Interview with Juxtapoz

EVAN PRICCO: Okay, we have to start here because it’s just so prevalent. Last time we spoke was back in 2012 for an all politics issue of Juxtapoz. Back then, we had a lot to discuss and work out, and some brilliant artists to showcase. But goddamn, if we were to do an issue on this in 2018, we would need VOLUMES. Do you find you are working with just so much content now, as opposed to say, 2008 or ‘12?

RON ENGLISH: I am always interested in the power of art that goes beyond commodity into conversation. And the conversation doesn’t have to be overtly political. It’s more about curiosity, about really examining concepts that we might take for granted. Especially with street art I like to take apart visual metaphors, catch-phrases or slogans because it forces the viewer to revalidate or invalidate things they might even subconsciously believe. At the height of the Iraq invasion I posted a billboard in Jersey City of a flowing American flag with the text “Support Our CEOs.” Around the corner I posted another billboard with an image of a Hummer and the text “Jesus drove an SUV. Mohammed pumped his gas.” Right after I posted it, an arab cab driver pulled over and got out screaming at me about how Mohammed never pumped anyone’s gas! I tried to explain that I was amplifying a boorish patriotic pastiche in order to spark a dialog, but he wasn’t having it. Sometimes people don’t get beyond their initial righteous indignation, but sometimes they do. I did a painting show at MOCA DC many years ago where my piece juxtaposing Malcolm X with a cartoon X Man was displayed prominently in the window. When I got to the opening I saw it had been removed by the nervous gallery owner because a group of angry black men had come in and complained. I promptly put the piece back in the window and went across the courtyard to find the men who had protested, invited them back into the gallery and asked them to consider the piece within the context of the entire show. They took their time, examined the work, and then talked to me about it. Dialog!

Years later, with the internet, twitter, Instagram, our visual and information landscape is just so crowded that outrageous content seems to be the only thing people can latch into. The truth is stranger than fiction, and I can’t even parody Trump effectively because he’s more extreme than anything I can think up. Just a few months ago I rented a billboard truck in DC to drive around the tourist spots for a week with a billboard that featured an image of Jesus and Trump with the text “Who would you rather worship: an Itinerant Jew or a Golden Billionaire?” No one questioned it. It made almost no impact. The only press mention was a story on an Asian cyclist reporting that the driver of the billboard truck made a racist remark to her as he drove by. Whether he did or not, I don’t know. He seemed like a nice guy.

EP: Can you remember your first foray into interventionist art? 

RE: I have always been an art interventionist. Even in grade school I made posters for campaigns on littering or riding the bus. Making 8mm movies created an interventionist dialog with the public. At first it was candid camera-type stunts, like jumping out of dumpsters or dryers at the laundromat at unsuspecting passersby. Later we staged mock shootings in public spaces, with lots of fake blood. I would show the movies at parties in between band sets, and my live narration (no sound with 8mm) became part of the performance. This is how I learned to build a community around art. I started posting my art illegally on billboards in the early eighties for two reasons: free access to large rolls of used seamless paper, and easy to reach billboards everywhere in the Texas landscape. To me they looked like frames. I would stage my photos and stick around sometimes to see what might happen. Other artists became intrigued and for a while we had a “Vandal Art” collective of sorts; artists would gather at a certain place where a quorum of billboards could be found and we’d have an “event.” These events continued until my first big bust in Dallas in 1984. We had just finished the eighth billboard when eight squad cars surrounded us. I had never understood what people mean when they say the cops came from out of nowhere, but that is exactly what happened. I had lived in Dallas for years, but I had no way of knowing that the weekend prior to our visit the police department had relocated its downtown office to within eyesight of our event. The cops had sat in their office watching us post until they figured maybe something slightly illegal was going on. But I don’t know why they needed eight squad cars. Artists are scary? Many years later in San Francisco with my buddies the Billboard Liberation Front, we staged one of my largest interventionist collaborative efforts, a billboard with an animatronic sculpture of Ronald McDonald force-feeding an obese boy, complete with a flash mob of more than 50 dancing Hamburglers and Ronalds. The cops confiscated the sculpture but couldn’t identify the ringleaders among all the costumed culprits, and the Ronalds and Hamburglers got away.

EP: What was your first love, painting or street art? 

