In Southern California, Ming Donkey is better known as Jay Grumpy of the former Recess Records punk band The Grumpies. Now a one-man rockabilly show, Ming spends his days perfecting the washtub bass, teaching drawing at Mississippi State University and making (very affordable, somewhat political) Worker Art, which is on display at Echo Park’s L’Keg Gallery through November 20.

Cheree: How did you first become interested in art?

Ming Donkey: My dad worked in the graphic department at an industrial company that made forklifts, so he had a lot of art materials around the house. On the weekends he would paint, and he would set things around to let me paint too. I was really fascinated with snakes, and I was really fascinated with cowboys, so I had this cowboy-snake thing that I did. It was a snake with holsters and sometimes mustaches and cowboy hats.

C: Did you keep the snake theme?

MD: In high school, I drew a lot of Iron Maiden stuff. I was really into their mascot, Eddie. I wrote songs back then, too, which I guess were kind of mimicking Iron Maiden. They were about nuclear war.

C: How are your years of making music visible in the way you make art?

MD: I grew up in a small town in Mississippi, grew up around grandparents and great aunts and uncles. When I wasn’t in school, I stayed at their place and helped in the gardens. There was a sense of community…picking things, shucking corn, snapping beans, all that kind of stuff. Later the closest I came to that kind of communal experience was playing music. I didn’t notice [that community] in art until much more recently.

I went to art school [undergrad], and then I was like, done with that, time to do music, not really pushing my art except as “decoration” to music…screening tees, stage props, backdrops…one bar owner left a note on a napkin requesting me to “please hide all religious and fallic [sic] items…you can do so during the break.”

When I decided to get back into [exhibiting] art, it was from a mindset of playing and putting on punk shows. In the 90’s I got involved with this scene, it was before the internet, and I was blown away that strangers would support each other across state lines. I had been associated with a band that got on a major label, not a band I was directly in, but I traveled and lived with them. It really soured me on [big labels]. At the time I was really into music and then I had the opportunity to tour with them, but it turned out to be lame, mostly, because it was so impersonal—it seemed fake. The [guys in the band] didn’t even seem to be that good of friends themselves. All around them, everyone was always saying yes, their management, hangers-on, whatever. Then they almost got canned but ended up having a hit...eventually their singer died of an overdose.

At that point, all I knew were big labels…I didn’t know there was any other way to go about it. But eventually I stumbled across the 90’s version of punk rock and realized that in these nowhere towns, people were grouping together and making stuff happen…house shows, putting out their own records, doing their own zines. I guess now we call it the D.I.Y.  movement.  

You mentioned something about struggling to keep the balance between rural and urban in your work?

I ended up living in New Orleans, where there’s lots of folk art. I had already made the connection that punk rock is electrified folk or even kind of electric white boy blues. It might have an urban origin, but the issues it addresses are the same, because basically urban punks are marginalized just like rural people, like the working poor. Lyrically the bands I got involved with, the songs I wrote, addressed those everyday issues, community or social concerns. Not that we were overtly political—I think that in itself would have been an act—but we subtextually addressed those issues while singing from a personal perspective. And getting back into art, I didn’t want to leave that, I wanted to not throw away those experiences. I wanted them to play off each other.

There’s an overt narrative that runs through your work.

I had seen the woodblock prints, the graphic novels I guess you could say, of Frans Masereel. I wanted to work along the same lines but with my own characters. Some people say he was a socialist. He made stories without words, he addressed urban alienation—they were cheap and mass produced, so anyone could have them, and maybe illiterate people could still get the point, you know? So that appealed to me. I also discovered a series of prints that Picasso did [Dream and Lie of Franco]. They were one of his few anti-war statements, and at the time, we had started our war in Iraq. I thought there was a lot of hypocrisy involved with that. I started paying attention to how media creates false needs and perpetuates fear, how advertising bombards you—this concern isn’t unique to me, obviously. That’s what happened with [the Left Field work] The Ballad of Franco the Kid. Putting it under this moniker gave it an epic quality, kind of like a folk or gunfighter ballad. I wanted to address the arrogance, the Wild West mentality that was flooding through America at the time.

I have the Workers Without Hands, the Mad Diners, the Sad Houses, the Stump Ghosts and there’s Franco the Kid himself—the guy in the bunny outfit that stands in front of the dagger and the money. He’s somewhat of a prodigal son, expected to follow his father’s footsteps. And the viewer isn’t quite sure, and possibly Franco himself isn’t quite sure, what path he should follow. No one knows if he’s a hero or a villain. Meanwhile, the Mad Diners are the people behind it all, pulling the strings.

