HUCK Magazine The Gonz Issue by TCOLondon

curated

the

gonz!

“ I s w e a r, sometimes I morph back into a l i t t l e k i d .”

Mark Gonzales

Mark Gonzales and Friends: Harmony Korine R a y m o n d P e t t i b o n – B a r r y M c G e e – To m S a c h s Cara Delevingne – Larry Clark – and more...

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O ’ R I G I NA L S

O N E I L L . C O M

MA RK APP LEYA RD NE W S IGN ATUR E S HOE TH E MA HAL O HA WAI I T ESTE D A ND A PP ROVE D AV AIL ABL E NO W FA CEB OOK .COM /GL OBEE UR OPE

UNITED BY FATE EST. AUSTRALIA 1994 WWW.GLOBE.TV

C o n t e n t s

12 Mark Gonzales

Friends

Larry Clark

Jocko Weyland

Jeremie Daclin

Maurizio Cattelan

Raymond Pettibon

Cara Delevingne

Barry McG e e

Harmony Korine

Georg Baselitz

Billy Ruff

Christopher Wool

Tom Sachs

R e b e cc a Horn

8 HUCK

M A D E

B Y

TEAM H UCK ANDR EA KU RLAN D EDIT AND OR Y TW PRO EDD JEC TA LE AN SSI STA NA NT SE -LISE NIO R D DUN BIN N ES D IGN BR I KA ER AN U F D D M CO ST RA ANN MM EA N TE ER F G IS C I A AU T L D LKN ED I RE E AN CT R OR DR EW S

S RDT WORD DEBE AMIN BENJ N DUN RYL E CHE RNI E CA KINS DAV EN TZ ID J ELI N AS DAV MA GB IED OR S FR GE LE E. EN BUTT GL Y O I RR JE D IGG K O AN YR RO EYL IES JA EB W HR O JO P CK UM JO H N JO

LA N MA CE MO RK OL U LIE GON NTA Z IN RE PE NN LL ALE ING S YP SK RIT IN PH I TH ILL KIN OM I PS AS TRI STA CAMP B NM ANC ELL O

R ITO ED E TT IAT IO OC LL GNER S E L SI AS A AN DE ST EV NIOR FE ER E S O I IZ ESIGN D BR

NI RO ED C OR NO A EDIT IC LIA GIU IN AMER DY HDA LAT BOG ISTANT L E S NAH ING AS M HAN PUBLISH N.CO HI-FE

curated

the

gonz!

“ I s w e a r, sometimes I morph back into a l i t t l e k i d .”

Mark Gonzales

NS LATIO TRANS

K BRISIC JAMIE OR IT GLOBAL ED

I TT BOCHENSK ATT AT MA EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

IMAGES

MICHAEL FORDHAM EDITOR-AT AT A -LARGE

ROB LONGWOR TH CREA A ATTI TIVVEE

DIRECTOR

RUTH C ARRUT HERS PROJE CT MA NA

9 771751 272046 37 £4.50 | ISSUE 37 | Feb/March 2013

THOMAS CAMPBELL UDIO TOM SACHS ST R R UE ERO TOMMY G T -SCOT B R O SON HUNTE WILL R E C A F ODIC / YVAN R

TODD HIDO

JO JO E BR N H OO KY OK UMP K O LA HR H NC E M AMA IES LA D RR O Y C UNT A LU LA A HR RK IN I N GA MA RK UG GO MA NZ USTIN RTI AL EG NE AL MAU FRA ES LE RIZ N C RY K/ IO C MICH MA ATT GNU AEL ELA DAN N MP MOR NEN HOT GAN MAN O JENK N INS PIERP AOLO FERR ARI RATIO 3, SAN FRANC ISCO RAYMON D PETTIB ON SIMON LEE GA LLERY SKIN PHILLIPS

Mark Gonzales and Friends: Harmony Korine R a y m o n d P e t t i b o n – B a r r y M c G e e – To m S a c h s Cara Delevingne – Larry Clark – and more...

ER OV S EC LE TH ZA T ON ON OT G SC S RK NLE MA BSO ZA ON RO KG LL WI MAR : IT: RA ORK W RT PO ART

BENJAMIN DEBERDT TZZ AT AT FILM BENJAMIN KA D PACIFIC SEUM AN U M T R A Y BERKELE LLA DERBA N A Y R B NN L YL DU WOO CHER PHER O T E R E CHRIS A AN L EY V ONG DAV H Y OTH R KER O D RUC M Y R U B Z SE EM MU SELIT N SL A MA B ES G ED OR . FRI AIN E G E I TT S EN BR TLE D GL T T N U A AN GR RY B EYL R W E O J CK JO

G ER SHEL LEY J O N ES DEP UTY STE EDIT OR PH P O SPE MPH TET CIAL PR REY OJE SU CTS HIK OE S N T DO VIN AF F WR CE ITE ME R DE I PU RO BL S IS

HE R

DISTRIBUTED WORLDWIDE BY COMAG | PRINTED BY BUXTON PRESS | THIS PUBLICATION IS PRINTED ON PAPER FROM SUSTAINABLE SOURCES | HUCK MAGAZINE IS PUBLISHED SIX TIMES A YEAR. THE ARTICLES APPEARING WITHIN THIS PUBLICATION REFLECT THE OPINIONS OF THEIR RESPECTIVE AUTHORS AND NOT NECESSARILY THOSE OF THE PUBLISHERS OR EDITORIAL TEAM. © TCOLONDON 2013. PUBLISHED BY THE CHURCH OF LONDON | DESIGNED BY HUMAN AFTER ALL | 71A LEONARD STREET | LONDON | EC2A 4QS | +44 (0) 207-729-3675 | INFO@THECHURCHOFLONDON.COM

10 HUCK

W E E K

W I T H

G O N z A L E S

Al l Im ages : Wi l l R ob s on - Sc ot t

M A R K

12 HUCK

Mar k Gonzales and the Gonz ar e t wo sides of the same f able . T her e i s t he m an and t he my t h , t he ar t is t and t he sk a t ebo ar der. A nd t hen t her e’s t he enigm a t h a t s om e h o w bin d s i t all . A s a k id h e r e w r o t e hi s t or y w i t h an o t her w or ldl y in s t inc t . A s an ar t i s t he s t ill f ind s w ay s t o t r an s c end t he adul t w or ld . T hi s s t or y is ju s t one piec e o f him – our v er sion o f t he Gonz .

“To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It's irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.” - EUGENE O'NEILL, The Iceman Cometh -

How do you make the Gonz sit still? It sounds like a joke, but it’s a serious question. It’s been roughly three months since Mark Gonzales came

fiction that’s about to commence. There’s the story we get told. The story we tell you. And then there’s the truth.

knocking on our door, armed with nothing but rolls of paper

Somewhere between the quotes that get captured and the things

and a head full of mad ideas. In that time, he’s gone from being

that go unsaid – the sidestepped answers, subtle observations, half-

a near-mythical enigma – the harebrained kid who practically

forgotten memories, fumbled notes, rumours and bizarre Google-

invented street skateboarding, and a contemporary artist whose

fuelled research – a picture of a person slowly comes into focus.

work hangs on Donald Trump’s wall – to a guy we’ve spent a little

But no matter how ‘definitive’ it professes to be, it’s still just an

bit of time with and, at a push, can say we know. Well, sort of.

approximation of an approximation of some version of the truth.

Because the imprint he’s left behind is becoming fuzzier each day.

Now, throw in a subject who refuses to stay put for longer than,

As with almost every person ever featured in this mag – or,

say, three minutes, and the whole ‘capture a person’s essence

come to think of it, in any newspaper, blog or rag around the

in 3,000 words’ becomes less a game of wordplay and more a

globe – there are approximately three sides to the piece of factual

battle of wits.

14 HUCK

Day One: The SceneSetting Snapshot From: mrjagger@soandsoemail.com

‘shmoo’ characters that populate his drawings are bobbing here

Date: 1 November 2012 14:33:53 GMT

and there – but Mark Gonzales, the human, is nowhere to be seen.

I have Mark Gonzales with me. He wants to

the week that follows will become one of a few unofficial go-to-

come and look at your space while he’s in

guys when trying to get a hold of Mark. “He’s been up all night

London.

creating work, like every hour of the day. I think he wants to do a

“He’s out back,” says Jagger, who manages the store and over

show with you guys.” Just then, a hobbit-like figure pokes his head from out the

Jagger

stockroom. His eyes are as wide as saucepans and his hair’s frazzled like a nest. “Hey, I’m Mark,” he says, circumnavigating fame. “So, Emails like this do not land in inboxes every day. Or ever, for

where’s your gallery? Is it far from here? Should we go get the bus?”

that matter. So when they do, you drop your little TeuxDeux list

Mark Gonzales does not sound like a forty-three-year-old. He

for the day, you get up and you go. But not before inviting your

doesn’t beat around the bush like adults do, and is refreshingly

co-editors along, of course.

direct. If there’s anything that sets the Gonz patois apart, it’s that pausing for faux niceties is just a barrier to real life, and now, evidently, really does mean now. His stubble is grey and wiry and his pitch is pre-pubescent. It’s a wild mix of old-guy body and

1 Nov 2012 20:44

young-kid intonation. “Should we go there now,” he says without gauging a reaction.

Midday tomorrow, you and me

“I’m ready to go now, come on let’s go.”

have to go pick up the Gonz.

He disappears for a second to grab a fresh-out-the-box hoodie – the rest of his clothes have a kind of slept-in look, offset by bright Oh my fucking god.

blue Adidas that belie his sponsored status. It’s the middle of

You’re kidding???

November and he’s rocking shorts, socks pulled high like he’s

I feel sick.

ready to run and play. Everyone else in London is a self-serious shade of grey. We spin around to leave and Jagger catches us at the door.

This is the effect Mark Gonzales has on people. Yes, even people

“Don’t forget it’s that premiere tonight,” he says. “You know, the

who ostensibly get paid to meet interesting people of the Mark

Bones Brigade documentary? Everyone’s in town.”

Gonzales ilk. I’m not saying it to be sycophantic; I’m saying it because it’s true. When we arrive at the Supreme store in London’s post-trendy Soho, the place is plastered with traces of Gonz – the signature

Mark cocks his head. “But I don’t have a ticket,” he squeaks. “Do you think I’ll get in?” “Um, I dunno,” chuckles Jagger warmly. “I think they may just let in the Gonz.”

air came at a big price. And as insurance costs mounted, more and more skateparks bailed beneath the pressure. Enter the homemade, backyard ramp – and a guy called Lance who had the best one in the state. “As those parks started closing, I had a ramp and people started coming to it,” explains Lance Mountain down the phone from his home in Alhambra, CA, taking a break from working in the backyard. “Mark was a kid who lived a few cities down and he’d take the bus to my house, knock on the door and ask

So, who is Mark Gonzales?

if he could skate – typically when no one else was skating, early

Well, it depends on who you ask. To skateboarders, and all the

mind, when I drove him back to the bus stop,” remembers Lance.

circling culture-vultures that borrow from their world, he’s a

“He got out the car, and the way he skated down to the bus stop

godfather-like creature; a kid from South Gate, near downtown

was...” He pauses as if to take a giant breath. “Whoo… it was

LA, who collided with skate history in the early 1980s, and

just the obvious change that was about to happen with street

pretty much reinvented the wheel. For them, our story begins

skateboarding. He rode away from the car, up the curb, down

on the monotonous flatlands of Southern California and the

the street, the way we would ride a pool. Like, he rode it! And

rudimentary skateparks that became a wavelike sanctuary for

people didn’t do that on the street back then. He had a mix on

kids who never quite ran with the pack.

what Rodney [Mullen] was doing with freestyle, with the ollie,

in the morning. I didn’t know his name or anything – he’d be down on the ramp by himself, just this odd little kid.” All neon shorts and bouffant hair, the kid started to make an impact. “There is one moment that really stands out in my

When the ’80s dawned, skateboarding dipped. After a decade

and also with flow. As skateboarders, everyone looked for some

of soaring progress – fuelled by Dogtown pool-thrashers like

kind of bank or vertical wall or something that emulated surfing.

Tony Alva, who proved it was possible to soar high above the

So there’s a wave, there’s movement, you’re on a transition and

lip – skateboarders still saw the world in vertical lines. Ramps,

then there’s a lip that you can do tricks on. Mark saw that you

bowls, ditches and pipes were the only things that mattered –

could eliminate the transition and get from the flat to the top of

anything that mimicked the skyward flow of a wave. But big

something and create the same manoeuvres. That’s a huge leap.”

The Bio Bit: For Those Less Familiar with the Legend of

At fifteen, Mark got picked up by Alva Skates after being spotted at a Venice Beach contest, but moved to Vision within a year. He dropped out of school, stopped having to trade in second-hand completes for cash and started earning a little dough. But more importantly, perhaps, he went from being a talking point at skate spots – or, as artist Thomas Campbell puts it, “that Mexican kid with crazy, rad style,” – to the guy who took the cover of Thrasher in November 1984. Though no one really knew it at the time, history had been re-written; the industry had just been hoisted from an early grave and street skateboarding was its saviour. “Mark, as history has proven, was overwhelmingly the guy that people credited that to,” says Lance. “He is arguably the most important skateboarder to live because he redefined what it became.” There were other skaters, though, most notably Natas Kaupas, who also saw obstacles as opportunities, and together they elbowed one another knowingly from the old world to the new. “Yeah, we compete against each other, but it’s not competing,” Mark told Thrasher in 1986. “You see, it’s better than a contest, because deep down inside if he’s skating better

L a n c e M ou n t a i n

than me, I’ll know he’s skating better than me. And I don’t need a fucking judge there to tell me that I wasn’t skating better than him or he was skating better than me... Lately we’ve been skating a lot together and that’s fun. We invent tricks and junk. We invented one we haven’t done yet.” Whatever, and however Mark and Natas did what they did,

Mark Gonzales, Lance's backyard ramp, circa 1983.

it never went unnoticed. “I can remember the first time I saw him,” says Thomas, who grew up skating around Dana Point with Jason Jessee, a close skate buddy of Mark’s. “My friend was like, ‘Do you want to go to this thing? It’s called a street skating comp.’ I was like, ‘What?’ It sounded really weird. Tommy Guerrero was there, Christian Hosoi, Stevie Caballero – I think

that people hadn’t done until a couple of years ago, like that

it was the second-ever street style comp, in Huntington Beach.

180 switch feeble that Chris Cole’s doing now. His video part

I just remember watching Mark – he had flames running up the

[was around for] so long before people were finally doing the

left leg of his pants, and him and Natas were ollieing to pivot

stuff he was doing.”

on a tyre. We’d never even seen an ollie before! So my friends

Mark eventually walked away from Rocco and Blind, tinkered

and I were like, ‘What the hell was that?’ It was totally magic. I

with ventures like ATM Click and 60/40, and later founded

remember driving home and being like, ‘Remember that little

Krooked with Jim Thiebaud and Tommy Guerrero. “It came

Mexican dude? He was ruuuling!’

about real organically,” says Jim. “We’ve all been friends for

Seminal moments came and went (Google: the Wallenberg

more than twenty years. I just think Mark Gonzales is a really

Set 4 Block and The Gonz Gap, Embarcadero) and by the time

smart man. Every time you’re around him something special

the 1990s rolled around, skateboarding was booming. In 1989,

happens – not in an artsy fartsy way, he’s just incredibly fun

Mark found himself in on the action when he set up Blind

to be around. He’s just been consistent and stayed excited in

Skateboards – a grand fuck-you to former sponsors Vision – under

everything he does – and if that’s a youthful trait then he’s kept it.”

Steve Rocco’s subversive World Industries umbrella, creating

And yet, in many ways, the business chapter of this particular

a cult-like aesthetic with collaborator Spike Jonze, whose own

skate story is merely a footnote. It’s not the reason Sean Malto can

career in filmmaking was forged from the brand’s game-changing

grind any handrail, or Eric Koston can fakie 360 flip a concrete

videos. Throw in the perfect storm of a VHS revolution and

abyss. It’s not the reason that countless, nameless, scabby-knee’d

Mark’s erratic sense of flow and instinct for fun soon had kids

kids see ten-step stair-sets as a launch pad for self-fulfilment.

across the planet turning cities into playgrounds.

There is a reason Mark Gonzales will forever be the Gonz, but

Younger skaters gravitated and soon the Blind team

it’s infinitely less tangible than any single moment or event.

boasted new blood, like Guy Mariano, Rudy Johnson and

“In every movement there is a pinnacle leader,” says Lance.

Jason Lee. “Mark put out [Blind’s] Video Days [in 1991] and I

“And he was given that position - well, given isn’t the right word.

think he shocked a lot of people,” says Guy. “That was a time

I mean, you can’t give something to someone when no one else

in skateboarding where the average age of a skater was between

is doing it… It takes somebody that people want to be like, or

twelve and sixteen – seventeen was old! He must have been in

act like, or emulate for it become a movement. Other than that

his twenties, and it was groundbreaking. He was doing tricks

it’s just tricks.”

