Beginnings - Cardwell/Jimmerson

BEGINNINGS - Cardwell/Jimmerson

For reasons having to do with impulse and parking, Cardwell/Jimmerson Contemporary Art, on Washington Blvd was one of the first galleries I visited when I started checking out my new neighborhood.  Tom Jimmerson had just finished installing a show of L.A. and southern California artists of the 1960s, mostly the earlier years. These were not the big name artists readily associated with that era such as the Three Eds; Ed Moses, Ed Ruscha, and Ed Keinholtz –but the artists who were well enough known at the time but have since radically changed style or been mostly forgotten.  That happens.

In putting the show together, Tom relied on conversation with old-timers, early issues of ArtForum (it was new and Southern California based then) and catalogs of exhibitions at small regional museums.  He’d then contact the artists (those still living) and/or their galleries (if still living) and/or their collectors (if still living) to identify and assemble the paintings and sculptures that comprise the exhibition.

This is a rare and admirable approach to being a gallery - requiring thoughtfulness, scholarship, and patience.  It also reflects a curiosity about artists whose work may have been inappropriately ignored or misperceived; a chance to rediscover a body of work all but hidden from current awareness.

Cardwell/Jimmerson doesn’t do this kind of show every time.  They’ll chase the hottest and the newest thing along with the other galleries, but the historical perspective such exhibitions bring serves as a reminder of art’s uncertainties, its fickleness from one moment to the next.  In the process, they enrich and challenge the entire contemporary art scene and tell some truths about it.

Toward the end of my conversation with Tom, I asked if there was someplace nearby where I could get a cup of coffee and a sandwich or something; somewhere where the people who go to the galleries and buy the art, the people who work in the galleries, and the people who make the art that’s shown in the galleries go to get a drink or a sandwich or something, and maybe hang out and talk. That would be a good place to find, I said.
Tom said there was a bar like that on La Cienega, a barely noticeable place around the corner about half way up the block on the east side.  He didn’t know the name of the place and he didn’t know if it would be open.  “But you should check it out,” he said.

So I checked it out.

I walked around the corner and half way up the block and found a modest little building that said “bar” on the outside.

“This must be the place,” I thought

It was around two in the afternoon and the place was closed.

There was no sign that said what it’s called.