HOT, HOT HOT-RODS : Laguna Art Museum Scores a Coupe, You Might Say, With Kustom Kulture

Artist Robert Williams is in heaven, a heaven where blinker lights serve as twinkling stars and oil filters come with afterlife-time guarantees.

Traipsing through a musty warehouse, he gazes excitedly at the rusted remains of old cars, expertly pinpointing the make, model and date of the automobiles that once bore the mangled parts.

“That’s a 1930 Model A Ford,” he says, “that’s a ‘28, that’s a ‘29, that’s a 1935 Ford, that’s a Cadillac, that’s a Chevy.

“I’m pretty good, huh?” he asks a reporter, grinning like a kid who’s aced his first driving test.

Williams was reared around motorcycles and cars--his dad owned stock cars--and he can tell you the year (1939) the term hot-rod entered the lexicon and describe the evolution of hot-rodding as deftly as he identifies just about anything with a gas tank.

At age 11 he was driving a 1934 Ford coupe on back roads in Alabama, and he now owns a 1932 Ford roadster and a ’34 Ford two-door sedan with a chop top. His wife, artist Suzanne Williams, drives a ’57 T-bird.

What’s all that got to do with the price of picture frames? Williams, after all, is known from coast to coast for his paintings, not his car knowledge.

“Kustom Kulture: Von Dutch, Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth, Robert Williams and Others,” opening Saturday at the Laguna Art Museum, attempts to show the influence of the Southern California custom car culture of the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s on the art scene of the area and beyond.

“A lot of people tend to view (custom car culture) as being extraneous to what was going on in the fine art world,” guest co-curator and artist Craig Stecyk said recently. Critics see it as “a bunch of greaseballs doing this horrid, tacky stuff in the ‘50s. But I think it has had an incredible influence on contemporary art” in terms of materials, techniques and attitudes.

Co-curator Bolton Colburn, the museum’s curator of collections, asserts in the exhibit’s catalogue that “the main influence on the art of Los Angeles in the past four decades has come from car culture.”

What is custom car culture, known as kustom kulture in the lingo of the day, and how will its influence be illustrated through roughly 200 artworks and objects by 43 artists and car fanatics?

If you’re at least thirtysomething, you may not need much explanation. You probably know that kustom kulture represents a nationwide renegade phenomenon with roots in 1920s Southern California, and that it’s synonymous with super-speedy or pin-striped driving machines agleam with multiple coats of bright paint and high-gloss wax .

You may even have customized--chopped, channeled, frenched, decked--your own car to make it flashier, or souped up its engine to make it faster. The goal was to make it look and drive like yours and yours alone, not some clone from an assembly line.

You probably also remember that weird, anthropomorphic cartoon monsters enter into this mix, with Rat Fink--that pot-bellied, fly-infested rodent--serving as the ultimate nonconformist. And T-shirt graphics and bad-taste underground comics such as Zap and Mad also play a role.

Now, if you know your contemporary art, you may know that all of this influenced “finish fetish” artists as well as later “low art” practitioners such as Williams, whose work was recently seen in the major “Helter Skelter” show at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

In “Kustom Kulture,” you’ll see classic customized cars; sensuous lacquered sculptures by “finish fetish” artists fascinated with a work’s flashy shell, or finish; Williams’ nightmarish paintings rife with roadsters and slobbering shark-toothed monsters; plus various Rat Fink incarnations, other cartoon and comic images, and, curators hope, the way it all links together.

You’ll also learn the story behind kustom kulture, which begins with an eccentric recluse named Von Dutch, whom Williams and others refer to as “god.”

Von Dutch, who died of liver disease last September at age 63, was born Kenneth Robert Howard in Los Angeles.

The son of a sign painter, he had a knack for painting too, and is credited with introducing pin-striping--which had been used for centuries on everything from Roman chariots to sewing machines--to the world of hot-rods. He turned a rather ordinary technique into a free-form aesthetic that boasted of his Baroque designs, his signature flying eyeball (winged and bloodshot), fiery flames and grotesque, Dali-esque monsters.

“Today, we have 40 or 50 years of this stuff, and people just accept it as ‘oh it’s just your basic hot-rod flame job’ or ‘this is the way custom cars look,’ ” said Stecyk, who knew Von Dutch and was also reared around fast and fancy cars. “But cars didn’t always look like that. Von Dutch came along and did something that’s never been done before.’ ”

Von Dutch also produced surrealistic oil paintings and was a virtuosic craftsman and machinist who restored motorcycles and built from scratch idiosyncratic vehicles and ornate guns and knives, some of which, along with a pin-striped dashboard from one of his creations, are in the “Kustom Kulture” exhibit.

