Lowbrow's Low Roots

In the beginning...

This is the first chapter of my book Lords of Lowbrow. Its an attempt to explain my conversion to the cause and give a bit of background information on how Lowbrow Art came to be. I know all this having been there but maybe you don’t, so I request comments regarding its clarity of purpose. I’ve labored mightily over this chapter but need your input. Feel free to contact me at: ausganger@earthlink.net if you really need to get down. Thanks in advance…

I left Hollywood and drove to Sunset Beach, where the waves are good and California surrenders to the Pacific Ocean. The painting on my easel wasn’t happening, so I’d given up too and just wanted to watch someone else have a good time for a while. But my timing was off like everything else that day and the tide was out, even the surfers had hung it up. I went in anyway, shivering in the water that should have been warm before going back onshore to use a beat up portable toilet. Thinking about my painting and, quite literally, not paying attention to the business at hand, I realized too late there was no paper left. In its place some bored surfer had left a sacrificial issue of the underground comic book Zap Comix #6. All the pages had been torn out up to a black and white spread titled Beamin’ Gleamer as Flash in the Pan by Robert “Hieronymus Bob” Williams. The insanely complex pen and ink cartoon was vaguely familiar, and I closely examined the drawing before defiling it.

In 1982, I was a fairly new arrival to Los Angeles, and had never heard of Robert Williams, which wasn’t surprising as he was the best kept secret in the Los Angeles underground art scene. Williams had worked hard to earn his reputation, making stunningly lurid paintings that were later shown at venues where the audience was drunk and/or high on drugs. All art dealers know that being under the influence greatly increases people’s enthusiasm, so Williams had great success selling his paintings at afterhours clubs and alternative galleries. The aesthetic rewards from his work were also great for those who were just there to gawk. In the early 1980s, Williams’ anticulture vibe was heavily influenced by Punk Rock, so his arresting representational style was perfectly suited to the new zeitgeist. Williams’ art shows were major events, attracting different groups of people that had never really mixed it up together. Burlesque strippers, drag queens, tattoo artists, hot rod gearheads, porn freaks, basically aficionados of any subculture disfavored by the mainstream would gather to celebrate Williams’ promotion of the berserk.

A few weeks after my scatological introduction to Williams, the LA Weekly listed an opening reception for a show of his work at the ZOMO gallery in Silver Lake, run by the artpunk Tequila Mockingbird and “3D King of Hollywood,” Ray Zone. Curious to see more of Williams’ art, I went to the opening and bought a print of Beamin’ Gleamer. Nattering nervously while Williams signed it, I spontaneously confessed to having discovered his art while taking a shit. Rather than taking offense, he seemed flattered. This mystified me until I studied up the rest of the show and realized no topic was too offensive for his consideration. ZOMO was crammed with images of monsters, femme fatales, drug consumption, death by misadventure, automotive disasters; in fact, every subject I had been told to avoid in art school. I was further impressed by Williams’ skillful rendering, particularly when it came to hot rods. I was trying to incorporate similar content in my own paintings and his work provided me with an unexpected blueprint. Somehow, however, the deeper I got, the more familiar it became.

As a typical young American male in the 1960s, I had been indoctrinated with hot rods and the attendant grotesquerie of monsters, blown engines, and to my mother’s horror, sexy drag strip chicks like Linda Vaughn. Trading cards were also a big deal, and I collected Odd Rods, a series of stickers featuring monsters bursting through the roofs of hot rods. The illustrations by B. K. Taylor were unlike anything I’d seen before, and I was soon drawing my own. Hot rods’ cultural resonance included model kits of the most popular custom cars, and I spent hours building my favorites at the kitchen table until they all got blown up with firecrackers one Fourth of July. I wasn’t aware of him at the time, but Williams played a big part in all this, designing tee shirts and magazine ads for Ed Roth, the custom car designer.

Roth had created custom car showstoppers like the Beatnik Bandit and the Surfite which, to their lumpen appreciators, were every bit as meaningful as say, Rodin’s Burghers of Calais was to Fine Art museum goers. Roth had also created Rat Fink, a hot rod golem resembling a cross between Mickey Mouse on a bad hair day and a rodent that ate old oil filters, a sort of Rattus gearheadus. As a kid, I had proudly owned a shoe box filled with the small plastic charms and when I told Williams at the ZOMO opening, he enthusiastically recommended I go to an upcoming event called the Rat Fink Reunion. Apparently, Roth, alumni from his shop in Maywood, and select guests got together once a year to hang out, pinstripe, and make “kustom” art for charitable causes. These were intimate gatherings in small shops or garages and the one Williams told me about was at Kim Dedic’s sign shop in Fullerton.

