Several months back I was invited to be in a group show along with some old friends from Paul Frank. The show, “No Brow,” was held at GINAC Gallery in Downtown Santa Ana. Sometime after the show the owner of the gallery, Tony Crisp, asked if I would be interested in doing a live art piece for an event in Century City, California.
The event was called, the “Meat Eaters’ Ball.” It is an annual event for venture capitalists to get together for food, drinks and entertainment and this year the theme of the party had something to do with art. They hired dancers, musicians and…me.
I asked my friend Travis Turgasen to help me with the project. We stocked up on acrylics and spray paint and drove out and set up two 4′ x 4′ canvases.
The place filled up with venture capitalists and capital-ladies pretty quickly. The dress code, I surmised, was “venture capitalist casual” which I took to mean a suit without a tie. Travis began to worry that we might not fit in, or worse, that the art we had planned might not go over very well.
When I first started drawing out ideas for the art I was trying to come up with Franky’s take on corporate culture. I was thinking of thermoses (don’t people take thermoses to work??) and expressions like, “No Free Lunch.” One of the “No Free Lunch” ideas featured a chicken with a missing leg on crutches. I was trying to view venture capitalism through the same kind of irreverent, playful prism that I use to skewer every subject.
The concept that I ended up settling on was “Bite the Hand,” which in a sense you could make the argument we were kind of doing since we were being paid to be at the event.
In the end Travis’s worries proved to be unfounded. We were hired to create art after all, which at its best can be provocative, and it is not like we had anything obscene or offensive screaming from the canvas. What I came up with was bright and fun, as per usual, and people seemed to enjoy it.
One of the neat elements of the art work was that it was interactive. When I was hired for the job I was told that they would like for the spectators to be able to participate in the painting in some way. So I came up with the idea of making stencils and letting the participants spray them onto the canvases themselves. There were several stencils from the GOST canon to choose from including, “Give Up” and “Why Try.” In fact, this was the closest we came to receiving any kind of an objectionable response to the art, when a group of drunk girls in cocktail dresses came by and started cackling, “Why don’t you beeeee more posssssitive? Why not peeeeeeace and loooovvve?”
After the background was complete it became a race against time to finish the foreground elements before the party ended. Unfortunately as the night wore on it got much colder and the paint stopped drying.
The event organizers graciously let us take the paintings home to finish them. We set them up on easels in the back yard and got to work.
The finished paintings are currently hanging in the gallery at the GCS store in Downtown Santa Ana. You can stop by and see them before they get shipped back out to the organizers from the Meat Eaters’ Ball. The GCS store/gallery is always open for the Art Walk which takes place the first Saturday of every month (and is coming up this weekend).
I would like to thank David Cremin of the Meat Eaters’ Ball for allowing me to be a part of the event, Tony Crisp for giving me the opportunity to paint and brokering the whole arrangement and Travis Turgasen for all of his help getting the project done.
Arlo
GOST
