ABSOLUT ARNOLD.
A Steven Arnold megamix by Scott Ewalt
@scottewaltnyc
SoundCloud link in bio !
On the occasion of Steven Arnold: Cocktails in Heaven, artist and DJ Scott Ewalt pays homage to Arnold in a megamix inspired by their friendship and the artist’s campaign ABSOLUT ARNOLD—a commissioned advertisement for
@absolutvodka starring Ewalt published in The Advocate in 1992.
In 1992, Steven Arnold was invited to participate in Absolut Symbols, a poster campaign begun in the 1980s, for which queer artists—among them Andy Warhol, Nicole Eisenman, Keith Haring, Monica Majoli, and Ian Falconer—were commissioned were commissioned to design advertisements that would be sold to raise funds for LGBTQ and AIDS-related charities. Arnold’s ad—featured in The Advocate—was a portrait of Scott Ewalt, the artist, DJ, and nightlife luminary. Photographed in the signature style of Arnold’s tableaux-vivant portraits, the image depicts Ewalt with his hair sculpted into a bottle top, eyes heavy with false eyelashes, lips cracked in a snarling grin, chest bare and hairy, hands draped in black gloves, wrist dripping with jewels, and fingers clasping a colossal martini glass.
In the 2019 documentary Heavenly Bodies, directed by Vishnu Dass
@vishnudass1008 , the Director of the Steven Arnold Archives, Ewalt expressed:
“There was this thing going on in the late 80s with so many people dying, especially in the early 90s in Los Angeles, where the connection between queer generations was dissolving and it was such a big part of the education of gay men during the last hundred years that the older man would teach them the ropes and the aesthetics. And because we were considered to be kind of subhuman, everyone always had to overcompensate with their intellect, their ability to design things, their knowledge on obscure subjects. And I think that Steven was born of that generation, and so he was trying to pass that knowledge on to about a dozen of us who were all in our early twenties, who were eager to learn this.”
Steven Arnold: Cocktails in Heaven at Del Vaz Projects on view through June 6, 2026
