names Greenberg and Kosuth don’t ring any bells. The painting is so popular with visitors to the Crocker that there’s a picture of it on the foldout map of the museum next to its location in the floor plan. Bob Nickas told me that when he saw it in a show at MOCA in Los Angeles, entire busloads of schoolkids on field trips were crowding around it to get a better look.
Kaltenbach started Portrait in 1972, after his father passed away, and worked on it through 1979 in a studio forty miles out into the country from Sacramento. “I didn’t have an address; I didn’t have a phone. All I had was running water and electricity,” he said. “It was a great place to work. I put in sixteen-hour days on that painting, week after week after week.” According to Cathy Stone, Kaltenbach had a rig that allowed him to raise and lower the painting, so he could work up-close on all areas of the huge canvas, and a cast-acrylic model of the pattern that overlays the image; he looked through it in order to more accurately render the painting’s translucent color effects.
He was also at the peak of his involvement with psychedelic drugs. In fact, the inspiration for the piece was to represent, in paint, the “experience of spectacular beauty” that Kaltenbach had shared with John Torreano while tripping in their building on Greene Street in 1968. (“The target audience for the portrait of my dad . . . is people who don’t know about art and would never take mescaline.”)34
Eventually, perhaps inevitably, the mood in Kaltenbach’s isolated studio darkened. He had been cycling through different religious practices, Transcendental Meditation, Scientology, Zen Buddhism, without much relief from a worsening depression. “I was in an extremely low period, lower than I could ever have imagined was possible,” he said. “I just had a bad opinion of humanity, and the world, to the point where I committed to never having children. I told people it would be so unethical to bring a human being into a world like this.” He began to get more and more visitors to the remote studio—friends from Sacramento who were worried about the artist’s mental state and, most of all, his drug use. “There was a rumor that he was packing heat,” Torreano recalls.
At some point during this long night of the psychedelic soul, a peculiar thing happened to the artist, which is that God started talking to him—and not in the metaphorical sense, either. Kaltenbach held extensive conversations with the Divinity in his studio. He later recounted his religious conversion during a gallery talk at Sarah’s 2010 exhibition:
The last LSD trip I took of about twenty trips, I landed in a worldview that I never really did get completely back from. Where I went, I went to this place where God was not a monster. He was this very authoritative but friendly person. He knew what was going to happen to me, and I had some problems, and I said, “So, this is like what becoming a Jesus freak is?” And He said yeah. And I said, “So that means I’m not going to have a lot of friends when I get back, right?” And He said, “Well, you’re always complaining about inadequate studio time.”35
In Davis, Kaltenbach described the experience to me in more detail: “One day I was listening to public radio, and I heard this Tantric teacher talking about meditation. He was talking about yoga, and he said, ‘In yoga, a person will meditate for five thousand lifetimes until they’re clear enough to realize there is absolutely nothing they can do to make themselves worthy of God—so they just surrender to God.’ He said, ‘In Tantra, we do it right now.’ It made so much sense to me. It really hit me between my brain and my heart.”
The artist began to have visitations. “I was hearing God, he was telling me things that were going to happen, and they would happen. It was just not possible.”
Telling the story in 2012, Kaltenbach recalls his experience in utterly calm, matter-of-fact tones; maybe coming to God from psychedelic drugs, or Conceptual art, fosters a sort of equanimity about the whole thing. He is self-deprecating and funny, and I sensed this was his way of acknowledging and mitigating the alarm, even scorn, that such a confession encounters in generally anti-religious milieus like the contemporary art world. Kaltenbach said that he’s always been committed to a philosophy of openness in communicating with others—and that his religious conversion tested this practice. “I lost friends, gradually, as the years went on, because I think people couldn’t really take it. I became known as a weirdo,” he said, chuckling. “And I wouldn’t argue.”
Though he’d been raised a Lutheran (he left the church in early adolescence) and was open-minded about spirituality, he remembers being utterly astonished by his encounter with God, and reporting on it to his friends; they were even more frightened by this new development than they had been about all the LSD. “I was scaring people,” he said. “They really thought I was going to be Géricault or something—finish my painting and kill myself.” John Fitzgibbon, a colleague in the Art Department at Sacramento State, drove the forty miles from the city to Kaltenbach’s studio almost daily, just to check up on the artist.
