Arturo Vega, Insults

Arturo Vega Insults Howl! Happening An Arturo Vega Project

Arturo Vega Insults March 5–31, 2016 Howl! Happening An Arturo Vega Project Volume 1, No. 9

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 lecturing at the Tate Modern, London, for the Merge Festival 2011

From top to bottom: Masthead from El Nacional, February 13, 1971; independent student newspaper Por quĂŠ?, Mexico, 1968.

Ted Riederer Arturo Vega, Making Headlines

Arturo Vega (October 13, 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 initially moved to New York to pursue a career in the performing arts, he had been actively producing collages since 1970. Vega’s love of theater, costumes, and performance was a constant theme in his life and work. Known worldwide for his designs as the artistic director for The Ramones, Arturo Vega explored his fascination with the power of the printed word in hundreds of paintings and prints throughout his prolific career.

One vibrant example of this work Vega called Insults, a series of paintings emblazoned with phrases like “HEY YOU FAG” and “YOU IDIOT BASTARD.” These paintings were part of a larger body of work that the artist described as “sentence” or “word “ paintings.

The Insults were first shown in 1992 at CB’s 313 Gallery in New York City, and subsequently in 1994 at Raleigh Studios in Miami. Arturo continued to revisit text-based work until his death. Later in his career he produced a series of additional word paintings called Love, Life, Lust and Lie, Cheat, Steal. His final large-scale commission was a textbased collage, which read “LIFE ISN’T TRAGIC LOVE IS JUST BEING IGNORED.” A more careful analysis of his choice of a simple bold typeface in his designs, painting, and print work reveals a heretofore unnoticed connection. The typeface used in the Insults is in the same family of fonts used in the headline of the October 1968 independent Mexican paper Por qué?, declaring “Murderers” in reference to the infamous Tlatelolco massacre, where an unknown number of student protesters were slaughtered by the military. We see the same style type-face again in a New York Daily News headline from the same year: “Actress Shoots Andy Warhol.”

In lectures, Arturo Vega often referred to another batch of newspaper clippings that he carried with him until his death in 2013. “Federal Judicial Police Arrest 149 Drug Addicted Hippies of Both Sexes” reads the headline of the Mexican daily El Nacional on February 13, 1971. This headline represented more than an ideological trauma for Arturo: he was one of those arrested along with 148 of the most important actors, actresses, artists, writers, poets, and filmmakers of the day. They were detained at a party in an affluent suburb of Mexico City.

A student of the National Institute of Fine Arts, where he studied acting and theater production, Arturo Vega was actively performing throughout Mexico. He toured with a student production of The Who’s rock opera Tommy. He performed in drag in “Festival Pop” at the Fine Arts Palace in Mexico City, and he performed in a Broadway musical called Your Own Thing at the Teatro Los Isurgentes.

His 1971 arrest alongside plastic artists Jorge Luke, Helen Escobedo, and the Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, who were all in attendance, highlights the persecution that Vega and other artists, actors and actresses suffered under the PRI, the repressive ruling party that encouraged gangs to attack hippies on the streets of Mexico. In search of

artistic freedom, Arturo Vega moved to New York City later that same year, where he would begin his career as the world famous designer and visual artist.

In faded microfiche printouts from 1971, the pictures and small point type are faded and illegible, but the bold headline letters remain as crisp and exclamatory as the day they were printed. These 40-year-old headlines not only match the same font used in the insult paintings—the masthead of El Nacional is printed with an almost identical font as Vega’s logo for the band The Ramones, which he composed with Franklin Gothic Letraset dry-rubbed letters. It is revelatory to note the masthead of El Nacional also contains the main building block of The Ramones logo, an eagle within a circle.

Arturo Vega chose the inculpatory urgency of a sans serif headline because the honesty of unembellished text was the most direct way to communicate a message or idea. These phrases from the Insults may have been hurled at Arturo Vega as he walked the streets of Mexico City, a young gay hippie during a period of repression in late 60s Mexico, or overheard between a shop owner and a vagrant on the Bowery during 70s.

