Samoa: Candy Coated Evil

“You can feel the atomic shadows of Hiroshima and the light between them in everything Samoa does.”

—Scott Ewalt

HOWL! HAPPENING: AN ARTURO VEGA PROJECT

Self Portrait, 2017

Oil on canvas / 40 x 30 x 1½ inches

KEMBRA PfaHler

Presents

SAMOA CANDY COATED EVIL

SAMOA CANDY COATED EVIL

Published on the occasion of the exhibition January 10–February 11, 2018 Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project Howl! A/P/E Volume 1, No. 21

Samoa, Immigrant Song

By Kembra Pfahler and Daniel Roberts

“Is this Pop Art?,” Samoa asked the other day, as we were varnishing one of the last paintings.

We stopped and thought about it.

Daniel Roberts: Samoa’s work is Pop Art with a Consciousness.

Kembra Pfahler: It is Non-fiction Surrealist Illustration. I’ve never really known what Pop Art is. Is it popular, populist?

For the people because they recognize the imagery somehow? It’s been lying dormant in their subconscious. Which is then surrounded by Samoa’s particular unbrandable oddness.... I agree with you completely when you describe his work as having consciousness. It’s prophetic as well. I see his prediction of our dystopic future in his paintings.

DR: It is ambiguous and frightening and delightful and makes you think.

KP: His earlier portraits were much more vanilla. This HOWL! Happening gallery show is “dark vanilla.” Elements of sweetness that cloak socially-transmitted diseases. But Samoa’s hell. In his clothing, represented in a reenactment of his store Candy Coated Evil, Samoa sews the sign of the devil…often the classic two fingers down and the pointer and pinky up. Dan, I thought it ironic when you told me the

hand sign for “love” in sign language was similar, the difference being the thumb is open. Samoa pushes love hard.

DR: The work is biographical in that the subjects of the paintings all stand for something larger than themselves…for something that has spoken to Samoa’s heart and soul.

KP: Despite how Samoa has been critiqued throughout the years, his talent is extremely provocative, as you say. Yes, I agree. Unknowingly, I think it affects some wanting to paint well. Samoa will share with you non-secretively that his technique is all Bob Ross. A popular, populist, pop artist to be sure. I say nonsecretively, rather than transparently, because secrets are what humans covet.

In this show at HOWL!, Samoa gives us his heart and soul.

DR: The work speaks out against the unjust history of our world—the unjust world we find ourselves in today. Whether it is pointing out the travesty of racism, the decimation of the Native American population, or the Cuban soldier who sold her soul to the revolution, to an ideal…all of the individuals are ICONS.

In 2017, Black Americans are not being lynched—they are being shot in the street by cops who are supposed to be serving and protecting, but are instead making poor decisions and killing a generation in the process.

KP: The most violence in 2017 was directed towards trans women of color; our contemporary hate crimes are so mean-spirited, clever, painful, and deadly.... It’s so unrecognized that there’s simply an absence of that statistic in our conversation...there is denial of it even happening. When I was in Denmark last summer, they kept saying that sexism and racism had been eradicated in their country, but, as you say, “young black kids are still being gunned down in the streets.”

So in the United States and most parts of this globe, the lynch mob is still out and Samoa gives us a reality check with his paintings. There’s such a separateness to all of us now, but if we blow our world to shreds by an atomic blunder, we’ll have no reservoir to drink from, no hotel to check in to, no gallery to visit Samoa’s work in. As Eugene Debs has said: “While there is a lower class, I am in it; and while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. […] I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth; I am a citizen of the world. […] The most heroic word in all languages is REVOLUTION.” I feel that Samoa is bringing us together with his work. We need that; I need that.

Samoa’s grandparents were from a generation that survived Hiroshima, and in his Immigrant Song series I feel that the breath of all that experience still lives.

He teaches us with his paintings—this is James Baldwin, this is chief Wolf Robe, and like the book by Wub-e-ke-niew, his work

says, “We have the right to exist.” Through his imagery, Samoa offers an indigenous thought process.

I’m not sure if I answered the question Dan, maybe I’ve answered a few. I don’t consider myself so much a curator of this show, but part of a group of friends who all love Samoa’s work. That’s my motive.

None of us would be here on the Lower East Side If we wanted riches and fame.

This neighborhood is a community that shares their cookies and hot dogs. I’m just a white girl from Los Angeles, and had I not held onto my anger like a waterskiing tether, I would have stayed in there, probably ending up in Kodak commercials or in San Diego. One of the things all of us helping to present Samoa’s show believe is that art can heal and change the world....

