Art and Curiosity: A Q&A With Curator Sylvia Chivaratanond

Everyone in the art world knows that Los Angeles' art scene is going through a frenzied and near-maniacal renaissance.  But for the last fifteen years, curator and art historian Sylvia Chivaratanond has sewn for herself a unique place in this strange Shangri-La’s rich artistic tapestry, which dates back to the 50s and 60s with artists like Ed Ruscha and Billy Al Bengston. After seeing the landmark exhibition Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s, which is widely considered to be one of the most important exhibitions of contemporary art, Chivaratanond switched her major from law to art history, volunteered to be a guard at MoCA, and began a long career organizing exciting exhibitions for institutions from the Centre Pompidou to the Tate Gallery in London. Recently, Chivaratanond has been brought on the curate exhibitions for After & Again, which is a contemporary art platform celebrating the craftsmanship of textiles. Merging art, design and fashion, the platform sources textiles from all over the world, which are then presented in unique site-specific installations. For the first installation presented by After & Again, Chivaratanond has curated an electrifying exhibition by established and leading contemporary Mexican artist Betsabee Romero, which explores pre-Columbian iconography, colonial imagery, and lowrider culture – it is currently on view at the Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Autre was lucky enough to catch the very busy Chivaratanond to discuss her beginnings in the art world and her continued thirst for exploring new creative landscapes – what you will learn is that she may just be one of the most important ambassadors for the Los Angeles art scene.  

Autre: What is your artistic background…how were you initially introduced to the world of art and can you remember a specific work of art that really set you off?

Sylvia Chivaratanond: I am originally from Los Angeles and was a pre-law major at UCLA. As a college sophomore I walked into the Helter Skelter show at MoCA's Geffen one evening, and that show single-handedly changed the course of my life. The following week I marched into MoCA to volunteer as a guard and intern in the Education Dept; switched my major to Art History and didn't tell my parents until six months before graduation day. My world was turned upside down when I saw the work of Charles Ray, Lynn Foulkes, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Lari Pittman, Jim Shaw, Meg Cranston, Robert Williams, Manual Ocampo, etc. Then I saw Sonic Youth perform at the Geffen outdoor plaza as part of the show and I was hooked. That work spoke to me on so many levels: viscerally, physically, emotionally, and intellectually. And it had a rock star component, which spoke to my youth culture. It was then that I learned that many of those artists taught at the art department of UCLA and several colleges around the city, and I wanted to be even closer to these individuals' energy.

A: How did you get your start in curation and can you describe your first curatorial effort?

SC: After UCLA I went to earn a graduate degree from Leicester University. During my time in London I interned at the Tate Modern for two years and worked very closely with the curatorial department on several Modernist shows. It wasn't until the following year when I received a curatorial fellowship at the Walker Art Center that my expertise in the contemporary art world was cemented. It was there where I met the most creative minds working the field of contemporary art. I was the assistant of Richard Flood, then Chief Curator, and I worked on my first contemporary art show: Matthew Barney's Cremaster 3. In addition, I worked on the drawing retrospective of Robert Gober, Bruce Conner and the most comprehensive Arte Povera show to date. It was a phenomenal time at the Walker as it was a think tank and laboratory for ideas and artists; it practiced what it preached as far as cross-discipline approach to the visual arts. There was an incredible amount of freedom in our thinking and way of looking at art; there was no hierarchy in place. The director at the time, Kathy Halbreich (now Associate Director of MoMA) practiced a special generosity with regard to knowledge and her time that continues to be her ethos till this day.  

A: You most recently worked as a curator for the venerable Centre Pompidou…what was most exciting about working with that institution?

SC: The Centre Pompidou is known for its stellar scholarship and excellent collection of art. It was an honor to work with their director and curators on building their permanent collection of art with regard to American artists, a focus for the Centre Pompidou Foundation. I was instrumental in adding important American artists to their collection including Jim Shaw, Rachel Harrison, Cheyney Thompson, Erin Sheriff, Sam Falls, Mark Bradford, Sterling Ruby, Barbara Kasten, Analia Saban, RH Quaytman, among many others. 

A: I want to talk about your work with After & Again, which celebrates craftsmanship of textiles…what has your experience been with textiles?

SC: I recognize the importance of textiles in art as they have been part of the fabric of culture since the dawn of time! From what we wear on a daily basis to folk and tribal art to contemporary artists working w fabric such as Sheila Hicks, Ernesto Neto, and Yinka Shonibare. There are so many artists using textiles in their work whether directly sewn or worked into the sculptural object or simply as clothing to evoke an era or statement in a photograph such as Mickalene Thomas. In Mickalene's paintings, even though she doesn't use textiles directly, she makes specific references to them in her work in order to evoke a certain epoch or make a political statement. Do Ho Suh is another artist who comes into mind who weaves intricate sculptural installations from translucent fabric and resin. 

A: One of the first exhibitions presented by After & Again is a presentation of works by Betsabeé Romero, which will be on view at the Masonic Lodge, can you describe your connection with this artist?

SC: I have always admired Betsabee's work from a far but never experienced it until now. She is a legend in Mexico and Latin American and I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to bring her work to audiences in Los Angeles. Her work in sculpture, photographs, drawings and installation bridge the gap between Pre-Colombian iconography and pop culture such as Chicano and lowrider culture. The notion of death as celebratory is also a big topic in her work. I have always gravitated toward work that both celebrates and draws attention death in our culture, not so much as a dark component, but instead using darkness as way to generate lightness. 

Installation view of Helter Skelter - the show at MoCA that changed curator Sylvia Chivaratanond's life forever

A: Can you talk about future shows presented by After & Again that you are curating? 

SC: We plan to choose the next artist by this summer in order to show in Los Angeles in the fall. The artist will also do an edition for After & Again and will somehow integrate that project into an installation at a location in the city. 

A: What type of art do you gravitate to the most…is there any type of medium or work that you are immediately drawn to? 

SC: I love work in all mediums across eras. I love Surrealist and Dada work and I also love strolling the Metropolitan Museum's collection galleries of ancient south east Asian art and art from the sub-continent from 400 B.C onward!

A: You recently curated a show of Devendra Banhart's work at Reserve Ames  - what is Devendra doing that is different than other artists? 

SC: I love Devendra's seamless fusion of visual art and music. He is the modern day dandy who understands the subtleties of our culture from the history of sound and the works of John Cage to the poetry of Ginsburg to the latest country music. He went to art school first then began his music career, in that order. 

A: What is the most exciting thing about art in LA – especially in the present – is there a boom or has there always been one continuous shock wave?

SC: Los Angeles has always been important to the scene of art since the 1950s and 1960s with Ed Kienholz and the birth of Ferus Gallery to all the artists in the now historical 1992 Helter Skelter show at MoCA. Los Angeles has always been in a strong position in the art world as this is the city with the most concentration of the best art schools in the country. The recent boom of art comes at the heels of the revitalization of downtown and with it affordable studios and housing in these dense areas of population. Everyone from New York City has figured out that LA has been inexpensive to work and live (not to mention unbeatable sunshine) so recently there has been a mass exodus of artists, galleries, and collectors from every major city in the world. Did I mention the outrageously delicious food scene here? It's out of this world with the most Michelin star restaurants in one city. Downtown LA is also the home to the most exciting museums from MoCA to the new Broad Museum, which will continue to bring fresh and new perspectives of art while broadening their audiences.   

A: What’s next? 

SC: For me: yoga and meditation somewhere far off. For art: continue the curiosity that makes art of our time. We must continue to support art, music and culture in any way possible. 

You can catch  Sylvia Chivaratanond's first curatorial effort for After & Again, featuring the art of leading Mexican artist Betsabee Romero at the Masonic Lodge (6000 Santa Monica Blvd - right behind Paris Photo) from May 2 to May 4, 2015. text and interview  by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

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Installation of Betsabee Romero's exhibition at the Masonic Lodge, curated by Sylvia Chivaratanond

Live Long Enough to Live Forever: A Q&A With Cole Sternberg

photograph by Adarsha Benjamin 

Multidisciplinary artist Cole Sternberg is an explorer of the human soul, the American psyche and the paranoia surrounding global growth, change and ecological destruction. Although he is predominantly a painter, Sternberg also practices sculpture, photography, film and room installations. At Paris Photo Los Angeles 2015, Sternberg will present what may be one of his most exciting photographic journeys yet: a recreation of his grandmother’s den from her home in Long Island. Sternberg has exhaustively documented every inch of the space and the strange objects that live there: "...Late 19th century plein air impressionist American painting, a 1990s TV with really strange, hardly decipherable instructions for how to use it, her VHS collection, my grandpa’s ashes, a binder about a Parisian tourist trip they did—this real weird mix of things—pillows knitted with puppies yawning." Through collage and unorthodox photographic processes, “My Grandma’s Den” is a microcosm of a larger consciousness: an America afraid of itself, afraid of its neighbors, armed to the teeth and begging for spiritual catharsis. After Paris Photo, Sternberg will be exhibiting a site-specific work in the Hamptons and then he is off to travel the world aboard a shipping vessel to create works that deal with human minuteness and global trade. In the following fascinating interview, Sternberg discusses his practice, the fate of mankind and his grandmother’s den.

Oliver Kupper: What were some of your earliest introductions to art? 

Cole Sternberg: Well, my earliest ones that I don’t actually remember—but I’ve been told from family members—my parents and grandparents used to take me to a lot of museums. I guess I got really into certain, specific impressionist paintings when I was four years old. I would just sit and stare at these different textured oil works for—not a serious amount of time—but a serious amount of time for a little kid, three to five minutes or something. Just staring at them. And they thought it was kind of strange, but that was the first thing.

OK: That makes sense now.

CS: Yeah, it came together twenty years later…The first thing I really remember getting deep into was in middle school, my family moved to Germany for my dad’s job for a couple of years. They kept dragging me, again, to museums. But these were more iconic European museums like, the ones you would think—whether it be the Louvre, or the D’Orsay in Paris, or the Uffizi in Florence—you know, whatever, every big tourist museum. So I saw a lot of work. In a two-year span, I saw a ridiculous amount of important, historical work.

OK: Can you name three artists that really had a profound influence on you?

CS: I don’t know. It’s hard because I don’t think my work really related to any of those early influences super specifically. I mean, I’ve always really liked texture, and I would see that in a variety of works. I think when I was seventeen, I started learning more about abstract expressionism, and then Twombly. Things like that – you can see a little bit more in the work. But it’s weird because I can’t really piece it to one or two specific people. It’s kind of a blend. I love Joseph Beuys, and Sigmar Polke, and Twombly, and Mapplethorpe—all kinds of different people.

OK: Yeah, I meant in a sense of—not necessarily influence your work, but just had an impact on your creativity…

CS: Well that immersive environment of large abstraction. “Fifty Days at Iliam” is a Twombly piece in the Philadelphia museum that’s either eleven or twelve massive canvases that go together to tell the story of the Iliad and the Odyssey. The feeling sitting in a room surrounded by those big, powerful works, I think, drove me to actually create something. 

OK: Yeah, that makes sense. So, do you travel around a lot? Did you travel around a lot as a kid? Were you sort of moving around the world a little bit?

CS: Not really. We were pretty much in Northern California except for that few year period in Germany. But during that period in Germany we tried to travel as much as possible because it was a unique time and opportunity. And then from college until now I travel a lot.

"I like this idea of an ongoing search for some sort of truth. That truth could be very grandiose. How is the earth placed in the whole environment, in the solar system, in the universe, and so on. How is one person’s life relevant to the rest of us? I like these amorphous concepts of searching."

OK: You work in a lot of mediums—photography, sculpture, insulation, film—but painting has sort of become your main medium. What is it about painting that best expresses your creativity?

CS: Well, it’s kind of a selfish thing. I think I just enjoy painting the most. There’s an emotional connection to that, and a sort of visceral feeling about it that I really like. But at the same time, my recent body of work is all photography. And then my next project after this is a mix of photography and painting. So I don’t know. I don’t know how locked in I am on it all the time. But painting a large-scale painting is probably still my most joyful thing to create.

OK: Your work seems to be this grand exploration of humankind—evolution, civilization, culture, what drives us, what moves us. You recreated the Sistine Chapel on shipping crates and the last moments of Ray Johnson’s life, which is incredible. What are you hoping to discover? What are you looking for? Is there anything specific you are looking for?

CS: I don’t know. It feels like I’m looking for something, but I don’t know what exactly it is. I like the overarching theme of how humanity or humankind (in a more positive way) affects our environment around us—for the better or worse. Mainly for the worst, but it kind of depends. I like this idea of an ongoing search for some sort of truth. That truth could be very grandiose. How is the earth placed in the whole environment, in the solar system, in the universe, and so on. How is one person’s life relevant to the rest of us? I like these amorphous concepts of searching. Also, I like to subversively deal with social issues in the work.

OK: Where do you think humans will be in five hundred years?

CS: Oh my god. Well, the way it’s looking now, we’ll probably be turning into fossils slowly. Sometimes I buy into the Kurzweil concept of a singularity, the possibility that in five hundred years our consciousness will be, basically, where it is twenty years from now. We’ll figure out how to live forever. The idea of neurology and robotics and general science and technology combined to the point where every day automatically our brain is uploading to a cloud and we know exactly how the brain works. So if I got hit by a car one second from now, I would just download all my memories and experiences into a synthetic brain and synthetic body and be rolling again. If that works, then in five hundred years, we’ll probably have explored deep, deep into the universe and learned more truths about how small we are in the context of our world and others.

OK: Sure. That was sort of a curve ball question, sorry about that.

CS: I could go on forever about weird theories of living on.

OK: I love that. I think we’ll be downloadable, too. I think that we’re already becoming cyborgs.

CS: Oh yeah, it feels like it in the stupid connection with our phones.

OK: That’s exactly what I’m talking about. So, Paris Photo is coming up. This is really interesting to me. Can you describe your solo exhibition with MAMA at Paris Photo?

CS: Well the idea started with taking a room and recreating that in photography in another room—that other room being the booth or whatever space for Paris Photo for MAMA. I spent a lot of time in my grandma’s den, which is in a small town on Long Island. The den is really creepy—like every grandma’s dens. But it also has all these weird little components that, taken separately, can mean a lot of different things. Or, together, can be this symbol of the weird state of America and the world. So I got really into my grandma’s den, basically. It has everything from a late 19th century plein air impressionist American painting, to a 1990s TV with really strange, hardly decipherable instructions for how to use it, to her VHS collection, my grandpa’s ashes, a binder about a Parisian tourist trip they did—this real weird mix of things—pillows knitted with puppies yawning. I captured all that, shooting each square foot of it very specifically. I took it back to my studio—all that photography—and then started to figure out what I was really going to do with it.

OK: What did you do with it?

CS: What that ended up being is a series of collages that are manipulated in a kind of strange way that give it this destructive, rough feel—in black and white and color. Then, integrating text in with different images to give these little hints of what I’m thinking with each work. They address the environment in some way. My grandma has been a lifelong left-wing democrat. Suddenly, she’s a very right-winged person, which I don’t understand, except that my uncle has her watch Fox News a lot. I think maybe that’s brainwashed her. There’s these little hints of what happens to people when they get old and why their viewpoints change for no rational reason. Then, the bigger thing that came out of it is this agoraphobic tendency of my grandma, of me, and then of America in general. We really want to build walls and isolate ourselves, which, I think is super unfortunate. So a lot of the work ended up getting into more of this agoraphobia than anything else. 

Agoraphobic Tendencies of a Modern World (2015)

OK: Does she know that you are presenting this exhibition? Does she have any idea what’s going on?

CS: She loves art. She’s exposed me to a lot of art. She went to the Ray Johnson Hamptons thing. So she knows I’m feeling it. I’m pretty sure she has no clue of the dark side of it or the agoraphobic side of it, until she sees the work. Even then, I’m kind of hoping she doesn’t figure it out. She’s very sweet and fine lady. I don’t want to bum her out too much. It’s more about everyone than her specifically. So, we’ll see.

OK: You’re about to go on this massive trip around the world. Can you talk about that project? You’re about to travel the world, essentially, on a shipping crater.

CS: I love this project. It’s been planned in a variety of forms for three or four years, and finally, it’s not coming to fruition in what I think is, probably, the best way. At first, it was more in regard to Chinese trade, and America controlling the oceans, and what that meant to the world. Now, I have been more focused on it being about the journey itself and how small humans are within the scope of the ocean. The vessel stops three times in China, one time in Korea, then goes across the Pacific. That part of the trip is around 10 or 12 days. You cross one of the few dead zones that are left in the world—zones of the ocean where if you get sick or the boat has a major issue, no one will reach you in time. Dead zones are closing very quickly due to technology. So this is a last moment to really spend any time in one of those areas. Also, you pass by, to some degree, what’s called the “plastic island.” It isn’t really an island, just a massive amount of garbage floating around. You can’t really see it all of it on the surface at once like a normal island, but it’s another sign of disgusting human waste. And then the ship goes through the Panama Canal, stops in Columbia, and then goes up the East Coast of America, ending in New York. That’s more of a human ingenuity part of the trip. I think that might be more fun.

OK: So, what are you doing on the ship?

CS: On the ship, I’m painting. I’m creating all kinds of work—paint, photography, drawing, writing—and exposing the work to the elements in different ways. For instance, a watercolor might be tied to a pole on the ship, and then the rain and saltwater will eat away at the paint to some degree for the whole journey. Another piece might be sitting in the engine room for the whole journey, and the soot will slowly build up on the piece. I’ve never done that before—physically integrating the environment into the works in some way. I think it will be a mental and physical challenge.

