©KATHERINE MCMAHON
L.A. Habitat is a weekly series that visits with 16 artists in their workspaces around the city.
This week’s studio: Jim Shaw, Altadena, Los Angeles.
As an artist, Jim Shaw is difficult to classify. Shaw’s practice includes painting, drawing, and sculpture as well as showing his prolific and ever-growing collection of found objects. (His 1991 show “Thrift Store Paintings” was recently restaged for his recent New Museum survey in New York, “The End Is Here.”)
In 1976 Shaw moved to the West Coast from Michigan to attend grad school at CalArts. “I was seeing movies that were made at CalArts at the Ann Arbor Film Festival and liked them,” he told me. “Mike [Kelley] was applying to grad school there and I applied too and got in and moved out for that reason.” He graduated with an M.F.A. in 1978 and decided to stay in Los Angeles. “I didn’t have the energy to move to New York afterward, which an ambitious artist may have done,” he said. “But it was such a dead art world then that it didn’t matter.”
Situated on a quiet residential street, Shaw’s studio space is located north of Pasadena, approximately 15 miles northeast of downtown L.A. “By its very nature, Los Angeles should be spread out because of earthquakes,” Shaw said. He noted that the cost of living is the most obvious thing to have changed about California since he arrived 40 years ago. “Now you can’t afford to live here. It’s a problem when the people who have the ideas can’t afford to live in a place,” he said. “Driving and parking are a challenge out here, too. I just don’t go to the Westside anymore if I can avoid it because it’s too crowded.”
When I visited his studio last December, Shaw was preparing for a trip to Taiwan and Tokyo with his daughter. “The last time I was there was during the Destroy All Monsters ‘Noise Music’ tour in the mid ’90s,” he said. Along with Kelley, Shaw was a founding member of that Detroit-based band, and he still makes music, or at least tries to. “I keep trying to do this prog-rock opera,” he said. “I keep running out of time, or money, or both.”
Shaw’s work is currently on view in the exhibitions “Rather Fear God” at Praz-Delavallade and “On Verra Bien” at Galerie Du Jour Agnès B, both in Paris. In June his work will appear in the exhibition “Maison de la poise” at Galerie Du Jour Agnès B, and “Realisms” at the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia. When I asked if he had anything else coming up, he said, “Recently we paid off all our debts and mortgages…. I’m getting old. I have to prepare for the end.”
Below, a look around Shaw’s Altadena studio.
ALL PHOTOS: KATHERINE MCMAHON
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Shaw in his drawing room. "This used to be a living room. It's turned into something horrifying."
A painting that Shaw picked up from the Pasadena City College Flea Market. "This one is forever in process," he said, adding that he will typically spend anywhere from $5 to $25 on paintings when he goes thrifting.
"I got this organ at a thrift store. I can play it, but not well."
"I try not to collect things," he said, admitting that he's not always successful. "I just bought this painting at the thrift store yesterday—some elephants at a circus. I didn't have anything else like it."
A Mike Kelley screen print on display outside of the kitchen.
A few of Shaw's supplies. "Some of the inks I use are waterproof. Others are not. When they're not waterproof, all havoc breaks loose. It's very messy."
"At one point my daughter and her friend decided they didn't like Barbies anymore and did this."
A figurine that lives in the studio.
A flea market find.
A painting by Tim Ebner sits behind Shaw's computer workstation.
"I flip through old advertisements looking for inspiration. It's hard to know what things to throw away. Usually there's a lot of dust involved, so sometimes it's easier to just leave it."
"I needed a vacuum cleaner for a piece I was going to to. This is the one my parents had—a classic Art Deco Electrolux. I had to get a separate cord for it, though, because the other one was contemporary."