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G on z ales

A Memory Re-Written in the Present Tense (aka The Bit Where We Get the Bus) On the way to the bus stop, we drop the kind of conversation starters that are applicable to most social situations. You know, ‘So, where’ve you come from? What brings you here? Are you having a good trip?’ Polite stuff people tend to skirt around just to be polite. But in Mark’s world, questions are simply jump-off points for barely related tangents. In the time it takes us to get from Soho to Old Street, we hear a trail of disparate stories. He’s just come from New York. But he’s been living in Paris. He can’t really speak French but he

Thrasher , Se p t e m b e r 1986. P h ot o b y M . F oc h e .

has a few favourite phrases. He once spent hours trapped in an airport terminal in Toronto – “like that Tom Hanks film”. He says he can’t stand to stay in one place for too long. His five-year-old son is going through a Spiderman phase and is inseparable from

Mark Gonzales on his gangster alter ego, Chavo.

his six-year-old girlfriend. He misses him like crazy. His nephew

Thrasher, September 1986.

is a football player. He used to skate with him on his shoulders but now he’s over six-feet tall. Whenever he sees girls’ stuff he

Who is Chavo? Not me. Chavo is like this real smart guy

wants to buy it for his niece, Summer. Girls are rad. He has a

and everyone goes to him with their problems.

video on YouTube that he wants to show us; it’s of his girlfriend, Alexandra, and she’s riding a skateboard coffin-style down the

What kind of problems? Girl problems for instance. Chavo

hills of Bel Air. They call it ‘Stalin’. Have you seen the Rothko

was once dating this girl. He said, “Man Mark, she was

show? The Pieter Brugel paintings at the National Gallery are

so smart when I first met her. Then after a year or so I

amazing. Oh, you like the one in Melancholia. It’s called ‘Hunters

started hanging around with her a lot and she started

in the Snow’ and it’s his favourite, too. The shield on that building

acting just like me, you know. She was even saying the same

looks like a yin yang sign. He likes the pattern.

words as me. She was like my carbon copy. So I told her how

Mark’s world is woven from short divergent strands, bound

I felt, and you know what she told me, Mark?”

together with the innocence of a starry-eyed kid. His openness is startling. Earlier this week, he started talking to a girl smoking a

What? I’m Mark.

cigarette outside his hotel about the fact that he was a bit down when he first landed here in London. The girl went inside and

Oh, what did she tell you? “When I first met you, Chavo, I

told her friends about the “random weirdo” that was trying to

was my last boyfriend and a few admirers of his.” And you

talk to her “for no real reason”.

know, she was so smart I used to wonder just exactly who

“It was super funny,” he laughs. “People don’t get how I just

her old boyfriend knew. She was only seven.

want to talk to them sometimes.” What else did Chavo tell you? He used to tell me about this one kid. “Real stupid guy,” Chavo used to say he was. He used to come to Chavo and tell Chavo about how he did all these paintings that had so much meaning in them. So much meaning to him. He liked to talk about heavy stuff. I told Chavo that kid wasn’t stupid he just hung around with the wrong crowd. The next day Chavo killed himself. Then me and this stupid kid started analysing Chavo’s death. And now, I am Chavo.

18 HUCK

Day One (Part Two): In Which Mark Hits Upon an Idea Mark Gonzales is writing his mom’s telephone number in my

Send him an email with a list of questions and you’ll get a

diary. He has an idea. But given that he doesn’t have a phone or

video response that holds no answers. come in london control:

a computer because he keeps “blowing them up,” it all hinges on

“How are you people in TV land, everything good?” squeaks

us figuring out a way to keep in touch.

the protagonist. “It’s all good in the pumpkin pie hood!” In

“Let’s do a show next week.” That’s how Mark responds

one, he may be sprawled out on a giant canvas painting a

when, after a quick calculation of mundane things like schedules,

naked blue lady (“I just love to cushy on her tooshy!”) In

deadlines, budgets and ‘viability checks’, we suggest that a doable

another, he’s creating a Frankenstein plush, sewing Donald

timeframe to prepare for an art show could be something along

Duck body parts onto a Disney Store-bought Dumbo.

the lines of, say, three months.

There are artists who prattle on and on about ‘process’;

“I dunno, I just really want to do a show,” he says. “I can draw

Mark simply shows you things, but always with sleight of

everything this week. Here, if you can’t get a hold of me you can

hand. He’ll send you photos, paintings, handheld movies –

always call my mom. She lives in California.”

cryptic visual messages from a tilted, shifting dreamscape

Beyond VHS

that make words feel like the trifling of a blathering, anxious fool. Words are absolute. Things are either good or bad, black or white, painful, difficult or fantastic. Mark taps into something intangible that hovers in-between. Elsewhere in this Gonzo corner of the ’Tube, videos are

There is a hidden YouTube channel that simmers away quietly,

‘liked’ (Frances Farmer, Humphrey Bogart, Siouxsie And

beckoning Gonz-o-philes like a lo-fi Easter Egg. Here, in

The Banshees, Kate Bush), comments are made (‘Killaugh!’)

varying degrees of shaky handycam, everyday life starts to

and films go up as quickly as they come down. The ones with

blend with the absurd.

female narrators sometimes vanish without trace.

opera house boogie: A panning shot of a regal Beaux-Arts ceiling. The grand stairwell of the Palais Garnier. The girl behind the camera shows her face briefly. Men and women

YouTube

in long, dark coats jar with a figure in bright, white pants. He trips, stumbles and starts tumbling down the stairs, legs

Published on Feb 8, 2013

flailing like a ragdoll to the sound of rising gasps. The long

17 mins ago:

dark coats rush to his aid, but he’s already side-stepping like Gene Kelly and waltzing back up the stairs.

i call a cab cause a cab will come fle flicker

Scroll deeper through the channel and videos of videos morph with reality, rendered through the lens of avant-garde

Description:

punk. woodchuck hard cider: In a palimpsest of high and

Lady cab driver, can you take me for a ride?

low touchstones, Edward Scissorhands melts into Ghandi,

Don’t know where I’m goin’

who melts into a monochrome skateboarding girl – white

’Cuz I don’t know where I’ve been

dungarees, stripy long socks, yin yang flag flailing in her hand. In a realm where fat kids on roller-coasters and ninja cats rule supreme, Gonz has found a way to extend his lifelong experiment into the world of user-generated film.

Adidas interview, 2009.

Life becomes art, movement becomes the message, and like

“Skateboarders are envied by people because they just

the VHS tapes that helped spark a revolution, a version of

glide so free. Any time something moves like water,

history is caught before it passes – added to, twisted and left

they’ll make a dam. Every time something moves in nature,

to dangle mid-air.

they want to stop it.” - mg

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One Week. One Show. The Gonz draws as quickly as most people talk. He draws on napkins, jackets, postcards, floors, walls, shoes and body parts. He draws girls with Alexandra’s face, and invisible men; VW Beetles with swastika signs and jailbird Madonnas. There are words, too, and they flow even faster. Most times, he doesn’t fully register what comes out. “I like how these two poems make a story,” I say, sticking a pin in what is obviously one half of a thoroughly thought-out, two-part piece. StopeD HER iN THE STREET TO GET A LOOK AT HER FACE SHE SEAID i WAS NiCE BUT SHE WOULDT WaLK ACROSS THE StREET WiTH ME “Oh, yeah,” Mark giggles, blue eyes flashing. “I never even noticed that.” It’s been four days since we convinced ourselves that pulling off a 24-hour pop-up show in the space of a week would be a cinch. Every day since, at around 4pm, the relative calm of our pretty studious little office is awoken from its pattern as soon as Mark bowls through the door, arms laden with rolls of paper worked on through the night. “Hey, have you got any scissors?” he’ll holler on arrival over conscientious heads. “Okay, bye now! We’re going to Ikea / to get nachos / to find some fish and chips,” come the various sign-offs not long after he’s arrived. He’s here one minute, gone the next. And even here, in our so-called ‘creative environment’, his energy is a welcome whack across the face.

20 HUCK

Right now we’re sticking, pegging, pinning and pasting dozens of pieces up onto the wall. Mark wanders the floorboards in pink fluffy socks, adding frantic flourishes to garish spray-painted scrolls, armed with the fattest Sharpie money can buy. “Stick ’em up punk!” he squeals to absolutely no one. He kneels down and starts drawing a warped world at lightning speed. If he’s thinking while he’s doing it, it certainly doesn’t show. “I just draw whatever I’m around,” he says. “Like for a while, I drew high heels, because Alexandra really likes them.” When it comes to art shows, Mark’s seen and done plenty. He’s soaked up dozens of London’s galleries in a matter of days, and weaves film and art references into most conversations. His own biography carries all the right names: from Aaron Rose’s Alleged Gallery to Franklin Parrasch in New York; from ’zines with Nieves, to a Chaplin-esque cameo in a Spike Jonze short. He fucked shit up in Harmony Korine’s Gummo, turned skateboarding into a performance piece in a film shot by Cheryl Dunn (see: Coconut Records’ West Coast video). P-Diddy has entire walls covered in his work. There are photography shows in Paris, clothing lines in Japan, Adidas ads co-starring Snoop Dogg, giant ‘shmoo’ installations in Supreme stores. And there’s a pop-up art show opening in London tonight. Everyone wants their own little Gonz. Later, as the clock starts ticking and the hoards gather at the door, Mark is still sitting and drawing on the floor, socked feet curled beneath him, eyes in a glaze. “I swear, sometimes I morph back into a little kid.”

Thrasher, September 1986. “I don’t know, it seems like everyone’s an artist nowadays. I like drawing a lot. I used to draw cars and stuff, hot rods. It’s fun to draw, you know. After you’ve done a drawing you look at it, you put it away and then when you see it later you go, ‘Man, I drew this? I like it’... But I hate when people go, ‘Oh I know what this means, I can understand what you’re trying to say through this drawing.’ When I do drawings and they do have meaning, if they do, I don’t do it for other people. I do it for myself so I can just go, ‘Yeah, cool.’ But I hate when people look at it and explain it to you.” - mg

The Conclusion (That Never Concludes) One day after our week with the Gonz, Mark fades away as quickly as he appeared. He was getting a train to the Scottish Highlands. Then it was an overnight bus to Milan. When you think he’s back in Paris, he turns up in New York, in the same hotel suite where the Marx Brothers used to stay. Soon, our relationship descends into a chase. Off the back of the adrenalin and excitement of the show, we decided to collaborate on a guest-edited issue – the very magazine that you are holding in your hands. But phone calls, messages and high-priority (!!) emails are not always in tempo with the vagabond beat. Getting a hold of Mark is still as hard as ever. If you have to email him, make sure it’s pretty – “I don’t read the words, I just look at the pictures. Can you send a fax?” I haven’t yet tried to call his Mom. All it takes is a quick flashback to the night his show opened (to the queue that wormed it’s way down the road; the skateboarders

[P O STS C RI P T]

and collectors standing shoulder to shoulder, elbows at the ready, eyes on the art; the constant flash of cameras and hungry iPhones;

Three hours ago I typed the last words of this story, went

the Instagrammed moments – ‘Me and #thegonz!’; the signings,

downstairs and watched Leonardo DiCaprio lose his marbles

bear hugs and incessant high-fives; the way he went out and bought

in Scorsese’s Shutter Island. Now it’s 01.22am and a message

Jackie O’ sunglasses ten minutes before doors opened and kept

has just landed in my inbox. So I guess I better begin again...

them and a beanie on for most of the night) all it takes is this halfcast memory of the man to remind you that predators have a way of wearing down their prey. But that’s the magical thing about Mark – he never sits still long enough for anyone to keep up.

YouSendIt xxxxxx.xxxx@gmail.com has sent you some files interview with jocko for gonzales guest editor

Thrasher, September 1986. “If I say something good, people can make it bad, you know,

Files (267 MB total)

they can just make it bad. If I say something bad, people

Movie on 2-8-13 at 2.49 PM.mov

can make it beautiful. They could say, ‘Oh, it’s so good.’ It’s

22 HUCK

like fortune cookies, whatever they say you can somehow

Mark Gonzales: One Week, One Show took place at 71a Leonard

make them fit with what’s going on around you. I think

St., London – home of HUCK magazine – on November 10, 2013.

about what I want to say and I wonder how some people

To watch the video that landed in our inbox, and see images of the show,

might take it. It’s hard to say what I feel.” - mg

visit huckmagazine.com.

Yo u c a n t e l l a l o t about a person from the people that inspire them. We l c o m e t o t h e next piece of the puzzle. We â&#x20AC;&#x2122; l l l e t G o n z t a k e i t f r o m h e r e . . . .

P r o f i l e N o .

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J o n e s

B ry an De r bal la

l A r r y C l A r k

Photographer-filmmaker Larry Clark has been keepin’ kids real for forty-plus years.

korine (who wrote the screenplay). The film shocked, appalled and wowed viewers. it also set the tone for his next five features, all focused on diﬀerent youth communities, which upset censors, divided fans and raised questions of ‘perversion’ and ‘voyeurism’. Now the bad boy of indie cinema is back with his first feature in six years. Marfa Girl explores real and invented stories with a mix of street-cast kids and legit actors in Marfa – a desert town

eople are scared of larry Clark. but the New

which minimalist Donald Judd bought up in small pieces in the

york-based auteur is fearless. Clark is just real.

1970s and 1980s and transformed into an artist Mecca. As a big

And to be down with his art is to be down with

fuck-you to hollywood, Clark released the film independently on

a certain way of seeing the world. once you’ve

the internet. he plans to make another two Marfa Girl films and

been exposed to his often disturbing ‛yoot-

release them on the seventeenth and eighteenth birthdays of the

gone-wild’ aesthetic, you’ll begin to see his

protagonists, Adam and Mercedes. Clark just turned seventy. he’s

enduring inﬂuence in all kinds of culture – from

now a vegan, he’s taken up boxing and he says he’s making some

contemporary art, film and photography to

of the best work of his life.

skateboarding, fashion, TV and advertising. larry Clark is everywhere.

Your new film is set in Marfa, a tiny West Texas border town

born in Tulsa in 1943, Clark grew up in a hazy, post-war America

comprised of three clashing communities – Mexican-Americans,

that was all white-picket fences and ford Thunderbirds. Not

border patrol police and artists in residence. What happens when

really buying the dream, the amateur photographer (roped into

Larry Clark is thrown into that toxic mix? Well, there’s a lot of me

baby portraiture through the family business) fell in with freaky

in this film because i wrote it and the characters are composites

suburban folk who shot speed, shot guns and ghosted outside

of probably everybody i’ve known in my life. i just kept drawing

society. During the 1950s and 1960s, Clark exercised his trigger

from memory and adding more. [...] i was just fascinated with

finger and captured his friends and fellow down ‛n’ outs in an

this town, which is in the middle of nowhere, and kids like Adam

intimate collection of photos that formed his first book, Tulsa

and Mercedes who actually live there and have the internet and

(1971). it was a game-changer, not just subverting a rosy version

see what’s going on in the world, but are so isolated. it’s like a

of America perpetuated by the Mad Men, but establishing an

throwback to the 1950s, you know? So anyway, i’d get up every

autobiographical quasi-documentary photography style that would

morning at 5am and write, and i filmed as i went along. i’ve never

be endlessly referenced and interpreted thereafter.

had more fun making a film.

in 1991, Clark moved into film with his dark debut Kids,

26 HUCK

following the lives of drug-taking, casual-fucking, underage skate

Are there any parallels between Tulsa and Marfa Girl and what

rats in New york – based on the Washington Square Park crew he

made you go back to the South? it was really serendipity. i was in

hung with for three years and then cast, launching the careers of

Marfa visiting a painter friend of mine, Christopher Wool, who

Chloe Sevigny, rosario Dawson, leo fitzpatrick and harmony

was advising this tiny little film festival. They were gonna show No

P r o f i l e N o .

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Wave films from the 1970s in New york and he asked me to come

filmmakers are going directly through the internet now. And i think

and show a silent, hour-long film i’d done in Tulsa in 1968. So i

that’s the future. The indie cinemas are disappearing and we know

just happened to be there and i was interested in this town – you

everyone watches their media on the internet. Cinema now is all

know they made Giant there in the 1950s? That was James Dean’s

the blockbusters and big films that make millions. it’s very diﬃcult

last film, and it was kind of the same then as it is now. but it’s a

to get smaller films out in the theatres, because there aren’t any.

melting pot – it’s one of those towns where you know everything’s happening that is happening everywhere else but the town doesn’t

In the past you’ve had reservations about putting your work out

talk about it. And my first thought was, ‘i’m gonna do Peyton Place

because it deals with some pretty ugly things. Did you have any

in this town.’ Peyton Place was the first dirty book in America. it’s

reservations with Marfa Girl? i always do. because i never hold

about this small town in America where everything is going on

anything back. i always push it as far as i can push it, and i don’t

but it’s all underground. No one talked about it because that’s the

think about what i can’t do, i just do it and it comes out like it

way it was in the 1950s.

comes out. When i was doing the sixteen-year-olds’ lovemaking scene [in Marfa Girl] – it’s so tender and beautiful, and so diﬀerent

People find your portrayals of youth problematic. But kids are

from the other sexual scenes in the film, because it’s so real. it’s so

dealing with some real shit. Do you keep up with contemporary

innocent. but they were very young. They’d just turned sixteen.

youth culture and what do you think of it? i’ve always been

And i said to the crew, ‘Am i going too far? i’m getting nervous!’

interested in what’s really going on and i’ve done what, in the past,

but i’m trying to make it real and i think i’m doing some of my

contrasted with hollywood’s image of youth and the portrayal that’s

best work ever. it’s like a new lease of life for me. i always think of

put out there. And i do find what’s going on now really interesting

my work as a comeback – like i’m an old boxer training for a fight,

because of the internet – kids have access to all this information,

‘Just one more fight!’

but they’re still innocent. They’re always going to be innocent until they experience life. When i was a kid, no one told you nothing

Your films kinda blur the line between fiction and reality. Are

and if you asked a question you just got told to ‘shut up’ you know?

there ‘truths’ you wanted to explore in Marfa Girl that would

kids were supposed to be seen and not heard and that was what

never transpire in a documentary? Well, it’s all reality but it’s just

was going on. it’s much better now that kids have information. i

all composites and blends. i think it’s all about feeling, you know?