After a few months, he said, not just God but Jesus Christ, too, was communicating with him—to his initial consternation. “Why would I need a figurehead of a religion when I have God in person?” he remembers thinking. “It just didn’t make sense to me. I had some concern that I was getting bad information or something.” But the experience persisted. “Eventually I caved in, basically.”
Over a period of many years, Kaltenbach became a regular churchgoer—though he occasionally identifies as a “Southern Baptist Catholic,” a denomination not likely to be found in any registry of religious orders. “It’s all one church, in my opinion,” Kaltenbach told me. Christianity helped clear up his depression and pessimism about the world and provided a moral compass for navigating the business of daily life. “I felt like I was being guided, and when I’d do things that were grossly selfish, I’d be tapped on the shoulder,” he said. “I can’t say it’s made me a good person, but it’s made me a person who’s a bit more able to act like a good person. I don’t feel like I’m ready for heaven. But I think it will happen . . . I believe that I’m an eternal being and that it’s going to be an amazing amount of fun.”
It was late in the afternoon and the dachshund was asleep on the ottoman. After we finished talking, we walked back out to the studio so I could take some pictures. Kaltenbach showed me some of the new sculptures he’d been making, the “densifications” of his early work: gray-painted boards with curved details and inexplicable notches, like disassembled components of some impossible piece of Ikea furniture. They were piled on a low table on the patio in the narrow backyard. On a wall of the house, we looked at a maquette for a public sculpture, a ring of interlocking human figures to be made into a large concrete-composite structure and installed, vertically, in a cleft between two hillocks.
The studio has a tall, vaulted ceiling; a half wall of corrugated metal separates a bay devoted to painting from a larger workshop. The storage racks at the rear of the space were lined with sculptures, some of them part of his Conceptual art—variations on the time capsules, mainly—and others corresponding to his figurative, public art. There were even some Clyde Dillons around. (“I think he’s gotten better,” Kaltenbach said of Dillon. “I mean, I’m allowing him to get what I would call better.”)
Taking up most of the front wall of the studio was an enormous painting in progress, showing Kaltenbach’s daughter as an ethereal, glowing cherub floating against a field of stars. A pattern similar to the ghostly arabesque in Portrait of My Father had been sketched in pencil over the whole canvas, and the artist was in the process of painting it in with an airbrush. Once this was finished, he said, he was going to make a nine-by-nine-foot portrait of Jesus. He showed me two pencil sketches for the work, tacked up to the wall next to the studio door. In each, a softly smiling, almost cartoonish head of the Messiah regards the viewer with unbearably clear, bright eyes. Kaltenbach said he was having trouble finding the right kind of source material to base the image on—surprising, given that in the history of art, there are probably more images of the face of Jesus than of any other face in the world. But then again, how do you paint a deity that shows up unannounced during an acid trip in a barn in the seventies and makes Himself permanently at home in your life?
Entertaining the idea of Kaltenbach’s “Elephant Project”—the cohabitation of austere Conceptual art, monumental public sculpture, prankish pseudonymous jokesterism, and earnest if unusual religious painting, all in the same body of work—requires a certain amount of mental limbering up beforehand. (“You have to take all of it in at once,” David Stone had soberly advised). Though he was forthcoming about most everything else, Kaltenbach was unwilling to spend a lot of time on Elephantology during our interview.
“I’ve thought about it, some,” he said. “I have some understanding of how things occurred to me and why I did them, but I don’t really have time to go into it to any extent.” He also seemed to feel it wasn’t really his job to do so. In the way that the time capsules were designed with certain receivers in mind, and the Artforum ads were meant to target an anonymous group of magazine readers, so too is the “Elephant Project” intended for a specific audience: art historians of the future. “My hope is that somebody will, and hopefully they’ll discover interesting structures of flow and thought,” he said. “That’d be nice . . . I just don’t want to be around to see it.”
Though he talked about being embarrassed by certain aspects of his work (his narrative was full of references to his sense of unease with a lot of the things he’s done), Kaltenbach evinced no actual traces of the feeling. His embarrassment is purely rhetorical. In fact, he seemed to relish the discomfort that the more outré aspects of his work produce for his audience in the contemporary art sphere—including, for example, the twelve-foot-tall painting of his daughter as an angel that he showed me in his studio. “Seeing it from an avant-garde view, there’s nothing right about that painting. Don’t you agree?” he asked.