Like Samoa’s astute son Patrick said, “Dad, there’s room for all different sorts of artwork in this world and you shouldn’t be judgmental. If you don’t like something, it hurts the artist.” Meaning that despite stylistic and aesthetic differences, art isn’t just about decoration. To the eye, or intellectually, art may present different polemics, but there is room for all art.

There’s especially plenty of room for evolution through art. Samoa’s paintings scream with color; I will say it again, they’re a hand we need to be dealt.

The work touches on “love” being the answer. I remember back in the day when International Chrysis, a legendary beauty now deceased, would always serve up those words when Samoa and I were both

growing up doing performances on the LES. Those ethics at times have abandoned me to this day, I admit it. But that selfishness has never overtaken Samoa.

Graphically, Samoa has a classicism to his paintings, utilizing “the golden mean.” I always thought the golden was actually mean. Seeing Samoa’s use of these classic golden rays of light emanating from his subjects, I always marveled at how clever he was with his use of gold.

Somehow, even the choice of each color in his vocabulary is Samoa-esque with meaning to me. No pun intended…like a large bite taken out of the fine art cake.

Through his Immigrant Song painting series, Samoa heats up conversations we’ve been having for some time, informed by the clothing and objects he created for his historic store, Candy Coated Evil.

I can’t even begin to speak about the gravity of some of these paintings. Again, it’s a different flavor for Samoa.

DR: The Native American plight is still being forced to accept the decisions of corporations, money, and the white man over the protections of Mother Earth.

Pipelines that pump dirty fossil fuel across reservations are leaking massive amounts of destruction in their path…. James Baldwin represents the LGBTQ community as well as the Black American community.

The Cuban female revolutionary was an enforcer against domestic violence—she fought a battle to respond to the violence against women in domestic situations.

Ken Takakura, the film icon, was a 50s and 60s movie star in Japanese gangster movies, which predated the Spaghetti Western genre made popular by Italian filmmakers. Nina Simone, the female singer-songwriter, pianist, arranger, and activist in the civil rights movement…all of these people were outsiders who stood for something larger than themselves.

All of them speak to Samoa and his desire to help preserve our world.

KP: Samoa loves Nina Simone. You feel the love in his portraits and intense heroic studies…also in his earlier, lighthearted works. Samoa’s ambition is to be a passionate lover of the freedoms New York had to offer him as a young man, and now as a mid-career interdisciplinary artist. A combination of an idealist, a determinist, and an immigrant. I’ll make up a word for him now and call him a “pimmagrant.” A punk immigrant with an agenda the size of Nebraska.

With punk, there’s a desire to work towards originality. Truth. New art.

I encouraged Samoa to have this exhibit at HOWL! Happening because it is one of the few art spaces that waters their artists like vicious little flowers.

There is no hierarchy of mediums when it comes to performance, sculpture, props, or painting, and Jane Friedman makes sure of this.

Untitled, 2017

Oil on canvas / 72 x 120 x 1½ inches

Nina Simone, 2016

Oil on canvas / 30 x 24 x 1½ inches

Nina Simone, 2016

Oil on canvas / 30 x 24 x 1½ inches

By Anohni

I met Samoa when I first moved to the East Village around 1992. From my 20-year-old point of view, Samoa seemed like an old timer, having been here since the late 70s.

He told me stories about how when he first moved to NYC he wore miniskirts made of garbage bags, newspapers, and duct tape, and how he would get mugged about once a week, going back to his apartment from performance art gigs at the Pyramid. He never had anything much for them to steal.

Who was this Japanese heterosexual man in a garbage miniskirt, wandering through an abandoned American wasteland, graciously enduring continuous assaults from desperate petty criminals, and why did he choose this place as his home?

When I arrived he was most visibly playing guitar for The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, and he and Kembra were a special art couple, like the East Village’s John and Yoko, or the West Village’s Lou and Laurie. He supported Kembra with his maximal aesthetics and worked on his own projects, selling original clothing and increasingly, painting. He made a dress for me in 1996 for a hardcore character I was doing at the time, Jennifer Honkytits. The garment was a pink stretch satin one piece that crept up well past my panty line and was emblazoned with the words “I Hate You” on the front, with pink fake fur Christmas muffler cuffs and fishnet arms.

