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 art and 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. The history and culture of the East Village/LES are still unfolding. The mix of rock and roll, social justice, art and performance, community activism, gay rights and culture, fashion, and nightlife is 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 connect with the creative community. As the father of the Happening, Alan Kaprow, declared: “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid and indistinct as possible.”
Published on the occasion of the exhibition September 19–October 10, 2015 at Howl! Happening an Arturo Vega Project
Howl! A/P/E Volume 1, No. 4
Beautiful Discord: The Art of Scooter LaForge TED RIEDERER
Day upon day, and year upon year, O city, walking your streets, Where you hold me enchain’d a certain time, refusing to give me up; Yet giving to make me glutted, enrich’d of soul – you give me forever faces; (O, I see what I sought to escape, confronting, reversing my cries; I see my own soul trampling down what it had ask’d for.)
“Give Me the Splendid, Silent Sun,” Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
To understand the art of Scooter LaForge, one must simply take an observant walk from 6 East 1st Street to his studio on Broadway, just south of Canal. This same path poets have trod will build an aggregate map of memory and landscape, one you will find you will remember and re-experience for years to come. To its long-time residents, the real New Yorkers, the city is never remade. Layer upon layer of remembrance builds a composite, a skyline where the Towers still stand, where the Bowery still evokes images of missions and flophouses. Turn left on the Bowery, cross Houston, and walk past the site of Sammy’s Bowery Follies immortalized by Weegee in his 1943 portrait of Shorty, the Bowery Cherub, a midget clothed only in a diaper, toasting in the new year at the bar. Walk down past the profligate symbols of contemporary art, the New Museum, and the architectural marvel, Sperone Westwater; past the restaurant supply stores where men in tank tops lug appliances into double-parked vans. Cut over to Broadway where the streets are lined with both high-fashion boutiques and bargain jean stores. Cross Canal, with its plastic tourist shops and bootleg handbag-hawkers, and its Chinese storefronts filled with golden clocks and jade curios. Scooter LaForge’s work is all of these things: the gutter, fine art, high-fashion, and cheap plastic junk.
If you dragged a stuffed animal behind you on a string as you walked this route, it would collect lots of New York by the time you reached your destination: a homeless man’s cardboard beggar’s sign, burrs of Bruce Nauman, Schnabel, Armani, and Gucci trash, a discarded souvenir. All of these bits and pieces of New York imbedded in matted and dirty fur. Scooter may paint a portrait of this tattered toy, or turn the toy into a sculpture, shoved into a painted cardboard box nailed to the wall. Scooter’s work is a hobo clown, a rotten Easter-Bunny costume, a Gucci box rescued from an oily dumpster but still smelling of leathery wealth. After all, as children our love rendered our favorite toys the dirtiest of all those on the toy shelves: threadbare, and loved, a velveteen rabbit tainted by scarlet fever, a toy longing to be real. Scooter La Forge is acutely aware of his antecedents, Joyce Pensato, George Condo, Phillip Guston, Fellini’s Clowns, Ringling Bros’ Emmet Kelly, Picasso, and German Expressionism, but Scooter seems completely of this era, a time of gentrification, art fairs, and the economic paradox where a high-end boutique stands next to a welfare hotel on a street notorious the world over as Skid Row. In his tiny studio at the end of our walk, Scooter holds out a cloth-bound, hard-cover book on the work of James Ensor. That it’s one of his favorite books is evidenced by its pristine condition in a room of paint smudged walls rivaling that of Francis Bacon’s studio. In his book Symbolist Art Theories, Henri Dorra describes James Ensor’s work as “artificial, dreamlike, deliberately discordant, and vibrantly expressive.” All of these adjectives characterize Scooter’s practice as well, yet Scooter’s work shows no “dédoublement,” no “dispassionate irony.” Rather, his works evoke the spirit of that great comic genius, Charlie Chaplin, the little tramp who entertained and comforted people during the second-worse financial crisis of the last century. Chaplin used to say, “Life is a tragedy when seen in (a) close-up, but a comedy in (a) long-shot. To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it.”
