Films of the Week: On Llyn Foulkes & Sol LeWitt

Llyn Foulkes One Man Band

“Artists are all egomaniacs,” comments the subject of Llyn Foulkes One Man Band, a documentary by Tamar Halpern and Chris Quilty. It’s no slur on Foulkes to say that he’s no exception (he certainly comes across as volubly, even morbidly preoccupied with his own life and travails). But all artists? What about the kind that attempt to dissolve or conceal their ego in their art, even detach their self from the finished product altogether? What about an artist like Sol LeWitt, to whom this week’s other artist documentary is dedicated?

LeWitt (1928-2007) produced a vast array of work, in two and three dimensions, sometimes site specific, often in the form of sets of instructions to venues for their installation. In Chris Teerink’s film (titled Sol LeWitt), we meet a number of curators—notably in the Netherlands, where LeWitt had a devoted following—as well as an Italian carpenter who worked on a LeWitt project for the Venice Biennale. As one interviewee points out, LeWitt’s great innovation was the creation of instructions for often temporary art pieces—“user’s manuals” which could be faxed to galleries and then executed. Installing LeWitt certainly looks like hard work: throughout the film, we see gallery workers grafting away on scaffolding to produce works such as Wall Drawing 801: Spiral, which involves applying adhesive tape to the inside of a cupola, to very precise geometric specifications. (It’s pointed out that these pieces are just as laborious—and expensive—to remove once a show is over.)

LeWitt himself registers as a self-effacing enigma: there’s no footage of him here, since he was utterly opposed to being a public figure, and hated to be photographed. When he published his so-called “Autobiography,” it was a collection of photographs, a systematic inventory of things and sights (bookshelves, cassette boxes, shop signs) that had meant something to him. We hear something of his voice in a recording from the Seventies: high, a little quavery, faintly like Chet Baker. Otherwise we learn next to nothing of this invisible man: he worked hard, didn’t socialize much, was generally liked but “was not a friendly human being,” according to fellow artist Lawrence Weiner, while other people testify to his generosity.

Sol LeWitt

So there’s no LeWitt in this portrait of LeWitt. The real subject is his procedures and their product, but the film’s distance (both personally and geographically) from the man himself, and its focus on Europe (various Dutch institutions, the LeWitt family’s home in Spoleto) makes for a partial, rather dry, somewhat gallery-centric study. It’s an informative film, rich in ideas because LeWitt’s ideas are rich, but it didn’t make me curious either to see more of his work or know more about this oddly nebulous figure.

What it did get me thinking about, though, was the idea of the absent artist directing the end product from afar, from a position of absolute impersonal distance (LeWitt’s “scores,” as far as we see here, seem to be strictly prescriptive, rather than allowing space for “musicianly” free interpretation by the workers who install the pieces). So while LeWitt might purge his work of self, “ego”—the imperious dictates of the artist as all-powerful absent deity—nevertheless sneaks into his work by the backdoor.

LeWitt is clearly the type of powerful artist that would rankle with Los Angeles–based loner Llyn Foulkes. And plenty rankles with him: in Halpern and Quilty’s film, Foulkes gripes about the art market, the prices that certain canvases fetch because of size alone, and the mandarins who decide who ranks high in that market and who doesn’t figure. He even moans at one point that he’s out of sandpaper, but begrudges the half-hour it would take to buy more at the hardware store.

Sol LeWitt

It makes for a curious contrast to see the LeWitt and Foulkes films released on the same week (at New York's Film Forum). On one side, there’s the unimpeachably prestigious international force, who could command armies of artisans to execute his will, his words and works commented on by priest-like curators. On the other side, here’s a man working alone—and, he claims, unheeded—with his hands in a messy garage of a studio, wrestling in time-honored Promethean manner with paint, wood, chainsaws, and a bewildering and sometimes macabre range of “mixed media,” from horse’s teeth to dead cats and allegedly a real human fetus.