I always appreciated Samoa and loved to be near him. He was so kind and also a bit uncomfortable, with a great sense of humor, really devilishly funny. When I started

performing plays as the Johnsons in 1998, he appeared again with me, accompanying Amanda Lepore on guitar as she whimpered the Ronettes classic “So Young”. He had brilliant timing and was so knowledgeable, up for anything—and so generous—qualities that characterized the spirit of VHOKB and his partner Kembra as well. Kembra and Samoa were among the only ones who received young artists and subcultural performers in the city, without defensiveness or judgment. They didn’t operate on the cat-eat-cat scarcity model that characterized many of the attitudes in the NYC club scene. They were true mentors, the young caring for the younger, and they both welcomed me into a lineage of underground NYC that snaked back through the 80s and 70s to Jack Smith, The Theater of the Ridiculous, Ethyl Eichelberger, Klaus Nomi, and more. They made me feel like I was welcome, and that I belonged.

In 2012, I curated the Meltdown Festival in London. The theme was NYC underground and Future Feminism. Kembra did a film presentation one night, and Samoa introduced the evening. He recounted with great humility his years working with Kembra, and expressed his admiration for her courage as a female artist, challenging peers, the art world, and a sexist society with her provocative and radical works such as Wall of Vagina and Sewing Vagina Closed.

These feminist works prevented VHOKB from ever entering the main thoroughfare of Marilyn Manson-esque shock rock. That evening on stage, Samoa sadly recounted

his frustration with Kembra for having chosen feminist expression over greater commercial success, and he expressed with heart-rending honesty his sadness at not being better able to support Kembra in those moments in the 90s when they were facing that crossroads. He stated that night on stage his tremendous admiration for Kembra and gratitude for her courage and conviction. He kneeled before her dignity.

This combination of generosity, selflessness, and empowerment struck me. I started to call the handful of men like this that I knew in the world “Golden Men.� They were the men that the rest of us dreamed of knowing, and whom we wanted to be near.

Men who were not afraid to look at their struggle or their privilege, and who would admit when they were wrong. Golden Men make me feel like there is a way forward. The strength of their courage and commitment to honesty and ethics are beacons that light up a path through the world, for everyone around. Women hope they will give birth to a Golden Man—a blessing to family and community, and so beloved. Samoa is the original Golden Man of my life.

Dolly Parton, 2014 Oil on panel 14 x 11 inches

Lou Reed, 2014 Oil on panel 14 x 11 inches

Untitled, 2017

Oil on canvas / 72 x 120 x 1½ inches

Princess Diana, 2014

Oil and acrylic on canvas / 24 x 18 x 1½ inches

By Stephen Tashjian

When I was first dumped into the bowels of NYC as a youngster of 23, waaaaaay back in 1982, I found refuge in a little club on Avenue A called the Pyramid Cocktail Lounge, just a few blocks north of my apartment/studio. I was painting away and making my own costumes, busking on the streets of the big city. One of the many “queens” who befriended me was none other than SAMOA!! He had this incredible musical performance thing called Fredrick & Samoa. It was sort of a Devo-new-wave thing with a drag twist (as were most acts at the Pyramid at that time!). But strangely Samoa wasn’t gay!! That club had kooks of every kind!! Though he was DEFINITELY WEIRD!!! Back then the neighborhood consisted mostly of old Ukrainian ladies, Puerto Rican drug dealers, and artists from around the globe. Samoa (via JAPAN) would wander around in the most incredible outfits, patched together from the many (at the time) local thrift shops.

Psychedelic mishmash, gender fluid, sexy punk-rock explosion. A kindred spirit.

He immediately solved my money issues by sending me to the guys at the club to secure a go-go dancing gig (which I held for the next 20 years!!).

Samoa is also an incredible painter.

Painting today, in 2018, seems an odd choice for anyone to pursue, and many people think “anyone can paint.” Not so if you ask me. But I LOVE Samoa’s paintings. He is the exception to the rule.

His paintings are as kooky as he is. They are also exquisitely executed. This man

can paint! I’ve been a fan for decades of his talent for guitar playing and sexy/ bizarre costumes, but this recent work in 2D painting is right up there with anything he has done before. In my humble opinion, possibly surpassing it all. Samoa paints in a realistic figurative style. His subjects are usually pop culture icons (Dolly Parton, David Bowie, Andy Warhol) or political revolutionaries (Angela Davis, Nina Simone, James Baldwin, Bob Dylan, Cuban Freedom fighters, Native American chiefs) or Japanese film stars.

