LA Artist Joe Goode, Who Put His Own Spin on Pop Art, Dies at 87
His practice was driven by a constant striving to reframe how we see works of art and the world around us.
By Matt Stromberg
Joe Goode, a mercurial artist whose more than six-decade career began in the fledgling contemporary art scene of 1960s Southern California, died at his Los Angeles home at the age of 87 on Saturday, March 22, one day before his 88th birthday. The news of his passing was confirmed by Michael Kohn Gallery, which has represented the artist in LA since 2011.
Goode emerged in the early 1960s as a member of the “Cool School,” a group of LA artists including Billy Al Bengston, Ed Moses, Wallace Berman, and others centered around the legendary Ferus Gallery, though Goode never actually had a show there. Though he exhibited extensively throughout his career and his work resides in dozens of museum collections, he never achieved the notoriety of some of his colleagues, perhaps because his work was hard to pin down, drawing associations to Pop Art, conceptual art, and the Light & Space movement.
Born in Oklahoma City in 1937, Goode had early exposure to art through his father, a portrait artist and sign painter. The pair would watch TV together and draw quick sketches of characters on various programs. Goode was childhood friends with Ed Ruscha, who left to study at the Chouinard Art Institute in LA in 1956, with Goode following suit three years later. At Chouinard, he studied with Robert Irwin and counted John Altoon and Larry Bell among his classmates.
“I didn’t know I wanted to be an artist until I came to L.A., but I always knew I could be an artist,” he recalled in a 2016 catalogue published by Michael Kohn Gallery.
Though he lacked an easily recognizable signature style, Goode was driven by a constant striving to reframe how we see works of art and the world around us. With his cloud paintings from the 1960s and ’70s, he sliced through painted skies with razor blades to reveal a second celestial layer. He blasted monochromatic canvases with a shotgun in his Environmental Impact series (1978–83), and used an industrial hand saw to jaggedly cut painted fiberglass sheets for his Flat Screen Nature series of the 2010s, merging lyrical beauty with visual violence.
“Joe was an innately gifted painter, able to produce the most gorgeously painted works while his subject matter often remained prickly (like Joe himself, smart and prickly!)” his gallerist Michael Kohn told Hyperallergic.
“He questioned the authenticity of experience through his color-saturated world-view. He wanted the viewer to remember that no matter how beautiful the painting, you are looking at a man-made image.”
Goode received early recognition for his “Milk Bottle” paintings begun in 1961, monochromatic, heavily brushed canvases featuring the silhouette of the classic glass container in front of which Goode placed an actual bottle. Blurring the lines between painting and sculpture, Pop Art and minimalism, they evoked a kind of mundane American domesticity, reflecting Goode’s Midwest origins. Two of these works were included in New Paintings of Common Objects, the seminal 1962 exhibition curated by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum).
Despite showing alongside Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Ruscha, Goode bristled somewhat at the Pop Art label. “I was always aware that my work wasn’t Pop,” Goode wrote in 2017. “I had the attitude of, I don’t care where you show me as long as you show me.”
He offered a surreal send-up of Minimalism with a subsequent series of wooden “stair” sculptures, created in the mid- to late-1960s, wood and carpet constructions placed against the wall that hovered between the familiar and the formal, ultimately leading nowhere.