Wally Bill Hedrick (1928 – December 17, 2003)Gerald D. Adams, San Francisco Chronicle, Wally Hedrick: Iconoclastic Painter, Sculptor, Wednesday, December 24, 2003 was a seminal American artist in the 1950s California counterculture,Peter Selz and Susan Landauer, Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond, University of California Press, 2006, pg.89. gallerist, and educator who came to prominence in the early 1960s. Hedrick's contributions to art include pioneering artworks in psychedelic light art, mechanical kinetic sculpture, junk/assemblage sculpture, Pop Art, and (California) Funk Art. Later in his life, he was a recognized forerunner in Happenings, Conceptual Art, Bad Painting, Neo-Expressionism, and image appropriation. Hedrick was also a key figure in the first important public manifestation of the Beat Generation when he helped to organize the Six Gallery Reading, and created the first artistic denunciation of American foreign policy in Vietnam. Wally Hedrick was known as an "idea artist" long before the label conceptual art entered the art world, and experimented with innovative use of language in art, at times resorting to puns.
1940s
Wally Hedrick was born in Pasadena, California. He came out of the military and car culture, first glimpsing the liberating promise of San Francisco bohemia in the late 1940s, then moving to the city permanently after seeing combat in the Korean War (1950–1953).Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Age of Dissent (New York, 1996) pg. 27. Hedrick visited California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) in 1946. During this period in Pasadena, Hedrick formed the Progressive Art Workers with his artist friends David Simpson, John Stanley and others. The Progressive Art Workers was a pun for The Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the group functioned as a co-operative through which its members were able to exhibit their works. At this time, too, Vesuvio Cafe in San Francisco's North Beach district hired Hedrick as an action painter to work (i.e. 'make paintings') while a jazz combo performed: "That was his job. He made these paintings and while he would paint the musicians would play along with him. He would go like this and they would go doodoo doop. It was very popular in North Beach. The guy would make four or five paintings in an evening."Smith, Richard Candida. Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California. University of California Press, 1995; p168
1950s Hedrick made an early break with the conventions of art training and art-making.John Natsoulas Gallery, Lyrical Vision Exhibition Catalogue, Davis, CA, 1990, pg. 64. "There were three directions an artist could take at that time," Hedrick says, "Figuration, Abstract-Expressionism. And this third thing, which was out of the surrealist and Dada tradition."Source forthcoming. Hedrick began "working out a form of personalized Dada", which led "perhaps to his most influential contribution to the course of Bay Area art: an elaborate kind of punning. The puns not only became titles...but appeared in the painting itself."Thomas Albright, 1885, pg. 89.
Hedrick's mature artistic career began with paintings of popular imagery—American flags, radios, television cabinets and refrigerators—years before the rise of New York Pop Art.John Coplan, 1963, “Pop Art, USA," Oakland Museum catalog essay for the exhibition. Reprinted Artforum, October 1963: 27-30. See also Solnit. John Coplans included Hedrick's use of popular imagery in 1951 in his timeline of the antecedents to Pop Art.John Coplans, Artforum, The New Paintings of Common Objects, December, 1962, pg. 29. Hedrick "began painting flags in the 1950s, before New York's Jasper Johns did. Soon after, Hedrick -- ever the anti-careerist -- painted many of those flags black to protest the Vietnam War."
In the early 1950s, Vesuvio Cafe, a popular Beat hangout, employed Hedrick to sit in the window dressed in full beard, turtleneck, and sandals and create improvisational drawings and paintings. Hedrick's figure, therefore, helped ushered in the Beat lifestyle which ballooned in the later 1950s; by 1958 tourists to San Francisco could take bus tours to view the North Beach Beat scene.William T. Lawlor ed., Beat Culture: Lifestyles, Icons and Impact, pg. 309. Hedrick once confided to his student Jerry Garcia that "he and his friends were the real Beat Generation."Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip, 2002, pg 14.
