In one of the hippest and most provocative shows of the summer, Anna Kustera has mounted a group exhibition curated by the London-based painter/designer Stuart Semple along with Ken Courtney, a relative newcomer to the art world also known as Ju$t Another Rich Kid. "The Black Market" is a hyper-pop contemporary riff on the concepts of comfort, consumerism and famous objects of desire.
By including limited edition T-shirts to gold-plated sneakers to toys and chairs dipped in tar, the artists here have elevated visual pranks to romantic and spectacular new heights. Cory Ingram, Mattia Biagi, and Carlo Zanni and others entertain us with compelling works that are doused in nostalgia for the recent past and explore the everyday act of coveting.
Of course Semple and Rich Kid contribute their own unique flavors to the mix. Semple's showy but sincere acrylic collages fuse celebrity with the wishes it elicits (then thwarts) in his painterly, diaristic collages. Ju$t Another Rich Kid--who has just been placed on legal notice by the McDonald's corporation--resurrects classic devices used to snort coke, from pen caps to fast food coffee stirrers, and reinvents them as 14K gold collectibles.
'Indulgences'
Their collaboration "Teen Dream Chaos" (2007) is a mixed media installation depicting an obsessive kid's messy bedroom. It comes complete with purple bedspread and an intense array of pop-cultural flotsam and jetsam that covers an entire corner of the gallery.
"The Black Market" even boasts with its own soundtrack: a CD with musical bits such as "We All Killed JonBenet," by K-tron & Exploding Triangles and "Britney Nuked My Pooch," by Dan Neeson. The show has been extended into August, so there's still time to check out the worthy group sensation.
I caught up with the charming and passionate Stuart Semple during his brief stopover from London. A few weeks later, Ken Courtney/Ju$t Another Rich Kid preferred to answer some of my sassy questions via email.
Stuart Semple
DOUG McCLEMONT: You're a painter first and the fashion thing came later. Right?
STUART SEMPLE: Yeah.
DM: How do they overlap?
SS: Well, I've always been interested in fashion in my work. That kind of imagery I grew up with: that sort of very stylized music video. My work is always referencing what was going on in fashion in a way.
DM: It seems like there are a lot of American idols.
SS: Yes, always. American music videos and movies, the Spielbergs....."Back to the Future," the Cyndi Lauper videos. The early Madonna stuff.
DM: The appeal was also New York City?
SS: Yes, because there was a whole buzz coming out of there..the Basquiat thing. Schnabel. I was born in 1980. I think advertising changed a lot for my generation. All of a sudden you've got this sort of aspirational branding--and sex selling stuff--flashy, strong images.
Stuart Semple, 'Media Killed the Beauty Star'
DM: Are your subjects usually famous people like musicians or actors?
SS: Not always. Models come to my studio.
DM: How do you embark on a new painting?
SS: The paintings almost always start with a song. I'm more interested in the emotional. I make pictures that make you feel like a pop song makes you feel. Don't even know if it's possible to do that, but that's what I set out to do with my paintings.
DM: Through the color or the painting's subject?
SS: Both. That's why I started using words. They're like the lyrics of the painting and the other attributes become the melody.
DM: Some of them resemble album covers more than others.
SS: I've always been obsessed with album covers. And up until I made these all my paintings were perfectly square, mainly because of that album cover format.
Stuart Semple, "Kurt Lied", 2007
Mixed media on canvas, 47 x 35 x 3 inches
DM: Your work is acrylic on canvas.
SS: It's my own acrylic that I get mixed at the factory. To my own recipe so that it's very flat and opaque. I sort of developed a whole color palate actually where the red I use is always my red, my green, my pink.
DM: Did you name these colors?
SS: Yeah. It's "Ray Gun Red," "Dick Pink". I can't remember what the green is called...
DM: You mentioned a factory. Warhol is obviously an influence for you. But is it fair to say that it's the people around him that interest you most? Edie Sedgwick and others?
SS: Yes, love her.
DM: I was again struck by the fact that they're American.
SS: I don't know why that is... I think in Britain in the 80s it was very bleak... sort of working class environment that didn't really have anything. But what American music did have was this bunch of amazing synth-based pop songs that told us we could do anything. They gave you a dream. A lot of British music wasn't like that.
DM: I'm older than you... but we thought YAZ was cooler.
SS: As I've grown older I've grown to appreciate that New Wave British stuff.
DM: Do you paint alone in the studio with music?
SS: I used to paint alone when I had a tiny studio middle of nowhere. It had mice and was freezing. Now I have assistants who help me paint, because I'm doing massive, massive stuff, right now. It's not the same...
DM: Not the same process, you mean?
SS: It's harder.
DM: How so? Do you mean telling other people how you'd like it done?
SS: No. I mean not being on my own. My painting is very performative. They're all pre-composed before going into the studio... like how a musician writes a track. Then it's recorded. I never allow myself to rub out or erase anything. It's all one take. I'm really passionate about that.
