Category Archives: Interviews

Interview: Lucy R. Lippard

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Front cover of Lucy Lippard's, 'Six Years: The Dematerialzation of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972', originally published in 1973

Front cover of Lucy R. Lippard’s, ‘Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972′, originally published in 1973

Lucy R. Lippard’s career trajectory has run from academically trained art historian, to critic, curator, and feminist activist. Eschewing definition, Lippard has described her methodology as “simply one thing leading to another.” Initially a critic, she rejected conventional art criticism on the basis of its “so-called objectivity” and lack of contact with artists and their practice. During the 1960s, she became a key figure and commentator on Minimal and Conceptual art. Her book Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object (1973), was the subject of a survey exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, entitled Materializing Six years: Lucy R. Lippard and the emergence of Conceptual Art. Her pioneering Numbers Shows (1969-1973) are understood to have complicated the definition of curating. “Radicalized” by a trip to Argentina in 1968, Lippard joined the Art Workers Coalition (AWC) in January 1969, campaigning for artists’ rights, against discrimination, and in opposition to the Vietnam War. She went on to co-found a number of organizations including the Ad Hoc Women Artists’ Committee (1970), the Feminist art journal Heresies (1977), Printed Matter (1976) and Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention In Central America (1984).

‘Changing: Essays in Art Criticism’ (1971) marks your ambivalence with art criticism. You’ve cited the rejection of Clement Greenberg’s elite patronization of artists, complicity with art market interests, and the avoidance of a rigid and systematic methodology as reasons for your move away from criticism. What do you make of the argument that criticism is under threat and is it worth saving?

As long as art is worth saving, good criticism will be too. That was a personal choice for me; after the first few years as a working critic, I realized this was not where I wanted to spend my whole life. I’ve always enjoyed sniping from outside to try to improve what’s going on inside.

Each chapter in ‘Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object’ covers a year between 1966–1972. Why did you choose to focus on this date range?

I’ve described the book Six Years myself as a curatorial effort, though a pretty encompassing (some would say undiscriminating) one. I focused on that range because that’s how I lived it, or was living it. And because my energies were going into feminism and I wanted to be sure the conceptual moment was fully documented.

What has been your level of involvement with the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition, Materializing Six Years?

I had little to do with the Brooklyn Museum show though I gave it my blessings. I handed it over to two very capable curators (Catherine Morris and Vincent Bonin). I was really pleased with the results.

Installation photograph of 'Materializing “Six Years: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art'. Courtesy Brooklyn Museum

Installation photograph of ‘Materializing “Six Years: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art’. Courtesy Brooklyn Museum

Of your first ‘Numbers Shows’, 557,087 at the Seattle Art Museum, Peter Plagen’s of Artforum wrote: “There is a total style so pervasive as to suggest that Lucy Lippard is in fact the artist and that her medium is other artists”. You’ve always denied that you were an artist, though numerous commentators have remarked that your shows blurred the boundaries between artistry and curating. Were you aware of a potential blurring of the roles at the time?

Yes, for me the blurring of roles was the most exciting part of conceptual art. It was a wide-open time and I think we actually did open up the artworld, though not to the extent we’d hoped. I collaborated with several artists on pieces (Bob Barry, Doug Huebler, David Lamelas, etc) but I did so as a writer, not a visual artist. If the times allowed artists to be writers, there was no reason why writers couldn’t play too.

You’ve frequently described your 1968 trip to Argentina, when you were invited as part of a jury at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, as a key moment in your activist development. What insights did you gain during this trip?

I juried a show at the Fine Arts Museum in Buenos Aires with French critic Jean Clay. We weren’t allowed to see artists during the jury process and in the last day or so we were let loose and Jorge Gluzberg took us to a small town on the way to Tucaman where we met with the Rosario Group which was doing Tucaman arde at the time. I was deeply impressed by their commitment to social justice above and beyond their artmaking and when I got back home I dove into antiwar activities and then the Artworkers Coalition.

Your only ‘real job’, as you’ve described it, was as a Library Page at The Museum of Modern Art. Did later working with the Art Workers Coalition (AWC) present any strains amongst your former friends and colleagues? Or did you find that a number of museum staff were sympathetic with your aims? I suspect that a great deal of artists and arts professionals today would be apprehensive about critiquing major institutions in such a public way.

I never felt any conflict when I picketed the Museum on various occasions – with the AWC, with feminists, with the MoMA staff union. My friends there were on the same side. I agree that risk taking is not as common now as it was then, but I was already a freelancer and had no interest in ever working at MoMA again so I was taking no personal risks.

With hindsight, how do you assess the tactics of the AWC? Were there any actions you particularly approved or disapproved of? What did you make of Tony Shafrazi’s defacement of Picasso’s Guernica? Is the defacement of an artwork an acceptable form of protest?

I didn’t like Tony’s defacement of Guernica and that was his own action, not the AWC’s.  But the AWC didn’t veto anything anyone did. Most of the actions were as effective as they could be in that context, especially those involving the ‘And Babies’ poster.

A number of the demands the AWC leveled at museum’s have since become a reality: free entrance one day of the week, later opening hours, the appointment of artists as trustees. Where do museum’s fall short today and what additional demands ought to be addressed?

I haven’t lived in NYC for almost 20 years and really have no idea what goes on in the museums now. MoMA is certainly a very different place than it was in my day, when curators, guards, and flunkies like me were all on a pretty much first-name basis.

As part of the Ad Hoc Women Artists’ Committee (independent of the AWC) you successfully campaigned for more women to be represented in the 1970 Whitney annual (there were double than the previous year). Your tactics included fake press releases and the projection of work by women onto the museum’s exterior. Is it true that the FBI investigated?

The FBI knocked on Poppy Johnson’s door. She was one of Ad Hoc’s founders and was only 19 or so. I think they thought her youth made her more vulnerable, but she asked them if she had to talk to them and when they said no she slammed the door on them and called the rest of us. So they picked the wrong target.

In Galisteo (New Mexico) where you have lived since 1992, you continue to contribute to local politics and activism. What have been the most critical lessons that you have learned from activism since the late sixties? 

I have a poster on my wall that says “Nothing About Us Without Us Is For Us.” That’s an important lesson for organizers.

Which artists and activists do you particularly admire at the moment?

I admire everyone who is out there trying to make the world a better place. Occupy was a wonderful interlude and brought inequality to the fore in American public life. A truly important accomplishment wherever it goes from here.

How are you currently involved in local activism? 

My life in rural New Mexico over the last 20 years is very different from my life in the East VIllage, Bowery, Lower East Side, and SoHo.  The village of Galisteo has a population of 250. It’s very very quiet, with no commerce. The issues here are all land-related, watershed restoration, village planning committee, County Open Space committee, stuff I’d never have considered as an activist in the streets of NYC. And I’m in the 17th year of editing my monthly community newsletter, El Puente de Galisteo, which I founded. That’s my real community activist work, raising issues, printing pieces on local passions (birds, development, road widening, oil and gas incursions, new residents, cultural trespassing, family histories). From my little house off the grid (on solar) I look out over vast rangeland and mountains and mesas in the distance, across a local highway. I hike alot with my New Mexico Brown Dog (i.e. mutt). I write a lot. I read a lot. I see friends a lot. My partner and I love road trips (he was raised in New Mexico). We had an Occupy Santa Fe for a while, which was exciting but didn’t last. Political art is rare here, though the environment is a major concern. The New Mexico economy is reliant on the military, tourism, real estate, history, and Native people, dead and alive.

Finally, what have been your most recent projects and what are you currently working on?

SInce 2010 I’ve published a tome (Down Country: The Tano of the Galisteo Basin, 1250-1782) on the abundant archaeology and history of the area, with photographer Ed Ranney. This spring another archaeology book comes out about Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde with photographer Peter Goin, called Time and Time Again. And I’m just finishing Undermining, a hokey little book, parallel visual and verbal narratives about the politics of land use, land art, adobe, water, coal, fracking (and the kitchen sink) in the New West. Next in line is a history of the village from late 1700s to present. I still live on freelancing, as I have all my life, writing essays, and singing for my supper all over the place. I’m almost 76. So far, so good.