OK: It sounds amazing. Now, are you exhibiting those works at MAMA? How long does that take? How long does something like that take?

CS: The journey?

OK: Yeah.

CS: It’s about a month—a few days in China on the front end. This production company is making a documentary about the journey and me, so we’ll spend a little time in China beforehand just doing things and wandering around. Then, the same on the back end in New York. So I guess the whole thing is about five weeks or five and a half weeks.

OK: It sounds incredible.

CS: I think it will be good. Hopefully I don’t jump off.

OK: Yeah, hopefully. So where do you see yourself as an artist in ten years? That’s my last question. It might be a difficult question.

CS: Oh my god. I don’t know. With every exhibition or project I do, I try to grow a little and push myself a little further in terms of process, and concept, and the ending visual too. If I keep doing that, as I’ve done for at least the last five years, I think the work ten years from now will be pretty interesting and pretty in depth in a variety of formats. I think that, through it all, that’s all I can really hope for, is the work itself. You can’t really predict what business opportunities or anything will come. 

You can check out Cole Sternberg's "My Grandma’s Den" at Paris Photo Los Angeles 2015, presented by MAMA Gallery, New York Backlot, Stand H3, Paramount Pictures Studios. text and interview by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

photograph by Adarsha Benjamin 

Ghost Rider Motorcycle Hero: An Interview With Alan Vega

interview by Oliver Kupper

When Alan Vega first heard Bruce Springsteen’s album Nebraska, he was convinced that the song "State Trooper" was a long lost Suicide song that he had forgotten about. The song was not a lost Suicide track – it was one of Springsteen’s own, but an obvious homage nonetheless.

That’s how powerful Suicide’s influence was and still is – a band created by two nice Jewish boys from Brooklyn. Black clad and with a lethally high-voltage sound, Suicide has had a profound influence on bands like Joy Division and The Jesus and Mary Chain – amongst countless others. But what many people don’t know is that Suicide provided a strange and pulsating soundtrack for a major change in American culture: art was being stripped to a bare minimalism of shapes and primary colors, and music was being peeled away to reveal simple digitized rhythms, computerized static and monotone vocals. Alan Vega – the front man of Suicide – was one of the first people to use the word ‘punk’ to describe their music. Today, Vega, and his band Suicide, is considered the missing link in the lineage between rock n’ roll and what would become known as punk, electro-punk, no wave, new wave and early industrial music. Before listening to Nine Inch Nails, start with Suicide.

Many people also don’t know that Alan Vega is also an established visual artist - art is actually his first passion. In fact, he studied under abstract expressionist turned minimalist artist Ad Reinhardt – an artist who was famous for his black on black painting that he deemed would be the last paintings anyone could ever paint. Vega would seemingly become a physical and creative manifestation of those “last paintings.” Experimenting with bare materials and items found in the barren and depressed landscape that was New York in the 1970s, Vega would create unique light sculptures that resembled Christmas ornamented crucifixes; a pastiche of a dystopian consumerist American culture.

In a new solo show at Invisible Exports – the first show devoted entirely to new work since 1983 – Vega presents a few of his iconic light sculptures and a series of semi-autobiographical portraits that are much more personal than his three-dimensional work. We were fortunate enough to speak with Alan Vega on the eve of the opening of this exhibition – entitled Welcome to Wyoming. In the following interview, Vega talks about Suicide, his current show at Invisible-Exports and how age brings wisdom and the general notion of not giving a fuck anymore what people think. 

What was your earliest introduction to art – when was your introduction?

It must have been in the late sixties – I started making art and that soon turned into music. But I was always into music, anyhow. I was always doing music while I was making art. But I wasn’t doing it as a career or anything. Not even when I started Suicide. To me, we were doing art.

"Everything. Everything was changing.
And it was great. At times, it was impossible
to know what the hell was going on."

Who were some of your earliest artistic influences?

I was influenced by Ad Reinhardt, and also some of the early surrealists. And Picasso – I used to hear all these stories about Picasso that were really wild. But Ad [Ad Reinhardt] was my generation, and as far as I’m concerned [his work] was the end of painting. It was black on black and almost no color.

And that was sort of the birth of minimalism, right – at the end of the ‘50s?

Yeah, it was. It was the beginning of the end. I didn’t know where to go from there at the time. It was like, ‘Oh shit, what do we do now?’

But that stripped down minimalism must have had a huge effect on your band, Suicide?

Yeah, it did. It was a time of minimalism – in art, in music. And Ad really started that beginning – to the end.

Well, that whole era was a time of change – the end of the fifties and early sixties – everything seemed to be changing at that point in history.  

Everything. Everything was changing. And it was great. At times, it was impossible to know what the hell was going on. But seeing Ad [Reinhardt] was enough – I remember seeing his paintings for the first time and I was like, ‘Holy shit.’ I knew Ad very well – he was a very shy guy, but he was also really funny. But just to see his paintings was really a treat itself.

I want to talk about Iggy Pop for a second, because he has also had a major influence on you as well – mainly as a musician and performer, right?

Yeah, well, Iggy was a major influence. The first time I saw Iggy was in 1969 at the World’s Fair in New York City and MC5 was the headliner. And they [MC5] tried very hard to outdo Iggy, but they could not outdo Iggy – no one could outdo Iggy. And it was twenty minutes of Hell. All his jumping on stage. He was all bloodied. I remember bringing two or three people with me and all their mouths were dropped.

So, how did you come up with the name Suicide? 

[laughs] We all laughed at first when we first thought of it. We would try to come up with names for days and each time we thought of Suicide, we would laugh. And then one day Marty [Martin Rev] decided let’s just keep the name, because that was really the band: SUICIDE – and it was. Suicide sort of summed up the world we lived in: Nixon, the bombings, and the war, and what the hell! People thought we were describing our own suicide, but it was the only appropriate name.

"It greeted hell for me, because
everyone that saw it was, like ‘Holy shit.’
They tried to kill me."

Well, it’s one of the greatest band names, probably ever…

It probably is one of the greatest names of all time. Everyday, you read the newspaper and you feel like you are getting closer and closer to suicide [laughs].

And you used to walk around with a jacket that read Suicide, right?

Yeah, it said Suicide on the back. It greeted hell for me, because everyone that saw it was, like ‘Holy shit.’ They tried to kill me. They threw things at me. It was just a jacket! I took hell. In fact, I took hell for the first ten to fifteen years of Suicide.

Yeah, I mean people probably hadn’t seen anything like that before. Can you describe one of your craziest experiences?

Oh god, there are so many of them. It’s hard, because we were younger. We also went out with a different energy than we do now. We were insane. Or we were acting insane. Or maybe we were insane! Every night was different. Really, because we never knew what to do – we never knew how to start. Sometimes it started right off the bat and sometimes there was silence. Waiting for a sound. For something….

So, when do you think that people started really appreciating the sound?

Well, we started getting appreciation in the United Kingdom in the early 80s. I remember there was a show in Edinburgh at the Glass Door and we expected all kinds of hell – I remember they had a big disco ball, but it was completely dark while we played four numbers or so. Then I told Marty to watch out – “expect it from all angles.” But then the lights came on and people were dancing! So it started then – then people were against the walls and they started following us. They really loved Suicide.

What about some of your peers – I mean there were other bands in New York making very avant-garde music, like Television and a number of other bands. How did they perceive your music?

I liked the guys from Televsion, but they were more rock n’ roll. But I liked the guys. I knew the drummer – he was very friendly with me. The lead singer was a very quiet guy and he didn’t really talk to anybody. But compared to Suicide, they were more commercial.

Speaking of commercial, Bruce Springsteen has said that you guys have been a major, major influence, right?

Bruce – I became very friendly with him.  He was in the same studio we were in – in about 1981 or 1982. We had a lot of laughs together, me and Bruce. But when I first heard that album [Nebraska] I thought: Did I write a song that I don’t remember now? There was a song on there that I thought was a Suicide song, but no, it was Bruce Springsteen. But I like Bruce and I always liked his music.

So, I wanted to talk about your upcoming show at Invisible-Exports. Can you tell us a little bit about Welcome to Wyoming?

I’ve always wanted to go to Wyoming all my life and I want to go before I die, and see the horses. So I was working on these drawings and the show came up, so I decided to call it Welcome to Wyoming.

And this is your first show devoted to new work in multiple years – what prompted you to show your work again?

Well, I love the gallery and the two people that run the gallery, they really know me.

And a majority of the work in this show is portraits – are they self-portraits?

They are portraits, but they are not really self-portraits. I’ve been doing these drawings since I was a kid. I would do them on the Bowery – these portraits of old people. But in a way they are self-portraits. And I don’t use any models or anything like that – I just draw. I’ve been doing it all my life. I did it before Suicide stuff. In this show, there are a bunch of drawings of these guys.

And I heard that you like to draw while under the influence?

I did, but….

Not anymore?  

Yeah, I did, but now the doctors have got me staying away. But I’ve been focused – I’ve been doing shows. Suicide has been better than ever. And I have new music that I’ve been working on. It’s the blues, which is something that I’ve always wanted to do.

"Age is a hell of a thing.
Maybe it’s the idea of running out of time –
knowing that I could go at any day."

You’ve always wanted to make blues music or play the blues?

Yeah, I was only going to do one song…maybe two…but it turned into a volume of ten songs…and everything is live from the top of my head. I just heard a few tracks and it sounds really good. As I get older, everything is better. Drawing is better. Singing is better. So, I don’t know…I don’t know what’s happened. After forty years, maybe I finally know what the hell I’m doing. And the album is going to come out soon.

Do you think wisdom comes from age?

Yeah, I do. Yeah, there is a lot of shit that comes with youth. Horrendous fuck-ups. Which is great – I really love fuck-ups. But working through that is a good thing. But after forty years – forty-five years – of busting my hump…now I don’t give a shit. I just do what I want to do. Age is a hell of a thing. Maybe it’s the idea of running out of time – knowing that I could go at any day.

Well, I hope for more albums and music and more of everything…

I hope so too! But I’m going through a re-birth. I’m already thinking of the next show and I am hoping for good things for it. I have a lot of ideas for it and now I don’t want to die. Whereas before, I was like, ‘The hell with it.’ Now I feel like I could live a little longer. Now, I can keep making my art, but all my friends are starting to reach that age…

But you can’t really retire from art, right?

You never retire from it. I get calls all the time – people asking why don’t I quit or retire. But why the hell would I want to quit? How do you stop art or music? You don’t…you do it forever and that’s what I want to do and I love it. 

Alan Vega 'Welcome to Wyoming' is on view now until March 29, 2015 at Invisible-Exports in New York. Click here to see photos from the opening.

Olivia Locher On Her Group Show 'Pheromone Hotbox'

We first featured the work of Olivia Locher back in 2011. Over the years, her work and photographic identity has matured, but has never lost that brilliant collision of erotic and surreal – with a feminine mystique that blossoms with rich hues and jarring contexts. Tonight, Locher is included in a group exhibition – entitled Pheromone Hotbox – with four other women who have that same mystique: Amanda Charchian, Shae Detar, Marianna Rothen and Aneta Bartos. Together, they are exploring female sexuality and womanhood that is counterclockwise from the predominant male perspective, which aims more to objectify than to celebrate. In the following short interview, Locher talks female empowerment and learning to trust her artistic ideas.

AUTRE: What can we expect tomorrow night at your show Pheromone Hotbox at Steven Kasher Gallery? 

OLIVIA LOCHER: A lot of girl power! I’m showing with four incredible female artists, who each have their own unique voice and style. The work all comes together fearlessly representing womanhood. It’s a great show, I’m really honored to be included in it. 

AUTRE: How does your work represent some of the ideas behind the show - "post-feminist" ideologies or exuding female sexuality, or otherwise? 

LOCHER: The pieces I’m showing are a really colorful, playful mixture of work. There are many different concepts though out the individual pieces, but these particular photographs meet sharing a universal theme focused around empowering women. 

AUTRE: You have been finding a very unique voice in your photography over the last few years - how do you think your work as evolved or changed the most? 

LOCHER: I have learnt to trust my ideas and act on them, sometimes impulsively. 

AUTRE: What's next? 

LOCHER: I am always working on a few projects at once. I am just finishing up a two year long series titled, “I Fought the Law”. 

Pheromone Hotbox at Steven Kasher Gallery in NYC – featuring Olivia Locher, Amanda Charchian, Shae Detar, Marianna Rothen and Aneta Bartos – opens tonight. The show will be on view until February 28, 2015. Interview and text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

The Fetish of Desire: An Interview with Nino Cais

I first noticed Nino Cais’s work at Art Basel in Miami. Amongst the literal miles and miles of gallery booths and art, Cais’s work – presented by São Paulo based gallery Central Galeria de Arte ­­– had a magnetic quality. His “fruit series” – which includes photo collages of bright ripe bananas, mangos, eggplants and exotic fruit covered in female panty hose, juxtaposed with nude glamor portraits – is a treatise on the temporality that culture places on female youth, beauty and desire. In other works, he plays with neoclassicism and roman iconography – one statue is half woman of antiquity and half stack of porcelain plates. We got a chance to ask Cais a few questions about his art – in the following interview he talks about choosing art versus priesthood and some of his biggest artistic influences. 

AUTRE: Your mother was a seamstress and you grew up in the suburbs of São Paulo, where did you find your inspirations and how were you introduced to art?

NINO CAIS: My relation to art was, and still is, very intuitive. Since I was a kid, I used to manufacture my own toys with some of my mother’s materials, such as fabric scraps. I never thought I would be a professional artist – I didn’t even have a close relationship to art, nor did I visit exhibitions.

At first I entered the seminary to become a priest. I used to decorate the Church’s events and festivities. One of the priests of the seminary was convinced that I had to study art and he managed to get a scholarship for me to study in Santa Marcelina, an Art School in São Paulo. It was then that I started to understand everything I had been experiencing as a kid and young adult and started to have a more theoretical background, to think of art in a more consistent way and to start to elaborate on my production as an artist.

AUTRE: Who were some of the first artists who really expanded your mind – artists who you identified with and were inspired by?

CAIS : At the art school I met some artists that were of great importance in my personal and artistic development. One of the teachers I directly identified with was Led Catunda. Afterwards, other contemporary artists became an important reference for me, namely Constantin Brancusi, Richard Serra, Erwin Wurm, Cindy Sherman, Sam Taylor Wood and Nick Cave. In a more historical perspective, I was always fascinated by Mantegna and Giotto’s paintings. I also have a great admiration for some surrealist artists such as Man Ray, René Magritte and Marx Ernst. More recently, I am very much interested in some African artists such as Samuel Fosso and Yinka Shonibare.

AUTRE: You studied dramatic arts for roughly 8 years, how do you think that has inspired your work?

CAIS: Although I don’t really conceive a direct continuity between my experience in dramatic arts and my career as an artist, I do think that some theatrical elements are recurrent in my work. First of all, some of my installations are very scenographic and have an underlying dramatic tension, as they suggest a narrative and/or an imminent fall suspended in time. One other convergence of my artistic practice that could also be related in some way to theater is the fact that most of the figures in my work, and especially my self-portrait photographs, enact a persona that mingles with the surrounding objects, and that become some kind of entity. Note for example that my face is always hidden by an object or by a posterior intervention on the image.

AUTRE: Can you talk a little bit about your current ‘fruit’ series  – I saw a few of these works in Miami and they are really stunning?

CAIS: My “fruit series” is centered on the idea of superposition of different levels and the nature of images. The starting point of this series is a recent research about the feminine figure. The pieces juxtapose images of fruits and iconic and beautiful women that harken a model of grace and sensuality. If both the fruit and the women relate to abundance, fertility and life, they are ephemeral and fleeting bodies that fade with the passing of time. In this sense, these images work as a kind of still life.

AUTRE: What’s next?

CAIS: I am working on a solo show that will take place at Central Galeria de Arte, in São Paulo, in February. The central axis of this exhibition is garments and how they relate to different cultures, how they drive projections, clichés and fetishes.

Text and interview by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. You can view more of Nino Cais's work by visiting the website of Central Galeria de Arte. 

LIVE LOVE DIE: A SHORT INTERVIEW WITH BRAD PHILLIPS

Canadian artist Brad Phillips' artwork elicits an immediate visceral reaction - like realizing your entire life is a joke and only God knows the punch line. His text-based works, which are composed in watercolor, are quickly becoming what he is best known for. But behind the striking, stinging, slap-you-in-the-face puns and plays on words, Phillips is a writer and a poet at heart - a writer that uses a grander lexicon to explore the darker meaning of life. On top of being a writer, Phillips is also a photographer. His new book of photography – Mother Nature Mother Creature – puts a twist on 1970s naturalist photography by following two women who undress and romp through a forest in the nude. You can also view Phillips’ stunning text-based work at Harper’s Books in the Hamptons. In the following interview, Brad Phillips talks about his obsession with literature and poking fun at Ryan McGinley. 

AUTRE: Your works deals with a lot of love, death and suicide – why are those themes meaningful to you?

BRAD PHILLIPS: Well, I suppose these are classic 'big themes' - and for me my work is always personal, and love death and suicide are all things that I have had vast personal experiences with.
 
AUTRE: Your watercolors are predominantly text based – like subversive poems – how do those quotes come to you?

