Michael Anthony García was born in El Paso, Texas, but has lived all over the state through the years. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art from Austin College in Sherman, TX in 1996 where became an Adjunct Art Faculty member after graduation. His work has been seen throughout Texas, Mexico and Brooklyn, New York and although he has explored a variety of media, the bulk of his constructions are true to the traditions of found-object sculpture, performance art and installations. Most notably he has presented work at Mexic-Arte Museum, the Lawndale and in the 2011 Texas Biennial. He now lives and teaches in Austin, TX and is a collaborating founder of Los Outsiders, a creative and curatorial collective that has organized exhibitions in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, Houston and Austin, TX. He was a recipient of the 2012 Austin Critics Table Award for best group show curation as well as being selected as the 2012 Austin Visual Arts Association‘s (AVAA) Artist of the Year, 3D.
Interview by Josh T Franco
I’m glad we finally met. Seems like our worlds circled one another for a few years. To business: you’re a busy guy. This summer, you curated the 18th annual Young Latino Artists (YLA) Exhibition at Mexic-Arte Museum in Austin, had work up at the People’s Gallery (aka Austin City Hall), and had a solo show at Red Space, also in Austin. Are you exhausted? Ready to get back to teaching in the Fall? And pre-kindergarteners no less . . .
The summer took off like a rocket for me and taking on projects back to back the way I did, was very exhausting, but since then I have had the chance to relax and recharge my batteries. This summer I had the pleasure of living in an art world mirage by curating and creating/exhibiting my own work, but now I have to refocus myself on my day job in education. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a bit of a let down, a postpARTum dip, if you will, but these things always come in cycles so I have learned to adapt.
We started at Mexic-Arte, walking piece by piece through the show. Off the bat, we got the question of identity out of the way, putting it very much in the way. The YLA has a different curator every year, and I assume the first question this person must ask herself is: What do I consider Latino/a? Yours is perhaps the most international exhibition to date. How did this end up being the case? (after some discussion with next year’s curators, I want to be a bit chismoso and say, they are going in a very different direction!)
In regard to your question about what constitutes Latino Art for me; in organizing the YLA, I was very conscious of what the public expected of it, and that wasn’t necessarily the direction I wanted to go. Whereas many would be quick to assume that Latino Art has to be graphic in some way or somehow safe or traditional, I specifically wanted to go in the other direction. Mind you, my elimination of most of those elements is not a critique of those ideas, rather an exploration of “what else is out there.” I am more than open to exploring those elements in future curatorial endeavors, but for this opportunity I wanted to turn expectation on its head. As I myself work in performance, installation and found- object sculpture, I wanted the focus on those mediums as a way of putting my stamp on this year’s iteration of YLA. I hope it also helped to challenge the public’s preconceived notions of what is expected in an institution like Mexic-Arte Museum.
You ask about the international nature of my YLA and I think it went in that direction because of my personal experiences with Latino Art abroad. As I have traveled extensively through Mexico over the years, I have made many connections and life-long friendships. These experiences have opened me up to art communities and individuals that reshaped my own expectations of Latino Art. And, it is through those friendships that I first approached the idea of making YLA more international. I started exploring the friendships I have made in Mexico and began reaching out to art world academia in South America to bring a broader perspective to the exhibition. In fact, one of the most rewarding aspects of the curatorial process for me has been connecting with fellow creatives either through Skype, email or Facebook as I assembled the group of artists in the exhibition. The artwork in the museum eventually comes down, but the friendships and conversations continue regardless of where we all live. Gotta love the internet for that!
One tension of your YLA was the co-presence of abstraction and affect. So much abstraction is significant in this particular exhibition, as past works often narrated issues of ethnicity, borders, and immigration. But the warmth of affect still pervaded. Sometimes, they co-exist in one piece, such as Eureka by Daniel Adame (though accident has to be discussed here as well). This tension is demonstrated too by the stand-off between, say, Ricardo Paniagua’s Unknown Source and [TITLE?] by Nelda Ramos and Javier Vanegas. The former behaves like interactive (for a studio assistant or privileged viewer), re-arrangeable logos. Logos with no corporate references. Eye candy. The latter video piece was difficult to watch for all it’s saccharine crooning and indulgent editing of young love. But, if I remember correctly, I made it through the whole damn thing!
As a viewer, you picked up on a different tension than the one that was more evident to me. Coming at this exhibition from the route of the curatorial process, I found the tension behind the creation of the work to be the most palpable. This is not necessarily experienced by the public, as they were not privy to the behind the scenes process, but by challenging the artists to work collaborate on new pieces as I did, there were huge swaths of time during which I didn’t know what the resulting exhibition would look like. The unknown really amped up the energy from my perspective! However, I think the tension really comes from the resulting artwork being physical manifestations of the artists’ collaborative experiences and having all those relationships and conversations playing out in one space. Again, it’s not necessarily something visitors to the museum can readily pick up on, but it’s there nonetheless.
I was struck by the quietness of the installation at Red Space following the rowdy exhibition we left behind. Your emphasis on site-specificity in conversation comes to mind. Here in this bedroom-cum-gallery, the bedroom is what is foregrounded. But not without artfulness. Beyond the selection of plaid fabrics—that pattern that moms inevitably get their sons as they send them off freshman year—how did you achieve this? Was it an aim at all?
I’m glad you picked up on how important the spaces themselves ended up being in my projects. I have always been interested in exploring site-specificity with my work, and it just so happened that it naturally flowed through in many of my creative endeavors this year. Over at Austin City Hall, the idea behind my piece, El Pórtico, had been swimming in my head for a while, but when I was exploring the building for an area to install, the stairwell space leading from the first to second floor jumped out as the only space that fit the idea of the work itself. It is a nether-space, perfect for a piece about an otherworldly portal straddling a buttoned-down reality and an escapist-unknown-plane. And, in the YLA exhibition, because discussion about the museum’s physical building has been a heated topic as of late, I was compelled to layout the work in a way that brought more attention to the architecture itself. But, it was with the installation I developed for Red Space, that the room where I installed was just so pregnant with it’s own identity, that I had to create something around that identity itself. As the space is traditionally used as an apartment bedroom, I had to talk about what happens in bedrooms and navigate the fact that there is a window in the middle of the far wall. It became a masculine (hence the plaid) boudoir. It became an installation about sexuality, attraction and exploration. Also, as a large portion of my work references the body through the use of clothing, I wanted to clothe the room itself in a larger than life “outfit” that captured both masculine and feminine traits. It’s at once a private and intimate space and a stage on which one is expected to perform.
I was taken with the precarious wooden constructions throughout. They’re not furniture, but not exactly sculpture. They are structural support, but so exposed and undone?
In that installation, the use of raw wood seemed a natural choice for some reason. As the piece itself is supposed to be a machine, albeit a useless machine that does not serve it’s purpose, I wanted a material that spoke to the notion of sturdiness but not permanence. Wood is a common material and much in the way birds build their nests with sticks, twigs or even trash they find, the wood is a readily available, familiar and not very far removed from it’s natural state.
