Dries Van Noten welcomes Los Angeles-born and raised artist [Peter Shire](http://petershirestudio.com) in a new exhibition, _In a Hollywood Bungalow_, at the [Dries Van Noten Little House](https://driesvannoten-la.com/the-little-house/peter-shire-at-la-cienega) in Los Angeles. Open through July 31st, the exhibition showcases paintings, furniture, sculptures, ceramics, and toys from Shire.
Shire, an early member of the Memphis Group who started his own studio in 1972, creates work imbued with an Angeleno perspective. Using a whimsical, playful approach, Shire’s work puts utility and aesthetic in dialogue, using cone, cylinders, grids, and other shapes to create sculptures that resemble functional objects, creating a category of understanding that he calls _Stanzaroto_, or Ol’ Squint Eye.
_Flaunt_ caught up with Shire to discuss the show at the Little House, LA mythology, combining art and commerce (or how they’re not so different), and more and see _In a Hollywood Bungalow_, open through July 31st at the Dries Van Noten Little House, 451 N. La Cienega Blvd. in Los Angeles.
**We're talking about _In a Hollywood Bungalow_.**
It's Jim Morrison. \[sings\] Hollywood Bungalow. Different melody, probably. And I should get it up on the phone or side. I forget. I think it's “LA Woman”. Anyway, one of them- the refrain is “In a Hollywood bungalow.” Los Angeles, where the show is, and Santa Monica, all of that, were just little houses. _Bungalow_ is an East Indian word, and it implies a house with a veranda all the way around. Everything became a bungalow here, and these little houses all along, and they're really ramshackle, sort of temporary. There was this fantastic Swedish restaurant called the Red Room. They were special, and it was sort of this feeling of a West Hollywood in the 50s and 60s, when I could run around over there in the 60s. It kind of got bypassed, there's still a few of them. And where we did another project where they put in a ramada, which was Duke’s Tropicana, this place was wacky because all the rock and roll guys stayed there. And then this motel was famous for being constantly busted up by all the rock and roll guys, you know, throwing tantrums. We’d go there, and they had the most amazing breakfast. And it was just this amazing place. Now it’s this gargantuan hotel. We did a sculpture when the developer turned out to be a person we knew well. And we made it into sort of a tropical theme to roughly be at least be some memory of Duke’s. And so there we are at this hotel
So same race different horse. I'm going to try this Jim Morrison “In the Hollywood Bungalow.” They've restored his house.
**You were talking about these bungalows. That's a very Los Angeles thing. You're from Los Angeles. So I'm curious how Los Angeles, the culture of Los Angeles, influences the work.**
That's like asking a caterpillar how it moves his legs. It’s in me. There's a lot of stuff to say. We move away from things that you do and then you go, “Why did I do that?” People ask, “What does it mean? Why did you do it?” And you just go “Uh, I don’t know.” And that’s not a good answer, right? You start thinking about it. Backtracking. And with that in mind, where I start to come in is that I feel that LA has a group of mythologies that people respond to, and there's certain weird crossovers, and one of the great mythologies is palm trees. Do you know about this? They're planted by developers.
**None of them are native, right?**
None of them are native. And they are actually part of a sale scheme. You'll notice certain streets have a whole row of them. They get houses and plant these trees. What's going on is that behind the palm trees are just these little houses bearing lives, you know, kids getting off the bus at Hollywood and Vine, and especially in Hollywood, and these kind of hopes, and this kind of an economy. The other part of the LA mythology is the open streets.
I'm really interested and concerned with what LA was, and what it is. I'm 73, born and raised here. On my mother's side, I'm a fourth generation Californian. And that means her people came in the 1860s, just just at the tail end of the gold rush to be merchants. So there's so many things that I do, narrative pieces, that are in the show, that are objects, sculptures. We've learned that we have to call the big wooden balls that might sort of be chairs, chair reference. We tried to get a patent, but we couldn't get it as a chair. These things are sculptures in the modern idiom of being semi abstract—referred. Oddly enough, that shape was derived from walking on the beach in Malibu and one of the houses, and I was sort of appalled by it. That's a big part of the work is things that disturb me or that assault my sense of taste. And I think they're funny too. And, and so it turned out that darn thing was a Lautner house. John Lautner—one of the biggest influences on me. And he did a restaurant called Googies.
In my youth, when I’d go to the beach with my parents, there was no freeway, you’d usually go out Sunset Boulevard and end up at the beach. And there was a very famous drugstore with a soda fountain called Schwab's, and that was supposedly where people went to go get discovered all that kind of hocus pocus. And it was right next to it. And it was, again, kind of appalling and kind of funny. It was a little storefront. And he had taken on a wall or panel, and just sort of shoved it into at an angle. My interpretation was that it set the tone for everything that was done in the late 60s, 70s, and 80s—it was a California approach of taking in a group of existing objects and literally shoving them together. Letting them collide.
We didn't call it post modern, now they call it postmodern, but we called it new wave. We're were doing these things, and this became a California way of creating something completely new. California gets a lot of credit for sort of breaking rules, because they don't even know what they are. Which is a nice thought. All of these people are very disciplined, very experienced artists, and have huge backgrounds. Backtracking, the more pertinent aspect of California is like iconoclast is the gold rush. What what happened was, all of the sudden people pulled out, if they got lucky, huge amounts of money out of the dirt. You know, they didn't have to manufacture widgets. They didn't have to build a railroad. They just had to that gargantuan nugget. And so there's whole groups of people, some of them we know, that became wealthy, became instant members of the oligarchy, but without any of the trappings or histories or manners of the oligarchy. And so this just sets us up for this. And even, probably lesser, sets us up for this kind of freedom, if you will.