Before they moved Another Year in LA to the Design Center, the Stones were running their gallery as a room in their live/work space, itself within a former record-pressing plant across from a Kia dealership on San Fernando Road in Glassell Park: not exactly a stop on LA’s art-world map. But in 2005, when they presented a small survey of Kaltenbach’s early Conceptual art—one of the first exhibitions of his work outside the Central Valley since 1970—people showed up. Los Angeles County Museum of Art curator Lynn Zelevansky visited, as did artist John Baldessari (whose enthusiastic comment, according to David, was “How come art isn’t fun anymore?”). Kaltenbach was invited to do a show at Konrad Fischer, a venerable gallery in Düsseldorf with strong historical ties to the Conceptual art movement. Los Angeles critic Bruce Hainley reviewed the exhibition for Artforum.
The Stones did a show of Kaltenbach’s room constructions in 2007 and a survey of his time capsules a year later. In 2010, Another Year in LA mounted “Legend: Annotating the Elephant,” the first exhibition at the gallery to include the artist’s post-1970 work. This one really let the cat, or the elephant, out of the bag; it featured not just Kaltenbach’s Conceptual art but also some psychedelic religious works, a wonky Clyde Dillon sculpture, and framed reproductions of his Lord and Taylor paintings. Passersby unfamiliar with the artist generally didn’t stop in to look, Cathy said, because the show looked like something that crawled out of a mall in Laguna Beach.
Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, who had studied with Hainley at Art Center, wrote her Artforum piece at this time. Curator Peter Eeley put a time capsule in a Conceptual art survey at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Sarah organized the Lozano, Kaltenbach, Graham show “Joint Dialogue” at the young LA gallery Overduin and Kite.
All this attention led to a gratifying scene at the exhibition “Land Art” at MOCA in the spring of 2012. “Steve came down for that, and we went to the press preview,” David recalled. “[Jeffrey] Deitch came up and introduced himself to Steve and said, ‘I just wanted to introduce myself. It’s such an honor. When artists are talking about who’s really happening, everybody’s talking about you.’”
Bob Nickas, who’d turned me on to Kaltenbach in the first place, once told me about his “half-assed theory of the box set.” He proposed it around the turn of the twenty-first century, and it’s about the recuperative function of the art market.
In the 1990s, the music industry found a lucrative new revenue stream in the collection, digitization, and recontextualization of archival musical materials from the distant and recent past. You could take an artist (anyone from John Coltrane to the Velvet Underground), gather up all of their miscellaneous recordings (demos, studio outtakes, concert tapes, radio performances), add their complete back catalog and remaster the lot, hire a music scholar to write an historical essay and graphic designers to put together a booklet, and then sell the whole package to aging baby boomers for seventy-five dollars a pop. The multiple-CD box set was born. The genius of it, from a record industry standpoint, was that the raw material already existed; you didn’t need to nurture new talent, produce new albums, or even cultivate a fan base. In fact, the box-settee didn’t even need to be a particularly well-known artist: the box set produced its own effect of historical legitimation.
Bob’s theory was that the same logic held true for the visual arts, and that, in the 2000s, the contemporary art industry was about to start box-setting everything it could get its hands on. And in the past dozen years, galleries and museums have launched many well-coordinated campaigns of historical retrieval, securing markets and audiences for under-known artists from the postwar period. Anybody from the fifties through even the nineties could become a candidate for career revivification. The art world saw a boom in lavish coffee-table books, museum retrospectives, and museum-esque gallery shows devoted to the work of lesser-known Pop artists, Color Field painters, Minimalists, Post-Minimalists, Conceptualists, Energists, Appropriationists, and Lyrical Abstractionists. Lee Lozano herself has been retrospectively accorded a prominent place in the art-historical record that once neglected her; her work has undergone a similar leap in visibility and market value.
The process relies on a convergence of market pressures and capacities. To make it profitable, you need the following: a reservoir of good, undervalued art that’s loose on the market and hasn’t been looked at very much; accessible historical documentation (in the form of secondary media like magazine reportage and exhibition catalogs); a labor force of accredited scholars to supply the critical imprimatur; and most important, a collector base—individual as well as institutional—broad enough to buy everything.
The expanding, accelerating contemporary art industry provides all these things; in fact, its somewhat alarming speed of growth ultimately requires the retrieval of art from the past to sustain its forward motion. “The market needs material, now more than ever,” Bob said; a major gallery that does twenty shows per year in two or three locations, plus a dozen art fairs worldwide, will find it economically expedient to work with mature artists rather than emerging ones. “Collectors don’t take things seriously if they only cost fifteen thousand dollars. They don’t care; it’s not important. And the gallery doesn’t want to spend all that money to make seventy-five hundred dollars. But if you have artworks with a built-in provenance, and the artist is historically significant, and can be put almost instantly into the institution at the museum level . . . that they will work on.”
