Ryan Humphrey , Velocity of Transparent Aspiration , 2005–06

BMW 7 Series hood, automotive paint, clear coat, carbon fiber hood emblem

52 x 59 x 4 inches; Courtesy of the artist, photo: Kevin Ryan

The Readymade does not postulate a new value: it is a jibe at what we call valuable.

It is criticism in action: a kick at the work of art ensconced on its pedestal of adjectives.

—Octavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare

I believe in the kind of communism where everybody drives a Cadillac.

—Mick Jones of the Clash(1)

The act of customizing—restructuring and reworking different parts of something so that a new vision or idea can take shape—has launched some of the most pivotal moments in America’s pop cultural history. In the post-World War II era, surfing became skateboarding when people took its freestyle movements from waves to concrete. DJs paved the way for whole new genres of music, such as hip hop and house, by sampling and mixing old vocals and beats with new ones. Hot rodders taught themselves how to revamp cars by chopping them up, ordering parts out of the backs of auto-trade magazines, and adding paint and chrome, to make personal statements of style and speed. In whatever form it takes, customization is an art that relies on intuition, a do-it-yourself attitude and aesthetic, creativity, and fearless improvisation.

With his first solo museum exhibition, Empty Thoughts, Lame Excuses, and Decorative Lies, Ryan Humphrey uses customization to comment on what he perceives to be a safe and static art world. His multimedia works shake up our connotations of class and culture, and rescript unrealized dreams of his adolescent past into personal triumphs. While his works acknowledge several figures, movements, and iconic objects in art history—including Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, Andy Warhol’s factory-produced paintings and sculptures, and Richard Prince’s car hood paintings—Humphrey also pays homage to key musical influences that made up the soundtrack of his youth and continue to inspire him today: guitar rock star Eddie Van Halen and pioneer rap artists from the 1980s and 1990s, such as Public Enemy and Run DMC. The result is an evocative aesthetic that taps into a boyhood nostalgia and juxtaposes high and low culture in a customized, multisensory mix of sound, color, and design.

Humphrey’s history reveals a strong interest in customizing as an art practice and lifestyle. He grew up in Ashtabula, Ohio, skateboarding, surfing on Lake Erie, tooling around on his bike, and trying not to get beat up by “mullets in Camaros.”(2) He eventually gravitated toward BMX biking, a free-wheeling sport that offered him professional sponsorship and connected him to one of his longtime idols and key artistic influences, the self-styled folk hero and motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel.(3) The athletic risk taking, energy, and exhibitionism of BMX biking, skateboarding, and surfing later found resonance in the art Humphrey made while studying at Hunter College and living in New York. His artistic adventures include performing stunts with bikes in parks around New York (such as jumping a child’s bike over ten Tonka trucks, Knievel-style) and riding up on gallery walls to scuff them with tire marks and footprints and enhance the experience of viewing his multimedia installations, which have often featured car or surfing imagery. He also founded a mock corporation, Humphrey Industries, through which he produces limited-edition T-shirts, bottles of soda, and stickers, among other items. He offers his ever-changing array of products as a positive, empowered response to one-size-fits-all, status-symbol mass marketing. Humphrey’s guerrilla tactics also emerge in comical critiques that include appropriations of fine art as well as everyday objects. For a 2006 show at DCKT Contemporary in New York titled Divine Objects of Hatred, he produced generic-looking, decorative, disc-shaped paintings and gave them names like Sunday at Ikea and Catalog Sweater. He then riddled them with bullet holes in an effort to articulate his angst about the uninteresting visual imagery and market mentality that pervade the art world—and popular culture at large.

Empty Thoughts, Lame Excuses, and Decorative Lies—a title that mockingly paraphrases the names of art shows featuring benign, decorative paintings—builds on Humphrey’s critical dialogue by bringing the gritty, gearhead world of cars, armed with rock, hip hop, and bold, bright graphics, into the white-walled gallery space. Inserting sketches or actual segments of automobiles into a collage of music references and imagery, Humphrey offers fragmented manifestoes of car culture that parallel society’s increasing obsession with all things automotive: the explosive popularity of NASCAR and television shows like MTV’s “Pimp My Ride,” the ever-present thundering low riders in music videos, and Hollywood’s recycled entertainment such as Dukes of Hazzard.

Humphrey’s works also excavate and archive lost opportunities from his adolescence, and restore them to moments of greatness, through a sort of hand-crafted “auto”-biography. For example, he recovered Vantasy from the front yard of his childhood home in Ashtabula where the van sat rusting for over twenty years. Humphrey recalls, “I remember telling people where I lived and they would often reply, ‘Oh, the house with all the cars in the yard?’”(4) By revamping the van to customized greatness with refinished, shiny surfaces emblazoned with flames, and coupling it with a Southwestern landscape, Humphrey reclaims an unrealized dream that reflects on the poetry of possibility of the open road, a popular American sentiment. He also symbolically turns the tables on the nonbelievers who saw the van as nothing more than a rusty eyesore, and perhaps as even some sort of lower-class stigma.

