Laurie Lovekraft explained to those gathered that we would be participating in a Wiccan ritual, wherein we’d write one desire on a piece of paper, fold it, and then offer our written hope to the flaming caldron in the center of the room.  It seemed simple enough.  As Lovekraft circled the room, each participant slowly approached the caldron and one by one submitted his or her secret wish to the flame.  My turn soon came. 

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Of course, the caldron, my wish, it was all put together as part of a RE/Search book release celebration.  And it’s just one of many of the gallery’s happenings, along with its monthly art openings Details magazine proclaims as “the biggest and best party in xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" ?>Los Angeles.”  It’s appropriate, then, that the party happen at this gigantic kitsch depot on Hollywood Boulevard.  All under one roof, the gallery and its two stores—The Soap Factory, Wacko—comprise what Billy Shire, who founded La Luz de Jesus in 1986, claims is “a shrine to 21^st Century culture and consumerism.” 

Maneuvering through The Soap Factory/Wacko, it’s impossible not to bump into a nightmare of childhood nostalgia.  That Planet of the Apes action-figure my friend Scottie stole.  Candles only appropriate for a Bukowski bar.  Tiki lamps surrounded by multitudes of bizarre books.  And in the back gallery, where Jesus’ light shines, artwork by admired luminaries Owen Smith, Robt. Williams, Tamara Guion and the slick one-namers:  Coop, Piz and Shag. 

“The basic concept,” Shire says of the gallery, and the store, “is visual overload.” 

Yeah.  True.  La Luz’s “hot rod, surf, pin-up, Mad mag, horror movie, pulp trash” aesthetic appeals to the schizoid part of my brain where I want to pray and then dice a few lines of the good stuff.  xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" ?>

Regardless, I know this for certain:  La Luz de Jesus does the idea of the art gallery true justice.  Have space, build wall, hang painting.  No pretentious pandering.  And it’s only one of many excruciatingly unique, fun and forward-thinking American galleries operating today.  In large part, it’s due to principle.  Thanks to distinct curatorial visions that embrace a true relationship between gallery and artist, that favor talent over hype, and that want to sate personal inspiration or encourage community participation, we find ourselves at a juncture where organic, out-of-nowhere galleries are proliferating, and, in the process, quietly rehabilitating the rest of us.   

“The original emphasis was to be an anti-gallery,” Shire says of La Luz.  “It is totally based on my tastes in art and style. I’m not afraid to poke fun at sacred cows.”    

***

Like anyone, what I understand about art is intuitive.  When I see an image that causes a series of electrical synapses to fire white light to my brainpan, well, that is art.  For each this experience is unique, because art educates differently.  Good art makes me see the world in new shades, hopefully in weirder or more profound ways. 

Over the years what has proven elusive is the unearthing of spaces where art is not bolted to a wall and surrounded by five-foot do-not-touch barriers.  So, naturally, I always feel somewhat vindicated and less alienated by the discovery of galleries like La Luz, places where I’m able to move with the art, and where the art feels free to move. 

In San Francisco, two galleries in particular stand out.  Both are run by people with vested interests in exhibiting the underexposed, tapping community interest, and simply sitting back to see what happens within these idiosyncratic, homespun spaces.

After painting for twenty years and teaching university for nine, Jack Hanley opened a gallery under his own name, first downtown, then later reopening in the Mission District circa 1998. 

“I started the gallery in an organic way,” he says.  Now, thirteen years later, “the gallery has evolved to taking more risks, showing more local artists, showing [those] younger or less experienced.  Most galleries seem to go the other direction.” 

Admittedly, the gallery’s layout is tempered with touches of Hanley’s personal aesthetics, which he claims are a “hybrid of humor, modernism and altered consciousness.”  The Valencia Street space is “messy, a bit disorganized,” but, Hanley’s quick to add, “it’s also ambitious, friendly and community-oriented.”  For the Mission District community-art project titled “17 Reasons,” Hanley and colleague Kate Fowle invited forty international and local artists to “insert new works into street life,” calling on them to “substitute commercial and abandoned venues for the white cube.”  After bringing the art together, they blessed it and sent it out into the street.  Hanley’s is an example of a gallery that doesn’t just exist; it extends beyond its own confines and happens. 

