Hangin’ on the telephone with the true face of California

PHOTO by DAVID GUETTLER

It’s not the new face of California but it’s a true face: the skull with big black eye sockets and a blocky old cell phone and twiggy little fingers-an LA hero, some happy person called it on the Internet, which is probably the most valuable and succinct evaluation yet. Somewhere between Shepard Fairey and Angelyne is the Skullphone, which likes to hit the back of billboards instead of the front, and if you live here, you have seen it: the original image years ago, or the craftier iterations since, like the roadside memorial floral-sculpture Skullphone, or the Jumbotron Skullphone ad that came on between Paul Mitchell and Motley Crue, or the glowing skeletal Exxon/Mobil pegasus, or the tiny and perfectly appropriate chameleon Skullphones disguised as the signs you have to look at every single day. Next time you wash your hands or pump your gas or reach for a payphone-intersections between private life and street life-please read any present instructions carefully. I was in New York at a bad Mexican restaurant and 3,000 miles from home was a tiny Skullphone on the restroom soap dispenser: LAVESE LAS MANOS, it said, so I did.

Now Skullphone-the man behind the Skullphone image-surfs couches all across Los Angeles but lives and works somewhere in Long Beach, where he has shown his art at Koo’s and {open}. The first museum to sell his art was the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which gave him a dedicated solo space in their Santa Monica annex, but he also sells locally at the Long Beach Museum of Art gift shop and the Orange County Museum of Art. He has just received a shipment of brand new Skullphone holiday ornaments from a factory in Poland, which he ships off to the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Colette boutique in Paris, and the Tate Modern in London. He keeps his Skullstudio very neat, though he admits he has cleaned it up for the photo shoot, and he is careful to make sure his face doesn’t show up in any of the photos. So you will have to forgive the redactions, omissions and confusions put in here to protect Skullphone’s identity-even the people who sell his art describe him as a “guarded enigma.”

But I will answer one question for you–yes, he has a cell phone of his own.

And the photographer had another: “So what exactly does this mean?” he asked, as Skullphone hauled out the original tattering silkscreen of the original Skullphone image that’s haunted untended blank spaces everywhere since the end of 1999. And Skullphone smiled the kind of beatific smile that develops only after years of practice answering unanswerable questions and answered him: “Probably the simplest way to put it,” he said, “is that it’s a self-portrait.”

Before Skullphone was Skullphone he was just a kid who grew up in an undisclosed beach town around here that wasn’t Long Beach, and just before Skullphone was Skullphone he was actually Ben Franklin, a college kid at a central-coast university where he was the curator of the print museum: “All the old stuff with the really big wood blocks and the small 10-point type you’d set newspapers with,” he says. “They needed someone to go in there and clean up and learn the machines, so I did that. I was stoked on being a printmaker—that 1910s vibe where you had to handwrite in a ledger all the transactions that happened and have your smock on—that guy!”

And after school he went right to work, and he kept working on his art journals—books of collage and drawings and rants and photo collage, he says—and as he tells it, one day the Skullphone came through fully formed and ready for mass production: “The one that you see,” he says. “The artwork has never changed. I drew one of them.”

“My entire being was totally open,” he continues carefully. “There were no parameters in my intake. I think I was truly caught in between the seam of this world and another, essentially. It all came out through an image—it was almost like I was freed of my demons when I drew it. And immediately it was something I wanted to share with somebody—to communicate something visual that made me feel better, and made me able to laugh at our world the way it is today, and I found a way I could truly integrate into it.

“I wanted to get it out there but I didn’t know how,” he says. “I didn’t know what I was doing at first, but I was really excited about it. And a few people would see it—family and friends—and be like, ‘Dude, I totally know what you’re saying!’ It was almost like I was communicating for the first time. So that fueled the fire.”

So that was 1999 and then there was the very first Skullphone art installation, where he mounted them with air vents on a board in a grid, and then an in-home gallery show at his early space at Fourth and Alamitos—he hired a U-Haul and “liquidated” all his things into it, and then turned the empty room into a gallery—and that show was where the oldest surviving Skullphone posters would have come from, if any survived. But there were a few before that didn’t survive, he says.

“The real birthplace was Santa Barbara. I’d made a few printouts and I went up to a party in Isla Vista and I threw a bunch on the dance floor for people to walk on—it was almost like they were walking on me—and I took some nihilistic pleasure in that! It was raining out there—Oct. 30, 1999—and when I went outside, people had picked up the paper off the floor, but instead of throwing them on the ground, they’d stuck them up on the wet walls. And I was like—‘All right.’”

PHOTO by DAVID GUETTLER

And now there are thousands, he says: “I only say it with a tinge because that means you have to buy all the glue and find the manpower to put them up. It’s depressing, maybe—you could do so much work and have so little to show for it. But that’s what the project is about—it’s designed to deteriorate.”

