Amer­ica, cap­i­tal­ism and music influ­ence the art of Win­ston Smith

by Justin M. Norton

Win­ston Smith stands out­side the DNA Lounge with a herd of tat­tooed and pierced punkers. With his trimmed gray beard, thick black leather jacket and brown fedora angled rak­ishly, he looks more like a chap­er­one than a metal head wait­ing to get into a music club.

The artist who cre­ated some of punk rock’s most rec­og­niz­able sym­bols a few decades ago is about to see GWAR, a heavy metal band of for­mer art stu­dents known for dress­ing in elab­o­rate mon­ster cos­tumes and spray­ing gal­lons of fake blood into the crowd. At 53, Smith still grav­i­tates to the loud, con­tentious music he helped pop­u­lar­ize with his defi­ant album cov­ers in punk’s early years.

“You real­ize that an entire gen­er­a­tion has passed you by, but it shows how endur­ing punk really is,” Smith says later at a [San Fran­cisco] cof­fee­house in the city’s North Beach neighborhood.

Smith’s life­long con­tri­bu­tion to punk was recently cel­e­brated with the 20th anniver­sary of the cus­tom twin fin surf­board. His art was repro­duced on surf­boards and toured clubs, includ­ing CBGB in New York. The boards were auc­tioned online and the pro­ceeds donated to VH1’s “Save The Music.”

The artist is revered by fans, and invited back­stage to visit bands such as Green Day; he designed the cover art for the group’s 1995 album, Insom­niac, a mon­tage that fea­tures a man play­ing a vio­lin while get­ting a chest X-ray and a 1950s June Cleaver-like house­wife play­ing a guitar.

While the Ramones cre­ated the angry three-chord sound of Amer­i­can punk, Smith is cred­ited with craft­ing a last­ing album cover aes­thetic — mon­tage art blis­ter­ingly crit­i­cal of the estab­lish­ment. Most famously, he cre­ated the styl­ized logo of the Dead Kennedys, a San Fran­cisco band that for many defined the in-your-face, polit­i­cally lib­eral pos­ture of 1980s Amer­i­can punk rock. The logo — with the “DK” let­ters pointed like spears — has appeared on club walls and note­books around the world.

Smith’s mon­tage art is a dark hybrid of 1950s adver­tis­ing and scathing social crit­i­cism that skew­ers cap­i­tal­ism, domes­tic­ity and sex­ism. These days, it’s as likely to be hang­ing in places like the Var­nish Gallery in San Fran­cisco as it is to be sta­pled to a tele­phone pole.

His works include such pieces as “Addicted To War,” a mon­tage in which the Statue of Lib­erty holds a hypo­der­mic nee­dle with the words “WAR” writ­ten on it while a shop­ping cart filled with tanks sits in the background.

Smith’s art was even called dan­ger­ous by the Dead Kennedys’ vocal­ist, Jello Biafra, in par­tic­u­lar “In God We Trust, Inc.” Smith took an old cru­ci­fix with a remov­able Jesus, cov­ered it with folded dol­lar bills and placed a bar code near the top to protest what he viewed as the com­mer­cial­iza­tion of religion.

But the artist known best for his con­fronta­tional work is a quiet and gra­cious man who sets his watch 35 min­utes ahead to off­set his peren­nial tar­di­ness. And he’s still chal­lenged by today’s tech­nol­ogy — he strug­gles to fig­ure out a cell phone, which he reluc­tantly bought last year.

Smith has worked by kerosene lamps in a cabin on California’s North Coast for decades, a fit­ting remote loca­tion for an artist who painstak­ingly fash­ions his work by hand and who changed his birth name. His tools aren’t com­puter pro­grams but an X-Acto knife, musty mag­a­zines, old cat­a­logs and glue, mate­ri­als he uses to lam­poon a world where “every­one is a suspect.”

Signs of his punk past include a dog tag on his key chain that reads “Smash the State,” and pins with the names of punk bands.

