With her thrift store clothes, self-described New York brassiness, and uncanny ability to solve with simplicity the unusual formal problems that only artists have, my first impression of Anya Kielar some six years ago was that she was so damn cool. I was 23 years old, working at the Dikeou Collection in Denver, CO, and Kielar was assisting then-boyfriend now-husband Johannes VanDerBeek with the installation of his piece, “Newspaper Ruined.” Now married and a mother, Kielar has stayed on schedule with her own career as an artist making most recently “sprayograms” (one of a few innovations) and sun prints of women’s clothing that are reminiscent of the packaging used to contain Barbie clothes. Kielar refashions the artifacts and marks of femininity—long opera gloves and big pouty lips, for example—into surreally vibrant characters with personality. Large noses and eyes and lips made from painted garbage and sand turn an exhibition wall into a female face that’s something like a stylized she-Frankenstein of archetypal womanhood. In the SoHo apartment where she grew up in the ’80s, Kielar reflected on the identity of “artist” and what it’s like for artists to start a family.
Interview by Rachel Cole Dalamangas
You grew up in New York in the ’80s, which is looked back at as the heyday but it was also the AIDS crisis. It seems like there’s a lot of nostalgia right now for what New York was back then and you grew up right where it was happening.
I definitely was influenced. We had galleries right across from us out the window. Those were galleries for a while, not offices. I was a big fan of Basquiat when I was in high school of course. When I was applying for Cooper Union, I had a lot of terrible Basquiat/Edward Gorey influenced work. Terrible paintings.
Where does your interest in the female form as Other come from? It’s interesting that your work is described as depicting the Other because I don’t really get a sense of “otherness” from your work.
I think it’s always been me trying to relate to myself as a woman in the universe and how complex that is. At the very base of it, I think it’s all simplistically self-discovery or about the strangeness of what femininity is, and how women are depicted in art history and culture. I’m especially fascinated by ancient cultures and drawn to things that were made to carry out some symbolic purpose or that had some kind of belief structure behind them. I think that’s something similar between my husband and I. The idea that a fertility figure or a figure that’s supposed to harness somebody’s soul after they’ve passed away—I just find that really fascinating. I think a lot of my imagery comes from Prehistoric work.
The work certainly depicts womanhood very differently compared to much of art history. You just said something about art that “carries out a symbolic purpose . . . ”
I think that’s the end goal and I can only hope my work captures a little bit of that power of conveyance through its symbology . . . It’s so hard given everything that can be watched, read, or heard in once day to expect a viewer to have a lingering memory of your work. But if you put yourself fully into your work, almost like it’s a vessel then I think even in the short amount of time someone looks at an artwork there is a chance you can give them something to hold onto. Again, I can only hope my work carries some kind of meaning that sinks into the viewers in a lasting way. I struggle a lot with how to make an object have that effect. I watch movies all the time and I think, “I’ve never cried at something I’ve made or that one of my friends made,” the way you do in a movie. So sometimes I’m like, “Am I in the right field?” But then I think there is a real power to the fact an object is made by a single person who is struggling to capture the quality of the world they feel is around them. That their reasons behind making it as an art object is to represent something they see in their culture that is worth depicting in a new light. I think when it comes to an art object you can get a better sense of the insatiable, underlying desires of the individual behind it. I think that’s what I’m most inspired by. Not to say that contemporary art doesn’t harness that, it’s just that there is a bareness and vulnerability to work that was made to harness the spirit world. I think it’s a really hard thing to capture that quality. It may be why I’m always changing my materials and my process constantly because I’m using my work like a barometer for my soul. I know maybe in the long run, that’s not the smartest tactic as an artist. You’re supposed to have your thing and I feel like I haven’t found that thing yet, but it always excites me to work with new stuff, but maybe that’s also a quest to find that one thing that emits all the things I want to emit to the world. That’s what makes art making exciting. If you found that formula, you’d probably be disappointed.
There is, I think, a contemporary jadedness about what art does in the world.
It’s hard because when you’re creating this tiny drop in this sea of cultural-whatever, it seems kind of like it just gets washed away or something. But you look back and you mention an artist’s name and you can see all the ripples of how much Brancusi has affected so much contemporary sculpture to this day. Time will tell that.
I also believe in luck. I just happened to be lucky that I had that one show and things snowballed. Not to say that it’s only luck.
Yes, there is a formula I think of talent and luck.
