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 If the objects in one’s home reflect the owner, but many other people have the same objects, then the owner must only be one of a type. — Lee Nordness, Objects: USA

People did stuff out of necessity. If you needed something, you built it, but you built it out of function, and because of that it had this naive, radical honesty. It’s like kids art, it just happens. — Chuck Arnoldi 

 In 1969, Chouinard Art Institute students Chuck Arnoldi and Laddie John Dill were living in a loft in downtown Los Angeles, where they started the ACME Frame Company making plexiglas frames. “We were hustlers and we started buying these huge pieces of plexi, so I started making paintings out of them,” recalls Arnoldi, who was awarded the LACMA Young Talent award that year on the basis of these translucent sculptural works. While business was booming, living downtown, says Arnoldi, “was sweaty and horrible, and when it rained the water came through my studio.” 

 So when he was invited to a party in Venice Beach at Harry Drinkwater’s studio on Brooks Avenue, his life was forever changed. “I’d never been to Venice before that, and I couldn’t believe how cool it was,” says Arnoldi. “This was that free love, hippie time, and there were all these beatniks, Hell’s Angels, naked people on the beach. It was the land of the wanted and unwanted and I fell in love with it immediately.”  

 Shortly after that party Arnoldi found a one-story building for lease where the Venice Boardwalk meets Brooks. There were five tiny storefronts on the boardwalk and the back was an old garage for trams. While Arnoldi couldn’t afford the space on his own, the painter David Deutsch was able to sign a lease and got his father’s construction company to divide the garage into a series of loft studios. By the mid-70s’s Deutsch, Pat Hogan and Allan McCollum had moved to New York, so Chris Burden took over a storefront, Billy Al Bengston rented a big studio in the back, and Frank Gehry relocated his architectural offices to the space. 

By the early Eighties, Arnoldi and Gehry had acquired the building and the vacant lot behind it off Speedway. Rather than wasting their money on seismic proofing, the duo decided to build six new artist lofts, each designed by Gehry with towering volumes of light—"We built the biggest possible spaces the city would allow," laughs Arnoldi—and the duo installed the same marine grade plywood interiors that Arnoldi had employed in his early Chainsaw Paintings.

“Artists are sensitive to materials and I loved the look of the plywood because it was all about the edge, so I started making plywood shelves in my studio and Frank started using plywood interiors in his buildings,” says Arnoldi. “But it all started there on Brooks Avenue.” 

 While the lofts on Brooks aren’t what most people would consider “Frank Gehry buildings” per se they do offer an object lesson on how an artist or architect experiments with practical—and sometimes impractical aesthetics—to work out formal, material and conceptual ideas within their practice. The off-site survey, Object Lessons, organized by the Landing and writer/curator Michael Slenske, utilizes this architecturally significant loft environment to examine how a number of Los Angeles artists have worked with and incorporated functional/dysfunctional forms and concepts into their oeuvre. Within the loft visitors will discover Art Deco chairs by Larry Bell; a glass “star map” table filled with blue pigment by Lita Albuquerque; painted folding screens by Billy Al Bengston, Ed Moses, and Timothy Washington; tea cups by Magdalena Suarez Frimkess and sake cups by Joe Goode; a tripped out TV room with a sofa, chair, TVs and vacuum painted by Kenny Scharf; and all manner of carved and assembled wood furniture by Arnoldi in addition to many other historical works.

“I think these objects are really just a result of this natural curiosity that comes from being in California,” says Arnoldi. “Living and working here is all about innovation.”