“Maybe I have this stupid feeling that art can save the world,” the Los Angeles–based artist Llyn Foulkes said in an oral history conducted for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. That was in 1997. Now, in 2024, Foulkes, one of the original artists to show at LA’s storied Ferus gallery in the ’60s, would likely be the first to admit that it hasn’t.
If anything, the world has, by most accounts, gotten worse. But our dark times seem like good ones to show work by Foulkes, an artist New York Times critic Ken Johnson once praised as capturing a “mood of moral indignation, anger and grief leavened by darkly visionary hilarity.” An exhibition of new and old work opens tonight at the New York gallery A Hug From the Art World; it’s specifically timed to the US election. The show, which runs through the end of the year, is called “The Untied State of America.”
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Llyn Foulkes
That’s All, Foulkes
At age 89, Foulkes may no longer be playing his sprawling, vaudevillian one-man-band instrument, which he calls simply The Machine, but he continues to make art that is no less eccentric—and no less urgent—than it’s ever been.
In this show, there is a 2022 piece showing a man with a bloodied face holding a sickle, his eyes obscured by the Ukrainian flag; a 2022 portrait called Ivanka, in which the former President’s daughter is made from, among other things, a fragment of an animal skull and a clown’s collar; jokily surrealist, borderline Boschian drawings from the ’40s through the ’60s; a 2017 piece depicting Mickey Mouse selling land in the American West; and a 2016 self-portrait as Mickey Mouse beached on a Trump lifeboat.
ARTnews asked Foulkes some questions over email about the political scene.
ARTnews: This show has been specifically timed to open five days prior to the 2024 US election. Why is that important to you?
Llyn Foulkes: Democracy is on the line. Historically speaking, assholes tend to be bad leaders. As an artist it’s my duty to shed light on the good, the bad and the ugly. I wish there was more good about politics, war, and land grabs, but there isn’t.
Since this show includes works dating from the past ten years, I have to ask: how did your work change after the 2016 election and during Trump’s presidency? You’ve made dark and weird “portraits” of presidents in the past like The Golden Ruler (1985), which shows Reagan. There is a portrait of Ivanka in the show. Have you painted Trump?
Conceptually, it hasn’t changed much. As I get older, the mediums shift as I dive into more bronze and sculptures. Trump and the 2016 election unfortunately inspired me to do my job. As far as depicting Trump, he is everywhere, just not in a direct portrait. Right now, he doesn’t deserve a portrait like the professional statesmen before him, he is a genuine hack.
You’ve made a lot of work referencing Richard Nixon. Corruption-wise, Trump has been spoken of as Nixon on steroids. What’s your take on comparisons of the two of them?
Well, for starters, they are both crooks, one being a professional, the other, an amateur.
How did your work change after the January 6 insurrection? Your work has always seemed to me to evoke a dark strain within American patriotism. What were you thinking on the day of the insurrection?
January 6 wasn’t much of a surprise to me—business as usual in MAGAland. It didn’t sit right with me, although something like this was expected if he were to lose the election. I remember thinking the media was lucky to have another shitshow to sensationalize.
There have been so many things involving Disney recently that bring to mind your Mickey Mouse work—and a new work in the show is Beached, a mummified self-portrait as Mickey Mouse on a Trump lifeboat. Americans are going into debt in order to visit Disneyworld; a guy is suing on behalf of his nut-allergic wife who died after eating at a restaurant there; there’s a tiff with Ron DeSantis over Disney’s criticism of a state law that restricted the teaching of sexuality in schools.
It’s nice to see Walt and his Disney legacy take a hit. They will go down eventually, although it may take 600 years. Disney’s whole purpose since inception has been to indoctrinate young children into backwards values; pretty sick if you ask me. Consumerism is the death of the soul, and our capitalistic society is finally starting to wake up to that.
I understand the show includes a kind of storyboard directly from your studio. Some things included in it are an antique cutaway view of a .38 pistol and, nearby, an actual pistol; framed birds’ nests and animal skulls; a tomahawk stone; a road sign that warns of curves up ahead; a sheriff’s badge; a picture of Charlie Chaplin; a corn cob; a grenade; seashells; a ticket for a 1966 Beatles concert at LA’s Dodgers Stadium; your drivers license that expired in 2015; a piece of driftwood on which is scribbled “Trip to Big Sur August 1984.” There are examples of your own work mixed in with souvenirs, thrift store finds, things taken from the street. All of this is positioned above and around a couch that looks like it could double as a sleeper or a site for psychoanalysis. Can you tell me a bit about this agglomeration of objects and how it has inspired you over the years?
The wall is my life. Work, personal, and all things between, often bridging the gap between the two. People have gifted me items, I have found items, and yes, some of the items are works of mine that I have never shown in the context of any gallery or collection. The wall is complicated. I am, too.
You’ve made works in the past that reference the Vietnam War and the Gulf War. What has been your reaction to the most recent, and ongoing, two wars (in Ukraine, and in Gaza)?
It’s a pity. My heart goes out to all of the people whose lives have been changed and lost because of government and corporate greed. They say World War II brought us (me) out of the depression; what a sick way to put corn on my table.
Your retrospective from 2012, which appeared at the Hammer Museum and the New Museum, seemed very dark at the time, in its references to America. I wonder if now it would just seem like our reality?
I knew we were going in this direction. As soon as Trump announced his candidacy, I kept saying he’d win. Shit.
Gauguin once made a large painting called Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? If you were to create an artwork with that title today concerning the United States, what do you think it would look like?
I’m not too sure what it would look like, but Gauguin asks a great question. In regard to the United States, we will have to see what happens on November 5.
Llyn Foulkes
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