“ M y ad ol e s c e n ce was n ’ t a h ap p y one s o it’ s in te r e s ting f or m e to s e e h o w p e op l e n avig ate it .”

have kids and i’ve watched them grow up – my daughter’s twenty-

i think the best art is all about some kind of feeling. And i’m not

six and my son’s twenty-nine – and they’re much more aware of

so interested in documentary, i’m much more interested in trying

what’s going on. So i put Marfa Girl out on the internet because

to make work about life. because there’s so much freedom when

that’s where all the kids see their media and i thought, why not

you do that. My first film Kids was all based on reality, except

go straight to the kids? [...] i guess there are always gonna be the

Jennie, she was the only completely made-up character. That’s

more sugar-coated visions of life, but maybe it’s getting better now.

why it was so hard to cast her and i cast Chloë Sevigny right at the last minute. All the other characters were based on people,

And you wanted to ‘cut out those Hollywood distributors and

on composites of people. harold [hunter] was basically harold,

crooks’? Well yeah – y’know, art filmmakers and most independent

Casper was basically Justin. We had a lot of life. everything in

La r r y C l a r k

Kids was based on something that I’d seen, heard or knew for sure

the way I saw things, it was so realistic. And that was kind of the

had happened over a three-year period. What I did was compress

beginning of Cinema Verité. So that was very important for me.

all those things into twenty-four hours to create a roller-coaster. And it’s the same in Marfa Girl – it’s like a microcosm of what’s

How does Mark Gonzales fit into your world? Mark Gonzales is

going on in America with racism. It’s interesting when something

a legend! Mark Gonzales is one of the greatest skaters of all time!

goes wrong with the country, with the economy or whatever, people

And Mark, for the last fifteen years or more even, the tricks that

tend to pick on the poorest people, like, ‘Well it’s all these illegal

you see skateboarders do, he invented. He’s such a legendary, great

immigrants coming in!’ But it’s total bullshit. People just feel better

skater. And he’s a really good artist. I’ve known him since he was

if they have someone else to blame. So all these things are in the film.

a teenager, and I remember him drawing all the time. Actually when my son was little, Mark did a drawing on his bedroom wall.

It’s never been easier for young people to represent themselves

My son left the house many years ago, but the drawing’s still there.

authentically. But no one’s making anything as challenging as

He’s a wonderful artist, he’s a great guy, and I love Mark. There’s a

Marfa Girl. What’s up with that? I think that I can do it because

simplicity and an intelligence and a humour [in his art]. He’s able

I have this distance and I can have a little perspective. I’ve always

to put everything down into forms that I think are really compelling

been fearless, well, I haven’t been fearless, I’ve just fought the

and interesting. He’s very sophisticated in his simplicity.

fear – but now I’m pretty fearless. When you’re a kid there has Can you tell us a bit about your new film project in Paris? Yeah,

learning and forming. My adolescence wasn’t a happy one so

I’m going to Paris in a few weeks to do The Smell of Us, which is a

it’s interesting for me to see how people navigate it. I don’t know.

contemporary film about Parisian youth and segments of Parisian

I’ve just always thought that’s why I’m here. The reason for my

life. I’ve cast a lot of young kids – seventeen, eighteen, nineteen-year-

existence. It’s that simple.

old Parisian adolescents, who are first-time actors, and I’ve mixed

M or gan Je nk ins c/o L ar ryC l a r k . c om

to be limits; this I can do, this I can’t do. Because you’re still

them with really great, older French actors, who you will know. So

28 HUCK

Who inspires you? John Cassavetes was a great inspiration for

it’s very exciting for me to meet these people and to cast them. There

me. I think I saw Shadows in ’62. I’d been raised on John Wayne

are more and more grown-ups in my films now, since I’m finally

movies and John Ford movies and the Hollywood movies, and

growing up a little bit. We start filming at the end of February and

the Rock Hudson and Doris Day movies, and I’d never seen

I’m very happy about that. I have a lot of energy right now and I

anything like it. I thought, ‘This guy sees how I see.’ So it kind of

feel good, which is unusual for me. I was the unhappiest guy in

validated me at that age because it looked like Tulsa, it looked like

the world and now I’m probably the happiest guy in the world

BEAU FOSTER MANSFIELD

MICK

OWEN

MACHADO

ACE

MATTE BLACK

DORIAN

www.dragonalliance.com

EVAN

NOA

BALARAM

P r o f i l e N o .

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J o n e s

Gr ant B r it t ain

J o c k o W e y l and

[...] I started making my own [’zine], Revenge Against Boredom, gluing and pasting pictures and doing all the writing myself. The first issue was three photocopied pages that grew to fourteen pages by the time I discontinued it after

Artist, writer and skateboarder Jocko We y l a n d i s s t i l l championing the art of the Xerox machine.

issue number five in 1984. I made 500 copies of it and sent it to record stores and other ’zine makers. My sister was living in Berlin so I got her to distribute there, people wrote from Yugoslavia and Australia for it, and I got a letter from Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore that said, “Dear R.A.B., Please send me your ’zine. I heard it’s cool.” It was a labour of love without any ulterior motives except to be a part of a community and trade information about the underground. It was fun, creative, and something to do

ocko Weyland grew up in suburban Colorado during the late-

instead of getting high and listening to

1970s and early-1980s. Through skateboarding and punk rock,

Judas Priest.”

he found a way to sidestep general society and connect with a global community who shared his ride-or-die outlook on life.

HUCK: Why did you start Elk? When I

He’s worked in images his whole life – as an archivist for The

started making Elk in 2003 there wasn’t

Associated Press and photo researcher for magazines – and is

much going on with ’zines. Certainly

passionate about drawing, painting, ’zines, photography and

people were making them but it was

writing, releasing a book The Answer is Never: A Skateboarder’s

kind of a low. In the last five years

History of the World in 2003.

there’s been this real explosion. And

His current ’zine Elk is in its twenty-fifth issue and features

now you’ve got things like the New

everyone from Virginia Woolf to Pontus Alv. Jocko is currently

York Art Book Fair and everything’s

in Lake Tahoe, on hiatus from New York City where he’s lived

’zines, ’zines, ’zines. There’s been a sort

most of his adult life.

of co-optation by the art world, or a

The Elk and The Skateboarder

willing collusion with the art world, and that didn’t really exist before the

An extract, by Jo cko Weyland .

early 2000s. I worked in magazines, I

O pen City, Issue #15.

was a photo researcher, but I wanted a magazine that didn’t exist, so I made

“In 1981 Ronald Reagan was in office, there was a recession,

it. And it was really mostly for myself.

unemployment was high, and the Cold War was at its height,

I wanted the image to stand on its own,

filling my adolescent mind with hyper-realistic nightmares of

and that’s what Elk is. Of course I didn’t

nuclear annihilation. The popular culture I was exposed to was

invent that idea at all, Wyndham Lewis’

overwhelmingly boring, conservative and unwilling to address the

magazine Blast was doing that in the

ugly realities of life. Music was the domain of over-bloated rock

1910s. And there were skate ’zines that

bands whose time of innovation was twenty years past. It was grim.

were really minimal, particularly one

Skating was an outcast activity and it was becoming increasingly

called Swank, which Tod Swank made,

connected to the even more subversive and iconoclastic punk rock

who is now the owner of TumYeto.

movement, particularly the brutally fast American offshoot of

There are others, too. It’s just about

punk called hardcore. Punk rock then was actually a movement

the sequence of the photos and how

of substance and importance, not the watered-down artistically

they relate to each other without being

bankrupt genre it is today. It was new and scary and against

overly explicit.

everything that was the establishment. The music was alien –

32 HUCK

speeded up, aggressive, and genuinely strange. The lyrics dealt

As you’ve gotten older, has the function

with things of real importance that weren’t talked about in the

of the ’zine changed for you? I don’t

culture at large. What the bands were saying was edifying and I

think making ’zines is as exciting

took them very seriously, imagining real changes and revolution.

now for a lot of reasons, personally

A whole world of radical politics and intellectual questioning that

for me because they don’t have the

was completely absent in the discourse of the day was revealed to

same meaning. What made ’zines feel

me. Skateboarding and punk rock changed my life.

so crucial, exciting, immediate and

P r o f i l e N o .

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important, was growing up in a time when there was only

How long have you known Mark?

mail. It was the only way of getting stuff. I also think there

I met Mark when I was about eighteen,

was a sort of golden age at that time, early-mid 1980s. It was

so probably 1985. I saw him skating

untrained and unpremeditated. There’s still plenty of ’zines I

at this contest in Huntington Beach,

like, but there’s so many of them now and the people making

which was one of the first street skating

them know what it means to make a ’zine. You know what

contests. I guess everyone has said this

I mean? There are rules to go by. ’Zines have become like

before, but he was really noticeable. He

a careerist thing. There’s a market for it. And back then it

was ollieing in a way nobody else was.

existed in a vacuum where money wasn’t even... it was just

Then we met a few times in San Diego.

more inventive.

I remember riding a ramp with him and having a conversation about the poet

How do you choose what goes in Elk? There are so many images

Brion Gysin. I don’t remember how he

out there in the world and it’s just about distilling it down to

knew him, or how I knew him. Then I

what I think is interesting. It’s funny in the internet age, the

didn’t see him for about five years and

last ten years or something, a bunch of people have said, ‘Wow

he turned up when I was living in New

Elk, it’s like the internet but better.’ Or not better, but what’s

York and I saw him riding in Washington

not on the internet. In a strange way it has a relationship to how

Square on this water-ski board he

people search. It’s like a weird, analogue, three-dimensional

borrowed off a stoner buddy.

extremely – and I’m not gonna use the word ‘curated’ because I hate that word – but an extremely discriminating and subjective

You’ve featured him in Elk. What do

take on what’s out there. It’s also just sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll and

you like about his art? I like Mark a lot,

architecture. That’s what usually ends up in it. Skateboarding

so I’m biased. His work is... organic, I

is almost always in one of them. For a long time I was like, ‘I’m

guess is the word. It’s natural. It’s not

so sick of skateboarding I don’t want it in there. I don’t want

thought out, not posed. His whole use

everything to be about skateboarding.’ But it’s just impossible

of language is really funny and witty

to erase that and I don’t want to erase that. That always shows

and interesting and kinda has some

up in some shape or form.

idiot-savant elegance. I think words and images often don’t work well in

Are you still skating a lot? I left New York a month and a half

the context of drawing, unless you’re

ago and I was skating pretty often there. It’s weird, I’ve talked

Raymond Pettibon or something.

to Mark [Gonzales] about this, but when we met there were

But Mark does this thing that’s kinda

no old skateboarders and I remember seeing Tony Alva when

magical, like, we did a show together in

I was eighteen or something and being like, ‘Dude give it up!

Franklin Parrasch and he had this one

You’re way too old!’ And he was probably twenty-three. But

piece, ‘The guy who has the food is the

now, I just saw this contest in New York back in September

king of the zoo.’ And the way he says

and Lance [Mountain] won the Masters, or whatever, and

it or writes it is somehow revelatory.

he’s better than ever. It’s odd to me, but I feel lucky that my

It makes you think about this totally

body can still do it.

mundane subject in a way you never have. ‘Oh yeah, the zoo! That’s funny!’

It’s become institutionalised as a sport... Oh totally, I totally think that. I mean there are much bigger problems in the world

What are your plans for the future?

and at this point I really don’t care but this friend of mine, Rob

I probably won’t make another Elk for

Erickson, who has a long history in skateboarding, said to

a while because I’m not living in New

me, ‛I wish skateboarding would die so we could have it back.’

York anymore and I don’t have access

Skateboarding is so gross and stupid now on so many levels. I

to the photographs. But lately I’ve been

would never have imagined that and I don’t think anybody else

painting these Russian doll figurines –

did. But that’s what happened. It’s a huge business, of course it’s

just really rudimentary on gouache and

going to be full of idiocy. I mean the great thing about skating

watercolour paper. I’ve been learning

is that it was not understood. Parents weren’t into their kids

how to paint, or trying to learn, just to

skating. It was this thing that nobody cared about. And that’s

try a new thing. Right now I’m really into

what made it able to develop, or be really fun and interesting

Chaim Soutine. There’s a ton of stuff

and cool, because it was happening outside of general society.

out there that’s interesting and cool

But now it’s totally a part of general society, and that’s really taken a lot away from it. And what’s kind of depressing to me is this whole father and son at the skatepark thing. Not the dad skating, that’s one thing, but it’s become a regular sport; the dad’s hanging out like, ‛Make sure you get that rock and roll or you’re not gonna get dinner tonight!’

From: Thomas Campbell Date: 7 February 2013 -t.cam here --- i am sending you a yousendit ,,right now,,,,,,,, 2 fotos and drawings of marks,,the fotos are from harrow skate park in 1992,,the kid on the shoulders is named toby,,,i think he is well known in the london skate scene,,,the drawings,,,,, mark gave me in madrid in

Thomas Campbell

1993 i think ,,,hope this works--t.cam

e’ve been in so many different art shows together, and you never know what Mark’s going to do. Mark could put up a good painting that he made and then in the middle of the show go up to it and start drawing on it with a Sharpie and fuck it up - or he could make it better. He could do anything! He’s just on a different time-space continuum, I would imagine.”

- Thomas Campbell is an artist and filmmaker from Bonny Doon, CA. He grew up surfing and skateboarding around Dana Point, and remembers being stuck in class while having to watch a kid call Mark skate outside his school. “That kid had it figured out,” he says.

M o m e n ts w ith

G o n z

ack in the 1990s, we used to have to go to Adidas’ advertising agency and sit in all these meetings where they’d pitch these crappy ideas that we would generally shoot down. Mark was brought into some of those meetings. One time, he just blurts out, ‘I wanna skate over a car! A moving car! It comes at me and I ollie and I ride over it!’ I’m like, ‘Oh-kaaay!?’ kinda looking around. I’m a pretty young photographer at this time, you know. I’m not used to big productions. So I basically just got these girls from Adidas to go and rent a car – Mark was really specific about what car he wanted, a Lincoln town car, I think. And he’s like, ‘I don’t know, I think I wanna do it at the hospital bump in SF,’ which is like this famous skate spot with big bumps in San Francisco. We didn’t have permits or anything so we thought we’d just go along early in the morning before people go to work. So we bring this car along at 6am and park it up the hill and ollies off a bump. Very first try, he kicks the board out and breaks the front windshield. Everyone was like, ‘Oooh!’ but Mark’s like, ‘No, I got it, I got it, I got it!’ and starts trying it a bunch. Eventually he’s like rolling up on top of the hood, and you can see all these wheel marks and dents all over the car. By that

time people are starting to come to work – we forgot that people come to work pretty early at hospitals – and all these pedestrians are tripping, like, ‘What is that guy

doing!? You can’t do this!’ And we’re like, ‘No, no, it’s cool – this is our car. It’s our car! We have permission to do this.’ They did not buy it, and just freaked out. It wasn’t funny for Mark – it was just something he wanted to do. It was amusing for me and everyone else, but no, he was pretty serious about it. He actually wanted the car to be moving! Then he thought about it for a minute and was like, ‘Maybe I should try it still first.’”

- Jon Humphries is a photographer from Portland, Oregon, who’s never strayed far from his skateboarding roots. He’s captured some of skate history’s most seminal moments, shooting everyone from Arto Saari to Lance Mountain, and is a big fan of Lance's never-ending stories.

36 HUCK

Jon Humphries

on the street at the bottom of a hill. Mark comes down

’ve shot Mark a bunch of times, but there’s one photo that stands out. I think Mark just got done filming for [Krooked’s] Gnar Gnar and I think we were on the video premiere tour. His mom came out to San Francisco, and we went to the Sunnyvale Skatepark with Dan Cates. Mark’s there and Dan’s tripping out. He’s super stoked on the whole deal. He was wearing an NWA shirt and I think Mark just liked him right out of the gate. So, Mark’s flying around skating, not wearing any pads or helmet, and his mom is yelling, ‘Mark, put on a helmet Mark!’ And he’s like, ‘Mooom, come on!’ And that was just super awesome to see. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, Mark’s mom!

Joe Brook

His mom! He’s a grown-ass man!’ So, Mark’s just cruising around and Dan goes to get a popsicle from the little ice-cream cart. He’s leaning against this fence eating the popsicle and then out of nowhere I just see Mark running and I’m like, ‘What is he

doing?!’ and he runs and jumps onto the chain-link fence and over Dan. And I have this photo that is him with his legs perfectly spread jumping over Dan eating a popsicle. That just sums up Mark. He’s just such an awesome person; so spur of the moment. He’s just so agile and nimble. Mark’s really just a rubber person. And just the way that he thinks and stuff - it’s fun. Mark did everything before anybody. He was the first to grind a handrail. He kind of paved the way for a lot of people. He’s the best skateboarder ever, you can ask anybody, he’s the most influential – just everything he’s done on a skateboard, in art and in life. Mark skates weird boards, too. I think he’s done he rides weird boards to make it challenging or harder for himself. I see him skate sometimes and I’m like gosh man, if he wanted to, like if he said today, ‘I’m gonna film the gnarliest video part for the next year,’ he would have a part that would make people’s jaws drop. He’s such a rad skater.”