Finally, I want to think about a quiet signature of yours: red bows. (Did you know it was a signature?) They are present at Red Space, tied non-functionally—but not exactly decoratively—at the corners of the wooden frames. They are present on the work at City Hall as well. One Chicano to another, I can’t help recall Amalia Mesa-Bains’s description of rasquachismo: “Aesthetic expression comes from discards, fragments, even recycled everyday materials such as tires, broken plates, plastic containers recombined with elaborate and bold display . . . and even embellishment of the car. The capacity to hold life together with bits of string, old coffee cans, and broken mirrors in a dazzling gesture of aesthetic bravado is at the heart of rasquachismo.” I wonder if the red bows are your rasquache bits of string.
As far as the “rasquache” ribbons are concerned, I began using red bows a few years back as the final phase of installing my work. It adds a delicate final step that makes the process feel complete. The idea that the work is tentatively held together by these precarious red flourishes appeals to me, because many of the ideas and concepts in my work exist in a similar intangible state. Undo the right ribbon and it just might cease to exist. And, in liu of “rasquache”, I would call them a “Mexicanada” -fixing something in a humorous, but not necessarily sensible, yet quintessentially Mexican way. They are used in the same vein as a mariachi decorates a “masculine” song with “feminine” gritos.
There is a palpable intimacy to the phantasmic and fantastical photographs of Dutch artist, Sebastiaan Bremer, who has been working out of NYC since 1992, exhibiting internationally at such venues as Hales Gallery, Galerie Barbara Thumm, and PS1 MoMA to name a handful. The multimedia works present rich visual palimpsests wherein Bremer draws appropriated images, private symbols, and expressive patterns directly onto photographs. To hear him describe the intricate process of finding a photo (often stashed away in his personal collection for years) and “caressing” it with the X-ACTO knife, is akin to listening to a surgeon recite the details of an operation, and if a surgeon’s science is the body, then Bremer’s craft is a psychological study in how the mind processes art. His awareness of how a viewer’s eye surveys an exhibition space and sweeps across a photograph and works at detail is precise as well as exhaustive. This is perhaps why these photographs—never staged or intentional—trigger a sense of the real becoming realer (which is a very welcome impression in a hi-tech, data-driven world). Of many artists I’ve talked to, Bremer is the most obsessed with the dexterity of the eye.
His studio in Williamsburg is nominal: a big empty table and chair. A couch below a shelf. On the opposing wall an enlarged, severe photograph of crop rows in Brazil, which he will tell me is from the early part of the 20th century.
Interview by Rachel Cole Dalamangas
What are you currently working on?
I have just finished the last works I’m creating for a show for the Edwynn Houk Gallery here in New York. I’ve used other people’s work before, found photographs or in some rare cases pictures that I really needed to use. But this time I took this a bit further. I discovered other, older artists that had intervened on the surface of the photograph in different ways. Brassaï really cut and scratched into some of his negatives. So I decided to work with parts of this imagery, but then combined it with other works that seemed related. I made collages, really quickly and partly chance based, in Photoshop, which I would normally never do, and made marks, cutting into the surface of the photograph with a knife. So I started making these collages and cutting into them, and these became new alloys. Part of it is reflecting on my practice. “What am I doing, where am I going?” I’ve been making art with photography for about 15, 20 years, and I got to a certain point where I am able to reflect a bit more objectively.
What is your interest in Brassaï specifically?
He was a photographer who hung out with a lot of painters in Paris, like Picasso, Matisse, and everybody else in Paris it seems, and he photographed their studios among other things. He’d take pictures of the sculptures by Picasso as documentation on commission, but then sometimes he would leave photo negatives behind in the studio, and Picasso started scratching and drawing on top of those negatives, bridging the two practices, and then Brassaï got inspired to do the same thing on his own work.
There have always been boundaries between the different arts. Photography was definitely the newer and lesser cousin of painting. Brassaï was able to bring it to another level, and play with the medium. Man Ray is another of course. By now, photography is entirely integrated in artistic practice all over, but there’s still kind of a separation in a sense . . . I think it’s changing, and this upcoming show is a comment on the history of that. I decided if I’m going to go steal from these people, I should steal from the best, (like Pablo said) so I’m using a little bit of Picasso on top, without holding back, just trying to collage something completely new out of their work, a little bit like Frankenstein.
The Picassos are what is etched onto the photograph?
Yeah, sometimes, or I took a photograph with my iPhone of an image in a catalogue and used that. It’s hard to tell by now what is what, even for me. There are works where there are five images or more images layered on top of each other. They turn into something else, they turn on each other almost, all these spirits crowded together in one image suddenly, creating a new and in some cases abstracted composition. It feels a bit Shamanistic.
I didn’t blur the transitions and edges, I used them as part of the composition. In some places too, you can see the different processes used in the parts that make up the collages, in some parts clearly a digital photograph, in some parts the Ben-Day dots of printing. I think when you see it, you can smell where it comes from.
How do you do the etching?
Just with a small X-ACTO knife. I just draw basically with a knife to cut into the surface of the emulsion.
And you take some of your own photos, but some of them are found.
I usually take my own photographs, but in this particular series it’s almost all other people’s photographs. Normally I work photographs from my family or pictures that I took myself. It’s all over the place. Like, this is a picture of a coffee plantation from 1900 in the north of Brazil (points to large photo of rows of crops) and a friend found a glass slide of it in a yard sale. I don’t know what it is going to be yet, I have worked on other slides like this, but that was a few years ago. This image just looks so strangely modern because of all the rigid lines and the empty space, but it’s really from a long time ago.
How did you come to photography?
My relationship to the arts is kind of funny. I never really had any formal training. I was always drawing and was a comic book fanatic and ended up working in a comic book store. They figured they should pay me since I practically never left the store. When I was finished with high school, I decided that the next step was to go and paint, it seemed like the logical next step.
Growing up I spent a lot of time at home just looking at photo albums over and over again. I have this particular relationship to the object, the photograph.
When I started painting, I started using the passport photo booth in the train station as a place to take a picture of myself or whatever I wanted to paint, and I would use that picture as a sketch or study. I would square it up and use them as a template for my painting. A lot of this practice is boring and stifling—you’re copying from a photograph and making a painting and there’s a whole problem in the transition between the two states. And it shows, you can see it at a glance when someone works this way. Projection is even worse I feel. Franz Gertsch found an interesting way through that, but few others do, in my opinion. It took me many turns and eventually I started working straight on the photograph. I realized it was the way for me go because you get whatever is underneath as the battery that’s charging what you’re doing. The mechanical kind of boring part of painting that’s just copying, I did away with.
My first impression of your work, what I found so striking about it, is that it’s just so unabashedly beautiful. A lot of art right now is more antagonistic and perhaps even anti-beautiful. I like that art too, but I’m curious about your regard for beauty.
I think perhaps that has to do with how my relationship with art started: comic books. There the art is fundamentally a language and seduction is part of this, it draws you in.
