Skin Deep

L.A.’s provocative “lowbrow” pop art pioneer Coop and his big, bold, bare babes get ready to expose the sexy side of corporate America.
by Lucinda Michele Knapp

Coop doesn’t look like the craven, debauched sex fiend I expected.

In fact, when I meet the prolific young artist in his workspace at the Brewery Arts Complex, he’s downright sweet. Of a compact, wiry build with a profusion of facial hair that’s a cross between Alpine gnome and beardo rocker, he’s approachable, unassuming, and thoughtful: a far cry from his ubiquitous images that adorn the rear windows of gearhead rockabillies and Von Dutch fans nationwide.

Artists often resemble their imagery, in the indefinable way that pets often look like their owners: something around the eyes, something in the emotional tone. But Coop-in-person is an entirely different entity from the hucksterish, cigar-chomping, horned devil whose sinister used-car-salesman grin often appears in his work. I’m thrown. I mean, this is the guy whose Web site is NSFW (not safe for work). This is the guy whose voluptuous women have adorned posters-from a Rhino retrospective of Love, to a sexy demoness whose cups runneth over for cinnamon Altoids, to Jabberjaw punk show flyers in the ’90s-and album covers-from obscure punk rock 45s for the Sympathy for the Record Industry label, to albums for Rocket From the Crypt, White Zombie and Lords of Acid. And now this is the guy who’s completely surprised me by being, well, normal.

“There’ve been several rock poster revolutions,” says Billy Shire, owner of Wacko, Billy Shire Fine Art in Culver City, and La Luz de Jesus-the seminal L.A. gallery whose presence on Melrose in the late ’80s and early ’90s provided a launching pad and safe experimental laboratory for L.A.’s homegrown artists throughout the end of the 20th century. “There was the one in the ’60s, obviously, but in the early ’90s…they really became popular, they were being produced to sell. Kozik [another poster artist who basically acted as Coop's publisher in the early days] started to do silkscreens with Coop, and this got it out because it was inexpensive: $25 for a silkscreened limited edition. That was real major exposure to getting a wider audience.”

Coop’s early posters set the stage for the takeover of “lowbrow” art in the United States. Chances are good that if you’re a die-hard music fan-or even if you were just a teenager during the early ’90s-you may have a print of his on your wall. “I did my first professional job, an album cover, when I was 16 and still living in Oklahoma, and I moved out here when I was 19. I’ve been out here for almost 18 years now,” he says as we wind our way through the Brewery to his workspace, where he’s currently prepping for an upcoming show at Culver City’s sixspace gallery that opens Saturday, Sept. 9. In the time since he moved to L.A., he’s gone from a kid drawing cool punk-rock 45 covers to a world-class artist whose work has been disseminated widely as a consumer product-a hallmark of Pop Art, and a factor that’s made possible the recent explosion of L.A. art onto the international scene. When the consumer base for a particular style of art widens through fans collecting posters, stickers, T-shirts and toys, the higher-end demand increases as well, causing prices to go up and artists to actually-gasp!-make a living.

“I’ve done a little over a hundred silkscreen posters,” says Coop of his early work, “and those editions were anywhere from 200 to 1,500. As far as stickers and T-shirts, I can’t even keep count of that. … That’s been the reason people know my work, all those little devil stickers stuck in the back windows of cars and stuff; people were paying me to promote my work, essentially.” He smiles wryly. “So I guess I’m complicit in the same sort of consumer culture I’m trying to take apart.”

In the ’90s, the art world was completely bored to death from abstract impressionism: Everyone was desperately sick of gray swirls on white canvases, red squares on blank backgrounds, and artists who thought they were god’s gift to wine and cheese. As always, a stultifying high-end art scene set the stage for a vibrant, rebellious underground, and while in New York that erupted as graffiti art, in Los Angeles it borrowed from our noir background, our car culture, our glossy celluloid preoccupations and our blend of ethnicities to burst forth as “lowbrow.” Mark Ryden, Robert Williams, Camille Rose Garcia, Shag, Gary Baseman, Liz McGrath-all shared a similar affection for the macabre, the retro, the mythic. Their imagery spilled over with memories culled from cartoons, advertising, the collective unconscious of modern urban America.