I have some very talented friends who have never broken in. Then I have friends who are doing exceptionally well. It’s interesting what happens over time if you’re friends with very talented people. It’s almost like it’s just this lucky twist in the road and some people make that bend and some people don’t and it’s hard to figure out why. It’s impossible to even think that way like, “How can I make something that will be successful in the marketplace?” It doesn’t work like that. There definitely are artists that think like that and are very successful at it. Hopefully, you work really hard and it leads to other things as well like a better teaching position or better grants, not just solely relying on sales.
Then on the other side, there’s the manufacture of wunderkinds, people who can afford to participate in the market and people the market sensationalizes.
Yeah, there’s a lot of those, but I feel like it’s a really good time to be a female artist, more so than any other era. Out of my friends, I can say that the majority of them who are doing really well are my female friends. So I find that really inspiring. I mean, ask me in 50 years if I think that I was totally naïve, but I think it’s a good time to be a female artist. There’s inequality in every aspect of life. But things are changing.
I agree that there’s this old school worldview that’s essentially dying off. I just saw Baselitz in The Guardian today defending remarks he made a year earlier about women being unable to paint. But the reaction to his statements seemed to be a combination of both anger and comedy. People seem to regard his comments as silly.
And dated and weird.
The way I was as a young person absorbing things, I never was somebody who got very upset about things. I think I generally have a ridiculously positive attitude toward being a female artist. But I get a lot of calls for group shows last minute and I call that “lady filler.” They’re like, “Shit, we need another woman in the show.” I don’t want to say that because there are people who did curate shows or it was a conscious decision to have me in the show, but that’s a pretty common thing among female artists. It’s always kind of funny, but I’m glad it happens.
The stereotype of what an artist “is” used to be this idea of the singular, tortured man. What’s interesting is that the stereotype of the female artist involves an assumption of eccentricity and madness.
In general, the characters are more amusing so that gets played up. If you look into anyone’s personal life or how they conduct themselves throughout the day whether they’re eccentrically dressed or whatever, people are just really strange. It’s more about the way things are romantically remembered.
I am reclusive in a weird way and sometimes I want to be around people. My husband will remind me, “You chose this career,” but to be productive you’re pretty much by yourself in a room all day. It’s a strange way to live your life. You kind of become a little strange because when you’re just around yourself all day, how you relate to people and how you relate to the world can become a little different.
Something I think about a lot is being alone and also how strange it is to constantly try to tap into your inner being to call out these images or things to attach to a feeling I have to compel me to do this thing. It’s very emotional, a very strange thing. It’s like being in therapy all day by yourself. It’s exhausting and it’s kind of weird to do that all the time.
I’ve had two periods of my life where I’ve had mental breakdowns and it’s always had a lot to do with insomnia and you get delirious when you don’t sleep. The thing with insomnia is that it’s a snowball effect brought on by anxiety. So I attribute the breakdown part, the depressiveness and stuff like that to the insomnia, but the insomnia is an effect of something different. I do think that introspectiveness, always trying to figure out what you’re trying to say or why you’re trying to say something or what you’re trying to hide or what’s revealed in your work . . . the two times I had episodes of depression, looking at my work was painful. When I was making it, it was just happening. The last time was right before I got married, the first time we moved upstate and I think the extreme isolation wasn’t good for me and it was also a difficult time in our lives. I kind of hid from everybody that I had this thing with insomnia until I got really kooky and I was taking Ambien, which made me crazier because it wasn’t working. So all these weird things were happening while I was trying to work on a show. I think what you’re supposed to do when you’re feeling anxious or a little bit depressed is to put yourself in the world or maybe stop asking yourself things that thoroughly, you only get propelled into a crazier state. I remember at that point, looking back at the work that I’d made several months ago, I’d made these plaster pieces and they were a lot about the female body and aging, and I remember making them semi-consciously, but not really, it’s also just dipping things in plaster very simply, but then looking at them I was like, “Oh my god this is what I think of my body.” Everything was a lot more psychologically in tune, or I thought I was a lot more in tune with my work. That’s kind of the crazy thing is that you can be making something and it never really can be stream of consciousness, you’re always conscious or you’re always quoting something or you’re always trying to say something, but it is kind of crazy if you look back at your work and you can draw the references to how you saw yourself or the world. But in the moment, it doesn’t seem that charged. It’s been a real eye opener. It really keyed me in on the subconscious effort that goes into making work and that’s something you want to harness.
I think when I met you at the Dikeou Collection when I was about 23, you and Johannes had been together a few years. I recall you and I having a conversation back then about how hard it can be to be a woman pursuing a career and trying to have a personal life. You mentioned something about seeing other strong, driven women you knew being trampled by men in romance, which is something I’d kind of thought about as well.
