Tag Archives: Contemporary art

Robert Hughes – Art critic, author and documentary maker

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I was hugely saddened to read the news last week of Robert Hughes’ passing. Of all the subsequent obituaries that have been published, I felt that the Guardian’s provided the best overview of his work.  Hughes was, in my own estimation, the greatest living art critic. His writing was widely celebrated for being jargon and theory free, but aside from being clear, lucid, and greatly entertaining, it was positively imbued with his own art viewing process.

His work had a huge personal impact throughout my History of Art studies. Along with Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art, Hughes’ The Shock of the New is one of the few texts nearly all incoming students will perfunctorily rush to read, the difference being that Hughes had you hanging on to his every word. Hughes’ panache and humor make for an addictive read, whether he’s imparting an art historical lesson (‘reproduction is to aesthetic awareness what telephone sex is to sex’) or puncturing art world fame (‘Schnabel’s work is to painting what Stallone’s is to acting – a lurching display of oily pectorals – except that Schnabel makes bigger public claims for himself’). A collection of his essays, ‘Nothing if Not Critical’, includes a mock epic poem entitled ‘The SoHoiad’, a withering put down of the 80s New York art scene.

During the 80s, Hughes’ assessment of the art market and the direction of museums was remarkably prescient. There is no better analysis than his essay published in The New York Review of Books in 1984, ‘On Art and Money’, which not only traces the history of art dealing and auction prices, but predicts the damage that will be wrought on art itself by economic excesses. At times, Hughes seemed to be the only critic who dared to voice his repulsion at the excesses of the art market. In a 2004 speech to Royal Academicians outside Burlington House, Hughes remarked:

‘I don’t think there is any doubt that the present commercialisation of the art world, at its top end, is a cultural obscenity. When you have the super-rich paying $104m for an immature Rose Period Picasso – close to the GNP of some Caribbean or African states – something is very rotten. Such gestures do no honour to art: they debase it by making the desire for it pathological’.

Hughes’ words echoed in my mind recently when Edvard Munch’s pastel version of The Scream sold at auction at a record figure of $119,922,500. His writing was imbued with moral imperatives. Hughes maintained that money, virtually a constant factor throughout the history of art, should never be a determining factor in how a work is aesthetically valued. He chided the Met for placing a red velvet rope in front of Rembrandt’s Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer after the museum purchased the painting for $2.3 million (a record then in 1961). The painting was immediately differentiated from the other Rembrandt’s in the collection which had no such luxurious barriers placed before them.

Crucially, not unlike Britain’s Brian Sewall, Hughes was not afraid to give his own stark assessment. He would not allow his opinions to be compromised by any art world allegiances or relationships. Can this be said today in a world where the value of art criticism has been seriously diminished? As Hughes himself remarked on the role of the critic; ‘it’s like being the piano player in a whorehouse. You don’t have any control over the action going on upstairs’. Opponents brand Hughes as a conservative who simply dismisses most art produced after 1970. But that simply isn’t true. Any critic who opposes the prevailing self-interested orthodoxy exemplified by the art market should be described as nothing less than a revolutionary. His recent documentary The Mona Lisa Curse, which examines the economic direction of the art world since the 1960s is essential viewing.

 

American Power

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Installation shot, ‘American Power’, Meulensteen Gallery (Photograph by Eli Ping)

The following essay is intended as an introductory companion piece to ‘American Power’, my contribution to ‘Young Curators, New Ideas IV’, which this year is being held at the Meulensteen Gallery in New York City.

‘American Power’ includes work by Darren Coffield, Adam Curtis and Jerry Kearns.

‘Young Curators, New Ideas IV’ has been co-ordinated by Independent Curator Amani Olu. The exhibition is open to the public until August 24th 2012.

For the press release with a list of all the show’s participants click here. Reviews and credits can be found at the end of the essay. 

Adam Curtis, ‘It Felt Like A Kiss’, Installation shot, Meulensteen gallery (Photograph author’s own)

Since the end of World War II, the United States has been perceived as having a virtual monopoly over the governing of global affairs, though its means of achieving this have been anything but monolithic. Whereas U.S. policy changes and adapts, the popular imagery of America remains pervasive and enduring. It is the prop by which American values are held in place and disseminated. America’s soft power is pop music, Hollywood, sports, cowboys, rock and roll, products, celebrities and cityscapes.

