Episode 497 - Shepard Fairey
Marc:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fucking ears what the fuck nicks what the phycadelics what the fucksters what the fuck'll bury fins what the fuck rakers and uh the regional wtfs i will uh keep to myself at this juncture please watch my show on ifc the second episode of maron airs tonight
Marc:Every Thursday, 10 o'clock, 9 p.m.
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Marc:Scattered different times throughout the rest of the country.
Marc:Between 9 and 10.
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Marc:IFC has a streaming element.
Marc:You can watch it there as well.
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Marc:Marin on IFC.
Marc:Tonight's episode features Ray Romano.
Marc:in a uh slightly plays slightly against character as himself i enjoyed this episode it's cute i can be cute i can be light-hearted in my heavy way yes yes i can uh did i mention who's on the show shepherd fairy is on the show today shepherd fairy the artiste
Marc:He's a shepherd fairy has fucked my head up for years.
Marc:I had no idea what the hell was going on because of his stuff.
Marc:Didn't have any idea.
Marc:If you know Shepard Ferry's work or if you want to, if you're in Charleston, South Carolina, that area, Shepard will be returning to his hometown next week to show some of his new work Thursday, May 22nd at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston.
Marc:Go see work from Shepard and Jasper Johns.
Marc:You know, targets and stuff.
Marc:Jasper Johns did some pop art back in the day.
Marc:But Shepard Fairey, Shepard Fairey fucked my brain.
Marc:He did.
Marc:I talked to him about it.
Marc:Many of you know him from the famous Obama hope poster.
Marc:But more of you probably know him from the obey business.
Marc:The Andre the Giant, the stickers, the graffiti, the markings, the obey everywhere.
Marc:Just Andre the Giant's head, obey.
Marc:How many years?
Marc:I mean, I lived in New York City.
Marc:How many years did I say, what the fuck is that about?
Marc:What the fuck's the point of that?
Marc:How am I supposed to react to that?
Marc:I kind of get it.
Marc:It's kind of creepy.
Marc:It's kind of a riff on some sort of totalitarian business.
Marc:It just, what is it?
Marc:What is this Andre the Giant Obey business?
Marc:I had invested so much conspiracy in it.
Marc:I had no idea what it was.
Marc:I thought that before I knew it was Shepard Fairey's artwork, I thought it was just a small army of people out to mind fuck the world.
Marc:And it was.
Marc:Because a lot of people picked up on the very intentional meme.
Marc:I don't know if it became a meme on purpose.
Marc:I talked to Shepard about that a bit.
Marc:But it was out in the world.
Marc:And back when it first started showing up, I was already a little fucked in the head.
Marc:I believe, I'm trying to think of what year that was, but I was down on the Lower East Side and I had become obsessed.
Marc:There was a lot of tagging going on, a lot of graffiti art.
Marc:I don't know what the right verbiage is around that type of expression, but there was this one thing, this upside down martini glass with like a gel underneath it with a cross through it.
Marc:The missing foundation.
Marc:That was everywhere on the Lower East Side.
Marc:I had no idea what it was.
Marc:The only point of reference I had at that point for any of this stuff was the postal horn.
Marc:in The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon.
Marc:And because I read Pynchon, I invested just a tremendous amount of meaning and possible mind-fucking conspiracy in both the Missing Foundation tag and also in...
Marc:And Shepard Ferry's obey thing.
Marc:I was like, what is going on?
Marc:It's sort of this weird kind of, you know, franchised radical wake up call.
Marc:And by franchised, I mean that obviously people picked up on the tagging and picked up on
Marc:promoting the the meme and pushing the art forward they were related to it it had significance or it just was a way to say you know fuck you there's something outside the box that you don't know about and it's functioning in your day-to-day life are you aware i'm like i'm paranoid i'm nervous i i feel left out but i am not aware
Marc:And I talked to Shepard about it because that's his baby.
Marc:And I like Shepard's artwork.
Marc:There are some arguments about whether or not that fine line between advertising and art.
Marc:But that's always been there, I think, since I've always had...
Marc:a love-hate relationship with Andy Warhol.
Marc:I don't think he cares.
Marc:But I remember seeing the retrospective of Warhol at the Museum of Modern Art.
Marc:I don't remember how many years ago that was, but just seeing how he started out as an artist in earnest, doing interesting things with the gold leaf and whatnot.
Marc:In my recollection of the exhibit, I'm not an art historian here.
Marc:And then at some point, he just turned it all in on itself and said, fuck you.
Marc:You know, I'm going to run...
Marc:you know, silk screens of things that you identify.
Marc:I'm going to make sculptures of things that you see in everyday life.
Marc:And I'm going to present it in a slightly different lens.
Marc:I'm going to take these objects that you know of both, you know, from supermarkets, from the press.
Marc:I'm going to take them and I'm going to mind fuck you with them.
Marc:How would you like to be mind fucked by a Campbell's soup can?
Marc:How would you like to have to reckon with the simplicity of a Campbell's soup can?
Marc:What does it mean?
Marc:It means I just took a delivery system out of context and shat in your head.
Marc:And that's art.
Marc:And it is.
Marc:Why not?
Marc:I mean, he was one of the first guys to do assembly line silkscreen portraits.
Marc:And I dug him.
Marc:He created something.
Marc:He created an idea.
Marc:He created a meme.
Marc:He created a process.
Marc:Created a format that he could repeat over and over again.
Marc:And again, his art, there's nothing wrong with art that's got a big, healthy dose of fuck you at the core of it.
Marc:I've always appreciated it, though.
Marc:I still question it.
Marc:I still question Warhol for years.
Marc:for years i talked to shepherd about this i did talk to him about warhol a bit but i i just i need more art in my life that's all i'm saying all right i gotta i gotta get out there and do it i think everyone should do it just actively go out and you know and shove some art in your head somehow all right so you're wondering about the hands and feet tingling those of you are caught up on my personal narrative of you know i everything is going pretty well but i seem to have a bit of a bit of of dark voidness
Marc:I'm not involved with anybody romantically right now.
Marc:I'm carrying a heavy heart about the failures of my recent relationships.
Marc:So when I'm alone, it's very hard for me to know what the hell to do.
Marc:I don't hang out with that many people.
Marc:So I get done with my work during the day and I'm like, what does a person do now?
Marc:What does a person do?
Marc:And cooking for yourself becomes a little sad.
Marc:I'll make myself some dinner.
Marc:Oh, look, it's a sad piece of chicken and some sad beans.
Marc:Why do you look at it like that, Mark?
Marc:Don't talk to yourself like you're not the only one talking.
Marc:It's just a shift.
Marc:I'm just trying to make the shift, you know, back to spending time alone.
Marc:And part of that time seems to be ruminating on my physical health.
Marc:So to get around to it, as some of you know.
Marc:i had the tingles in the feet and the tingles in the hand they persist although it's not compromising anything my balance is fine i went running in 91 degree weather yesterday i don't know what i was trying to prove to myself but i lived could have gotten heat stroke could have dropped didn't drop fine that's what i'm doing so i go to the neurologist seems like a decent guy
Marc:I don't know him.
Marc:There's a lot of pictures of rock and roll people.
Marc:You know, not patients, but someone's a rock fan.
Marc:But I go over there and he does the thing.
Marc:You know, he does, you know, he checks my reflexes.
Marc:He checks, you know, makes me look away and checks, you know, if I know up and down with my fingers and my toes.
Marc:He hooks me up to a machine.
Marc:He's pretty dead sure that I have carpal tunnel.
Marc:I don't know where I would get carpal tunnel.
Marc:Then he starts shocking me.
Marc:He says, you don't mind being shocked, do you?
Marc:And I'm like, I don't know how much shock.
Marc:And then, you know, they put some tape, some wires on me.
Marc:He shocks my arm and I give you a little jerk.
Marc:And he says, well, I don't know.
Marc:It looks fine, but I still think you have carpal tunnel.
Marc:He asked me a bunch of questions about, you know, my vision.
Marc:That's fine.
Marc:Is, you know, am I am I OK?
Marc:Otherwise, it's fine.
Marc:How's my erections?
Marc:I'm like, well, you know, hit or miss, but usually, OK, you know, some nights are better than others.
Marc:That's normal, right?
Marc:ah this is such a great great question how are your erections well i'm very proud of them no but everything's fine he could find nothing so now i'm that guy like can you just give me like oh maybe it's this maybe it's that no it's nothing i don't know there's nothing wrong with you so what is it then is it my mind
Marc:I've been very sort of operating at a high level of not aggravation, just like I am amped all the time.
Marc:I know some of you are diagnosing me.
Marc:Okay, look, maybe a little anti-anxiety stuff would help me out.
Marc:because i would i would like to enjoy my life for however long of it i have left i would like to enjoy that would you mind did i plug my shows tonight i'm interviewing vince vaughn in nashville um that's sold out tomorrow night the 16th i will be at zany's for a 7 p.m show there are tickets available for that on saturday i'll just be in nashville
Marc:driving around in a rental car.
Marc:What else is happening?
Marc:I will be in Albuquerque, New Mexico on May 31st.
Marc:I'm going to be in Chicago in June for the big 26th annual, first annual comedy festival.
Marc:Go to wtfpod.com and check the calendar.
Marc:I feel a little bit heavy hearted.
Marc:I'm not complaining.
Marc:It's just life weighing down saying, Mark, you're 50 years old.
Marc:Do you even know what you like to do?
Marc:Do you even know what you want to do with your free time?
Marc:Do you even know how to have a good time?
Marc:Who's saying that stuff to me?
Marc:That's a good question.
