Tabloid covers from years past. Glamorous headshots. Porn-parody DVDs. Artist Brendan Donnelly’s show I Wanted to Be an Actor, but I Could Never Remember My Lines mashes up all of these pieces of pop culture ephemera into subversive tableaux.
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First displayed at Los Angeles’s Show Gallery in the fall of 2022, Donnelly’s collages are deep dives into the dark side of Hollywood, born out of his obsessive tendencies as a collector. They can now be found in a book, also called I Wanted to Be an Actor, but I Could Never Remember My Lines, from the independent publisher Hat & Beard Press.
“I had close to 30 years’ worth of magazines and other things that I’d collected sitting in flat files,” Donnelly told me. “When I started to organize everything into categories during the last three years or so, there was a section on Hollywood and it all tied together, so I made a big wall mural of all these clippings.” Donnelly intended the work, with its dramatic scale and rows of images covering everything from Charles Manson to Britney Spears, to be “overwhelming,” and it succeeds, feeling like an uncanny mix of a teenage bedroom and a train wreck.
Some of Donnelly’s pieces juxtapose images of classic movie stars with those of contemporary actors, drawing parallels and contrasts between gestures and stories. One image connects troubled child stars Lindsay Lohan and Judy Garland; another finds echoes of Marlon Brando’s sensitive tough guy in a young Matt Dillon. Then there’s the one that finds winking overlap in Ronald Reagan and rapper Lil Nas X wearing cowboy hats.
To create these, Donnelly relied not on the instant availability of Google Images but on something decidedly more old-school: Hollywood memorabilia shops. Over the years, he’s amassed a large collection of celebrity photos from these tourist traps. “I collected things in threes or sixes, so I was collecting the same kind of image over and over again,” he says. Repeated images pop up throughout his work. With today’s celebrity images existing in primarily digital form, there are only a couple of stores left that carry these photos, and he finds the fact that the pictures are “pretty shitty—sun-faded, a little scratched” complements his vision: “It’s the decay of pop culture.”
This fascination with decay and the provocative potential of appropriated imagery feels rooted in a DIY ethos and plays into the indie-publishing scene of which Donnelly is a part. In a 2018 Los Angeles Times interview, J.C. Gabel, founder of Donnelly’s publisher, Hat & Beard, said that the press emerged out of “a nostalgia for the period before the internet changed everything—for the worst.” Hat & Beard’s catalog includes volumes centered on rebel icons like Dennis Hopper and Lou Reed, cult artists like the prolific painter Steve Keene, and unexpected fascinations like the 75th anniversary of the Doomsday Clock. Each volume pays tribute to niche passions with publications that are beautifully packaged yet quirkier than the average coffee-table book. In addition to publishing his art book with Hat & Beard, Donnelly is also the press’s community manager.
Donnelly and Gabel are about to embark on the book-fair circuit and will be at Los Angeles’s Acid-Free, a three-day market from June 16 to 18 featuring over 90 vendors. “I’ll get to sit and talk to people about books all day, which is something I really enjoy doing. I can’t shut up,” says Donnelly. For him, both public-facing book fairs and “being a hermit in the studio” are all about the thrill of the hunt. “I’m constantly in flea markets and thrift stores and on eBay,” he says. “It all goes into a box for a while; then something clicks and I start going.”
Donnelly can trace his passion for found imagery to his preteen years, when he’d plaster his walls with posters, many of which he’s kept. “I’m obsessed with different subcultures and countercultures,” he says. He uses imagery like porn-parody DVD covers not just to get a laugh (though some titles, like Edward Penishands, Twinklight, and Pulp Friction, certainly do) but to illustrate Hollywood’s duality, with big-budget mainstream productions on one side of the hill and low-budget porn on the other.
Originally from the East Coast, Donnelly says he hated L.A. for years but moved there in 2009 and has come to love it. His art, with its mix of fan-ish fixation and a deeply critical eye, perfectly embodies this contradiction. While he shows the seedy side of Hollywood, the fact that he’s cultivated such an extensive collection of images speaks to an enduring fascination with the place and its mythologies. The curation of all these celebrity images is hardly self-portraiture in the traditional sense, but Donnelly calls his art “a look into how my mind works.”•
Acid-Free Los Angeles Art Book Market runs June 16–18 at Blum & Poe gallery, 2727 S. La Cienega Blvd. Check out the official site for more info
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Abbey Bender is a New York-based writer on film and fashion with bylines in the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, Nylon, Vulture, and other publications.
