brent cunningham
Brent Cunningham is a writer, publisher and visual artist currently living in Oakland with his fiancée and new daughter. 
Pretend we’ve never met, how would you describe yourself. Age? Location? Hometown?
I’m primarily a writer, and sort of obsessively interested in what’s often labeled “avant-garde” or “experimental” poetry and poetics. I work at a Bay Area non-profit called Small Press Distribution that just happens to distribute books of experimental poetry, as well as lots of other literary material. In a matter of weeks I’ll be turning forty years old, I live in Oakland, and I was born in Wisconsin. We moved a lot when I grew up, so I can’t remember much about Milwaukee except something about a crabapple tree. I should also add that my fiancée Melissa Benham and I are busy taking care of a relatively new daughter, not yet two years old, whose name is Mina Natalia Duchamp Benham-Cunningham.
Can you describe your show Poets on Paper?
It was a group show that the Canessa Gallery, on Montgomery, put on in September. All the works were by people who primarily identify as writers but who also make visual art. Most of those works did indeed turn out to be done on paper, possibly due to economic circumstances. The other poet-artists were Cassandra Smith, Dan Fisher, Scott Inguito and Jared Stanley. My own pieces came from two different series’ I’ve been doing, the first for a couple years and the second for just a few months: a series of “diagram” drawings, and a series of things I’m calling “even-scale” drawings. You don’t have to include all this, but I’ll just quote the whole artist statement about my idea of what even-scale since it’s kind of intricate: “Even-scale is a principle I’ve been developing for use in cartographic art pieces. It began in thoughts about how visual information is usually structured in maps, diagrams, graphs, and other instrumentalist visual arts. Customarily the presentation of any given source data is determined by the supposed legibility of that data to its imagined future ‘readers.’ By contrast, in even-scale the objective is to establish an experiential and/or bodily connection between the mapmaker and the data. The assumption is that a new kind of legibility, directly emblematic of the phenomena, will continue to be perceptible, if only as a by-product. In practice, the mapmaker tries to find some technique to directly experience the scale of people or quantities being represented. A physical mark made by the mapmaker might represent time, dollars, distance, people, or deaths. Other kinds of alignments are out there to be invented. The ideal is a one-to-one equivalence of some kind, but realistically any equivalence (10 to one, 100 to one) is a sufficient gesture towards even-scale.”
How did it come to be?
Avery Burns often initiates shows at Canessa, and he had already helped set up a show of Brian Strang’s great drawings. Brian is generally known as a writer. I’m speculating, but I think the Strang show was so successful that it gave Avery the idea to do a group show of writer/artists. Zach Stewart owns Canessa and he liked Avery’s idea, which was all it took since Zach is remarkably supportive and flexible. Really both of them are just terrific.
What drives you to make art?
I should say first that visual art is, for me, kind of a relief from writing. The reasons I’m driven to write, and why I’ve now spent a couple decades of my life obsessed with that art form, is a big question I’m always trying to answer with specificity. But I mostly make visual art to get away from those questions, and to practice something that isn’t so closely tied up with my identity and sense of self-accomplishment. It’s a chance to do something I don’t take too seriously. I hope that doesn’t sound flip to all the hard-working visual artists out there, since I know most visual artists are very serious about what they do, and they should be, and I fervently admire that seriousness. But there’s an interesting relaxation that happens when you practice an art you’re new to, where you maybe haven’t even thought through the secret significance of all the techniques, and where for all you know you’re doing tremendously anachronistic things but that’s ok because you’re a beginner. I once felt almost nothing but lightness and pleasure when I was writing, but there’s a natural process where, as you get more sophisticated, you start to re-think the structure of that pleasure, and it complicates things. Basically you get an education in the form, and you begin to see the wider meaning of every tiny aesthetic gesture you might make. So right now I’m sort of vacationing in a second art form. I use it to remember that art—any art, really—is also about enjoying something as well as being about judgment and cultural or social statement. So I guess I’m trying to take some of that “beginner’s” feeling back from visual art into my writing.
If you had to explain your work to a stranger, how would you do it?
The diagram drawings try very hard to explain themselves directly, which is what you might expect a diagram to do. I’m generally interested in an art that appears to stand there just telling you what it is. This has something to do with the idea of hiding-in-plain-sight. It’s an endlessly fascinating dynamic: as soon as a piece openly explains itself, the one thing you suspect as a viewer is that the piece can’t possibly be about what it says its about.
