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29/3/2006

Drawings 1978-2006

Pollock Fine Art, London

Works by Andy Warhol, Robert Hawkins and Jonathan Meese

Pollock Fine Art is pleased to present an exhibition of drawings from 1978-2006 with works by Andy Warhol, Robert Hawkins and Jonathan Meese. Introductory text by Glenn O'Brien.*

What About Robert Hawkins
by Glenn O'Brien

I have always been a huge fan of Robert Hawkins. I think it used to be a sort of secret thing. Like an art crush. I didn’t really know him and I guess I was sort of scared of him for years. Not that I thought he was going to knife me or bite me or anything, although he really did look like a scary punk, with a fierce Mohawk, a really good one, and raffish leather with rude stuff written on it and big paratrooper boots and major tattoos and real fang implants and a nose ring…just a sort of generally forbidding presence. He also seemed to glare a lot, but now I think he didn’t realize he was glaring. I do the same thing. It’s like when my Latin teacher threw me out of class saying “Wipe that smirk off your face Mr. O’Brien." I didn’t even know I was doing it. I was just being natural. And that’s what Robert is. He is more than natural. He is Nature. He is more natural than just about anybody I know, but more on that later.

Anyway, I was just afraid that if I talked to him he might say “What do you want?! "in a really loud voice or something. And in the art world getting shown up or embarrassed is far worse than getting stabbed. But in fact that was what I really liked about him. To me, in this world, if you’re not a desperado you just don’t get it. To be a good artist you have to be a desperado, and to be great one and to stay that way and to stay genuinely alive you have to be a desperado in your bones.

Now that I know Robert I realize that this shyness of him was all silly because it was all about his shyness. He is really a sweetheart, even the beast within him that he must nourish. (See Johnny Cash.) In fact this air of ferocity, this attitude of apparent dangerousness, this flamboyantly built-in sales resistance, that desperado aura, is only the beginning of the things I admire about him. His cultivated terribleness protects a big heart of butter cream. (Punk’s big secret. See Sid.) It’s like barbed wire protecting a playground.

Not only is Robert Hawkins one of the great artists of my time, he has actually gone to more trouble to escape the usual consequences of this and say “Fuck you!" to the hideous, loathsome art establishment and its inverted public relations contortions, than anyone I can think of who is still alive. Robert just doesn’t suffer fools lightly, he is so allergic to them that he starts making you wonder if you are one. His scrutiny is not only survivable, it’s healthy.

But now I have gotten past all that and I’ve come to think of him as a sort of pirate, a loveable pirate like the one Johnny Depp plays in the movies. He is ferocious but that ferocity is so under the control of great good humor that there’s nothing to fear unless you really deserve it. (And maybe you do. I don’t know who’s reading this.) Anyway, Hawkins is even a perfect pirate name. And in the dangerous seas of art he’s definitely sailing under the jolly roger. He’s a freebooter in the best sense. He’s an outlaw because the law of the art world and the law of the jungle and a lot of law in general is really fucked, and Robert is a true noble by nature. He is, uh, Sir Robin of Locksley, a real Robin Hood type, who probably digs robbing the rich as much as giving to the poor. Hawkins is no pirate in the sense that he has never pirated anyone’s work or style. He is utterly original. But he don’t kowtow to no one no how.

Anyway, to sum up so far: Robert Hawkins is not a big famous artist because he has resisted all attempts to make him that. And, up to a point, that was necessary and right. But now that he has a large, madcap, ferociously witty, and startling original body of work behind him. Now that he has gone through his self-crucifixion phase and resurrected himself from the dead. Now that he has allowed the smile to follow quickly the scowl. Now…I think…it’s time that he can relax and enjoy making art work on his own roving, druidical, picaroon, anarchic, swashbuckling terms.

The work has always been ardent and inflammatory and flagrant and pyrotechnically accomplished, but now it’s really on fire. He’s branding all the sacred cows with irons red-hot from the bonfires of vanity. Most painters need somebody swanky or official to tell people that what they are looking at is good, but when people walk into my living room and see Jesus waterskiing to the amazement of His disciples they don’t need any help to get it. And, in a way, I think, they are nicely altered by that vision. And that’s the job of the artist. To fuck you up good. To convince you you’re lost and possibly offer some hint of orientation at a price.

Hawkins’ work is both funny and mysterious. He’s an initiate in the brotherhood of sacred folly and transcendental shtick. William Blake as Johnny Rotten somehow seems in the ballpark. His work reminds me, somehow, of the late, great Lord Buckley, who, in his prophetic work “H-Bomb" wrote:"It is the duty of the humor of any given nation in times of high crisis to attack the catastrophe that faces it in such a manner as to cause the people to laugh at it in such a manner that they do not die before they get killed." Robert Hawkins work is fiercely funny and uniquely stylish (not a la mode but in the true sense of style—the deepest, unalterable essence that lives in ever line. ) Every work is a grand jest, a delightfully improvised game with secret rules, a forgetful memento mori, a sending up of the absurd to where it belongs. This buccaneer can fire a broadside with the very best, he just likes hanging out on the horizon, behind a mist, where nobody can fuck with you, only to pop up out of nowhere when you least expect it and take no prisoners.

*Glenn O'Brien is a poet, essayist, novelist, editor, TV host, stand up comic, advertising creative director and copywriter, film producer and scriptwriter, playwright, actor, commercial director, radio show host, photographer and international advice columnist. He is also a husband, father, golfer, Yankee/Jets/Knicks fan, bibliophile, oenophile and table tennis enthusiast. He lives in New York City and Cornwall, Connecticut. His television show, TV Party, is re-released on DVD. His first novel is forthcoming and he is at work on a memoir of the No Wave era. He wrote the introduction to Warhol’s World a Steidl publication in conjunction with Hauser & Wirth and ran the column Glenn O’Brien’s Beat in Interview magazine, described by Anthony D’Offay as "perhaps the most influential column in the world".

Private view: Thursday, Mar 30 6-8

Pollock Fine Art
58a King Henry's Road - London

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