PHILLIPS: My watercolors are only predominantly text based in the last few months, primarily my watercolors have been figurative. Some of the paintings of text are taken from other sources, like the bible, but for the most part, I can't say exactly how they come to me. I'm far more interested in writing than I am in art. I publish a lot of writing, I've been obsessed with literature and language my whole life and also comedy. So much of it just comes to me spontaneously – sudden puns I come up with, bad jokes, one liners, like art in general, the source is usually a mystery to me, except that I know it begins somewhere in some dark recess of my mind.
 
AUTRE: You have a new book – called Mother Nature Mother Creature – can you tell us a little bit about your new publication?  
 
PHILLIPS: I've painted from photographs for my entire career, but I don't think photography has much currency as an art anymore. I think it's been done to death. So I'd taken these photographs of my friends before I moved back to Toronto from Vancouver. I guess I was interested in making a parody of 'naturalist photography' from the seventies. I don't know that it comes across as being parody and also I wanted to sort of poke at artists like Ryan McGinley, who hire attractive models to appear to be his friends and then photograph them frolicking in the nude. For me it was a way to document two women:  one is my best friend's wive, a mother of two kids, who were both raised in the west coast, just being naked hippies in the forest. It's pretty simplistic, which is what I see as one of the problems with photography. So for me photographs right now are ideally suited to being seen in books, not on gallery walls. 

AUTRE: Is everything a joke or is the joke everything?

PHILLIPS: I'm not sure about this – some things are jokes, some things are deadly serious. The interesting part is to make what's deadly serious and turn it into a joke, and to take what's superficial and light and make it look serious.

Text and Interview by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. You can view Brad Phillips' exhibition Law and Order at Harper's Books until January 5, 2015. You can also purchase 'Mother Nature Mother' Creature here. 

photograph by Lisa Petrole

photograph by Lisa Petrole

​

Subversive Narratives: An Interview With Ryan Heffington

Ryan Heffington has carved an extremely unique place in the world of dance and contemporary art. If you’ve seen the music video for Sia’s triple-platinum song Chandelier, you know Heffington’s work. If you’ve seen the Sigur Rós music video where Shia LaBeouf goes full frontal, you know Heffington’s work. But Heffington’s real magic exists in his spectacular live performances – where he uses the medium of modern dance and movement to paint a portrait of identity and culture in a fragmentary digital age. Next week, as part of Art Basel Miami, MAMA gallery will present Heffington’s premier of Wading Games – a performance that he describes as a “punk rock water ballet" – at the Ritz Carlton hotel. In the following interview, Heffington explains his upcoming performance in Miami and how dance can change the world.

AUTRE: Can you talk a little about your upcoming performance in Miami – you once described it as a “punk rock water ballet.” Is that an accurate description?

RYAN HEFFINGTON: Yes, the piece will live between a glorious ballet in terms of scale, and at moments aesthetically beautiful, but sharply contrasted by a subversive narrative where the dancers will have to fight from drowning over collectively taking part in a synchronized swim routine.

AUTRE: You have been thinking about this project for a long time – why is this particular project so meaningful to you?

HEFFINGTON: The fact that certain performative spectacles cling to my brain collecting momentum over the years creates a feeling of deep respect and attachment to the piece. I'm not sure exactly when this ballet pushed itself inside, but the element of potential danger, the symbology of over-flooding tears, and a certain societal class - all of this is so dramatic. It has spoken to me in my dreams and waking state as well - at this point it's a part of me and I cannot keep it a secret any longer.

AUTRE: Why is dance important in today’s contemporary artistic landscape?

HEFFINGTON: In this age of digital media, over-saturation of well most everything, dance claims it stake in that it is most simple in its form. Its the body expressing the mind. No need for tools, keyboards, audio accompaniment - just the human form. There is something inherently grounding about this. It's access is given once the being accepts their own invitation to do so - again no money, tools or experience is necessary. It's also powerful in terms of invigorating the soul and once you come to peace with that you dance like no one else on earth - think fingerprint - an endless amount of joy is yours. Really - imagine if every human danced for 1 hour a day, how that would change your life, your work space, your community, your nation, our world.

AUTRE:What do you hope to convey – or what kind of feelings do you want to emote – through your dancers and your choreography?

HEFFINGTON:In rehearsals, sometimes I squint when watching the piece in front of me. I know when I feel something from the bodies before me - I'll get a tingle or goosebumps or rays of energy - I know I've created something visceral and this is what I hope my audiences experience. I can make aesthetically arresting imagery - yet without playing to the heart I'm afraid people leave empty handed. We're over stimulated visually as a society - but to connect emotionally to people or art is how I want to live and have my work experienced.

Text and interview by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. MAMA gallery will present Ryan Heffington'sWading Games – with music by Banks and film installations by Osk – at the Ritz Carlton (pool) in Miami Beach as part of Art Basel Miami 2014 on Thursday, December 4 (rsvp@mama.gallery). 

The Ecstatic Body: An Interview with Julius Smack

Under the stage persona Julius Smack, Peter Hernandez is part of a new wave of emerging artists that are trying to define their identity in a century that is trying to do just the same. Often wearing white jeans, his signature white face paint, a white shirt, and a tuft of blond curls hanging out of a white baseball hat worn backwards, Julius Smack combines the slow mortal pangs of Butoh with a sense of definitive post-internet Millennial angst. His performances cross boundaries between music and performance art and he will often sing his own songs, which are produced and released by his own record label – called Practical Records. Most of Smack’s recent songs were produced in his former home in San Francisco (he is now based in Los Angeles) and they have distinct political overtones. In the following interview, Julius Smack (Peter Hernandez) talks political performative art, his recent move to Los Angeles and why he uses Starbucks cups and yoga mats in some of his performances.

AUTRE: Who is Julius Smack?

JULIUS SMACK:Julius Smack is an awoken statue from antiquity that pontificates social and political messages through dance and song. In the past I used make-up to conflate an impression of a Grecian statue and Butoh dancer. I’d paint my face white and wear some white hair under a white hat. I explored vogue and butoh dance mostly at a historic drag bar in San Francisco called Aunt Charlie’s Lounge, where every Tuesday I presented a new track and a new choreography.

AUTRE: How would you define your genre of music – is it art or music?

SMACK: Maybe it’s Los Angeles, but I am beginning to see the two modes as one. I’m interested in music as art and vice-versa. I don’t think of the individual recordings of my music as art, but I think of the physical package of music as cassette or CD-R as being artful. That’s when it can be packaged and asserted as art with the accompanying liner notes and design. When I can convey a narrative arc, I think of the music as art. When I perform, I feel like I’m displaying artistic gestures. When I can give a whole Julius Smack performance, I think it’s art.

AUTRE: You recently moved from the Bay Area to Los Angeles – what prompted the move?

SMACK: I’ve long wanted to live here since I was a teenager because I listen to a lot of music from here. There's a wealth of possibility and invention here and that’s partly why I'm here. I’m witnessing exciting and new modes of performance all the time, where there’s little delineation between music or dance or theater. I’m also dating a performance artist and writer named Brian Getnick, who I met when I lived in San Francisco. Being here with him has really shaped my performance practice because we discuss ideas and possibilities and he equips me with rehearsal and studio space. He also has a great performance art journal called Native Strategies that I recommend to anyone curious about Los Angeles’ emergent performance art.

AUTRE:What can you expect from a Julius Smack performance – I read something about yoga mats and Starbucks cups?

SMACK: That performance was at Aunt Charlie’s Lounge in San Francisco. There’s a great party on Tuesday nights called High Fantasy. It’s an incubator for new performance coming out of the Bay Area. The night I used a yoga mat and Starbucks cups I performed a version of the song “Choices” from my new album. I arranged three members of the audience in poses that resembled Julius Smack. One person was in the pose of the Statue of Liberty, one was in a Thinking Man pose. Then I placed in their hands a Starbucks cup of varying sizes and directed the lyrics to them --"There's no time to make up your mind, you're not sure of it anyway." I was thinking of ways to delegate the performance to the audience. I’m interested in transforming a place into a performance space through movement and voice. There’s something really exciting about seeing someone step into a performance in their usual garb. What are the possibilities of the spontaneous and unchoreographed present?

AUTRE: What are your performances like lately?

SMACK: Lately my performances involve a deal of surprise and emergence, field recordings and live recordings. I want to affect space as clearly as possible and not to rely on pre-recorded music, which has begun to feel like a crutch for performance. There is so much possibility in witnessing a body in space! Am I going to pose against a wall? Am I going to hold an audience member? In what order will I jump, sing, and dance? To allow that kind of response to space, I have been doing more acapella performances that use field recordings and live instrumentation. At Human Resources last month I used a night vision camera that was operated and projected live as a reflection of the audience. Human Resources used to be a film cinema, but all the chairs have been stripped out and it’s just a big white cube with concrete floors and perfect reverb. So I did an acapella song and then used a keyboard live for my first time. It was so liberating - I don't intend on relying heavily on backing tracks.

AUTRE:Can you describe your new album Everyday Ballet?

SMACK: Most of those songs were crafted in my big bedroom in San Francisco, and then I had a lot of room and space and time for recording. I could focus on audio effects and to adjust synthesizer tracks in a dance music form. I was really inspired by the house dance music that pervades San Francisco's music scene - it was there that I discovered some of my greatest house influences, primarily Terre Thaemlitz. And I was also looking at themes of social justice, progressivism, and gentrification, which are so fundamental to San Francisco's depleting culture. There's a song titled "Living Social," and I illustrate an image of house flippers speculating on the value of the Victorian I was living in. The lyrics empathize with the house and its history and feeling. Or "I Say What I Want," which basically calls out those who claim to oppose climate change with rhetoric instead of action.

Text and interview by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. Photograph and video by Perry Shimon. You can learn more about Julius Smack by visiting his website. You can also purchase music – including his new album Everyday Ballet - here. If you are in Los Angeles, you can see Julius Smack perform on November 29, at the Handbag Factory, 1336 S Grand Ave Los Angeles, California

Liquid State: An Interview with Sculptor Jonathan Prince

The great cubist sculptor Jacques Lipchitz once said, “Copy nature and you infringe on the work of our Lord. Interpret nature and you are an artist.” This sentiment holds true for a lot of sculptors – those artists that borrow stone and bits of earth in the creation of eternal and impermeable monuments to their artistic vision. This sentiment is especially true for sculptor Jonathan Prince, whose father actually once took him to visit the studio of Jacques Lipchitz. Watching Lipchitz work – Prince became transfixed. Today, Prince works with materials like Corten steel, aluminum and bronze to create sculptural works that twist and tear at basic physical properties and our own perception. In the following interview, Prince talks about his recent sculptural series Liquid State and why there is more beauty in imperfection than perfection.

AUTRE: You have been making sculpture in stone and metal (stainless and Corten steel) since you were young, why is sculpture your mode of choice when you also experiment with other mediums?

JONATHAN PRINCE: I’m not sure why but - I have always had an affinity for three dimensional work. Perhaps it’s because a sculptural work inserts itself into the real world - maybe because there are innumerable angles to visualize the piece from. Whatever the reason - it has always made more sense for me to create a line in 3 dimensional space rather than trying to simulate that same gesture in a 2D world.

AUTRE: How do your experiments in design, photography, painting, and installation inform your sculpture for which you are known?

PRINCE: Regardless of the medium - I am always looking for a new way to inform myself and the viewer about alternative ways of seeing the world around us. If I am using photography - ink and paper or stainless steel - I am always trying to deepen my own investigation of a particular subject matter - to open my eyes and mind in a way that I have not done before. I’m not always successful at accomplishing that task - but I’m always on the hunt for it.

AUTRE: Can you explain the process of evolution regarding your current series Liquid State?

PRINCE: Almost all of my work through the years has looked at the boundaries between internal and external form or what we see on the surface but feel inside. My Liquid State series are the first works that I have done which seem to have no exterior skin - in other words - the forms are made from only internal material in a figurative sense. Liquid State refers to one of four states of matter : liquid - solid - gas and plasma. The works in this series explore the relationship between geometry and fluidity - creating forms that have their roots in geometry but ultimately assume only the barest vestiges of cube, sphere, cone or disc.

AUTRE: Where do you think your interest in the contrasting qualities of perfection and chaos come from?

PRINCE: It is always difficult for me to determine where a motivation comes from - what is important to me is to recognize the interest and look at it from as many vantage points as possible. The thesis that keeps coming back in my thoughts as I go through the process of making work is that - no matter how hard I try to create a perfected object or form - the real beauty of the piece is in the breaks. I believe the same is true in life.

AUTRE: What would you like viewers of your work to experience, whether it be intellectual or visceral?

PRINCE: My hope is that my work will provoke the viewer to have questions about what they are seeing and perhaps why this object - thing or image may be of interest to them. It is my belief that each person will have their own unique questions based on their individual life experience.

Intro text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. Interview and photographs by Abbey Meaker. You can view more of Jonathan Prince's work on his website. 

Art with Benefits: 5 Questions for Betty Tompkins

It’s easy to have impure thoughts when looking at Betty Tompkins’ large-scale photorealistic renditions of pierced clitorises, double penetrating phalluses, macro coital embraces and all manner of twisting and sinuous tongues taking turns on the human anatomy. Indeed, this is art with benefits. Starting with her first Fuck Painting in 1969, Tompkins has been exploring and confronting a black-bar culture that censors any reminder that our most basic instincts are to inseminate and to be inseminated. Right now you can catch Betty Tompkins’Kiss Paintings at 55 Gansevoort until December 15th. In this short interview, Betty talks about smuggling porn, the inception of her Fuck Paintings, and some of the strange reactions people have had to her work.

Autre: Can you describe the moment when you discovered the inspiration for your Fuck Paintings?

Betty Tompkins: Yes, I can. My first husband came with a set of porn photos that he had imported from Hong Kong. He was 12 years older than I was. At that time, it was totally illegal to use the US mail to transport porn. He rented a postal box in Vancouver BC, drove there from Everett WA where he lived, hid them in his car and crossed the border back into the US hoping he looked like an all-American boy. It was a different time. In 1969, about a month or so after we moved to New York, I was looking at them and realized that if i removed the hands, the feet, the heads, everything but the money shot, that what was left was abstractly beautiful and had the great punch of an aggressive subject matter. I did Fuck Painting #1 in 1969.

Autre:Do you think the internet and the proliferation of pornography has made your art more "available.”

Tompkins: Certainly more people can see my work and the internet has helped make it more accessible. There was always a lot of porn. It is just easier to get now. And getting it is more private.

Autre: Has anyone had any bizarre or strange reactions to one of your works?

Tompkins: At my 2007 show with Mitchell Algus, the main exhibition room had a double penetration painting in the prime spot. A man walked into the gallery, had no problem with the front room, walked into the back room, looked at that painting, yelled at the top of his lungs and ran out. When I show in Zurich, the gallery gets serious hate mail. They sent me some of it. During my 2009 show at Mitchell Algus,Jerry Saltz made it the Show Of The Week feature in New York Magazine. The gallery told me a LOT of people were showing up so i thought I should see for myself. It was true. While I was there, a woman came in with a toddler in a stroller. she parked him near the desk and a painting that featured a breast. she put her hands over his eyes and said, “Don’t look.”"

Autre: Where do you recommend hanging one of your works in the house?

Tompkins:Anywhere the collector wants to hang my work is fine with me.

Autre: What can we expect at your new show at 55 Gansevoort?

Tompkins:Kisses. Smooch. 

Text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper for Autre. Photograph by Nancy Oliveri. Betty Tompkins Smooch will be on view until December 15 at 55 Gansevoort Gallery, 55 Gansevoort St, New York 

Light as Air: An Interview with Gregory Aune

Gregory Aune is a photographer and collagist based in New York whose images are both dreamy and classical. There is also a unique confidence in Aune's vision throughout his ouvra making his photographs seem both effortless and light as air.  I caught up with Aune to ask him a few questions about his technique and inspiration behind his work. 

PAS UN AUTRE: When did you first know you wanted to become a photographer?

GREGORY AUNE: I grew up in a small desert town in southern California. I was always drawing as a kid and actually wanted to be a illustrator when I grew up. So I always had a love for the visual arts I tried all aspects but the one I couldn't shake was photography, It was just something I fell in love with and just made the choice to grow within that, and will be growing until I die.

AUTRE: Can you remember the first image you ever took?

AUNE: I wish, I do however have my first roll of film that I developed myself. Its a collection of out of focus flowers.

AUTRE: What goes through your mind when you look through the viewfinder?

AUNE: Trying to place myself within the picture not trying to be a voyeur or hide behind the camera. I rather feel Im there with the subject, not just within the frame but the world that it lives in.

AUTRE: Who are some of your biggest inspirations or influences?

AUNE: There is quite a lot ranging from music, film, art, dance, close friends, lovers, broken hearts, nature and of course photography. It can be from the simplest things to the most damaging of things. I couldn't really pin point one person. I guess with in a commercial aspect I would say people like Paolo Roversi, Sarah Moon, Deborah Turberville purely because there artistry was translated and used in a commercial world...

AUTRE: What is your ideal subject to photograph?

AUNE: I have my list of people through out time that I would have loved to photograph but I always enjoy a nice roam in a forest or along the coast.

AUTRE: You are also a collagist – can you describe the aesthetic and inspiration behind some of your collages?

