The burlap and bronze “bags” posed on Avenue of the Stars, flanked by business centers and corporate office spaces, connote the type of bags Scrooge McDuck might dive into. As the central business district of the Los Angeles basin, Century City’s skyline often symbolizes L.A.’s free enterprise and capitalism.
But these “bags” aren’t filled with money. Inside are rocks. They’re “Full of Nature,” as the name suggests, and represent the high cost of our throwaway culture.
As an artist who uses natural resources to create enduring, almost immortal, installations, Marlene Louchheim prefers to view her bags as two people stuck together for eternity.
Art and commerce have inevitably met up on the streets during the Century City Sculpture 2015 exhibition, a yearlong walking encounter between sculpture and the public realm. As the only female sculptor featured in exhibit, Louchheim, a vivacious 83-year-old native Angeleno, infuses acute observations about relationships into her works.
So, who are these two bags living on the streets of Century City? Are they siblings, colleagues, friends, strangers, lovers? All of the above, says Louchheim.
“And in my strange sense of humor, male and female,” Louchheim said from her in-house studio in Hawaii. “One is always bigger or lower in the relationship. In other words, one is dominant.”
But Louchheim wants viewers to decide for themselves who is what, to participate in the emotional stage she creates with the natural twists and sensual curves of the material. To think and feel what they want. To pull them into the relationship, much like a good novel or film.
It all began with sculptures in stone in the early 70s, when Louchheim decided to pick up the chisel after the last of four children left home for college. She decided to change her life right there. Being civic minded in her hometown of Beverly Hills, she got off all the boards she was on and wholeheartedly throw herself into making art.
When chiseling stone, she would use sandbags underneath to support the material. She was working on a two-part piece and became very involved with the negative and positive space of the two elements.
“I threw the sandbags on the floor to clean my studio after and looked how the sandbags fell, and they were totally a relationship with each other,” she recalled.
The light bulb went on in her head, and she looked at these abstract forms and envisioned the epic story she would tell with the bag series, each getting bigger as time went on.
The bags are made of burlap, which she makes or buys from a company in Alabama, and shot with molten metal to stiffen. She fills the bags with rocks pulled off railroad tracks, picked up one by one. She works with renowned “Fabricator to the Stars” Jack Brogan. And her mentor was George Rickey, the father of kinetic sculpture.
The well-connected sculptor comes from a family real estate firm that helped develop Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade and preserve the Helms Bakery building. Her father, Walter N. Marks, sold or created many complexes on Wilshire Boulevard from downtown to the ocean.
For this, she said, she’s always been hyper-aware of architecture, even sensitive to it, and property and “how people take care of their property and preserve what they have.”
She has a heavy heart for Mother Nature.
“I want to take a throwaway material and make something beautiful out of it,” she said. “I like extracting materials, I like trimming tress, and that’s why I like working in the wood now. Getting down to the core of what the structure really is, I like real things, and I like real people.”
Her latest work reveals the gnarled roots of the ancient Ohia trees, native to Hawaii and found in the barren lava fields. The roots are dead and decaying, maybe 100 years old, but each one is completely different than the next.
She credits living in Hawaii as her daily source for inspiration. Everyday is a different painting, from the clouds in the colored sky, to the water, to the mountains, to the wildlife. She’s surrounded by the peacefulness of nature, sans traffic or buildings.
She remembers her brother, the late Wally Marks, fondly for his commitment to social justice and to people in general.
“Our society today is not so dedicated to making a commitment to another person particularly,” she said.
After his death in 2009, she created two 8-foot bags in memory of him, installed in a temple in Nashville, Tennessee.
“I think you have to have a strong sense of commitment and responsibility to yourself for achieving things you think are important,” Louchheim said.
In addition to L.A. and Kamuela, Hawaii, she has exhibited her work in New York, Malibu, Orange County, Austin, and Kansas City, Missouri, has had significant commissions; and in 2005 was honored with a 25-year retrospective at the Walter N. Marks Center for the Arts on the campus of the College of the Desert, in Palm Desert, California.
For more information about Louchheim and her work visit louchheimstudio.com.
