By John Pecorelli
Art Collector International magazine, July/August 1999
“I'm not presenting a case that predicates true art as being the domain of the lowest common denominator. But it sure as hell is less pompous.” —Robert Williams
In 1882, Oscar Wilde was asked to lecture a handful of miners in a tiny, violent Colorado town called Leadville. The topic: Sandro Botticelli and aesthetics. The Irish poet accepted, and to establish common ground with the rogue's gallery of drunk cowboys, dingy miners, and cutthroat knaves that made up his audience, Wilde broke the ice with an anecdote about the 16 th century Italian Renaissance goldsmith, author, and ultimately, exile Benvenuto Cellini. When asked why Cellini wasn't present, Wilde replied that he was dead. “Who shot him?” demanded an irate listener. “I'll kill the son of a bitch!” And the man bounded from the room, revolver ready.
It's no secret that painter Robert Williams loves to tell this story. And it's no surprise either. The same corsair spirit defines Williams, whose personal stationary and business card read “Befouling the art world's nest since 1957.” Williams eschews commercial ventures and views his own work as fine art, though his thematic palette draws as much from B-movies, comic books, and hot rod culture as it does from the surrealists and Renaissance classics. His vernacular is American slang, his music is rock and roll. He and his wife founded a glossy renegade art magazine called Juxtapoz.
Williams has been at the helm of the most-attended show in Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art's history, and last year he hosted a sold-out exhibition in New York City 's prestigious Tony Shafrazi Gallery. At 55 years of age, Williams has influenced a countless number of contemporary artists, from Anthony Ausgang, Frank Kozik, Coop, R.K. Sloan, and Jill Jordan to Jim Shaw and Mike Kelley.
And, to the absolute horror of moral guardians on the left and right—as well as stolid museum trustees everywhere—Robert Williams' oils are selling like Big Macs.
Sitting in his '32 Ford three-window hot rod at Bob's Big Boy Restaurant in Toluca Lake, California, Williams explains.
“When I was a kid, I would go to a museum and look at the pastoral paintings, then go to a second-hand store and see all the one-sheet movie posters,” he says, slurping a Coke. “I started noticing that the one-sheet movie posters really kick you in the ass. And they're a lot more fun than looking at abstract expressionism. The commercial artists have come up with all these bitchin' devices to grab you and hold you, while these other characters have just glopped this stuff on, trying to be subtle and elusively intelligent. I'd go for the one that uses a splash panel like the first page of a comic book—or any other cheap device to just nail you. That's an art, an underappreciated art, and it requires calculating and intelligence. There's a composition that has been strained to the breaking point for energy. That's what I try to bring out in my paintings.”
In fact, Williams' compositional style is so visually arresting that in 1987 the city of Los Angeles hired him to paint a notoriously graffiti-prone underpass to discourage vandalism. It worked—for a while. Eventually the graffiti artists took to painting their own white canvases over Williams' torrid patterns, upon which they could once again apply graffiti.
But it's not merely his compositional elements that are flipped-out. Check the subject matter: dead puppies, pinheads, bestiality, religious icons in drag, nude women straddling everything from corn dogs to slaughtered unicorns—and a host of stalwart, well-scrubbed American archetypes enduring all manner of physical, emotional, and psychic abuse. Despite claims by certain of his critics, the confrontational visuals rarely seem gratuitous. This characterization is a point of contention for Williams however. In fact, he seems almost taken aback by it.
“They are gratuitous,” he states. “It's not necessarily there for some moral statement; depicting mutilated people is a device to get emotion. That's hard to understand, especially to sensitive people who say. ‘You're just doing that to shock people.' In reality, I'm doing that to make people nervous, to work on their anxieties…
“And since a painting is two-dimensional and has to compete against television, video games, computers and a whole arsenal of time-consuming entertainments resulting from electricity, a painting has got to have real energy. So the obvious thing to do is take the lessons learned from psychedelic art and punk rock art and pop art—all these devices that generate energy—and see if they can't be orchestrated into a painting that would entertain you, stimulate you, and sit as a static thing, but on the other hand give you the impression that it is continually in some kind of motion. The tradeoff is that you sometimes have to come up with some pretty hair-raising tricks, and one of those tricks is the use of gratuitous sex and violence.”
Little wonder, then, that the fine arts world has required some time to get used to Williams. “Flying Saucer Attack on a Pirate Galleon” does not exactly sit quietly alongside Sol LeWitt ziggurat sculpture, after all. “Two Bull Dykes Fighting for the Privilege of Buying a Prostitute a Banana Daiquiri” does not lend itself easily to the lobby of an old-money brokerage. While Williams allows that his work displays an intrusiveness that almost forbids its use as a decorative item, he thinks the real reason that full-scale fine arts acceptance has remained elusive is much simpler.
