L.A. Man

by Joe Donnelly

  “Stecyk went beyond the museums and got it out there with the surfers and the skaters, against their will at first,” he says, speaking of the trade shows. “But it was different. It was a stunning, bold thing to me. He took what he had in museums and brought it to the trade shows.”

  Like many who got sucked into this world, Escalante’s biggest charge came from the visceral thrills of the Bones Brigade videos that Stecyk directed and which bore titles such as The Bones Brigade and In Search of Animal Chin. The best was Future Primitive.

  “It was a skateboarding movie. At that time, the worst movie I’d ever seen was some skateboard movie by a guy named Hal Jepson, a surf video guy who was making a skating video. It was playing at the Surf Theater in Huntington,” recalls Escalante. “So this video is called Future Primitive. I know it’s going to be bad, but I just want to know how bad it’s going to be. I watch it and right from the beginning, it’s good. It’s so good it blows my mind. It had high production values, good music, good story, and good visuals. It was super-intelligent. I thought, whoever made this movie made an art movie disguised as a skate movie. I ended up watching the video over thirty-five times.”

  It’s easy to dismiss a piece of trivia like a skateboarding video, but, for many, Bones Brigade videos were like punk rock. They were subversive, irreverent, and full of manic energy, like the skate movement itself. With the Bones Brigade and Powell Peralta in general, the evolution that began with the Z-Boys and that took skateboarding from a distraction to a lifestyle to an influential, multimedia creative field became complete. The career arc of former skate punk Spike Jonze demonstrates how it resonates today.

  Picking up where Powell Peralta left off, Jonze did his first filming for the Blind skateboarding company, including Video Days with skateboarding hero and future artist Mark Gonzales. His videos took the high jinks of the Bones Brigade videos to even more deviant levels, including driving a Buick off a cliff in one scene. Like Stecyk and Peralta, Jonze went on to establish his own skate company, Girl, in which he’s still active, before becoming a music-video director. He’s famous for Beastie Boys videos, including “Sabotage,” “Root Down,” and “Sure Shot,” which incorporate skateboarding in the footage. These days, of course, Jonze is best known as the coproducer of Jackass, the MTV series about the crazy stuff skateboarders do, and as the director of Being John Malkovich.

  Other artists, like Mike Mills, followed similar paths. Mills went from semi-professional skateboarder to skateboard graphic artist (X-Girl) to director of music videos featuring skateboarding (Air’s “All I Need”) to television commercials (Gap, Miller Genuine Draft, and, along with Jonze, Levis) that frequently retain the grainy, jump-cut, high-speed, street-level feel of the Bones Brigade movies.

  For Larry Reid, a Seattle-based punk impresario and the city’s Center for Contemporary Art curator, the Bones Brigade videos were the shots heard ‘round the world in a budding counterculture that has only recently become mainstream,

  “What Craig was doing was almost transcendent. [He spoke] to America’s youth in a language he was inventing in a way, but everyone understood. [It was] just this collective unconscious response to the words, images, and attitude in those videos. These people were telling a story, and that story was defining a movement. We’re all used to it now from MTV, but this was before,” says Reid, who claims Stecyk’s work inspired him to open the Craven Image Gallery in Seattle—an influential underground nightclub, punk rock clubhouse, and art gallery. “Craig wasn’t just the poet laureate, he was the artistic savant. He was the apostle of the birth of this youth-culture movement that pretty much permeates our [American] culture. It’s even finally infiltrating fine art.”

  Given the importance of emblems in the skateboarding and surfing worlds, it’s perhaps not surprising that skateboarding has launched an art movement of major significance. Artist Shepard Fairey, known for pasting his Obey Giant stickers in public places, a stunt that later evolved into billboards and a cult phenomenon, found inspiration as a kid in Skateboarder magazine’s early “Dogtown Chronicles,” in Thrasher’s “Skate and Destroy,” and in Stecyk’s work with Powell Peralta.

  “Whether it was accurate to [Stecyk’s] intention or not, the vato rat was the skateboarding version of Kilroy was here. The endurance of this skateboarding iconography is pretty amazing, too, in that it beckons you to look back into the history of it because the context doesn’t give away what it’s about, necessarily, which is what I love about street art,” says Fairey. “I think it goes back to a very primitive urge to not necessarily mark your turf in an aggressive way, but in a way to signify what you’re about and also to reach out to other people who are similar. That’s what I always loved about skateboarders; they always seem to leave evidence of their existence behind in ways that are sometimes destructive, sometimes creative, and sometimes a combination of the two.”