In an interview with On Creativity from 2012, Arturo Vega says, “I cannot get a book and read it and say my next series will be based on this, this, and this. No. my ideas come from the streets.” The Insults certainly did, and as he composed the script that he would enact through his paintings, designs and prints, he made headlines.

HEY YOU FAG, ca. 1990-94 Acrylic on Canvas 54≠ x 54≠ x 1› inches

WHAT THE HELL, 1994 Acrylic on canvas 54 x 162≠ x 1› inches

AINT REAL, 2011 Acrylic on canvas 20≠ x 40 x 1› inches

AINT MINE, 2011 Acrylic on canvas 20≠ x 40 x 1› inches

YOU FUCKIN ASS, ca. 1990-1994 Test image, dimensions variable

Sandra Schulman Hell, Love and Other Insults

YOU BIG APE. YOU IDIOT BASTARD. No one could insult you quite like Arturo Vega. And because he was brutally honest, fiercely intelligent, and spoke several languages, you knew that he meant it. And it was true.

Then he would laugh.

Ah ha ha ha.

Words as art always had a power and meaning to him, from the real grocery store signs CHICKEN PARTS and BLUEBERRIES that he first earned money off of when he hit NYC in the 1970s, to the HEY HO LETS GO fist pump chant heard round the world. Cue Zippy the Pinhead and his hand-painted sign under the giant hand-painted RAMONES banner.

HEY YOU FAG. PEOPLE ARE ROTTEN. The insult paintings probably came from the years he spent in the Ramones van listening to JohnnyJoeyDeeDeeTommyMarkyCJRichieElvis rip each other to shreds on the endless drives where racial, homophobic and religious slurs flew past like so many exit signs.

The primary colors of red blue yellow black ensured a major pop wow factor. The slant on the letters gave it a visual edge. You can’t read this head on. There is always an angle.

I didn’t mean it THAT way.

AINT REAL. AINT LOVE. He had words inked into his skin—E PLURIBUS UNUM across his shoulders, LOVE bordered by decorative bands on his arm, and in a huge scroll across his chest JUSTO Y NECESARIO. And of course The Ramones logo huge on his back, arm to arm, neck to waist.

Words to bleed for. Words to live and die by.

In one of his last public pieces, a mural on Elizabeth Street, words showed up one last time in a halo around Jesus’s head that read: LIFE IS NOT TRAGIC, LOVE IS JUST BEING IGNORED. Maybe by spelling it out Arturo made sure it could not be ignored.

LOVE. FUCK. LOVE. FUCK.

As he wrote in a 1994 statement for an exhibition of his paintings I curated in Miami Beach: “Art is everywhere but there is never enough Art. Art has stopped being a chronologically correct string of schools and isms and is being born all the time, everywhere; Art connects to the eternal demanding fast changes and a reckless appetite for truth, justice and a better way of life. I want my art to look clean and clear, and like light rays to be loaded with a vast spectrum of meaning. I want it to be direct and instantly engaging and above all I don’t want my paintings to carry any waste; my ideal painting should be in its form and context 1000% just and necessary.

Gary Indiana it ain’t.

Art is the better way of doing things.”

But it is some Warhol Brillo and Campbell’s Soup

Even if it’s insulting.

TO HELL WITH YOUS. YOU FUCKIN ASS. Or maybe they came from the band’s songs, short, sharp, pop pow punches to the gut all sung to a headbanging melody. Words as logo. Words as lyric. Words as cretin credo.

Pure porn poetry. He made a series of shirts and designs that read PORN IS THE NEW PUNK. In the sex-crazed 80s it was true.

It is some Basquiat SAMO It is some Rene Ricard Blowjobs 5¢, w/lipstick 25¢ It is some Barbara Kruger The future belongs to those who can see it It is some Keith Haring Crack is Wack LIE CHEAT STEAL YOU KNOW YOU WILL. How did he know us so well?

Or perhaps they came right from the mean streets of New Yawk City, where just walking his interchangeable Boxers named Diesel could yield a gallery’s worth of rude sayings.

Get outta my way. Watch where you’re going. Walk Don’t Walk. Hey I’m walkin’ here! Whadda ya want, punk?

