‘PEOPLE REALLY SEEMED TO LIKE IT. IT DOESN’T HAVE QUITE SO MANY KNIVES OR PENISES.’
Arlo Eisenberg is holding a semi-cooked hamburger, seated by the side of the road in Los Angeles’ most nefarious hooker district. He is talking about his recent art show, ‘Let’s Be Nice Forever,’ where he debuted six years of original artwork. By all accounts the show was a huge success. He sold eleven pieces on the evening of the show and generated glowing reviews from a hypercritical art community. Even his ex-wife bought a piece, although it’s questionable if she actually knew the work contained a scathing subtext Arlo wrote in his journal while they were going through their divorce.
Across the street from where we are sitting, a hooker in four-inch steel stilettos flags down an Escalade.
Eisenberg spent his high school years at the Arts Magnet high school in Dallas, Texas, where he studied visual arts and theatre. From there, he went to the University of Texas. ‘I was studying communications, but I was really majoring in rollerblading. I wore my skates to class and skated the campus every night. It could’ve been a movie. I had to evade security every day.’
A SIX-FOOT TALL LATINA HOOKER WALKS INTO THE BURGER JOINT, AND ARLO PAUSES TO ADMIRE THE INK WORK ON HER LOWER BACK.
‘Eventually,’ Arlo says. ‘I gave up on school and moved to California.’ In Los Angeles, Arlo found his niche as an influential figure in the growing rollerblading movement, and, together with a few friends, he started an inline company called Senate. His main role in the company was graphic design, and he used his unique perspective to carve a niche for his company as one of the edgiest brands in action sports. Top selling graphics included a print of a boy with a bloody baseball bat behind his back and the caption ‘Sinner’ branded across his forehead and another was of a boy slitting his wrist using the ace of spades from a deck of playing cards.
When Arlo produced a line of T-shirts featuring tags that said ‘Destroy All Girls,’ conservative middle America decided he had finally gone too far, and raised the alarm that rollerblading in general, and Arlo Eisenberg in particular, were morally bankrupt.
‘I remember explaining to an interviewer from a local news program how I originally wanted the tags to say, “Shave Your Head, Kill Your Parents,” but that even my colleagues thought that was going too far, so we settled on “Destroy All Girls”’.
Naturally, the controversy only served to sell more Senate products, and made Arlo a household name. In 1997, Arlo was profiled in People Magazine and Newsweek named him one of their ‘100 Americans for the Next Century.’
In 2000, Arlo married and had a daughter. The marriage lasted less than two years, but during that time, his art developed a softer side. Where once, his paintings were filled with gleaming knives and severed penises, his more recent canvases feature smiling turtles and butterflies. I ask if the change in his artistic direction has something to do with his daughter, now four years old. ‘Look.’ He uses a french fry to emphasise his point. ‘It is the burden of the nineteen-year-old to be angry and effect change. The bloody baseball bat, ‘kill your parents,’ etcetera – that was more about wanting to be heard, to make a statement.
‘Now, it’s less about that, less in your face, and more about more subtle emotions – loneliness, insecurity. A thirty-one-year-old is more reflective. It’s not about impact so much as insight.’
Arlo has always been well-spoken. He puts a lot of thought into what he says, manipulating the words to express exactly what he means before he says them. His art is the same way. Each piece goes through many phases before it is allowed to be output and displayed. It starts with a sketch in a book – an elephant or a monkey – something that piques his interest. Once he is happy with the illustration, he scans it into the computer and then builds the final piece in Illustrator™.
The art in ‘Let’s Be Nice Forever’ was created using commercial tools, but unrestricted by commercial guidelines. For a piece like ‘Another Jesus,’ that meant letting the knives emerge in the theme. The piece depicts a monkey and an angel in a loose embrace, slitting each other’s wrists. The two characters wear expressions of such calm that you wonder if they have any knowledge of their own actions. Arlo explains that that is exactly the point.
‘It’s a suicide pact,’ he says. The monkey represents ignorance – he’s a primate, after all, without an evolved sense of mortality or understanding of what it means to be alive or not alive. The angel represents a being on the other side of the evolutionary continuum, a creature so enlightened that he exists in a world beyond death. So you have these two creatures, from opposite ends of the spectrum, who have achieved companionship and a common bond of bliss through this act of suicide.
The work does not come across as overwhelmingly morbid because the main characters are cartoons. ‘No matter how extreme the acts are they always looks nice and cute. I make bad things nice, like angels cutting monkeys.’
The tall hooker, who has just emerged from the hamburger stand, overhears this and gives Arlo a curious look. Arlo finishes the last bite of his burger and meets her gaze. ‘It takes the judgment out of it,’ he says.
These days, Arlo is living in an artist’s village in Santa Ana, California, where he plans to host a gallery show every month. He will continue to work on graphics for his family skatepark, Eisenberg’s, as well as skate companies like Franco Shade and Mindgame. You can check out his artwork at
www.thedigitalmessiah.com or ‘if you’re ever in Santa Ana,’ Arlo says jovially, “come by the gallery.”