In his first decades at LAAC, Hal had revolutionized the L.A. art scene by adopting and rearing the scruffy outliers who didn’t fit with the Venice studios’ frenzy for surfaces or with the fine-art standards of the stuffier city schools. Many of Hal’s students had been male performance artists: showy, good-looking, confrontational guys who used their bodies as art, burying themselves alive or rolling around New York inside oil drums. Others had painted, but rarely with paint, or had made video art when video was still new. Hal’s support had launched numerous careers. As his early students thrived, so did Hal, commanding major retrospectives in London and New York for interactive installations that walked the line between silliness and horror. His 1981 artwork Showers got frequent mentions in textbooks. We showed it at the Rocque once; it was hellish to install—a darkened gallery with four flowing, curtained showers that drained beneath the floor and sent the water up through the heads again. Each illuminated shower hid a silhouetted human figure inside. Beneath the rush of the water, three of the silhouettes sang the same steady, wordless song in harmony. The fourth screamed it. The room’s eerie noise shifted between pleasure and violent discord. It was Gregorian chant, the showers like giant altar candles. It was also Psycho. Visitors loved it.

But something had slipped for Hal in the past ten years. He was approaching sixty, his shoulders had begun to hunch, and he kept resisting the same premodern convention that art was a made thing, instead of the idea of making in the mind of the artist. Everyone knew Hal commandeered his most talented students and alumni to build his installations, and then took credit for their skills. In the seventies, this was an upstart move, but now it looked like indentured servitude. Meanwhile, a mounting number of women and people of color at LAAC had started to complain about the masculine, bravado-puffed ethos of the school, claiming that its scholarships and grants always went to the same kind of white male.

No one had ever claimed sexual harassment, though. In all my encounters with Hal, I’d never seen him touch anyone, not even in greeting. He simply didn’t breach the gap between bodies. He materialized right next to people, but he was short and his arms stayed glued to his sides. He popped up, exchanged cutting banter, then vanished and popped up elsewhere.

“He’s like a social whack-a-mole,” Yegina had muttered to me one night. “Where’s my hammer.”