In a dungeon-like basement studio in Williamsburg on a drizzly November afternoon, Aubrey Mayer is settled in an easy chair. Scattered around him are scraps of paper on a paint be-speckled cement floor, a box of American Spirits. A drawing of a kangaroo with boobs adorns the bathroom door—apparently freshly rendered by Henry Taylor the night before. On the wall to Mayer’s left, “POLICE THE ART WORLD POLICE” is scrawled in black paint. With a pensive look on his face as he surveys a table covered in ‘brillo’ boxes and several walls of photos and autosheets in various states of construction, he almost seems as if he’s holding court. By his count, he spends about 18 hours a day in the studio and has a lot of work to make considering that earlier this year he began to sell enough of his art to sustain a full-time practice. Wearing a baseball cap, glasses, jeans, and sneakers, Mayer can go from laid-back, twenty-something urbanite who enjoys a good bullshit over a beer, to intense with a hungry look in his eye. And if recent history is any indicator, he does have an all-or-nothing ballsy streak. Before making sustainable sales, he did what almost no one else should do and quit his job to pursue a full-time career as an artist, in his words “threw a Hail Mary.” His talk about the discipline with which he approaches making art verges on old school visions of the great artiste, but then he’ll soften, lower his voice and speak very deliberately about putting a sense of humanity back in images, keeping subjects comfortable, getting audience to literally touch and toy with art. His extensive portraits of other artists, some of which are published in zing 23, exhibits a similar twofold nature. The gaze is decidedly heterosexual and male, but emotionally vivid and nuanced. There is something calculating happening and a strong whiff of seduction, but the expression is anything but cold. There’s none of that stale masculine voyeurism in the energy of the images and subjects frequently seem to be captured on some psychological edge, as if looking out from the frame of a strange film.
Interview by Rachel Cole Dalamangas
How do you choose your subjects for portraits? They’re usually other artists.
Yeah, I photograph like one person a year now basically, but when I was really heavily doing a lot of portraits of other artists, one artist would lead to another. Or, I’d get interested in an artist because of another artist. It just naturally umbrella-ed.
I saw that you photographed Agathe Snow, another zing contributor. How did you meet Agathe?
I met Agathe when I was maybe 22 or 23. Carol Lee (then) of Paper Magazine had me do this thing where I would photograph an artist and ask them twelve questions, actually send them a short interview. So I met Agathe. I think I photographed her for the first time for the Whitney Biennial when she had something at the Armory and that’s where I met her. Then she rented a house on the same street I live on in Orient Point on Long Island. I don’t know how we saw each other there, but then we hung out. It’s where I took my better photographs of her.
When did you start making art?
I’ve been making pictures for a long time. Since high school. It was never my major. I never got classically trained, but I’ve been taking pictures for a long time. I took pictures as a teenager. I took pictures in high school. Like, I did a lot of nudes starting in high school.
What was your earlier work like?
I took some pictures of a couple having sex in high school. I was taking naked pictures of girls and I asked this one girl who was my friend and also doing photography if she would pose nude and she said, “Yes, but can we take pictures of me and my boyfriend having sex, too?”
Why do you think you’re so drawn to photographing people?
I don’t really know. I just think that’s the most interesting thing. It was just natural. I don’t know. Everything is just natural for me. Everything I do. Every move I make . . . I just make it and you know I have no idea why. I think that portraits and artwork of people has always seemed like the most important to me until I met Christopher Wool’s work.
What I’ve learned about my work and what pushed it to evolve is that in the beginning it was hard to get an audience, it was hard to get people interested in the photographs. I felt like I had the best photographs in the world and I had the responsibility to figure out how the fuck to get them out there and that’s what has pushed my work—that’s what’s pushed my work into the books and now the ‘brillo’ boxes.
I didn’t go to art school, but I’ve learned a lot from the artists I photographed. I chose which artists to learn the most from.
Can you describe what you mean by this feeling of “natural”?
It’s gut. It’s all gut. Everything I do is gut.
So this picture (gestures to black and white photo of creek). I think it’s an amazing picture. But in today’s art landscape, a lot of people would overlook an image like that. So I painted it neon yellow to make sure people didn’t forget to look. That was a gut instinct.
You seem to think a lot about audience.
Yeah, because a lot of people say that photography is dead or different versions of this. And it’s not dead.
I believe in classical, traditional photographic techniques, but I believe that photography needed a new energy. I don’t color correct, like shit is straight through. There’s no artifice. I deal with it without artifice. I guess I’m painting on it because other people are ruining it with Photoshop. That’s why photography was dying, because of the way people manipulate images.
If you want to know why I think photography’s dying, it’s because of fashion photography.
Interesting. How so?
Because a lot of young photographers come up and they think they have to be a fashion photographer or they use all the fashion photography re-touching and it just sucks the life out of their photos. And also, fashion photographers aren’t even photographers, they just do fashion. They’re getting told what to shoot and how to shoot it. They just have to show up, look pretty, and shake hands.
What is your process then for creating a portrait?
That’s interesting. It’s definitely a collaboration. I don’t think when I’m taking a portrait. That is a natural thing. I don’t really talk to the subjects other than that we’re hanging out. They don’t even really notice that I’m doing anything. I’ve been told many times that it feels like I’m not even there. I try to make the subjects not feel me, the weight of my presence. There’s just like a right way to do it. I have instincts.
I think it’s important to note that I went on a photo-shooting spree. I always wanted to be an artist and it always bothered me—it probably shouldn’t have—that people would call me a photographer. What I do is art. We’re all image junkies and everybody’s got a camera. But what I do, nobody else does. So I always thought I was an artist. The whole process of getting other people to realize that was very difficult. Really hard, the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. But the most worthwhile, obviously.
How did you fight the label photographer?
By making the best work I could. I just work hard. I spend 18 hours a day at the studio.
Elizabeth Peyton is from Orient. When I was younger, that was the first artist that I photographed. She was down the street from these awesome people who I used to stay at their house because my parents used to work in the city in the summer. And I was taking pictures and they’re like, “Oh you should look up this person who lives down the street, she’s really sweet.” And they said something like she wants to learn how to sail. And at that point in my life, the year before, I was campaigning for the Olympics. I was on the 2005 U.S. sailing team. I went to St. Mary’s College of Maryland. We were ranked 1st in the country. My freshman year we won a National Championship.
