Bunny Ultramod, Hollywood Art Critic
I want to take a moment to talk about going to a recent exhibit at the New Image Art Gallery on Santa Monica, because it was extraordinarily satisfying. You know you’re going to see something worthwhile when its a bit of an ordeal. Art is always best when there is a velvet rope thrown across it, either literally or figuratively.
There were posters hung around Los Angeles that look like an invitation to an especially crappy punk rock show — a hand-lettered photocopy that read “Neck Face & Fuck This Life: 2 of Amerika’s Most Wanted,” and how could that be more exciting! Punk rock shows are best when they are crappy, and the poster could only have been better if Amerika had been spelled with three K’s, rather than one. Best still, Neck Face and Fuck This Life are not bands, but artists.
John Waters once told me that the best galleries are impossible to get into. I had never had this experience until the New Image. When I went to see the show, the gallery was closed and all its lights were off, but there was a note on the door explaining that the gallery office was just a few doors down, and one could, if one wanted, call over or even just knock at the office to be let into the show. So I walked next door and knocked. Eventually, a puzzled looking, punky young woman appeared, cell phone pressed to her ear, looking bewildered. I told her that I wanted to see the show, but could return later, if this was a bad time.
“Um … ” she answered, looking confused. She thought about it for a while, as though she had just now found out there was a gallery nearby and wasn’t sure what to do. “Um … No. No, I can let you in.”
I walked to the gallery and waited for at least five minutes — long enough to suspect I had just been tricked, and she had fled out the back way. But, no, eventually the back door opened and the young woman entered, dressed in a parka with a fur hood, as though she had just trudged through the tundra to reach the gallery. She opened the door and flipped on the lights, then went to a chair at the back of the gallery and collapsed in it, seemingly exhausted, phone still to her ear.
The gallery is long and narrow, and had a dozen pieces by each artist facing each other. Fuck This Life’s work consisted, for the most part, of an assemblage of found images, primarily of women dressed as witches, hardcore pornography, pictures of actual (and immensely disturbing) violence, and a surprising number of images of Lindsay Lohan. It’s the sort of art that one doesn’t quite know how to react to immediately, and I must confess that I was a bit taken aback by the images of violence. But there, in the upper left hand corner of one collection, was a picture of a lynched man. And not just any lynched man, but William Brown, who was killed by a mob in Omaha in 1919. I once wrote a play about William Brown, and it has been my most successful. It was hard for me to argue that Fuck This Life had no right to make use of such an image when I had based an entire play around it, and so, touché, Fuck This Life. I don’t know how you knew I was coming, but you made your point.
Opposite was Neck Face, a Sacramento-born anonymous graffiti artist. His work consisted almost entirely of drawings of devils. But “drawings” is too sophisticated a term for what he produced. The illustrations looked very much like the sort of thing a very bored, very stoned teenager might attempt with their non-dominant hand when there is a lull in shop class. The drawings are crabbed and primitive, and consist mostly of jokes about alcohol that might have been lifted from a cocktail napkin. In one, the devil is vomiting into a toilet, while above him, in bold cartoon letters, are the words “It’s a spewnami!” In another, the devil looks at a haggard woman with a martini glass and declares “Uhh, you look like I need another drink.”
Idiotic, I know, but I enjoy deliberate idiocy in art. It felt like the punk show that the posters seemed to promise — at least, it felt like the meticulously mindless provocation of The Ramones. I looked at the art and felt something that I always like to feel when I look at art: The urge to cry out “Oh, come on!” Sometimes the best provocation art can offer is to leave you wondering if it’s art at all that you just looked at, or some elaborate prank, with you as its victim. And it’s not uncommon for people to storm out, angrily declaring that a hoax is afoot, and the emperor has no clothes.
Sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes it is a hoax or a prank. But I always think it’s worth sticking around for a while, just to look. Because, every so often, the emperor looks gorgeous naked.