It is such a big part of life. You have to be so vulnerable and such an idiot to fall in love and to be with somebody. It’s a daily thing you work on, but it’s really nice to have one person that you’re not competitive with. I really just wish him the world and hope for him more success than I have, and I know that he has the same feeling toward me, and that doesn’t really exist with anyone else.
As I recall, there’s a funny story about how you and Johannes began your romance?
We were in Cooper Union and I saw him on his first day of school. We hooked up when I was graduating and he still had two more years. It was the end of his second year when we hooked up. The first time I saw him at school, he had a heart on his shirt and we locked eyes and he didn’t look away. I was with somebody at the time, but I was in love with him for like a year before I ever talked to him. Then he was working on this giant Crazy Horse sculpture. [At Cooper Union] you basically got a desk to work at with maybe six feet of space and three feet on the side of the desk and the horse didn’t fit in that because it was nine feet tall and maybe 10 or 12 feet wide. It was a larger than life horse. He was working on that and we both kind of liked working alone at school late at night. While I was working on my senior show, every night I would walk past him, it was like a fairy tale, he was literally like a prince on a horse and he’d be like all powdered and white because he was using plaster. He was even really clever back then because the plaster was free, he used like 30 bags of it. He’d be doing that all night. Everybody on the floor knew when his piece was due because everyone was always rooting for him because he was this sweetheart always doing these crazy, impossible things, and his Crazy Horse was supposed to be a comment on American culture or something. It was turned into a miniature water park and it had a motor in it and he actually hooked it up to a pump. Of course it leaked and was crazy, but everybody was helping him before crit, so I grabbed a spray paint can and was spraying one of the slides for him. He stood up and dusted his hands off, and said, “We’ve never been formally introduced. My name is Johannes VanDerBeek” and I went, “I know who you are, Johannes,” and that was pretty much it. I think a couple days later, I literally grabbed his arm. He was standing in the lobby and I was like, “You’re going to walk me home.” I was living here, in this loft in SoHo, and I made him walk me home from Cooper Union. Then I said, “You’re going to meet me here tomorrow at 7p.m. and we’re going to go on a walk.” I was very aggressive because I knew he was a special human being.
How has having a family changed working for you and Johannes?
Our second year anniversary was this October. So our first year anniversary I was just beginning to be pregnant or whatever. It was kind of old fashioned because we were together for 10 years and then within six months of being married I was pregnant. I mean we had been planning on it. That was a big life changing moment. It literally made us change our lives from being in a big live/work space in DUMBO. We knew we had to get rid of that. We would be washing, like, resin in our sink and you can’t do that with the baby.
Your kids just demand your full attention. It was really trying this summer because I was asked to do two solo presentations within five months of each other so we quickly had to learn about how to straddle a heavy work schedule and keeping Talula happy.
I’m a Cancer so I’m a big homebody. So [before having a baby], I’d be like, “Oh I’ll reorganize the pantry and work in the studio and do laundry and then work in the studio.” When I could really focus was at night so that’s what I really miss is that night time when I’d be in my studio from nine to one a.m. or something. When I envision my memories . . . like, my music on really loud and having some wine and working in my studio and I think, “Oh my god, it’s going to be a really long time before I can do that again.”
It’s kind of good too though. Everybody said this. You’re a lot more efficient in your studio practice [after having a baby]. You’re thinking about your work all the time and then when you get an hour to work you’re actually physically working. In the past, there’d be a lot of sitting and thinking and a lot of wasting a lot of time. So now, I feel like I’m more productive when I do get to work.
Have these time constraints changed the work?
Yes now I find myself coming up with pieces that can be made in quick bursts of time. My last two show were paintings done on wet pieces of fabric out in the summer sun so they had to be completed within the time it took for them to dry. But it’s great when your life changes and forces you to adjust because it can lead to completely new ideas. Over the summer I also came up with these canvas pieces that I called “impressions,” that were literally impressions I took from clothes that were saturated in paint and laid down on canvas. It’s like a stamp where I put one on, walk away from it, feed the baby, and come back and do another one. I think your work just naturally evolves to what your life is and how you need to work.
My impression is that you and Johannes have been very intelligent about finding ways to fund basic living while still having time to make work and that’s really the rub for a lot of emerging artists.
