The Suck Lord and his Suckadelic Empire

The Sucklord is the creator of Suckadelic Enterprises, which Bravo TV described as an evil arts organization based in Chinatown NYC.  Part entrepreneur, part artist, he is primarily known for his small run handmade toys, many of them Star Wars based. He appeared on Season Two of Bravo’s “Work of Art” this year, which has taken him to a new level of “art world outsider.”  He came by the SiriusXM studios to talk about his art, his toys, his experiences on Work of Art and everything suckadelic.  Excerpts from that interview appear below.

Ron Bennington: Suck Lord has come in and you can just feel the evil.

The Suck Lord: Yea, that’s actually THE Suck Lord to you sir.

Ron Bennington: Now, we’re trying to figure out exactly how somebody would have come up with your angle on the toy business. Because I’m not a big fan of the fact that corporations put out these figures and then tell people  you’ve got something worth collecting.

The Suck Lord: What do you mean? Give me an example of what you don’t like.

Ron Bennington:   I think in the toy business that they have a way of artificially making some things more rare, more collectible than others.

The Suck Lord: I supposed that’s true but people in the independent designer world do the same thing, Blind boxes, Chase Pieces, artificially rare things. Maybe it’s just…do you collect things?

Ron Bennington: No, I’m not a collector at all.

The Suck Lord: I don’t collect things either. I prefer to sell things to collectors. There’s a certain masochism to collecting and if it’s too easy, people lose interest. Part of what makes it fun for people is the chase or the adventure, or the rarity or the ability to brag or show off that you got this rare thing. And whether it really truly is rare or has been made rare artificially doesn’t seem to figure in. It’s feeding some sort of weird addiction that people have. If you make it too easy for them, they lose interest.

Ron Bennington: So at one point, you’re an artist making this stuff. But another part of you is almost like an entertainer.   

The Suck Lord: There are people, both supporters and detractors who say that the actual toys I make are crap– and that’s debatable– and it’s really the spectacle that you’re buying into. I guess you could say it’s the personality, or the show, or the performance art aspect of it, and then the toys are just a byproduct or prop or a souvenir from that spectacle.

Ron Bennington: Alright how did you come up with the Suckadelic, The Suck Lord…?

The Suck Lord: I was on an acid trip a long time ago at the Oregon Country Fair. And we didn’t have overnight passes so we were sneaking around trying to stay in.  So we played some band thing there and we were tripping on acid and when you’re on acid you come up with these little word games. So we were like this is suckatronic, this is suck-o-matic, this is suckadelic, and then I thought, that sounds like a cool word, I’m going to hang on to it. And then when I started doing my music, I realized pretty quickly that a lot of the stuff I was making was going to be, shall we say, less than professional quality. So I figured I’d just give everyone a heads up right off the bat by naming everything that came out of my production world, Suckadelic, so they know not to expect very much in terms of quality. And then it sort of became built into the aesthetic.

Ron Bennington: So in a way it’s almost punk rock. You’ve punk rocked up the toy business.

The Suck Lord: I guess. I didn’t do that on purpose. I just knew that…well, I first started making records. The first thing I ever put out was “Star Wars Break Beats” which was a re-mix record of Star Wars stuff. I should have brought it with me;  I should have brought you all kinds of stuff, but I didn’t bring it. I’m too fucked up. So I was making these records myself in my mom’s house and they weren’t professional sounding. So I was like, alright, you know, Suckadelic, don’t take it too seriously, don’t expect too much. And then people are sometimes pleasantly surprised. And then the same thing happened with the toys. I couldn’t get a real toy manufacturer to produce anything of mine which turned out to be the best because I was making the little molds and pouring the resin myself. You can’t make a large run of quality items that way. So I was like, okay, these suck too, so these are also Suckadelic. Boom! So I’m not even going to try to make them that good. And that seemed refreshing to some people. Is that punk rock? I guess, I mean, it’s do it yourself. People consider that to be a punk rock thing I suppose.

Ron Bennington: And they’re buying into this personality of yours. Acid played a big part of it. What kind of acid were you doing?

The Suck Lord: Just blotter acid.

Ron Bennington: Just regular paper acid. I was really hoping it was some kind of four way. Cause I’m not really sure if the Universe opened up for you or whether this was just some kind of pleasant mistake.

The Suck Lord: Nah, I’ve been taking acid since high school, and I’ve taken shitty dirt New York LSD and I’ve taken really super clean Oregon LSD. I don’t know if I ever got Owsley Acid. I have tripped on Keysey’s compound back in the day, which was fun. That was some clean shit.

Ron Bennington: Was Kesey there?

The Suck Lord: Yea, Kesey and Babs were there. This was a long time ago, this was in the early 90s when I was living out in Oregon. The first couple of times or the first ten or fifteen times I took it, the Universe opened up for me, but then after that, it stayed open, so the more times I took it, it was just wow, kaleidoscope shit. I did start fucking with DMT last year a little bit.

Ron Bennington: How’d you like that?

