John Yau is a poet as well as a supremely prolific art and literary critic. A new collection of his prose, The Wild Children of William Blake (from Autonomedia, 2017), centers on oft-forgotten artists and under read writers, with the occult as the leitmotif that threads many of his connections. Leave it to a poet to consider the unseen, the enigmatic — and even the mystical — in critical writing today.

Yau’s apparent sense of constant genuine interest is what first attracted me to his art writing. He works tirelessly in efforts to tell his readers what they don’t already know — as opposed to constantly reminding of theoretical conventions, canonical standards, etc. As the painter Philip Guston said to Bill Berkson, quoted in these pages, “I got sick and tired of all that purity. I wanted to tell stories” (91). His manner of clear analysis is in the service of engaging the senses first and foremost, evident in prose that emerges from curiosity. The writing is sharp, never pedantic but exploratory, off-the-cuff. Like other poets who know how to write about art (from Apollinaire to a litany of modern successors who knew that someone could, and needed to, improve upon those efforts), he looks intently and thinks imaginatively on his subjects and their occasions, coming up with parallels and historical insights that are often strange, memorable. But unlike some poets whose art criticism focuses almost exclusively on formal qualities, Yau’s writing is invariably dedicated to telling stories.

Yau has been engaged with art criticism for the better part of three decades. Reading The Wild Children, one doesn’t get the sense that he sits at his desk, armed with art history textbooks to get it “right” in an anticipated scholarly way — despite the fact of his prolificness (96 articles at Hyperallergic, for instance, where he is a member of the editorial collective that produces the Weekend section, in 2017 alone) and the kind of frame of reference it might require. It really seems like Yau just takes simple notice of what tugs on his coat tails. He makes it a point to put aside time every day to look and ponder at art, and further, to remain in the daily practice of writing.

The chosen organizing theme in this book, the occult, gives way to novel approaches (as opposed to otherwise narrower views) to artists, their works and lives, and what to notice in art. As I understand it, the occult relates to and communes with the things in this world that we can maybe perceive but not necessarily see or define, and to consider it is to invoke new experiences that might perhaps bring surprise and new understandings. Its consideration involves, in short, “looking for what was hidden in plain sight, for the invisible within the visible” (35)—which in turn recalls, perhaps, Odilon Redon’s notion of “the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible.” In his essay on the poet Robert Kelly, Yau observes that “whatever place we consciously or unconsciously inhabit — call it a house or reality — is in a state of flux” (49), that we are constantly dealing in uncertainty. This essay is strange, brilliantly peripatetic, and reveals a lot about Yau’s one-thing-follows-another mode of investigation, and many of his affinities. “Between its root and its obsolescence, the word (the author) wanders, meaning only one thing to him at a time,” (53) he writes.

Yau often turns his attention to painters, refuting the idea that painting is dead — seeing its value, its continual power to transport. In his essay on British artist William Tillyer, Yau asks important questions relative to anachronisms in painting that one might dismiss too quickly. In his analysis, he sides with sincerity, asking “how do you make an image laden with history fresh?” considering what it takes to re-frame an idyllic subject — in this case, a bucolic stone bridge as in the Bridge Paintings series (1982-83) — to bring it up to date, and make it “part of the present rather than an artifact of the past.” I get the sense that loaded subjects like this, tropes from Romanticism that carry over to today, are sometimes frowned upon in more rigorous circles, and yet Yau takes note of Tillyer’s being “critical of those who would approach this subject solely thought mechanical means or solely through an ironic use of paint” (108). The poet’s attention to what’s dialectically possible, worthy of another point of view, proves utterly worthwhile today.

Innate curiosity explains, I think, why Yau pays so much attention to biographical information in these reviews and essays. It’s not his one chosen methodological “lens” per se, and he’s not just paying due-diligence — it’s clear that Yau wants to know, to dig, and for the reader to find out. He’s not an evangelist, either, and his takes bear little air of sentimentality, nostalgia, or hyperbole — it’s more ‘take it or leave it’, and it’s all very user-friendly. The book is broken up into six chapters, with an interrelated parade of fascinating figures that goes from painter Hilma af Klint, in the book’s beginning, to figures like the sole “American Surrealist” poet Philip Lamantia, and the painter Katherine Bradford. Two very striking illustrations made it into print here. Jay Defeo’s The Eyes (1958) takes up an entire spread (befitting of its massive aspect) early on, and Brian Lucas’s rather psychedelic Afternoon’s Embryo (2016) helps to close the book’s eponymous essay. The Wild Children share 264 pages; not one of them is super famous, but all of them are congenial.

John Yau. The Wild Children of William Blake. (Brooklyn, 2017: Autonomedia) ISBN 1570273243. $15

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Last year, I attended a touring talk given by critic and curator Bob Nickas in which he showed slides of a hundred paintings, one from each year in the past century. A colleague of mine complained, “This guy is too cocky. What the hell does he know anyway?” I laughed: He was right, but only kind of. Nickas was a little arrogant as he blazed through a century of art in just over an hour. But an off-the-cuff, disaffected manner of talking and writing about art is energizing— it keeps you looking. He’s often called a misfit, and his work is seen as an antidote to stuffy art history and unintelligible critical theory. To me, having seen him draw large crowds of young artists and art history students, he’s not really a misfit. He does, though, seem keen on maintaining that conception: “The art world is such a haven for misfits … because it can be very forgiving of its talent.”

In Nickas’s latest book, The Department of Corrections: Collected Writings 2007-2015 (Karma), he does little to dispute his reputation as an art world maverick: After all, he wrote that “in art, if you’re allowed or encouraged to do something, I always opt out.” Covering his writings from a period of eight years in over 400 pages, he doesn’t drone on about what’s aesthetically worthy of attention or what’s fashionable at the moment. Neither is this book a sampling of his favorite artists: Nickas is just telling the reader about art ad hoc because it’s in our midst and it occurred to him to do it that way. Throughout his oeuvre, Nickas considers art just as we consider other things in life, without hierarchical assumptions of quality that get in the way of curiosity.

The book is organized into four theme-driven sections: Lost & Found; NYC; Repetition and the Politics of Time; Out of the Blue and into the Black; and Supply & Demand. The lattermost section is my favorite: It has a poem composed by Nickas, made up of phrases and lines from a piece of art criticism published in Artforum that engaged in what Nickas calls the old “See How Pretty, See How Smart,” or what he describes as “a foxy, linguistic blurting.” It’s a pretty good reminder to keep it simple. “Why are there prizes in art?” he asks in “Closing the Gap Between Art and Life,” adding “it doesn’t get more medieval than that.” Nickas often deals with the practical implications of producing art today, and he’s recommending that we pay attention right now — meaning that we ought to forget what we’ve been told, do things “the wrong way,” or piss some people off if that’s what it comes to. But at the same time, he’s not calling for some kind of idiotic, random art for the sake of itself, created just to produce more material waste. He can be deprecating and appreciative at the same time: “We really have to stop blaming Andy for the numbing commercialization of art. From the very beginning of his career, Warhol implicated himself within a system where not only is art for sale, but so too is the artist. And so he became the CEO.” I find his analyses of the art world to be necessary (and funny) in such a complex political and social period; they pull no punches about its problems. “Branding wasn’t just for cattle” he writes, “apparently it’s also for sheep,” complaining that the blasé look,of much contemporary art exhausts us all.

