Rise of Rebellion: DailyServing’s latest week-long series

I recently worked on a photo shoot with arguably America’s most prominent metal band. During the fourteen hour work day, I had the privilege of witnessing these icons in action amidst thousands of objects, instruments, images and banners that celebrate the band’s nearly three decades of prominence. As the day progressed, I watched as a band member lovingly called his mom to tell her what the day holds. I saw the wife of the aging guitar player tenderly paint the balding head of her husband black in a vain attempt to preserve the appearance of youth and vitality. What was instantly apparent was the first-hand deterioration of the aggressive spirit of rebellion as it aged over decades. No one can deny the use of masquerade and theatrics in heavy metal culture, but what is rarely seen is the softer side of this unruly behavior, which was something that I was privy to that day. When thinking about this softer side of metal and its rebellious association, it occurred to me that rebellion is an act best suited in short bursts, rather than sustained in perpetuity. I recently sat down with Ben Venom, an artist fascinated with the rebellious nature of metal, black metal, the occult and southern identity, to talk about his work. Venom employs many of the symbols and images associated with these defying subcultures, and by creating handmade quilts, pillows, flags and banners, the artist is able to celebrate and mock these cultures simultaneously.

Seth Curcio: Ben Venom seems like an all too convenient name for an artist with rebellious southern identity and slant towards black metal. Is this your real name?

Ben Venom: No..Venom has been my nickname since I was a teenager. I grew up going to a lot of punk rock and metal shows in Atlanta, GA, and it came about from hanging around the that scene. Everyone had some obscure nickname, mine just stuck and never left.

Later, I started to incorporate my nickname into my artwork more and more while I was at the San Francisco Art Institute pursuing my masters degree. I was tired of having my last name misspelled (Baumgartner) in exhibition catalogs or postcards for art exhibitions. Plus, so many people already knew me as Ben Venom, it seemed like a natural progression and of course a much easier name to spell!

SC: Much of your new work uses imagery and materials that are related to black metal as the aggressive epitome of an already masculine sub culture. You physically unite imagery from this movement by sewing it together into quilts, flags and banners. Where do you derive the source material?

BV: The source material is collected from attending concerts, reading, and researching certain aspects of metal culture. For instance, Sam Dunn, Canadian anthropologist and heavy metal fan, has produced two documentaries that explore the origins of heavy metal music from early bands such as Blue Cheer and Black Sabbath, to current bands like Slayer & Mastadon. I recently read Lords of Chaos and just bought Only Death Is Real (An Illustrated History of Hellhammer and early Celtic Frost). These books offer an inside look into what goes on behind the scenes or after the music dies, literally, HA! More specifically, a few pieces are directly inspired by bands that use corpse paint. Influenced by the likes of Alice Cooper, KISS, and the Misfits many black metal bands paint their faces with black and white shapes to mimic inhumanity or death. I re-design these shapes into forms that mimic faces or objects associated with metal or the occult. I was initially inspired to start quilting after seeing the Gees Bend traveling exhibition, which showcases handmade quilts from a very rural region in Alabama. I had a lot of old Heavy Metal t-shirts hanging in my closet and thought it would be interesting to make a metal themed quilt from them. The result was a 6′ x 9′ quilt constructed with over 35 vintage heavy metal t-shirts from my own collection and a few purchased on Ebay. The quilting pattern (Red Stitching) forms a Pentagram shape when viewed from a distance. The quilt is entirely hand-made using a basic sewing machine and took roughly 3 months to complete.

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Babak Golkar is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice, at its fundamental roots, takes aim to deconstruct, recontextualize and rearrange our perceptions of the world around us. Like Zen koans, Golkar’s work seems to arrive at new understandings by setting up impossible questions. At it’s core is a spirit of unbridled philosophical investigation; one that exhibits a Duchampian twist on the visual pun mixed with a Gestalt sense of multistability and reification. Golkar’s work understands both the destructive and regenerative aspects of perspective and shifting visions; and fundamentally contests the fixity of subject and object and space. And, like his work, Golkar’s visual language maneuvers between seemingly oppositional realms–East and West, politics and revolution, Modernity and antiquity, Minimalism and ornament—ultimately exposing not the dialectical relationship between polarities, but rather the poeticism in the world around us.