I guess that’s become part of my nature, in a sense, to automatically feel an affinity with art that doesn’t shy away from beauty. For example, I really like the paintings of Ingres. I don’t think if something’s beautiful that that immediately makes it superficial or silly. It’s my inclination to work that way and it’s my way to relate with the subject matter in a tender way, to bring certain things out. If you have something that is aesthetically appealing, you can hold people’s attention in a certain way and then you can suck them in, and then a communication can start. I never had a fear of doing that. It’s not like I was trying to make pretty pictures, but I guess just the way that I related to what I was making and the subject matter that I was dealing with. With my drawing I was almost caressing the images underneath, in the beginning especially with these undulating lines that were just squeezing themselves between the emulsion of the photographs. It is just part of language.
But I like the more antagonistic art too—don’t get me wrong. I just find myself doing what I do, and I don’t feel I should run away from that.
It’s interesting too I think in terms of how that process deals with gaze. There’s the photograph, the initial image, but then there’s this weird work of the eye that’s happening in the etching.
Exactly, it’s almost a registration of me, especially in the first works on photographs, of the process of looking at the image and my direct response to it.
It was partly subliminal and not really calculated. A ‘flow of consciousness’ kind of work and it’s a registration of how my eye goes, and I think in some lucky situations, the viewer can have that same experience, as if you’re seeing through somebody else’s eye.
After making works that had these allover approaches, my work became larger and I was perhaps more confident. I wanted to work on a different scale in order to open the work up more, rather than have this small picture that you’re gazing at. I started to work at a more painterly scale. Whereas originally the drawing was a net, a scrim that you would see through, later I started consolidating the drawing more into certain areas of the photograph, making objects that seemed to stand into the picture plane of the underlying photograph. So I would draw, for instance, a goose or something on the right bottom and try to make it voluminous and three-dimensional, and try not to have this web where you have figures hidden, but I would create more solid objects. That changed the work a little bit, but it also played [with the gaze] a different way because I became more adept at the drawing and was able to get into the atmosphere of the photograph in a different way. I could make things appear in the picture that seemed solid and had equal weight to the photography and reality. I was able to balance the two and play tricks on the eye in some cases where you wouldn’t be able to tell if it was drawn or if it was photograph. So I treated them equally in terms of volume and color and brightness. I hope to do the same thing where people would see the picture, and then step back and see how it’s made, and then have the reality of that intervene, and then again spend time with it. So you would still have that engagement without the allover treatment. I work out of my own desire, but at the same time, I want to conjure up something for other people to see and spend time with.
That’s intriguing because that was my experience with your work—this game of zooming in to see the detail then zooming out to take it all in then zooming back in to examine the detail some more.
That time spent is precious because this is the experience I’ve had seeing other people looking at my work and I see myself doing this. It can happen that you walk into a gallery or a museum exhibition and you kind of scan the works and it’s: “This is my thing” or “This is not my thing” and then you walk out again. If you have this moment where you are able by whatever means to capture somebody and hold them just a little bit longer so that they investigate, then the communication starts and it’s not just a relationship to an object against a wall, but a gateway to someone else’s ideas and psyche and materials and whatever. Viewers can still disregard it, but it’s a communication process that has started, and that’s something that I appreciate.
Can you tell me about how you gather the subject matter of photographs?
I usually have some kind of obsession or interest already going, and I find a photograph that goes with it. I spend a lot of time browsing through my own collections of photographs that I’ve taken over the years and it’s often that I take a photograph and only end up using it six years later or ten years later. It’s not very often that I go goal-oriented with a camera to capture an image that fits a particular idea, though I have done that. I’m not a real photographer per se. I use photography.
I’m more of a painter because I have to find the material that suits the idea that I’m working with. But none of this process is particularly linear. It takes a while.
For example in 2006, it was palpable that there was a shift in the balance of powers in the world. The West had been the center, the dominant power, in art, economy, what have you. Here one didn’t really consider contemporary not-western art very much. But in 2006 you really could feel a shift, and everybody started talking about China for instance, for the first time as a serious cultural and economic force. Finally the dominance of European culture shifted and rightly so, and it was really funny feeling. I felt like this automatic dominance of western art and the whole iconography that is part of that, the still life paintings or the interiors, the European tradition of landscape painting and the particular styles and ideas related to it were all thrown into question. It felt that the west was the decadent, tired old man, and I wanted to make work that reflected that. It was a looking back, a saying goodbye.
I started to make a lot of work on black and white pictures, and used imagery that was related to the European seventeenth century traditions. I wanted to show the inside of a tired, rotting, old castle. I took pictures in the style chambers in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I used some older interiors that I’d shot over the years, some pictures that I found that my uncle Paul had taken around the 60’s and 50’s around the Netherlands, dark and gloomy interiors. So that’s how in that particular case that I found my imagery to fit my story. The bulk of this work I showed in three solo shows: at Galerie Barbara Thumm the solo show titled Cold Turkey, and Tryptich (Spinoza’s Trials) at James Fuentes LLC, and the third at a presentation Hales Gallery organized in Basel. There is still a lot to be reevaluated I feel, about the history of the Western dominance and how we depict it. So many stones left unturned.
With the mountain series, the Schoener Goetterfunken works, the opposite happened. I was looking to work with colorful work and something much more positive, alive. The dark I had surrounded myself with was getting me down perhaps. Color, and a sense of present and energy showed up first in works I showed in the Panta Rei show I made for Bravin Lee in Chelsea. I had found a bunch of old color negatives that I had never seen before, had never seen printed. When I found these images, they seemed just way too strong. The magic of developing these for the first time, and see them appear, so colorful, so alive, so glorious there was nothing I could do, I had to surrender, I had to fit my ideas around the pictures. In some experiments I seemingly reduced the photograph, but the photograph was so strong and so ebullient and joyful that I had to put my personal concerns and preconceptions aside and allow myself to delve deep into and surrender to this really blissful, happy imagery and not critique it in any way, but just try to pump up the volume and bring it fully into the present.
In those photographs, that’s your family in the Alps, but you weren’t there, right? They took the pictures and then you worked with them?
Yeah, they were shot in 1973 most likely, and I was a baby at that time, and not there. I was left with my aunt and uncle for the summer. The thing is that like any personal narrative, things are not as they seem, but you have dreams and hopes of how you wish it to be. I have a good relationship with my brother and my sister and my father and my mother, but we don’t gel as a group that often. That’s okay, but seeing these perfect slices of this wonderful family and everyone is dressed to the nines and the sun is shining and the mountains are beautiful. No melting glaciers, no pollution in the air, no labels, no pettiness, no strife. This is not how they remember that trip of course, but they just look so great. Then I started thinking: I should look at the history of ‘happy art’ and found there is almost nothing, very little. The art I did identify with was the beginning of the Romantic era around the 1800’s when Beethoven was making the “Ode to Joy,” the beginning of Enlightenment. So I used that thought as a template to see how far I could go. I wanted to see how far I could go into making those people in the pictures appear to realize how lucky they were to be in that moment. This multidimensional magical reality we live in all the time, but you rarely ever really experience, truly, fully, completely with all the energies that are a part of it. I ended up rubbing and painting these large, colorful blobs in the works and on the works, making it seem as if they were in touch with the power of it all, the wonder of it all. It was a way, again, to relate tenderly to the individuals in these pictures who mean something to me, but they also could be anybody’s family, an uncle you don’t know about. My parents never took pictures that well, they are truly sublime. And also the film was never developed, so I was the first one to really see them, so magically happy, perfect. And since I wasn’t there, I had not been part of that trip, this is my participation in that situation.