- Joe Brook is a photographer from San Francisco. In 2007, he hung out with Mark Gonzales and writer Jay Riggio for a story in HUCK. Gonz carried an umbrella most of the day. It wasn't raining.

Jo e B ro ok

J on H um ph ri es

everything he’s ever wanted to do on a skateboard and

P r o f i l e N o .

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0 3

Dave y Van Lae r e

J e r e m i e

A l l i m a g e s b y D ave y Va n L a e r e

D a c l i n

French skateboarder Jeremie Daclin created an antidote to California cool.

40 HUCK

P r o f i l e N o .

0 3

Flo Mirtain; Australians Sammy Winter and Andrew Brophy; and Americans Joey Brezinski, Daniel Espinoza and Pete Eldridge. It’s also found respect from the SoCal-centric industry with plenty of props and coverage from the likes of Thrasher and Transworld (with the latter awarding them Best Team at their annual awards ceremony in 2006), and much hype given to their upcoming team outhern California. Skateboarding’s Mecca. It

video, Bon Voyage, to be released in March 2013.

has everything: smooth concrete, drained pools,

“Now with the internet, videos and everything, you can come out

sunshine, the enduring legacy of Dogtown. But

with a crazy video part from a small little town and be worldwide

most importantly, it’s where the money’s at.

famous after that,” says Jeremie. And yet, for a period in the mid-

The skate empire may have planted flags

90s, Jeremie may as well have been in California. When Mark

worldwide, but the SoCal motherland has

Gonzales followed a girlfriend to Lyon in 1995/’96, Jeremie found

always retained unbridled influence over the

himself hanging out with a leading figure of the SoCal fable. “He

skateboarding landscape with its style, slang and personalities.

was dating a girl and she went to Lyon to study French for one

To make it in skateboarding, or so the myth goes, it helps if you’re

year so they went there. That’s how I met him,” Jeremie explains.

prepared to relocate and cosy up to the industry overlords based

“We skated together for a year. Back then, I ran a shop in Lyon

in The Golden State.

so he started hanging out and skating for the shop. It was crazy

But in 1997, a European champion skater from Lyon, France, decided he didn’t want to pursue the Californian gold rush, and

at that time to have him around. He used to love skating late at night. He comes to Lyon sometimes and we hang out.”

instead chose to stay put in the country he’d always called home.

He pauses then adds: “For me, he’s the OG Z-boy. He’s the real

When his sponsor Death Box (run by Brits Jeremy Fox and Geoff

deal, the guy who brought the skateboard outside, the real tricks

Rowley) shipped over the Atlantic from the UK and became

to handrails, skateboarding in the streets. The Z-boys brought

Flip Skateboards, he decided to start a company of his own.

the skateboards into pools, but they didn’t do any tricks. He did

His name was Jeremie Daclin and the foundations of his DIY

all the tricks and invented everything.”

venture – printing boards and t-shirts by scraping together a few

In some ways, the success of Cliché has mimicked the path of

Francs – would become the now-renowned Cliché Skateboards.

Mark Gonzales himself, starting out from a core skate background

“To be professional and get things like plane tickets instead of

yet unafraid to explore its artistic side with a light-hearted,

just a few boards, you had to move to the States. But I didn’t want

youthful vigour. The fruits of Cliché’s endeavours led by creative

to, so I thought about starting a company where skateboarders

director Eric Frenay include cruisers, corkscrews and guest boards

could get salaries from skateboarding and still live in Europe,”

given to the likes of Chet Childress and Mark Gonzales himself.

remembers Jeremie over the phone, explaining the company’s

There’s also a collection of artsy promo videos shot by pioneering

history with an audible shrug and laissez faire air. “I had nothing

lensmen Fred Montagne, aka French Fred, that blend fine-art

to expect from Cliché. It was just to make skateboards and give

photographic compositions with classy, all-terrain skating.

them, along with a little money, to my friends. Keep having fun, travel, skate and do what I was doing. Nothing more.”

“Cliché in French means taking a picture,” explains Jeremie, “so the vision was always based in art and pictures. The people

The need to break the ‛California rules’ mindset and support

who work for Cliché were more involved in skateboarding than

more Europeans on the scene was also noted by Parisian skate

creative studies. The artistic side is more about a state of mind

writer and photographer Benjamin Deberdt, who’s been taking

than studying it at [prestigious] schools.”

observational notes on French skateboarding since 1999. “Europe

As a company that thinks and acts visually, Cliché have become

has seasons and cultural differences,” says Benjamin. “Of course

known for their high-end publishing ventures, putting out a

Californian skateboarding was an enormous influence, but some

number of photography books like their canonical Cliché RéSUMé

stuff would just not work for us. Cliché was a way to develop

and Hand in Hand, a selection of French Fred photos from their

something that made sense for us in general, I think.”

‛Mazel Tov’ tour of Israel in 2010. Jeremie insists the focus of their

One of the first people to get onboard with Jeremie’s vision

tours is more on getting pictures, both still and moving, and less

was Javier Mendizabal, a skater from the Basque Country who’s

on shop signings and demos. And yes, like the rest of the skate

been on the team since 1999. “What appealed to me about Cliché

world, you can now follow them on Instagram.

was the idea I could be part of something closer to where I’m

But with expansion comes the endless need to shift more

from, both physically and culturally,” says Javier. “Like Jeremie,

product and monetise the act of skating so that people can get

I’ve always been pretty clear in my mind that I didn’t want to

paid. As part of this, in 2009 Cliché went under the wing of El

live in the States, so I didn’t care if it was a really small French

Segundo-based industry giant Dwindle Distribution, following

company not going anywhere, or so people told me at that time.

a stint of ownership by Adidas-Salomon, and now finds itself

For me it was just a true skate project coming from skaters who

accountable to the SoCal masters that were shunned a decade

respected each other.”

and a half ago. Not that such an arrangement seems to dampen

Success may have come as a happy coincidence for Jeremie

Jeremie’s enthusiasm.

and his team but nowadays, having recently hit its fifteenth

“[Profit] is a component of how we think, but it’s not a very

anniversary, Cliché is respected around the globe. With Jeremie

important component. Creativity is more important than making

as team manager, it sponsors an international, all-terrain team

money right now for us,” insists Jeremie. “It’s pretty much the

including Daclin’s countrymen Lucas Puig, Charles Collet and

same as ever. We’re still in Lyon doing what we want.”

TWO SCOOPS Ever fancied seeing yourself on screen or getting to know how the movie industry works? HUCK has teamed up with Sin City and Planet Terror director Robert Rodriguez and BlackBerry for a user-generated movie-make-a-thon in March and April called Two Scoops – a semi-scripted film in three acts that invites you to have your say in each step of the artistic process. The comic-book inspired thriller is centred on two lead protagonists, teenage twins Lola and Lucia, who run an ice-cream truck in a town

where people are being abducted by an unknown 'thing' – and they just so happen to be monster hunters in their free time. There will be several ways to participate in the project as the film progresses and submissions will be hosted on the Keep Moving Projects website for the world to see..

Act One: Download a script from the Keep Moving Projects website, film yourself acting it out and share a link to your YouTube clip back on the site for your chance to win a starring role. . .Or, if acting’s not your thing, submit a photo of yourself before17 April and you may find yourself morphing into one of many 'missing townsfolk' on posters dotted throughout the film.

To find out how you can get involved in Act Two and Three head to … keepmoving.blackberry.com

P r o f i l e N o .

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Pi er p aolo Fe r rar i

Maurizio Cattelan is an Italian rebel p r a n k s t e r. And he’s got the gallery world in a tizz.

'A P e r f e c t D ay' ( 1999) c / o M a r i on G ood m a n G a l l e r y.

44 HUCK

here’s a bit of a rebel in all of us, a

after tinkering around with anti-functional design

latent urge to break the rules and

objects he was soon drawn into the art world, which

raise a few brows. one man who

he is said to have found “much more appealing”. But

has made a spectacular career in

even when he was offered shows, a fear of failure

artistic rebellion is italian visual

lingered in his work. “i have been a failure for most

prankster Maurizio Cattelan.

of my life,” Cattelan has famously stated. “i couldn’t

Audacious and anti-authoritarian,

keep a job for more than two months. i couldn’t

Cattelan creates work that is dark,

study: school was torture. And as long as i had to

satirical and taboo-breaking. Take

respect rules, i was a disaster. initially art was just

for example ‘la Nona ora (1999)’,

a way to try a new set of rules. But i was very afraid

a meticulously detailed sculpture

of failure in art as well.”

of Pope John ii being flattened by

His first solo show in 1989 was a sign of things

a meteorite. or perhaps ‘l.o.V.e.

to come: lacking in confidence, Cattelan closed the

(2011)’, a four-metre-high marble

gallery and left a sign on the door that read, ‘Torno

hand that sits outside the Milan

subito’ – ‘Be back soon’. in a similar vein, during an

Stock exchange flipping the bird in

exhibition years later at the de Appel arts centre in

the opposite direction. it’s comical

Amsterdam, he audaciously stole work from another

stuff; a healthy poke of ridicule in

artist’s show and displayed it under the title, ‘Another

the often stuffy world of high art.

fucking readymade (1996)’. The Dutch police didn’t

And here’s the best bit: the art

appreciate the post-Duchampian wit and he was

establishment has lapped it up.

politely asked to return the piece.

Cattelan began his creative

in spite of his disruptive tendencies, Cattelan

career as a furniture-maker and

began to develop a distinctive visual style charac-

P r o f i l e N o .

' Him ' (20 0 1 ) c /o Ma rio n G o o d ma n G a l l e ry.

'U n t i t l e d ' ( 2007) c / o M a r i on Goodm an Galle r y.

terised by a hyperrealist approach to sculpture. Using

into space, and possibly into the cities in which they

life-like waxworks and taxidermy, his sculptural

circulate. I’m searching for that magnetism, like a

installations portray a world that is both familiar

chemical reaction.”

yet absurd at the same time. Human and animal

And it seems New York is one city where Cattelan

characters are presented in improbable scenarios, or

sees sparks. It was there that in 2002 he teamed up

at diminutive or exaggerated scale to shocking effect.

with curators Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick

One infamous piece titled ‘Him (2001)’ – a sculpture

to found The Wrong Gallery, a small non-commercial

of Hitler as a young boy kneeling in prayer – may

gallery space that was intended to be a “back door

seem to cross the line, but in its boldness he attacks

to contemporary art”. In a classic sideswipe at the

the abuse of power and failings of society. And then

inherently elitist contemporary art world, the gallery

of course there’s ‘Novecento (1997)’, a taxidermy

was kept locked at all times; if you wanted to see

horse, which was hung unceremoniously from the

an exhibition, you had to peek through the glass.

ceiling of the Tate Modern in 1999. As is typical of

Despite or because of its subversive philosophy,

Cattelan’s work, the hairy pendant elicited mixed

The Wrong Gallery attracted a string of artists

reactions; was it offensive and in bad taste, or a tragic

who playfully embraced the concept – like Polish

comment on the indignity of death?

interventionist Pawel Alhamer, who hired two illegal

Since settling in New York in 1993, Cattelan has

Polish immigrants to smash in the gallery door with

flitted between living there and in Milan. Without

a baseball bat every Saturday. In total, the door had

a studio, he works in situ at exhibition spaces,

to be replaced four or five times to which Cattelan is

incorporating the environment into his work. As he

said to have remarked, “It’s a good way to keep the

explained in 2005 to arts journal Sculpture Magazine,

window cleaned!”

“Art should not be a space shut in on itself, but rather a magnetic field that attracts the energies of artists

For Cattelan, the mystique and machinations of the gallery system is something to be toyed with.

“ A rt sho u ld n ot be a spa ce s hu t i n on its elf, but ra ther a ma gn e tic field tha t a ttr ac ts the ener gies of a rt is ts i n t o spac e.” 'M a u r i z i o C a t t e l a n : A l l ' ( 2011) G u g g e n he im M u se u m , N Y.

46 HUCK

When The Wrong Gallery was

artist’ still circulates online, featuring an American

its wing caught between scissor

evicted from its Chelsea address,

who looks nothing like the Italian provocateur.

blades are just some of the jarring

it took up residency at the Tate

Even with his most important retrospective to

images described by Cattelan as a

Modern in 2005 where it carried on

date – Maurizio Cattelan: All (Nov 2011 – Jan 2012)

“mental outburst”.

with its signature pranks, becoming

held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York –

And being completely mental

a gallery within a gallery and a

he remained resolutely unorthodox. With typical

seems to be working for Cattelan.

work of art in itself. And when The

playfulness, Cattelan used the museum’s famous

One of his most famous pieces – a

Wrong Gallery team were invited

atrium like a giant puppet theatre and suspended

taxidermy horse titled ’The Ballad

to curate the Berlin Biennale,

his sculptures en masse in a vast tangled web. The

of Trotsky’ – was auctioned off in

they responded by audaciously

result was a magnificent chaos that contrasted the

2004 by Sotheby’s for $2.8million.

setting up a fake Berlin branch of

usual reverence given to art.

Cattelan insists he won’t see a penny

the successful Gagosian gallery

It was during this retrospective that Cattelan

of the sum. So, how does he deal

chain. Appropriating the gallery’s

announced he was retiring from art to concentrate

with being at the peak of a global

logo, they set up a bootleg space in

on curating and publishing – an interest he’d

art market he professes to find so

a disused plumbers’ merchants to

pursued in the mid-nineties with Permanent Food,

absurd? “It’s like going to sleep

create the antithesis of the luxurious

a publication that was created entirely using pages

fourteen years old and waking up

Gagosian brand.

torn out of other magazines. Most recently in 2010,

thirty,” Cattelan told The Guardian’s

And the pranks don’t stop at the

after collaborating on an art issue of W Magazine,

Sophie Arie in 2004. “Things that

gallery door. Request an interview

Cattelan struck up a creative partnership with

maybe seemed a joke before are now

with Cattelan and you may well find

photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari to produce Toilet

taken more seriously.”

yourself sitting down with one of

Paper, a mag that lampoons the visual language

many imposters – fake Cattelans

of glossy fashion and art magazines by combining

Tristan Manco’s latest book, Raw +

sent by Cattelan himself. A video

commercial photography with twisted narratives:

Material = Art, is published by Thames

featuring ‘an interview with the

bloody fish-head shoes, giant dildos and a bird with

and Hudson.

To celebrate the completion of the Philly Painting project by Haas&Hahn, we designed a HUB Footwear x Philly Painting limited edition shoe, inspired by the projectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s design process. To view our documentary on the Philly Painting project or to find out more about the limited edition shoe, visit hubfootwear.com.

The Philly Painting shoe is available in stores from February 9th. Tinfish (L E ICESTER ), Badger (BR I G H TO N )

(All profits of the sale of this shoe will be donated to Haas & Hahnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Favela Painting Foundation, to support their future projects.)

HUB Footwear x Philly Painting

M o m e n t s w i t h

G o n z

Grant Brittain

Mark Gonzales, Sanoland, Cardiff-by-the-Sea, CA, 1986.

G ran t Br i tta i n

Gra n t B r itt a in

Mark Gonzales, Oceanside, CA, 1986.

Mark Gonzales with Vivien Westwood crown, Hermosa Beach, CA, 1986.

Natas Kaupas and Mark Gonzales, 1986.

- Grant Brittain has been a forefather of skate photography since he started shooting his friends at the Del Mar Skate Ranch, which he managed, in the 1980s. As founding photo editor of Transworld and co-founder of The Skateboarder Mag, Grant continues to tweak the modern skate aesthetic,

but you can always check his Instagram for archive gold.

Joe Brook

t was cold that day in New York City. I think it was sometime at the end of November, 2007. There was a reverberating chill in the air that seemed to hover just above the excitement of the morning. But that may have existed solely in my mind. An assignment from HUCK led to me walking, skating and chasing down Mark Gonzales for the day. I planned on picking Gonz’s brain, but mostly played catch up with his physical spontaneity and unpredictable mind. Everything he encountered on those Manhattan and Harlem streets was positively altered by his presence, whether he was borrowing a cigar light from a stranger, carefully choosing one of five boards he brought along to skate, withdrawing large sums of cash from an Jo e Br oo k

ATM or screaming hysterical phrases at speeding taxis as he barged from street to sidewalk to spot. Mark Gonzales isn’t just an artist or a skateboarder. He is art. And he is skateboarding. He is a force of nature that breathes reality, reshuffles it in his lungs and exhales invention for anyone lucky enough to catch it.” New York, 2007.

- Jay Riggio is a skateboarder and writer from New York City. He no longer believes you should never meet your hero.

P r o f i l e N o .