PLATE 1
Cyclops Man Smoking, 2015 Oil on Canvas 40 x 30 inches
PLATE 2
Taking a Nap, 2015 Oil on Canvas 80 x 160 inches
PLATE 3
Crying Man, 2015 Mixed-Media Assemblage 79 x 42 inches
PLATE 4
I’ll Probably Never See You Again, 2015 Mixed-Media Assemblage 17 x 22 x 4 inches
PLATE 5
Joy, 2015 Mixed-Media Assemblage 11 x 16 x 10 inches
Scooter LaForge and the Magic of Monsters CARLO McCORMICK
If, as Plato tells us, “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation,” we must in likelihood know far more about Scooter LaForge than most any other artist. In a highly coded art world where citations, references and appropriations are construed as content amongst an economically-powered connoisseur class and where aesthetics are based on intellectual precepts that are rather more disingenuous than the simplest acts of looking at and experiencing art, Scooter comes on like the one nice kid in the schoolyard who couldn’t give a toss what anybody else thinks, hardly knows the game let alone the rules, but is always down to play. His art reminds us of the incredible creative potential that is unleashed when we shed the gravitas of culture and return to the wide-eyed wonder of an unfettered imagination let loose in the domain of make-believe. His art is a call to enter a diversion that if you follow its amusements will surprisingly get to the real point in the end. There is fun to be had in LaForge’s art, but it invokes the kind of laughter we all need to shake off melancholy, the kind of joy we take that allays suffering without denying it. Charlie Chaplin explained, “To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it.” His demonology is far more myth and metaphor than matter-of-fact; it’s the pain that lurks within all hearts let loose from the shackles of self to romp free as comic grotesques. Like the monsters in our closets and under our beds it’s the not-looking and the still silence that most terrifies. Brought to light and given form in Scooter’s splendidly lurid and alluring multiverse, they no longer threaten but amuse, the comfortable company of beauty’s ugly friends, the cartoon villains that make us jeer and hiss only to allow us some special grace of empathy when they inevitably meet their slapstick ill-fates. His monsters are made of distress and torn from trauma, but they are born of faith and animated by love. Scooter LaForge is the kind of artist I believe could do anything because he is motivated by goodwill and activated by an unfailing belief in the uncanny. His art can manifest impossible dreams with glorious candor precisely because it keeps consort with our storybook fictions, racing off the cliff like Wile E. Coyote, as if jumping down the rabbit hole with Alice, only to soar on the heels of Peter Pan. If for Picasso “all children are artists, the problem is how to remain an artist when he grows up,” Scooter seems to have found the best solution in the deliberate ways he has chosen not to grow up. His is a happy talent that way, and an extremely fertile one. As Jung would see it, “The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct,” and it is this overwhelming sense of novelty here that does in fact allow us to see differently. He makes playthings to share them and with that communion of play to share a greater experience that is not so much his as all of ours. Where does he get these toys and how does he make them come to life we may never fully know, but they are not so much made as they are saved, rescued from growing up and awakened by the kiss of a kind of alchemical and whimsical transmogrification. And they are not new or shiny or perfect; these are old souls whose heavy hearts have been lightened by magic. They are toys yes, but they are memories too, salvaged from that dark, dusty attic of neglect and given new meaning by the innocent eyes of another that has always lived within each and every one of us.
PLATE 6
Don’t Be Scared, 2015 Mixed-Media Assemblage 16 x 24 x 18 inches
PLATE 7
Skeleton Clown Autopsy II Oil on Linen 35 x 38 inches
Scooter LaForge ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST
Your opening impression in a space given over to the work of Scooter LaForge – and I was in three such spaces in a single day – is likely to be the cheerfully feral, in-your-face rawness of what you see. And that’s okay, given that the pictorial vocabulary LaForge has developed, what you might call his comic militia, includes his one-eyed bear, Cyclops; a bevy of not-particularly-threatening demons; and various characters with bright red clown noses. Add that his work-spaces are rich with such jaunty props as paint-spattered mannequin heads, soft toys, and a joke-shop charred cigar, this last - a gift from the anarchic maximalist, Bjarne Melgaard – being stuck to a completed canvas. Soon enough though, you will pick up that LaForge’s paintings and sculptures by no means conform to the aesthetic of what has become the overly-well-trodden Post-Pop playground. It cannot, for instance, be bracketed with LowBrow or Pop Surrealism (which I am not dissing, by the way.) Nor does he have anything in common with the merry pranksters ripping off Warhol, Haring and Basquiat on the streets of SoHo and in the storefronts of West Broadway (whom, yes, I am dissing). Scooter LaForge was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, but this afforded him no protection from Pop. “My mother gave me Andy Warhol’s Diaries when I was eight. I read it from cover to cover,” he says. He left home, first for San Francisco, then New York, arriving with an admirable touch of bravado the month after 9/11. He had been drawing since he was six, but first put bread on the table by working in design at Barney’s and Marc Jacobs. He was increasingly making his own fashion pieces on the side as well, and got a fellowship to Cooper Union. Patricia Field, the fashion perennial, laid eyes on a LaForge tee-shirt at Spank, the dance party in Bushwick, five years ago. He was shortly producing one-off’s for her, and they are terrific. You won’t take my word for this? Consult Dr. Google! LaForge’s career in art-making was also taking off, and the connection between his art and his fashion work strikes me as entirely positive. This is a rarer phenomenon in the art world than you might imagine. Warhol had been a hugely successful commercial artist, but this was held against him for many years both by many artists and by the art world generally. The appetites of the art world are perhaps more omnivorous now. Hanging in the first LaForge art space I visited was a dark blue garment upon which he had painted a vivid abstraction. It turned out to be a high-end Armani suit he had just been given by Patricia Field. “I got it at about nine o’clock,” he said. “I painted it while I was waiting for you.” In the second La Forge space, a row of canvases was leaning against a wall, the one on the left-hand end being a shimmery abstraction. Next to it was a canvas with a burst of figuration. This vortex of figuration then grew from canvas to canvas, like a life-form in a lab. I indicated the abstraction to the far left.