AUNE: I enjoy collage a great deal. With a lot of contemporary collagist not saying all but there all compiled on the computer which it doesn't feel right to me. I enjoy the hands on approach and rather cut things out with scissors and paste with glue. I guess my aesthetic would be loosely based on the principles of photography that your capturing a moment. I enjoy extremely surreal collagist or others that use shapes and textures to mold into each other, but with my own work I just want to add a little more to everyday situations. For example I did a whole series of birds fly over structures or landscapes, theirs not much to it but the idea of what it would be like to travel the way they do and see the things they see. As far as inspiration it comes from everywhere could be a broken heart or based on a drawing I saw and my interpretation of it...Inspiration comes from everywhere.

AUTRE: Analog or digital?

AUNE: The great question. I learned on film, was kind of the last generation of students to completely learn on film so it will always be a part of me. Also with anything it’s the hands on feeling, its romantic and exciting. Digital however, is great in its own right…the turn around in a work environment is quick but I feel lacks that excitement, also at times everything is realized in post. I like both for different reasons and Ill hold on to film as long as I can but wont be fighting digital either.

AUTRE: Whats next?

AUNE: I just plan to keep creating and keep moving forward. Growth within myself and my work.

See more of Gregory Aune's photography on his website. Text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper for Pas Un Autre

Camelops Femina in Dubai: An Interview with Olaf Breuning

Olaf Breuning is one of those mystical artists with a gift that is both totally innate and at the same time seems to involuntarily possess the artist – as if he were haunted by the immense creativity that overcomes him. This is evident in the art that he has created and presented in over 250 exhibitions, either solo or group, since his professional career started in the late 1990s. The Swiss-born, New York based artist, has created everything from creatures made out of rakes and cardboard, to films that explore the thin line between reality and fiction, bizarre photographic explorations, and installations made from kitchen appliances. Now Breuning brings his phantasmagorical world to Dubai for the very first time with a striking and magical exhibition at Carbon 12 gallery. “Camelops Femina,” as the exhibition is called, is a fictional exploration of pre-conceived ideas and iconography that digs back 10,000 years in history to excavate an extinct species of Camel that once roamed North America. The images, which were created exclusively for this exhibition, are distinctly Breuning in the quotidian and strange manner of the composition of the photographs where models are dressed like desert sheiks or Bedouin gypsies to represent the imaginary extinct species of camel. This wonderful exhibition is on view now at Carbon 12 in Dubai. Pas Un Autre got a chance to speak with the artist himself in the following interview.

PAS UN AUTRE: You’ve had over 250 exhibitions since the late 90s and this is your first in the Middle East – do you have any expectations – trepidations?

OLAF BREUNING: Trepidations? Uhh…. I will have them if there would be a reason! And expectations? No never have them. The most important for me is that I do an artwork I like. And so far I love the "Camelops Femina."

AUTRE: Your work experiments with, or is a reflection of, popular culture – what are some of your predictions as to where pop culture will go in the next 10 years?

BREUNING: Haha, pop culture...I am not sure…if it still exists…the art industry is pop culture itself. For example Andy Warhol’s work in the seventies was something different because the self-awareness of art itself was still very conservative, but today there seem to be no borders…just different strategies produced and read by different groups of people. Random, like our time in general.

AUTRE: What are some of your favorite inventions of the last 10 years?

BREUNING: To be able to challenge my small brain and come up with always new ideas responding to me and the time I live in.

AUTRE: Have you always want to be an artist? Can you remember the first time you said to yourself: “I want to be an artist”?

BREUNING: I think I never said that, it was always a natural situation. Maybe I am just a natural self-centered person who cannot do anything else than speak about himself. No, no I am a modest person.

AUTRE: What is your ultimate goal as an artist – is there a specific message you want to communicate?

BREUNING: No, no message! I do art to go through this life on my terms. Sounds dramatic, but it is fun and addictive. I feel free as an artist and I hope I can do so until my last day.

AUTRE: Why is art important to society?

BREUNING: Well, I am not a politician, but would I would say: EDUCATION! Whatever that means, just to give different points of views to things.

AUTRE: Where do you find inspiration or creativity?

BREUNING: Mostly at Balthazar in New York, the breakfast restaurant I’ve gone to for 12 years from Monday to Friday. This is the time where I have my first coffee and make my drawings for new ideas.

AUTRE: Is art a product or can a product be art – or both?

BREUNING: Art is whatever you say is art....no borders, just a matter of definition.

AUTRE: Your art deals a lot with the human condition in the 21st century – is there something unique about this time or perhaps different than other epochs?

BREUNING: Yes! THE INTERNET, it changed the way we see the past, the now and the future…so long we are online.

AUTRE: What can we expect from your show Camelops Femina at Carbon 12?

BREUNING: I show with my kind of humor and I hope people in Dubai like my humor.

AUTRE: What’s next?

BREUNING: One day New York, one day Toronto, four days New York, one week Japan, one week Switzerland....and after that I have to focus on a show in August at the Paul Klee museum in Switzerland.... have to make some art!

Text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. Camelops Femina will be on view until April 30, 2013 at Carbon 12 Gallery, Warehouse D37, Alserkal Avenue, Street 8, Al Quoz 1, Dubai contact kourosh@carbon12dubai.com for all inquiries

Kourosh Nouri of Carbon 12 Gallery in Dubai

Out in the exotic, desert landscape of Dubai a blip is growing ever larger on the international art world’s radar. In the cosmopolitan metropolis that is Dubai, the second largest city in the country known as the United Arab Emirates, which sits southeast of the Arabian Peninsula on the Persian Gulf, bordering Oman to the east and Saudi Arabia to the south, a host of galleries, artistic institutions (such as Art Dubai), patrons, and local artists are making their name known in the international and local art market. Dubai might have a few more years before a certifiable recognition as such, but with galleries such as Carbon 12 and about 20 other galleries who are setting up shop in the revitalized Al Quoz industrial zone, the contemporary art scene in this distant Middle Eastern locale is growing fast. Carbon 12, which opened its doors in 2008, was co-founded by Kourosh Nouri who always dreamt of opening a gallery and Nadine Knotzer. Carbon 12 represents established and emerging artists and major artists like Olaf Breuning. We got a chance to speak with Kourosh Nouri, director of Carbon 12, about his gallery, his thoughts about the art scene in Dubai, and his incredibly ambitious plans for the future. 

PAS UN AUTRE: Can you remember or talk a little bit about your first introduction to the world of art?

KOUROSH NOURI: Professionally, it was when I started to collect (very) modestly in the mid 90's. I started in Iran, with "super emerging" Iranian artists, at a time no one was even looking at this country/region...My first significant professional steps where in 2007, even though in early 2000 I was already following super closely the art scene, where the idea of wanting to open a gallery was growing in my mind. I have spent altogether over a year and half of intensive research, and heavy benchmarking before I even set a date (nov. 2008) for the opening of the space. The whole adventure started in 2007... and, it was hard to keep my mouth shut!

On a personal basis I fell in love with Brancusi's muse when I was in my early teens... so, my love of art started already more than 20 years ago. I also remember the first art book my parents offered me when I was 6, "history of modern art" by Arnason and in English. I still have the book in the gallery's bookshelves...

AUTRE: Why did you want to become a gallery director?

NOURI: It is much worse, I wanted to own a gallery, and that already since 10 years! The why is, I guess, for the passion I discovered for contemporary art. Now that I look back, I am proud to say that not once I regretted my decision. So far, except commercially maybe (!), everything is going according to plans... I have the most beautiful profession in the world, despite all the ups and downs, and I am surrounded by magnificent artworks of amazing artists I am proud to represent.

AUTRE: Can you talk a little bit about Carbon 12 Gallery?

NOURI: Carbon 12 opened its doors in November 2008. We started the concrete planning of the gallery, with my partner Nadine (Knotzer) already in 2007, and in January 2008 we decided to open the gallery in Dubai. The choice of the artists was a bit surreal in a sense... we listed our "dream team", from museum shows, art fairs, books, and gallery shows. From very early stage we wanted to have a wide program, in a way very painterly, but comprehensive and rich... hard to get bored with all those amazing artists. The process was beautiful and organic...Earning money is a must, but a must for the big picture, the big picture being this fabulous work we are dedicating ourselves to. The name Carbon comes from the most widespread element in nature, the common element to all living being, loved the name for decades, and in French literature Edmond Rostand in Cyrano de Bergerac named the captain of the musketeers Carbon de Casttel-jaloux... This masterpiece of literature was always in my eyes the reference in arts in general. That's how the name came to me, and since it is super catchy and I didn't want to call my gallery Nouri Falegari-Knotzer contemporary arts or projects (We avoided that one!!!), here we are with Carbon 12, and 12 as the non-radioactive isotope of Carbon.

AUTRE: Carbon 12 represents a lot of emerging artists as well as established artists – what do you look for in an artist or what is the X factor an artist needs to be represented by your gallery?

NOURI: Here again, we are really blessed by the artists who have decided to trust Carbon 12. I like the notion of x factor for artists... well, never thought about it that way... now that you put it, yes; crazy talented, professional, multi-layered, and so different one from another, yet a very thin hair connects all our artists together.

AUTRE: I don’t know if you want to talk about this, but art can at times by seen as subversive by some creeds and religious beliefs – do you ever run into any restrictions or censorship when putting on a show?

NOURI: Never faced anything similar here. Having said that, we are also extremely respectful of all cultures and believes, and we don't work with provocation, pure and stupid without any fundament. All our artists have so much more to offer than provocation, so that we face any censorship. Dubai and the UAE is a great country where over 170 nationalities coexist peacefully and harmoniously with each other.

AUTRE: How would you describe the artistic atmosphere of the United Arab Emirates – is there a large “art scene” in Dubai?

NOURI: The art scene is small... still waiting for the real "birth", however there are about a hand full professional and amazing galleries in the country, and these galleries are as well among the top 10 in the region.Naturally, the number of private collectors is relatively small and mainly consisting of expatriates, the few emerging collectors are not enough to be considered as a growing trend... There are no institutions, and corporate collections are totally absent! Fortunately there are a few experts and Artdubai who do an amazing educational job, almost like the missing museums. This will pay off for sure in the next 3-5 years.

AUTRE: Do you have international collectors or is it mainly local connoisseurs of contemporary art – would it be impolite describe or elaborate upon a typical art collector in Dubai?

NOURI: I love the polite way you pose that question. it almost forces me to be rude and provocative...the collector of Carbon 12 based in the UAE, can be described as follow: under 50 years of age, highly qualified and Europe/US educated professional, with a decent net worth, collecting art since less than 5 years, and very open-minded to any artistic approach, and working tightly with us, and following in average 3-5 of our artists. Many of them, follow us in art fairs, and know the mechanics of a gallery. Dubai art scene & the middle east is very fortunate to be on the radar of lots of international Museums. Many artist represented in the Region or from the region have been selected by famous Museums over the last few years. Our aim is to bring more and more people to Dubai and make them discover the small but amazing art scene we have.

AUTRE: Who are some of your favorite artists working today and why?

NOURI: I genuinely love and respect dearly all the artists we work with... sounds maybe strange, but the roster we have is the "dream team", and in my list I can mention all the artists we represent. This is the magic of contemporary art, the favorite works change, rotate, let you discover more layers...

AUTRE: Carbon 12 visits a lot of the art fairs – why are art fairs important and how would you describe the general milieu?

NOURI: We need to reach out, the art market in the region is too small, a "Waiting for Godot strategy" is not a solution. Also the culture of collecting is still very weak in the region. We also like to put Dubai on the international Art map and make people discover more about it. So far we had great experiences in the past, Art Cologne last year was amazing, "our" Art Dubai is gradually becoming the "Basel" of the region, abc in Berlin was great, and here and there in Viennafair little things happen. Of course we want to start going to our fair wish list, but considering we are turning 4 years old on the 28th of November, we need to be patient.

AUTRE: How would you describe the art market right now and how to do your see it evolving in the future?

NOURI: Slow at this very moment!!! The future is bright, and beautiful though! My gallery opened in 2008, after the financial meltdown... so, euphoria, commercially, is an unknown thing to us. We never faced the heat of 2007-2008 where collectors would fight for every artwork, and galleries were counting sold-out shows one after the other. So, for Carbon 12, every week is a move forward, every acquired collector a blessing, and every exhibition an achievement on out path to become a highly respected international art gallery.

AUTRE: What is the next show on view at Carbon 12 Gallery?

NOURI: We have opened on the 5th of November the fire with James Clar's "Iris was a Pupil"... an incredible show, and the public's as well as the collectors feedbacks has been incredible. In December we will continue with Hazem Mahdy, one of our emerging artist, and January will see the well expected first solo of Anahita Razmi at Carbon 12. This will coincide with her solo show at the Stuttgart museum of art. Olaf Breuning promised us a "Dubai" show for March. A lot of good things ahead then...

AUTRE: What does the future look like for Carbon 12?

NOURI: Shiny and warm like the weather here! Our program is always set two years ahead, and we will have many exciting shows. We want to make out of every single exhibition the best possible one, in terms of quality, content, and critical value... We really aim to make sure that every artist who leaves Dubai, sits in the plane thinking about the next exhibition with us at Carbon 12. We also hope to connect more and more with international institutions, and place our artists in museum shows, and museum collections. So far, we are really happy about our regular fairs, the top ones being Art Dubai, and Art Cologne, and maybe in the future we will be adding a few more on our list of international participations.

Preschool Tintoretto: An Interview With Adam Green

Adam Green is standing under the fluorescent pink glow of the Veniero’s Pasticceria sign on East 11th Street. Lanky, shaggy-haired and clad in olive green corduroy pants, a red paisley 70’s Western shirt and a somewhat ironically ostentatious two-toned fur coat to fend off the icy December air, he could almost pass as another twenty-something traipsing about the East Village—yet I immediately recognize him as the anti-folk wunderkind. Most know Green as one half of the Moldy Peaches, the quirky indie duo that achieved sleeper mainstream success via the Grammy-winning soundtrack of Diablo Cody’s Juno (2007). Green met Kimya Dawson, the other half of the Moldy Peaches, in the 90s in Mount Kisco, NY, where they both grew up. “She worked at the record store, and I worked at the pizzeria, so I would come to her on lunch break and I’d bring my guitar,” he recalls. At seventeen, Green moved from Westchester to Manhattan and began following the path of the New York troubadour, playing his guitar and singing on the street and in subway stations. “For a time I almost became one of the kids that’s just sort of like at Astor Place near the cube,” he laughs. Green has come a long way since then—between releasing seven solo albums in just eight years, exhibiting his paintings and drawings both in the U.S. and abroad, and releasing his first feature film, which was shot entirely on his iPhone—the “screwball tragedy” The Wrong Ferrari, which he wrote, directed, produced, and acted in (along with Macaulay Culkin, Devendra Banhart, BP Fallon, Alia Shawkat and Sky Ferreira. In just a few weeks, Green’s duet album with Binki Shapiro (of Little Joy) will be released. The album, which Green describes as “a nighttime album,” is sweetly melancholic, a fluid indie-pop mélange of the two singers’ styles.

Green, who describes himself as “basically an adult who likes to draw with crayons,” is pensive, focused and effervescent. As he talks, sipping peppermint tea and twisting the various silver rings on his fingers, he radiates enthusiasm and passion. He possesses an endearingly neurotic, Woody Allen-esque demeanor and an offbeat, deadpan sense of humor. He shows me a photo on his iPhone of the engagement ring he designed for his fiancée, using one of his own cartoonish color-block paintings as inspiration. Later on, at his covetable Gramercy Park studio, strewn with oil pastels, tubes of paint, guitars, books, records, paintings and playful set pieces from The Wrong Ferrari, he shows me a framed drawing that Pete Doherty did of him, using, of course, his own blood as ink. What’s next for the charmingly unpredictable Adam Green? Anything is possible. “My next venture is to make my own [film] version of Aladdin,” he says. I’m going to play Aladdin… I already have the lamp.”

ANNABEL GRAHAM: My first question is about 3 Men and a Baby.

ADAM GREEN: 3MB. [laughs]

GRAHAM: 3MB. Can you tell me a bit about that, how it started, what your most recent projects have been?

GREEN: Yeah. It was an extension of The Wrong Ferrari. I made this movie, The Wrong Ferrari, and it’s an iPhone movie, and it stars Macaulay Culkin. And Toby Goodshank, who I used to play in The Moldy Peaches with, he was the cameraman on The Wrong Ferrari, and he helped me to build the sets of the movie. So I guess me and him and Mac were working pretty closely at that time, and I think as an extension of that, we began to treat his house as an art studio. At first it was because some of the sets of The Wrong Ferrari were in his house—for example, in the corner of the room—and they would become like an installation, kind of. I remember we were shooting a scene from The Wrong Ferrari around the time of Halloween a couple of years ago, so the set from that scene sort of became a part of a Halloween party. And I think that he liked that, he liked the idea of having art in his house, and installations… so it grew from there. Mac does a party at Le Poisson Rouge called “Macaulay Culkin’s iPod,” so he has a relationship with that club. So they asked him if he’d like to do an art show, hearing that he was doing paintings, and he said that he would, and that became the reason why we did that show. Because they asked him to. I think it’s kind of funny, I guess almost in a way… you know, people would do lots of stuff, but it’s just that no one ever asked them to.

GRAHAM: So you’ve been painting for a while.

