Fixing a Whole

Julie Becker spent her life in Los Angeles. She ended it there too. Becker’s 2016 obituary appeared in Artforum three days before the artist’s first solo show in a decade closed at Greene Naftali Gallery, New York. This survey pulled drawings from all different eras of Becker’s short, brilliant, patchy career; it touted recent work, out of context. Nowhere in the curatorial statement did the word whole appear and yet since 1999 Becker had been consumed by it, the name for a project without end. Evidence of  Whole’s concerns bubbled up anyway like the boiling cauldrons Becker often drew. One work from 2015 bore the inscription “I must create a Master Piece to pay the rent. How do I do that?” And written in haste, maybe later, in answer: “Circles, circles, lots of round and round we go.”

Spiraling as a research strategy and survival necessity characterized Becker’s entire oeuvre, recalling the words of another recluse, Emily Dickinson, who once wrote: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant —. Success in Circuit lies.” And that’s what Whole is, a lie designed to contain all the truth that Becker, who died in 2016 at forty-four, gathered in the last fifteen years of her life as a researcher of Los Angeles. Whole is not a finished product but a never-ending Gesamtwerk comprising drawings, installations, videos, and collages that responded to the catastrophe of the 1990s Los Angeles housing crisis, forecasting the grim tent city future present while at the same time trying to desperately catalog all the things that were being lost in real time. Whole is like one of Charlie Jencks’s Day Dream Houses slipping off the cliff face into oblivion, the family locked inside. Whole is the foundation of a visual vocabulary for constructing new urban legends to describe and digest an era that the city’s late historian Mike Davis called “the worst crisis period since the early Depression for Los Angeles, wrought by the uneven impact of economic globalization and an ‘explosive convergence of street anger, poverty, environmental crisis, and capital flight.’” Whole is a refreshingly human response to what design critic Peter Plagens summed up as an “ecology of evil.” Whole is a campaign for urgent intervention scripted by someone on the edge whose time was up.

For all these reasons, Whole is a hard artwork to exhibit or even historicize. And there is little incentive for art dealers and institutions to do so. Whole vilifies the traditional wallets of the arts—real estate developers, government attachés, bankers—without producing collector-friendly commodities on the backend that can assuage those same individuals’ feelings of privileged complicity with humor, beauty, intelligence, or return on investment. In this way, Del Vaz Projects’ exhibition (W)hole is a landmark event, one entirely dedicated to accomplishing what Becker wasn’t able to: creating a show about Whole. In a letter to Becker dating from 2002, her confidante, the novelist Chris Kraus, compares Whole to the concrete roses made by Jay DeFeo, whose self-sabotaging sculptures consumed her apartment like a “tapeworm.” Kraus also reminds Becker of her own resolve to let Whole remain a loose thread:

You’d been preparing this show called Whole for nearly four years, and you were starting to realize it would never be finished. You said: “There’s always an attempt to be whole. Everyone in the universe has spent time trying to become whole through religious means, from sitting in a church to yoga to swimming.” But you couldn’t do it. The real project of Whole would be “an endless exposing of parts and not ever reaching a whole,” you said.

Del Vaz’s show is definitely an “exposition of parts”—an exquisite corpse whose vertebrae sadly don’t quite stack. It contains the prerequisites, the vital organs Becker left behind, but it fails to recreate the frenzied abundance of her installations like Researchers, Residents, a Place to Rest (1993–1997) or the generosity of simple recipe-based conceptual works like Golden Force Field (1999), which encourages viewers to bewitch any room of their choosing by placing foiled postal stickers at the corners. Instead, the show takes the point of view of a concise survey held in the guest house of an idyllic Spanish colonial near the Pacific Becker could never have afforded. I wonder what Becker would make of all the houses in LA becoming galleries.

