ARTURO VEGA American Treasure Howl! Happening An Arturo Vega Project
ARTURO VEGA
American Treasure March 28–April 25, 2015 Howl! Happening An Arturo Vega Project
Curated by Ted Riederer
Howl! Happening takes its name from the unpredictable, free-form happenings of the ’60s and ’70s, where active participation of the audience blurred the boundary between the art and the viewer. More to be experienced than described, Happening will curate exhibitions and stage live events that combine elements of art, poetry, music, dance, vaudeville, and theater—a cultural stew that defies easy definition. For more than a decade, Howl! Festival has been an annual community event—a free summer happening in and around Tompkins Square Park, dedicated to celebrating the past and future of contemporary culture in the East Village and on the Lower East Side. The history and contemporary culture of the East Village are still being written. The mix of rock and roll, social justice, art and performance, community activism, gay rights and culture, immigrants, fashion, and nightlife are even more relevant now. While gentrification continues apace and money is king, Howl! Happening declares itself a spontaneous autonomous zone: a place where people simultaneously experience and become the work of art. As Alan Kaprow, the “father” of the happening, said: “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid and indistinct as possible.”
Arturo Vega (October 3, 1947–June 8, 2013) was a Mexican-born artist who lived and worked in New York City from 1971 until his death in 2013. While he is widely known for graphic imagery that defined punk music and fashion, he was also a prolific painter and printmaker independent of that imagery. Arturo Vega was influenced by De Stijl, a Dutch movement of geometric abstraction that included the artists Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg, as well as by pop art, citing Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein as two of his inspirations. As a young artist fleeing the violent repression facing Mexico’s student movement in the late 1960s, Arturo Vega, in paintings and prints, explored the relationships between the symbols of the power of the United States government, advertising, commerce, sloganeering, and corporate logos. Beginning in 1972 and over the course of his lifetime, he produced between 80 and 90 paintings of an open palm holding a 1972 silver dollar. As Vega lived on the Bowery from the early 1970s until his death, the paintings can be viewed as depicting a beggar’s outstretched palm or as a means of co-opting the power of the symbols of the United States.
PLATE 1
Department of Commerce, 1974 Silk-screen on paper 38 x 38 inches
Carlo McCormick Hard Currency: Arturo Vega’s Silver-Dollar Paintings
A master iconographer for an era of irascible iconoclasts, Arturo Vega understood the potency of symbols as both the visual language by which power could reify itself and the metaphoric idiom that allows us to question and confront the authority of those very same representations. He was able to brand a moment that resisted the corporate culture of commodities and trademarks, allowing us to buy into something that was inherently subversive to the patent acquiescence of consumerism. Yes, he created the emblem that made a bunch of unruly and unapologetic delinquents truly iconic, but as an artist his entire oeuvre has been potently double-edged, barbing the mundane and quotidian semantics of pictorial and written language with a kind of street-level vernacular critique that transformed the benign into the thorny and the common into the extraordinary. A master communicator who wholly embraced punk’s mandate of directness with a terse lexicon and acute articulation of unswerving, matter-of-fact honesty, Vega was also a consummate mediator. The very legibility of expression that made his work so “easy” to read was conversely predicated on how the brilliantly bad translation of terms can proffer unlikely and contrary meanings: understandings that reveal themselves in the misreading. Employing, and in many ways inventing, the fundamental precepts of the punk aesthetic—a DIY approach to creative practice that relies heavily on handmade adaptations of what is accessible—Vega’s appropriation and mutation of the secondhand made him a post-modernist long before such strategies became art-world theory. With this in mind we might say his silver-dollar paintings are both immediately comprehensible and gradually dubious, unmistakable gestures that are ultimately about the mistakes we all make in the process of apprehension, a subtle tracing of that sad little bit of slippage of significance measured in the loss, like water between our fingers, every time we grasp something. Predicated on our near-pathological habit of misunderstanding, or perhaps our penchant to take everything at face value, Arturo Vega’s silver dollars demand that we imagine the flip side of the coin and come to acknowledge the less-certain truth that the inherited terms of our reality are also very much a coin-flip. A sustained body of work that Vega began in the early 1970s and would return to throughout his career, numbering more than 80 works in all, the paintings are deeply disquieting in their insistence. They are the epitome of passive-aggressive gesticulations, at once a request and a declaration, a statement of ownership and of need. As such, they constitute a kind of urban argot, idiomatic of a world in which money is the tangible embodiment of systemic inequality. Likely these palms outstretched with that mighty dollar were a sign of the pride and desperation Vega first registered growing up in Mexico during the crisis and bloody turmoil of the student revolts of the ’60s—the demands for a fairer world and the aspirations for a better life so brutally thwarted that he left for the United States. But more surely they were the signal of an equally profound social dis-ease he learned from his roost in his adopted home of New York City, where just such a show might be performed endlessly along that skid-row stretch of the Bowery where his apartment famously stood.