This exhibition does not aim to provide a rigorously historical or political analysis of America’s power as a nation.  An art exhibition is not best suited to achieve such an aim. It is however, the ideal setting in which to contemplate how power is communicated, envisaged and understood. American Power presents two contemporary artists and one filmmaker for whom the understanding of power is key to their working practice. All three appropriate the imagery and language of newspapers, magazines, film and advertising and recontextualize it in an attempt to expose inherent ideologies and cultural values. They continue to do this at a time during which the global status of America is in flux.

Jerry Kearns, ‘Mortgage’, Installation shot, Meulensteen gallery (Photograph by Eli Ping)

On display in the gallery are two large paintings by American artist Jerry Kearns, Repo Man (1984) and Mortgage (2012), the artist’s response to the foreclosure crisis.

Works by British artist Darren Coffield include two silkscreen prints of Marilyn Monroe and Cary Grant, as well as paintings of U.S. icons Rock Hudson, Cary Grant, Andy Warhol and Christopher Reeve as Superman centered around a contemporary vanitas, entitled Not I (2010).

Various works by Darren Coffield, Installation shot, Meulensteen gallery (Photograph by Eli Ping)

Screened throughout the day is It Felt Like A Kiss (2009) directed by Bafta-award winning filmmaker, Adam Curtis. Through the use of archive footage, music and on screen titles, the film captures the years, specifically 1958 to 1967, during which America’s post-war certainties were beginning to unravel. Segments are devoted to the assassination of President Kennedy, the Vietnam War and the counter culture of the 1960s.

Curtis is renowned for his documentary films in which he typically traces the influence, digressions and impact of particular philosophical and political ideas through recent history. It Felt Like A Kiss dispenses with the most familiar aspects of his documentary filmmaking style. Instead of his trademark voiceover and interviews, there is a diverse soundtrack of classic American tracks (including songs by Roy Orbison, Solomon Burke, Bob Dylan, Peggy Lee, Tina Turner, and the Velvet Underground) undulating in between snippets of advertisements, news, documentary footage, and ambient sound. Curtis’ narrative is limited to starkly composed screen titles.

In short, It Felt Like A Kiss is the closest thing that Curtis has made to an art-house film. It is an all engrossing audio-visual experience in which Curtis (and indeed the viewer) rapidly builds connections between disperate pieces of footage. In 2009, Curtis teamed up with the theatre production company Punchdrunk to stage an interactive screening of the film at the Manchester International Festival. In order to reach the screening itself, vistors first had to navigate a series of thematically designed rooms and corridoors, prepping them for the film’s dissection of the American dream.

The film’s credit sequence (above) suggests that Doris Day, Rock Hudson, Saddam Hussein, Lee Harvey Oswald and Enos the Chimp (the first chimpanzee launched into orbit) are all somehow connected, a notion that initially seems absurd. But as the film progresses, the lives of these individuals are shown to have fleetingly touched one another in a series of metaphoric and literal ways. For instance, in one sequence we learn that Osama Bin Laden’s favourite television show as a child was Bonanza and that the Manson family set up a commune on the show’s disused set. Doris Day’s son, the musician Terry Melcher, later met Charles Manson and offered to produce his songs, one of which, we are told, was entitled ‘Pretty Girl Cease to Exist’.  Curtis visually exploits such uncanny connections to full effect by locating and contrasting serendipitous pieces of footage that brings the film’s narrative alive.

Adam Curtis, ‘It Felt Like A Kiss’, World Trade Center construction montage (screenshots)

Curtis’ emphasis on these resonant connections is intended to disrupt our casual conceptualizing of history. Rather than understanding history as a series of linear events punctuated by key individuals at key moments (casually referred to as the ‘great man’ theory of history), the film forces us to accept that history is infinitely more complex and that our ordering of it (including Curtis’) is really our own way of assuring ourselves of any purposefulness or direction that we can read into it. As the film sardonically puts it:

Every day thousands of things happened to thousands of people. Some seemed to be significant and others did not.