Lucy Lippard

Lucy R. Lippard (Image: CCS Bard)

Interview: Darren Coffield

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Darren Coffield, ‘Episodical (study)’, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 10″ x 11″

Darren Coffield (a.k.a Darcoff) studied at Goldsmiths College, Camberwell School of Art and the Slade School of Art in London. During the nineties, he worked alongside his friend, the curator Joshua Compston (d.1996) to establish the influential gallery space, Factual Nonsense, which was a key presence in what has been dubbed the ‘yBa’ scene. Compston exhibited Coffield’s work in The Courtauld Loan Collection (1991), alongside pieces by Damien Hirst, Gilbert & George and Fiona Rae. In 2010, Coffield participated in Exhibitionism, the ninth biannual East Wing exhibition, the series of shows established following The Courtauld Loan Collection. Coffield’s work is frequently selected for the National Gallery Portrait Award where his portraits have garnered considerable controversy. His work is characterized by a formalism akin to British Pop and a darkly humored investigation of political extremism.

Let’s begin by discussing your inverted portrait paintings. Have you given the series any sort of title?

No, I prefer not to give the series a title. I find that people’s first reaction is always to try and identify the figures, but they’re not always well known. The work is really about portraiture itself.  I started using figures I found in old Hollywood magazines because they were the easiest to use. I’ll use whatever comes to hand, it’s easier than commissioning photographs myself. The portraits came out of this fascination for celebrity culture. Everyone always says that Warhol was truly prophetic when he said that everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes but some remain famous far longer than that.

Darren Coffield, ‘Night & Day’, 2011, acylic on canvas, 10″ x 12″

Even though your figures are distorted, they remain recognizable. The works demonstrate that these figures have become pervasive commodities.

Well someone like Marilyn Monroe has never been allowed to rest in peace. She now has an agent who sells her to be used in digital products. So she could still turn up in films. Even the dead don’t sleep anymore. There’s endless discussion about the range of digital communication but most communication is given through the face. You’re picking up messages all the time when you pass or talk to people in the street. Most of it’s subconscious. Now everyone wants to use Skype, everyone wants to be seen. It’s because of the connection to the face. A lot of contemporary fine artists aren’t really engaging with that. It’s a challenge to portray a face in the age of mechanical & digital reproduction, an age which has negated the whole reason of painting portraits.

How do you choose your subjects? Do you find that you’re drawn to particular people?

You can’t choose who to paint because it never works. I really wanted to paint George Orwell because I conceived of the portraits as embodying a sort of Orwellian ‘doublethink’. I wasted about a month trying to find the right picture of Orwell. Not one single picture of him works when you try to invert it.

Darren Coffield, ‘Mein Kampf’, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 36″ x 26″

You found that he wasn’t recognizable?

It just didn’t suspend your sense of disbelief when you first looked at it. It looked completely jarring. The works look best when they’re not completely jarring. The Hitler one works quite well because it looks like he’s got a black mark in the middle of his forehead which is actually his mustache. He was the first one. It began with the difficulty of doing portraiture in the twenty-first century. That’s why the painting is titled Mein Kampf (‘My Struggle’). It’s a bit of a joke. It’s my struggle to paint portraiture in the twenty-first century. It has nothing to do with Nazism, history or politics, just the contemporary situation that we’re in.

How long does one of your portraits take from conception to finish?

They can take months. After the George Orwell debacle I realised I could spend my whole life looking for the right images. Generally it’s complete serendipity. Even the act of painting them is serendipitous. I’ll only paint them when I’m in the right mood. You’ve got to limber up like an athlete to achieve the right brush marks. I paint very very quickly. If they don’t work I’ve got to scrape them all off. If I am not in the mood to paint I will sculpt instead.

The sketch like quality of your brush marks suits the material very well.

I want them to look effortless and off the cuff. It belies the work that went in to it. It’s a bit like those fluid ink drawings of heads by Matisse, you don’t see the twenty heads of the woman he did beforehand because he ripped them all up in exasperation. You only ever see the final fully formed yet effortless looking one.

Darren Coffield, ‘Not I’, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 10″ x 11″

When did you first begin the portrait series and how did they come about?

A lot of these things just sit in your subconscious.  I thought of the inverted skull about a year before I painted it. I tend to think of an idea and then it takes a while to percolate. I was painting a jigsaw puzzle of Picasso and I stuck his nose upside down in the wrong place and I realised that the shadow underneath his nose worked really well with his eyebrows and created a new sort of space, punctuating the preconceived space of the face. That’s where the idea came from. I still didn’t start to make the first picture until several months later.

Darren Coffield, ‘Hockney takes a Breather’, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 70 x 80 cm

Your new portrait of David Hockney is well timed given that he’s being heavily discussed at the moment.

I was interested in putting a hand into the picture, to play with gestures a lot more. I wanted to widen up the whole field of what I was doing. I came across a picture of Hockney having a cigarette, which is completely the ‘wrong’ thing to do these days, completely anti political correctness. He was having a cigarette outside the Royal Academy, literally thrown out of his own exhibition, the only person having a cigarette. It’s his two fingers up at contemporary manners.

How do viewers tend to react to the works other than try to recognise the figure? They can be very disquieting and creepy.

Some people are freaked out by them. A dealer took some to the Far East and the galleries just wouldn’t have them. They were quite superstitious. There is this whole notion of evil concerning inverted crosses, symbols and heads. I am not remotely superstitious myself, I was searching for a Mary Magdalene or a Madonna to invert but I still can’t find one!

There’s a definite connection between your celebrity portraits and the vanitas pieces of skulls that you began with. Most of the figures you’ve painted are already dead and celebrity itself is our deliberate psychological evasion of death.

Well the other thing about the portraits is that I became sick and tired of hearing artists like Damien Hirst bang on about death all the time. He’s been lecturing everyone about death since the age of 23. It’s always been a paradox to me that people obsess and meditate on death so much when they don’t know anything about death. It’s something you’ll only experience once and you’re not gonna be telling anyone what it’s like.

The smiling grimaces of the skulls are a nice touch. The colours are also untypical for a vanitas. They’re bright and acidic as opposed to ashen grey.

Well that’s the paradox again. You’re alive and looking at something dead. The paradox is made explicit by turning the face upside down. It’s also part of the paradox of even painting those things in the first place. I wanted it to be a satirical reposte to Hirst and this ridiculous fashion for skulls. Skulls are everywhere at the moment.

Darren Coffield, ‘George Galloway MP’, 2006, acrylic on canvas, 6ft x 4ft

You’ve had a number of politically active people sit for you. George Galloway, Yvonne Ridley and Peter Tatchell.

Peter Tatchell was my favourite but we had to destroy the picture. The painting became very political and I was already very wary. I had done some work with Galloway and the anti-war movement and was having problems with my mobile phone. I’m convinced that I was being bugged. I decided to get rid of a lot of political work. I still have his (Tatchell’s) head. I cut it off! Tatchell attempted a citizens arrest of the Zimbabwean President & Dictator Robert Mugabe whilst in London. He stopped his car, opened the door and the British police just stood there and watched Peter getting beaten up by Mugabe’s cronies on the street. I admire his courage. He’s an exceptional man. The people I choose to paint are usually those slightly outside of the system and though a few may be well off, they’re essentially underdogs. The next person I want to paint is Barry Miles, an author & friend of many of the Beats, William Burroughs and so on. He also introduced the Beatles to dope. He cooked them all hash cookies when they went round to his house. He’s a quiet man but an exceptional character. No one else is going to paint these people because there’s no money in it and they’re not considered to be  ‘establishment’ or bankable. Lots of people paint Kate Moss but she’s an obvious choice. Why paint Kate Moss when there are so many great photographs of her? I paint people who I think should be painted and who should be in the National Portrait Gallery.

Darren Coffield, ‘ An indifferent attitude to wallpaper design’, 1991, polythene & photo collage on wood.  The work was exhibited in ‘The Courtauld Loan Collection’.

