Thursday, March 28, 2024 Mar 28, 2024
71° F Dallas, TX
Advertisement
Publications

DAY OF THE IGUANA

By MIKE SHROPSHIRE |

Motorists are frowning at the black and white El Camino pickup truck as it speeds down the Dallas North Toll-way. The reason they are frowning is quite logical: A dead horse is strapped to the back; its legs, locked in a grotesque rigor mortis, loom skyward.

If you think people aren’t offended by the public display of a dead horse, just strap one to the roof of the family station wagon and take a spin through downtown some afternoon. People frown.

The driver of the El Camino, however, is quite pleased with himself. Beneath the mirrored sunglasses, the scraggly San Quentin beard, and the Republic Gypsum baseball cap beams a smile. Robert Wade considers the horse (which isn’t really a horse at all, but a pseudo horse made of metal, plastic, and fake horsehair) to be just another in a series of artistic triumphs.

Wade is transporting the artificial horse, named Funeral Wagon, to serve as a visual display at an outdoor dinner party given in honor of a North Dallas debutante. He could have chosen several other props, but he chose to bring old Funeral Wagon simply on the basis of its frown value. He gains a vicarious thrill from watching the looks of shock and disgust on the faces of motorists as he zips past them on the tollway. For the better part of 15 years, Wade has based his career as an artist and, to a certain extent his life, on being frowned upon.

This is the man who built the 40-foot iguana atop the Lone Star Café in New York. This is the man who built a football field-sized map of the United States -that was later declared a health hazard – on the edge of LBJ Freeway during the Bicentennial. This is the man who made the pages of the Washington Post by building a pair of 40-foot cowboy boots a few blocks from the White House. This is the man who toured Paris with a house trailer display that included examples of “authentic Texas tornado damage.” Lots of frowns in lots of high places. And to this particular absurdist artist, whose work is his life, driving down the Dallas North Tollway with a dead horse protruding from the back of his truck is an exhilarating experience.

The visceral appeal of Wade’s art is its consistent capacity to grasp the beholder by the eyeteeth and jerk him to attention. The aesthetics of his various creations are an essential factor in the planning stage, but the primary determinant of whether the piece is successful or not is based strictly on spectacle value.

His 16-foot dragonfly was suspended briefly from the ceiling of Bond’s (supposedly the world’s largest disco) in New York last year. The management had to take the dragonfly down almost as soon as it was put up. It is now stored in a warehouse in Brooklyn because, as Wade contends, “it was frightening to some of the little wimps who came in there.” Consequently, the dragonfly, in Wade’s thinking, is an unmitigated triumph.

But the dominant opinion of the people most familiar with Wade and his amazing art (which comes categorized by the reviewers as Texas Funk, Texas Kitsch, or Texas White Trash) is that the force of Wade’s personality transcends any of his off- or on-the-wall masterpieces. He was headlined in the Soho News as “Robert Wade: The Artist As the Cultural Catalyst.”

This became evident from the first day he rolled into the University of Texas in 1961 in his ’55 Chevy. Wade marched into the living room of one of the leading fraternity houses, totally unknown to anyone on the premises, and announced, “How in the hell do you get into this club, anyway?”

The fraternity boys were so stricken by the audacity of his come-on that they invited him in with open arms.

This has been, in house detective parlance, his MO ever since, and he’s universally effective, whether he’s dealing with the most prestigious galleries in the U.S. or simply seeking a place to crash for a couple of days.

At the university, Wade was probably the first art major to belong to what was considered at the time to be a hotshot fraternity. The wisdom of age has led him to the conclusion that “those Mexicans I grew up with in El Paso were a hell of lot more ’aware’ than most of the rich fraternity boys down at Texas.”

When he finally totaled the ’55 Chevy, he carried the pieces down into the basement of the fraternity house and welded them together as his semester project for a sculpture class. Even the “unaware” bankers-to-be could spot this as sheer genius in the making.

Wade, also known as Daddy-o, the name they stapled to him in his college days, hasn’t stopped since.

No matter where Wade is, he’ll size up a visual or social situation and every 15 minutes make a comment so perceptive it’ll almost make you gag (that is, with the exception of the times when he alters his state, so to speak, with alcohol and God knows what else, which turn his eyes beet red and throw him into an eerie trance).

