Joe Foti keeps bringing Americana nostalgia and weirdness to the art world

A key theme is always the absurd. Aliens, space travel, scientists – they all have a nice marriage together. I also love shocking art, art that makes people feel uncomfortable. There are some people that will turn their head away and go, ‘Oh my god, that’s horrible’, or their eyes will get wider and they go in for a second look.

I try not to do anything political or too sexual, but I like to have a sense of humour about it. My mentor Daryl Trivieri always told me, ‘If you’re not sure where to go in art, just go weirder’. Sometimes I’ll pull back and think, ‘Oh, I can’t do that, that’s way too weird. People are not going to look at me the same any more’ – but then I go, that is what I should do.

There’s so much beautiful art out there, but so what? That’s like someone who can sing that Titanic song perfectly. So what? It’s great, but do something different, do something shocking. Do the Titanic song with a punk rock band! When you stand in front of a piece of art, I hope you can go, ‘I never thought of that’ or ‘I wish I thought of that’ – that’s always my favourite.

I think the closest I ever got to goth was when the Ramones’ movie Rock ‘n’ Roll High School came out. I was living in Atlanta, Georgia, and at the time, The Rocky Horror Picture Show was very popular. I don’t know if people know this any more, but they used to have Friday and Saturday midnight movies, and people would go dressed as the characters and act out the film. It was the weirdest cast of people.

When Rock ‘n’ Roll High School came out I was working in the movie theatre and we started doing midnight movies of it, and the Rocky Horror people would show up, starting to dress like characters in the Ramones. I looked like Johnny Ramone and I had a leather jacket, so I’m the Johnny Ramone character. All of a sudden I’m hanging out with these Rocky Horror kids and after the movie, they’d say, ‘Let’s go to this drag club’.

It was my first exposure to the underground nightlife. I’ll put some eyeliner on, wear tuxedo tails, and go out with pins in my face – and that’s as close as I ever got to goth. But I was just really drawn to those people and how interesting and creative they were.

When we travel, we do it to see beautiful nature, to eat delicious food, and to research and buy art supplies. This means going to antique stores around the world. Antique toy stores are our favourite and we usually come home with a suitcase full of stuff. These drawers that we’ve been using lately, we found at a flea market in Japan, and they’re from old printing companies that used to have a drawer for every kanji letter to make a type print. They’re a great vessel to have lots of little things. We’re limited to what we can put in them, but we love it because you can create something that you can look at for a long time. It’s almost like watching TV without changing any channels.

In American folk art, a lot of people built little sets – just tchotchkes, kind of cheesy-looking, almost – and my grandmother made something similar, so the idea came from that, but a more adult, artsy version.

We’ve always made every piece of art in our home. Our kitchen is just scattered with tons of stuff like this – in fact, when we’re really having a good art day, the kitchen’s closed, we can’t cook. We start putting things together as a combination and move things around, and they sort of come together naturally. Some pieces will sit there for a year and I wonder what to do with it, but then something else comes along into that world, and it’s a perfect combination. There’s also times when all of a sudden, five things just look amazing together and they’re real easy. I love to do those, but at the same time, it feels almost too easy.

I lived in Los Angeles for 30 years and a long time ago when I first got there, I met Steve Jones, the guitar player for the Sex Pistols. So we’ve been friends for a long time, and we both share a problem where we have kidney stones. In fact, he nicknamed me Kidney Stone Joe, even though I don’t have them any more and he does.

I did a piece one time as a dedication to Steve, it was called Jones, and it’s like a human face and all black. And in the bottom corner is a little medical vial about two inches long. Inside this vial is a real kidney stone that I passed. Where the sealed vial is, there’s fluorescent orange paint to signify the burning pain kidney stones create. I guess that’s the most bizarre thing I’ve used in art: my real kidney stone.

They came about because when we first started doing exhibitions in Japan, we wanted to dress up the show and the cabinets, so we were taking toys and cutting their arms and heads off, Frankenstein-ing to make new, weird little monsters. Then people started inquiring about them. Luckily, Richard [Stark, co-founder of Chrome Hearts] was there and he said, ‘Let me take these back to Los Angeles. We’ll cast them in silver, put them in the store, and see if they sell’. And that’s how the line was born.

A lot of the time, the names would come from weird things that happen to us. Like, we went to a Dodgers baseball game and one of the ball boys was really good looking, and all the girls were going ‘Delfino, Delfino, Delfino!’ That’s a cool name, so one of our characters is called Delfino. One time, we were sleeping next to the factory in Los Angeles, and we heard someone yelling outside to someone above us, ‘Hey Pepe, let’s go!’, so there’s Pepe. The statue is Skippy – my mother’s nickname when she was a little girl, because my grandparents said she never walked anywhere, she skipped.