How do you feel your work has developed through your career? Your early work tends to be very abstract and inspired by design.

I was more into being a virtuoso when I was younger. A painting would take months and I’d endlessly work on several layers. As you become older you do get a lot freer. Now people say to me ‘oh you didn’t spend much time on it’. Oh well!

What was your experience of The Courtauld Loan Collection?

It was my first institutional exhibition. Jeremy Fry commissioned me to make my picture (see image above). We had a frame cut for it. It was going to be for Robert Fraser, the famous art dealer. It was made of solid blue plastic with white running through it. Ordered from a place in Atlanta. It was quite trippy. I didn’t enjoy making it at all. I spent my summer trying to cut this huge interlocking jigsaw by hand and I was using photographs. There was no digital technology I could use then. I’d try to stick the photographs down and they’d just get stuck to my hand with perspiration. The whole show was very stressful and Joshua (Compston) didn’t enjoy it either. I was told the night of the opening by a Cork Street gallery that they wanted to sign me onto their books. They said the Courtauld picture was very good but I’d have to make three of them, one for Paris, Tokyo and another for New York. I thought that doesn’t sound very good, I’m not going to sign on with you. I said no for my integrity, but of course financially I should have just done it. If you don’t do these things people assume that you’re ‘difficult’ and won’t exhibit you.

Joshua Compston in a publicity photograph for ‘The Courtauld Loan Collection’ (1991). The works in the background are by Piers Wardle (left), Fiona Rae (centre) and David Taborn (right). Photograph by Guy Moberly.

What is the scope of your recent book on Joshua Compston’s life? – Factual Nonsense: The art & death of Joshua Compston.

The book follows Joshua’s whole life. I’ve written the book in a filmic manner. The book starts when I meet him at 17 at art school and ends when he’s 17 and about to go to art school. In between, he starts off at art school, goes off into the art world, starts to get ahead and then is ‘killed’ by the art world. I set out to find out why he died as no one has really explained why, and to look at his early life. He definitely had some form of autism or aspergers, which in those days wouldn’t have been diagnosed. He was just seen as a particularly unruly child. He was a complete utopian. If he were alive today he’d be pricking the social conscience of many of his art world contemporaries in the press, lambasting them for not putting enough money into philanthropic projects and helping out more. He was trying to put Abstract Expressionist paintings into poor inner city schools. He believed it would spiritually elevate the kids and improve their lives. The irony was he could get the Mark Rothko paintings but he couldn’t get anyone to insure them. He would endlessly hit a brick wall. ‘Oh no no, you cant put those paintings there, not with those poor children around!’

Reading about him, it seems that though he always had precise plans, money was an endless obstacle. He was exhausting himself daily to maintain the financing of Factual Nonsense (Compston’s East London gallery space).

He was living under siege basically. He couldn’t leave the gallery for months on end in case the bailiffs came round. It’s ironic given that the local government has made millions off his artistic legacy and yet they were hounding him to his death for a few thousand pounds.

Joshua Compston, Invitation for ‘Es La Manera!’ exhibition, Factual Nonsense, 1993

There are two difficulties in studying Compston’s life and work. One is that the circumstance of his death (Compston died of an ether overdose after attending a Basquiat exhibition) was eagerly lapped up by the British press and heaps of mythology was suddenly piled on top of him. The other is that he continuously struggled to convey his curatorial projects to others. His ideas were often willfully contradictory or absurdist and I suspect many people didn’t know how to react to them. It also didn’t help that he branded Factual Nonsense with a highly charged military aesthetic.

A lot of people assumed he was a fascist but the imagery came from anti-fascist propaganda published by the British Communist party during the war. Many didn’t understand the context from which these images came from. He was saying that fascism is the enemy. His posters of Nazi’s goose-stepping didn’t equate with any sort of Nazi sympathy! He was one of the first artist-curators. Now you have dozens of curating courses so one is able to get an adequate sense of what has been done before. There was nothing like that during his lifetime. He was incredibly precocious. He was hanging out with Maureen Paley as a student. He knew a lot of big players including many who had yet to be a part of the art world. He met Cecily Brown within a few weeks of me starting art school. He had exceptional antennae. He knew who was interesting even if he didn’t agree with them. A lot of people didn’t get on with him. He was very divisive.  Factual Nonsense was a form of insurgency. When he died, it was discovered that he had been stockpiling dynamite at the gallery. He was planning to blow up public art sculptures that he didn’t like.

Do you think he really would’ve done that?

Oh yeah. He would have. If Joshua said he would do something, he would actually do it. He never posed like many of his contemporaries. A lot of yBa’s posed as hard, working class and being on the edge. But they weren’t. They wanted to become Royal Academicians and be part of the establishment. They didn’t have to sell out because had already done so long before they had even left art school.

That’s one of the observations of art historian Julian Stallabraas. That despite it’s self-image, the British nineties art scene remained inherently elitist.

They like to go to the Groucho Club where members of the public can’t go. They all go on about what a wonderful place it is. Well I suppose it’s because you don’t have to deal with the proletariat. They can sit there and say ‘oh look it’s Bono from U2’. They’re not interested in meeting ‘ordinary’ people. That is what’s fascinating about Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and the other artists of their generation. They would socialise and drink with ordinary people, life was their teacher. For example, Francis Bacon loved travelling everywhere by public transport, he liked watching people’s distorted reflections on the underground trains.

You spent a lot of time in the Colony Room with the likes of Francis Bacon.

Yeah Joshua and I met Bacon a few times. You’d have to go at a certain time of day. If you met him in the afternoon he was very charming, pouring champagne for everyone. If you met him late at night after he’d been drinking for quite a while, he was a nightmare. He was a magnetic character. He was a living legend. People went to find him and they could. It was very easy to access and meet people in those days.

Darren Coffield’s studio

Let’s discuss your experience of art school. You attended Goldsmiths, Camberwell and the Slade.

Art school was incredibly different then. We didn’t have to pay to go. It was genuinely bohemian. Now you’re paying to be educated. I was shocked at how academic it’s become when I went back to lecture recently. It’s become more about saying the right thing and reading the right books and regurgitating a certain script. People go in wanting to make a perfect, tidy product. When we were at art school we used to make a mess. We’d smoke and paint with turpentine and frequently set ourselves on fire. Of course there were many people who went in treating it as a finishing school. You’d never see these people again until your final degree show. The benefit was more studio space and resources. I knew one guy who only ever did abstract paintings that looked like squash courts. His father was a squash player who bought all his squash buddies over to the show. He was the only student who sold all his works!

Who were some of the tutors you particularly admired?

Euan Uglow, John Hoyland, John Hilliard. We were very lucky. We also had great visiting tutors, Peter Doig and David Hockney for instance. The quality of teachers has changed for many reasons over the years.  You have to remember that even Lucien Freud was teaching at Ravensbourne School of Art. That’s quite funny isn’t it? It isn’t a flashy school like Chelsea. Most people don’t even know where it is!

Darren Coffield, ‘Vogue’, 2005, acrylic on canvas, 12″ x 16″

You’ve received a few death threats over some of your works. I’m thinking specifically of your ‘Insurgent’ series.

Yes I have (laughs).

Do you want to talk about it?

Well that’s a sensitive area. Like I said, I believe that my phone was definitely bugged. I’d phone people and couldn’t get through to them. I’d leave a message and within a minute my phone would ring and tell me that I’ve got a message. I’d play it back and it would be me talking. It was bizarre. It was like someone was bouncing your calls back on to you to let you know, that they know, they’re out there, listening.

Do you have any idea who it was? I assume it wasn’t News International…

Yeah maybe I was being hacked! I doubt it was Rupert Murdoch, I’m not big enough! But it was truly bizarre. It went on for weeks.

Darren Coffield, ‘Christmas as the Kennedys’, 2006, Indian ink on paper, 48″ x 36″

Your ‘Black Rain’ series of family portraits, including the Kennedys and the British Royal family, are explicitly art historical. You borrow compositions from Titian and Poussin.