People who don’t know him well sometimes feel compelled to call the paramedics. Last Memorial Day, a woman was introduced to Wade at a cocktail party, and Robert, who was being touted as a world-famous artist, was in La-La Land.

“How do you do?” the woman asked.

“I…I…think I could be spaced,” Wade answered, and then marched off at a zombie-like gait, much to the consternation of the woman, who had wanted to discuss the state of the arts.

Wade has academic, teaching, and professional credentials that are, from almost any standpoint, outstanding.

After obtaining his master of fine arts degree at the University of California at Berkeley, Wade acquired most of his income from teaching positions, first at McLennan Community College in Waco, then at Northwood Institute in Cedar Hill, and finally as assistant professor of art at North Texas State University, from where several of his former students catapulted to exalted levels in the art community. These protégés include Andy Phehan of Houston, who tattooed wings onto a pig as a post-graduate project, and a female named Rocky, who progressed into dance (she performs nightly at a North Dallas topless establishment called Young-blood’s). Wade attempts to stay in contact with as many of his former students as he can.

Throughout the Sixties and into the early Seventies, Wade’s creative theme more and more echoed what he kept addressing as the Texas myth. His artistic thrust was geared toward the old Lone Ranger folk ethic.

He fortified this with a pursuit that will someday be recognized and revered as the Neo-Taxidermist Period. Through the generosity of the Buckhom Room of the Lone Star Brewery in San Antonio, Wade secured several stuffed animals to beef up his exhibitions in the North and Midwest. Most of these animals were freaks, like the two-headed calf with two sphincters and a leg sticking out its back – objects that the brewery believed were too graphic for public display but proved to be totally ideal for the type of Texas ideology that Wade was attempting to exemplify to the folks back east.

An art critic in New York once summarized Wade’s approach in these words:

“There is an untamed animal instinct lurking around the numerous dismembered and decapitated stuffed animals, plus photographs Wade has assembled into an aesthetics, based on Texan cult objects of muscle, sport, violence, and death.

“Apparently down in the Lone Star State, guns aren’t just used to assassinate U.S. presidents, or by occasional nuts who climb university towers and rifle off pedestrians like they’re sitting ducks. Hunting with guns and traps is a ritualistic sport that’s second nature to many Texan natives. Wade’s odd selections from his home state’s ’funky folk art’ shows there is a really primitive level and involvement operating between the cowboy hunters and their prey.

“Wade said he just bought a used Cadillac, the super-deluxe model we’re used to seeing rock stars, country musicians or, in New York, pimps drive, to see what the feeling is like since fellow Texans adore spending thousands on Cadillacs.

“He knows that the observations he’s made about the Texan and his environment go over as art in New York. In Texas, the people don’t see his objects and freaks of nature as art at all, but as a lamp, a chair, or a trophy only.”

The more the Eastern cultural intellectual set continued to lay down this kind of misperceptive, culturally naive garbage, the more they played right into Wade’s hands. He exploited it to the maximum, and that kind of recognition, in turn, spurred Wade on to the kind of wild-eyed inspiration that cranked out the bizarre undertakings that have made him, from the standpoint of air time and column inches, the most famous artist in Dallas.

This is not to say that Wade is the most prosperous artist in Dallas, only the most publicized. Even during times when his exposure was at its peak, the gravy was awfully thin, as evidenced by the fact that Wade’s Dallas chalet has been an abandoned church on Bookhout Street and an abandoned bakery that now serves as the eyesore adjacent to the Asel Art Supply store on Routh Street.

His current headquarters, in fact, is in a commercial district building located between a car wash and what used to be a trim shop.

Projects like the Bicentennial Map of the U.S., the Texas Mobile Home Museum, the Lone Star Iguana, and the World’s Largest Cowboy Boots might draw condescending smirks from the velvet blazer, trimmed goatee artist set in this community. Wade simply views himself as being among a group of artists “who are not necessarily avant-garde.”

Wade generates the majority of his income through his photo-emulsion paintings, which have been primarily geared to the adventurous collector, the current themes being a close-up of a. Mexican dinner, an illustration of bovine love, a graphic of Lee Harvey Oswald on the autopsy table, and a chunky stripper with a boa constrictor tastefully arranged around her torso.

There are also several landscapes, ranging from the striking to the serene, that hang in corporate boardrooms of Houston and Dallas.

These are the subjects that are tailored to bring in the bucks.

