Objects of Our Desire

Elizabeth Peyton.

Elizabeth Peyton paints David Bowie.

"Sleeping, reclining, sitting, daydreaming, fantasizing, brooding -- Ms. Peyton hardly ever depicts these young artists and musicians standing, and she never visually associates them with an activity like making art or music -- Ms. Peyton's friends and lovers Piotr and Tony and Liam encounter her celebrity obsessions John Lennon and Prince Harry and Kurt Cobain like chess pieces on opposite sides of existence. The tribe of the obscure look strikingly similar to one another: blank-faced, thin, closed-up yet strangely open, looking so intensely outward that it feels they must actually be looking inward.

They are also strikingly similar to the tribe of the celebrities, who bear the same physical features. You feel that the desire of Ms. Peyton's friends to be famous is so powerful that they have acquired the appearance of the celebrities they yearn for -- the way dogs begin to resemble their masters."

Stella Vine.

Stella Vine paints Kate Moss.

"Most jarring of all, nearly all of Ms. Peyton's subjects, both famous and obscure, don't just resemble each other. They also look a lot like her: delicately featured, wispish, androgynous. Ms. Peyton has spoken of how moved she has been by Proust's meditations on the nature of time, and how Proust's work has influenced her attempts to capture her subjects in the web of fleeting mortality. But it seems that what she has really taken from Proust is his exploration of the way we project ourselves onto the objects of our desire. We recreate the people we love -- and the people we hate -- in our own image."

Alice Neel.

Alice Neel paints Andy Warhol.

"Ms. Peyton's likenesses may not capture her subjects as intimately as we would like, but she has used the embattled genre of portraiture to lay bare a very contemporary perceptual and emotional predicament. At a moment when technology has made it possible to "know" people without ever meeting them in the flesh, there is the peril of imagining them as mere reflections of our own wishes and obsessions. Then, too, we have just lived through a time when we were tempted into projecting our desires -- some would say our greed -- onto reality beyond the point where they could ever be satisfied. Ms. Peyton's dreamy, insubstantial figures, waiting to be fulfilled by fantasies that will never be realized, may be more intimately connected to us than we think."

- Lee Siegel, "Painting Faces", The Wall Street Journal, 2009.

Brown Spots

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Brown Spots (Portrait of Andy Warhol as a Banana), 1984.

Why is Warhol a banana?

Because he made a famous album cover. Because he collaborated. Because of friendship. Because of rivalry. Because he was subject to homage, tribute, and patricide. Because he was another painter's mentor. Because he was taking advantage of rising stardom. Because it's a joke. Because he's gay. Because he seriously wore those wigs. Because of spontaneity. Because Basquiat ran out of ideas. Because he lived his own art. Because you can be anything in a painting.

Photograph of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat pretending to box.

Because of love.

Why Is It "Bad"?

Ralph Pugay, Liondix, Acrylic on panel, 12" x 16", 2010. www.ralphpugay.com

Why do we feel the need to call our paintings "bad", "naive", "hobbyist", "crafty"?  
Why can't we just let them be what they are going to be?  
Is it because we are insecure?  
Is it because we want to make sure everyone knows that we are self-aware?  
Does it legitimize the paintings?  
Does it make the paintings humble?  
Does it make the paintings pretentious?
When we make a humorous painting, is it automatically sorted into one of the categories in my first question?
Who does this sorting?
Why are we uncomfortable laughing at a painting?
Is it because it lowers the entire art form?
Is this a bad thing?
Is painting not supposed to make us feel those emotions?
Does a painting have to be witty or conceptually intriguing if it is also "bad"?
Can a strong concept make up for poor aesthetic choices?
Who is evaluating this balancing act?
Must we always tip the scale one way or the other?
What is the difference between painting and illustration?
Is an illustrative aesthetic "bad"?
Why do we have to put "bad" in quotation marks?
When will irony die?

The Shape of Things

1. A reality TV show

Promotional poster for Face Off, a reality-competition TV show featuring complete
 face/body transformations through prosthetics and make-up, 2011. 

2. A photograph I took in undergrad

Adair Stephens, Other no. 1, Gelatin silver print, 2008.

3. A recent painting

Bruna Massadas, Mother of All, Acrylic on canvas, 2012, 42 x 54 in.

4. A music video

Cropped still from the music video for "Rio" by Duran Duran, directed by Russell Mulcahy, 1982.

5. An older painting

Henri Matisse, Femme au chapeau (Woman with a Hat), Oil on canvas, 1905, 31 1/4 x 23 1/2 in.

6. A play and movie

Movie poster for The Shape of Things, a play (2001) and movie (2003)
written and directed by Neil LaBute in which a woman slowly and secretly
 "sculpts" a man by convincing him to alter his appearance and personality.