The signification remains as ambiguous as the parlance of our metropolitan hustle: the flash of cash, the come-on, and just as surely the beggar’s hand asking for help. Arturo Vega speaks to us in mixed messages because he understands confusion as something more deliberate than accidental. While culture resorts to ambivalence as a matter of not quite being able to make up its mind on things, Vega suffered far less from doubt than from an abiding duality. He took the same test we all do, and his was more exacting than many, coming from where he did: he found an America in decline and a New York in freefall. When it came to the questions that really mattered, he never saw it as a choice between one answer or another but always checked all of the above. This is the virtue of his art, why it speaks to so many in so many different ways that remain simultaneously personal and universal, and above all emotionally complex. In a time of profound aesthetic nihilism, Arturo Vega managed to deliver his critique of society as an act of indubitable optimism and love. He could curse the world for all its evils with a smile, damn the whole thing as an act of unmitigated love. Vega did so in his art because he had a poet’s sense of semiotics wrapped up in a radical’s heart of abiding social empathy. Vega’s capacity in these pictures to snarl and smile simultaneously is predicated on his capacity to embrace the capitalist illusion of happiness while querying its darker agenda. Built of silk-screened acrylic paint on canvas, rendered in a silver-patina monochrome that reeks of the black-and-white copy machine image thefts and reproductions endemic to punk art, and often fitted out with flags from Latin American nations that speak to the imperialist thrust of America’s manifest cultural destiny, the hands and the flag patterns are merely the frame for the real subject of the dollar coins. This currency is the thematic focus around which those other human and geopolitical concerns inevitably orbit. Here we receive the full psychological weight of cash-in-hand that only marginal economies can give you. It is not the simple happenstance of any loose bit of change, but that monetary signifier that bears most clearly the official stamp of America’s globalizing hegemony —that eagle, which has played so significant a role in Vega’s art since the mid-’70s and which he borrowed to brand the Ramones as a singularly American band. For the post–Vietnam War condition in which so many young people could suddenly see how political strife and national identity were manifestations of a captalist machine—a machine whose power was vested in its uncanny ability to reduce itself to a glossary of logos—Arturo Vega’s silver dollar is money and state minted as a metaphor for self— the failing promise of hope rendered in that last tease of possibility: all you need is a dollar and a dream.
PLATE 2
Untitled, 1989 Acrylic and silk-screen on canvas 76 x 60 x 1› inches
PLATE 3
Untitled, 1989 Acrylic and silk-screen on canvas 76 x 50 x 1› inches
PLATE 4
Untitled, 1977 Acrylic and silk-screen on canvas 79fl x 58 x 2 inches
This currency is the thematic focus around which those other human and geopolitical concerns inevitably orbit. Here we receive the full psychological weight of cash-in-hand that only marginal economies can give you. It is not the simple happenstance of any loose bit of change, but that monetary signifier that bears most clearly the official stamp of America’s globalizing hegemony—that eagle. . . .