There is no way to do a formal group composition better than the old masters did it. I like to play with the idea of an historical slippage through modern times. You’ll get two different scenes bleeding through the image. I like to Google things just to see what gets thrown up, because some of it’s irrelevant or downright offensive. You get strange jumbled up imagery. People also don’t care about originality anymore. Richard Hamilton once remarked that he was shocked at how derivative most contemporary art had become. A lot of bad art is made to be marketed as a product, repackaged as ‘new’.

Is there a remedy for that?

Well that’s why I’ve gone back to painting apples! I think Cezanne had it right. You should just go back and work from classic motifs. All the old subjects are the best subjects. Painting flowers and so on. No one does it anymore because they can’t think of a contemporary way of engaging with it. The only person who gets away with it is (Gerhard) Richter. Because of what he does, Richter can wake up in the morning and say ‘oh I want to paint a seascape, oh I want to paint flowers or maybe paint my daughter. He’s a really fortunate artist. Many artists will look at their daughter and want to paint her, but then you think, ‘oh but I’ve aesthetically and intellectually negated the reasons for painting children’. It’s quite a sad world when you have to think like that. But that’s artistic integrity. There are whole swathes of imagery & genres you can’t use any more and I intend to bring some of it back into currency.

Darren Coffield, ‘Coal dust Thatcher’, 2010, coal dust on paper, 35″ x 23″

Which recent exhibitions of your work have you particularly enjoyed?

Probably the exhibition Ashes & Diamonds about the miners’ strike but that hasn’t come to London yet. I have met some truly remarkable people through making that exhibition. Arthur Scargill, the miners leader during the strike, opened the show in Sheffield. It got some great coverage on the BBC.

You painted a portrait of Arthur Scargill made of coal dust.

Yes, along with works depicting the miners’ famous battles with the Government. This period between 1984-85 was the closest the England had come to a civil war since 1651. There’s about 35 works in total. When that show comes to London, it should do quite well. It is currently touring all the old mining communities in the north of England. When the strike collapsed the government reeked revenge on the mining communities, the closing of the pits didn’t just mean unemployment, the knock on effect was a deliberate attempt to break the human spirit and erase generations of culture in those communities. We’re hoping to exhibit the work in a recreation of a coalmine in the 19th century subterranean tunnels under London’s Waterloo train station.

How did you meet Arthur Scargill?

You can’t meet Arthur Scargill. He has to come to you. It took two years to get him to come along but he did eventually turn up. Over the years he’s had quite a few attempts made on his life so he’s not really a public figure in the way he once was. He gave a rousing speech at the opening of the exhibition to a standing ovation. He is undoubtedly one of the greatest living political orators whether or not you agree with him.

Finally, what was the inspiration behind your latest series of jigsaw puzzle paintings?

The jigsaw works are paintings of fragmented narratives interspersed with one another. The use of jigsaw pieces allows you to have several different picture planes operating at once. Every time you take a piece and move it, you’re creating a completely different space. There are echoes of Cubism in it. You’ve got to test yourself. I’ve always been fascinated by artists who really tested the limits of what they could do. Bacon, Pollock, Picasso. Even as he lost the ability to paint, Matisse began to use paper cut outs to create beautiful work. You’ve always got to be testing the limits of what you can do.

Darren Coffield’s website: www.darcoff.com

Darren Coffield. Portrait by Robin Mellor

Interview: The Guerrilla Girls

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In 1984, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held an exhibition entitled An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture. Of the 169 artists involved, only 13 were women. Its curator, Kynaston McShine, told the press that any artist who wasn’t in the show should rethink “his” career. Enraged by this, a dedicated group of artists founded the Guerrilla Girls, whose mission ever since has been to expose racism and sexism in the art world through the use of activism, posters, publications and humour. Famed for their use of gorilla masks and pseudonyms after famous women artists, co-founder and press director, ‘Kathe Kollwitz’ kindly agreed to an interview.

You regularly name and shame curators, collectors, directors and trustees who are either corrupt or underrepresent women and artists of colour. But who are some of the art world professionals you admire?

There are many great curators out there who care about these issues. One of our favorites is in Spain, the fearless feminist Xabier Arakistain, a great supporter of women artists.  The Tate Modern London, The Moderna Museet in Sweden and even MoMA have women’s initiatives now.

Have members of the Guerrilla Girls ever been arrested for their activities?

We’ve been chased but never caught!

Given that you call upon the art world to be transparent, shouldn’t the GGs be transparent too? Perhaps by revealing your own demographics for example?

Our anonymity is one of the secrets of our success. It keeps the focus on our work, not who we are as individuals. But the fact that we cannot reveal the identities of our members is a drawback, as you imply above. We can’t divulge much about who we are, but we can say that over the years more than 50 women have come in and out of the group, some for a week, some for decades, and our members have been from different backgrounds and ethnicities. We’ve also been diverse in age, and in level of art world success.

Besides your posters and publications, how do the GGs finance their projects?

We get paid for doing talks and workshops at museums and universities, and we sell our books and posters. We don’t apply for grants or solicit donations. We’d rather have people support us by buying a poster. Then we get something and they get something in return.

Will guys ever be allowed to join the ranks of the GGs? 

We’ve had transgendered members, but no biological males. There are so many male feminists today and often men ask to join. I’m sure it will happen eventually.

‘Museums Cave in to Radical Feminists!’ (Courtesy www.guerrillagirls.com) Copyright © Guerrilla Girls

In your new and updated version of the Guerrilla Girls’ Art Museum Activity Book, you credit the actions and comments of MoMA curator Kynaston McShine for starting off the Guerrilla Girls. Has McShine ever contacted you since? Has anyone else you’ve targeted later approached or reconciled with you? 

That’s a great question. We have never heard from McShine, and have never received intel from any of our moles about what he thinks of the whole thing. We have heard from critics like the New York Times’ Roberta Smith who told us that she wasn’t aware how little she wrote about women artists until we posted statistics on her coverage.

How should museums avoid conflicts of interest with their trustees? 

The art world and the art market really suck. Both are full of poseurs, snobs, insider traders, and crooks. The art market is pretty much unregulated. In fact, it has been described as the 4th largest black market in the world, after drugs, guns and diamonds. It’s the playground of the 1% who manipulate prices and tell the rest of us what museums should collect. Museums are overseen by a board of trustees consisting mostly of wealthy businessmen who donate money and artworks and get huge tax deductions. Museum newsletters are full of photos of these trustees at museum functions and bios of their illustrious careers, that is, until they go to jail for price fixing or running their companies into the ground. Trustees sit on acquisition committees that help the curators decide what art to collect. Curators don’t really need help figuring this out, but they need trustees’ money to get the art. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that the system is ripe for corruption since collectors can promote acquisitions of work by artists they own, and that in turn makes their private collections more valuable. There should be rules to prevent these kinds of conflicts of interest or insider trading, just like in other industries. Also, No More Cookie Cutter Collections of Art That Costs The Most. Convince art collectors their collections are inferior without work by women and people of color. Make sure your favorite museum casts a wider net and collects the whole story of our culture.

Would you ever sell the works you’ve exhibited at museum or galleries (such as those you exhibited at the 2005 Venice Biennale)? Will we ever see a GG poster at auction? 

We haven’t sold any of our large banners, but we sell smaller poster versions of them. Works of ours appeared at auction once many years ago when a bunch GG posters someone had purchased were auctioned at Sotheby’s. We protested outside.

Will the GGs target unpaid internships at museums and galleries? 

We really should run some stats on that. Plus, museum directors now get millions a year, while almost all the other employees are underpaid.

And finally what GG projects or events should we be looking forward to?

More creative complaining. More facts, humor and fake fur! Look for Guerrilla Girls’ projects in Krakow, Recife, Germany and Switzerland. Plus, we’re trying to come up with new work around the election and global women’s issues.