It sounds like these features of ambition and competitiveness are very much a part of who you are.
Extremely. Ever since I was little. I grew up very overweight and I was tortured as a child, really ostracized. And my dad would always try to get me to sail and one night when I was like nine years old, for some reason one night, I was like, “Man, I’m gonna go race the older kids.” They were 18 year olds and I kicked everyone’s ass. It gave me something to feel good about. From then on, I sort of just found happiness through hard work. When I was younger it was sailing and now it’s art. I enjoy the process. I enjoy being here 18 hours a day. I enjoy pushing to get it right.
The StoneScape group exhibit earlier this year was curated as “portrait work that unveils the identity of the artist as well as the subject.” Is that something that’s going on in your work, the revelation of your identity?
I think it’s portrait and about portrait, and definitely because I think that the thing about the new portrait is that the work’s just as much about the person taking it as it is about the subject.
It’s about including everything. When I was little I would look at a Peter Hujar book and then I would go take a Peter Hujar photograph. Then I’d look at a Robert Frank book and then go take a Robert Frank photograph. Eventually I ran out of people to take pictures like and it all started to become my own, but the one thing it taught me is that portrait and about portrait is an important idea. There’s not one portrait for me. A portrait of somebody is really in one of these auto sheets, you know, hundreds of pictures. The feeling of being with somebody. The warts. The bad pictures. It’s almost like I’m filming.
I try to do everything so that the artwork can’t be put in one compartment. I use every compartment so as to keep all the balls bouncing, to keep it really alive, really happening, really fun, a lot of energy, fun to look at. It’s by doing everything that that happens, not by doing one thing. My mind is like on a constant hamster wheel. Once it becomes one thing, I’ve hit a wall and now I have to go in the other direction.
There were three years where I felt like, “Why aren’t people paying attention to this?” [gestures at work hung around studio.]
How do you get people to pay attention to art?
I was a photo assistant for years, which enraged me, because I thought I should take the photographers’ cameras and smash them over their fucking heads. It disgusted me to go to work everyday. I was the lighting director on the Gap campaign last year. That was the last straw. [My wife,] Toby and I went to Amsterdam for Christmas holiday to see the Mike Kelley show at the stedelik. I went every day. Over and over again. I got back and I just got in touch with a couple people that had known my work and had bought some things in the past. Thea Westreich is one person who I got in touch with. I was like, “I can’t live like this anymore, I need to make this work, please help me, give me some advice, tell me what to do. I know that I should be an artist right now for a living.” And we talked about the work and she highlighted some things she liked about it and at that point I went from working to living off my credit card. Basically, I was throwing a Hail Mary. And that’s when I came up with the brillo box. I wanted to put all of the photos in one place. I knew they took up too much real estate on the wall, so I put them in a box. The box was a natural evolution from having no money and having to make books for five years. The only way I could look at my photos not on a computer screen was in a copyshop book from Staples. So that naturally pushed me into book-making. I have so much material. The only way to deal with it was to put it in a box.
It sounds like it’s important for you to have the work in an object form instead of on a computer.
Yeah, I was so tired of looking at a computer screen because I’d been looking at it only on a computer screen for so many years. I think it’s crazy how people treat books and photography. I wanted my audience to touch it . . . to feel it . . . to be able to experience it like I do in the studio everyday. Not preciously but rather roughly, aggressively, fun-ly. I mean the touching part is really important to me, fingerprints.
Do you have any self-portraiture?
Yeah, it’s a big naked picture of me. It’s in here. [Picks through brillo box]. Sometimes I hand off the camera to the people I’m photographing too. Wool took good portraits of me, Jacqueline Humphries and Charline Von Heyl did too.
It seems like you take a lot from Warhol, but you haven’t referenced him as an influence so I’m curious about your thoughts on him.
We just share some things in common because we took a lot of pictures of other artists. That’s it. Also, he’s really good at making pictures. I think about all this stuff and I think about painting and the reason why I wasn’t afraid of it is because it’s all just picture making to me and I think that Warhol is a really prime example of that. He was just really good at making pictures. In a way, that’s how I got people to look at my photographs. I realized that I had to make them into pictures that were imposing, they’re big and on linen or stacked tall in a huge box. They just have to have weight for me. Literally. Metaphorically. Everyway.
Another thing that’s been written about you is that your work captures introspection and has a capacity to capture interior life.
I guess that comes from people just being natural, letting their guard down because we’re just hanging out and it’s cool. I was more nervous than most of these people, especially in the beginning. We definitely collaborate. The most I say is if somebody was sitting in one chair for a long time, I’d be like, “Maybe we can go sit somewhere else.” I want the images to keep changing, to keep moving and I wanted to hang out for a long time so I realized early on that you sort of have to keep the situation stimulating somehow and that’s where the instinct kicks in. Everybody’s different, there’s so many different personalities, but that’s where it really kicks in. What’s this person comfortable with, what’s this person uncomfortable with. The reason why I love my work is because it’s all humanity.
How do relationships with other artists and subjects figure into your process?
In every way you can possibly imagine.
There’s talk about whether the role of artist is changing and what that role is.
It is changing.
To what?
I don’t know, but it is.
As an artist I’ve tried everything and it’s just gotten to the point where people have started to buy it so I can make more of it and that’s a great privilege to make art for my living. Especially being so young.
What do you do when you have a failure?
Throw it in the trash. Rip it up. If it’s not good enough for me, if I’m asking the question, for me, it’s not good enough, it’s a ‘maybe.’ If I don’t totally love it, I throw it out.
What are you working on now?
Heaps of new paintings on Linen over black and white pigment prints. Wool in Marfa junkyards, Laura Owens in her backyard in LA, Raymond Pettibon stripping his girlfriend in Zwirner’s Gallery, a Japanese Cow, a Wild Horse.
Finishing up the user manual for my new Brillo Box (#4) ‘Prisoner of Ismaul Volume 2’ . . . It’s like a giant puzzle or board game . . . you can make it into a Carl Andre . . . you can make it whatever you want. I’m just trying to make a manual that helps people figure out their own ways to play with it. It’s a toy. A giant sex toy for art collecting adults.
