Good Italian eats,
but they won’t break
your heart.
Page 2, Friday Edition
Friday, January 13, 1984
The Friday Edition
The weekly arts and entertainment newsmagazine
Just who are these masked Maggots?
Spray-painted on a wall in the
alleyway between the Atrium Building
and Newberry's, some artsy latterday
Vandal has written: "Eugene, home of
the Art Midgets."
Most others might have cracked
underfoot at that comment, but Art
Maggot Billy Haddock just doubles over
in laughter. "Yeah, I saw that," he says.
"Hey, any response, even a bad
response incites somebody to do
something."
Who are these Art Maggots and why
do they incite people to paint on walls?
Story by Cort Fernald
Photos by Mark Pynes
According to "Bad to the Bone," the
"proud history" of the Art Maggots as
chronicled in the Art Maggots' newslet
ter, they "shlepped into existense" (sic)
in Eugene around 1977.
From such humble beginnings, they
say, paraphrasing ZZ Top, they are bad
— nationwide. That should be amend
ed, the Art Maggots are bad — world
wide.
The house is on the west side of
Willamette Street — the heartland of
Eugene suburbia. There are kids com
ing home from school, kids on bikes,
kids yelling: "Yoo, Scooter, how 'bout
some videos?" and teens slowly walking
arm in arm, nestling acned cheeks. At
dusk young mothers push pacifiers into
the mouths of their new babes, wedge
their diaper-fat bottoms into walkers
and wheel the little buggers all over the
neighborhood. And in this
neighborhood live the Art Maggots, hat
ching their insidious designs and plot
ting their subversive intent "ars gratia
ars."
The house is an anonymous off-beige,
off-bronze two-tone one-story run-of
the-mill, no frills (front lawn with a few
bushes and one tree, attached garage
with concrete driveway and black sedan
parked out front) type of house. It lacks
only the overturned trike to be the
home of John and Jill Doe. John sells
State Farm insurance. Jill is a perky
homemaker. Snotty-nosed little Jimmy
Doe makes mudpies in the backyard.
A sparse-limbed, altogether bedraggl
ed Christmas tree stands before the pic
ture window and dominates the liv
ingroom. Nothing really incongruous
about this, except the season for indoor
forestry has long since passed. The liv
ingroom is furnished in minimalist
1950s decor. It's very German.
The dish rags are all neatly hung on
the dish rack, a clean and efficient kit
chen. In an adjacent room, though, is a
drafting table, a round table and walls
stocked with supplies. Posters, Art Mag
got and others, grace the walls. The
room has the look and feel of creative
clutter.
Mick "Chud" Chudy, Joan DeLoretto,
Haddock, Rudy Fox and other Art Mag
gots circulate about the house. Randy
Jack, guitarist with The Milkmen and
Cyndee Domke, the band's manager,
are at the house to see about the
poster for the next Milkmen gig.
"One thing about our group, " says
Chud, "is that we like to remain
anonymous to a certain extent."
"This is a small town and at least
Mick and I are associated with the Mag
gots," Haddock says. “We do a lot of
business so we're not totally
anonymous."
Vicki Bruno comes in. “Ah, home
sweet home," she says. "Nothing like
suburbia."
In the beginning of the Art Maggots
there were two houses, creative people
and a collective obsession for expres
sion. While the Art Maggots wefe star
ting up, the Foamlords and other
adventuresome musical groups like the
Symbiotics were also starting up.
"We just ended up in a situation
where we had a bunch of creative peo
ple living in two houses right next door
to each other and just by the way the
people were, getting to be good friends
and sitting around the table, we could
start doing things together and work on
some things," Haddock says.
"With every new movement in music
there is a new movement in art that
goes along with it," Chud says. "We
were diving into a new art form."
How did this group of creative people
come to be called Art Maggots? That's
as much an accident as the spon
taneous generation that spawned the
founding maggots.
During the early days the Art Maggots
were prolific in producing anonymous
art — provocative flyers that would sud
denly appear on walls and telephone
poles. While working on a word and
photo collage for a flyer, Haddock hap
pened to put together the words "art"
and "maggot." And like Laszlo Toth's
hammer stroke on Michelangelo's Pieta,
the Eugene art scene was never the
same.
The years have seen some Art Mag
gets come, go and proliferate. Neither
Haddock or Chud dare venture a guess
how many practicing Art Maggots now
exist, but, like the maggots they are,
they are multiplying at an alarming rate.
"It's all starting to come back
together again," Haddock says. "Things
splintered up for awhile. Now it's more
cohesive. Not necessarily that
everybody's coming back, people are
still pretty spread out."
"There's a chapter of the Maggots in
Austin, Texas," Chud says, "that does a
lot of work with bands — does posters
and stuff."
The Austin chapter was founded by
Haddock who moved to Austin and
within a year was working with five or
six people on Art Maggot projects. He's
proud of the fact the Austin Art Mag
gots have festered, er, flourished even
after he returned to Eugene last year.
The Art Maggots are actually known
the world over. Individual Art Maggots
have toured the Continent distributing
Art Maggot flyers and stickers. T-Bone
Williams, an Art Maggot from Chicago,
III., left cards and stickers in East Ger
many, Poland, Moscow and Leningrad.
There are Art Maggots residing in
France. The Art Maggots are indeed bad
— world-wide.
"Joan went to London with a lot of
flyers (Maggot stuff)," Chud says, "and
put them up and left around. And this
button (It's pinned to his lapel, he
shows it.) we gave out at the (Portland)
Stray Cats show. In 1982 we rented a
bus and took 50 Art Maggots up. We
had reserved seats by the stage. We
Continued on Page 2B, Friday Edition