Nonconformity comes as second nature to Robert Williams. Famed as one of the original Zap Comix artists alongside Robert Crumb but perhaps best known for his 1979 painting Appetite for Destruction, which provided both the title and cover art for Guns N’ Roses’ debut album, Williams is a West Coast art icon and underground culture legend. His fans revere him for his lurid psychedelic mash-ups of hot rods, hot girls and bug-eyed men, like a Tex Avery cartoon run riot, with lashings of sex and violence all wrapped in biting sarcasm.  Yet despite its popularity, Williams’s work, currently the subject of a major solo show at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery entitled Slang Aesthetics, continues to confound the art establishment. He has been critically snubbed and vilified for decades.  “I’ve gotten a lot of bad write-ups in newspapers over the years and they like to refer to my stuff as ‘kitsch’,” says Williams. “Well, my stuff is way fuckin’ kitsch. It’s kitsch to an abstract level, you understand. It’s fuckin’ meretricious.”  Born and raised in the American south-west, Williams talks in a reedy voice that, befitting his reputation as a bad boy of contemporary art, makes everything sound like a sneer. Nevertheless, with his southern ways, he comes across as unfailingly polite and erudite, even when pouring scorn in the most scabrous of terms on those who would underestimate him. At 72, there is little sign he has mellowed or is willing to give ground. The art world at this point, he believes, is little more than a fight for the use of real estate: “If you can get into those big museums, in a big white room, and you’ve got a pedestal, and you put a dog turd on that pedestal, that thing is going to be sanctified.”  Even if he’s never been fully accepted, Williams, by his own admission, has always had one foot in the art establishment, whether they like it or not. His work was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial. He was featured in MOCA curator Paul Schimmel’s groundbreaking show Helter Skelter: LA Art in the 90s, alongside Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy. Williams likes to boast that he was described as the “nadir” of a show that, while a huge hit with the public and now considered hugely influential, was critically reviled at the time. He was also represented for 27 years by gallerist Tony Shafrazi alongside Francis Bacon, Ed Ruscha and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Shafrazi, according to Williams, saw his charge as the next Andy Warhol.  If you’ve got a pedestal, and you put a dog turd on that pedestal, that thing is going to be sanctified  “He realised that I had a certain capability and that could be turned into an acceptable academic direction.” But despite his gallerist’s best efforts, Williams says he remains “the same asshole I’ve always been”.  Shafrazi’s belief in him is not as far-fetched as it may sound. For Williams has had an enormous, almost immeasurable impact on the art world not only through his own work but also through Juxtapoz, the populist art magazine he co-founded in 1994 that is still going strong today, for which he also provided “direction” during its first couple years. Styled, he says, “in the same flavour of the old surrealist magazines in the 20s and 30s – La Revolution Surrealiste and Minotaure”, Juxtapoz quickly found its place, becoming the biggest-selling art magazine in the world by covering artists that none of the others would touch – artists who had similar concerns as Williams and were unabashed in their love for and inspiration from pop culture. In the process, he says, it “punched a hole in the wall” of the art world that “people could pass through”.  Raised for the most part in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Williams had to create his own way in. Some of his childhood was spent in Montgomery, Alabama, where his father owned a restaurant called the Parkmore, then “the largest drive-in restaurant in the world”. There, he was first exposed to the two overriding obsessions in his life: cars and girls. The roller-skating waitresses in hotpants who worked at the Parkmore and the girls in bobby-sox who frequented it became, says Williams, “a fascination I’ve never been able to slow down”. His father, who had invested proceeds from the restaurant in a fleet of stock cars, bought Williams, then 12 years old, his first car, a 1934 Ford Coupe. Soon he would become involved in illegal hot-rod road races that became the subject of a 1976 painting.  “I’ve always been in trouble,” he says. “I just socially didn’t fit.” In the 50s, in the south, he says, “you were a good citizen or a criminal, there was no middle ground there. So I early on related to beatniks, the bohemian world of letters and art.”  In the early 60s, he moved to Los Angeles only to study fine art at the Chouinard Art Institute. At that time, abstract expressionism was in vogue and, despite the fact Walt Disney and his brother Roy had bought Chouinard in 1961 to incorporate it into CalArts, Williams was upbraided for his commitment to draftsmanship and denigrated as an “illustrator”. “That was the argument that’s always thrown up to me in art school. ‘You’re not really a painter, you’re really an illustrator. You should take up illustration.’ Well, yeah. What am I going to do, be a commercial whore? No, my work’s as fuckin’ valid as anyone else.”  A break came working as an art director for Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, the Walt Disney of custom car culture, whose most famous character, Rat Fink, re-imagined Mickey Mouse as a syphilitic, thrill-seeking, hot rod-riding reprobate. After leaving Roth’s employ in the late 60s to concentrate on painting, he joined the ranks of contributors to Robert Crumb’s groundbreaking Zap Comix, and found fellowship with underground comics artists – like Gilbert Shelton, S Clay Wilson and Crumb himself, who had experienced similar discrimination in art school. After a while, he says, “the hippie thing started getting so saccharine and so self-righteous”. When hippy culture morphed into punk, Williams found himself embraced by a whole new scene in Los Angeles. He exhibited in makeshift galleries and venues in vacant storefronts in Hollywood that used art as a front to sell liquor in the back.  “I loved the music,” Williams says of the punk scene. “It was just pure energy.” The musicians, in kind, recognised the same thing in his paintings. Debbie Harry, who Williams once described as “to the 20th century what Jenny Lind was the the 19th century”, confided in him the story of her near-abduction by Ted Bundy, which became the subject of a psychological portrait he painted of the singer and her neuroses. And in the mid-80s, Williams was approached by Axl Rose, the lead singer of a then-unknown Los Angeles rock band, to use one of his paintings on the cover of their debut album. The artwork caused a furore and brought the band instant notoriety. “I knew exactly what kind of trouble they were going to get into,” he says. “I laid it all out to them. And it happened just as I said.”  From the 80s onwards, Williams’s oil paintings, while continuing to be rendered in his familiar style, became ever-more structurally complex. Recent work, such as the Death of Sophistication and the Death by Exasperation (both featured in the LAMAG show), are a riot of ideas and fantastical imagery, albeit rooted in specific concepts or idea that Williams wants to express, that follow their own internal (albeit helter skelter) logic to tell a story. His canvases are, in effect, like pages from a comic book with all the panels removed.  Williams puts great stock in never having painted the same image twice or basing his work on anybody else’s ideas. “I have a great deal of pride in imagination,” he says. This at a time when he believes that the virtues of creativity and imagination, along with craftsmanship, virtuosity, even the very ‘thinking’ that conceptual art implies, have all been disregarded and dispensed with by the art world. “They’ve run out of everything,” he says. “You’ve got a crucifix and a bottle of urine and canned faeces, and [someone] doing nothing, and a pile of sand in a museum – what is left? The only thing left is wide open use of imagination.”  The only barrier to unfettered creativity and imagination, he says, are the highfaluting ideas of “sophistication” demanded by the art world. Until the advent of abstract expressionism, New York, the vanguard and the gatekeeper of art in America, was the first port of call for all the “canons of sophistication”, as Williams terms art movements like impressionism, surrealism and dada imported from Europe in the early 20th century.  By the time those styles crossed the continent and reached the west coast though, Williams believes, they had transformed into something else, something peculiarly American. In his view, the west coast developed its own popular art forms: “If you take into consideration in the last 30 or 40 years, the advent of psychedelic art, underground comics, movie posters, B-movie posters, the pornography industry, skateboards, surfing, tattoos, biker art, hot-rod art – all of that is west coast.”  This is the art and these are the cultures that have long informed Williams’s work, along with things like EC comic books and the golden age of Warner Brothers animated cartoons. “There’s no question in my mind that the greatest art of the 20th century was the cartoon,” says Williams. “No other form of art has such a great and giant form of vocabulary than the cartoon.”  There’s probably a good argument to be made that the cartoon is also one of the most influential art forms of our time. But critical oversight says otherwise. “Everyone has a certain appreciation for cartoons, but no one really wants to think of them as ‘fine art’,” he says. “The obstacle that stood in the way of the cartoon is fucking sophistication.”  Maybe Williams can have the last laugh after all. The work of once-fashionable artists inevitably fades from view but, decades on, Williams and his dirty, funky, kitschy pictures still feel vital and remain very much in vogue.  Robert Williams: SLANG Aesthetics is at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery
The artist who provided cover art for Guns N’ Roses’s Appetite For Destruction may still not be accepted by some in the art world – but that’s the way he likes it