And another sort of felt record tower, I guess Brillo (#5). It’s the first printing of 6-17-10B the rest of my photos of Christopher Wool in Marfa on June 17, 2010. Stacked in two sections 9×6 double sided pages mounted on davey board. 22-inch tall tower.
When I first met the virtuoso pianist and composer Pete Drungle as a guest at zing Editor/Publisher Devon Dikeou’s loft (also the location of zing HQ and Devon Dikeou’s New York studio) I didn’t know his music or really anything about him. But at some point we started discussing the late, great Dan Asher and that sealed the deal. However, for whatever reason, I failed to look up his music. On another visit to New York from Paris, Pete nonchalantly invited me to a performance in a music studio in Times Square. Not really knowing what to expect, I showed up for the early performance in a small studio room with a small group in attendance—an intimate scenario. Pete greeted everyone formally, but warmly, thanking all for attending, sat at the piano, took a deep breath with his eyes closed, then began to play. My jaw dropped. The whole room was hypnotized. Pete performed an astounding 10-15 minute long improvisation, music that had a classical familiarity and beauty yet felt like an intense emotional journey. When the song was finished, Pete got up and bowed to smiling faces and applause. Then he sat back down, did a few more songs, including sections in which he was reaching inside the piano to pluck the strings in a very skilled manner, even playing the keys with one hand while reaching in and muting with the other. The performance ended with another humble thank you, and people began to file in for the next performance. It was then that I knew Pete was a special fellow. His DREAM SEQUENCES FOR SOLO PIANO on November 6 is part of Performa13.
Interview by Brandon Johnson
How did you begin with music?
I discovered that I could play by ear right away and began to improvise and also to write little tunes. I started playing the trumpet early as well, in concert and marching bands. At age 11 I got into synthesizers, sequencers, and recording studio technology and learned the basics of orchestration. During high school, I continued to play the trumpet, played keyboards and bass in rock bands, and also composed scores for school theatre plays. After that, I went to the University of North Texas and studied Music Composition, theory and orchestration, and private piano studies. I lived in Denton, Texas in the early ’90s, and it was a great environment for music at that time. There were so many great jam sessions happening all the time, it is kind of hard to describe how much musical activity was going on . . .
Your music is so classical, yet fresh and explorative. What have been some of your main influences?
I have loved listening to Ravel, Bach, Debussy, Stravinsky, Satie, Ligeti, Scarlatti, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Morton Feldman, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, George Crumb, Webern, Cage, Stockhausen, Takemitsu, to name a few.
Also, I grew up in America so listening to rock music was inevitable; Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Jeff Beck, Prince, Jane’s Addiction, etc.
In my late teens, I discovered Jazz—specifically the music of Ornette Coleman. The song “Endangered Species” off the album SONG X was the track that got through to me first. Also, Ornette’s playing on Howard Shore’s score to Naked Lunch was a big revelation for me. That score is a great convergence of composition and improvisation, with Ornette serving as the lead voice in concerto to Shore’s orchestra. The sound of it is seductive yet eerily haunting, and every moment of that music is alive.
I have had the good fortune to become friends with Ornette, and to have played music with him. He has been one of my mentors, and I have definitely been influenced by his music and his philosophies.
In my early twenties, I became obsessed with was Miles Davis. I was under the spell of Bitches Brew, Big Fun, Dark Magus, In a Silent Way, Jack Johnson, On the Corner, Live-Evil and Get Up With It. I drowned myself in this period of Miles’ music, learned how to play many parts of the compositions and solos, and studied the music of Miles’ alumni—Keith Jarrett, Jack DeJohnette, Wayne Shorter, Steve Grossman, John Scofield, etc. Miles was incredibly inspiring to me, and his music made all the hair on my body stand on end. Also, Miles had a great sense of style and he dressed really well.
. . . And John Coltrane—when I learned that John was practicing 12 hours per day, I began trying to do the same. John would work out of the Slonimsky Thesaurus of Scales and Modes, so I did that too (maybe I will get back to that . . .). For me, John’s two most striking features as a player were his overwhelming amount of soul (as evidenced on A Love Supreme, and basically everything he ever played . . .) and his ability to play pure melody with an incomparable tone and inflection (i.e. Naima, Central Park West, In a Sentimental Way (with Duke Ellington), etc). There was always a vast intelligence present in Coltrane’s sound, even in a single sustained note, and you always know it’s him.
Possibly the most important musical influence in my life has been the drummer/composer/bandleader Ronald Shannon Jackson. Sadly, Shannon (as he was called) passed away very recently, October 19, 2013, at age 73. It is a huge loss for music, because the man had more music to write. But Shannon’s influence is omnipresent, he was a great mentor and I am incredibly fortunate to have known him. I met Shannon when I was 23, and started to play in his band—The Decoding Society. Shannon turned me on to a universe of great ideas, his house was literally like a small museum with a great library of rare and subversive books on history, philosophy, music and the occult. There were things written all over the walls—ideas, dates, philosophies, names—but there was something written on his wall that I will never forget—the word NON-CATEGORICAL. Shannon taught me about the non-categorical in music, which is the essential ethos of Jazz without the clichés. Shannon did more to help me find my sound as a pianist than anyone or anything else, I owe him a huge debt for that. If my sound “seems classical yet explorative,” I would attribute much of that to Shannon. Shannon would not let me play in a “jazz” way when I played in his band. He would say, “Drungle, play classical . . .” meaning that he wanted me to play what was most authentic in myself. (Also, Shannon loved Classical music, and had biographies of composers like Paganini and Liszt laying around his house. He wanted “classical” elements to be present in his music.) Anyway, Shannon simply wouldn’t allow me to pick up “the black thing” in my playing, as so many other white musicians were (and are) doing. Although he didn’t mean it literally, when he would say “play classical” it would push me to improvise in ways that were authentic for me, and that was very satisfying; I remember that I started coming up with 2-handed “classical” runs, and many other things that have grown and mutated over the years. Since then, I have been working to develop the building blocks of a improvisational musical language that is unique to me, yet it was Shannon’s influence that put me directly onto that path.