Nickas is critically aware of the flaws in collecting and art historicism, and writes that “history usually ends up being written by those who came into the world around the very same time that is subject to examination,” indicating that a close look at the infuriating circumstances of our time might be a good idea; although his comment that “the future is a thing of the past,” hints that maybe the past wasn’t exactly ideal either. That said, there’s an entire section dedicated to New York, a place where “art has always left traces behind, but like everything else in the city, those traces vanish a little more every passing day, until they are completely erased.” With the exception of the appearances of the ‘80s and a dedication to New York, there’s not too much sentimental nostalgia here.

Corrections rings true to free-association, but only in part. One thing of note here is a critical sense of what’s been given too much publicity (such as Jeff Koons) and who’s been left out of the conversation. In “Basquiat and the Collecting of History,” Nickas takes a popular Frank Stella line for a spin, changing it to “what you don’t see isn’t there,” adding that, despite Basquiat’s popularity in contemporary eyes, the MOMA has not yet acquired any of his paintings. He makes it a point to write about other important black artists like Kara Walker and David Hammons — with a notable sense of curiosity, making an example of how to approach contemporary art and culture with imagination and a critical mind. As Nickas has said, “it’s what’s in front of you that’s important.” His interest is in stories and in seeing things, and nothing is prescribed or necessary. Rather, for Nickas, art is about experience on a continuum.

Bob Nickas: The Dept. of Corrections: Collected Writings 2007-2015. (New York: Karma, 2016. 416 pp. ISBN 9781942607199. $25.00)

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Imaginative responses to art can be scarce during bleak times. Unmediated responses are even less likely, thanks to the internet. A lot of contemporary discourse hinges on art-market trends, (e.g. Zombie Formalism), cultural analysis, and too little of the imaginative attention that can make talking about and looking at art more enjoyable. This aspect of enjoyability is what charms me about Swiss-born writer Robert Walser’s art writings, collected in a new book titled Looking at Pictures. The book was translated by the redoubtable Susan Bernofsky along with Lydia Davis and Christopher Middleton. Walser’s art writings are playfully subjective, absurd, and they reveal a writer more engaged with pictures than artists and their educations or backgrounds. These musings, often not “about” the paintings, render art historical genre distinctions useless — at least while in the whimsical nowhereland of Walser’s vernacular.

Marcel Duchamp said “there are two kinds of artists: the artist who deals with society; and the other artist, the completely freelance artist, who has nothing to do with it.” The latter is how I’d characterize Robert Walser. But unlike the dadaists, he celebrates aesthetic values, with a distinctive rigor of discernment and impassioned description, in place of frigid academicism or conventions engaged to meet expectations. Walser’s work is on his terms, ones that in contemporaneous eyes seem childish and strange. It’s a strangeness not for the sake of cuteness, but to point out the strangeness already built into things and situations.

In 1910, Walser wrote that the “imagination that counts is not the external sort, it’s an inward one.” This is a good way into his art writings, done from 1902 till the end of his career in 1930, a few of which were never published. In Looking at Pictures, context can be tenuous, but that’s OK: we don’t come to this kind of book for news or intellectual rightness, much less the truth. I don’t recommend a total lack of critical context, art historical or otherwise. Rather, I find that certain of our earlier belletrists remind us how to look in new ways. Like Giorgio Vasari’s writings about the artists of his times, Walser’s characterizations of people and the art of the past show a depth of feeling and a surprising poetic consciousness.

His takes on paintings by Paul Cezanne, Vincent van Gogh, Éduoard Manet, and his brother Karl Walser, among others, are often entirely irrelative to an art historical canon and can seem critically nascent; as Bernofsky and Christine Burgin point out, in Walser’s review titled “The Van Gogh Picture,” his intentions to compose a clear review are dashed by his having realized “that art criticism is not possible.” Walser goes on to add that “Not only is it impossible to say anything about the work — it is impossible even to begin to ’see’ it.”

One of my favorite parts of Looking at Pictures that had me doubled over, crying with laughter is Walser’s take on a tragicomedy, “The Brueghel Picture.” There’s nothing all that funny about Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s The Parable of the Blind (1616) — six blind men in a line stumble over one another — but Walser’s turn of phrase, his oblique point of view and illogical descriptive methodology relative to the painting’s subject, make seeing it now a different experience — as if the painting has transmogrified. Suddenly, each man in procession appears to be simultaneously guiding and jostling one another into his demise. The pit into which the men fall is now inevitable, irresistible, spellbinding each of these nincompoops: “Blind men are quarreling … people blindly hacking away at each other’s worthy, respect-worthy heads.” Walser adds, quite dumbly, that, “in a certain sense, all of us are blind, even though we have eyes to see.”

Elsewhere, Walser makes imaginary tableaus. His “analysis” of Rembrandt’s Saul and David (II) (1655–60) begins with a critique of power, a send-up of the contradictory state of a man having everything but “assailed by melancholia.” Walser leaps into a two-page fantastical scene wherein David’s harp plays a quoteworthy, aphoristic spectacle. One statement that “anger lacks greatness” is followed by the observation that “those in power must not forget that they are powerless, because they’re human. A thousand times more beautiful than living life is living for others.” These are worthy of the timeless wisdom of someone like Japanese haiku master Matsuo Bashō. “When we all have made peace with ourselves, no one will be left with an adversary,” Walser writes, presumably still gazing back at Saul and David.

Walser is at his best when he writes about the paintings of his brother Karl, as in his review of Portrait of a Lady (1902), a painting of a young woman reading in a park: “The green of the meadow is rich and warm, and speaks a romantic and adventurous language, and the whole cloudless picture inspires observant, quiet contemplation.” This gives insight into why, given his wont for flights of fancy in other of his prose forms, writing about art finds Walser at home. He ends with the assertion that “every living thing in the world should be happy,” and in case he hadn’t been clear enough, he punctuates it: “No one should be unhappy.”

A proletariat, son of a shopkeeper, Walser spent his later years in a mental institution (willful to the vicissitudes of modern society; no doctor was able to diagnose Walser as having any illness). He’d vow never to write again, resolved to live out the rest of his days so-called “mad,” obstinate to the end. “Everything I have neglected to say can be given voice by others” he wrote in 1926. 30 years later, some kids found Walser frozen dead on Christmas Day; he’d escaped from the hospital to wander. It’s not hard to imagine Walser looking at his world, then Switzerland, sufficed to take it in and appreciate it without having to describe it. Just like an artist, “He feels it, that’s all,” as Walser wrote in 1921, “and that’s how he finds it.”