The official website of the Guerrilla Girls

Interview: Jerry Kearns

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Jerry Kearns, ‘Pumped’, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 84″ x 84″, Private Collection

Jerry Kearns’ work examines the use of popular imagery whilst revealing how certain images articulate America’s use of hard and soft power.  Kearns has had a long standing relationship with the legendary Exit Art cultural center in New York. Some of his work can be seen in their final ever exhibition Every Exit is an Entrance: Thirty Years of Exit Art (till May 19th 2012). Kearns’ first book, Blue Eyed Devil, a work of autobiographical fiction, will be published to coincide with his forthcoming exhibition at the Modernism gallery in San Francisco next Spring.

The term most often deployed to describe your work is ‘Psychological Pop’. That is to say that you are concerned with the impact of the various types of imagery which we are surrounded by everyday, be it advertising, comic books, newsprint and so on. Your work is not dissimilar to Pop, though it could be said to have a moral dimension. Would you agree? 

Yes, I think so. The first generation Pop artists are remembered for elevating the commercial vocabulary used in everyday communication into fine art by making hybrids reflecting commercial art methods. Early Pop is primarily remembered as celebrating its source values. The first generation is said to have ‘Americanized’ art and diverted it from its European influences. The passage of time has revealed more subtle intentions were also at work. I look at the control of information as a formable force in social control and manipulation. I think of the media as a system of symbols, signs, and codes. I accept its ideas and images with a ‘grain of salt’. So, I guess there are morality tales in my work.  There are certainly socio-political values expressed. But, I’m far more interested in recording my perception of what’s going down, than I am in offering prescriptions for change. I’m continually painting images where conflict, questioning, and struggle are players in the narrative. I like images where I’m not sure who is winning the contest.

Jerry Kearns, ‘Cold Shoulder’, 2005, collage on paper, 15.75″ x 15.75″

You’re not afraid to juxtapose different registers of imagery in your work. For instance you’ll adopt the iconography of comic books and fuse it with imagery of Christ or images of supermodels. The result is highly charged and ambiguous, the viewer forced to make some kind of sense out of it. Are some of the works intended to be more didactic than others? Or do you prefer an ambiguous terrain?

I think I gave clearer maps to possible meanings in the earlier works than in more recent images.  For me, the recent works are more layered in their references, thus, a longer read than earlier images. I use the register shifts you refer to for several roles. One desire is to suggest a quantum perspective in locating one’s position in time/space relationships.  Recent theories about time and space, such as the notion that our universe may be only one of millions or billions of others, influence my thinking. I also like the idea that the exact same event occurs simultaneously in multiple realities. As a consequence, I’m drawn to taking images from various contexts and repositioning our understanding of them by making sometimes jarring associations on the canvas. It may be that I’m an ambiguous didactic.

Jerry Kearns, ‘Earth Angel’, 1989, Acrylic on Canvas, 76″ x 100″, Private Collection

We’re so saturated with media imagery that we consciously forget that it’s loaded with an ideological content. ‘Earth Angel’ (1989) encourages a tripartite cross-examination of different imagery. You have Andy Warhol’s Elvis, Nick Ut’s iconic Vietnam War photograph of Kim Phuc running burnt and naked from a napalm strike, and John Paul Filo’s iconic photograph of the Kent State shootings. The result is an interrogation of hard and soft power.

I do like to question power, hard and soft. They sleep together.  When we first encounter an image, we generally view it in isolation, as a separate event. Often, the image has a particular purpose that is frequently hidden from view.  Over time, once isolated images morph or collage in our consciousness and form a kind of gestalt. In building the composite, we construct ways of seeing and interpreting reality.  In paintings, I suggest that possibility by overlapping and morphing imagery.  I collage so the viewer can see different notions of an idea at the same time.  Collage is a visual ‘theory of relativity’. In constructing Earth Angel, I relied on most viewers knowing Elvis as a ‘bad boy’ alpha rock and roll hero. Later, we learned he was a drug addict. And, that he was also a reactionary, famously volunteering as a narcotics agent for Richard Nixon. Of course, the fact that he was stoned out of his mind when he volunteered is liberating. The six-gun toting image of Elvis was initially a movie still. The image is famous as part of Andy Warhol’s work. When first released, the Kent State images of middle-American college kids lying on the ground, dead and dying, killed by American soldiers sent an earthquake through the minds of millions. The iconic image of the Vietnamese child Kim Phuc, napalmed, naked, running with her arms spread wide in a crucifix gesture toward the viewer, exploded across the world’s TV screens and newspaper headlines. The searing images of the child’s tragedy brought the ugliness of war to American dinner tables. Layering the wounded child in Vietnam with dead college students in Ohio, and placing Elvis in the foreground, I collaged a matrix of thoughts about a specific time and place I experienced.

It seems to be that you are consciously holding images of soft power accountable for the real, historical events that can be situated through them.

I’m certainly would like to know more about how power and control works in America. We could all benefit from knowing more. I think it is useful to explore the dark matter and dark energy behind what we think. I’m particularly intrigued by the use of imagery in relation to the two.  Whether it is the news, TV commercials, program content, magazine photos, the internet, or art itself, the control of information is central to maintaining power. I think art has a role to play in looking at the situation

Jerry Kearns, ‘Naked Brunch’, 1985, acrylic on Canvas, 96 ” x 85″, Private Collection

I find your use of comic book figures particularly brilliant. When you juxtapose them with historic imagery, you realize just how much those characters communicated certain anxieties about modern culture and American power. In particular, you tend to use the western iconography of the cowboy, the lone ranger and the detective.

Yeah, I often use heroes and villains many people would recognize. Cowboys and detectives are the same guy in different clothes.  They’re key players in moving cherished notions of male identity through time. Cartoons, newspapers, television, etc, reflect the history of popular meaning. They write the story we share, they’re an alphabet made of shared visual language. They carry collective meaning through time. Cartoons are important messengers. Most of the fragments I have quoted reflect a specific time in American culture. Most of them originated in the EC comics classic series, ‘Haunt’, ‘Horror’, ‘The Crypt’, and others published in the fifties. I love the bold noir expressionism of the drawings. Publisher, William Gaines, was called to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, to defend his freedom of expression in the mid-fifties.  Comic books, as well as other most forms of entertainment, were attacked as un-American and detrimental to children.

Jerry Kearns, ‘Right of Way’, 1992, acrylic on canvas, 72″ x 86 1/2″, Collection of Kalamazoo Museum of Art

Tell me more about your historical portraits and landscapes.

When I started painting I chose the cartoon and the newspaper photograph as my image sources. The cartoon can be personal and psychological. A newspaper photograph is an official looking public image. When collaged, they present potential for depicting interior minds and public realities. After painting that interaction for four or five years, I wanted to get out of the news, and make images with a longer time frame.  About then, a newly invented ink jet print technology began covering the urban landscape with building size advertisements. These often covered ten to fifteen floors of a building wall. Printed on giant tarps, the images read with photographic fidelity. I was excited, because it made possible a project I had been thinking about for a couple of years. The ink jet print was perfect for making large scale reproductions of 18th and 19th century portraits and landscape paintings.

Albert Bierstadt, ‘Among the Sierra Nevada, California’, 1872, oil on canvas, 72” x 120 1/8”, Smithsonian American Art Museum

I made inkjet reproductions of several iconic paintings, and then overlaid the prints with cartoon imagery, applied by hand.  When I first started the project, I didn’t know that those magnificent paintings by Albert Bierstadt, George Heade, Asher B. Durand, and others were effectively real estate ads at the time they were painted. The artists and their paintings traveled around the Eastern seaboard. Popular displays were staged in theatrical theaters. The proscenium curtain would lift to reveal the paintings in stage sets. The landscapes looked pristine, virginal, very rarely were people depicted. The light in the images was thought of as celestial and was described as being from Heaven. The paintings were presented as pictures of the ‘New Eden’. The image campaign organized around the paintings was essential to selling the audience on becoming settlers, and moving west toward our ‘Manifest Destiny’.

Jerry Kearns, ‘Fair Hearing’, 1992, acrylic on canvas, 48″ x 38″

In the case of ‘Fair Hearing’ (1992) by juxtaposing the portrait of Charles Willson Peale with that of a comic book rendition of a Native American, you’re exposing the ideology behind both images.