RE: I always liked the balance between the two, painting and street art, or introspection versus extraversion, from the very beginning of my consciousness as an artist. As an eight year old I liked to sit at the kitchen table and draw, but also I liked to make movies outside with my friends. Painting can be such a deep dive. My assistant pointed out to me earlier today that I often go for six hours at a time completely silent, painting. Conversely, street art is very social. Street artists love to hang out and party together. Lots of people come by to watch you work. I think one activity makes you appreciate the other. I was painting my Guernica show for Allouche Gallery in 2016 when I got an opportunity to go to Dubai with Jo Brooks and paint a large mural in an outdoor mall space with a great and diverse group of street artists including dear friends Beau Stanton and Andy Phipps. I decided to adapt a Guernica with my own characters that I had done as an oil painting for the mural. The one change I made was to substitute the pig character for a camel. I like to adapt my public art for the local population. My wall was ground level and lots of people came by to chat and watch, including a teenaged son of a prince dressed in an immaculate white thobe. He approached me respectfully and showed me his book. He was a good artist and wanted desperately to help and hang out, but I told him he wasn’t dressed for spray-painting. He laughed and told me his father had allowed him to come approach me only if he was dressed in his best clothes. The next day he and his crew of friends came back in their best graffiti streetwear and I taught him a few tricks of the can. I’ve done hundreds of billboards and murals, sanctioned and illegal, in public, but usually I’m up high enough that people can’t really talk to me. But sometimes I’m right in the fray, interacting, taking pictures with interested, engaged strangers in front of my art. I’m probably in the family albums of people all over the world. And you never know where that might lead. A young filmmaker once tracked me down after having seen a few billboards in New York City of my character MC Supersized, the fast food mascot who actually ate the food he promoted and was consequentially morbidly obese. Visiting my studio he was surprised to see a number of my oil paintings exploring these same themes, and he ended up using these images in his movie “Supersize Me” which changed the public dialog forever on the nature of industrial food production and public health.

EP: Was there ever a time when you thought maybe you had to choose between genres? Like I have to be Z instead of X? Because nowadays, it seems like a younger generation of artists have so many mediums and genres they can get into, but you in particular are a trailblazer in just opening the floodgates of an artist covering street art, paintings, pop art, political art, music, toys, merchandise, comedy... give me a blueprint

RE: There has always been a lot of pressure to adhere to a narrow vision. Discipline is the word most often used. Consistency makes art easier to market. Liechtenstein painted dots. You recognize it instantly. And if you bought one, all your friends would recognize it too. McDonald’s is successful because you always know exactly what you’re going to get. You are not going to find a McDonalds that serves fine wine and filet minon. Their food may not be great but it is consistent, which is the secret to success in fast food and also in art. The more predictable you are, the easier it is for everyone involved. I am sure I have been quite a challenge for many who have participated in the marketing and promotion of my art. But at the end of the day I am far more interested in my own artistic signature than making things easier for the commercial end. The fact that I have had so much success following my muse and not the market has perhaps emboldened a new generation to approach their art the same way, and as with most powerful movements, the world changes to accommodate. I have lived in multiple art worlds simultaneously, but they are all different experiences and many people in each world are completely unaware of the other worlds. Street artists live like globe-trotting rock stars, knocking out huge murals in short time periods, then partying with the locals. There’s always a certain level of excitement and insanity, which is almost the polar opposite of the pop surrealists, where the most exciting thing that might happen in a long solitary day of painting is when the cat steps on your palette and tracks your paint across the floor. Not that pop surrealists don’t party. I’ve been to quite a few Baby Tattooville gatherings at the Mission Inn in Riverside, California, in rooms full of my favorite artists painting on a group canvas, drinking and dancing with old man Robert Williams and his Goddess wife Suzanne, surrounded by Dark Art Superstar Michael Hussar’s posse of enthusiastic naked models. Good thing I had a camera. I have also been to comic cons from Bangkok to Brooklyn and witnessed the rise of collectible culture. From Funko Pop to Murakami, Sucklord to Sorayama, I have seen a vast genre of art rise from the confluence of new technology and age-old imagination, introducing new generations of global participants to a gateway slice of art and hopefully a lifetime of art appreciation. I think artists today are lucky to have such far reaching avenues for their visions

EP: What do you see is still a viable way of challenging authority? Bare bones, back to basics, what works for you? 

RE: Voting, offering viable alternatives, doggedly pushing real facts against propaganda, humor, and most importantly, inclusiveness. I think people sometimes just wish the fight was over and the good guys won, but that will never happen. The fight is continuous. And it is internal. You have to keep re-evaluating your own belief system and never fall back on cultural norms and traditions. Understand the past but stop treating it like it’s the future. If you give more credibility to a person who may have lived before the age of science, never traveled more than one hundred miles or knew more than a couple hundred people over a PhD scientist who has traveled the world and interfaced with thousands of educated people, you are probably going to make your own existence more shallow and ultimately more tenuous. To challenge authority, you must find the limits of power, and you do this by defining your rights. You don’t have rights if you don’t resist forces you find incompatible with your ideals. If you don’t get in the streets, up on a wall, out in the public discourse, you may never have the chance to define for the public record exactly what you can and can’t say, believe, or act upon. One of the greatest things about being an artist for me has been the ability to travel and interact with a staggeringly large cross-section of people, from Kazakh shepherds to Dutch politicians, Jersey gangsters to Chinese astronomers, Hollywood CEOs to East Village junkies. I’ve watched a shaman summon a rainbow on a Russian mountaintop. I’ve harvested figs on a commune in California. The best way to understand the vastness of life’s possibilities is to engage the world.