  The pop-culture magazine Tokion recently dedicated an issue to tracing the growth of this art movement, dubbing it “The Disobedients.” Although it profiles a diverse lot, there is a clear unifying theme.

  “Looking at the issue, they are all skateboarders, except about three out of a group of about thirty, and Tokion is not a skateboarding magazine,” says Fairey, who’s among a mix of artists including Ed Templeton, Margaret Kilgallen, Thomas Campbell, Barry “Twist” McGee, Geoff McFetridge, Mike Mills, Mark Gonzales, and Jonze who’re making waves in the art world.

  “It’s not an intentional thing,” says Fairey, “it’s just who the people are who’re affecting popular culture, [who’re] starting to be embraced by the fine art world—but who, before they were being embraced, were doing skateboard graphics, album covers, clothing lines, whatever. The stuff every seventeen-year-old lives by. This thing is a document of our time.”

  Tokion’s “Disobedients” issue comes with a pullout poster charting the history and family tree of “The Disobedients” with an East-to-West map. Craig Stecyk’s name is at the top of the map, on the West side, right above Dogtown.

  “The thing that’s ironic and the thing that sometimes annoys me with the culture is that it’s taken thirty years for people to appreciate Craig,” Rose says. “Stecyk should get a ten percent cut on every ad that’s made in America these days, anything by Mike Mills, Spike Jonze, or Levis or Adidas. They all go back to him.”

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  For a guy who in his younger days spent a lot of time sneaking into empty pools with scofflaw skateboarders, Stecyk has little tolerance for nonsense. Almost everyone familiar with him describes him as intellectually intimidating. In person, though, there’s a melancholy about him. Some friends trace this mood to his recent parting with his longtime partner and wife, artist Lynn Coleman. It’s been an unpleasant separation, and, as a result, a good deal of Stecyk’s work is tied up in legal proceedings. The break happened a few years ago, after Stecyk had traveled to the Maldives. At sea, he had a bad reaction to medicine for an ear infection. It made him delirious. He passed out and banged his head on the deck.

  “I was laying in the sun on the equator for hours, and that’s not a good idea,” says Stecyk, who suffered severe dehydration. Though he was in rough shape when he got back, he immediately went to San Francisco to work on a show—Surf Trip—with Barry McGee. He was exhausted, manic, and obsessive. Working didn’t help.

  “I’m not known for my user-friendliness when I’m focused on doing a show anyway,” Stecyk admits.

  Though Stecyk’s difficult demeanor had long been a joke among friends, this time they were worried about his sanity. Something happened after the Maldives, and a breakup of his marriage followed. It’s obvious that the split has taken a toll on him. A friend said he’s never seen anyone as sad as Stecyk not kill himself. The friend says it was the death of faith for Craig.

  Stecyk resists the conclusion, as he does most attempts to characterize him. “I hear all kinds of rumors about what I’m supposedly abo
ut. Let’s see... I never made it back from ‘Nam. I made a killing off a movie, and I live on Malibu Point. I play horses for profit. I am currently committed to a mental hospital. How would anyone know what’s true? One man’s mania is another man’s modus operandi.”

  Could be. Stecyk’s sadness, though, is the kind that evokes empathy, for sure, but can also evoke humor and art. It may have been there for a long time before the Maldives, or the divorce. It could also be fallout from people close to him—Don James, Ed Roth, Mickey Dora, and Margaret Kilgallen, among others—dying lately.

  The sadness comes through when he’s asked about his life and career, which he claims not to think about at all. Then he’s asked what he does think about, and he says, “Well, today I’m thinking that eighteen people who I’ve been connected with have died in the last year, and this morning they called me and told me that a friend of mine has gone into pneumonia and he’s unconscious and it’s a matter of seconds, a matter of hours, a matter of days. I mean that’s nineteen that I know about.”

  “I try to see good in it,” he says. “There’s something good in it somewhere. That’s what I try to find.”

  The reason Stecyk has trouble talking about himself and his legacy could be that such conversation seems arrogant in the face of all this encroaching mortality. “I don’t know if you have any control over what you do,” he says. “It’s pretty egocentric to assume that...you are responsible for anything. There are a lot of circumstances, varying forces that are brought to bear for anything to come to pass.”

