Innovative artist, writer and director Aaron Rose reflects on what inspired him to create his unique art movement that ended up boosting the careers of well-known pop culture figures Shepard Fairey, Spike Jonze, Chloë Sevigny and others.
Rose discusses his Alleged Gallery, which opened in New York in 1992 and became a scene sensation. “When I got to be a bit older, I kind of got out of the super sub-culture thing and I got more into skateboarding culture a little bit. And I was skating a lot – not so much in L.A., and I moved to New York in ’89.”
Eventually the Alleged Gallery ran its course and Rose said he really wasn’t successful as a manager. “Sometimes creative people don’t necessarily make the best managers, and I was really just one of their friends who got thrust into the role of being their manager – their gallerist, their rep, but I never was very good at it.”
On his first professional collaboration with Shepard Fairey, he said it wasn’t even an art show. “He was making skateboard films. He made one called Attention Deficit Disorder and we did a premiere of it at the gallery.” At the time, Fairey was just making stickers, including the widely circulated Andre the Giant design.
He speaks about his documentary Beautiful Losers, which follows the lives and careers of his artists and designers – including Spike Jonze, Shepard Fairey, Harmony Korine, Mike Mills, Barry McGee and Margaret Kilgallen – and ultimately allowed him to end an important chapter in his life.
“Beautiful Losers was a great way to close a chapter. It’s very rare in life that you get an opportunity to really close – sometimes chapters of your life just kind of bleed into the next chapter – so it was nice to have a situation where it was like, that is done,” he said. “It was good for me and it was good for the artists too. It was like, okay we’re grown up now, there’s a book, there’s a traveling museum, there’s a movie, we can now move on with our lives. Our 20s are over, and we’re into the next phase.”
On the continuing careers Fairey and other artists portrayed in the film, Rose said a major reason for their success is because it was always a tight-knit group, they were all friends and hung out together as well as collaborated artistically. “It struck a cord and it was very, very interesting because it’s the kind of stuff you can never predict, there’s no formula for that. You can’t learn it in school, you’re just in the right place at the right time.”
Comments