Decimal & Zero

Henry Taylor’s is pleased to present Decimal & Zero, six early paintings by Jeff Lipschutz and a sculpture by Lipschutz & Lipschutz. The paintings tell of a man named Decimal and his talking beast Zero wandering through an empty landscape. Made in the 1980s, when Jeff first began to paint in San Francisco, the works visually interpret a pulp novel he wrote called Ten High, influenced by Ishmael Reed’s neohoodoo Western Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969). Jeff grew up in the iron-ore mining town of Eagle Mountain, California, which became a ghost town in 1981. A remote company town owned by Henry J. Kaiser, the community lies in one of the most barren stretches of the Mojave Desert. During the Second World War, before Kaiser Steel broke ground to build the mining camp that would become Eagle Mountain, the U.S. Army determined in a series of flyovers that this was the ideal, desolate region in which to train the its Third Army for the coming invasion of North Africa. A flyspeck hidden in a valley—one road in, same road out—the town functioned as a vital link in Los Angeles’ meteoric growth. Its sole purpose was to provide iron-ore to the largest steel mill west of the Mississippi, located in the L.A. suburb of Fontana. Squeezed out by foreign competition, Kaiser Steel shut down Eagle Mountain in 1981. Within a year all of its citizens had to evacuate, leaving the town’s 660 tract homes intact, but empty, its occasional swimming pool derelict and waterless, and its gaping strip-mine depressions eerily frozen.

Jeff Lipschutz saw this place and time as it vanished, but Decimal and Zero survive as precursors of a digital era, a binary unit (man-horse) that departed before the Internet Age. They embody post-industrial disorientation and a post-colonial reckoning. The paintings are early mirrors of the rise of globalization, the off shoring of jobs, and the existential dilemmas that followed. Curiously, the land artist Robert Smithson attempted to work with Kaiser Steel in the late 60s, but Kaiser backed out upon seeing his “de-architecturalization” proposals.

Jeff Lipschutz is part of the artistic collaboration Lipschutz & Lipschutz, with his son, Mike Lipschutz. Together they recreated an element from one of the exhibition’s large oil paintings as a standing sculpture called Scoreboard (2016). Curated by Lipschutz’s daughter Yael Lipschutz, the recently rediscovered Decimal & Zero series has never before been exhibited. The presentation here is the third exhibition at Henry Taylor’s, a newly inaugurated open-format space in downtown Los Angeles, across the street from Hauser Wirth & Schimmel.