Letters became words became symbols became art became something more.

YOU IDIOT BASTARD

LOVE ME TENDER, ca. 1990-1992 Acrylic on canvas 26≠ x 78 x 1› inches

YOU FUCKIN’ ASS, ca. 1990-1994 Acrylic on canvas 18 x 204 x 1› inches

HELL YEAH, ca. 1990 - 1994 Acrylic on canvas 34 x 68 x 1› inches

TO HELL WITH YOUS, 1992 Acrylic on canvas 60 x 60 x 1› inches

Jade Dellinger Arturo Vega: To Hell With Yous

Music and visual art for the late downtown New York painter Arturo Vega were truly revolutionary forces. He believed that each had the capacity to effect profound change, and he used them in ways both defiant and seductive. He critiqued capitalism for its lack of conscience while questioning social norms, commonly held beliefs and widespread conformity.

The artist’s deceptively simple approach to graphic/visual production (as evidenced by the ubiquitous t-shirt designs that helped to support the band) perfectly suited the stripped down rock ‘n’ roll of The Ramones.

“I was almost always into the basics—trying to make things as simple as possible,” Arturo Vega once confessed. “Your brain reacts to primary colors,” and, as he continued, “everything else is trying to make things pretty.” Black, white, red, yellow and blue—applied flat with mechanical precision, hard-edged geometric order and uppercase-only sans serif typeface (a thin Bauhaus-inspired Futura with an extruded drop shadow for weight) provide the distinctive Pop-meetsDe Stijl/neoplasticist vibe that makes Arturo Vega’s “Insults” truly iconic. Like the punch-in-the-gut affront of a shouted slur—“HEY YOU FAG”, “YOU FAT COW” or “YOU FUCKIN’ ASS”—these paintings speak with the brevity and clarity of a seminal Ramones song. Often divided into quadrants, like “LOVE”, “LIFE” and “LUST” (perhaps as a nod to Robert Indiana), Vega’s paintings are a call to action—a muchamplified “1-2-3-4” with the visual impact of a stage banner (by the same steady hand) that both announced and backed the band for most of The Ramones career spanning 2,263 shows.

“Rock ‘n’ roll was always my guiding light,” as the artist recalled. “I heard Elvis Presley when I was eight years old.”

So, while it stands in sharp contrast to the messages delivered in many related works from the series, Vega’s painting LOVE ME TENDER is an homage to the 1956 song recorded by the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll and is intended to represent the life-changing “happy music” he described hearing on the radio for the first time as a young boy growing up in Chihuahua, Mexico.

“WHAT THE HELL”—much like “PEOPLE ARE ROTTEN” plays with the same horizontal and vertical word composition that would be typical of a Scrabble board if only the letter tiles relied upon each other or were used to form the next word. So, whereas, the “T” in the horizontal “WHAT” might create the first letter in the vertical “THE”, and the middle “H” in “THE” might have provided a start to another horizontal “HELL”, instead Vega’s “WHAT” and “HELL” panels are connected by the downward reading “THE”—causing something of a double take and giving the effect of a misspelled “WHATT” and “EHELL” separated by an “H” (and the lack of any “blue” on the corners of those square letter tiles) that spell “THE.” Unlike the board game first named Lexiko, later Criss-Crosswords and finally Scrabble (literally meaning “to grope frantically”) or the popular newspaper puzzles, the words found in Arturo Vega’s “Insults” certainly irritate yet never actually cross.

The Situationist-inspired, ransom note designs of so-called British Punk that attempted to hold hostage and point to the

hypocrisy of institutional power, like the bands they promoted, would hardly have been possible without Arturo Vega and the Ramones. Jamie Reid and the Sex Pistols proclaimed Her Majesty, the Queen (with safety-pinned lips) pretty... pretty vacant. While, in much the same way, Vega’s Presidential seal-inspired insignia for The Ramones (predating the Brits) remained open to interpretation—a celebration of the quintessential all-American band and, perhaps simultaneously, a satirical assault on the nearly-sacrosanct symbol of the highest office in the land. And, much like the Louisville Slugger baseball bat in the talons of the eagle that “Beat on the Brat” (and was a “Hit on Sire”), Vega’s series of “Insults” from the early 90s—now presented at Howl!