When I arrived, Jimmy Cleveland and Von Franco were pinstriping toilet seats and trashcans that would be auctioned off at the end of the evening. I’d pinstriped before with line brushes and wanted to join in, mentioning that to Robert Williams’ wife, Suzanne. She replied, with her best no-bullshit delivery, that if I didn’t use a dagger brush, I wasn’t pinstriping. Dagger brushes have long bristles but very short handles and using them properly was an acquired skill I lacked. Someone had left theirs out, so I tried anyway, making a big mess until Roth himself came over and showed me how to do it. Without a doubt I failed again, but Roth said it was good then wiped off my muddle with his rag of thinner.

In later years, the Rat Fink Reunions moved to Moon Equipment in Santa Fe Springs and became much larger public events. The streets outside the shop were now parked up with custom rides, hot rods, and immaculate classic cars, which made for some great fellow travelers on the 5 Fwy as I drove down from Hollywood in my 1968 Mercury Cougar. Although at least one of his custom cars was usually on display, Roth drove from Utah in a nondescript rice burner. When I asked about that, he said the car didn’t matter to him as long as he could sleep in it. I figured Roth was probably used to spending the night in his car anyway because he once pissed off a gang of bikers and couldn’t go home.

At the time of the Rat Fink Reunions, Roth’s wild years were over and his conversion to Mormonism made him dedicated to supporting charities through these kustom art auctions. Like some Iron Age pageant, the events were filled with gearhead weirdos, neo-beatniks, hot rod artists, and, most importantly, mechanics who worked on old cars. Still, the gatherings were all-day events and could get tedious. When I remarked that the smell of spilled gas and sound of an under-rehearsed Rockabilly band were getting tiresome, the weekend warrior Greg Escalante said he was having a great time, and I should try a municipal bond salesman’s convention for boredom. Robert and Suzanne Williams were big attractions at the Rat Fink Reunions where they held court and sold prints of Robert’s hot rod paintings at their merch table. Entertaining and informative, the Williamses had plenty of stories to tell, some of which involved other kustom automotive OGs who had been hard at work while I was playing with Hot Wheels on the living room floor.

Kenny Howard, AKA Von Dutch, was a mythic figure in hot rodding and the originator of automotive pinstriping. Nicknamed “The DaVinci of the Garage,” Von Dutch was able to fix anything mechanical and built functioning guns without the use of a micrometer. His personal trademark was der Flieger Augen, or Flying Eyeball, which over the years became a global icon of hot rod culture. In his prime, Von Dutch worked with celebrities like Steve McQueen and Marilyn Monroe, even creating his own pearlescent color called Candy-Apple Red for her car. Von Dutch and Roth were kustom cousins since both pinstriped and customized cars, but their individual methods yielded distinctly different results. One popular criticism of Roth was that his gleaming customs were “all show and no go,” said to run on humanpower, not horsepower, as they often had to be pushed into place. The opposite was true for Von Dutch, evidenced by his kustom “KenFord” truck, which featured flawless engineering and a hole in the cab’s floorboards to dispose of empty beer cans while driving. Roth loved to work the crowd, playing up his persona by sporting coattails and a top hat to car shows. Von Dutch was far less flamboyant, wearing work shirts to his car show pinstriping demos. Either way, what mattered was that custom hot rods looked and performed better than their mass-produced relatives on the street. To this end, both designers’ creations exuded threat and sexiness, Roth had even designed a car model kit in 1963 named Mother’s Worry. But in the 1980s, I needed additional vulgarities to enhance my paintings and discovered them in the Left Coast underground comics of the 1960s and ‘70s.

These publications were a reaction by cartoonists and their turned-on readership against stringent codes that governed content. Debuting in 1968, Zap Comix No. 1 was originally conceived as a showcase for the artist Robert Crumb, who’s drawings perfectly caught the hippy movement’s élan vital. In addition to his legit album cover art for bands like Big Brother and the Holding Company, Crumb’s epic Keep on Truckin’ and Stoned Again cartoon drawings were available as bootleg posters across the country. Other artists were quick to pick up on Crumb’s style, like Bill Narum’s “Runaway Radio” logo for the Houston FM radio station KLOL. Subsequent issues of Zap Comix included work by other artists including Robert Williams and S. Clay Wilson. This group of artists drew the most offensive material published in comic book form up to that point and Wilson’s Checkered Demon character was so appalling even Robert Williams, no slouch himself when it came to vileness, was dutifully impressed. The disturbing imagery made availability of such magazines difficult and in 1970, Ron Turner started the company Last Gasp, which became the premier worldwide distributor of underground comics and related alternative art. Rip Off Press was one of Last Gasp’s accounts and in 1979 published The Lowbrow Art of Robert Williams, the first instance of the patrician word “art” being applied to work consciously involving unsophisticated aesthetics. With its literate text and glossy full color reproductions, Williams’ book was a manifesto for artists like me who felt disenfranchised by the mainstream art world and wanted to create their own scene. And so, after getting Williams’ book and hanging Beamin’ Gleamer on my apartment wall, I decided to become a working artist in this strange cultural amalgam and make the most of it.