YOU GREW UP IN MINNEAPOLIS—WHAT WAS THAT LIKE?? It was awesome. It was cold. Very, very cold.
BEYOND BEING COLD, WHAT ELSE CAN YOU REMEMBER ABOUT LIFE THERE??It’s Minneapolis. The Mid West in the eighties. It was really f**cking cool, now that I think about it. We were New Wave kids and we wore tons of eyeliner and wanted to write songs like Heaven 17—if we didn’t get called queens at least once a day, the day wasn’t complete. But it was so small that everyone would go to everyone’s shows. Hip hop kids at death metal shows, for example. It was great. Minneapolis in the eighties was nuts. It’s different now—people are into their specific kind of music and specific kind of scene, but when I was growing up it was like “OK you are totally in to this, and I am totally into that, and we're both just sitting here and its f**king cold”.
SO WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO GET INTO PHOTOGRAPHY?? Nan Goldin’s book, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”. I was working as a bus boy at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis right after high school and I used to sneak out of the restaurant and go hang out in the book store. There was a lady who worked there who I had a crush on—she was older and had red hair and smoked cigars, and I was like ‘wow, she’s f**king crazy”. I never talked to her, it was just observation. I would go down there and flip through books and watch her out of the corner of my eye. Then I opened up the Nan Goldin book and it was like “holy sh*t”. I started sneaking downstairs just to look at that book.
YOU SHOOT ALL THE COVERS OF THE MUSIC MAGAZINE, LA RECORD. TELL US HOW THAT CAME ABOUT.? Sean Carlson (founder of LA’s F*ck Yeah Fest) called me up and said “we are doing this weird magazine, will you do a photo of The Rolling Blackouts looking like the New York Dolls?” and I was like “yeah, sure”. I thought all the covers should be remakes of classic album covers, so that’s what we did for a long while. It was bonkers, because it came out weekly—I was still shooting film and there was no money and we would shoot a roll of film, maybe two rolls, get them processed real quick then they would have to be scanned—and we had to do all this within a week. We were cranking these things out...they were so bootleg.
WHAT ARE THE STORIES BEHIND SOME OF THOSE COVERS?? Dios Malos as Queen—that was the second or third cover we did. We were going to do the Beatles “Yesterday and Today” cover, the one where they look like butchers that never came out. Then I found out that my friend Piper Ferguson just did the same thing for a story in Swindle magazine. So the band shows up and I was like “um…I have bad news.” Everyone was super bummed. We went online and started looking for album covers that would work—and we came up with the cover of Queen II. They were already in black turtlenecks so we knew it could work. Freddy Mercury and Joel are physically very different, but somehow it ended up really working.
WAS THERE ONE ALBUM COVER THAT EVERYONE ALWAYS WANTED TO DO?? Yeah, bands were always wanting to do Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band—for us it became like someone yelling “freebird” at a concert. Our policy was like—“you bring it, and we’ll do it”. But Sgt. Pepper was too complex, we never did it. Mika Miko set the standard for every band—they wanted to do “The Incredible Shrinking Dickies” album cover, and they came up with all the props and everything. Then there was Giant Drag doing Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumors”, Arabian Prince as Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain”, Jim Smith (of LA music venue The Smell) recreating Patti Smith’s “Horses” cover. Nels Cline (Wilco) as Annie Lennox. And Andrew WK and David Cross as Bob Dylan and Suze Rotolo from Bob Dylan’s “Freewheelin’” album.
SO YOU’VE PHOTOGRAPHED PRETTY MUCH EVERY BAND IN L.A.? Yeah, it’s pretty rad. I am not really part of the music scene at all. I know them mainly because of this.
YOU’RE REALLY INTO PHOTOGRAPHING BIRTHDAY CAKES RIGHT NOW—WHAT’S THE FASCINATION?? A cake is super temporary…a brief and awesome statement on a moment. Plus I love baking and I love cake. I mean—I don’t actually bake myself. I am just obsessed with baking and I want to open a bakery. I think its one of the most noble and beautiful professions. I love the “best wishes” and the rainbows and that it’s all cut up and I took this picture and put it on a t shirt, then I started doing them all the time.
YOU ALSO LIKE THE VALLEY.? Yes, the San Fernando Valley is the most perfect mistake in the world. It is a valley and everything from LA ran into it—all this weird damage. The whole thing was mapped out by people who had no intention of living there. And it never became hip.
WOULD YOU PUNCH AN ALIEN?? That depends. I mean, why would you punch anybody? Forget that it’s an alien. Why would you punch a mechanic? I don’t know—if an alien showed up and if it was trying to punch me, I would probably try to punch it back. --By Caroline Ryder??