“Is that the beginning or the end?” I asked. “This is the end,” he said. “So it ends in abstraction?” “It begins in abstraction, and then it ends in abstraction,” he said. LaForge employs a parallel strategy compactly within a single composition, one which takes off from Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson. His variation is a big, fluent canvas upon which the proportionate relationship of abstraction-to-figuration differs greatly from individual to individual in his treatment of the group clustered around the ultra-comic-strippy corpse. He indicated an area of the canvas. “I’m right-handed, and I painted this with my left hand,” he said. “I decided that I was painting too well with my right.” He pointed at one of the heads, adding: “And I painted this with my eyes shut.” It so happened that this particular head was the most realistically executed in the group. I noted that it looked as if it were itching to crash the group of surgeons in the original Rembrandt in The Hague. We are touching on here what might be described as the strategies of conceptual art. This is usually kind of a no-go zone for those working in a Post-Pop landscape, as of course are abstraction. But Scooter LaForge plays with a full hand. Images on another large canvas include a road, two furry bunnies and several of his clown-characters with red noses. I wondered what the narrative was. LaForge asked if I was familiar with the techniques of “bibliomancy.” “Uh, no.” He explained that it means opening a book at random, putting your finger on a passage, and then using whatever it is that chance has dealt you. So it had been with this canvas. “One page had the road,” he said. “Another page had these two bunnies ... another had the clowns ... “ “But you paint a lot of clowns,” I said. And he does, including wry self-portraits, with bulbous red noses. “I have a whole book full of clowns,” agreed Scooter LaForge, blithely. “Chance, plus chance-management, an excellent art-making strategy,” I think to myself.
PLATE 8
Get Off the Fucking Phone, 2015 Mixed-Media Assemblage 27 x 67 inches
Scooter LaForge MICHAEL MUSTO
Scooter LaForge manages to plumb the recesses of our imaginations while rummaging through his own. His collages mix found objects, fanciful creatures, and classical references for inspired potpourris of expression that he says are not attempting to comment on any sociopolitical themes— “It’s all in my own head. A lot has to do with my depression and anxiety or my happiness and joy. It has nothing to do with political statements, it’s all what’s going on upstairs. I haven’t watched the news for years, and I don’t even have a TV.” That’s not surprising, considering that “what’s going on upstairs” obviously provides more viewing pleasure than anything you could see with a remote. How To Create A Monsterpiece—a collection of new works that comprise LaForge’s third solo show in New York—reveals him at his most darkly playful and wickedly ruminative. Using varying textures while bringing together the detritus of urban life, he can charm and seduce as easily as he can unnerve and alarm. In his hands, a totem pole of slightly creepy puppet faces is topped by a green broom head that’s as jaunty as the emotions below it are grotesque. A large grasshopper with a man’s face is painted on cardboard, along with the words of a homeless person’s plea for help. And a riff on Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp mixes in some clown noses, exposed lightbulbs, and a tongue-darting animal who’s not out of place at all, since he’s one of LaForge’s self-created “imaginary friends”. While Kenny Scharf’s kitsch obsession and Salvador Dali’s surrealistic swirl might seem to be big influences, New Mexico–born LaForge says it’s actually Rauschenberg, Guston, and Rembrandt who pilot his inner light. “I’ve read Rembrandt’s biography,” he relates,“and he reminded me of Andy Warhol a lot because he was a total social climber who went in and out of fashion. If one looks at the paintings he did, there’s such imagery in there. You have to open your eyes and see what’s really going on in his work.” The unofficial “Dutch master” of NYC, LaForge shares that gift for imbuing his works with all sorts of eye-popping stuff going on. You don’t just breeze through a Scooter LaForge show en route to your next engagement; prepare for spending some serious quality time within these walls. In 2001, after eight years immersed in the arts in San Francisco, LaForge moved to New York, having received a fellowship to study at Cooper Union. There, he went from painting realistically to using bigger brushes, working more from his gut, and ultimately collecting objects and collaging them into conjurings full of the immediate and the imagined. He also does splashy T-shirts and other garments for Patricia Field, clothes that often look like his art pieces with stitching instead of frames. “Eighty percent of the time, I’m working 10-hour days,” admits the introspective creator. “So fame or social media or magazines, I’m mostly unaware of.” But he’s become obsessed with pop culture and keeps up with it through friends and people he meets on frequent nights out. Now that he’s become part of that culture, how does he plan to watch himself on the inevitable TV segments? “I’d probably go to a friend’s house to watch it,” he says, unworried. Or maybe he can just see it in his mind.