Happening—were intended to deliver a vigorous wallop.

Just as “Hey ho let’s go” replaced “Look out below” on the banner in the beak of our national bird on his omnipresent Ramones logo, we were never fully-warned about the blitzkrieg bop of insult bombarding we would soon receive.

However, for Vega, “it’s some kind of purification process— like an exorcism,” and we are the beneficiaries of the evil expelled. According to the artist, “The most important element is that the concepts and ideas [are] executed, completed,“ so, TO HELL WITH YOUS.

YOU IDIOT BASTARD, ca. 1990-1994 Acrylic on canvas 80 x 48 x 1› inches

Arturo Vega pictured in his exhibition LOVE, LIFE, LUST, 2012, La Estaci贸n Arte Contempor谩neo, Chihuahua, Mexico.

ARTURO VEGA: “TO HELL WITH YOUS!” The Making of an Artist

Arturo Vega was the most optimistic, jubilant and fun pal anyone could wish for. If it wasn’t for Artie, Joey Ramone and I would’ve starved to death in those early days. He used to give us each a buck fifty so we could each buy a quart of beer and a pack of cigarettes. Joey smoked Winstons; I smoked Marlboros, at 75 cents a pack. The quart of beer was also 75 cents. Which makes a buck fifty. I used to sit in awe and watch Joey and Dee Dee write those first Ramones songs by the windows of Artie’s loft with a two-string guitar. Everyone said it was a three-string guitar, but I never saw that third string.

When things were at their worst, which was quite often, Arturo would laugh and say, “Happy, happy, happy,” like some twisted mantra until everyone was in a good mood again. If you wanted to get in a good mood, you hung out at Arturo’s. I miss him everyday. ­—Legs McNeil Once, when I was still in Mexico, I must have been about 16 years old, and I used to walk home after a night in La Zona Rosa, Mexico City, ya know? La Zona Rosa was like a district where all the chic boutiques are, and the nice hotels and the art galleries—but there was no such thing as gay bars or anything like that then—just gay hang-outs and restaurants.

And I used to walk home, and all these guys wanted to pick me up in their cars, and every time I used to tell myself, “I’m gonna ask them for money, I’m gonna ask them for money tonight!”

But it was too ugly. I never did.

I had been a rock & roll fan all my life, so I started doing Tommy, the rock opera by The Who, at the National University in Mexico City, and then we toured other colleges.

I have the record of our performance. We translated it, we did the costumes, we did the choreography—and I played Cousin Kevin—so I was into music, ya know?

Then I moved to the States in the late 60’s, and Tomata Du Plenty and I used to hang outside bars in San Francisco, and I didn’t have any ID. I was too young, so we couldn’t go into the bars. So Tomata and I used to hang out outside.

Gorilla Rose and Tomata De Plenty were original Cockettes, ya know? And I saw the Cockettes and I thought they were unbelievable. They were not like your typical drag queen act, that wants to look feminine, and act feminine, and does lip-sync to Diana Ross. And because of the Cockettes’ look, because of their visuals—it’s very hard to tell now, now that we have seen it ALL! Now you turn TV on, and you’re gonna see the most outrageous drag queen on All In The Family or Family Matters, or whatever, any TV show, you’ve all seen the look already.

But this was pre-Alice Cooper, so if Alice Cooper made an impact, imagine what it was like before him?

This was the Cockettes and this was absolutely the beginning of everything, the beginning of all glitter, the beginning of all glamour, the beginning of all those precious whore costumes, it was the beginning of everything, just amazing to see, something so SPECTACULARLY original ya know?

But so glamorous at the same time...

This was San Francisco in the 60s, so everybody was there.

It was just a young, trippy audience, and of course, everybody was on acid, and whatever else you could get.

And there was no distinction between gay and straight. It was very, very nice.

This was also a time when music was still kind of mixed, ya know?

I remember going to see Joan Baez and The Mamas and the Papas together with Jimi Hendrix, ya know?

