Bob Zoell: I Wish I Was Happy

October 25, 2008 - November 12, 2008

WAL-ART

If you mention artist Bob Zoell to anyone who's been around Los Angeles for the past 40 years, they might not know who he is, but they'll know where he's been. Bob Zoell’s work is as diverse and indefinable as the vast topography of the city it inhabits, reaching from freeway underpasses and lampposts to New Yorker covers and Ace Gallery walls.

Back in 1985, as a promotion for Bob Zoell’s 2nd series of parking signs, Los Angelenos in downtown found fabricated parking tickets with the headline “Going Plenty” tucked beneath their windshield wipers. In place of the usual details was a playfully graphic allusion to a 13-year-old boy’s first masturbation, transforming a sign of punishment into a testament of pleasure. The promotion was one of many examples of Bob Zoell’s appropriations of the signs and symbols that dominate our lives.



While he maintains a very private life, Zoell’s friends--artists, musicians and former punks--aren’t shy about discussing one of the pioneers of the Los Angeles street-art movement. Zoell’s work started showing up on the streets decades before Shepard Fairey and Banksy arrived on the scene, and is “a little more political,” in the words of publisher Richard Duardo, co-founder of WAL-ART where Zoell’s upcoming exhibition I Wish I Was Happy, will be on view this October.
Born in Regina, Canada in 1940, Zoell quit school at the age of 16 to work in his father’s print shop where he was first introduced to commercial art. From there he took various jobs, working at a sign shop, an outdoor advertising firm, a publishing house and a design studio. While he earned an M.A. in fine arts from Yale, Zoell is largely self-taught and “an extraordinary designer,” says artist Gary Panter who has been a friend of Zoell’s for 30 years. “He was always just a working guy, and he’s German so he’s one of the best designers in the world,” adds Panter. “He can build anything, he’s a perfectionist and he’s also humorous.”

In the ’60s, Zoell worked for Esquire and various other alternative magazines and was famous for his airbrush illustration inspired by Max Fleischer and early Disney animation. Towards the end of the decade, Zoell started reading art history and lots of philosophy, particularly Nietzsche, and became enthralled with Duchamp’s work which motivated his transition to conceptual art.

In the late 1970s Zoell When Zoell’s marriage to his high school sweetheart came to an end, he moved to a large loft in downtown Los Angeles where he got involved in the early punk scene. Panter describes the years when the two lived in Los Angeles as a time of social and artistic exploration. They hung around with a much younger crowd and were part of the famous group of artists who frequented Crabby Joe’s Bar on Main Street. Zoell found a community in L.A. but the city wasn’t always up to speed with his work, says Panter. “He has these advanced chops, and ambition and perfectionism and so he always brought that to a scene, (one) that didn’t appreciate him in some ways. So he declared L.A. ‘Turtle Town.’ It was so slow to catch up and appreciate what he was doing that he started doing paintings making fun of L.A.”

In the 1980s, Zoell recognized that street art and graffiti could offer him even greater artistic freedom. “In 1982, I was attracted to creating work for the street because if offered me a venue that avoided the politics inherent in the gallery system,” Zoell explains.

Zoell’s latest show, I Wish I Was Happy, is a retrospective of his parking signs from the past 20 years and will be WAL-ART’s official gallery launch since it was founded by Richard Duardo and Jamie Beardsley back in October 2007. Included in the show is Zoell’s third series of fabricated parking signs since he started appropriating the design style of parking signs in L.A. back in the ’80s long before the Photoshop revolution. “I found the parking sign especially attractive because we are all forced to read parking signs and this little metal sign worked as a new field for my thoughts,” says Zoell whose collectors include Jackson Browne and Mark Mothersbaugh (who loaned a few early Zoell pieces to the show). “Formally, it allowed me to manipulate language and my message and still retain the integrity of the original sign.”

His most recent series protests the war and what Zoell explains as “the insidious dismantling of the democracy which was salient to the foundation of this once widely respected nation.”

That sets them apart from some of his earlier work as Beardsley argues. “Contrary to the playful humor of the previous parking series,” she says, “these signs are bold, angry and condemning of war.”

Yet for Ed Ruscha, the master of appropriated word plays, Zoell’s knack for subversion of the urban environment works best when it’s integrated into the very system that it’s toying with. “CALTRANS should let Bob have complete artistic control over all public signage,” he says. “Wouldn't we have a better life out here?"

Filed Under: See Exhibitions WAL-ART Culver City

Posted by: Erica Zora Wrightson on October 22, 2008

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