As David Stone had once intuited while thumbing through Artforum, Stephen Kaltenbach is an eminently viable candidate for the box-set treatment. He was active during a historically significant period, he has the CV to prove it, and he’s produced enough stuff over the years to make his work attractive to collectors interested in buying in bulk. As he anticipated while hiding out in Sacramento, history will remember Stephen Kaltenbach—if only because he was in the right place at the right time. It will do so because history is in the business of remembering things; and lately, business has been good.
But despite the enthusiasm from a new generation of artists and critics, Kaltenbach’s return to the art market hasn’t been without logistical difficulties. The Stones have had to work hard to get Kaltenbachs into collections and institutions that reflect the artist’s stature and historical importance. After his 2005 show, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art expressed an interested in acquiring Modern Drapery, one of Kaltenbach’s arrange-it-yourself fabric pieces from the late sixties. Despite its impressive pedigree (the piece was first shown in a landmark exhibition at the Leo Castelli Warehouse in 1967), the Stones had a difficult time agreeing with the museum on a price. Even in 2005, it still wasn’t easy to convince an acquisitions committee to shell out five figures for a three-by-twelve-foot piece of ordinary beige cloth.
In “The Aesthetics of Administration,” Benjamin Buchloh observed that Conceptualism created a situation in which the work of art was “on the one hand a matter of linguistic convention and on the other the function of both a legal contract and an institutional discourse.”36 In other words, when you dematerialize an art object, you’d better be sure its paperwork is in order. Unlike Lozano, who at least kept detailed notes about what she was doing even if she never intended to exhibit it, Kaltenbach seems to reject even tacit compromises with documentation. Artworks have been given away, kept secret, falsely documented, made up, produced anonymously, or buried in the backyard.
“He thinks a lot about fucking with art historians,” Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer said. “I don’t think he’s ever told me something that isn’t true, but he will withhold information, happily.” Cathy remembers visiting the artist’s studio in Davis, armed with a notepad and a pen, to make a complete list of its contents. After hours of work, Kaltenbach generously offered to type up the list. Cathy handed it over, and never saw it again. “I swear to God he threw it away.”
From a commercial standpoint, the most important form of art documentation—one that Kaltenbach’s art utterly lacks—is an auction record. Despite his impressive exhibition history, Kaltenbach’s art has few indices of value on which buyers or sellers might base their calculations. When he removed himself from art-world circulation, he interrupted not just the historical narrative but also the economic narrative of his work. “Part of that ‘Leave New York and become a regional artist’ thing is, in the meantime, you don’t have market pricing that’s going up with how many years you’ve been doing art,” David grumbled.
If one of the problems of selling Stephen Kaltenbach is that the artist himself likes to muddy the art-historical waters around him, then, it occurred to me, maybe the Stones weren’t making things any clearer. Introducing quasi-artworks such as reprinted blueprints, new maquettes of old sculptures, and inkjet prints of lost paintings adds a further level of ambiguity to an already confused archival situation. The smart thing to do, I thought, would be to get very hard-ass and forensic. Pin the artist down about dates and quantities, and get everything on paper. Don’t replicate anything. Produce a catalogue raisonné. Convince an art history Ph.D to write a dissertation. Furthermore, hide the religious stuff. Get the artist some cool-looking pants and put him on the plane to New York to lecture at the Whitney.
All of this, of course, is thoroughly against the spirit of Kaltenbach’s art, which, despite coming to resemble nothing like Conceptual art, has held fast to one of the most central tenets of the movement: that art ideas can operate across time and space, nearly in defiance of physical and causal laws; the rest of it is window dressing.
Recently, Kaltenbach decided to honor Lee Lozano by remaking some of her work: pieces that she never documented but that he remembers seeing in her studio in New York. Among these are Time, a small assemblage of two lengths of string nailed to a wall, with a metal washer. The washer hangs on the strings and slides back and forth, into the past or toward the future. “I didn’t know anybody who knew about that piece,” Kaltenbach told me in Davis. “It didn’t exist, it was very ephemeral, and so I was basically saving it for society.”
