Interview

The ironic thing about Saturday's The Art of Rebellion group show at la.venue in Chelsea is that, in practice, it's hard to make capital-A art and capital-R rebellion work together. (Especially when the whole affair is corporate-sponsored. Harley-Davidson, to be fair, is not exactly Coca-Cola, but still: not so rebellious!) The result, in this case at least, is a bunch of lowbrow artists milling about in nice clothes, chatting politely while a DJ plays remixes of The Doors at a perfectly respectable decibel level. (PHOTO CREDIT: BRENDON BOUZARD)

This was the second iteration of The Art of the Rebellion (the first was in Santa Monica in February, which showed Shepard Fairey's work the same day he was arrested), featuring ten artists best known for designing rock posters, each of whom painted a gas tank to benefit CUE Art Foundation. The interpretations of the theme ranged from the fairly predictable (Brian Ewing showed a beautifully detailed skull-and-hummingbird theme) to the rather impractical (artist Art Chantry blew holes in his tank and shone a red light inside, creating a cool jack-o-lantern effect that also rendered the tank totally unusable). At the preview Friday, we spoke to three of the artists.

Frank Kozik has silk-screened posters for Nirvana, Pearl Jam, the Beastie Boys, and many more. Since 2000, he has worked primarily in designing concept toys, including the popular Smorkin' Labbit character. His Harley tank replaced the face of Che Guevara, seen on dorm room walls everywhere, with a skull.

ALEXANDRIA SYMONDS: Where did you get the inspiration to turn Che into a corpse?

KOZIK: I think it's a little ironic that for Generation Z, or whatever the fuck, Che's a big hero. But Che was a fucking asshole.

SYMONDS: He was an asshole.

KOZIK: And a murderer, and a scumbag. I'm a big fan of history. I like how all these rich hipster kids worship Che, when all he would really want to do is either shoot them or put them to work in the cane fields. But it's all "Che Vive," so I have my little "Che No Vive" thing going on. It also looks cool.

SYMONDS: It does!

KOZIK: So there you go.

SYMONDS: How do you see the relationship between music and art - the two working together?

KOZIK: For me, the two things were the same, because I was never trying to be an artist. I hung out in a really good music scene back in the punk-rock days, and part of it was, you know, you wanted to be more than just a spectator–you wanted to be a participant. That was kind of the whole point. All my friends had these bands–some of them got really famous - and I couldn't play or sing, but I could do their posters.

SYMONDS: What do you think about the music scene today?

KOZIK: I don't know anything about it. I took a walk like 10 years ago. I did it for 20 years, and then I was like, it's over for me. I design toys. It's way more fun.

SYMONDS: I love the Smorkin' Labbit. What are you working on now?

KOZIK: I do about fifty or sixty different releases a year, so I do lots and lots of toys for everybody. And I have my own company where I do higher-end fine-art toys. And I do a lot of bronzes now, furniture.

SYMONDS: How did you get into toys?

KOZIK: the late ‘90s, I was going to Japan a lot, doing commercial artwork, and I was working with all these fashion brands, who started making little mascots for their fashion brands–and the little mascots were way cooler than the clothes! And people started collecting the mascots, including me, and I was like, "I want to do this!" So I did some in Japan, then I came back here, and nobody really cared for a while. But then finally when it started to become popular, I was ready. I'd already done it in Japan, I already had designs. So when Kidrobot and those guys started up, they called me, and I was like "Here's a hundred designs." I was ready. And now I do really well in that field.

SYMONDS: In the spirit of Harley-Davidson, what would your ideal vehicle be?

KOZIK: Oh, I have one. I have a 1969 RT Charger four-speed.


John Van Hamersveld is responsible for many of the music industry's most iconic images, from the cover of The Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street to an image of Jimi Hendrix done in the style of a classical-composer portrait.

ALEXANDRIA SYMONDS: You have a very distinctive touch with color.

VAN HAMERSVELD: Well, I studied color, and I understand it very well. In teaching color, you teach people how to look something and see the tone in it and break it down to be able to paint it and reproduce that color. But then, I'm psychedelic, so I look at color differently. I like colors that are in contrast with one another, so that they flicker back and forth.

SYMONDS: The Hendrix-in-Beethoven-mode is so brilliant–where did that come from?

