EMPIRE: An Arturo Vega Retrospective

EMPIRE

An Arturo Vega Retrospective Curated by Jade Dillenger and Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project

EMPIRE

An Arturo Vega Retrospective Curated by Jade Dillenger and Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project

Carlo McCormick On the Edges of the Empire

Arturo’s Empire, built of dreams from the rubble of disillusion, is a sandcastle bastioned against the deluge, a temporary refuge of the mind in fortification against the incessant assault of stupidity. The coin of the realm Arturo Vega minted was always an alternative currency, a negotiation around the Ponzi scheme of capitalism where honesty is always free, interest is never so much an amassing of wealth as the terms of engagement, and value is measured by what we give away. Having fled the slaughter of militarized intolerance and institutionalized corruption to set up camp on an island of urban blight in the land of broken dreams, Vega’s ideal was never idealized, rather a dystopian utopia, a concrete resistance to the concurrent post-hippie flight of back to nature in a reclamation of the city itself. They called it Punk, which has its own historic potency, but looking back now it seems rather a trivial term for something that in its tough little heart was trying for something a whole lot more.

Arturo Vega’s domain was constructed upon the margins of polite society just outside the bounds of corporation and commerce, similar in structures but contrary in ethos.

Independent and exterior, his otherness was nonetheless central in its critical distance from big business; a DIY production of mock messages that derailed the semiotics of national identity, consumer desire, mass manufacture and corporate coercion. A microclimate unto itself, sustained by ingenuity and a trickster’s wiles as the unruly jungle of feral biodiversity around it slowly got slicked up and priced out into a gentrified extinction, Arturo transformed his apartment in a living/working hybrid, in parts home, studio and salon, a dense cluster of difference that was haven for so many bands, artists, inveterate delinquents and cultural renegades. What he left behind in legacy of rock history and an extensive oeuvre of screen printed paintings are like the treasured artifacts of an un-civilization gone by, the gang colors for a tribe now far flung to a global diaspora, the flag of an anti-nation that has no place on any map but some of us still salute.

The retrospective account offered by Empire allows us some measure of his aesthetic territory, the methodology to his madness, and an insight into an underlying modus operandi that was forever lurking in gestures that the artist passed off as a far more casual practice, like a weekend painter who was secretly making bombs on the side. Through the signature series of his sign-like Insult paintings and the formalist leitmotif of his Silver Dollar canvases, both sly subversions on both the signs of authority and the authority of signs, the height of Vega’s cultural relevance is bookended by his early and late work here, where his minimal and maximal tendencies are made distinct, the hope and pessimism articulate and symbiotic. He was a punk and a hippie, something no one can truly be with the grace he managed, but most of all he was a radical. Arturo Vega’s supermarket sign paintings make evident his great debt to Pop Art, in particular Warhol’s transference of the Duchampian found object into a kind of fetish object, but already show the impassible schism that would always lie between the

acquiescent blank stare of pop appropriation and the critical politics of his postmodern mediation.

Whereas Warhol might want to mimic the seductive packaging of consumer America to produce surrogates for our collective identity, Vega was far more interested in the vernacular of handmade local adverts, the fast and disposable screened signs markets would put up on a weekly basis to promote sale prices, complete with those all too personal touches of inadvertent misspellings and animal meat parts that can only find a happy home in the kitchens of the impoverished. That too is a huge difference—whereas most successful artists eventually come to dine at the plates of the very rich (Warhol himself was obsessed with money and fame to a pathological degree), Arturo found his society in the dispossessed.

He made his home, not insignificantly, on the main street of skid row, the nether-land of those exiled to the single room occupancy hotel flophouses and soup kitchens at the very nadir of our social safety net, and he formed and reformed again over his decades there a community and family of those who came for no greater reason than that they could fit nowhere else in the mundane mainstream of middle America. Misery loves company, but Vega made it an ongoing festival of joy.

By the curious logic of some esoteric psychogeography that we’ve all unwittingly practiced a few times before, if you keep taking left turns you will likely end up back where you started. As a friend of Arturo’s I would have to admit there were plenty of occasions where I thought he has making an erroneous turn, following a whim or a passion that seemed clearly the wrong direction, but he always found a new way around the same old obstacles, arriving back in art and soul upon the higher ground where he might forever survey his impossible empire: the sum of his orbit a geometry of chaotic symmetry with an irresistible gravitational pull. The lovely last gift of this exhibition is the final painting Arturo made for his friend Oliver’s store in Little Italy. A rare article of faith from a true disbeliever, it offers that most quotidian (and flagrantly Latino) image of Jesus as a kind of psychedelic op portal to the transpersonal that lies within the social, words of wisdom rescued from cliché by that unique elocution of tongue-in-cheek “Life Isn’t Tragic/Love Is Just Being Ignored.” This is the kingdom Arturo Vega promises, and empire as imagined by those without dominion, a place next to him in that international arena stage lighting booth he ran like the Wizard of Oz, a land of vagrants and vagabonds, of beautiful losers and boundless leapers, a street that goes through time where the paupers are poets and the poets write the lyrics that kids around the world who don’t even speak the language know the words.