WHAT ARE YOU DOING NOW? Once a week I visit my friend who is paralyzed, usually at his home, but today we are driving around. He won a raffle, and the prize was a taxi with handicapped access for the day, plus a driver who will take us anywhere we want—so long as it’s in the Valley.
OH COOL. SO, WHERE HAS HE TAKEN YOU? We went to Red Lobster for lunch and now we’re going to a strip joint called Candy Cat One.
ARE YOU FROM THE VALLEY? No, but I was born in L.A.
HOW DID YOU GET IN TO PAINTING? It started with graffiti. And I got into that in the way many other artists would—its what my friends did. I was never like a famous graffiti guy or anything but I did it a lot and it was all I cared about for years. I didn’t go to art school but I did go to college and I have a degree in Biblical History. At the end of my senior year I went to Italy because I knew some Italian graffiti writers. While I was there I started drawing in the museums and realized how much I love drawing figures. I came back to America wanting to be a fine artist. That was in September 2001.
HOW HAS YOUR TAKE ON ART CHANGED SINCE THEN? When I started getting in to art I was pretty unsophisticated in my artistic interests. I just loved the impressionists, and that was it. All my heroes were from 1850 and prior. I didn’t understand anything besides what was obvious, and the impressionist painters are super easy to understand. I would go to contemporary galleries and see a weird square of wood on a nail and I didn’t get it. Now that’s the stuff I’m actually more into. The abstract stuff.
YOU PAINT LOTS OF HOT GIRLS—ARE THEY ALL FROM YOUR CIRCLE OF FRIENDS? Well I live in Hollywood and not everyone in Hollywood is beautiful. But I do look a lot and I sketch a lot. I also read and collect fashion and culture magazines and if anything, I usually draw my source material from those these days. I used to draw friends and now I don’t so much. I guess I am going through an identity change.
WHAT SPARKED THE CHANGE? I got into a serious relationship a year ago, I guess that changed my perspective. A lot of the girls I was painting were from that old porn site God’s Girls and they would come over and model, and I would party with those girls. We’re all still in touch but after a while you just want to change things up a little.
SO WHERE ARE YOU AT RIGHT NOW? I definitely feel a little more sophisticated, not that I am near to where I hope to get. Graffiti was something I really loved and cared about for years and after a while it just gets boring…you have to keep evolving.
SO WHAT’S THE FOCUS OF YOUR UPCOMING SHOW, AT THE COREY HELFORD GALLERY? The focus is going to be color…I am so interested in colors. This show has colors from graffiti like neon oranges and purples and blues and weird colors that come in a spray can, or cheap craft colors. I used those to try to push my visual language. So this time, the paintings are more about color, and the women in them are more like a frame for the color.
THEY ARE VERY FEMININE PAINTINGS. Yes, that actually ties in with my biblical history degree. I am not a religious person at all, I don’t even believe in God, but I studied it because it was fascinating to me. So many religions are based on the duality of the goddess and the god; the male and the female. So many mythologies suggest that the union of the two is what leads you to Nirvana and Enlightment—that’s when all dualities have been merged. So for me, I am a man, and I am a straight man, but I want to make work that is so feminine that it removes a duality.
SO YOU’RE A PRETTY GIRLY DUDE, THEN? Yes. I do smiley faces all the time in text messages.
LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE, I WONDER WHAT’S COMING NEXT FOR YOU, IN TERMS OF YOUR STYLE. OR EVEN IF, GOD FORBID, YOU BROKE UP WITH YOUR GIRLFRIEND. If this relationship ended I would change my name to a symbol and start only painting androgynous people in shades of gray. Maybe. --By Caroline Ryder /Hurley Art
The show, entitled “Conceptual Realism In the Service of the Hypothetical” was most definitely high brow in name and in intent (Williams’ artist’s statement , in which he breaks down the philosophy of conceptual art, is worded so as to appeal largely to critics and theorists.) But the work itself was gleefully accessible—one wouldn’t expect anything less from the artist who invented the term "lowbrow", with his groundbreaking 1979 book, Lowbrow Art of Robt. Williams.
Inspired and schooled by legendary custom car builder Ed "Big Daddy" Roth in the mid-1960s, Robert Williams learned, along with his peers (Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, S. Clay Wilson, Spain Rodriguez, Victor Moscoso and Rick Griffin) how to carve his own path and exist outside the walls of traditional contemporary galleries.
Initially dismissed as a rookie outsider, it took many years for Williams and those of his ilk to gain the respect they deserved. On October 31 2009, the well-dressed crowds at the Tony Scharfazi gallery spoke for themselves— Caroline Ryder / Hurley Art
For more, go to: www.robtwilliamsstudio.com.