Back-biting jealousy has always been an inherent part of the American art community. Artists quietly seethe when they see what they consider a less-qualified colleague featured in, say, the Arizona Ceramics Quarterly.

Imagine, then, the traumas that must occur when artists see Wade’s Bicentennial Map, passed off by many as a monstrosity, getting a two-page layout in People magazine under the headline, “Eat Your Heart Out Rand McNally, Bob Wade is Building a Map Bigger than a Football Field.” Or when they see his amazing Lone Star Lizard pictured not only in National Enquirer, but also on the front page of the New York Post, and distributed nationally by the AP and UPI news services.

And then there’s those 40-foot cowboy boots stuck on the front page of the Washington Post, with Joan Mondale embracing Wade, and two weeks later, Wade appearing on The CBS Morning News.

Wade got his first national ink, other than in the art journals, in a 1972 Newsweek article in which Jim Roche, George Green, Jack Mims, and he were featured as a coalition of maverick artists living in Oak Cliff.

“I had this great upstairs studio over there on Beckley Avenue that rented for $75 a month. The four of us would get together over there and get loaded all the time. The original Beatles,” Wade says. “We had to break up to pursue our individual greatness.”

The concluding line of that Newsweek article said that the quartet of artists “seemed determined to make it – both nationally and internationally.”

For the next four years, Wade tap danced in and out of the spotlight with occasional projects like the exhibition of motorcycle art at the Phoenix Museum of Art and the Texas Formal Garden in Austin, which consisted of a pagoda-like structure adorned with steer skulls, a chicken feeder, tin roof strips, and a mounted sailfish, surrounded by elaborate shrubs and crushed limestone arranged in the shape of a star. This, in turn, was enclosed in a stockade made up of wagon wheels and chicken wire.

This project was followed by the “Map of Texas,” a 30-foot-square platform structure filled with cactus, rocks, miniature oil derricks, and a stuffed javelina.

Throughout these years, Wade, who grew up in Waco and El Paso and claims to be Roy Rogers’ cousin, served as assistant professor of art at North Texas State. He lived with his wife and young daughter in the bottom of a missle silo south of Denton, an arrangement Wade referred to as “the bungalow.”

“As a teacher, Wade was amazing,” recalls Stuart Kraft, a former protégé who now makes a living in Dallas as a photographer and goldsmith.

“At the first of the semester, he’d ask if anyone in the class owned a van. Somebody always would, and Wade would say, ’Great. We’re gonna take that sucker to New York and look at the museums. The rest of the class can chip in for gas.’ “

In mid-1975, Wade began concocting the blueprints for the infamous Bicentennial Map, a project that would gain him a measure of national recognition and a massive dose of local exposure.

It would also cost him his marriage, cripple his credit rating, and indirectly lead to the end of his academic career.

That seems like an eternity ago to Wade, although others remember it more clearly. Wade says, “The map was a natural progression of the Texas map. We got partial funding from the National Endowment of the Arts; the idea was to get major funding from corporate entities.”

The project really got rolling when Trammell Crow agreed to donate a section of land just north of LBJ at Dallas North Tollway for the football field-sized replica of the United States. Wade put together an elaborate press kit and prospectus that read in part, “I am optimistically designing and directing a monumental work of public art that is to coincide with celebrations and issues during 1976.

“My design and plan for this new ’Map Project’ call for extensive coordination with local communities, businessmen, advertisers, contractors, and all the complexities that go into a project of this magnitude,” the prospectus continued.

“As a miniature America, the one-acre map will provide thousands of visitors a free walk-through experience of 50 states on scaled-down highways in order to view mountains, rivers, state foliage, myths, symbols, indigenous objects and agriculture, heritage, commerce, and stereotypes.

“The U.S. map should have a broad range of appeal: from state birds to major corporations; from regional heritage and traditions to contemporary images. Grand Canyon, Painted Desert, Mt. Rushmore, oil wells, windmills, cactus, cattle, and real advertising are just some of the things the map will contain.

“The visitor will walk on miniature highways which pass through mountain ranges, cross rivers, and enable one to travel from Los Angeles to New York in a matter of minutes. It will be visually, geographically enlightening, and philosophically genuine Americana. It is the most exciting project I have been a part of.”