Marc:Good question.
Marc:We'll deal with that later.
Marc:Let's talk to Shepard Ferry now.
Marc:Shepard Ferry, I didn't know if you really existed.
Marc:There you are, sitting right there.
Marc:In the flesh.
Marc:But don't clam up on me now that you're on the mic.
Marc:We almost did the entire interview in the house.
Marc:Just sitting there.
Marc:You know, it was weird because I went down this rabbit hole because I knew you were coming over.
Marc:And I started thinking about when I lived in New York in the late 80s.
Marc:And I started thinking about, you know, I went back beyond the obey Andre the Giant things.
Marc:And I started thinking about these symbols that I used to see in New York all over the place.
Marc:And just the power of that sort of the omnipresent symbol that is coded somehow or mysterious enough to make you go like,
Marc:what the fuck is that about?
Marc:And I went on Twitter, and at first I thought it was the Dead Kennedys logo, but it wasn't.
Marc:And then I couldn't remember what the logo was or anything, and then I finally figured it out that some guy on Twitter had sent me that.
Marc:Do you remember that?
Marc:Yeah, I do.
Marc:That's the Missing Foundation, Peter Missing's thing that was all over the Lower East Side in the late 80s.
Marc:And I never knew what the fuck it was, and it haunted me.
Marc:And I think there's a power to that that you certainly tapped into.
Marc:But what was your first sort of...
Marc:What compelled you to do Andre and what did it mean?
Marc:I mean, I know it's a weird place to start, but it seems like the place to start.
Guest:Sure, sure.
Guest:Well, to go back a little bit further, the things that got me excited about...
Guest:about art making were skateboarding and punk rock.
Guest:I drew as a kid, but I grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, so all that I was surrounded by was paintings of ducks and seascapes.
Marc:No exposure to modern art or the ideas of modern art as a child at all?
Guest:No, no, not really.
Guest:You know, later in high school, I finally was exposed to to Warhol.
Guest:And of course, you know, the the Impressionists, though they were somewhat progressive and controversial at the moment, had been well assimilated at that point.
Guest:So no, no contemporary art.
Marc:But you gravitated towards the Impressionists.
Guest:Well, I liked that as at least there was some sort of pictorial liberty taken in sort of reducing things to brush strokes.
Guest:Which one did you like?
Guest:The way light reflects off things.
Marc:Well, I... Because I grew up like kind of... My mother painted a bit and she would drag me to museums all throughout my childhood.
Marc:So art was sort of this ongoing thing in my life or sort of being around it.
Marc:But I gravitated towards impressionists too initially.
Marc:But I think it was because she did.
Guest:well you know i i was somewhat contrarian from about age 13 but i still my parents liked monet and i i liked that he could paint something they liked the cathedrals i liked the the hay bales yeah something so simple as the light hitting a hay bale during different times of the day different seasons and how um what what seems like very inane subject matter could yield a really compelling picture
Marc:Right, yeah, Cezanne's fruit, I kind of liked.
Marc:Do you go to museums now?
Marc:I was talking to someone else about this.
Marc:Do you have any relationships with pieces of art that you need to see once a year or twice a year?
Guest:You know, I wish I had more time to go to museums.
Guest:Whenever any of my favorite artists work is in a show, I try to go.
Guest:You know, when I was still living in San Diego, I drove up to see Barbara Kruger's show at Mocha because Kruger had been a really big...
Guest:uh inspiration for me and if you look at the the obey logo with the red bar with a white type i mean that's a straight barbara kruger lift um and you know she was inspired by working in advertising and that was a device that was used in advertising that she just then uh you know really utilized in her work and made a very specific aesthetic known to her which which which device exactly the the white type reversed out of a red bar across a black and white image and um
Guest:You know, I so seeing that her work in person where it was it was presented as installation was really moving to me.
Guest:Seeing Rauschenberg's combine paintings in person.
Guest:One of the first things that I saw at 10 years old when we took a family trip from South Carolina to New York was the Chuck Close.
Guest:Philip Glass painting.
Guest:It's just a very large piece, incredibly meticulously rendered photorealistically, but it was mind-blowing to see something done that well technically, and that basically made me want to draw and paint well at 10 years old.
Marc:Isn't it amazing when you first see Chuck Close and when you see it in a book, you have no idea how big those canvases are, and then you stand in front of one, and you're like, holy shit.
Marc:And the way, like, as he got on in life, the pixels became different, and he started to experiment with colors within the actual, I would say, painted pixels of what he does.
Guest:Yeah, the abstraction within the element of the grid.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I mean, the original paintings were really, really impressive, but a lot of it's about, you know, technique, but also patience, that it just takes forever to do that.
Guest:But once he...
Guest:had the spine issue and some partial paralysis, the way that that limited his precision, but he found another way that actually I think is maybe more impressive to render these photorealistic images with all these elements of the grid that are not representational at all.
Guest:Oh yeah, that was fascinating.
Guest:It's incredible.
Guest:And I love the idea of people, of artists setting out sort of...
Guest:you know, parameters for themselves, but having, you know, having a lot of impressive innovation within those parameters.
Marc:So, okay.
Marc:So you grow up in, in, in Charleston, that's South Carolina, right?
Marc:Yep.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:And you know, what, what's, what's your childhood like?
Marc:You're not, are you living in a rural area?
Marc:What is it?
Marc:Do you have animals?
Marc:What business is your father in, in the agricultural field?
Yeah.
Guest:That's condescending to me.
Guest:No, that's great.
Guest:I mean, when I left Charleston and I visited San Francisco for the first time and had my skateboard with me and I was a pretty decent skateboarder.
Guest:People said, where are you from?
Guest:I said, South Carolina.
Guest:How do you skateboard?
Guest:Isn't it just dirt roads there?
Guest:I'm glad.
Marc:I mean, I'm showing my ignorant judgment.
Guest:Send me a letter of Pony Express.
Guest:We'll get it there in six months.
Guest:But no, my I did grow up in a it's fairly conservative.
Guest:I went to the same grade school in high school that Stephen Colbert went to Porter Gowd.
Guest:Very guys buddies.
Guest:uh no we didn't he's six years older than i am so we didn't know each other but um a guy that he knew when i when i first met colbert he said yeah did you know carlos salinas i said no but he's the first guy i ever saw wear a sex pistols t-shirt so he made an impression on me but um my my dad was captain of the football team when he was in high school and my mom was head cheerleader and then you know so there was a depth to the struggle at home it wasn't just parental it was ideal
Marc:Psychological on all levels.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:So, um, you know, I grew, I grew up, uh, yeah, uh, I had a fine, my childhood was fine, but, uh, I always felt dissatisfied and I still do, but I couldn't put my finger on it.
Guest:And then I found, um, uh, discovered skateboarding.
Guest:And with that came the dead candidates, the circles, black flag, the clash, the sex pistols.
Guest:And then I was like, ah, this is what I've been missing.
Guest:This is the, you know, the alternative, a phrase that had not been coined yet.
Guest:Right.
Marc:there's a way out right there's a different there's something that's completely different from anything that's around me right and and so at that time was that what year was that so was that when skate punk was it or were you already a little late to the game or was it right in the middle of it um well at the end of 1983 so um so that's right there right yeah and um
Guest:But what came with that was this rebellious, visceral, creative.
Guest:There was art, like Raven Pettibone's art for Black Flag, Jamie Reid's art for the Sex Pistols, all the great graphics for skateboards with skulls and daggers.
Guest:And so that...
Guest:for me as someone who liked to draw all of a sudden I could make homemade stencils and make my own stickers.
Guest:And I put the sticker on the car that said, stop the arms race, not the human race that I'd made myself.
Guest:And my parents really upset about it.
Guest:But when they tried to peel it off, it was one of those paper ones and it was going to look even worse trying to get it off.
Guest:So they, you know, they, yeah, they had to leave it on.
Guest:But, um,
Guest:All of those things meant that when I went to the Rhode Island School of Design for college that this do-it-yourself culture was part of me.
Guest:And then I discovered graffiti.
Marc:Well, what was your struggle at home in terms of like what kind of profession was your dad in?
Guest:My dad was and is a doctor, and my mom had taught English to put my dad through medical school, then was a stay-at-home mom for me and my sister, and then started a bed-and-breakfast reservation service, because Charleston has all these historic homes that had a room to rent, and before the internet...
Guest:It was inefficient to run your own ad with just one room, but my mom had the great idea to aggregate all of that.
Guest:Does she still do that?
Guest:No, she sold that business and now she's just a part-time real estate agent and does a lot of charity and local organization work.
Marc:So when you first started showing signs of being a sort of artistic rebel, I mean, I always assume that when parents or teachers that they want to encourage creativity, but was there a fight there?
Marc:Your old man's a doctor.
Marc:What kind of doctor?
Guest:Just family practice.
Marc:Oh, GP?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, so, like, was there, were they excited?
Guest:You know, I think my parents liked that I had a hobby that wasn't just throwing water balloons at cars.
Guest:Or drugs.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:You know, I was always mischievous, but when I would draw and paint, they'd say, oh, you know, you'd be in your room for hours and hours and hours without coming out, and...
Guest:I think they liked that at least there was something I put some energy effort into and focused on.
Marc:What were you drawing and painting at that time?
Guest:Well, it's funny.
Guest:I went through phases.
Guest:When I was a little kid, all I wanted to draw was war shit.
Guest:It was like tanks, aircraft carriers, jets, bombers.
Guest:But then I went through – Charleston has a lot of pretty cool architecture, so I went through a phase of painting a lot of these distinctive houses with their shrubs and everything.