DM: Pre-composed how? By drawing or on the computer?
SS: On the computer.
DM: So you project them.
SS: Some of it. Only initially. I'm a bit obsessed by this idea of taking the mechanization out the pop stuff. Because I find a lot of it non-emotive.
DM: That's sort of an anti-Warholian notion. He got off on the mechanization of it all... the silkscreens, etc. And he liked films because he said that the camera had a motor and you could just turn it on and walk away.
Stuart Semple, "Fuck Wad", 2007
Mixed media on canvas, 47 x 35 x 3 inches
SS: In my new works I have a team of assistants who are actually painting from reproductions as if it was a silkscreen. With tiny brushes on 20-ft. canvases. From a distance it looks like silkscreen, but when you get up close you see all the human imperfections. That's the way it works.
DM: Do you make any distinction between the T-shirts and the hoodies and the paintings? The fashion is just an extension of your painting, no? Like paintings on fabric.
SS: Yes. I think there's a preoccupation with what artists should and shouldn't do. At the time I had made so many paintings. I wanted to do something different. So I liked the idea of having a human inside a little painting. Something that moved.
DM: Would you tell the story of the piece you made from the Momart warehouse ashes? What's the Uri Geller connection?
SS: When I was 17, I went to art school... my parents thought I'd be a doctor or something. Because you can't be an artist, particularly in England, it wasn't done. They bussed us all to see the 'Sensation' show where we saw Tracey's [Emin's] tent for the first time. Before that I was looking at my feet the whole time and didn't get what was going on. But that just opened everything up for me.
DM: So she's important to you.
SS: I'm obsessed with her. Those guys are my idols. Changed everything for me. Then something weird happened. Uri Geller, who's my friend, was driving by the [aftermath of the Momart warehouse] fire and he noticed that they were shoveling all the remains into big trucks and taking it away. I was saddened by this and asked him to get me some of the pieces. I felt that somehow they had to be kept safe.
DM: So it was a rescue, not a theft.
SS: The media in England turned it into something else. There was a debate about who everything belonged to and the insurance had paid out, so that was going on. It was initially treated as some sort of publicity stunt. They didn't really understand the trajectory of my work. I deal with pop culture and reassemble it all the time. This was very natural for me.
DM: How did Tracey react?
SS: She wanted to put the tragedy behind her. But then everyone started jumping on it like it was so tragic, almost as bad as the Holocaust or something. It wasn't of course. A lot of those pieces, we don't know what would have happened to them in fifty or one hundred years time.
DM: What was the title of the sculpture you made from the stuff?
SS: "R.I.P. Y.B.A."
DM: You responded viscerally to Charles Saatchi saying that British art would just be a footnote in history. You bristled at that, didn't you?
SS: Yeah, that really upset me. Because the thing is all those artists changed my life. Furthermore, he's the one who convinced me that they were important and seminal. Decades later he turns around and says it's a footnote? I've invested so much of my passion in what he told me was a good thing. I still have respect for him in many ways. I don't totally disrespect the man. Insensitive to artist. He has a responsibility to nurture the talent and that he was around and I just don't think on a human level you kind of do that. Seems a bit wrong.
DM: But he loves art!
SS: I'm sure he does. I think that the whole thing... bit of a lie... why did he hype it and sell tickets?
DM: His tastes changed, I guess.
SS: But he was the champion of British artists. We needed that. When Damien Hirst had nothing Charles Saatchi was enabling him to make that work.
DM: That was a long time ago. There's a tendency to romanticize the past. But I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense to bemoan an indirect knock on Damien Hirst when the guy has his own private plane now.
SS: Still, it's always sad when any artwork gets destroyed.
DM: Of course it is.
Stuart Semple, "Britney Nuked My Pooch", 2007
Mixed media on canvas, 47 x 35 x 3 inches
SS: Just the other day my friend Boo Saville, Jenny's sister, had a flood in her studio and lost all of her labor-intensive drawings. When I was in art school, some kids scratched up two years worth of paintings. They were in pieces.
DM: Did you show them anyway?
SS: Yes. I showed them like that. I wrote on them the names of the people who destroyed it.
DM: That's great. Is it true that you walked into the gallery and hung one of your own paintings in the "Triumph of Painting 2" show?
SS: Yes. I made a work that said "British artwork still rocks." It was the first show in a decade that had no British art, you know.
DM: What's your next big project?
SS: We're doing this thing for Frieze in a 4,000 sq. ft. space in East London. Used to be a brewery. I'm showing nine massive paintings. Each is like 25 feet.
DM: Why the large scale?
SS: Several of the works are about sort of taking the reproduction back. Reclaiming it. The proportions are like wide screen movies. And they're each composed of three panels in oil. But at the same time, they're kind of digital. It's about the process, and how painting deals with the fact that the computer is dominant as graphic design and what that has done to our visual culture.
DM: How have computerized graphics impacted the way we see things?