Turning tables and ruminating on the West also surface in Honky Spaceship, another work where Humphrey unearths an experience from his teenage history and customizes the memory into a super-charged statement of autonomy. Growing up, he sometimes heard people toss around racist slang that referred to the souped-up cars blacks drove around town. The slur caught his attention in particular because he divided his time between his mother’s white neighborhood and his father’s predominantly African-American section of Ashtabula. “Depending on what day of the week it was, I was either ‘honky’ or ‘whigger,’” he says.(5) With Honky Spaceship, Humphrey retaliates against the racist attitudes of his hometown and plays with the idea of racial vernacular, souping up his own white-boy status with a running soundtrack of Public Enemy and Run DMC, powered by a car battery and a step-down transformer. He also lays claim to another fantasy—owning a 1964 Lincoln Continental, one of his favorite cars, and embarking on some adventure in the Southwest, the imagery of which floats among the work’s spliced planes.(6)

Velocity of Transparent Aspiration, a 7-series BMW hood customized with the emblematic white and black striped guitar pattern of rock god Eddie Van Halen, also reveals Humphrey’s fascination with the potent cross-fertilization of music, nostalgia, and automobiles. Humphrey found the pristine hood, a leftover prop from an ad agency photo shoot, in a Brooklyn basement. He decided to appropriate the cultural context of the BMW, a high-end luxury vehicle, by painting it an in-your-face red slashed with the ultimate iconography of everyman rock—the bright, bold crisscrossing lines of Van Halen’s guitar. This juxtaposition not only reveals a lively mix of high and low culture, but also pays tribute to the innovation and creativity of Van Halen, who inspired countless guitar models with the legendary Strat-style guitar he customized by hand using found components, and painting it with his own designs. The striped emblem also represents how Van Halen transformed the sound of classic rock ’n’ roll with innovative playing techniques, music whose raw immediacy and energy still inspire Humphrey and other fans today.(7)

Humphrey’s use of Van Halen’s imagery is also a powerful testimony to self-taught, creative expression. Van Halen came up with the design on his own, without any formal art training, and it became instantly recognizable to countless fans. The dramatic, interlaced stripes also share affinities with the bold expressions of modernist painting and the artwork of the Russian Constructivists, a group of socialist-minded artists who also used industrial materials and produced political posters with similar brightly colored, geometric imagery. For Humphrey, the familiar red, white, and black pattern symbolizes the will to be great at what you do; he has used it to make various readymades, and the colors are reflected in the graphic design elements of Humphrey Industries.

In our highly customized culture of mix-and-match options and disposable identities, it is easy to get lost in the shuffle of our iPods, to lose sight of our cultural crossroads and the questions they provoke and ideas they elicit. Humphrey’s art deftly cuts to the chase in this search for meaning with humor, design sense, notions of kitsch, and a playful, intelligent sense of autonomy.

Becca Ramspott

Curatorial Assistant

Notes

1. This quote, from the 1980 rockumentary Rude Boy, is borrowed from the introduction to an insightful essay on car culture: Ruben Ortiz Torres, “Cathedrals on Wheels,” in Nora Donnelly, ed., Customized: Art Inspired by Hot Rods, Low Riders and American Car Culture (New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2000), 37–38.

2. Ryan Humphrey, interviewed by Edsel Williams, in Humphrey Industries (New York: Printed Matter, 2003), 6, produced to coincide with Humphrey’s exhibition at the Green Barn, Sagaponack, New York, August 16–September 15, 2003.

3. Humphrey says he “looked to Evel Knievel before any visual artist.” He had the opportunity to meet Knievel once in 1999. Phone interview with the author, February 12, 2006. To learn more about Knievel’s life and work, see www.evelknievel.com/bio.html.

4. Humphrey, e-mail exchange with Kemper Museum Curator Elizabeth Dunbar, November 2, 2005.

5. Humphrey, phone interview with the author, February 12, 2006.

6. The opportunity to buy a Lincoln Continental for a mere $1,600 slipped through Humphrey’s fingers when he was in high school and unable to scrape together enough money to purchase it. Humphrey, e-mail exchange with Dunbar, November 2, 2005.

7. For more information on the class and cultural connotations of cars, see Theory, Culture & Society 21 (London: Sage Publications, 2004), no. 4/5.

Born in 1971 in Ashtabula, Ohio, Ryan Humphrey currently lives and works in New York. He received his BFA from Ohio University, Athens, in 1996 and his MFA from Hunter College, New York, in 1999, and is currently finishing postgraduate studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. He has had solo gallery exhibitions at Rocket Projects in Miami, and DCKT Contemporary and Caren Golden Fine Art, both in New York. His work has been included in notable group exhibitions at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh; the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, New York; and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. This is his first solo museum exhibition.