Sometimes they’re named after favourites of ours like Mahalia, after Mahalia Jackson, a singer in America in the 60s. Harris Teeter came from a grocery store in North Carolina. We thought it was a really tiny little grocery store up in the mountains where we were travelling. What a weird name, Harris Teeter. Then we found out that Harris Teeter is the seventh largest grocery store chain in America. If you’re not from the south, you’d never know it.

We’ve never had kids so I always tell my mom, you should learn their names, this is all you get. These are our kids, and there’s 12 of them.

These came about because we did three shows about the town that I grew up in called Bristol, Tennessee; the things that happened to me growing up; and how this town has basically died now. Small town America is gone because business shut down, Walmart came in, closed down the main streets, industry left. These beautiful, small towns that were very charming and great places to grow up in are all dying in America.

But growing up in Tennessee in the 60s, it could be a dark place, because where I lived it was called dry county – no alcohol. Everybody made moonshine, and there would be these things way out in the countryside called roadhouses. They always looked like an old shack or barn or old church that was falling down. You could always recognise these places by the signage on the outside; it was never a proper sign. It was like some guy went out with a bucket and a paintbrush, was probably drunk, and wrote ‘Barbecue! Open 24 hours’ – just handwritten weird shit.

They’re kind of scary to go into because you don’t know what you’re going to encounter when you go in there, or if you get to come out. But as a teenager, we would go to roadhouses for lunch; they always had great food.

But when nighttime came, these places turned and they became really dangerous places to hang out. It was where all the local workers went to buy alcohol. There was prostitution, there was gambling, there was a lot of crime. Any drug you wanted, you could go in there and get, and everybody knew about it. Even the cops would hang out there. They’ve all disappeared because you can get anything you want now, and the only places you can kind of see the history of roadhouses is in some old movies during the 50s and 60s. You’ll see them in the background. 

My birdhouses are just a memory I had of these places. The BDSM figures are not necessarily because there was bondage in those places, but it was the mystery of what was going on in there. We found these little characters in Japan and got boxes of them on the Internet.

Well, my funny answer is I was looking in the office supply paperweight world, and there’s a big hole there for a penis! [Editor’s note: We see what you did there, Joe.] In reality, we have a cake mould of a penis and we use a lot of resin in our art. When we have resin left over, this mould became a great reservoir for pouring it all in, and eventually we thought about building stuff in there. It’s not for everybody, but they became a great, fun, weird thing to put these objects in.

What I’ve learned working with resin is when it dries, it heats up a lot. If you put a piece of wax in there, which some of our characters used to be, they’ll melt. So you can’t do a heavy pour; you can’t do the whole [penis paperweight] in one go and wait for it to dry. You got to do it in stages, which takes weeks – that’s why these penises take maybe a month or two to really complete.

There’s a paperweight that has my mom’s old doll in it. We were going through her collection for things to use and my grandmother kept everything so there were these toys from the 30s. She’s a beautiful doll, in hard plastic. Sometimes it’s hard to use stuff because you don’t want to give it up, but we’ve had her for years and now she’s in art. I feel like it has another life; it gets to go have an adventure.

I grew up in a time when there wasn’t a lot of pornography in the world. You had to go to a really scary place to try and find a magazine. It was entertainment for a young boy, sure, but I was always fascinated by even the adult porn stars: Who are these people? How do they get these jobs? I just always thought it was a fun industry that was very underground, and nobody really gave any of these people respect.

People have always been fascinated by sexuality and the naked body, and I’m one of those people who like that world, and putting it in art is always fun. It’s mysterious. It’s a little taboo.

There’s a lot of great Japanese artists who influence me. My favourite is a guy named Toshio Saeki. If you want to see some really weird shit, look this guy up. He was an illustrator and he would do these nightmare scenes that were bizarre and had a lot of weird sexual stuff that would really upset a lot of people. I just love that this guy was doing this in the 50s and 60s.

I have to give a lot of credit to Daryl Trivieri. He was sort of my art teacher and mentor, and he taught me how to do art, how to think about art, how to talk about art. He was very popular in the early 80s in New York, during the time that Keith Haring was coming up, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Martin Wong. These guys either made it, or they didn’t. A lot of them died, and Daryl unfortunately had a heroin problem so he sort of faded out of the art world. But he’s still alive, and he’s one of my favourite artists in the world.

Go to Tokyo in June! We have a show again with JPS Gallery, very different from this show. It’s going to feature 1,420 hand-drawn Japanese-style postcards. This is something that I started when I first moved to Japan – I was bored and had nothing to do, so I bought blank postcards and started drawing on them.

It’s also going to be a group show with Mayumi – her first show. She’s going to have a whole room of her own stuff and it’s a lot of graphic art and computer stuff – it’s mind-boggling to me but she’s going to have a great display. The fun thing about my side of the show is the sheet volume of art. We could probably make a wallpaper from all the pieces, and they’re all for sale.