At least Whole recommends itself to domestic paranoia and images of living rooms emptied of people in favor of value. Becker’s drawings, photographs, and sculptures look quite at home sprawled out in a space designed for the perpetual guest. A triptych of photographs and handful of drawings line the walls, but the tableaux are anchored by 1910 West Sunset Blvd (2000), the largest sculpture Becker left behind, a life-sized facsimile of some sidewalk from outside the California Federal Bank tower in Echo Park, the building that ate up her view of the Valley like an invasive species. Becker had plans for a roller coaster that would turn curb chunks like this into rideable carts that would glide on gravity-defying curlicues—perhaps simulating the physical toll, nausea, disorientation, suspension of reality, and cyclical displacement that plagued the artist all her life. Mounted above 1910 West Sunset Blvd is another seminal hunk of Whole: Federal Building with Music (2002), a video work in which Becker is seen lowering yet another facsimile (this time a mini version of the bank itself) into a perfectly square shaft she dug in her real floor. It’s interesting to learn that at the same time Becker was making this architectural voodoo doll, the bank was closing, having been purchased by Citigroup. As is mentioned in the accompanying essay by Joel Kuennen, the carefulness with which Becker excises the hole in the Federal Building with Music seems to suggest that she had critically observed the boom and busts of 1980s and 1990s finance, taking them to be planned strategic explosions by some invisible but powerful entity sleeping with government and private interests alike. Becker was a lifelong subscriber to conspiracy, someone who enjoyed questioning assumptions and givens, someone who found solace in the alternative answers of pseudoscientists, UFO spotters, and tarot card readers, someone who was a devout listener and caller of redpilled radio host Art Bell. She was a product of a city hooked on alternative medicines.

Conspiracy and its entanglements with architecture perhaps peaked with 9/11 and the foregoing years of Y2K paranoia. Because while Becker was furiously making drawings inscribed with sentiments like “I wanna live in a house with beautiful flowers and a lot of safety” and digging graves in her kitchen, her conceptual counterpart Lutz Bacher was making chillingly prescient videos of the Twin Towers shot in a snowstorm from her East Village apartment window (Snow, 1999). It’s interesting to think about Whole in conversation with Snow, which embraces the perspective of the casual spy, the friend for whom nothing is coincidence, the vigilant curtain-twitching neighbor over-steeping their tea. Whole is also interesting in contrast to another 9/11 adjacent work: B-Thing, Gelitin’s 2001 architectural intervention at the World Trade Center, a micro terrace the artist collective constructed on the ninety-seventh floor as temporary residents and now 9/11 conspiracy villains. B-Thing was a literal incision, an occupation. Like Gordon Matta Clark’s cuts, it defiled a readymade phallic symbol of unmitigated capitalism with the same crude means that were used to build it. Becker, by contrast, addressed the violence of Los Angeles urbanization but never trafficked in it. She couldn’t afford to, so instead, she displayed radical kindness—housing others, sharing what little she had with those with less—and continued to make work designed to communicate and unpack brutal truths without the associated risks of revictimization or exploitation. She used an ancient technique, honed by Hollywood: mythmaking.

Because Becker was a conspiracist, photography unsurprisingly played an important role in her storytelling. In the show, there are a series of interior shots, Becker often simulated reality with sets, but the ones here are actual documentation of the Echo Park house, which inspired her to concoct a story about her own indebtedness to the Capital Federal Bank. She told herself and others that the bank had given her the house in exchange for clearing out the personal effects of the previous tenant, a stained-glass maker and victim of AIDS. As recently as her first and perhaps last posthumous traveling retrospective in 2018, curators at the ICA London and MoMA PS1 were operating under the belief that this fabrication was fact. It was only at Del Vaz’s exhibition that Becker’s ex-lover Ralph Coon had the opportunity to share what he’s learned in the past couple of years doing research for a documentary and printed biography. Becker didn’t get the house from the bank. She may have gotten a discount on the sale for clearing out the previous tenant’s garbage herself, but a man didn’t die in the place where Becker dug her hole.

This is the revelation of the show, although it comes through in the text more so than in the curation of objects. (W)hole, the show, is missing a dedicated scholar, or rather a researcher as devoted as Becker was to her work, to go through the artist’s archive and animate it through personal curiosity. Coon and his forthcoming biographical documentary are a promising start, but his focus is less on Becker the artist than Becker the addict, tattooist, martyr, and housing crisis advocate. The work, the archive, needs an advocate and scholarship of its own. As Peter Wollen once said to understand Becker’s work, “you have to participate in it.” You have to take on the role of the observer, the researcher, the sleuth, the heretic. You have to track down tails, coincidence, and the corners of the big picture. You have to question the assumptions, the motives including your own, and then rinse and repeat. You have to lavish the chase with all your attention and not be afraid to follow it in its circles. If we can’t hunt evil, how can we hope to conquer it?