VAN HAMERSVELD: At that age–I was about twenty-five when Hendrix was in the press, and I was buying the albums and all that, playing it in the studio–I looked at him as a brilliant, amazing person. So I electrified his hair.

SYMONDS: How do you think the artistic branding of musicians has changed since the ‘70s?

VAN HAMERSVELD: Actually, I have a book coming out next year that delves into that, which is from 1950 to 1975: beat culture, surf culture, and psychedelic culture. Then, you had people priming things, and being a part of things; and it was more political, the way it was put together. Now, it's arranged in a room. It's taking fragments out of the context which represents them. Take John Lydon and Kurt Cobain–there's 30 years between the two, but both of them are successful at the same time, because they're a fragment that a corporation looked at and was able to market.

SYMONDS: To be an artist who's also intimately involved with music–how did that happen for you?

VAN HAMERSVELD: Because I went to Chouinard, which then became CalArts, I became a multi-discipline artist–it wasn't just about painting, it was about media and performance. So the Pinnacle poster that you've seen, the Hendrix poster, was really about a group of people that came together and did happenings from weekend to weekend. So it was more about the politics of art and entertainment: that became what I represented in that day and age.

SYMONDS: What do you feel like you represent today?

VAN HAMERSVELD: Today, I'm trying to be an individual. I'm working on my own work, my own publishing company.

SYMONDS: That must be very satisfying, not to be alienated from your own labor–not to get too Marxist about it.

VAN HAMERSVELD: I was at Disney one day, to do a movie poster, and they said "We'll pay you $80,000 to do the poster."

SYMONDS: What movie was it?

VAN HAMERSVELD: Oh, it was something stupid. The Shaggy Dog. And I said, "My God, that's a lot of money, that sounds fantastic, and I'll think about that, we'll go to lunch." So we do all that, and I come back, and they say, "You have to sign a contract which deems that you can't tell anybody you did the job, and you can't have your signature on it. But we are giving you $80,000." But the problem is that maybe that unique thing I do for them, for The Shaggy Dog, maybe that becomes a whole style that they can make an animated movie out of, and I have no control. I've lost my rights.


Tara Mcpherson is a Brooklyn-based artist who has created posters for some of your favorite artists: The Strokes, Interpol, Air, Sleater-Kinney, Bright Eyes, Melvins, and many, many, many more.

SYMONDS: How do you match an artist to a palette, when you're setting out to create a poster?

MCPHERSON: I guess it more depends on the illustration. Sometimes I'll have a specific color palette in mind, and it goes really fast, and then sometimes it takes a lot of experimentation. And then I can't decide on a version, so sometimes I'll do alternate colors for a small edition.

SYMONDS: How did you get involved in poster art?

MCPHERSON: I always collected rock posters, but never realized that I could do them myself, and then when I graduated school I focused on painting. And I've always played bass, since I was 15, and I finally had time to start a band, and I was a recent art-school graduate, so they were like, "You make the flyers!" So that was totally allotted to me.

SYMONDS: What was your band?

MCPHERSON: That first band was called The New Detectives. It was an all-girl post-punk band. It was a lot of fun. I made our posters, and then I started doing them for a couple friends, and then I thought, "Hey, this is really fun, I could actually make a living doing this!" It just grew from there, and I started getting better and better bands as I got better at doing it.

SYMONDS: Do you mostly work for bands you listen to yourself?

MCPHERSON: Yeah.

SYMONDS: Who have you been listening to lately?

MCPHERSON: A lot of metal, lately. My more recent posters have been, like, Mastodon and Torche. But it's an eclectic mixture of music.

SYMONDS: How long have you lived in Brooklyn?

MCPHERSON: About four and a half years.

SYMONDS: How have you seen the culture of music and art in Brooklyn change in that time?

MCPHERSON: It's stayed pretty consistent. That's what I love about the neighborhood: it's full of artists and musicians. It was already a good community when I moved in, in Williamsburg, and it's maintained that and it's gotten even more art-oriented. That's one of the things I really love about Williamsburg.

SYMONDS: How long do you think it can stay that way?

MCPHERSON: We'll see. It is changing, and it's getting really gentrified, and also, a lot of the artists are having to move to Bushwick. It can't be that way forever: look at Soho now. But we don't have any Starbucks yet, so...