| Jim Shaw: Can you tell me your interest in the caverns of Los Angeles? Dani Tull: A few years ago I began a series of paintings and drawings that documented my explorations into the network of secret caverns that are under Los Angles. As a matter of fact, there are a few entrances that are not too far away from where we are now, in Eagle Rock: there’s one at Avenue 64 and York Boulevard, and legend has it another in the basement of the old Church of the Angeles on upper Avenue 64 in Pasadena. |
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Dani Tull and Jim Shaw are both Los Angeles–based artists.
Jim Shaw: Can you tell me your interest in the caverns of Los Angeles?
Dani Tull: A few years ago I began a series of paintings and drawings that documented my explorations into the network of secret caverns that are under Los Angles. As a matter of fact, there are a few entrances that are not too far away from where we are now, in Eagle Rock: there’s one at Avenue 64 and York Boulevard, and legend has it another in the basement of the old Church of the Angeles on upper Avenue 64 in Pasadena.
My initial interest in the caves stems from looking at reproductions of the cave paintings of Lascaux. These are among the earliest paintings known. I began to fantasize and visualize about caves near my studio, sketching and drawing what I saw. For me their existence became more real with every drawing, but there were and are so many details that couldn’t be conveyed in the work: the smell, the insects, the plants, and so on. And so I presented the imagery as factual. I also produced a booklet called The Secret Caverns of Los Angeles that was a sort of guide with a map and CD of cavern-inspired music by my friend musician Brad Laner. Eventually I began to get emails and phone calls from people that were actually looking for my secret caverns.
The experience reminded me of something that had happened to me about 15 years earlier. I had taken a big road trip through the Southwest and straight through Mexico with a girlfriend, and we ended up in Acapulco. We were looking for something interesting to do, and we saw a small sign the read, “Glass Bottom Boat Tour: see the underwater sculpture of the virgin de Guadalupe!” We followed the signs straight down to the marina and sure enough, there was a modestly sized glass-bottom boat boarding its passengers. So we hopped on the boat as it left the small harbor and it headed straight out into the ocean for about 20 minutes, to where there was nothing around, and then it slowed down and began to circle. Then the boat stopped. The other passengers gathered around the rail around the glass bottom, and we noticed that that everyone else were local Mexicans. We leaned against the rail too, and suddenly people began to point and talk about the virgin. We looked at the glass bottom and saw a few colorful fish swim by, but no virgin. People got more excited and made the sign of the cross. Again we looked (real hard this time) and saw nothing, and then the boat turned and headed back to land. We were bummed out, and my girlfriend confronted the captain, explaining that we didn’t see the underwater Virgin and wanted our money back. He responded, “Ah, but you have to believe that she is there!” It wasn’t until much later that I realized what a cool experience that was. And so it is with the caverns of Los Angeles: you have to believe!
I don’t think those paintings have too much to do with what I am doing now: yes they were paintings of caves and one could call them “cave paintings,” and now I’m painting depictions of early man and you could call them “cavemen.” There’s not a direct connection, although…thinking about it further, I see that there’s a connection to prehistoric Los Angeles, and that has a connection to my childhood. I grew up in the neighborhood of the La Brea Tar Pits, and coming from a family of artists, I frequently visited the LA County Museum that’s right next door to the tar pits and Natural History Museum. So my first experiences looking at fine art went hand in hand with looking at depictions of prehistoric life and early man.
JS: Is there any relationship to those early paintings they used to have of like every dinosaur current 65 million years ago in one landscape? Like those educational explanatory vistas that had an improbable amount of stuff happening in them?
DT: Right, the volcano in the distance with prehistoric birds—like a cornucopia of prehistoric life. Yes, one of my resources is the old school books on evolution.
JS: And do you see these Neanderthals relating to hippies in some way with the Tie-dye, or is this purely about evolution?
DT: For me the Tie-dye backgrounds are campy and iconic of the sixties. In light of these backgrounds the Neanderthals can be scene as hippies, especially in this painting that we are sitting in front of, where you have a group of prehistoric-looking men and women fighting with a pack of wild hyenas over a piece of meat. One of things that interests me in this scenario is that the group of people seem to be of different ethnicity and color, so you can’t view it as a Neanderthal tribe, but maybe a group or commune of hippie types.
JS: Do you want to talk about the psychoactive plants that appear in some of these works?
DT: Well, this brings us to an idea that people like Terrance McKenna explored. The notion that pre-human apes encountered and included psychoactive plants such as mushrooms in their diet, and that this created the flowering of the human consciousness. This might explain why the evolution of the human conscious mind happened very quickly, in an evolutionary sense. It’s an idea that the paintings touch on with the 60s motif.
JS: Early on you said that you saw them as a sort of accidental meeting of two different eras, and I was thinking that some of these psychedelic plants supposedly allow you to transfer to another dimension or another place.