Guest:And then and then later, later in high school, I really got into images with a lot of emotion, like guys in jail putting their hand out.
Guest:And I don't know where that I think that was coming from some sort of punk rock affectation.
Guest:And you were making that up.
Marc:I mean, you didn't draw from pictures.
Guest:Yeah, well, I sometimes I drew from life and sometimes I would draw like I'd see, you know, a movie still, but it would be, you know, in a book I couldn't take with me and I would just try to remember it or I would or I would.
Guest:My mom had a Xerox machine.
Guest:I would Xerox something and use it as a as a reference.
Guest:But it was a mixture of.
Guest:you know, uh, from my head, from things that, uh, I could set my easel up and do right in front of me or create a still life in my room or whatever, or, or from, uh, yeah, things from things from books and magazines that were cool pictures.
Marc:And it's interesting too, at that time though, like there was still that, that weird, um, the Xerox mentality that you could go down to the copy store and just do all kinds of weird shit and put shit together.
Marc:And that sort of was art in a way.
Guest:Well, I mean, one of the things that punk rock dictated was that, you know, you don't have to be good.
Guest:You just have to do it.
Guest:Be earnest.
Guest:Yeah, the Xerox machine was like the ultimate tool of empowerment and that you could make multiples really quickly and the way that it would...
Guest:um reduce the image to you know high contrast was actually really appealing with a lot of images and i love that and my mom happened to have a xerox machine for her bed and breakfast business so she was like don't use up all the toner but i would late at night i was sneaking down to the to her office to use the xerox machine the high contrasting that's true it kind of breaks the image down to complete black and white and you get a whole different thing
Marc:Yeah, it's great.
Marc:I remember it like because I remember this from my childhood because that, you know, that art was sort of I went to I worked at it right across from the university.
Marc:So I sort of tapped into this, you know, to the kind of whatever the Albuquerque art scene is or was.
Marc:But what in order to to sort of decide to go to RISD, I mean, RISD comes, you know, that's a pretty big reputation.
Marc:There's there's expectation there, you know, like a lot of.
Marc:kind of famous artists went there that, you know, redefined what modern art was.
Marc:I mean, what was the decision-making process around that?
Marc:So you're skating around, you're in high school.
Marc:Why'd you decide on RISD?
Marc:And your parents must have been supportive of that as well, right?
Marc:Sort of.
Guest:Well, I...
Guest:I went to Porter gal, the very conservative school and I left after, did you have to wear a uniform?
Guest:I had to wear a coat and tie and, um, throughout high school.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, uh, it, it, it also was 60% guys and 40% girls.
Guest:And I, I, uh, it was all rich, smart brats.
Guest:I, I felt like, uh, I was, I was suffocating.
Guest:Southern rich, smart brats.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Uh, and, and, um,
Guest:So I switched from there and went to public school for a couple years where I was able to be around a much more diverse group of people and have friends that had high IQs and low IQs.
Guest:It's important, man.
Guest:And did drugs and didn't do drugs and were white and weren't white.
Marc:It's a big change.
Marc:I mean, I did the same thing.
Marc:I went to private school until I got thrown out.
Marc:And then when you go to public school, you're like, oh, this is real life.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:This is how it's supposed to be.
Marc:This is how you learn and grow and get new ideas and things.
Guest:And, you know, navigating all the, you know, different social and economic things, I think is actually really valuable.
Marc:What did you do?
Marc:Were you the funny guy or the weird guy?
Guest:Or did you play sports?
Guest:I just, I was, I loved how porous the different cliques were in a way because I was in honors classes, but I hung out with the skater pothead kids.
Guest:And, um,
Guest:But then I also had friends that were in band, but just because we both liked Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin.
Guest:So I liked that, but my parents hated that I went to that school, and they kept saying, you're skating by, and they loved using skating by as a term because I was a skateboarder.
Guest:Were you doing pools and stuff?
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Guest:I skated ramps, pools, board slid down handrails.
Guest:I was a very serious skateboarder.
Guest:When was the last time you got on a board?
Guest:Well, now my daughter, who's eight, she's skateboarding.
Guest:And so I've been going out with her.
Guest:But my wife, when we had our first kid, she said, well, you know, you've got street art.
Guest:djing uh you know all the all these other hobbies skateboarding one of them's got to go and um and so i decided it would be skateboarding since i had arthritis in my left knee but then when our daughter said you know i really want to get a skateboard yeah my wife my um i said no i don't think you want that vivian you know bikes are a lot cooler but because i knew if i pushed it on her she would say no i would you know i want to bike instead reverse psychology but um then now my wife says like you got to go skateboarding with vivian you got to make time for it so
Guest:It all worked out.
Guest:Just remember you're a little more breakable now.
Guest:Right, yeah.
Guest:And it is, it's very humbling because I was, the skateboard was like one with my body at one point.
Guest:I had such good control over it.
Guest:And now it's, yeah, it's, you know.
Guest:It's a young man's game.
Guest:It is, it is.
Marc:But with skate punk, because it's interesting when I was thinking about talking to you before and I was sort of like, you know, free associating, you know, images and, and,
Marc:And then it sort of came to me that that skate punks, you know, gave us Spike Jones, gave us, you know, the Johnny Knoxville phenomenon, gave us, you know, obey and on through, you know, your art.
Marc:It's you can sort of track that that what do you think it is about?
Marc:About about skate punk in particular, that there's something different than than drugs or something different than violence.
Marc:There's something so immediate and so compelling about skating in that pace.
Marc:Do you think it had any any effect on your neural pathways or your creativity in a direct way?
Guest:Oh, absolutely.
Guest:I mean, the way I would look at a city when I was skating around or my parents were driving me around looking for spots like, oh, yeah, that embankment, that looks really perfect.
Guest:Oh, when I was flying into anywhere, I would be looking out the window to see if there were any drain pools I could see from the plane.
Marc:It's a different analysis of the landscape.
Guest:gonna get in it you just knew that you could get in it oh yeah i would look for landmarks that would help me find it in a car later um but i um you know i i think that the that combination of creativity um aggression and you know and you know a physical outlet but it's not it's not violent towards someone else it's just uh you know but it's very therapeutic um that combination of things i'm
Guest:Ever since I got that high, I've been looking for it in other ways.
Guest:Never a drug guy, though.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:I mean, yeah, I enjoy a beer or two.
Guest:I like to go out and get loose, but I don't have an addictive personality other than to stickers.
Marc:addicted to stickers yeah all right so so you're gonna make the jump now before you went to the Rhode Island School of Design had you been in New York had you been to uh cities had you been to Boston when did you go to San Francisco that was earlier on or were you yeah were you shocked by sort of was the adjustment difficult no when I you know when I went to um
Guest:When I went to Providence to get back to getting into RISD, my parents didn't like that I went to public school, so they made me go to art boarding school my senior year.
Marc:What is that?
Guest:And I was supposed to go to this place, the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem, where I'd gone for the summer program.
Guest:I was serious about art, so I always did the Brevard summer art program, the North Carolina School of the Arts summer program.
Guest:I'd be there for three weeks, a month, just doing art every day.
Marc:But at that time, I mean, what is art training like?
Marc:Because you were already sort of building a vision around a punk rock sensibility.
Marc:Were you still drawing?
Marc:Were you still working your muscles in a standard way around painting and stuff?
Guest:Yeah, absolutely.
Guest:I had not come to formulate my vision as an artist at all.
Guest:I still was...
Guest:just learning how to draw and paint better and understand.
Guest:I started to do some photography.
Guest:I was doing very primitive screen printing, mostly just to make my own homemade bootleg band and skate shirts that were like my take on Husker Du, the Dead Kennedys.
Guest:So one color, maybe two colors.
Guest:Yeah, one or two colors, yeah.
Marc:And in terms of models for the early Shepard Ferry art, I mean, who were your guys in terms of influence?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, when I discovered Warhol, I really liked Warhol because... Screen printing.
Guest:Yeah, screen printing, high contrast, using accessible subject matter.
Marc:So the portraits.
Guest:Well, yeah, I did.
Guest:Of course, I liked the Marilyn, but I also liked a lot of the stuff that was his painterly take on advertising and newspaper headlines and things like that.
Guest:That's real early stuff.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:With the photographs, silkscreen photographs of car wrecks and stuff or whatever.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:No, even before that, before he started screen printing in such a technically proficient way, he was doing paintings and creating stencils like the first Coke bottles and like, you know, airplane crash kills 213, things like that.
Marc:Did you see that retrospective in New York at the modern when they had it?
Guest:No, but I've, I've seen a few of his shows in different museums.
Marc:There's that gold leaf period too.
Marc:Didn't he do a bunch of gold?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he was doing gold on, um, and then urinating on it to create a weird patina.
Guest:He was doing all sorts of, he was an interesting guy.
Guest:And I, but you liked the whole, the, the, the, the thought process behind
Guest:Well, I think that because I was having trouble reconciling the elitism of the art world with what I was into.
Guest:Warhol as a guy who used, you know, accessible imagery, worked with the Velvet Underground, started Interview Magazine.
Guest:I just I just like that he seemed to be more of a populist.
Marc:And also but a populist within with a very strong undercurrent of fuck you to the elitist art world.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, I think he's he's somewhat enigmatic because I think a lot of the things he said were were contradictory.
Guest:But I think he's really shrewd about how to spin something in one context versus another.
Guest:And, you know, making compelling work is that's essential.
Guest:But also being able to find an audience and communicate with an audience is equally as, you know, as valuable and important.
Guest:And I think he did that really well.
