At Alias Books East, in Atwater Village, hangs an unfinished piece of sky. The artist and musician Matt Fishbeck made it by scrabbling a piece of denim-colored stick of oil pastel onto a board. The painting hovers on Alias Books East’s west-facing “art wall” next to a Chihuahua face made out of wire, a black painting with a little wavery white line drawn through it, a topographical map of maybe the French provinces that appears to have been designed by an insomniac cartographer, and a luminous violet rectangle bordered by black and rimmed in blood.
Photo by Yxta Maya Murray.
Alias Books East is one of L.A.’s used book jewels, like The Iliad Bookstore in North Hollywood and Oof Books on Cypress Avenue. At Alias there are books on witchcraft and poetry, philosophy, and fashion. They also have a serious collection of fiction: You can pick up treasures like a 1973 hardback of Graham Greene’s Collected Stories or a gorgeous Yale U. Press edition of Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke, with a bossy introduction by Susan Sontag.
Photo by Yxta Maya Murray.
But Alias Books East also has a rotating art exhibit, which is the brainchild of owner Patrick Paeper and curator-artist Eric Johnson, who has been bringing shows to the shop since December of last year. Johnson’s selection of Fishbeck’s work proves inspired, since as soon as you walk into the tiny, lit-stuffed space, Fishbeck’s Alexander Calder-like face-wire sculptures and radiant canvases gallop up to you like ponies and make you panic with happiness. His show is called O, I Ask a Slob.
Photo by Yxta Maya Murray.
My favorite paintings are Vanity Smog, a smeary ruckus of charcoal-grey and pink, and Stretches, Yaws, and Is Awake, that piece of unbuilt blue sky. Like the rest of the works, they reveal Fishbeck’s finesse with a David Hockney palette and his ability to conjure the exquisite out of the messy and unmade. The paintings look like a beautiful side-effect of myopia, which appears to have been Fishbeck’s intent: In his neurotic, all-cap artist’s statement, he yells “IT IS NOT MEANINGLESS. . . . LISTEN TO THE INDISTINCTNESS. FUCK FOCUS. THERE’S SO MUCH TO SEE IN A SNOWSTORM, AN INFINITY IN A BLUR.”
Fishbeck is some supercool rocker who formed the band Holy Shit with Ariel Pink, and who murmurs songs like Marriage Monologue or I Wonder Why on his now-solo effort, the 2017 LP Solid Rain. He also graduated from Harvard in 1998, and has had exhibits around town, in San Francisco, and at Yale. Despite this lofty CV, Fishbeck belongs to the class of artists who are known as “permission givers”—a phrase that, when I looked it up on Google, seems to have been hijacked by the self-help crowd, but which nevertheless describes cultural producers like Calder, as well as Louise Bourgeois, Sid Vicious, Carrie Brownstein, and Jean Dubuffet. All of those artists have special gifts for realizing rough and witty visions that observers may also feel that they share, and could possibly also communicate.
Photo by Yxta Maya Murray.
While I stared up at Fishbeck’s busted sky and the pink smog, a man with a cumulus of white hair came up to me, smiling. “It makes you inspired, doesn’t it?” he asked me. “Do you paint?” I responded, and he nodded, shyly. “What kinds of things do you make?” He didn’t answer, but gestured awkwardly at Fishbeck’s work. I clutched my little haul of books (Kafka’s The Great Wall of China, as well as the Gombrowicz and the Greene) and, like him, felt agitated that I was not at that very moment attacking a canvas myself.
“What is Fishbeck like?” I harangued Paeper, who hovered nearby as I began eyeballing the manic artist’s statement.
“Oh, well,” the laconic book impresario coughed, looking down at the stacks of tomes on his desk. “You just have to meet him.”
The white-haired maybe-painter, Paeper, and I then stood around silently, our mutual social weirdness seemingly illustrated by Fishbeck’s stammering paintings. I opened the first pages of the introduction to Ferdydurke. There, Sontag declares: “To irritate, Gombrowicz might have said, is to conquer. I think, therefore I contradict. . . . “
It was one of those L.A. used bookstore/gallery moments.
Photo by Yxta Maya Murray.
O, I Ask a Slob is on for two more weeks. Alias Books East’s next show stars Sally Parks, a watercolorist.
Alias Books East is at 3163 Glendale Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90039.
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