In California I lived with my friend Joey. I just came across a draft of a piece I was writing about him for a friends magazine. They were going to publish it in conjunction with a show they were organizing, but there was also some interest at the time from another, larger, east coast publication and we thought it better to hold off.
As often, cold open.
‘I went to visit my friend in San Francisco, he’s an old gangster and dope dealer. And a master martial artist.. He’s like 6’6 and lives on a boat in Oakland. Totally bipolar. He might be stopping by later on this week. I decided to start microdosing psilocybin.’
Sounds nice, Joey, I reply.
We’re in his painting studio where I see him most days. I use the bathroom in his place in the morning because I’m not thrilled about the compost toilet he installed in a converted Tuff Shed where I live on his land. We’ve been friends for about 5 years. A mutual friend, who has since passed (imagine Dianne Keaton circa Woody Allen with a huge, kinda stoned, glowing smile) introduced us so I could help Joey with a website for his art. While we were working, I lost my housing and he offered to rent me a grow building he was converting into a tiny house. When I moved in, someone came by and graffitied ‘trap house’ on the fence. A few months later someone else crossed out ‘trap’ and wrote ‘deep’ over it.
I had met Joey before then, around town. I worked at the co-op for a couple years and he would come in to get lunch. I could tell that he worked with his hands and was not disposed to small talk. As I began photographing the work he would share insights into his process. He told me the images came to him in dreams, and then he would transcribe them into journals before translating them into paintings and sculptures. There appears to me a global and postmodern vernacular of signifiers and motifs that coalesce in a distinctly Californian register of late Capitalocene anomie.
Joe moved from Kansas City to Redwood City as a child. He went to the Haight, watched it die, and then went back to the land and watched it gentrify. He is a lifelong ‘botanist’ and mycologist. We hang and chat. I love hearing old stories and town gossip. ‘...back when I was in the acid family, I had this giant mastiff and one day he ate an enormous amount of LSD… or ‘they came in the middle of the night with shotguns and rolled me up in a carpet...’ or ‘the lady that was trying to get me to do tricks for older women at church would leave her ocelot with me and it would attack you or hide under the bed unless you fed it tranquilisers in hamburgers…’
He doesn’t have a cell phone or very many friends left. There’s a bird he calls Tweety that comes in the house to visit. There was a raccoon he called De Kooning that would come by for a while too. His living room is filled with art books and design magazines. A few guitars, a television and a lot of his own art. He’s mostly stopped doing drugs and drinking and spends most days in the studio painting and sculpting. He eats very simply and healthily. It seems like every season there’s a new diet regimen and configuration of art around the house.
I walked by the studio the other morning and Joe flagged me down. He was excited to share something he was working on. He led me to a room in the house he built where he hung four older paintings. The skylights filled the small room with warm light and the paintings grouped together really transcended themselves. He began to explain the work to me. A hollowed out world and a dying spirit rising, severed roots and terrified beings, a panel about a friend who threw up in a ventilator at the hospital. Listening to him talk I felt many of the central themes that characterize our time, the oppressive forces of patriarchy and capitalism, mass extinction and ecological devastation, a coursing libidinal undercurrent, uncontainable forces overwhelming the stifling modern grid, and an internalized need to keep producing towards a validation from the market. And perhaps like everyone, with their idiosyncratic and irreducible perspective.
I sent a few phone pictures to my friend Oliver of this magazine and he replied immediately that we should do something and invited us down to a fair he was participating in that weekend at the historic Bradbury building. It was in partnership with NeueHouse, a luxury coworking conglomerate ‘where culture and commerce collide.’ The Bradbury, born of gold mining and real estate development wealth has been home to the Los Angeles police department's internal affairs division, the Museum of Architecture and Design, the Berggruen Institute, the Ross Cutlery where O.J Simpon bought the stiletto and a Blue Bottle coffee. It is probably best known for its appearance in Blade Runner, and for another generation perhaps, as the backdrop for the La Blogotheque video for Justin Timberlake’s Say Something.
The work seemed to be received well. There was a short ambiguous bio circulated with some images of Joey’s sculptures that began to proliferate in significant art world instagram stories. Some pieces were sold and there was talk of press and gallery shows. Oliver told me he was having a cigarette at Gagosian’s house when he made a presale of one of the chairs to a significant collector.
On the drive down to LA we listened to Arundhati Roy on the effects of the coronavirus in India. We listened to Ben Lerner talk about The Topeka School and Rosi Braidotti on necropolitics and ways of dying. All subjects that pertained to our ongoing conversations. By the end of the drive, Joey said ‘I can’t listen to one more person describe these problems that we already know.’