Walser, Robert. Looking at Pictures. Susan Bernofsky, Lydia Davis and Christopher Middleton (trans.) (New York: New Directions Publishing, 2015). ISBN: 9780811224246. 128 pages. $24.95

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“The elements of a new life should already be in formation among us — in the realm of culture — and it’s up to us to draw on them to liven up the debate.” – Asger Jorn

Is Rob Pruitt an artist or a salesman — and if the latter, what is it that he’s selling? A new book from Italian publisher Bruno, Rob Pruitt’s eBay Flea Market: Year 1, describes itself as Pruitt’s “unconventional autobiography.” Beyond being a catalog of cultural detritus cum-artist’s-book, this strange paperback might make one wonder, What about this is Art? And why would the publisher waste time and money to make this thing? It looks pretty crappy (seemingly on purpose), as it’s literally nothing more than an eBay item inventory in print, enfolded by a glossy cover bearing a blurry, incidental image. But a good sleuth will always search through the trash. You can find out a lot about somebody by looking there; and a flea market can also be a good place to learn about someone’s life, based on maybe what it was once like.

With this in mind — and eBay often being a lot like a kind of digital bazaar — Pruitt is selling a kind of story, one that has also been staged as an actual flea market installation or performance all over the place. In fact, that’s how this all started. Pruitt began his flea markets as his own sort of Happenings way back in 1999 in NYC. They’ve been held art galleries, art fairs, museums, and sometimes businesses. He and his friends began by exhibiting and selling pretty much whatever they wanted, from art to the stuff they had laying around their apartments. No wonder. His book is a jumble of quotidian personal objects in the most perplexing of situations: a confluence of consumer products, some of which are considered fine art or pop culture relics in the space of an online flea market. Funnily enough, the images of each object for sale are set against a generic cloud backdrop, either that or, for items sold during the months of November or December, one of that and falling snowflakes — to evoke what any merchant of consumer goods would, you guessed it, The Holidays.

As an autobiography, the book is unconventional; it says almost nothing strictly personal about Pruitt. It’s at first glance a mishmash of nonessentials: a “POWER Brass Paperweight CROWN *Pop *Art *Sculpture” is listed as having “plenty of mass to hold down ALL of your papers!” It comes with the caveat “*Warning this paperweight can be used as Brass Knuckles if things get a little dicey.” The book goes from Valentine’s Day tchotchkes to a MoMA toilet brush in a page or two. Really, what the hell am I even looking at here?

I haven’t seen a book like this since having been introduced to the once impossible-to-find An Anecdoted Topography of Chance (Atlas Arkhive, 1966), by Daniel Spoerri. That book essentially documents (ad absurdum) a moment in time and all the things on or in the author’s desk in that moment. Like Spoerri’s insane book, Pruitt’s is so absurd — so mind-blowingly packed with surprising objects, their juxtapositions and descriptions and the misfit spirit that’s still somehow hard to come by — it’s laugh-out-loud funny and worthy of any well-made book to be found in the catalogues of DAP. That is also to say, with a backhanded compliment, that the book is a piece of junk. The aforementioned cover image, one of a little old smiling, wooden, armless doll with a mustache, is blurry and set on the backdrop of cloudy heavens, and the pages, sans-pagination, are no different from what can be found on Pruitt’s actual eBay page, making the book essentially just here for posterity, proof of life, or at best a gag (my bet).

What I know of Pruitt’s art is that it’s all this surprising and unconventional; he seems uninterested in art trends and has a great sense of humor. “Is this guy French?” someone asked me, going on to comment that past inventive French artists and writers seem to have been bent on scatology — from François Rabelais to Alfred Jarry to Marcel Duchamp — of the same lineage. He’s not writing about crap per se, just presenting things — crap and some higher art stuff — with no discernable hierarchical importance at all. Pruitt seems to be along this lineage, though he perhaps doesn’t exactly belong to it. To me, Pruitt and his sense of abandon may be in a similar trajectory as a thinker, or better, a prankster, is more Marx Brothers than those artists. Pruitt takes some of what he’s doing just a little further, perhaps the way that Andy Warhol did, with art embracing and involving itself in consumer culture and materialism in order to motivate or further a different kind of thinking.

Duchamp, Warhol, or even Tony Smith all realized that art is happening in time immemorial and with all things, and what they made and talked about had this in mind. That’s how I think one can appreciate this book. To these people, and now to Pruitt, there’s “a reality there,” as Smith said, “which had not had any expression in art.” What’s art? Anything. Pruitt’s own pants, sold for $.99 this month online; maybe, as his book evinces, almost anything with a panda bear or a heart on it. Pruitt presents, of all things, fuchsine grapes, which are poisonous if eaten — and a fake apple that he gives the hilarious appellation “Magritte-esque”!

The unbelievable effect of this book is that in its utter pointlessness and overwhelming cacophony it becomes something like a digital arcade, such as those within which Walter Benjamin found reason to both protest and to admire the contemporary. Beyond how strange the book is describing it outside of art historical and theoretical terms is surprisingly difficult. “It’s a catalogue, very spare in often ironic or witty description, with no other literature or even an introduction, made up of all this guy’s eBay items.” This kind of thing usually begs the question of why, what for? Or else the statement, like it or not, “how dumb.” The former of which isn’t far off at all, in the best way possible.

Pruitt, Rob. Rob Pruitt’s eBay Flea Market: Year 1. Tommaso Speretta (ed.) (Venice, Italy: bruno, 2015). ISBN-13: 978-8899058098. 296 pages, $32

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“He talks but he has nothing to sell.” – Edwin Denby, “Dance Criticism,” 1949

Early last Thursday, we received the regrettable news that the poet, teacher, and art critic Bill Berkson had suddenly passed away. Having miraculously recovered from a few serious health setbacks over the past decade, including a double lung transplant, Berkson succumbed to a heart attack. Over the weekend, talking with just a few of his close friends, so many were impressed by his resilience and youthful spirit specifically during this comeback. He would often look very well again, gaining back some of the weight he’d lost, and in general still as sharp and as uniquely vivacious as ever. As painter and friend Tom Burckhardt shared in an email message, “it was wonderful to see his great second act after almost dying from emphysema about 10 years ago.” Over the past few days, many artists and writers have been mourning his death and celebrating his life. A born New Yorker and long-time California resident, there will doubtlessly be celebrations on both coasts in the coming months.

As Bill’s contemporary and close friend the poet and art critic John Ashbery has pointed out, “like his friend Frank O’Hara, Bill Berkson writes about his friends.” This is also absolutely true of both his poetry and a lot of his critical prose. Berkson contributed to and was a corresponding editor for Art in America, was a contributor and poetry editor for artcritical, a contributor to Artnews, Modern Painters, and many other publications. Since his early twenties, Berkson had surrounded himself with visual artists and poets, often collaborating with both. In his lifetime he wrote about a dozen books in collaboration with visual artists and poets, many of which remain in print. His most recent publication, Invisible Oligarchs (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016) is a book of his travels through Russia collected in an Apica model notebook. An entirely Berkson-dedicated publication, For Bill, ANYTHING: Images and Text for Bill Berkson was recently published by Pressed Wafer, chalk-full of writing and visual works from 75 contributors, musing on Berkson’s work and life, including collaborations with some of his friends like Philip Guston, Alex Katz, Bernadette Mayer, and many others.