We’ve been kind of lucky. Right out of college, Johannes started working with Zach [Feuer] and I took a year off and then I went to graduate school. I was just figuring out what I wanted to make and I applied to with very different stuff. It was performative/photo-based digital stuff. In graduate school, I realized I enjoyed making more of the work rather than the final photograph. In graduate school you’re given a chance to dive into your head and challenged to dissect your interests. I realized what I really loved doing was making the sets or props or objects for the photographs and then I thought, “Why am I stressing out so much trying to make these finished photographs when I enjoy more of the sculpture and handmade aspect of the work?” Also, Johannes has always really influenced my work and he’s done a lot with sculpture and I think that influenced me subconsciously.
I basically had my first show with Daniel Reich a month after my thesis show. All my thesis work went into that show plus I made a couple supplemental pieces. And that was kind of at the height of the market before it totally fell out. So we were kind of lucky to have shows where you’re modestly able to kind of live off of that. We also had the gallery [Guild and Greyshkul] and we all got a small—really small, small—salary from that. I think we were living in this place in Hell’s Kitchen that was a floor-through that was 12 feet wide and at the narrowest nine feet. We had a room that was 30 feet so we both had a section of that so my studio was nine feet by 15 feet. We also had the basement and the gallery and that was our house and our studio. Johannes made this giant wax bush in this crazy apartment where I would have to literally bend under it to get to the bathroom in the middle of the night. And that piece that’s at the Dikeou Collection, the newspaper piece, he worked on that at the Hell’s Kitchen apartment, but there wasn’t room to fully set it up so I remember we had the dining room table and these pieces were all over the table and any surface in the apartment including the galley way kitchen.
Also, I think that’s really influenced how we work with materials. It’s not like a fake folksy-ness. The newspapers were free. Or, I literally found objects and furniture on the street. I also lived by the Salvation Army and so I used a lot of thrift store finds. Not so much now, now I’ve been working in fabric, but with modest materials. Now I’ll try to go to the fabric district and try to find the cheapest and highest quality fabric per yard. My dyes that I got, they’re powder so they last a long time.
The thriftiness is still within us. We’re both kind of hands on. I really believe in making my own work. I’m not an artist that can have an idea and have other people execute it. Maybe I will one day. There are things that you just cannot do. But I think that also comes from kind of enjoying finding materials that you can transform into art materials. There are shows where the material budget was really limited. For example, I did a show at Rachel [Uffner’s] with these things called “Sand Paintings.”
I believe the Dikeou Collection owns at least one of these pieces?
Yeah, well basically, for all that work, the only thing I really purchased was masonite, paint and sand, and for all the objects on it, I would take walks at night through DUMBO and find fruit containers or sticks or detritus or recycled materials or wine bottles—those I would find in my own house. You just kind of come up with these things where you need to work like that. As you move through different periods of your life, your work is totally affected by what you can manage and what you can’t.
It makes so much sense that so many New York artists turn to garbage for materials. I hear that almost every time I interview an artist for zing.
New York is just crazy. Now our place looks pretty spiffy, but I grew up just going to flea markets. This area used to be good for that. On Canal there actually were three different flea markets and my dad would go every weekend. I grew up like that. All my clothes were from thrift stores and I’m still like that. I get most stuff from thrift stores. It’s more fun and it’s very inexpensive. New York is a great place for that. There’s so many people, it’s so diverse, and so much waste comes out of everybody, it’s just a great place to find stuff.
What are you working on now?
My most recent work were these sun prints I made up in the country. They involved wetting fabric and applying dye and then laying objects on top of the painting. The sun does the rest and it’s kind of amazing. The areas around the object dry faster than the areas where the object is so the heat pulls the dye away from where you have an object. It’s similar to the process of the photograms and they look really photographic but they also involve a lot of painterly moments where the ink bleeds in unexpected ways that are ghostly and foggy. I was making them late into the fall after the success of the summer versions but it was getting colder so the sun wasn’t strong so the images were really faint. In the beginning I thought, “Oh god these are failures and I hate them.” And in the end, those were my favorite ones because they were so elusive. That’s what’s interesting about art and process, is that you can get kind of mechanical with the process and you know what it’s going to look like. But it’s always kind of the best when you don’t know what it will look like. The better things come out when there’s a little bit of fuzziness about how it will look in the end. Then it was funny because I was trying to emulate the ones that were failures, but it never works out that way.
One body of work always leads to another. So my last two bodies of work have all been in fabric and I’ve been working in dyes and I’m excited about where those things went, but working on the sunprints made me want to reinvestigate my spraygrams or working again with the airbrush, but maybe bringing the hand back into it. The previous show was really painting different mediums on fabric and the last one was using objects as the main handmark, but I kind of want to meld the two a little bit and I think maybe I want to get into three-dimensionality again.
