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Ron English Interview
by Zephyr
Reprinted by permission from the Spring 1998 issue of JUXAPOZ magazine
Ron English has made quite a reputation for himself as an artist who doesn't play by the rules of polite society. He's been called the Robinhood of Madison Avenue for his seminal work in billboard subvertising and is widely considered, along with San Francisco's legendary Billboard Liberation Front, to be a founding member of the Culture Jamming movement. A new CD ROM chronicles fifteen years of balls, energy and imagination courtesy of a unique artist and social commentator who drives his points home with offbeat wit and amazing technique. Also recently released is the CD "POPaganda", a rock opera of Ron's artistic sojourn to hell and back. I recently spoke with Mr. English at his Manhattan studio.
Z: Hey, Ron. So how old are you?
RE: I'm 35. How old are you?
Z: 35.
RE: Really? I guess around the same time you were doing subways I was painting billboards in Texas.
Z: How long have you been in New York?
RE: Ten years.
Z: You're from Texas originally?
RE: I'm from the midwest, but I moved to Texas after high school. I'd heard it was naturally surreal.
Z: You did a lot of billboard assaults back in Texas?
RE: Yeah. Texas is littered with billboards, so it was a pretty logical thing to do. Millions of billboards in your face, very few galleries, very little interest in art. I actually had no idea how to break into art as a career, not that I calculated billboards as a way to do that, but I just thought I wanted tons of people to see my work, even anonymously. I admit it was kind of an ego thing. I started doing the billboards and other painters saw me and wanted to do them too, so we started doing strips of them in Dallas, Houston, Austin, and then after we were done we'd have big keg parties nearby. It became a regular thing from '80 till around '84.
Z: How'd you get the idea to paint billboards?
RE. I thought of staging a play on the scaffold. I just remember looking at a billboard and wondering how I could possibly use that much space. First I thought of it as a huge canvas. Only later did I pay attention to the advertisement subversion aspect of it. My early billboards were more like paintings. There was a lot of social commentary in them, but they weren't specifically commenting on the advertising medium. That evolved gradually for me.
Z. Were you in school at the time?
RE: I was at North Texas State studying Photography. I also worked in a photo studio in Dallas, Messina Studios. My boss, John Messina, loved the idea I was doing these billboards and provided me with seamless backdrop paper, paint, and let me work on them after hours at his studio.
Z: So you were a photographer?
RE: I was studying art photography. I created these photorealistic drawings of people that I placed in situations and photographed. The drawings were done in sections with distortions that were corrected by the flattening effect of photography. So a person could be standing in the foreground reaching his hand around a person 30 feet behind. I shot the photos in seedy topless bars or wino camps or any social situation off the beaten path.
Z: When did you start painting on canvas?
RE. Not until I moved to New York. Before that all my art was in environments, on billboards, my photographic stagings. I painted photorealistic shadows on walls, I painted on cows, chickens, dogs. My house was painted top to bottom with sideshow imagery. I had old cars flipped upside down in my yard that we painted on. I had a mud wrestling pit in my front yard complete with a painted pet pig. I painted dinosaur skeletons on rock formations. I body painted people, but I guess painting on canvas hadn't occurred to me.
Z: You painted the Berlin Wall too, I remember seeing a photo.
RE: I was having a show of my photography in Amsterdam so I decided to make a pilgrimage to the wall to do a mural. I wanted to create the longest one.
Z: Was it the longest mural?
RE: At that moment yes. Ever? I don't know. I did have the dubious distinction of being detained in East Germany. I was there for two weeks painting the mural, and the guards would sneak up behind me and try to grab me. A few escaped East German kids were camped out there-- this was at Check Point Charlie-- and they watched my back. How I screwed up is I tried to visit East Germany with a friend when I was finished painting and they caught me with some West German articles about my mural. I felt like a complete idiot.
Z: What happened?
RE: They detained us in a room for a few hours and had various officials interrogate us. Finally they kicked us out of their country. We were happy to leave, believe me.
Z: You were also busted doing billboards, right?
RE: Eight of us snagged second degree felonies in Dallas in 1984. I know with graffiti artists it's a point of honor to never get caught, but with me it was inevitable. I think I wanted to get caught because it would prove I fully understood the consequences. If I continued after that I would truly be legitimate.
Z: And you did continue on.
RE: Within hours of being released from jail in Dallas I was in Austin painting over a Stuckeys billboard. You have to get back on the horse. I think that's the first true advertising subversion I did, too. The sign read "2 eggs, toast, $1.99." I wrote "tits" over the toast and painted a lovely buxom woman reclining on the breakfast plate.