PLATE 1 AND 2

Charles Atlas, 2011 Silkscreen on paper Framed Dimensions: 37 x 37 x 1› inches Edition AP 1 of 1

Dan Cameron Mexico City, Circa 1970

Arturo Vega had already enjoyed the beginnings of a burgeoning career in Mexico by 1971, the year he arrived in New York to launch the chapter of his career highlighted by his 18-year collaboration with the Ramones. This early chapter of Vega’s life, which seems to have provided him with a visual and conceptual framework for both his Ramones saga as much as his studio paintings, has not really been explored until now, and many of the pieces of the puzzle have still to be located. Nonetheless, based on some basic things that are known, it is possible to begin tracing an outline of some early artistic influences and cultural inspirations that became amplified once his sensibility melded with lower Manhattan during the explosive pre-punk era.

One thing we do know well enough about Vega’s late adolescence and early manhood is the startling degree of social and economic mobility he demonstrated in his interactions with the larger world. An attractive, charismatic young gay man from the relatively provincial city of Chihuahua, Vega, while barely out of his teens, managed to make his way to San Francisco in 1967 to experience the Summer of Love firsthand. For more than five years after leaving Chihuahua as a high school dropout, however, Vega mostly lived in Mexico City, where he soon met and was drawn into some of the city’s most elite and avantgarde cultural circles. Working at an antiquarian’s shop by day, Vega presented himself as a singer-actor, although like many at the time, his true vocation seemed to be complete self-immersion in the late 60s wave of peace, love and universal creativity.

As befits a man who had a tendency to be exactly in the right place at the right time, Vega’s years studying acting and theater production at the National Institute of Fine Arts coincided with a compressed period of remarkable cultural transformation in Mexico. The expansion of mass media throughout the country, coupled with the internal migration of millions from rural to urban areas, had overlapped with the rapid growth of Mexican cinema, radio and television production in the early 60s, such that the emergence of a nascent counterculture, in the form of a youth-driven nonviolent movement known as La Onda (The Wave), was all but inevitable. La Onda spawned magazines and graphic artists whose work adorned their covers, but its greatest impact seems to have been in the forging of strong cultural bonds between student activists, fans of rock music, free love advocates, and the emerging widespread use of marijuana, which for sociopolitical purposes had been especially demonized by the reigning Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) political party.

A key element to this fusion of interests was the close philosophical alignment between the worlds of visual art and rock music in the late 60s. Alejandro Jodorowsky, the experimental Chilean filmmaker who moved to Mexico at the beginning of the 60s, was signed to direct a TV program called 1, 2, 3…a Go Go. The show regularly featured upcoming groups such as Los Dug Dug’s, who performed in elaborate costumes and incorporated visual artists as a

key factor in their lineup. Jodorowsky regularly collaborated with German-born sculptor Mathias Goeritz in his theater productions, while the quintessential 60s artist José Luis Cuevas chose the Las Rosas neighborhood in 1967 to produce an “ephemeral mural” that symbolized the end of the mural movement that had dominated Mexican art since the 30s. Soon after, future filmmaker Sergio Arau would launch his own rock project, the group Los Tepetatles, whose stage presentations were carefully art directed in a manner that bordered on the theatrical and also featured Cuevas as band member.

One prominent visual artist into whose orbit Vega was quickly drawn was the painter and designer Pedro Friedeberg, who was rapidly becoming well known for his tightly patterned, wildly colored compositions, which often featured Pop-like distortions of pictorial space accompanied by vaguely hallucinatory optical illusions.

More than any other Mexican artist of the 60s, Friedeberg’s unabashedly countercultural imagery and compositions signaled an abrupt break with the postwar artistic status quo, which had emphasized the struggle of the Mexican peasant in the post-revolutionary era, in tandem with Olmec, Mayan and Aztec pre-Colombian cultural sources.

