Justin BuaHis disembodied head is floating at the bottom of my phone screen, his curly gray hair framed by a video of an artist smashing a mirror with a hammer. “What you see is not you – deeper than you know -” is printed on one side of the mirror. With a hammer, the artist breaks the other side. In the mirror’s reflection, half a dozen people are standing in an austere gallery, intently watching the artist create his work. Below it, Bua explains how this piece is a “disruptive intervention in the economy of viewing.” He goes on to talk about several dialectical semesters of art school, talking about “the consolation of a coherent reflection”, “the fractured ego against the very apparatus that once produced it”, how “each fragment is the telltale trace with itself; a meditation on fragmentation as the only honest portrait available to its own civilization for long reflection”.
“Pure genius,” he calls the part, before his furrowed brow turns into a subtle smile. “No, I’m playing,” he says. “Someone broke a mirror and put a price on it. That’s crazy.
Bua has been posting these criticisms (removals, really) for the past three years on his Instagram. They’re almost always the same, with Bua appearing at the bottom of the screen, explaining why he thinks the job is, for lack of a better term, shit. Behind him, a video of some contemporary artist or another plays. In one, an artist knocks over a stack of buckets filled with sand. In another, two women scribble on a wall, their arms attached to a rigid glass rod. An artist drink a pile of butter with a microphone, while another kayaks in a small pool in the center of a gallery. And almost always, the onlookers in attendance stand in rapt attention as the artist rolls in puddles of paint or charcoal press on a white wall.
Bua’s critique is as much about us, the viewing public and, perhaps to a greater extent, the art industry, as it is about contemporary artists themselves. It’s not just work that worries him – although work definitely does. It’s the self-promotion of many of these artists, who present themselves as something Bua feels they may not have earned. Beating butter with a microphone, can a person really call himself an artist? As long as the pile of butter happens in an art gallery, it will appear.
He presents an analogy in which he suddenly decides that he is a fighter and, because of that declaration, is allowed to step into the ring with the UFC Hall of Fame mixed martial artist Jon Jones. “I could die,” he tells the Observer. “He might kill me. And so, we don’t allow anyone to call themselves a warrior. Yet everyone feels good saying they’re an artist.”
For Buan, who is an artist himself, it is not only an earned title – achieved through study, practice, mastering the fundamentals and relearning the childhood magic we all seem to lose along the way – but also one that comes with an obligation. The artist is the DJ who spins anyway, the guitarist who plays on the roof even though no one is listening, the cartwheels on the playground with no hope of making it to the NBA. “Look, people can do whatever the hell they want to do,” he says. “I think we should be a little more careful about calling everything ‘art’ just because someone did something in a gallery.”
He grew up a New York City street kid in the 70s and 80s, eventually finding his way to the city’s legendary graffiti center and breakdancing the scene. His childhood was filled not only with street art, but with the classics and fundamental building blocks upon which all art was built. At home, he was schooled by his mother, who was an artist, and his grandfather, a noted sculptor and writer who worked on early comics such as Felix the Cat and Prince Valiant.
Bua spent as much time learning inscriptions and dances from local masters as from the masters of the capital. It is a mixture that permeates his outlook today, as, in the same sentence, he will speak of Caravaggio, Bruegel, Camille ClaudelCubists and Futurists, important graffiti artists Doze Green, Bill Blast and Futura 2000, 1984’s seminal breakdancing film. Beat Street (in which he appears as a dancer) and breakout groups like the Rock Steady Crew. In conversation, he doesn’t so much move between topics or eras as wrap everything up in separate ideas. If Doze Green is as important as Picasso, why not refer to both to express a concept?
After graduating from New York’s Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School for Music and Performing Arts, Bua studied painting at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. It was in college that Bua first encountered artists explaining their work, many of whom appeared to have little or no skill and, in one case, little to nothing. He recalls a critique session during which a classmate spoke of how their piece reflected the emptiness and emptiness of modern existence. The piece, he explains with a laugh, was a blank white canvas hanging on the wall. “And we learn that in school. Institutions are designed so that ‘if it’s on the wall, it’s great.’ And that’s stupid.”
After graduation, Bua stayed in Southern California and began his career as a commercial artist. He collaborated with Plan B and New Deal skateboards, EA Sports, MTV, Toyota and a host of musicians and rappers to create album art. He hosted a reality television competition and even served on a committee with the United States Postmaster General to recommend subjects for official postage stamps.
Early on, Bua sold prints and posters of his work, with the goal of making art more accessible to young people, college students, and anyone who couldn’t afford a five-, six-, or seven-figure piece on their walls. More than three decades later, he is perhaps best known for his painting DJwhich, according to Bua’s website, has sold more prints than any other piece in the history of modern art.
The piece depicts a Dutch-angled turntable mixing on a pair of Technics SL-1200 turntables under a single lamp in front of stacks of LPs in what I always assumed was his basement. According to Bua, the DJ is not mixing at a party or a show. Rather, he is alone in his space, forced to create something new. Therefore, according to Bua’s explanation, DJ is a painting by the designated artist.
Bua’s art moves. Not literally, of course. By all definitions, his work is traditional. But, in his paintings and illustrations, he grab the movement and the sound and the rhythm of hip hop and the rhythm of breakdancing in a way that makes his work seem alive. His subjects are all elongated limbs and raised jaws with deep-set eyes that stare directly at the viewer, as if we’ve captured them in their high state of creation and release. “Dance, more than graffiti, really influenced my work, in terms of the rhythm of everything,” he says.
His nearest computer is probably Ernie Barneswhose famous 1976 painting Sugar Shack provided that both cover for Marvin GayeS ‘ i love you record and image for the closing credits of the hit 1970s sitcom Good Times, which Bua watched every day growing up. Like Bua’s, Barnes’ paintings possess a movement, a momentum, and a spirit that transcends static, frozen-in-time images.
Bua, who recently moved to Texas after nearly 40 years in LA, accepts the comparison. It’s one he’s no doubt heard a million times before, and one he welcomes. “Look, everyone is influenced by someone else. No one created the dirty wheel. Everyone is a spoke.” But as quick as he was to admit that he was influenced by Barnes, it was Barnes’ predecessor, the American painter. Thomas Hart Bentonwhich Bua says has had the biggest impact on him as an artist.
Influence, he says, is impossible to avoid, whether from other artists or the everyday. But, he adds, it’s essential that artists filter those influences through their own lenses, using the work of Caravaggio and the Rock Steady Crew, the sublime dance of Kobe Bryant or de Kooning’s expressionism to create something that is new, unique and the origin of the artist’s particular point of view. Otherwise, it might just be performance crap. “There is only one William Bouguereau– says Bua. – The boy who broke the mirror? You or I can break the mirror.”
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