A Beautiful Deep Dive Into Our Worldwide Arts + Culture
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A Beautiful Deep Dive Into Our Worldwide Arts + Culture |
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BOB & BOB: BIRTH OF AN ART WORLD DUO AT THE DAWN OF PERFORMANCE ART, Part One of Two The Dark Bob Interview by Gordy Grundy
Art Report Today: Did you two "meet cute"? The Dark Bob: In 1974, The Light Bob, a classmate and I at the ArtCenter College, formed a conceptual art team that we called Bob & Bob. Even though neither of us were actually named Bob, we chose that name because it seemed like the most generic, banal everyman name possible. This happened in a painting class taught by Llyn Foulkes. Llyn, at the time, was not only a well known painter, but he also had a musical, comedy group called "The Rubber Band," which performed around town and even appeared on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. Llyn was a huge influence on us as well as a mentor. He encouraged us in every way and even gave us our first break out in the real world after we graduated. The exciting thing for The Light Bob and myself is that we had never seen or even heard of an art team. So it was new territory for both of us and we felt very rebellious. We shared this idea that art—and especially new forms of art—should be rebellious. A kind of revolution against the previous generation. And Llyn gave us the territory and the space to explore almost all of our early ideas. Foulkes must have been a huge influence on your lives and creative work. On your latest, 9th album "Ekphrasis Synesthesia - Songs For Artists," you honor him with a tribute song. Yeah, we were especially taken by Llyn’s effort and desire to reach beyond the art world and into the mainstream. At that time Llyn was also in negotiations with Norman Lear, a huge TV producer, about doing a show for television. We saw our own work as an extension of that idea and with the same potential and possibilities. And sure enough, over the years, offers from television and film came our way, but honestly nothing really fit with what we wanted to do.
So Bob & Bob’s first collaborative artwork happened in Llyn’s painting class. It was a performance piece called “Hands Behind Your Back.” We showed up late to class that day, and made what is called a citizen’s arrest of Llyn. We pushed him against the wall, put his hands behind his back, handcuffed him, hauled him out of class and detained him outside. We explained to our classmates that we were legally charging him with “promoting degenerate and often drug-addled artists to minors.” We then instructed our fellow classmates to leave, as there would be no further class that day until this matter was resolved. Once the students left, we brought Llyn back into the classroom, removed the handcuffs and explained to Llyn that we were dropping the charges against him. He loved it and we got kudos for doing what we did and calling it “art.” Plus we all got to go home early!
That’s a hard act to follow. Did you continue doing performances in his painting class? In Llyn’s painting class, we did everything but paint! We did performances, we made short films and created little Xerox books. We even took the class on a field trip to LACMA, promising them that we’d meet famous artists! This was a very funny piece, but kind of difficult to explain easily. You had to be there! It had to do with Bob & Bob mistaking someone as a famous artist and asking them questions. We had the class follow us around the museum, as we searched for famous artists to talk with, and we’d say, “Oh, look everyone. There’s Robert Rauschenberg!” And then we’d go up to some random guy on a bench and ask, “How hard is it to put a tire around a goat?” We had prepared interview questions that were specific to a particular famous artist. The questions were phrased in a way so anyone would be able to answer them with their own opinion, without knowing they were being spoofed. If we mistook someone for Roy Lichtenstein, we’d ask “What role did comic books play in your life?” And they’d have an answer, and it was sincere, but certainly not the answer had it actually been Lichtenstein! We recorded these spontaneous interviews on cassette. They were pretty funny, but really, you had to be there. Those cassettes are now in the Smithsonian!
Our second “performance” in his class was called “School of Painting.” Llyn had set up a still life for the class to paint and, when he stepped out to have a smoke, Bob & Bob took the fruit and the bowl and the candle and we taped everything to our canvases. When he returned to the class, he loved what we had done. He even joked that our “paintings” looked “so realistic that the fruit seems to be coming right off the canvas.” So Llyn was playing along, and becoming part of the piece essentially. That was very encouraging, because our classmates had no idea what was going on. After we graduated, Llyn invited us to exhibit our collaborative drawings, and to do a performance piece at the newly opened 'Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art' (LAICA) in Century City for a show he curated called “Imagination.” I’m pretty sure that was the inaugural show at LAICA. After that show, the Bob & Bob thing really took off. William Wilson, the art critic of the LA Times, wrote a glowing review of our work and suddenly we had a couple of drawing shows at the Ruth S. Schaffner Gallery on Melrose and we were regularly featured in all of the artsy print media of the day. The Simpsons' creator Matt Groening wrote an in-depth cover story about us for the LA Reader and we were also featured in a cover story for High Performance Magazine as well as WET, The Free Press, LA Weekly and Slash. I remember Jesse Kornbluth wrote in The Village Voice that Bob & Bob were “the best thing to come out of the West Coast since the Beach Boys.” Obviously tongue-in-cheek, but we loved it! Anyway, that doesn’t seem like much now, but in the pre-internet age, this kind of ink coverage was broad exposure for sure.