Marc:those last paintings, the portrait of him with the camouflage colors, and also the Last Supper with the logos.
Marc:To me, when I saw those, and I don't remember where I saw them, and I think it might have been posthumously, it was almost like he was creating these images that encapsulated everything that he represented through his entire life, and I think he saw the end coming for him in those last paintings.
Marc:I found them very moving.
Marc:I don't know if he had the same experience.
Guest:Well,
Guest:You know, there's some of the things that he did towards the end, like just the dollar sign.
Guest:Yeah, right, right.
Guest:And, you know, how that, you know, has so much, it's so loaded.
Guest:There's so many angles of interpretation.
Guest:And yet it seemed to, like you say, like one image, if it could encapsulate what he was about and what he did, it was, I named my book Supply and Demand partially in response to that everything has some of those dynamics and what could symbolize that better than the dollar sign.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:You know, but it was also compelling just as an image.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I was always pretty fascinated with him and pretty, you know, the simplicity and also the sort of there was clearly an element not only of populism, populism, but like aggressive satire, you know, and humor in the thing.
Marc:You know, even even the portraits that he became so well known for.
Marc:Felt like a little bit of a fuck you to the elite, even though that he relied on them.
Marc:He was like this classic example of of a guy who everybody wanted to be near.
Marc:And they also sort of were patrons.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You know, it was all built on that.
Marc:He's a very fascinating person.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So, OK, so early on.
Marc:So that was starting to hit you in the head.
Guest:Yeah, and I also really liked Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and, you know, Lichtenstein, too.
Guest:I mean, a lot of this pop artist... That makes sense.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, Lichtenstein was something, huh?
Guest:Yeah, I mean, he had great sense of humor, and he's... I mean, in a way, he's like a hip-hop artist because he made most of those paintings based on...
Guest:Evolving things that frames that he saw in other cartoons, but we're comics but but what he the way he isolated something to draw more attention to it the scale the way he would change the the text to be more for him and then later on taking the syntax of the halftone dot and the color of the of the comic and turn and using that in a really funny way like a very mechanical looking paintbrush stroke those were genius reflection of a mirror and
Marc:right yeah smart guy so that that was using the the visual vocabulary of of comic art to sort of uh you know represent things that are virtually impossible to represent exactly yeah that's how that's exactly because i remember when i first saw the paint strokes i was like holy fuck yeah that's great yeah i don't even know why yeah the magnifying glass where the halftone dots are just bigger underneath yeah so you know there's the magnification right um
Guest:It's so smart.
Marc:But I mean, do you like do you find like I guess maybe a little older, but certainly contemporary that, you know, along the same vision, you know, someone like Coons, do you do you do you find him interesting?
Guest:Yeah, I think Jeff Koons is really interesting and smart.
Guest:I don't, you know, I think the sculptures are pretty impressive objects.
Guest:And I like a lot of the ideas.
Guest:Once again, that fuck you of I'm taking the most ridiculous thing and turning it into really valuable art.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I don't want to be critical of Coons, but there's a little bit of like an emperor's new clothes factor to it that I think he understands that, okay, he probably could make anything into one of those high polished chrome sculptures and somebody's going to buy it.
Guest:And sometimes like a blank check's dangerous, but-
Guest:I, um, but I, I think he's very, I think he's very interesting.
Guest:And, you know, there's people like, like Richard Prince who do, he did the rephotographed the Marlboro ads and, you know, made images that sold for a lot of money that, um, I mean, we live in a, we live in a time where, but those are all riffs on Warhol.
Guest:I mean, none of that happens without Warhol.
Guest:Right.
Guest:No, you're absolutely right.
Guest:And, and I, I think that, that, um,
Guest:And one of my one of my favorite Orwell quotes is it's the duty of intelligent men and I'd say or women to constantly restate the obvious that there are things out there that are motifs that even if it's been done 100 times, you're going to figure out your way to do it in your way and that it needs to recirculate.
Marc:And yeah, well, that's the argument of that's the argument in defense of appropriation and the inevitability of it.
Marc:That at some point, you're going to have to be building on something.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And, you know, people, I've been criticized a lot for appropriation in my work, but I am an accomplished illustrator.
Guest:I can make things from scratch, but the...
Guest:Language that we all share is reference points.
Guest:So, you know, an image, a word that if you want to connect with a lot of people, it resonating and having a preconceived idea that you're either building upon and transforming or that you're subverting is incredibly important to a broad communication.
Guest:I'm not an abstract painter.
Guest:I, you know, I'm I'm trying to make a picture that talks to people.
Marc:But I think that's also, you know, that's Warholian in the sense that, you know, you go to where the juice is.
Marc:That, you know, you have, you know, certainly something that, you know, either a famous piece of photography or a consumer product that brings with it its own baggage, its own juice, its own energy.
Marc:Yeah, absolutely.
Marc:And then, you know, you riff on that and you sort of ride that energy and take the message in a different way.
Marc:And before we get into, you know, really talking about this specifically, I think that's what's interesting about where you were coming from is that on one side, the populace and the economy of what Warhol was doing, you know, versus, you know, somebody like Raymond Pettibone, who was clearly not planning on any success.
Marc:Right.
Marc:I love Pettibone.
Guest:He's amazing.
Marc:He's great.
Marc:I mean, when you first sort of get into those, you know, the simple sort of comic images almost with the dialogue, and you spend just hours going like, why that dialogue?
Marc:What the fuck is this about?
Marc:But so you have these two forces.
Marc:You have the utter disposability of punk rock, in a sense, and its intention of being that, which is also a popular form in a certain world, but it's not based on money.
Marc:And then you have the other side, which is a popular form, but it's completely based on money.
Marc:So those were kind of the driving forces in your mindset.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, you know, there's a lot of discussion about money and its relationship to street art, which, you know, I came up through street art and everything I've chosen to pursue is probably the worst business decision ever.
Guest:And somehow, miraculously, I've made it work for me.
Marc:And with the Obama thing, was that the turning point, really?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:no um you know obey uh i started to be able to sell my prints because the internet allowed me to have an unmediated relationship with my audience okay well before we get to that let's go to risdy so i can i want to know what got dumped in your head there and where you know where you went from that well risdy was risdy was incredible um you know i i first of all
Guest:I think I was okay at drawing and two-dimensional design and the things I did.
Guest:But when I submitted my portfolio to RISD, I didn't expect to get in.
Guest:I got in.
Guest:And when I got there, the first year is boot camp where you're just getting very little sleep, drawing, painting, critiquing, doing design classes, sculpture classes.
Guest:It's called foundation.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But so that was all basics.
Guest:But the thing is, I was surrounded by a group of really talented people who brought their perspective from whatever part of the country or the world.
Guest:And when I'm competitive, when I'm around people that are really good, I try to step my game up.
Guest:And so that was valuable.
Guest:But then I was also exposed to.
Guest:a lot of different kinds of art history and contemporary art.
Guest:And all of a sudden, my world just got a lot bigger in terms of my thoughts of what I could do as an artist.
Marc:Do you remember something in that first year having all of a sudden entered that...
Marc:that stream of people from all over the world who are obviously gifted and talented and had a certain amount of courage creatively, was there something that just blew your fucking mind?
Marc:Because there's moments, you listen to R. Crumb talk about the one or two times he took acid and then developed the big feat.
Marc:Was there a second where you're like, holy shit, that my perception just tweaked to a point where I've got this whole other avenue?
Guest:Well, there were a few things, and yeah, there's no sort of one big bang moment, but I mean, one of them is we took a trip to New York, and we were supposed to be going with RISD to the Met, but on the way in,
Guest:We're on the West Side Highway and, you know, outside on the Cross Bronx Expressway.
Guest:And I'm seeing all this graffiti and it's accumulating, getting more daring, larger as we go into the city.
Guest:And I was just in awe because it was...
Guest:very defiant, courageous.
Guest:There was no money involved.
Guest:It was clandestine, and that tapped into something in me, especially after feeling like everything was hyper-analyzed at RISD, and you didn't want to say the thing that sounded dumb.
Guest:This just...
Guest:It just was what it was.
Guest:It was very reflexive, and I loved that.
Guest:I decided to bail on the Met thing and walk around New York and look at graffiti.
Marc:The stuff on the trains was what I really remember, is that the train cars became such elaborate canvases for so many people and so many colors.
Marc:That used to just blow me away, the sitting train cars.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, by the time in 88, when I first went, spent some real time in New York, the that era of the trains was over.
Guest:But there was still a lot of street bombing going on.
Guest:And I mean, New York was was still fairly economically depressed at that point.
Marc:I was there in 89.
Marc:Yeah, I was on the Lower East Side in Tompkins Square hadn't quite fallen yet.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And, you know, there was, you know, there was missing foundation and cost revs and all that stuff, you know, that were cost and revs were a big inspiration for me.
Marc:Yeah, it was it was cryptic.
Marc:And, you know, my brain, see, like, you know, coming from where I come from, you know, I assume meaning like I want to know, like, you know, the idea of just tagging for the sake of tagging.
Marc:So you have a presence in the world.
Marc:You know, it was sort of like, you know, what does that imply?
Marc:What does revs mean?
Marc:You know, not that it's just a tag name.
Marc:And I always brought that much baggage to like obey.
Marc:When I first saw obey, I'm like, what's where's that coming from?
Guest:Well, you know, all the things you're talking about, um, the reason that I went in the direction I went and not in, you know, the graffiti direction of just putting my name up or, you know, or, or a symbol that, that didn't really have anything to it was that, um, you know, I know I, I understand because when I first encountered revs and costs, I assumed it must be a political organization because they were so prolific that I didn't think it could be two taggers.
