Notes on Big Daddy Roth and Cultural Resistance

Theory tells us that consciousness is a construction of the language and images which surround us in a one way stream of information. Recently some writers have been looking at instances in which individuals have frozen this onslaught long enough to convert it to their own, invariably subversive, uses. (For example, Constance Penley spoke last year at Langton about women Star Trek fans appropriating the characters of the series, writing their own stories and adding provocative sexual elements.)

In the early sixties Big Daddy Roth and his friends and followers knew that the nonstop flood of propaganda coming from Detroit's auto giants about American superiority was ringing very hollow. Creativity and innovation in connection with new technology—like fiberglass—was lagging far behind what America's young people were beginning to come up with in their backyards and garages. These outlaw customizers appropriated the raw materials of commercial carmakers' output and turned them in on themselves to create eccentric, even bizarre, modern looking units which subverted the uniform, anonymous and efficient modes being proffered as new objects of desire by Detroit.

In 1963 the Beatles' breakthrough records overwhelmed young people with hit after hit. She Loves You, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, I Saw Her Standing There, reinvented what pop music sounded like, anticipating equivalent changes in what the world would come to feel like. At about the same time, (with the Beach Boys churning out their amazing records), car after car, image after image, rolled out of Ed "Big Daddy" Roth's shop; Outlaw, then Beatnik Bandit, then Druid Princess, then Rat Fink®, and the monster cars. The products of Roth's imagination in the early sixties were so powerful and original that they too established a wide ranging and continuing following for the artist, and had enormous, usually unattributed influence on a generation or more of young artists and designers.

Contemporary visual artists in particular are indebted to Roth for both his embrace of the slick—his pristine fiberglass, pinstriped, gleaming car bodies—and his embrace of the down and dirty—his Rat Fink® and related menagerie of monsters and outcasts. Southern California visual artists such as Mike Kelley, ranging to The Kipper Kids and Paul McCarthy in performance, have taken off in part from Roth's self satirizing revels investigating the fringe, the nasty, and the organic.

Revisionist Hollywood productions ascribe benignity to the gangs of the fifties (with characters such as TV's The Fonz) repressing the alienation and anger of the time and emptying out any political implications of that stance. That which transgresses the myth of shared mainstream values undergoes tremendous repressive pressures; this is why there are underground heroes. This exhibition is an attempt to acknowledge Roth's role in providing an alternative vision for many years, as part of Langton's ongoing interest in revealing the diversity of American experience and cultural production.