There was also a fairly comprehensive book published about your work early on, correct? Yes, in 1980 Linda Frye Burnham, the publisher of High Performance Magazine, wrote Bob & Bob: The First Five Years, which was the first in a series of books about performance artists that were published by Astro Artz. The book was a slick production with color plates of our drawings and all the details of our performances and films and recordings. Linda wrote the text and Llyn Foulkes wrote the introduction. The book had wide distribution in the States and even abroad. The publisher sent us on a promotional tour that included book signings, lectures and performances all across the country. So this brought national attention to us in a climate where people were still very curious about this new thing called “performance art.” And since Bob & Bob wore suits, had a funny name, and looked approachable, we became the go-to artists for journalist and critics who wanted to know “What is this new thing called performance art?” Of course we had no idea how to answer that question, so we gave some pretty outlandish interviews.
The other thing that boosted our profile here at home was the early support we got from LAICA. Their founding directors, Bob and Toby Smith really got behind the Bob & Bob thing and allowed us complete freedom—and the funding—to produce concerts, exhibitions and happenings at their art space. Ah, yes, LAICA! Please tell us. LAICA was amazing. You can’t underestimate how important LAICA was to the growth of contemporary and experimental art in Los Angeles back in the '70s and '80s. LAICA, and later LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), really fostered, funded and encouraged the most outrageous ideas and artworks that actually expanded the definition of what art could be. So thanks in large part to these two institutions, Los Angeles in the '70s was booming with new ideas, methods and forms. Both of those places, LAICA and LACE were called “alternative art spaces.” And it wasn’t just art that was begging for alternatives to the status quo, there was also at this time “alternative music,” “alternative radio,” “alternative press,” “alternative life styles,” “alternative medicine” and alternative everything else. The '60s were over, and it seemed people were ready to embrace and create new platforms that could legitimize these alternative ideas in all aspects of our culture. Even politics began to embrace gender and ethnicity in the discourse. So that was the world where our work flourished.
Yes, but by the mid-'80s, both Bobs were doing a great deal of solo work and billing yourselves as “The Dark Bob” and “Paul Bob.” How did this separation come about? This came about because of a geographic separation, and not because of any ideological differences between the two of us. What happened was this: In 1984, Bob & Bob were offered a record deal with PolyGram/Polydor Records in New York City. This happened after Laurie Anderson’s success with her Big Science album. The major record labels were looking for a follow-up to Laurie, by scouting around in the world of performance art, which is where Laurie came from. Since Bob & Bob had already put out a few albums of their own, a producer named Jeff Gordon tracked us down and thought we had the right stuff to make a hit record. Gordon had just produced some audio works by Chris Burden, Hannah Wilke and other performance artists for Pace Gallery, but it wasn’t the kind of work that he felt could go beyond the art world. He wanted a “hit record.” So he put us in the studio with a bunch of hotshot musicians, and we cut an EP called We Know You’re Alone, which PolyGram released and we had ourselves a little radio hit in the summer of ’84.
We sold quite a few records and made more money than we’d ever seen in our lives, even though I know we were getting ripped off. But back in those days, a major label release was a big deal, and almost destined to make money because of the symbiotic relationship the labels had with radio, television and media. We were even offered a spot on the Tonight Show. But they wanted us to lip-synch the record and we refused. We told them we wanted to do a live painting on stage. They told us Carson liked the idea, but the producers said no. So we bailed. PolyGram was furious, but in retrospect, I’m glad we didn’t. Lip-syncing a song like a couple of wannabe rock stars just wasn’t who we were. Too bad they didn’t let us do the live painting! After the record came out, and we fulfilled our obligations to PolyGram, which included performances in Amsterdam and Rotterdam and a few U.S. cities, The Light Bob decided he wanted to stay in New York. He tried to convince me to stay, and he wanted to keep doing Bob & Bob on the east coast, but I was lonesome for Los Angeles. And I left. Now, that sounds like a country western song. Was it a hard break up? Bob & Bob never really broke up officially. We continued to have a few shows and work together whenever we could, but suddenly, the geographical separation made it difficult to collaborate and it was more convenient, for both of us, to do work on our own. We still did stuff as Bob & Bob on occasion. We had a retrospective show at Otis-Parsons in 1985 and collaborated on exhibitions and performance works with MOCA, Portland Center for the Visual Arts, The Kitchen in NYC, Walker Art Center, the WPA in D.C. and I can’t remember what else. But eventually the solo work overtook the Bob & Bob partnership, and I ended up painting, making films and records, and touring performances around the country as The Dark Bob. By then, there was an actual performance art scene happening and I began to identify with a whole new breed of performance artists that were emerging in the ’80s. It was less about getting naked physically and more about getting naked emotionally! I’ll have more to say about that as we keep talking.
Gordy Grundy is the Editor-in-Chief of Art Report Today.
Buy the Dark Bob's double album on collectible vinyl! Or classic CD! Or all of his creations!
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