The Suck Lord: Awesome. Well it depends on the quality. I only did it twice and the first one was fantastic. It’s great because it doesn’t have all the weird philosophical head shit that other psychedelics have. It’s purely visual. You don’t have time to get into deep philosophical shit, because there’s no up and there’s no down. Immediately you’re peaking and then it’s over ten minutes later. It’s all geometrical shit on the walls and if you have the music, and we had the iTunes open and that thing that makes the weird patterns when you put the screen saver on. And I swear to God the shit was just crawling up the walls and then it was over.

Ron Bennington: I think that the judges [on Work of Art], right from the word go, had a problem with you coming in, and it had more to do with– hey he’s grabbing a lot of screen time here, and I don’t know if that’s going to be good for the art world or bad for the art world.

The Suck Lord: Maybe. I got that sense too. I read [Jerry] Saltz’s blog where he said right away, “I think it was just the fact that there’s a guy called Suck Lord here.”  If it was me, I probably would have been like, I’m going to stomp this fucking guy out as soon as he gets here. And unfortunately I gave them the ammo to do that…I couldn’t function that well under those conditions. Looking back, I see how I could have done everything different and killed everything but when you’re in that situation it’s hard to think straight. I made the wrong choices. Most of the times instead of picking strong ideas, I got caught up in the materials. Like with my Lord of the Rings piece– that piece wasn’t very good, and it wasn’t very Suckadelic. I spent so much time sculpting casting and making molds – I threw everything in there — spray paint, flocking, all that shit. And I really could have done something much more simple and direct. But who fucking cares at this point.

Ron Bennington:  What you needed out of that show, you got out of that show. Because people know you and people know the show was better with you on. That’s kind of where they fucked up a little bit. Not realizing, it’s also about it being a show.

The Suck Lord: Yea but at the end of the day it’s still about art. I don’t think I was making great work. And especially that last piece that was a street art piece. It was okay I guess but at that point if I didn’t blow them away then it was a fail.  Just keeping someone there because they have a good personality maybe works for tv but in order to maintain the integrity of the art part, you’ve got to be real about the art, and my art sucked. I don’t think I was ever going to get better at that point.

Ron Bennington: The whole Star Wars angle freaked them out too…the fact that Star Wars does show up in your work a lot…did that happen to you as a kid and you stayed with it? Or is that something that you thought as an adult, “I’m going to bring this back.”

The Suck Lord: A little of both. Of course when I was a kid I was completely immersed in it. I was eight years old when the first one came out in the theaters. The whole lifestyle…it was kind of a new thing and it was a generational thing so obviously it’s hardwired into my personality and it stayed with me for a long time. And there was a time period right around mid-nineties where ironic Star Wars references became cool again.  I found that it was sort of easy for me to use the symbols and language of Star Wars to apply to what I was making and it was instantly understandable to millions of people all over the world.   Like my Gay Empire figure: it’s a pink storm trooper and it says Gay Empire and that’s pretty much it, and you can infer a lot from that just because it’s a storm trooper. Even though it’s not about a storm trooper so much, it’s using a storm trooper to say something else– the vision of this new gay militancy. What if there were gay shock troopers that showed up anytime some kid got gay bullied and all these fucking pink storm troopers pop out and lay waste to this bully asshole?  I don’t like to say what I mean when I make something, but as an example, that’s how I apply Star Wars. Other people try to do it and are a little less successful because they can’t take it out of the Star Wars world. Like oh here’s Mickey Mouse dressed up like Boba Fett. Not transformational.

Ron Bennington: Are there some people out there who think that fucking with the Star Wars thing at all is being disrespectful.

The Suck Lord: I’ve never heard that. I don’t know why on Work of Art the judges were so against it. Possibly my use of it in that particular case wasn’t that strong. And maybe there was a kernel of truth there because there is a risk with any type artist who relies on appropriation that they can use it too much to the point that there is nothing original about them. I’ve always asked myself, what would I do if I didn’t use Star Wars? What else is there? Will I ever outgrow this or get to the point where I’ve created my own Star Wars universe? That’s always something I’m striving for. So when he said to me, “stop the Star Wars” I should have said, no fuck you, this is an important part of my generations cultural references. But I felt bad because I had handed in a stinker, and I felt kind of demoralized. And I thought, I should be able to make shit without Star Wars. And I do. I mean, I use transformers too.

Ron Bennington: Can you imagine if somebody had said to Jackson Pollack, now I need you to draw? Use a brush. Or telling Basquiat– I need to see some smiley happier faces.

The Suck Lord: Yeah I know it’s arbitrary. Two episodes after that I’m like, “Well what do I do now? What do I do now?” and I was just plagued with doubt and I couldn’t come up with anything and I feel like an asshole for listening to him but you have no power.

Ron Bennington: The Suck Lord. It’s suckadelic.com and on twitter its @sucklord. When you go over there, he’s going to open this whole world up to you too.

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This interview and others can be heard in their entirety exclusively on SiriusXM satellite radio on the Ron Bennington Interviews show on Stars Too.  Don’t have a subscription?  You can sign up for a free trial here.