(DETAIL) PLATE 4
Untitled, 1977 Acrylic and silk-screen on canvas 79 x 58 x 2 inches
Dan Cameron Hiding in Plain Sight
Although artists are frequently reminded that creating work that is somehow ahead of its time is key to being remembered by posterity, the downside to this prescription is the unlikelihood of that same innovative work being understood and recognized in an artist’s own time. The harsh reality— which is no less painful for being a shopworn cliché—is that most art that does become recognized during its time is more than likely a stale and derivative version of some other art that came before it, while truly breakthrough ideas, techniques and forms often languish for years before genuine recognition takes place. No matter how many curators, collectors, gallery owners and art critics roam the cities in search of the new and untested, the unfortunate truth is that few people who are deeply invested in the art system genuinely welcome challenges to the status quo that might, in the process of being assimilated, undermine some of their own long-held positions. Arturo Vega is a classic case of an artist who had stumbled onto something vital by the time he became known as a creative force in the downtown New York scene. The twist to the story, however, is that in Vega’s case, the thing he became known for gradually overshadowed the thing that he came to New York to become, which was a painter. Deeply influenced by Andy Warhol, but also politicized by his personal experiences in Mexico City prior to becoming a New Yorker, Vega does not appear to have felt neglected in his art, if only because his application of a visual artist’s thought process, lexicon and toolbox to the building of the Ramones’ legacy is the kind of exposure and contact of which most visual artists, even today, can only dream. If one also takes into account that the New York downtown punk scene of the late 1970s was very much beholden to the 1960s in terms of its apparent anti-materialistic principles, it is entirely understandable that in making a vital contribution to a musical movement that had more than a touch of revolution in its DNA, Vega might even have felt for a period of time that the paintings he made were primarily relics—objects of luxury that had little place in a milieu in which brash attitudes and street smarts seemed far more valuable assets to possess. One of Vega’s most significant mentors in Mexico was the artist Pedro Friedeberg, who developed a very particular version of psychedelic art that was heavily indebted to graphic art and industrial design. In fact, Friedeberg’s success presaged Vega’s own, insofar as it was not Friedeberg’s paintings that made him a financial success in those heady years, but instead his invention of the hand chair, a simple yet ingenious design that could be adapted, copied and licensed for mass production, so that a small army of designers and decorators who had no idea of his name (or his art) made Friedeberg a financially secure individual at a time when most fine artists of his generation found it necessary to teach, publish or perform an array of odd jobs simply in order to maintain their practice. Even as a visual artist, Friedeberg was more recognized as a printmaker than as a painter, at least until recent years saw scholarly interest in his paintings increase. Finally, as Freideberg’s closest artistic friends and collaborators in Mexico were fellow European expatriates—sculptor and theater artist Mathias Goeritz and
filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky—it is likely Freideberg also imparted to his protégée both the importance of collaboration with like-minded artistic souls and the probability, if one was to realize one’s innate artistic gifts, of self-exile. That the punk movement of the 1970s preceded the East Village gallery scene of the 1980s was both fortunate for Vega as well as a hindrance, since by the time art galleries finally appeared that might have taken an interest in his paintings, Vega had already established both a reputation and an income stream as the “fifth Ramone,” and for years his paintings took a definite backseat to his graphic production. This was unfortunate both for him and for us, since the context of appropriated imagery and mechanical production that emerged in the neighborhood by the mid-1980s appears, in retrospect, tailor-made for the kinds of imagery in which Vega specialized, of which the silver-dollar paintings are perhaps the most vivid examples. Gracie Mansion, International with Monument and Nature Morte, to name a few, featured artists who adapted Warhol’s silk-screened techniques through the application of conventional painting skills, producing a hybrid style that felt like a deliberate rejection of the highly expressionistic modes of painting that had ruled the Soho galleries at just about the time the Ramones were breaking into the national spotlight. In particular, Vega’s silver-dollar works seem very much like precursors of the gritty black-and-white photographic imagery that David Wojnarowicz began to produce in the late 1980s, once his AIDS-positive diagnosis convinced him that he would never express everything he felt he needed to as an artist if he continued to rely exclusively on painting. In this sense, the historical predicament that Vega-aspainter represents is doubly problematic, since not only were these paintings never seen by a public that might have been predisposed to appreciate them, but even those artists who might have been his closest artistic allies were, in all likelihood, unknown to him, and he to them. Now that some of the lingering art-historical questions raised by Arturo Vega’s paintings from the 1970s and 1980s are beginning to be addressed, it might also be possible to suggest that the timing, for once, is on his side. Because they exist in serial form, Vega’s paintings from decades ago seem readymade for an artistic era in which production trumps individual expression—in other words, the present moment. Because of Vega’s position as an outsider within American culture, it seems almost inevitable that the burgeoning scholarly and market interest in lost or missing chapters of Latin American modernity seem poised to provide a more international context for his work. Because his foundational artistic collaborations were with musicians, the inter-media paradigm that is driving much of 21st-century work has begun to enhance, rather than deflect, the meanings within Vega’s paintings. And because of the growing general awareness of the gradual waning of America’s unilateral power in a multilateral world, within Vega’s ambiguous image of the hand displaying the coin of the realm—is the hand offering the viewer the coin in a spirit of generosity and sharing, or has the photo been taken an instant before the hand shuts tightly?