A Painting Retrospective by Kevin Bouton-Scott
Towne Square
Los Angeles
June 23, 2024
On Fourth Street in Los Angeles where it becomes Skid Row, east of San Pedro Street, there’s a club called Towne Square that usually has grindcore and black metal shows but in June hosted a one-night retrospective for painter Kevin Bouton-Scott. “Don’t park your car here,” it said on the flyer. I wasn’t sure if that was just a warning or the title of the exhibition. The club is next door to a needle exchange, and next to that is an SRO building. The street is a dense spectacle of the kind of misery you probably otherwise encounter in dispersed arrangements — in the shadow of an overpass, on a Hollywood sidewalk — and out of a car window. I arrived in the late afternoon, and it was stifling inside. I can only imagine what it was like in the tents.
There were dozens of paintings up, mostly on unstretched canvas. They led back through a warren of dingy rooms that issued onto a small patio where attendees were drinking cans of beer and sucking on nitrous balloons. (Incredibly, this was the third thing I’d gone to this summer where there was a nitrous tank.) Bouton-Scott has an atypical profile for a recent ArtCenter MFA: he’s in his mid-forties and spent the years before going to art school as a vagabond graffiti writer and “professional shoplifter,” riding the Greyhound from city to city, doing pieces in an astonishing array of styles on walls and trains across the West and Midwest. The crowd reflected this history — vandals and metalheads along with the familiar art people.
Looking at his paintings, you wouldn’t be able to tell necessarily that he has a background in graffiti. They incorporate material drawn from the internet, popular culture, and subcultures, past and present, invoking a hysterical circulation and mutation of reference and meaning. A lot of the imagery is appropriated; some of it is just made to look like it is. But he tells me, weeks later over coffee in Pasadena, that his graffiti and his art are “all one work. A cumulative thing.” He says he’s the only graffiti writer ever to change up his style with every piece, and this tracks a restlessness in his painting. “I was my generation’s avant-garde within the crime-heavy, illegal, vandalism side,” he says. “Not street art or whatever.” He mined the history of graphic design, cycling through thousands of letter styles before he ever made a respectable painting, and so his use of appropriation is “hyperspecific.” Although the viewer maybe wouldn’t recognize it, these quotations are actually an archive of broad “cultural shifts.” “It’ll be helpful a hundred years from now, but people won’t get it for that long,” he says, and I think he means it.
Back at Towne Square, we’d all gone inside for an exhibition walkthrough with the artists Frances Stark and Oliver Payne. Bouton-Scott is usually great at talking, which he does with an intense and amused edginess, as if a lot of ideas were occurring to him at the same time. Payne and Stark are also good talkers, but it was kind of hard to hear for some reason; Bouton-Scott had been up all night installing the show, and the conversation seemed to sputter, reflecting a general wooziness that was setting in.
We moved from a cramped room to a bigger one, and Stark and Bouton-Scott sat on the floor. The latter explained that the small works on paper were from his itinerant days: he’d show up in a new city and put on a quick show. “Should we talk about the elephant in the room?” said Payne. It was the biggest painting and it said AIDS in big letters. The work reproduced a screen that would pop up if you got the AIDS computer virus in the early 1990s. “What?!” came a frantic voice. “You think computer AIDS is worse than human AIDS?” It was the artist Mark Verabioff. No, no, he was assured, everyone there agreed that human AIDS was worse than computer AIDS. “Sorry,” he said, fanning himself. “This heat.”
There was a pragmatic logic behind the choice of venue. A few months before, Bouton-Scott had been working at an artist’s studio nearby and learned from another studio hand that it was a good place to buy drugs. Bouton-Scott became friends with the guys that ran it, who said he could rent the space for $500. He mounted the exhibition partly to provide an example of old DIY ingenuity — you don’t have to wait around for a gallery to give you a show — and partly as a farewell. He had run out of money. L.A. was impossibly expensive. The few times he’d shown since graduating in 2018 had all been joint exhibitions initiated by some of the more established artists who have taken a shine to him and his work — Payne, Stark, and Diana Thater. But these hadn’t resulted in anything like a livable income, and despite everyone’s efforts, the invitation to do a solo show never came. There’d been a promise from a gallerist in Hollywood who then ghosted. A few people had been trying to get him in touch with Mills Morán of a gallery called Morán Morán, but when Bouton-Scott finally met him at a Zwirner after-party at the Chateau, the guy turned out to be “a huge douche.” So he started a GoFundMe to raise the $500.
It would be wrong, of course, to compare Bouton-Scott’s struggles to the crushing poverty outside Towne Square, but that was the context. The inequality that has come to define cities like Los Angeles is at its most barbaric on Skid Row, but it’s also made it so that they are hospitable mainly to the kinds of people who buy art, not (except a lucky few) to those who make it.