The map turned out to be so geographically enlightening and philosophically genuine that it threw Trammell Crow into a purple rage and was eventually declared a health hazard by Farmers Branch, which bulldozed Miniature America near the end of our nation’s 200th birthday.

This isn’t to say that Wade didn’t almost pull it off. Thanks to, the help of a coalition of wetbacks and hippies (who did the dirty work) and a female fund raiser (whose zeal and audacity exceeded all boundaries for what is considered a conventional sales approach), the four months of the map project will live forever in the annals of Dallas art history.

Wade set up a mobile home near the “West Coast” as command center for the operation from which he would spend at least 12 hours a day on the telephone, trying to scam free money, free materials, and free services.

About three o’clock each afternoon, a mercy vehicle would roll in from the PK liquor store, where the fund raiser’s parents used to have a charge account, and then it would become “Miller Time” at the map.

“I kept pushing those people over at Daddy’s Money, which was just next door, for free steak and scotch, but they never would go for it.” Wade recalls. “In fact, they were hostile as hell and wouldn’t even cash checks for us.

“I finally figured out what the problem was. When we first cleared the land for the map, all the rats must have run over to their place.”

Early on, the map developed what Wade termed “logistical problems.” Extensive underground wiring had been laid for lighting; that was destroyed when the sprinkler system was installed. Then the pipes for the sprinkler system were heavily damaged when the trench for what was supposed to have been the Mississippi River was dug.

However, Wade generally maintained a brave front. He would direct VIP visitors to a shaky, 40-foot scaffold erected in the Gulf of Mexico, then – once atop the platform – stand like Cortez to show them the grand overview.

At one point, Wade hired a young technical genius (whose tattoo identified him as “Kris-ko”) as associate foreman on the project. Kris-ko from Fresno had just been fired as maintenance man at an apartment complex and seemed to have problems adjusting to the ebb and flow of Dallas society.

“One morning I drive up for another day at the map and see these three police cars,” Wade recalls. “I think ’Oh, God. What now?’ What had happened was that Kris-ko had gotten blitzed the night before and passed out on top of the scaffold.

“So some old woman and her granddaughter took a swing through the map early in the morning, and the little kid climbed up on the scaffold. Then she goes running back down and goes, ’Granny! Granny! There’s a nekkid dead man up there!’ “

Kris-ko was taken away in irons.

Wade rationalized the whole thing to the arresting officer by explaining to him that “major projects sometime develop major complications.”

Additional problems with law enforcement authorities arose about a week later, after Wade dispatched two Mexican aliens in a dump truck to scavenge whatever rocks and scrap lumber they could locate on construction sites throughout North Dallas.

The boys located a bonanza of junk, filled the truck, and were en route back to the map. It was about 4:30 on a Friday afternoon when one of them somehow triggered the truck’s dump mechanism at the intersection of Preston Road and Forest Lane, depositing the entire mess in the middle of the road. They attempted to flee the scene of that debacle, but were apprehended three blocks later. Another black eye for the Bicentennial Map.

A few short days after that, Wade watched with astonishment as a funnel cloud, which was ripping rooftops off apartments along Royal Lane, swerved and headed directly toward the map site. Wade, his wife, and the fund raising lady fled in terror into a parking garage across the street while the scaffold and Mt. Rushmore bit the bullet. At this point, Wade began to harbor serious doubts as to whether the gods of art were smiling on his project. Robert’s wife, Suzy, was so frightened she couldn’t talk for a week.

Cash flow problems were becoming more and more of a headache, too. The president of a large Dallas electronics firm called Wade to complain that the fund-raising lady had called him a “fool and a turkey” for refusing her request for $3500 in return for a miniature billboard on a miniature highway.

The contractors who had laid down the little asphalt roads around the map became regular callers at Wade’s office headquarters. In manner and appearance, these gentlemen were strikingly similar to the Georgia mountain men who perpetrated the love scene in Deliverance. These men wanted their money. Each time they called on him, Wade would explain that this was a nonprofit venture, a public park, a work of art.

They became less receptive to that rationale with each visit. Map headquarters was no longer the happy place it used to be.

“At that time, just about everybody was hitting up on these companies to participate in some Bicentennial project, and they just weren’t receptive,” Wade says. “We realized we should have first started making our pitch in ’73 and 74. But by then, it was just too late.”