By contrast, Friedeberg’s glamorous, cosmopolitan world seemed like an open door to the kind of universal consciousness that was slowly becoming popularized north of the border by way of the indigenous drug odyssey novels of Carlos Castaneda. At the same time, Friedeberg’s art and public image symbolized the constant lingering threat of foreign-made cultural influences, which were dramatized as expressions of cultural imperialism coming from the north, especially through music.

At surface level, any formal comparison between Friedeberg’s and Vega’s pictorial styles reveals a shared interest in heraldic and symbolic imagery, repetition, hard-edged graphic borders, eye-popping color, and written language.

Possibly a more important lesson the young Vega appears to have absorbed from his mentor centered on the pragmatic dimension of the artist’s life, which so easily becomes unmoored and directionless in the face of poverty and indifference. Friedeberg, whether by design or happy accident, developed an ingenious method of being free to work on his paintings without ever worrying about money, thanks to the runaway commercial success of his signature hand-shaped chair, which has been produced over the years in innumerable sizes, materials, colors and stylistic variations, and is arguably the most Mexican contribution to the psychedelic 60s, without many people being able to pinpoint its roots. For Vega, a student performer who also constructed collages, the principle that every struggling artist should find a way to survive off some aspect of their art, even when it is not precisely connected to painting or drawing, is one he took to heart upon arriving in his adopted country.

As was true for many other countries, the pivotal year in any discussion of Mexico’s modern era is 1968, when Mexico City hosted the Olympic Games in front of the

entire world, only days following a police massacre of as many as 300—the number has never been verified— university student protesters and antiwar activists. Being a student himself, the Tlatelolco massacre undoubtedly made Vega deeply aware of his own precarious position in Mexican society, as well as the inherently oppositional core of cultural transformation in a society where a single political party monopolizes all authority. Still, the distinctive 1968 Mexico Olympics logo, with its op art rendering of “Mexico 68” and Olympic rings, and typography that evokes Olmec lettering, perfectly encapsulated the country’s ideal of honoring its deep folkloric roots while fully engaging the modern world.

Vega’s last few years in Mexico City were a time of increasing artistic experimentation. He played a rock singer in a staged musical production called Sigue tu onda (the Spanish-language version of the Broadway musical Your Own Thing), worked as costume and production designer for a touring Mexican production of The Who’s Tommy, and nearly got arrested at the Festival Pop, held in the Palacio de Bellas Artes, for a striptease drag performance that climaxed in Vega wrapping himself in a Mexican flag and then quickly fleeing the scene. By this time, it also seemed the underlying connections between being an artist and being involved with rock music were no longer mutually exclusive concerns, if they ever were. In the four years between the initiation of his formal studies and the decision to move to New York, Vega had directly experienced a Mexican mini-renaissance, in which all forms of creative expression were celebrated equally.

Artists formed rock bands and experimental filmmakers directed TV shows about rock and roll, while at the same time the state had shown it would not hesitate to use violent force to counter too much change too soon.

Vega’s final role as a performer in Mexico was as part of a local production of Hair, the quintessentially 60s American rock musical. While there were a handful of productions of the show going around the city, its climactic performance took place at the Festival de Rock y Ruedas music festival, which would soon be simply known as Avándaro, the name of the lakeside resort where it took place. Nothing sums up the collapse of the Mexican art-rock nexus which provided the basis for Vega’s earliest artistic explorations quite like Avándaro, which for years was known as Mexico’s Woodstock (although Altamont might be a more apt description). Staged in September 1971, at a race track two hours away from the capital by car, the event was planned to draw 25,000 people, and ended up with nearly 10 times more in attendance. There was open drug use and nudity on the part of many erstwhile hippies who made the trek. After the festival concluded, conservative media began to spread false stories, claiming violence and even deaths had occurred during the event. The Mexican government, in an effort to assert its control, immediately banned all large rock concerts, and started harassing music clubs and stores. Arrests of cultural provocateurs soon began, followed by a rushed exodus of musicians,

promoters, actors, dancers and publicists, mostly to New York and Los Angeles.

In retrospect, it seems clear the Avándaro debacle and its aftermath proved to be the catalyst that propelled Vega towards New York that fall. With the crackdown on countercultural activities in Mexico City, and a blanket tour ban on foreign rock groups that lasted 10 years, artists like Vega evidently envisioned a bleak future for themselves in their native country. While passionately lunging into artmaking and earning a living in New York—and emphatically arguing that rock and roll was dead or dying—a few years would pass before artist-rocker Arturo Vega would fully recover from a temporarily broken heart.

