Justin Boa’s disembodied head floats at the bottom of my phone screen, his shaggy gray hair surrounded 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 smashes the other side. In the reflection of the mirror, six people stand in a simple gallery, intently watching the artist create his piece of art. Underneath, Boas explains how this piece is a “destructive intervention in the economy of the gaze.” He goes on to bring up the art school controversy for a few semesters, talking about “the solace of coherent thought”, “the broken ego against the same machine that once produced it”, and how “every fragment is the indicative trace of the self; contemplating fragmentation as the only honest image available of a civilization that has long since lost its self-reflection.”
He calls the piece “pure genius,” before his furrowed brow turns into a smirk. “No, I’m playing” He says. “Someone smashed a mirror and put a price tag on it. This is bullshit. Complete bullshit.”
For the past three years, Bua has been posting these criticisms (takedowns, in fact) on his Instagram account. They’re almost always the same, with Bua appearing at the bottom of the screen, explaining why he thinks the work is, for lack of a better term, bullshit. Behind it is a video of some contemporary artists or other plays. In one, an artist drops a pile of buckets filled with sand. In another photo, two women scribble on a wall, their arms attached to a solid glass rod. One artist Slaps a mound of butter With a microphone while another kayak in a small pool in the middle of the exhibit. Almost always, the observers present stand in rapt attention as the artist rolls in puddles of paint or… Coal crushes into a white wall.
Boas’s criticisms are as much about us, the viewers, and perhaps to a greater extent, the art industry, as they are about contemporary artists themselves. It’s not just work that bothers him, although work certainly bothers him. It’s the self-advertising of many of these artists, presenting themselves as something Boa feels they may not have deserved. By hitting butter with a microphone, can anyone really call themselves an artist? As long as the pile of butter is in an art gallery, it will look that way.
He gave an analogy in which he suddenly decided he was a fighter, and because of that announcement, he was allowed to get 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. However, everyone feels fine when they say they are artists.”
For Boa, an artist himself, this is not only an earned title – one achieved through study, practice, mastering the foundations and relearning the childhood magic we all seem to lose along the way – but it is also one that comes under duress. The artist is the DJ who spins no matter what, the guitarist who plays on the roof even though no one is listening, the players on the court with no hope of making it to the NBA. “Look, people can do what they want to do,” he says. “I think we should be more careful about calling everything ‘art’ just because someone did something in a gallery.”
He grew up as a street kid in New York City in the 70s and 80s, eventually finding his way into the city’s legendary graffiti and break dancing scenes. His childhood was filled not only with street art, but also with the classics and building blocks on which all art is built. At home, he was educated by his mother, who was an artist, and his grandfather, a famous sculptor and writer who worked on early comics such as Felix the Cat and Prince Valiant.
Boa spent as much time learning graffiti and breakdancing from local masters as he did from Capital-M. It’s a combination that permeates his outlook today, as he will talk in the same sentence about Caravaggio, Bruegel, Camille Claudel, the Cubists and Futurists, and the notable graffiti artists Dos Green, Bill Plast, and Futura 2000, the 1984 break-dance film. Pete Street (in which he appears as a dancer) and breakout groups like Rock Steady Crew. In conversations, he does not move between topics or eras so much as wraps everything up into single ideas. If Doze Green is as important as Picasso, why not refer to both to express a concept?
After graduating from Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Performing Arts in New York City, Boa studied painting at the Arts Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. In college, Boa first encountered artists explaining their work, many of whom appeared to have little or no skill and, in one case, little of anything at all. He remembers a critique session, during which one of his colleagues talked about how their article reflects the emptiness and emptiness of modern existence. The piece was a blank white canvas hanging on the wall, he explains with a laugh. “We learn this in school. Institutions are designed so that ‘if it’s on the wall, it’s great’. That’s nonsense.”
After graduation, Boa remained in Southern California and began his career as a commercial artist. He collaborated with Plan B, New Deal Skateboards, EA Sports, MTV, Toyota, and countless musicians and rappers to create the album art. He hosted a reality television competition and also served on a committee with the United States Postmaster General to recommend topics for official postage stamps.
Early on, Boas was selling prints and posters of his work, with the goal of making art accessible to young, broke college students and anyone who couldn’t afford to put a five-, six-, or seven-figure piece on their walls. More than three decades later, he is perhaps best known for his paintings DJwhich, according to Boas’ website, has sold more prints than any other piece in the history of modern art.
The piece depicts a Dutch-angled turntable, juggling a pair of Technics SL-1200 turntables beneath a single light bulb in front of stacks of LPs, in what I always assumed was his basement. In BoA’s view, a DJ doesn’t mix at a party or show. Rather, he is alone in his space, forced to create something new. Therefore, according to Boas’ interpretation, DJ It is a painting by the selected artist.
Boa’s artistic movements. Not literally, of course. By all accounts, his work is traditional. But it’s in his paintings and illustrations picks up The movement, sound, and rhythm of hip-hop and breakdancing make his works seem alive. His subjects are all elongated limbs and prominent jawlines with deep-set eyes staring directly at the viewer, as if we have captured them in a heightened state of creativity and release. “Dance, more than graffiti, has influenced my work, in terms of the rhythm of everything,” he says.
Perhaps his closest companion is Ernie Barnes, who painted his famous painting in 1976 The Sugar Shack He provided both covers for Marvin Gaye I want you Record and picture the closing credits of the hit 1970s sitcom Good Times, which Bua watched daily while growing up. Like Boas’s paintings, Barnes’s paintings have a movement, momentum, and spirit that transcend static images frozen in time.
Boa, who recently moved to Texas after nearly 40 years in Los Angeles, acknowledges the comparison. He’s no doubt heard it a million times before and he welcomes it. “Look, everyone is influenced by someone else. Nobody created the damn wheel. Everyone’s a spoke.” But once he admitted being influenced by Barnes, it was Barnes’s predecessor, the American painter Thomas Hart Benton, who Boas says had a greater influence on him as an artist.
He says it’s impossible to avoid influence, whether it comes from other artists or from everyday life. But he adds that it’s essential for artists to filter those influences through their own lenses, to use the work of Caravaggio and the Rock Steady Crew, the sublime leap of Kobe Bryant or de Kooning’s expressionism to create something new and unique and the source of the artist’s unique point of view. Otherwise it might just be performative nonsense. “There is only one William Bouguereau,” says Bois. “The man who broke the mirror? You or I can break the mirror.”
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