“The highbrow art world does not want the intrusion of a lot of artists and their art groups vying for the same real estate in museums,” he says. “This is where things are sanctified and declared official art. Once you have space there, you have a chance to start grabbing off the collectors. And there are only a certain amount of collectors, and only so many foundations that invest money in art. It's a shark-eat-shark situation.
“These people established themselves through a long, brutal process in the ‘50s and ‘60s, evolved into what they are now with all the connections to Europe—it's all a large network that revolves around art critics and art schools, foundations that support art, trustees on museums,” he continues. “So to come in with a whole new kind of art is a little freaky for them. The change has got to be very gentle and very careful. Everyone's up for the change, see, but they all think the change is going to be something they already anticipated.”
Suddenly a 1939 Ford convertible cruises by—Bob's Big Boy is a hot rodders Valhalla on Friday nights—and Williams is quick to point out that the Ford's body has been chopped, channeled, and sectioned in an attempt to look slicker and sleeker. Ask him and he'll tell you that this, too, is art, regardless of its social relegation to blue-collar craftsmanship. Hot rodding for Williams is a modern anachronism for “getting spirit and soul out of a piece of machinery,” and it played a central role in his artistic development.
Growing up in Montgomery, Alabama with a father who ran stock cars, Williams developed an early eye for detail—and a dedication to the craft that not only separated him from huge amounts of cash (at the time hot rods had no resale value), it separated him from an attention-starved fiancée as well.
Running wild with a hot rod club in New Mexico as a teenager, Williams found himself spiraling into a world of drugs and criminal behavior that resulted in arrests ranging from public drunkenness to aggravated assault. He was involved in hundreds of fights, of which he admittedly won “very, very few.” By the early ‘60s Williams figured that if there weren't some sort of drastic change pronto, he'd be relocating to the penitentiary in Santa Fe .
He decided on art school in California instead.
Williams enrolled in the vocationally oriented Los Angeles City College, where he could polish his draftsmanship skills for $6.50 per semester. After becoming an award-winning cartoonist for the school newspaper, Williams moved on to the Chouinard Institute, the prestigious fine arts academy that would later become known as CalArts. There at Chouinard began a long-standing feud with the world of abstract expressionism.
“In the mid-‘60s, the art world was totally dominated by abstract expressionism—a washy, muddy form of that painting which completely disregards the skills of draftsmanship, and works more on shape and texture and loose wash,” he says. “It uses a limited palette of, say, all earth tones and maybe blue, so the imagination really stifles. And just about anybody could have been an abstract expressionist, so you had an awful lot of happy art students who later couldn't sell a painting.”
Insistent on mastering representational skills, Williams was snubbed by the school's dominant professorial clique as a common illustrator (“which is kind of like being called a bus boy,” he quips). So Williams checked out of Chouinard and tried his hand at commercial art. A stint as an art director for Black Belt magazine led quickly to a stint as a container designer at the Weyerhaueser Corporation—the box company—which led quickly to a stint at the unemployment office. While there, Williams noticed a job posting by Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, a maverick painter, machinist, and hot rodder whose Rat Fink cartoons inspired millions of adolescent boys, and whose low-tech, high-imagination automotive designs challenged Detroit 's elite engineers. Roth was later dubbed by Tom Wolfe as “the Salvador Dali of the movement.”
Williams enjoyed years of success as Roth's art director—but the times they were a-changin'. As the Vietnam War and the protest era hit Southern California, a new generation of teenagers entirely disregarded the trappings of ‘50s culture, hot rods included. Roth, hounded by the FBI and the IRS for his perceived role in the counterculture, closed up shop. But Williams was quick to adapt, his work of that era incorporating elements from the strange, new psychedelic art seeping down into Los Angeles from San Francisco —harsh contrasts, gooey liquid fonts, ultra-vivid coloration. Other artists were also taking note, and a small, iconoclastic community began to emerge.
“It hadn't gelled yet,” remarks Williams. “But with Stanley Mouse and Roth and Von Dutch and me, and the psychedelic poster artists and the soon-to-be underground cartoonists like Robert Crumb and Rick Griffin and Gilbert Shelton, all these things were heading toward one common form of low-brow art that would eventually rise up and challenge the art world.”
