Larry Bell and Oliver Bell

[00:03] OLIVER BELL: Okay, I am here. My name is Oliver Bell. I'm 41 years old. Today's date is March 16, 2023. We're in Taos, New Mexico. And I'm sitting here with my father, the prolific Larry Bell

[00:27] LARRY BELL: Good morning, Ollie. I'm Larry Bell, your dad. And it is Thursday, March 16, 2023. And we are in Taos, New Mexico. At the Taos library.

[00:42] OLIVER BELL: That's right. Okay, so my first question is about your nickname, which is Ben Lux. How did you get it, and what is it all about?

[00:58] LARRY BELL: It's a funny story. I was. Years ago, when I was just about 16 or 17. I got interested in folk music from. Basically from a kid's album that was. Which I think I still have somewhere. Tex Ritter sings songs for children. And that led me into an interest in folk music. And through my interest in folk music, I came across a singing group called the Weavers. And there was a quartet of amazing voices. And they were quite popular in the fifties, in the late fifties, mid to late fifties, maybe even before the middle fifties. Anyways, one of their hit songs was called good night Irene. And the song originally was written by a folk singer named Leadbelly, hootie Ledbetter. And he wrote the song. And I suspect that some of the roots of the song. Came from his relationships with people. But the Weavers sang a lot of folk songs. That were influenced by Leadbelly and other people. And one of the songs that they recorded was called Wee Mawe. Which was an african folk song from somewhere in Africa. And it was very popular. On the backside of another one of their hits was a song called the Bononi Song. And I liked it a lot because it had a great rhythm and kind of mysterious bass sound to it. That was provided by one of the weavers. And I had a good friend who was a professional singer named Judy Henske.

[04:20] OLIVER BELL: We worked together a couple years later. Then you weren't a teenager anymore.

[04:26] LARRY BELL: Thank you. That's true. And I remember in a conversation with her about this. About the Weaver song, the Bononi song. I said, I want you to hear this. Because she had not heard this before. She listened to it, and she just broke into hysterical laughter. Thought it was the dumbest song she'd ever heard in her life. And somehow the Benoni song became Bononi, became a joke between us. And one of my akas, also known as. Was given to me by an art dealer named Walter Hopps. That was a great guy. Anyways, he called me luxury. Because I used to go out to thrift stores with another artist. Friend named Billy Al Bengston. And we bought up all kinds of fancy clothes that were sold and neckties and things and dressed up in this stuff when we went to art shows and so on. Anyways, it was a great social time, and we had a good time with how we dressed ourselves. He started calling me Biloxo Bononi because of the humor of it all that was shared by the woman singer with him and sort of made fun of me in a silly way. Silly, funny way. So Biloxo Benoni somehow got contracted down to Ben Lux, and that's Yiddish for son of light. And it turned out that the Hebrew and Latin translations for Ben means son of, and Lux means light. And so in Hebrew and Latin, the name means son of light, which is appropriate.

[07:30] OLIVER BELL: That's very cool.

[07:34] LARRY BELL: Well, that's sort of how it happened.

[07:36] OLIVER BELL: That's good. Mom will be very happy I asked that question.

[07:40] LARRY BELL: It all happened out of a sort of an affectionate joke.

[07:45] OLIVER BELL: So the full name is Benoni luxurious.

[07:54] LARRY BELL: We tried to find a record of the Benoni song, and we couldn't find it. The Weavers record, it was on side b of one of their hits, and I can't remember which hit it was, nor do I know where that record is.

[08:23] OLIVER BELL: Well, maybe someone out there will be.

[08:26] LARRY BELL: Able to find it. Somebody might remember the Bononi song by the Weavers.

[08:34] OLIVER BELL: Let's talk about your art.

[08:37] LARRY BELL: Yeah.

[08:42] OLIVER BELL: Your art is about light on surface. Your art is about light on surface.

[08:50] LARRY BELL: Well, I think the visuals of my work are about the interface of light and surface. Yes.

[09:00] OLIVER BELL: And probably the most iconic work you did is your cubes.

[09:08] LARRY BELL: That was the beginning of it all. Yeah.

[09:12] OLIVER BELL: And that went into bigger works that filled up people's peripherals, hopefully with the same stuff that a cube gave them. But my question is, I'm not sure if that's fully correct, but my question is, do you have specific instructions for how people should look at them? People are always asking you about how they're made. And being that, I had the honor of learning how you use that equipment to make them, and how you use improvisation, spontaneity, and intuition in that medium, which is a really mind blowing thing for me. Do you have specific instructions on how things like your cubes might be viewed?

