“Hopefully you never draw the line”: Sucklord

Meet the New York pop artist Sucklord. Morgan Phillips. I assure you, he doesn’t give a shit what you call him.

Interview by Sinan G.

Before I leave his office for the last time to drop off my camera in Carroll Gardens where I’m staying with my pal Josh and make it to Rough Trade to somehow get into the Murder By Death show and after running around like a madman looking for a new memory card all over Chinatown, Morgan tells me he’s in the mood for a beer:

Morgan Phillips. Sucklord. I assure you, he doesn’t give a shit what you call him.

Having been in the mood for a beer almost consistently since I landed in NYC, I tag along. He walks into one of those Chinatown dollar stores that are inherently depressing and oddly hopeful at the same time. Depressing because the store feels like they sell things no one would ever buy. Let’s face it: There are items in these stores that are worth the dollar tag. There are items that do not. What Morgan reaches out to, to grab from the shelf, is not worth it for the ninety-nine percent of this store’s clientele. Like those toys in gas stations. But to yours truly, there’s something incredibly soothing and yes, hopeful, about watching him do justice and pay a dollar for this particular toy, made in China, being sold in what is essentially China, in New York Fucking City. You know those girls who immediately start dancing to “Empire State Of Mind” as soon as they land at JFK? Yeah, Morgan and I are on the other side of the spectrum. We are buying beer and plastic toys not worth more than a dollar in Chinatown. Perhaps worth more with tax. Perhaps.

Time warp: His studio. About an hour earlier before.  I’m watching Morgan build figures. At some point along the line, he will dump his box of figures on the table and will find two Taurus figures, the only GI Joe, who is, according to Hasbro, from Istanbul, despite the ridiculous name. Morgan asks me if I own one of those. At that moment, I think I do. I’m too proud to let Morgan give me one of the figures, because he confirms he was about to. In hindsight, this is a mistake.

Dad has always been a good driver. He used to drive us when I was a kid. Mom used to wake us up before we got on the road to Ayvalık. I don’t think my little brother was yet born. Mom used to turn the lights on in my childhood bedroom in an apartment that no longer exists and say “Hadi canim, gidiyoruz!” and then proceed to dress me for the first day of our summer vacation as a family. The sweetness of the memory still reverberates. I digress: Mom used to wake me up, Dad used to drive and my kid brother wasn’t alive yet: But one thing: If we stopped by at a gas station, there were those toys. There were those fucking toys. Those toys, the maker of which was dubious at best and unknown at worst… Whether they were made locally or China… I will never forget when I had smallpox when I was nine and dad showed up from the domestic flights, somehow having gotten the bootleg Turkish figures for his son who had more spots on his face than a desire for action figures at that given moment. A rare one.

Everything I mentioned above reverberates. Wildly. There’s a timing issue. When I live through this at his studio, and months later, conceive the text you’re reading, Sucklord confirms his thoughts on Chinatown:

The first thing that attracts me to Chinatown is its “Real New York” feature as in that it seems to have resisted (at least better than some areas) the sanitizing and homogenization that has virtually transformed other neighborhoods into something lame and unrecognizable.

The second is of course the bootlegging and shady business of the area, which mostly lends itself to my branding.

Finally I like it because I gravitate to Chinese people and culture, or specifically New York Chinatown culture. I like the food, and how cheap it is and I love the music and seeing Kung Fu and Tai Chi on the street like it’s no big deal.

We shoot the shit. Just talk. It feels casual, but the closure I’m getting at thirty-plus years old is nothing short of fascinating.

There was a guy who I don’t think was you, but he released these action figures for The Fog – the John Carpenter movie.

Yeah, the ones with cotton in them.

That was ironic but I think there was a sophisticated joke in there somewhere.

Explain what it is, because sometimes when I see stuff like that, I get the cleverness of it and I see the humor… But even when I was a kid, I used to joke… “What if they made a figure of The Force” but there was nothing in there…

Or, The Monolith figure!

That’s a thing too, because those are what you would think are non-figure representations. There is still a 1-to-1 corollary where it’s like, here’s a figure of something that wouldn’t normally be a figure but at the end of the day it’s still the representation of a figure from a film. Maybe you can extrapolate a little bit more about the meaning of action figures, how they work and what our expectations are and by that extension just question expectations in general about what we consume and how can we take in information: But I’m trying to build on top of that. We take it granted at this point that action figures can be ironic. How can we make ironic-ironic action figures?

