For 20 years, Aspen’s vaunted art community has enjoyed a series called Art in Unexpected Places, but never art like Alex Israel’s — and never in a place like Ruthie’s, perched on the west side of Aspen Mountain but closed for almost a quarter-century.
It took a partnership between the Aspen Art Museum and Aspen Snowmass to bring the colorful, pulsating art of Alex Israel — think of LA-inspired, post-Peter-Max retro cool, which of course works well with the LA/Aspen set — to one of the most iconic spots in Colorado’s winter sports culture.
But getting Israel himself to Aspen wasn’t much of a struggle. He loves a breakfast or lunch at Bonnie’s mid-mountain hangout and increasingly has been spending many a wintry morning on Chair 4. As a child, he went on one or two ski trips a year. At age 43, he’s becoming a devoted skier. “Not an amazing skier,” he says, “but I am getting better.”
But while he is seeking to master the ski arts, it is his multi-platform art initiatives that have made his name — and that drew Aspen’s artistic leaders to create perhaps the most unorthodox art exhibit in the most unorthodox venue in the Rockies. In doing so, they joined creative efforts across the globe to place art in unexpected places: a tobacco factory in Athens, a lighthouse in Copenhagen, a diesel-power station in Tashkent, a public toilet block in Camberwell, United Kingdom.
“A lot of people have wondered if Ruthie’s, which was resting there for two decades, would be used again,” Israel says. Now it has, unforgettably.
As a child, Alex Israel loved to take crayon to paper and, like so many young people with traces of talent, received encouraging words from adults, so much so that he was propelled to art school. One of those who spurred him on was a teacher, Marianne Hall. “She just gave me a lot of positive feedback on what I did,” he says. “When she retired, I was part of a group who made a scholarship in her name. She was a very important part of my childhood.”
Once he got his driver’s license, Israel started visiting galleries in Los Angeles, seeking to understand not only the history of art but also the fresh currents in the contemporary art world. He was drawn to Yale’s premier art curriculum and eventually earned an MFA from the University of Southern California.
“I always made art about things I knew and liked,” he says. “Growing up in LA, I was fascinated by the world of tech, the entertainment industry, the ways in which the city dictates so many things about how we communicate with each other and how we live our lives.”
Israel has a madcap preoccupation with Kim Kardashian, is inspired by David Hockney, Joan Didion and Andy Warhol, and sees himself as the product of entertainment culture. “I’ve been closely observing, participating in, and digesting it and its wide-ranging impact through my art,” he once wrote.
One of his insights: People today come of age through movies. “They tell you about life, providing some kind of subconscious blueprint for how to live, how to communicate, what to dream of,” he says. “Some of this may be more fantasy than reality but all of this is embedded in the subconscious of our culture.”
Los Angeles, where so many people head to re-invent themselves, or to explore their creativity, was fertile ground for him — and for his art. Israel also is reinventing himself — a movie, video interviews, collaborations with novelist Bret Easton Ellis and with Louis Vuitton, Rimowa, and Snapchat, a line of sunglasses — even as he explores the frontiers of his creativity.
His first landmark self-portrait was rendered digitally in an homage to Alfred Hitchcock and, in time, he once said, he “embraced myself as a brand.” He went on: “As a physical artwork, I wanted my Self-Portrait to look and feel like Los Angeles.” He produced it in fiberglass and acrylic paint — “materials used to make surfboards, custom cars, and movie sets — to connect it to the aesthetic history of Southern California.”
Along the way Israel had two solo exhibits in London that included a seven-channel interactive video installation, and produced a series of video portraits of Los Angeles icons under the title of As It Lays, which provided looks at such luminaries as Kris Jenner, Wolfgang Puck, Cindy Crawford, Eva Marie Saint, and Jaclyn Smith. In the Vanna White episode, Israel, in sunglasses and a white suit that would be the envy of Thomas Wolfe, sits stiffly, asking the game-show hostess whom she would haunt if she were a ghost (she said she was afraid of ghosts) and inquired, “Do you know how to change a tire?” (She does.)
“I just want to do more art, make more exhibitions, make more episodes of my online talk show, make another movie, make a TV show, I want to make more books, I want to do all kinds of projects and collaborations,” he says, breathlessly. “There’s just so many things to do. There’s no lack of inspiration or excitement about the future.”
The Impressionist movement started when artists such as Claude Monet began to paint outside, to produce works that would be displayed inside. The movement to bring the Israel work to one of the premier outside areas in the United States started equally modestly: the notion that the LA-based artist would design Aspen’s ski lift ticket. With paper ski tickets receding into the past in the era of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) cards, the impression of Israel’s imagination on a plastic card clearly pointed to the future. But that was just the beginning.
Momentum swiftly built, and a far more ambitious idea took hold. “Soon,” says Daniel Merritt, curator of the exhibition, “we were talking about bigger ways to tell the story behind the lift ticket.” He travelled to Israel’s Los Angeles studio and saw the portraits of the celebrities who had died since the invention of Instagram in 2010. He was hooked. So was Israel. The result was the ski-in exhibit.
The invention of Instagram is, to be sure, an unusual touchstone for art — not quite like Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 (inspired by the Nazi bombardment of Leningrad) or Picasso’s Guernica (inspired by the bombing of that city during the Spanish Civil War). But that is the whole point: Israel believes media and celebrity are the essential elements of contemporary culture, as worthy of exploration and celebration as the Russian resistance to the onslaught of Napoleon’s troops that marks Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.
The ski ticket and the exhibit bear the name “Heaven,” an homage to the Century City mall pop-culture shop of that name, a novelty venue once frequented by Andy Warhol and Freddie Mercury and the go-to destination for all your lava-lamp needs — a place that television producer and Los Angeles pop historian Alison Martino termed “sooooo quintessential “80’s LA” [when] wearing a Heaven T-shirt was essential at that time.’’
The surprises have come, characteristically, in multiple dimensions. First, of course, is the vibrancy of the work. But also surprising was the number of non-art people who lingered in Ruthie’s; they had just powered down Ruthie’s Run, a blue trail, and saw a crowd gathering at the building. Many if not most of them had no familiarity whatsoever with contemporary art. Until then. They left in awe.
There’s another element to the Israel phenomenon, significant in its own right. The exhibition has changed the definition of what a ski area does — even as it influenced the identity of Aspen’s ski culture. At the same time, it has prompted the leaders of Aspen’s art community to re-examine fixed ideas, to be willing to bring artists into the outdoor environment — art en plein air, in a way — and to consider future ventures and exhibitions that go beyond the gallery.
“Sometimes you have to make a real effort to get to see a work of art,” says George T.M. Shackelford, deputy director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. “It’s not easy to get to see the Buddhist carvings at Borobudur or the giant pictures scratched into the earth along the Colorado River in California, so big you can really only see them from the air. In some cases, the effort’s part of the experience and enhances your appreciation of the work when you see it. By placing his piece where he has, Alex Israel has made the visitor’s arrival in Heaven — and the departure from it — very much part of the work of art.”
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