PLATE 3

Department of Commerce, 1973 Silkscreen on paper 50 x 40fl x fi inches

PLATE 4

Supermarket Sign (Steak Sale), 1973 Acrylic on canvas 48 x 72 x 1› inches

PLATE 5

Department of Commerce (Pink on Yellow), 1974 Acrylic on paper Framed Dimensions: 49› x 37› inches

NEXT PAGES PLATE 6

PLATE 8

Supermarket Sign (Apples), 1973

Supermarket Sign (Watermelon), 1973

Acrylic on canvas 48 x 48 x 1› inches

Acrylic on canvas 52 x 52 x 1› inches

PLATE 7

PLATE 9

Supermarket Sign (Grade A Eggs), 1973

Supermarket Sign (Sweet Peas), 1973

Acrylic on canvas 52 x 52 x 1› inches

Acrylic on canvas 52 x 52 x 1› inches

PLATE 10

Untitled, 1989 Acrylic and silkscreen on canvas 76 x 51 x 1› inches

PAUL ZONE

Arturo Vega, 1975 Digital print 22 x 16 inches Taken from the book PLAYGROUND: Growing up in the New York Underground

PLATE 11

Untitled, circa 1973 Silkscreen on paper 11 x 14 inches

Adam Lehrer Empire

Whenever I hear an artist or critic label an artist’s work as being “ahead of its time,” my internalized cynic screams “HACK!” Nevertheless, that is the only way to describe Arturo Vega’s artistic output. There are critics who would seek to separate Vega’s fine art work from his graphic work with the Ramones, but the truth of the matter is the artist considered both bodies of work to be equally important, and so we should examine them with equal scrutiny. Vega cannot be assessed without the Ramones. Examining the visual phenomenon he created with the band is far more fascinating than analyzing any single object could ever be.

Like many New York artists of the late 70s and 80s, Vega’s output hints at influences in Warhol and Pop Art while also presenting ideas that place him in line with the postmodernists of the Pictures Generation. Arturo moved from Mexico to New York in 1971, nine years before Richard Prince ushered in the era of postmodern appropriation art with his first solo exhibition at CEPA Gallery in Buffalo, New York. Vega, who drew influence from Warhol, appropriated much of his imagery from folk art, newspaper clippings, and commerce. Had his career gone a different direction, Vega could have very well found his work considered alongside the revolutionary artistic movement defined by the likes of Prince, Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine and others. His Insult paintings and their use of color to abstract and redefine the meaning of obscenities and harsh language remind the viewer of Kruger’s juxtaposition of images and politically charged text, as well as some of Ed Ruscha’s text paintings and drawings.

His supermarket signs force the viewer to question the strategies and mental manipulations of branding iconography, much like Warhol did before him with the Campbell’s Soup Cans and Prince did after him with his re-photographing of Marlboro ads. So how do we discuss the seismic alterations of the language of visual art that occurred as Pop Art bled into postmodernism and The Pictures Generation? It has to be through the Ramones.

It’s interesting that while fine art photographers of the era like Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar and Sherman often took jobs doing fashion photography, Arturo took a full-time job with a rock and roll band. That speaks volumes of the mindset of most conceptual artists versus Arturo. So much of conceptual art requires the artist to remain chilly and distant towards their subject matter, with an attitude of “Sure, I’ll do some fashion for this department store; it’d be interesting to see how my critiquing of fashion becomes an ad for fashion critiquing ads for fashion.” Multitudes of meta layers follow.

With Arturo there is no irony. He loved the Ramones with all of his heart and every image he created for the band was done with utmost sincerity. Many artists since Vega have come from rock and roll or non-fine art backgrounds and achieved great success in the fine art world. Raymond Pettibon, currently the subject of a career retrospective at the New Museum and solo show at David Zwirner, designed flyers and record covers for his little brother Greg Ginn’s band Black Flag and record label SST. Gee Vaucher, who now exhibits with Jack Hanley Gallery, designed all the graphics

and iconography surrounding the late 70s anarchist punk rock collective Crass. Even Los Angeles-based artist Cali Thornhill DeWitt saw his career get a massive boost last year when Kanye West chose him to design the graphic scheme for The Life of Pablo tour merchandise. Working with musicians has proven to be, at the very least, great bio material for contemporary artists. But it’s possible that the myth of the Ramones, and Arturo’s place within it, has simply overwhelmed the myth of his larger artistic body of work.

One of Arturo’s more eye-grabbing paintings depicts the ultimate icon of branding: Jesus H. Christ. His logo for the Ramones, however, is certainly in the top 10 with Jesus in terms of recognition. Arturo wasn’t a great artist despite the Ramones, or because of the Ramones, he was a great artist who did great work for the Ramones and outside of the Ramones.