At the time, Hedrick was one of the first San Francisco artists in the early 1950s to work almost exclusively with metal. He began welding in 1952, and these efforts are considered the first kinetic-junk assemblages.Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Wally Hedrick Interview Hedrick made assemblages and sculptures from beer cans, lights, broken radio and television sets, refrigerators, and washing machines he found in junkyards. "What interests me", he said later, is "to take garbage and make it into art, kind of ironic art."Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Wally Hedrick Interview. He painted over the surfaces with thick layers of gesso and impasto which incorporated the work into the aesthetic of action painting. He was particularly pleased when he could fix an abandoned appliance sufficiently that at least some piece of it would work and he could turn his assemblages into moving sculptures.Richard Candida Smith, Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California, University of California Press, 1995, pp 202-203. "Some of his most memorable sculptures came from crushing and welding beer cans together, or stacking and welding them...In 1956 he made the first light sculpture that I had ever seen; a fixture that responded to sound. Later on he had the piece on at his house during a Christmas celebration for which Wally put on some Miles and Coltrane on and the sculpture went crazy! I also remember his assemblage Xmas Tree Sculpture, that lit up and danced!"Carlos Villa, Remembering Wally Hedrick, www.stretcher.org/archives
Although using beer cans was popularized in 1960 by Jasper Johns, Hedrick began the practiceSmithsonian Archives of American Art, Wally Hedrick Interview: "to me, the beer can had a mystical quality about it. I contained something that contributes a lot to my way of living. But also, most people throw them away and it's always been a concern to me to try to make something out of nothing. You've heard me say that several times, but it is. I like to make something out of nothing. To me, that explains why I'd have a fix-it shop, because I'm taking something that's useless and bringing it back to life. Well, a beer can that's been empty has lost its usefulness. You can't reuse them. Well, you can now; we have aluminum. But when I started these things they were all right. With some of the early beer can things, I made a point pouring acid on them so they'd be rusty. Or I'd find rusty beer cans." in art many years earlier, during the early 1950s.Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Wally Hedrick Interview." One of Hedrick's favorite beer can sculptures "was made up of smashed beer cans in a kind of pyramid, as sort of a mountain, so I called it American Everest." The welded beer can sculptures "carried over until -- 1969."
During the 1950s, Hedrick's efforts followed two main paths: painting and sculpture. More specifically, between 1952Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Wally Hedrick Interview: "I guess I started (making kinetic junk sculptures) somewhere along in '52." and 1958,Smithsonian Archives of American Art: Oral History Interview With Wally Hedrick At His Home, San Geronimo, California, June 10, 1974. Hedrick begins his kinetic junk assemblages, beer can sculptures and 'Black Painting' series. Not only do Hedrick's junk kinetic beer can sculptures, now all lost or destroyed, possibly rank as the seminal "kinetic junk sculptures...made before Tinguely",Rebecca Solnit, 1990, The Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists. Jean Tinguely's (1925-1991), supposedly self-destroying Homage to New York (1960), not only failed to self-destroy, it appeared some eight years later than Hedrick's first kinetic sculptures, and nearly two years after Hedrick's own destructive Christmas Tree (1958) kinetic sculpture created a sensation at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. but also, Hedrick is one of the first American artists to oppose US intervention in South Vietnam.Peter Selz and Susan Landauer, Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond, University of California Press, 2006, pg. 40.
Pre-conceptualist Some artists at the time considered Hedrick a 'pre-conceptualist': "Wally's mind, I think... is of primary significance in this way. I think he's much more a preconceptualist than perhaps any of the others... the paintings, and the objects that he created are really more expressions of an idea."Smithsonian Archives of American Art: Oral History Interview with John Humphrey at the San Francisco Museum of Art, June 25, 1974. Indeed, Marcel Duchamp had influence on Hendrick's work as he put it; "Well, I can't say that I knew about Duchamp. I knew about his work....And it always appealed to me and I probably am a Dadaist, but a left-wing Dadaist, you know."Smithsonian Archives of American Art: Oral History Interview With Jay Defeo At Her Home, Larkspur, California, June 3, 1975. See also: Smithsonian Archives of American Art: Oral History Interview With Wally Hedrick At His Home, San Geronimo, California, June 10, 1974: WH: Well, I can't say that I knew about Duchamp. I knew about his work....And it always appealed to me and I probably am a Dadaist, but a left-wing Dadaist, you know."
Korean War In 1951, during the Korean War, Hedrick was drafted into the United States Army against his will, escorted away by US Army MPs without even having the chance to call his parents. "Wally must have been a problem for them, though, because Wally didn't ever do military things quite the way they intended...you told Wally not to do it, that's what he would do.Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Oral History Interview Walter Askin in His Studio in Pasadena, California, March 4, 1992. He was stationed in Korea until 1952. During this time, his paintings and assemblages shifted from neo-cubism to metaphysics to political subjects painted in a cartoonish style and dealing particularly with the escalation of the Vietnam War.
Studio 13 Jazz Band Hedrick joined the Studio 13 Jazz Band in 1952. The group was founded at the San Francisco Art Institute in the late 1940s by two members of the Bay Area figurative painters David Park and Elmer Bischoff.Jesse Hamlin, San Francisco Chronicle, Painters Make Music in Studio 13, January 13, 1996. He played the banjo.
Peace (1953)