I need only to walk a few blocks from the 16^th Street Bart station in the Mission to find another gallery that has evolved from merely a bookstore to, possibly, the nexus of the Mission School.  It is also, arguably, the epitome of creative spatial use.

The Adobe Books backroom gallery is—in a word—small.  The first time I ventured to the back room I was shocked by its walk-in closet size.  But even the grandest possibilities can spring from the tiniest root. 

“Adobe Books backroom gallery really is a character of its own,” says Eleanor Harwood, one of its curators.  “The space is not four white walls.  It’s about fifty bookcases, many visitors, sometimes pigeons, and a cat.  And, of course, Andrew McKinley, who owns the bookstore.” 

Not to mention that art tends to magically stick itself to the bookstore’s walls.  Amanda Eicher, another curator, says the gallery’s early aim was to “offer a space for emerging artists to take on a whole space at once, however small.”  It in turn became a place that uses every available inch, bookstore included, lending truth to the adage that less is more—way more.

During the “Red Man Show, an exhibition in honor of [neighborhood celebrity] Prince Charm Patel,” Eicher explains, “more than fifty artists covered the walls of the bookstore and gallery with images in homage to the Red Man in a full scale installation.” 

“The installations…have offered meditative spaces,” Eicher says, “nightclub-like atmospheres, fantastic otherlands, and, in one case, a perfect space for a Wiccan ritual.”

     Another Wiccan ritual?  Strange.  But good strange.

Such extra-ordinary attention to a gallery’s inherent quirkiness is only one of many factors that make it successful.  It’s the act of acknowledging limitations, then pushing past them.  Or, better still, refusing to acknowledge any limitations at all.  Classic galleries are only concerned with vanity—something I, and others like me, should hold in contempt, if it weren’t for the sometimes-cool art on the antiseptic walls.

I ask Will Rogan, an artist who’s shown with Jack Hanley, his views. 

“I’ve given [this] a lot of thought,” Rogan says.  “I think galleries can be oppressive environments.  They strive for some sort of neutrality, clean, white, hard-edged, but what they end up with is not something neutral but something too clean, too white, too hard.” 

Rogan’s feelings mirror my own.  Paraphrasing Flaubert:  Art has no other end than to drive away bitterness.  And the simplest way for art to drive the bitterness away is to display creative output, well, creatively—in unautocratic spaces built to be in tune with the complexities of our human fabric.  It’s analogous to someone spray painting a fire hydrant, building a gallery up around it, and then saying, hey, look what grew here, look how weird and pretty.  It’s this instinctive, sometimes raw spirit that makes a gallery happen. 

“Accessible is the kind of space that works best,” artist Brian O’Connor says.  “Not just physically or architecturally, but socially.”

O’Connor’s magnificently hideous painting “A Thousand Lies” struck gold with me on a recent visit to La Luz de Jesus.  So it comes as no surprise that his misgivings about fashionable gallerias match mine.     

“Too many gallery spaces are about exclusivity and intimidation, about projecting an image of intellectual or economic superiority.  These spaces, and the people who staff them, often mistake scale and expense for content, and the only references to working class aesthetics and values are fetishistic or superficial architectural or artistic flourishes which provide the elite with the illusion of simultaneously being in touch with and superior to mainstream America.”

And this is where the odd whims of the curator enter, center stage, to turn up the heat on what would otherwise be “overly sincere” spaces.  The alternative becomes exactly that, and it works.

“I have managed to shake up the art market a bit,” Billy Shire says.  “And the number of galleries like La Luz seem to be proliferating.”

Ultimately, the proliferation is to our benefit.  Far too much brainpower has gone into spaces with a surplus of hard light and so many rigidly “subtle” patterns that they induce serious cases of minimalist nausea.  The art gallery is a liberating force, not a place to be stifled by, while in.  Art does not live in a vacuum.  It’s almost enough to make you decry the Guggenheim and hang some paintings on the dark sticky-sweet walls of an opium den. 

As for the finest gallery of all?  Brian O’Connor says it best. 

“The perfect gallery is a four thousand square foot Quonset hut attached to a bar and a bookstore with great light, an unpretentious, intelligent, friendly staff, and a director who pays the artist when the painting leaves.”