Tony Kaye: Art! Art! Get your free art!
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If you passed by CAA this morning and saw a painting sitting outside the talent agency, it was an original piece of art by Tony Kaye. In fact, you could start your own Kaye art collection just by roaming around town, looking for stray paintings leaning up against the doors and windows of various local art galleries, Disney Hall and the L.A. County Art Museum. It’s all part of what Kaye is calling his ‘Left Lying Around Painting’ series, the latest oddball enterprise in the eccentric artist turned movie director’s oddball career.
When it comes to artistic loopiness, it’s hard to top Kaye, the crazy-like-a-fox filmmaker best known feuding with Edward Norton over the release of 1998’s ‘American History X’ (Kaye tried to take his name off the film and substitute the pseudonym ‘Humpty Dumpty’). Kaye has been out of the mainstream for years, having spent most of his time directing music videos and finishing up ‘Lake of Fire,’ a nearly three-hour-long documentary about abortion. He’s also recently completed a film with Laurence Fishburne and Stephen Dorff called ‘Blackwater Transit.’ It’s still waiting for a release.
With deep roots in the British art scene -- one of his good pals is the artist Damien Hirst -- Kaye has gone back to his first love, painting and conceptual art, with the emphasis on concept. (When Charles Saatchi’s ad agency refused to pay him for a British Airways ad Kaye had directed -- before he was fired from the account -- Kaye photographed all of his outstanding billing invoices, smuggled them into Saatchi’s posh London art gallery and hung them from the wall.) Now he’s producing batches of paintings every day, leaving them around town and photographing them. Earlier today he propped up five paintings on a ledge outside the Larry Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills.
‘I do them really quick, 15-20 minutes at most,’ he told me today over the phone, having just returned from a jaunt with his pal Mickey Rourke, who’s working on a script with him. ‘They’re my Twitter paintings. Just a quick message on a canvas. My wife thinks I’m mad. My plan is to do a thousand of them and leave them in front of galleries, synagogues and mosques, in front of trees and on bus benches, because in L.A., bus benches are the best advertising going.’
I had only one question: Why? ‘It’s entertaining -- well, let’s say it entertains me,’ he explains. ‘I love the idea of leaving the art around, having people stop and stare. They’re not graffiti. Their gifts. I suspect in years to come they’ll be really valuable because there will be a story behind each one of them. Look, an artist has to be entertaining, even if you have to chop your ear off the way Van Gogh did -- not, mind you, that I’m going to do that.’
Kaye says his biggest triumph, so far, is the painting he left at the L.A. County Art Museum. ‘I think it was the best one,’ he said with a laugh. ‘Some of the others, I admit, are pretty awful. I sat on a bench, painted a picture of the devil -- well, a person with horns -- and put it at the entrance and within minutes someone took it inside. It was great! I mean, I’m sure it’s in a dustbin somewhere, but at least now I have a painting inside the L.A. County Art Museum. Not everyone can say that, right?’