Illustration by Nick Sumida
Since the days of my youth, I’ve always enjoyed a nice, weird story. Whether it’s the Brother Grimm, Alice In Wonderland, Edgar Allen Poe, Flann O’Brien, or my father’s improvised bedtime stories about cat gangs, the more bizarre the better. Phillip E. Shaw is an old friend, longtime writer compatriot, and fellow weirdo (among many other things). A section of his manuscript The Takes—a tale of a family assemblage thrown into cosmic crisis—was presented as my project in issue #23 in zingmagazine. Phil’s fiction met my aforementioned standards, and I most likely would’ve been as much as a fan when I younger as I am now. As it so happens, this book is still available to be published [hint hint]. Phil and I corresponded both telepathically and via email. Here are the results:
Interview by Brandon Johnson
In my intro I called you a weirdo. Are you a weirdo?
You called me a weirdo? I think that’s fair.
There’s a folk gothic quality to this story, like the Grimm Brothers—maybe it’s the combination of violence, strangeness, and adversity. Is this due to your German heritage?
Maybe. I read Heidegger’s Being and Time a few years before I started The Takes. He’s concerned with authenticity, being towards death, and what defines existence. Looking back, it’s pretty obvious to me that there’s a lot of that going on in the book. I know the Grimm stories, but I wouldn’t say I know them that well. I saw the movie a couple years ago with Matt Damon as one of them, hunting witches etcetera. Not a good movie.
The Takes are a family—two precocious kids, Brian and Olivia, and their hapless father Norman. I see Norman as the antithesis of the modern hero, a Leopold Bloom in American clothing sans interior life. Who does Norman represent in our society?
That’s pretty right on. The lack of interior life has a lot to do with Norman being not a real person in the natural, common sense. He just doesn’t have the complexity, at least at the outset of the book, which other characters have. Brian and Olivia are definitely precocious, and that’s probably the more noticeable because of Norman’s flatness. But Norman’s journey toward complexity is one of the arcs in the book. And so in a way he represents anything that grows from flatness to complexity. He doesn’t get there at the end of the first book, though. I’m writing toward that in the next one.
I’m interested in this fake-human/real-human thing—the flatness of Norman and his progression toward complexity. It seems like people could relate to this in life—trying to be present or authentically themselves, via meditation, yoga, various forms of art and culture. Is this also coming from Heidegger?
Yeah, Heidegger is batshit for authenticity. His road to that authenticity is through being-towards-death. At least as I read it, if we know that the end is coming at all times, we won’t squander the present or indulge in fantasies like “I’ve got a lot of years left,” or “tomorrow is another day that’ll make up for today.” That kind of mindfulness can be a product of yoga, meditation, and everything else that combines the intellect—he isn’t engineered to get it. Even for Brian and Olivia, the idea of loss doesn’t really start to have meaning until the end. Can people relate to that? I do, anyway. At least I think I will.
After Helen’s interloping Mother rampage, we meet her creator—a low-level Deity who’s churning out defective quasi-humans to unleash upon the earth to please his own vanity. This is interesting to me, especially in the age of the Internet, where anybody can release anything in any stage of completion to the big blank Unknown at little to no cost to themselves. Is there any relation here? Or maybe this is a comment on the creative process in general? As he said “It’s a lot like poetry, babe. Some compositions just don’t turn out as well as others.”
I never really thought about it in terms of the Internet, but damn that’s pretty close to the bone. I’ve been guilty of that for sure, shoving out my imperfect, unfinished creations. Why the hell not? I guess the only reasons not to put it out there would be low quality creations cheapen my “brand,” or whatever, and dilutes the medium by flooding it. Procrustes has definitely done that. He sees himself as an artist, but his art isn’t ready. Just like Norman he’s going to grow through the experience of realizing this, of being chastised and cheapened for his transgressions. Which I guess means that there’s no room for vanity in art because art outlives you, goes further. And that it deserves to have a that life of its own.
I’m also interested in this pantheistic universe where according to the character 8, “there are no rules except infinity and the inconsequence that not only accompanies but defines it.” What’s up with the pantheism? Why is the “God” God just a bored dude staring at his television?
Pantheism is really natural to me. Even monotheistic religions tend toward pantheism after awhile. Most, I’m not sure all, monotheistic religions tend to deify some entity other than the primary God, whether it’s his son or his son’s mother or his son’s cousin or whomever. We like characters. I decided that 8 should be bored because he’s not an interventionist in the sense that he’s controlling everything. It’s that watchmaker argument, in which God sets things in motion but has no control of the mechanism after it’s been created. How long can you watch a watch tick? So he’s bored.