GREEN: I was always really interested in art history. When I was young, I read art history books. Even when I only did music, I would still continue to read art history, and I was a frequenter of museums and exhibits. But for some reason I just hadn’t really had the confidence to make my own artwork. It was actually a weird situation where I got divorced, and I returned back to my old house and found a huge stack of paper, and so I started to paint on the paper, and I kind of made the house really messy, I think I wanted to… mess up the house, and make it my own again, or something… so I think that’s how I started doing artwork. I’d always sort of done drawings, I’d even had an exhibit of drawings at a Swedish gallery called Loyal, back in 2005. Also, I guess I could say when I was a kid I did comic books; I was interested in comic book art and cartoons.

GRAHAM: Your prints are reminiscent of comic book imagery.

GREEN: I was interested in it, but I started to take it more seriously, and I think definitely making a movie, which was largely… the sets were made out of papier mâché, and they were sort of my own visual aesthetic… I think that was my introduction to really doing visual art, and then I guess I really concentrated on it for a few years, probably the last three years, I did mostly visual art, except I did the duets album with Binki [Shapiro]. But besides that, I mostly painted. I made so many paintings… I had three art shows.

GRAHAM: Making music, making films, painting… do you feel that you get something different from each of those forms of expression?

GREEN: I like painting because I almost attribute it to having a social element… I like to just listen to music and hang out with friends and paint at the same time. I like that I can sort of zone out and do it. I think painting, for me, is in the category of something I’ve been doing the longest. I’ve probably been drawing pictures since I was five or something, so I feel really comfortable… it’s relaxing to me. But I guess I was looking for a way to connect all of those different things. I’m obviously always looking for a way to paint the way that my songs are, to sing how my paintings are… I want to all sound like part of the same universe, and I think The Wrong Ferrari was a good attempt to fuse those worlds. It’s written in a half-poetic style, almost like song lyrics, and the script is much in the same pool of writing that I’d write my songs out of. The difference is that songwriting for me is special, because it’s very soothing for me. It’s almost like a meditation, I can kind of walk around and… I just sort of, I guess maybe at my core I think of myself as a singing man, maybe like if there was a circus attraction, or something, I’d be the “singing man” in the tent. I guess I grew up wanting to be a folk singer, and now that I have so many different songs… this is my ninth album, so I guess I’m more of a folk singer now than I was when I was a kid, and I was just thinking of it more as just a style or something. I do think that my songs are kind of like cartoons. I also feel like maybe my artwork is a little bit like a preschool Tintoretto. [laughs]

GRAHAM: A preschool Tintoretto. That’s great.

GREEN: I guess ultimately you just look for fulfillment in any creative area. My next venture is to make a film, my own version of Aladdin. I’m going to play Aladdin. In doing that I think I can write the music and combine my music with the film.

GRAHAM: Would you shoot it yourself as well?

GREEN: I don’t know if I’d shoot it, but I want to direct it, I want to have it look like my paintings, to have my music in it… it’s a cool chance, to have the wishes and stuff. I already have the lamp, so…

GRAHAM: Oh, wow. Where’d you get it?

GREEN: Antique store.

GRAHAM: Have you tried rubbing it?

GREEN: I haven’t rubbed it in a while. [pause] So, the unifying theory of art, music, writing… I think I’m pretty close to being able to do it. Sometimes I think when I’m at my best is when I’m tracing exactly what’s in my head and just making it real. I feel like there’s a world inside of me and I’m just pushing it out through my skin. So I’m taking an inside world and pushing it into the outside. And that’s a good feeling.

GRAHAM: Where can we see The Wrong Ferrari?

GREEN: It was released in a weird way. I wanted it to come out with a bang, and I guess I wasn’t even really sure about the protocol of how to release a film, because my background is in music… and I thought it’d be cool to do it over the internet, and to release it as a free movie. Even though it’s really long, it’s 72 minutes, so it’s a feature-length film. I decided to have the premiere at Anthology Film Archives on 2nd and 2nd, and I decided to release it on the internet the following morning. So I got to have the premiere, and then they released it to the whole world at the same time. And that actually worked pretty well, I think the movie got 300,000 downloads in entirety, which is really cool. So actually a lot of people have that file of The Wrong Ferrari. At the time it was up on thewrongferrari.com, but I took it down because it was really expensive to host it, and now if you go to the film section of my website, there’s a link to download it. You can stream it. But anyway, as it was, the movie got… I don’t know how I feel about the way it was released. I went to Italy and did a screening of it, and I played it in Mexico City, and I played it in LA. But aside from that, I didn’t get to do as much traveling as I wanted to do to promote it. Because of the method that I chose to release it, it was ineligible for any film festivals. So basically, I released it, and a bunch of people downloaded it, and that’s what it is. My intention wasn’t to make it an internet movie at all. I didn’t want people to watch it on their computers, I want people to put it on their TVs and watch it in groups, or to watch it in a movie theater. I think it’s an unnerving and tense movie that I think is interesting to watch in groups. The plot is… we take Ketamine and turn into pets… and I think that’s well-suited for a midnight movie demographic. On a broader spectrum… I really thought that the whole point of the movie was that, you know… the movies we see in movie theaters, like romantic comedies, are so old-fashioned. I thought that all movies in the future would be things that people would make on their phones. I’m surprised that now we go and there’s a new 40-Year-Old-Virgin type movie in the theaters right now. I thought that was over… I don’t understand why the world always stays the same. Have you ever had a friend who was in a bad relationship, but they stay in it for like five years? That’s like our culture with movies.

GRAHAM: So you grew up in New York?

GREEN: I grew up in Mount Kisco, which is a small town about an hour away, in Westchester. It was nice. My parents lived in the city and they moved to Westchester to raise kids, which I think is really noble. I think it’s really good to grow up around trees, parks, fields, fresh air… I think that’s nice. I just got in an argument with this lady who was like “It’s perfectly great to raise kids in Manhattan.” I was like, “Yeah, you’re saying that ‘cause you have some nanny or something…” I think my parents made the right decision, they were pretty selfless in doing that. I think my parents were pretty good. I’ve got a high opinion of them.

GRAHAM: When did you move to Manhattan?

GREEN: Well, my parents moved back when my brother and I grew up. When I was about seventeen, they moved back here, and I just kind of started wandering around. I became a folk singer.

GRAHAM: Did you ever play in the subway?

GREEN: Definitely. I played in the subway, on the N R train, on the 8th Street stop, quite often. Sometimes by myself and sometimes with Turner Cody, who’s a really great singer. We would alternate. I also played on the street. I guess for a time I almost became one of the kids that’s just sort of like at Astor Place near the cube. For a little while I was kind of a cube kid. But then I also found my way to the Sidewalk Café, which is a folk club, and I started performing there. I think I was a decent subway singer, and I played mostly original material… I think that was cool. I don’t know why, when I get on the train, I don’t see as many people doing it. Maybe they’ve cracked down or something. I definitely think I wrote some pretty barbed lyrics to get the attention of people walking by. It was cool, because I met the local peers of mine in the subway… they were my first friends.

GRAHAM: Is that when you realized you wanted to make music a career?

GREEN: I really, really didn’t want to work at McDonald’s or something, and I didn’t have any training to do anything but fine arts, so I knew I had to do music or something like that… and I guess I got cracking really young, I was just everywhere. I was always on the street, and I always had a bunch of CDs and flyers, I was just on a mission. Maybe also because I think my parents didn’t really want me to be a singer, so that helped to motivate me. I feel like for years, my dad really couldn’t look me in the eye because he thought I was delusional.

GRAHAM: Doesn’t it feel good now to prove him wrong?

GREEN: Sometimes, and then sometimes I feel like they were right. [laughs]

GRAHAM: How did your first album come about?

GREEN: Well, I recorded a set of songs around the same time as The Moldy Peaches album came out. The Moldy Peaches is a collection of different home recordings that are mashed up together. I think the main difference between my first album and The Moldy Peaches is that it’s just songs that Kimya [Dawson] didn’t sing on. I think I’d probably offered or showed

GRAHAM: How did you and Kimya Dawson meet?

GREEN: She’s from Mount Kisco… from a neighboring town, Bedford Hills. She worked at the record store, and I worked at the pizzeria, so I would come to her on lunch break and I’d bring my guitar. I met her at a poetry reading at the art center in Mount Kisco. She’s a lot older than me, and I think at the time everyone thought we were really an odd couple. She was like 21 and I was like 14… She’d come over to my house, and my parents would think, like, “Who’s your older friend…?” But that seems to be in keeping with me. I’ve always been friends with whoever I thought to be friends with, and I never really cared if people thought they were the “right” friends that I should have.

GRAHAM: Can you tell me about your collaboration with Binki Shapiro? Your album’s going to be released next month, right?

GREEN: It was my idea to make a duets album with her, just because I thought she was really talented, and I really liked listening to her sing. I thought it’d be fun to try to write with her, and work with her, and we’d known each other as friends for a bunch of years. I’d toured with Little Joy in Brazil; I was a supporting act. Little Joy is really popular in Brazil. I think [Binki and I] had kind of bonded on that tour, and then a couple of years later the idea popped into my head… it wasn’t like there were a bunch of other people I wanted to work with, she was really my first choice. So I just went with it. I think I also wanted to write with somebody because I’d just done something like six or seven solo albums that followed The Moldy Peaches. That’s like a decade of having no one ever give their opinion about anything I did artistically. So it was pretty fun to work with her creatively, because I hadn’t let anyone in for a long time. GRAHAM: I read about it being a breakup album of sorts… can you elaborate?

GREEN: I definitely think it’s a nighttime album. I would encourage people to get the vinyl and listen to it like that. It’s far from a collection of pop singles, it’s much more of an album –album. It’s not very long, only about ten songs. I think in my head I can sort of piece together a narrative about a dysfunctional relationship inside of the track listing. The track listing was one thing that Binki and I really agreed on, so we must see some sort of picture of the album as a whole that we share. But I don’t know, we both were going through different kinds of weird relationship stuff during the writing of the album. I think when we both started writing, she just came over to my house… we drank a bottle of wine, we were writing a bit, we went out and got Chinese food… maybe it was our third writing session that we started to realize that we were in some really messed up relationships. We didn’t even really talk about it, but during the course of writing the record, we found that our relationships fell apart. So we were using each other as confidantes in the writing process, and it was great to be making these composite situations, sort of Frankenstein-ing together different things… also putting ourselves in the head space of each other, so that we could know or at least propose things for each other to sing, which was interesting, and I liked the result of it. We did a lot of articles and interviews on it, and really now we’re just waiting for it to come out. I just feel like… are the people that are reading the article ever going to hear the thing? So that’ll be cool, when it comes out. I feel like it’s a bit like Groundhog Day, it’s like every day of the year I wake up and think, “Oh, this album’s not out yet?” It’s been pushed back quite a bit. We recorded it without knowing what was going to happen, we just made it to make it. And then we both had to change management during the course of it, so it slowed everything down, which was kind of annoying. But I’m really proud of it, and excited for everyone to hear it. And honestly, people have been so kind about it. I think most of my things have a punk element to them that is distasteful to many… People brush off a lot of my stuff immediately, but people seem to be acting kinder about this album. Maybe they’re able to hear it because they think I’m not trying to be a punk about it. I guess my natural inclination’s always been to punish the world until they learn to love me for who I am.

GRAHAM: Do you think you’ll stay in New York forever?

GREEN: I’m certainly not tempted to spend any more time in LA if I can help it. When I was there, I found myself to be really isolated, because I don’t drive, so I was kind of at the mercy of anyone who had a car. I think I’ll probably stay here, but you know, you have fantasies, touring around… But this is how I know that they’re fantasies, essentially that whenever you tour anywhere vaguely vacation-y, like Italy or Spain or something, I think to myself, “Oh, it’d be so nice to live here,” but I probably need the hustle and bustle of New York to feel good. I spend almost every weekend at the Met, or somewhere, and it would be really disappointing for me to not have access to the things in New York that I like. It’s also the only place I know how to get around. I don’t have a good sense of direction, and I’m actually starting to feel confident that I know how to get around everywhere in Manhattan.

GRAHAM: What inspires you?

GREEN: Probably the same things that inspire everybody… definitely love, sex, anything romantic… seeing visual art, anyone that’s interested in analysis, I love critical thinking. I hate when people are like, “Oh, you’re overthinking that,” that’s the worst thing you could say to me. I love when someone wants to go straight in, really deep on something. In art, I love when something’s so mind-blowing that you don’t even have to question how amazing it is. Something like Alejandro Jodorowsky’s “Holy Mountain.” I really, really like him. When you see something that is unquestionably so amazing. I think I’m basically an adult who likes to draw with crayons, I guess I’ve accepted that I’m sort of charmingly a man-child. I think I’m basically a naughty boy who’s grown into a man.

GRAHAM: Who are some of your favorite artists and musicians?

GREEN: I like visual artists like Georges Rouault and Erich Heckel. I like Jodorowsky a lot. I like that new Dirty Projectors album, Swing Lo Magellan. I’ve been listening to that a lot. I’ve been listening to George Jones, Nick Cave… I really like that album Let Love In, I’ve been listening to that a lot lately. Shirley Collins, just because I think she has a really natural voice, I love that album Oar by Skip Spence. Eddie Martinez… and George Condo.

You can purchase limited edition artwork prints by Adam Green by going to Exhibition A. Adam Green and Binki Shapiro's album will be officially available on January 29, but you can preorder here. All photos and text by Annabel Graham for Pas Un Autre

Automatic Assembly Actions: An Interview with ANAHITA RAZMI

Anahita Razmi is one of those artists that are tough to define, but all the same make shock waves that force us to take a deeper look inside ourselves. Ramzi, a video and performance artist based in Stuttgart, makes work that deals with issues concerning identity and gender by employing objects with a national and cultural significance; sometimes borrowing and citing the work of other high-profile artists. Working within the tradition of appropriation and re-enactment, Razmi detaches cultural symbols from their established meanings by employing them in unexpected situations and contexts. Her works, like the tongue-in-cheek Burquini which was designed for the swimming activities of Muslim women and the more serious Roof Piece Tehran, where she had 12 dancers dancing on the rooftops of different building in Tehran in a county where dance is illegal and artistic performance is forbidden. Ramzi, whose father is Iranian – her mother German – has a special connection with Iran and it’s panoply of struggles. On view now at Carbon 12 Gallery in Dubai, Ramzi’s solo exhibition Automatic Assembly Action, which opened with a performance RE / CUT PIECE, a modfied appropriation of Yoko Ono’s 1964 performance Cut Piece, will be open until March 14. Pas Un Autre got a chance to ask Razmi a few question about her artistic practice, her current show at Carbon 12 and what she has planned for the future. 

PAS UN AUTRE: When was the first time you realized you wanted to be an artist?

ANAHITA RAZMI: For me there was no decision of becoming an artist, it was more a progress within time. I studied media arts before continuing in fine arts, but  never became passionate about just editing or designing stuff. For me being an artist means dealing with a lot of risk, but also with an incredibly multifaceted field of themes and references. I don't think one can become tired of it.

AUTRE: What does it mean to be a female artist in the 21st century?

RAZMI: I wouldn't choose to speak generally, but at least for me I feel and hope that categories like male - female at least for artists working conditions become more and more irrelevant these days. My work still often deals with these categories in a broader sense, but I am trying to question stereotypes and preassigned images, rather than determining them.

AUTRE: Can you name some other female artists who inspire you and why?

RAZMI: My work is often referencing other female artists work, - for example I recently quoted Tracey Emin and Cindy Sherman. Anyhow, I am quite amenable for inspiration, I never choose to sit in my studio and work from a blank sheet of paper.

AUTRE: What do you think is the biggest spiritual quagmire for people in todayʼs times?

RAZMI: Dependancy on questionable values and rules. That deserves a bigger discussion however.

AUTRE: Is art important in politics….how can art spark political discourse?

RAZMI: I don't think art should at all be considered as something with a function. Anyhow, I still feel that it can be an independent factor questioning political situations and conditions within a society by activating discussions, thoughts and possible reconsiderations.

AUTRE: Some of your work has dealt with the politics and restrictions imposed on people living in Iran….is religion a problem or is it how people use it?

RAZMI: A lot of my work is making reference to the current situation in Iran. Anyhow I am never choosing to explain about the country, - I am more making reconciliations between existing images that are shifting between the Middle East and the West.

AUTRE: Your work is extremely multifaceted and people seem to have a plethora of ways to describe it – how would you describe your work?

RAZMI: I am happy to hear that, as I don't like my work to be pigeonholed. I am using different kinds of media and am not sticking to one method of producing my work. Still I think, one can find repeating conceptual strategies within my practice: appropriation of existing works and images, certain themes (like contemporary Iran) that repeatedly are dealt with.

AUTRE: Can you talk about what we can expect at your upcoming show at Carbon 12?

RAZMI: The show is my first solo exhibition at Carbon12 Dubai, so I am quite excited. It is titled Automatic Assembly Actions and features two new video installations, one photoseries and a textile work. I also did a performance during the opening, which involved the audience.

AUTRE: Whatʼs next?

RAZMI: My show Swing State will open mid february at Kunstverein Hanover, which will be accompanied by a publication. From april on I will be in residency in Los Angeles for 6 months working on a new project - really looking forward to that.

Text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. Anahita Razmi Automatic Assembly Actions will be on view at Carbon 12 Gallery until March 14, 2013, Warehouse D37, Alserkal Avenue, Street 8, Al Quoz 1

Art And Ecstasy: An Interview With Artist Sara Falli

The artworks of Florence based Sara Falli are both mythic and phantasmagorical. They tell visual stories with simple, but complex devices a chaotic, dark, and beautiful world of strange creatures, women seemingly contorted with desire, and the veins of stained water color that conjure blood and ritual. Falli is telling us secrets with her brushstrokes, but keeps them deeply hidden in a labyrinth of multidimensionality. Falli has also published an autobiography, entitled Vita di Saragaia, which hints at a dysfunctional past which adds yet another layer.   