It’s a long way from his rural roots in Okla­homa, where he was obsessed with high­way bill­boards pro­mot­ing afflu­ence and a cor­nu­copia of con­sumer goods fol­low­ing World War II. His par­ents gave him pen­cils to keep him quiet and sketch­ing became his form of ado­les­cent rebellion.

Smith traces his strong polit­i­cal views to a time when his father refused to buy him a Hopa­long Cas­sidy whis­tle cap gun because it was assem­bled in a sweat­shop over­seas. His father was polit­i­cally con­ser­v­a­tive in many respects but also a union sup­porter who didn’t want to pur­chase prod­ucts made out­side the United States. He taught Smith to be ana­lyt­i­cal and mis­trust infor­ma­tion from big busi­ness and corporations.

“I real­ized we have this opu­lence because chil­dren in other coun­tries are slav­ing away so we can have Mickey Mouse dolls,” he says. “When it dawned on me that the Amer­i­can empire was built on the suf­fer­ing of oth­ers, it col­ored me for the rest of my life.”

Unable to han­dle high school — in part because of dyslexia — Smith left the United States at 17 and went to Flo­rence, Italy, where he stud­ied art. He tried to paint but quickly decided he was bet­ter at manip­u­lat­ing images.

When he returned home in 1976, he was struck by the pro­lif­er­a­tion of police and secu­rity cam­eras. It reminded him of 1984, George Orwell’s dystopic novel in which thought police “elim­i­nated indi­vid­u­als capa­ble of becom­ing dan­ger­ous.” He took the name of the book’s pro­tag­o­nist, who rebels against a despotic gov­ern­ment but is finally brain­washed and shot dead. Smith will not reveal his birth name, partly because he doesn’t want his par­ents to be ostra­cized because of his artwork.

“When I left, there were peo­ple fight­ing in the streets and this ener­gized youth move­ment,” Smith recalls. “When I came back, the whole move­ment had been defused by the government.”

He wasn’t able to pay bills, so he took jobs as a rock and roll roadie for such bands as Crosby, Stills & Nash and Quick­sil­ver Mes­sen­ger Ser­vice. He spent his free time play­ing pranks, putting up posters of fake bands with names like “Half Life” and “The Spit Wads.” Unsus­pect­ing punkers showed up only to find empty park­ing lots. Music pro­mot­ers were outraged.

A Col­orado trans­plant named Eric Boucher, who took the stage name Jello Biafra, liked the mes­sage he saw after receiv­ing a pack­age of Smith’s art, which included altered ads for “Vice” and “Mas­ter­scam” credit cards.

“Tak­ing the whole­some role mod­els and illu­sions forced on us and cast­ing them in a wickedly dif­fer­ent light makes us laugh,” Biafra wrote in the intro­duc­tion to the sec­ond col­lec­tion of Smith’s work, titled Art­crime. “It makes us see and learn. It makes us think.”

Smith’s three art books — Act Like Nothing’s Wrong, All Riot On The West­ern Front and Art­crime: The Mon­tage Art Of Win­ston Smith — sell well for small pub­lish­ing house Last Gasp of San Fran­cisco and have remained con­sis­tently in print.

“He’s been a great influ­ence because he speaks to the deep con­nec­tions between your shrink­ing pay stub and what goes on in other coun­tries,” said Ron Turner, owner of Last Gasp, which also pub­lishes under­ground comic artist R. Crumb. “He was so far out from the main­stream and was going for peo­ple who under­stood the street politics.”

Smith is even approached by sneaker and cig­a­rette com­pa­nies with lucra­tive offers. The money would be good, but he’s faith­ful to the prin­ci­ples that anchor his best work and turns them away.

“Win­ston tried to cram in as many sub­ver­sive ideas as he could on every inch of every album cover,” said V. Vale, who chron­i­cled the nascent San Fran­cisco punk scene and now runs Re-Search pub­li­ca­tions, which pub­lishes eclec­tic books.

“Some­one like Win­ston must have had rebel­lion coded into his DNA.”