As a fiction writer, sometimes I think about that. Just once and awhile, I want there to be a happy ending. I want the love affair to work out, but I want it to still feel authentic, not cheesy.
It’s difficult and I think it’s the same thing that a lot of writers and directors say about making a good comedy. A truly good comedy is supposedly much harder to make than a nice dramatic, dark, gloomy story.
There is funny art. I would consider some of the work of Claes Oldenburg happy. There is David Hockney . . . I think there’s not a lot of happy art because people mistake beauty and joy and happiness for shallow, and perhaps fear of being perceived that way too. And there is a common mistake to equate dark, dirty, and gloomy with deep. It’s just a default position that people fall into. If they look for something profound, then they think it has to be dark and morose. Maybe that’s a northern European thing.
I think in other cultures there is a stronger tradition of joyful, happier emotions reflected in art.
This is something I really envy of people who work in music. I don’t think a lot of artists consider being on the stage such a wonderful experience all the time because it’s not the creative part necessarily, but I would say that the energy communicated and experienced by live performance; by standing on the stage can be extremely powerful, and must be invigorating and reinforcing.
I must be hard to do, but if it’s done well, it hits home in a powerful way. The moments that happen like that for me in the studio are just excellent, it doesn’t happen all the time but when it does it is just such a sense of moving forward, of change, of tapping into some current, which makes it really clearly a worthwhile endeavor. I feel really lucky then. I imagine that sensation experienced in a group, on a stage, must be even more invigorating. I am at this moment also full of desire to go there again in my work because it’s just so exciting, if you can hit the right vein, to be able to transfer that kind of energy. I am starting on new work where I will go straight for this. Hopefully.
You said you were the first one to develop the film for those photographs too?
Yes, and when they were printed, it was like they were taken yesterday. The colors were incredible, crisp, like few I had ever seen before.
For me, there is still this preciousness, a magical thing about the photograph. I have almost an aversion to taking photographs to add to the enormous amount of photography that is being taken all the time because I have this feeling that there is so much there already and it’s so precious. I can’t throw photographs away. You have all these slices of time that need to be treated well. I mean, it’s silly to think that way, but I really, truly feel that.
Your work is sometimes described as nostalgic, and as I hear you speak I notice this interesting idea of relating to art in the present tense, but life itself is happening all within memory.
I think “nostalgia” is maybe not the right word because that is reductive and takes away from direct experience and is maybe more like a pining for something that was there and is never going to come back kind of thing. I think your medium is really important and carries a lot of weight for free. If you have an audiocassette tape and you play it, there’s a sequence of the songs, the clicking of the tape and the texture of the sound. I’m not saying one thing is better than the other, and the same is true of a camera phone picture or whatever. They all have their own set of parameters and own language. It ticks off boxes in your head automatically and puts somebody in some place, the same way smells work. I have the same relation to books. I’d say I’m more of a bibliophile than a nostalgic person. I just like objects from different periods. You can mix them all. It’s not like you have to be reverent and sit on your knees and put them on a little silver pillow. I feel that you should just use it. I think, especially in art making, there should be no rules, anything is game, and you should feel as free as possible in order to go where you want to go. Play and irreverence are quite important.
When I came to New York, since I never really went to art school, I went to people’s studios or curated small shows and tried to contribute something, and so I found my way into other people’s studios just to see how they did stuff. Seeing what others did, I found a possible road. One of the first studios I visited in New York was Dona—that was really cool. I saw him make his paintings and he had these bits of embroidery that he had bought in Egypt. They were ancient, they were like 3,000-year old little pieces of textile, and he would just throw them on the painting and then with latex paint would just make them part of these enormous collages he was making. I was a bit of an Egyptophile as a kid so I was like, “Oh my god, this is really wonderful embroidery and it’s really old, and you just smack it in there?” And he said, “Yes, never respect your source materials.” By putting it in there, of course, he does use a little bit of the magic and a little bit of the history or the texture or the smell from something else. It’s a magical object, you imbue it with power, but at the same time, it destroys it and kills it and puts it in there.
I likewise relate to objects. Even the x-acto knife that I’ve been using for the past few months has now become bendy in the right way and blunt in the right way, and I got to know it really well and now it’s imbued with a history of my hand. If somebody would come in here and take that, I would be more upset than if they took anything else. I think you can relate to photographs that way too, and to textures and mediums and so on. I wouldn’t say that’s nostalgic, it’s also practical.
Does your process ever fail?
Yeah.
What do you do after that?
I do something good.
On the same work?
I try to, yes.
There is no mistake. In music, for example, there is no false note if the next note in relation is right and then the one before it becomes right. At least, that is what Miles Davis said I think. Sometimes, of course, you really make it muddy and nasty and muck things up, but I’m pretty neat and I have a good steady hand. And I can fix things, save things. And I know that things are going to go wrong. I just have these prints out too long, the process can spread out over years, so something might happen. I’ve had plenty of accidents to have had hundreds of heart attacks while working. But the mistake might be an opening to something else and you just don’t know. Every time you start something, it’s just having the courage to manifest things and see how they end up. Of course you do tweak things later, but the crucial part is having this attitude of a naked warrior on a horse like Don Quixote. You cannot have fear while you do something.
Some writers seem like they walked straight out of one of their own stories—the punky novelist who writes about freakishness, or the Bohemian who writes about lost worlds of Europe, for example. Fiction writer Brian Evenson is just about one of the most cheerful, good-humored authors one can encounter. He wears sweaters and texts his daughters on his iPhone and is married to children’s book author Kristen Tracy, and one wouldn’t know it on sight or even if one had a polite conversation with him at a cocktail party, but he also has one of the most disturbed, savage literary intellects currently walking around this side of sanity (but how does one know which side one is on anyway). For those who have not yet had the profound experience of having one’s mind/value system/sense of philosophical peace (delightfully) put through the shredder of an Evenson story, his are novels of nightmarish puzzles in which limbs are systematically amputated, tongues go missing, and youthful love decays into religious perversion. These are stories in which human nature is explored at its most foolish and cruel, society has devolved into barely functional hierarchies driven by cultish fanaticism, and the “good guys” are some version of the anti-Christ. Evenson’s fictional worlds are complicated by the dark beauty of his prose, which alternates between decadence (typically regarding the bizarre and grotesque) and icy focus (typically regarding the metaphysical).
