Into it for the shock of his life

Joel Tauber tries to jolt himself into seeing his place on Earth. In his art he flies, dives, dares.

By Hugh Hart
Special to The Times

December 25, 2004
Picture Woody Allen in a wetsuit swimming with sharks and you begin to grasp the contradictions embodied by Los Angeles' resident highbrow argonaut, Joel Tauber. The 32-year-old Conceptual artist can't brew a decent cup of coffee, and he uses the wrong remote control to bring down the volume on his TV because he's been, for some time now, preoccupied with weightier concerns.

"I have these pantheistic leanings," he explains, standing in the kitchen of his cave-walled mountaintop apartment in Eagle Rock. "If there is a divine, I think it probably lies in everything around us, so I've been trying to figure out ways to have these profound experiences for myself, and I've also struggled to figure out ways to chronicle it."

The quest for transcendence began four years ago when Tauber began studying film and video at Pasadena's Art Center College of Design. First came the "Holes Project." Tauber dug himself into the ground in a variety of positions, at one point burying himself naked, neck deep in the dirt. He failed to find God but did contract a case of poison oak rash. Later he distilled his endeavors into a video installation, "Seven Attempts to Make a Ritual."

Next, inspired by Don Quixote and the noble failures of medieval monk Eilmer, Tauber tried to fly using only his arms. He plummeted 150 times from a desert cliff onto a mattress. "I was trying to mentally prepare myself to think that I actually could do this, like a 2-year-old, without any pre-assumptions," Tauber says. "I wouldn't jump until I was convinced I could fly. Each time, when I hit the crash mat, it was a shock. I ended up pretty bruised."

It's all documented in his video, "Searching for the Impossible: The Flying Project" (2002-03), which can be seen at Orange County Museum of Art's 2004 "California Biennial" through Jan. 9.

Tauber eventually attached himself to a platoon of helium balloons that allowed him to sail across the desert while blowing into a set of bagpipes.

For his latest piece, "The Underwater Project: Turning Myself Into Music" (2004), on view at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Tauber learned to scuba dive. Accompanied by a video-camera-toting companion, Tauber made 40 dives off the Southern California coastline and later translated the depth data into dance music. Drones and bleeps provide a soundtrack to a portrait of the artist as a frequently flummoxed diver, costarring an assortment of fish, crustaceans and seaweed.

"The problem with going underwater is having to breathe through these tubes, like a cyborg, carrying this tank of air," Tauber says. "In the earlier pieces, the earth or the sky weren't trying to eat you alive, whereas here, sometimes you'd get red tide … that makes you sick. So if this tube breaks or that shark gets angry, you're screwed. It was a really hostile environment yet also really beautiful."

'Beauty and craziness'

Elizabeth Armstrong, who co-curated the Orange County exhibition, says Tauber's work is emblematic of a change she has observed among younger California-based artists: "I've noted a return to sincerity. It is such a relief to leave irony behind. The flight project seems very amusing and droll at first, but as you watch the story unfold, you can't help but get swept up in both the beauty and craziness of his venture. That spirit, to me, seems indicative of this particular generation of artist, which is very positive, even sort of utopian, and very much in the moment."

"Look at the artists Joel shares the gallery with," Armstrong adds. "Mindy Shapero has created these really zany dream images that seem very uninhibited. And video artist Marco Brambilla is very ambitious. In order to really enter this world of violent-action video games, he went to work for one of the manufacturers. I think that's something we didn't see in earlier generations so much, this willingness to not just be an artist working in this very prescribed world. For many of these artists, their art and their life [are] indistinguishable. Joel's work doesn't get mired down in technology…. He communicates the experience so that anybody can understand it."

That some of his efforts are rife with danger is precisely the point, Tauber says.

"I have a fascination with this mix of dread and ecstasy," Tauber says. Citing 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant's "notion of the sublime," Tauber adds: "Kant describes how the terror of the majesty of a mountain can lead to the sublime. Shelley, Byron and Coleridge, and the German Romantics, also write about this relationship between dread and the sublime. These ideas have influenced me, but I've tried to determine for myself what exactly would work for me on a metaphysical level. I guess I'm probably the victim of the American ideal that values originality and individuality because I like to do things my own way."