—it is possible to discern a sour note of political dissatisfaction
with a world in which anyone’s ability to achieve one’s goals seems to be idirectly related to the amount of capital one can apply to making it happen. Vega might have come to the U.S. without any conventional form of artistic patronage, and he may even have prospered in a cultural milieu where such support systems seemed at once remote and obsolete, but it wasn’t until his death that the impetus to take a new and much closer look at his artistic achievements became evident. In contrast to colorful myths about the figure of the overlooked genius, the forces of revisionist history are both systematic and entirely lacking in sentimentality. What truly matters to the hordes of young and hungry artists bursting onto the art world today is that the version of art history that they end up embracing match their own creative needs. For every Damien Hirst, whose artistic star burns intently for a fleeting instant, then fades into crass irrelevance while his coffers swell, there also exists a Charles Burchfield, the affable and self-effacing painter of wildly animated landscapes who died in near-obscurity in the mid-1960s, but is now justifiably celebrated as one of the most potent American artists of the 20th century. Apparently the artists of Burchfield’s day simply didn’t need his example as much as today’s artists do, for reasons that are less compelling for their own sake than for their apt illustration of one of art history’s most ironclad rules, which is that as long as there are dedicated individuals willing to champion artists like Arturo Vega, whose time might once have appeared to have come and gone, meaningful art simply remains as fresh and compelling as it was on the day it was made, still waiting for us to meet it halfway.
PLATE 5
Untitled, 1989 Acrylic and silk-screen on canvas 76 x 51 x 1› inches
PLATE 6
Untitled, 1989 Acrylic and silk-screen on canvas 76 x 44 x 1› inches
PLATE 7
Untitled, 1989 Acrylic and silk-screen on canvas 76≠ x 60 x 1› inches
PLATE 8
Untitled, 1989 Acrylic and silk-screen on canvas 80 x 60 x 1› inches
PLATE 9
Untitled, 1989 Acrylic and silk-screen on canvas 80 x 60 x 1› inches
PLATE 10
Untitled, 1989 Acrylic and silk-screen on canvas 80 x 60 x 1› inches
John Lyons On Arturo Vega and Latin American Flags
Who better to appropriate the U.S. presidential seal than an immigrant, an artist who left Mexico in his 20s and landed on the East Village? Adopting a new country requires taking the symbols, emblems and shields of a new nation and making them one’s own. Arturo Vega took the seal and refashioned it for posterity as the ultimate punk icon, the Ramones logo. But Vega’s perspective on national emblems and logos comes into panoramic view in his series mixing flags—the logos of nations—with the image of an open hand with a shiny American dollar coin, eagle side up. Vega resisted stamping interpretations on his coin series, or on any of his art. “I just found a coin,” he told interviewers once, seated by a large image of his hand and the coin. “I said, Oh, what are we going to do with this? Let’s take a photograph of the coin in my hand.” Later in the interview he said: “I also feel the artist doesn’t have to know or understand what he is doing. I think that’s more the role of a critic.” Vega likely had pretty good ideas about what he was doing. But you can understand why an artist defies defining his work. For sure, Vega’s formative years in the tumult of Cold War Mexico would have honed his sense of the global potency of American symbols. At the time, Mexico was run by a one-party regime, in power so long it was known as the “perfect dictatorship.” By 1968 that party, the PRI, was cracking down on students inspired to demand greater freedoms by contemporary revolutionaries like Che Guevara (who would later become a kind of logo for revolution himself). Mexican troops opened fire on a student march in 1968, on the eve of the Mexico City Olympic Games. At least 30 died, but it could be that the toll was several times that. Leaders dispatched gangs of clean-cut thugs to attack peaceful marches. In 1971, these gangs, called the Halcones, descended on a Mexico City march with bamboo poles and guns, killing dozens. The government feared that the students, with their hair, their ideas and their more open sexuality, could become seeds of the kind of insurgencies taking hold across Latin America. Later, when Vega talked publicly about leaving Mexico, he sometimes showed slides of Mexican newspaper pages with headlines like “142 Artists and Drug Addicts Detained.” So Vega’s move to New York was a move toward greater freedom of expression. But a Mexican artist would also have been aware of the U.S. role in backing repressive, often murderous, regimes across Latin America in countries such as Argentina, Chile and Brazil. A complexity of perspectives on the U.S. emblem comes through in the coin series. Consider one work, where he places the flags of Sierra Leone and Brazil over his image of the open hand with the dollar coin.