I just read a draft of a newer story you wrote about a down and out Tony the Tiger who goes on a psychotic drug-fueled rampage. Where are you going with this?
That, not surprisingly, started when I was buying cereal. I looked at the store-brand cereals and the name-brand ones. I wondered how much store-brand mascots made, where they would live if they were real, how they’d feel about the wealthier, more established name-brand mascots. I wasn’t sure but I figured Tony was the oldest of the mascots. His fall would be the most tragic, and so he had to fall. But it’s also a story about obligatory friendships, identity, blah blah. What did you think about it?
I was thoroughly entertained, but with a little reflection I was surprised how believable it was for a giant tiger humanimal thing to be in existence. Like when he’s drying off his fur with a towel—totally believable that this thing exists. Maybe it was the dialog that made it more real for me—there was a lot of character and nuance. With that said, I know you’re currently working on a few projects across different mediums. Anything you’d care to mention here?
He’s definitely real to me, anyway. Projects? Always. I’m trying to do a thing where I release, record, or curate a different 2 or 3 song single every month in 2014. The first one is a “band” called Boner Beach that’s available for streaming up or loading down on bandcamp at this moment right now. And I’m working on the sequel to The Takes, which goes back a number of years, then forward, then back again. It’s a prequel/sequel that advances the conflict between all those gods with indeterminate goals in the first book. And of course it explores what happens when two kids get absolute freedom, and how debilitating that can become.
Lizzi Bougatsos doesn’t believe in waste. A scattering of Christmas tree ornaments with miniature dildos affixed to them cutely adorns a table in her studio share in SoHo. A natural junk collector (and an artist disinclined to working in a studio at that), she’s using up the materials she already has on hand. When the front woman of experimental band Gang Gang Dance is done working with these items, she intends to make art with different sorts of objects: water, ice, trees. There’s a dilemma in the process, however, because Bougatsos’ understanding of beauty goes beyond the formal properties of material and the conceptual concerns of vision into the ethics of material itself. In other words, in a capitalist economy, art is an expression of consumerist waste, so how to make art that is both a product of creative human construction, but not another excessive object in an economy of exploitation, gluttony, and squander? Bougatsos has some ideas.
The first time I encountered Bougatsos’ work was via the Dikeou Collection when curator Devon Dikeou, in collaboration with Artpace’s Mary Heathcott, exhibited a trio of 2010 pieces in group exhibit, “Swapmeet” at Artpace in San Antonio. I was surprised at the emotion—a sort of girlish, bitchy glee—that the objects elicited from me. A FOR RENT sign with “my pussy” scrawled in the entry field, Tracy Morgan raising his eyebrows on a Cop Out poster through a vanity light stand, and “In god we bust” scribbled in neon green lights. So irreverent and unpredictable, and most of all, I recognized I thought, the too little expressed reaction of contemporary female identity to the mainstream smorgasbord of celebrity obsession and perpetually confusing/infuriating onslaught of depictions of femaleness. However, Bougatsos’ work is shifting to reflect a shift in consciousness she anticipates for culture.
Interview by Rachel Cole Dalamangas
You’re known as an icon of the underground and some of your artwork appropriates/parodies the cult of celebrity. I’m curious about your thoughts on the relevance of subculture for unrepresented voices and perspectives?
I’m really excited about the youth now. I believe that every 10 years there’s a revival in some way whether it’s in music or art. The other day, my friend had a bunch of New York Times-es from the past month. I went through them all and there was a designer that I knew, there was a musician that I spoke to in a bar recently. They all know Gang Gang, but now they’re making their own albums and they’re in the Times. They’re making their own clothes and they’re in the Times.
I don’t believe in hierarchy. When I would curate art shows, one way that I would deal with the underground is put in artists that were emerging or never represented. For example, Rita Ackerman and I used to curate a lot of those and we would put a Louise Bourgeois next to a photographer that never showed in a gallery before—Katija Rawles known as a fashion photographer, her work was sort of similar to Marilyn Minter. There was another photographer that was an underground figure in New York for a really long time. Her work is incredible—Robin Graubard.
My whole goal in curating art shows was to never have anyone on a pedestal and keep everything on the same plane. And I feel that way about music too.
I never believed in idolizing somebody higher than yourself. I like to deface celebrity a lot because there are all the politics that come with it that are so gross and hard to deal with.
I would always play the show and then do the merch table after the show. The only reason I didn’t last tour is because I’m getting older and I’m getting tired. But if somebody asks me to come out and sign things and talk to people, I’ll always do that.