PAS UN AUTRE: When did you know you wanted to become an artist?

SARA FALLI: I began to think of myself as an artist in a very hazy way when I was 10. I noticed that art made me feel good and this happened before I even started to become aware of things... I really began without making a decision and it has become a need I cannot help but satisfy, otherwise I think I'd be a very sad person. However I started using the word "artist" to definemy status only ten years ago when I owned my first studio, after finishing my studies at the Academy of Fine Arts.

AUTRE: When did you start drawing in your current style?

FALLI: My style now is really just a stage that I am exploring, I do not know where it will take me, but I love to experiment and give myself new goals. I am very different when I work on canvas than when I work on paper, because as materials and type of paints change, I am very much guided by the impact of color now.

AUTRE: How would you describe your artworks?

FALLI: My works are anchors of an underground work that is within me. Those that I have been able to do are perhaps a thousandth part of what I would like to do; my job is to keep on trying to make visible to myself and others my underground world.

AUTRE: What are some of your inspirations/influences?

FALLI: I am inspired by everything that moves me and captures my interest. I place these feelings aside for a long time, then one day the whole or a part reaches out, always transformed by my use of color, for me the mediation through the matter is crucial, the ink pigments mixed with water, the smudge of graphite ... I do not know if I would be able to be a conceptual artist and never get my hands dirty, but one day it could be stimulating to try there too.

AUTRE: What do you think about when you are making art?

FALLI: When I create art I am either intractable or in ecstasy, almost "I can't draw a single line" or "I will do it, I am invincible". It takes me a while to find the right dimension, I need good music, space and time to "lose".

FALLI: In 2007 I wrote an autobiographical novel that was published by a major Italian publishing house. I had a very "offbeat" infancy, to use an euphemism, and I wanted to tell it. On the cover of the book there are 4 of my oil paintings; in that period I was painting people's objects, and those were my objects. Now besides painting I'm writing short stories.

AUTRE: Whats next?

FALLI: Then, for the future, I can only say that I will always be doing, never trying to reach a finality. I am terrified of finding myself at the finish, but the goal is not so much the finish, it is nothing but a mirage, you can see it only while walking.

You can find Sara Falli's book Vita di Saragaia here. You can also follow her on flickr to see new works.  Text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper for Pas Un Autre.

Suck them in with beauty, knock them out with the truth: An Interview with Kathe Burkhart

Clad in her signature all-black attire and plum-colored lipstick, with a pensive disposition and a laugh that can only be described as infectious, the artist Kathe Burkhart presides regally over the massive paintings and wooden haiku letters that fill her light-dappled, paint-spattered Brooklyn studio. Black-and-white stills from Elizabeth Taylor films, old love letters and lists of materials are pasted to the walls; tubes and cans of acrylic paint, mannequin parts and other random artistic accoutrements litter the desks and floors. Burkhart takes me on a tour through the studio—which is gargantuan by New York standards—first the room mainly occupied by her infamous Liz Taylor paintings, which are awe-inspiringly large in person; then the living room area, the walls of which are adorned with several of her nude photographs (mostly taken on a nude beach in Spain); then the bedroom, which houses her S&M Series—a collection of paintings of various medieval torture devices, each inspired by and named after a different ex-lover (“I stopped because I ran out of boyfriends!” Burkhart confesses); the “print room,” in which Burkhart keeps many of her prints, drawings and photographs from the pornography series (a collection of photos chronicling the changing window displays in Amsterdam’s red-light district sex shops). Since the mid-1980’s, Burkhart has been known throughout the art world and beyond as the original “bad girl” artist. Her work is political, nonconformist, deeply personal, acerbically witty and intensely provocative—one need only refer to her performance video piece American Woman (2001-2) in which the artist dressed herself in a burka made out of an American flag, then sat motionless in front of a screen onto which original footage from the September 11th terrorist attacks was projected; all the while blasting The Guess Who’s American Woman. Burkhart is arguably best known for her Liz Taylor series, a collection of iconic, extremely large-scale portraits of the notoriously audacious, often profligate violet-eyed screen siren (who Burkhart calls an “unapologetic hedonist”) interwoven with autobiographical elements from the artist’s own life. Drawing inspiration from actual film stills, Burkhart emblazons each Liz Taylor portrait with a different provocative phrase, making a tongue-in-cheek commentary on women’s sexual emancipation. Throughout the series, Liz oscillates between the roles of abject victim and dominatrix heroine, playing out each seemingly unshakeable stereotype that persists throughout Hollywood and the media. In Junkie, we find a middle-aged Liz on a street corner, draped in fur (made from dozens of real minks Burkhart glued to the canvas). On the dirty sidewalk surrounding Liz’s high-heeled feet, the artist has attached real syringes, used condoms, discarded heroin baggies, a Vicodin prescription label, pill bottles, razor blades, temporary tattoos, plastic croissants, a sterling silver spoon and cooker, an abortion flyer, a cervical cap and other miscellaneous paraphernalia. The word “JUNKIE” is stenciled in giant red block letters across the canvas. In Blueballs, Liz reclines seductively on a large brass bed with a dealt hand of tarot cards spread in front of her on the teal duvet. It’s the small, personal details Burkhart adds that bestow yet another layer of meaning upon the work— the ones I might not have even known were personal without speaking to the artist herself—the tarot card reading in front of Liz was Burkhart’s own actual reading; on the bedside table rests not only a stack of Burkhart’s own books but her then-boyfriend’s prescription for Cialis; in the upper right-hand corner of the wall behind the bed hangs a subtle framed painting that appears abstract upon first glance but is actually a scanned and printed photograph of what Burkhart calls “my strange hoo-hoo.” Burkhart is also a prolific writer—she has published three books of fiction and poetry (and, I might add, a series of chocolate haikus!) and has plans for a possible film project in the future—an adaptation of her novel Between the Lines, which she describes as “sort of the female Brokeback Mountain.” Much like her muse, Liz Taylor, Burkhart embodies the role of the noncompliant subject— utterly unapologetic for her own “unladylike appetites,” she breaks down accepted notions of femininity, reevaluating the role of the woman artist throughout her body of work.

ANNABEL GRAHAM: What is your conception of feminist art? How do you think perceptions of feminist art have changed since you first began your career as an artist, both for you and for the public?

KATHE BURKHART: Well, I think I’m an artist who happens to be a feminist. I don’t know what “feminist art” is anymore. I mean, it had a certain connotation in the 70’s and now, it just has a totally negative connotation…  I think that the more women are shown in the art world, we have more of a presence, but feminist issues, feminist art, feminism and the social field - the art world is just a reflection of the rest of the world. And we’re in a period of terrible retrenchment right now, where your generation has to think about the right to control your own body again, which to me is insane. In 1992, I did this installation called The Abortion Project, with the signatures of women who had had abortions, and you guys have to fight this still… On International Women’s Day I posted stuff on Facebook with it, I was like what happened in the intervening years, was the intervening generation asleep at the wheel, or what? What happened? George Bush, but women were still sexually active and maybe needed an abortion from time to time, no?

KENDALLE (Burkhart’s studio assistant): Not on his watch.

BURKHART: Right? [LAUGHS] That’s good! We’ll be putting that one in, Kendall… that was excellent… good call. So… I think that there’s a real negative connotation to the word [feminism], because we’re in a time of retrenchment, but that’s silly…

GRAHAM: Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people equate the word “feminism” with bra-burning, men-hating…

BURKHART: That is so incredibly old-fashioned. I think that now we see feminist issues are being addressed in culture… in art, in movies, in literature, and the reason why is because women are consumers. That’s why. So parity will be built through that. But I do feel like the previous generation was maybe a little bit asleep at the wheel, because we have like half-hookers now, and that’s really sad. I would think that a young woman in 2012 would be able to buy her own cocktail, you know?

GRAHAM: Yeah. I don’t know if that’s quite the case yet.[LAUGHS] So what’s the climate like for women artists today? How has it changed?

BURKHART: We have more visibility but we still don’t command the same prices at auction as men do; women are still considered a “bargain.” You know what the new market is? Old women. So, if you don’t die, you’ve got a chance in your 80s to make a market.

GRAHAM: Wow. Okay. So there’s hope for us yet!

BURKHART: [LAUGHS] There’s hope! You can be Alice Neel. I always wonder, what the heck will I look like?

GRAHAM: It’s interesting to think about. You work with a number of different mediums; painting, writing, installation art. Would you say that you have a favorite, or one that you gravitate towards more than others? Do the different ones help you express different things?

BURKHART: Yeah. Different ones help me do different things. Come, we’ll take a small tour. So this is… we’re in the painting studio now. [We walk into the other half of the studio, where several of Burkhart’s photographs are hung] These are some of the nudes… This is funny. [She gestures towards a photograph of two men sleeping naked on a nude beach in Spain] These guys were sleeping… I went away, and came back, and they were still sleeping… [LAUGHS] Nice nuts, you know? So, having such a big space, I’m able to break up the bodies of work a lot more; I can really turn it into… [We walk into the bedroom. The walls are lined with paintings from Burkhart’s “Torture Series.”] TThese are all paintings from the Torture series, so these are all old boyfriends.

GRAHAM: So you title them with the ex-boyfriend’s name?

BURKHART: Yeah. First name only! There are more of these… but I stopped making them at a certain point because I ran out of guys. [LAUGHS] That could always change again. But I made these from about 1992 to 2000. [We walk into the next room].This is the “paper room,” where I have all my prints and stuff, but also photo prints are kept in here… This is the porno series… in Amsterdam. I started shooting them in the early 90’s. So I was really shooting porno shops in the Red Light district in Amsterdam, and the weird thing was that I had kept the negatives shelved because I couldn’t afford to print them for years, but I then I had access at NYU to make these prints, which was great, and I did a show with them in 2005.

GRAHAM: Wow. So you had no idea what they looked like until you printed them up?

BURKHART: I knew what they looked like, but not this big… and all the ones that were shot on film had to be meticulously cleaned, because they were full of dust and scratches… and then I started shooting digitally, and, you know, that took care of that. But the odd thing is that now, all of that’s online and there are fewer and fewer porno shops… they’re being overtaken by young clothing designers and stuff. The whole neighborhood’s being gentrified; people buy this stuff online now. So a whole visual culture is disappearing. Something that was at first kind of documenting my reaction to this, what seemed to be openness, but is really just commerce… started out that way, and then I realized, wow, I’m kind of documenting a moment in history that is going to disappear eventually as everything goes online. And now it looks like this. [Gestures towards a photograph of a “tasteful” window display in an Amsterdam sex shop] That was taken this summer, in that neighborhood.

GRAHAM: It looks like an installation piece, almost.

BURKHART: Doesn’t it? I know. Here we have your tasteful tit and ass prosthesis for rich trannies, or something. It’s got that… I mean, it’s still the surrealistic kind of mash-up, but it’s all… everything costs more. I’m going for a residency this summer at the Center for Contemporary Art in Majorca, so I’m going to shoot a ton more of these nudes. I’m going to be a photo machine. I am a camera.

[We go back into the painting studio through a secret passageway]

BURKHART: [Gesturing towards one of the Liz paintings involving a voodoo doll and pins] And this one has pins… Many many pins. You can really see how many if you look back here.

GRAHAM: Wow. Guess you have to handle that one with care. So… what’s your reaction to the perception of you as a “bad girl” artist?

BURKHART: Well, it really morphed into something that I didn’t intend very quickly. We didn’t have words like “gender nonconforming” when I was your age. You were gay or straight, or you didn’t exist, basically. Now, fortunately, we have that word, gender nonconforming, which encompasses sort of what I meant by being a “bad girl.” It was picked up and marketed… it was strange, it was like suddenly to be a bad girl was to be a lesbian. I didn’t get that, I mean, there are plenty of “good girl” lesbians. So, I wanted to represent a kind of woman who wasn’t represented, who wasn’t complicit, who was a noncompliant subject… and that’s what I meant by it, more or less. Gender nonconforming, a noncompliant subject with agency…  Liz Taylor’s a good container for me to dump all that personal history into, because she’s unashamed about having appetites… for sex, for food, for money… for all of the material things that we associate… with hedonism, really. So, in a sense, it was like an unapologetic hedonist, and a linking-up of a punk sort of resistance. It wasn’t about cowgirls, or lesbian mothers, or any of that… What happened was, I was on the cover of Flash Art, the article was called “Bad Girl Made Good,” it’s the first time that term was used in contemporary art. But then it was picked up on by the media and applied to artists like Lisa Yuskavage, Tracy Emin, etc...people who really wanted to be…'good'. So some women who basically wanted to be part of the tide seized upon the “bad girl” mantle, which also for me encompassed a bit of performativity; that the work would come out of the life, and for that to work,  the life had to be interesting. So it was all of those things and more, but it quickly spiraled out of control when the Bad Girl shows happened. So it was considered stupid… Laura Cottingham wrote an article called “How Many Bad Girls Does it Take to Screw In a Lightbulb?” and… it really spiraled out of control and became totally negative, of course. I mean, you say “bad boy” and people just snicker. Soon it became kind of feminist infighting. Like, “I’m not a bad girl, that’s stupid, whatever, I’m a prisspot intellectual. I’m neuter.” [LAUGHS]

GRAHAM: Can you really be “neuter” as an artist?

BURKHART: There is that kind of position. There’s a neuter position, women who are not attractive and so they can’t factor their sexuality into it, because they don’t have it, so they’re not threatening. So, when you’re a young woman you can have a lot of success with your sexuality up until you’re about 35 and you have power. So then it’s like, you have a little bit of power and you’re sexual and good looking and smart? That’s really fucking scary. So they put you out to pasture until you’re like 50, and don’t pay any attention to you.  That’s how it is. Because they’re figuring that you’re going to breed and leave the field. And if you don’t breed and leave the field, or if you breed and make money anyway, after you’re about 50 and you’re not dead yet, then they can… then you’re harvestable.

GRAHAM: So it’s a bleak future.

BURKHART: I’m sorry.

GRAHAM: No, it’s good to hear. My next question is about your Liz Taylor series. Can you tell me a bit about the concept behind the series, and how it’s maybe changed throughout the process of these… how many are there?

BURKHART: Oh, god. I don’t know. Three hundred and something? It’s been 25 or 30 years… Crazy. I don’t know how many I’ve got. There was a photograph, an advertisement from The Little Foxes, which was on stage in LA, and that was the very first Liz painting.

GRAHAM: And then from there, did you have the idea that you’d do a series?

BURKHART: No… I guess that’s when I started to collect the images. And then I did another one, and another one… you know, and then I kept going. But I was doing other things at the same time, of course. I was taking pictures and making videos and writing.

GRAHAM: So what is it about Liz Taylor that merits such extensive exploration?

BURKHART: Well, it’s a way to talk about myself without being really solipsistic, and to talk about the woman artist. She really represents a woman artist who continually played herself, so it’s completely performative, and, that’s what I pretty much do as an artist, is kind of unpack my own life through the work, but also to talk about the limited range of roles and representations of women. Things have changed a little bit… but not that much, clearly. We don’t have stars like that anymore. I mean, who plays themselves every time? That doesn’t exist. They’ll just play whatever role for money. It’s not like you’re following the star anymore in the same way. The star system’s all over. But what it spawned is that now everybody is a star, of course. Everybody is for sale, for free.  So celebrity culture… I mean, who knew how it would open up, the way it has? So I think that the series, in a way, anticipated that… tracking of ourselves that we do all the time now, how we refract ourselves through culture, through the movies or through what we see in the media. There was no YouTube, there was no Facebook or blogs… I mean, for example, for the film stills, I would go to the still store; I had to collect them. Now I can just do an image search and print them out. Of course, I still get books and stuff like that, but… she’s provided a way for me to talk about myself and also about media, and also to be able to make paintings when you’re not supposed to make paintings. Conceptual artists aren’t really supposed to make paintings, so there’s that too. When I was in school, painting was like the worst thing you could do. It was declared “dead,” you know? At the same time, a painting appreciates faster than a photograph, and gets the highest amount of money at an auction. So it’s kind of a “thumbing my nose” at all of that monumentality, and ideas about mastery. Am I making sense at all? [LAUGHS]

GRAHAM: You are! Definitely. [LAUGHS] You’re also a writer. How do you feel about writing versus visual art? What can you express through writing that you can’t through visual art?

BURKHART: The really personal stuff. [Painting] is a real process, I have to get the picture, and then I project it, and then there’s the painting part, and the collage part, and I have to put the word with it… but with writing, you know, I just write. I always go back and edit; I’m a fastidious editor. Writing’s great, all you need is a piece of paper and a pen. It’s much lower maintenance.  I’m able to do stuff in writing that would be too graphic visually, you know, problematic… and wouldn’t work. I mean, the only way that comes together is in the Haiku series, and those are made with chocolate letters… and there are a few in wood. This one is going to be… “What I want to do/ what I have to do and what/ I don’t want to do". It's the id, the ego, and the superego. This one will be in wood letters, so it’ll last.  The chocolate will melt or discolor. It’ll turn eventually… the milk chocolate will get white streaks, and the white will… parts of it will yellow… the white lasts longer, it’s nothing but sugar. The dark and the milk die the worst.

