SHARON MA What is your methodology for making an artwork?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY I like to highlight incongruity, juxtapose ideas that seem mutually exclusive. I think a lot about medium and scale and display and audience. Usually I start off with an object or a design that I find unique, it just turns me on, and I want to understand it more, so I reproduce it or I hybridize it in some way. That unlocks its mystery for me.

SHARON MA What drives you to make the work that you do?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY I can never paint something that doesn’t hypnotize me. My heart isn’t in it. When I make films or perform, it’s usually similar. A fascinating object or document starts me off. Maybe just a scrap in the street on a lamp-post or a line from a song, something ephemeral, something that has a beauty, a history, a poetry, a sadness to it– something elusive that I want to spotlight and commemorate.

SHARON MA You are always doing something or going somewhere. How do you manage multiple projects in different countries?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY I come from London, and have lived between NYC and Berlin since the late 1980s. All three cities have thriving art scenes. So I have slowly done a lot of projects between those places. I have family and work and friends there and I can earn a living in all three.

I only ever do one project at a time and I don’t juggle things. Patience is key.

SHARON MA Who are the contemporary artists you identify with, either through their personalities or artwork?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY I admire the mavericks and the succinct. I identify with the grassroots East Village artist-run galleries or early Soho artists more than this current moment.

Félix González-Torres was a brilliant, funny person to be around and studying with him remains inspiring. Warhol I never met but the work is great, plus he built a circle of people around him, he nurtured a scene, and created an open system, not a hierarchy. He didn’t seem a snob.

I find it hard to separate the personality from the work. The handling of the career is often as interesting to me as the work itself.  I’m interested in the idea of retaining one’s integrity both socially and artistically.

I like the subject matter of Bruce LaBruce and Johan Grimonprez and I know them personally a bit. I admire painters like Inka Essenhigh and Marilyn Minter.

I always think about the work of Hans Haacke and Art & Language because what they did remains better than what most people later have achieved in that field.

SHARON MA I read that you are also a curator, how do you come up with a theme for an exhibition?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY You have to find a topic that’s hot, a bit edgy, but also that you personally love and know a huge amount about. You have to extend the dialog.

SHARON MA What do you look for when choosing works to show?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY Because I began as an artist myself, I only like to show artists who can do something that I can’t do, usually technically or conceptually. That’s part of the exchange for me. I show their work because I am a fan. If I know I could make the work easily myself, I don’t want to show it.

SHARON MA What do you put out that is related to the exhibition, and how do you show it?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY These days I list in magazines and on facebook and make online PDF catalogs. I also write press releases and sometimes make printed catalogs.

SHARON MA I remember how you said that we should keep an eye on galleries that show works similar to our own, how does one approach a gallery, if at all?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY I would never suggest approaching a dealer cold, it’s better to dialog with an artist you meet who shows at the gallery and whose work you like.  Then follow up and ask them if they think their dealer or a curator might like it. I think if you are doing something good, people will find you. Artists define things: they are always the first to see a new good artist. Your peers create a critical mass.

SHARON MA As a working artist, what do you stress as key elements to being successful in the art world?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY Being generous and open to dialog and making yourself aware of what a lot of other emerging artists are doing. Also understanding marketing clearly.

Success in the art world is really about being a success on your own terms– being a compassionate person and acting with great personal integrity. Some of the best artists are great teachers, great community activists and/or doing amazing stuff that is not centered on any commercial/institutional-success paradigm. Being in the Whitney Biennial is clearly not the central thing, because that fame can be very fleeting. It’s more important that you make great work and really parent it into the world in a cool and ethical way.

The post A Success on His Own Terms: A Studio Visit with Rupert Goldsworthy appeared first on artcritical.

