But that’s one of the hardest things—to give up that control of how you wanted it to be, or how you thought it should look.
Oh totally. I was talking to somebody else about this body of work and talking about ideas about taking risks, or working in the space where you don’t know what the end result will be. They kind of associated that kind of risk-taking as part of my practice, but I incorporated that into my practice to save me from myself because really, what I am is over-meticulous, over-perfectionistic, and I’m really connected to trying to reproduce this thing that I see so clearly, but will never actually come outside my mind. Then, over time, I can see that it’s not even worth it—it’s not even worth it to fucking try. Even if I could do it, it’s not even worth it, because to allow all these other influences that makes it infinitely more interesting, and more profound.
So, you’re not usually a risk taker when it comes to your work? I’d think that would be surprising to a lot of people.
No, that’s the thing—I am usually a risk taker, but it’s not my instinct. After my first show, I immediately saw a lot. It was mostly because I wasn’t sensitive enough to understand my own flaws, in a way. But I saw that the audience wasn’t seeing what I wanted them to see, so it changed my relationship to my practice a little bit, and that allowed me to get to this place where I realized that I need to be working out of places of discomfort. It’s just like life—the unknown is where the beauty is. But we’re always looking for security and stability. So, to keep myself in a place where I’m working from an unknown space is incredibly important. It might not be my instinct, but I am always trying to push myself back over there.
The conceptual area between 2D and 3D in these paintings is fascinating to me. In a lot of ways, the works feel totally 2D—almost like a backdrop from a movie set. As opposed to some of your other work that, like you said, feels much more atmospheric, these pieces really stand on their own.
Yeah, it’s funny because there are a lot of little weird contradictions built into that view. I totally agree with what you are saying, but the way I talk about these, or the way I think about them, is less as images and more as objects, although the object is a flat surface, or essentially a box. But I think about the object of the paint, and what that is, as opposed to these other things that you’re talking about, which almost negate the paint as material and open up a fantasy space. Then all of a sudden, they almost become less 2D, because you have this illusionistic space. So, when you figure out the illusionism, they become very flat.
But what these paintings connect most to, and kind of distant part of my practice, has a lot to do with how I started thinking about sculpture, and how these different realms of realities, or these different dimensions—like the Birdshit Paintings. I was making them really at the same time I was making the gum pieces, and illusionism got really twisted in them for the first time for me. So, I was making paintings that look like AbEx paintings, with bubblegum, and I was using oil paint to make a wall of substance that looked like bird shit. But what I realized was that it is illusionism—the Birdshit Paintings are actually sculptures, they are not illusionistic paintings, because they are dimensionally accurate to bird shit. Again, I am not using the paint to actually render anything—I am using it to actually be a material, to take the form of that material. So, if I were to paint a drop of bird shit, it would look totally different than an actual drop of bird shit.
So, the idea of paint as an object was inspiring, and I didn’t know what to do with it. In there, it was illusionism, but there was no rendering. These, in this very weird way, and in taking on this ultra flat consideration, are just as much about the material as those Birdshit Paintings. Neither of them allow the viewer to cleanly focus on that, they are both kind of slippery in a way. But the paint is first in both of them. I had been trying to apply that to a figurative image since then, and it has been very hard. So, I think this is really the first time that I’m really getting at that.
Let’s rewind a bit. Was painting something you’ve always done? Like, even when you were at RISD?
I have always drawn, and I was able to go to college because I had always drawn, and could draw very well, and because I enjoyed drawing. I also did outside of schooling. Anything inside schooling was always difficult for me, so I was able to develop it more like that.
Right. It’s always more fun when you’re doing it outside of the rules.
Yeah, I was just always resistant. I have a pathetic authority complex—I’ve always been plagued with that. But so, I did do a little bit of painting in high school, but I didn’t have the time to be comfortable with it. I probably made three paintings in Arts Students League. Then, I went to college. I was searching to find my voice and pretty quickly I decided I wanted to take all of my hand out of the work. I started spraying pretty soon after—I didn’t want to use a brush, I didn’t really want anything to do with a brush, and I just started spraying and stenciling and using a lot of different alternative and more industrial techniques. That first body of work that I talked about earlier—the show was called Seven Days Always Seemed Like A Bit Of An Exaggeration—I started it by spraying right when I got out school—it was my first show after school. But I started with spraying, and I kind of knew that it wasn’t going to work because I wasn’t very good at it, but I got far enough into it that I had to find a way to figure it out, and realized I was going to have to paint it.
Those two years is really when I learned to paint. I called up every friend at school that I knew was painting seriously, and asked them like, ‘How the fuck do you do this?’ Someone said, ‘You have to go to The Met and paint every day. Unless you get the fanciest brushes, you are going to be at a handicap to everybody.’ So, I got a couple of different things like that, and I kind of got set up and then I just started painting. That is my beginning and what I was doing in school, so I do think of it as being at the core of my practice—oil painting—and I did do what my friend said, and started going to The Met every week and painting every day. It was an amazing time and hopefully I’ll find another time in my life to be able to do something like that again, because just to kind of be a viewer, and indulge in that, in a very intense way—it’s so powerful.
I was going to ask you about working in different mediums, like painting versus sculpture, but I’m hesitant to call the medium in this series painting—in a lot of ways, it’s not the medium, bur rather the art itself.
As much as I want it all to be fluid, the painting happens to—I don’t think it’s my intention—but it becomes more of a sacred space, in a way. I am, in a way, willing to negate, or disrupt the focus on content, or themes, or things that are important for me to say, to let the material, speak and to let the experience be a much subtler thing, just because I believe that something mysterious and worthwhile happens in that space, where I use some of the sculptural, and now performative works, to explore more blatant themes or issues. But at the end of the day, what I want is to start with an idea and give myself the space to find the best material to use, to explore that idea and then give the space for that idea to totally transform once I start interacting with that material. And that’s true with painting, or whatever over medium I’m working in.
Do you feel like there is a through-line throughout your career, or certain themes you always find yourself revisiting in your work?
I really do think of it’s this idea of experimentation, exploration and the unknown is something that is always tying things together for me. It is diverse in a way and I am another consistent part of it. The work ends up, at least in my mind, engaging global ideas and global conversations, but it never starts there—it always starts with my personal experience. So, for me, that’s something I do think about a lot. And it’s a dilemma to make work about myself—I often question that. But since, I’m resigned to that in a way, and also the fact that I feel everything is connected and you can get global from a microscope. But there is a dilemma in just indulging in that and saying, ‘I started with a feeling that I had where I felt like I didn’t know where my home was at that moment, so now the work has to do with refugees.’ But that’s how it works. It’s boundless in the same way as that is, but also as basic as that is, it all comes from me. I am not just a source, but I am the subject, too.
‘High Noon’ is on view now through December 15 at Gagosian Beverly Hills.