All of Curtis’ films straddle a fine paradox, for whilst his documentaries aim to legitimize a particular reading of history (i.e. his own), he similuateonsly affirms that all of us effectively construct and impose our own understanding of history ourselves. As Tim Adams of The Observer newspaper eloquently surmised, ‘If there has been a theme in Curtis’s work…it has been to look at how different elites have tried to impose an ideology on their times, and the tragi-comic consequences of those attempts’.

In the case of It Felt Like A Kiss, the notion of what constitutes individuality, is continually dissected. The film’s concludes that our understanding of individuality has become narrow and stifling. It is comprehended only within the terms of free market Capitalism, fulfilling our own personal desires, and the ability to choose as consumers. Against the backdrop of a teenage girl dancing in the dark, Curtis’ titles read:

The computers that controlled the Cold War and guided the rockets to the Moon were put to a new use. They started to analyse the credit data of all Americans…so that in the future everyone could be lent money…

Adam Curtis, ‘It Felt Like A Kiss’ (screenshots)

Recently, Curtis has become much more vocal in his critique of our current narrow-minded individualism, despite the fact that his documentaries have previously targeted the dangerous allure and simplification of grand ideologies and schemes. In an interview with the Guardian’s Katherine Viner, Curtis remarked:

‘There’s no one like, say, Tolstoy, who wrote of both man in his world and the architecture of his world. Now there is no context, just the feelings of one person… Because now that there’s nothing more important than you, how can you ever lose yourself in a grander idea? We’re frightened of eccentricity, of loneliness. Individualism just wants to keep the machine stable, leads to a static world and a powerless world’.

Jerry Kearns, ‘Repo Man’, installation shot, Meulensteen gallery (photograph: author’s own)

Much like Curtis’ film editing, Jerry Kearns’ paintings conflate and fuse various points in time and space. Each canvas is a universe onto itself, where only isolated fragments are familiar to us. The presence of Ronald Reagan in Repo Man immediatelysituates the painting in the 1980s as does the hammer and sickle earring worn by the zombie. Kearns has chosen to render the scene as an ambigious and abstracted nightmare. Dollar bills are strewn among the floor and the seated figure appears to be bleeding a black substance. Could it be ink, or perhaps oil? What is the meaning of the Santa Claus figure? The ‘tick tocks’ rendered in reverse clearly suggests a regression, but of what exactly? There is an uncanny parallel between Reagan’s and the Soviet zombie’s smiles. Should we take this to signify an equating of these two world powers, and if so how can they be equated? Kearns has described himself as an ‘ambiguous didactic’. At a glance, the viewer can broadly situate the socio-political perspective of the work, but the composition is rendered so as to be as pregnant and interpretive as possible.

This approach is entirely fitting with Kearns’ choice of source material, the media. Images from advertising, films, comic books and television are reappropriated and made into something new. To force an exact narrative upon the finished canvas would constitute a denial of the diverse origins, context and meanings of those various sources. Kearns’ key observation is that the imagery with which we are surrounded every day is saturated with varying (and often conflicting) ideology. Kearns’ insistence on ambiguity serves as a concrete reminder of this, and his point is directly accentuated by the viewers’ own interpretative efforts. Indeed, despite the discernable logic of Kearns’ overall compositions, each constituent component resonates in isolation as much as it does as part of a whole.

Jerry Kearns, ‘Repo Man’ (detail)

‘Ronald Reagan was our Repo-Man. 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’.

To underline this point, Kearns appropriates imagery from 1950s EC (Entertaining Comics) cartoons whose Publisher, William Gaines, was called to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The imagery of such serials as ‘The Crypt’, ‘Haunt’ and ‘Horror’ were deemed by some as anti-American. More saliently, the story lines and rendering of the characters can be understood to have expressed the anxieties of the age, in particular racial tensions, sexual politics and the Cold War. Repo Man depicts a short-circuited age, where the tensions of the 1950s remain. These decade old comic book characters are used by Kearns as conduits for ever present concerns.

Adam Curtis, ‘It Felt Like A Kiss’ (screenshots). In the above sequence, Curtis playfully slows down footage of Doris Day and Rock Hudson to capture them at their most paranoiac.

