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Hi, I’m Greg Kashmanian. I’m a Los Angeles based comedian and I hate Donald Trump. Luckily, I’m not alone in my distaste for the half-deflated orange balloon that’s crushing the Republican polls for president. Two local artists created #trumpurinal, which is now exploding across social media. I recently sat down with one of its creators in the Review Weekly Los Angeles office. When he arrived, I was expecting some scrappy millennial Photoshop wiz. Who actually showed up was closer to a Phillip Seymour Hoffman clone. Brandon Griffin is a relatively unknown artist who is now bracing with his first bout of virality.
Listen to the interview here:
Greg: Right off the bat, I’ve never had anything go viral before, I just wanna ask you: are you now a millionaire?
Brandon: Yeah right! No, I haven’t figured out how to monetize this.
G: That’s my dream—is just have something go viral then all of the sudden I open a bank account and, “Hey! You’re a millionaire!”
B: Yeah we didn’t plan this to go viral.
G: You created an image in collaboration with another artist—can you tell us about how the idea came about?
B: The guy that I did this with is William Duke, a well-known photo-illustrator—he does a lot of editorial work. He moved out to California some years ago and we had this thing where he always puts my photo into images. He puts me in photos like I’m a fat Elvis with a camel toe.
B: So this is an ongoing joke, okay? So on world toilet day—there is such a day—I was looking at the Washington Post online and they had a slideshow…and they had set up the lead photograph as the urinal with the lips, and I thought, “Oh that’s a great image.” World toilet day, just FYI, it’s about the deplorable toilet conditions around the world. This was not one…
G: Right. As far as toilets go, it’s one of the more famous toilets.
B: Yeah, and I had never heard of it—I thought they were pretty funny. So anyways I post this on Facebook and my friend Bill sends me an image and it has my face on the toilet. I called him up and said, “Well that’s really funny.” And he goes, “You’re not offended?” and I said “Oh come on. But it’s not quite right it needs something else.” And he goes, “Yeah I was thinking of putting Mick Jagger…”
G: Right.
B:…and I was like “Let’s do Trump,” and he’s like “Oh yeah!” I sent him an image of Trump that I found online. Again this was not thinking about…
G: Right this is just a gag…
B: …and I said, I’m gonna post this thing in public and see if we can get 100 likes—thinking “birthday likes,” because the most we ever got was 100 likes on birthdays.
G: So you’re going for the birthday like.
B: Right so we posted. A buddy of mine in New York hashtagged it with #trumpurinal. We were working with “Piss Trump” based on Andre Serrano’s “Piss Christ” which is a famous piece of art, a crucifix suspended in piss. Pissed a lot of people off. We started getting quite a few likes—but it wasn’t for 6 or 7 hours. By the next day, just on my Facebook page, I was getting 1000 shares an hour. I was like, “Oh sh*t!” Next thing we know BoredPanda picked it up, and Moby picked it up on his Instagram…
G: When Moby picks it up… It’s gone. I would be stoked if Moby shared anything I did.
B: We were just honored that somebody was saying something. Reddit picked it up—and then Moby picked it up, and then The Fat Jewish picked it up. I hate to say it but I didn’t know who he was. Well I looked and…this dude’s got three million followers! And that’s when it went crazy…
G: Did he caption it for you? B: He captioned it wrong…
Donald Trump by Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA)
G: The Fat Jewish has never been known to be good at attributing works.
B: I found this out…but they did correct it because apparently he’s been sued. It’s still sometimes tagged as this other guy—again we didn’t really care who was claiming ownership of it because it was really just about sticking it to Trump. So you know—then after that Huffington Post UK picked it up, Nas picked it up to attack Trump…
G: I saw Nas posted it, “One of the best pieces of art he’s ever seen.”
B: No he did a screengrab of The Fat Jewish. And I’m okay if someone wants to attach that verbiage to it! So he picked it up, Vibe picked it up from there.
G: I saw a piece on The Guardian…
B: Well The Guardian called us up…she writes a lot about art and culture and she’s out of Berlin. We got top billing on that which was cool, because there was a lot of great Trump stuff there.
G: Now I did some research on Brandon Griffins and I found that there’s a Brandon Griffin who’s an MMA fighter—# 1 ranked…
B: That’s not me.