Incidentally, Shannon was Ornette Coleman’s drummer (and student) in the 1970’s, and I met Ornette through Shannon. Shannon was also the only drummer to play with all three avant-jazz luminaries—Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman.
And it was Shannon who suggested that I play for 24 continuous hours . . .
You’ve related your piano playing to speaking a language. Yet your improvisations appear so pre-meditated. How are improvisation and composition related for you?
Regarding improvisation, I usually don’t have any idea what I am going to play before I begin. When I play, I try to let go of my thoughts as much as possible and become the music I am playing. Ornette said, “If you’re going to play music, don’t think about it!” My body, mind, and breath are in total service of the ideas that surface in my imagination, and I try to ride them like waves.
Improvisation IS composition, except that the process is vastly sped up; improvisation happens in the moment, in real time usually without preconception or editing. However, there is a great deal of interplay between composition and improvisation for me. I find that the more I improvise, the better I can compose; and the reverse is equally true, because composing a lot of music helps to create, among other things, an innate sense of structure and thematic development which is invaluable in improvisation. I love to compose as well as improvise, and in my solo piano concerts I try to smear the lines between composition and improvisation so that they become indistinguishable from each other.
Can you speak about the performative aspect of your music, which seems so crucial? And perhaps a few words about the 24-HOUR CONTINUOUS SOLO PIANO IMPROVISATION performance—what went into preparing for this and just the physical process of playing a piano this long?
I love to perform. I think playing in front of an audience often pulls things out of you that would not come otherwise. In fact, it is probably identical to a phenomenon that physicists study called ‘observer effect’. You cannot observe something without altering it, and when a group of people gather in a room and focus their attention on a performer, it alters him. If a performer is brave enough to “let go” in this environment, it can be an amazing experience for everyone.
The 24-HOUR CONTINUOS SOLO PIANO IMPROVISATION came about at the advice of my mentor, Ronald Shannon Jackson. He saw me engaging in a lot of self-destructive behavior and said, “Drungle—if you want to torture yourself, try playing the piano for 24 straight hours.” I completed the 24-hour improvisation three times in private before attempting it in public. I performed it at SculptureCenter in Long Island City (NYC), as part of Performa07. I didn’t have a hard time doing this long improvisation. I loved it—it was more like a love affair than an endurance test. The only real discomfort I experienced in the public performance occurred in the final hours of the piece. By the 22nd hour, my fingers were bleeding and I couldn’t feel my arms or hands—and that was when the larger crowd began to arrive—so on top of being in pain and physically exhausted, I felt like I had to play to the audience. I felt a lot of pressure in those final hours, but I pushed myself to stay in the music until the very end. You can hear the final 30 minutes of 24-HOUR CONTINUOUS SOLO PIANO IMPROVISATION, it is posted on my site here: http://petedrungle.com/Music
I am preparing to do this piece again in Paris in 2014.
You made a record with Rudolph Stingel. How did this collaboration come about?
I met Rudi through Marianne Vitale, who has been a close friend and collaborator for a decade. The vinyl record was Rudi’s idea, he had wanted to make one. Although I have played on many records and composed scores for many projects, I hadn’t yet made my own solo record and was really keen to do that—so we decided that I would make PETE DRUNGLE SOLO PIANO in Rudi’s studio in NYC. I wanted to have a unique piano sound for this record, so we rented a 9′ concert grand from Steinway Hall and installed it in the spray room of the studio. Rudi set up an amazing environment for me in the spray room; in addition to several of his gold series paintings on the walls, he actually installed the piano on top of one of his paintings from that series, I guess he liked to have the canvases slightly damaged. You can see an image of the spray room set-up on the opening page of my website—http://petedrungle.com, and you can hear my improvised “Suite #1” which was recorded there (it will play automatically).
PETE DRUNGLE SOLO PIANO only exists on vinyl, and is a very limited series.
If you are interested in acquiring one, contact me through my website.
I noticed you’ve also collaborated with Agathe Snow, who curated a project in the current issue of zingmagazine. Can you tell us about this collaboration?
I collaborated with Agathe and Marianne Vitale, making the music for their amazing show OKKO. It happened at White Columns in 2008. I hired the trombonist/composer/ Sun Ra-alumni Craig Harris to play duo with me. We improvised accompaniment to Agathe and Marianne’s performance (which is impossible for me to describe, but at one point Marianne was up on a table running a jackhammer), and we played a version of “I Wear My Sunglasses at Night” for the finale, at Agathe’s request.
You previously mentioned that you had played music in Paris with a drummer you’ve idolized for years. Could you tell this story?
I have been listening to a great drummer/composer from Cameroon named Brice Wassy since I was about 19 years old. I first heard him on the Jean-Luc Ponty record Tchkola, where Brice played, composed, and music directed the ensemble. I wore that record out! (actually it was a cassette). Some years later, I got a copy of Graham Haynes’ (son of drummer Roy Haynes) The Griot’s Footsteps, and that is a spectacular record. It showcases Graham’s amazing trumpet playing as well as Brice’s virtuoso drumming and music direction; the ensemble is comprised of several west African musicians that play astonishingly well.
Since I recently moved to Paris, I was able to find Brice through Graham Haynes—and I asked him to meet me in a studio to play. So we did that, and it was very exciting for me. I started to write some music with Brice in mind, and then asked my friend the legendary bass player Al Mac Dowell to play with this trio. We did a night at the Sunset/Sunside in Paris a few months ago. I will post a clip from this gig on my music page very soon.
What are some of your other dream projects?
I want to work with orchestra as much as possible.
I’m working on a chamber orchestra w/ piano project at the moment, which will be released in 2014. I honestly don’t think anyone has yet done what I am attempting to do with this record, but I don’t want to give away the surprise—so I’ll tell you about that later.
But to answer your question, my dream project is to compose and perform a piano concerto with full orchestra.
What can we expect at forthcoming performance for PERFORMA 13 next week?