Last year, Evenson published a new short story collection, Windeye, as well as a novel, Immobility. Windeye includes depraved revisions of (already nasty) fairy tales and Sladen suits in which characters disappear (a Sladen suit, by the way, is one of those creepy, old diving suits from back in the day). Immobility is basically about the end of civilization and how much humans suck and how unwittingly one can work very hard to repeat the stupid tragedies of history even more stupidly than before (misanthropes: draw a hot bath and get the bourbon; nervous types: you’ll need your smelling salts). His chapbook, Babyleg, published in 2009 by Tyrant Press in a limited edition of 400, has become something of a cult hit, featuring a twisted, rather revolting seductress who, indeed, has a baby leg.
Interview by Rachel Cole Dalamangas
Many of your stories begin as a puzzle, but rather than allowing a reader to put the pieces together, there are more and more pieces, but never the one that would complete the picture. Where do these puzzles come from? Do you ever set yourself up with a puzzle to write and decide to abandon it?
I think it’s less that I have a puzzle in mind and abandon it and more that I’m really suspicious of knowledge as a concept. I really have a hard time believing we can ever know anything for certain, but at the same time I feel that so much about human experience is about interpreting signs, making connections, making leaps, finding ways of defining different experiences and different realities as significant. That puzzle-solving impulse is very human, I think, but at the same time it’s so easy to start to see things as significant that probably aren’t, to believe that the world around you is “telling you something.” The line between the normal human process of interpreting signs and the overinterpretation of them that can be a symptom of madness is pretty thin. My work, I think, both enjoys that puzzle-solving impulse but also is very skeptical of it, and tries to get at the basic human frustration of never being quite able to make as much sense of the world as we’d like.
Tell me about your writing process. Your narratives tend to pull off acrobatic feats of destabilized perspectives, broken flashbacks that turn out to be copies of the past and future, and paradoxes taken to the edge, but all this is still reliant on a linear movement of plot. Do you write your stories straight through? Or in pieces? Do you always know how they’ll end?
I generally do write them straight through, from one end to the other, though over a number of days, and often revise the first pages of something before continuing on as a way of trying to give a sense of continuity and flow. I’ve spoken about this with Jesse Ball, a friend of mine, who writes work that looks like it’s discontinuous but which he usually writes straight through. I think for me (and maybe for him) there’s something about the excitement of those jumps and breaks coming as I’m writing that makes them more meaningful and significant—there’s an element of risk, I think, to suddenly allowing things to swerve. I do revise a lot when I’m writing something, but very early in the process I get the structure in place—I end up revising rhythm and wording and pacing rather than taking a chunk of a story out and moving it—though I do sometimes make big cuts. I am, as you mention, a fairly linear writer, but I don’t know where I’m going or how it’ll end. If I do figure out too early how a story might end, I usually stop writing it because I get bored . . .
As I recall, over coffee you once told me that you began writing as a child. Your mother wanted time to write and would assign writing projects to you and your siblings to distract all of you. Do you have or recall any of these old stories that you wrote as a child? Did you ever read your mother’s work?
I did read my mother’s work. She wrote just a couple of stories, which were Mormon science fiction stories and which negotiated in curious ways between Mormonism and science fiction. I think that was one of my first exposures to work that participated in several different genres (though very different genres than most mixed genre work). I still have a few of the stories I was writing back then. They included a story starring a rock who lived in the center of the earth, a story in which the Messiah is living in a cabin and refusing to hold the second coming, and a story that’s a retelling of the Stormalong tall tale.
The title, Windeye, comes from the etymology of the word, window, which means, literally from Old Norse, “a wind eye.” Do you study etymology? Where do your titles come from?
I’m interested in etymology. I’m interested in languages in general and the relations between languages. My titles come from all over—sometimes from a line or moment in the story. Often that’s the last thing I settle on with a story. Usually my titles are a little understated, tending toward the minimal. I don’t know why I like that, but I do.
In your three most recent books—Baby Leg, Windeye, Immobility—reality is destabilized and the reader, along with the usually pitiable narrator, is unsure of what is “true” within the texts. This, and the surreal-sci-fi qualities of your stories, operate in tension to the use of literary techniques that are hallmarks of realism: random details that speak to the chaos of life, sophisticated moral problems, natural dialogue. Can you tell me about your tendencies to genre-bend?
I read a lot and tend to read in all sorts of different directions, and tend to read very different things back to back or at the same time. I think that naturally encourages a tendency to genre-bend that’s probably more deep-rooted in an attitude about the world. When I was growing up my father was very insistent about using the “right” tool for the “right” job, whereas I just really felt like you should use anything that works and be able to see the virtual possibilities in non-tools. So, instead of using a screwdriver to tighten a screw, know when you can use a dime. I think I was naturally looking for ways of doing things that didn’t really follow the rules, and I like the tension that comes from bringing different generic regimes together to interact.
Even though you’re known as a genre-bender, it seems that “horror” is the label most often applied to your work. Does this nucleus of horror in your narratives signal a philosophical attitude?
Hard question. I guess I would say that there’s a philosophical attitude toward the world that informs all my work, and that it’s something that probably is friendly with ideas of horror. I think of horror as an art form that, at least in certain of its aspects, is very interested in the unknowability of the world and of what that makes us think about the condition of being human.
One thing that’s interesting to compare between the stories of Windeye and Immobility is the way the object-world is focused on technology. Windeye contains a number of archaic objects—my favorite: the sladen suit—and Immobility contains both objects of the future and objects of wreckage. Where does the object of the book fit into the progression of technology?
I think of the book as a very sturdy sort of technology in that it doesn’t rust, lasts for a long time, and has very few parts that can break to make it non-functional. It’s also easily replicable and proliferates—and now is able to proliferate in electronic form as well almost instantaneously. Even when it’s an object of wreckage, the printed book is quite accessible and assimilable. I guess I see the book as related to the wheel and the e-book as something like the car: the first technology is something long-lasting and likely to continue: the second technology is more recent and not likely to last more than a few centuries (if that). But after the car is gone, something will still be around that is made possible by the wheel.
I don’t know if you saw Steve Pinker’s non-fiction book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Pinker argues, essentially, that humans are slowly getting better, not worse. The leftover societies in Immobility are heavily considered and critiqued by Horkai, the narrator, and the Kollaps that brought about the wasteland is alluded to as a human error. Do you think humans will do themselves in with their own technology and if so, do you think there will be any writers left over? What will they write about?
I do think that we as humans are likely to do ourselves in, though I’m not sure if we’ll do this simply culturally (as we’ve done a time or two before) or in a way that annihilates our species. At the very least, I think we’ll need to really change the way we think about our place in the world around us. I do like the idea of a writer being the last one to survive and essentially ending his/her account of humanity with something like Wittgenstein’s “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” as a kind of summary of his inability to explain or understand what humanity did to itself. The idea, too, of a writer leaving a record that he/she knows won’t be read, but being compelled to write it anyway, is something I like very much.
Beyond horror, there’s the perpetual discussion of trauma, usually from some sort of absence: a missing body part, a lost sister, a major lacuna of memory. These absences also tend to be a portal by which to access knowledge beyond what could be retrieved in reality. How does one approach the writing of what can’t be known, since language is the way that we report knowledge?