But when the artist wanted to include some of these pieces in his 2010 exhibition, he and the Stones disagreed on the issue of attribution: Kaltenbach wanted to credit the works to Lozano, period, with no explanation.
“I was like, ‘I cannot sell this to people as a Lee Lozano work,’” David said. “People are going to ask, ‘Where’s the documentation?’” (Kaltenbach: “They said it’s dishonest. To me, it was just interesting.”) Eventually, they agreed on a phrasing—Lee Lozano (as remembered by Stephen Kaltenbach)—that would satisfy Kaltenbach’s insistence on the actuality of the works while heading off any legal-ethical issues about authenticity: a wary linguistic truce between the last, utopian tendencies of Conceptualism and the bureaucratic realities of the art industry.
The final stop on my Kaltenbach tour of Northern California was an Office Depot plaza at the corner of 65th Street and Folsom Boulevard in Sacramento. Matter Contemplates Spirit, a concrete woman’s head in Greco-Roman style, about the size of a golf cart, rests on a stone dais in a patio between the Dos Coyotes Border Café and a Starbucks. Nearby, in an oasis of tall potted plants and metal tables with yellow parasols, a couple in T-shirts and shorts sipped iced coffee and looked at their phones. I ordered some food and sat down facing the sculpture: man awaiting burrito contemplates the meaning of art. The head looked up blankly at the California sky.
On the flight to the West Coast the week before, I’d read The End, Kaltenbach’s self-published eschatological science fiction novel. It begins with two twentysomethings suddenly experiencing the Rapture while driving to LAX in a Jeep. As the faithful are bodily assumed into heaven, the city convulses: drivers disappear from cars, cyclists vanish from cycles, and airplanes drop pilotless from the sky (needless to say, I don’t recommend it as in-flight entertainment).
When I mentioned I’d read the book, Kaltenbach goggled at me. “Oh, I’m so sorry! I’m a terrible writer.” The prose in The End is certainly clunky, although sometimes this is charming (“Mark and Marci were high in more ways than one and for once it wasn’t all drug related” is its incredible opening sentence). But it isn’t clear how good it’s supposed to be. The End is undoubtedly a novel. But based on everything else the artist has done, it may very well be a “novel” too: a self-conscious work of Conceptual art that resembles an amateurish attempt at Christian fiction, in the way that Kaltenbach’s furniture-showroom paintings resembled the clumsy daubings of a Sunday painter. Is The End terrible, brilliant, or brilliant because it’s terrible? Christ, I thought. Once you go down this kind of rabbit hole, it’s really hard to pull yourself out.
Kaltenbach’s art poses many such challenges. Doubling is everywhere: there’s Kaltenbach the Conceptual artist and Kaltenbach the “regional artist,” the arch-strategist and the intuitive maker. There’s the “Elephant Project,” in which a cannily prescient artist engages the art world in a forty-year game of hide-and-seek; and then there’s the simpler story, endlessly repeated, of an artist who gets tired of the big city and settles down to teach in a small town. Kaltenbach’s unique talent, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer told me, is “being able to be critical of it and also totally in it”—it being, I assumed, art, or life, or both. Probably both.
A few things are clear, though. In 1970, Kaltenbach set off for a remote point in non-art space, in order to work in a zone outside its industry and culture. In the intervening years, the industry and its culture have grown to encompass most, if not all, of that zone; Kaltenbach’s position now feels eccentric but hardly remote. He rode into the sunset on the dark side of the moon but came out the other side of the black hole; pick your metaphor. So, what do you do when art catches up with you?
Kaltenbach’s dealers had clued me in to a subtle feature of his time capsules: the ones he’s made since moving to California are officially dated 1970–present, regardless of whether they were assembled in 1975 or 2015. In one sense, this is yet another of the artist’s attempts to tweak of the nose of art history, with its uptight, non-groovy attitude toward provenance and chronology. But it’s more than that, too: a gesture toward a different sense of longevity, foreign to that of a world where innovations must be dated by the hour, movements come and go in handfuls of years, and careers rise and fall in decades or less. That dash in 1970–present is an elastic cord, stretching further and further between then and now; the work of art expands to fill the time in between.
The Stones had one of these in their storage room, a time capsule to be uncorked before Kaltenbach’s speculative future retrospective at MOCA. “And this one has a secret!” David said. He rocked the object forward on its base, and something inside it rolled and struck the inside wall with a low and resonant bong.