Berkson was always surrounded by and making new friends. It didn’t matter how young or old you were: with him status went out the window. Burckhardt, who is the son of Berkson’s close friend and collaborator, the filmmaker and photographer Rudy Burckhardt, remembers that Berkson’s “depth of friendship with artists and writers was amazing. Despite this he never came off as egotistical or self important. I had had some passing conversation with him regarding David Park. A few months later he was writing an article for Art in America on Park and asked me for a quote on my observation on how Park used a very specific (and “incorrect “) color for the eye area of a figure but delivered with a loose ham-fisted panache and how it still convinced. I was thrilled to end up quoted in the article as a barely 20-something artist.”

At a reading in San Francisco’s Alley Cat Books art gallery this past weekend, the poet Norma Cole, a close friend of Berkson’s, gave a reading and a dedication, urging Berkson via one of her lovely closing poems: “So keep on/ Proposing paradise”. Cole also gave fond remembrances, particularly of Berkson’s liveliness and joviality just one night before his passing. Wednesday night at the release party for his wife the curator Constance Lewallen’s new catalogue on conceptual artist David Ireland titled 500 Capp Street, Berkson shared a delightful exchange he had with the young children he taught poetry, wherein one of the kids reported, after the group was asked “what are letters made of?”, so imaginatively shouted out “microbes!” The answer of course, in keeping with Berkson’s siding with clarity, his base of practicality which enabled further wild imaginings, “sound,” — going always for an understanding of how and why this or that works.

Another friend of Berkson’s was at the Cole reading — artist Léonie Guyer, who collaborated with Berkson for the book Not an Exit, (2011) went out of her way to share an anecdote with me from Lewallen’s book release party, when he was in cheerful form, talking excitedly about poetry, jazz, and visual art. Said Guyer, “I was reluctant to come out for the reading, knowing it would be so strange and terribly sad to be amongst the poets without Bill. But I was grateful to be there, to be there for Norma, whose reading moved me so deeply. It’s incredible to think just one week before, I was at Bill’s reading — never dreaming it would be the last one he gave.” Guyer shared perhaps one of the last of Berkson’s enchanting remarks about his favorite artists and the phenomena that caused him to write about them with the charm that he did. Berkson commented that “it was De Kooning who said (in a dialogue with Harold Rosenberg) of Mondrian: Where the lines cross they make a little light.” Guyer concluded by saying, “Every time I was with Bill I learned something special. Every moment luminous.”

As a dedicated reader of Berkson’s writings, the unmistakable trait of both his prose and his poetry is his sense of clarity and his use of surprise — a rare and incredibly satisfying combination when it comes to any expressive medium. You can never predict where his writing is going to take you; his is always insightful, relatable, with hints of spontaneity that never went for weird. An unquestionably unique poet, Berkson’s writing bears characteristics of a world traveler with a breadth of affinity and knowledge. As his friend Aaron Simon, a poet from the younger generation of his poet friends tells it, “Bill had such diverse taste. He liked everything from Beethoven to Miles Davis to Cat Power, and he liked poets as seemingly antithetical as Auden and Amiri Baraka.” One is also hard pressed to compare him to any other writers. Berkson had a vast frame of reference and understanding with which he could passionately and humorously ruminate, or incisively lecture, depending on the assignment. His work is the record of a rare sensibility that blends the intellect of a scholar, the imagination of an artist, the experience of a traveler, the gusto of the impresario, and the heart of a hero.

Berkson saw himself as more or less “unprincipled” in terms of remaining as unconventional as possible — to arrive, as it were, to any object or situation “as fresh as possible,” as he remarked to Charles Bernstein in 2014. It was this fresh approach that gave Berkson the kind of attentive eye to bring unique and memorable things to his criticism, and the power of his intellectual mind that could render his tellings in such varied and effective ways. Communicating what’s being perceived was job #1 for Berkson. And it wasn’t all about what he likes. “I am an amateur” he told a California College of Arts class in 2009, “in the sense of a lover of art when it is lovable.”

Berkson has commented on his being aware of the ethics of a writer, and the humaneness in his writing comes from his distinctive tone and the fact that you can trust what he is telling you. Like a confidante, his writing can be friendly but also will tell you the tough thing you might need to hear which others might not say. He asked for “more life” out of art, and he inspired more life in people by virtue of who he was. Bill lived, as his good friend Frank O’Hara asked of himself as well, “as variously as possible” in his writing and in the world.

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PAUL MAZIAR: Take us back to Buffalo in 2001 when Cuneiform Press began. As I understand it Robert Creeley, a key influence on your work, was there.

KYLE SCHLESINGER: Wow, that’s a blast from the past. Bob was and continues to be a huge influence on me on so many levels: the art of collaboration, poetry, poetics, grace, generosity, and a general ease of movement and insistent curiosity towards the world that is absolutely singular. He was the busiest guy in town, but when you sat down to talk he didn’t miss a beat, remembered everything, which taught me a lot about presence, giving your attention to whatever’s happening on a particular occasion.

Just before I left for Buffalo I had a stint teaching high school English in a mill town in northern Rhode Island. I was fine with the work, but a terrible disciplinarian; he suggested that I come up to Buffalo, get an advanced degree, and try teaching college, which is exactly what I’m doing now, 15 years later and a little bit grayer.

I started Cuneiform with the intention of publishing experimental work by emerging poets — very simple chapbooks by people like Patrick Durgin, whose Color Music (2002) has, to my mind, totally held up over the years. His wife’s brother made some punk collages on a photocopier and we printed the images on a Print Gocco, a little silkscreen kit that was briefly big in Japan. I’d throw a proof in Patrick’s mailbox at night, he’d make any corrections after dinner, then I’d go back to the press, make changes, and repeat for the next page.

I love the low-fi action that comes out of your printshop. The punk show posters you recently did look great. I’ve also seen Cuneiform’s phenomenal book by Okkervil River’s Will Sheff, your call for musicians’ manuscripts for Cuneiform, and heard that you’re moving into a camper on a California beach, to surf and write a book about Bill Callahan.

The Sheff book is definitely the strangest thing I’ve done with Cuneiform. I emailed him, saying that I think his essays on music are the best since Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus, and that I’d like to collect them as a book.

He was very busy, but it occurred to me that books don’t always have to be published in large editions, that, as with book artists, sometimes just a copy or two can do the trick, that sometimes you make a book just because you want it to exist. So I tracked down every essay I could find, started copy-editing and fact-checking just like I would any other Cuneiform book, designed it, got it printed and bound by hand, the whole nine yards, sent him a copy and kept one for myself. Took about a year, a ridiculous amount of work, but it turned out perfect since many Okkervil River songs are about keeping it real, and the virtues of failing in a world with a conservative notion of success. That’s the first in this music series and others will follow, though they’ll be printed in standard editions, distributed properly, etc.

This failure virtue is part of what charms me about poets like Alfred Starr Hamilton. It seems to be something that we don’t find so often these days, do you agree? For instance, you took me to that Katherine Bradford exhibition in Portland, at Adams and Ollman; we were both pretty tickled by the show.