Coop’s work runs in this vein as well, as ’70s porno goofiness merges with ’50s advertising, hotrodding and the surly spirit of punk rock in his art. His is a uniquely Angeleno kaleidoscope through which we can view American culture: excess, sex, candy-apple-red gloss, diamond finish and the devil in a Rat Pack smoking jacket. “I really love living here,” he explains. “I think L.A. has a great art history that is sort of ignored because people are so focused on New York in terms of fine art; but someone like Ed Ruscha, one of the great artists of the 20th century-his work has always been about Los Angeles, and he really evokes the spirit of L.A. I wanted what I was doing to reflect my interests, and a lot of the things I’m interested in relate directly to Los Angeles.”

Of course, there are plenty of other artists whose work draws from car culture, like Robert Williams and Von Dutch. What sets Coop apart is his groundbreaking early work as a poster artist, fueled by the prolific independent music label industry in the United States during the ’90s; and now his new work, which sees him taking off in another pioneering direction, leaving the small-scale pieces of his ascendancy behind, and gutsily leaping into large-no, scratch that, HUGE-works that tackle the major issues facing our culture today.

In his latest work, Coop turns his trademark wit, and his willingness to confront the viewer with uncomfortable or aggressive imagery, against our own consumer culture. His latest show, titled Brand Recognition, pairs blatantly sexual imagery with the great new signifiers of our modern age: corporate logos.

“We grow up now with those logos so ubiquitous, and they have this larger meaning to us beyond the representation of a company or a corporation-if they suddenly all disappeared I think people would be very anxious,” he explains as we sit in his loft, surrounded by seething sexual imagery, vintage cars in various stages of assembly, antique tools that would make any gearhead’s pants tight, and a giant promotional replica of a grenade about as tall as my chair. “I like the idea of using the corporate logo in a way they [corporations] probably wouldn’t approve of, re-appropriating it, taking back a little of that idea space that they’ve taken away from me by jamming that logo into my head for a whole lifetime.”

His Goodyear girl in a rubber cat suit writhes seductively behind him on the wall. “Obviously, sex is a big part of advertising, but there’s sort of a limit to it-a limit to the tease. So taking it beyond that repurposes it as well.” By identifying and magnifying the hidden triggers in advertising-sex, gloss, sensual gratification-Coop’s work lays bare the cynicism behind marketing and consumerism. Goodyear’s (or any company’s) ad execs would never admit to balancing their bid for our pocketbooks on promises of sex or prosperity, but at its basest level, all advertising uses these simple, primal buttons to motivate us.

Civilization has had to fight many internal battles over the millennia: colonialism, papal iniquity, racism-all spiritual crises within the soul of Western culture. In our contemporary society, our latter-day demons are consumerism and globalism: a battle where the territory at stake is our sense of self and sovereignty in the face of ravenous and impersonal corporate interests. As has always been the case, artists are the canaries in the coal mine.

Coop’s work, like that of many of our most important present-day artists, points out the dangers and hidden meanings behind consumer culture, turning the logo against the company and thereby working to reclaim the mental territory that’s been encroached upon in the battle for the “hearts and minds” of the people. In his new show at sixspace, his paintings take on logos that have been a large part of his life due to his interests and passions: the Atari logo for gaming, the Goodyear logo and the Ridgid toolmaker’s logo for his inner hot-rodder. “There’s the obvious sexual connotation with the word “rigid,” he says, but he was even more surprised when he turned the logo on its side for the painting: “I thought it would be interesting to turn the logo sideways, so that it becomes a graphic device. Your brain doesn’t read it the same way. But when I did, it looked like a cock.” The painting shows a ribald, lusty woman’s face juxtaposed with the loaded logo. “I thought that was a really cool, interesting happy accident. To have it actually represent this phallic object, that’s just a bonus.”