That doesn’t happen anymore. But in those days you could have like totally opposites together, because everybody that was in San Francisco liked to see everything that was happening.

That’s what we used to do; it was just like people would tell you, or we’d say, “What’s happening?” And you would see the same people at the Fillmore at the Cockettes, or the Family Dog taking acid at night in the hills and the parks, and in the morning the sun rise at this beach, and the sun set on that other beach, everybody was the same people, ya know?

It was great.

But I moved to New York on Christmas Eve of 1972, and at first I lived in a penthouse on 63rd and 3rd, with Carla, my wife. We lived there for about six months, and I started going to see The New York Dolls at the Mercer Arts Center. I went to the Mercer with Carla, and her sister Beatrice, who used to date Johnny Thunders. So we used to go to the Dolls all the time, and I liked them a lot, I loved their whole scene.

Everybody was dressed up, and it was a real event, it was the instant party, anything that had to do with the Dolls was instant party!

Ya know, you arrived at the Mercer and the party was already there, and then the Dolls played and it was a party, and when they finished, there was a party, ha, ha, ha!

It was like parties from the minute you walked in the place!

With the Dolls, everything was a party! It was just a great feeling to be there.

I didn’t actually meet the Dolls and talk to them, until I tried to design an album cover for them with florescent swastikas, and this little Nazi plane that the German’s built at the end of World War II, like a total desperation plane! It took off like a rocket and carried 12 missiles in the nose, and it shoot the 12 missiles, and then it couldn’t land, ha, ha, ha! The Nazi’s were using it to shoot at formations of B-17 bombers, the flying fortresses, but it couldn’t land, and had to crash, ha, ha, ha!

These planes were like Too Much Too Soon, which is the perfect Dolls symbol, ya know? I thought this is what the Dolls were all about—maximum power in a minute and a half, but then they have to crash, so I made this design with florescent swastikas.

I used to wear fluorescent swastikas in those days, arm bands; I can’t believe I used to walk around this city like that. Now you can’t do that, they’ll kill you, but I went to the record company, and David Johansen looked at it, then he looked at me like, “You gotta be kidding?”

But he said, “This is so perfect, but you know this is impossible.”

And he went around showing everybody, “Look, look, look, this should be our record cover,” and I remember Marty Thau looking at it, and he goes, “Yeah, right...”

Well that’s when I started talking to David and Johnny, and we became friends a little bit after that.

But Carla and I only lasted about six months in the penthouse, and I don’t think I ever came south of 14th Street, until I had to come and look for an apartment that I could afford, ha, ha, ha!

I was looking for something of $150 a month and I came to Alphabet City and, oh, it was a surprise, ha, ha, ha!

I was working at the Orange Julius stand in Times Square.

I used to make $67.50 a week, and on pay day, I used to run to Woolworth’s and spend it all on plastic raincoats and plastic umbrellas and plastic sunglasses!

They were like three dollars a piece, and we used to make dresses out of plastic table cloths, ha, ha, ha! It was great, and we had great wardrobes, ya know?

So I moved to the loft on 2nd Street, and I was painting supermarket signs. Tomata and Gorilla Rose, who’d also moved to New York from San Francisco, were living upstairs with another person from their troupe, Sweet Pam; she was staying upstairs with them.

My door was always open, and Dee Dee used to come upstairs to see Sweet Pam, who was his girlfriend at that time. And Dee Dee started talking to me, and telling me that he and his friends were putting this band together, and how he thought that I was a really cool person, a really cool dude, and that I should design things for them.

That’s how I first met him.

What did I think of Dee Dee? I thought he was sweet, and I thought he was cute. I wasn’t really attracted to him, but I thought he was a sweet kid. So I went to see The Ramones at one of those parties in Soho, at some loft. Because, by then, Fayette Hauser kept telling me, “Oh you have to see them! You have to see them!”

So the first time I saw The Ramones, I didn’t know what to think, you know what I mean?

It was beyond your reason, I mean your senses told you that something was happening there, but then it would just be this big “MMMMMMMMMM,” ya know?