Every artist I talk to is in the same boat: how to make a living and make the art they want to make. Not just in the United States, but Canada, Mexico, Australia, Europe, and so on. Everyone’s wondering, maybe even a little nervous, how life can be more meaningful, but no one can say why… Or can they? The MFA and the National Endowment for the Arts killed art in America, which is why I can say that I feel a strong sense of connection to various artists of the last 40 years or so.

Lou Reed said something like, “There’s a door, and behind that door, is everyone you’ve ever wanted to meet. Then the door opens, and you stand there wondering, knowing that once the door closes, you can’t get out again.” And that’s the danger of monetary success, to my mind. Once you write a “Paul Maziar poem” you can’t write that poem again. Goodbye, Paul. The surplus of art versus the demand for art is at an all-time low, which leads us to an interesting question: Why do you want to do what you do when there’s really no social need or viable economic gain to be had? Is it personal happiness? I’m on board with that; I want everyone to do exactly what they want to do every day, all the time, but I also think that’s the real question we all must ask of ourselves, not specifically related to the day-in/day-out fact of our lives, but taking ourselves, as such, out of the equation.

I know that could sound pessimistic or jaded, but I don’t mean it to come across that way at all; it’s actually quite the opposite. The artist George Herms said, in a recent lecture I attended, “The single most important fact of my existence is that the population of the Earth has doubled since my birth.” I take the sentiment seriously, or as William Carlos Williams once remarked, “An empty space is the sign of a poor economy.” We’ve got a revolution going on, one with more talent and underutilized artistic resources than ever before. So let’s storm the fucking gates and build a world we want to live in, with history close to the heart.

I was charmed by that Creeley anecdote in The Art of Collaboration (Cuneiform, 2015), where he, having seen your letterpress printshop digs, asks why you haven’t gone all-digital, adding “If we had the internet in the fifties when we were editing the Black Mountain Review, we would never have done things this way.” It’s worth pointing out that you’re no extreme model-acolyte (you didn’t follow his line of thinking comme ça). Do you view art online or strictly in museums and galleries?

I keep a foot in both worlds. I teach classes on New Media Theory for a living, so I’m always reading up on the latest advances in technology. I think it’s something artists need to be aware of on multiple levels, but in terms of my personal practice, the more unplugged I am, the happier I am. It would never occur to me to look at art that has been reproduced digitally, nor am I partial to computer-generated art. On a recent trip to New York, I was happy to see a return to painting in the galleries I visited; no more projectors and flat-screen installations, and that’s something of a relief to me. I feel fortunate to have grown up with a typewriter and records, moved to CDs and word processors, and now I have a computer I use as strategically as possible. Mostly you’ll find me reading books, listening to records, and visiting as many artists in their studios and galleries as possible. The all-consuming pendulum of the digital age has hit its apex, at least in the art world, and for people younger than myself in particular: The tangible, sensual, real-time experience of creation is making a major comeback. The desire to get one’s hands dirty is an inexplicable fact of being.

How does your digital music listening experience stack up to your vinyl collection?

Being very much aware of the havoc corporations like Spotify have inflicted on the music industry, I’m adamant about the listener’s responsibility to support musicians because their livelihood is at risk. Needless to say, were so many musicians any less committed to their practice, we would live in a world of silence, barring only the most mainstream pop celebrities.

That said, I have a Spotify account and use it regularly to hear sounds I’ve never heard before; in that sense, it’s a practical tool to have. But if I like something, I’ll buy a ticket to the show, a record or two at my local shop or directly from the musician. It’s actually rather shocking, and saddening, to realize how popular one has to be to make a sustainable wage as a musician. If everyone at a concert threw in $10 into a tip jar, then that musician who just entertained you for a few hours might not have to get up the next morning to mow someone’s lawn or mop the floor of a brewery.

In 2006, Bill Berkson and Bernadette Mayer published What’s Your Idea of a Good Time?: Letters & Interviews 1977-1985. What’s your idea of a good time?

Exactly.

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“A surd is a radical whose meaning cannot be exactly ascertained.” – Lewis Carroll

One exciting thing about the creative act (in the parlance of Marcel Duchamp) is its way of bringing about, for actor and viewer, things that haven’t been experienced before. At least not in the same context. Some of what’s been made by the Belgian poet, filmmaker, and artist Marcel Broodthaers is a good example of this, and in a way that also allows the viewer to creatively complete the picture by way of imagining new meanings of what’s being shown. With this I’d like to bring up nonsense, or better another sense, which is what to my mind what Broodthaers was engaged in. In My Ogre Book, Shadow Theater, Midnight (Siglio, 2016), he tries on Lewis Carroll’s shoes and explores the partitions of reality and make-believe. In one edition of texts and images spanning a little more than a decade, the book collects three short works. The first of three parts, Mon livre d’ogre (My Ogre Book, 1957), is a tableau in a series of poems — with Midnight (1960) in similar fashion, and then the all-image collection Shadow Theater (1973-1974) between the two, made from one of Broodthaers’ Projection series.

Like in Carroll, the why of Broodthaers needn’t be put into words. The tale that Broodthaers weaves is often a fragmented one that is at times homely and always bewildering. These things are what make his poetry congenial, seeming from the wellsprings of consciousness. Consciousness, after all, as writer Harry Mathews has said, “does not produce a particular meaning — it produces no conclusions.” That seems a pretty apt description of this collection: Broodthaers isn’t concluding anything, and with that he makes an adventurer of his reader. For children first, this nonsense has always been a secret means of access to a more vibrant, harlequin world — one I’ve come to find belongs to poetry, in all of its guises.

When the first of the three books came out, it was 1957, a post-war world. The first US edition of Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat appeared, and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl was printed in England and seized by customs officials that year. What is the significance of this? Maybe nothing. To liken Broodthaers’ writing to Carroll is, by the way, in no way to call it anachronistic — a word I’ll look askance at, not abiding by the notion that styles “belong” to specific eras. At the start of My Ogre Book, through the “present day mirror,” morning becomes a world unto itself, reminding one of Alice holding to her orange. Broodthaers also, while courting a familiar style, brings to the poems motifs and highly unusual turns all his own. There is otherworldly music where donkeys play the drums, and the bells of Easter Island, well, remain silent. Elsewhere goats knock on doors, fairies grind coffee, paper flowers fill with dew, and all the while everyday, clearly explained things happen too, making some of this fantasy material even more interesting. “The wind allies itself with the fire/ the rafts burn in the night” is one such line so lucid you can almost smell the smoke, and “The key is under the doormat” as ever.

In his writing and in the images within Shadow Theater, Broodthaers was able to summon the chance-originated play, conundrums, or (un)concerns that his later visual artworks hinge on physically. I’m thinking of Broodthaers’ La Pluie, a 1969 film wherein the artist tries to write as “rain” falls on him, washing away text even as he continues to write. A simple, strange tableau on astronomical situations, human effort and circumstance, all of Broodthaers’ work seems to engage the processes of being in the world and making things. But in his writings, the poet plays with meaning with an almost wholesale disregard for ordinary sense — no net as far as the game of reasoning and logic goes, he creates extra significances that endlessly drift in and out of new senses. In Midnight, surprising things take place: rain falls from the sun, a straw man guards the sea, a black cat constellation is made, centuries get lined up in a matchbox, and stars are turned to salt. This memorable nonsense impresses me just about as much as the regular phenomena it parodies.