Guest:And, um,
Guest:And so, you know, when I started, I made the Andre the Giant sticker as an inside joke with some skateboarder friends.
Guest:What was the joke?
Guest:Our small group of friends that hung out at this skate shop called the Watershed.
Guest:We were called Team Shed.
Guest:And this was in Providence?
Guest:In Providence, yeah.
Guest:A friend wanted to learn how to make a stencil, so I looked through the newspaper just for something for him to practice on.
Guest:Saw an ad for wrestling and said, why don't you make a stencil of Andre the Giant?
Guest:He said, no way, I'm not doing that.
Guest:And I said,
Guest:What are you talking about, man?
Guest:Andre's posse's taken over.
Guest:Team Shed has played out.
Guest:It's gotten too big.
Guest:It was like 11 people.
Guest:We got to narrow this down to a more elite squad of two.
Guest:But that's the skateboarder mentality.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Like, oh, that band sold more than six cassette tapes.
Guest:They're total sellouts.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And and but then, you know, once I made it, I thought it would be an inside joke.
Guest:Give them to a few friends, put them on some stop signs at some clubs.
Guest:And I didn't take it seriously because it wasn't serious.
Guest:But then the responses were serious.
Guest:The local newspaper, the Indy Rag, like the L.A.
Guest:Weekly called the the Providence Nice Paper.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:said had this thing with a picture of the sticker and they said um what is this sticker about anyone that knows gets free tickets to the living room show of their choice that was a venue where i was seeing the ramones and james addiction and all sorts of people and i was like oh i want those tickets but i don't want to let them know who it is so you know i put a i put an envelope with some stickers and said i can't tell you what it is but here's some stickers if it's any consolation then they ran that the next week and then you know they got all these letters in if people were like i think it's a skateboarder thing i think it's a band and i realized the power of an image in public space that's not
Guest:just an ad or government signage.
Guest:And I realized that, wow, the control of public space really is very limited.
Guest:And putting something out there that functions like a Rorschach test, it's really fascinating to see what the responses are.
Guest:So then I thought about sort of the mechanics of...
Guest:of mechanisms of control and I love Orwell and I read Heidegger's theory of phenomenology that people need these unique things to encounter that reawaken a sense of wonder about their environment and I love the Sex Pistols who were really into the situationists and that idea of the spectacle to snap you out of your trance.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, right.
Guest:So...
Guest:i thought well how could i evolve this and i want to i want to take it in a direction that's a little more serious because i accidentally stumbled onto something that pre-internet seems to be coming like like a you know a meme it's going viral sure and um so uh i saw the film they live have you ever seen that movie it's john carpenter yeah exactly with rowdy rowdy piper and the people that could see the the everything had the images underneath the the advertising yeah so when you
Guest:When you put on the special sunglasses, you realize that the ads don't say vacation in Tahiti.
Guest:It says consume, obey, marry and reproduce.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And silly movie, but somewhat of a profound concept.
Guest:And it's satire.
Guest:yeah yeah yeah and and um you know in in that the it's not that there's you know there's two class you know or or masters and slaves in society it's the aliens are the masters and everybody else is the slaves and there's a few there's a there's a few uh cooperative um uh humans who were um you know who were willing to take the money but it's all you know it's all symbolism about you know politics and corporate greed and etc etc but um and
Guest:I decided from that, seeing that movie, that I was going to start using the word obey because that was the command that to me seemed, you know, most offensive when articulated words
Guest:really uh in your face but but the but sort of um the thing that happens people people submit and follow the path of least resistance um in a way that they can they can justify um or even even subconsciously all the time so i thought you know that's the thing to get the the dialogue about about you know what you really believe how you want to be controlled what you want to submit to i'm going to use that so
Marc:So the Andre the Giant thing was just a goof.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But you committed to that delivery system because it had traction.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And then you added the Obey thing, which made it even more kind of puzzling.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Because I'm just thinking about my own reaction to it before I had any fucking idea who you were.
Marc:And it was around because it sort of spread everywhere.
Marc:It became some sort of punk rock totem.
Marc:Chain letter.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:That people are just sort of I'm doing it.
Marc:I'm part of this.
Marc:And, you know, it was I remember seeing it a lot in L.A., but I saw it in New York and it was just sort of like, you know, that's Andre the Giant.
Marc:I didn't really put that together.
Marc:And I'm like, what does it mean?
Marc:And there doesn't seem to be any explanation for it, but it's disturbing and it's everywhere.
Marc:And then when I'd see it on billboard spaces out here, I'm like, who the fuck is this guy?
Marc:How many of them are there?
Marc:What are they trying to do?
Marc:And it just became your brain craves order.
Marc:What's the conspiracy here?
Marc:What is the message?
Marc:And then when I started to realize it was just a punch in the brain that this is completely out of context.
Marc:It operates in its own time zone, wherever it is.
Marc:The power of the image was that anywhere you stuck it, it sort of kind of destroyed the power of whatever that space was supposed to be.
Marc:And it was just sort of like, oh, there's one of those things.
Guest:Well, yeah, that idea that order is actually very manufactured.
Guest:It's maintained, and the idea that you can't deviate from the dominant structure or that it'd be a futile endeavor, I think is what keeps a lot of people from speaking out, trying to shape things into what they believe.
Guest:And so the moment you sort of pierce that, I think...
Guest:that emboldens a lot of people and a lot of people are just lazy shits and they're not going to do anything anyway but for the people that maybe needed some sort of spark i i you know i think it has it has value and especially pre-internet when you had to let your own internal uh dialogue happen about it and you couldn't just google it i i found that very valuable and you know since the since the internet has become such a
Guest:You know, quick route to figuring anything out.
Guest:I still use the obey icon within my work, but I do a lot of, but it's not the standalone.
Guest:I, you know, I perpetuated just a couple of images for years and then started to make more topical work, especially when Bush was elected.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Well, it's it's it's culture jamming is what it is in the real zone.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:Like like that, what you're talking about, the moment where you encounter it, you know, what it does in any given individual is jarring that, you know, you can't just dismiss it.
Marc:You know, there there's questions.
Marc:There's sort of like there's a feeling of being provoked in some way.
Marc:And it's very simple.
Marc:But like the Bush years, I mean, were you friends with Robbie Connell or did you know his work?
Marc:Because that stuff blew my mind.
Guest:Well, he.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:OK.
Guest:When we're talking about inspirations, when I was a senior in high school, I went to school in Idlewild and we took trips into L.A.
Guest:to go to art fairs.
Guest:And at one point in 87, we went downtown and to the convention center.
Guest:And Robbie had bombed all the electrical boxes with his Reagan with Contra above and Diction below.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it was it was.
Guest:a really well painted image well painted in an unflattering way right um it was a good copy good politics humorous it had everything i was looking for and i was like that's all right that's the model that's the template but i didn't it took me a few years to get around to it but that was uh you know that was percolating for quite a while his
Marc:stuff Robbie Connell that you know uh uh men with teeth or women with teeth and men with no lips and yeah and they these were like really sort of grotesque caricatures that were that were beautifully painted and they were wrought with you you could feel the intensity and the evil and the in the the sort of um predatory yeah vibe oily skin and just just reducing um these politicians to
Guest:almost like you could just you could just see through the super the superficial charm and right to their core being organic yeah yeah exactly yeah is he still around yeah he is he um he recently did a uh a nelson mandela portrait when he died and he's not just doing negative things he's still you know he's still we we collaborated in 2004 and
Guest:um, to try to, you know, discourage people from reelecting Bush didn't work, but, um, right.
Guest:I did, uh, I, I did an image of Bush hug, uh, holding a bomb and it says, or what, or, or was it hug babies and drop bombs?
Guest:Um, but, um, and then he had, um, read my apocalypse and, um, you know, with a mushroom cloud in the background.
Guest:Oh yeah.
Guest:I remember that one.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, uh, but he, he's still doing things, but I think he, he, um, you know, he's older now and I think he's almost 70 and, uh,
Guest:So it's it takes a lot of energy to get out there and put these posters up.
Marc:So, yeah, well, how did that how did that function?
Marc:How was what was the Shepard Ferry army around?
Marc:Like, you know, obviously the identify the identification with the Andre the Giant Obey stuff.
Marc:It became sort of, you know, like everyone was part of the secret club in a way that was involved with, you know, running their own stickers off and that stuff.
Marc:But did you actually manufacture stickers at any point?
Marc:Were you were you distributing them?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:From the very beginning, from 89, I started off with just paper stickers, running them off at Kinko's and cutting them with a paper cutter or an X-Acto knife while I watched movies at home.
Guest:And then I started my own screen printing studio.
Guest:Where, in Providence?
Guest:Yeah, in Providence.
Guest:And I would screen print them.
Guest:And I've made millions of stickers.
Guest:And you're not brain dead from...
Guest:Chemicals?
Guest:Well, it came close.
Guest:When I was in Providence, I would sometimes screen print for hours and then try to, I had a skateboard ramp inside my studio and try to skate the ramp.
Guest:And I would be dizzy to the point of not being able to skateboard.
Guest:And so, yeah, when I left Rhode Island, I decided I'm not going to print with that toxic ink anymore because I'm from the South.
Guest:I already feel dumb and genetically inferior anyway.
Guest:So why make it any worse?
Guest:I didn't say it.
Guest:I didn't say it.