I don’t know. I’m excited about the underground in music.
With digital media’s impact on culture, is there a scene that is genuinely underground anymore?
I think the underground is equivalent to selling out. I don’t know if it exists. I mean I think there’s underdogs. I think there’s people that are coming up that need to be represented, but they don’t stay underground very long now because of the internet. It’s like two walls that face each other and cancel each other out.
For example, in the past, when we didn’t have the internet, you got a music contract for a tampon commercial. I always say tampon because Gang Gang was always like well the only thing we’d do is a tampon commercial, like we won’t do a car commercial. But because everything is so free, now you do those commercials. You’re forced to kind of do them. You’re forced to take that car commercial. Because there is no idea of selling out. With the internet, there’s survival too. One has to learn not how to be watched. Identity theft is huge.
Censorship was a big issue that came up like three years ago. That was going to be a big issue. We’re seeing it on like Facebook and even imagery on Instagram, but now everyone has a voice. If you want to be in a movie, just make your own. If you want to make a song, just put it on iTunes. There’s no need for a label even anymore.
What are the underdogs?
They’re the ones that haven’t been discovered yet, have the drive and will be a part of culture.
I think culture is a force, but I think that a big part of it is common sense. You need street cred. You know what I mean?
You gotta work for it and you gotta have common sense. If you’re from New York, it helps. If you act in a mindful way, you will be rewarded.
I went to this art lecture once. Jerry Saltz was giving a lecture about how to make it in the art world. He had this pie diagram and it was really funny because being in the right place at the right time was a big part of that pie, like 65%. Like Yoko Ono when she met John Lennon—as far as I’m concerned he was in the right place at the right time. It’s really interesting, like, there’s about 65% of life that is about chance. 65-85%. I think he said luck went hand and hand with chance. I’ve heard actors say that too.
What were your ambitions when you were 19? How did you perceive the career in front of you when you started out?
I’ve been thinking it about it recently. I perceived it exactly as I perceive it now. I remember my girl friend was dating this hot Columbian guy whose dad owned a deli and they had to move out of their deli and they put all this stuff in the garbage. I went into the garbage and I took out this huge tube and I took it home, coiled it up and put it on a piece of whiteboard and that was the sculpture that I made. I remember taking it off of the board and placing it on the beach and placing it on the lawn. I just believed in performance ever since I was in that garbage. It was sticky. It was filthy. There was, like, Coke syrup. I remember everyone saying, “That’s disgusting. That’s garbage.” There was nothing gonna stop me from making performative land art out of this sticky, disgusting tube.
Later on, I met Pat Hearn who was one of my major mentors and she was the first person that ever said anything to me about my art. She was dying of cancer at the time and she was so thin. She looked kind of like a shaman. She had this huge turban on and she said, “You remind me of Joan Jonas.” She said, “You work with error.” And that’s kind of why I kept working. Then I met this other artist, Suzanne Anker. I met her in New York when I was in college. She said to me, “This is sculpture” [throws a no. 2 pencil in an arc.] That was another thing that made me, it just stuck. Every single place that that pencil went in the air from the moment that it was kinetically and chemically in motion, it was performative sculpture.
Have you ever doubted your practice as an artist?
In 2009, I had an art show with James Fuentes and I got really upset. I didn’t have an art studio. I had to borrow one for a month. I never had an art studio. I always made art out of my apartment. I wanted to make this sculpture of a tongue that moved so I went to the sculpture store and I bought this material, it was $100, and I brought it to the studio and I read the directions and I was like, “Why am I buying this $100 material to make sculpture with when I have no money to eat anything?” So I brought it back and ever since then I’ve been really skeptical of what I put out. I just didn’t want to contribute to anymore waste. Waste is such a huge problem for me. I recycle almost everything. Everything that I own, I usually put into my artwork if I don’t sell it or give it away.
Three years later when I saw Urs Fischer make that tongue sculpture, I said to my friend Spencer, “I wanted to make that and I didn’t make it. Did you ever get upset that you didn’t make something and then you see someone else do it?” And he said, “Yeah, sometimes I get upset, but they did it first.”
How do you come through the other side of doubt?
I think it’s just a survivalist thing. I mean that’s the only way I’ve been able to make art or even music. I’ve always had a purpose for making music. With art, it’s really a survivalist thing. I get upset when I see really crappy art, but I don’t know why I keep making it. Because people really like it and I do get joy out of it, and I think that’s the communion side of my makeup. I really enjoy when people are laughing.
There’s a strong element of provocation in your work—an intense emotional charge and sense of humor coming out it.