Sasha M. Lee: I wanted to begin with your series “Negotiating Space,” in which you use Nomadic Persian Carpets as a kind of architectural support, transforming its geometric twists and turns into rough blueprints for gleaming, white, three-dimensional models, rising from the woven geometric patterns. I thought the title and the conceptual framework of the work, for me, was actually a poetic way to summarize many of the themes that run through your work. Can you talk about how these forms interact, and why you chose to juxtapose these particular forms in this manner?

Babak Golkar: I’m interested in the alchemy of the art practice…arriving at gold, metaphorically of course, some sort of proposal for new understandings, the creation of new meaning. I like the idea of a particular piece transforming from two dimensions to three dimensions; something non-existent becoming a possible structure, and the subsequent interaction between the two. I like to talk about my work in terms of “becoming,” of interdependency between these two forms. In the case of the series “Negotiating Space” I don’t like to look at the nomadic Persian carpet as the origin of the whole thing per say…but rather one visual form constantly becoming the other and vise versa.

Hence the title—I like to use titles as materials in and of themselves– it is carefully chosen to hint at a state of uncertainty, a fluid or malleable state of existence. Really, I call the works “proposals,” rather than installations or sculptures.

Even though the carpet is technically the blueprint for the architectural scale-models, the structure adds a vertical dimension, which, as you move above the piece it collapses back to carpet once again. I like to talk about this idea of 2D to 3D, and its reversal; in particular the Duchampian aspect of playing with space. I’m inspired by Duchamp’s alchemical approaches to art making. In some ways I make a reference to Duchamp, in particular his piece, 3 Standard Stoppages. Do you know that piece?

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Today, DailyServing continues our 7-day summer series, Summer of Utopia, where we investigate seven different artists who either employ or interrupt ideas of utopia. Full disclosure: Ted Purves was the first person I met at the California College of the Arts and—despite the fact that I don’t work in relational aesthetics—one of the reasons I decided to apply to their graduate program.  He is the editor of the seminal book What We Want Is Free and founder of the country’s first MFA in Social Practice. Last week he took some time to discuss utopia, democracy, morality, and the success of the projects he creates with his partner Susanne Cockrell.

Ted Purves and Susanne Cockrell, Temescal Amity Works (July 2004-January 2007).

Bean Gilsdorf: I listened to your interview at Bad At Sports and you said, “I’m not a utopian in any way” and that intrigued me.  Tell me how you’re not a utopian, working in social practice.

Ted Purves: Let’s think about what the utopian project is: generally, to design a coherent social system that satisfies all basic needs.  Thomas More created this very intense class structure, and utopia saw to the needs of the upper and middle classes.  It’s really horrifying, utopia, because it’s the idea of agreement about what a perfect society is.  We don’t live in times of agreement or tribal identity or singular religious identity. We live in a situation of disagreement and negotiation.  I’m much more interested in the notion of democracy rather than the notion of utopia, because it allows for the possibility of negotiation and change and alteration.  Democracy is about the peaceful negotiation of disagreement.

BG: Has that come up in your work, like the Temescal Amity Works, that feeling of negotiating disagreement?  Where has that come in for you guys?

TP: I wouldn’t say that we’ve actively looked at disagreement in our projects.  We’ve been working from another starting point: the position of economies in people’s lives and how exchange functions.  Even though we tend to think of ourselves as living in this highly capitalist market economy, we actually live within several different economic systems all at the same time.  Getting paid and going shopping is participating in a larger capital economy, but giving a friend a lift to the store is a different, casual kind of economy.  Not all of our relationships are of cliency and payment.  We are interested in the way people are negotiating between competing or overlapping economies within their own lives, and creating a way to see that there are different ways to view your own personal economy.  For instance, the projects about sharing fruit were about getting people to think about latent caloric energy that’s growing in the neighborhood, free of charge, at the same time that people are going out to stores to maintain their bodily lives.  It’s getting people to see that we’re living in one system where we’re working to get money to buy calories when, yet, there’s another production of calories that’s going on…

BG: …aside from that, parallel with that…

Ted Purves and Susanne Cockrell, Temescal Amity Works (July 2004-January 2007).

