Jay DeFeo: Romantic, Influential, Privileged?
Jay DeFeo and the rest of the Beat artists did everything in their power to stray from the norm. That was arguably their entire point: to never conform with — to oppose the culture of their time. Throughout the semester, we have seen artists representing all different eras of countercultures in Northern California and the world. These artists strove to create things outside of the comfort zone of the mainstream, and challenged what people’s received perceptions were of art. Because of this, and because of how different all of their art looked from what was considered “beautiful” in their times, counterculture artists did not really have a place to show their work in conventional art spaces. Traditional galleries and conventional museums were not receptive to such hard-to-grasp pieces of art, which forced these artists to the margins where they had to create their own spaces. They ended up showing their work in the deep underground counterspaces, like the Six Gallery in San Francisco, the Smell in Los Angeles, or in the Emeryville Mudflats.
The underground nature of a counterculture was not something that these artists were upset about; rather, the very un-showable nature was exactly what made the art so great. The pieces, and in particular those of the Beat artists, were often too large, too disorganized, and too perishable to be placed in an institution or home. For example, the assemblages that were shown in 3119 Fillmore Street (the Six Gallery) were made to be shown there… and only there. The possibility of any of these artists becoming famous and integrating into the mainstream was exactly what they were afraid of — that would be counter to the essence of a counterculture. Instead, the Beatniks and others managed to be hugely influential within their realm of counterculture, while still remaining off the radars of the general public.
If Jay DeFeo and the Beats were so good at avoiding fame and recognition, however, how did they survive in San Francisco? Artists are always struggling to pay for rent and food, as the rhetoric goes, and San Francisco has been a historically expensive city to live in. In today’s terms, the median rent in San Francisco hovered at around $405 a month, which was almost twice the national average of $260/month (Barmann, 2015). And, according to the United States census in 1959, the median household income in San Francisco City and County in 1959 was $6,717 (California Department of Finance, 1960), which was much higher than the national income of $5,400 (U.S. Department of Commerce, 1961). This city was composed of mainly white, upper-middle class workers who were professionals or took office jobs (DOC, 1961). Economically speaking, it was not a place for an artist, let alone a countercultural one. An artist that made unsellable pieces definitely would need another job in order to live in the city and pay its already unaffordable rent. A biography of Jay DeFeo’s life briefly mentions that she “took odd jobs” and worked at the California College of Arts and Crafts, but that she was fired for shoplifting two cans of paint. After that, she supposedly made and sold jewelry as a way to sustain herself (Scheldahl, 2013). But, was this enough? How did she afford to live in the city when her entire career was centered around refusing to sell out? In the same vein, how did the Beats manage to survive when it seemed that most of the art we have studied didn’t have monetary values assigned to them? As a millenial born into a capitalist world, obviously I want to know: how practical was it to be a part of the counterculture?
Kal Spelletich wasn’t a Beat, but was a counterculture Machine-artist of the 80s and he did choose to address his means of making a living. During his lecture, he spoke of his time roaming the streets for scrap metal to use for his projects, and how he was homeless for some of his youth. He made it clear that his career of constructing noncommercial robots was not exactly lucrative. So, to make money, Kal said, he took other jobs to keep his dream alive. He said he was a carpenter, had his own repair shop to fix machines and electronics, and even helped others start their own marijuana grow-ops. His honesty about what he did to stay afloat as a young adult differs from the biographies I have read of Jay DeFeo. Instead of glossing over the realities of being an artist, and especially as an artist that actively defied social norms and selling out, Kal was completely transparent about his life. Like almost every artist we have studied so far, Kal openly criticized capitalism, but it was not without acknowledging his own accumulation. His ability to acknowledge the constant ironic struggle between anti-capitalism and needing to make a living is respectable, and it shows a realness that I have not seen in DeFeo and the Beat movement’s stories.
Going back to the fifties, hopelessly romantic and slightly cliché was Jay DeFeo’s life. Bruce Conner’s black-and-white film The White Rose (1967) perfectly captures the artist’s tired soul with choppy cutscenes of her and her apartment with a slow jazz composition going in the background. She was an emotional artist who was evicted from her apartment after working on the same painting for eight years. She lived the broke, counterculture artist’s life that you would, ironically, expect. During my research, however, I read in her biography that she was born in the rich, white city of Hanover, New Hampshire (the Ivy League college town for Dartmouth College) to an Italian-immigrant father who attended Stanford Medical School, and I realized that growing up, DeFeo had something that many others may not have had: financial stability. I will not assume that she was given money from her parents throughout her career, because her biography made no mention of that and I will trust it, but I have to wonder if her upbringing made possible her eight-year-long period of living in the same apartment while working on The Rose. If she wasn’t supported at all by her parents, just having the privilege of growing up without having to worry about money must have set the stage for her participation in the counterculture. I believe that being raised in a financially stable, white family gives young people an outlook that enables them the courage to go out into the world without fear. This “can’t lose” philosophy is deeply ingrained in the children of the privileged and could explain why DeFeo was so ready to depart from mainstream society and go down her own path.
This points to another trend I noticed while learning about California’s countercultures in class: most of the artists we learned about were white. I think that white privilege in California from the fifties to the eighties gave these artists the security to join the counterculture. Minorities in California, as progressive of a state as it is, had and still have to struggle with being paid less and being born with a lower likelihood of succeeding. For people of color in California during the Beatnik era, simply making enough to provide for one’s family was a far larger issue than it was for white people, which meant they didn’t have the time or care to be a part of some cultural revolution — there were more pressing issues to be concerned about.
I don’t mean to offend or discount anything that the Beat generation has done — Jay DeFeo was an immensely influential pioneer of Bay Area counterculture. Her works, especially The Rose, took incredible patience, talent and dedication, and no regular artist could have touched so many like she did. I just wanted to recognize her privilege as a white person in the fifties. I don’t mean to bash on DeFeo in any way or attempt to take away from her evident significance in California’s counterculture. Her background would not make her any less of a Beat artist or countercultural figure, as there is no debate on the clear excellence of her fine art. It is simply that the obvious domination of white people in the Beat movement made more sense to me when I made the connection that growing up white gave these people a “can’t lose” attitude that made their decisions possible.