Interview: Jake Ziemann at Tartine Bakery (San Francisco)

Jake Ziemann, Pull no. 1, Acrylic, spray paint & collage on paper, 2012, 15" x 11" (unframed).

the face painters:  Congratulations on your show, Pull, currently up at Tartine Bakery!  It seems like you haven't slowed down a bit since graduating from California College of the Arts in May.  How do you think your work has evolved over these last few months since completing your MFA?

Jake Ziemann:  Thanks.  It's true, I was in a high-paced rhythm near the end of my MFA, and one of my goals I set for myself was to continue this momentum after graduation.  Sort of "hit the grounding running" if you know what I mean?  When I took a step back from the body of work I came out of graduate school with, it was clear to me that my work was edging into a more non-representational realm.  I began the series of paintings thinking of each one as a different landscape scenario, but it was apparent that with each new painting I was less interested in the landscape and more concerned about the formal aspects within the work, i.e., the shapes and forms I was creating, the way the paint was interacting on the surface of the canvas, and the color relationships that I set forth.  My new work embraces this lack of subject matter, and in most cases source material, and is blatantly about the formal decisions I make in the studio.  The work does not hold onto any particularly subject or theme, yet there are forms and colors that get recycled and reused throughout the show.  The work has essentially begun to reflect what has been occurring with my painting process, and visually depicts the breaking down and building up of formal layers, teetering the line between structure and debris.

Jake Ziemann, Teeter, Oil & acrylic on canvas, 2012, 53" x 53".

tfp:  I'm interested in the relationship between your small-scale drawings and larger oil paintings.  What amount of influence does each have on the other when you're working in the studio?

JZ:  I think the smaller works are a way for me to get the ideas out more quickly, a way for me to use the process of translating cut-up old work and found forms to create fragmented sections of what appear in the larger paintings.  In the smaller drawings, I limit myself to only a few gestures, whereas in the larger paintings, I usually labor over them and use many methods of applying layers of pigment over the surface.  I think of the smaller work as extractions pulled from the larger pieces.  I take a single thing I see present in a larger oil painting, for example a cutout form, and make that the main focus of a drawing.  My works on paper are refreshing to make and act as a reprieve from over-thinking and over-working.  I foresee them influencing my paintings more and more as methods of isolating potential solutions that could in turn help me un-complicate the irresolute mess I make on the canvas.  They ultimately help me make decisions and become less hesitant with the brush, which for me is not always an easy task.

tfp:  Where do you think your paintings will go from here?  Will you stay on your current path or shake things up even more?

JZ:  It's hard to say.  I'm quite enamored with the process of formal translation and extraction I've begun, and by no means have any plans to stop it.  I can envision getting more entrenched into my method of rebuilding and breaking down forms to a point that it implodes.  I don't know what the resulting work would look like or have any clue how long this would take, but the possibility of taking something so far that it almost obliterates any sense of lucidity within the work truly tempts me.  I do, however, always have grand ideas and plans for the next big project.  For the moment I've written them down and decided to focus on diving headfirst into my current method of making.  I'm sure I will get restless, but I think I'm going to let the work lead me blindly into an uncertain terrain for the time being.

tfp:  Do you have anything else exciting coming up on the horizon?

JZ:  No upcoming exhibitions; I, however, am going to Vermont Studio Center for a four-week stint this winter.

tfp:  Thanks, and congratulations again!

If you would like to see more of Jake's work, check out his personal website here: www.jakeziemann.com.  

And if you're in the Bay Area, don't forget to come to the opening reception of Pull on September 19th from 8 - 10PM at Tartine Bakery (600 Guerrero Street, San Francisco, CA, 94110).  See you there!

Rachel Hecker at CAMH (Houston)

Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, metal wheel mounted on painted wood stool, 1951 (third version, after lost original of 1913).

While visiting Houston this July, I went to an exhibition titled It is what it is. Or is it?, curated by Dean Daderko, at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston. The text provided in the exhibition guide centers around the idea of updating the term readymade and its use in the contemporary art scene:

"As forms go, the readymade is a slippery one. Its originator, Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), spoke of it as 'a form of denying the possibility of defining art.' Now, as the form nears its 100th anniversary-- Duchamp made his Bicycle Wheel in 1913-- CAMH presents It is what it is. Or is it?, a group exhibition that explores how the form has changed... Duchamp's point was for us to get caught up in a conceptual effort to consider what we can and what we can't see, and what happens when we encounter something familiar in an unexpected way... These artists' works chart changes in perception, demonstrating that artistic practice has become notably more engaged in addressing a diversity of social, political, aesthetic, and temporal realities... The readymade, and its multiple legacies, demand that we be active viewers."

