While Chip was up at Cal Arts, Joe was going to Cal State L.A.
getting an art degree. In fall of 1975 he along with friend and
fellow artist, Waynna Kato, got their B.F.A.s and started grad school
at Otis Art Institute. The three schools shared a lot of faculty and
guest lectures only Cal Arts with its deluxe facilities cost much,
much more.
The California Institute of Arts sits like a
castle in the hills outside the city. Back then, before the golf
course and tract homes filled in, the hills were ala natural, which
translates into weeds. The Cal Arts castle did a magic trick as you
approached on I-5 from the city. It appeared on a hill as you leveled
out after climbing a couple thousand feet above sea level, then as
you dipped down into the meadows the castle sank and disappeared. It
was actually on the next hill up and dropped behind the first hill as
the perspective changed.
In contrast Otis sat in the heart of the city. The once nice
neighborhood, where earlier on bankers and their families strolled
around MacArthur Park (of someone-left-a-cake-out-in-the-rain fame),
was slowly dissolving into a funky barrio. The neighborhood bums and
druggies shared the park and streets with retirees who played chess
and checkers at picnic tables and refugee families with baby
strollers.
A while later, they drained MacArthur Park’s man-made lake exposing
decades of discards. Years of ‘offerings’ had sunk to the murky
bottom including plenty of handguns, knives and other weapons. An
artist collected dozens and dozens of muddy shoes of all shapes and
sizes, which he displayed in a neat pile on campus.
Otis was on busy Wilshire Boulevard, a main east/west vein from the
heart of downtown L.A. out to the ocean in Santa Monica. Ironically,
Cal Arts had sort of morphed out of another art college, Chouinard,
which had been only a few blocks away. Now the whole neighborhood was
slipping. The art world was changing with the use of many new
mediums. Artists were finally getting access to video and audio
equipment. Boundaries were being trampled for better or for worse.
There was an anything goes kind of freedom that was open to anything
but the same old crap. Artists made music or films, too. It was all
the same. Ideas were more important then technique. Concepts were, at
times, replacing art objects. There was a rebellion against the
gallery system that was parallel to the DYI music scene that was
growing outside of the giant record companies.
Joe Potts contributed a crucial tactic to the LAFMS in those early
days. His idea was to adapt a common Hippie business model of the
sixties where buying in bulk brought the price down. Dudes, who
pitched in and bought a large amount of “granola” and than divided it
and packaged the portions themselves, got a righteous deal on
breakfast cereal by cutting out the middleman. It’s called communal,
man. Artists of the day were cutting out the gallery middlemen by
making a series of small multiples and mailing them out to each
other. Joe and his production partner Waynna twisted these concepts
and created several editions of I.D. Art. Originally, the idea was a
way for the new students to meet and get to know their fellow
students and teachers. Instead of going around the room doing the
“say a little something about yourselves” routine, they proposed a
book of narcissistic self-portraits by fellow students as a way of
everyone introducing themselves.. Faculty and some friends were given
flyers that invited them to participate and explained their scheme.
The deal was each person had to print their own standard sized pages,
fifty of them, for the edition of fifty. These pages would be
collated and bound into a book. Most of the pages were just straight
from the Xerox machine or P.I.P, a printing chain that was Kinko’s
before Kinko’s. There were exceptions including some sewn in fabric
on one page and most notably Chip’s contribution which included a
firecracker taped to the paper with ‘Baby, you’re a rich man, too”
written across the page.
After a funny session of running around the Kato family’s dining
room table making stacks with the pile of stuff people submitted, it
was Waynna’s task to find a place that would bind them. Explaining
the eccentricities over the phone, she found reluctant businesses
giving prices that were adding up to hundreds of dollars. Back then
you had to rely on the Yellow Pages and word of mouth to do your
research. For a day or so there was no solution until finally Waynna
tracked down another shop to try. She gave her spiel again only this
time the person on the phone thought it was funny. The firecracker
was hilarious. They could spiral bind them for a buck fifty each.
Like Bikini Tennis Shoes, the covers were scavenged by Chip from
his job at Cunningham Press. Off-register postcard sheets with messed
up versions of stodgy portraits from the Huntington Library worked
great as covers for this book of narcissistic self-portraits. The
spiral bound books came out great. Everyone in the book received a
copy and the extras were sold to recoop some of their costs. Waynna
and Joe wondered “what next?’
After the success of I.D. Art the next project connected the I.D.
Art concept with the Bikini Tennis Shoes breakthrough. I.D. Art 2 was
a record.
Joe figured if eight dollars was charged for every minute of time on
the record, a forty minute record would take in enough money to fund
the 200 copy pressing.. Participants receive four copies of the
record for each minute they bought.