  Stecyk drives an old Chevy El Camino that was given to him by a friend. He claims to have practically no money. When he’s in town, he crashes at either his family’s house in Ocean Park or his girlfriend’s pad in Venice. Otherwise, he goes wherever his artistic pursuits take him, living out of motels in the desert where he scours junkyards for inspiration, staying down at Laguna Beach where he curates the current Surf Culture exhibit at Laguna Art Museum (more on that below). When asked how he makes a living, he jokes, “Not very well.” He steadfastly clings to a gypsy life, and opportunities to cash in on his commodity, like the current fascination with all things Dogtown, do not appeal to him. In fact, Stecyk has distanced himself from most of the hoopla surrounding Dogtown and Z-Boys. So much so that he claims not to have seen the documentary since its award-winning debut at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. He’s also said no thanks to participating in the forthcoming Hollywood feature, for which Stacy Peralta is writing the screenplay. Stecyk’s involvement has been limited to signing away his life’s rights. He says doing so bars him from discussing his past in detail, particularly the Dogtown era, something he’s glad not to do.

  “In that sense it was the best deal I ever made,” he says. “So all of it never happened. It was a life I never led.”

  His disdain for Dogtown nostalgia is based on his insistence that his contributions to the skate culture were coincidental. “I was sort of an incidental documentarian. The skateboarding thing I got involved in because Tony Alva asked me,” he says, perhaps apocryphally. “I had shot pictures of them all, and I was kind of doing it, but I didn’t have any interest in the magazines or any of that stuff because it didn’t have anything to do with my life.”

  It’s as if Stecyk were leading two lives: one under the aliases of John Smythe and Carlos Izan, who documented and popularized the lifestyles of radical skaters and surfers, and another as Craig Stecyk, conceptual artist, a man focused on creating a thematic body of work that is as far removed from the current, highly commercialized skate culture as graffiti is from Monet.

  For example, in the early seventies, long before the Z-Boys surf or skate teams, Stecyk went about the desultory streets of his neighborhood dressing them up with large aluminum poles he planted in the ground that were marked with fluorescent icons. They were called Streetrods. At the same time, he bolted cast-bronze plaques bearing his trademark Calavera mask on walls across the city. Both projects were anonymous public offerings that hinted at secret worlds beyond the radar of mainstream society. They were symbolic of the dissident nature of his crew, whose members were executing guerrilla art protests like Bomb Plant, in which he and Engblom buried that surplus bomb painted with Russian insignia on the beach. When high tide revealed it to the July 4, 1968, beach crowd, people fleeing the sand saw a man dressed in bomb-squad gear rushing to carry the shell safely away. That was Stecyk.

  His interest in using public spaces to make loaded statements with art grew more pointed with Road Rash. For this early-eighties project, he drove across the country with a casting furnace in the back of his truck gutting every dead animal he found, casting them, and then sewing their hides back over a bronze caste. He then bolted the animals to the ground where they had been killed—symbols, in his mind, of man’s rapacious drive for a better life somewhere over the next horizon, or with the next invention.

  Perhaps those themes were no better illustrated than in 1989’s Northwest Passage and 1990’s La Frontera. The former was an installation Stecyk did at Ruth Bloom’s much-missed gallery in Santa Monica, a thriving venue for underground artists before Hugh Hefner took it over in the early nineties for Playboy Studios West. The intention of Northwest Passage was to illustrate the penalty exacted on life and the environment by sheer wantonness. The story was told through a painstaking assemblage of Day-Go cast ducks, a shotgun rotating in a turret, a decaying marsh, and pictures of famous duck hunters through the years: Harry Truman, Ivan the Terrible, Hitler. Typically, it was a critical success and a commercial bust.

  “I thought there was something so unique about what he was doing, and we ended up doing two or three large installation exhibitions. His work was never easy work to sell,” Bloom says, laughing. “He’s definitely one of those people who could use a MacArthur genius grant for his work.”

  La Frontera also appeared in Bloom’s gallery. For it, Stecyk went to a spot on the US/Mexico border and built a shack made from effluvia such as license plates discarded in the crossings. The artist inhabited the shack on and off for eighteen months, documenting things with the trash left behind in the desert outside the doors of his art-piece/living space. Later, he assembled this experience into a montage that told the desperate stories of illegal immigrants.