While it is important to note that Daderko was not necessarily making a direct statement about a connection between the readymade and painting (out of the 31 pieces in the exhibition, only 7 are what one could call traditional paintings), I find the association intriguing. To be honest, I had never really considered how the readymade has affected painting before. Obviously, the conversation around pop art painters such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and James Rosenquist has been mostly about appropriation. However, the readymade is about to be a hundred years old, and artistic appropriation strategies are at least fifty. Looking around at what is happening now, I question how useful these terms, especially the readymade, can be when thinking about painting.

Rachel Hecker, Jesus #1 (Viggo Mortensen/Lord of the Rings), 2011, acrylic on canvas.

Citing Hecker's Jesus #1 (pictured above), as an example, I believe that many painters and artists today are doing something very different that can't quite be covered by these blanket terms. Duchamp, with his Bicycle Wheel and Fountain, took things from 'everyday life' and presented them as art with little or no alteration. Thus, the act of placing objects in a new context becomes paramount to the work. Hecker, I would argue, is not really doing the same thing. Yes, she is taking the iconic image of Jesus out of the context it would normally exist in, religious worship. And yes, she is taking the iconic image of Aragorn out of the context it would normally exist in, a Lord of the Rings movie or fan website. But, what would be considered the "readymade" here? Is it the image of Aragorn that the artist took from the movie or the internet? Is it the image of Jesus?

I believe that what Hecker is tapping into shows an overall shift in popular culture that we have been experiencing in the past decade or so, where lines between large cultural institutions such as entertainment and religion are becoming more and more blurred. What is the cause? Some may say the internet, others may say the role that celebrity culture and reality TV now play in many of our lives. Who really knows? But it is evident that this kind of mixing, combining, and regurgitating is happening all over the place. And this process cannot be easily contained or explained away by the readymade. You can follow the logic of Duchamp's readymades fairly easily: he takes an object or two and places them in a gallery as art. Hecker, on the other hand, deliberately complicates the relationships between her two conflated subject matters by the methods and materials she chooses to paint them with. The painting is not 100% photorealistic and therefore not "readymade": Aragorn's clothing is simplified and any background indicating the Lord of the Rings universe is stripped away. He is just a man in robes. But he is also Jesus, a savior among men. The airbrushing technique creates a soft-focus image which readies it for intense and sincere devotion (something which is shared by zealous Christians and obsessed fanboys alike). 

While Hecker has two more of her Jesus paintings in the show (the other two are of Pink Floyd's David Gilmour and model David Axell), Aragorn and Jesus are the perfect pair for this type of painting because they share more than just a physical likeness. In their stories, they are both heroes that save mankind. So is this stock character, the trope of a savior with mythological greatness, the real readymade here? Is there an emerging term that would do better justice to this complicated relationship? I recognize that this exhibition was more about broadening the term of readymade and don't take issue with the inclusion of Hecker's painting (on the contrary, this has made me think more about the nature of art than any other show all summer), but I can't help thinking that there is a better way to look at and talk about this kind of painting.

I am very interested in continuing this conversation, so if you have any thoughts, please feel free to leave a comment!

You can view more of Rachel Hecker's work here: rachelhecker.net, and photos of her Jesus series, (along with in-process shots), here: rachelhecker.blogspot.com.
And you can view more images from the show It is what it is. Or is it?, here: CAMH

My First Painting

Adair Stephens, Cellmates, acrylic on canvas, approximately 3' x 4', 2009.

I wrote a whole other post about this painting explaining the details, facts, whens, whys, and wheres surrounding its creation, but I’ve realized that those things are not what interest me.  When I think of this painting, I am mostly intrigued by the fact that I threw it away.  Most people say that you should never throw any of your art away, and they are probably right.  But I still throw a lot of things in the dumpster.  My recent attempt to move everything from my studio at CCA into my bedroom in my apartment forced me to toss the things I didn’t like and give away the things I did.  But I’m not saddened by this loss.  Instead, I feel like a weight is lifted.  I don’t want to look at my finished paintings.  I’m excited by the process of making a picture more than the finished picture itself.  Hanging up my own paintings would feel like nailing corpses to the wall.  My advisor in grad school once suggested I go back and work on some of my finished paintings, but that is impossible for me.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

I love Humpty Dumpty because his story is how I work.  I break things down and try to put them back together again in a different way.  You can’t go backwards once it’s happened.  You can cover up the body, but the ghost will always be there.  And the seams will always show.  It is up to you to either put it back on the wall or sweep the pieces into the trash.