No Interest In Starving

No Interest in Starving

[Note: This is a pre-edited version of a story which appeared in the July 24, 2003 edition of The La Habra Journal]

It's been 25 years since Mark Kostabi last set foot on the La Habra High School campus, but the memories remain strong.

As the modern artist who earned fame in the early 1980s New York art scene as both a tireless painter and an equally tireless self-promoter, Kostabi remembers nothing so much as the urge to graduate and move on to bigger things during his days as a La Habra student.

At the same time, the man whose credits include the cover art for the Guns 'N' Roses 1991 album "Use Your Illusion I & II" and the Ramones' "Adios Amigos," he also recalls the adolescent hijinks and predictable clashes with authority that would prepare him well for a professional art career.

"I would do sound poetry," says Kostabi, recalling one of his favorite classroom pranks. "I would stand on a desk and howl like a hyena, making those sounds only a person in puberty to could make."

Another favorite prank was to take a desk, put it out in the middle of Monte Vista street and watch the puzzled drivers as they detoured around him. It wasn't until a few years later, Kostabi admits, that he learned that professional artists were doing the same thing in the 1970s and callig it "performance art."

"At the time, I was just trying to get attention."

The desire for attention still burns. For a man who, at age 42 could easily retire to pursue his many side project, Kostabi remains deeply commited to maintaining his visibility in the professional art world.

Now living in Rome, Kostabi manages his main studio, the factory-like Kostabi World in New York City, with the help of the Internet and his younger brother, Paul. True, a team of 18 assistants does most of the actual painting, but it is Kostabi's acute instinct for marketing and market value that keeps the entire operation running. Among the many plans lurking on the Kostabi agenda is a book explaining how other artists can follow in his footsteps. The working title is characteristically direct.

"I want to call it How to Become a Rich and Famous Artist by Mark Kostabi," Kostabi says.

If such comments go against the suffering artist cliche, maybe it's because Kostabi has no interest in being a suffering artist. Kostabi credits his family and the many teachers at Macy Elementary and Starbuck Junior High School for nurturing his artistic capabilities and for teaching him to pursue art as an end in itself. Still, he says he didn't begin to think ambitiously about art as a career until his first year at Cal State Fullerton.

"I remember when I first walked onto the campus. I was overwhelmed by the six story buildings," he says. "That I was going to spend a lot of my life amid these buildings, I got a big surge from that."

Challenged by his art instructors to think big, Kostabi says he began exploring the work of famous artists such as Andy Warhol and sculptor George Segal. Quickly drifting away from the well-rendered but artistically-bland work of his childhood, Kostabi grew more experimental both in terms of his work and his artistic persona.

Darin Toohey, a former La Habra classmate who also attended Cal State Fullerton at the time and who now teaches as a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Colorado, recalls running into Kostabi during one of his artistic explorations.

"I found him in a trash can near my lab," recalls Toohey, now a professor of atomospheric chemistry at the University of Colorado. "I asked him what he was doing and it was typical Mark. He said, 'My teacher told me my art was trash and told me to go find a place to think.' So I decided to come here."

By the end of junior year, Kostabi was ready to meet his idols. With $100 in cash and a list of names, he headed to New York City and immersed himself in the post-punk art scene then flourishing in New York's East Village.

"I had a burning desire to become a rich and famous artist, and I knew one had to go to New York to do that," says Kostabi, explaining the move. "Just like a young actor has to go to Hollywood."

In New York, Kostabi crashed exhibitions and studio openings, introducing himself to the Warhol and top art dealers like Leo Castelli. Kostabi says he arranged the second meeting by claiming to be the author of a book on pop art. "I knew I'd never get an appointment if I said I was an artist," he says. "I was 22 and obviously fresh off the boat. I think his secretary was charmed by my youthful chutzpah."

Although Costelli turned down Kostabi's request to show some of his artwork, citing a full gallery, Kostabi recalls the art dealer as "gracious and charming." Leaving the meeting with a "big ego boost," Kostabi eventually learned to make chutzpah his calling card. In 1988 he founded Kostabi World, an art-gallery that took the Warhol "factory" concept one step further. As a team of assistants churned out a steady stream of paintings, Kostabi played overseer, selecting works that best fit the artistic themes of his own personal repertoire as well as works that best fit the evolving taste of the marketplace. In 1990, he released a compendium of his 1980s work under the grandiose title: Mark Kostabi: The Early Years.

Toohey, who also moved to the east coast for his own studies during the mid-1980s, laughs when remembering the trips he took from Boston to check out Kostabi's celebrity-studded art openings.

"I mean, I knew him as this guy who used to come by my gas station at the corner of Imperial and Walnut and chat about rock groups," says Toohey. "And here is hanging around with people like Brooke Shields, acting outrageous."

Toohey says a recent trip to Rome, where the two managed to track down fellow LHHS-alum Rusty Anderson after a Paul McCartney concert, allowed him to glimpse an older, mellower Kostabi. "This time it was like the Mark I new in high school," Toohey says.

Kostabi says the desire for respect is now stronger than the simple desire for attention. A renewed fascination with the piano and a budding career as a musician now take up much of his time. Still, Kostabi finds time to visit European art exhibits and pen an advice column for the website Art.net.

Here again, high school offers a preview. As editor of the Scotch Tape, the La Habra High School student newspaper, Kostabi was booted after secretly embedding cursewords into the artwork of the paper's cartoons. The resulting scandal, Kostabi says, gave him both a taste for controversy and an even more painful taste of anonymity. Open the 1978 LHHS yearbook, and today you will find little mention of Kostabi's journalistic career.

"It's the same in the art world," Kostabi says. "If you don't fight for your place, you'll get air brushed out of history."

Sam Williams is a freelance writer. His email address is sam@inow.com

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