Each Worker follows the same template, but [my] hand is there, so they’re slightly different. It’s the homogenization of the culture that we’re in and how cultures are becoming more and more similar—the McDonald-ization of society. So these guys are referred to as Workers, but they have no hands—suggesting they can’t think for themselves, they can’t really do anything until they’re told what to do. And visually, in comparison to the other characters, the Workers are flat.

 I’ve also heard you explain your work in more academic terms.

My door into theory was Guy Debord. I don’t know if it was because he was in collectives or what, but he really thought that art had the potential to be a revolutionary tool—not in an 'overthrow the government' kind of way, but as a way to rediscover life and living. He seemed kind of like a punker to me. He did his own thing and he wrote passionately, like some of the zines I discovered in the 90’s [Cometbus, Doris, Rice Harvester, Iggy Scam]. He claimed that he was a better drinker than a writer. Through him, I tried to find other people that wrote about the subjects that he was addressing.

The Workers Without Hands are similar to Herbert Marcus’s one-dimensional Man. Marcus suggests that there are two forces, a status quo and an oppositional force. But the prevailing system of production and consumption assimilates the oppositional force and then sells it back, so you think what you’re doing is revolutionary, when really it’s already been neutered and controlled. And these guys wrote in the 60’s when TV was really globalizing, so I started thinking about how that related to the internet. The internet might help you get your work out, but social networks can make you think that you’re a part of something while keeping you separate from ever really being there. That’s what you have to be cautious about.

Is the prodigal son Dub-yah?

I wouldn’t want to specify because I think that dates everything, and I’m really interested in having these be mythological characters that reference many things. Like the Mad Diner, he’s done in a style that in my mind illustrates my interest in German expressionism. Some of the other characters almost look like graphic design, packaging or products. That’s because I feel like we’re packaged, I’m packaged. Subtextually, a lot of what I do—music, art or whatever—is addressing identity. To me it’s all role-playing, whether we want to admit it or not. Even as an artist, I don’t enjoy using my real name, I enjoy using monikers…it’s just real embarrassing…

To use your real name? Why?

For obvious reasons—like hey, come check me out? I feel like I’m more at ease with myself with a pseudonym. Because I think some people are role-playing indirectly, and I guess I’m…I don’t know…

You’re indirectly addressing role-play through direct role-play?

It sounds silly, but it is kind of like that. Take Burt Reynolds—Burt Reynolds is known as Burt Reynolds, but Burt Reynolds is as much of a caricature as anything. Who is the real Burt Reynolds? Maybe that’s not even his real name? My dad looked like Burt Reynolds when I was growing up, and I really wanted to have hair on my chest like Burt Reynolds. Too bad it’s not the 70’s—I’d still play shows naked.

What is Niagara?

It’s a running theme through this body of work. The different layers of interpretation are interesting to me. You think of it as a waterfall, possibly offering nourishment, mental or physical. [His artist statement reads: These nameless and to some degree faceless workers share a collective dream of Niagara…a place of rebirth or renewal, a way to escape the present through any means…be it a waterfall, the bottom of a bottle, death with the hope of an afterlife…]

Did you include ‘hope in afterlife’ because you’re from Mississippi, and that’s what people are into here?

I don’t know. I mean, I grew up that way. I grew up in a little country church and whether I believe or not, it’s there. It’s just another thing we, as humans, do…maybe it’s something Southerners do best…Niagara as a place of replenishment or of escape, and that escape being drinking or religious beliefs. Those are all things found in country and folk songs and just kind of ‘people songs.’ Those are central, archetypal themes, and I feel like that’s what I’m doing. Niagara Falls is one of the first natural resources that was commoditized. As soon as they developed the railroad, America latched onto Niagara Falls. It was advertised as a place to vacation, a place to get married, a place of escape, and then inadvertently, people went there to kill themselves or to become famous by throwing themselves off and surviving…I knew this girl who would say, ‘are you ready to go to Niagara, I just want to go to Niagara,’ and I would say, you mean Niagara Falls, and she would say, no, just Niagara. And I realized that this person was talking about Niagara as, do you want to fall in love, I’m just ready to fall in love. So then I was thinking, wow, this is a great concept. Because Niagara is such a commercial place, but for her, in casual conversation, to take something that’s so well known and make it both personal and metaphysical…it’s like Tennessee Williams or something. For me, that statement was everything Southern.

Why do you create installations as opposed to 2-dimensional work?

After undergrad, I wanted to do it all. I was already projecting stuff behind bands, making a sort of crude animation. I decorate the stage when I play music. I just don’t think there should be a separation, you know? Instead of hanging a piece and then another piece two feet over, why can’t they interact and overlap, why can’t the work overtake the space? The same thing happens when I play. I try to take over that space, change and personalize it, because that’s what I’m interested in—creating a moment, creating a spectacle.