I was into rock & roll, and of course, by 1973, 1974, nothing was happening. I couldn’t get that much excited over the new Rolling Stones album, any more than the new Led Zeppelin album. I mean Led Zeppelin was okay, but then there were things like Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, and those people. I guess they looked very good on the stage, but the music was not much. The music didn’t say much.

So Dee Dee came here to the loft, and would talk, and then

one day they needed an ad for The Village Voice. It was going to be very small, of course, and we didn’t have a photograph where everybody looked good.

So I cut out each one of them from different photographs, with just a white background, so it would stand out a little bit, that was the first thing I did. And then I did some fliers and posters and things. And just started helping them to set up the drums, ya know?

Then Tomata and Gorilla played with The Ramones at CBGBs, the Ramones opened up for them in that play, Savage Voodoo Nuns, and I played the novice Connie.

And my favorite line was when the Mother Superior interviewed me, “Well Connie, why do you want to be a nun?”

And I said, “I want to become a famous virgin!” Ha, ha, ha, oh ha, ha, ha! It was great, some of the nuns were killing each other, ha, ha, ha, killing the other nuns, throwing transistor radios in the shower, ha, ha, ha, electrocuting them, ha, ha, ha!

It was great, those were the days...

Carlo McCormick Arturo Vega & the Fine Art of Invective

Come-ons and put-downs, shout-outs and catcalls, the urban argot of the street corner and schoolyard is an aggressive mode of communication based upon the impolitic. Like a chorus of curses, when Arturo Vega’s paintings scream at you, snide and surly, you know you’re no longer in that polite place where we contemplate art—you’re back out there in the ugly world of affront and confrontation. Brutally honest and frighteningly direct, the language-art of Vega’s insult paintings is not simply provocative—it is reactive. Yes, they accost the viewer with a deadpan brutalism, but they also address art itself, for here is a supremely successful “commercial” artist showing off his subversive chops as if to reflect on that watered-down gruel of meatless mannerisms from which the art world takes its empty sustenance. A vernacular of vulgarity decidedly more contemporary than classic, Arturo was in fact calling back the lost rambunctious voices of culture at a time before art seduced in hushed whispers and instead yelled loud and throaty just to be heard over the mob.

Like the bawdy theatrics of yore, from the Greeks through Shakespeare and onto the Theaters of the Absurd, of Cruelty and of the Ridiculous, Arturo plays well to the peanut gallery because his art is an insult to the elites, a voice of the people intoned by the criminal, the scoundrel, the predator and pervert that lurks on the margins of society. And yet it feels even more ancient than that, reminding us that if language was invented to communicate, the most likely things we might ever want to say to one another was either ‘do you want to fuck?’ or ‘fuck off!’

Vega’s curse paintings harken back to the curse steles of our earliest cultural roots, where upright stones or slabs were inscribed with the foulest execrations and imprecatory verses. Society learns to wash its cultural lexicon of the very worst, but the sentiments remain, each age reinventing new disparagements, humiliations and jibes to express the animosities and tensions by which longing and domination churn our emotional strife. Yes, we may read the same words Vega employs on the walls of our sleaziest and dirtiest public toilets, but look carefully at the literature we can’t go back and correct—the graffiti left in situ upon Pompeii or the inscriptions on the acornshaped missiles the Romans and Picentes hurled from slingshots that would describe who to wound and where on their bodies such an indignity should occur—and there can be no denying that language and art have long collaborated to articulate our ongoing mutual detestations.

If Arturo Vega’s paintings here are intentionally lowbrow in tone, they are conversely stylish and smart in manner, just seductive enough in appearance that their aspersions bait enticements the way school kids have a way of acting out dramas of minor violence upon the very people they have a crush on. Arturo addresses us with tongue in cheek and cock in hand, a fight-or-fuck demeanor balanced on a degree of ambivalence, coyly desirous and disdainful like a Mona Lisa smile, leaving doubt behind to take on these disembodied missives. Is ‘Love Me Tender’ a pop culture quotation, the pleading of a hound dog or a cynical

piss take? Or ‘Hey You Fag,’ sounding at once like the pre-assault hails of fag-bashers, the inverse identity politics of queer culture and the made-you-look barbs of juveniles, all these possibilities deserving of an equally ambiguous response. These are the castoffs and empty expletives of speech’s imbecilic impulse brought to the uncomfortable zone of fine art, made symmetrical, concrete and composite, and most perfectly for Vega, powerfully iconic, quite literally s-p-e-l-l-e-d o-u-t for us.

