SFAQ_issue_sixteen

JOHN KILDUFF
By SARAH THIBAULT
“I decided, ‘Hey, let’s just do a painting show.’” That was John Kilduff’s reaction when I
asked him what inspired him to create his live television show/video performance art
project Let’s Paint TV. The first episode aired in 2001 on cable television in Los Angeles.
The set was a stark, black backdrop and Kilduff, a.k.a. “Mr. Let’s Paint,” dressed like a
used-car salesman in a cheap suit, instructed his viewers how to paint a still life of donuts,
coffee, and sardines with loose, expressionistic strokes.
Thirteen years later, his show is still running (now on YouTube). Some of his more
popular shows have over a half-million hits, and he has performed as Mr. Let’s Paint on
national TV in front of millions of viewers.
Let’s Paint TV began as a reaction against the educational, kitsch painting shows like The
Joy of Painting by Bob Ross. “I was quickly bored with almost every painting show I’d
ever seen. . . . For someone who’s interested in painting for the weird, crazy, fucked up
parts of it, approaches to the masses on how to paint seemed wrong in a way,” Kilduff
remarked.
“I started doing one or two straight edge shows ‘how to paint’ and quickly the introduction
of weird stuff was happening—I started to welcome it.” The weird stuff included
elements from his earlier sketch comedy show The Jim Berry Show—interviews,
blue-screen graphics, bad camera techniques, and, once a week, cable access callers.
In the 2005 Halloween special, “Portrait of a Skeleton Mask #78,” the still life subject
matter is replaced by a costume “Scream” mask. A graphic overlay of a skull flashes on
the screen to punctuate the key moments throughout the show, while Mr. Let’s Paint
interjects random Crypt Keeper style laughs.
Kilduff builds visual noise, in part, through low-fi, neo-cubist camerawork—an effect he
gets by layering blue-screen graphics and multiple camera angles in shapes around the
frame. “I’m kind of scatterbrained. So I’m imagining, ‘What would be more interesting?’
Let’s fill up the picture plane or do something else, instead of this straight-ahead thing.”
He and his collaborators, the cable access crews, continued to max out the special
effects as the show progressed. Despite the compositional complexity, all the moving
parts retained the same ham-fisted quality that mimicked and enhanced the sloppy
mania of the show’s action.
By the mid-2000s, the addition of the treadmill gave the show its trademark punkmeets-multi-tasking
aesthetic. In “Let’s Paint, Blend Drinks, and Exercise,” Mr. Let’s Paint
begins the episode in medias res—walking at a brisk pace on his treadmill, his suit is
already covered in paint. The background, a photograph of him and a sexily dressed
woman, quickly switches to a blue screen and then to a psychedelic trail of colors
and freeze-frames to a close-up of his painting table, and so on. As he walks/runs, he
attempts to instruct the viewers on healthy eating, how to blend unpalatable drinks,
the benefits of creativity, and how to paint—all the while fielding calls from increasingly
aggressive callers saying things like “fuck Santa Monica!”
The local access callers, an analogue version of today’s Internet trolls, serve as an antagonistic
foil to Mr. Let’s Paint’s indefatigable optimism. “These people who used to call
in on the cable access, they didn’t just call my show, they called everyone else’s show.
It wasn’t just me. It was a great, fun thing for them to do because they’re on TV. And
there was no screening.” Despite the name-calling, swearing, gang-related shout outs,
and sexual solicitations, his character maintains its disheveled cool, like the eye in the
center of a shit storm.
Kilduff’s position either inside or outside the art world is ambiguous. What unifies his
otherwise diverse studio practice is his desire to reach a wide audience rather than be
limited to the cultural hierarchy of the art world. His work with Let’s Paint TV has led to
live performances at a range of venues from the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, to
comedy clubs, to The Tyra Banks Show and America’s Got Talent. He said, “To me it’s just
a crazy experience. Being freer to have the angle of the cable access—which [is] more
entertaining—as opposed to the dryness of the art community.”
“I had a teacher tell me once—she looked at my videos and she said, ‘The art world
does not like naiveté.’” Her comment refers, perhaps, to the art world’s mean girl tendency
to shame anyone who embraces mainstream culture without irony or refuses
to engage in art jargon—dismissing them as either lazy and ignorant, or calculating.
Whether Kilduff genuinely does not care if he performs at the Hammer or for Tyra
Banks (and I mean, who wouldn’t want to perform for Tyra), or if that stance is part of
the punk attitude that led him to create his cable television show in the first place, it’s
up to the viewer to decide.
Let’s Paint TV is now streaming live on YouTube instead of on cable television. The format
of the program has shifted gears away from the perpetual motion of the treadmill and
high volume of callers towards a reality TV-style production more akin to “the artist in
his studio.” This move was in part to allow him to make work for his recent exhibitions
Fast Food Paintings, a pop-up fast food store that sold made-to-order paintings, and Very
Good Plus (VG+), a pop-up record store.
“The show at Steven Wolf [Fine Arts] really evolved from me doing my show every
day in the sense that, well, what was I going to paint? So I started painting my record
collection on the Internet show.”
While some fans may miss the frenetic campiness of his earlier performances, the new
show has produced some raw, introspective shows, like, “The Let’s Paint TV Christmas
Special with Mr. Let’s Paint!” where Kilduff performs noise rock renditions of Christmas
carols while jogging on his treadmill. “Performing and the way that my performances
become with the treadmill—[their] improvisational aspect with the fear of failure—I
incorporate that part. I’m okay to stumble because I know I’m going to keep going.
That’s what the treadmill does for me, makes me keep going.”
Let’s Paint, Exercise & Make a Sushi-Gingerbread House, 2006. Courtesy of the artist.
Fast Food Painting Truck, part of the show Mulholland Dérive, LA Road Concerts 2012. Courtesy of the artist.