[10:08] LARRY BELL: No, I don't.

[10:11] OLIVER BELL: How do you look at them? Sometimes I remember when you'd see a cube you hadn't seen in a while. You'd kind of squint one eye and look at it.

[10:21] LARRY BELL: Well, you know, the cubes, I suspect I've been working on essentially the same things all my life. When my first studio, the thing that was most engaging to me about it was that it was a big, empty room, and the only thing in the room were the corners of the room. And so when I started, actually, when I left school and decided to go into a studio, get a studio, and see what I could do with it, I wanted to feel like I was doing something nobody else was doing. And I wanted to feel like the materials I was using for whatever it was I was doing were not common materials. So the influence of the corners of the room on my work were quite profound. And I started making paintings that suggested the volume that was suggested by. To me, by the details of the room. There was a skylight in the center of the room that was rectangular shaped. And I did a big painting that was kind of an illustration of the volume of the well that the skylight covered. It was a rectangle something. It was a shape somewhat like a brick with glass on the top that led to smaller versions of. That was quite a large piece painting for me.

[12:45] OLIVER BELL: Which one was that?

[12:46] LARRY BELL: It was called.

[12:49] OLIVER BELL: Baby Judy.

[12:50] LARRY BELL: No, it was called little. Little. It was called Orphan Annie.

[12:56] OLIVER BELL: Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah.

[12:58] LARRY BELL: Because the colors I used reminded me of the colors of. It was just black and orange, and her hair was orange and bummed.

[13:09] OLIVER BELL: That one went away.

[13:11] LARRY BELL: What?

[13:12] OLIVER BELL: I'm sad that one went away.

[13:14] LARRY BELL: Yeah. Well, I sure kept it for a long time before it went away.

[13:22] OLIVER BELL: Yeah.

[13:26] LARRY BELL: Anyways, I'm getting lost now.

[13:32] OLIVER BELL: That's cool. I got lost, too, kind of.

[13:34] LARRY BELL: Ask me something else.

[13:39] OLIVER BELL: Back to improvisation, spontaneity and intuition. There's three things you say an artist, tools that you use as an artist to do your thing. I have taken that from in running the tank, as some of the things that we do are found, are sought after, and some of them are stumbled upon.

[14:07] LARRY BELL: Yeah.

[14:07] OLIVER BELL: Do you agree with that? And can you elaborate on those three things and what they are? Because they're kind of this improvisation and spontaneity, kind of similar type of words, don't you think?

[14:24] LARRY BELL: Yeah. Well, I like to work spontaneously. I think I. By working spontaneously, you limit the amount of distractions that are collected in your brain to your normal life. And so by being spontaneous with the materials and things you handle to deal with your need to externalize your feelings, which is sort of what I think the evidence of the hands on does. It externalizes your feelings, and the materials you use provide the evidence of your ability to be spontaneous. And improvisation is one of those kind of things that just happens, but it only happens if you engage yourself with the hands on efforts of the work. So it's all connected. And intuition is that kind of sensual feeling that is not so dissimilar to feeling a chill on the back of your neck. If the window's open, there's a sensuous input to your feelings that comes from what you do. So we talk about improvisation, spontaneity, and intuition as tools. But the most important energy, which could be a tool, also has to be trust. You have to trust yourself to believe in the feelings you have are worthy enough of taking action within the control of your media and your hands on experiments with things. So everything is a product of your understanding of your media and your work. And the what you suggest were accidental things that happened, they may or may not be accidental, you may not have. It doesn't make any difference how they happen. They happen because you decided to be there in the studio to do that work that day. So you are responsible for every single aspect of everything that is stimulating you to work. It is your work, you are responsible for it, period. And the way I see it is the more you trust what you are doing, the more work you get done. And the more work you get done, the better you feel, the more evidence.

[18:40] OLIVER BELL: You have of the work.

[18:42] LARRY BELL: What?

[18:42] OLIVER BELL: The more evidence you have of the work?

[18:45] LARRY BELL: Yeah. The work is like a long stream of thoughts that materialize into objects. And you can, if you keep track of the. Of those thoughts by the evidence that you have accumulated, you can trace back to any given moment within the studio activities. You may not be able to remember what you felt at that moment, but in fact, there's no denying that you made it, and you're responsible for whatever that lesson provided you.

[19:42] OLIVER BELL: And the feeling.

[19:43] LARRY BELL: And the feeling.

[19:44] OLIVER BELL: So tell me about the feeling.

