I’m fascinated by this new painting you’ve done with all the flyers.
This is a painting based on a photograph I took in 1980 of Dot-A-Rock from the Fantastic Five, one of the MCs featured in Wild Style. He invited me over to his place. He was living with his parents, like everybody of his age was in the Bronx at that time. Nobody had their own apartments. So this is in Dot-A-Rock’s bedroom, there is his alarm clock. He wanted to show off his flyer collection. And I was obsessed with these flyers. Each one was like a magazine—it had all the information you needed. The same group of people who started hip-hop are all on his wall.
Tell me about the process of making this work.
I took one picture of Dot-A-Rock in his bedroom, and it’s a fucking bad picture.You can’t even make out the flyers very well.As I started to enlarge them, they became more and more out of focus. I was very frustrated, as I knew this piece was the key to my painting work. I was talking to two friends of mine, Sureshot [La Rock] and Pete Nice [of 3rd Bass]—as well as being an MC, [Pete] is a huge flyer collector. So I told him my idea of making this into a large version, and I wanted to get all the original flyers. So he gave me his collection, as did Sureshot. I added them to my collection, and we recreated Dot-A-Rock’s wall. I discovered I could blow up the photo of Dot-A-Rock, and it lost none of its power. So then I drew each of the flyers with pencil and painted them. I didn’t want the colors to be totally authentic.The flyers used to be in these bright colors, but I really exaggerated it.The work was so big it had to be created on five separate silkscreen sections painted in advance, laid out on a table, then joined together.
Another painting is of Patti Astor, who is sadly no longer with us. I’ve always been interested in how she came to be involved in Wild Style.
I was at this wild hip-hop event in this gigantic hall in Harlem, and I saw Patti and a friend there and took some pictures of her.Then there was a gunshot somewhere in the space. Can you imagine thousands of kids in this place, and a gunshot goes off? Everyone is running in all directions, scared. By the exit, Patti was there and I was like, “God, that was amazing.” From there, we went to a bar, and she knew I was making a movie. I was like,“There might be a part for you in this movie—you could play a part like what’s just happened.” That became her character in the movie, based on who she actually was.
I wanted to talk about some of the other recent works based on old photographs, where you’re scratching into the film.
Many of the old photographs I took were done with a flash and were too dark.You have to remember, back then, we used slides to keep pictures—you didn’t make copies. But, although they were too dark, instead of throwing away the slide, I took a screwdriver to scratch into it.This one was Grand Wizzard Theodore, so I wrote “scratch” across the top because he was the inventor of the scratch.There’s another, of Futura. I went to visit him in his studio, which was called Soul Artists. When I arrived there, I was getting my camera ready, I’m walking into the room, and he approaches with this handstand flip without telling me. He does that as a way to say hello, and I take a flash of it. But when it comes back, it’s too dark. So I scratch into it the words “Futura” to bring something else to it.
So the darkness actually brings something to the piece?
Even more than the darkness, the fuck-up became something.The mistake becomes the point.That is the cornerstone of the new slide show in this exhibition.This goes back to when I started doing slide shows at the Ecstasy Garage that became my playground. I would show the slide show on a carousel with Grand Wizzard Theodore scratching, or Busy Bee up onstage making rhymes of the people in the shots.They all used to call me “CharlieVideo.” They really didn’t know what I was doing. But what I was doing was making them into stars. I was making them into famous people.
( previous spread ) The Outlaw Four at T Connection, circa 1980. Photo and scratch art by Charlie Ahearn, courtesy of Arrow Films. ( opposite ) Dot-A-Rock of the Fantastic Five, posing with his flyer collec - tion inside his Bronx bedroom. Painting by Charlie Ahearn, based on his own photograph from 1980, courtesy of Woodbury House.
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