That’s the performative side, I think. I think that it’s about gratification really. I think I get a lot of gratification from taking a knife and stabbing it into the wall and hanging pearls from it or a microphone and having that be my self-portrait. If it’s visually balanced, then I’m so satisfied.
You make work pretty spontaneously?
I have a tough time laboring. I am not even a studio artist. The fact that I have this studio, I mean, it’s pretty tough for me. This isn’t the way that I work.
Lately, I’ve been dealing with more physical forces of nature. Like ice or plants, dirt. Those have been the driving forces for me lately. You can’t own them. If you do own a plant, like the piece I put in my last show, a tree, when someone bought it, I gave them instructions on how to take care of it. I believe in making things that grow or that you can’t really own anymore. Like, I’m a feather. That’s how I’m thinking about my art right now.
You mentioned your problem with waste and described in other interviews your interest in a “shift in consciousness.” What is art’s and music’s role in a shift in consciousness?
I mean people put so much money into the fabrication of things that aren’t beautiful. Everything that exists in nature is already beautiful. That’s the dilemma I’m having now. I almost believe that art is the anti-Christ of what is beautiful. It’s basically a gluttonous production of waste and more garbage and more things that we’re going to have to bury. This is a dilemma that I face almost every few years.
I remember I was on tour and we were in Ireland and there were these stone statues facing the sea at the top of this mountain. And I thought, “This is the kind of art that will withstand the test of time. This is the kind of art that never goes away. This is the kind of art that you remember.” You can’t throw it away and it will erode naturally. When I look at those, I never want to make art again.
In the year I’ve been doing these interviews, one question I’ve asked almost every artist is do you think the world is ending because of environmental problems with material?
No.
I’m hoping that there will be a shift of consciousness that’s more mindful and more humane. The truth is there’s always evil because there’s always holiness and there needs to be a balance of yin and yang. I don’t think the world will end, I did almost think that for the Mayan calendar and I was a little bit scared, but I knew that that just meant that things were going to change and I was just hoping for a mindful consciousness among humans.
In a mindful world, where do you think art would be situated?
I have no idea because evil still holds the leash of art.
I mean this all goes back to how I studied ceramics for eight years. I knew that clay was from the earth and it was the only thing that wouldn’t pollute the earth, it would just go back into the earth. So I never considered myself making waste when I was working in clay because it could be recycled. When I did work in clay, I also believed that medium was equivalent to those sculptures on top of the hill.
You’re also considered a fashion icon. How does fashion matter to your art and music or vice versa?
I’m in this position where one of my closest friends, you know, she’s a fashion icon and she designs cloths. I get all of her hand-me-downs and it’s funny because sometimes I’ll have these really incredible things, but it’s not about having these incredible things, it’s about playing with them. I think this is where being an underdog really comes into play. You’ll see this hat at Balenciaga and it will be like a helmet with a crazy visor on it and there’s no way you could afford it, but if you’re creative you can recreate it, some version of it. So then you don’t have shell out $8,000 for this hat.
Some designers make the most beautiful art, wearable art and its so linked with performance. I loved when Björk wore that swan. I even liked when Lady Gaga came out of the egg. I love those crossovers. I love erratic creativity that sort of disturbs.
I’ve been called a muse by a lot of different people over the years and I’ve been told that I inspired this and that. My friend that I was talking about likes to watch me get ready.
It’s interesting because fashion also involves the use of material—“wearable art” as you called it.
Exactly. But it’s the man too. You have to know how to wear it.
You’re referred to as a feminist frequently and there is this irreverent revelation of female identity happening in your work, but you never actually describe yourself as one.
Well, I do identify, but I never believed in calling myself a feminist. The people that I’ve always admired or wanted to be more like were men because somehow they always get a break. It seems like the women who get the break to be in the group show with the men are really in the show because they’re not a force, they’re not a threat. I’ve always considered myself a humanist instead of a feminist. I admire people who earn their keep. I don’t care whether they are men or women.
I do don’t think it’s easy for women. We’re a threat. We’re able to create physically and a man can’t do that so I think that opens us up to having more psychic powers or something. We sort of see in circles, like mother universe, and men see in squares. That is why they so-called “succeed.” Most of the men in my life have A LOT of female in them. That’s why they wanted to do a tampon commercial, he he.
What are you working on now?
One piece is a sculpture that I’m envisioning right now that will go in somebody’s house, it’s a tree sculpture. The other piece that I was making was supposed to be a waterfall made out of ice, but I couldn’t make it happen. I got a movie job and I acted in a movie.
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!