Marc:um but yeah yeah you know i i uh as long as as long as uh maybe i stay away from that stuff and everybody else uses it it'll be a level playing field but obviously like there there's a nature like you know it seems early in your work and once you once notoriety was achieved that the the intention was was is was almost in the world of of prank it was a prank and and so when did you become you know politically active well
Guest:Well, I, you know, I think I was activated in, in some ways by people like the clash and the dead Kennedys.
Guest:I remember, um, Jell-O-B offers lyrics for the song bleed for me about, you know, uh, the Peace Corps three thinks they're, um, build us labor camps when they think they're building schools and what's 10 million dead.
Guest:If it keeps, if it's keeping out the Russians and, uh, you know, uh, America needs oil, but to get it, it needs puppets.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Um, you know,
Guest:And these things started to make me question that we were always whether we were always the good guys, the Americans.
Guest:Are we always the good guys?
Guest:And and then when, you know, there were things happening like I remember I first during the flag burning controversy, I thought, well, if the flag is the symbol of free speech, then of course you can burn it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But, you know, there were people were being arrested on the Capitol steps for burning the flag.
Guest:So, I mean, I've been interested in this kind of stuff.
Guest:I actually made a freedom of speech series back in 1990.
Marc:But even if you look at like the interesting thing about that, you know, and probably was planted earlier is that even Jasper John stuff that, you know, his interpretation, the American flag or how these other pop artists utilize these images that seem sacred, you know, it's not burning, but the intent is the same.
Guest:Yeah, I think that artists and musicians have always wanted to be provocative.
Guest:And a lot of the stuff that I do, I know a lot of punk rockers and skateboarders that are fuck you for just the sake of being fuck you.
Guest:I actually, when I'm being fuck you, there's a point to it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But, you know, especially after Bush was elected and after 9-11, the idea of you're either with us or with the terrorists, like, whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down there, man.
Guest:You know, and if you say, what's the cause and effect here?
Guest:What are we doing in other nations that's creating such hostility?
Guest:That was seen as un-American.
Guest:And I think that's a dangerous place to be coming from.
Guest:So
Guest:I felt like there was an absolute need for me to be more overtly political in my work.
Guest:Prior to that, I had a concern that I'm too ignorant about the complexity of these issues to make an informed assessment.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But then when I saw that, you know, what was happening after 9-11 and the things that a lot of people are saying, I realized, well, the people in charge are definitely no more informed than I am in a lot of ways, or they have an agenda that's really contrary to what the value system of this country is supposed to be.
Marc:Right, but also I think that the sort of jingoism and nationalism that sort of was propelled, you know, for people that, you know, I'm not saying that creative people by and large are innately selfish, but there is, you know, a focus on your own expression and your own work.
Marc:And, you know, you're obviously a bright guy.
Marc:I was a bright guy.
Marc:Before I went to, you know, Air America, I felt like my knowledge of politics was, you know, sort of knee-jerk reactionaryism.
Marc:That, like, I didn't have the depth of detail.
Marc:But it turns out, even when you look at Warhol's work,
Marc:or once you sort of unlock it, is that simplicity is really the key.
Marc:There are fundamental, simple sort of freedoms that we are guaranteed and saying that they're lying or that this has to be seen, this has to be questioned, there has to be justice.
Marc:Those are American ideals and they're very simple.
Marc:You don't need to know exactly what the nuances of a military strike and what they say it comes from to know like, I don't know, I think there's questions.
Guest:Yeah, well, absolutely.
Guest:And I think that the great thing about art, especially in the age we're in now with so much media diversity and so much white noise, the idea that a piece of art or a piece of music or design could sort of crystallize an idea really simply where...
Guest:it becomes a reference point.
Guest:People want to share it.
Guest:And, you know, it's the simple point of entry to a more complicated conversation, but it needs to be the thing that sparks it.
Guest:And so, you know, I'm aiming to do that in a lot of ways with my work, but I don't want to get it twisted here.
Guest:I...
Guest:I'm somebody that wants to make pictures.
Guest:I want to make pictures and I want to be able to have a point of view with my pictures, but the point of view comes second, the picture comes first.
Guest:And because going over what's in your head with what's happening in politics is incredibly depressing.
Guest:And this is a therapeutic way for me to address that, but I get lost in the process itself of making a picture because it's pure pleasure to come up with aesthetic solutions.
Guest:And
Guest:If I didn't have that side of what I do, I'd probably be suicidal.
Marc:Right, and it seems like your style has evolved and there are certain sort of trademarks to some of the things you do, certainly post the hope thing.
Marc:But it's sort of interesting where you draw the ornate boundaries.
Marc:I don't know where that sort of came from, but there's a postage stamp sort of feel to it.
Marc:Where did you start to stylize?
Guest:that well you know i probably the the thing that most people knew me for originally was my um style that was inspired by russian constructivist design the propaganda posters from future the kind of looking toward the future yeah yeah yeah exactly and you know it's a great integration of of of bold colors type and imagery um
Guest:You know, and you've got Rodchenko and the Sternberg brothers in the late teens and early 20s in the Soviet Union.
Guest:But then there's stuff from China and Cuba that all has a vibe like that.
Guest:And you could even say that Barbara Kruger's work is pulling a little bit from that sort of, you know, powerful image.
Marc:So you're saying the fine line between, you know, communist propaganda and just good advertising.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Guest:I mean, I think the advertising world doesn't embrace that aesthetic only because of its symbolic association.
Guest:It would be a more if you could clean clear the slate, you know, tabula rasa with the with a viewer.
Guest:No, no baggage.
Guest:that would be the way advertising looked in the United States.
Guest:Like Russian constructivism.
Marc:Removing the baggage of Russian constructivism.
Guest:Yeah, well, the ideological association that comes with it.
Guest:So, I mean, one of the things that I found with that work was that I could provoke people and I could do images.
Guest:I had a series called In Lesser Gods We Trust, which was Mao, Lenin, and Nixon all on stamps.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:you know i i don't think our bad guy is better than their bad guy you know right and and um and it done in this russian constructivist style with a mixture of sort of um currency motifs you know like the the dollar bill the way it's designed it's uh you know i think it's subconscious but it's it's got all this filigree and all this all this beauty that it's it's it's like a temple to
Guest:uh to commerce in a way the church of commerce is all all these elements within the bill and um when you look at that it all it almost like commands you know reverence or submission and so taking some of those things and value yeah and value and using them in my work um i did a series inspired by public enemies lyric um most of my heroes don't appear on stamps yeah and
Guest:I did Noam Chomsky, Bobby Seale from the Black Panthers, Joe Strummer.
Guest:On stamps.
Guest:Yeah, on stamps.
Guest:And I thought, well, you know, part of what's taken seriously is just the form of presentation.
Guest:I mean, look at it in politics.
Guest:You can take an absolute dimwit and put them in the American flag, pin, coat, and tie, give them a few talking points, and they will be taken a little bit seriously by a lot of people, if not a lot seriously.
Guest:And that's terrifying.
Yeah.
Guest:yeah that that needs to be taken down a notch but but but you know i a lot of what i'm trying to do in my in my work is um use devices that i think get people's attention but also bring them to question the use of the devices themselves to see the intended manipulation and you know some of the things i do are very um very sincere the obama poster was very sincere other things i do they have um you know some some layers of irony and and um
Guest:and even duality or contradiction.
Marc:You did.
Marc:I just realized that, you know, I saw Russell Brand's, you know, one man show and you did the set, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And that, that was a dollar sign, a motif, wasn't there?
Marc:There was a few.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There was, um, it was, uh, was that the dollar sign at the base of an exclamation point?
Guest:Um, and the, and the skull with the, uh, with the diamond dyes.
Marc:And we had, had you done that type of, have you done set design before?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Um, well, yeah, I've done, I've done a couple of things for music videos for, uh, I did a thing for Billy Idol.
Guest:I did some stuff for death cab for cutie.
Guest:Um, did some stuff for Interpol, but, um, Russell and I became friends, um, in early 2010 and I think he's a really smart guy.
Guest:I know he's been on the show.
Guest:He's, he's brilliant and, um, complicated, but, uh,
Guest:I really admired that he had an amazing, deep, deep reservoir of below-the-belt jokes that were smart below-the-belt jokes, but he also would put in some things that I thought were very, very intellectually provocative about it.
Marc:Higher aspirations.
Marc:Exactly.
Guest:To making a difference.
Guest:About people's obsession with social media and greed and materialism.
Guest:And the way that he was weaving those things into this very sort of diverse shtick that he's developed, I thought was really brilliant.
Guest:So when we became friends, we talked about all that.
Guest:And I said, hey, if you ever need any visuals for anything, I'd like to do it because I'd like to amplify what you're doing.
Marc:Oh, that's sweet.
Marc:So let's talk about the life of the Obama poster, the Hope poster, because, again, not unlike Obey, but for a different generation and a broader audience, you know, that that style became a meme that, you know, literally the colors and the the the the format.
Marc:And it became it just was everywhere.
Marc:So.
Marc:So where did that come from?
Marc:Give me the story of that.
Marc:Of the actual piece.
Marc:Sure.
Guest:You know, I had been making all of these posters that were against the war in Iraq, against the Bush agenda, against the Patriot Act, and I felt like all of that was great for me to do, but...
Guest:But what was the alternative?
Guest:Was I presenting any sort of alternative?
Guest:And when I saw Obama's speech in 2004 at the DNC, I thought it was a great speech.
Guest:And then when he announced that he was running for president, I looked more at his policy positions and things that he'd said.
Guest:He'd opposed the Iraq war when everybody else fell in line because that was the smart thing to do politically, including Hillary.
Guest:And he was talking about reducing the influence of lobbyists in Washington.
