FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.


Conversations with Kostabi
Mark Kostabi
Journey Editions, 210 pp.

Art isn't dead, but it has left the canvas. Picasso and Duchamp kicked it's highfalutin buttocks into orbit the better part of a century ago. A host of artists like Lichtenstein and Warhol have hackey sacked it since. First came Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d' Avinion." The first painting of the 20th century was so dubbed for it's breakage of classical rules. Eyes and ears appeared on the same side of heads, proportion shmerportion, and oh! those funny colors. Duchamp signed a urinal R. Mutt and it screamed "anything is art!" The two thusly washed away the sins of art to come. With anything being art and there being no set rules, so did our century in art really begin.

If art isn't on the canvas then where is it? Art history's new ground is being covered on a less tangible level. Kostabi finds it in the art world's new rules (remember no rules?) post R. Mutt. He's custom fit his persona to take advantage and yes, it or he has become the art. Hired hands do most of the actual painting in his factory studio Kostabiland, where hangs the words "A fasterpiece is a masterpiece." His works are based, in short, on simple faceless figures because patrons can easily relate to figures. They're also fast, fast, fast to paint. A great number of his canvases incorporate figures grinding out paintings in a sweatshop scenario. While you're at it, add lots of color. Color sells better.

The art is in the manufacture and maintenance of his art celebrity self; he's ridden his bad boy image like a Tijuana bobsled down a slurpee colored mountain of publicity. Notably, he appeared in People magazine covered in paper money, wearing goofy shoes, standing beside a guy painting one of "his" paintings. Kostabi's flatly rendered figures are as recognizable and available as Keith Harring's flatly rendered figures ever were. Check out the cover art on Use Your Illusion I and II. There's also a Kostabi Swatch and a whole pile of stuff he's done for the Japanese.

Interviewing himself, he gives his act completely away. Step by step he details his own invention and the mythology of Kostabi. He's not simply acting contrary. "How do you get away with biting the hand that feeds you?" he asks himself. "They don't feed me. I feed them art and they pay me money for it." Helpfully, he lays out a few easy steps with which any young artist can access the art world and make a stinktillion dollars.

With content and formal qualities beyond a basic framework being decided by any number of people for any number of reasons, many paintings pictured in this book are gawdawful eye sores. They are, however, funny and undeniably compelling especially as part of the Kostabi persona context. The mixture of high and low art sensibilities create a captivating froth. "The History of Inspiration" is packed with references to art past. Warhol, Duchamp, Lichtenstein, Michelangelo, Groening, all framed with Kostabi's high school art class people. Try on a portrait of David Bowie poking out of an Afro-American woman's hair-do, adrift amongst the planets. They're a lot like gaudy gag cartoons with impressionistic punch lines.

Conversations with Kostabi is a bingo of a how-to. Brisk and irreverent, it's profound in its clarity. The art is the artist is the medium is the message (whatever the hell that means). Lots of big pictures make it a winner on the coffee table. If we've forgotten how Picasso and Duchamp freed things up with some creative backbone and a few timely ideas, Kostabi is a clownish beacon steering us back in the right direction.

Ian Doig

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