GRAHAM: Do people ever eat them?

BURKHART: Oh, you know, people kick them and break them. It was very interesting, I did this solo show in Belgium in September, and there was one broken letter, and this museum curator that I worked with was doing a speech or something, and you know, we worked our asses off for this installation; I got there, they had the opening in the afternoon, so I was late to my own opening… and he just started harping on the broken letter. Oh, it was just like… Oh, god. Like it had a special meaning or something. The special meaning was that the letter was broken and we didn’t have time to get another one. [LAUGHS]

GRAHAM: He was talking about it like it was supposed to be that way?

BURKHART: Yeah.

GRAHAM: That must have been interesting to listen to!

BURKHART: That’s why I try to teach my students to try and control the intention of your work, because of all these weird things that can happen that you totally cannot control. You can’t control what people are going to think anyhow.

GRAHAM: Yeah. People can read the weirdest things into art.

BURKHART: They certainly can. So in the haikus, I was able to find a visual form for the writing. That was important for me… but I can’t do it with narrative. I can’t do it with fiction. I write in between fiction and nonfiction anyway, and sometimes I write straight nonfiction. But the fiction is all drawing on life… it’s all true, so I guess it’s in between. I don’t know how I would use narrative in any other way than I have already. When [the Liz paintings] are all put together some day like they should be in a museum show, what will occur is that there will be a narrative of my life… and the people who really know me, who have worked closely with me, will know and will be able to talk about how the life informs the work. And that will be cool… and I actually had a thought, a great idea to do as a piece, to have an audio tour, but the audio tour would be just me reading stories from my books. I mean, it would be filthy sex,…  when I write about sex… I could never do it visually the way I write about it, or it would just look like… porn. And that wouldn’t work.

GRAHAM: Can you tell me a bit about your background? Where did you grow up?

BURKHART: I grew up in West Virginia. I should have never gotten out… most people never leave. It’s about an hour and a half away from Washington, in the Shenandoah Valley.

GRAHAM: When did you first realize you wanted to be an artist?

BURKHART: Oh, really young. Yeah. I mean, I learned to read early, so I started writing fairly early, and I started making art fairly early, and I directed plays that I wrote… so I guess that was the performative part of it very early on. I can’t remember why I stopped the play directing…

GRAHAM: Well, you can always pick it up again!

BURKHART: Correct. [LAUGHS] Well, there’s a movie in me yet. There’s one of my books that I’d like to adapt into a screenplay.

GRAHAM: Oh yeah? Which book?

BURKHART: Between the Lines, which is a book about my great aunt, who lived to be 100, and between 1927 and 1929 she received 79 love letters from a woman in South Carolina, so they had like a romantic friendship… or lesbian relationship, and I published a book in Paris with Hachette,and then a small section of it last year in Esopus… I’ll show it to you, it’s in the front… but it’s really like a female Brokeback Mountain story, so I’d love to make a real movie out of that. That’s a back-burner project. Gender radicals in the family, going all the way back.

GRAHAM: You should do it! So then how did you begin your career, where did you go to school…?

BURHART: Let’s see, I left West Virginia and went to University of Pittsburgh just for a semester… came back to West Virginia and went to Shepherd College, which has an okay art department, but it wasn’t big enough for me, so I applied to CalArts. I found out about the feminist art program… in the library of Shepherd College, I found this catalogue for CalArts, about the feminist art program, and I was like, oh, I want to do that! So of course the catalogue was old in the library, and by the time I called the school to find out if those people were teaching there, they were like, “Who? What program?” [LAUGHS] So there’s the answer to the feminist thing. “What? We only have men teaching here.” They didn’t say that, but that’s basically what it was. So, you know, I set my heart on that school and it was a total conceptual art boys’ club, it really was. There were very few women teaching there. You had to have a personal interview to get in… it was a big deal. They lost my portfolio, they rejected me the first time… so I went up there to meet with somebody and then finally they accepted me. So I guess I had two years of college, about, when I went into CalArts. I lost one year as a transfer student. And then I finished my BFA and got my MFA there too. So once I was there, it was like the citadel on the hill. I had an excellent studio, and I really developed my practice at CalArts; it was really hugely important in my development, and I still pretty much identify as what we call a “CalArtian.” [LAUGHS] There were two things that we called ourselves, the CalArtians and then the CalArts mafia. That’s still operative, because you have all of these wonderful people who came out of CalArts in those years. You have Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler, Steve Prina,Chris Williams, you know, they’re all guys, right? It’s crazy. Only a few chicks. Where are the women? So I get to be a CalArts token, kind of. There are other CalArts women, Ericka Beckman, etc..but we seem to get treated differently by the art world.

GRAHAM: And then you stayed in California for a while?

BURKHART: I stayed a year after school. And the scene in LA was really taking off then, and while I was in school I worked at LACE, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, which was a lot like artists’ space in those days, it was a very well-funded nonprofit artists’ organization. I started a bookshop there, and then I came to New York in ’85. I think I’ve had this space since ’86.

GRAHAM: Wow. So you live in the Netherlands part-time as well, what’s the difference between the artistic climate here and there? Can you compare the two?

BURKHART: It’s really different, and yet things are changing to make it more the same, in a sad way. You know, when all that “bad girl” stuff erupted, like ’94 or so… it’s funny because that was delayed… when that term was used, it was around the end of 1990, and then people picked it up around ’94. It’s funny how things linger, you know, in its original potent form, nobody wanted anything to do with it, but dilute it down a few years later and everybody wants to jump on the bandwagon, kind of. Around that time I left and started to immigrate to Holland. I was going back and forth, and spending more and more time there each year, and around ’95 I officially started to immigrate. And that’s when all that stuff took off here, and this market in figurative painting for people like John Currin, and all that stuff which I considered to be incredibly reactionary, and, you know, my work was too conceptual for that, it didn’t really fit in. So I found a lot of support in Holland, there’s a wonderful grant support there. I mean, I wouldn’t have been able to pay for my studio in New York if I hadn’t gotten Dutch grants. So they were incredibly supportive, they understood the critique of American culture, the sort of political stance in the work, the anti-capitalist stance… they got it, you know? That you could be personal and political at the same time, that it didn’t have to be prescriptive. So that was really freeing and great for me… also to be in a place that was seemingly much much more tolerant than the United States, and much cheaper to live, with a higher quality of life and a lower cost of living. It’s kind of like an escape from New York, so that’s been good. But things are changing there now, and they’re dismantling the support system for artists, and the individual grants may well be gone in four years. So I don’t know what’s going to happen, it’s very conservative there now, there’s a lot of anti-immigration sentiment there now, and that’s being extended to people who have dual citizenship, it’s being extended to artists… artists are the next to go, and that’s sad. I hope that the E.U. kicks in to put more money back into the system. Now they’re like, “We’re going to follow the American system.” I mean, what system? We don’t have one. So there, up until now you could have a career without having a big market. IT was possible. But now they want the market money too, and it’s kind of disgusting. It’s changing a lot. There’s a lot of support there though, because people are smart.

GRAHAM: Who are some of your favorite artists?

BURKHART: Louise Bourgeois… I just saw a beautiful Hans Bellmer show, can’t stop raving about it… Cady Noland, Barbara Kruger... and some of my favorite writers are Hélène Cixous and Clarice Lispector.

GRAHAM: Last question. What inspires you?

BURKHART: Popular culture, films, literature, daily life, relationships. Suck them in with beauty, knock them out with the truth…

Text and photography by Annabel Graham for Pas Un Autre

I LOVED YOU: An Interview With Richie Culver

Richie Culver: provocateur, bearded mystic raconteur, tattooed romantic, enigmatic rising contemporary British artist. Culver falls in line with some of the great rebels of creative expression that have made the United Kingdom a landscape of artistic rebellion for the past 40 years in contrast to its powdered wig, high tea, keep calm and carry on reputation. From the social dissatisfaction that gave birth to the punk movement, Vivienne Westwood, to the gothic angst of new wave, to Damien Hirst, to Tracey Emin, Culver is part of a cultural evolution of artists with extremely unique and inspiring ideas. Art has treated Culver well – almost as soon as he started exploring art as a career he was featured in a group show at the Tate Modern and now his list of collectors and demand for new work is growing exponentially. Culver was also recently invited by Eastpak to design a series of bags to support a charity alongside other artists such as The Smiths' Johnny Marr. Pas Un Autre contributor Christopher Lusher caught up with Richie Culver to chat about everything from the current state of the art world, his passion for music and the difficulties of living ones life as an artist. Lusher mentions, "It's only a matter of time before Culver catches fire stateside." 

CHRISTOPHER LUSHER: Being an artist working in London what do you see as the differences in the contemporary art scene there as opposed to the one in the States?

RICHIE CULVER: There are many differences! London is very much stuck in a time warp, the 1990's. Its really sad to see. It depresses me in fact. We all know the artists in question. I'm not disrespecting them! (well not all of them) They are all old now, I'm not saying age makes a difference, cos it doesn't. Great art is great art but times are changing, musics changing, fashion is changing. The YBA's [Young British Artists] paved the way – but paved it for who exactly? The bigger major contemporary galleries seem scared to bring a new crop through & when they have attempted to do so have failed miserably. I personally am a fan of Damien Hirst ( hate me nor love me for that ) but I just like what he does, I like him as a person. He causes controversy what ever he does. He is a working class lad from Bristol done good, but in this country we love to slag the ones, the pioneers off once, they get to a certain level which is a shame. Hirst is Hirst, he does his thing. You have Coventry, Emin to name but a few. They are all just still doing their thing. Good luck to them I say but its 2012 now not 1993. (thank fuck) I'm not gonna divulge into Bacon etc. as I see there works in a totally different light....In America on the other hand the art world is scattered with really interesting people and works which translate into the modern world we live in. Also the curators are far more open minded and slightly more youthful, willing to take a chance of the likes of Dan Colen at the Gagosian Gallery. Dan is a fantastic painter & continues to do his thing. Once all that "Warhols Children" died down Dan continued to make strong work and shows. Scott Campbell for instance is another amazing young artist who is moving things forward. Of course you have the not so good artists such as Nate Lowman, whos work is neither here nor there. I'm sure he is s nice guy and all but his work strikes no chords for me. Agathe Snow is great. I'm not too clued up on Dash Snows work but I shall delve deeper. In a nut shell I see the NY scene as much more open to new ideas and the galleries & curators are much much more on the ball than over here in London. Their moving things in the right direction. London unfortunately is still stuck and wanking over pieces that were made over 20 years ago. LET GO FOR FUCKS SAKE! There are some realy cool artists & photographers living in London at the moment. To re cap ... Londons still in the ice age .. NY is daring to change the game and give young talented artists shows in historical galleries. The past is gone now. GONE.

LUSHER: Do you draw any inspiration from the young American art scene? If so, from who?

CULVER: I dont draw inspiration from anything but personal experiences. Being hung upside down from my ankles on the 34th floor was one of them....but back to young American artists, there's so many I hate (not personally)... I love as I said Scott Campbells work, always did even before we became mates. He is doing something totally different. My mate Jose Parla is doing his thing and such a lovely guy! Dan Colen is a great painter for sure! There used to be so many of them now I can only think of a few. Asger Carlsen is good. I'm not gonna even go into the street side of things. That's kinda joke at the moment. Even photographers, they're all way past their sell by date. It really is all in London now when it comes to artists / photographers under the age of 35 but they're not getting the scope they need. It's young and fresh. Like never before.

LUSHER: Do you find it difficult to earn a living as an artist?

CULVER: I was finding it hard for awhile but I now have a strong driven team behind me who all have the same vision I do. Since I had my Jesse Owens piece in the Tate Modern its all just fallen into place really quickly. My prices for my photography have rocketed so much its hard to keep up with. Same with my "I loved you" paintings!! It's unreal. I now only do a certain amount per year because the orders were getting silly. My main talent is painting. I've kinda kept that for last. I'm super excited for the world to see them. But no I don't find it hard anymore. I have a huge collectors list, ranging from musicians, art collectors, actors, government people and mates. As soon as word gets out I've finished a set of photos, collages or Polaroids etc. they have usually all sold which makes it hard to work towards the next show. I usually sneak off to my mates studio in the country side with no phone then hide them before they get hung. For whatever reason my work is in demand at the moment especially my photos, my collages and my "I loved you" painting. I'm bracing myself for my first collection of painting. That will be ready for next year though.

LUSHER: If you weren't involved in the arts what other career would you have chosen or has that ever been an option?

CULVER: If I were not an artist I'd probably be a stray street cat. Hustling and telling peeps I'm gonna be starting a band and stuff. Shoplifting, dead or in prison.

LUSHER: Describe your process. Is there any specific routine or is it more of a spontaneous action? How much forethought goes into your works?

CULVER: None. I get an idea and run with it down the street with a stolen TV in my hand.

LUSHER: Alot of your work has a relation to sports. What is the genesis for this or the ideas behind it?

CULVER: I love sport. Boxing. I love football too. I like bare knuckle fighting.

LUSHER: I know your a big music lover. What do you usually have playing in your flat or when you create? Any up and coming musicians we should know about?

CULVER: I'm listening to Death Grips new record, Charlie Parker, Kilo Kish, Joey Bada$$$, Capital Steez , Fila Brazillia , Bullet Nuts, Das Racist, Gil Scot Heron, Boldy James, Mr Muthafuck Esquire ,Waka Flokka, Danny Brown, ( shout out to my good mates now) - Eliot Sumner, Adele, Paloma Faith, Hurts,The Macabees,Tribes, Liam Bailey, Jack Penate, Jai Paul, The Weeknd, GG Allin, Miles Davis etc.

LUSHER: Whats lined up for the future for you project and gallery wise?

CULVER: So much. Shows in LA, NY, two shows in London, Berlin, Oslo, Rome, Barcelona. There's loads more but I can't remember! Thanks for having me! Fo real...

You can follow Richie Culver at his website. Text by Christopher Lusherfor Pas Un Autre.

The MEDIUM IS THE MEDIUM: An Interview with WINSTON CHMIELINSKI

On a bitterly cold day in mid-February, Winston Chmielinski is nestled in a giant armchair at a corner table in The Bowery Hotel’s plush lobby area, a room festooned with decadent tapestries, mahogany detailing, oriental rugs, large vases full of peacock feathers and multiple blazing fireplaces. Among the guests lounging in the lobby today are Charlotte Ronson and Emma Roberts, along with a number of other semi-recognizable characters involved in the arts (it is New York Fashion Week, after all). The lithe and statuesque Chmielinski is halfway through Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sensation, a philosophical treatise on Francis Bacon’s work—having graduated recently from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study with an interdisciplinary degree in philosophy and creative writing, he is characteristically intrigued by the theory behind the practice. A self-professed “painter’s painter,” the young Boston-born artist has already begun to carve out a name for himself within the vast landscape of the international art world. His sensual, evocative portraits feature broad, gestural swathes of vibrant color that serve to both define and obscure the forms he deals with. His work treads the line between representation and abstraction—his impulsive brushstrokes and purposeful censorship of those “recognizable” elements of the figures he paints contrast with the unquestionably lifelike quality he achieves in each work, creating a sort of harmonious discord—a dreamlike, ethereal ambiance tinged at the edges with a suggestion of the uncanny. I sat down at the Bowery with the contemplative, eloquent Chmielinski to talk about his artistic process, sources of inspiration, upbringing, passion for travel, and plans for the future (a residency in Antwerp may be in the works).

ANNABEL GRAHAM: Has your aesthetic developed and changed over time? Your paintings have this intensely otherworldly quality, and your forms are both defined and obscured at the same time. Has that developed or has that always been the style of your work?

WINSTON CHMIELINSKI: It’s developed on a subtle level. I think if you look at my work from high school until now, I’ve always concentrated on figures, and they’ve always been figures that I don’t know. But the way that my obscuring and defining has evolved, I think, is that I used to paint figures and then obscure them after the fact. And that was a way for me to rudimentarily censor out the recognizable elements of somebody, and kind of give myself the space within a figure, or actually on top of a figure, to have abstract explorations, to just kind of go for it and really involve myself with the process of painting as opposed to the rendering.

"Man Woman Bird," Winston Chmielinski

GRAHAM: So would you say the process is more of concern to you than the rendering?

CHMIELINSKI: I would say I’m a “form over content” person. So the way that that’s changed over time is that… as soon as I realized that it became more of a formula, you know, rendering a face and then putting something on top of it, or putting an abstract explosion around a face instead of painting the body, I wanted to incorporate all of that fluidity into the actual initial painting itself. So, you know, deforming a face. Or deforming a body, and using that blank canvas—that first impulsive brushstroke on a blank canvas as the final product, as opposed to polishing and polishing. So, to me it’s changed a lot. And I think that people—there is a divide within my audience, between people who really like the early work and people who like the later work. And one funny thing that’s happened is… when I first started, I would get approached for commissions, and people would see me as a portrait artist, first and foremost, so there would be people who’d be like, “Can you paint my children?” or “Can you paint my dog?” and I don’t really get that anymore… It’s amazing, I mean it’s interesting when someone thinks that you’d want to do that. They always get tedious. And I mean, I guess that’s the commercial part, like if you want to do commercial work and support yourself, but when you don’t want to paint something, it’s more than impossible, because painting is my whole language, so it’s like having to write, like, a sex romance novel, or something, when I’m into poetry… you know, it just doesn’t work. But that’s kind of changed. Now people know that I won’t flatter them to begin with, so I don’t really get too many commissions for that reason anymore.

