Williams airbrushing "A Diamond in a Goat's Ass (A Lyrically Poetic Euphemism for Pretension)"

Often know by the name “pop surrealism,” lowbrow art leapt onto the art community’s radar in the 1970s in Los Angeles. A tormented stepchild of punk rock, underground comix, and America’s obsession with hot rods, this movement was delineated by a sense of humor, sharp wit, and, above all else, a grandiloquent denouement with chaos ruling the canvas, the likes of which had not been accepted in a gallery setting before.

Barret S. Bingham tells us, “This alternative art movement found its most congealing participant in one of America’s most opprobrious and maligned underground artists, painter Robert Williams. It was this artist to brought the term “lowbrow” into the fine arts lexicon, with his ground breaking 1979 book, The Lowbrow Art of Robert Williams. It was from this point that the seminal elements of West Coast Outlaw culture slowly started to aggregate.”

The wonderfully garrulous David Dalton says of Williams, “Who the hell gets to call it reality, anyway? Robert Williams, the kinky king of West Coast outlaw culture, that’s who. Why? Because this is his show, a rabid art dog’s x-ray of angsty, eye-popping hyperreality. Putrid, crusading, loutish, leering, and profound, Williams is a generator of pure cerebral monsters summoned out of drooling lust, apocalyptic kitsch, alien hatchlings, and gross gonzo tableaux.

A master draftsman, inventor, and depictor of the seething teen brain, Robert Williams’ art is an uncanny graphic analogy for heavy metal’s raunch and grind—nasty, perverse, loud, lewd, and out of control—which is why Guns N’ Roses used his title and painting “Appetite For Destruction,” on the cover of their album of the same name eight years later,where a hideous chrome-toothed orange space monster zaps a robot into a skeleton as he is about to rape a blonde female street peddler…. Wait a minute, I can’t describe this! You just gotta see it. Not surprisingly, art academia was aghast at this aesthetic whiplash. It was as if the Hells Angels had vroomed into the hallowed white space of the gallery on their Harleys threatening to gang-bang the Mona Lisa.”

"Wrangling the Firmament"

Joining Ed “Big Daddy” Roth in the mid-1960s, Williams had previously tried to forge a fine-arts path, finding more solace in the underground world of comix. Embracing the same trinity that helped spawn the movement from its inception, Williams soon joined forces with the likes of R. Crumb and other pioneers of the lowbrow to form the now-ubiquitous Zap Comix.

"Mythical Benevolence Via Ice Cream"

Bingham continues: “Robert Williams’ influence on alternative art is immeasurable. From his endeavors to broaden the possibilities for young artists to gain exposure, sprang the well known art chronicle, JUXTAPOZ magazine. Even with this popular manifesto and landmark publication, Williams’ well-meaning machinations still places his work in a lost league of unvindicated ghosts—he’s now an outsider among outsiders.

Williams’ paintings now take us into the world of subjective theory-a mock realm of violated graphic physics. This is his theoretical search to pinpoint the exact location where the sky meets the ground, with the golden socket wrench used only by quantum mechanics. His art is the first step on that hypothetical ourney, but it is now a hapless sojourn through metaphysical superstition or false mystery. It is simply the next logical step into abstract thought.”

"Tortured Libido"

Robert Williams’ “In the Service of the Hypothetical” is showing through January 23rd at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York.