[19:48] LARRY BELL: Well, the feeling is, again, sort of like a breeze on the back of your neck, the kind of inner chill you might get from a sensual moment with the work where all other things don't exist, only that thing that you're the focused on at that moment. It's not possible to live one's life always in that moment, I don't think. But you can pretty much count on the count you make of the evidence that you externalize and add up the time that it took to do that. And I think you'd probably find that it was, you know, eight to 12 hours a day that you spent in that space. That is your space alone, the space in your head and the space in your studio and the space within the materials you work with and the hardness of the materials and the way the light impacts on the materials and all of that stuff concentrates itself into a feeling. And it's a complex thing because there's a lot of. A lot of external forces that are wanting to distract you from that, not the least of which is how hard the chair is you're sitting in or whether your shoes fit properly or not. I mean, all of those things are part of the. The act of being an artist. I dress a certain way. I dress a certain way because it supports the feeling that I like to carry about myself in relationship to the studio and the importance of this stuff to me. So I like to dress up because I think the work deserves that kind of formal consideration. It makes me feel better.

[22:50] OLIVER BELL: That's good. So that brings me to a memory I have of you. Me skating in Venice beach, skateboarding, and you watching, apparently, from the room 412 of the Irwin or the marina Pacific at the time. And I came back and you said. You said, I could tell which one was you because there was crowded, because of how you did it or how you. The way you moved. So that was a big compliment to me that you didn't even know, because it would mean that I have some sort of style. Style being unique to myself.

[23:33] LARRY BELL: You got it.

[23:34] OLIVER BELL: And I was wondering if you. What the word style means to you.

[23:43] LARRY BELL: The word. The word itself doesn't mean anything to me in particular, other than it being a force of inner feeling that one has towards just about everything. I guess so it is kind of important. I have no words to describe it.

[24:29] OLIVER BELL: Yeah, it's just an idea. Let's see. Let's go from, look at these nice questions that they have for us.

[24:43] LARRY BELL: You look at them, I'll respond. You.

[24:57] OLIVER BELL: How would you like to be remembered? That's too deep.

[25:07] LARRY BELL: Well, now that I'm 83, we're half each.

[25:17] OLIVER BELL: I'm half your age, by the way.

[25:19] LARRY BELL: Oh, well, now that I'm 83, sometimes it occurs to me that people might remember me when I'm not here anymore, but I don't dwell on that at all. I don't really care. Recently, I hired a woman to come. She was an art historian professor at University of California, Berkeley, and her name is Robin Clark. And she's written a lot of catalogs for art. And she's a serious student of the arts in general. But she's taken a particular interest in my work over the years. And so I asked her to come and go through the archives, the boxes of papers and things that related to the studio activities that I've kept for 60 some years. You know what a packrat I am. I never throw anything away. I'm of the, of the thought that if it ever had any value to anybody, it still has some value to somebody. And so I keep the stuff. And that's one of the reasons we built a new studio, is because of the fact that I find it very difficult to discard anything that was part of the studio process. That includes my clothes, that includes my collection of hats. It includes all the things that were part of my, of my being. And I remember one time your mom said to me, listen, I can't stand all these shoes anymore. Either the shoes go or I go. And so I got rid of all the shoes that I'd had since high school, and then she threw me out.

[27:55] OLIVER BELL: Well, you're back. I still have all my shoes. She wants me to get rid of the shoes, too. So we are. Tell me about your love for guitars.

[28:28] LARRY BELL: Oh, well, the I like, we began this conversation about Ben Lux and the songs that it influenced. Well, I always, I liked folk music when I was a kid, and I remember my, I wanted to learn how to play the guitar so I could sing froggy Winna Cortan, which I got from that Tex Ritter album, which I think I still have somewhere, a collection of 78 revolutions per minute. Anyways, the dad rented a guitar for me and got me guitar lessons, but I couldn't get anywhere with the. I couldn't get. I just couldn't get anywhere with it. And I didn't practice. I wasn't engaged in it for some reason, even though I wanted to do it, I couldn't get myself to do it. And it had something to do with the instrument itself that dad had rented. He rented a guitar and what guitars were available for rentals back in 1957 or 56 or something like that? I didn't know anything about guitars at all. But.

[30:21] OLIVER BELL: That'S when you found the twelve string?

