zapped!
Los Angeles Reader
IT’S LATE JANUARY, at the opening of “Helter Skelter,” the Museum of Contemporary Art’s look at L.A. art in the 1990s. Inside the Temporary Contemporary, ambling about the two rooms devoted to his paintings, Robert Williams, former hot-rod T-shirt designer, underground comix artist, and punk painter, can hardly contain his glee. For years, he’s worked in the same style, inspired by the same vision, despite the high-art world’s disdain for his “illustrative” renderings and the fire his subject matter has drawn from would-be censors. Now, finally, due to the good graces of curator Paul Schimmel, his work hangs in a real museum.
“Did ya see my hot rod?” he asks a fan, in what longtime friend and fellow comix artist S. Clay Wilson mockingly calls his “cracker” voice: the drawl of an Alabama redneck sittin’ around the cracker barrel. The fifty-year-old painter’s grand gesture has been to park his ’32 Ford roadster, “Eights and Aces,” directly in front of the museum’s entrance. But despite his excitement as he circulates among the hip underground crowd that’s turned out to celebrate his vindication, it’s still difficult to see this somewhat socially inept individual in generic work shoes, trousers, and sweater-vest as the mastermind behind the bizarre images on the walls.
In one corner, an innocent teenager plays with a Ouija board and is swept into the netherworld to become an evil genie’s sex slave. Across the way, the heads of state of WWI-era France and Germany grovel at the feet of Mata Hari, like dogs in heat, their tails the flags of their respective countries, attached to poles sodomizing them. In the other room, a female vendor of toy robots lies raped and beaten against a fence. Her mechanical assailant stands above her with bear-trap jaws and camera-lens eyes, looking up in shock as a huge, red monster, swords lashed to its mouth, descends on him, having leaped from behind the fence.
Relaxed, with his gray hair slicked back, Williams looks like a cross between a trouble-making teenager and the Gary Cooper of High Noon. He’s even managed to drop the usual pull at the corner of his mouth that can remind one of a crotchety old man.
But then the fliers arrive.
Members of an anonymous group calling itself PIGs (Politically Involved Girlfriends) are handing out leaflets criticizing the show and Schimmel for excluding the work and views of “women, queers, and people of color.” “Helter Skelter,” according to the handout, privileges the viewpoints of “straight-identified white males,” allowing their works to define Los Angeles’s culture and community.
The flier singles out Williams, calling his work “homophobic, racist, and sexist,” and points an accusatory finger at one work in particular, a painting of Oscar Wilde. “The wordy title of Williams’s painting,” says the handout, “spells out his homophobia in case the image were not enough: Oscar Wilde is called a ‘sodomite’ ... and a ‘syphilitic lily-sniffer.’ The last phrase collapses Wilde’s queerness onto disease, as if queerness and sickness were somehow one and the same.”
Williams’s bubble bursts. Euphoria gives way to the exhaustion of three days of socializing with collectors and gallery owners. Most of the previous criticism of his work originated on the right, from antipornography groups for which he had little respect. This time it’s coming from the left, and Williams is at a loss. During the next few days, he begins to consider changing the subject matter he’s stuck with for more than twenty years, which has been perhaps the central element of his work and has taken his images from T-shirts to the temple of high art.
“I remember when he was trying to think of an idea for his next painting,” Williams’s wife of more than twenty years, Suzanne, says of the period of time following the opening. “He talked about how this attack totally squelched his ability to just be free, because things kept entering his mind about, ‘well, this will possibly offend someone, or that will or this will’—things he’d never even considered, not just in relation to feminists or gays, but how anything might offend someone ... he doesn’t really want to offend anyone,” she says, “he just wants to do these things that have lots of imagination and stimulation and deal in things he’s interested in. He’s still preoccupied with not wanting that to creep into how people view the paintings, so he’s kinda thinking, ‘maybe I should tone it down.’”
It’s ironic that Williams’s work—which comes out of the underground comix tradition that rebelled against restrictions on what could and couldn’t be rendered—should now be attacked as politically incorrect. He’s long been a counterculture hero, and his representational approach has always been scoffed at by the art establishment. But his new critics—who refused to go on record by name— doubt the existence of any such depth in his work.
PIGs and another group that's protesting, Queer Nation, wonder how Williams can possibly justify his use of negative stereotypes and racial slurs.
