Justin Bua’s disembodied head floats below my phone screen, his tousled gray hair framed against a video of the 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 smashes the other side. In the mirror, half a dozen people stand in a tight gallery, intently watching the artist create his piece. Under him, Bua explains that this piece is “a destructive intervention in the economy of the eyes.” He continues to chew on a few semesters worth of art school, talking about “the comfort of parallel display,” “an ego broken from the machine that once produced it,” that “each piece is a trace of an index and identity; a reflection on separation as the only reliable image found in civilization long ago.”
“A pure master,” he called the piece, before his furrowed brow turned into a subtle smile. “Nah, I’m kidding,” he said. “Someone smashed a mirror and slapped a price on it. This is stupid. End manhood.”
For the past three years, Bua has been posting these criticisms (putdowns, actually) on her Instagram. They’re almost always the same, when Bua appears at the bottom of the screen, explaining why she thinks the job is, for lack of a better word, dogshit. Behind him, a video of a modern artist or another game. In another, the artist drops a series of buckets full of sand. In another, two women write on a wall, their arms linked by a solid glass rod. One artist churns out a batch of butter with a microphone while another kayaks around a small pond in the center of the gallery. And almost always, the onlookers stand in rapt attention as the artist rolls in puddles of paint or smashes charcoal against 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 does. The pride of many of these artists, who express themselves as something that Bua feels they did not get. By beating butter with a microphone, can one really call oneself an artist? As long as a mound of butter happens in an art gallery, it seems.
He gives an analogy where he suddenly decided he was a fighter and, because of this announcement, he was allowed in the ring with UFC Hall of Fame mixed martial artist Jon Jones. “I could die,” he told the Observer. “He could kill me. So, we don’t allow anyone to call themselves a fighter. Yet everyone feels good when they say they are an artist.”
For Bua, an artist himself, it’s not just an earned title—achieved through study, practice, mastering the basics and relearning the childhood magic we all seem to lose along the way—but also one that comes by force. The artist is the DJ who spins no matter what, the guitar player who plays on the roof even though no one is listening, the hooligans on the playground who have no hope of making it to the NBA. “Look, people can do whatever they want to do,” he said. “I think we have to be a little careful about calling everything ‘art’ just because someone did something in a gallery.”
Growing up as a New York City street kid in the ’70s and ’80s, he eventually found his way to the center of the city’s popular graffiti and dance scenes. His childhood was filled not only with street art but with classics and the building blocks upon which all art is built. At home, he was taught by his mother, who was an artist, and his grandfather, a famous illustrator and writer who worked on early comics such as Felix the Cat and Prince Valiant.
Bua spent as much time studying graffiti and dancing from local masters as he did in the capital M masters. It is a mélange that fills his vision today, as, in the same sentence, he will talk about Caravaggio, Bruegel, Camille Claudel, Cubists and Futurists, the historic painters Doze Green, Bill Blast and Futura 2000, the dance film of 1984. Beat Street (where he appears as a dancer) and breakout groups like the Rock Steady Crew. In conversations, he does not move between topics or periods so much as he combines everything into one point of view. If Doze Green is as important as Picasso, why not refer to both to express the idea?
After graduating from New York City’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 musicians explaining their work, most of whom seemed to have little talent and, sometimes, little to nothing. He recalls another critical moment, when a classmate commented on how their piece reflected the emptiness and futility of modern life. The piece, he explained with a laugh, was a blank white canvas hanging on the wall. “And we learn this in school, institutions are designed so that ‘if it’s on the wall, it’s good. And that’s bullshit.”
After graduating, Bua settled in Southern California and began her career as a commercial artist. He collaborated with Plan B and New Deal skateboards, EA Sports, MTV, Toyota and a host of artists and rappers to create album art. He hosted a reality TV show and even served on the United States Postmaster General’s committee to recommend a course on official postage stamps.
At first, Bua sold prints and posters of his work, with the goal of making art accessible to young people, broke college students and anyone who couldn’t afford to put a five, six or seven figure piece on their walls. More than thirty years later, he is perhaps best known for his painting DJwhich, according to Bua’s website, has sold more prints than any other piece in modern art history.
The piece shows the Dutch-angled turntablist, 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. To Bua’s point, a DJ doesn’t mix at a party or a show. Instead, he is alone in his place, forced to do something new. Therefore, according to Bua’s definition, DJ illustrated artist’s drawing.
Bua’s art is moving. Not literally, of course. By all definitions, his work is traditional. But, in his paintings and illustrations, he you take pictures movement and sound and hip hop rhythms and breakdancing rhythms in a way that makes his work seem alive. His subjects are all long limbs and plump cheeks with deep eyes staring at the viewer, as if to catch them in their state of creation and release. “Dance, more than graffiti, has really affected my work, in terms of the rhythm of everything,” he said.
The closest person to him is probably Ernie Barnes, his famous 1976 painting Sugar Shack gave both a Marvin Gaye cover I want you record and closing credits footage of the 1970s sitcom Good Times, which Bua watched every day growing up. Like Bua’s, Barnes’s paintings have movement, energy and soul that transcend static images, frozen in time.
Bua, who recently moved to Texas after nearly 40 years in LA, welcomes the comparison. It’s one you’ve no doubt heard a million times before and it’s welcome. “Look, everyone is influenced by someone else. No one created the evil wheel. Everyone is a speaker.” But as quick as he is to admit that he was influenced by Barnes, it was Barnes’ predecessor, the American painter Thomas Hart Benton, who Bua says had a major influence on him as a musician.
Influence, he says, is impossible to avoid, whether it comes from other artists or everyday. But, he adds, it is important for artists to filter those influences through their lenses, to use the work of Caravaggio and the Rock Steady Crew, the high jump of Kobe Bryant or the expressionism of de Kooning to create something new, unique and the emergence of a single vision of the artist. If not, it might be bullying to do. “There is only one William Bouguereau,” said Bua. “The boy who breaks the mirror? You or I can break the mirror.”
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