It was then that Williams began to embrace cartoon art, joining Zap Comix with Crumb, Griffin, and S. Clay Wilson, among others. Williams already had a history with the form: Like a lot of other kids in the ‘50s, he'd been hopelessly addicted to E.C. comic books, a line of finely penned periodicals like Shock Illustrated and Vault of Horror that dealt satirically with everything from cannibalism to the occult. Not long after, Seduction of the Innocent was published, a rabidly rightwing anti-comic treatise by Frederick Wertham. As a result, in 1954 an Estes Kefauver-led congressional subcommittee declared such comic books “unhealthy” and illegal, sending the entire comic book industry into a self-censoring tizzy. E.C. went under, and Williams felt the loss.
The birth of Zap Comix was, in part, revenge.
“The United States was involved in Vietnam —a goofy fuckin' war,” Williams recalls. “We were over there trying to arrest an entire nation, and they were arresting everyone here who wouldn't go and arrest them there. I was a draft dodger—not a leftwing person, but I sure as hell wasn't interested in going to a war of no relative significance for us. But the divide in this country was tremendous! The majority of Americans supported the war, but I belonged to the dissident batch, and the internment camps in eastern California and Nevada [originally used to “relocate” Japanese-Americans during World War II] were being reconditioned to round up the dissidents. And the FBI was down on Roth and they knew my private business, all our phones were tapped.
“So this brutal social cyst that brewed was natural fodder for a number of underground comic artists, who began voicing a very definite dislike for authority. And part of that goes all the way back to the outlawing of those damn funny books: ‘If you think you didn't like the comics then, wait till you see what we're up to now!' You know, sodomy, every kind of sexual perversion imaginable. ‘You think E.C. was bad? You don't know what bad is! You think that stuff poisoned kids...' So the prophecy that Dr. Wetham made—that comics would bring harm to children—was right. I'm testimony to it.”
Williams' time with Zap led to a further exploration of comic techniques in a series of paintings he calls, “Super Cartoons.” Unapologetically comic in imagery, these paintings nonetheless display a remarkable depth and detail, utilizing underpainting techniques of the Flemish masters. The Super Cartoons required three layers and an amber varnish glaze, and while successful commercially, this was a time-consuming process. Just then the punk rock movement, with its emphasis on speedy, slam-it-at-‘em energy over careful craftsmanship, exploded internationally. And Williams, as is his way with youth culture, was paying attention.
“So I'm a young man painting all by myself with no peer group, see. My paintings were getting finer and finer, more detailed, more blended out, bigger. All of a sudden these punk rockers start having shows around town, doing this real fast, real brash stuff and getting attention. So I just started churning out this crap, see, that was shown at after-hours clubs who used the gallery format to sell liquor without a license. So drunks and people on drugs showed up after 1 a.m., and the stuff was designed for them: cheap and sensationalist, but it's got a real innocent, spontaneous energy. These paintings were a great success—it was quick work, the prices were inexpensive, and I took time payments. I went from this really well-done stuff to this real slop, and gained a tremendous amount of respect in just a few years.”
Williams eventually drifted back to more elaborate work, fleshing out the backgrounds with detailed scenery rather than discordant, electrified graphics. By the time the full-fledged narrative sequences began appearing in his work, Williams was enjoying sold-out shows on both coasts. His inclusion in the 1992 Helter Skelter exhibit in the Museum of Contemporary Art proved a milestone, for MoCA as well as the artist. Helter Skelter featured a slew of what MoCA Chief Curator called “iconoclastic artists,” and attracted 117,000 people, the most in the institution's history—at one point necessitating the deployment of the L.A.P.D. riot squad. Williams considers that event a rousing success of extreme import. The mainstream media and highbrow art critics, however, did not.
“There must have been 150 American newspapers that reviewed it, and all but one just cut it to fuckin' pieces,” he bristles. “This was the first large museum show with prominent modern artists where the majority of the work was cartoon-oriented. Cartoons are our vernacular. A hundred years from now, you ask what the music of the 20 th Century was, they'll say rock and roll. What was the art of that time? Cartoons. They're not just an adjunct to pop art, they're not a subservient part of graffiti art, they are a language.
“But these critics…they're very intelligent people, they're very sensitive people, they're very liberal people, and they're very scared and clique with each other. They're all in synch; when some anomaly comes up and they're not going to accept it, they all don't accept it. This validates some notion that they're dealing in absolutes,” Williams concludes.