DT: Yes, I think a lot about time, and I think that this work says a great deal about time. For the moment I think of my studio as a “Super Collider,” or particle accelerator on the lineage of time. I’ve taken two distinct moments of human evolution and with a speed greater than the speed of light, I’ve collided these two elements on the surface plane of my paintings. The result may be a trippy revisionist history or a looking at our evolution through a tinted lens.
I also think about beginnings and ends, and if you want to look at time in a linear way, that perhaps we are closer to the end at this point than the beginning, and perhaps the end is just around the corner, as the Mayan calendar says…
JS: 2012
DT: right, 2012. And perhaps the end is the beginning and that we’ll enter a loop-feedback into time.
JS: According to this book that I just finished reading, by Barbara Hand Clow, the Mayan calendar has multiple levels of time that occur at the same time, and that everything is speeding up and the last 365 days will include a whole bunch more new activity than the previous era, which was based on certain chunks that they measure time by. And they’re all supposed to end on this date, or maybe the year later.
DT: Well if you look at how radically technology is advancing, it seems that everything is speeding up.
JS: Well it is.
DT: Yeah, it sucks.
JS: But you can take drugs to make you work faster!
DT: You can! Or to make the days slower, or even stand still. That’s my fantasy, days that stand still so I can work in my studio…
JS: But time flies when your having fun.
DT: Is that so?
JS: Well don’t you have fun when you’re working in your studio?
DT: Ah. No. Making the work is not fun.
JS: I think of having ideas as fun.
DT: Yes, having ideas is fun, and sitting and looking is fun. Actually at times making my work is a lot of fun. There are definitely times when something truly supernatural is happening, or maybe the music I’m listening to and what I’m painting bring about a transcendental experience.
JS: It’s fun when things work out easily and well, like when we were rehearsing [music for Shaw’s upcoming performance at the Hammer Museum] the other day, that was fun.
JS: Have you thought about introducing any other 60s motifs, like fringe?
DT: By the way, I do all of the Tie–Dye myself, and that’s important.
JS: Do you compose the image after the Tie-dye or do you have a bunch of Tie–Dyes to choose from?
DT: I tend to sketch the image out that then try to make a Tie-dye that will work with the image. In the beginning the Tie-dyes were kind of ugly looking, and I liked that: I was reminded of fading hippie T-shirts.
But the more I do it the better I’m getting at it, and I’m taking this campy craft and earning a sense of pride in how good it can actually look. But it’s a funny thing, I had to ask myself the question, “Shall I be a good Tie-dye craft person or shall I just allow it to be pathetic and not so good?” And I think that as a painter in this day and age you have to ask yourself the same sort of question, because you have “good-bad painting,” but sometimes it’s really bad-good painting. Another question I had to ask myself was, “How good should I paint this?” and, “With how much detail?”
In the beginning the imagery was more illustrative and flat, but I started to care more about detail and paint things like hair, fibers, leaves of grass, skin cells, all of those things that speak of evolution—things that are the fabric of evolution.
JS: Do you ever feel like going closer in for the microscopic? So far these are some version of landscape.
DT: But they are also Petri dishes. Yes the Tie-dyes can be seen as suns and a landscape but also as amebas and microorganisms or something on a molecular level. I think that it’s all in there.
JS: Well your cave paintings are in a sort of over-all field where things are just kind of floating, and these are very grounded in a post-Renaissance reality. But in a way the tie-dye backgrounds are kind of like the background of a pre-Renaissance painting, a gold field that represents some version of reality that didn’t include perspective…
DT: I think in a way the gold fields were metaphorical for the spiritual, the things beyond the world that were painted on top of it. Another question I’ve had to ask myself is about the responsibility of depicting something that some people know a lot about. But I allow myself the freedom to create not a historical depiction but a fantasy. I’m starting to think about the scale, too. The paintings are getting larger and the scale more life-size. It’s interesting for me to think about viewers standing in front of the paintings and a painting becomeing like a mirror or window into another reality.
JS: You’ve done a lot of stuff with sculptural elements. I’ve always been attracted to the old dioramas, especially the ones with forced perspective…does that appeal to you at all?
DT: Absolutely. I frequently go to natural history museums. The notion of creating 3-D environments or displays based on what is happening in these paintings is fantastic. The deeper I go into creating these paintings the more I see developing relative works that are sculptural and also smaller works in watercolor.
JS: What about music? You’re a very good musician. Have you thought of incorporating musical elements?
DT: I’m developing some film ideas using the same imagery, and I should mention that not all of the imagery is derived from books; many of the figures are from models that I have hired to pose for me. In fact one model in particular is a local homeless man that’s pretty amazing looking, and he gets really into character.
When I think about doing a film, I see it black-and-white and grainy, maybe super 8 or 16mm. And sometimes I wonder about the tie-dyes in black-and-white. One of the things that had me thinking about it is the black-and-white fabric scenes in your new zombie film Into the Hole. As I said the other day, it’s black-and-white psychedelia.
JS: Well I’m thinking about it as Fillmore lightshow psychedelia. You know the people that originally started that were abstract expressionist, or action painters. It was a way for them to be further action oriented.
DT: Is that so?