TP: …yeah, right under our noses, that’s not being used.  And how do you create a project that illuminates this other kind of economy?  One project I admire is The Blue House project.  It’s a really interesting counter-utopian project because it’s about creating a space for unplanning, a space for ongoing negotiation and debate in a highly planned suburb—even though the idea of that suburb wasn’t necessarily to be a utopia.  I think there is a utopian interest in most kinds of civic planning because they are based on the idea that there is a perfect fix or a mostly-perfect decision to make about how you apportion resources, how you set up where people are going to live, what people need, and what’s going to make them happy.

BG: There seems to be a kind of benevolence that underlies a lot of these projects, and I wonder if you guys think about that explicitly in your work.  Does morality enter into this at all?

TP: I don’t know if morality does because from our “negotiation-and-disagreement” mindset, morality is another sort of thing that is always going to be disparate among people, so it’s always going to be a negotiated space.  We’re interested in working with the public and in public spaces to learn what people think and how people perceive public space around them.  We start a lot of these because we don’t know everything about a situation and we’re curious about it, and we are interested in creating opportunities for research and dialogue with people.

BG: So you start with a question?

TP: Exactly. Temescal Amity Works started with questions: What is the history of the neighborhood that so many fruit trees were planted here?  How do we negotiate the idea of the developed economy of the neighborhood?  And that’s given way to a larger set of questions that we’re thinking about: how does the social imagination continue to drive people’s decisions, beliefs, lifestyle choices?  What kinds of social imaginaries regarding the rural inhabit the minds of people in cities?

Ted Purves and Susanne Cockrell, Lemon Everlasting Backyard Battery, San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art (2008).

BG: When do you feel a project is successful?  What makes you go home and high-five each other at the end of the day?

TP: I feel like a project is successful if we have had substantive encounters with people, if we have created spaces where a kind of exchange—whether it’s family history, or talking about why something should or shouldn’t be in an art museum, or sometimes it’s just swapping recipes—some form of animated or engaged dialogue comes out, or some sort of story emerges.  It means we learn something, a story can be brought forward from that, that’s when things are successful.  Another high-five moment comes when there is something compelling to look at.  A lot of times when you see a social practice show, it’s either a room full of crap to read, or it looks like a place where they had a party and you didn’t get to go.  I’ve been to a lot of those, and they’re not satisfying!  You either wish they had just printed a book you could take home and read in your own chair—because it’s not very comfortable to sit in a museum—or you wish that you’d been at the party.  When we did Lemon Everlasting Backyard Battery we had hundreds of jars of lemons on this table, and it was beautiful.

BG: It sounds like bringing aesthetics back into it is important.

TP: Yes, certainly when there’s a material expectation for it to be art.  [Lemon Everlasting] was great for us, because it got to be beautiful-looking, but it also got to do something; two things were happening in the same space.  It occupied the institution and it challenged the institution in ways that were playful, functional and aesthetically critical.  Aesthetics are important.  Obviously some artists don’t think this way.  They can just go in and do straight up exercises, and by the rules of the game that’s art too, but for us there’s got to be something else, a twist, a different way of seeing.  We’re working in public space, so we need to challenge public expectations, a kind of weirdness, wrongness, whatever that might be.

BG: Do you think of projects as iterative?  Would you want to restage that project, or do something similar someplace else?  Or have the questions been answered and now you can move on to other questions that have been formed by the outcome?

TP: That’s a great question.  I think it depends from project to project.  I would definitely say that you never answer all the questions.  The new thing we’ve been working on is this ongoing newspaper project, The Meadow Network.  We structured it in a specific way because a thing like Temescal Amity Works was such a Herculean effort that you don’t want to do it again!  We created TMN so that there was an option to have a repeatable form that could grow on itself, so that we wouldn’t have to reinvent an entire project every single time…  That only half answers the question: I think it is good to have some projects or programs that are sort of open-ended but able to be temporarily concluded, because some questions don’t go away.

This week, DailyServing is publishing content from a few of our friends and partnering websites in order share some amazing new artwork with you . Today, we have a fantastic interview with Dan Attoe from our friends at Beautiful/Decay. B/D features really great contemporary art, illustration and cultural content. Make sure to check them out if you haven’t already.

Dan Attoe, The Scrape, Oil on Canvas

When I met Dan Attoe we were both starting the MFA program at the University of Iowa.  I’ve known him for eight years now, and even though Dan lives in Washington State and I live in New York we have maintained our friendship through collaborations, especially with the art group Paintallica.