The first Sucklord on your website is Sucklord IRL (“In Real Life”), which I believe is you, as a kid, in an outfit (Boba Fett)…

One of the most transformative things in my life was encountering Boba Fett and to take the role of impersonating Boba Fett. I used to dress as Boba Fett for Halloween as a kid. I was kind of a nerdy kid. I wasn’t one the alpha kids in school… I had socialization issues and insecurities and stuff like that and for whatever reason putting on that costume made me feel more than what I really was. It just sort of gave me an identification not only with masks but with personal transformation and also being able decide “I want to be this and by wearing this and taking this mantel on I’m becoming a version of myself I aspire to be” I may never actually achieve that but I’m aspiring towards it. But it occurred again in my 20’s when I started putting stuff out into the world and I started putting out albums and made a Star Wars Break Beats record and I needed some persona to represent this new excursion I was doing of these Star Wars mash-ups, and as it was the late 90’s and it was a new thing at the time and I once again revisited that. I took on a Boba Fett visage with some hip-hop trappings and I once again found it to be transformational. It worked when I was a kid and it worked when I was a young adult. It coalesced in my mind that something is going on here more than just wearing a costume. When I started making my toys, as a natural extension, it became that and in a lot of ways the figures started to become aspirational ideas… That represented not just “Hey, here’s a parody Boba Fett”, it doesn’t say Boba Fett anywhere on there, it’s not taken for granted. It sort of cooked into the source.

Perfect: And another question we may expand upon: What about the LGBT side of it? The Gay Ultimate, there’s also another Boba Fett…

There’s tons of gay stuff. There’s an idealistic answer and a cynical answer: The first “gay toy” that I made was the Gay Empire. It was really the second thing after the first Sucklord figure and I thought, “this could be a thing, that a Star Wars figure and fuck around with it and it could become something new… What am I gonna do next?” The next cool thing in Star Wars after Boba Fett are Stormtroopers so let me do something with a Stormtrooper… I wasn’t trying to do anything elaborate, maybe I could do something with a different color… I like the color pink… It’ll look good, it’s pink now…  It’s a strong color I’m attracted to, it’s a risky color in some ways because it’s supposed to be a feminine or a gay color which I don’t agree with, I was honestly not thinking any of those things, I just wanted to make something that looked cool. I’ll admit it, I hadn’t thought it through at the time. I was just starting with the elements and then when I made it “Well, it’s pink, I can’t just make pink Stormtroopers, it’s gotta be some context around this thing and well, you know, it’s supposedly the gay color, maybe he’s gay, Gay Empire, oh, a gay Stormtrooper! Ok.” That seems like a thing to me. I don’t know what it means, it doesn’t have a particular intended singular meaning, it was more like: Here it is: Here’s a Gay Stormtrooper. Gay Empire homotrooper. Whatever meaning you bring to it is what it is. And it was successful. My read on it is that it could be seen as a call to gay militancy. Because the regular political process isn’t working. Or you could even put a cynical view and look at it like “The gays are taking over! The gay mafia, now they have an army! Oh my god, what are we gonna do?”

How did you grow up with the figures? Where did you grow up?

I grew up in New York. Greenwich Village in the 70’s at an artsy place in time. Grew up with a cool, creative, supportive type of family. I also grew up in the Golden Age of Star Wars. I was about 8 years old when the first Star Wars movie came up and the avalanche of toys that came after that… GI Joe, He-Man, Transformers all came out after that I was completely immersed in that classic 80’s toy culture. I was encouraged to make shit: Draw, paint, make shit out of clay, on a computer… Super 8 camera. I was encouraged to fuck around. Gravitated around toys. Greedo figure, the green and aquamarine alien guy, is my favorite figure of all time. Squished the figure into bar soap to make a mold of it and melted a green crayons to make a casting. Didn’t work, couldn’t get it out, it had blended into the soap, but my mind was already working that way even when I was a little kid. I went thru the classic NYC upbringing with the weed, LSD and doing bad shit on the street. LSD, I was super influenced by that growing up. Got into music. First thing I ever released (as music) was a record called Star Wars Break Beats. Remix record. I love sampling, mixing and beatmaking. Around 1997 when the Special Edition’s were coming out. We were getting ready for the prequel trilogy to come out. I had stopped being into SW around 1986 but I was getting back into it around [late 90’s] as they had stopped making the toys but there was a resurgence when the new movies were coming out. It was the only thing I was an expert in, and now being into Star Wars was cool. I used that to enhance my cool factor growing up in the Gen-X world. I made this meditation on SW using beats. When I returned to making toys, I used the same approach. I just started sampling things from other toys, chopping them up and assembling them. Like Micronauts: They don’t transform, but they’re interchangeable. They are more like LEGO’s. It was cool shit. The original toy-line was connected to Transformers. It was a fascinating line. It’s weird because it’s been so elusive, it never quite got into popular consciousness like He-Man or GI Joe because it predated that era. It predated Star Wars, then it ran tandem to Star Wars for a while. They didn’t start TV shows of toy lines until the 80’s. Reagan… There was a law that said you couldn’t do that because it was too much like a commercial… This was the 70’s when everything was very liberal and hyper-educational. There was a fear of this television and advertising and corrupt kids…