  “It was absolutely amazing,” recalls Judy Spence, a renowned art collector and local psychiatrist. “There were four different border stories and each one broke your heart more than the one before.”

  An experiment is under way at the Laguna Art Museum that attempts to resolve the conflict between the lowbrow identity that cultural institutions typically assign to the beach culture—which Stecyk represents (whether he wants to or not)—and Stecyk’s own conceptual art projects/ambitious journalistic endeavors. It’s called Surf Culture: The Art History of Surfing, and it’s a summation of the decade that Stecyk, museum director Bolton Colburn and others have spent discussing how beach culture has come to symbolize the California dream. With Stecyk’s Papa Moana exhibit in 1989, Kustom Kulture in 1993, and now Surf Culture, the collaborators’ point is that this beach culture-inspired California dream is now an integral part of the youth-and-freedom-loving American psyche.

  “Surf Culture is about getting a sense of what this culture really is,” says Colburn. “The idea that surfing has been...an icon that represents the idea that somehow you have pleasure in your life now. You know, you don’t have to work your entire life and die and go to heaven to have pleasure—you can have pleasure in your lifestyle and at work. That’s what surfing has come to represent.”

  “Papa moana” is a Hawaiian phrase that means “ocean board.” The Papa Moana show used surfing to explore the impact of the mainland’s cultural imperialism. For instance, the exhibit’s corrugated steel facade employed the primary building material in the Pacific Rim during the 1940s and 1950s, an era that saw the rise of primarily US military and colonial intervention in the Hawaiian Islands. The Stecyk-made sur
fboards propped against the exhibit’s facade were shaped in the tradition of the kahunas (Hawaiian kings) and were adorned with symbols conveying mana, or spirit.

  The symbolism got more intense once you entered the installation. The “Aloha Ha” montage featured artifacts from the mixing of Anglo and Hawaiian culture, among them a broken-down Philco floor radio (popular during the territorial period) that served as a table for snuffed cigarette butts, beer, sunglasses, and a postcard of a bare-breasted Hawaiian girl submissively offering a lei. A Japanese ceramic cup and fan symbolized that the islands were long ago overrun by haoles (whites) and the Japanese, Filipino, Portuguese, Koreans, and Chinese they brought in to work the plantations. A neon sign on the blink flashed “Aloha” and then “ha.”

  Four years later, Kustom Kulture was one of the first major institutional attempts to put the lowbrow art of the likes of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, Robert Williams, R. Crumb, and Raymond Pettibon into context with the custom car movement of the fifties and sixties, which had begun in the South Bay.

  Kustom Kulture opened not long after the death of the movement’s spiritual godfather, Kenny “Von Dutch” Howard. Stecyk cocurated the exhibit and wrote the catalogue’s historical essay. It was a major undertaking that furthered the role of cultural historian that Stecyk had been playing in surf and skate magazines for years. The show brought together a seminal group, including Greg Escalante, Robert Williams, Thrasher’s Kevin Thatcher, and, of course, Stecyk. The group followed Kustom Kulture’s success by starting Juxtapoz magazine in 1994. Today, it’s the fastest-growing art magazine in the country, mostly because it’s the first in a long time to trade in the language and culture of the young.

  Surf Culture is on display at Laguna Arts through October 6, after which it goes on tour to Australia and other international destinations. Stecyk is again the curator and author of the companion catalogue’s main essay. The exhibit contains thematic elements and artifacts in keeping with both Papa Moana and Kustom Kulture as well as contributions from a vast array of artists, such as Kevin Ancell, Chris Wilder, and even Stecyk’s ex, Lynn Coleman. The exhibit is a history of surf art, featuring everything from posters for movies like Endless Summer, to the surfboard used by Colonel Kilgore (played by Robert Duvall) in Apocalypse Now, to the political art of Raymond Pettibon’s giant-wave murals (coded with messages like “the next president should be a surfer”), to the “surfer-crossing” road signs that Cris Hicks got permission to post in the town of Encinitas, and, especially, Ancell’s painting of battered Hawaiian “hula” girls fighting back against haoles with M-16s and grenades. The exhibit also presents an impressive lineup of surfboards, from the earliest planks to today’s tricked-out short boards, that documents the long progression of surfing from a small, insider coterie of “soul” riders to the global granddaddy of “extreme” sports it is now. In the end, the show is perhaps the most comprehensive look to date at surfing’s enduring power as a lifestyle and a metaphor.