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Br yan De rb all a

r A Y M o N D P e T T i B o N

Artist Raymond Pettibon helped define what punk looks like when it's hung up on a wall.

flag in 1976, Pettibon was appointed chief graphic designer. He ﬁrst designed their famous logo (four black bars), and then a slew of album covers. He also published ’zines of his text and drawings with catchy titles like Tripping Corpse, The Language of Romantic Thought, and Virgin Fears. for much of the next decade he remained decidedly underground, exhibiting in small galleries and record stores. As his work evolved, so did his audience. in the mid-80s a handful of renowned lA artists – Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, Paul McCarthy and ed ruscha among them – embraced Pettibon, and subsequently a number of key collectors and curators.

n a frigid January afternoon in his

Soon he would occupy an almost contradictory post. He was a

downtown Manhattan studio, raymond

bonaﬁde global art star; he was also a DiY/indie icon. Though

Pettibon pulls from his pocket a ﬁstful

he’d graduated with a degree in economics from University

of wadded-up pages. “i have books lying

of California, los Angeles, in ’77, he was essentially self-

around,” he explains, “and i take the pages

taught. His medium required nothing more than a piece of

out. it could be practically anything. i do a

paper and a pen. He ran with jazz musicians, barﬂies and

lot of reading in transit, whether it’s a car,

Mike Watt of the Minutemen. He did not drive, but rather

bus, train, whatever. i don’t read for plot. i

rode public transport, often scribbling away at the back of

don’t care how it ends. i read a lot slower,

the bus. To top it oﬀ, he still lived with his parents in the

because i’m often trying to analytically almost break down the writing as it occurs, or as it scans. in a way, it’s rewriting of a sort.” raymond Pettibon is an American artist whose work is collected in major galleries and museums worldwide. He has won countless prizes and awards, most recently the University of Vienna’s oskar Kokoschka Prize in 2010. He is most famous for his text/image drawings and paintings, which look a bit like frames from a comic strip, albeit with a dark, ironic twist. “This one is going to be about a diver who could suck his own dick,” he says of a sketch taped to the wall. “And this one,” he pulls a drawing out from under a stack of about twenty drawings – it depicts Gumby and a team of basketball players. “This one’s about Chuck Cooper, one of the first African Americans to play on the Celtics.” i ask him which comes first: the text or the image. “Where the image stops and the words begin is not that clear cut,” he says. “it’s more a give and take, a back and forth, dialectic almost in between the two and/or both. Probably more times than not when i have problems it’s because i tend to overwrite, so it’s more learning when to stop.” Born in 1957 and raised in Hermosa Beach by academic parents, Pettibon’s childhood was filled with books, comics, basketball, baseball and surfing. When his brother, Greg Ginn (Ginn is the family name, Pettibon is raymond’s nom de plume), formed seminal punk band Black

52 HUCK

home he grew up in.

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'N o T i t l e ( T h e f e e l i n g i s ) ' ( 2 011) c / o R e g e n P r oje c t s, LA. in 1990, he created the cover art for Sonic Youth’s Goo. i remember it vividly; it presided over the bed i shared with my first girlfriend. A black-and-white illustration of a pair of young, mod-looking lovers in dark sunglasses, the girl at the wheel, the mood vaguely sinister. in the upper right corner the text reads: ’i stole my sister’s boyfriend. it was all whirlwind, heat and flash. Within a week we killed my parents and hit the road.’ At the time i saw it as the perfect metaphor for our newfound love. After our colossal break-up i would learn that it was in fact based on a paparazzi photo of a married couple en route to the famous ‛Moors Murders’ trial in england. Pettibon’s work moves in mysterious ways. His subject matter includes Charles Manson, surfers, baseball players, vixens, homicidal teenage punks, elvis, fBi director J. edgar Hoover, and the cartoon figure Gumby, who has the miraculous ability to walk into a book and enter a story (an alter ego, perhaps?). His brilliance resides in the marriage/ collision/disconnect of image and text. Some pieces do this in a

Pettibon’s studio exudes a certain ‘ransacked by the DeA’

wry, straightforward manner; others are like great song lyrics:

appeal. Dirty socks, weathered lPs, pulp novels, surf magazines,

they could be interpreted a thousand diﬀerent ways, and none

and vintage baseball mitts and bats share ﬂoor space with his

would be wrong. “The ideas came out of reading,” he said in a

dachshund mutt, Barely Noble. Strewn haphazardly about his

2001 interview with Dennis Cooper in LA

work table are newspapers, tubes of paint, lidless inkpots, pages

Weekly, “and they were kind of between

torn from a John Keats biography, loose CDs, an open bottle of

the lines, or suggested. it’s kind of like

rosé, and a half-eaten slice of pizza, all of which sit precariously

swimming in words and letters. i place

close to or atop valuable half-ﬁnished drawings.

myself in this state of consciousness where i’m receptive to associations.”

“Mark is a genius,” he says of his friend Mark Gonzales. “i love his art, his writing, of course his skateboarding.” He goes on

Pettibon’s early work generally

to tell me about the time he and Gonz were in Vienna together.

employed only one or two lines of text.

Pettibon was there for an exhibition that included an installation

But as the 1980s wore on he expanded

by artists Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy. The installation was

into three or four, often in a cacophonous

worth a lot of money. “Mark ollied over the thing,” says Pettibon.

manner that suggested disparate voices.

“i was worried he was going to crush it. of course he didn’t.”

As oscar Wilde famously put it, “Man is

Though he still keeps a home and studio in los Angeles,

least himself when he talks in his own

Pettibon spends much of his time in New York. He lives downtown

person. Give him a mask and he will tell

in a frank Gehry-designed high-rise with his girlfriend, the artist

you the truth.” Pettibon’s work, seemingly

Aïda ruilova, and their one-year-old son, Bo. He is an avid sports

channelled from great books, B-movies,

fan. Above the kitchenette hangs a poster of John Mcenroe and

and ﬁlm noir, creates a kind of opaque,

BjÖrn Borg. Deeper in the studio, presumably where the serious

offbeat, American-style poetry.

work takes place, portraits of baseball players Babe ruth and lou

“The economy of means is one of

Gehrig do a sort of face-oﬀ.

the best things that drawing has going

“We can hit some balls,” says Pettibon.

for itself,” says Pettibon, between sips of

“What do you mean?”

coﬀee. Tall, shaggy and bearlike, he wears a paint-splattered dress shirt, camouﬂage

“Can we set up the pitching machine?” says Pettibon to his studio assistant, Billy.

shorts and striped socks. He speaks

A minute or two later i ﬁnd myself taking turns at bat with

slowly, carefully. “The great masters of

Pettibon. The pitching machine hurls soft plastic balls. Pettibon’s

drawing tend to have that elegant line.

stance is relaxed and sturdy. He hits like a motherfucker

That tends to be an ongoing struggle with me within each individual work.” He shows me a drawing of a wave. “i’ve done a number of waves before, but the point of view or take on it can get old. So i try to diﬀerentiate from that. When you can do something that seems new, the economy of the sublime – that’s what i’m trying to do.”

P r o f i l e N o .

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0 6

Yv an Rod ic / Face H un t er

C A r A D e l e V i N G N e

And make no mistake, she wants you to look, to be challenged by the inherent contradictions of one who accepts but subtly thumbs her nose at stereotypical very fashion model has a

beauty norms. it’s like she’s

touch of the monstrous.

laughing at both those who

Take a teenage girl in all her

would sooner see her lasered

self-infatuation and petty cruelty, lavish her with ﬁne clothes and admirers, then throw her into a pit with a hoard of hungry competitors and feed them nothing but champagne and cana-

How eyebrows, onesies and funny faces shook-up the world of the perfect, silent pout.

those who would hold body hair as a sign of female liberation. We are supposed to look at her, to judge and critique, but somehow, you see, the joke is on us.

pés while professional pho-

Although few in the

tographers capture it all for

beauty game are gauche

posterity: the creature who

enough to criticise publicly,

not only survives in such an

the Daily Mail has branded

environment but thrives is

Delevingne “socially ambi-

a formidable thing indeed.

tious” and one fashion writer

History, which is to say,

dismissed her trademark

the version that men have

wackiness as “too clever to

written down, is not bereft

be believed”.

of formidable females, but

Cleverness, especially if

it prefers them to look the part. A beautiful woman, on the other

it’s too apparent, is a word that isn’t quite comfortable next to

hand, should not be formidable. A beautiful woman is a delicate

beauty. it’s what strict, Victorian governesses tell young ladies not

woman, a guileless woman, a deferential woman, a creature so in

to be. The actress emma Stone, when she’s in comedy, is Clever.

need of guidance and protection that she threatens at any moment

The writer Caitlin Moran, when she talks about body hair, is Clever.

to shatter under the weight of her own tragic femininity. This

The comedienne Tina fey in most anything she does is far, far Too

woman, of course, does not exist – she is a ﬁgment of aesthetic

Clever. And yet these women have piqued something in the often

whimsy, like Klimt’s water nymphs, or o’Keefe’s ﬂowers – but she

sluggish public imagination. They have slyly, and by sometimes

can be conjured, ﬂeetingly, by a certain type of person.

very small measures chipped away at the façade of the porcelain

if the fashion gods created a muse from gold ﬁlament, good breeding, a keen sense of self-awareness and one big damn deluxe

56 HUCK

to silicone smoothness and

woman. Perhaps they have not changed the paradigm of beauty, but they have certainly altered the conversation.

set of ermine eyebrows, she would be called Cara Delevingne. She

The charm of these women, and indeed Delevingne, is that there

would spring, fully-formed, from a British mother named Pandora

is a certain playful artistry in their public personas, like a magic trick

and be blessed with the innate self-possession of one who has never

that prolongs itself improbably, precariously at times, but always

been told that something is impossible. Which isn’t exactly true

engaging us, lightly mocking, constantly testing the boundaries.

for face-of-the-moment supermodel Delevingne. for every door

Polite mouths call it “zany”, a rather feminine word, but the better

opened by thirty-four-inch hips, another is closed by the norms of

term would be plain “goofy”. Delevingne is just as likely to tweet a

masculine society, until the glitzy world of professionally looking

picture of herself in an animal print jump suit crossing her eyes at

good starts looking more and more like a gilded cage.

her camera-phone as she is to grace the cover of Vogue. This is, in

Beauty is a game played within this cage. forget what you’ve

some ways, a long way from the days of heroin chic and Kate Moss

heard about the supposed vacuousness of models, it demands the

eschewing interviews in favour of “maintaining an air of mystery”.

canniness of a spy and the shrewdness of a tent revival preacher.

english novelist laurie lee called charm the “rarest, least

What sets Delevingne apart from the sea of statuesque faces is that

used, and most invincible of powers, which can capture with a

she seems to understand the game like few others and whether

single glance.” But he also cautioned that for women it is more

through practice or intuition, she plays it with unique verve. let’s

exacting than for men. As long as Delevingne can keep skipping

not overstate it, she operates within the rules, but like all the greats,

across the precarious ridge of sex pot and court jester, as long

she does so in a way that makes them appear incidental.

as she can keep feigning eﬀortlessness and the air of one who

The eyebrows say it all – two big ﬁngers up toward the last

has not bothered to look into the abysses on either side, charm

great female grooming taboo. it’s not that she doesn’t groom

will be hers and we, the audience, will remain rapt in mingled

them, it’s that she does groom them: she grooms them to be huge.

bemusement and delight

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M o m e n t s

Lance Mountain

w i t h

G o n z

And Mark said to them, ‘Hey guys, why do you just go

down the rail? You should try going up the rail!’ And they’re like, ‘Whatever stupid man.’ This was years before anyone was going up a rail, and they just brushed him off, like, ‘No way dude, what do you know? We’re going to be in the next TV commercial!’ But they weren’t thinking for themselves. And then when someone else threw an idea at them they were just like, ‘Who are you. Leave us alone.’ In reality, Mark could have been like, ‘I invented

ne time we were skating at UCLA. We went to this

you, that’s who I am. And I’m inventing more things right

spot that has a handrail and rollerbladers were

now. I just invented going up rails but you couldn’t

riding there, doing whatever it is they do - going

even see that.’ He never said that, obviously, but he

down the rail, whatever, mimicking skateboarding, nothing

could have. That to me explains Mark very well. That’s

new. Mark went ahead and started talking to them, and

who he is to me.”

these rollerbladers brushed him off as if he was a madman

- Lance Mountain is one of skateboarding’s most important

had no idea that everything they were doing, going down

originators, a central figure of the Bones Brigade and

that rail, had come from him.

arguably the best storyteller this side of Mark Twain.

La n ce M oun t ain

- a homeless madman that shouldn’t have been there. They

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his photo was not meant to happen. Mark had planned to film a Circle Board session in Paris, to go alongside a short film shot by William Strobeck for an exhibition about his homemade contraption at Franklin Parrasch in New York. He wanted to do it at Trocadero, the plaza watching over the Eiffel Tower, so we agreed to go there just before sunrise to avoid the swarms of tourists. We showed up on one of the first metros to find Mark already skating the thing around. He said he was already tired as he skated it all the way from where he was staying, and so it wasn’t that long before he was ready to leave. I pleaded with him to wait a couple of minutes, but he wasn’t having any of it, and before the sun could fully rise, he suggested we ‘skate’ back to his place for breakfast. So there we were, following Mark cruising the Circle Board along the Seine embankment - or should I say, trying to keep up with him. He was skating that monster as if it was nothing! I realised I had just finished my black and white roll of film, and as the sun was now really embracing Paris had to be quick as Mark was steaming ahead. It was only later, looking back on the day, that we all agreed that the greatest feat we witnessed that morning was the ride back, but because Mark was so casual about it, we didn’t even realise it at the time. This must be the craziest thing I have ever seen done on a skateboard. And it might just be the best trick I’ve ever pulled on a board, too

Benjamin Deberdt

roofs, I decided it was time to switch to colour. But I

- changing film in time to keep up with Mark.

This second shot, below, was January 1, 1999. I was hungover and on my way home when I spotted two people skating the deserted Bastille plaza. I headed over to say hi, thinking it was some locals, and found Mark Gonzales and an Italian skateboarder he had just met while pushing around the city. I had no idea Mark was even in Paris. Over the next few hours, Mark dropped the Bastille Opera ledge in pitch dark just for the hell of it; tried to buy a BB gun from a shooting stall round the corner; ollied a tall bar while holding a mini tape-player in his hand; engaged in a long conversation with an old couple walking by; tried to shoot a skate photo with passing traffic inches away from his face because ‘it would look better’; and made bets based on whether or not he could pull it off. He won the can of Coke he was betting by landing his trick and not getting run over. Oh, and the only tape he had and played all night had Biggie on one side, and Tupac on the other.”

- Benjamin Deberdt is a skateboard writer and photographer Be n jam i n D e ber d t

from Paris, and a co-conspirator behind Gonz’s Le Cercle art project and book.

P r o f i l e N o .

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0 7

Tod d Hi do

B A r r Y M C G e e

From the streets of San Francisco to pristine museum walls, Barry McGee is still a tagger at heart.

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In the early 1990s, Barry McGee, himself only

of a tiny experimental artist-run centre in San francisco, which

in his early twenties, was already emerging as the most noted ﬁgure

McGee mentions in our talk that took place as we strolled through

of what became internationally known as the Mission School of

his retrospective at the Berkeley Art Museum in Berkeley,

San francisco artists. The name came from the working-class,

California (across the Bay from San francisco) in the fall of 2012.

largely latino neighbourhood in which he and his friends lived.

i knew that the way the art world grows and evolves is that

His then wife Margaret Kilgallen, along with Chris Johanson,

great artists move the ﬂag that marks the boundary of what

Alicia McCarthy and many others, simultaneously invented a

is permissible way out to the margins, and that open-minded

style that celebrated a life of improvised urban poverty, skater

curators and institutions follow their lead out into that new

and surfer attitude, graﬃti struggles to claim city turf, art school

territory. i had commissioned McGee to paint the fence around

punk point of view, and other youthful shenanigans. Their art

Yerba Buena when it was still a construction project. That project

was highly skilled but determined to not look like it, with values

became his most known early work, with hundreds of yards of

including use of the cheapest materials, quick and dirty rendering

imagery – cops, winos, tools and the like depicted in black on

of images, and subjects ranging from feminist heroines to the bums

a screaming red background. i then heard about an unusually

on the street, archaic typography and hobo train art.

generous grant opportunity for artist travel – $25,000 (in 1990

At that time, i was curator of the large Yerba Buena Center

dollars!) to go anywhere to further career research. i approached

for the Arts in downtown San francisco, a brand new institution

Barry about where he’d like to go and he said Brazil; Barry was,

looking for a niche and a constituency. i had come up as director

and is, a quiet shy man and only explained that he’d heard they

A l l ima ge s : B a rry Mc Ge e In s t a l l a t io n at B e rk e l e y Art Mu s e u m a n d P a c ific Fi l m , 2012.

had a great street art scene there. His planned three-month trip

raza, The lab, luggage Store, ATA. There’s nothing like the

stretched to six months as he explored the lively multicultural

San francisco alternative scene. it’s unbelievable. it’s like the

reality of that country (McGee has a diverse heritage, his mother

independent record labels [scene].

being Chinese). At the conclusion of the project we had agreed that he would manifest his experience in Brazil at his ﬁrst museum exhibition,

At one point, talk turns to speciﬁc early inﬂuences

at Yerba Buena. Soon after the publicity went out for the show i

and McGee smiles as he recalls “that big Daddy roth show”. roth

received a furious phone message from an irate citizen. “Barry

was a pioneering Southern California car customiser and hot

McGee is not an artist, he is a vandal and a criminal and deserves

rod designer, and creator of the infamous rat fink alternative

to be put in jail, not given a museum exhibition!” it turned out

to Mickey Mouse. other inﬂuential artists, as McGee goes on to

she was on the mayor’s anti-graﬃti task force. Two decades later

mention, were Bruce Tomb and John randolph who, working

McGee is an internationally acclaimed artist, but he has also spent

together as The interim oﬃce of Architecture, made an elaborate

the night in jail on occasion, as we learn in this conversation.

installation in which car traﬃc outside the gallery triggered the

We began by talking about Barry’s early experience as a young

windows of the gallery to ﬂash instantly from clear to opaque.

artist in San francisco, and how New langton Arts, where i

The way in which their work bridged the indoors and outdoors

was director, was a resource for him around 1990. langton was

and made the insular gallery space responsive to the real world

a national leader in the artist space movement, begun in the

left an indelible impression.

mid-1970s, in which artist power – on the board of directors, on the staﬀ, in the choice of exhibitions – was manifest, and artists

MC G E E : i remember all that, it was like my formative years.

were always paid for presenting their work.