SS: You can do stuff you would never have seen before. I think the computer has dumbed down a lot of design. It has taken a lot of the emotion out of what design was before the computer. Also I'm fascinated by the deception of it all. It's a trick or a lie... an artwork within an artwork within an artwork. It's a painting of a reproduction that has been compiled on the computer and then repainted by a painter.
DM: So one of the goals is that you want the language of painting to become even less rarified?
SS: It's maybe the best language we have to deal with contemporary issues like celebrity and fashion. I'm fed up with the idea that painting has to be... why can't it be like music? Why does it have to be so precious? It's completely capable of dealing with things like YouTube does or Myspace does. It's not out of date at all... we've always had ways of doing it all in paint.
DM: More accessible in terms of a broader audience?
SS: In terms of approachability, yes. It's not some secret code. Its as easy to read as it is to read as a gossip magazine.
Ju$t Another Rich Kid, "Love Will Tear Us Apart" 2007
Limited Edition Designed T-Shirts for The Black Market Exhibition
Run of 22, S - XL sizes
Cory Ingram, Crude Installation & Performance, 2007 (performance date June 2, 2007)
Paper, crude oil, glass, metal and fabric
Dimensions Variable
From: Doug McClemont [mailto:rmutt@saintly.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2007 3:36 PM
To: JustAnotherRichKid
Subject: hey Ken from Doug @ Saatchi
Hey Ken... i'm like a neutered dog chasing his own stubby tail lately...behinder and behinder.
but here are some questions for you...ok?
Thanks. Doug.
From: "Ju$t Another Rich Kid" info@justanotherrichkid.com
To: "Doug McClemont"
Subject: RE: hey Ken from Doug @ Saatchi
Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2007 13:48:49-0400
Doug:
--replies! let me know if you need any images, have other questions, etc. i've attached a pic of the Nikes, which would be great to include!!

Outside View of the Gallery, featuring Ju$t Another Rich Kid, 'Indulgences' series: 24K Gold Nike Dunk High-tops, 2007
24K Gold Dipped Nike High-tops
Edition of 5
DM: So were you born rich? Or just white/privileged?
JARK: Definitely white. Not rich or privileged, though.
DM: Tell me about the ebay origin of the idea...
JARK: I was scouring eBay one night for vintage tees to use for a project and happened upon one of
the original McDonald's coffee stirrers that was taken off the market in the late 70's. My first thought was: this needs to be remade but in gold. I bid on it and won. The rest is history!
DM: Do you think of it as an art object or jewelry/accessory?
JARK: Objets d'art.
DM: You're a graphic designer. Is this your first sculpture?
JARK: I'm actually a painter and a graphic designer. I was making paintings prior to starting the clothing company and it wasn't working for me. I needed to do something I could more easily get in front of people's eyes, instead of having these big paintings sitting in my studio with only me seeing them. To answer your question, though, yes this is my first sculpture and I love it. I can't wait to do others.
DM: Are the sculptures from the "Indulgences" series intended to be used as coke spoons as well as art? Do you hope it will be by somebody? Like some parody of upper class excess?
JARK:The concept for the line was to address the ever-expanding luxury market and how it's possible to get a luxury version of almost everything these days. Do I hope someone will use it? For sure. Although in that case they might want to get two (2): one to use and one to display.
DM: Can you talk about the legal threat from McDonald's? ...fuck them? Or "Yikes"?
JARK: My true feeling is: fuck them. Corporations have been riding the wave of artist appropriation for a while now, kind of copying certain people's work, hiring someone to mimic an artist's style, having artists do collaborations for them, etc. My feeling is that it should work both ways, especially with a piece like mine, that is an art/design piece. In the off chance that they take me to court, my thought is: yikes. It's not worth it to me for this one piece to fight them. I've had my time with it. And it's now part of the permanent collection at the SFMOMA. Mission accomplished!
DM: Can you tell me a few personal bits on some of the other artists in the show and how it came together?
JARK: Stuart and I put the show together. We each choose a few artists whose work we thought would fit with our concept. Carlo Zanni is a digital artist from Milan. Mattia Biaggi is an Italian artist out of LA who dunks consumer objects in tar. Adam Faramawy did the video installation. He's a video artist based out of London by way of Egypt. Amazing work from everyone! I feel very fortunate.
DM: Any other thoughts on the show and its reception by the public, the press and by the corporate world? Museums? SFMOMA?
JARK: So far everyone has loved it. I'm hoping that someone bites on the "Teen Chaos" part of the show so we get to install it again at either a gallery, museum, or in a collector's house.
DM: What's next for Ju$t Another Rich Kid?
JARK: I want to see everything in gold. I've just had a photographer offer to shoot a portrait of me dipped in gold. I can't wait.
"The Black Market"
Until 3 August
Anna Kustera Gallery
520 West 21st Street
New York
T: +1 212 989 0082
Doug McClemont is the former Editor-in-Chief of HONCHO. He is currently writing about his adventures as a mortician.
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