Von Dutch, a vagabond who lived in a trailer equipped with a machine shop, one day pulled the trailer into the parking lot of Movie World, Cars of the Stars and Planes of Fame, a Buena Park museum that operated from 1970 to ’79.

The museum specialized in customized cars and hot-rods, many of them used in movies or TV, embellished by such leading car customizers as George Barris, with whom Stecyk’s father worked. All this evidently attracted Von Dutch, and museum owner James F. Brucker, who idolized him, allowed Von Dutch to park his bus behind the museum and live there, according to Stecyk.

(Later, Von Dutch moved the bus to Brucker’s Santa Paula warehouse, where he stayed until his death. The vast former citrus packing plant housed myriad items amassed by Brucker--who recently sold its contents--and his family, much of the defunct museum’s holdings and the old car parts that Williams recently surveyed.)

At the museum, Von Dutch became reacquainted with Ed (Big Daddy) Roth, who revolutionized the hot-rod world in the ‘60s by building wild cars from scratch, rather than by altering existing vehicles. His most infamous, the Beatnik Bandit, a futuristic bubble-topped Fiberglas vision, will be included in the Laguna exhibit and is likely to lure car fanatics from near and far.

Roth, who was designing displays and signage at Movie World, had met Von Dutch years before, just after Von Dutch began pin-striping, something that Roth subsequently took up professionally. Roth is also known for creating Rat Fink and other raunchy creatures that he airbrushed onto T-shirts and sold at car shows around the country where his cars were on display.

Roth, who became a counterculture idol, would “dash off exaggerated cartoon-style monsters with giant heads popping out of zany coupes or roadsters with big supercharged engines and smoking rear tires,” writes Pat Ganahl, senior editor of Rod & Custom magazine, in the “Kustom Kulture” catalogue. “ . . . The young roadsters (who bought the shirts) would wear them as further proof of their rebellious yet fun attitude.”

Roth, whose cars and Rat Finks were marketed nationwide and beyond as toys and trinkets, went on to work as a sign painter at Knott’s Berry Farm from 1974 to ’84. During that time he became a Mormon, and in 1989 he moved to Manti, Utah, where he continues to design unusual vehicles and sell Rat Fink comic books, T-shirts and other paraphernalia.

He says Von Dutch’s influence on him and on others was profound, and he, like others, credits Von Dutch with innovating the monster imagery as well as with broadening his creative vision.

“Possibility thinking is what he taught me,” Roth said during a recent Orange County visit, “so that everything that I do, I say, ‘Well, why can’t it be this way?’ Well, it can, if you want it to.”

In addition, Von Dutch “never did the same thing twice, and every artist would like to change styles. They don’t like to be (typecast for a single style). And that’s what Dutch was successful at doing.”

The legacy of Von Dutch and of Roth filters into the fine art world through artist and hot-rod fiend Williams. He worked for Roth and was awed by Von Dutch’s talent from the moment he first saw a Von Dutch customized car on the cover of an early 1950s Hot Rod magazine. Williams was about 10 at the time.

“There was this race car,” he said in a recent interview, “looking right at you, dead center, and right on the front of the race car was painted a flying eyeball and it was flamed and there was pin-striping on top of that. For 1953 it was so unbelievably wild. So I was immediately infatuated with Von Dutch. Not only did I like hot-rods, but here was somebody that had this real abstract form of self-expression, and I immediately had a role model.”

Between ’65 and ‘70, Williams worked as art director for Roth, who had set up a studio in Southeast L.A., out of which he marketed his T-shirts, largely through magazine ads, and created his remarkable cars.

There, Williams did everything from designing T-shirts to working on the cars to illustrating the ads for Roth. He calls Roth “one of the very first underground artists,” one with a graphic repertory of “lowbrow stuff that makes mom go ‘eeeuuuuu,’ ” such as hairy moles and cavities and “bugged-out eyes.”

This influence, as well as that of Von Dutch, would show up in Williams’ scabrous underground comic work (he later co-founded Zap Comix) and his paintings, odes to gratuitous sex and bloody violence.

If nowhere else, the shared sensibility of all three men is easily seen in the bloodshot eyeballs common to their work: There’s Von Dutch’s flying eyeball; the bloated, distended eyeballs of Roth’s Rat Fink, and Williams’ multi-eyed monsters.