PLATE 6

Untitled, 1989 Acrylic and silk-screen on canvas 76 x 44 x 1› inches

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Untitled, circa 1973 Silkscreen on paper 11 x 14 inches

PLATE 13

Untitled, circa 1973 Silkscreen on paper 11 x 14 inches

PLATE 14

Untitled, circa 1973 Silkscreen on paper 11 x 14 inches

PLATE 15

Untitled, 1989 Acrylic and silkscreen on canvas 76 x 60 x 1‹ inches

PLATE 16

Untitled, 1989 Acrylic and silk-screen on canvas 80 x 60 x 1› inches

PLATE 17

Untitled, 1989 Acrylic and silk-screen on canvas 80 x 60 x 1‹ inches

PLATE 18

Empire, 1989 Acrylic and silkscreen on canvas 80≠ x 132≠ x 1› inches Individual panels: 80≠ x 20≠ 80≠ x 30≠ 80≠ x 31≠ 80≠ x 25≠

PLATE 19

People Are Rotten, 1994 Acrylic on canvas 54› x 234 x 1› inches

PLATE 20

To Hell With Yous Acrylic on canvas 60› x 60› x 1› inches

PLATE 21

Lie, Kill, Cheat, Steal, 2012 Mixed media 54 x 66 x 1 inches

Anthony Haden-Guest

The sheet of paper Arturo Vega carried in a pocket until his death told the story. It was a newspaper clipping, headlined on the front page of El Nacional, the Mexican daily, reporting the arrest of 149 “Hippies” drogadictos de ambos sexos.

Men and women, that means. The bust had been at a party in a well-to-do suburb of Mexico City and the “hippies” had included Alexander Jodorowski, director of the cult movie El Topo, and Vega. That had been February, 1971. The Students Movement had a rally in Mexico City that June.

Bottles were thrown and Los Halcones, a specially trained shock troop, opened fire with rifles. There were 210 deaths in what came to be known as the Corpus Christi massacre, with some youths being slaughtered in their hospital beds.

The heavy political clouds intensified. Arturo Vega left expeditiously for the U.S., hitting California before homing in on New York. He soon found a loft space on East 2nd and Bowery.

Arturo was interested in getting some performance gigs, but his goal was a career as an artist and he was working in the young but thriving tradition of Pop. It was those times.

Irving Blum, who gave Andy Warhol his first solo show at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, once told me, speaking with wonderment of precisely that period, “There were two hundred Pop artists.” But it’s plain to see in Empire that Arturo Vega was a Pop artist of an unusual sort.

“In some examples of pop art, acceptance of the environment has changed into a campy game about it,” the critic Thomas B. Hess wrote in 1964. “The vulgar, instead of being taken for granted, admired and transformed, becomes a cult object or fetish or inside joke for esthetes. An epicene simper is sensed behind some of these works that go all out to seem daring or risky.” Presumably the late critic had second-tier Popsters in mind when he delivered this searing critique but certainly there is also ironic distancing in the work of Claes Oldenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, if arguably less so in the Andy Warhol of Marilyn and the Electric Chairs. But I detect neither camp nor irony in Arturo Vega’s early Supermarket series. These paintings are the scrupulously un-arty replications of food labels that he was making pre-Ramones, and both in their subject choices—CHITTERLINGS—and the occasional misspelling— CHIKEN PARTS—they radiate acceptance, which also, to me at least, suggests this is an acceptance of the service economy and the individuals likely to be doing some heavy lifting within it. “I get my ideas from the streets” would become Arturo’s mantra and it was this forthright acceptance that he brought with him when he segued from being a full-time artist to becoming an artist/designer who would be described by The New York Times as the “Shepherd of the Ramones.”

PLATE 22

Arturo in front of his mural in front of Quality Mending on the corner of Prince and Elizabeth St., 2013

The tale of how Arturo melded with the Ramones has been often described. It so happened that Douglas Glenn Colvin, not quite yet rebranded as Dee Dee Ramone, was climbing the stairs of Arturo’s building to see a girlfriend. He liked the music he heard welling out of Arturo’s loft, banged on the door. Next thing, the Ramones were embeds in that loft, and Arturo was an embed in the embryonic group. Anecdotal touches in the memoir co-written by Joey’s brother, Mickey Leigh, and Legs McNeil, I Slept With Joey Ramone, bring out the closeness. As when they quote Pam Brown, described as “Joey’s first girlfriend who wasn’t from the ‘nuthouse’ and wasn’t on medication.” Pam speaks of falling for Joey while watching him perform at CBGB. “I packed my bags and moved right in with him in Arturo’s loft. I don’t think Arturo was too happy about it at first, but soon he really liked me.

