ArtIsUnity

The term “artist” is so weighted now, I’d rather just view someone as an artist if they’ve chosen to make art of some kind. The rest is just categorization of monetary success or professional commitment, differentiating between fine and commercial art or lowbrow vs highbrow—but sure, I think of myself as an artist. Currently I’m working on pieces that engage directly with the work of other artists, namely John Baldessari and Robert Ryman. Engaging directly with existing art is a new path—and one I had to come to terms with going down because there’s an almost inevitable “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” element to it. I don’t want it to be academic or too “insider.” So, I’m trying to be playful with it and make sure that comes through.

Your process is deceptively complex and uses different methods including inkjet printing, stenciling and hand painting.  How did you end up with this process?  Why is it important to you?

I’ve been working fairly fluidly between digital sketches and the canvas for a while now, even before involving inkjet and stencils. But using inkjet and stencils both started with the “Death of the Author” series a couple of years ago. I had recently purchased a large format vinyl cutter, which is usually used for the vinyl lettering you see on museum walls or for stencils in commercial airbrushing. My original intention was to make stencils for pure text pieces. But I put that project on pause to work on digital sketches for the “Death of the Author” series.

While working on sketches in Photoshop and not finding them compelling enough, I decided to copy and paste a scribble. It was just one stupid little pasted scribble, but I recognized as soon as I did it that the duplication had to be a core part of the work. And immediately after that I thought of the vinyl cutter sitting just a few feet away and how stencils would be the perfect tool for painting reproductions of complex scribbles. And, of course, the duplication also reflected perfectly some of the themes of originality in the text. There aren’t a lot of “aha” moments in making art, so that was a rather lovely little convergence. That simple copy/paste ended up setting me off the work I’ve been doing for the past couple of years.

Can you explain your use of pop imagery and why you use it?  Is the clean, but also seemingly Twomblyesque mark making important to your artistic vision? 

Pop art for me is something that addresses pop culture, which isn’t something my work touches on too much. Even when I was focused on cartoons and comics, it was more about the means of communication rather than the pop culture aspect. But I’ve brought some of the aesthetic from the cartoon-based work into the text work to allow for levity. If there weren’t a sense of humor in it, I’d probably find my own work dreadful.

Do you consider yourself an abstract pop artist in the vein of Jonathan Lasker or Nicholas Kurshnick? Your work also has a conceptual element.  Do you consider yourself a conceptual artist?  Or a painter where the concepts are very important, but the object still takes precedence?

Well, I didn’t know Nicholas Kurshnick so thanks for the tip! But the narrative that conceptual art denies the object bothers me. Let’s take an 8.5 x 11” page that describes a work that could be executed, for example. There’s an assumption that the art has no object because the work described in the text doesn’t exist—or at least doesn’t have to. However, the page format, font, and framing of the work all have an effect on how we perceive the work. The fact that a physical document exists is important, as is the fact that it’s the printed word and not written or oral. It’s also a commodity. The same is true of a black and white photo of a performance that no longer exists. Those early conceptual artists deliberately chose an aesthetic. Even if they said there’s no aesthetic, there is one. It was just reduced. In fact in several recent paintings I’m deliberately lifting that aesthetic.

Fortunately, artists today can combine the conceptual and painting without having to toe a party line—whether conceptual vs painting, figurative vs abstract, etcetera. And 1980s painters like Lasker, Christopher Wool, and Peter Halley opened that up a lot for painters like me.

Can you talk about your use of text?  Why are you working over text and how do you feel about that conceptually and aesthetically?  When you choose a text, how do you choose it and why?  Why do you obstruct them with paint and other mediums?

Aesthetically, I find working with text an interesting challenge because of its regular pattern–pitting these loose marks against the Gutenberg galaxy, as McLuhan calls it.

So far, the texts that I’ve chosen are ones that I’ve been mulling over. I had worked with existing text before–but in a comics context. But the impetus to work with the printed word came from a combination of getting bored with working with comics and mulling over the essay “Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes. I hadn’t read it in years, but it was something I’d occasionally think about.  It occurred to me that, if you take his position to the logical conclusion, you could not only disregard the intent of the author, as he suggests, but also cancel the text itself. In other words: If the reader’s interpretation of the text trumps the author’s intent, why bother with the text? So I thought of how to cancel the text in a playful way. The reproduced scribbles act as a callback to the content of the text, so it’s not just some sort of antagonistic gesture. It’s also not a definitive statement but rather an exploration.

Is creation planned, detailed, spontaneous, improvisational, reactive, proactive?

Once I start the actual painting, everything is planned, even if there are still small decisions being made along the way. But I allow for a lot of spontaneity in the ideation and sketch phase. And I also allow myself to try out stupid ideas in those phases–absolutely horrible concepts and sketches. Every once in a while, even a stupid idea will suggest something worth following.

Does the medium you’re working in influence the content and or composition of what you’re creating?

Generally I start with a general concept and then work out what technique would work best to execute it. But since there’s a self-reflexive element, the medium usually does become the message, as it were.

Did you study Art?    If so, in what ways was it most useful? Are there things you had to unlearn?

I studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Probably the most useful thing was connecting with other people who were seriously engaged with art. Professors can be important but it’s students who you end up exchanging ideas with and spending the most time with. The luxury of a lot of time spent in the studio is important, making horrible work and learning from that. The Academy was in transition when I was there. After my first year, a whole fleet of older professors exited. The curriculum was probably the same one Egon Schiele had–classical perspective, life drawing, paint chemistry, etcetera. But the new batch of professors brought in new trends, new media—artists like Sue Williams, Muntean and Rosenblum, Eva Schlegel, Renée Green, Peter Kogler, and so on. None of the professors in my master class were dogmatic so any unlearning I’ve had to do are things I had taught myself.

Can you talk about your experience in both the US and in Europe?  How has that influenced your art?

Living in both places has definitely had an effect personally, socially, and politically. But it would be hard for me to say how that’s influenced my work. But living in Austria, where tuition was reasonable, made it possible for me to get a master’s without crippling debt.

Are there artists or art works, in addition to the artists you’ve talked about, that have made a lasting impression on you? If so, has it influenced your thinking about art or the art you make?  This does not need to be limited to visual artists.

There have been plenty, some probably more apparent than others. I connect with a lot of the American artists from the 50s and 60s like Ryman, Twombly, Agnes Martin, and Sol LeWitt. But also painting that references itself—Bram Bogart, Jonathan Lasker, Pia Fries, Bernard Frieze, Mark Bradford, Wade Guyton, and so on.  But I’m also always drawn to Netherlandish painters like van Eyk and van der Weyden and Venetian Renaissance painters like Crivelli, Bellini, and Mantegna.

And the 1960s films of Jean-Luc Godard take up an unhealthy amount of my thoughts.

You’re also a musician.  Is there overlap between your music and your visual art practice?

I’ve thought about this, and the short version is that I don’t think there is much overlap. I’m happy to keep them as two separate streams.

Is your art actively influenced by thoughts, emotions or spirit in the moment of creation?  If so, how? Do current events or politics impact your creation?

That sounds like something an artist should say “yes” to…But honestly, emotion is not the first thing on my mind. But I can listen to, for example, a process piece by Steve Reich and have an emotional response. So I know that a work where the artist isn’t trying to convey specific emotions can actually evoke an emotional response. Similarly, I don’t see my work as reacting directly to current events and politics,… it’s not too hard to see some overlap with the dialog on fake news, disinformation, etcetera. But that’s not been the impetus for the work; my work deals with authenticity and communication

Many thanks to Michael Boring; view Michael’s work here, and in our ArtIsUnity Gallery.

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