What do you think of the Funko stuff that imitated the Kenner logo… ReAction figures.

I like the idea of them, I don’t think the execution is excellent. I understand that they had to make them cheap and they produce them on a gray-ish plastic and just paint it… Like the original SW figures, which is what they were based on, or at least the aesthetic of it. They were cast in actual colors and the detail was painted on and they had this sort of glossy look to them but the figures were very matte. That’s such an annoying, pretentious complaint to have about them. Some of their packaging design falls short too, they just take the licensed image and they slap it on there and they just don’t push it. It looks like they’re not totally taking it to a hundred, but it’s cool, but I mean it’s fascinating that people are still interested in 3 and ¾ quarter figures. And that has nothing to do with my work.

Then there’s The Fog figure, which is the mold/representation of the ReAction figures, which is already based on Kenner, and the ReAction figures already have the John Carpenter figures, so it’s almost like a joke on top of it. Where do you draw the line?

Hopefully you never draw the line. Why do you need to draw the line? I mean the whole thing is to push the line further and further away. Any kind of innovative work. Let’s just assume for the sake of discussion that this toy thing we’re talking about is actually an art movement. Let’s not get into the debate of whether or not it’s art. Let’s pretend it’s art. We can let history decide whether it was or not. Whether the art world accepts that it’s art, the people who are making it, or at least certain people who are thinking about art, or who consider themselves artists… That being said, in order for art to become art, it has to always push beyond established boundaries, it has to break rules. It has to go against the established traditions, ideas or preconceptions and it has to do something different. There’s always a next logical step to any creative development and the bootleg toy movement is at that point right now. I may be the person who started it…How do I know bring something to the table? So to me it’s about looking outside of the pop-culture realms. If I’m gonna make toys, I don’t want to make a toy of any sci-fi movie thing. I’m still gonna fuck with Micronauts because they have a special place in the Suckadelic world of symbolism. We could talk about why I chose to put a Micronaut with a Roscoe’s Chicken & Waffles instead of a Stormtrooper, which would be the normal go-to figure. But that’s a whole other thing. I think, for me personally, I’m looking to bring in more sex, everything from vintage, gay S&M magazines to Robert Mapplethorpe photography and Japanese bukkake movies. I’ve been starting to go in that realm. I’ve already done to death the Suckadelic characters: Sucklord, Boba Fett helmet guys, a lot of Toylords figures, like the Star Chump or the Galactic Jerkbags figures. Everything in the toy world has been so cannibalized so I want to outside of that and do something completely different. You can’t afford to experiment or make mistakes. If you do, you don’t pay your bills. I found myself in this difficult position of having to constantly produce all the time, to get it to market to sell it and the pressure of doing that and the resentment of not making enough money of it – it really dampens the creativity.

How did the Sucklord become a character?