Z: You probably know Rosenquest was a billboard painter who took his style to his paintings.
RE: I definitely learned to paint by doing the billboards. After years of painting things at that scale, canvasses were a piece of cake.
Z: Is it fair to say you concentrate more of your energies on canvasses at this point?
RE: I still paint a lot of billboards but nowhere the volume I once did. Most of my energies are focused on my canvasses. It's idea-based art. I have an idea and the painting is the vehicle to express it. I may at times try to be more painterly or use other techniques, but it's all about expressing that idea.
Z: Do you consider yourself a pop artist?
RE: Not in the strict sense of the term. I don't take a bland enough look at the surface of pop culture. The pop guys only commented on it in the sense that it existed-- there it is. But I'm passionately engaged in pop culture, I have opinions about it, I bring the subconscious into play with it. My work is more about social commentary. It just has the look of pop because I'm using pop iconography as a sort of visual vocabulary with which to comment on my life and times. And in this way I feel more akin to the social realists or even the surrealists. It's like this: Art is polite society, and there's two things you don't mention in polite society-- politics and religion. My work is filled with both, and that may make it unpalatable to polite society, but at least it's never boring. It's Popaganda!
Z: What's the story with "POPaganda"?
RE: It's a CD ROM and a separately released soundtrack to the CD ROM. The CD ROM lets you check out my illegal billboards, paintings, photographs, video clips of my wife and I crashing talk shows with phony problems, tons of wild stuff. The CD is a sort of rock opera featuring Tripping Daisy, Wesley Willis, Daniel Johnston, The Sutcliffes and a bunch of other bands. It's truly phenomenal.
Z: Are you upset by labels?
RE: I like labels. Used correctly, they're a good thing. They serve a purpose by instantly narrowing things down so you can zero in on something. But used incorrectly they can replace authentic critical thought.
Z: So how would you describe yourself as an artist? I think of you as a great painter and a great self promoter as well.
RE: Some people think it's crass to be a self promoter. But I say either you're doing it or someone else is doing it for you or to you, and doing it yourself lets you control it to some extent. If you're a musician, then the record company is in charge of helping create and disseminate your image. So you're technically not a self promoter, you're not crass. But let someone take things into their own hands and it makes people uncomfortable. I've had over 60 bands record songs about me. People think that's crass, but when a band asks me to shoot their press photos, paint them for their CD cover, shoot a video of them, then there's nothing crass with that. Yes, I have an ego, yes, I think I'm good, and maybe we should be worrying about people who don't.
Z: You've created a lot of paintings that are take-offs on famous paintings. What does this work mean to you?
RE: I call that series Revisionist Modernism. The '90s have generated a lot of revisionist interpretations of history, and these paintings are responding to that. It's also about living inside a manmade visual environment. The work is akin to a ritualistic personalization of my surroundings. That includes the common visual environment like corporate logos, famous works of art, ads, you know, the common visual vocabulary. Once you experience my version, you'll never see the original quite the same. Do you know what I'm trying to say?
Z: Like when I'm in the soup isle at the grocery I catch myself pondering Andy Warhol.
RE: Exactly.
Z: How's the art world of the '90s treating you?
RE: Oddly, when the artmarket crashed, suddenly I had a career. I think the '90s are finally emerging from the shadow of the '80s, and it's less about making it and having lots of money to spend and more about surviving and establishing your dignity and social stature as an artist. But both decades have produced some amazing art.
Z: What do you think of the gift marketing practices of some of the '80s legends like Haring?
RE: I notice some people get very upset when an artist produces knick knacks for the general public, like it somehow demeans his paintings or the seriousness of his art, but that sort of thinking is so one dimensional, so elitist. Keith broadened the spectrum of what an artist can do. I think he was a very healthy thing for the artworld and the real world.
Z: What artists do you admire?
RE: I like artists that really seem like they're being themselves, unfettered by market forces, criticism, artists like Peter Saul for instance. You can tell he just wants to make great paintings. And he does. There are a lot of great artists up and running at this point in history. Maybe more than at any single point in history. Loads of garbage too. That's why the good lord created editors and curators.
Z: What do you feel about Warhol?
RE: Warhol ended the notion of the great suffering artist and replaced it with the notion of the great irreverent, partying, social climbing artist. You know, the artist studio as social club, art as the perfect background for a great party. The artist as producer of films, the artist as producer of bands, the artist moving in the same social/economic sphere as his collectors. And he was from modest means. A great American story or what!
Z: How do you want to be judged?
RE: By the quality of my collectors. I'm very proud of the people that have bought my art, those whom I've met. They're impressive people, and if my work connects with them in some way, then I guess I'm doing something right.
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