I hope so. The ‘official’ portraits of the time operated in much the same way as the landscapes. I wanted to draw attention to the fact that those images had a very specific social and political impact. My intention, whenever I use a fragment or reproduction, is that it carry forward some of its history and intentionality.  In a way, these paintings symbolically deface American history and art. That’s how some people saw the works. To me, they were like Duchamp’s drawing of a mustache on the‘Mona Lisa’. I was putting a mustache on the Mona Lisa’s of American history painting.

Jerry Kearns, ‘Repo Man’, 1984, acrylic on canvas, 84″ x 94″

One will find uncanny resonances in your paintings. In ‘Repo Man’ (1984), a grotesque, grinning zombie has the same expression as the photograph of Ronald Reagan placed in the background. What was the context behind that painting?

‘A grinning zombie’, I like the sound of that. Ronald Reagan was our Repo-Man. He took away many of the freedoms the population had won in the previous two decades. He always had a twilight zone dark side to him. I felt like the 1950s returned in cowboy Reagan during the 1980s. Under his flag, the American right moved to destroy the legacy of the counter cultural movements.  They were out to ‘take back America’ from the decadence of the sixties. Reagan was the sheriff disciplinarian, riding back to clean up the town. He killed the unions, went after progressives, disciplined the universities, and changed the tax structure in favor of the wealthy, for starters. For me, the noir styled EC cartoons I quote seemed perfect for describing the time warp I felt. Zombies and werewolves were useful myths for describing my dismay. I’ve heard that vampires were initially symbols for greedy European aristocracy.

Jerry Kearns, ‘Foreign Affairs’, 1987, acrylic on canvas, 90″ x 90″, Collection of Ronald Meyers

Your work expresses a dissonance between how men and woman communicate and are represented in visual imagery. In ‘Foreign Affairs’ (1987) we see a couple lying in bed before the U.S. Capitol. There’s an emotional gulf between them and the scene suggests that some sort of violence has taken place, be it physical or emotional. The ambiguity makes it unnerving.

I’m drawn to images where the viewer in not sure what happened just before or after the moment on view. That unknown quality gives the painting a kind of cinematic motion.   Around the time I made the painting, there were news stories circulating about sexual peccadilloes in Washington. While watching TV coverage, I was looking through some newspaper photos and saw the capital dome image.  I was caught by the male/female power in the image. The capital dome is a giant cement breast filled with the milk of white male political power. Foreign Affairs collages a very private moment, rendered as a cartoon, against the building. What is going on between the man and the woman is any body’s guess.

Jerry Kearns, ‘Lesser Offense’, 1993, acrylic on canvas, 72″ x 62″

In ‘Lesser Offense’ (1993), the woman implores the man and his response to her is rendered in reverse. They too are emotionally isolated.

I depict relationships that sometimes make me uncomfortable and I’m not sure why. There is a lot of contradiction and conflict in my work. That has been my experience. I’ve seen a lot of conflict and contradiction. My view of it is framed by my personal experiences, as well as what I see among my peers, my friends, and the world around us. I see a lot of conflict and isolation in reality, and in the media.

Throughout the last decade you have been examining Christ as a savior figure. One could interpret your depictions of Christ as a critique of religious fundamentalism though I understand there have been some positive interpretations of these paintings too?

During 2003-2004, I fixated on the ways fundamentalism controlled our reality. Islamic and Christian, fundamentalism seemed to be dictating destiny. As for Jesus, he has been the Christian West’s warrior/savior for two thousand years.  He is the alpha hero, one of the key sources of male identity in our culture. My family is Southern Baptist, from rural North Carolina. Jesus was the most influential image of my childhood. As for my use of his image now, I play with his and my meaning. I give him choices to make, things to do. The viewer judges. My use of his image is not limited to being a symbol for the rejection fundamentalism, though I do reject it.

Jerry Kearns, ‘Tucson’, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 72″ x 112″

When I first viewed these paintings, the one specific feature that really unnerved me was the clear, blue sky in the backgrounds. It took me a while whilst  processing the fundamentalist imagery, to realize that it reminded me of 9/11. That calmness was a disturbing component of that day.

Yes it was. I was in Manhattan and well know the quality you’re describing. The tragedy yanked America into twenty-first century global terrorism. Before the attack, people knew about terrorists, such as Bin Laden, through television reports from far away. It was a distant, almost other worldly, phenomenon. Boom…here it was in Manhattan. I was on the Lower East Side, and watch the whole thing like it was a movie. Afterward, I started painting blue skies, and continued, over and over, dozens of clear September blues, for quite a while after. I can still see my idea of 9/11 blue. I think I use it to portend an unknown action that is about to burst the peace.

Jerry Kearns, ‘Bag Dad’, 2003-2004, acrylic and collage on paper, 21″ x 26″, Collection of San Francisco Museum of Art

Muscular figures appear throughout this period of your work. Why were you drawn to them?

I think my bodybuilders are images of distorted power, political and cultural. While we flex our muscles around the world, domestic media culture is obsessed with body opposites.  In this time that the majority of the population are carbohydrate bloats – debilitated and ill, the media preaches the rewards of having the best abs and the tightest clothes available.  Muscle and fat – greatness and obesity, gyrate through the landscape, at home and abroad. The muscular steroidal freaks of the bodybuilding scene lend me a tool for juxtaposing conflicting material and mental realities.

Jerry’s mock-up images next to ‘No! No! Yaaaee…’

Would you say your work demonstrates the contradictory nature of beliefs and images?  That a photograph of a skimpy model has as much hold over us as an image of Christ?

I try to make images that engage the conversation between reality, perception, conception, and belief. I try to make works that are both believable and unbelievable, that present a dialogue between contrasting realities. We live in a world that is made of multiple realities.  We’re biology based, and heading toward rebirth as cybrog technological. I’m painting the space between the two morphing realities. Although my body is bound by nature, I live mostly within a timeless culture, where definitions constantly dissolve and reform. I have to engage the space in-between.

In your upcoming book ‘Blue Eyed Devil’, the protagonist says as one point that ‘art is a cheap shot for immortality’.

That’s a complex idea, said first and better by others. The idea is that art and culture are ways of diverting the mind from death. The making of objects, buildings, movies, etc., is a vain stab at immortality, because these creations will outlive us.

Jerry Kearns’ studio

Recently you’ve begun replacing the clear blue skies with starry darkness.

During the recession of the last four years, we entered the night. We’re well into it. I don’t need to list the pain and chaos the Wall Street heist of the economy has wrought. Corruption and deception are leading us further into the darkness.

Since your historical works in the 90s you’ve found digital technology and printing to be an important part of your work.

I’ve always enjoyed Andy Warhol’s use of printing as painting. Like him, I want to use current advertising technology to produce my imagery. Magazines, newspapers and comic books, are all printed. I like the correspondence between the initial form and my fine art use of the source material.

There have been a number of high profile copyright lawsuits in the arts lately. Given your use of source material have you ever encountered a problem with a particular image?

Back in the early 1990s, I was invited to meet with lawyers for EC comics regarding possible violations. They were generously open to my work. We drew up a simple agreement granting limited use as long as I acknowledged the source. None one else has contacted me. Clearly, there can be copyright questions posed about my work and the work of hundreds if not thousands of artists over the past fifty years. Creating by quoting mass produced images is as natural as breathing to many artists of my and subsequent generations. The impulse is an inevitable part of our mediated experience. As I understand it, copyright law, drafted to protect written works, was not written for imagery. I’ve talked to a variety of copyright expects. They were divided on a number of definitions with regard to images. How much of the image you use, and whether you interfere with the marketability of an image is important. Are you’re competing with the original in some way? Are you using it alone or in relation to other imagery? Are you making an ironic or satirical remark? I’ve paid for copyrights at various times. If you try, you’ll find that there are multiple copyrights linked to media images. You could pay for two or three of them and still remain vulnerable. There’s no easy solution to it. Sometimes, with historic imagery and cartoons, I’ve credited the original artists on the back of my painting. The whole point of my work is that it originates in culture. I want viewers to know that the images are from magazines, newspapers and movies. I’m not trying to obscure that. To understand my work you need to view it as repositioned excerpts and quotes from other forms of visual culture.