While at school we became friends – I’ve noticed Dan sort of collects weirdos like me.  Before coming to grad school Dan had created a studio practice that involved making a painting a day, and was already working on paintings that have a relationship to his current work.  While in school Dan wasn’t stuck on some notion of an ideal practice, he just worked while everyone else was talking about how to work, he wasn’t terribly concerned with theories; he has a background in psychology and knew to trust his own creative faculties.

While everyone else was screwing around with their identities, Dan had already settled into a kind of self-knowledge.  I don’t know if his gnosis came from growing up in the deep woods with a forest ranger for a father, or from one of the experiences he had growing up that caused him to study psychology and art.

Being alive you meet a lot of bull shitters and have to play a lot of stupid games, but rarely do you meet someone as genuine and considerate as Dan.

Dan, can you point to any one experience that pointed you towards becoming an artist?  There aren’t any other artists in your family are there?

No, there are no other artists in my family, but my mom has always been into crafts, and gave my brothers and I interesting projects, and lots of materials to work with.  I was one of those kids who always drew on his clothes, and before I had regular paints I used spray paint on my clothing, my skateboard and various ramps that I built.  When I was fourteen, my parents got me a set of acrylics with the intention of redirecting my impulses.  The result was that I started making more meticulous paintings on paper and canvas as well as clothing, but still maintained a fondness for spray paint.

I suppose that growing up in rural and remote places had something to do with my interests too.  There weren’t many activities for kids in the towns and ranger stations that I lived on, unless you were into sports, which I wasn’t.  There was a lot of trails and things to explore, which was pretty formative for me, but there was a lot of time spend indoors too, because winters in Minnesota and Idaho could be long and cold.  In addition, about half the time my family didn’t have television, so that wasn’t an option for entertainment.  I couldn’t always read, because I liked to listen to fast and loud music.  It’s hard to concentrate on a book at the same time as Metallica or Ministry lyrics, so I used to make things.

I got whacked in the head a few times too as a kid, so that might have had something to do with it.

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In a world consumed by technology, there is no doubt that countless artists have adopted many forms of new media into their work. In today’s art world, what is harder to find is an artist whose work seamlessly uses technology and image-making to show us something new about the way we understand the world around us. Jim Campbell’s work does just that. His work effortlessly combines light and darkness, flatness and space, movement and stillness, to subtly expose how we perceive imagery. I recently met with him at Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco to talk about the way he makes images, how he uses technology and some of the new projects he has in the works.

Julie Henson: To start with, I would love for you to talk about your practice. One of the things that I noticed when I first entered the gallery is that your work appears to be rooted in both technology and the creation of an image, which seem to be very important parts of your practice. If you could start by telling me a little bit about how you work and about creating images?

Jim Campbell: My background before I made electronic art was filmmaking, which is completely about making images, unlike a lot of people in new media who come from painting or from sculpture. So the image has been the most important thing to me.  In fact, even sometimes a little too much so, in that I do get complaints from friends who, for example, will say that since it has to plug I should show that it plugs in. I tend to really hide everything as much as I can and just leave the image. Obviously that changed with Exploded View (Birds).

So you aren’t asking about my background but my daily practice, right?

JH: Well, I am really interested in your process of creation more than anything else, because the work is so complex and, like you are saying, the way they are made is somewhat hidden. They become very wonderful and mysterious things to look at, and I find that really fascinating.

JC: Well there are two works here that come at it from a different perspective, one would be Exploded View (Birds) and the other would be Taxi Ride to Sarah’s Studio. Sometimes what I do, and Exploded View (Birds) is a good example, is that I will start with an idea for a technology, like taking my relatively 2D images, and really trying to come off the wall and just pull the image off or stretch it out. And so the idea for the technology was there before the image that was going to go on the display. That probably happens about half the time, where I will have a new technology and I will try a bunch of different things in it until I get something that makes sense. Sometimes it even takes a couple of years to come up with imagery that really matches the display. Up until that point they might be real works, I might sell them, I might display them, but they aren’t necessarily the perfect match with the technology. One of the things that I say to myself is that if I can do this with video, I should do it with video. There has to be a reason that I use this low-resolution technology to do each of these works.