I am doing a piece called DREAM SEQUENCES FOR SOLO PIANO, at Roulette on November 6. It is a solo piano concert accompanied by a video collage of dream sequences lifted from the films of Luis Buñuel. It is a collaboration with filmmaker Toby Rymkus, who researched Buñuel and edited the video. Roulette is a beautiful hall with a 9′ Steinway Grand, and I think it is the absolute perfect setting for this piece. I am very excited to be coming to New York to give this concert. Please come!
Marcel Dzama doesn’t like horror films, but in a Brooklyn studio peppered with animal masks and the odd serpent puppet, he is ever-ready for Halloween. You may have seen his costume—the bullheaded man in a polka-dotted toga dancing alongside other hotshots of the art world in Jay-Z’s performance art film, “Picasso Baby.” Underneath the mask is the man with a neat haircut and boyish grin known for the erotic cavalcades and cool anarchy rendered with childlike stylization in drawings as well as dioramas and films. When I ask him what he does when he faces an artistic block, he looks dumbfounded as if he’s never known such an experience. “You mean like what writers face?” he asks with a confused smile. Dzama has been making art as long as he can recall, lacking time rather than inspiration. The testimony to his voluminous body of art is Marcel Dzama: Sower of Discord, a monograph of his work from 1995 to present, which will be out November 5th from Abrams including three stories by Dave Eggers as well as a taxonomy and comparative essay by Bradley Bailey.
Dzama’s project in zingmagazine issue 23 titled “A Coming Insurrection” animates chess pieces into full-blown characters that cavort with men dressed in polka-dotted pajama-like garb and women wearing thigh highs and masks. As with other drawing series, “A Coming Insurrection” portrays an almost-narrative that begins with the penance of medieval femme fatale Jane Shore and moves through army-like processions of ballet dancers, sex parties, the violent execution of a royal, and anarchy in an art gallery before arriving at the grand finale of a Bosch-like apocalypse scene crowned by a fetus-headed woman descending from the clouds. Rich in references ranging from Marcel Duchamp to Federico García Lorca, random bits of personal significance, mythology, and profusions of art history, Dzama’s drawings are chic, lurid visual networks of history, culture, and imagination.
Interview by Rachel Cole Dalamangas
What are you going to be for Halloween?
A Picabia bull with the bullhead and I have this polka-dot cape that goes with it. There’s this painting that Picabia did of this dictator cow, but I added the weird cape, he just had a toga. I admire his work so I was trying to think of ideas for a new film and I invented this whole character that is based on that painting and now it’s a Halloween costume because I have the leftovers as a prop. It had an appearance in the Jay-Z video, Picasso Baby.
I’m interested in Marcel Duchamp’s influence on your work. How is your artistic practice related to his ideas on process?
He was just an obsession. I remember seeing his work at a really early age because of our first names being the same so it was a bit of an ego thing I guess. I remember picking up this art book and being too young to understand anything in it so I was blown away. It was a TIME magazine thing when they put out these art books. I think I had it as a library book. I remember the “Étant donnés.” Someone seeing that in elementary school for the first time, it was definitely a little bit of a naughty thing to see. It stayed with me and I didn’t understand what it was either because it wasn’t a painting. It’s a sculpture, but it looked so realistic. But I think I just thought everything was a painting back then too so I was like, what is this strange thing? Later on I got into Surrealism in high school and went back to Duchamp.
Regarding your own process, where do you get ideas?
Sometimes I’ll have an idea to do a film or something like that and then I’ll get focused on doing the film, do storyboards, drawings of costumes, and then after that usually there will be a show coming up and then I’ll start doing drawings loosely based on the film, and then sometimes vice versa, drawings that influence the film.
I just jot down weird sketchbook ideas. I read a lot of art books and get influenced by other artists and get inspired by films. Newspaper articles also influence a lot of things. It’s kind of everything. I almost feel like it’s some sort of therapy and getting out everything I’ve read from inside of me.
Earlier this year, The Afternoon Interviews featuring conversations with Marcel Duchamp and New Yorker journalist Calvin Tomkins were published. In The Afternoon Interviews, Duchamp discusses his fatigue with the role of the artist in the world and his concern about what the role of the artist would become. What do you think the role of artist is becoming?
There’s just so much information and it’s so easy to access now, I don’t think any one artist really can do what they used to. I don’t think any one artist can have that much influence on culture anymore. I find some artists give these little boosts to culture, but in a minor sort of way. There’s so many voices that everything is drowned out and you have to search for the ones you like.
What would you be doing if the art career hadn’t happened?
I have no idea what I would be doing. My back-up plan was that my grandfather has a farm in Saskatchewan and I was going to be a farmhand and I could just do art. It costs nothing to live there. I used to help my grandfather farm there and my uncle too. It’s super isolated. There are maybe 30 people in their town. I can deal with that though. They have good radio stations.
On several occasions you’ve described drawing as intimate.
I like the intimacy of it. I always find that painting is a grand statement whereas drawing is very personal and of that moment. There’s an immediacy of drawing also. If you’re working on something for a long time, it loses that moment of inspiration. A lot of times I’ll start with an automatic drawing and then by the end of it I’m organizing it to make a little bit of sense in my mind. There’s a creative spark to creating something brand new and if you don’t get it out within a few days, it disappears or you forget what it was.
In your work there’s an implication of narrative and you’ve worked with writers like Dave Eggers and just recently illustrated an English-language translation of the German novel Momo. Do you have an interest in narrative?
I would like to give a more clear narrative sometimes, but for some reason I do like having a mystery in the drawings. I like letting the viewer decide what happened before and what happens after. Sometimes if there’s too much narrative I feel like I’m just telling the viewer the entire story and then that’s it.
And that seems to relate to your interest in history. When I look at a large body of your work, it looks a bit like a history book. Where does that come from?
When I was growing up, my dad was obsessed with World War II documentaries and books on Vikings, any war-related history he found interesting so I was introduced to it at a really early age. I probably inherited whatever gene he has that is interested in history. At probably too young of an age I watched some of those documentaries with him, especially that World War II stuff with concentration camps and just not understanding it all and being really horrified and disturbed by it.
Besides the art books, do you read often?
Oh yeah. Hardly any fiction, but usually biographies or history and I read a lot of poetry, especially Lorca. I almost relate the drawings to poems in some ways because they’re kind of loose-ended usually.