Jerry Kearns, ‘One Trick Pony’, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 72″ x 92″ (detail)

To end, I want to briefly discuss your book ‘Blue Eyed Devil’. How much of the material is autobiographical?

Its all me, and the things I’ve been through. I think of the text and images as a ‘beggar’s lie’, that’s based on a careful attention to the facts. The story works like a dream. Sugar, the main character, is confused about who he is. Overly identified with Jesus and certain movie characters, he can’t see an authentic shelf. He spends a lot of time looking for his soul, which he isn’t sure even exists, and so forth. He worries that the physicists are right, and there isn’t much beyond the neuron goo that animates our brain. Finally, Sugar is almost totally preoccupied with building his story as a hedge against disappearance.

It can be quite harrowing to read because the details are often very personal, though you’re making the point that much of our own self identity is totally invented by the imagery and culture that surrounds us.

The story tells of Sugar’s struggles with understanding the relationship between daily experience and mythology. If pushed, I’d say the self, or the soul, lives in the story we invent to describe the passage of our body through time. In Blue Eyed Devil, Sugar mythologizes my experience. The result presents Sugar as an amalgam between his biology, his direct experience, and the media experiences bringing him the world beyond his body.

Jerry Kearns’ website: http://www.jerrykearns.com

Interview: Amanda Tiller

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Amanda Tiller, ‘Fred Savage (Genogram Construction)’, hand embroidery, 30″ x 38″, 2011 (detail)

Amanda Tiller’s work addresses the pervasiveness of popular culture and our ability to retain facts and information. Whether she’s working on her Movie Poster series or Facebook Portraits, her work is always characterised by laborious and time-consuming working processes. With her Genogram series, Tiller takes a famous celebrity and weaves a web of connections between their real and fictional families. The faces of the figures are all stitched by hand. The interview was conducted at the artist’s studio in Chelsea, New York.

Your work is set in antithesis to our current ‘information age’, your focus being on your personal repositories of knowledge. Your Genogram series are a useful illustration of the themes you address. How did they come about?

Genograms are usually used by medical professionals or social workers to diagram families and relationships, so it’s not your typical family tree. I started with the idea of one’s relationship to fictional characters, which stemmed from a conversation with a friend. We were joking around at a bar one night and she asked ‘who would be your TV dad?’ She said that hers would be Bill Cosby, but for me, it would be Bob Saget, who was the dad on Full House. Bob Saget was actually the first work in the series I got started on but my diagram got to be so gigantic that I realised I had to get started on a smaller one to sort out the technical issues. That’s why Bill Cosby was the first in the series. Bob Saget, or Danny Tanner, the name of his character, was more of a dad figure in a sort of stereotypical way in that he’s really not anything like my father but he encompasses everything that you think of as a television dad. He’s kind of embarrassing, a little bit nerdy, always trying to impart the morals whereas Bill Cosby’s character felt more like a real person. When you think about these people you’re really thinking about their characters. When my friend said Bill Cosby, she didn’t mean Bill Cosby the person, she meant Cliff Huxtable (his character on The Cosby Show) and when I said Bob Saget, I meant Danny Tanner. In reality Bob Saget is the complete opposite of Danny Tanner. His stand-up is extremely vulgar and especially shocking if you’ve grown up with his character.  We feel like we know these people but we don’t.

Hence your decision to blend these fictional characters with their real families into one diagram.

Exactly. There’s no difference to me. When I think of Bill Cosby I think of Cliff Huxtable because they’re the same person to me. His family on The Cosby Show mirrors his real family too. He has one son and four daughters just like he does in real life, and their ages are similar so it gets even more confusing!

Amanda Tiller, ‘Bill Cosby (Genogram Construction)’, hand embroidery, 20″ x 30″, 2010 (detail)

A unique part of your process is that you won’t research the fictional or real families on the internet. You’re very strict about making all your preparatory diagrams from memory.

Well that’s key to all my work. It’s about my personal relationship to a broader culture. Thinking of things from memory started out as a bit of a lark while I was at graduate school. I was known by my friends as being a fount of useless information. We didn’t have smart phones, so if we were sitting at a bar and my friends were trying to recount a movie fact they would usually ask me. I’m really good at remembering stuff that doesn’t matter! Something useful like artist’s names, which I really should know given my field, I can never remember. But ‘who was so and so’s wife in that movie?’; I can remember that. No one remembers these kinds of things now because we don’t have to. You can just pull out your iPhone and go straight on to Wikipedia. No one needs to remember anything anymore.

Even if a viewer didn’t know about your working process, that you insist on creating the diagrams from memory, your choice of media complements the personal nature of the work. The figures are very skillfully stitched by hand but up close look appropriately awkward, much like a hazy memory. It reflects the fact that the diagrams are purposely imperfect.

I feel that it’s important to do things by hand even though the planning of my work is done with computers. The diagrams for the Genograms are laid out in Adobe Illustrator and the faces of the figures are broken down in Photoshop into simplified colours for the embroidery. But when I make the piece, I do it by hand and it’s really labour intensive. It requires a lot of focus, which isn’t something that happens much these days. I could easily get these machine embroidered but I’m not interested in that. I like the look of a wonky character when you get up close to it.

Amanda Tiller, ‘Fred Savage (Genogram Construction)’, hand embroidery, 30″ x 38″, 2011 (detail)

Why did you choose Fred Savage as the subject of the second work in the series?

I will always start with a character I grew up watching who is a member of a well-known family. They tend to be from television rather than movies because of the prevalence of sitcoms. Even if an actor has played several well known roles, I’ll pick one who I know of as one character.  I always think of Fred Savage as Kevin Arnold from The Wonder Years even though he’s been in other TV shows. Sarah Michelle Gellar is another one I’m going to be doing soon who to me is always Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’m also going to do Carrie Fisher. Carrie Fisher will be interesting as she’s got an old Hollywood thing going on with her mom being Debbie Reynolds and her father married to Elizabeth Taylor. There’s going to be a lot of people going up on there!

How do you express the connections between the figures? What are the meanings behind the coloured lines and symbols?

The dark grey fluid lines relate parents to children. Sometimes a line will rise up from a figure but I can’t remember or don’t know who their parents are, so they’ll end abruptly. The lighter grey, thicker lines are marriage lines. One character could have five or six marriage lines depending on how many characters they’ve played. Red slashes over marriage lines denote divorce and black slashes are for deaths.

On average, how long does one work take to execute?

I started Fred Savage in June 2011 and finished it at the beginning of December, but of course that’s not all solid work time. Bill Cosby took about the same. That was all done by hand whereas for Fred Savage I used a sewing machine to start the lines.

I imagine that you divide up the time you spend on individual works?

If I have a deadline for a piece, I’ll really focus in on it. The wonderful thing about my studio’s location, which is also near where I do my day job, is that I can come and go early in the morning or in the evening and get a couple of hours work in. On a full studio day, I have to break up the time as the work can be physically exhausting, especially the eye strain. The Facebook Portraits help me break up the time and they can be executed quickly. The preparation for those is the hardest part.

Amanda Tiller’s ‘Facebook Portraits’

For your series ‘The Facebook Portraits’, you essentially recreate a friend or acquaintance’s profile picture from handwritten sentences which describe everything you know about them. The better you know an individual, the more detailed their portrait will be. How many individuals do you plan to draw?

The plan’s to cover all of them. At last count I had something like 390 friends so I’ve got plenty to go. I’ve started with those who I haven’t got current contact with in any real way, so I won’t be learning anything new about them. Many of my friends don’t show up on my feed because of Facebook’s algorithm deciding who my friends are. So I’ve mainly focused on high school friends and friends from college.

How do your friends feel about being drawn this way? Have you met with any opposition?

