BONUS NUMBER 110: MIKE PARKER, SURFER ARTIST
(Did You Sleep With the Models?)
I said in an earlier chapter that all of us at the Modernismo magazines — editorial staff, art directors, advertising department — considered Playguy a bothersome stepchild. Until, that is, 1985, when we upgraded and expanded it. Looking now at some of those issues from my final year as editor-in-chief, I think to myself, Not bad, not bad at all for an unloved urchin.
When I came across this feature on surfer artist Mike Parker, I remembered — nothing. I probably dismissed his work as mere filler for the September 1985 Playguy. Four decades, however, bring changes in perspective. Today, I find Parker’s paintings as refreshing as a sea breeze off the Pacific. They’re much more pleasing than the daubs and scribbles of Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and others of that ilk.
Who wrote the unsigned text of this Playguy feature? I assume that it was supplied by the gallery representing Mike Parker at the time. In that case, it’s odd that no titles were supplied for the paintings.
An online search turned up additional information on the artist in The Surfer’s Journal, Vol. 2, issue 1 (2010). Born in 1957, Parker moved to New York in 1981. (“Surfers go to Hawaii, artists to New York,” explained Bolton Colburn, author of the Surfer’s Journal appreciation.) In the feverish New York art world of the early eighties, Parker stood out as “the embodiment of the tanned Southern California surfer.”
And no wonder, because, Colburn adds, “surfing was considered very exotic and it was fashionable to go to surf bars and clubs. Equipped with his surf persona and paintings of surfers and surfing, Parker was able to get his artwork shown at the prestigious Leo Castelli Gallery and was reviewed in the New Yorker.”
New York artists strive for inclusion in such prestigious galleries and for classy media exposure. Such dreams materialize for only a few.
Mike Parker touched the fringe of such uptown Manhattan success, but his career remained below Fourteenth Street. He was not actually reviewed in the New Yorker. Instead, he was featured in the magazine’s “Talk of the Town” section (April 29, 1985), which often focused on the whimsical and the slightly askew. Nor was he represented by Leo Castelli, who specialized in superstars such as Warhol, Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns. Something of Parker’s was, however, on view at an East Village gallery show in 1986 that had a vague, ambiguous connection to Castelli. Not quite the same as representation, it was more like Belle Poitrine and “luncheoning with Roz.”
The Playguy article names Parker’s gallery as 46 Avenue B in the East Village, in so-called Alphabet City, an outlaw neighborhood that was “bohemian” only to those who thought the word “dangerous” not quite p.c. Now, however, Alphabet City, like every square inch of Manhattan, has undergone pricey gentrification.
In Mike Parker’s case, location had nothing to do with it. Doesn’t his work show more
freshsness, more imagination, than a Warhol soup can or yet another banal flag painting by Jasper Johns?
Give me Alphabet City over Alphabet Soup, and hold the Old Glory!
Now I'm trying to find more of his art online. it's harder than I thought it would be.
Thanks for the artist update. I always like knowing more about an artist I was familiar with.