“ While he often chides the abstract expressionists and chuckles at the huge sums of money charged for minimalist and conceptualist art, he does think it absurdly “bitchin'” when an artist, say, is able to charge upward of a quarter-million dollars to arrange several large wood blocks for a patron. For Williams, the question of artistic value goes back to the Dadaists, specifically to Marcel Duchamp declaring that one day an artist would merely point at an existing object and in so doing declare it art. Generations of Dada veneration have resulted in generations of incapable art students, he says, but still Williams finds the Dadaist agenda of devaluation worth defending. And it is not merely relevant to the stuffy art world of 1890 from which Dada sprung—“a brutal, academic world dominated by arrogant dipshits”—Duchamp's assessment is wholly relevant today. Williams' proof positive comes from an unlikely source: Wall Street.
“There was a bad stock market crash in '87, and the first thing that was upset was the art market,” he explains. “Because none of it is a necessity like iron ore or commodities, it's just sellin' smoke to people. The art market tried not to let anyone know how hard it was affected, but the whole thing had collapsed horribly. Los Angeles and New York lost half their galleries within just a few years. The Japanese took it in the shorts to the tune of billions of dollars that they'd spent on minimalist and conceptualist art, and all these foundations started donating this stuff to museums for tax write-offs, until even that was saturated.
“So now you have warehouses and warehouses of this stuff that you never hear about,” Williams continues. “Why? Because no one wants to say, ‘You know that art we spent seven or eight million for? Well, it ain't worth the powder to blow it to hell now.' Maybe somewhere down the line the stuff will get back on its feet again. When Picasso died, the market just suddenly froze because everyone thought, ‘Gee, this guy did three paintings a day, and we're just going to get barraged with all this shit.' It took seven or eight years of the stuff just sitting around before the market stabilized. And now, of course, it's the most expensive shit you can buy. But at the time, everyone was like, ‘Freeze. Let's not do anything. What we got might not be worth what we thought.'”
While Williams currently enjoys a waiting list of nearly 250 patrons for his paintings, the collectors are not merely limited to celebrities such as Nicolas Cage, Deborah Harry, and Leonardo DiCaprio, all of whom own Williams originals. Nor is the respect of colleagues limited to the countless up-and-coming artists who've used his trailblazing style and acute business sense for inspiration. Crumb, gallery owner Shafrazi, and actor Dennis Hopper have all gone on the record to champion Williams' peculiar genius.
But there have always been detractors. The New York Times ripped his landmark Shafrazi exhibit last year, cutting Williams down as little more than a glorified illustrator. And there appears to be a silent majority within the fine arts realm that refuses to recognize low-brow culture as a noteworthy—or even a serious—form. Such attitudes are one reason Williams chooses to give his current paintings three titles: one, a normal title. Second, an artfully bombastic academic name, and third, a blue-collar denotation that spares no vulgar expense.
Case in point, Williams' visual retelling of the aforementioned Oscar Wilde lecture. The painting's general title: “Oscar Wilde in Leadville, April 13, 1882 .” The academic slam: “Culture, Unlike War, Moves in a Breeze and Not a Gale, This with its Slight Persistent Force Has Made a 19 th Century Playwright & Sodomite the Messenger of Art to Cretins and Is Destined to Be the Doomed Nut in a Three Dollar Fruit Cake.” The pool-room title: “A Fairy's Kiss for Syphilitic Lilly Sniffers.”
The “Leadville” painting resulted in an irony even beyond its name, however. Williams has grown well used to criticism and revulsion from rightwing moral guardians, from Dr. Wertham and the Kefauver Subcommittee to the New York criminal court judge who suppressed Zap Comix's fourth issue on obscenity grounds in 1969. But with “Leadville,” the enemies came from a different and unexpected camp: the left. A feminist and gay advocacy organization called Politically Involved Girlfriends (PIGS) loudly protested his inclusion at the Helter Skelter exhibit, tagging Williams' art “homophobic, racist, and sexist,” and alleging that Williams had insultingly depicted Wilde's homosexuality as a disease. ‘
The artist's thoroughly nonplused response is chronicled in Malicious Resplendence, a beautiful, 300-page Williams retrospective just published in Seattle by Fantagraphics. In defense of his personal politics, Williams wrote, “The irony of this protest is that I happen to believe in a lot of the points the MoCA protestors were attempting to get across.” In defense of his painting, and his views on Oscar Wilde in particular, Williams expressed deep admiration for the poet who would address a morass of “roughnecks and cowboys and prostitutes and miners and gunslingers” on aesthetics. “To me,” Williams wrote, “this was the most incredible thing, to visualize him on a stage dressed in these Edwardian tights lecturing about beauty to these hard-assed frontiersmen… Well, he got up there on the stage and absolutely won these people over.”