Aerially, the map looked impressive; Wade had secured occasional access to a Jet Ranger helicopter, from which some striking photographs (like the ones that appeared in People and Art in America) resulted. Unfortunately, the majority of the general public didn’t have a helicopter, so the tour of America down the miniature highways was, as one visitor described it, like walking through a landfill.

The “indigenous objects and stereotypes” of the map consisted in part of two vertical steel beams planted in New York (supposedly representing skyscrapers); a 1939 Buick parked in North Carolina; an old tractor that symbolized five Midwestern states, and, in the Great State of Texas, a Kip’s Big Boy and a billboard from Radio Shack (which turned out to be one of the few corporate donations).

“Maintenance of the place was getting hard-core,” Wade says, “and as it got closer to the Fourth of July, we had people in there elbow to elbow. And by now, we had sheep and goats and God knows what all else roaming around in there as exhibits. In the meantime, we were like the average American family in times of economic stress. We couldn’t pay the phone bill.”

Shortly after the big Fourth of July celebration at the map that was fortified considerably by a dozen kegs of beer (generously donated by the Lone Star distributorship) and the 50 pounds of brisket that the Neuhoff people didn’t know they were donating, Wade realized that his financial resources were exhausted.

And the asphalt people kept coming around. So Wade reacted on artistic instinct. “I gave it a lot of thought and decided, ’When in doubt, run.’ “

Which he did.

Throughout July and August, the hy-dromulch grass donated by the city finally began to flourish, so that by Labor Day (when Wade finally returned from a tour of the Northeast) the American Midwest looked more like an Amazon jungle. All the exhibits had been stolen or vandalized, and, a month later, the bulldozers from Farmers Branch came to make sure the Bicentennial Map would be nothing but a fond memory evermore.

While Wade does concede that the map wasn’t a resounding success, he refuses to pass it off as a total disaster. “One day I went out there and found about $4 in change in the donation box. And we donated the little log cabin to an orphanage,” he says.

He was now going through his divorce, so his personal finances were not in a particularly stable condition either.

He visited Elliott’s Hardware store on Maple one afternoon to purchase some paint and other supplies. The tab came to $52, which he attempted to purchase with a MasterCharge card. The checkout girl consulted her little manual and determined that Wade was well in excess of his card limit.

“I’m sorry Mr. Wade, but I’m going to have to keep that card,” she said.

“N-o-o-o-o,” he said, “I don’t believe you’re gonna do that,” and attempted to snatch the card out of her hand.

A little tug-of-war ensued, with both contestants savagely gritting their teeth. Wade finally prevailed, took his card, and ran out of the store.

He went into hibernation for awhile, plotting his comeback. The following March he unveiled plans for another extraordinary venture: the Texas Museum of Awful Crap, later modified to become the Texas Mobile Home Museum.

This burst of creative inspiration was assigned to appear at the Bienelle de Paris, one of the paramount blasts on the continental cultural calendar. Wade was the first Texan ever invited to participate in the event. He decided it was only appropriate to take advantage of the occasion to celebrate the “Texas phenomenon.”

His “museum” was a Spartan house trailer, a sleek item built by J. Paul Getty’s aircraft factory in Tulsa shortly after World War II as the company retooled for peacetime production.

He was able to purchase one in Dallas for next to nothing and (through the benevolent auspices of the local CETA operation) hired some flunkies to polish and generally refurbish the stinking, old trailer.

Wade decorated the exterior with tooled leather belts, reflective windows, chrome-plated barbed wire, rope graphics, and a steer’s skull, which served as a sort of hood ornament.

He described the interior as “exquisitely upholstered in white Naugahyde and filled with vignettes of Texana… a stuffed two-headed calf, the world’s longest set of longhorns (14 feet tip-to-tip), armadillos, plastic bluebonnets, a stuffed rodeo bucking bronco, a gold statue of Venus de Milo in a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader costume, a mechanical steer, and a display case of authentic Texas tornado damage, all augmented by the recorded voices of Willie Nelson, LBJ, and other Texas audio greats.”

“I’d been to Europe for about a month the winter before and determined that the traditional Texas myth was still very exotic to them,” Wade explains. “I figured an exhibition like this would really knock them out. Europeans continue to think of Texas in terms of John Wayne and the movie Giant. It’s just lying over there waiting for you.”

Wade put the trailer together mostly on the back parking lot of the Maple Terrace apartments, where he and his girl friend were residing.