Conceptually, their work shares the counterculture stance--personified by the monster image--that undergirded the outlaw hot-rod mystique. Those who “didn’t like what they were given,” that is, assembly-line cars, “made something else out of them,” cars that went faster and looked unique, co-curator Stecyk said.

“It’s a kind of delight in taking a contrary position; a certain non-mainstream orientation,” he said.

Williams describes the uniting force in his “Rubberneck Manifesto,” included in the exhibit catalogue.

The only worthy art, he writes, is that which “you find yourself driven to see. Higher notions of art tend to confine art with lofty moral restrictions. . . . Something dead in the street commands more measured units of visual investigation than 100 Mona Lisas. . . . Hail the voyeur, the only honest connoisseur!!!”

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Other “Kustom Kulture” fine artists didn’t have the same exposure to Von Dutch and Roth that Williams enjoyed, nor are kustom kulture influences as obvious in their paintings or sculpture.

But, assert Stecyk and Colburn, works in the show by roughly 40 others (most of them Southern Californians) nonetheless clearly reflect the impact, and some of these artists in fact had their cars pin-striped by Von Dutch.

“One of the best illustrations of the influence is in work done in 1960s by finish fetish artists” such as Billy Al Bengston, Kenneth Price or DeWain Valentine, Colburn said.

These artists emphasized surface and reflection and used high-gloss lacquers, pearlescent paints and other materials and techniques borrowed from the car customizing arena, which borrowed them from the burgeoning aerospace industry, he said.

Bengston, a nationally known leading contemporary artist, repaired, raced and painted motorcycles, and he influenced his colleagues by transferring his metal lacquering and painting skills “right over into his artwork,” Colburn said.

One work from his well-known “Dentos” series--dented squares of metal spray painted with rich colors--is included in the exhibit. “Lady of the Night” (1970) was actually given a clear overcoat by a professional car customizer Bengston had hired for the job, Colburn said.

Robert Irwin, another renowned contemporary artist, modified cars as a youth and readily credits hot-rod influences. Irwin biographer Lawrence Weschler writes that Irwin’s art is imbued with “a hot-rod aesthetic: precision, attention to minute detail and passionate concern for the consistency of the whole.”

Works by a group of younger artists in the exhibit--such as Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, Georganne Dean and Anthony Ausgang--particularly express Roth and Williams’ influence, according to Colburn.

“These artists,” he writes in the catalogue, “have not only adopted the punk cartoon styles of Roth and Williams, but claim as their subject matter our society’s stew of materialism, sex and violence.”

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Taken as a whole, the exhibit underscores the idea that the West Coast art scene, often viewed as a mere outpost of New York trends, was developing an aesthetic of its own, Colburn said.

Local artists were “influenced by what was actually happening in Los Angeles, in the culture at large, rather than in the art culture specifically,” then dominated by Abstract Expressionism, he said.

While few may argue with that point, Colburn’s claim that the “main influence” on L.A. art in the past 40 years came from car culture triggers debate.

Walter Hopps, founding director of the Menil Collection in Houston and a key figure in the early development of the L.A. art scene, calls Von Dutch “a legendary figure” and an “absolute master of painting and metal work and engraving.” He said recently that kustom kulture, as pioneered by Von Dutch, had “a powerful influence” on the local art scene.

(Hopps tried to exhibit Von Dutch’s work at his seminal Ferus Gallery in the late ‘50s. But, he said, he lacked the money to commission a car by Von Dutch, who didn’t want to exhibit only parts of autos and who also resisted involvement with the fine art world.)

Still, “I’m not about to say it’s the biggest influence,” said Hopps, former director of the Pasadena Art Museum, now called the Norton Simon Museum. “Bigger than Matisse? I hardly think so.”

In 1985, Zero One, an offbeat Los Angeles gallery, staged a show akin to the Laguna museum’s. “Western Exterminators” took its title from the bug-obliterator company logo created by Von Dutch’s father.

But “Kustom Kulture” is the first of its kind in a museum, said curators, who are confident the show will appeal to car-lovers. They point out that the cover story of this month’s Smithsonian magazine asserts that hot-rodding is undergoing an “international, All-American” revival. The story focuses on Boyd Coddington of Stanton--some of whose cars will be in the exhibit--who is arguably the country’s top hot-rod builder.

Although the exhibit includes leading mainstream artists, it may alienate those who don’t believe that cars, car customizers or Rat Finks belong in a museum, Colburn said. “Shows like this run the risk of being criticized for not being art.”