There are three Llyn Foulkeses in the film, inseparable and interlocking, but the one most likely to polarize viewers is the malcontent, the full-time prophet without honor. A big name in the early Sixties as part of the Ferus Gallery circle in Los Angeles, Foulkes has gone in and out of fashion, but mainly stayed out of it. The film-makers—off-camera, occasionally heard asking questions—have become Foulkes’s confessors throughout the shoot, which took place between 2004 and 2012. Obsessive, slightly manic, with the look of a man who’s forgotten to eat over many nights burning the candle, Foulkes is forever predicting his own failure, and blaming himself as much as the world: it’s his curse, he contends, to be always unfashionable because he’s always just ahead of the curve. He comes across like a much less droll, less charming Larry David, albeit one who’s supremely good with power tools—and yet, you can’t help warming to him and wishing him well. Even so, the kvetching, and Halpern and Quilty’s very functional filming of it, wear out their welcome by the film’s final third.

Of the two other Foulkes, one—the visual artist—ought to be the subject of someone’s novel (and it wouldn't at all surprise me to learn that he had been). He’s the creator who can never complete a work, but constantly revises, strips down, reshapes, destroys, starts again, until he absolutely has to let a work go to a gallery (even then, he’s refused buyers, at one point turning down a $75,000 offer, to carry on tinkering). Two works are in focus here, both “in progress” for several years: The Lost Frontier, a huge landscape with figures, composed of layer upon layer of paint and who knows what other mass media, the surface congealing into a chunky relief sculpture. We see Foulkes hacking it apart, prising away chunks, then sweeping mounds of detritus off his studio floor. The other painting is a grotesque depiction of himself and his former wife in bed, him with real nails for eyes, her as a sort of elderly embryo clutching an egg. It was supposed to solve problems with his marriage, he says; funnily enough, it hastened its collapse. This work too has been ripped apart, chainsawed and recomposed: Foulkes shows its reverse side, a crazy paving of timber, cuts and joins, with an electric light patched in for good measure.

Llyn Foulkes One Man Band

If Foulkes the visual artist is engaged in a constant, obsessive search for impossible perfection, the third Foulkes has a fetish object that seems to allow him to be at ease with himself. As a musician, he’s the single player (no one is either competent to play it, or allowed to) of something he calls “the Machine,” a massive assemblage of drums, tuned percussion, trumpeter, car horns, and electronics that Foulkes plays while singing tragic-comic ballads. As a one-man band he’s an absolute virtuoso with authentic jazz swing—we see him hammering away, hands bristling with multiple xylophone mallets, as he sings in a style that mixes Tom Waits, William Burroughs, and the vaudevillian busker on a 1930s street corner. The songs are mawkish, sometimes wryly self-pitying, sometimes graceful—a desert fantasia goes: “You can hide beneath the stars / And shoot at passing cars / Like real cowboys do.” But what’s striking is the leisurely grace with which Foulkes lets rip on the Machine, in contrast to the agony that attends his creation of visual work.

It’s not obvious how the three Foulkses fit together—or to what extent he views his music as part of, or opposed to, his visual art. And it’s suggested by one of the film’s interviewees (among them, briefly seen, is longtime admirer Dennis Hopper) that Foulkes’s musical activities damaged his art-world reputation because no one could understand what he was up to—especially when he landed himself an abortive residency as novelty bandleader for Johnny Carson.

These two films stand in stark contrast—one sleek, professional, somewhat institutional, and ultimately a little dull, the other a touch slapdash, repetitive, indulgent, and yet compelling, mainly because its subject is so troublingly, excessively odd. Llyn Foulkes One Man Band isn’t as exotic a study in artistic obsessions and its supposed mental dangers as, say, Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb—partly because the Foulkes movie isn’t a horror story, just a representative, if extreme, document of how self-defeatingly fixated some artists can get about their work and its imperfections. And there comes a point when Foulkes transcends the kvetching, triumphs—and, in triumph, finds something new to moan about. He sells his ‘Last Frontier’ to the Hammer Museum, considers himself rediscovered, is the subject of a major cover profile in Art in America—and complains because the photograph makes him look old. How can you not like this guy?