With his slow, steady penetration into the sanctified fine arts realm (“I've gone from the top of the bottom to the bottom of the top,” Williams says), with his far-reaching influence on a generation of modern artists, and with the startling success of his Juxtapoz magazine, one can hardly argue that Williams is bringing art to the roughnecks, as Oscar Wilde did.
The problem with Robert Williams, if you ask certain people, is exactly the opposite: he's bringing the roughnecks to art.
Back at Bob's Big Boy, the parking lot is packed with all manner of hot rods: ancient Model A's, chromed-out T-buckets, early roadsters, a couple of hydraulically lifted low-riders, even a Harley hog with a Chevy 350 powering it. Groups of teenyboppers, rockabilly cats, and middle-aged car nuts mull around, chatting and checking specs. Williams takes another sip of Coke and surmises the scene.
“When I came out here in 1964,” he says, “hot rodding was absolutely dragging my life down. Every cent I would beg, borrow, or steal went into gettin' stuff chromed, and there was absolutely no return. So I said, ‘I'm going to be an intelligent, sophisticated artist—and I'm not going to run around with these dipshit hot rodders. I'm going to expand my mind, not be one of these idiots.' Some of these guys are the most interesting, creative people in the world, but you talk to most of them, they're just fuckin' knaves.
“But I get around art people and they're so delicate and boring,” sighs Williams, exasperated. Then he adds, “I'd rather be with these knaves.”
SIDEBAR:
“Art magazines are boring.” That's what Robert Williams thought, so he started his own
“For me, the history of art that I was told in college seemed seriously lacking I certain things,” says Greg Escalante, editor of Juxtapoz magazine. Escalante also happens to the Trustee of the Orange County Museum of Art, and President of the Board of Trustees at the Huntington Art Center . “I don't know how the whole thing works, but Juxtapoz has definitely shown a light on a lot of art that wouldn't have gotten recognition any other way.”
Robert Williams and his artist wife Suzanne founded Juxtapoz four years ago, partially as a means of combating what Williams calls a “stoic, stale, and boring” art periodical climate in America . In its four short years, Juxtapoz has enjoyed phenomenal success, racking up a circulation second only to Art in America, he says.
One reason why: hyper visuals. Published by skateboard magazine publishers High Speed Productions, Juxtapoz pooh-poohs fancy graphics work in favor of a crammed, busy style more reminiscent of Cosmopolitan than Art Forum. It is shot through as much with ads for tattoo parlors and indie record labels as for galleries and museum exhibits.
Another reason: readability. In the summer 1998 issue, filmmaker Spike Lee wrote, “Michael Ray Charles is a natural born filmmaker who so far has never made a film. He instead is a painter.” That's as clear an example of the magazine's vision as any. If not overtly anti-intellectual, Juxtapoz certainly straightforward and understandable.
One last reason: Wack subject matter. In addition to more mainstream coverage of artists such as Keith Herring and Kenny Scharff, Juxtapoz runs pieces on the oil paintings of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, articles penned by the likes of actor Nicolas Cage, painters interviewed by rock stars, and, once, something called “Drunk Driving in the Name of Art.”
“One missing element in all the art magazines is anything that gives the feeling that art can be fun,” says Escalante. “Here's the picture, here's the didactic criticism, here's the boring story, here are the dry facts. But where's the rest? Art openings can be cool. There can be interesting-looking people, cool music, good conversations, and great art to look at and talk about. The essence of it can be completely fun, a party-like experience. None of the magazines give any hint of that—you never see the pictures of Roy Lichtenstein having a cocktail with his arm around Claes Oldenburg in the magazines.”
Nonetheless, digital artists Carlos Encinos calls Juxtapoz “a big ad rag for Robert Williams' work,” and other critics have slammed the quarterly for its heavy representational slant, an unstated policy that might ironically exclude the art of its cofounder, Suzanne Williams, who works in a more abstract realm. Meanwhile, others praise the magazine for providing a place for young and unheralded artists to find a following, a nutrient crucial to the future of art.
“The whole scene of the national art magazines was so Byzantine,” says Michael McManus, an art historian and faculty member of the Art Institute of California. “You had to be a gallery-represented artist first, and the galleries had a very elaborate pecking order. You had to have all of that, as well as a lot of other things, to even advance to the next step. Juxtapoz just looks at the art. You don't have to be represented by someone like La Luz de Jesus to get some consideration there. All you need is something interesting to look at.”
Robert Williams' own appraisal is characteristically to the point—one might dare even say minimalist.
“At magazines are boring. Art museums are boring. Juxtapoz 's success shows that people want something to look at. You're not going to get some bland-looking drawing and three pages of art-speak, you know.”