For a long time, drugs have been played a role in the social life of the art world. Charles Baudelaire wrote about them. If you do not possess a Delacroix, he said, the next best thing is to be high. But he was opposed to drug use, a weak person’s way of achieving aesthetic experience. In the 1960s, when use of marijuana and LSD became commonplace amongst the American middle-classes, drugs certainly influenced how visual art was made and seen. Many believed that getting high was the best way to see through the political subterfuges of the establishment. And yet social historians of art hesitate to introduce this history—in which many of them must, I expect, have participated—into their narratives. Thomas Crow’s great The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent, for instance, focuses instead on the civil rights movement, the consumer economy, and the Vietnam War. The same is true of the grand history of modernism by the writers associated with Rosalind Krauss’s October.

Are You Experienced? is a dazzling, extraordinarily radical revisionist history. For since taking drugs changes perception, they surely must affect how art is made and seen. Everyone sees that 1960s head shop art shows the direct influence of psychedelics, but what is the connection, exactly, between the promiscuous use of drugs and art world art? Ken Johnson, who came of age in this period, offers a highly personal account of it. His book is very good at explaining how drugs were linked to seductive ideals of political liberation; to contemporary films; and to a great variety of art from the past half-century. He describes how R. Crumb was inspired by his acid trips; how James Rosenquist’s F-111 deals with the endless flow of information, which especially fascinated people who were high; and he connects the writing of Robert Smithson, and the art of Chris Burden and Richard Tuttle, with the experience of being stoned. His aim, Johnson explains, is not to link individual artists or works of art with drugs, but to point to the ways that the drug culture influenced how a great deal of art was made and seen, whatever the personal concerns of the artists. In the 1960s “some kind of awakening took place in art. . . and the creative and intellectual energies that were brought to life are still feeding the imaginations of artists today” (p. 220-1).

Johnson himself certainly is not nostalgic, and has a critical perspective on the era of his youth. Being high, he rightly notes, didn’t make you a better person, or saner. Nor did it make you an original artist. But you cannot understand much recent art without knowing this history. “The psychedelic culture of the ‘6os involved most of the same aspirations that contemporary art has, and it became for me a hub where all roads intersected” (p. 225). Part of the fascination of Johnson’s account lies in its very fast movement and the variety of paintings and sculptures discussed. “If todays art is about altering consciousness and doing so broadly,” he writes, ‘what better medium to achieve that than computers and the Internet, which can reach millions?” (p. 101). When he pulls such different artists into the analysis as Ed Ruscha, Sigmar Polke, David Salle, Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine and Lucas Samaras  then we see how diverse the drug-fuelled experiences of art have been. Jeff Koons’ erotic scenes, Tino Sehgal’s performances and Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living all pose the question: “In a real, shark-infested world, can art be a means to attain broad-minded, transcendental consciousness?” (p. 199). I cannot think of a better one-sentence statement describing the present state of our art world.

After you read this book, lots of familiar art will look different—as if you, too, have momentarily become high. Strange enough to be a masterpiece, its quick movement and far reaching analysis is a reminder of how slow moving, by comparison, is almost all scholarly writing about modernism and contemporary art. We are accustomed to make a distinction between art history, which is frankly academic and art criticism, which provides a lively perspective on the immediate present. Are You Experienced? gives reason to question that distinction. Unless an artist can sketch a man throwing himself from the fourth floor before he hits the ground, Baudelaire quotes Delacroix to say, he “will never be capable of producing great machines.” Of course, Baudelaire also describes himself, for a gifted art critic, too, must be capable of responding very quickly.  Always suggestive, always readable and very often highly original, Johnson is as supple as anyone writing art history today.

Ken Johnson, Are You Experienced?: How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art. (Prestel, 2011, ISBN 3791344986, $49.95)

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March 5 – April 16, 2011
521 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues,
New York City, (212) 629 6100

Inka Essenhigh’s paintings flit between abstraction and representation. Populated by a cosmology of figures that appear surreal and distended, they draw from her own very particular if perverse psycho-architectural interior world.

Her work has been described as both “exotic and operatic.” Critics cite 19th-century caricatures, oriental art, Arabic miniatures, and contemporary comics as influences.  Other references that come to mind are the mad machines of 1920s British illustrator W. Heath Robinson, and the Rabelaisian folk scenes of another Brit, Sir Stanley Spencer.

