Vice Style

New York based artist, bar and gallery owner, Erik Foss, recently finished a project he calls Word, a font made out of vintage porn clippings. He also made parts of this new body of work – or work of bodies, if you will – wearable, in the shape of four t-shirts spelling out the series' name. Excited to find printed t-shirts I'd actually wear, I popped by Erik's studio to ask why he spent weeks meticulously making letters out of bums and boobs, and ended up helping him arrange his huge magazine collection into different piles; triple-X, double-X, soft porn and War Monthly.

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Vice: That’s a pretty massive porn collection you’ve got there.
Erik Foss: I don’t even want to think about how much I’ve spent on it. Four years ago, when I had a show in San Francisco, I stumbled upon this great store called The Magazine in Tenderloin that had all these old black and white porn magazines from the 70s with great-looking aged paper. I was psyched, so I started collecting them.

What came first, the porn collection or the art project?
Well, it all started because I had an idea. It’s kind of a coming of age thing; growing up in American and dealing with puberty, and trying to figure it all out. Those years are very frustrating and confusing.

So making words out of porn represents your entrance to adulthood?
There are several sides to it. Porn started getting big in the 70s, around when I was born, and part of my entrance to becoming an adult—I was raised in a very suppressed, religious and strict household—was finding my dad’s porn stack when I was a tween. That’s how I learnt about sex and the naked female body.

Is this the first line of t-shirts you’re doing?
No. I had a t-shirt company called Dope Clothes when I was in my early 20s. We were one of the first to rip-off other brands’ logos. For example, we took the Chanel logo and drew a line on the first “c”, making the Chanel logo spell out our label initials. Two months later, Damon Way and Ken Block started DC shoes. I was like, “You fuckers!”

Ouch. Where can one buy these Word tees?
At a shop called The Cast on Orchard Street, in New York. The guy that made them for me owns the shop. They’re $45 each.

Isn’t this Nipple Madness magazine in the wrong pile?
No, it has full frontal in it, so it’s triple-X.

Right. Doesn’t some of this stuff ever gross you out?
No. Naked girls and skateboards are my two favorite things. The dirtiest publication I own is actually a John F. Kennedy coloring book. Politics is dirty, it’s all about greed and power. Pornography is harmless in comparison. And, you know, there are as many roses as there is porn in my art, but people always seem to focus on the porn.

I guess roses don’t have the same 'in your face' quality to them. Do you think you’ll get an angry radical feminist mob on your case after exhibiting this?
This series has nothing to do with feminism. My mum - who was about to become a nun when she met my dad, a marine - raised me. She didn’t take her vows and they got married, and then he started drinking and turned our life into a violent and sad after school special. So, if anything, I really respect women. My work is about exposing darkness.

Dash Snow also made collage art with porn and criticized the US. Do people ever compare you two? 
Sure. Dash was a magical part of my life and I think about him every day, so it’s an honor being compared to him. I think it’s normal for friends to rub off on each other. However, I’d been making art for ten years before moving to New York in 1996, and have always been eclectic in what I do. Collages are only a small part of it. Dash was more of a photographer to me. He made work about darkness and poverty because he grew up privileged and was curious. My work deals with many things; poverty and politics are part of it, because it affected me personally. 
 
Did you flip the letter J on purpose? 
Nah, I’m dyslexic, so anything to do with letters and numbers is challenging to me. I was halfway through making it when I realized it was backwards. So I thought, “Fuck it. It’s art, right?” [Laughs]. 

Sure.
American English is filthy, so making a porn alphabet seemed suitable. The US is built on McDonald’s, Disney, and porn.

What's next?
I’ve started working on my first commercial gallery solo show in Manhattan, which will open at the Anonymous Gallery on September 11, 2011, to mark the ten-year anniversary of the World Trade Center coming down. I lived very close to Ground Zero when it happened and felt the effect of that bullshit as much as anyone else, except I didn't lose anyone. The FBI also audited me two weeks before the towers were blown up.

Come again?
I know it sounds crazy and my friends laughed behind my back when I told them about it, I’m sure. But I was searching for images of women being flogged by the Taliban, for a painting I was about to make. Late one night, my computer flashed this FBI message saying, "You are being audited by the FBI and you must cease and desist the searches on the Taliban". I thought it was a joke, but I was sober and the shit only lasted for 30 seconds.

Weird.
Yeah. The paintings I’m making now are an abstraction of the World Trade Center, and dedicated to the people who perished in the towers. I’m filled with anger towards why and how this happened and that’s what fuels my next series of work.

Oh, and why t-shirts?
I decided to make shirts simply due to the fact the artwork looks great that way and most people cant afford $1200 for a piece of my art, so I made a special run of t-shirts that are rare and collectable, yet obtainable.

 

MILÈNE LARSSON

TAGGED: War Monthly, Tshirts, Porn, Erik Foss