[30:23] LARRY BELL: Yeah, by accident. I was in downtown Los Angeles one afternoon and I found a twelve guitar hanging in the window of a pawn shop. I'd never seen anything like it. And I went in and asked if I could see that. And so they pulled it out of the windows and handed it to me. And I just sort of strummed the back of my fingernails across the strings and this astounding amount of sound came out of this instrument. Well, I asked my dad again to if he would pop for this instrument. I found it was $35 or something like that, which was a fair amount of money in those days, and he did. So I got a book on cords and stuff like that, and I learned a little bit about how to make the guitars play chords and listen to the records and the rhythms and stuff like that. And I really got into it, and something happened to that instrument, and I can't remember now what happened to that instrument, but I had to get. I got another one to replace it, and it was a mexican instrument, a mexican twelve string guitar. And the difference between it and the one that I had before was the first one was an american made guitar. Well, ironically, the twelve string that was made in Mexico sounded a lot better than the one that was made in America. But the neck began to warp from the extra tension of the strings on it, and it became almost impossible to play. So I got another guitar, which was playable and also a twelve string and so on. And I worked in a little bar, kind of not a bar, a coffee house in Hollywood while I went to art school. And I sometimes was asked to play when there was nothing else to do. My job was working the door, seating people, handing out menus and so on. And when it was quiet, I could take my guitar and sit in the back kind of yard that they had behind this place and just played the guitar, and people could sit around and listen and talk and do. Anyways, it was just a very fun thing to do. And so what I didn't know was, okay. That's the story of me up until my 20 or something like that. And then.

[34:29] OLIVER BELL: When you're 46 and then.

[34:32] LARRY BELL: 26 years later, I had my hearing tested, and it was discovered that I was born with something called hereditary nerve degeneration and had a 40% loss across the audible spectrum in both ears. I remember when the doctor gave me that diagnosis. He says, I'm really surprised you don't stutter. And I told him that I stuttered terribly when I was a kid, so that made me think about things. I got the hearing aids. After a while, I adjusted to being able to hear a lot. Ironically, the better I heard, the less playing of the guitar I did, but the more collecting the guitar I did. So I ended up with an enormous collection, which I still have.

[36:02] OLIVER BELL: And you're still growing?

[36:04] LARRY BELL: What?

[36:05] OLIVER BELL: And you're still growing?

[36:06] LARRY BELL: And I'm still. Yeah, and I still pick him up and play with him sometimes. But anyways, that's. It's all one package, you know? I mean, I am not a musician, nor am I a. A very good guitar player. But everything that is part of the stuff in my life that I like to play with. That includes my studio, that includes the materials in the studio. Thats why I like to think of myself as celebrating my 62nd year of unemployment. I dont work for anybody. I dont work. I only do my thing for me. And that makes me happy, too.

[37:08] OLIVER BELL: Yeah, makes the world happy.

[37:11] LARRY BELL: Well, I dont know about the world, but it does.

[37:15] OLIVER BELL: You're like the most sought after artist in the world right now.

[37:19] LARRY BELL: I don't think that's true.

[37:20] OLIVER BELL: And the cubes are the most sought after objects in the world.

[37:23] LARRY BELL: The what?

[37:24] OLIVER BELL: The cubes are probably the most sought after objects in the world, in the art world.

[37:30] LARRY BELL: But it doesn't have nothing to do with art, I don't think.

[37:34] OLIVER BELL: Well, maybe.

[37:38] LARRY BELL: Everybody has a right to make a living from their work, but making a living and making art are two completely separate acts. And there you go.

[37:49] OLIVER BELL: That's a good one. That was a good saying. I haven't heard that one.

[37:55] LARRY BELL: Well, I think our time is about out, isn't it? Two minutes. Okay, well, how about two more minutes of bullshit?

[38:05] OLIVER BELL: I think that your infatuation with guitars is similar to. Or guitar collecting. Is my similar. Similar to my love for skateboarding?

[38:20] LARRY BELL: Yeah.

[38:23] OLIVER BELL: So that's similar. And working for you and running the tank has been one of the greatest.

[38:32] LARRY BELL: Well, I'm thrilled with the way you have taken to finding yourself in control of that equipment. You know, it's not so different than the way I learned when the guy sold me that thing and gave me a book, and some guy pointed out, this does this and this does this. And based on those little bits of instruction, the technique became more and more familiar. And those kind of forces that include improvisation and spontaneity and intuition took over as more of a driving force. So you got to trust yourself that those things are worthy. And you may not be able to sell it, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth a lot. Because if it motivates you to keep going, then there is nothing more important than that.

[39:46] OLIVER BELL: Great. All right, we'll wrap it up and say.

[39:54] LARRY BELL: Thanks. I'm glad you're my son.

[39:56] OLIVER BELL: I'm glad you're my dad. And to everyone out there, remember, danger lurks everywhere, right?