Aaron Rose

And A Fairy Tale for Losers

By Kyle Lemmon

11.17.08

Aaron Rose is an artist, writer, musician, film director and sovereign curator that dreams about metropolitan fairy tales and suburban nightmares. He currently lives in Los Angeles but he cut his artistic teeth for 10 years (1992-2002) as the owner/director of the Alleged Gallery in New York.

Even though Alleged closed its doors, Rose has found ways to stay busy. He works as a freelance curator, plays with his band The Sads and recently chose artists for the Undefeated Billboard Project, a public art project in Los Angeles produced in concurrence with Nike. Alleged finally received a filmic representation with Rose’s Beautiful Losers. Antics visited with the plucky artisan at one of his favorite LA coffee hangouts. Over a strong cup o’ joe, Rose divulged some of the secrets behind his recent fairy tale, the artistic differences of Europe and the U.S. and his ruminations on the power of creativity.

Your film speaks to the breaking-down-the-walls workshop approach that your Make Something program aimed for earlier this fall. Many of the artists at your gallery wouldn’t necessarily hang out with each other but since they had a common purpose that turned their prejudice on their heads. What do you think about art’s ability to do that?

Well, it does do that. In my opinion there’s no real way to judge art. I mean people try. Critics exist and people who know a lot about it try to judge it but it’s such a personal thing. It’s really impossible to judge what is being made. Not all the kids that come to the workshops are artists, they’re kids. Some kids have obvious talent where they can draw a really good face or character. There are some kids that are more into sports and not art. What those kids make have been the most interesting, concept-wise, because they are not coming at it from the whole rules of art world. They learn from being a creative person. It sort of makes everyone equal. I’ve seen some of the kids that said at the beginning of the course, ‘I can’t draw,’ by the end of the class they’ve done it. They walk out totally happy. That’s more interesting to me than the kid who is already an artist who just gets to meet their hero.

I know you wanted Beautiful Losers to be a real personal story. Speaking on that, of the latter half of the documentary I really connected with Margaret Kilgallen’s story. What do you remember about Margaret before her passing?

She was a very good friend of mine. It’s funny because Thomas Campbell (who’s also in the film) and I did a photoshoot in Venice and we were talking about her. When somebody passes away it’s very tempting to make them perfect with a halo on their head and wings. She’s an incredible woman and someone who really kept our scene together. She was a supporter and incredibly enthusiastic. She was also a big competitor. She made everyone work three times as hard. Margaret just killed it and everyone responded. There’s another side of her that was incredibly feisty. That doesn’t come across in the film though. It’s hard to get that. You only get that from knowing someone. Of course it was all archival footage. She wasn’t feisty in a mean way. She was a fiery woman who had a lot of passion.

To me Beautiful Losers takes on a fairy tale tone. What do you think?

I did that on purpose. The narrative concept of the film is definitely set up to discombobulate the audience. For the first 25 minutes of the film we don’t interject any narrative. You don’t know who is coming next and that was done on purpose. It gets the audience off guard and takes them into a place where they will be open to randomness. After that we start with the story, which is taboo in the film world. Conventional wisdom says that you should be within the narrative before 25 minutes. It wasn’t set up deliberately from the beginning though. If I can be honest with you we started slapping stuff together and we liked how it turned out. It wasn’t planned, it just happened that way. It plays nice. It made you laugh and there were emotional responses. If that’s happening then it’s not bad. The second, third, and fourth acts are pretty much the story.

Finally, what are you doing with your band, The Sads?

Well, we were on a break for a little bit but now we are going to record some stuff in the studio and put out another release. It’s hard being older and trying to put out a music release. Just because you are successful in other areas doesn’t mean you get a free ticket into music. We have to do a basically build the band up from the ground again. We are booking a three-week European tour right now. We don’t have a touring manager so I do it. [Laughs] The guys that are booking our shows woke me up at 3 a.m in the morning.

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