about the Ferus days. His recollection of the time he opened for Lenny Bruce brought the house down. He was working the door at the Unicorn Club in Hollywood where Bruce was doing two shows a night. The first show went long, and by now the line for the second show was becoming unruly. Finally, the manager pulled Bruce off the stage, but the crowd wouldn’t leave. So he sent Bell out to play his 12-string guitar. “After the first song there was no one,” he told the audience. “The place was empty.”
Music is another great love of his, and the guitar is a central motif in his “Church Studies,” a multi-year journey into collage originating from his Venice Beach studio, which used to be a Christian Science Sunday school. Figurative and semi-figurative vapor drawings on Mylar, paper and laminate film, the “Church Studies” have been vacuum metalized and fused in a way that actually seems to bend light and color. The same treated Mylar hangs from the ceilings in sculptured forms, which Bell calls “Light Curls.”
In late April he’ll be in London installing a new show at White Cube, including works from the late seventies, the “Church Studies” and an improvised glass installation, like those he installed in Marfa, Texas, as well as Miami.
“People need shoes, cars, food, clothes, stuff like that. They don’t need what I do. I’m thankful someone wants it, but nobody really needs it,” Bell says of his artistic output, but doubles back when asked about President Trump’s proposed elimination of NEA/NEH grants, of which Bell was a recipient. “I don’t know how he could see the NEA as a waste of resources. If anything, it’s just the opposite. An artist takes something that has little more value than just a piece of paper and turns it into something that’s worth a fortune compared to the cost of that paper. The gross domestic product is tremendously enhanced by the artist.”
Looking around the studio at his “Church Studies,” the “Light Curls,” a bronze figure he designed for a Frank Gehry project that fell through years ago, he sees what he calls “evidence” of where he was at different periods in his life. “That’s a piece of evidence of what I did two years ago on February the 10th. And the one next to it is from February 13th. The one that was done on the 10th informed the one that was done on the 13th and so on. In that sense, art is a teacher. It’s the energy that is released when you teach yourself what you do. And the leader is the work you did before. You always have access to the future through the work. It’s the one thing you can trust. That’s how I feel about it.”
His eyes settle on a flower petal on the corner of the desk, the inspiration for a new project. Earlier in the week, while at a wake for a friend, he saw it on the floor under the vases. “It was so beautiful I scooped it right up, a gift from the deceased.”
Jordan Riefe is an LA-based journalist who writes about arts & culture.