Both Brazil and Sierra Leone have large populations of the desperately poor, many of whom can trace their ancestries to slavery. Seen through this lens of poverty, the hand behind the flag could be the desperate hand of the alms-seeker. Or perhaps the American coin is being held enticingly out of reach on the other side of the flags, which become barriers of nationality. And what role did the U.S. play in these nations? Sierra Leone had been populated by freed American slaves seeking refuge. But cities like Freetown were largely left to their own devices, leading to a long, volatile history of coups, poverty, wars and disease. In Brazil, the U.S. backed a 1964–1985 dictatorship that tortured political dissidents to death and sent a generation of artists, writers and musicians into exile. By the time Vega made these paintings, Brazil was opening up again, but it remained a deeply unequal, impoverished and volatile nation. Perhaps ironically, as countries like Brazil and Argentina shed military juntas in the 1980s and eased restrictions on American music, the Ramones became huge. Cities like São Paulo were just getting their first rock-and-roll stations, and the Ramones went into heavy rotation. Bands who toured there won deep loyalty. The Ramones achieved a level of fame in these new democracies that Vega and others in the U.S. always believed they deserved. On tours in Argentina and Brazil, frenzied crowds mobbed the Ramones, forcing precarious escapes in cars— scenes fitting for a band Vega knew early was big enough to make the U.S. presidential seal its own.
PLATE 11
Untitled, 1989 Acrylic and silk-screen on canvas 80 x 60 x 1› inches
Bob Nickas E Pluribus Unum
Do artists, in the moment in which they begin to engage with the world, ever have more than a vague sense that their work will not only reflect but transcend its time and enter into history? Looking back on the just-passed by way of the culture, the counterculture and the vast and wild undergrowth of subcultures encompassing the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, it’s becoming clearer that there are more pieces to the puzzle than we, or the artists themselves, may have once imagined. We find ourselves in the midst of an extended period of rediscovery of much that was lost, forgotten or barely known, allowing us to see how past and present inform one another, and how to go on. And what are three decades? No more than the blink of an eye. In that brief space of thirty-odd years, the very notion of the historical— particularly in terms of Art with a capital A—as reduced to winners and losers would dilate and contract and dilate once more. You wake up in the morning, lids lifting as if from a narcotic sleep, then gradually the room comes into focus, and one by one you begin to rouse others from slumber. As you shake off the sense of being on the outside looking in—as a consumer, as part of an audience—a possibility begins to emerge, a possibility you circle in your subconscious and daydreams: to grasp culture as something in which to participate, without need of anyone’s permission. Little by little, acquiring a heady momentum, everyone allows everyone else. As the pieces begin to converge and interlock, often uneasily, that picture reveals itself to be bigger, increasingly complex and more challenging. But then art, like life—how to make a place for yourself, invent or reinvent yourself— is a matter of problem-solving. While some may see the artist as a solitary, romantic figure, let’s imagine that the artist embodies something else entirely: a gang of one. Walking along the street, you may encounter these other one-member gangs and an initial problem is solved: discovering that you’re not alone. A first step in establishing a personal declaration of independence is to recognize that this awakening occurs for others as well—in charged moments almost simultaneously—and that you are one out of many. If there’s any place to reinvent yourself, or at least if there once was, it was New York. Like so many others before him and since, Arturo Vega headed to New York when he decided to leave home. Home was Mexico City in the early ’70s, a far more troubled and convulsive place than New York in that period. Of course our fair city had dangers and degradation of its own back then, but along with the crime and the grime it was also dirt cheap. Young artists might live in a sketchy neighborhood, but they could survive with a part-time job and still be able to devote time to their work. If this sounds like a million miles away to an artist arriving in New York now, it is, and you probably can’t get there from here. Caught short in these coordinates, there’s only one guarantee. Anyone who wants to make art in this town has to either embrace or resist the Warholian notion of the business artist. Curiously enough, among the early artworks that Arturo Vega made, dating from 1974, are paintings based on the seal of the Department of Commerce, the