One Sunday, he threw a “trailer party,” during which most of the displays for the Paris show were situated in the parking lot. An amateur rock and roll band performed. Someone referred to it as “Carney Bob and his dead animal show.”

The party turned out to be just a little much for the staid clientele of the Maple Terrace; the next day Wade and his girl friend were granted a hard-earned eviction notice.

The remainder of the work was done on the parking lot of the nearby Delahunty Gallery. The owners seemed deeply relieved when the “3000-pound piece of rolling Texas funklore” was hooked onto a pickup truck and towed to the shipyards in Houston. A breathless Europe lay just around the bend.

A Dallas concern known as Texas Jeans donated a form-fitted, jumbo denim travel jacket for the trailer. “They even had a little tail sticking out the back so that the trailer would resemble an armadillo as it went down the road,” Wade recalls.

“But the tail was too long, so we coiled it up and tucked it into the back pockets, sort of like wrapping a lariat around a saddle horn.”

The actual transportation of the trailer to Paris turned out to be a bureaucratic gas pain. Throughout the summer, Wade had appealed to the federal government to pay the freight on the grounds that the Mobile Home Museum was the lone U.S. representative in a distinguished international exhibition. (The Reagan Administration will be relieved to learn that Wade’s attempts were unsuccessful).

“We got the damn thing down to Houston and the guy at the docks said the ship wasn’t even due to arrive for two more weeks. So 1 put the trailer on a truck, sent it to New York, and caught a plane for Paris, not knowing whether the trailer was coming over or not.

“After I got over there, I sent some cable to the ship it was supposed to be on, trying to find out if it had made it. But I don’t speak French so good, and it was a big disaster.

“Finally, I found out that it had, in fact, arrived in La Havre, and I towed it over to the exhibition and set it up about 12 hours before a press reception was supposed to take place.”

The Texas Mobile Home Museum, naturally, turned out to be the belle of the Bienelle de Paris. “We played these Willie Nelson tapes and served Ranch Style Beans. They lapped it up.”

The only mishap came when Dallas stockbroker Monk White, Wade’s backer on this venture, was guarding the trailer one evening. He accidentally locked himself out and had to get on a Parisian subway carrying three steer skulls and a saddle.

During the stay in Paris, Wade was the frequent target of media attention, including one full-scale interview in a French publication called Liberation, in which Wade, through the naiveté of a translator, appeared in print asking his interviewer, “Do you know where I can find some grass?”

The fate of the Texas Mobile Home Museum, for awhile, became an international mystery. “After the Bienelle shut down, I didn’t have the funds to ship the trailer back to the U.S.

“I just left the thing in the hands of the museum, hoping they might store it for me someplace. When I got back to Dallas, I started getting these cables indicating there had been some kind of trouble with the police.

“So I called over there and got hold of Mr. So and So -some ridiculous name – and he tells me he turned the trailer over to this sheenie filmmaker from Austin.

“The following spring, I go back over there and ask everybody I see if they know anything about the trailer… describing it in hand language and broken French, and I finally kind of track it down.

“It turned out that the Austin guy actually sold the trailer to somebody named Omar Kajmirik, who attempted to transport the trailer to Spain, but he didn’t have the right kind of papers to get it across the border.

“So he brought it back to Paris and sold it to none other than Nicolichi, whoever the hell that is. Subsequently, we’ve managed to run him down and are currently in negotiation to buy the thing back, or maybe pay his storage fees, or whatever it takes.

“My plan for the summer of 1982 is to finalize those negotiations, then transport the Texas Kid’s pickup (a product of Dallas artist Willard Watson, customized in the finest traditions of black American vehicular art) over there, and the trailer is on the road again.

“It would tour Europe with this other thing I’m trying to piece together, a punk rodeo. It would never work in the United States… the concept of a bunch of midget junkies riding goats. But I’m convinced it’ll be a huge success in Europe, particularly Germany.

“All artists are manufacturers for foreign consumers. The Mexicans don’t buy velvet paintings.”

Following his return from the Parisian conquest, Wade was confronted once again with the perennial predicament: what to do for an encore.

He ventured to California, as he’s done from time to time, to seek new ideas. It was on this trip that he was reunited with an old friend from Dallas.

Wade and several other Dallas visitors were guests at her home in Malibu for a party honoring Frankie Valli. They played a demo cut of Frankie’s new album.