And Survival research laboratories. You would see their work on ﬁre on a street corner in the middle of the night – that wasn’t

MCGEE: All my foundation was at New langton Arts. You know

going on at all [elsewhere]. That was really inﬂuential. it could

that, right?

be horrifying. They instilled real fear with their work. You could potentially die. Anything could go ﬂying oﬀ it. i remember they

PRITIKIN: i had no idea.

did a show once at an abandoned pier on the embarcadero. it was ticketed and it was sold out, and all these kids couldn’t get

MCGEE: i was talking to Chris Johanson about how important

in, hanging out by this chain link fence. And i remember seeing

the non-proﬁts were in San francisco at that time, like a perfect

Mark Pauline [the founder and director of Srl] come out with

storm. it was so rich… [Besides New langton Arts, there was]

wire cutters and cut the fence himself for his own show. They

Southern exposure, Capp Street, Camerawork, Galeria de la

informed me in so many diﬀerent ways.

B A r r Y M C G e e

For the 2003 tenth anniversary exhibition at Yerba Buena – where i had curated the above-mentioned McGee show eight years earlier – he asked if he could install one of his then-new, upside-down truck pieces using his dad’s old van. Not only that, but he wanted to do it on the sidewalk outside the front entrance, and have a hidden theatrical fog machine spewing smoke from the engine. i agreed but we ran into an unexpected dilemma: every time we tested it, unseen Samaritans working in surrounding office buildings kept calling the fire department. The firemen were Not Amused. in fact they were unamused to the extent of threatening that the next time a false alarm was called in they would charge us for their time. The amount of the fine was unstated but the inference was that it would be around enormous. We adjusted the gizmo so that the smoke was only occasional, with less of it, and put up signs saying in essence, ‛Art not life, please don’t call 911.’ We tried one last test, for five minutes: so far so good. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, an Australian tourist rushed up

MC G E E : i have no idea. i’m fascinated by it. They’re still

to Barry, hugged him, and said, “No worries mate, i just called

promoting themselves, that’s it. i love that. it’s counter everything

911. everything’s going to be okay.” Cue to sirens in the distance.

that’s going on. everything is for some product that you can purchase, or lifestyle. There’s still these kids that are interested

MCGEE: i love how that happened. i don’t think it could ever

in promoting their name. Showing people they have style.

happen again on the street in front of a museum. Thank you. PRITIKIN: Are things changing in tagging, evolving, or is it pretty PRITKIN: i read recently about a graﬃti kid getting shot...

much staying the same?

MCGEE: it happens a lot.

MCGEE: it exists in a whole other way. everybody has cell phones.

Before, it was people mailing photos or packets to people. Now PRITIKIN: Have you ever been in danger? MCGEE: i like that aspect of it. You have to get it done without

it’s text messages with what you’re doing.

getting caught. i’ve been caught so many times. i was in New York

Now in his mid-forties, McGee has managed

one time. i think i was writing ‘Abort Bush’ on Canal Street. i’d

to build an international career in galleries and museums. His

done three or four roll-up gates. on the fourth one – i think the

retrospective travelled to the Boston iCA, for example. McGee

republican convention was in town, it just wasn’t the right time

became even more of a legend with the success of the travelling

to be doing that – this taxicab rolled up and four cops jumped out.

Beautiful Losers exhibition of a decade ago, and was greatly

You just go into the system for twenty-four hours. Community

supported by the New York gallery director Jeﬀrey Deitch in

service… that’s part of it.

several famous, over-the-top installations-cum-raves over the past decade. The Prada foundation published a doorstop-sized artist

During McGee’s exhibition in 1995, i

book about him, and even his modest works, like his signature whiskey bottle paintings, sell for ﬁve or six thousand dollars. At

got a practical lesson in expanding museum constituency. i got

the same time he has maintained most of his street credibility

a call from the front desk with a story that they thought i’d be

through his modesty, resistance to the cult of personality and

interested in hearing. it seems that every day since the opening,

dogged determination to live anonymously with his family in

a steady stream of wide-eyed teenage boys – with skateboards

the same neighbourhood he did back in the 1980s. He travels

and holding their pants up with one hand – were coming in and

a lot, of course, and recently was seen in The New York Times,

asking with disbelief if there really was a show by Twist in the

but McGee, more than any other artist i know, has remained

gallery. i told the receptionist that Twist was McGee’s street

true to his youthful vision of rebellion and still loves what he

name, and to let the boys in.

does, as excited as ever about grassroots culture’s ability to resist mainstream authority

MCGEE: There’s still just as many people tagging now as ever.

i like that.

Renny Pritikin is a San Francisco Bay Area-based art writer and curator, most recently director of the Nelson Gallery at the University

PRITIKIN: Who is it that’s doing it?

64 HUCK

of California, Davis.

Originating from

the heart and soul of skateboarding

dusterscalifornia

@dusterscalifornia

dusterscalifornia.com

P r o f i l e N o .

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0 8

With new caper Spring Breakers, haunting filmmaker Harmony Korine has made his most surreal, complex and transcendent work yet.

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P r o f i l e N o .

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sk Harmony Korine, director of Gummo,

conformity can have their plus points. Which is a pretty radical

writer of Kids and archly disobedient

statement to make.

renaissance man, from where he gets his

It also appears to perfectly encapsulate Korine’s career to date.

ideas, he’ll usually spin you some quaint

While Gummo still astounds with its moments of ramshackle

yarn. Back when his 2007 film, Mister

lyricism and Julien Donkey-Boy is masterful as a movie monument

Lonely, came out, he told journalists that

to its brain-frazzled protagonist, Spring Breakers feels like Korine’s

he came up with this story of a Scottish

most purposeful and artfully sculpted work. It occasionally comes

commune of celebrity look-a-likes (with a

across as a big-money remake of his previous feature, the rubber-

sub-plot involving fatalistic sky-diving nuns) during his time

masked VHS oddity, Trash Humpers, particularly in its focus on

spent among a little-known tribe called the Malingerers who

the simple pleasures of mindless destruction. Even though most

dedicate their entire lives to searching for an elusive golden

scenes in Spring Breakers are intercut with slo-mo montages

fish. As someone who cheerfully skirts the margins of the

of gyrating, tan-lined boobs or phallic fountains of light beer

contemporary cinematic firmament, Korine can pretty much

spraying over ecstatic partygoers, there’s a sense that this is

play by his own idiosyncratic rules, and it all adds to the cultish,

carefully choreographed chaos. Korine is no longer relying on

self-governed mythology that enshrouds him. The tall tales of

the poetic accidents of yore.

imagined production histories and otherworldly inspirations also

What’s most fascinating about Spring Breakers, though, is that

dovetail nicely with the provocative and poetic works themselves.

it almost tells the story of its own production. Here is a movie about

It’s difficult to envision what went down on the set of his

four young, impressionable girls who are eventually corrupted and

latest, and arguably greatest film, Spring Breakers, released in

pushed to the very bounds of their thrill-seeking capacities by a

UK cinemas in April. It stars apple-cheeked Disney Club alumni

detached and perversely magnetic local celebrity – is that not exactly

Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens alongside Days of our Lives

what Korine is doing to Disney’s finest? The director stated at a

mainstay Ashley Benson, and Harmony’s other half, Rachel

press conference that he made this film for the type of audience

Korine. In its simplest terms, it’s the chronicle of four scantily

who grew up with Gomez and Hudgens, but frankly that’s a hard

clad, bongwater-soaked highschool tearaways who stick up a

pill to swallow. While the cornfed superstars don’t go so far as to

roadside burger joint in order to coach down to the Florida Keys

irrevocably taint their clean-cut images for the long haul, there

so they can be part of that gaudy American rite of passage: spring

is something undeniably haunting about watching these girls go

break. They holler and swear and belt-out Britney Spears songs

all-out to fulfil their director’s playfully lewd requirements.

in desolate parking lots. But soon their unchecked hedonism

But there’s even more to the film than that. Near the beginning,

gets the better of them and they’re carted – in their omnipresent

there’s a short interlude focusing on Selena Gomez’s character

neon bikinis – off to jail. Thankfully James Franco’s Alien – a

whose name is Faith. She’s seen attending a heated Bible

cornrow’d, silver-toothed rapper and self-styled mobster – rescues

discussion which is being overseen by a muscular, tattooed

these damsels in distress. He too, it transpires, is a Britney fan.

gentleman who resembles a pro wrestler and preaches in a

When Spring Breakers premiered at the Venice Film Festival

mercurial, emotive parlance that wouldn’t be out of place in the

in September 2012, it was met with a mixture of disbelief and

ring. “Hey there Crazy Keith – are you crazy about The Lord?”

bemusement: was this Korine’s attempt at a raunchy Hollywood

he bellows, rhetorically. Gomez’s character appears fraught

exploitation movie aimed at a mass market and destined for

with contending sympathies – would God look kindly upon her

home video infamy, or was he taking us on another incendiary

knowing descent into Spandex hell?

and exhilarating jaunt? All there is to say – and Korine acolytes

But Spring Breakers is not so rash or banal as to suggest that

will probably be way ahead of us here – is that Spring Breakers is

youthful, devoutly religious girls get nasty too. The preacher’s

perhaps not about what it’s about. While we follow these girls on

fervent manner is echoed later in the film through the constant

their increasingly debauched escapade, it becomes increasingly

echo of, “Spring break, bitcheeeeeees!” And later still, when

clear via the hypnotic, repetitive editing, the ambient soundtrack

Franco’s Alien offers the girls an ad-hoc itinerary of his automatic

care of Skrillex, the ironic gun-and-drug fetishisation and the

weapon collection, he repeats over and over, “Look at ma shit.

peculiarly earnest performances from its central cast that this

Look at ma shit. Look at aaaaaall ma shit!” In all tiers of Korine’s

is more of an ambiguous pop cultural satire than a cautionary

world, dialogue has been reduced to lurid slogans. Partying,

tale of teen licentiousness. But that’s not to say that Spring

learning, relaxing, churchgoing and drug-dealing are all activities

Breakers cannot be enjoyed (immensely) if taken purely at face

which can be reduced to aggressive platitudes.

value as a sexed-up caper.

It goes without saying that Spring Breakers is one majorly

Spring Breakers is less of a straight crime flick than it is a

subversive work that captures a mood, rather than telling a story.

rigorous, apocalyptic and often hilarious essay on the realities

A single euphoric moment. One could come away from the film

of blind consumerism and conformity, which adopts the

with a sense of pumped-up elation or Universe-ending gloom,

iconography of an ostentatious hip-hop promo. But it’s seldom

such is its careful balancing of the rapture of the party against,

scathing or didactic: on one hand you could read the film as a

well, The Rapture. This may look from the outset as Korine’s

sickened admonishment of spring break and the apparently

bald-faced bid for mainstream acceptance, but it’s anything but

vile, amoral cultural baggage that comes with it. You could

that. It’s probably his most surreal, complex and transcendent

also take it as a celebration of self-discovery, independence and

film yet. And that’s saying something, bitcheeeeees

youth, untethered, unmonitored, eternally bound in mutual ecstasy. It’s a film that suggests that maybe consumerism and

Spring Breakers is out in the UK April 5.

P r o f i l e N o .

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0 9

Mi chae l Dann en m ann

G e o r G B A S e l i T Z

the best ways of destroying this myth is by painting the image upside down. it’s its own reality.” There are all kinds of reinvented realities at play in Baselitz’s

German artist Georg Baselitz draws like a man possessed.

work, as well as personal conundrums like the struggle for identity – or in his case, what it means to be a German artist in a postwar world. Born in 1938 as Hans-Georg Kern in east Germany, Baselitz’s art reﬂects on the painful trauma of the war’s destruction and the Communist regime that followed in its wake. As he told The Spiegel recently, “All German painters have a neurosis with Germany's past: war, the postwar period most of all, east Germany. i addressed all of this in a deep depression and under great pressure. My paintings are battles, if you will.” it’s these roots, and this societal tension, that fuelled the young artist’s rebellious tendencies. in his native east Germany he was taught to paint in a traditional style, which he later rejected after being exposed to abstract art during his studies in West Berlin. At first, the abstract expressionism embraced by the West symbolised a creative freedom that excited him and yet he also chose to reject it, preferring to remain outside prevailing movements. His first solo show in 1963 in Berlin certainly caused a stir and was the subject of an obscenity case, which led to two paintings being seized by the public prosecutor. As he recalls, “When i started it out it was my motto to be a bit peculiar, bit off the wall – and that comes through in my work and upsets people.” Baselitz’s paintings, sculptures and prints all have what he calls an “aggressive disharmony”, often dealing with disturbing subject matter that stirs up strong reactions. for the viewer he seeks to “remind them of their own conﬂicts, stir up what disturbs them, then offer them, if not a new peace of mind, at

' S ch neezeit' (2 0 05 ) c /o E s s l Mu s e u m.

ld guys in suits may not look like ideal rebels, but all it takes is a cheeky glint in the eye to prove that looks can be deceiving. With a comparably maverick status in the contemporary art world, its no surprise that this issue’s curator, Mark Gonzales, would sense a kindred spirit in the work of self-confessed outsider and highly inﬂuential German artist Georg Baselitz. Since the 1970s, Baselitz has become world renowned for turning the language of painting on its head – quite literally. His ‘upside down’ paintings feature recognisable subject matter, like people and landscapes, but by inverting them Baselitz usurps them of their real-world connotations and transforms them, radically, into conduits of ideas. This abstract approach, Baselitz explains, stems from “the belief that painting is not a mirror of reality. That is a myth. it’s about reinventing reality, and one of

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least an understanding of the disturbance”. His unique, unfiltered aesthetic may work against the conventionally critical eye, but for the viewer who manages to keep an open mind the payoff is art packed with raw emotion: a portal to a reinvented world. In the extract that follows, Baselitz ruminates on what it means to be a man possessed by an insatiable need to draw.

Questioning Myself An extract, by G eorg B aselitz.

Drawings are like caprioles, they amaze you and scare you and terrify you. If I didn’t draw, my mind would feel numb, like in a mine. Not that drawing is fun; it’s no fun at all. But then again it’s not annoying. It’s like a language without understanding, and it makes sense only when I’ve learned some vocabulary – that takes a long time. At first I don’t know what I’m doing, then I think I do know. Ultimately I use it in a hygienic way – that is, it really uses me more. Since by now I know what happens if I don’t do

“ Eve n the stup ides t p e r son ca n dr a w l ike Ra p ha e l ; but doing r e a l l y mise r a b le dr a w ings is ve r y hard be ca use it ta ke s a lot of inte l l ige nce.”

'H oc k e n d e r H u n d ' ( 1968) c / o E s s l M u s e u m .

it, it controls me more than I could ever control it. You can’t offer it just one finger; it’ll take the whole hand. It installs a cipher of something that was not on the paper. More cipher than thing. A picture has actually become a thing, just like Cezanne’s still apples. A drawing is the synthesis – that is, when you go to bed with Cezanne’s apples and then dream about Provence at night. I smoke more cigars when I draw than when I paint. I can’t draw while eating, telephoning, listening to music or conversing. I can, but the drawing turns into unbelievable crap. I find so-called telephone doodling repulsive. I don’t think one should place a compass on a drawing; you can draw better with a pendulum similar to the one that dousers use. A drawing is always naked. Everyone instantly sees the lovely, pleasant sides, which are so boring; but not everyone sees an ugly, unpleasant side because he simply doesn’t want to see it. A person doesn’t want to see certain

B e njam i n K at z c/o O f fi ce Ge org B asel it z .

meals. Is someone who forges drawings less dishonourable than someone who forges paintings? Today almost everyone draws like Beuys. Drawings always contain something of an acquired talent. Even the stupidest person can draw like Raphael; but doing really miserable drawings is very hard because it takes a lot of intelligence. I’m terrified when I see a drawing of mine done by someone else. I sign and date my drawings myself. - Original translation by Joachim Neugroschel, July 1993 Extracted from Georg Baselitz, Collected Writings and Interviews, ed. Detlev Gretenkort, London Ridinghouse, 2010.

M o m e n t s w i t h

G o n z

y first personal experience with Mark Gonzales was at Aaron Rose’s first ‘skate art’ show in Hollywood. I was invited to hang one of my photos. It was a large Starn twins’-looking portrait of a boot, printed across multiple sheets of paper, stained and pissed on, all taped together amid a four-foot wide frame. Aaron Rose came up to me and said, ‘Mark Gonzales wants to buy your print.’ He brought the two of us together in the middle of the gallery and made introductions. It was kind of like meeting Andy Warhol. Mark has a similarly peculiar, yet endearing manner of speaking. He said he liked the boot print and wanted it. I was flattered. But almost immediately I had to turn into a dick because he wanted to trade one of his painted decks for it. I love skateboard graphics, and I love the art of Mark Gonzales, but skateboard art rubs me the wrong way. It’s like a folksy mailbox painted like a pig. This was also around the emergence of the board-collecting rage and I was adamantly opposed to the idea of hanging a skateboard on the wall. ‘Skateboard for skating! Push uphill! Grrrr!’