beginning of his fascination with the power of the logo. At first glance these works resemble modernist targets, closer to Kenneth Noland than to Jasper Johns: graphic, clean and direct. At the center, the bull’s-eye, is a text which reads: “PACKED UNDER FEDERAL INSPECTION.” In appropriating this sign and its meaning, Vega affords himself citizenship in the United States and a place among the society of artists, mischievously conferring an official seal of approval upon himself, as well as acknowledging that a painting is a form of currency. New and relevant, a painting can also be considered “legal tender,” a commodity that participates actively in its circulation, value and exchange. We all know this today. In our hyperinflated market, every studio and gallery and museum that’s run like a business is a de facto Department of Commerce. (Not forgetting that the inspectors include critics, curators, consultants and collectors.) Having been made 40 years ago, these works are certainly prescient. A painting from 1974 appearing no less than newly minted, any of these might have been made yesterday. While several years would pass before Arturo Vega began his silver-dollar paintings, they follow these earlier works closely in terms of sensibility and conception. And yet they are visually more sophisticated. They are still graphically dynamic, but there is a heightened sense of mystery. There are layers of imagery, overlays of color, a play between abstraction and representation (no representation without taxation), and the hand of the artist as alternately visible and invisible, receding and coming forward. In many we can see that the silver dollar is held in the palm of a hand. This could be someone panhandling in the street—which Vega would have encountered at that time—though the change they ask for is not really change at all. This is a dollar, cast in silver. The metal had to be extracted from the ground. This is not a flimsy dollar, perhaps not worth the paper it’s printed on, the ink nearly rubbing off on our fingers. In these paintings we can also discern the swirls of fingerprints, unique to each of us, potentially used against us, to be taken if we’re arrested. Equally sinister and poetic, this trace of the body brings to mind another New York émigré and Bowery/East Village artist, the photographer Robert Frank, and his book The Lines of My Hand. Engraved with the American eagle, its wings spread, poised for flight, ready to swoop down on its prey, the silver dollar is a sculptural object imbued with the power of church and state. (On its opposite side are the dual declarations Liberty and In God We Trust.) Inscribed above the eagle’s crown is the Latin phrase E Pluribus Unum, which translates as “One out of many.” Seeing this over and over again in Vega’s paintings, we’re reminded of one of the key compositions by the Last Poets, a group that emerged from Harlem at the end of the ’60s, merging jazz, funk, poetry, black consciousness and political engagement—a mix which presaged and would come to influence rap and hip-hop. In the lyrics to “E Pluribus Unum,” a song that appeared on their album Chastisement in 1972, there are parallels to Vega’s silver dollars, to their undertow.
Credit cards, master charge, legacies of wills real estate, stocks and bonds on coupon paper bills Now the US mints on paper prints, millions every day and use the eagle as their symbol ’cause it’s a bird of prey The laurels of peace and the arrows of wars are clutched very tightly in the eagle’s claws filled with greed and lust, and on the back of the dollar bill is the words IN GOD WE TRUST. In addition to silk-screened images of a silver dollar and the palm of his hand, Vega has also incorporated in these paintings flags from countries in North and South America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Serving as backdrops for the silver dollar, they assert—at a time when there were more currencies in circulation than today, and of pre-globalization—that it is the American dollar which serves as the one globally accepted currency. These flags introduce a strongly modernist and pop-inflected iconography into Vega’s paintings. In addition to circles and “targets,” there are stars, stripes and crescents in these works, motifs which are conveyed in repetition. In the duplication of imagery by means of printing techniques such as silk-screen, stenciling and what appears to be Xeroxing (in the grittier black-and-white works and passages they take on the eerie glow of X-rays), pop’s strategy of parody and appropriation is evident. Although it’s often the case that classic pop appears readily identifiable as ’60s, Vega’s approach does not in any way date his works. His use of printing applications and a graphic sensibility in the service of painting aligns him more closely with the current crop of “un-painters” who avail themselves of scanners and printers—our new age of electronic reproduction. Vega’s paintings can be linked as well to today’s process-oriented artists. Rather than painting on traditional canvas support, he chose material most commonly used for drop cloths. On close inspection, we see its seams and imperfections. Vega’s silver-dollar paintings, if shown tomorrow at an art fair by a Chelsea gallery, could easily be mistaken for brand-new works by an up-and-coming star. They might readily be snapped up by speculators and within six months turn up at auction. Flipped, as it were. But this would be no mere coin-toss—heads I win, tails you lose. In the case of Arturo Vega, imagine him looking upon the present—where, as the saying goes, too many know the price of everything and the value of nothing—and leaving us with these words: “Today your love, tomorrow the world.”