I cleaned up Joey’s old cereal and everything.”

As for Arturo Vega’s visual contribution to the Ramones, well, part of this was on the production side. Lighting was tremendously important in the culture of Nightworld. Arthur Weinstein began in lighting, became the clublord behind Hurrah, The World and the after-hours explosion. Arturo handled the lighting for the Ramones. Inarguably, though, one of his most durable contributions to the Rock Economy was his invention of the rock tee—a generation before anybody wearing a tee with Coca-Cola written on it was presumably working for the Coca-Cola company. Marlon Brando had sexualized the tee in the 1951 movie A Streetcar Named Desire, Hippiedom flaunted tie-dyes in the 60s, but it was Arturo Vega who birthed the rock tee, a wearable that made a definitive statement, was a tremendous promotional tool and a useful source of revenue too.

Arturo’s design for the Ramones tee incorporates an eagle, in large part the American eagle, the eagle on the presidential seal, though his bird is clawing a baseball bat rather than a sheaf of arrows, but it’s clearly not a coincidence that an eagle also features on the sheet of paper that Arturo was seldom without, being that it is the logo of El Nacional, a borrowing from the Mexican flag. Arturo’s Ramones tee shirt became so wildly popular that Danny Fields, a convert to the group since he heard them in 1975 at CBGB, and who became their manager, signing them to Sire, has claimed that the group sold more tees than albums. This notion of the subversive tee would shortly be one of the many elements of U.S. Punk that Malcolm McLaren would borrow for the store-with-many-names that he and Vivienne Westwood ran on the Kings Road in London. No wonder Sid Vicious famously wore one on a gig, an unusual example of a member of one band of rock marauders selflessly promoting another.

Arturo’s work with the Ramones doesn’t wholly dominate Empire. His Insults series from the 90s seems to connect with the Supermarket work in that he is dealing with a cheerily vulgar patois, with no suggestion that the speaker or listener are likely to go for a knife or a gun. And his Silver Dollar series reflects the fact that artists and performers in the U.S. frequently draw on the symbolic potency of the currency, as when Warhol painted dollar bills and Jerry

Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, referencing Antonin Artaud, tossed dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on April 24, 1967. Arturo’s silver dollars nestle on the palm of—an equally meaningful—open hand, his own, and are often charged with geopolitical meaning being accompanied by paintings of national flags. So Arturo Vega’s oeuvre, his lasting and growing reputation are by no means Ramones-dependent. But what of the meaning the Ramones relationship had for Arturo in the life he lived?

He wore the Eagle image he had created for them tattooed across his back.

.

In 1992, as an NYU graduate student living on 3rd Avenue and 9th Street in the East Village, I was up and down the Bowery with great frequency.

CB’s 313 Gallery presented an exhibition of Arturo Vega’s Insults, and, although the vitality of anything artistic around CBGB seemed to have long-since diminished, this particular visual art show resonated and enticed me back for repeat visits. At the time, I knew little if anything about the artist or his rather profound relationship to that historic place, but his paintings (as verbally abusive as they seemed) clearly spoke to me.

About five years later, I began assembling an archive and building a personal collection of punk era artifacts. I amassed boxes of Devo-related material while researching the book I co-authored about the band, but was feverishly tracking down significant memorabilia from others too. In July of 1999, Dee Dee, Tommy, Johnny, Joey, Marky and CJ Ramone made a special appearance at the Virgin Megastore on Union Square for the release of their Rhino Records’ Anthology. After years of random neighborhood sightings (primarily of Joey – who at 6-feet, 6-inches was always hard to miss), I had the opportunity to finally meet them all in a single unforgettable evening (along with tour manager Monte Melnick and crew). When the Ramones were welcomed into the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame a few years later, I lent a number of items – including the classic Arturo Vegadesigned Ramones t-shirt that was once owned (a highly prized possession) and stage-worn by the Sex Pistols’ late bassist Sid Vicious—for the display celebrating the band’s 2002 induction.