**California is as West as you can go in the United States. So there's kind of this air of like it being America’s last stand. Do you think maybe that sort of influenced the way that you think, You're talking about just like taking these objects and mashing them together, it's kind of like, well, let's see, let's make this work.**
Well you sort of looked at these things—there's an aspect of the economic climate around things that drives them. And we look at the big historical shift in art, and they start to really be more of a shift in what we refer to as economics, either with the good the exchange of goods and services, the way that we make money and buy things, the way that we improve our life. One great comment was that the cotton gin increased everybody's life by 20 years, the minute they invented the cotton gin, simply because people could change clothes, get clothes inexpensively, and the minute they could change clothes, they can wash in between, and hygiene became an obtainable factor for a lot of people that it hadn't been. You could extrapolate that, and then look at post-war, we've gone through this depression and this huge evolution in our our standard of living, our economy, our ability to make money, our ability to siphon off resources from other parts of the world, but we don't want to talk about that too much, right. Theres these shows, and this is a big deal to me. _The Life of Riley_, _The Honeymooners_, where these are about working people. It isn't like _Friends_ where you don't know quite what they really do. They live in an apartment that's big enough to be a movie theater. It's just like, who are these people? Now all they do is hang out in a coffee shop and complain about getting laid or not getting laid. Ralph Kramden came home with his lunchbox in his bus drivers uniform. Have you ever seen the darn thing? Oh, it's the darnedest thing ever saw. I mean it's literally in a room as big as this. It's like maybe 15 by 15. _The Life of Riley_, he worked at an aircraft company in Burbank and came home in his company shirt with a box. You don't see that now.
So theres this evolution in our southern California economy and our national economy that was created from my age, post-war baby boom. We were “children of the 60s.” We believed in fair play, and believe in our own willfulness and over the veracity of our hopes and opinions. That was the object of the far right, the neo-cons had really tried to stop that. But in the meantime, there was a great article on why Bob Dylan and Barry Goldwater were alike. And the final conclusion—this was in the New Yorker—was that neither one wanted anyone to tell them what to do. Barry turned into Ronald Reagan, which turned into Trump, and a couple in between. It's really gone haywire. So wanting to talk about why we did things, how we did things, started with all of these things. We were thrilled to be in the dialogue with what we're about—absurdity. We're just on the cusp of all sorts of values changing. I started as a potter, there's no need for pottery, you use Tupperware now.
And really funny story. One of the neighborhood kids, who was a tough kid, had jumped parole, and one of the counselors kept coming in here, and finally they caught up with them and put them in prison. He said, “You gotta help me” and the counsel said, “Hey, it's too late. You got to call your family, and they're the only ones that might have something to say.” And he says, “I tried to call him but they were having a Tupperware party.” Perfect. So we were interested in, can these things that were so protracted that the whole function and the relation to the body movements became the issue, not whether you were having lemonade in the afternoon and you needed something to put it in.
**You talked about the economy. It’s interesting then to think about both of those things in the context of showing these works. The Little House is in this sort of store setting, so I’m curious about the play with commerce there.**
First of all, it should be understood that I have a profound background in retail. My parents and my brother now own a store called Wacko. It actually started as a Soap Plant as well as Wacko. He’s a brilliant merchandiser. We love to buy things, and as we talk about the post-war prosperity and ascension, we talk about becoming an exceedingly exquisite culture. People have always loved objects and always loved to buy things and decorative objects, which means people are on a platform where people can use them and they are part of a broad spectrum of life. And anthropological and sociological objects. Talking about digging up Pompeii, we are interested in their plates. How people lived and various strata. My joke is, if we got buried preserved, and they dig up in every house, they’d find a Mickey Mouse. Probably could be as little as 1% don't have some mouse in their house. Disney's every bit what we call a decorative idiom. This is an interesting thing as you're going back and forth, there's a lot of this so-called collaboration with the fashion artists and artists that have met in the past who would have been considered selling out, but it wouldn't be now, it's something to add to your resumé. Build up. And art has always been part of high society, which is where fashion lives.
Back to when we're talking about the cotton gin, the trickle down of mobile fashion is way broader. 100 years ago, people didn't change their style every year. Now, all I have to do is go down the street on a Saturday, you'll see people with tons of clothes hung out on their fence stuff, right? One year, a young man showed up named Scott Runyon. He had been in the performance troupe called the Cockettes. They were very funny. He was a fashion kind of guy, and we would talk about this, and his comment to me at one point was, I'd rather have a really good cloth coat than a mediocre leather coat. My mother had one really good suit. But really good, and that's the deal. They're going out to Forever 21, and they buy something for $20, $10. This the pleasure of buying. Buy this, it builds up this stuff.
When you meet someone with children, you'll find you'll notice that their children have more toys than five people. They’ve got people producing these things for next to nothing, shipping in America costs 10 times what the thing costs shipped. But what's wrong with this picture? By the end, then they've got this stuff, and it's ubiquitous. Dries is making things that are really good—well-made, original, interesting. And that's what we're attempting to do with the sculpture and the artwork and the things that are actual objects for use and the things that are, shall we say, referencing them.
**Both of them kind of live in the space of like marrying utility and art object, and you're talking about Dries, clothing being have sort of this elevated standard, it kind of elevates them to this sort of art object. What do you think about that and then showcasing the works next to each other?**
It’s really the most of the reason I did this show. To be associated with him.
.jpg)