This is the one project I haven’t listed on Facebook. Usually I like to get feedback on what I’m doing. The whole point of Facebook is to network so it will be interesting to see how those whom I’ve only met once will take it, especially if they’re artists! I do have links to my website on Facebook so some people have found them. Usually friends say ‘oh god! I can’t wait for you to do mine’. Those who are the most worried about it, well, their information will be practically illegible because there’s going to be so much of it.

Amanda Tiller, ‘Erica S.’, graphite on paper, 9.5” x 8”, 2012

Do you find their discomfort paradoxical given that they are happy to upload photographs of themselves and surrender personal information online, though they balk at the idea of the drawing being physically present in a gallery?

If you put information out there it’s not private anymore, though much of this information is not on Facebook; it’s stuff that I know and has stuck.

The drawings really capture the conflict between the public and the private. Most profile pictures are highly choreographed. There’s always a graduation photo, someone with a pet or their kid. Here you lock private information into its false contrivance.

The profile pictures all follow a basic formula. They show people in their most flattering light or when they’re trying to be funny. It’s a personality that they want people to think they have. I use that as a springboard to reveal how I personally perceive them to be.

Let’s talk about your movie posters. Would you say that they are your most labour intensive production?

Perhaps. Most of my projects are. It’s the recall of information that’s always the worst.

Your movie posters are created by recounting the entire plot of a movie from memory, printing a copy of its publicity poster and then overlaying your text upon its surface. You’ll then painstakingly scalpel out the area around your text from the poster’s surface so that the image bleeds through the words.

Yes. It’s definitely labour intensive. I could just print out the work, and I have done a print series, but I enjoy the laborious process of it. At least with the embroidered works there are minor victories along the way such as when you finish a face. With the movie posters, it depends how long the text is. Sometimes I can’t recount as much. The Karate Kid was in my rotation of movies I watched as a child so I know it very well! When I get to working on the actual poster I listen to audiobooks a lot, there’s a nice focus and meditation on the task, especially living in New York City. Everything’s go-go-go-go-go, always. There’s very little time to really sit and focus. I rarely get to read books because I feel like I don’t have enough time, except for on the subway. That’s the only place I allow myself to sit down, relax and read.

Amanda at work on ‘The Karate Kid’

I find your work is characterised by an affection for film and television, that you enjoy expressing the memories of what you’ve seen and know. Other artists such as Fiona Banner produce huge canvases documenting everything that happens in a movie scene for scene, which are completely banal by comparison. Intentionally joyless. Whereas you’ll try to infuse joy with mundanity. Personalising the impersonal.

There’s a degree of ridiculousness in everything that I do too. It’s an absurd project to be spending four months or so scratching out the surface of a movie poster. It’s The Karate Kid. We’re not talking Citizen Kane here! It’s not a good movie but it is a good movie. It’s not a good film but it is a good movie, if that makes sense. It’s the same with the celebrity stuff. I’m not one of these people who cares about celebrity gossip. I never buy US Weekly or any of those magazines, though I may glance at them in the store. There are more fictional relationships on the Genograms than there are real ones. Of course, there are well known connections you can’t avoid if you have a computer or a television. You know about what happened between Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston, Angelina Jolie and all those kids. You can’t help it. And that’s part of it too, my ambivalence and mixed feelings towards this culture. I love it but I also hate that I love it. I hate that I know all these things. It’s the stuff that just sticks. But that’s okay. It’s a love-hate thing. I work at this poster tediously, even though it doesn’t matter. I still love the movie. It was one of my favourites growing up. I dressed up as Johnny from The Karate Kid for Hallowe’en. I love nostalgic eighties movies because of the community it builds. It’s part of popular language. It’s part of what’s right about our society and what’s wrong about it.

Your most grandiose, absurdist project is ‘Everything That I Know’. Could you describe it and your intentions for it?

It’s a series of books that I’ve made where I’m literally trying to write down everything that I know. The books are catagorised into different genres and are colour coded. For example ‘People and Places’ are blue. It’s all based on the Trivial Pursuit categories. There’s also ‘History’, ‘Science & Nature’, ‘Arts & Entertainment’, ‘Sports & Leisure’ and orange is the ‘Wild Card’ category, which is for anything that falls in-between.

Amanda Tiller, ‘Everything that I Know’, handmade artist books, 2006-present (detail of ‘Movie Quotes’)

Have you set yourself an end date for this or will you work on it continuously?

It’s an ongoing project. I’ll keep working on it in the studio. I don’t think it can ever be sold. I’m just going to keep working on it ‘til I’m done. I’m drawn to its Sisyphean quality. It’s only facts. There are no opinions written down in these books. It’s part of that idea of the quest for self-knowledge. This would be my encyclopedia. Though they’re broken down into categories, there’s no order in the books. I just write from stream of consciousness.

Do you consciously infuse your work with a performative element? You’ve previously worked on the books in front of members of the public.

It was the project of my MFA thesis show which is how this all started. People walked into the gallery and the only things there were a shelf of the books on the wall, myself at a small writing table and a larger table for visitors to sit and read. People could watch me filling up the books with information or take one off the shelf and read it. When it comes to secrets about friends which I’ve been told in confidence, those get put down into a book labelled as Secrets. When they go into one of the other categories they will be blocked out. ‘Performative’ is the art term for it, for me it was more of an activity. It wasn’t a performance in the strictest sense. Usually when you watch a performance you can’t talk to or engage with the performer, unless of course that’s the intention. I didn’t want that to be the case at all. People came up and asked me questions.

Amanda Tiller, ‘Everything that I know’, handmade artist books, glass shelf, book ends, 2006-Present

You’re keen not to aestheicise the action?

I didn’t want to put in any cues about what people are supposed to do. If people asked to take a book off the shelf I would say yes, of course. If they didn’t, I wouldn’t suggest it. Sometimes with Performance art, I can feel a little pressured. It ends up detracting from the piece if you have to make people feel engaged, unless your idea is to make people feel uncomfortable.

As much as I sense an affection for the trivia you have amassed, you also express regret. Your work is a commentary on the inanities we’re surrounded by every day.

That’s definitely part of it. In The Everything I Know project, the pink book, the ‘Arts & Entertainment’ category, is the largest. The first book that I made was Every Movie Quote that I Know. It was a hundred pages long and I filled it very quickly. I can’t deny it. With the ‘Science and Nature’ section, which really interests me, I found I couldn’t recall as many specific facts with confidence. With the movies, I can even recall specific song lyrics. It’s information that’s stickier for my brain. Friends would see that and say ‘you’re so smart!’ and I’d say ’…um…not really! Is this smart? Is knowing the plot of The Karate Kid really smart?’

Amanda Tiller, ‘Everything that I Know’, handmade artist books, 2006-present

Are you ever shocked by some of the things that you are able to recall?

For a long time I’d be carrying around a grey, non-specific category book where I would write down information which I’d later transcribe into an appropriate category. The order of things that I remember is really interesting. I’ll be sitting with a friend and writing down a fact about them and then that would generate another fact and so on. There are weird pockets of knowledge that are somewhat important. I know a lot of facts about the U.S. presidents that all goes back to one class I had in elementary school. People would deem that more important knowledge than the plot of The Karate Kid because it’s history. By putting the knowledge into categories upon a shelf, I’m treating them equally. Does the fact that the movie quotes are in a thicker book make them more important? I try not to pass judgement. I present the information and let people decide for themselves.

Though you address weighty art historical subjects such as memory and the use of text in art, you seem to purposely devise an idiom that will appeal to a broader range of viewers, beyond the confines of an ‘art world’ audience. Is that fair to say?

I think so. I don’t know if I’m doing that intentionally or not. The subject matter happens to be popular culture. But I do like how relatable the work is. I’ve had people look at the Bill Cosby piece at a few shows and they love to examine it. To work out what’s going on. That doesn’t happen with most artwork. There’s an eight second rule, even in museums. There’s very few things that make people stop and pay attention. That’s not necessarily the reason I do my stuff, but it is a good effect.

Amanda Tiller’s website: http://www.amandatiller.com