PLATE 9
Anatomy Class II, 2015 Oil on Canvas 60 x 85 inches
CLOSE-UP JORGE CLAR
The evening air is warm A breeze wafting through The Goat Factory From the yard door to the front Scooter stretches on the sofa Thumbing through children’s books Pauses are important The fan moves A spread of canvas on the floor A scene from a book captivates Brushstrokes of form Relaxing into impulse The hand starts to move Suddenly a scene, a detail… The fifth canvas is smaller Painting after expanses Large, like the basement Close-up Make it big A barn: red and black gesture A house blue, disappearing Trees and mountains Aurora borealis The aura… Paint rising Orange is provision A flame of impressions… Burst of movement Visions remembered Through squinting eyes When in nature Flashes of light are testament To a world inside Waiting to be revealed Every day in the studio
PLATE 10
Winter Landscape, 2015 Oil on Linen 30 x 40 inches
PLATE 11
Backyard Garden, 2015 Oil on Canvas 60 x 80 inches
PLATE 12
Blue Bear and Cyclops Man, 2015 Oil on Canvas 60 x 80 inches
PLATE 13
God Bless, 2015 Oil on Board 13 x 22 inches
PLATE 14
Hare And Tree, 2015 Mixed-Media 22 x 24 inches
Scooter LaForge CHRIS STEIN
Scooter is in the fore of a movement that I see brewing which deals with do-it-yourself psychology and an assault on social conventions. He uses techniques that are the province of outsider art coupled with elements of graffiti and modern surrealism. The kids are pumping out more art than ever. Instagram is packed with great revolutionary artists who are producing some very powerful left-field things that speak to the cultural mash-up that is modern America. I came into awareness of Scooter for his Blondie-related T-Shirts and some very crazy dresses he painted for Debbie. His pieces could definitely be construed as “punk,� and his aesthetic fits in nicely with the loudness of rock-and-roll and the push forward into the new age of magical abstraction.
ODE TO CLOVE JORGE CLLAR
Charlie races down the stairs Jumping on the sofa Legs in the air Waiting to be petted A touch on the belly Reveals a fountain Few drops on the landscape Quickly wiped with a napkin Peace is restored Sheets are changed Elixirs on hand From the Bushwick Best Grocery Corporation A pause for a smoke with James— Talk about expression From the left hand, Sartorial detail A herringbone pattern Frames a face One, two, three cigarettes Smoke blurs Mouth contours Circles Transmute a miasma Marks dictated by a presence Above, the space Is ready to transform The character rises A mission of transmutation Now complete
PLATE 15
Cyclops Man Smoking Oil on Canvas 40 x 30 inches
PLATE 16
I Think I’m Dumb, 2015 Mixed-Media Assemblage 17 x 22 x 4 inches
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 Archive Manager: Mikhail Torich
Scooter LaForge, How to Create a Monsterpiece Howl! Happening, an Arturo Vega Project September 19–October 10, 2015 ISBN: 978-0-9961917-1-5 © 2015 Howl Arts, Inc. Howl! Archive Publishing Editions (Howl! A/P/E) Volume 1, No. 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, without prior written permission of Howl! A/P/E. Howl! Happening, an Arturo Vega Project 6 East 1st St. New York, New York 10003 www.HowlArts.org 917 475 1294 Photos © 2015 Ted Riederer, Plates 2, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16 © 2015 Ron Amato, opposite All other images @ 2015 Jason Wyche Essays © 2015 © 2015 © 2015 © 2015 © 2015 © 2015
Ted Riederer Carlo McCormick Anthony Haden-Guest Michael Musto Jorge Clar Chris Stein
Editor: Ted Riederer Copy Editor: Dorothee Riederer Design: Jeff Streeper, Modern Identity
The Arturo Vega Project: Jane Friedman
Š 2015 Howl Arts, Inc. Howl! A/P/E Volume 1, No. 4 HowlArts.ORG