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MURAL MURALS

Edited by

The Visitor

Directed and Narrated by

In California you can go see friends

and enjoy the finest of all grasses.

In Los Angeles you can see angels walking on the Pacific waters,

but they're really just blond guys on surfboards.

You can visit the big Hollywood studios

and really see the movie stars.

As for me, in Los Angeles I mostly saw walls —

graffiti-covered walls as beautiful as paintings,

signed by dozens of anonymous Kilroys, walls long as mythic serpents.

This was the beginning of a surprising and joyful disco very -

the painted walls,

or “murals, ” as they call them in the U.S.

Murals as living, breathing, seething walls.

Murals as talking, wailing, murmuring walls.

Murals — one cries out, the other doesn't.

But these walls don't sell you anything.

A billboard — an enormous advertising panel —

has to be well placed, smiling, and made up to the hilt.

It's not a mural.

That's obvious as soon as you arrive.

From the landing strip to the freeway,

sometimes in a traffic jam you spot a mural.

It's often badly placed, unsmiling, un-made up.

Suddenly a face in close-up, with an insistent gaze.

What should I call them, these residents of the L.A. walls?

“Los Angelenos”? “Losangelics”?

Or else...

“Los angels in aspic”?

“Los ugly losers”?

“The lousy jealous of Los Angeles”?

In any case, as if the city were only murals and palm trees,

I drove 35 miles from Los Angel-east

to the ocean in Los Angel-west.

Whether collective daydreams or personal visions,

the walls tell of a city and its people.

It's a recent and widespread phenomenon,

although the Mexican tradition goes back to Orozco, Siqueiros, Ribera.

Is it a result of the '60s?

The flower children who sought to beautify life?

The people of '68 who wrote their protests on the walls,

and the artists disgusted by the gallery system

and the collectors' art market?

Is it a primal need to display private life in the public square?

For all these reasons and more,

murals have flourished everywhere.

In Los Angeles, there are lots, in very particular styles.

The fall of Icarus is quite a story.

As told by John Wehrle, a stranger to the city,

who told me on the phone,

"Los Angeles is a city planted in the desed

and under-populated with angels.

I see it as a collision of different mythologies

in a drive-in, ride-in, fly-in...

a surrealist get-together

between an angel, a cowboy, and an astronaut.”

The cosmonaut fell through the air. Lay the blame on Voltaire.

Icarus fell to the flows. Lay the blame on Rousseau.

As for the fall, it plays out every day

on the Venice roller stage.

Venice is a mix between Fire Island

and Greenwich Village.

It attracts artists and tourists,

dopers and gropers, movers and shakers,

and French image makers.

In Venice, it's calm on a weekday.

You have to come on Sunday.

Everyone comes to pick up girls, to swim,

to roller-skate, to see the murals back there

and over there.

I shoot a lot of pictures of the murals. I use them as backgrounds.

I put people in front —

roller skaters.

In fact, “Frenglishman” Richard Bennett

does roller skaters only, with mural backgrounds only,

just as we 're doing to a disco beat.

Authorities demolished the top half of a wall

called Life in Venice to better monitor drug traffic.

The state and its officers, disguised as beachgoers,

have their own reasons for ignoring collective art,

especially when they can get a free snort.

Richard lent us the missing heads.

Then we left the din of Venice...

for the silence of Kent Twitchell's studio.

Like Alice herself, Kent finds his way

among the very large and the very small.

I saw him grow tall and shrink small during our Torrance interviews.

We hadn't predicted the fanfare of a local parade.

So our artists, in both their giant and miniature perspectives,

were honored by the cavalry, the marines, and the army.

Nor had we predicted the children weaving in and out

like a flight of swallows in the fading daylight

by the pale mural of Opal Way.

And then there's the night.

The street kids pass by it all — the world of drugs...

of motionless voyeurs...

of little birds and flying fish.

At St. Elmo's, a black village within the city,

“black” means “colored. ”

On this June Sunday, there's a festival

organized by the Sykes brothers, the village painters.

Roderick Sykes is here with Susan Jackson.

Compton, a black community near Watts.

The people Richard Wyatt knows and paints aren't white, in any case.

They're black, yellow,

and burnt sienna.

As for the pyramids that inspire him, they reappear

as stairways in immigrant neighborhoods without elevators.

As a gesture in kind to this black American

who paints images of Mexicans,

a Mexican American, or 'Chicano, ” sings in the black blues tradition.

Manuel Cruz, former member of the Macy gang,

conveys through the blues the misery and pride of la raza

in front of a bar he painted.

- What's your name? - Juliet.

Topo, Flaco, Indio, Lobo, Tita —

the homeboys and homegirls are gang members.