Calling it an artist’s book is no stretch — at just over 150 pages, its layout has the look of a children’s book juxtaposed with the simple aesthetic appeal of Raymond Roussel and the artist Zo’s collaboration from 1929, New Impressions of Africa, where images and cantos are informed by one another throughout. The images in this book lie between the two short collections of poems but have no text on their pages.

Thumbing to Shadow Theater (Ombres chinoises) (1973-74) — a series of 80 slides of images taken from comic strips, books, and a photography manual, all of which were projected somewhere sometime — Broodthaers tells another story, again a provisionary one that unravels and winds up again by turns. A visual lexicon involving ordinary or comic incidents, objects, and figures, is reimagined in new juxtapositions that make the familiar baffling. In Shadow Theater, celestial bodies career through outer space and transform to erupting volcanoes, exploding perhaps through a kitchen window, to maybe cause the seasons to tear a man from limb-to-limb. Volcanoes, shadow puppets, and solid black rectangles are a few of this book’s recurrent motifs.

Broodthaers explained the effect of his work in 1965, saying, “The preference for eternity and the natural had ended up producing academicism, as we know. Its replacement by a preference for the ephemeral, for the artificial, for all that is false, aroused my enthusiasm as much as my poetic loyalty.” In Broodthaers, assumed logic is, for a moment, set aside or transmogrified. Be the truth “interstitial,” as Broodthaers calls it, or mere traces in the mind of the artist, the person experiencing the objects will always come away with something new when the imagination has a say.

Broodthaers, Marcel. My Ogre Book, Shadow Theater, Midnight (New York: Siglio, 2016). Trans. by Elizabeth Zuba with Maria Gilissen Broodthaers. ISBN-13: 978-1-938221-11-8. 160 pages. Edition of 1,000. $39.95

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March 19 to April 24, 2016
2916 NE Alberta Street, Suite B (between NE 29th and NE 30th avenues)
Portland, OR, 503 805 5458

Long before it was fashionable to glue clippings of ziggurats (to intimate exotica) from 1970s National Geographic pages, juxtaposed with some modern trope or other (to suggest time-flux), collage had already enjoyed its heyday. The many cute new versions readily found online have the attractive quality of anything else torn out of time, labeled “vintage” and mixed with contemporary imagistic trappings, but like anything novel for the sake of novelty, this kind of juvenile charm wears off pretty fast.

On the other hand, (there’s always another one) there’s “Totems & Cantos,” on view this month at Ampersand Bookshop & Gallery, featuring a selection of collage work by artist and New York gallerist Scott Zieher, created over the past five years. While wildly juxtaposed (e.g. a single glove standing in for legs), these collages aren’t composed of zany connections but diurnal, sometimes totally banal objects displaced, re-contextualized, and distorted to make for something more decorative, puzzling, strange, and often very funny. Actually, these aren’t superimpositions or replacements at all, they’re imaginary constructions. This characterizes their charm. That the figures are composed of disparate parts, giving them almost a readymade quality, makes them more convincing. But of what?

Marvelous robots and occult figurines wear hats made of images of what appear to be bowls, dishes, thimbles, and crucibles, hanging there (so to speak) on toothy white sheets or else found pages in frames, as if to pose their incipient questions from nevertheless mesmerizing appearances. Some of them have toothbrush and bottle bodies or some kind of marble plinth lower situation. Their compositions often appear to have been made up of parts decided on by pulling from a hat. One form, Wave Pattern (2015), is mostly the clipping of a colorful blue, white, and gold waveform filigree ending in a cluster of spheres (flattened, left within borders of white), while another figure in Totem #2 (2012) is made up entirely of those famous helical stripes of a barber shop’s pole.

When Totem #2, the first in this series of 18, makes its appearance near the Ampersand entrance, its four figures stand waiting like deranged poker players and you’re late to the game. But there’s neither hostility nor friendliness in these visages, nothing personal or alien for that matter, and it’s partly because of this that Zieher’s pictures are so enchanting. It’s this kind of magic within the human imagination that Bertrand Russell writes about, describing a force that comes from far off carrying with it the “vastness and fearful passionless force of non-human things.” That’s what these things look like to me anyway. It’s a strange distancing relative to the so-called ordinary that causes the artifice to change a person’s perception with what amounts here to more or less simple cut-up decorations. And there’s always an odd one out. The last in the above-mentioned line of four is caught mid-sway as one of those crazed SkyDancers seen at used car dealerships, only one made of stacked electric hotplates supporting a totemic mask for a head, rather than monochrome nylon. One could posit that this work has something to say about commercial imagery, but should that be done here?

In addition to these dazzling figural compositions, here and there are other forms. Rain Cone (2015) is an ice cream with a kind of hot pink spray paint overlay, and venturing further into the exhibition is a series of multiple forms made up of fragments of type and snippets of collage, aptly called Concretude (2015) (alluding to the shaped language of concrete poetry). Looking long enough at Zieher’s cinematic collages, one begins to consider what that old stage conjurer Georges Méliès was doing when he assembled his magical films a century ago. Through a certain kind of lens, ordinary things (even letters and numbers, not out-and-out strange in their own right straightaway) are put together to make something happen that one didn’t at all expect. In the case of the Concretudes, one can scarcely make out letters at all. These compositions amount to a visual gag, turning the tables on art of the imponderable by way of common objects.

After having seen the exhibition once, a few of these odd little minions paid a visit in two successive nights’ dreams, occasioning my return to them, to guess at the origins of their constituent facets and search for deeper meanings — a totally hopeless task. Seeing this exhibition a second time, Zieher’s works seem, to me at least, to be composed only to delight, taking on the characteristics of dreams. Like some of these compositions, dreams are often cold and at some remove as they occur, but are sometimes unforgettable. Archetypes may be manifested in dreams through familiar and uncanny imagery, and these collages have that same temperament, if such a term can be used for inanimate constructions. Emotions on ice.

Zeiher’s exquisite miniature images are X-Acto’d fragments butted up against larger parts with a scarcity of imperfection, so that when a visual hiccup does appear — such as a white border corner taking a turn to brown or black toward its furthest edge — one has to wonder if it happened by mistake at all. And if not, then are these images, in keeping with their mode of curiosity cabinet on paper, really just here to delight? This is the kind of art that necessitates no further context, history, or other anecdotal information, save for the fact of their creator’s absolute painstaking and considered rendering. This singularly interesting collection of pictures is exactly enough.

The post SkyDancers and Concrete Poetry: Scott Zieher at Ampersand appeared first on artcritical.