A master of the quotidian, with an alchemist’s touch for turning the mundane into the highly meaningful, Arturo Vega’s distillation of clarity out of chaos and formidable articulation of the feral and fierce into terms of impeccable finesse made his graphic work with The Ramones a paradigm of cultural synesthesia. His command of common language and base sentiment is just so real in these paintings however, so sophisticated and sexy, so brutal and beautiful, that we can see how even his most famous of emblems could never carry the full weight of irony and honesty he bore in his heart. Vega could read the degenerate lapses of civility proliferate on the streets and clubs of urban life as a kind of semiotic architecture, all asides, put-ons and come-backs reined into a visually formalist order, and then unleash their dumb-ass poetics like a pictorial Turret’s Syndrome. Vega’s text messages from those primordial days of social interaction before the deluge of disposable IM chatter hang there like the word balloons in comics; suspended signs, bold and belligerent, subverts in and of themselves, détournements where the most obvious and direct of speech becomes doubtful and nuanced.

His work is in the tradition of text art, welding Robert Indiana’s hard-edge dazzle and Lawrence Weiner’s post-minimalist conceptualism on the mutual ground of contested social issues their work all shares. Working within this tradition, Arturo forges a clipped and acerbic style to match the terse prose, the craftsman’s hands of this silkscreen virtuoso working in so primal a mode as if to mimic the urgency of primitive stencil art. ‘You Idiot Bastard’ he calls to us, grappling with that wild and unruly language of anger, ignorance and insult to craft a reflexive tongue of sophisticated satire. A Mexican immigrant, a homosexual, a New Yorker and a Punk, Arturo Vega understood the dominant language of authority as only a true outsider could; the sting of hatred, the sound of the slur, the camaraderie of swapping barbs and, ultimately, the transformative force by which those who refuse to be defeated or defined appropriate the parlance of oppression for their own means. To read Arturo’s nasty quips and sarcastic slings again these years later we can hear him yet, defiant as ever, a loudspeaker to the sound of now echoing endless histories of malicious prose for the sheer joy of how it sounds, the ancients who literally carved their animosities in stone, the acerbic aspersions of catty queens, the hilarious insults of Jewish Borscht Belt comedians indelibly woven into New Yorkers’ sense of humor, and of course rock’s raucous provocations, as could only be delivered by the consummate Punk Arturo Vega himself.

HOWL! COMMUNITY Arturo Vega Foundation Lalo Quiñones Jane Friedman Donovan Welsh BG Hacker Board of Advisors Curt Hoppe Marc H. Miller Dan Cameron Carlo McCormick James Rubio Anthony Cardillo Debora Tripodi Lisa Brownlee Howl! Board of Directors Bob Perl, President Bob Holman, Vice President BG Hacker, Treasurer Nathaniel Siegel, Secretary Brian (Hattie Hathaway) Butterick Riki Colon Jane Friedman Chi Chi Valenti Marguerite Van Cook, President Emeritus Gallery Director: Ted Riederer Program Director: Carter Edwards Creative Consultant: Susan Martin Howl Artist/Videographer: Darian Brenner

© 2016 Howl Arts, Inc. Howl! Archive Publishing Editions (Howl! A/P/E) Volume 1, No. 9 Arturo Vega: Insults March 4–31, 2016 Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project ISBN: 978-0-9961917-8-4 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, with prior written permission of Howl! A/P/E. Essay © 2016 © 2016 © 2016 © 2016 © 2016

Ted Riederer Sandra Schulman Jade Dellinger Legs McNell Carlo McCormick

Photography: Jason Wyche Editor: Ted Riederer Copy Editor: Jorge Clar Design: Jeff Streeper for Modern IDENTITY Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project 6 East 1st St. NYC, 10003 www.HowlArts.org 917 475 1294

The Arturo Vega Project: Jane Friedman

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