If I’m asked to go into more detail about the sources of the diagram pieces, I tell people about a brilliant essay by Anthony Vidler in an equally brilliant book on Situationist Architecture called “The Activist Drawing.” That essay was the seed for the series. Vidler points out that, in architecture, the diagram is not properly a drawing, nor a sketch, nor a plan, but somewhere both between and outside of them all. He quotes the philosopher Charles Peirce, who also happens to be an obsession of my own, claiming that the diagram elides “the distinction between the real and the copy.” What Peirce is noticing is that it’s quite hard to decide whether a diagram refers to an object or is an object itself. On the one hand, a diagram for how to fix a car is referring you to how you fix a car. At the same time, reading and understanding a diagram for fixing a car is an intrinsic part of how people actually fix cars—they stand there reading the diagram as part of the procedure. So the diagram for fixing a car is itself how you fix a car (i.e. “step one: read and understand this diagram”). This is even truer for diagrams of more abstract procedures. For instance a diagram for how the international banking system works both is and is not how the international banking system actually works. I suspect that if you made a remarkably lucid and acclaimed diagram for how international banking worked, in some significant ways that system would itself begin working the way the diagram claimed, since before the diagram existed no one knew how it worked with such precision. So a diagram reveals how a given system functions but also, to some degree, invents those functions. Vidler sees all these wavy object/objectless spaces of the diagram as connecting it to utopia, and this made immediate and resonant sense to me, since a lot of my writing is also concerned with investigating utopic thinking.
Do you consider yourself an outsider artist?
That’s a tricky question. I consider myself outside pretty much all communities of visual artists, but at the same time I consider myself very much within the Bay Area literary community. Either way, I’m suspicious of the outsider artist category. Roger Cardinal meant something rather specific when he came up with the term “outsider art,” relating it to Dubuffet and the art of the insane for instance. But now it’s a floaty idea that has problematic tentacles. It seems to carry with it, now, connotations of an aesthetic position where it’s thought that art springs sui generis, outside of the history of art or any history generally, as some pure result of an individual genius laboring in solitude. I think such a position, in its cruder forms, is a dramatic misunderstanding of what really takes place. Nobody lives or invents in a vacuum, and nobody can make art outside of all sophistication and contact with art’s history. I do think there’s a drive to invent, and a drive to escape boredom, in most human beings, whether they’ve had contact with art or not, but I think the expressive forms those drives take is largely determined by the idea a person has of art, and I’d be skeptical that anyone, even someone isolated deep in an Amazonian rainforest, would be entirely without some specific presuppositions about what art is. The point, to me, is to accept that we start with lots of presuppositions, and to work to complicate them and bring them into view, rather than imagining ourselves standing outside them.
What do you love most about living in the Bay Area?
I’ve lived for stretches in the south (in North Carolina), and also in less progressive parts of California. So I never get tired of the feeling that, at least in this corner of the world, my politics aren’t marginal, weird, detested, misunderstood, or even especially radical.
What are you excited about right now?
I’ve been recently reading a book called Writings on Cy Twombly which is tremendously exciting. It has some of his paintings and drawings reproduced of course, but it’s mostly texts. Since it’s Twombly many of the contributors are famous literary people: Giorgio Agamben, Charles Olson, Roland Barthes, Frank O’Hara, Marcel Pleynet, and so on. Twombly’s works have always been supremely interesting to me, but they’re also a guilty pleasure in a way since I’ve always been aware of something especially rarified and actually socially unengaged about them. Brooks Adams, in his essay in the book, calls this Twombly’s “blithe cultural imperialism,” and that’s exactly it—his is an intellectually and aesthetically challenging body of work, really rigorous and absolutely moving, but it certainly doesn’t register much discomfort with the art world’s loving embrace of it either. So the excitement in reading the book is seeing that others have noticed this problem too, and have things to say about it. In poetry we generally don’t have to worry much about being besmirched by contact with wealth and power, but in visual art it’s everywhere—there’s a whole lifestyle that rewards the most famous figures. As a result, as a viewer you can easily be cynical and decide that every famous canonized artist must have, by definition, something in their work that appeals to an upper class sensibility. No matter how radical the work seems, it’s either comfortable with the present distribution of wealth, or it’s confused or conflicted since it’s trying to critique a structure it benefits from. But the book is doing a lot to help me widen that rather crude binary I carry around in my mind. And meanwhile, whatever the political content of a Twombly piece, I’m just awestruck by the evocations, by Twombly’s sheer abilities, and it’s great to feel I’m not alone in those feelings either.