But, he countered, “the important thing is to get people to think about what they think is art and what they don’t think is art.”

Furthermore, said Stecyk, who has been trying to organize such an exhibit for the past 25 years, recognition of the impact Southern California’s kustom kulture has had on the art world has increased over the past five years.

“People are waiting to see this,” he said, predicting “it’s just the first of a number of (major) shows that will deal with this phenomenon.”

Related Events

* “Sculpture Culture,” a children’s art class in which youths will make three-dimensional works from traditional media and wrecking yard cast-offs. Laguna Art Museum main site. Ages 7 to 9, class meets Aug. 3 through 13; ages 10 to 12, class meets Aug. 17 through 27. Cost is $80.

* “Good Morning Laguna,” lecture by “Kustom Kulture” guest co-curator Craig Stecyk. Laguna Art Museum main site. Aug. 12, 11 a.m. Free with museum admission.

* “Road Warriors: A Panel Discussion” by “Kustom Kulture” contributors Ed (Big Daddy) Roth, Robert Williams and Gilbert Lujan and Von Dutch companion and Cal State Northridge film professor Temma Kramer. Moderated by Pat Ganahl, senior editor, Rod & Custom magazine. Forum Auditorium, Festival of the Arts grounds, 650 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. Sept. 9, 7:30 p.m. Admission: $8.

* “An Auto Body Experience: Customize a Car,” a family workshop led by Northern California artist David Best, who will help participants “customize” a car by attaching to it various items, from a baseball bat to old records, they bring from home. South Coast Plaza parking lot at Bristol Street and Anton Boulevard. Oct. 2 and 3, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Cost per day is $10 per family; $5 per person. Participants may attend one or both days.

* “Good Morning Laguna,” lecture by “Kustom Kulture” artist Georganne Deen. Laguna Art Museum main site. Oct. 7, 11 a.m. Free with museum admission.

Note: Space may be limited for some events.

You Can Quote Them

“Kustom Kulture” artist Robert Williams:

* On the popularity of hot-rodding: “Right now (people) don’t really appreciate what a big thing hot-rodding was in the ‘40s and ‘50s. It was a tremendously large social activity and sport” that “pretty much died” after the Vietnam War. At that point, “an intellectual movement” generated on college campuses predominated, and owning hot-rods and turning wrenches was not for intellectuals. “That was for grease monkeys.”

* On kustom kulture “god” Von Dutch’s talents: “Von Dutch could take a . . . cold piece of machinery, and with a couple of loops with a pin-striping (brush), the thing had soul. It had hand-touched, warm soul on it. It was wild. This piece of machinery all of a sudden had this tremendous vitality.”

* On kustom kulture progenitor Ed (Big Daddy) Roth’s studio in Maywood, in southeastern Los Angeles: The studio “was like this incredible think tank. Roth had all these artists working there, really odd people. Roth really liked odd people. When he met me, he realized I was a little off, and he fell in love with me.”

* On Roth’s influence on his art: “Before I met Roth, I was doing kind of a cheesy surrealism. I purposely tried to get the comic-book look out of it. It was there, but I tried to censor it out, I was trying to be sophisticated. When Roth got through with me, I realized this is what’s happening. Why am I trying to fight the most natural thing about what I do?”

Kustom Kulture progenitor Ed (Big Daddy) Roth:

* On Von Dutch’s origination of pin-striping for hot-rods: “I met (Von Dutch) 30 years ago when he started this pin-striping thing. (He would cover up) little imperfections in (car) paint jobs, and he made a big thing out of it so that everybody wanted to have it done, regardless if they had imperfections in their paint job or not.”

* On creating his cartoon character Rat Fink, which he calls his alter-ego, while joking with a friend about how the Mickey Mouse cartoon character might have evolved: “I tell him you can take these figures and go back and they evolve. . . . (I said) here’s what Mickey Mouse’s father would look like, and I was just kidding and I drew it on this napkin. And then he wanted that drawing on a shirt, and that (Rat Fink) thing just kept growing and growing.”

Seminal Los Angeles art scene figure Walter Hopps:

* On Von Dutch’s refusal to allow Hopps to exhibit (at Hopps’ Ferus Gallery) only pieces of Von Dutch’s cars, rather than a whole car, which Hopps could not afford to commission: “I felt like I was asking Henry Moore to carve a little pebble when he wanted to do a whole sculpture.”