Essenhigh’s images unfold her own internal mythologies and legends. They show figures caught frozen in dynamic moments of suspended animation. Abstracted hydras mutate into melting organic shapes, human figures are caught in exaggerated grotesque gestures, as they morph with mouths open, cavorting and yawning in the evening light.

Her earlier paintings in enamel were first celebrated for their flat surfaces, the detached perfection of virtual reality, and their sense of hyper-artificiality. But in her newer work, Essenhigh has progressed to deeper space, more eternal and more earthy themes. She switched from enamel to oil paint, and now she has added a new medium for her, monoprint. Her series of monoprints – along with new editions of intaglio prints – at Pace Prints Chelsea draw their  subjects from nature, the seasons, mythology, and theater.

Inka, can you tell us about the genesis of the work you are current showing at Pace Prints? How you did you come to make this body of work?

It’s an extension of what I’ve been working on with my paintings for the past couple of years. With the monotypes I would go in every day, sit down and make an image and it’s very fast. All these things just come out of my head: I don’t worry about their meaning.  What I’m going for is an inner vision. or at least the feeling of an inner vision.

Can you explain what you mean by “inner vision”? Is it an internal world?

Yes, it’s an internal world. But it’s an internal world where I feel I’m tapping into everybody else’s internal world.

The collective unconscious?

Exactly. When something feels sacred then I feel I’m on to something. I don’t know what that looks like but that’s the feeling I’m going for.

There are forty in the series, quite an expansive body of work.  So, they’re one-of-a-kind prints.

They are basically paintings on paper. I paint on a steel plate and then a sheet of paper gets pressed down on it picking up the image. The quickness and liquidness of painting on a smooth plate really works for me. I can make something small, substantial, and complete.

Right, it’s a fast medium for you. There seem to be two dominant motifs in the series: the natural environment, seas or forests, and then corridors and stages.

Theater stages.

Exactly, theater stages. I sense a connection to paganism, the outdoor world, with forest gods or sea gods, different mythologies, anthropomorphism and archetypes. But can you say something about these stages, these corridors with what appear to be arms reaching out holding lights.

The stage is a metaphor for having arrived somewhere, or I suppose it’s a place of consciousness in a public setting. And perhaps I’m not there yet but I’m on my way. I’m on a path to being able to articulate something or know something. And being backstage of something is like a metaphor for just that.

I think of Manhattan as being one big stage. It’s kind of a small, compacted stage, as opposed to other cities where you drive around and you don’t see it. You can actually walk around New York like a stage.  You run into characters. You perform.

And there’s a certain kind of lighting in the stage paintings that is reminiscent of the Bowery and that vaudevillian tradition, of Judy Garland or Ethel Merman. There’s a quality to the light where the subject is bathed in, well, a very different kind of light to the lighting at the Oscars which is this all-consuming, every-wrinkle-visible light. This is much more of a golden, bathing type of light. Is that referencing something particular for you?

No, I just like it. In twilight things can emerge and disappear and can be ambiguous, and I sort of use that. I don’t want to say as a crutch, because god, I feel that, for so long now, I’ve pursued taking art out of my art.

Taking out all of your tropes.

Right. I’m attracted to twilight in terms of making things appear and disappear and flatten things out and bring things to shape in an easy light.

… in a mythological sense, the magic of twilight.

It’s not like Manhattan where you get sunny days, you get rainy days, you get twilight, you get all sorts of things.  I just set it all to twilight.

You prefer twilight because there’s more of a blend going on?

Or more ambiguity.

Not so claustrophobic, not so oppressive?

Right. I was making one that had light in it and I thought, Oh god! (laughs) I hate making light and shadow. There’s something so oppressive about that formula.  You’ve got to have a light source but then the next thing you have to do is to make it somewhat logical. It’s so oppressive, I can’t stand it.