“I was sitting next to this woman who was Frankie Valli’s wife, but didn’t know it at the time,” Wade said. “She asked me what I thought about the music and I said, ’Awful.. .sounds like shit.’ “

A month after that, Wade was stricken with a divine revelation for a project he’d contracted to attempt for the drive-through Art Park in Lewiston, New York, near Niagara Falls. A friend had returned from Mexico with two stuffed iguanas. The idea was to construct a giant iguana, much more suitable for a presentation like that than what Wade calls “the clichéd armadillo.”

“Before I took that on, I consulted Richard Wilkens up in Ponder, Texas, who builds airplanes and guitars. He’s a pretty prominent eccentric up there, and he showed me how to do all the substructure so I could do a piece like that and disassemble it for easy transportation.

“Whenever I take on a large project like that, I always go to him just to make sure my scheme is solid.”

Wade had no way of realizing just how far that ugly lizard would catapult him as a Texas celebrity in New York.

The Lone Star Iguana, aesthetically, was just right for Art Park. Wade was eager to cash in on its potential; he urgently wanted to find a prominent showcase for this special beast somewhere in the heart of Manhattan.

He settled on the Lone Star Cafe, after reading a piece in Rolling Stone depicting it as a “downtown Fifth Avenue joint that was becoming the Carnegie Hall of the Texas chic and transient kicker set.”

“I was real loaded on wine in the Art Park office and decided to call down there on their WATS line, not to talk to anybody official, but just try to get some measurements as to whether or not the thing might fit on the roof, so I might be able to go down there later and pitch my deal,” Wade says.

“I knew that if I wanted to display it in New York, it would have to be at a place like that. Certainly not a museum because of the lead time and the controversy.

“So I talked to this guy for about 15 minutes about the size of the roof and all, and he finally says, ’What are you after? I’m the owner.’

“So I explained who I was and what I had, and he said to bring it on down.

“Rick Hernandez, my assistant, and I loaded the iguana into a U-Haul truck (the lizard courtesy van, I called it), attached the head to the top of the cab, got totally screwed up on a case of Molson’s ale, and headed into New York City.

“We measured the roof of the cafe, and the thing fit exactly, with two feet to spare.

“The first day, we caught two Puerto Ricans trying to make off with the iguana head. Big guys. I forget how we did it, but we talked them out of stealing it.”

The presence of the iguana on the roof of the café initiated a hailstorm of indignation from an outfit known as the Fifth Avenue Association, the guardian angel of architectural integrity for commercial buildings in that area.

The iguana, they contended, was a commercial display of such vulgar extreme that it had to go. Mort Cooperman, Lone Star Café owner, realized he was dealing with a great publicity vehicle with unlimited horizons, and took the ball and ran with it. Wade, assuming the role of the quiet accomplice, sat back and casually watched the most significant payoff, from the standpoint of free publicity, of his professional career fall into neat pieces at his doorstep.

The New York Daily Press, the composite publication formed during a newspaper strike, ran a banner headline: “Look, Up In the Sky, It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s a WHAT?”

The Soho News provided a revelation that Kinky Friedman, generally the featured performer at Lone Star Café, and the iguana had produced a litter of 20 Jewish lizards.

Later, the New York Times offered a major feature headlined, “What Price An Iguana?” The New York Daily News Sunday magazine provided a major feature entitled, “The Monster of Fifth Ave.,” and a front page feature in the New York Post headlined, “Fifth Ave.’s Night of the Iguana,” in which the lead paragraph read, “The 5th Avenue Assn. doesn’t hate all iguanas, just the one perched on the roof of the Lone Star Café.”

In this article, Cooperman is quoted, “If that was Venus de Milo on the roof, nobody would complain.”

Eventually, the matter went to court. The expedient issue was whether or not Dallas artist Bob Wade’s iguana was, indeed, art.

“One of my best documents is a transcript of that trial where the iguana wins,” says Wade. “The judge’s final comment was, ’What’s the difference between this and a sculpture in front of the Seagram’s Building?’ “

Eventually, the iguana had to come down, anyway. “Some building inspectors wanted to get paid off, and they started harassing Cooperman with stuff like the building not being properly treated for roof display. First one thing, then another. As soon as the inspectors get their graft and the building gets its final sign out, the lizard goes back up, hopefully, sometime this summer. It’s stored in Brooklyn right now. Getting it back on the roof is a simple matter. Plunk. It’s a two-hour job.”