There are also a lot of apocalyptic events in your drawings. Does that relate to what you were saying about reading history and the newspaper?
Yeah, probably. It seems like in the last few years the whole entertainment industry and maybe newspapers especially have become obsessed with the apocalypse happening and it’s a good subject matter for drawing. It’s kind of grandiose. Also, my drawings have been cluttered with characters and an apocalypse is a good reason to have clutter and chaos everywhere and to give it some form of a story.
There are a lot of apocalypse narratives in the news right now with war and the environment. There’s a lot of chatter right now about what’s going to happen to the world. Do you think humans are going to do themselves in?
Oh yeah, for sure. The technology keeps getting more and more advanced and all it would take is maybe another hundred years and some teenager will be able to blow up the entire world.
You think we have one hundred years left?
Maybe a little more than that.
Or less!
Maybe something weird will happen and we’ll have a normal brain function fixer. It just takes one real disturbed person or a way of viewing the world. I’m not sure. I think we’re kind of doomed. Hopefully we have more than one hundred years.
Earlier in your practice, you worked collaboratively with other artists. Can you tell me about that transition from collaboration to working alone?
I always worked alone, but I would get together on Wednesdays or Sundays and collaborate with The Royal Art Lodge. I did that for five years maybe. We were all socially awkward artists so it was kind of our way of going out for drinks. I find that I still kind of collaborate with other people, but I usually don’t put that work out there. I just go over to a friend’s place and we’ll draw together. I did a lot of drawings with Maurice Sendak and Spike Jonze, but we were just trying to shock each other. I think that inspired a lot of more perverse drawings in my own work because it was a lot of fun trying to shock each other. I used to draw with my wife as well. Actually our first date was going to a Spike Jonze film, Being John Malkovich.
An L.A. Times critic once described the figures in your work as “humanoids run amok.” There is a homogeny in your work in which humans are a bit animal-like and animals are a bit human-like.
In the earlier work there were these hybrids and later on I defined them more as costumes. I like the whole idea of the mask and the mask represents what the creature’s purpose in the drawing is.
What in your mind is underneath the costume?
Usually a female character. Except for the polka-dotted men – I just see them as background choreography that’s going on for the main subject matter in the drawing, almost like back-up dancers.
Now that I think about it, there are a lot of female protagonists in your work.
I usually prefer the field of female to be in the power position. I always disliked any kind of sexist artwork or anything like that. It’s been around forever so it’s good not to have it. People that I look up to are usually strong women like my wife and a lot of my friends are strong women.
You’ve said that you’re not interested in making art with new technology or with computers. We’re living in a technological revolution in which human lifespan will greatly increase possibly to immortality and space travel will become commercial, for example. How do you think this technological leap will change how humans interact with and process art?
I imagine that there will probably always be a certain amount of people that will be fed-up with an overflow of technology and will always come back to the intimacy – I keep saying intimacy – of paper or of holding a book or a magazine like zing. There will always be that, I imagine. Like the way that vinyl has had a comeback, for example.
Well if we’re only here for another hundred years . . .
Yeah, it won’t matter that much!
I agree that culturally, there will always be those groups of people that come back to the tangible world and to objects.
Maybe they’ll be the ones that survive. They’ll be in caves and they’ll have gas lamps. They’ll survive because they won’t rely on the technology so much. And they won’t have some chip in their heads that when the power goes out their brains shut down.
There’s hope then, right?
Yeah, exactly.
In your zing 23 project “A Coming Insurrection,” you address a lot of the ideas we’ve talked about, the apocalypse and this naughty S&M stuff and this sense of anarchy. How does art relate to this idea of insurrection?
I was obsessed with the hundredth anniversary of the Armory Show having such an impact and during this series of work I was wishing art could do that again. It’s kind of the nostalgia of it in these drawings.
In “The Grand presentiments of what must come” I was celebrating the birth of my child, so in the center at the top there’s the fetus-headed character coming out of some sort of mythological god. It’s kind of apocalyptic, but it’s also a new beginning.
“The penance of Jane Shore” is sort of the catalyst for the whole series starting. I was working on the film A Game of Chess at the time and was designing the costumes and was working those into the drawings. I also wrote down all the moves from a famous chess game Marcel Duchamp played with someone. Oskar Schlemmer and the costumes that he designed for his ballet were also a big influence.
A monograph of your work from 1995-present is coming out this month from Abrams. How did it feel to look back through almost twenty years of work?
It’s strange to go through it all especially when I was being interviewed by Bradley Bailey because my memory is disappearing so it’s good to get it down now. There’s some really early work from the middle of art school. It was hard to find those. I was also at my parents’ place going through old boxes and trying to find anything that was in there so there’s a few drawings from then too. I like some of it, some of it I don’t. That’s alright. It would be sad if I peaked back then.
Travis Egedy, also known as Pictureplane, is a musician and visual artist who currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico, Egedy set out on a journey of artistic development and experimental living in Denver, Colorado before making his move to the East Coast. His paintings, drawings, photography, and mixed/digital media works have been exhibited in galleries in Denver, New York, and Europe. Egedy has toured throughout Europe and the U.S. performing his unique electronic concoctions of dreamy trance, darkwave, synthpop, and industrial rhythms as Pictureplane. I was able to score a brief Q&A with the artist before he jetted off to a distant land across the Atlantic earlier this summer.
Interview by Hayley Richardson
You’re originally from Santa Fe, which is where I hail from as well—I am pretty sure I went to high school with your brother. Santa Fe is a weird place to be a teen and develop an identity. Tell me a little bit about what it was like for you to grow up there—did the small desert town and its history, environment, and/or population have a significant impact on your present style (in art, music, fashion, or otherwise)?
I have been really fortunate in that I have been able to travel quite a lot, all over the world, and Santa Fe, New Mexico is really one of the most interesting, unique and beautiful places I have even been to. And it just happens to be where I grew up. Santa Fe has been a huge influence on me my whole life. The culture, history and southwestern aesthetics where a huge part of my lifestyle while living there as a kid and into high school. It’s just a very magical place that I think is really sacred, no place is like it. I feel like I am really lucky to be from there because it is just so different than how most Americans grow up, in suburbia or the inner city or some sort of really generic and ugly place. I don’t know if Santa Fe is still an influence in my art, but it is a huge part of who I am today and I hold it dear to my heart. I always say the southwest is my spiritual homeland.