Guest:The government supplementing, subsidizing green energy and green technology, raising fuel emission, fuel standards, fuel economy standards, things like that.
Guest:All of this was like, wow, that's the opposite of Bush.
Guest:If this guy has any remote chance, I want to support him because.
Guest:The two party system is really flawed and you don't get a wide range of ideas.
Guest:It's so reductive.
Guest:But this guy actually seems like he might be charismatic enough and smart enough to figure out how to subversively infiltrate and change things from the inside.
Guest:And I've always believed in this concept of the inside outside strategy.
Marc:So you had hope because I know as a grown person and just by your art that you know that it's all a single party representing money.
Guest:Yeah, you're absolutely right.
Guest:And I'm making campaign finance reform images all the time.
Guest:But... But you had hope.
Marc:Not unlike the rest of us.
Guest:I genuinely had hope.
Guest:I decided... I had also had two daughters at that point and decided that... It was actually... I was designing the poster about three days before our second daughter was born.
Guest:But I decided...
Guest:You know, I'm I can be the cynical, cool guy and say nobody gets it except me.
Guest:And, you know, whatever the world's doomed and forget about it, you know, or I can think I've got kids that are going to inherit whatever I'm handing off to them.
Guest:And am I going to am I going to do the best I can regardless of the odds to try to make a difference?
Guest:And, you know, it's not I'm not I'm not self-righteous.
Guest:I just I really selfishly thought.
Guest:I should do what I can for my kids.
Guest:And and so that was a big factor there.
Guest:And also looking at.
Guest:But you just did it.
Guest:You just did it to do it.
Guest:I just did it to do it.
Guest:And I did it in.
Guest:I looked at it as this is in conceptually in the same vein of what I'm doing against Bush, because if I'm vigorously protesting these things, then I should be vigorously supporting the things of the opposite.
Marc:And the way you did that was with with softening the pose, picking the right picture and changing the colors.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, basically, I looked at Obama's obstacles, and I looked at that he was unproven.
Guest:He was seen as a rookie.
Guest:So I looked at sculptures and photographs of politicians that had seemed to elevate them, make them seem legitimate.
Guest:And there's the Kennedy looking up with vision.
Guest:There's Lincoln on the $5 bill.
Guest:There's all sorts of statues.
Guest:I thought, how can I make...
Guest:An illustration of Obama that sort of turns him into a two-dimensional sculpture that looks like he has gravitas, vision.
Guest:And I also have to illustrate it.
Guest:I have to make it stylized and idealized and iconic, but it can't look...
Guest:Quasi Soviet propaganda like a lot of my other stuff it has to feel patriotic so I used red white and blue and and I I you know I found I looked search on Google images for an image that I thought would be the right thing to illustrate from out of you know
Guest:thousands of images out there i chose i chose a you know a few and then was like i think this one's the best and then i i you know i did the illustration and uh amplified a few things and um and minimized a few things that i thought were unflattering and released it on my website 350 prints for sale made 350 prints to put up on the street and um and then it was uh
Guest:Then it was off to the races, but I thought it would maybe affect 25 people like most of my work, and that would be that.
Guest:But I also made a free download of the image, and once I sold the first 350 posters, I printed 10,000 out that were given away at the Oprah rally, and then eventually I printed 300,000 posters and half a million stickers and only sold 1,400 posters total.
Marc:Right, but the interesting thing also is that
Marc:You chose red, white, and blue, but it was not the traditional primary colors of the flag red, white, and blue.
Marc:They were a little different, weren't they?
Guest:No, I mean, it's a little bit muted, and I use the off-white that I use in a lot of my work.
Guest:And so I guess if you wanted to read into it, you could say, okay, I'll do the red, white, and blue thing, but it has to be on my terms.
Yeah.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So now, okay, so now this thing becomes this iconic image, defines the campaign in a way, and it was picked up by everyone.
Marc:And really, it's amazing that you've kind of created as an artist and not as an advertising entity two very distinct memes at different points in your career and in your creative life.
Marc:Now, the backlash from this image, I don't have facts at my fingertips, but you got flack.
Marc:Because of the appropriation, correct?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was sued by the Associated Press who owned the rights to the photograph because they said it was copyright infringement.
Guest:But the way I looked at it, it was fair use because I look at copyright.
Guest:I value copyright.
Guest:I mean, I think people deserve to have their creations protected.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:but protected from bootlegging.
Guest:What I did was made an illustration from a photograph, completely transformative aesthetically, and then completely different conceptually, which is, you know, concept is a more important principle than aesthetic and fair use.
Guest:So I felt like I was very safe, but I sympathize with the Associated Press's problem of having people lift their materials regularly
Guest:and use them verbatim photos and video but that's not what I did and I um you know I don't think copyright is there to protect hypothetical transformation like oh I made this and then later on somebody else might decide they wanted to use yellow on a can yeah or whatever um so but corporate interests have broadened the interpretation of intellectual property yeah of copyright protection tricky man and um I'm a reasonable person I felt like their law their lawsuit was unreasonable and when they approached me I said
Guest:I'd be glad to pay the licensing fee that it would have cost to license this photo, but I'm not open to anything punitive.
Guest:And what was the licensing fee?
Guest:The licensing fee, well, there are a lot of different variables that they can figure out how to spin to their benefit.
Guest:But the most it could have cost for worldwide exclusive use was $30,000.
Guest:But it probably would have been about $400.
Guest:And how did you settle this?
Guest:We were in a lawsuit and we settled and I'm not allowed to disparage them or talk about the settlement.
Guest:Did you think it was fair?
Guest:Oh, no.
Guest:I was very excessive.
Guest:But luckily...
Guest:I live to, you know, fight another day and on different fronts with a new understanding of sort of the pain of going through a lawsuit and how to avoid it.
Guest:And also the copyright and intellectual property landscape.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, there's...
Guest:I think what a lot of people don't understand is most of the art since the invention of the photograph, based on the same criteria I was sued, would be illegal and pulled out of museums if it were held to that.
Guest:And there are people that love to just say...
Guest:Warhol was nothing but a good editor.
Guest:He just chose good images to make stuff of.
Guest:But it's actually, I think, a very unsophisticated analysis because the way in which he would transform, even if it was simple, it was the part that mattered.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm sure you deal with that all the time.
Guest:Five people could tell the same joke, Mr. Comedian, but somebody's got one slight twist or one way of delivering it that makes all the difference in the impact.
Marc:Well, yeah, and if you're doing stuff that is based on pop culture or based on the ebb and flow of cultural commerce and images or ideas, everyone's pulling from the same pool, man.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, and I mean, that's another thing that I've tried to bring up is that the evolution of, you know, science, technology, culture is all based on building upon what's happened in the past and communications the same way.
Guest:So I.
Guest:I'm not making an argument for being lazy because there's plenty of raw material out there to just recycle.
Guest:I'm actually saying that that raw material is valuable in evolving.
Guest:Right.
Marc:And if you want to do the kind of art that defies any cultural interpretation or attempt at sort of being part of culture, I mean, that's a whole other different world.
Marc:I mean, it's really like if you're going to be
Marc:If you want to do what the abstract impressionist did for the first time and carve your own world out of nothing, that's a different creative agenda.
Marc:And it's equally as valid.
Marc:And some people would argue that's pure art.
Marc:But the other thing is, is continuing the cultural conversation and sort of building on ideas that came before you.
Marc:It's a tricky area.
Marc:But I think now that a lot of people just seek a payday.
Marc:is that a lot of it is driven by predatory lawyers and also by this sort of – there's a whole new – as art moves on and representation moves on, the ways that lawyers can try to make money also broadens.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And there are things – I buy music because I want to support the musicians, but I'm also –
Guest:in a luxurious position to be able to afford to buy music.
Guest:If I were 15 right now, I probably wouldn't be buying music.
Guest:I'd probably be downloading.
Marc:And also, yeah, right.
Marc:But if you had a conscience when you became 22, you'd try to give something back.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I want to see that kind of creativity continue and thrive.
Guest:So if there's no financial support structure for those people, things I enjoy go away.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And what about with Andre?
Marc:Was there any flack from that?
Guest:Uh, well, by the time the Andre's estate hit me up, I had already transitioned.
Guest:They did hit you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They, I'd already transitioned to obey and, um, and you know, the obey icon is, um, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a very transformative abstraction from the, from, you know, from the original Andre.
Guest:So they knew that there was no, um, legal leg for them to stand on in terms of trying to say that, that, that was Andre the giant.
Guest:So I just can't sell the original Andre the giant has a posse sticker.
Guest:And my original website was Andre the Giant has a posse.
Guest:I mean, Andre the Giant dot com, which a lot of a lot of wrestling fans were hitting me up saying this has nothing to do with Andre the Giant, one of the greatest athletes ever.
Guest:And, you know, you're doing this commie propaganda stuff.
Guest:I don't I don't get it.
Guest:This is really horrible and disrespectful.
Guest:And so then I just changed my website to obey giant dot com because Andre the Giant is a trademark name.
Guest:The WWF owns it.
Marc:OK, so but it's also interesting that that mindset you were just talking about that insists on keeping, you know, what they see as the purity of representation, you know, becomes also an obstacle to creative progress in some ways, because you're not going to convince them.
Marc:You're not going to bring them around to understand your intentions.
Guest:No, and it's very different.
Guest:A lot of people are like, well, what does it have to do with Andre the Giant?
Guest:Not much.
Guest:He's memorable, and for some people, he's scary and intimidating, and for other people, he's goofy and feeble and sad, and that's cool that he has that range of interpretation, but beyond that, nothing.