Language is both the way that we report knowledge and the way that we come to understand the limitations of that knowledge, to show the contours of what we can’t understand or depict, but also, inversely, to suggest the limits of language itself. I think I got a sense of this first with negative theology, which was complicated later by my reading Kant’s notion of the sublime, which has been further complicated for me by all sorts of writers who end up getting something across almost at cross-purposes. But yes, the question you ask is one of the big questions, and one that I keep trying to find temporary answers to.
In these unsettling literary worlds, death isn’t even certain and final. Most often, the unthinkable nightmare only perpetuates. How do you think fiction writing relates to the human tendency to create elaborate narratives around death?
I think even though there’s a focus on death and dying and its uncertainty in my writing that, paradoxically, there’s very little memorializing in my fiction. I do think the connection probably has to do with the way that so often we continue to think of the dead as still alive, speaking of them in the present tense, still seeing them as present even though we know they’re not. Pieces of mine like “Dark Property” just cut out that intermediary step of the dead living on in our memories of them and simply let them live on even after they’re dead. That’s probably partly influenced by Jean Genet’s The Screens, though without the political dimension. Certainly there’s an science fictional element in it as well.
What forthcoming projects do we have to look forward to?
I’m just finishing a short book about the relationship between Chester Brown’s graphic novel Ed the Happy Clown and his comic book series Yummy Fur (in which the Ed story first appeared). My daughter Sarah and I also just translated David B’s graphic novel Incidents in the Night, which should appear any day now. Other than that, I’m about 2/3rds of the way done with a new story collection, slowly getting there, and trying to figure out what the next novel might be. I have an idea for a sequel to Immobility, and that may well be the next book.
Richard Benari’s current work focuses on the possibilities of a pared-down photographic language and its ability to provoke a visceral response to form. His chief concern is the interpretation of that language in print. Relying solely on the literal qualities of the photographic object, meaning in his pictures derives from the unique interaction of surface, ink and light, rather than from the image, per se. His photographs are in numerous private, public and library collections including Smith College Museum of Art, the University of Oregon and Yale University.
Lauren Henkin grew up in Maryland, graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in architecture from Washington University in St. Louis and resides in New York City. She states, “My work focuses on the tension between preservation and extinction. I work from the inside out, using internal narrative as the foundation in which to reinterpret space, light and form found in the external.” Henkin is an educator, reviewer, writer, frequent speaker, author of numerous books, and active member in the arts. Her work is widely collected by private collectors as well as institutions such as Southeast Museum of Photography, Yale University, Smith College and Dartmouth College among others. Her work has been published in numerous journals on photography and the book arts including PDN, Shots Magazine, Black+White Magazine, Diffusion Magazine, Flak Photo, Urbanautica, Landscape Stories, Parenthesis and The Washington Post. She is a Px3 multi-category winner, Oregon Regional Arts & Culture Council grant winner, with other award nominations in both the Brink Emerging Artist and Contemporary Northwest Art Awards.
Interview by Josh T. Franco
The notion of a “touching photograph” is schmaltzy, saccharine. Well, at best, a photograph can be genuinely touching as a mnemonic talisman. And these are crucial. Distinguishing between personal and generic is the key. But touching a photograph feels illicit and irreversible. If the viewer is not imbedded with basic conservation protocol, she is nonetheless touching, and that is something in a world where looking at even shocking images is quotidian. The fingerprint will never fade. The human oil cannot be fully conserved out of the print. You have offered up your photographs explicitly for handling, manhandling. (Is mangling so far away?) To do so in the context of art is a risk. Thank you for taking a risk, not merely for the sake of being risqué. The touching matters, you tell us. It makes me begin my engagement with your work in a place other than the visual. Tactility seems the highway, visibility the exit ramp. The vehicles: hand-built vellum and sandpaper.
“Manhandling” feels a bit loaded. But “tactile” fits. That’s what we were after—reconnecting viewers to the haptic quality of a photographic print. And, yes, there’s some risk in that. Thanks for acknowledging it. The idea isn’t so much that the feel of the print in your hand supersedes the visual, but that you get to experience the print as we did when making it: up-close, unframed, unmediated and accessing the ambient light in which it is viewed.
And what is pictured in Pictures? What is visible? By beginning from touching I—nor you, I believe—am not implying that the visual is secondary. The labor and care with which the images are crafted seem guided by a desire to put in perpetual motion a scale. On one side of the scale are objects in space. On the other side, objects’ images as ideas. To tip the scale, the print and the viewer/handler must dialogue with one another. Orientation seems key. The process of holding up, rotating, flipping, is integral to the intended experience. I think?
Handling the print is secondary; that’s right. Again, we wanted to create an intimate viewing experience, and one in which the feel and weight of the print would be add something—a way to further convey, or sometimes play-against, the already-tactile quality that’s so much a part of the photographic print. So the scale of the prints became important. But our main concern: give the prints a chance to be viewed in different kinds of light. At the end of the day, Pictures is a study in photographic abstraction. Meaning here doesn’t depend on the image, it depends on the object—the print itself. So the ambient light in which the prints are viewed is as important an ingredient as the ink with which they are printed.
About orientation: Actually, it’s not so essential. Two of the project’s four folios are shot in portrait and what we noticed is that that’s a bit tough for viewers. People see the world in landscape, after all. So, many viewers try flipping the vertically-oriented images on their side. But, after a few minutes, they’ll right them vertically again. The visual clues in the images—the way the lines run, the way the light falls—tend to tip them off about our intention.
Orientation and vertigo do play a role in how one experiences scale in the works. Where there is a rocky landscape, the light’s presence in the photograph is manipulated in such a way as to confuse: is this a sheer rock cliff? A rocky, endless beach? A trompe l’oeil drawing? And when one is sufficiently disoriented: Is this an abstraction? But as vehemently as you want us to demystify the photograph’s claim to truth through touching it, you seem to want us to avoid abstracting this image as well. What does it mean to say that these are rocks? Or that they are not?
Yeah, these images are plenty disorienting. That’s purposeful. There are no clues about scale in these images and no tips about pictorial space. In fact, subtle shifts in tone purposely confuse the viewer’s read of pictorial space. So the Oregon landscapes, for example, tend to engage because of the sheer feel of rocks and because of perspective—the images feel at once vertiginous, like you said, and flat. But for us, “abstraction” and “disorientation” aren’t at all synonymous. We’re interested in abstraction because it intensifies the physicality of what’s photographed; disorientation is a by-product. A real useful one, but still a by-product. The Oregon landscapes, which say so much about abstraction in the found and the everyday, convey the sheer physicality of place—without reference to location and without documentary comment. Similarly, the sandpaper constructions create a tension, we hope, between the solidity a viewer sense and the fragility of the paper. They also feel voluminous, and this lends a kind of biomorphic feel to the prints. We were surprised that so many viewers see legs and pelvis in these images.
The onus to orient again falls on the viewer/handler herself in the photographs of interior walls. How did you get the images of stacked empty walls to behave as if nothing but two dimensions? I am thinking here of the odd moments where the edge of a wall closer to the foreground and the edge it creates (the same edge) against the wall behind it twist on one another. It’s as if the beginning of a braid happens in an arbitrary pinpoint where the walls are, in reality, just as far from one another as in any other spot. Is the editor exposed? Is the viewer working hard enough?