You don’t need to know much about the life of artist Niki de Saint Phalle in order to sense traces of it throughout the breadth of her oeuvre. I’m looking through the new monograph, Niki de Saint Phalle (Museo Guggenheim Bilbao & La Fábrica, 2015), thinking of her memory and its constant influence — a cultural memory of women, bodies, the Judeo-Christian religious right, and what a work of art can be. All this seems to me to have conceptual impact on her paintings and sculptures, in a general sense and in the specific — you see it ranging from part to part. But a lot of it also looks ugly if you compare it aesthetically to that of her Modernist friends and the canonized pioneers of the 20th century. This is one reason her work is to me so exciting, in a world where appearances rule. A lot of what she made gives a sense of repulsion, and I like that.

The book is expansive, taking us from her beginnings with writer Harry Mathews, to happenings and the theater, to the end of her creatively fruitful life in 2002. It contains a marvelously detailed timeline, giving a sense of why a lot of her art looks the way it does — with a palpable rage, always a contemptuousness flirting with a kind of heartbreaking and joyous beauty.

She made interesting, weird stuff while a lot of her male contemporaries seemed to care more about career. When asked by Maurice Rheims if she considered herself a Pop artist, she replied, hilariously: “I don’t regard myself as having anything at all to do with Pop art. To begin with, as far as I’m concerned they’re Madison Avenue sellouts, poor publicity-drunk wretches who sit there and wait for Picasso to come out of their navels. As a poet, I have nothing to do with these pathetic people.”

Each thing eventually begins to look not like a solitary object but a fragment of her life’s work in total, something of a serial body of work. Various objects like shoes and other items of clothing, tools like hatchets and pipes, appear frequently. The things she made tastefully lend an impression of personal history or identity. There’s also an imaginative adventuring from or transformation of that specific identity. It’s refreshing, because since Modernism, artists of all kinds have done anything they can to remove the personal, and art in turn takes on the cold aspect of that remove. Les Trois Grâces (1995–2003), from her Nanas series, is a good example of the kind of exuberance that comes from the transformations that I think her creations both underwent and caused. Nanas are biomorphic sculptures of delightfully rotund dancing ladies, larger than life and composed of joie de vivre.

Three mosaic-tiled figures — made from black and white mosaic tiles and mirrored glass — in multihued swimsuits, are caught in three different positions of dance. The imaginative composition of the sculptures is a signature of de Saint Phalle. They don’t look “good” or conventionally sexy, but in their freewheeling, curvaceous absurdity they recall a Renaissance view of the female body to remind that roundness is quite lovely and that the prior view of perfection in said form isn’t real. The Nanas are celebratory, but they certainly don’t represent the celebrated paper-thin girl figure, and the artist knows this. Flipping the pages of Niki de Saint Phalle, female figures and various otherworldly forms congregate — forms which subvert the proposed feminine ideal (still coming after the physiognomy of ancient Venus statues of all things) that’s been around since what seems like forever.

Wonderful quotations are peppered throughout this book, in a script-like white typeface on cobalt pages, which mimics the charm of her handwriting, a recurring element in her work. In a viciously funny interview, called “Art and Guys,” Rheims asks her why, if she’s so anti-men, does she wear clothing only to attract them even more. She replies, “I have no grudge against men. Basically, I just think they’re rather pathetic types who are only good enough to decorate my bed and polish my boots. But for other things, I have no need of them.”

The many interesting textual examples we see throughout don’t undermine the rest of de Saint Phalle’s work. I mention this because contemporary artist statements tend to have the inverse of the intended effect. Looking at the more conceptual of our era’s art, there’s often an attempt to augment what we see, to make better sense of it through explanation; in the case of Niki de Saint Phalle, the text adds context and insight while confirming what we can already see at a glance.

De Saint Phalle’s later work is full of other femininities like necklaces, pendants, brooches, perfume bottles, and (you guessed it) more Nanas. Come to think of what I’d said of the serial aspect of her work, some of her late sculptures even take on their Nana form while replicating memorable celebrity figures like Louis Armstrong. In addition to these, though, are her very mystical totems, tarot cards, and whole sculptural gardens with which the artist and her viewers get to approach the present with a playful and imaginative advance.

Talking de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden (1978-1998) in Tuscany Italy, inspired by Antonio Gaudí’s Park Güell in Spain and based on the 22 major arcana of the Tarot card pack, de Saint Phalle describes “a place far from the crowd and the pressure of time,” showing how through the reimagining and exploration of figures and spaces, one is able to re-approach time. One of the figures in the Tarot Garden, the Hermit, is the representation of triumph. The figure “resembles an Amazon — very sexy and feminine, but strong. There’s no doubt she’s in control of the situation.” It’s an allusion to a continuous battle for the composure of her mind. Another representational figure arises in her sculptural works, the female hero archetype. But it’s the photograph of the artist herself poised with a rifle at the camera, Niki de Saint Phalle Taking Aim (1972), featured on this book’s cover, that seems heroic, especially considering that there’s paint inside the chamber. In the ‘60s, de Saint Phalle saw the television as a framework for artistic experimentation. She once used a TV news spot to shoot paint onto canvases with a rifle. What moxie. These performances were reactions to Modernist painters’ machismo, and are good examples of her ingenuity.

De Saint Phalle seems to come after, formally anyway, the stranger works from the milieus of Pop Art and Surrealism, and, like almost anyone making art in his wake, the paintings of Henri Matisse. That said, Matisse’s paintings are more stylized than much of de Saint Phalle’s art, and because of this I might even more readily liken her sculptural works and collages to someone like Alberto Giacometti, whose creations also seem more like physical embodiments of utterances from within, as opposed to aesthetically, or retinally, beautified stylings.

De Saint Phalle didn’t wait around for big things. In a 1985 TV interview, she said “I had this dream of building a huge sculpture garden; but there are no great patrons anymore. So I thought: ‘Why don’t I become my own patron?’” She then designed a perfume line that would be mass-produced and sold in order to finance her sculpture garden. The perfume bottle is a blue crystalline rectangle topped with a gold lid, upon which two entangled snakes face (perhaps to kiss); one is green, blue, yellow, red, and white, while the other snake is the same gold as the bottle’s lid.

De Saint Phalle defied conventions (and anything else in her way), in keeping with the Dada movement that preceded her. But she went beyond Dada in her ability to transcend the banal and the juvenile. Her buoyant figures and architectural forms are abstract but also go beyond, say, the proto-process abstract Nudes made by Matisse in the ‘50s, in both their expression and abstractions. They remind that exuberant figures and vibrant colors don’t preclude the occurrences of emotion or even despair. My absorption in her work’s visual dynamics was broken only by the realization that, having such optically vexing (read: pretty/ugly) aspects, she may have been one of our greatest masters of blending the conceptual with the physical.

Bloum Cardenas, Camille Morineau, Catherine Francblin, et al. Niki de Saint Phalle (Bilbao, ES: La Fábrica/Guggenheim Bilbao). ISBN: 9788415691983. 368 pages, $65

The post “No doubt she’s in control”: A New Niki de Saint Phalle Monograph appeared first on artcritical.

We don’t talk much about “art” when I see Jeremy Davis. We end up goofing around or talking about songs, movies, just about anything else. Sitting down with him in his Portland studio, I learned more about his philosophy and process than I ever would have otherwise. Davis has most recently shown his art at the Lonnie B. Harris Black Cultural Center at Oregon State University, with permanent installations of his work there, as well as The Studio Museum in Harlem’s “Speaking of People: Ebony, Jet and Contemporary Art.” During this studio visit, Davis and I got to talking about his most recent paintings and a few of his affinities found on Tumblr.