Wade, buoyed by the thrust of all that media attention in New York, plunged into a similar project in Washington, D.C., the next summer. This time it was a pair of 40-foot-tall cowboy boots constructed on the vacant lot of a street corner just three blocks from the White House, in what Wade terms “the most god-awful neighborhood I’ve ever been around.

“They have these people called alley ghouls, who are, to date, the most amazing scum I’ve encountered. They’re a bunch of Jamaican transplants who roam the back streets and live out of garbage cans and go around jabbing people with ice picks.”

The technical processes behind the boots were virtually the same that got the iguana job accomplished. The substructure was once again predetermined with the help of Richard Wilkens. The exterior was put together with a polyurethane spray technique.

Wade paid a physical price this time, falling off an interior scaffold and taking the entire 40-foot ride to the bottom of the boots. For days, he felt like he was suffering from one of his neoclassic Bob Wade hangovers.

But once again, the Eastern media exposure was gratifying. The boots made page two of the National Enquirer. Ben Bradlee’s people came by twice. “Not Made For Walking,” said the first Washington Post headline. “These Boots are Made for Gawkin’,” said the second headline, in the features section, a month later.

The people interviewing Wade started zeroing in on one central theme: Why in the hell do you do such preposterous projects?

At one point he answered, “Well, there’s this saying that you climb a mountain because it’s there, and you do art because it’s not there.

“You find a need and then find somebody who’s nuts enough to deal with it.”

The boots turned out to be Wade’s most successful commercial venture. A shopping center in San Antonio, North Star Mall, paid Wade a handsome fee for ownership of the boots and used them as an outdoor display to showcase its operation.

“I thought trucking them down there would be a simple operation since the basis of these big sculpture things is easy disassembly and easy transport.

“The damn boots turned out to be a fraction too big in all directions, so the trucker had to take a bunch of back roads and go 60 miles out of his way at times to dodge the weigh stations and all, driving at night all the way.

“I put together this little song for his trip.. .’Too Long, Too Wide, Too High.’ He made it, though. There was this one little problem with the boots after they’d been down in front of the shopping center for a while.

“Apparently, some characters punched a little hole in the back of one of the heels and had been living in there. They were sleeping and cooking in there. They’d made these peepholes to let the smoke out, and people were driving by and seeing smoke coming out of the tops of the boots.

“That’s when they called security. I mean, you can’t have that stuff going on in front of North Star Mall.”

Wade’s been confining his program to the Dallas area for the past year, designing corporate murals, including a 30-foot panorama of the Dallas skyline that appears on the fifth floor of the Apparel Mart (despite the map problems, Trammell Crow still values Wade’s talents), and, at times, playing the role of social superperformer.

Wade put on a five-star presentation at the 8.0 Bar last November, when he marched through two tables, knocking the inhabitants over their chairs, then seemingly hung suspended in midair for 30 seconds before crashing belly first into still a third table.

“That was a courageous performance,” said Shannon Wynne, the 8.0 proprietor. “That deal where he hung in midair. That was spectacular. Most artists get violent when they drink. Wade just has this mellow-type destructiveness about him that’s a lot more appealing than most.”

Wade describes a situation in Houston, when he impressed a group of powerhouse collectors by wrestling with a garden hose in some rich guy’s front yard. He thought it was a giant anaconda.

His studio is on Lemmon Avenue, in an abandoned furniture store. He calls it “the artist’s villa. It was pretty rustic at first, but I fixed it up. You could sell furs out of there now.”

At this point, he is unable to reveal what his next major project will be “for security reasons. Wilkens, the guy up in Ponder, wants to put wings on the iguana and fly it. But that’s not the big project.”

He will only confirm that it will fit his general creative motif, which he justifies with the statement, “This is the kind of stuff you like if you like this kind of stuff.”

Related Articles

Image
Basketball

Kyrie and Luka: A Love Story

It didn't work last season, but the dynamic duo this year is showing us something special.
Image
Politics & Government

Q&A: Senate Hopeful Colin Allred Says November Election Is ‘Larger Than Our Own Problems’

The congressman has experience beating an entrenched and well-funded incumbent. Will that translate to a statewide win for the Democrats for the first time since 1994?
Advertisement