There are 300 gangs in Los Angeles, 15 of them in East L.A.

Each has its own name, logo, and sign

related to its neighborhood, the barrio with a V —

here, “Varrio” Nuevo East Los Angeles,

Happy Valley,

Hazard Grande.

And so emerged a series of murals dedicated to their dead.

When I tried to find out why these kids

looked like adult dudes and chicks from the '50s,

A tattoo gave me the answer.

Drawn in a jail some 25 years ago,

and copied from a photograph of Jean Harlow pressed up against a man,

this same couple ls still used as a model to represent young people of the '80s.

War games begin in childhood

among the dragons and skeletons.

The skeleton is the pepper of the Mexican imagination...

whereas education is as necessary as salt,

and an educated woman is priceless.

A rose-colored graduate.

Of course, woman is always a rose

in the cliché garden of the tough guy's heart.

Yes, he said “mural” when he spoke of his tattoo.

Anything decorated to express

ideas or feelings is called a mural.

Including cars, as we'll see.

The word “mural” means “I exist...

and I sign what's mine.”

Chava is one of the White Fence Gang members

who worked on the Wabash Recreation Center

under the direction of a feminist.

Those forgotten by history already take up 1,500 feet,

and it's not finished yet.

This long, reproachful gaze and this lengthy accusation

tell of the exploitation of man by man.

As for the Women, here they are —

at the beginning of the war...

during the war...

after the war...

on strike...

in trouble...

and on-screen.

The Little Tramp, the most famous of the forgotten ones, stands guard.

Watch out! Painted walls have ears.

Chaplin and McQueen are the only superstars

who file go! mural billing.

After this first piece,

Twitchell preferred cameo and television actors.

He magnifies the crocheted shawl,

reinvents the white lab coat, and sacralizes it.

For Chicanos, Christ is still traditional...

and the Virgin is always from Guadalupe, on her crescent moon.

In Ramona Gardens, a Chicano housing project,

mural painting has been organized.

At first, it was to prevent wall graffiti.

The state provided money for the residents to paint

under artists' direction.

From this, a need to paint developed.

The residents became artists,

and that's just fine with the artists.

From left to right: Willie Herrón,

Wayne Healy, Gronk, and Manuel Cruz.

The local good Samaritan, Father John Santillan,

is a Chicano rebel.

He can relate to children by day and drug addicts by night.

You hear him from afar with all his keys — the neighborhood Zorro.

They're called Los Streetscapers:

Wayne Healy...

David Botello...

George Yepes.

On Sunday morning, they wash down their painting.

That same Sunday morning,

the Chinese are rinsed off in the Tujunga Wash...

while across town, Arthur Mortimer

soft-soaps his wife at the beach.

There's one mural everybody's seen who drives down Pacific Coast Highway at 55,

but no one can actually describe it.

That doesn't bother the artist, Jane Golden.

Nostalgic for the days of beaches before cars,

forests before motels,

and ocean piers before the fires that burned them down,

Jane Golden painted the Santa Monica summer crowd of 1920,

but without faces,

ghosts of the period when Abbot Kinney was dreaming

of building his American Venice, almost as beautiful as its Italian model.

Who pays for all these murals? For the artists?

The paint in cans? The ladders and vans?

In Jane's case, there are grants.

For others, there are organizations, benefactors, and business people.

I filmed one such businessman.

He looks more like a patron of primitive painting than a merchant.

This is my store. I had this mural painted.

Piazza Navona is one of Rome's main squares,

where people meet, chat, have ice cream,

look at the sky, talk about the weather.

European ice cream is quite different from American ice cream,

especially at the “Tre Scalini” in Rome.

We've been quite successful.

I'm head of the Municipal Art Gallery,

here in this park, which is close...

to this house built by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1920.

I'm interested in how art is used...

as a means of communication between people.

There are professional artists,

and there are artists who create folk art.

Many are Mexican-American.

They wanted to paint ideas.

They wanted to express problems

that exist in their community.

There are also American artists...

who wanted...

to bring art to the streets...

for everyone, not just those who go to museums.

The advent of mural paintings...

shows art, once again,

as it was during the Middle Ages.

Art was a part of life.

Yes, it's very nice.

It's a beautiful painting.

It's an impressive sight.

Lincoln and Kennedy are neighbors on this anti-police mural

in another Chicano housing project called Estrada Courts.

Charles Felix, called Cat Felix,

organized this collective work.

This is Sonny here...

with Felix the Cat, who, when he paints,

paints big, fearsome cats.

In Ramona Gardens, wild animals too have their place

in the Garden of Eden.