A bonus indeed. Coop’s never shied away from making art that confronts the observer with imagery that’s explicit, even pornographic. He’s not a fan of “safe” art. “I saw this trend happening in [the art world]-moving away from art that had any confrontation in it, that provoked any sort of anxiety, and moving toward things that were safe and cute, kitschy and small, easy to sell-people doing small, little paintings that no one would have an objection to, because if they hung it up on their wall their mother wouldn’t be offended if she came over-and I wanted to go in the opposite direction, do things that were big, and that really kind of slap you in the face when you look at them; and I wanted content that was more provocative.”

What elevates his art beyond pornography is its content-the attacks on corporate imagery and contemporary consumerism-and the way in which he chooses to depict that sexually charged imagery. These aren’t Playboy bunnies: they’re robust, dynamic, aggressive and downright large. “A really great, substantial part of my audience is women, and the No. one comment I get from women regarding my work is, ‘I really appreciate that you draw and paint these women that are sexy, curvy, bigger and more voluptuous than the standard.’ There was never any sort of political intent behind that; that’s just the sort of women that I find attractive, and so that’s the kind of women that end up in my work.”

In choosing to depict powerful, voluptuous women as sexually empowered and aggressive, he’s bucking a trend that’s afflicted the art world and pop culture for a long time. “I see the whole sort of anorexic standard of beauty as being a really recent phenomenon. I guess it started in the ’20s with the flappers, but it really only came to life after the ’60s, and I don’t know why that’s still the case because it seems like so many people I talk to, their standard of beauty is very different from what’s being shoved down their throats every day in the media. I think also what it is historically-and this has a lot to do with the way women are portrayed historically in art-is that rich people buy art. Rich people have always bought art. And from the beginning of time, a symbol of status was weight: that you were fat meant you could afford to eat. But now the poorest person in America can be fat, so now the societal standard of wealth is that you’re thin as a rail, that you can afford to starve yourself, which is insane, but that just points to a whole other larger conversation about what’s wrong with Western society right now.”

Straight, male artists will always have a charged relationship with the female bodies they portray, because it’s all but impossible to remove one’s own sexual relationship to the world from your work. The nice thing about Coop’s art is that it avoids being simply titillating: It elevates its women to agents of action and change. While Coop’s women don’t often get to step out of their sexualized role, that’s not the point. Coop’s goal isn’t political, humanistic liberation; his messages relate to our sexualized society, the erotic undercurrents of pop culture-and points out both our discomfort with and our irresistible attraction towards archetypal, instinctive symbols of the primevally fuckable.

In the end, it comes down to the simple fact that we’re only human. As much as we might wish we’ve grown beyond primal, physical urges, we just plain haven’t. Losing touch with that doesn’t merely leave us open to manipulation by advertisers; it leads to a sort of spiritual sickness, a schism between our sensual immediate experience-being immersed in the moment, being involved with our environment-and our inner world of vaulting concepts and ideas. Basically, we get so caught up in our modern world of symbols and gadgetry that we lose touch with the ground, with our senses, with our physical world. Coop’s artwork reminds us to get our feet back on the Earth.

“I live in my head a lot,” he admits, as we walk past the cabinets full of tools that he uses to work on his vintage cars. “Artists tend to not do a lot other than focus on their work.” But this fall he’ll be leaping into action, racing in the vintage-car-inspired La Carrera Panamericana where, with a partner, he’ll launch their little hot rod through the thick, forested undergrowth along the rutted roads of the Pan-American highway for seven days. When he returns, he plans to paint his experiences in a set of what’s sure to be more profoundly visceral, immediate, affecting work. “It’ll be a really good experience for me, to paint something that I’ve lived. To have this really amazing adventure and turn it into art. That’s what art is supposed to be about.” LAA

Coop’s latest show, Brand Recognition, opens at sixspace gallery in Culver City on Sept. 9. Visit www.sixspace.com for more info.