Jade Dellinger Empire: An Arturo Vega Retrospective

As art director for the Ramones and their longtime friend, Arturo Vega was the foremost authority, trusted spokesperson and gatekeeper for the band. He often interacted with fans managing their official website, so I corresponded with him occasionally in the decade that followed the Ramones’ retirement. I enthusiastically reached out once more in 2011 when I had the good fortune to acquire a 5 x 20 plus feet. hand-painted canvas banner that Arturo created in the 70s as the primary backdrop for the Ramones club dates. He expressed enthusiasm for my find and confirmed the authenticity and provenance of my acquisition. Arturo sent me the catalogue for his upcoming exhibition at Galería OMR in México, D.F. and wrote, “It’s very cool how you and I share interests in Art and the Ramones… I hope we can meet soon and talk and work on something together.”

So, the invitation from friends at Howl! Happening in New York this year to contribute an essay to a catalog in conjunction with a (sadly now posthumous) solo show of Arturo’s Insults seemed both full circle and an appropriate impetus to make good on finally doing something together, even if simply collaborating in his absence with those who represent him so thoughtfully at the Arturo Vega Foundation. This first ever U.S. museum retrospective simply would not have been possible without the tireless efforts of Howl! Happenings: An Arturo Vega Project director Ted Riederer, and the vision, passion, unwavering commitment and support of Jane Friedman at the helm of the late artist’s foundation.

Alerting us to the cultural and economic effect both U.S. and Spanish colonialism had and was having on his Mexican homeland, the late artist Arturo Vega painted and screen printed a monumental multipanel canvas he called Empire in 1989. Superimposing photo-based imagery of an open hand offering or accepting American “silver dollars” over Honduran, Costa Rican, Panamanian, Filipino, Spanish and Mexican flags, Vega seems to acknowledge that U.S. trade and monetary policies were by then as dominant as the “empire on which the sun never set”.

Spain had once ruled all of these represented nations and many more as the first global empire in history, imperialism and money were but two of the shared interests and themes regularly explored by both Arturo Vega and Bob Rauschenberg.

In 1961, with newly elected President John F. Kennedy strategically increasing the number of U.S. troops in Vietnam, Rauschenberg reacted to what he then perceived as imperialist aggression by installing his solo Leo Castelli Gallery show day by day, a single work at a time, over the month-plus duration. Attempting to provide subtle commentary while non-violently mimicking our militarism and expansion of war, the artist featured two new combines he titled Empire I and Empire II as the exhibition that preceded Rauschenberg’s was gradually replaced by these and other assemblages. Steadily extending his presence, commanding greater authority and asserting dominance over the previous (slowly disappearing) installation in Castelli’s exhibition space, Rauschenberg, a former U.S. Navy draftee who had been outspoken about his aspiration of “not to kill” and antiwar beliefs, was amply aware of the tactics employed and human costs suffered when governments unjustly asserted their force.

Both artists, Vega and Rauschenberg, undoubtedly knew that economic aid could have negative consequences too, but each explicitly understood that placing a coin in hand was a more reasonable solution than offering insults or arms. As, just a year prior, in 1960, attempting to create a “mascot” for Jean Tinguely’s large kinetic and “self-destructive” Homage to New York in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art, Rauschenberg presented his Money Thrower for Tinguely’s H.T.N.Y.. A small sculpture with springs, once loaded, the work was built to propel a dozen or more silver dollars into the hands of an appreciative crowd and proved a playful alternative to the imposing presence of Tinguely’s more complicated and likely more dangerous apparatus.

Decades later, when Rauschenberg exhibited his work at the Museo Rufino Tamayo, the renowned Mexican poet Octavio Paz wrote, A Wind Called Bob Rauschenberg, in his honor. Art and ideas, like currents of air, are difficult to contain and can travel broadly like flung coins in unexpected directions. In the 80s while Vega was responding to similar global issues through his Silver Dollar/Flags series in New York, Bob Rauschenberg began a worldwide initiative (Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange/ ROCI), working with locals to present exhibitions in nations that were developing or simply difficult for Americans to

access. Ultimately realizing 11 stops in countries like Cuba, Chile, Russia and China, Rauschenberg noted that, “Mexico was an ideal place to start because at that moment our political relationship had never been weaker.” Unfairly criticized by some in the United States as a “project of cultural invasion” or, worse, “American cultural imperialism,” Rauschenberg’s stated goal for ROCI was to “introduce the world to itself” and his committed efforts would in due course prove to have an overwhelmingly positive and lasting impact.

Having discovered Elvis as a child and later co-directing a touring production of The Who’s Tommy at the National University in Mexico City, Arturo Vega also understood the revolutionary and transformative power of music, theatre/ performance and art. While working on his first painting series of supermarket signs, he befriended members of the Ramones, a rock and roll band that would soon play their first show (and would decades later be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame). Designing the Ramones’ ubiquitous logo based on the Great Seal of the United States, painting backdrops for their stage and creating a lighting scheme loosely adapted from Albert Speer’s Lichtdom to enhance their effect, Vega created visual imagery that defined the transgressive aesthetic of punk rock by co-opting and questioning symbols of power.