The Skullphone discography is very varied—silkscreens, piñatas, neon signs, stocking stuffers like T-shirts and guitar straps (by local company Couch) and coming this season those new Skullphone ornaments, purportedly already sought in bulk by Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis. And this weekend’s Heavy Metal Vomit Party show at Koo’s—a top-flight selection of lively American odd-moderne that includes Andrew Jeffrey Wright and Shepard Fairey, the Led Zeppelin of street graphics—will debut an intermediate work that puts Skullphone on vacation in Miami and Finland, the global capital of cell phone use. (“Go do your research!” he says.)

But those are the durables—Skullphone was born out of wet mess on a wall and the wild works trade extreme visibility for heavy casualty rates. One giant Skullphone poster stayed stable on the American Hotel downtown for a few weeks before coming loose, flapping like a flag and eventually tearing apart in strips. Another pegasus on Seventh is holding tight to an abandoned gas station—a favored Skullphone venue for an artist who deeply prefers to only hit derelict property, instead of making a problem that someone else’s job will make them clean up: “More and more I feel like I’m being shut out of my own creative environment—streets aren’t inspiring anymore,” he says. “I like to put stuff up where I know I’m not fucking over the person who owns the building. But now it’s a more scripted environment. Downtown Disney meets Los Angeles. Plus it’s hard to wheatpaste on stucco!”

He usually conducts his expeditions alone, running on five hours of sleep if he can get that much, and by now he has a veteran’s selection of tricks. (“The minute I have a pair of shoes on that get filthy dirty—that’s it! I become Skullphone.”) Out on the street at 3 a.m., he says, sometimes you gotta fake like a crackhead and twitch—“I’ve spent plenty of time out twitching on the street!” On a trip to New York, he’d found a stack of good shipping foam in an art museum dumpster, so he put that in a bag and used it as a ladder to reach the tops of roll-down gates he wanted to work on: “My role was ‘bag guy,’” he says. “When I was behind it, it just looked like I was sleeping in trash. But really I was back there prepping all my stuff.”

He remembers the last time he actually had to back off—climbing a billboard along the 405 at the curve around the Skechers building on a slippery early morning, about a hundred feet over the freeway with no ladder, just clutching with his elbows and knees like a monkey goes up a palm tree with nothing to hold him up except luck and friction and force of will. And finally he thought: “Your life is way more important than this,” so he shivered on down and walked away.

Was that your Everest? I ask.

“Don’t say that!” he laughs. “You’ll only challenge me!”

You’ve got Skullphone in your blood, I say.

“Yeah, well,” he says. “In my mirror.”

After many years skullphone found out how to stop the questions: “Argh!” he says because people always ask him what it means, and “Do you really want me to go into this?” he says when we derail into strange questions on infrastructure security and the way cities and people are changing.

“My friend David summed it up best: ‘You’re an abstract artist.’ I tell people that and they stop asking questions. If you say you’re a painter or a silkscreen artist or a video artist, people say, ‘Oh, really—what do you do?’ But if you say you’re an abstract artist, they’re like, ‘Okay.’ It’s like reaching out to touch a reflection in water—you can never really grasp it.”

But still—the Skullphone image persists (for like seven years, which in ‘street art’ terms is Paleolithic) because there is something about it that really puts a bite into people. He politely blanks when I put the medieval omnia vanitas vibe on him—skulls were once as confined in meaning as a copyright symbol—and he’s probably heard that before, and heard the editorial-cartoon idea before, which he sums up as CELL PHONES CAUSE DEATH. (He is exploring the idea of selling custom cell-phone-death-ray-protector discs with tiny Skullphones on them, too.) It’s kind of bigger than any particular political entity in our immediate surrounding, he allows—that’s almost the path of least resistance. But for me: the more Skullphones I see, the more I think that it’s not that Skullphone is a skull. It’s that it’s trying to talk to someone.

“You ever see the Oh, God! movie series?” Skullphone asks. “I remember seeing that trilogy and how he was looking for God because God had decided he was over the world, and so the kid was depressed, and he put up signs—like billboards over Australia and China—that said, ‘Oh God, Where Are Thou?’ It’s kind of like that.”

And Skullphone grins: “Make sure that quote goes in there. That’s such a good metaphor.”

HOORAY FOR HUMANS PRESENTS HEAVY METAL VOMIT PARTY WITH SKULLPHONE, SHEPARD FAIREY, LAUREN FRANK, MICHAEL WYSONG, BRYAN SCHNELLE AND MORE KOO’S | 530 E BROADWAY | LONG BEACH 90802 | OPENING RECEPTION WITH MUSIC BY GHOSTSHIP, I.E. AND LACO$TE SAT 7PM | $5 | ALL AGES | COMPLETE LINE-UP AND INFORMATION AT HOORAYFORHUMANS.ORG | EXHIBIT RUNS THROUGH NOV 27 | VISIT SKULLPHONE AT SKULLPHONE.COM | AND CONSIDER SEARCHING FOR SKULLPHONE ON FLICKR

Tags: abstract art, heavy metal vomit, Hooray for Humans, shepard fairey, skullphone, street art