It’s a good read of the images. Thanks.
A big part of this project was to return the viewer to the pleasures of modernism. So, again, the idea of flattened perspective was key. In each of the prints, subtle shifts in tone confuse the viewers read of pictorial space. This is especially true of the interior shots, the architecture studies. So a part of the tension in these images is about, again, about depth and flatness. About how it was done: a lot depended on the light in which we photographed and a lot depended on how we interpreted these images in print. We tend to photograph at the tightest aperture available, which sharpens the image but also deepens pictorial space. So the flat light in which we photographed, the subtle gradation in tone and, later, careful spit-toning—all of this was key. It’s also generative. It’s helped shape one of our current projects, which focuses on the built environment and how we conceptualize space.
The slowest arriving question about this work is the question of text. It seemed at first to have nothing to do with the printed work, the alphabetical. Perhaps it is the handholding that takes me there. Do I engage these works like books? Why do they make me want to read them?
This is a terrific question. Thanks for asking it. The short answer: These photographs aren’t intended for the wall. First, there’s a lot of them—four series of five—and each image within a series dialogues with the next. So, seriality is key; that is, these images develop their ideas across a series. So there is a textual reference here, and a kinship with books—which is, in part, why we first decided on the folio format. Also, it was important for us to give a sense of those ideas unfolding, but without any narrative present. It feels like the majority of what’s photographed today hinges on narrative. We wanted to make a conscious break with that.
The longer answer, though, involves how we—the viewers—have become accustomed to looking at art: on the wall, episodically, and seldom within the context of what surrounds a work or how the work is lit. We tend not to engage the curatorial decisions that went into hanging the art—probably much to the frustration of curators. So a piece of this project involved a degree of “self-curation” on the part of the viewer. The viewer gets to order the prints and choose the light in which they’re experienced. By doing that, they create a kind of conversation with the work—and with us, a kind of questioning of our intention. There’s more to say here, but it’s a long conversation. Perhaps another day.
These works are meant to be consulted and engaged, to be brought out and experienced within the specific and viewer-chosen context of light and quiet room. In this sense, the textual reference goes deep—as if it’s a book one would wish to consult and experience, then later re-read. The impetus for this is the Chinese Handscroll, and the best feel for that is Maxwell Hearn, Chief Curator of Asian Art at the Met, talking about it. Here’s a link to that kind of kitschy vid from the Times. (Click.) Of course, we don’t intend to “lovingly swaddle” and of our work in silk.
You touch your work as well, beyond the touching required by all photographic production. Crumple: to create lines whose weight is not the detritus of graphite traveling on vellum, but the result of intimate handling in three dimensions. You have had such intimate relations with your material. I wonder why, and I wonder how the “why” changed as that mode of relating unfolded over time, forgive the pun. How does your relationship with the material set up the framework for our relationship with it? What will the institutions taking on this work have to consider in how they relate to their visitors as a result?
Materiality is the thing we wanted to convey most. We wanted to give a viewer a chance to experience the sensations and emotions one feels from touch, without reference to any actual thing. So the crumpled papers, for example, have an ethereal and often a fleeting quality to them. There are moments in the prints where the ink is barely visible on the paper and image and paper seem to become one. An interesting effect, considering that the image itself is of a piece of paper, though people have read these as any number of things, from aerial landscapes to bed sheets. We’re drawn to these prints because of the tension they create between the material fact of the print and the ethereal quality of what’s photographed. Plus, again, how these, in particular, depend on the ambient light in which they’re viewed. I hope viewers of these prints share that our take.
About how the institutions that have acquired this work will choose to exhibit them: of course, it’s not our call. We made an effort to reach out to those institutions which had study rooms, hoping this work would be accessible off the wall and in-hand. We also considered offering acquiring institutions two sets: an exhibition set and a handling set. But, like you said earlier, museums and library special collections—the institutions that have shown the greatest interest in these folios—have their own set of conservation protocols—and rightly so. Many institutions have incredibly good facilities—their study rooms—that enable viewers to page a work from the collection and view it up-close and personal. It’s a terrific resource, one we hope more viewers make use of. The white gloves don’t concern us. These institutions go to great trouble to make work available—and in a ways that acknowledge the artist’s intention—while still maintaining conservational safeguards.
I thank you both. Engaging your work has been, after all, a touching experience.
Thank you, Josh. These meetings have been terrific.
The strangely shaped ceramics arranged in a line like soldiers and stacks of jaunty portrait drawings of flamboyant characters create an aura of sweetness paired with the macabre in Elisabeth Kley ’s Brooklyn studio. Hidden faces painted on kiln-fired jars stare back at the viewer and a dusty cat sashays about the room until jumping into Kley’s lap to do some affectionate writhing. The studio if full of both life and death—and yet, without the usual luggage of either. The subject of mortality, for Kley, invokes bright colors and eccentric patterns. Faces are both inviting and defiant. Designs are aggressive, but playful. What is perhaps most alluring, however, is that these uncanny, subtle juxtapositions that Kley works in are as intelligent as, well, friendly. I’m not sure how else to put it: I don’t believe I’ve ever felt like a ceramic jar was trying to be friends with me the way Kley’s jars and portraits do, that is, these works smile and actually look inquisitively at you from across the room. For all the ways that art tries to seduce, repel, antagonize, disgust, and move viewers, the experience of feeling an actual personality projecting from a jar is unsettling if just as charming. Of course, these jars and portraits have a real bite to them too: Kley’s interests as an artist span from Louise Bourgeois to Dali to Chanel to Kolomon Moser, etc. etc. Her Facebook wall is a flood of various images: Anna Pavlova, Harry Belafonte, Henri Matisse, and “the first yogasan chart ever found.”
Interview by Rachel Cole Dalamangas
I’m curious about your ceramics with eyes. How did the notion of an object that looks back at the viewer come about?
Well, it might have been because I was doing portraits at the same time that I started doing ceramics, but I also wanted really early paintings that I did when I was 18 or 19 to have eyes. I’ve always liked the idea of objects looking at you. For the first several years I made ceramics, they almost all had faces and eyes, sometimes quite disguised. The pattern on this piece from 2009 (gestures to colored ceramic on the floor) was taken from an antique French tapestry that Louise Bourgeois used for a sculpture of a head. It’s a leaf face with eyes and a mouth. I was after a specific expression, rather sad and blank. In the last few years, the faces began to feel cartoonish, so I switched to large aggressive flowers.
What was the portrait work you were doing at the time you started making ceramics?
It started when my father died. I was devastated and I wanted to do something with the feeling. I made ornamental drawings of angels and also some drawings of corpses done from pictures I found in the library—the first time I ever worked from photographs. Later, a friend asked me to be in a show about David Bowie. I liked his gallery and I wanted to be in the show, so I found a bunch of pictures of David Bowie and made drawings looking at them. This was the beginning of my portraits.