The actual name didn’t come about until 2004. But there was naturally a gigantic primordial progression that led up to that which I pretty much trace up to 1979 when I dressed up as Boba Fett for the first time Halloween. This was even before Empire Strikes Back came out. We only knew who Boba Fett was because we were getting hyped about Empire Strikes Back. The first time I saw him was when it was around ’78 or ‘79 where the Star Wars Holiday Special came on which is generally regarded as the absolutely worst product ever created. That came out at a particular time: Star Wars came out in ‘77 and there was demand for more of it but the next movie wasn’t going to come out for three years later. At the time, there were variety shows on TV, like the Donnie & Marie show, which were still popular and all these B-list stars that would do these campy musical numbers… It was a whole era of television with all these variety shows and they made a TV special about Star Wars that was a Holiday Special – Christmas thing and that had Chewbacca and Han Solo going back to Chewbacca’s home planet for Chewbacca’s Celebration Of Life Day… It’s fucking terrible. But within that, there’s ten minute or so of Star Wars cartoon that introduces the character of Boba Fett and it’s instantly captivating. We knew he was this guy who pretended to be a good guy but was really a bad guy and gets away. He left us with the idea that there’s this Boba Fett guy who’s gonna be important in the new movie. The following year they had the second wave of Star Wars figures and they had this mail in offer for the “new villain from the new Star Wars movie, Boba Fett.” You had to mail in four proofs of purchases and you got a figure in a few months, which was Boba Fett. I was 9 or 10. This was ‘79. Do the fucking math. ‘80 when the movie came out. ‘81 I continued to refine and it became like a thing. And then I got older and did edgy stuff for Halloween. Jump ahead to ‘96 or ‘97 – which is when I came out as a maker of things: “I make art.” I make toys, I’m a DJ, I’m a producer, a rapper – this was when the hype for the new Star Wars movies were coming out – Star Wars was suddenly this hip retro thing to be into and I was like “I’m gonna make a Star Wars breakbeats record.” I wanted something to represent Star Wars breakbeats attitude at these conventions. I want to sell it, but I can’t go as me. I made a customized Boba Fett. I hip-hop-ified it, graffittied the helmet, had a chain, a utility belt, markers and graffiti shit and sneakers walking around with this boombox: Killing it. Taking on the Boba Fett persona gave me this larger than life sense ability both in myself and I was able to convey it to other people. It was the only hip-hop thing going on. It worked. It worked and it gave me an identity. At the time I was still a Boba Fett impersonator. I had not yet morphed into the Sucklord. But I continued to do that throughout the next few years. Then I had the Star Wars music and I had the Star Wars custom toys. And that was my business. And then I wanted to build up the toy aspect of it. Then the designer toy movement came about. Kid Robot’s and the Dunnies. That movement was going and I was going to be something in this. The world was waiting to catch up to me and I’ve been making toy shit all my life.

You mentioned the subversive aspect of it all. I’m looking at the wall here. The very LGBT friendly aspect of it.

Yeah, that’s true. There’s a lot of gay stuff in what I do, which may or may not be ironic because I’m not gay and I’m not particularly any sort of activist. I grew up in the village in the 70’s where my mom ran a very gay business making S&M gear for gay macho men. It was never an issue for me. It was something I was always aware of – alongside many other liberal, progressive, acceptant, intelligent ways of seeing the world. Growing up in NYC, I mean variety, all these different cultures piled on top of each other, everybody fucking gets along. To me that’s just normal, so when people have a problem with that it makes me fucking mad because I’m offended by stupidity and ignorance and things of that nature and it’s always been something I’d like to push back against and I think any sort of fear and prejudice against gay people is intellectually stunted and foolish. That’s one thing that I push buttons on just because that’s what I do in general. I’ve always been that type of person, I’ve been an outcast as a kid, I was always attracted to punk and pushing back and I was always smarter than everybody else. I guess that matched with some of the anger I developed over the years of being not successful enough and being left out. I had to push back to people because there was a lot of rejection going on there. I think a lot of supervillains, like Dr. Doom, feel that. They haven’t gotten their fair shake in life. So they come back, bigger and better, and they attack, trying to inflict their way. I feel the same way, that’s why it has that element to it.

 [Let’s talk about] Richard Prince. When he took these photos from Instagram and added these comments which in a weird way acted like a signature… And he made five figures out of it. I think that was the apex of insincerity but there was also a comment there…

I think the point was to make something as insincere as possible and in that there’s a certain sincerity.

I don’t know if he was the right guy to do that. He’s done shit like that before and the last exhibit made him look like an asshole. [Again,] where do we draw the line? Can we ever draw the line? Should you draw the line?

I don’t know if “Drawing the line” is the right phrase to use. Should I not look at that as something that’s going to enrich me as a person? Should somebody have prevented him from having bad taste? Of course not. It’s his right to make something to make him look like an asshole.

Should he have compensated people?

No.

No?

It would have compromised the point of the piece.