PLATE 12
Untitled, 1989 Acrylic and silk-screen on canvas 76 x 51 x 1› inches
Arturo Vega American Treasure
Arturo Vega Foundation
Howl! Happening
March 28–April 25, 2015
Lalo Quiñones
The Arturo Vega Project
Jane Friedman
6 East 1st St. NY, NY 10003
Donovan Welsh
www.HowlArts.org
Curated by Ted Riederer Plate 1. Department of Commerce, 1974. Silk-screen on paper. 38 x 38 inches. Plate 2. Untitled, 1989. Acrylic and silk-screen on canvas. 76 x 60 x 1› inches. Plate 3. Untitled, 1989. Acrylic and silk-screen on canvas. 76 x 50 x 1› inches.
BG Hacker Board of Advisors
(Howl! A/P/E)
Curt Hoppe
Volume 1
Marc H. Miller Dan Cameron Carlo McCormick James Rubio
Plate 4. (Front Cover). Untitled, 1977. Acrylic and
Anthony Cardillo
silk-screen on canvas. 79fl x 58 x 2 inches.
Debora Tripodi
Plate 5. Untitled, 1989. Acrylic and silk-screen on canvas. 76 x 51 x 1› inches.
Howl! Archive Publishing Editions
Lisa Brownlee
© 2015 Howl Arts, Inc. ISBN 978-0-9961917-0-8 Photography © 2015 Jason Wyche Essays © 2015 Carlo McCormick © 2015 Dan Cameron
Howl! Board of Directors
© 2015 John Lyons
Plate 6. Untitled, 1989. Acrylic and silk-screen on
Bob Perl, President
© 2015 Bob Nickas
canvas. 76 x 44 x 1› inches.
Bob Holman, Vice President
Plate 7. Untitled, 1989. Acrylic and silk-screen on canvas. 76≠ x 60 x 1› inches.
BG Hacker, Treasurer Nathaniel Siegel, Secretary Brian (Hattie Hathaway) Butterick
Plate 8. Untitled, 1989. Acrylic and silk-screen on
Riki Colon
canvas. 80 x 60 x 1› inches.
Jane Friedman
Plate 9. Untitled, 1989. Acrylic and silk-screen on canvas. 80 x 60 x 1› inches.
Chi Chi Valenti Marguerite Van Cook, President Emeritus
Plate 10. Untitled, 1989. Acrylic and silk-screen on canvas. 80 x 60 x 1› inches. Plate 11. Untitled, 1989. Acrylic and silk-screen on canvas. 80 x 60 x 1› inches. Plate 12. Untitled, 1989. Acrylic and silk-screen on canvas. 76 x 51 x 1› inches. Plate 13. (Back Cover). Untitled, 1989. Acrylic and
Special Thanks Jaime Chavez Diaz Jaime Riestra Fernando Rascon Kathy Rosenblatt Archive Manager: Mikhail Torich
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of Howl! A/P/E. Editors: Jane Friedman, Ted Riederer Creative Consultant: Susan Martin Copy Editor: Mike DeCapite Design: Jeff Streeper for Modern IDENTITY Creative Direction and Branding: Modern IDENTITY Printed in NYC by Compucolor
silk-screen on canvas. 76 x 44 x 1› inches. All images courtesy of the Arturo Vega Foundation.
The Arturo Vega Project: Jane Friedman
Jane Friedman, Publisher Howl! A/P/E 6 East 1st St. NY, NY 10003 Volume 1
Howl! Happening An Arturo Vega Project www.howlarts.org info@howlarts.org
HOWL! ARTS INC. ARCHIVE PUBLISHING EDITIONS NYC