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Says the art history professor in PIGs: “You do have some responsibility, or don’t expect people not to criticize your work—which is sort of what he does, like, ‘these people just don’t get it.’ Well, in fact, we do get it—we are looking at the work and we are involved in the art community. It’s not like we work for Jesse Helms and we see a nude woman and it’s bad. These are decisions he has to make himself if he’s to seriously reevaluate his work. He might not want to, since it’s selling so well, but it would be courageous. I mean, as an art producer, I want to be engaged in a critique, because if my art isn’t communicating what I want it to communicate, then I want to change it.”
But cartoonist Carol Lay (whose “Story Minute” strip runs in the L.A. Weekly) disagrees. ”When you can play a rich piece of music,” she says, “some people are just gonna hear the surface tune, and some people, because of their education, knowledge, and skill, might be able to appreciate it on an entirely different level. He can’t be responsible for the ignorance or intelligence of his viewers.”
The reason Williams has stuck with his approach over the years, despite court hassles and even death threats, is that he sees himself as defending his right to freedom of expression, a right he deserves every bit as much as Robert Mapplethorpe did. And, like Mapplethorpe, he’s concentrated on a personal, rather than directly political, vision.
“I’m not a moralist,” Williams says. “The world has to turn without me. I’m not a great, good person, but I’m not a bad person either.... You know, in the ’60s, when I was a young student, we were very idealistic, and there was a thing young artists were after called truth. All art had a truth. Now it’s freedom, but it wasn’t freedom then, it was truth, and I’d eat that shit with a shovel: What was the truth? And they’d say, ‘Well, you have to be true to your medium.’ If you’re gonna do something in wood, you’ve gotta make it look gnarly and half-ass ’cause that’s the way wood looks. You don’t carve nice folds and stuff in it and make it something it isn’t. So, you had a couple of generations of assholes that learned no quality craftsmanship, see? So, now we’re into freedom,” he continues, “but we’re gonna have that twisted a little bit, too. So, these ideals—I don’t have the ideals anymore, I just do what the fuck gets energy into people.”
Finally, PIGs’ criticism is directed primarily at Schimmel, the way the curator has used Williams’s work to push the idea of a “badboy” movement, opting for sensationalism while failing to allow for a diversity of viewpoints. But it can be argued that PIGs has treated Williams in a similar fashion.
Though his opinion of both Schimmel and Williams is not particularly high, and he agrees with PIGs to a large extent, Lane Ralyea, author of one of the essays in the “Helter Skelter” catalog, doesn’t necessarily admire the group’s approach. “PIGs stuff looks like it's not exactly about opening up thinking or arguing, either,” Ralyea says. “So, you get the two against each other, and it just seems like battle of the mind constrictors. It seems like the opposite of a space where you can talk about things, and that’s a real bummer. It just makes the whole thing unattractive.”
The flier urges the museumgoer to “think about what you see,” and says “this is not a call for censorship,” but it labels Williams’s paintings with words perhaps as inflammatory as those used in his titles and (along with the group’s criticism of the “Bull Dykes” painting) pulls pieces out of the context of Williams’s history and larger body of work. “When you look at a body of two hundred paintings,” says Suzanne Williams, “and single out the ten that are offensive to you, you’re way too narrow in your personal thinking.... They’re looking for the finite thing they’re looking for and trying to make everything they see and everything that’s there validate their point.”
So, what of Williams’s subject matter? On a recent Sunday, a reporter spoke with him at his home in North Hollywood. A simple postwar tract house, it's surrounded by more of the same, with all their accoutrements: folded-metal awnings, walls of pink-and-gray cinder blocks, lawns of yellowed grass, and the occasional faded American flag. The exterior gives no hint of the treasures inside. A miniature natural history museum, the house is filled with skulls, fossils, Persian rugs, huge bouquets of every type of paintbrush, both antique and new. The footrest for the couch is a large, ancient tortoise shell. As he talks, Williams stares at the images that flicker on a muted television.
“I have so many artists and women calling me, supporting me on this thing,” he says. “I could just back off and say, ‘I’m sorry, I won’t show this stuff anymore.’ But I’ve got so many people on me to be the point man on this thing.”
“So, I guess the subject matter’s not gonna change,” the reporter says, and glances at the television. Archival footage of Malcolm X appears on the screen. On the wall is a new painting of a crying baby with its head blowing open in a fountain of pills, syringes, and drugs. In the background is a detail of a bunch of hippies hanging out by a VW bus, and in the upper right-hand corner is a huge prophylactic wrapper that reads “Sans Crac-Baby Condoms.”
“Would you like to see me do that?" Williams asks. +