The wild environment is present in these giant stone heads

dominating these newlyweds in their civilized wedding costumes.

This is how this showy mural, “Bride and Groom, ” came into being.

It's a love story Kent Twitchell lived and painted

over five years and five stories.

But not everything was romantic.

He was asked to pay parking fees for his scaffolding,

so he had to paint at night.

As models, he'd chosen the bridal-shop owner himself

and his fiancée at the time, but she left for Hawaii and forever.

So her fiancé remained a lone, unmarried widower,

left with the head of the woman who'd taken back her heart.

They represent, first of all...

everything they're fighting for.

A very busy East L.A. intersection — the corner of Brooklyn and Soto.

You can see The Young Man and Death.

The other day we saw “the young man and the motorcycle.”

The backdrop to this incident

had been painted a few days earlier by Willie Herrón,

in a much better mood than his self-portrait would suggest.

On the other side of this same drug store,

he'd painted a subject of an allegorical and surgical nature.

Willie invites us to imagine a few of the catastrophes that inspire him —

misery. ..

Famished cows, locusts...

fire...

the atomic bomb...

and the delirious interplay of freeway interchanges.

The car, however, inspires more peaceful paintings

of moving murals and tongue-in-cheek contrasts.

This mecca of spirituality

is actually the Culver City DMV, so we haven't left

the world of cars and money after all.

Judy Baca paints money —

or rather, work and capital —

as two monsters to be hunted down and dragged from their caves

for a duel in the sun.

It's hard to know whether capital's running after work

or work after capital,

just as we don't always know whether art imitates life

or life imitates art.

The famous Farmer John, both boss and logo, dominates the factory

that makes the infamous hot dogs, bacon, and other piggy products.

It's the site of an enormous mural

called simply Pig Paradise.

Pigs are processed here in their final resting place,

while the consumer is offered this mural,

a processed mix of decoration, advertising, brand name,

black humor, pretension, and false naïveté.

In any case, in their public-relations pamphlets,

where images of pork sizzling in frying pans

alternate with pigs romping through bucolic meadows,

they don't even mention Les Grimes and Arno Jordan,

the two artists who each spent 12 years

painting the walls and pipes of this enormous slaughterhouse.

I search in vain. Their names don't even appear

on the reproduction of their work.

That's boss politics. Pig politics.

Painting painting everywhere. Directly from producer to consumers -

those who buy in markets...

and those who consume in restaurants.

Not all decorators of bars have the same propensity

for illusion and existentialism.

Their tastes lean towards leaning.

And when windows of bars and cars are crooked...

it smacks of alcoholism...

and neorealism.

Before ending your days on the road because of a drunkard,

there are still a few good days left to spend in the bars.

No, this isn't Jacques Prévert's blue-eyed gray whale

but two gray-eyed blue whales

swimming along to the Chinese gymnastic slow motion

in the waters between Beethoven Street and Venice Boulevard.

Here, they're at one with the wall and the silence of the ocean.

Here, they slow down time.

Elsewhere, Willie Herrón and his friends relate to time

with the impatience of childhood and the rage of la raza.

They paint a whole wall in a weekend and in vent a performance,

put it quickly together, make nonsense of it,

then undo it even more quickly —

that's the subject and the very essence of this happening.

Do they mean to challenge the idea of a mural and confront the wall itself,

or enter into the wall and be part of it forever?

Their group is called Asco, which means “nausea” in Spanish.

Everything ends up in dust and rubbish ground up by mechanical means.

Everything disappears, even certain murals —

especially in Venice, where they're the prey

of condo-with-a-view developers.

They made a famous mural disappear - Venice in the Snow —

by building right up next to it.

It no longer snows, except on the face of the mime on duty...

and the mural is visible only to cats and rats.

His first mural, on Brooks, will disappear soon.

Developers seem out to get him.

He doesn't think much of them either.

He chose a huge wall near a vacant lot for his trompe I'oeil of Venice,

which he managed to paint

from sky to street

without even making a sketch.

His space has been invaded by a bank and its parking lot,

and this mural may disappear entirely behind a huge commercial complex.

We may be looking

at the last beautiful months of an imaginary city.

Californians talk about the great earthquake all the time,

even with their foreign friends.

The huge fault follows a path laid out by seismologists

that will separate California from the American continent.

The furthest edges of Arizona will become beaches,

and California will be an island, as in the title of this mural.

But not a flowering and inhabited island.

An island of ruins and silence, the ultimate failure of concrete.

And this final mural, seen here between two mail trucks,

murmurs its message:

The future may be a wave that will wash us away.

Our Thanks to the Muralists Appearing In Person or Through Their Works