Fortunately Aaron spared me from being a dick to Mark Gonzales: Aaron’s mother also wanted the print of the boot and she wanted to pay for it with money. So now I feel like I owe Mark a print, or something. And not just for the above incident: I have one of his drawings framed and hanging in my house. He used to send me random packages when I was editor at Big Brother, usually filled with newspaper clippings that had swastikas drawn all over them. I interpreted this in many ways, one of which was, ‘Is he saying I’m a Nazi?’ He had, after all, shown his disdain for Big Brother by once telling our photographer Rick Kosick, ‘I’m not down with your shit, fat-ass.’ Amid these swastika-laden clippings was a pen drawing of a strange woman with a long neck. I’ve always thought of her as a mermaid, or the leader of a nation of Amazons. She’s wearing a tiara/chariot — a tiariot? — bearing Poseidon and Amphitrite flanked by swans and Pillsbury Dough Boy sentinels. To the left of the portrait is a drawing of a woman lying on her back, drawn from the perspective of her cunt. Is it the same woman? At the bottom is the word, ‘SCHADENFROH’. Which I always took to be a misspelling of schadenfreude, but schadenfroh is actually the German adjective form of schadenfreude — ‘to take pleasure in another’s misfortune.’ There’s some schadenfreude somewhere when a smug little know-it-all snoot (i.e. me) is mistaken about the spelling of the adjective form of schadenfreude. That’s some next level schadenfroh, bro.” - Dave Carnie

e x t rac t: ‘A d i da s Ska t e b o ard i g ’ B y D a v e C ar n i e , K i n g S h i t maga z i n e . “Gonz faxes everything,” George said. George was the Adidas team manager. At the time, we were sitting on a ledge in a small cement plaza in the middle of a German park. Perhaps a bomb had been dropped there in WW2, and they covered the unseemly crater with cement. The Canadian Adidas team was warming up for another day of skateboarding in Berlin. I had noted that most of them were wearing t-shirts with Gonz designs. “That’s weird,” I said, “because apparently Morrissey only communicates via fax as well.” From what I understand, you communicate your question to Morrissey’s manager who then faxes your question to Morrissey. Morrissey writes his response and faxes it back to the manager who then translates the message for you. “Even better,” I continued, “Jason Jessee used to respond to emails by handwriting a letter, scanning the sheet of paper, then he’d email the scan.”

Adidas had asked Gonz to write ‘Adidas Skateboarding’ for a shirt, but the fax they got from him said, ‘Adidas Skateboardig,’ no N. “Skateboardig?” I said. “That’s awesome.” “So we got our art director to kind of fake a Gonz N,” George said laughing. “Wait. What?” I said. I was not laughing. “Why would you change that? ‘Adidas Skateboardig.’ That’s the best shirt ever.” George laughed again. The warm-up session was over. It was time to move on to the next spot. To a real spot. I, however, was not able to move on. I told George he better not use that stupid fake N. He saw my point and promised to mention it. The idea of changing anything the Gonz wrote — and to think that you’re fixing it! — is absolutely appalling to me. I just grew madder and madder throughout the day. “Skateboardig,” I kept saying to George. “Why would you To mm y Gu er re ro

change that?” It’s like adding a note to one of Beethoven’s symphonies. Blasphemy.

- Dave Carnie is a writer and former editor of Big Brother magazine. He’s also, ironically, a pedant for spelling and good grammar - or, as David Foster Wallace likes to put it, a ‘snoot’.

- Tommy Guerrero is a skateboarder and musician who took a soul train from the Bones Brigade in the 1980s right into the heart of West Coast Jazz. He still skates when he's not running Real Skateboards with Jim Thiebaud or art directing Gonz's Krooked, but says his knees are a little ropey these days.

P r o f i l e N o .

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Em bry R uck er

B i l lY r U f f

G ran t B ri tt ai n

Billy Ruff was one of the best vert skateboarders of the 1980s. And he puts it down to hard work.

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career. He regularly competed against the likes of Christian Hosoi, G&S teammate Neil Blender, Chris Miller and other legendary skateboarders. And he regularly won. At one point, Billy was ranked number one in the pool and vert category, and between 1983 and 1985, he bagged over fifteen contest wins. He also invented ‘The Unit’ – an early-grab precursor to the modern 540, which Tony Hawk later took above the coping. From the early-to-mid-’80s, Billy was also known to be a formidable force at San Diego’s legendary Del Mar Skate Ranch, which closed down in 1987. “It kind of became a Mecca for skateboarders,” he says. “That’s where everyone wanted to go. arch, 1983. The cover of Thrasher Magazine depicts an eighteen-

When a contest was coming up, guys would turn up from all over

year-old Billy Ruff launching a backside air high above the lip

the world a month ahead and literally live there. In hindsight it’s

of a bowl at SkateCity skatepark in Whittier, California. His

surreal. If you were a skateboarder, Del Mar was Mecca, and you

kneepads are scuffed and his white socks pulled up high and proud.

needed to make your pilgrimage and perhaps even move there for

Onlookers lean on railings from which banners hang for the likes

the rest of your life.”

of Independent, Gullwing and Variflex. With his G&S pro model

By the mid-80s the new guard of shredders were stealing the

deck under his feet, Billy stares down at the landing. There is a

show and after a cocktail of injuries Billy sidestepped into the

calm smile on his face.

business side of the industry as a sales rep for Airwalk. But his

Inside the magazine, a young Neil Blender advertises Tracker

style and prowess continued to influence a new generation of street

Trucks. Glen E. Friedman looks back on the history of skateboard

skaters. “We always looked up to Billy Ruff,” said Mark Gonzales in

photography. Seminal companies like Santa Cruz, Powell Peralta

an interview. “Ruff was smooth. We wanted to be smooth like Ruff.”

and SIMS showcase their latest products. And Billy Ruff, the polite

And the admiration flows in both directions. “Mark’s been

and clued-up San Diego local is interviewed. He is asked to name

a huge influence on the sport,” says Billy in retrospect. “What I

some things he doesn’t like. “I don’t like people that don’t really

remember most about him, and what still holds true today, is how

try,” he replies. “They should keep trying and not just get stuck on

much respect and attention he received from everyone I looked

one setback. If something gets in your way or you get stuck, you

up to. I couldn’t figure out half the stuff he was doing, but I knew

should leave it and come back to it.”

it was really hard and really cool. […] Mark always seemed like

Billy Ruff was born in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, in 1964 and

he was having a blast and thoroughly enjoying whatever he was

nothing in his childhood suggested he might grow up to become one

doing. He’s a really creative guy and he made everything he did

of the best skateboarders in the world. His father was in the military,

look easy. The sport needed someone like Mark to show up when

which meant Billy spent no more than a month in Fitchburg before

he did. Things were getting a little boring and he gave it some

the young family began moving all over the country and beyond.

much-needed energy.”

In 1976, at the age of twelve, Billy and his family finally settled in

It was an old friend, however, that made Billy realise he couldn’t

San Diego – an “overgrown surf town,” he says affectionately. It

keep up anymore. “It was maybe ’85 or ’86,” he says, looking back.

was here that Billy became infatuated with skateboarding. “I got

“Mike McGill had just got back from Sweden and there were

to junior high and out of all the different cliques, the guys that

rumours that he had a new trick. I remember standing in the mouth

skated just made me think, ‘That is cool,’” reminisces the forty-

of the Del Mar keyhole when I saw him do the McTwist. That was

eight-year-old down the phone from San Diego, where he still lives

the tipping point for me. I knew that I either had to skate 100 per

today. “I don’t remember the date, but I remember seeing a demo

cent of the time, or not bother. I rolled the tape forward and knew

somewhere and telling myself that that’s what I was going to do

that I had to go with the business side, because at the time it had

forever. So I got my dad to get me a board and off I went. After that,

more longevity than the career of a professional skateboarder.

I was on a board every day.”

Skate careers then weren’t what they are now.”

Billy got an annual pass to San Diego’s Oasis Skatepark and

Today, Billy still kicks back in San Diego with his wife and two

would regularly skate for the twelve hours the park was open. It was

daughters. Just last year he launched Ruffcase, a mobile phone-case

there that the then fourteen-year-old was spotted by Steve Cathey,

company featuring Dogtown-inspired graphics. Through all the

an older skateboarder who rode for G&S. “If we didn’t move to

ups and downs, Billy navigated his career as a skate pro with total

San Diego and live where we did, which was literally less than a

grace – an ethic that stayed with him since that first Thrasher cover.

mile from the G&S factory, it probably wouldn’t have happened,”

“I remember when my skating began affecting my college work,

he says. “He pulled me aside and gave me a set of YOYO wheels. I

I talked to my dad for some guidance on what I should do,” he says.

remember thinking that if he’s giving me a set of wheels; I better

“I said, ‘I think I’m good at this skating thing, I think I can make

skate really well to promote his product.”

a career out of it, but if I keep up college I’m just going to end up

Despite considering a medical career in his teens, Billy decided

beige. I’m not going to please anyone.’ He just said, ‘OK. I don’t

to focus solely on skateboarding and turned pro at the age of fifteen,

like it, but I’ll back you as long as you’re not lazy. You’ve got to give

riding for G&S Skateboards for the next nine years – his whole

it every last effort.’”

P r o f i l e N o .

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Kyo ko H am ada

C h r i s t o p h e r Wo o l i s a c o n t e m p o r a r y artist immersed in the manic boogie of the Lower East Side.

' Untitled' , (2 0 0 9) c/ o Luh r ing A ugu s t in e , Ne w Yo rk .

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Like mu si c [ ma ki n g t h e w o rk ] is an emo t i o n a l e x pe r i e n ce. I t 's a visual la n g ua g e a n d it ' s a l m o s t im possib le t o put w o r d s t o i t .â&#x20AC;?

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hristopher Wool was born in Chicago in 1955 and moved to New York City in the mid-1970s. He has since lived and worked on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Though Wool is recognised all over the world as one of the most important painters working today, there is something in the essence of his work that is fundamentally rooted in these hard-edged streets. Wool enrolled in the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture in the early 1970s and studied with the likes of abstract expressionist painters Jack Tworkov and Richard Pousette-Dart. He came to creative consciousness in NYC as the post-punk scene was obliterating the boundaries of fine art and his bold use of

Ranging from pure, gesturally bold

found materials (so familiar these days with the ubiquity of street art) was not only

abstraction through to confrontative

groundbreaking but prescient of a future where such boundaries seem quaint.

typography and photographic statements,

In the early 1980s, Wool worked as a studio assistant for modernist sculptor Joel

Wool’s work has the flavour of a kind of

Shapiro and by the end of that decade he was making his famous word paintings,

hybrid pop art. There are silkscreens with

apparently after seeing a white truck with the words ‘SEX LUV’ hand-painted on

enmeshed, Lichtenstein-like dots but also

the side. Aspects of mass culture – film, television, music – weave their way into his

freely flowing, multilayered, patterned

work and one of his most recognisable word paintings, ‛Apocalypse Now’ (1998),

canvasses with the energy of an abstract

draws text from Francis Ford Coppola’s film of the same name: ‛Sell the house, sell

expressionist like Jackson Pollock. Wool

the car, sell the kids.’ Even as an established artist Wool hasn’t been afraid to mix

continually plagiarises himself too, one

with pop culture, collaborating with Supreme on a series of skate decks in 2008 and

painting or piece borrowing a detail from

the Pass The Bitch Chicken book in 2002 with Harmony Korine – in which the latter’s

another. It might be in a different tone, a

photographs were put through an intense process of layering, drawing, overprinting

different scale, angle or situation but there

and photocopying by Wool.

are language-like elements, or musical

At the heart of Wool’s work is abstraction. But how is abstraction related to the

motifs, that crop up time and time again.

context in which it is created? Does it emerge from the inner-reaches of the artist’s

In 2008, Wool collaborated with punk

unconscious? Or is it a reflection of the exterior, rather than the interior of the mind?

legend Richard Hell for an exhibition and

“When an improvising musician expresses the deep-lying structures of his

publication, PSYCHOPTS – fifty-seven

unconscious out there on a stage, there is a true bravery there. It’s a powerful

word images that play with symbolism

statement,” says Dan Sapen, a psychoanalyst, musician and author who’s written

and language. His work is a powerful

extensively about the connection

self-referential body, motored by an

between psychological processes and

improvised energy. Like Jazz, it repeats,

the improvisational nature of art forms

echoes and riffs, reflecting perfectly the

like Jazz. “He is creating something that

manic boogie and shuffle of life on the

has never been heard, or even thought,

Lower East Side. The recurring phrases

before. And it’s even more powerful to

constantly appear and disappear, making

be able to make that stop. When you’re

it impossible to ignore a connection with

talking about abstraction in painting,

bebop – improvised music that twists,

there’s an added bravery. It’s out there.

turns and explores the deep-lying, perhaps

There’s a permanence to it,” Sapen

unconscious, corners of the mind.

continues. “It’s a crystallisation of

“With the painting the inspiration

unconscious processes, and it’s there to

comes from the process of the work itself,”

be consumed, judged and traded. It goes

Wool said recently. “Like music [making

on forever. There’s a real bravery in that.”

the work] is an emotional experience. It’s a visual language and it’s almost impossible to put words to it.” Ultimately, Wool’s work points to the limitation of semantics – the fact that language can only tell us so much. Images that communicate rise from the

' R un D ow n R u n ' , (2 0 0 3 ) c/ o Luh r ing Au gu s t in e , Ne w Yo rk .

chaos, reminding us how a city like New York is composed of a kaleidoscope of elements that are constantly rearranged, continually shifting the meaning ascribed to itself. The work, like the city, takes on an improvised language of its own – without thought or fear. “With Jean-Michel [Basquiat] or Picasso, the fact that they could do it so easily is what makes the work, in the end, so great,” Wool told Interview magazine recently. “They had absolute fearlessness.

' U n t i t l e d ', ( 2011) c /o L u h r i n g A u g u s t i n e , N e w Yor k .

If you’re not fearless about changes, then you won’t progress.”

M o m e n t s w i t h

G o n z

first toured with Mark in ‘91. He’d just come off his first kind of New York episode and I remember he had this fucking briefcase that was covered in carpet or something that he carried on his shoulder. He had on an Adidas tracksuit, and at that time no one was wearing Adidas tracksuits, except for the Beastie Boys. At the end of that tour I was clearing out the van and there was a bunch of his art all over the floor, on the

All images on this page: S kin Phillips

back of grip tape. So, I decided to keep it and I have them still framed in my house now. He’s always doodling. On a napkin, on anything. He makes drawings for everyone all the time. His nature is to produce art. That’s just what he does. And that’s not a forced thing, that’s the way his brain works. I think that when he paints and when he’s immersed in art it helps him a lot. I think it puts him in the zone that he needs to be in. It calms him in a way that is really different. I think it’s very therapeutic for him.

He just has a God-given talent to ride a skateboard. That’s what he was fucking made to do. He’s the best skateboarder that’s ever lived. And even now the way Mark looks, the way he dresses, the way he is, he still stands out. That’s not an easy thing to do. [...] One of my favourite shots of Mark that I’ve taken is one from an art show in Germany in ‘98 where he skated around this huge gallery in a white suit. People absolutely freaked out about that and to this day I still don’t know what really went on. I don’t think anyone else does either. But it all went into the West Coast video, which is on YouTube now. I watched that clip and it almost made me cry, that’s one of my favourite things ever.”

- Skin Phillips is a photographer, former editor of Transworld Skateboarding and current Adidas skate team

manager. He moved from Swansea to the States decades ago, but sounds a little Welsher by the day.

All images on this page: Jerry Buttles

y wife and I were having dinner at Hotel Amour in Paris when Mark came in carrying a skateboard. After dinner, we started chatting and he mentioned something about hanging out. We ended up linking up at this huge French appliance store because he wanted to fix a lamp. It was an all-day event with that light. After spending three hours repairing it, we walked for two miles because Mark wanted to go get nachos. He hopped up on a wall as we were walking past the river and, after all that time in the store, a piece of the light fell into the water. He almost fell too. Then we got to a courthouse and Mark went to jump up and climb over the fence - he said he wanted to walk up the stairs. As he was climbing the fence, which was super illegal, the top of the fence pole broke off. He ended up keeping it and put it in this little shrine area in his apartment next to a King Louis candle heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d just bought.â&#x20AC;?

- Jerry Buttles is a photographer from New York City, and an avid collector of the random pictures and homemade videos that still land in his inbox, courtesy of a friend he made this one time in Paris.

M o m e n t s w i t h

G o n z

From: Cheryl Dunn Date: 23 January 2013 y really earliest memory . of

mark . was of him

coming to a show i was in that thomas campbell was curating at the luggage store in s.f. in about 1998 or so.

i think i met mark there .

and he saw my work .

maybe within the year he was conceiving of the back worlds for words project with aaron rose.. to me to make a film . i think

they reached out

he might have

chosen

because i really wasn't from the skate world ..and a dance background

when the time arose . i packed

up every film camera i had . beaulieu

i had

multiple

a little 3 chip video cam.