The effect is analogous to way Curtis uses select footage of Doris Day and Rock Hudson in order to highlight the discrepancy between the ideal (a Hollywood fantasy) and the real. It Felt Like A Kiss uses scenes from Pillow Talk (1959) and Lover Come Back (1960) in which Rock Hudson’s character flirts with Doris Day. Curtis’ on screen titles observe that in reality Hudson was a closeted homosexual who married his wife to order to hide his sexuality. The irony of these scenes deflates the apparent freedom of the American Dream, holding it accountable for its actual shortcomings. The film continues to do this in segments devoted to the role of women and African Americans, preempted by the use of Ruth Brown’s song ‘Oh What A Dream’ (which includes the lyric, ‘so disappointed, I laid back down. Oh what a dream…I had last night’) at the start of the film. Both Curtis and Kearns are keenly concerned with the pervasiveness of media imagery and the attitudes that they can inspire and enforce.

Jerry Kearns, ‘Mortgage’, installation shot, Meulensteen gallery (photograph: author’s own)

Kearns’ latest painting, Mortgage, is his response to the foreclosure crisis. The word ‘Mortgage’ makes a simple but effective title, the etymology of the word literally being ‘death pledge’. An archetypal American home, rendered in three dimensions, is reduced to a flat cut out by the stars shinning directly through its windows. Here, the home, arguably the most important of material possessions, is at its most vulnerable. Attempting to protect it (or perhaps even invade it) is the figure of Christ, dressed as a Cowboy, brandishing a pistol and accompanied by a faithful dog. Though humoursly absurd, the painting retains a sinister edge. We can see that two intruders are present given the shadows depicted on the lawn, but they lack physical presence. Christ himself looks desperately to the skies, the dog gazes in the distance, ears erect. It is clear that neither can actually see these figures approaching. The work embodies our very fear of economic processes. We may be surrounded by bank branches, bills and cash, but for the majority of people, our understanding of the overall mechanisms governing the global economic system remain opaque at best. The painting captures our frustration, desperation and inertia in dealing with the present economic crisis whilst also prompting questions about how economic power operates.

Jerry Kearns, ‘Mortgage’ (detail)

As Kearns’ compositions and Curtis’ films demonstrate, we are all drawn towards narrative and where there is none, we will attempt to create it ourselves. It is the most effective prop by which we can comfort ourselves with a feeling of completeness and purposefulness. After all, narrative itself has a structure and a linear order, a beginning, middle and end. Curtis acknowledges the power of narrative in almost all of his documentary films, many of which start with the phrase ‘this is a story about how…’. Our fondness for narrative accounts for the enduring popularity of ‘great man’ histories and the classic myths, which distill hugely complex issues. There is a modern phenomenon that offers a similar comfort. It is the celebrity.

The omnipresence of a celebrity is in itself suggestive of their importance and power, even when both may actually be in short supply. Every day we are surrounded by familiar faces who have been deemed significant. We are comforted not only by the familiarity and ordering of these presences, but also the faint suggestion that we too could, one day, be deemed as significant as these figures. It used to be that you were famous for something, a particular attribute, profession or skill. Now individuals can be famous for nothing. Paris Hilton, the Kardashians, reality television stars. All are famous for being famous. The retort that such individuals have earned such status because of their demonstrated business and publicity nous is in itself a highly seditious and hollow exercise. Celebrity is an industry founded on fostering exclusion to create exclusivity. As much as it can be comforting in its familiarity and aspirational value, when in excess, it essentially debases human interaction.

This recent incarnation of celebrity is primarily associated with America, where as the familiar adage goes, ‘anyone can make it’. It is therefore unsurprising that the majority of Darren Coffield’s distorted portraits are of famous U.S. icons. However, most of Coffield’s chosen subjects are of earlier twentieth century figures. We can therefore surmise that his interest lies in the orgins and early formation of today’s celebrity as well as with portraiture itself.

Darren Coffield, ‘Shockheaded Warhol’, 2011

Despte their distorton, Coffield’s figures remain recognizable, such is their iconic status. The portraits underline the fact that most of our communication is non-verbal. Indeed, the reason that many viewers find the portraits intially unsettling is because they disrupt the psychological process of reading the face, an inherent and unconscious part of our everyday interactions. Coffield’s paintings are a bold retort to the argument that painted portraiture is a virtually spent medium in our age of mass production and instant imagery.