Literary antecedents aside, if there's a rational explanation for his worldview, it might be found in Tauber's brainy, zany Boston upbringing. "My parents are pretty eccentric hippies, basically, who kept the TV locked up because they wanted us kids to play and read and be active," he says.

Tauber's father, Alfred, is a former cancer researcher who now teaches philosophy at Boston University. His mother, Alice, is a painter. He also has a brother named Dylan Bob. But Tauber says the 12 years he spent at a yeshiva had the deepest effect on his worldview. "My parents are Jewish but didn't know anything about Judaism, so they decided to send me and my siblings to a very serious Jewish school."

Tauber attended classes from 8 in the morning to 6 at night, prayed three times a day, did four hours of homework a night and spoke fluent Aramaic and Hebrew by age 13. He was also routinely ejected from class for being disruptive. "I had a lot of energy, a very active imagination, and I liked to run around," Tauber says. "Art was forbidden at the Jewish school, and for me it was an extremely restrictive way to think about religion. They were training me to be a rabbi or a Talmud scholar or something."

Instead, Tauber defied expectations and went to Yale University. "I found art there, and I became interested in thinking about art as a replacement for this Jewish upbringing," he says. "When you go to a yeshiva, everything is about ethics, and for me that kind of idealism is related to naiveté. I guess, in a way, I'm looking for the same kind of moments that worked for me as a kid, during a more naive period — and I don't mean that in a pejorative way at all — where I'm allowing myself to still have this sense of wonder about the world."

Flirting with absurdity

After earning a bachelor's degree in art history and sculpture from Yale, Tauber picked up a teaching degree at Boston's Lesley University, then moved west in 2000. Hirsch Pearlman, a Los Angeles artist who now teaches at Yale and served as Tauber's Art Center graduate advisor, sees some linkage between his protégé's approach and that of Chris Burden, the performance artist known for orchestrating his own shooting in front of an audience. "There's something about scaring yourself with your work that can't help but bring about interesting new ways to establish relationships between the viewer and the work," Pearlman says. "With somebody like Burden, there's a lot more skepticism, whereas the funny thing about Joel's attitude is, there's a real utopic thread running through everything he does."

Tauber is willing to flirt with absurdity if it leads to an unfiltered, uncompromised connection with the environment he's exploring. "In all of these pieces, I wanted to see if I could form some kind of relationship to the earth or to the sky, or to the sea, or to the fish down there, and I wanted to do it in my own way by ignoring any presuppositions embedded in me by our culture."

Every now and then, the willful naiveté pays off. As Tauber speaks, a video of his "Flying Project," silently playing on the TV screen, reaches its finale to reveal the artist wafting his way through the cerulean sky 150 feet above the desert near Joshua Tree. "That was, by far, the most transcendent moment in my life," Tauber says. "You can see everything for miles and miles. I could hear conversations that people were having on the ground a mile or two away. It was incredible because I had no control of where I was going. The wind was blowing me slowly here and there. It was complete exhilaration. I didn't want to come down."

Tauber, of course, did come down. He begins teaching at the USC School of Fine Arts next month. Beyond that, he says, "I come out of each of these things completely exhausted. I have no idea what I'm going to do next."

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Joel Tauber

What: "The Underwater Project: Turning Myself Into Music"

Where: Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 5795 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City

When: Noon to 6 p.m. today and Tuesday through next Friday

Ends: Next Friday

Contact: (323) 933-2117, www.vielmetter.com

Also

What: "Searching for the Impossible: The Flying Project," at the 2004 "California Biennial"

Where: Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays. Closed this Saturday and Jan. 1

Ends: Jan. 9

Price: Adults, $7; seniors and students, $5; 11 and younger, free

Contact: (949) 759-1122, www.ocma.net