I have been working with what I refer to as “the curtain works” for three years maybe, and I think Taxi Ride to Sarah’s Studio is a good example of a pathway to this work. If you look at the work a little more than just glance at it, you’ll see that it changes resolution as it goes across.  And all of the works up until this one were like the others – they reflected off the wall but they were still grids of consistent resolution. One of the things that this technology allows for, given how modular it is, is to change where the pixels are and allow for something other than the perfect X/Y grid. And that came together with another idea that I have had for many years, which is to do a work that somehow represents peripheral vision. And that is this work. It marries one idea that is more of a concept or structural idea with the technology that I have been playing with for three years.

JH: It is interesting that you say that, because one of the things that I kept coming back to is that the image rests somewhere in between the object and illusion. There is something about your creation of an image that becomes a play between the image and your physical space, and your physical limits of being able to perceive it. One thing that caught my attention in Taxi Ride to Sarah’s Studio and Market Street Pause was that they almost live as abstraction until they start moving, which I find really fascinating. How do you work with the play between movement and still image or image in space, which is something that I see in all the work?

JC: One of the very first works like this that I made I tried to photograph, and about 98 of 100 pictures didn’t come out, because they were stills.  And what I quickly realized was that the way in which you perceive these images is through their movement. That is actually what that work is about. By freezing, the image goes to abstraction. It makes you aware of your relationship between perception and movement. Hopefully it freezes and goes into abstraction, but it is never really abstract because one can comprehend the image before it freezes. I have done a number of works, probably ten, that really deal with that relationship between perception, abstraction and movement. One of the ones that I think was successful was one of the first ones, around 2004, where I took an image of ocean waves moving and then gradually slowed it down until it stops completely over a 10 minute period. It starts out completely representational and ends up purely abstract. So it slowly goes from one to the other, and Market Street Pause is a more abrupt version of that. I am fascinated by how if you press pause in a video image that it stays an image, yet it in the low-resolution works, it actually becomes abstract when it pauses. This is really unique to low-resolution work.

JH: Yeah, it is a really affective way of recognizing the connection between what your brain realizes as image and what it understands as abstraction. That is the first thing that I noticed when I walked in the door, and you can really see this in Exploded View (Birds) and Taxi Ride to Sarah’s Studio. You started talking about it a little, but one thing I noticed was that a lot of the work has very different spaces, but they seem to be environments that the viewer relates to from a very observational or removed place. Can you talk about how you pick our imagery?

Market Street Pause (still), 2010. Courtesy of Hosfelt Gallery

JC: Yeah, I don’t think it is profound, but hopefully some of them become profound in terms of what I do with them.  And I say that because I am very limited (because what we were talking about in terms of the movement) in what I can shoot. The images have to be very simple in some ways and the backgrounds generally can’t be very complex because you just can’t tell what you are looking at otherwise. So I need to find these very simple images, and I use the figure a lot because the figure is an image that relates to what I call primal perception. And going back to what we were talking about in terms of movement, I believe that we perceive movement almost separately from detail and edges. I think movement is less analyzed as it’s interpreted, so these works get rid of the details, leaving open the more primitive pathways to one’s brain, and allow one to perceive things like isolated movement.

But, I think I drifted from your question.

JH: That’s ok, because this was something that I was really interested in to start with. In Exploded View (Birds) and Taxi Ride to Sarah’s Studio, the technology seems to be more apparent than it is in a lot of the other work. How do you feel about exposing the system?

JC: Like I was saying earlier, I tend to hide it as much as possible because it is really the image that I am interested in. But, I have done a couple of works that connect to Heisenberg, and for me, Taxi Ride to Sarah’s Studio does this because the display device is actually obscuring the image. The only way to look at the image is through the display device.

JH: I think that the same thing happens with Exploded View (Birds). Your ability to perceive the image is through this field or mask of lights. I find it really interesting that even as you walk around it, that the form maintains it shape. How did you find that technology to create an image in a special field?

JC: Most images that I would put in that display can’t be seen from the sides – they mostly go completely abstract. Because the birds are so small and the movement is so simple, you can see them from the side. So it is really about seeing it from the front. The image is exploded towards you by taking the LEDs and pulling them towards you. So when you look at it from far away, it looks flat – just like one of my  “normal” images. But, when you look at it from the side it becomes meaningless, which I like. It’s the same as we were talking about with movement. When you slow it down, it becomes abstract. In this case, as you walk around it, it becomes abstract.