I walked in to see a massive painting he’d been working on. The painting brings together imagery inspired by the cover of We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite; an Oregon State University student protest; portraits of John Coltrane, Max Roach, and Charles Mingus; a quotation from Ralph Abernathy; and a large black gestural stroke on an abstract background of yellow and orange hues. At eight-by-six feet, this commissioned piece goes along with 25 smaller portraits of black leaders for the Lonnie B. Harris Black Cultural Center at OSU.

PAUL MAZIAR: What are you working on?

JEREMY OKAI DAVIS: These 25 portraits lining the wall and this painting that’s been kind of morphing over the past few weeks. I’m trying to keep things loose.

I was talking to a friend who was here earlier and was telling him I want to do a really gestural black stroke across the painting. It’s funny because I’m kind of over-thinking it, when the idea of gestural is to just do it. I think I need to be in the right mindset to be that free and loose. It’s kind of intimidating. Usually it happens if I’m working on something else. If I’m doing something, I’ll look over there and think, Now, it’s time.

Do you think that gesture has anything to do with the sounds you hear from the Roach album? It has a lot of moments…

Punchy moments. Maybe that’s what it’s gonna take. Like when Abbey Lincoln screams. Maybe it takes getting invested in those tracks to make me do something crazy. Like a moment. The painting is called Predicting a Movement.

You’re waiting for the moment to make that brush stroke… you want to get around doing it a certain way.

I want to make an actual gesture. It’s difficult, though. I want it to be gestural, but to tell yourself to be loose and free, you’re putting yourself in this box. And for me that mark is such an important part of the piece. I want it to be free, but it’s a big part of the piece so it has to be right, strange.

Where are these images from?

The OSU archive. In 1969, the Black Student Union had staged a walk-out, when Fred Milton, an OSU football player, was asked to shave his beard; he didn’t want to, and the coach threatened to kick him off the team. They did a lot of things like this, but this image is one I was really drawn to. The image of union and movement.

Is that what accounts for the drips and splatters in your figurative paintings?

I think so. For me the drips and that kind of thing make it feel more like a painting. When you get in close and tight on them, taking little squares out to look at, they’re a bunch of little abstract paintings. That’s how I come at it, instead of smoothing out everything.

When I go to galleries and museums, I enjoy myself more when I move around the paintings, seeing how the work shifts. The richness and buildup of the paint are super important to me. I get disappointed sometimes when I see something online that I really love, and I go to see the piece in person at an art show — and it’s exactly like it was on the Internet! Like a flat jpeg with a smooth surface, etc. — no improvisation. I think you hope for a new experience.

There’s this other element to your paintings that, to me, is shared with jazz, experimental music and poetry — where you return to it and see something new. Like you’ve never encountered it before.

I’m just now starting to get into jazz and investigating it, listening to Money Jungle (1963) a bunch; I’m getting so much out of it. Every listen feels different, depending on your mood. That’s the amazing thing about jazz: it’s timeless and location-less.

I see a lot of movement in Predicting a Movement. Has this album been a recent influence?

I don’t think one song in particular, but yeah, jazz in general has been.

I was going to bring up affinities. Your Tumblr has a lot of good stuff on it. Some of it seems to have a timelessness about it. Do you think much about tradition or trends?

No. I don’t think about that at all. Well, I do. I think about them and try to avoid them.

You’ve got a lot of powerful imagery here. How about the museum guard photograph, where the man is standing there looking at a painting?

That was a film shot at the Portland Art Museum. My friend Nate and I were just walking around and we saw him standing there looking at that painting for a really long time. It’s a really great painting: just the sea, that’s all it is. It’s one of those things you can just get totally lost in; the water starts moving if you look at it long enough.

Imagine how many times he’s seen that painting!

Maybe he does that every day; maybe getting lost in that painting is his break.

Vince Staples’ Señorita (2015) video is amazing. At the end where he opens up his coat and it’s just a black hole. That part is insane!

That is a crazy video. I’m super inspired by a lot of what’s happening in hip hop right now. There was a long period of time where musicians weren’t considering their audience, and the music videos weren’t considerate of the audience either. It seems like right now, more than the last 15-20 years, the artists are really thinking of the audience and this video is just another example of that.

Everything in that piece, considering the cultural climate right now, is really important. I think I posted two in a row, that one and Close Your Eyes and Count to Fuck (2014) by Run the Jewels. They share similarities. The Vince Staples video is like a zoo, basically, where people are just watching the chaos, like all the news reports right now. And with the Run The Jewels song, with Zach de la Rocha, the scenario is a young black man and a middle-aged cop. They’re just wrestling, moving through the streets; it’s a choreographed fight. They end up in a house pouring milk all over each other and end up totally exhausted at the end. It’s supposed to show a dance that cultures have been having for years and years and how we’re trained to fight, trained to be at odds.

It seems like you’ve always had cultural references in your paintings.

Definitely. Whether it’s just pop culture, celebrity news, or the real news that people want to pay attention to. I pay attention to it all. It makes its way into my work, always. But it’s never in your face. I’ve always tried to make sure my paintings aren’t grandstanding. I want people to see it, think about it, go home and let it stick. They hear a news report or they’re listening to jazz and might think of this painting. I just want these little moments in time with my paintings to kind of bubble up.

What’s the idea behind the series of smaller portraits?

I wanted to find inspiring African-Americans from history. Pictures of them, not as kids, but young, before they were legendary. The reason being is that I wanted them to be relatable to the kids who’ll see them. To show possibility: they were bright-eyed kids just like you. So it’s these and then the Lonnie B. Harris portrait with the rest alongside him.

What’s next?

My mom’s from Liberia and I am just now realizing I don’t know a lot about her. I want to do a body of work that’ll be an investigation of Liberia and her in some way, relating to the disconnect that I have from my mom and Africa. A charting of my education of where she came from in my paintings. I have images in my head of what it’ll be, but I’m not sure yet.

I’ve always tried to temper my excitement, but it’s hard for me to think about this work being at OSU for all time and not get stoked. This stuff is going to be permanently installed. As an artist, that’s kind of my goal, to inspire for all time. I look at someone like David Hockney, and a lot of these artists, the pieces they made in the ‘60s and ‘70s. I still call back those for inspiration. To think that the possibility is out there that some kid in 2070 might stumble into the Cultural Center and see my paintings and decide to be a painter, is pretty amazing. I think that’s the kind of the goal for me. It keeps the ball rolling, you know?

Are all children artists?

I think so. Everybody has a creative side. I think everybody can exercise that if they choose to. Some people don’t have the desire to exercise it, they have other things that are important to them, which is fine.

It takes a certain person to let it take over. It’s a fun thing to do, but to let art take over your life is kind of scary. To let it be the thing that you do can be kind of frightening. I think everybody isn’t a genius, but everyone has the capacity to be a genius at their chosen vocation.

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