EP: You figured out a way to redefine a lot of pop iconography, and I was thinking about your version of Guernica and the icons in that painting you used. Can we talk about how you use humor and serious issues all in one painting? You definitely have a sense of humor but its a dark sense of humor where you aren’t working on bits or jokes, its an overall look at our current society.

RE: I take all of the cultural refuse we swim in and let it filter through my subconscious and return it to the world as a testament to the inner dialog of a person living in this age. Creating a universe between familiarity and the idiosyncratic creates the space for a more critical view of society in opposition to a tacit acceptance: a habituated perceptual equilibrium challenged by an inscrutable unfamiliarity. It’s just part of my personality to poke into things and celebrate the absurdities and stir things up to see how they work. I went through a period when I was 33 (my Jesus year) where I intently studied the Bible and the gnostic scriptures, and I used my own likeness as a Jesus avatar model for much of the art I made while I was on this journey. A few years later I came up with what I thought was a funny and thought-provoking concept: Redneck Nietzsche. I painted a billboard of myself as Jesus on the cross with the text (in gothic font, of course): Let’s get drunk and kill God. It just so happened that I posted this in Jersey City on a low hanging billboard across the street from a bar on a Sunday afternoon. I noticed the baseball bat wielding drunkards piling out the bar before the rest of my crew. I got the photo and jumped into Pedro’s car as it pulled away with a few new dents on the hood. There’s something very American about the combustible admixture of alcohol, religion and sports equipment.

EP: Who were your heroes? And who are now your heroes? 

RE: My heroes tend to be people who challenge the status quo or people who devote themselves to their vision, at the expense of their own comfort or often their lives. My heroes are people who are able to inject truth into the myopic mythologies and delusions that hold back progress, who act in the greater interest, not self-interest. Years ago we took in a young radical artist trying to lay low while congress denounced him and his face was plastered onto commercially sold gun range targets (along with Khadafy and Saddam Hussein) because he had dared question the inviolability of the American flag with his art. His day job was computer programming, and the military offered him substantial money for a program he designed, but instead he quit, refusing to serve the machine. His name is Dread Scott, named for the slave who sued for freedom. And my friend MD Young, who fearlessly entered and ultimately defined an entire industry in the world’s biggest country, based only on his imagination and hard-won insights. And of course, my wife, who negotiated every aspect of our family life, dealt with every crazy person, got me out of jail, and always made me look smart without making me feel stupid.

EP: Do you still get a joy out of painting in the same way you got it 20 years ago? 

RE: Or 40 years ago! Painting is a very grounding activity for me. It is a meditation that produces sharable results. As broad as my interests get, I suspect I will never find anything that will replace the deeply personal and solitary act of painting. It took me almost six months to paint “Delusionville Manifesto,” a massive oil painting that measures 8 by 14 feet. When you start something this big, you have to keep your wits about you and pace for the long run or you’ll never get it finished. The painting process becomes about rewarding yourself by seeing one little part come to life each day and then seeing the pieces begin to fill the holes and propel you towards completion. And that brief moment at the gallery opening where you get to stand there with a glass of wine and admire your handiwork and listen to others talk about it, before the work begins its life beyond your reach and out of your control is always a bittersweet experience.

EP: Are there trends in art that excite you? And I assume, as someone who has seen a lot of good and bad art come and go, are there trends that you just absolutely dread? 

RE: I have found street art to be a very exciting movement. It has allowed more artists to make a living and achieve greatness and it has earned the attention of people who may not have had an interest in art. The art world has not been able to sustain a singular vision or movement for sometime now, which is a healthy development in my opinion. Artists don’t have to dance to a specific tune anymore, which allows artists to gravitate to the mode of expression that suits their true soul. I find trends to be very circular; everything goes round and comes back again, so I don’t worry about fitting into some transient definition of what good art is. I like to make each show something completely different, telling a new story, with characters, tropes and themes. When I travel, I let each town I visit tell me what to paint on its walls. Sometimes I go into a situation expecting to do one thing and I am changed by the people and the circumstances. I prepared for an Easter excursion to Colorado Springs, the epicenter of fundamentalist Christianity, by creating an ascension event for my character Santa Christ, who is based on a self-created myth that Jesus never died on the cross but instead aged into an elderly Jewish gentleman who hides out at the north pole and once a year brings gifts to the children of Earth. We got a great crew together, tethered Santa Christ to some weather balloons and sent him 200 feet up in the air for the local news, but after the news crew left the wires snapped and Santa Christ went sailing over the air force base, never to be seen or heard from again. But that’s not the best thing that happened in Colorado Springs. I asked my local friend Don Goede what else was happening that we could have fun with. He mentioned that he had over 40 stuffed animals left over from a Kimya Dawson video he had just shot and that there was a great outdoor shooting range nearby. So we stopped by a butcher shop and stocked up on blood and guts, stuffed the animals with balloons of gore and shot them up with high powered weapons and slow motion cameras. We even crucified Mickey Mouse on an improvised cross and incinerated him with a homemade flame thrower. Every town is full of treasure for the curious.

EP: What’s going on your epitaph? 

RE: OK, now you can raise my prices.