8 mm's .

a 16 mm

and went over Cheryl Dunn

to this town in germany that i couldn't spell if my life depended on it .. this museum had an amazing contemporary art collection and they just let mark build ramps.. skate up walls , jump down stairs and zoom around incredible valuable art works . this could never have happened in the states.. it was wild .. the night of the performance

we got to shoot it 2 times .. mark is so elegant , yet aggressive. it was a marvel to watch him . the next day during the live performance

he taped off sections of

the floor for people to stand in and watch . they in turn became obstacles as well that he skated around and through .

i don't think people knew what was going on

it was pretty funny . i passed my cameras to anyone that would have one as i had this one chance to capture this and the museum was like a matrix .. with this project

he has his own language. physically verbally

and creatively ..

like codes in a way .

his physical

feats are so beyond human ability . his drawings, zines , poems and other works pendulum, very complex

seem

like the other side of the

with the veneer of simplicity .

i think we will be still trying to decipher his visual and written language for years to come . i know he cares about the kids..

at one point while

filming in his fencing uniform he skated on a 6 inch wide

Ch e ryl Dun n

top of a stone wall that must have been 3 stories above a highway . he did it seamlessly and with such grace. i was shooting from a distance . i was scared shitless watching him . when we came back together he asked me not to put it in the film . so that little kids wouldn't try it â&#x20AC;Ś

- Cheryl Dunn is a photographer and filmmaker from New York City who enjoys riding the subway with Bruce Davidson and shooting kids at festivals on her Leica. To see the footage she shot of Mark, check out Coconut Records' West Coast.

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C he ry l Du nn

him then .

we became friends

. and i got some good hang time with

met Mark when he was a teenager. We only really became friends when he moved to New York. Him and I were just two people who could identify with each other from the original skateboarding scene of California - like two transplants. In fact, I never took a picture of Mark in his heyday. He’d always ask me, ‘What can I do that you would want to photograph?’ And I always used to say, ‘You need to do something I’ve never seen before - something phenomenal that no one else can do.’ One day, we’re walking past that skate area on 11th street, in New York, and he’s wearing these ridiculously expensive, crazy funky red shoes that looked like something from The Wizard of Oz. I don't know what dead animal they were probably made out of, but you could tell they were high-end. I said, ‘If you can ride up on that wall and get ten feet above the ramp, that would be interesting to me,’ kinda giving him a hard time. So Glen E . Friedman

right at that moment he tries riding with those funkyassed shoes on, not even using his own skateboard, just to test it out - and he blew people away. One day in the park, he was skateboarding with his son [William] on his shoulders, which everybody thought was completely insane. He was racing around the playground and he took a spill. Everyone just held their breath - it could have been an incredibly horrible, ugly thing. But Mark, always doing the best that he can, he would certainly

put himself in the way of death before his son would get a scratch. And that’s what he did. He took a bad fall everyone was waiting to see how bad, and the first words out of William’s mouth were, ‘Can we do that again?’”

- Glen E. Friedman is a photographer who lives in New York City but grew up documenting Southern California’s punk and skate roots. His archives read like a ‘Who’s Who?’ of radical culture, featuring everyone from Fugazi, Black Flag and Beastie Boys to Tony Alva, Jay Adams and

G le n E. Fri e dma n

Stacy Peralta.

P r o f i l e N o .

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Dor ot hy H ong

C o n t e m p o r a r y a r t i s t To m Sachs has developed a creative process that resonates with ’makers’ across the globe.

' HG (Her m és Hand G re n a d e ) ' (1 9 9 5 ) c /o To m S a c h s St u d i o.

'H e l l o K i t t y N a t i vi t y' ( 1994) c / o Tom Sa c h s St u d i o.

om Sachs caught the attention of the art world in 1994, when he

artist autobiographies, and even my favourite, the Dutch art

created ‘Hello Kitty Nativity’ – a Christmas window display for

collective Atelier Van lieshout, did this book called The Manual,

the department store Barneys, in which he replaced the Virgin

which is about how they build their sculptures, and i always felt

Mary and baby Jesus with Hello Kitty dolls, the three kings with

that an art book was a demystifying process, which is always a

Bart Simpson figures, and crested the stable with a McDonald’s

big risk for an artist, but ultimately i figured he was making it for

logo. Since then he has made a slew of memorable pieces. for

his interns so it would be less frustrating for him to teach them

Cultural Prosthetics, his first major solo show, he created a

the basics. Any time you teach something it’s an opportunity

Hermès hand grenade, presented in a cute little Hermès box.

to define it in greater depth and seriousness for yourself. So the

With ‘SoNY outsider’ he made a full-scale model of the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki. in his exhibition Space

movies are and continue to be a way for me to understand my practice in depth.

Program: Mars he performed an imaginary manned exhibition to Mars that included a twenty-three-foot tall plywood version

There’s a kind of Germanic rigour to them. They could have

of the Apollo lunar Module and an elaborate ‘Mission Control’

been issued by the Army Corps. Sure. The authoritarian or

complete with over three-dozen computer screens.

perfectionism of it all. it’s sort of like the Buddha. You never

Through his elaborate sculptures, Sachs has become a highly

really achieve Buddhahood, but you spend your life meditating

skilled builder. Allied Cultural Prosthetics, his studio, operates

on the idea and trying to improve yourself. So no one’s perfect

as a buzzing, well-oiled machine. He created a series of videos,

all the time, including myself, but if you have some rules to live

one of which is called Ten Bullets, that serve as a kind of Ten

by you can aspire to something, and why not self-invent that

Commandments for his employees. i watched them before

and make it what you need and what is good for you.

interviewing Sachs over the phone. Had i been going for a job interview, i’d have shaved, got my hair cut and tucked in my shirt.

Tell me about your studio. Allied Cultural Prosthetics is a catchy name. Yes, that’s one of its names. That’s a twenty-year-old

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Your videos gave me a window into not only how your studio

name i used before my given name had profile. it was used when

works, but your artistic process as well. Yeah, i’ve seen many

i was getting materials, or asking questions to engineers – it

was a way to make my brand seem more serious. It was always

In your Ten Bullets video you state that, ‘Creativity is the enemy.’

really confusing, people never understood what it meant, but I

What does this mean exactly? Well the idea of ‘creativity is the

would always get more reverence than I deserved because the

enemy’ is to do the work that is set out before you and not to

word ‘prosthetics’ was in there and it kind of made me into a

improvise unless it’s absolutely necessary. I think there’s a

pseudo-doctor in some situations. Particularly useful when

capriciousness that happens in art that’s very indulgent, and I

getting medical-grade fibreglass.

like to make the innovations and creative acts within my work incrementally. There are some cultures that worship innovation,

How does a typical day at the studio go? Well, the studio right

and I believe in innovation, and I believe that innovation is one of

now consists of ten people. A workday starts at 8:30 with ’Space

the characteristics that define my work. However, it only works

Camp’ and then breakfast, and then we’re sort of working

when it’s on a really solid foundation. And I think this is largely

around 10:00. People usually eat lunch in the middle of the day,

a reaction against the perceived obsolescence that is perceived

around 12:00 or 1:00 or 2:00. On Mondays we have our staff

in consumer products, and a reaction against the capriciousness

lunch where it’s red beans and rice, Louis Armstrong’s recipe,

and indulgence of artists in my community who I love, but am

New Orleans-style, traditionally. And then it’s building, and for

frustrated by the quality of their work because there isn’t enough

me it’s building and these days more reviewing and drawing

backbone to it.

and researching and planning. If I can kick everyone out of my side of the studio, shut off my computer, and pop an Adderall,

Cultural Prosthetics, your first big solo show in 1995, conflated

I can make a sculpture myself, occasionally.

fashion and violence. You made a Hermès hand grenade, a Tiffany Glock… The formula that I use in art is ‘one plus one equals a

‘Space Camp’ is a sort of fitness regimen? It’s five core

million’ and the hard part of that formula is deciding what those

exercises. We call it ‘The Five’. It’s a push-up, a dead-lift, a

two ‘one’ things are. I know that Mark Gonzales is the subject of

sit-up, a chin-up and a lunge. It’s all about strengthening the

this issue [of HUCK]. Mark’s formula is a little different than mine,

core. If your core is strong everything else works better. This

or I don’t even know if you would call it a formula, but he’s more

is good for any athlete.

an advocate of ‘any two things in the world are connected by a

Gr aham Jud son

' LEM (Landing E x c u rs io n Mo d u l e } ' (2 0 0 7 -2 0 1 2 ) c /o Tom Sa c h s St u d i o.

third’, it’s just finding out what that ‘third’ is. I believe that his

work comes in because I spent so many years mastering wood and

philosophy on skateboarding and art-making and poetry and

metalwork that it’s now an expression of what I choose to do or

all these creative activities all stem from the same approach.

what I choose not to do in technically finishing something. I don’t

And the creativity in Mark’s work is excusable because he’s a

necessarily do the most traditional craft because some of that erases

genius. But I would argue that you have to be a genius at the

the evidence of my work so I go up until that point where I start

level of Mark or Louis Armstrong to be able to pull off creativity

erasing it, so that’s my line, that’s part of my formula.

like that and get away with it. To answer your question, putting Chanel and a guillotine together is that rare combination that

You skated through the whole ‘birth of street skating’ era. Did

just kind of makes sense.

that have an influence on your artistic practice? There’s this concept in Japanese called mitate and it means something like,

You grew up skateboarding. Do you still have a strong connection

‘Using the wrong thing for the right purpose.’ And I thought that

to the skate culture? I always felt like an outsider to skate culture. It

street skating, or whatever that’s called, really is the same kind of

was the first activity that I did that had a culture that was steeped

approach, you know, skateboarding on a car, or a curb, and the

in individualism. But my skateboarding skills never matched my

world is your skatepark, it’s not just a ramp, it’s not just a hill. To

ambition towards making things, so it was always frustrating to me

me that was very influential.

to not be at that level, and I always struggled with sports when I was young so I wasn’t able to really excel or get to a level of mastery

When did you become interested in building things? It’s been

over the basics to where I could innovate. And strangely I think

gradual. It’s thirty years of this, so it took a long time, and it

that’s true of some of the top people in skateboarding right now;

continues. I remember the moment that I sold my skateboard

it’s a very conservative,

to buy a wrench. And I felt

rote activity and there

bad about it, but I had to

are very few people out

choose, and it was almost

there who are expressing

as if I was choosing the

themselves. It just seems

focus of my life away from

to be a game of matching

skateboarding and more

the last guy’s tricks and

towards making things.

only very rarely is there Who are your heroes? Well,

more rarely is there a new

we talked about Mark and

approach. I was at a bar

how he transformed skate-

with Mark once and there

boarding, and we talked

was this young kid and

a little bit about Louis

he said, “What do you

Armstrong and how he

D or ot h y H on g

something new, and even

do?” and Mark said, “I’m a skateboarder,” and he said, “Me too,” and he was like, “Show me a trick,” and

certainly had great mastery but then invented all these things like the solo, and the idea of leaving out notes so

Mark was like, “No, I don’t

your brain could connect

want to,” and he was like,

them. And Sen no Rikyū,

“Show me a trick. Come

who was the first guy to

on!” And so Mark went outside and he did a firecracker. And

sort of make it cool for rich people to dress like poor people in the

of course you or I do it and it sounds like a clack, Mark does

sixteenth century. The myth of him is that he eventually offended

it and it sounds like a gun going off. And, you know, this kid

his boss and had to kill himself. I don’t know the whole story

wasn’t impressed, and he’s like, “Show me another one,” probably

because I wasn’t there but the idea of living with that kind of

thinking of some super complex kickflip ollie combo or whatever.

integrity... These are the heroes for me. I’m interested in these

And Mark throws the board ten feet in the air over his head and,

figures of transformation – Malcolm X, Martin Luther King – these

like, it lands on the ground, and right as it lands on the ground

guys who transformed their lives and, through their example,

Mark traps it with his feet the way a soccer player would catch a

helped others to see how to do it themselves.

ball with his feet. And it lands on the ground without making a sound. The kid didn’t really get it, but to me it was profound in

That’s super interesting. God knows there are so many gifted

that only someone with total mastery and also the Zen-like refusal

artists whose personal lives are not quite so noble. Yeah, myself

to be embarrassed by playing skateboard monkey could do this.

included [laughs].

He was simultaneously able to show his mastery, put this guy to shame, and invent something that I’m sure he just thought up

Tell me about your Space Program. Well, only that it continues,

and did on the spot.

and we just had a successful mission to Mars that we’re following up with another mission to Europa, where we hope

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Creativity just gushes out of him. He’s so childlike and pure. That’s

to find life. Europa is the icy moon of Jupiter. It is surrounded

the place where I think creativity should be encouraged, because

by ice and beneath the ice is liquid water. And what we know

he has such a strong foundation. I always think it’s so frustrating

about life on Earth is that where there is liquid water there

that some of these top pros are so uncreative, yet they have all

is life. So we’re hoping to go there soon and bring back some

this ability. I also think that’s sort of where the experience of my

evidence of that

For more of what you’re reading here, plus exclusive digi-only content – videos, photo galleries, interactive maps – head to our brand spanking new website. The conversation continues online, homies.

P r o f i l e N o .

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1 3

M art i ne Fr anck / Magn u m Ph ot os

She even directed a ﬁlm called Buster’s Bedroom, about a young woman who goes to the sanatorium where Keaton spent various stints for alcoholism and reenacts scenes linked to his life. like many of her automata, the ﬁlm is a sort of mystery box that one New York Times art critic described as having “a touch of fellini’s magic, a touch of Visconti’s decadence and a touch of Buñuel’s

Rebecca Horn‘s kinetic sculptures and high-art films are proof that the act is more worthy than the object.

liberating illogic” – surely the ﬁrst and only time the names of those directors appear alongside those of a silent movie comedy star. But these kinds of unexpected syntheses lie at the heart of Horn’s work. A mystic and a believer in alchemy, she captures the free ﬂoating potential of movement and breathes it into the inanimate, creating precise moments of art that drift away suddenly like the light of sparks in a dark room. in a similar way, skateboarding distills movement in an almost desperate attempt to string together enough of these immaterial moments of action to

In the summer of 1926, Joseph frank Keaton – better known as

form something wonderful, something defined by its very ephemerality. No

‘Buster’ – came to work in a small oregon mining town called Cottage Grove. With the

one demonstrates that better than Mark

help of a ﬁlm crew, a closed section of railway, and a replica of an 1860s locomotive, he

Gonzales, who, along with Keaton, the

made ﬁlm history. His feature-length silent comedy The General contains probably the

patron saint of all grown men who bounce

ﬁnest chase scene to ever be committed to celluloid. in fact, the ﬁlm is little more than

when they hit the ground, is a master of

one extended chase scene, a human rube Goldberg device in which Keaton’s improbably

the uncut sequence. Watch any ﬁlm clip

athletic frame ping pongs around a moving locomotive like a live action cartoon.

that Gonz happens to pop up in – whether

Movement is the hardest art to capture and preserve. Keaton himself disdained the

he’s rewriting skate history in Video Days

title of ‘artist’. in some sense, it’s a matter of tangibility. The Mona lisa, though over

(1991) or dancing down the street in a

ﬁve-hundred years old, still sits in stately repose in the louvre while large parts of the

Spike Jonze short – and it’s immediately

extensive repertory of the modern dancer Merce Cunningham died with him in 2009.

apparent that he favours long, unbroken

“evanescent, like water” – that’s how Cunningham described dance in his later years,

lines, punctuated by the odd ﬂourish. The

as he turned to the daunting task of ﬁguring out how to preserve what he could. He may

camera follows him as he races through

as well have been talking about all movement, from Michael Jordan to Jackie Chan.

cities, often skitching on vehicles, neither

You can see their performances again and again in replica, but unless you were in the

moving towards nor away from anything.

Delta Center for game ﬁve of the 1997 NBA ﬁnals, or on the set of Rumble in the Bronx,

Sometimes it’s beautiful, sometimes

you have missed the original forever because it cannot be contained in a medium, just

comical, but you can’t help but get the

reproduced imperfectly.

feeling that the essence of the man, and

The art of the kinetic is central to the work of German-born installation artist and ﬁlmmaker rebecca Horn. Her work was once described in the Guardian (in an article

what he’s striving for, is only truly apparent at speed

tellingly titled ‘Bionic Woman’) as a cross between a performance and an installation because of her approach to portraying movement. She delights in creating both moving automata and body extensions that only come to life when attached to a human. one of the most famous examples of the latter is Horn’s ‘finger Gloves’ – sinister yet somehow dainty rods of metal and fabric that, when attached to the hands, extend each finger some four feet. Although they now sit lifeless and inert at the Tate Modern in london, there is a 1974 video on YouTube of Horn wearing them while she slowly paces a rectangular room in Berlin, arms outstretched, ‘fingers’ rasping along the walls. it carries a mingled sense of elegance and menace, like a gothic horror film. The sound of the gloves on the wall echoes like slowly tearing paper while Horn paces the room in high heels, her hips moving languidly. She is one of the few serious artists in the world willing to put herself in the same club as Chan and Johnny Knoxville, among others, by claiming Keaton as an inspiration.

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'F i n g e r G l ove s ', Be r l i n , 1974.

To watch Gonz's homemade video, head to huckmagazine.com.

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AdiCourt Gonz