And honestly, it was just an experiment. If I explode this image in this way, will anything be recognizable? Will we be able to tell what we are looking out, or will it just be a waste of my time? Honestly, that is what drives me to do a lot of these works. I am just really curious to know how it will turn out.

JH: With Taxi Ride to Sarah’s Studio, you were talking about the focus changing from the left to the right side, and I noticed that the piece actually curves off the wall. Does the change in focus come from the distance from the wall or in the image itself?

JC: It is actually in both. It is in the resolution of the image. So, it is very high resolution on the left side. It uses  50 pixels to define that side and on the right it is only 6 pixels. It is almost a 10:1 resolution change going across. It is not actually getting blurrier, it only changes resolution.

JH: That’s amazing, because it this goes right back to this relationship to your perception, and shows how little changes like that can actually make things come into view or show distance.

JC: The reason it moves away from the wall, and it is kind of a technical reason, is that the LEDs have a cone of light that come out of them. So when the LEDs are close together, they need have to be close to the wall to have their reflected light overlap. But on the far right end, where the cone hits the wall, it is much bigger, so the LEDs need to be further from the wall.

JH: It is interesting that it is a somewhat technical reason, because the shape actually mimics the sensation in the image – moving in the car. It is nice to hear that it is not only a visual tool to create an experience.

JC: Right. Well, they all go together. But in the experience of driving, as things get closer they come into your peripheral vision, which is blurry. So the technology actually reminded me of the sensation of riding in a car, and that’s why I chose this image.

JH: So since the work is so technically complex, how much of this work is made by you, or do you outsource it? How do you come across the technology?

JC: I am an engineer, so I still get trade magazines to to keep up with technology. A few media artists have told me that I cheat, because I know what I am doing in terms of the electrons moving around on the back of the board. I have three assistants plus contractors and vendors in Silicon Valley that build my circuit boards for the works. For example, for Fundamental Interval (Waves), it has nine circuit boards fabricated from my design. We take the nine and put them together in my studio to make it. But the fun part is when it is not a cookie cutter of something I have already done, like Taxi Ride to Sarah’s Studio. The ones I have made like this in the past, had all the strands made with the same distance between the lights, and for this one they are all different. There was no way to send it out to a fabricator to have it built. So the quirky ones and the prototypes, I definitely do in my studio.

I am working on a large-scale public art project for the San Diego Airport and so we are having all kinds of materials cut and tested for the studio, and then once we have them done, we will find a place to have this 1000-foot long sculpture fabricated.

JH: Well, what other projects do you have coming up?

JC: Beyond the project for the San Diego Airport, the most fun thing in the near future is that I am doing a large-scale version of Exploded View (Birds) in Madison Square Park in New York as part of their rotating public art program. Instead of LEDs, they will be light bulbs, and instead of one inch a part they will be eight inches apart, and instead of six feet wide it will be 50 feet wide, 20 feet high and 20 feet deep. I am really interested to see what it is going to look like because the equivalent of being ten feet away here will be 50 feet away there. There is a little nervousness that it will be too abstract and that you will really need to see it from three blocks away. I am also doing a an intermediate sized one in the lobby of the SFMOMA in 2011.

Jim Campbell’s work will be on view through June 19th, 2010 at Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco. In 2011, his work will also be on view at The National Museum of Photography in Copenhagen and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki.

When I first heard that Kadar Brock was using Dungeons and Dragons dice as engines of chance to determine the elements in his new paintings, I was as suspicious of it as I am of mullets on the L Train. I’d seen his work in several recent group shows, but it didn’t really stick with me until I saw Night Fishing at Thierry Goldberg Projects last month.  Kadar’s painting was a mysterious moment in the never-ending parade of lukewarm group shows on the Lower East Side. The surface, a repeat pattern of linear diamonds, somehow felt more personal than past work I’d seen of his.  It seemed that he was revealing, through reductive means, something more than an arch sense of nostalgia for a teenage fixation. Intrigued, I approached him to do this interview hoping he would shed some light on his process.

"Spell List (Resist Planar Alignment)," 2009. Marker, spray paint, and house paint on paper. 30 x 22"

Michael Tomeo: I’ve read that you use Dungeons & Dragons dice rolls to inform your compositions…how does this work?