I am interested in how an artist’s living environment influences their work. Tell me a little bit about your creative development and how it has influenced your moves from New Mexico to Colorado, and then New York.
I would say one of my biggest influences on my creative development was living at Rhinoceropolis in Denver for 6 years. Rhinoceropolis is a warehouse in north Denver that was just a space of pure artistic freedom and expression. Anything was accepted there and I was organizing wild and weird events there for years. It was a large social experiment of living outside of any sort of imposed boundaries within society. It was a beautiful time in my life and, like Santa Fe, made me into the artist I am today. Most of what I do as an artist and as a musician is informed by Rhinoceropolis places like it and also the people who are involved in communities that surround those creative spaces.
I’ve experienced Rhinoceropolis on a couple of occasions and it definitely carries a heavy experimental, DIY energy—one that can be confusing or even intimidating to someone unfamiliar with that type of lifestyle or aesthetic. Your photographs exhibited at Gildar Gallery seem to capture that type of ideal, with images that are gritty and sometimes dangerous, but that also express feelings of camaraderie and revelry of life. Your aesthetic appears strongly linked to your lifestyle . . .
Yes. A lot of what I do and who I am as an artist is informed by living in an environment like Rhinoceropolis and surrounded by the type of people that share that same lifestyle. The photographs are just documenting this environment and choice to live outside of societal norms.
The “Real is a Feeling” group exhibition at Gildar was named after one of your songs. The song is interesting because it is catchy and upbeat like a pop song, but it still sounds haunting and the lyrics are pretty obscure. The title and the music seem open to the listener’s own interpretations. And I think it’s cool that the title has been used to incorporate the visual as well as the auditory. Can you share more about the meaning of this song?
I guess that the meaning of that song is really just intuitively knowing in your heart what feels real. Just being in touch with yourself.
You studied painting at RMCAD. How you do you balance or incorporate aspects of your formal education with your DIY style?
I was educated just as much by living inside of Rhinoceropolis as I was in 5 years of “formal education” and it wasn’t anywhere near as expensive.
You’re on the road a lot performing, and you were recently on tour opening for Crystal Castles. You’ve performed at venues that range from historic theaters to dive bars and warehouses. What is life like on the road? Any interesting stories you want to share?
I feel really comfortable traveling. It is what I do for a living. I’ve been able to gain knowledge from it. I just feel really fortunate. I don’t know any crazy stories off the top of my head. There are too many. It’s all crazy.
In your show “Reality Engineering” (Fitness Center for Arts and Tactics, Brooklyn; Make Up Gallery/BAZZART, Kosice, Slovakia) you pose a powerful question: “Who creates our reality?” The work you created features a bold combination of Internet stock pictures, corporate logos, and pop culture imagery with drawings, painting, and photographs of your own creation. “Reality” is portrayed as a mixture of the authentic with the manufactured. After creating and exhibiting this body of work, do you feel any closer to answering that question of who creates reality?
Well, I don’t think there is any one answer to that question, because everyone’s “reality” is quite different I think. The show is really about being able to create your own reality rather than let it be left up to outside forces to define who you are.
To be continued . . .
Original street-artist, vet of the Lower East Side scene when it was still the scene, and Instagram-extraordinaire, Kenny Scharf is picking through a tabletop full of Brooklyn detritus as if he’s a foodie at a late-night buffet. He’s got all these knickknacks including baggies of bright plastic jewels and a turquoise plastic cup dispenser that he’s going to make into what he calls “space vomit” (and who knows what else). In 2013, Scharf has painted a mural for the pediatric and adolescent psychiatric ward of Kings County Hospital, collaborated a fashion show during New York Fashion Week, hosted a Cosmic Cavern party, been arrested mid-tag in Bushwick, and executed a spat of free paintings on cars.
On a warm Thursday September night, in a far corner of his otherwise dim home/studio in Williamsburg, bright lights shine down onto a painted canvas adhered with junk from Metropolitan Avenue. He drops colorless bits of plastic into wet gesso while talking about how much he dislikes the influence of market on art (and if there’s anything to pin on the guy—he’s a workhorse example of not selling out even if his work sells), the difference between Pop and Surrealism, what the Lower East Side was like back in the day, and what’s cool now.
Interview by Rachel Cole Dalamangas
How do you choose the junk that goes into your work?
Oh, it chooses me. I collect it and then I save it and then one day it comes in handy. It’s crazy. I mean look, look at all this crap. These are jewels, but there are also these little pieces of plastic. I found this in the street, Solo Cup. Right here on Metropolitan Avenue. That’s where I find most of my good stuff.
You just completed a mural at Kings County Hospital. How did the children react to your art?
They were so excited. It’s an institution so it couldn’t be more depressing and you want kids to heal. I felt really good that I was able to do that in that environment because it is really bleak and it’s really needed and it stands out. You can see [the mural] a mile a way, like there’s a sign of life in the hospital. It shows the kids that someone cares because it was done for them and no one else sees it because it’s in a children’s psychiatric ward.
You coined the term “Pop-Surrealism” and in another interview with I Think You’re Swell you described how the cartoons that make it into your work are coming out of your sub-conscious in a stream of thought rather than being intentionally chosen, so I’m curious what you think about contemporary art that’s appropriative.
There’s a fine line between appropriation and just taking something. The fact that the imagery alludes to or has come from common, popular imagery isn’t necessarily coming from the same place as Pop art. I’m a Surrealist purely, and information in my brain has Pop in it and that is just situational because of how I grew up and that’s a really different way of going about using Pop imagery.
We’re all always so inundated by Pop imagery.
Yes, we are. More and more and more. It’s insane. It’s funny because I’ve been using these images from Hanna Barbera and people ask me all the time, “Does Hanna Barbera ever go after you?” and I’m like I almost wish they would. I didn’t ask to be bombarded with this imagery so I’m just responding to what has been thrown at me and regurgitating it. I’m the television generation so the impact of TV was similar maybe to what the Internet has done to the kids today. It’s a similar kind of thing with the screen.
