Despite millions pumped into develop-ment and a string of half-empty condos dotting the grimy streets near the water, Long Beach Boulevard on this first Saturday night of 2009 is decidedly tomblike. Acres of Books, for decades a hive of early evening activity, shut its doors for good in October, forced out of business by a city now content to let the 1930s-deco barn stand empty until it’s demolished. Much of the rest is generic mallspace sporting the same tight-guarded, user-unfriendly chain-stores you find everywhere else, only here plopped into an already depressed landscape.
As if to mock official measures to make downtown Long Beach safe from literacy (there are talks underway about closing the city’s main library), the local art-proletariat looks to have discovered the place in a big way. Phantom Galleries, a movement dedicated to turning the county’s ever-increasing number of empty shop windows into temporary museums, has discovered the friendly old brick retail spaces, and light glows from studios scattered along the numbered side streets. Next to the shuttered bookshop is Goods Gallery: three metal shipping containers butting together to form a U-shape, its blank interior dotted with canvases. Within the crotch of the U, an R&B band loads out, and slender, sharp-featured Max Neutra paces inside the adjoining containers, talking of personal demons through a cheerful giggle.
“There’s definitely a lot of angst in this stuff,” says Max, gesturing at blank utilitarian walls festooned with his spiky caricatures – harsh and hilarious studies of men with TV screens for heads, glossolalic robots, human faces contorted in all manner of shock and horror, and an upright fish dressed in a business suit and breathing bubbles of worry. That one, he says, is called Drowning in Your Responsibilities.
“I decided to become an artist by epiphany, the only one I’ve ever had,” he continues. “I was sitting in a coffee shop after a gig installing a stereo at some shop in NoHo and I was looking around at everybody, feeling bitter against everyone there – ‘Look at these people! What are they contributing?’ Then I thought, ‘What am I contributing?’ Then, being an artist came to me, as the biggest contribution I feel like I can make in my surroundings.”
That was 2006. But long before that, before Max heard his own voice from this burning bush, he was a kid living outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, a kid whose great-grandfather is the celebrated modernist architect Richard Neutra (whose one-story Neutra Office Building on Glendale Boulevard is in the National Registry of Historic Places). Out there in the desert, he fell under the wanton influence of R. Crumb via dad’s collection of Zap Comix. He moved to L.A. as a young adult, got into sound recording and design, working as an A/V tech at Warner Bros. while composing electronic music. Since the epiphanic moment in a coffee shop in 2006, Max has become a regular on the local art scene, with showings/performances at the Hammer, the Found Gallery, the Mountain Bar and the Paul Gleason Theatre. His next gig is part of a group exhibit in the Loft at Liz’s on La Brea Avenue, February 9-15.
He cites Ralph Steadman and Jackson Pollock as influences, but the wiggy aesthetic animating his portraits of proud Indian chiefs, cracked robots and walleyed, multi-mouthed lumpen-bourgeoisie derives from a tension between animal dignity and human folly.
The result looks like one half Lucian Freud and 50 percent Mad magazine circa 1973, a preposterous, unsettling muster of faces and attitudes. As sold-out and world-battered as Neutra’s humans often are – and despite his frantic lines and crabbed, neurotic framing – his images of animals retain dignity and poise for all. “When it comes to animals,” admits Max, “I focus more on the beauty than on the grotesque. Man grosses me out more than a giraffe does. They’re innocent. Man has a choice, and the thing I struggle the most with is humanity.”
Ed Gold checkin the scene from the outside.
I'm still working on my "cool artist guy" pose. I think it still needs work, but I'm getting there.
Ladies...
