Something dead in the street commands more measured units of visual investigation than 100 Mona Lisas!" So says Robert Williams in his "Rubberneck Manifesto" of 1989, and it's true--no Louvre gridlock matches the rubbernecking delays caused by a good carwreck. But isn't this a deadly realization for a painter? Creating a single Mona Lisa would be enough for most artists, but Williams wants to surpass a hundred of them. Can rattling the bars of an old medium like easel painting ever attract as much attention as road kill?
After a youth spent among beatniks and street gangs, in the mid '60s Williams attended a Los Angeles art school that propounded a rigid Abstract Expressionist pedagogy. In rebellion he turned to the city's underground culture, designing tattoos and customizing cars for Ed "Big Daddy" Roth. In 1967, Williams joined cartoonists R. Crumb and S. Clay Wilson S. Clay Wilson (July 25,1941- ) is an American underground cartoonist and central figure in the underground comix movement. Wilson is known for aggressively violent and sexually explicit panoramas of "lowlife," often depicting the wild escapades of pirates and bikers. at the underground comic Zap, which would become famous not only for its sharp graphics but for its lavish sex and violence. To Williams, the no-holds-barred creative freedom of Zap was an expression of social dissent as important to him as dodging the Vietnam draft; and indeed, as if to prove the point, the magazine's publisher and various of its distributors were harassed by the FBI, and the artist began to receive hate mail from right-wing types.
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