Kadar Brock: It isn’t so much about the composition per se; it’s about determining an amount of marks. Each piece adopts a rule set from a D&D spell. These rules involve rolling a certain type of die a certain number of times, and the resultants determine how many of those zigzag marks the piece will get. That then determines the composition. But really the use of D&D is just a system or a set up. It takes away certain decisions from me and forces more onus on the mark making and paint handling to communicate things. It also sets up an analogy with abstraction – both essentially being belief systems and participatory experiences.

MT: This reminds me of how 60s artists like John Cage or Robert Rauchenberg would use the I Ching to create music or dance. I feel like the spiritual and Zen-influenced side of their work kind of got trampled by the onward march of minimalist sculpture. At the risk of sounding corny, does any spirituality from the spells influence your work? Are you into any thing like Jospeh Campell or the idea of the monomyth?

KB: Not corny at all – in fact incredibly spot on…this is what I’m getting at, while trying to co-opt/include self-criticism. It’s post-cynical romantic, i.e. incorporating and coming out on the other side of my doubts, while still maintaining and believing in this stuff I choose to call “other content” like the sublime, spiritual, romantic (essentially the lineage I find myself to be a part of). It’s about finding meaning and creating meaning. The I Ching is a set of rules too, and something that is given belief, given meaning, by the person playing by those rules or using those rules. That participation is a creative act. For me I’ve always felt that, and this really ties into Campbell, it’s my job/endeavor/whatever as an artist and human being to come up with my own sense of meaning for this life, to come up with what would be my own mode of myth. It’s the only way not to succumb to some other person’s story and the power that exerts over you, it’s also, at least for me, the only way to be sure that life is “fresh” or new to me.

I’m also very much into the spiritual connotations of spells and magic. My parents were hippies, I was raised all new age, and the reason I got into abstraction was because of its spiritual, metaphysical, and Gnostic underpinnings, and the relationship between that and my upbringing. I like the idea of abstract paintings being spells and being magical. I think using this set up, calling them spells etc. co-opts any cynicism I have about it and incorporates it, takes in my doubts and beliefs. It comes out on the other side with something.

"Combust," 2010. Marker, spray paint, and house paint on canvas (diptych). 72 x 96"

MT: About being a post cynical romantic, correct me if I’m wrong but it seems like you are taking up where Gen X left off or maybe it’s that you don’t have to follow their well-worn paths. To generalize, Gen X seemed to know more what it didn’t want to do rather than what it did. I’m thinking of John Cusak’s famous “I don’t want to buy anything, etc…” rant from Say Anything. You don’t have Gen X’s weighty sense of nostalgia/regret and you seem to combine some ideas from the literary sense of romance, like a belief in the supernatural, but your work is also firmly placed in the unsentimental present.  In other words, your work has feeling and you believe in things but you’re not like Lloyd Dobler standing with a boom box over his head in the rain, right?

KB: Yeah, I think I do believe in things. And that pretty much sums it up, I think I do… or better yet, I think about what I do believe in and challenge that, but as a means of clarifying all of it, not trying to get that nihilistic “I don’t want to do anything.” I have these moments of intensity. I have these things I relate to and feel moved by. And I see people in the past that talk about these same things, these same moments. So maybe it’s something other people relate to also. That said, maybe not everybody does, maybe some paintings ain’t gonna do shit for someone and they’ll be meaningless to them.

I think abstract painting really exists on a precipice of being meaningful and meaningless, and I really embrace that. For me the paintings are meaningful, but for someone else – nothing. Same like D&D – for someone invested in that system, someone putting into it and participating – wow! I read a study about how role-playing was able to cure someone’s social anxiety, and another one about how it cured someone’s depression. I also watched a documentary about a live action role playing community outside of Baltimore, and man, that game, that world, the characters these people played, gave their life a more pointed sense of purpose and meaning and worth. I mean, couldn’t you say by being this art maker I’m doing the same thing? I get to think and feel all these things that are incredibly important and crucial, and make all this stuff.

But yeah, for me, I am concerned with this romantic stuff. I had been taught to be cynical about it in school, to make fun of it, or use it winkingly. I’m over that though, but I also feel a responsibility to not just weep and bleed out a painting (in fact I think that’d be boring). It’s like how do I experience that moment of intensity, how do I talk about that moment with some self-awareness, that precipice of believing and feeling, while still giving into the feeling and the belief. And that in itself is another precipice between letting go (which I do in the act/action of painting), and staying self-conscious.