Done with working on “space vomit” while the gesso dries, Scharf suggests we go on his roof because he’s seen the moon earlier that evening and it’s huge and not to be missed he says. A large gray cat—his daughter’s—follows us up to the unlit, unremarkable roof where the sky is purple-gray and the harvest moon sliver by sliver rises above a neighboring building.
Ever since you started out, you’ve run around with some mind blowers, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat in particular.
I met Jean-Michel and Keith within my first month of arrival [to New York] and they both became really important, inspiring people in my life.
The friendships were intense?
Yes, they were very intense. Keith and I always got along real well, and Jean-Michel and I had kind of a tumultuous relationship of intensity. They’ve been gone for a long time. They’ve been gone for what, 25 years already, or more. Oh my god, it’s crazy how many years they’ve been gone and how they’re still so important and part of my whole dialogue.
How does that impact your art?
When Jean-Michel died I was still in my 20s. When Keith died I was 30. That was very profound to be a 30-year old survivor. When you’re younger, you expect to lose all these people when you’re old so that was profound in so many ways. They were not only my art friends, they were my cohorts. I kind of felt very lost. It was a really strange feeling back then to be the survivor. Now we’re talking over 25 years later, it serves me in a different way. I feel like I’m continuing a lot of the spirit and philosophy that we had all believed in.
I know you’ve spoken about it before, but could you share some of that philosophy with me now?
It’s an anti-elitist philosophy. I don’t want art to be an elitist thing that only certain people can understand what I’m doing. I know that there’s an elitist audience and I went to art school and I studied art history and I’m aware of that and it’s important to me to be part of that dialogue, but at the same time, I’m also aware of so many people who don’t know about that. It’s important to me to reach out to everyone and offer something for all different audiences, whether it be the art elitist or the art-uninitiated person on the street.
There is also a language of beauty in your work too.
I get inspired by things that I find beautiful and I would think that maybe I could add to the notion of beauty. Not always, but often. I want to express beauty and embrace it.
On that note, I think it’s important to try to discuss what beauty is.
Notions of beauty are so different. There’s the notion of beauty that society says is beautiful and then there are things that a lot of people would find ugly that I find beautiful. For example, what I’m doing now with the space vomit. It’s crap, it’s garbage. I find beauty in things that aren’t necessarily what people would think of as beautiful. I like to find it and bring it out and celebrate the beauty in ugly. If you can get other people to see what you can’t photograph because it’s in your mind, that’s pretty cool and I think Surrealism can definitely do that.
How has New York changed since you arrived?
When I first arrived, it was punk rock. It was a big free for all. It was a very raw place. Here we are sitting in east Williamsburg. Back then we wouldn’t be sitting in east Williamsburg right now. No one would ever want to go here. Where we all lived on the Lower East Side was bombed out enough. I’m sure over here must have been really funky back then. I can’t imagine how funky it was. It was a completely different world. I can’t think of a better place to spawn amazing things.
Why is it that intense landscapes have that impact on art do you think?
Depression, economic depression. A lot of it has to do with the fact that it’s not based on any kind of market. Maybe there was a market, but not so far as we were concerned and what we were doing, and that’s very liberating when you’re not like, “Oh I hope it sells,” or “I hope this collector likes it.” It was the farthest thing anyone ever thought about.
You could find a weird abandoned floor in some building somewhere and claim it as your studio. The opportunity to make things without money—it’s still there actually. That’s why I use all that trash and junk in my work, it’s right there and it’s interesting to me. It has a life, it has a history, it has a meaning beyond what the object is. It has connotations of being garbage. There are so many levels to me about garbage that I find really interesting.
How has your art responded to this change in the landscape?
When I started making art out of trash in the early ’70s, I was using old radios and ’50s refuse. Now I’m finding keyboards and computer pieces and cellphones, so just the actual electronics themselves have changed over the years.
Oh—I just saw a shooting star. It looked so close. (Points to the sky). In the city! It was really bright. It went straight down and then it stopped.
You do have this fascination with space too. Where does that come from?
That comes from my childhood. I was born the year the Space Age started. The first satellite, Sputnik, Russia, took off 1957 and burned up 1958, the year I was born. So my childhood, everything outer space was the huge thing. I was always and still am all for the fantasy of space and what space represents to me is the ultimate spirituality. What is beyond the universe makes you seem very small and it makes your problems and everything we are so concerned about materialistically seem insignificant. That’s the kind of thing that turns me on.
Regarding this “bigger awareness” you mentioned, do you have a spirituality that is being exercised in the creative process?
Totally. My spontaneity in a way is my spirituality because I’m having faith in something outside of myself that will guide me and take me somewhere that I don’t even know. So every single time I’m faced with a big white wall and I’m like, “Here I go,” I’m putting faith out there that something outside of myself is going to come to me and I’m going to bring it out. Every time it’s that exercise in faith that something will get me to that special place. All you are is the facilitator. There’s something big out there and you let it enter you and then you let it out, it comes out your hand, and there it is.
Speaking of technology and the mortal condition, Google just announced that it’s going to try to solve mortality. Which is interesting because the question of class arises and who could afford the benefits of such technology.
Why would you want that? How would you know it’s not better when you’re not living? Maybe you’re just running around out there in outer space. Just because it’s unknown doesn’t mean it’s not 100 billion times better.
You’ve been called an arbiter of cool. So what’s cool now?
When I see kids doing stuff now and I think, “These kids are really cool,” the attitude and their ideas of success are not the traditional ideas of success, like the idea that in order to be successful you have money and this and that and your car and your house and you’re obtaining all these things. I think it’s cool when you can just say, “I’m going to do great stuff, I’m going to create, I want to help, I want to add.”
You know what’s cool? Being conscious. So many people just live and they’re not even aware that they’re part of some whole system designed by people’s pockets. I’m not saying I’m Mr. Perfect and I’m above it because I take airplanes and I go to the store and buy food that was brought in a truck and has packaging on it. It’s not like I’m moving some place off-grid to grow my own food, which is an alternative and I have thought about that before, but I also want to keep my foot a little in this Pop—popular world—so I’m part of it.