These paintings are HUGE! yet delicately crafted. Done in oil paint and then varnished, these babies take a long time to make! (and worth the wait!). Usually there is a main figure, and dotted all around are little perfectly-painted sections that could be anything from a mountain waterfall to a Mr. Monopoly man! These carry a subtle political message about anything from racism to the exploitation of our planet’s natural resources. Yet these messages don’t distract from the overall visual.

Samoa’s inspiration—it seems—is not Picasso, or Dali, or even Rembrandt, but the unlikely “let me teach you how to paint” TV GURU Bob Ross!!!! Yes, spotted about Samoa’s creations are “fluffy little clouds” and “tall green pine trees” direct from the brushes of Mr. Ross!

Samoa’s paintings are a thing to behold.

Big, Beautiful, and Bold!! And most importantly, FUN!!!

James Baldwin, 2017

Oil on canvas / 60 x 48 x 1½ inches

You people are human waste. Let me send you to death, 2015 Oil and acrylic on canvas / 30 x 24 x 1½ inches

Andy Warhol, 2014

Acrylic on canvas / 24 x 18 x 1½ inches

John and Yoko, 2011

Acrylic on canvas / 40 x 30 x 1½ inches

Cuban Revolutionary, 2017

Oil on canvas / 36 x 36 x 1½ inches

OPPOSITE:

Ken Takakura, 2017

Oil on canvas / 102 x 51 x 1½ inches

Citizen Four (Edward Snowden), 2015

Oil and acrylic on canvas / 30 x 24 x 1½ inches

Chief Wolf Robe, 2017

Oil on canvas / 72 x 60 x 1½ inches

Vic Morrow as Sgt.“Chip” Saunders, 2014 Oil on canvas / 20 x 16 x 1½ inches

The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, 2012 Oil on wood panel / 20 x 16 x 1½ inches

Michael Jackson, 2015

Oil on canvas / 30 x 24 x 1½ inches

Nonsense and Sensibility: Samoa’s Fine Art of Misunderstanding

By Carlo McCormick What does Candy Coated Evil taste like?

Is it good for you, addictive, adult, or good fun for all? It is yummy and satisfying, yet leaves you always wanting more; it is comfort on the edge of disquiet, absurdity without shame, familiar yet utterly alien. It is what is lost in translation and all that which is found in this loss: the new open-ended and impossible meanings constructed from our miscomprehension of our culture, the deification of our irreverence, and the highly internalized adoption of public spectacle as personal dreamscape. These are the fantasies we take as real and the reality we make of fantasy, the look of desire and the mesmeric spell of what might rather make us look away. It was a legendary store in a time of legends where clothes hung in a place where people hung out, and where the very pretense of commerce was its most uncommercial aspect. It’s also a very apt phrase to describe the art of Samoa, who has been beguiling us for some 35 years with an innocence that is profoundly cognizant of the perversity around it.

Hard-rocking stalwart axeman for the performance-core musical spectacle band The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, Samoa’s abiding sense of unembarrassed theatricality, self-taught ingenuity, mock fetish, and exaggerated excess has wandered across media and genre like a casual accumulation of extremes over the decades. Did we notice him first as a gogo boy dancing on the bar (it was quite a

sight) or when he took the stage covering Sex Pistols songs on a low-tech department store guitar and in an accent that made the lyrics as indecipherable as they were immediately recognizable? Samoa’s perpetual ad hoc relationship to creativity, his infectiously ebullient amateurism— as if taken wholly from the we-got-a-barnin-the-back-let’s-put-on-a-show-to-savethe-farm spirit of the old Mickey Rooney/ Judy Garland Andy Hardy movies—his thrift store in a blender aesthetic of adapting all manner of material as readymade artifact (what his long-term collaborator Kembra Pfahler has aptly termed “Availabism,” as in making art out of whatever is available), and his various tenures in professions ranging from high-end floral design to set direction for porn movies, before the industry left New York City for Southern California, all constitute the same attributes and strategies of his more recent studio practice as a painter.

Like many whose sense of adventure and possibility was germinated in the wake of punk’s improvisatory self-expression and flowered in the postmodern pastiche of the early East Village art scene, Samoa’s style is outré and organic, as much a matter of attitude as it is of sensibility. Be it his all-too-revealing habiliments, the elaborate and ornate fantasy of his fan-art paintings, his guitar thrashing madness with The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, or the manifestly sincere irony of the country-tinged folk outfit The