G: Then there’s a Brandon Griffin who’s an Arena football star. Are you prepared to say you are the best Brandon Griffin?
B: I am the best Brandon Griffin.
G: That was my opinion too, I knew it. Have you gotten any feedback from Trump supporters?
B: You know at first I thought, “I’m going to read all these comments”…and then you quickly just get bored with it. We also got a couple of death threats which is like—hey we’ve arrived!
Donald Trump by Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA)
G: That’s how you know you’ve made it.
B: Yeah we’re getting death threats so that’s kinda funny. We saw Conservative Tribune which is a conservative website…they called us “liberal artists” and we were like, “Yeah alright!”
G: That’s always nice—the LIBERAL artists—as opposed to all those conservative artists out there.
B: I was like, “Yeah this is awesome; this is really wrong in a good way.” But we realized that a lot of people thought it was real. They thought it was a real mural. All of the sudden you have people seeing flying saucers like, “Oh yeah I saw that thing.” And then it was a urinal in New York. The urinal was traveling all around the world. Actually, one of the first audiences we noticed was Latin America, specifically Mexico
G: Makes sense.
B: I don’t like to have a lot of friends on Facebook. I got a couple hundred. Next thing I know I’ve got over 600 people following me. So I start looking through their pages and almost all are Mexican—so I was like yeah this is cool, the group that he pissed off were the first to…
G: Yeah rally around it…A lot of people are calling online for a Hillary version. Any interest in hitting all around?
B: The great thing about Trump and the urinal is it wraps it all up in one image that is super simple. It’s almost two colors—black and white…and red. It says everything about him, the shit coming out of his mouth. The other candidates—I don’t know how you capture something so immediate in an image…
G: Some argue that parody images help Trump—just fanning the flames of popularity. Were you worried about that at all?
B: As they say…No publicity is bad publicity and I think Trump knows that. I hope Trump has seen the image. I hope he has. We were worried that he’s going to come after us and sue us. My friend Bill was like, “What if Trump gets in office and sends his secret police after us?” And I’m like “Oh come on…”
G: It’s a pretty clear parody.
B: We’ve always positioned it as a parody because we used other people’s images, we tried to credit them where due, and we have not tried to monetize it. We are thrilled that it’s sticking it to Trump a bit and it’s an image that—as long as he remains in the race—will be relevant.
G: Is it a resume builder? B: Here’s what I think is interesting. A lot of people think you don’t understand social because only the young generation understands social. Well, this old man and his friend just blew it up with something that was organic. I have a lot of friends that work in social media and they’re doing paid placement and they’re not getting traction like this so…who’s the champ here? We did have this model—Cara Delevingne. She’s probably the hottest model working today.
G: Will she marry me?
B: I’m in front of you. She’s got 26 million followers. We posted this thing around the weekend of thanksgiving. She posted it about a week ago and I saw this morning we’re at 940,000 likes. She’s now got it going to a whole different audience.
G: So you’re a creative consultant and this is more of statement-artwork. Do you like to do art on the side—is it a hobby of yours?
B: Not really. I like to do design. I like graphic design. That’s what I’m trained in. I find I’m really good at subverting things, so this falls right in that category of what I consider my hobby. I’m not somebody who’s painting or cranking out videos or anything like that. I like to stir the pot.
Donald Trump by Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA)
G: I gotchu. Are you and your friend are going to go for anything in the future—like try and hit lightning twice.
B: Well we think this is probably a one in a million shot but we’ve chatted about how to approach this stuff. I don’t know if we can recreate it that easily. I think you could create something that feels forced. I have thought that I’d like to maybe do something that’s ongoing, up until the end of the political season, like develop a meme generator that we are putting images into that aren’t as iconic as the trump one and then letting people actually add a comment to it, but again, I don’t really know.
G: Cool, thank you so much.
Like the invention of the microwave, the virality of this picture is largely an accident but a pleasant one that shines a light on one of the worst political figures of our lifetime—and yeah, I was alive for Reagan. So next time you feel that tightening in your groin, that all too familiar feeling of compression within the bladder, head to the urinal and let out a long stream of Trump.
*Interview was edited for clarity.