Whilst Coffield and Kearns share a Pop sensibility, their working processes couldn’t be more opposed. Coffield’s scale suits the engagement with his subjects whereas Kearns’ compositions intentionally refer to the grand scale, ambition and narrative of classic history painting (established as the most revered of subjects in the eighteenth century). Given that Kearns’ paintings are self conscious collages of media imagery, his painting technique is appropriately highly refined, each register or source of imagery meticuoulsy rendered as it would appear in print (be it a fashion advertisement or a cartoon strip character). In comparison, Coffield’s paintings are rapidly produced and exhibit a sketchlike quality, his painting method a reflection of the rapidity with which we process the face.

Darren Coffield, ‘Night & Day’, 2011

Some of the portraits are rendered as shadowy silhouettes upon a single palette background (for instance Night & Day), whereas others are fully fleshed. In almost all of the paintings, viewers can glimpse minute patches of unpainted canvas. These gaps serve as Coffield’s declaration of the artifiace of portraiture. These icons are ‘true untruths’, idealized images of manicured self presentation. Celebrity harnesses the notion of intimate familarity with a subject when no such contact or connection exsists. This is at the heart of its power and hold over our imaginations. In interviews, Coffield has described the portraits as exhibiting an Orwellian ‘double-think’, that is to say that they exhibit the existance of contary beliefs and opinions simultaenously. For example, you may be familiar with Cary Grant’s films well and thus can recognize him easily. Though you have an idea of what Grant was like as a person, you do not know him at all. You have been presented less with a personality, and more with a aspirational self-presentation (in short, a lifestyle). Here we return full swing to Curtis’ concerns regarding our definition of individuality and the trappings of its marketability.

The purpose of this essay has not only been to introduce the work of these three individuals but to demonstrate how their works compliment one another. A number of common threads can be articulated through the examination of their work. The power of narrative and symbols, the operations of power, and the mechanisms of fame are just some examples.  It isn’t just that their subject matter correlates (for instance, Rock Hudson, so prevalent throughout Curtis’ film, is also the subject of one of Coffield’s portraits), nor that the works echo one another in a formalist sense, rather all three can be said to share similar socio-artistic concerns.  Though Curtis does not consider himself an artist, his documentaries have inspired a number of contemporary artists. His inclusion in this exhibition felt completely natural. Both Curtis and Kearns utilize the power of juxtaposition, the former through montage and the latter on canvas. Our current obsession with celebrity, the embodiment of unfettered and fetishized individuality that Coffield captures so eloquently, is also of concern to Kearns and Curtis.  The ingenuity of both Coffield’s and Kearns’ work is that their paintings address art historical concepts whilst simultaneously engaging current issues. Though the symbols of America’s power may seem simple, they are anything but. As I hope this exhibition has demonstrated, the real and the ideal are not without contradiction, and the ideal is never apolitical nor ideologically unbound.

Special thanks

Darren Coffield, Adam Curtis and Jerry Kearns                                                             Amani Olu and Eric Gleason                                                                                                Mia Curran                                                                                                                    Jennifer Hoffman-Williamson, Shawn Lefevre, Thomas Keelan                                       Lucy Kelsall at the BBC                                                                                                   Steph Allen at Punchdrunk                                                                                                 and Amanda Tiller

Press 

DeShawn Dumas, A Curation of Curators: Young Curators, New Ideas at Meulensteen, Artcritical.com

Chloe Wyma, Bright Young Things: Who to Watch in Amani Olu’s “Young Curators, New Ideas” Showcase at Meulensteen, Artinfo.com

Amelia Reynolds, Young Curators, New Ideas IV, Whitewall

Jamel Robinson, Best of Show: Young Curators, New Ideas IV, The Inkwell

Malcolm Harris, Declared Cool: Young Curators, New Ideas IV, The Huffington Post

Kyle Fitzpatrick, LAIY In NYC Diary: Day Eight, Nine, And Ten, LA I’m Yours

Charlie Schultz, Young Curators/New Ideas IV, Artslant

Young Curators, New Ideas IV, exhibition catalogue

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