GRAHAM: Who or what inspires you? Anything at all. Or rather, are there certain things that you think about when you’re beginning a painting? Certain ideas that influence your work?

CHMIELINSKI: As someone who’s always painted, I’ve been highly considerate of, you know, the role of painting within the art world and within my own life, and I think that I’m coming to a point now where I’m embracing painting as a very specific language that can open out onto everything. And it’s okay that I’m a painter. And I think it’s taken a lot of time for me just to reach that point, where it’s like, you know, painting is okay. It’s not stupid, it’s fine.

GRAHAM: Right. Because there’s so much pressure nowadays to do installation work, and video…

CHMIELINSKI: Exactly. And to just be a Renaissance man in a contemporary landscape. I think that the one thing that I’ve embraced also is that I’m drawing from everything that isn’t painting. So I’ve realized that… when I think of the art that I do for myself, as opposed to painting, which is like a face… It’s what people see… I have these strange collections of images I take of street trash and forms that to me are evocative, and all those things are things that I would never show people. You know, I just have these huge gigabyte drives of just images… weird images of everything, and I’m always snapping pictures and reading a lot… I find that my inspirations just kind of coalesce into this manageable 2D surface, in which I can just have a composition and have it completed there. But my greatest inspirations come from masters of… this is going to sound really abstract, but there are certain things I’ll hear… certain composers or musicians or films, that just come off as “perfect” for me. And I’m so inspired by this idea that within one piece of art there can be perfection. Just to name a few… there are [Francis] Bacon paintings… Of course he probably sees something that he would like to develop within his painting process, but to me that painting itself is perfect.

GRAHAM: Is there a specific Bacon painting you had in mind?

CHMIELINSKI: There’s this painting called Jet of Water. I mean, I love his work, how he places a figure inside of a plane and all that stuff, but I think with Jet of Water, this is one of his last paintings, he completely escaped the human figure and… it was like he reached another stage. He had this immense sensation and movement, but within a form that wasn’t human. I think that to me right now, as a figure painter grappling with the same idea of, “How do you paint something that isn’t narrative but that is full of sensation without being literal?” And he managed to do that with Jet of Water. That’s a goal for me as well… I can’t follow in his footsteps, but it shows that it’s at least possible. And it’s really nice.

GRAHAM: Can you talk a bit about your color scheme and what role color plays for you?

CHMIELINSKI: I think that for me, color is what texture is for other painters. If you see my paintings in person, they’re very thin…

GRAHAM: Do you paint with oil or acrylic?

CHMIELINSKI: I use both. For acrylics, I water them down to the point where they’re like watercolor consistency, and then I get an almost plastic luminosity from just the thinness of it, and the white canvas showing through. And then with oils, I’ve just started using oils on top of acrylics, where I know the paint’s going to be thicker and I don’t want it to look plastic. And also of course, the handling is different—with oils you can go back and really polish stuff, whereas with acrylics it gets… mucky and weird. But I would say that I’m more of a colorist, so a lot of what I end up doing when I’m painting is balancing extremes of color, and I think that that’s what gives my paintings dimension, because I really… I’ve never been one to slop paint on, I’ve always been quite reserved with the amount of paint, so the color kind of compensates for that.

GRAHAM: When you begin painting, do you set out with a particular idea in mind of what you think it might look like, or a color in mind? Or does it form as you go?

CHMIELINSKI: I do. I need a lot of guidance while I paint, so I actually try… I always use a source image, and I try to obfuscate it as much as possible so there are moments of me incorporating accidentals and leaps of faith while I paint, but in terms of having a kind of structure on which to kind of load that freedom while painting, I create source imagery from collages. So I’ll take a lot of elements and make sure that they work together, and what I’ve been doing recently is I’ll create collages… I think to go back to that idea of “perfect images,” there have been times when I’ve created something as a source image, but it’s been so cool on its own that when I tried to paint it, the elements that I liked were lost, and the things that remained were like a skeleton, and it didn’t have any of that movement that I like to keep or center things around. So now what I do is I make sure that the source imagery is great but it’s not perfect, and then I hope that in the translation, or the transliteration, it’ll kind of complete itself.

"Portrait 18" - detail - Winston Chmielinski

GRAHAM: What time of day do you work best? Morning, late night…?

CHMIELINSKI: This is actually a really big problem for me. [LAUGHS] I have no good schedule. I’ve found that my best time is in the morning, and that’s usually before I get a coffee, because coffee makes me want to listen to music. And then when I listen to music I want to dance or something, so I think if I wake up and have breakfast… that would be the best time to start painting for me. Also late at night, my contacts fall out, and I hate wearing glasses while I paint…

GRAHAM: Really?

CHMIELINSKI: Yeah. It’s so weird, like the little tiny things that you can see that are in your periphery kind of pull… they kind of weight the process. So even when I’m looking at my source imagery, if there’s a border on it, it completely changes how I would grapple with the composition. It’s just these weird things that I’ve started to become really sensitive to, and having your contact fog up or get sticky is probably the most distracting thing in the world for painting.

GRAHAM: Can you tell us a bit about your background? Where did you grow up, how did you “find” art, how did your love of art and painting develop?

CHMIELINSKI: I grew up in Boston, and originally… well, I played a lot of computer games, like a lot of computer games, and I had always been doodling, but I think while I gamed I was doodling a lot of swords, and elves and stuff, so I thought that I wanted to be a concept artist, and then… I don’t think that attraction to the fantasy world has ever ended. But maybe around when I was a junior in high school was when I first started painting, and it was because I was so lackluster at every other extracurricular activity. My school required that we played two sports out of the year, so I would do them, but I was so, again, lackluster at these things that… I wanted to be known for something, and I wasn’t, so when I started painting, it was the first time I ever got, like, a pat on the back. So there was that support from one teacher, and I kind of just went with it. I guess it was a good environment to latch onto something, and so I latched onto painting. I’ve always been really liberal with my colors, and I think that that’s one thing that doesn’t normally happen when you’re in this sort of classroom environment… you have cheap oils, and you’re told to paint this. There’s a kind of “high school brushwork” that’s very tiny and meticulous, and I’ve always been impulsive and impatient, so I just kind of went for it, and that’s turned into what I embrace now.

GRAHAM: So how did you begin to launch yourself in the world as a young artist? What was the turning point for you, when you went from being a student to being more recognized in the art world?

CHMIELINSKI: I would say having an online presence early on was probably what gave me the idea that I could do this for a living. I joined a few of those art portfolio communities, and I just got a lot of good feedback from them. My mother’s actually a pastel artist, and she’s involved in more of a local art scene in Boston; she does fairs and things… and in the neighborhood where I was living when I was in high school, Jamaica Plain, they have this monthly art open studio thing, so I kind of just submitted my art to the city arts council and they gave me a little show, and I sold work there for the first time. And it was insane, because my dad’s a lawyer, so he was like, “Okay, price it high.” And my paintings sold for quite a bit of money, and then this one collector bought like thirteen pieces… and all of a sudden, I had a savings, like a pretty nice savings. And so I ended up going… as soon as I graduated from high school, I took a year and a half and went to Paris, and there I kind of pretended that I was an artist. And I think that gave me the confidence to kind of just say, okay, I can go somewhere and just do this, and from the get-go, present myself as somebody who, you know, paints, and be taken seriously. And because I haven’t really done anything else, maybe it’s out of ignorance that I’m still doing it, I don’t know.

GRAHAM: When you went to Paris, were you doing a program?

CHMIELINSKI: I enrolled in a third-party study abroad program, and it was a French language, contemporary art kind of coursework thing. I ended up leaving the program because it was so overpriced for what we were getting, and worked in a bar… painted out of this really shitty apartment near Bastille on the fifth floor. It was a rooftop thing… I guess they call it sous les toits, or “under the roof.” I couldn’t stand up, I had to like sit down and shower. It was super intense, my parents of course were like offended… they were like, “How could you do this? This is disgusting!” But I painted there, and the one good thing was that I had this amazing skylight, so I always had really nice sunlight for painting. And so I just did that for a while.

GRAHAM: What bar did you work at?

CHMIELINSKI: I worked at a bar in the Marais called Le Feeling.Super tacky bar. I tell people now because it’s funny. If anyone’s ever been in that district, it’s like the one bar that you never go into. You literally walk by and you’re like, how could that place still be in business? And I got hired because they just lost their… they called it their “one ethnic employee.” So they were like, “Come in! You’re underage, that’s fine, just don’t tell anybody…” I learned a lot of really bad French there.  [LAUGHS]

GRAHAM: Who are some of your favorite artists?

CHMIELINSKI: Francis Bacon… I really like Kirchner, this lady Maria Lassnig… she uses a lot of white space too, and has these kind of deformed figures. I mean, they’re all within the same school, I think. I like some obvious ones, like Egon Schiele… I really like De Kooning. He has so many perfect paintings… he’s a painter’s painter. I saw his exhibit at MoMA twice. It blew my mind. It’s amazing… it’s also amazing how much these people have produced. I’ve realized lately that there’s no shortcut to developing your work. You have to do this every day, and you have to just keep going and going and going, and then you’ll find a way to satisfy yourself as you go along.

GRAHAM: Do you have one seminal piece of your own that’s your favorite, or you feel defines your aesthetic?

CHMIELINSKI: That’s actually a really good question. There are ones that I know people will like. So if I’m meeting someone for the first time, and I say I’m an artist, and they say “What do you do?” and I whip out my phone, I’ll probably show them this painting called Man Woman Bird, because I think it’s a good mix of. It was a very successful transition from rendering beautifully and having amazing interplay of colors and shapes and things. My personal favorite work tends to be… the subject matter tends to be a little bit abrasive. It’s funny to me because I definitely don’t arbitrarily choose the images that I do, but I tend to just deal with the forms and then when people see it, the first thing they see is something extremely sexual, or… and I think that it’s a good pointer for me because I want to get away from the literalness of what people can see in my paintings. So I recently did a painting for Envoy Enterprises, which is the gallery that I show for now, and it’s called… it was for this show called Containers. And I really like that painting, so I would say that, out of my recent work. It’s called Large. It should be on my website.

GRAHAM: What’s it of?

CHMIELINSKI: The image is of this lady… it’s a full figure, the only thing that’s cut out is the foot, part of the foot is cut off, but I really like that the whole figure is there, I think that, to kind of sidetrack a little bit, I think that when you have the whole figure, you can really  deform it, because you have all the parts. So it would still make sense that it’s a figure, whereas when it’s just a cropped bust, or a face… then it’s dead. You can’t deform it too much or else it won’t be anything.  But in order to do these full figures, you need space…

GRAHAM: What’s the scale of your work?

CHMIELINSKI: It’s getting bigger, it’s normally from like two or three feet on a side, all the way up to six feet. But the six-foot stuff, I’m just starting to do it now, because it involves making my own canvases, being in Boston, where I’m painting out of right now… but I never want to go back to being forced to paint small. I really, really like what you can do with a large surface.

GRAHAM: Any future ideas or projects that you have in mind?

CHMIELINSKI: Yeah. Well, I’m trying to get into residencies right now, so my idea is to leave New York, where I know that my lack of self-control is kind of… it’s delaying my development as an artist. And it’s been amazing, I’ve met good people, I joined the gallery Envoy, on Chrystie and Delancey, so that’s a liaison. So my next step is to get out… hopefully not have to pay for it, if I get these residencies, they’ll give me a stipend or whatever, and then just work on my art until I feel like I’m ready to get into an MFA program. I’d like to have that studio program, just because I’ve never done it, and I think that it is an important place to have a think tank of ideas and talk with other artists. In terms of actual specific development in my own painting, I think that I’m on the right track, so I just want to see where that goes.

GRAHAM: So you’ve been living in New York since you graduated from NYU?

CHMIELINSKI: I’ve been living here since NYU started, so… in total, it’s been five and a half years.

GRAHAM: Do you think you’d want to go back to Boston?

CHMIELINSKI: I think that I need to leave the United States. I’m trying right now to get into a two-year residency in Amsterdam. If that doesn’t work out, then I’m going to try for one in Japan. And then, for living after the fact, I’m kind of… I kind of just jump into things, so I’ve been looking at the artists and designers who live in Antwerp, and I know nothing about the place except that it’s small. I think it would be really nice, and I like how across the board of fashion and art, there’s a really nice embrace of both beauty and challenging ideas, and so it’s approachable but it’s also grappling… it’s also pushing the line subtly, which I think is also my inclination. I like that it’s small, and I can’t get too lost, and I also like that temperament there. It’s kind of like the Northeast, but it also has a richer culture.

GRAHAM: Last question. Do you have a few words that you would use to describe your aesthetic?

CHMIELINSKI: Yeah. “Sensation”… I have to throw “figure” in there. I don’t like the word “abstract,” so “exact,” “clean,” “painterly”… I guess… Oh, I hate that word actually. I hate the word “painterly.” But I really think that I am a painter’s painter. So I guess it’s painterly. But I hate the word.

Text and photography by Annabel Graham for Pas Un Autre. Visit Winston Chmielinsky's website to view more of his artwork.

(Annabel Graham is a photographer and writer who travels regularly between Los Angeles, New York, and Paris – she has worked for Interview Magazine as well as the Paris Review, and she is a regular contributor to Pas Un Autre and Autre Quarterly. Read all here articles for Pas Un Autre here)

"High Tide," Winston Chmielinski

Crime & Love: An Interview with Maxwell Snow

You'd think by the look of things that artist Maxwell Snow's outlook on life is decidedly grim, but amidst the decay and the funereal macabre lies a deep curiosity about what it means to really be alive. His artistic oeuvre is a documentation of sorts of life's constant and cruel reminder of its strange impermanence, from the grim-reaperesque portraits of hooded KKK members, to his stark black and white imagery of skulls, crosses, coffins, and girls tied to railway tracks, to a headstone in a recent series that reads, "Wish you were here." However, Snow, who is based in New York City, seems fastidiously intentional about his philosophies on life and death. There is a sense that Snow subscribes to the notion that the soul lives forever and the body is like a some sort of racing motorcycle and we're all blowing down the highway at 120 miles an hour and we might as well crash into the wall at full speed in a heap of burning metal than at a slow meaningless sputter. Snow's new series 100 Headless Women, which will be on view this March at the Kathleen Cullen gallery in New York, explores this notion further by turning the gallery walls into a mausoleum with a selection of ghostly mugshots, black and white photographs of statues of saints who were doused in acid to obscure their features, and a series of portraits of nude women with their faces blackened out with a whip of etching ink in order "[to wrap them] in a cloak of anonymity to seal their singular identities….[so] the viewer is asked to focus on the collection group and devise a story within." I got a chance to ask Maxwell Snow a few questions about death, life, the afterlife, his inspirations, and a run down on what his new show is all about. Read interview after the jump and see selections from the new series.

PAS UN AUTRE: A lot of your work seems to be seeped in the mythologies of death and the afterlife – where do these allusions to death and darkness come from?

MAXWELL SNOW: Death is ever present. Human beings for as long as they have been on this planet, have been fascinated with the afterlife. I would say for good reason. It is a part of almost every story. In mythology, heroes and saints are defined by how they die as much as by how they live, Artistic representations of the end of life stimulate my curiosity. As a child I was always interested in stories of great men and I continue to be inspired by the hero’s journey. Death is a mystery. Einstein said, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.” Death is beautiful. No one likes to talk about it, people want to sanitize the idea of death because they are afraid of it. People fixate on the physical side of it and not the metaphysical. You cannot erase energy you can only change its form. The soul doesn’t die it just takes its clothes off at the end.

AUTRE: What do you expect the afterlife to be like?

SNOW: If its hell its Time Square but I imagine the conversation there will be more interesting than anywhere else.

AUTRE: You started to pop up on the gallery circuit around 2008 - have you always been such a consummate artist?

SNOW: Thank you for that but satisfaction with my work is elusive. There is no such thing as consummation. I am always striving for an imaginary plateau that can never be reached. Always looking for perfection, though impossible, I aim for it. I want to make things that resonate with the universe.

AUTRE: Where does the outlaw persona come from - what is it about the American outlaw?

SNOW: I suppose it has always been my nature to question authority. Crime and love go hand in hand.

AUTRE: Who are some of your favorite American outlaws?

SNOW: Billy The Kid.

"Crime and love go hand in hand."

AUTRE: There is a quote in the press release for your new series of photographs called 100 Headless Women that says something to the effect that death is a "territory unknown to the living, and thus can be whatever we make of it" - can you talk a little bit about that and the new series?

SNOW: It’s the ultimate mystery and who doesn’t love a good mystery? This series is about stripping perspective in order to force it into new channels of awareness. How do we see the other? What are we looking at? What are we looking for? Most importantly, what are we missing? When the eyes and face are taken away you are forced to redirect. You almost frantically search for an anchor for your view, a place for your eye to rest. The place where the information can be appropriated. The subjects are naked, eyes completely obscured. I expect that perhaps the viewer will experience is a form of cognitive dissidence that shakes them up. It puts you off kilter and off balance. The only way you can expand on your conciousness is to question the way you do things now.

AUTRE: Who are some of your biggest artistic inspirations?

SNOW: The surrealists and the old masters.

AUTRE: Whats next?

SNOW: The undiscovered country.

Maxwell Snow's100 Headless Women will be on view at Kathleen Cullen Fine Artsin New York from March 3 to April 7, 2012. Text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper for Pas Un Autre