Lonely Samoans—which he undertook during a hiatus from his other band— Samoa strikes a multitude of potent contradictions as an artist, constructing self as a fluid and indefinite frame of community based on an otherness that is at once catharsis and caricature. A persistent stranger (he’s not even from Samoa as his name always insinuated, but from Hiroshima, Japan), his craft lies somewhere between DIY authenticity and high-camp impersonation, constantly wavering between the quotidian and the quirky, the foreign and the familiar. Naïve yet knowing, heartfelt yet utterly ludicrous, Samoa recovers the ordinary and returns it to the unimaginable, working within an iconography that belies the obvious with a startling subjectivity; he takes the tropes of pop and transforms them into the props of cultural misapprehension. Building an optical derangement and frisson from an art of incompatibility—whether he’s fusing zebra-skin lounge with metal mania flame jobs with stripper chic, Americana with the avant-garde—or dissembling the hero worship of celebrity icons through the mannerisms of folk, he transforms the common and recognizable into something disconcertingly off, repurposing the deification of our household gods (an unlikely pantheon including TV painter Bob Ross, Princess Diana, Warhol, hyperidealized revolutionaries, Dylan, Ono and Lennon, Bruce Lee, and Ronald McDonald) into a panoply of perversity, a domestic shrine to the falsity and failure of faith.

Ken Takakura, 2017 Pencil on paper 14 x 17 inches

Howl! Community Arturo Vega Foundation Lalo QuiĂąones Jane Friedman Donovan Welsh BG Hacker BOARD OF ADVISORS

Curt Hoppe Marc H. Miller Dan Cameron Carlo McCormick 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

Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project Founder and Executive Director: Jane Friedman Gallery Director: Ted Riederer Program Director: Carter Edwards Collection Manager: Corinne Gatesmith Marketing and Public Relations: Susan Martin Social Media and Development: Michelle Halabura Videographer: Yoon Gallery designed: Space ODT/Teddy Kofman Creative Consultant: Some Serious Business

SPECIAL THANKS Laure A. Leber Brad Taylor Steve Ellis Stefani Mars Jack Pierson Dave Sewelson Peter Cramer and Jack Waters Allied Productions Stephen Tashjian Howie Pyro Carlo McCormick Dave Manilow ♼ Hope, Zenichi and Patrick Moriki Production Team: Curator: Kembra Pfahler Technical Adviser: Daniel Roberts Studio, Administrative: Barry Frier Video Transfer: John Rauchenberger Administrative: Stephanie Hwang Dizzy Video: Milah Libin Brad Taylor

SAMOA CANDY COATED EVIL Presented by Kembra Pfahler January 10–Feb. 11, 2018 Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project © 2018 Howl Arts, Inc. Howl! Archive Publishing Editions (Howl! A/P/E) Volume 1, No. 21 ISBN: 978-0-9975565-9-9 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. © 2018 Scott Ewalt © 2018 Kembra Pfahler and Daniel Roberts © 2018 Stephen Tashjian © 2018 Carlo McCormick © 2018 Jack Pierson © 2018 Gyda Gash © 2018 Howie Pyro © 2018 Hope Moriki All photos by Laure A. Leber, except by page: 13, Elizabeth Bouiss; 18, Ned Ambler; 26, Katrina Del Mar; 29, Leigh Soderberg; 37, Tora Inoue Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project 6 East 1st St. NY, NY 10003 www.HowlArts.org 917 475 1294 Editor: Ted Riederer Copy Editor: Jorge Clar Design: Jeff Streeper for Modern IDENTITY

The Arturo Vega Project: Jane Friedman

—PRAISE FOR SAMOA— “I know Samoa, you know Samoa, we all know Samoa as a Rock God on stage, in flames, with The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. There were no ashes and yet still he rises phoenix-like, paintbrush in hand, casting a spell and teaching us reverence for the other Gods of Rock we come to know better through his work. He is a history painter moving deftly from one icon to another with skill and alacrity. His spirit and presence in these paintings make me feel more alive.

What more can one hope for from work of Art?” —JACK PIERSON

“With his artistic genius, it’s no surprise that his paintings are staggeringly brilliant.”

—GYDA GASH

“Like the true artist, Samoa just needs to create.

We now luckily have a chance to step into his circle, always with a hand out to help you in as an equal.”

—HOWIE PYRO

“Samoa has never had a plan beyond what he felt he needed to do and where his interest was being pulled.

He did not agonize over developing a style or compare, judge, or question his direction. He simply set out on a journey and became a channel for the experience, as his paintings do as well. In this case, for Candy Coated Evil.”

—HOPE MORIKI

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

HOWL! ARTS INC. ARCHIVE / PUBLISHING / EDITIONS 6 EAST 1ST STREET, NYC 10003