Guest:But one thing that was really funny about the...
Guest:About the copyright stuff with Andre is that a few years after we had already signed paperwork that I won't make.
Guest:I won't sell images of the original Andre sticker.
Guest:The estate came back to me and said, well, you know, we're doing some bobbleheads and things like that.
Guest:And we just for shits and giggles, we threw some of your images in front of the Andre crowd and they actually performed better with the focus groups.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:than the real Andre stuff.
Guest:So we were wondering if we could license, like split license it from you like they would pay me half of what they'd normally pay because they're considering it partially their IP in a sense, intellectual property.
Guest:So the surreal thing was there are these guys that got nothing to do with what I meant, now wanting to change the meaning back.
Guest:Please tell me you just gave it to them.
Guest:Well, I said, you know, well, what do you want to do with it?
Guest:And they said, you know, like bobbleheads and gumball machines and things like that.
Guest:And I said, you know, it's really not what I'm trying to do.
Guest:So I said, yeah, you know, you guys can talk, use anything to tell the story of this whole thing, but I just don't want it on those products.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:And because I get accused of being a sellout all the time because I make T-shirts with my images on it.
Guest:So, you know, doing that, even if the spirit had been generous, I would have been accused as always.
Marc:Well, that would have been real sellout.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:In a way.
Marc:But it would have been a different story if you're like, you know, just fucking take it.
Marc:And that became the narrative for you.
Guest:I mean, when I first started, the coup of just insinuating it wherever I could was the biggest deal.
Guest:Like, wow, how did that happen?
Guest:Look at this.
Guest:So that was like the ultimate in terms of that idea.
Guest:But I knew that I wasn't going to get to sit face to face with every single person who was going to have a knee jerk reaction to it and explain.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:How this happened.
Guest:I get it.
Marc:Because that would have been funny.
Marc:It's like, yeah, take it.
Marc:You win in a way.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Not to the people that are dying to fucking take you down.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So in terms of sellout, in terms of how your sensibility has been appropriated and you've been involved in advertising as well.
Marc:I mean, how do you reconcile that?
Marc:Because with Warhol too, and obviously some things after people are dead and estates sell things, but you're actively working within the creative framework for your own expression with propaganda and advertising.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:So how do you reconcile actual advertising and being involved with that?
Guest:Well, a lot of people think that I became known as a street artist and then was able to cash in on the brand I'd built around that to, you know, flog Mountain Dew or whatever else.
Guest:But actually what it was was that I was still –
Guest:After my screen printing business in Providence failed, I had to just make a living and I was trying to keep the dream alive creatively.
Guest:So I started doing graphic design mostly for streetwear and skateboard companies.
Guest:But then I was approached by Netscape to do a logo.
Guest:I was like, oh, wow.
Guest:I'd have to do 25 t-shirts to get the same check I got for that thing for Netscape.
Guest:And I was using that money to pay for my $69 flight from San Diego to San Francisco to go put posters up and just funding my street art project.
Guest:You know, one of the things that I always said was working as a graphic designer, I'll never work for a company that I have an ethical conflict with.
Guest:And so, you know, I'd been approached by Hummer and Camel Cigarettes.
Guest:I just said, no, I'm sorry, I can't do it.
Guest:But then there are a lot of people like Levi's or Mountain Dew, Netscape, Toyota, Toyota.
Guest:That I felt, you know, not emotionally invested, but not like I've gone to the dark side for doing this stuff.
Marc:But it's also interesting that because, you know, your style and your capacity and capability...
Marc:uh as as uh as an artist is so defined that like some people who would do that would would sort of um you know make a living but you know they would use their talents to just service the product without bringing their own style to it necessarily right but they were at that point probably actually after you know exactly what you do that you define for yourself so it'd be probably tricky to explain it to people who are fans of yours yeah it's like you can't be like
Marc:There's been plenty of artists that have done stuff graphically that really couldn't be associated with them unless someone asked them.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And there was a period of time in the early 2000s where my profile was a lot greater than my cash flow.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So a lot of people thought, well, I'm just doing this to cash in, but really it was just about survival.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Black Eyed Peas album cover, things like that.
Guest:I'm not ashamed of, but it wouldn't probably be my first choice of things to do.
Guest:We're really just about survival.
Guest:And then now what's happened is I'm able to be...
Guest:So the only commercial projects I've been doing for the last few years are things like the Led Zeppelin Celebration Day package or, you know, did a collaboration with Levi's.
Guest:I really like, I wear Levi's and I'm friends with a bunch of the people at Levi's.
Guest:I do too.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:You know, things like that that I've done.
Guest:But really, I'm getting to live what I've always been wanting, the dream I've always been wanting to live, which is making art that's meaningful to me.
Guest:And I put it out there through a lot of platforms.
Guest:I believe that art should be a lot more democratic than it usually is.
Guest:So street art, T-shirts, my clothing line.
Guest:T-shirts were the visual currency of everything important to me as a kid.
Guest:So, you know, I made Andre the Giant has a posse T-shirts the first week I made the sticker in 89.
Guest:But a lot of people think like, oh, you know, having a clothing company is watering down your brand.
Guest:But I actually do a lot of awesome things with my clothing line.
Guest:We do a thing called the awareness program every two seasons that is for a cause like, you know, genocide in Darfur or not to bolster the genocide in Darfur, but to reduce it.
Guest:I'm glad you cleared that up.
Guest:Yeah, okay.
Guest:Yeah, just in case.
Guest:But, you know, and the cool thing is that for a lot of people who don't get to see my art firsthand in a city like LA or New York or Chicago or whatever, the T-shirt that goes into the local skate shop, that might be the point of entry for a lot of the ideas.
Guest:So fashion is inherently superficial, but I'm able to put some things there that I think –
Guest:sometimes have a little bit more content or a little bit more provocative, but are also maybe the gateway drug for the other stuff I'm doing.
Guest:And to the ideas of the other stuff.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:I think it's interesting that drawing from...
Marc:the the the that sort of russian form that was specifically propaganda but but framed in the way that this is people's art people's art in the sense of like how communism defined what peoples are yeah is that you know but there's a there's a sort of imposed
Marc:and malignant populism to that, that was disguising nationalism and totalitarianism.
Marc:But what you're doing is actually, within the context of the American economy, is championing a populist form of art that has multi-tiers of not only a profit margin, but a message margin, but then also coming back to the actual ideas of the artist, which is part of the freedom of being in America as well.
Marc:So it is a true populism.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, I'm I think my philosophy somewhat Marxist from each according to his or her ability to each according to his or her need.
Guest:But my but the realities of the system we're in is it's capitalism.
Guest:So I embrace what I call a conscientious capitalism where I don't have to be.
Guest:forcing everybody to work part-time so I don't have to give them health insurance.
Guest:I don't have to, you know, I can take the profits from a poster that somebody buys as like a luxury item, basically, and give them and put that to causes I believe in, whether it's the NRDC or campaign finance reform with root strikers, any number of things.
Guest:But those are things that I have created within the parameters of, you know, the realities of the system we're in.
Marc:Well, it's all impressive, and it was a pleasure talking to you.
Marc:And poster art was part of your thing, rock poster art, because I know you brought me some stuff, and they're beautiful.
Guest:Love rock posters, rock poster art from John Van Hammersfield's Hendrix to new stuff that's coming out now from Aesthetic Apparatus out of Minneapolis.
Guest:Still a very, very great medium.
Marc:I love it.
Marc:And, and really, you know, when you're a kid of a certain age, like we are, you're not that much younger than me, but, but entering that world was, it's just like, it was mind blowing, man.
Guest:So much, uh, to absorb.
Guest:It was the magic kingdom.
Guest:And, and, and, and from like, you know, cool people speak this language.
Guest:I have to learn how to speak this language.
Marc:You remember the, the, remember the old bleaker bobs?
Guest:Oh yeah.
Marc:Like walking into that place with all the 45s up on the wall and you're like, what the fuck?
Guest:That was when I went to New York in 86 to see the Smiths and GBH and the Cro-Mags at separate shows.
Guest:That and Second Coming Records on 2nd Ave were the places that I went every day and was like a lot of window shopping, didn't have much money, but chose a few important records.
Guest:But yeah, of course.
Guest:I mean, that was heaven to get to have all that good music right in front of me when I came from South Carolina where I had to mail order the Great Rock and Roll Swindle.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:And I remember this switch from when I was really young, like 14, 15, when I'd go visit my grandmother and go into the city, and he'd go into Bleecker Bob's, and all the 45s on the wall were like Beatles of that era of music.
Marc:And then at some point, it just crossed over to all punk 45s that were... Yeah, you know, God damn it.
Marc:Huh?
Marc:Let's not get too nostalgic.
Marc:All right, man?
Guest:It was nice talking to you, Shepard.
Guest:Yeah, great to talk to you too, Mark.
Guest:Thanks for having me.
Marc:See that was interesting I like talking to artists More artists please
Marc:Folks, thank you for listening.
Marc:I enjoy you hanging out.
Marc:I'm glad you're here.
Marc:It makes me feel better.
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Marc:Write a comment.
Marc:We left the comments there.
Marc:I don't know why, but they're still there.
Marc:Get the app.
Marc:Upgrade to the premium.
Marc:Stream all of the shows.
Marc:Oh, God.
Marc:See that?
Marc:There's even like a shake in my inhale.
Marc:This is no time to come unglued, man.
Marc:I mean, things are going okay.
Marc:Things are going well.
Marc:There's no time to come unglued.
Marc:Is that when some people come unglued?
Marc:Boomer lives!