My father wasn’t particularly flamboyant, but he did have a mustache, and sometimes he sat in a chair in a certain pretentious way that reminded me of Dali. So I began doing drawings of Dali, again from photographs. I then went on to other aging, flamboyant characters including artists Nevelson, Warhol and Fini, fashion designers Erte, Chanel, Trigere, and art world characters like Peggy Guggenheim. I was interested in mortality and decoration, aging people defying death through extreme dressing up. Later I carried the idea of transformation even further with characters in drag: portraits of Ethel Eichelberger, Candy Darling and Jack Smith. At the same time I was doing large drawings of colorful airy pavilions, using expensive Japanese paper. I would begin at the bottom with a horizon and continue up adding sections in pen and liquid watercolor. If I made a mistake, I realized I could cut out the part I didn’t like and neatly collage in a replacement. I began doing the same thing with the portraits, and eventually I began getting messier, constructing the faces by gluing on separate features, which reminded me of putting on makeup. Around the same time I became friends with an artist and drag performer whose work I had loved for years. I photographed his performances and used them to make drawings. The drawings weren’t pretty, but he tolerated me. He was my first (and so far only) live muse.
It’s interesting because you’re a female artist whose gaze is setting upon men who are bending gender.
I admire the guts it takes for people to transform themselves so dramatically. I am fascinated by metamorphosis.
When did you begin making ceramics?
This was also quite happenstance. My husband wanted to get a kiln and make ceramic sculptures, so we decided to take a class at a small local pottery studio. I had recently abandoned painting for drawing. I was tired of painting’s historical baggage and wanted to do something lighter. I’d always liked the decoration of historical ceramics, so I thought, why make paintings about it when it’s so much nicer to make the ceramics themselves.
What about decoration appeals to you?
I like an extreme environment that’s visually over-the-top. I remember when I went to Mexico in 1990 I was interested in the colonial hybrid decoration that is Spanish and Native American together. I thought, oh my god, everything is so decorated and everything is so colorful. I just love that.
How do you make your color choices for the ceramics?
I’ve become comfortable with a group of underglazes I mix myself. I’ve chosen the colors that are clearest: lime green, turquoise, yellow, yellow orange, orange red and deep blue. I want the work to emit light—I adore Matisse—but at the same time I want it to be loud and defiant. Bright colors don’t always signify happiness; they can express other emotions, perhaps exhibitionism and rage. They may also cover up things you want to hide.
Where do the patterns and motifs that decorate your ceramics come from?
I look at a lot of things: Islamic, Central Asian and Russian textiles, Ballet Russe sets and costumes, Islamic and Spanish ceramics, Wiener Werkstatte design. I improvise from images I see in books or in photos I take at museums. I’ve always been interested in foreign cultures. I had a collection of costume dolls when I was small.
You mentioned “decoration and mortality.” How did those two come to pair in your mind?
I think it was through the idea that the extreme behavior and the extreme of visual expression, the personal visual expression of someone like Dali, or also Warhol, those different artists as they aged—maybe they were always flamboyant—but it seemed to me as they aged, that the flamboyance was like a battle against death.
Did your father influence you as an artist?
Yes, I think so. He was an architect. My parents encouraged me to make art and sent me to an after school sculpture class at the Museum of Modern Art. My father always painted. Some of his work was quite interesting, especially a few quite surreal pieces made when he was in psychoanalysis, before he had his crazy shrink committed. After that he painted athletes, trees, and portraits of my mother.
So you’ve been making art your whole life?
Always. At 5 or 6 I was planning to be a mommy, but a few years later I knew I was going to be an artist.
I took sketch classes on Saturdays at the Art Students League as a teenager. When I finished high school I’d had enough of academics so I continued there instead of going to college, not exactly the best career path. I didn’t have a clue about contemporary art, but I tried everything else. I was aware of the old masters, Post-Impressionism, Matisse and Picasso, and Abstract Expressionism. I began rather abstractly doing hallucinatory paintings with hidden figures out of my imagination, but then for some reason I became compelled to make my way through art history and conquer the representation of three dimensions. Life drawing, modeling clay sculpture figures, wood carving, still lives, and so on—all things I’d now advise artists to skip unless they are necessary to what they want to do. Next I learned etching at Hunter College and then I enrolled in the studio semester program at Empire State College. It was designed to allow art students from upstate to experience the New York art world by providing studios in Manhattan at State University tuition, which was really cheap at the time. Contemporary artists like Eric Fischl and Carolee Schneeman came in and talked about their work and looked at yours. That’s when I became aware of what was going on around me.
What was your impression of contemporary art when you started to encounter it?
I wasn’t really crazy about macho Neo-Expressionism and the messy East Village scene. In the nineties the market crashed and things became more modest, which I liked. Of course now I’m more open-minded and interested in a lot of art I once dismissed.
What do you think about where art is now?
There’s a lot going on. I tend to like dark, sensational, somewhat twisted things, maybe because they make good copy. I was writing for Walter Robinson during the last four or five years of Artnet and I knew what he liked—TABLOID. I had a great time writing about artists like Otto Muehl, the Viennese Actionist who recently died, as well as Genesis Breyer P. Orridge, Miriam Cahn, and Ron Athey. But I also love Tabboo!, whose work is supremely joyful.
What’s a recent show you’ve seen that was good?
The Kolomon Moser show at the Neue Galerie is sublime, and my friend Joyce Pensato’s retrospective at the Santa Monica Museum is fantastic.
Given that you have been a lifelong artist, what advice would you have for a young artist starting out today?
Learn a skill that is in demand and pays extremely well by the hour. I never did that.
What are you working on right now?
I’m working on drawings for two large round bottles to go with the four that are already done. I’m also making five longer, skinnier bottles that I can put in between the six large three-part bottles I finished last year (gestures to line of large ceramics). It was fun to make these exuberant and crazy shapes, but then once I was trying to figure out how to decorate them, I felt somewhat constrained. Complicated shapes need simpler decoration. The round ones can be more complex and interesting.
I have also decided that it would be nice to unify everything I have [at the studio] with some really aggressive black and white wallpaper. I’m running out of space and there’s only so many more ceramics I can make. Eventually I may go back to doing portrait drawings, and hang them on the wallpaper, which might turn the other work into décor for the spaces where they live. I went out and got a little silkscreen kit and I’m starting to figure that out.
Is that typical of your process? The idea is followed by gathering materials and then playing around?
I would say that my process is really quite obsessive. For example, I did a printmaking project for Randy Wray’s Element Editions in 2010. He wanted a group of unique variations on one print, but I wound up making 4 small and 4 medium plates to warm up and then 6 larger ones, each with two versions in black and white, and more in colored ink with collaged and painted additions on white paper, and even more in colored ink on colored paper. I worked on them for months. Similarly, every portrait subject is drawn repeatedly and each ceramic bottle that I make requires extensive preparation with many black and white drawings and colored watercolors before I can finally apply decoration. Although I strive to make things look as if effortlessly done in one breath, I don’t work quickly. Everything must be completely explored.