Having narrowly escaped the repressive violence of an authoritarian regime under Mexico’s “perfect dictatorship” in the late 60s, Vega immigrated to the United States to pursue a career in the arts and enrolled in English, philosophy and photography classes at the New School for Social Research.

Falsely labeled with fellow “drug-addicted Hippies” by a El Nacional newspaper report at the time, Vega had been arrested at a party in an affluent suburb of Mexico City and detained by police in a much-publicized incarceration of 148 of the country’s most notable artists, poets and intellectuals (including Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky).

With government forces still carrying out disappearances (estimated at over a thousand), systematic torture, and extralegal executions during this so-called Dirty War, this harrowing incident signaled it was now time for Vega to leave.

Famously speaking of working in the gap between art and life, Bob Rauschenberg often took to the streets for raw material and inspiration. “I want my paintings to look like what’s going on outside my window,” he once confessed, “rather than what’s inside my studio.” For Rauschenberg, “‘If I walked completely around the block and didn’t find enough to work with, I could take another block...” He had purchased his five-story building at 381 Lafayette Street (near Great Jones) several years prior to Arturo Vega’s 1973 arrival in New York City. Yet, with Vega at his 6 East 2nd Street loft (and little more than a block and the Bowery separating the two for over three decades), it seems inevitable their paths would have crossed.

Perhaps in part inspired by Rauschenberg, Arturo Vega would occasionally proclaim, “My ideas come from the streets.” As a child growing up in Estado Libre y Soberano de Chihuahua–the Free and Sovereign State, or the Big

State of Chihuahua, Arturo Vega was introduced to rock and roll as American radio infiltrated the Mexican airwaves. Vega and Rauschenberg understood that art had the power to permeate borders and bring revolutionary change. They were born and raised on opposite sides of the Tex-Mex divide, but were citizens of the world with global ambition to engage in a dialog about the sociopolitical, humanitarian and monetary impact of nations. So, while Rauschenberg and Vega may never have been formally introduced, these artists clearly had much more in common than the close proximity of their live/work situations and a shared attraction to their neighborhood as a source for creativity.

Empire: An Arturo Vega Retrospective at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery invites viewers to contemplate these parallels. Of course, as Rauschenberg once said and Vega would undoubtedly have concurred, “(Art was) a means to function thoroughly and passionately in a world that has a lot more to it than paint.”

Jade Dellinger, Director of the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at FSW

HOWL! COMMUNITY

EMPIRE An Arturo Vega Retrospective

Arturo Vega Foundation Lalo Quiñones Jane Friedman Donovan Welsh BG Hacker

Curated by Jade Dellinger and Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project March 23 – April 20, 2017

BOARD OF ADVISORS Curt Hoppe Marc H. Miller Dan Cameron Carlo McCormick

ISBN-10:0-9975565-6-0

James Rubio Debra Tripodi Lisa Brownlee Howl! Board of Directors Bob Perl, President Bob Holman, Vice President BG Hacker, Treasurer Nathaniel Siegel, Secretary Brian (Hattie Hathaway) Butterick Riki Colon Jane Friedman Chi Chi Valenti Marguerite Van Cook, President Emeritus

© 2017 Howl Arts, Inc. Howl! Archive Publishing Editions (Howl! A/P/E) Volume 1, No. 17 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of Howl! A/P/E. Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project 6 East 1st St. NY, NY 10003 www.HowlArts.org 917 475 1294 Installation photography © Andreas Nicholas Paul Zone: Arturo Vega, 1975 Taken from the book PLAYGROUND: Growing up in the New York Underground (Glitterati Incorporated) Editor: Ted Riederer Copy Editor: Jorge Clar Design: Jeff Streeper for Modern IDENTITY

Founder and Executive Director: Jane Friedman Gallery Director: Ted Riederer Program Director: Carter Edwards Gallery Coordinator: Liz Cvitan Marketing and Public Relations: Susan Martin Social Media and Development: Michelle Halabura Videographers: Andreas Nicholas Yoon Gallery designed by Teddy Kofman Creative Consultant: Some Serious Business

The Arturo Vega Project: Jane Friedman

COVER

Untitled, circa 1973 Collage on paper 11 x 38 inches

Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project www.howlarts.org info@howlarts.org

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