Robert Williams' Car-Crashes on Canvas
Supervert's defense of the outrageous, violent, supposedly sexist paintings of Zap Comix legend and underground artist Robert Williams. Originally published in Artforum Magazine (November 1993). (Incidentally, the awful title of the piece was invented by an Artforum editor.)
"Something dead in the street commands more measured units of visual investigation than 100 Mona Lisas!" Robert Williams wrote in his "Rubberneck Manifesto" of 1989. How true! No gridlock in the Louvre ever matches the "rubbernecking delays" caused by a good car wreck. But isn't this a deadly realization for a painter? Most artists would be more than happy just to reach the acme of a Mona Lisa once in their lifetime, but Williams appears to have set himself no less a goal in his art than surpassing the effect of a hundred Giacondas. It doesn't sound humanly possible. Can you still rattle the bars of an old medium like easel painting enough to shake people up?
In fact, Williams has been a real mover and shaker. After a youth spent fraternizing with beatniks and street gangs, Williams went to art school in the mid-60s in California. Rebelling against its rigid Abstract Expressionist pedagogy, he turned to Los Angeles' underground culture, designing tattoos and customizing cars for Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, one of the motor mavens of the hot rod scene. In 1967, Williams joined with cartoonists such as R. Crumb and S. Clay Wilson to put out Zap Comix, the first underground comic. Zap would become infamous for its sharp graphics, excessive sex and violence, and "fuck the establishment" attitude, though for Williams its no-holds-barred creative freedom was also an expression of social dissent as important as his having dodged the Vietnam draft. As if to prove the point, the publisher and various distributors of Zap were harassed by the FBI, and the artist began to receive hate mail from rightwing types.
In recent years, however, the hate mail has begun to pour in from the opposing camp: leftwing "politically correct" types who see Williams' art as violent, sexist, homophobic, etc. In other words, though Williams may not have yet attained the power and allure of a good crackup, he must be doing something right. What's the modus operandi that pisses people off? In any given painting, Williams combines brash, lurid colors with half a dozen different painting styles. He avows that his influences range from Bosch and Delacroix to girly magazines, carnival midway art, and, of course, comix. And while the form of Williams' vision is thus tantamount to a slap in the face, its substance is like a finger down the throat. Williams adores the extreme. Human beings are mortal? Williams depicts them with their heads blowing up. Men desire women? Williams depicts women as buxom babes and men as horny goons. Artists need subjects? Williams depicts the artiste as a slobbering subhuman scraping a pancake of a dead raccoon off the road.
Williams' m.o. is apparent in a recent work titled THE CARTOON DISEASE. Like many of his paintings, it has two subsidiary titles: its SCHOLASTIC DESIGNATION: SATISFACTORY MENTAL HEALTH IS PREDICATED ON THE SELF-DENIAL STANDARD THAT, ABSTRACTION IS ANOMALY AND WHAT A MONKEY SEES IS WHAT A MONKEY WILL DO, HENCE THE LIBERTIES EXPRESSED IN CARTOONS EXPOSE THE SUPPLE MINDS OF CHILDREN TO THE 'CURSE OF THE THREE-FINGERED GLOVE' and its REMEDIAL TITLE: PANTYHOSE & SHORTS NIBBLIN' PULP-PAPER GOONS AREN'T FOR JUNIOR AND SIS. Williams distributes key moments of narrative across the surface of the painting: in an inset image, a boy is scolded by his father for reading a comic; in the central image, thug-like police rush onto the scene as the boy's head explodes, leaving "MR. BUGEYES GOES TO THE FAIR" unread. Splattered across the canvas, the boy's brain is maltreated by a host of evil comic characters: one tempts it to drink, another to drug, one shits on it, and Coochy Cooty (Williams' signature character) pisses on it. These vicious little characters illustrate the fear that comic books have a deleterious effect on the minds of youth. (In the McCarthyite 50s, this fear led to public burnings of comic books and the establishment of a "voluntary" ethical code; in turn, this censure helped to provoke the rise of the comix underground.) While the ethical arguments underlying this fear are complex, by lampooning it Williams argues against censorship and makes a sort of humanitarian assertion as well: people are not mindless automatons in a "monkey see, monkey do" world.
In spite of the intelligent commentaries that often lurk beneath the apocalyptic surfaces of Williams' paintings — he has one of those polymathic minds that can offer penetrating insights about everything from contemporary art to WWI history — would-be censors have dogged his every career move. In recent times, moral censure has especially hounded the artist. The controversial artwork by Williams that Guns N' Roses put on the cover of their first LP Appetite for Destruction caused the album to be banned from record stores and picketed by feminist groups. During the 1991 "Helter Skelter" show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A., Williams was singled out by members of Queer Nation and an anonymous group calling themselves PIGs (Politically Involved Girlfriends) in their protest against what they argued to be the show's overly SWM orientation.
On the other hand, Williams has had to face a sort of aesthetic censure that condemns his work as merely "illustrative." While artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein had success in the 60s"appropriating" the comic idiom, the door to art's upper echelons was closed to actual practitioners of the genre. More recently, even an Art in America review of Williams' sold-out 1992 New York show called his work "authentic kitsch." Although Williams has all but ceased to do any commercial work since about 1970, it's true the stigma of being a commercial artist can be hard to shake if you want to cross over into the "high" art world. It's like being a porn star who wants legit acting roles. But now Traci Lords is making the transition from teenage skin queen to "straight" actress, and in the world of comix Art Spiegelman has "arrived" or emerged from the underground. So is it Robert Williams' turn? Is his work Art? Williams himself likes to say, "If it commands attention it's culture, if it matches the couch it's art." Unless you happen to have a blood-spattered couch riddled with whoopie cushions, stained with Mexican food, and covered with buxom babes, then Williams' paintings are definitely not art.
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