In your earlier work there were certain kinds of figures that make me think of institutional settings with uniforms – jackets with particular kinds of buttons being used. In these later works, the clothes are more like shrouds and rags, something more decaying…

When I was making the earlier work I think that I was very consciously trying to make something contemporary, taking a color sense and a design that is from today.  But these new ones are not attempting to be contemporary at all costs. These are inspired, if anything, by timelessness. So I just don’t have those ideas any more. I mean, they just don’t come to me. I don’t sit there and think “How can I make this contemporary?” which is what I would have done before and it’s very easy, you know, you can see something you just saw, like uniforms or things like hazardous waste, “Haz.Mat” suits and things like that. They just look like they don’t come from any other time, because those materials didn’t exist before.

Do you see the clothing now as shrouds sometimes?

Not so much. No, it’s just a feeling. No I don’t necessarily see them as shrouds. I see them as amorphous, unformed energy.

Contemporary references in that earlier series bring one right into the now. But these newer works are more eternal. I’m seeing Father Christmas in one of the works, for instance.

Yes. Often it’s about representation of energy forms on an elemental level.

And I was thinking in terms of the cycle of images that you have at Pace Prints right now, they seem to be seasonal, maybe we could talk about how that works in the show. Are they arranged in a particular sequence?

The Pace people arranged it, but what you see is Spring, Fall, and Winter. I wasn’t there during the summer so I don’t have any Summer prints but yes, when I was on my way there and I was wondering what am I going to do this morning images that come to mind are part of where I am at.

So there is a diarist quality to them?

Yes there is a diarist quality.

So there’s a seasonal flavor. The stage ones, are they more Fall/twilight?

Yeah, Fall and Winter.

I always feel that asking an artist like you to specify what you’re doing in your work spoils the elusiveness of your work. There’s a quality of “Does this mean this?” That said, do you feel like you’re heading more into abstraction or you’re coming more into figuration as you progress?

I think I’m probably heading more into figuration. But figuration isn’t necessarily that something means one thing or another. When I come out with an image of something, you could say that it’s a stage, and I want it to be a stage, but whether I put one person there or two people there is based on feeling, it’s basically that I’m still working on an abstract level. I mean there is abstraction in all figuration and figuration in abstraction. I have a rule that if you can name it, it’s not abstract.  “What is it?” (laughs).

I really think with painting you can tell what people are thinking and feeling for each thing. So if you are making work where you are totally not into it, you can see it. Maybe you can see that in sculpture too. I can’t read it as well because I’m not a sculptor. But with painting you need to be clear. “Oh, here I felt like I needed to do something. Here I needed to make this look more like this.” And any time you start to go and make art where you have a certain set of rules, like “I can’t be too much this way and I can’t be too much that way, and I’m only going to go here and not so far because it gets too cheesy or this way because that’s no good, too figurative, too literal,” all these criticisms, you’re not really making art. If all you’re doing is negotiating these rules, that’s not art, that’s sort of like you’re patching together various things. But when you’re onto something for real, all those rules fly out the window, when you want to do something.

And when you really have something to say. But how does that relate for example to your shift into a deeper, three-dimensional space?

Because I could feel more and more that in the flatter work, “You can’t be too much this way, you can’t be too much that way”, and I started to want to expand but I couldn’t figure out how. “You can’t put a face in, you can’t make it too illustrative. You can’t.”

It’s more limited, you’d be stuck with your facility to draw and paint, which is phenomenal but you’d be stuck in the role of “She’s the one who does these incredible line drawings” but whereas you needed to expand your range.

Right, to be a real human being, not just somebody who is afraid to be this, and afraid to be that.

You’re taking on a more canonical type of painting in some sense.

Well I think I always loved that kind of canonical painting, I always did. That is what I really love. I love older work more than I like most contemporary artwork, and I also understand that what the contemporary art world is actually trafficking in is contemporary art. It’s got to be current on some level. I don’t know what to say beyond saying that I want that and I feel happy and easy and right making these paintings. And I trust the ease of it. The inspiration of it. The rightness of it.

… in that it’s not a contrived position?

Yeah. I was a young person trying to be a part of things but that’s not my main focus any more.

Inka Essenhigh will appear in conversation with Alexi Worth at the New York Studio School on Tuesday, March 29 at 6.30 pm.  8 West 8 Street, between 5th and 6th avenues, New York City, 212 673 6466

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