1 Image from Josh Amatore Hughes' Lower East Side apartment.
About Place
Issue #27
Windows to the punk soul
By Dina Zwiebel
Published: March 1st, 2006 | 12:00am
Each of the following have, at some point, found a home in Josh Amatore Hughes’ Lower East Side apartment: a bloody pillow nailed to the wall, a sofa sawed in half, and a sculpture of an invisible man hanging himself. You may be asking yourself, “Why would someone choose to surround himself with this sort of décor?” Hughes’ new book, Punk Shui: Home Design For Anarchists (Three Rivers), describes a method of interior design that turns the more traditional feng shui on its head. He writes, “[P]unk shui is the practice of creating a chaos in the home so deafening that it creates a contrast in life powerful enough to enable you to cope with the inevitable shit sandwich that is the outside world.”
Hughes called Venus from New York City traffic to talk about his art, making others happy, and why we should all give the punk shui ethic a try.
The book is really funny. How much is humor and how much is punk shui a real philosophy of yours?
When I do a sculpture or when I do a space, I do it in the sense of it being art. But a lot of it’s humor. A couch cut in half — to me, aesthetically, I like it. I think it’s great art. But it’s funny at the same time. The art’s very nonsensical, and when you look at this nonsensical art and it’s also semi-functional — and I stress the semi — that’s funny. Humor has to be an aspect of it because otherwise, it gets pretentious to me.
So is that part of the reason you would shun places like Pottery Barn?
When you get into Pottery Barn and IKEA, you lose it all. You lose all your decision — and you lose your money. There [are] designers you don’t even know about that are really, like, making our decisions for us.
The punk shui ethic means putting a face behind your space.
Yeah, exactly. If you want to see what your date’s like, you look in their medicine cabinet, but with punk shui you see it when you walk in the door.
Like why should you hide your fears and insecurities? Just put them out there.
When we’re in these traditional spaces that we’re born in and grow up in and create for ourselves, we get in these patterns. A lot of patterns are fear. And when you break those patterns, when you break your space up and you become a little more aware of your space, you become aware of your fears, too.
What kind of environment did you grow up in?
I was born in a log cabin in the middle of the woods in Tennessee. My parents were old hippies. I did go to public school, so I kinda knew how that went.
I’m not really traditionally trained in art. The guy that taught me to paint was Bob Ross [of TV series The Joy of Painting]. I dropped out of high school and I did manual labor. I built houses, I worked at airports, I worked at bars. I do art direction a lot for commercials. I have a little jack-of-all trades, master-of-none thing. I found punk shui is something I can use all those things for because there [are] so many different mediums that you use.
It seems like young, single people would be most into this aesthetic. Could families use it?
Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of families — no, not at all. But I wish they would, because it’s not about turning your whole place upside down. Like, have one punk shui sculpture in your place in a certain room, something to remind you that there is art. And the fact that if it’s not serving a purpose or it’s not completely functional, we still do need art and we do need things that aren’t essential. Which is a total oxymoron to say — that we need things that aren’t essential — but we do.
Where did you get the idea to write a book about punk shui?
It all fell together. And that’s one of my main things about punk shui — it’s just about it all falling together.
I don’t want everybody to like [my art]. I consider myself someone who thinks that everybody’s right in their own way. And the only way that everybody can be right is if you have an awareness of contradiction. I don’t want to keep people happy, and at the same time, I do want to keep people happy. That’s the thing with punk shui — you might not like it, but you’re probably gonna learn something about yourself along the way.
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