But to get back to your analogy, I think if I were going to be Cusak in the rain though, I’d be him in High Fidelity, figuring out relationships and feeling some shit.

"Disintegrate," 2009-10. Spray paint, house paint, and pigment dispersion on canvas (diptych). 96 x 144" (courtesy private collection)

MT: What I like is that even though you’ve poured a lot of energy into a painting, you acknowledge that someone looking at it just might not get it, and that’s ok. I don’t think you’d ever be offended by a reading of your work that might not match your intentions…

KB: Not exactly, but I’m definitely not offended if people don’t respond to it. Everyone is different, and that’s ok. Some people will get into it and others won’t and that’s fine. I do want the people into it though to get into what I’m into, and to experience that in someway. And if their interpretation is a little different, all the better, because then they’re participating more and making it more their own, which in the end, I think is more meaningful and will be more significant to them.

MT: When did you start to fully engage with myth? Did that have anything to do with a tendency toward reduction and the monochrome I’ve noticed in recent works?

KB: You know, I’m not totally sure when it started. I’ve really always been interested in that mode of thinking and relating. I mean, I’ve always thought, since like high school, that it was my job to come up with my own belief system or synthesis of belief systems in order to relate to the world in a more direct and meaningful way. I mean if you want to look at it one way, I would always draw comic book characters and fantasy characters when I was a kid – those subjects are rife with mythological content.  I was reading myths in college too and making some drawings related to them – the subjects ranged from Siegfried in the Nieblungenlied to Jonathan Livingston Seagull. And I’ve always been fascinated by the myths I related to about being an artist – ideas of heroes and shamans, the magic of the painting practice and inherent communication that happens in the act of painting. The possibility to talk about things words can’t really touch on. The ability to get all this complexity of thought and feeling into on object/moment, that then can unfold and change before someone.

The shift towards monochromatic work came from wanting to challenge my belief in the myth of painting’s inherent communicative qualities and wanting to put as much pressure on my gesture/mark making as the touchstone of communicating subjective content. So yeah, it definitely relates to a myth I believe in and want to investigate, challenge, and potentially validate.

MT: Although my experience is limited, what I always liked about D&D is that despite its endless volumes of rules, the nuance of the game lies in the dungeon master’s discretionary or even improvisational application of them. Does improvisation play a role in your current work?

KB: It’s really funny, Michael, I’ve actually never played either! I wish I had, and actually would still like to now (if there’s anyone out there who’d be into it, email me). But yeah, there’s a lot of freedom in the framework – and again, it really comes down to a belief system and participating, and internalizing and making it one’s own.

In regards to the painting though, I think improvisation is everything in the work. I mean that’s where all the feeling is going to come from, all the wet “other” content. How a piece gets folded, what sort of spray/marker/house paint/other paint combination is used, how many drips, footprints, scratches, whatever, are all in the moment.  The whole system thing is just that, a system, a box, a set up, so I can have as much freedom in the act of painting as possible. If I know what I’m painting, have all these limitations, the only place for the stuff I want to come through is in improvisation in the action of making it.

- Kadar Brock’s work can currently be seen in Substance Abuse, curated by Colin Heurter, at Leo Koenig Projekte, up through July 3rd, and in In.flec.tion at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art through July 26th. Conjuring and Dispelling, a solo show at Motus Fort, Tokyo, Japan, opens on June 18th.

Opening Thursday, May 6th, We have as much time as it takes is the final thesis exhibition of the Curatorial Practice program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. The following interview was conducted for the exhibition catalog between curators Nicole Cromartie and Courtney Dailey and two members of Red76. It is the first in a series of interviews to be published at Daily Serving with artists from the exhibition. The catalog is available as a free downloadable pdf at www.wattis.org/whamtait.

Red76 is a multi-artist collective founded in Portland, Oregon, in 2000. The project they conceived for We have as much time as it takes was executed mainly by two of its members, Sam Gould and Gabriel Saloman. Counter-Culture as Pedagogy: Pop-Up Book Academy is a yearlong series of events that take place in a variety of venues. The latest edition of The Journal of Radical Shimming, available for free in the gallery, includes interviews and a counterculture index created for this exhibition. It will accompany the project’s next iteration at the Walker Art Center this summer. Learn more at www.red76.com.

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