ICEBERGER

Brian Willmont Rules!

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 20:22:00 -0400

Willmont is building the new American folktale with technicolor paintings that are tarnished with American history, Pre-Renaissance and Persian miniature painting, worship, dreamscapes, blacklight posters and the fantastic. On the verge of decoration, vividly patterned compositions are designed to entrance the viewer (like a siren), disguising and distorting violence.

So, you live in the desert, what’s up with that?

I was attracted to the history and drawn to the myth of the west, big skies and Green Chile. Maybe Im trying to fulfill some sort of boyhood fantasy or something. New Mexico was epic and cheap compared to Boston and after finishing art school I felt like I had to go somewhere really different and needed time and space to work. Research.

Where would you say your choice of imagery derives from? What ideas are you currently interested in exploring?

I create iconic imagery inspired by the beauty and conflict of the American Dream. Hopes and aspirations as well as complete failure swirl around and are neither themselves or without.

I really like breaking up space and playing with pattern and decoration in order to both attract the viewer and disguise or break up the picture. I’ve always been drawn to narrative and myth and am interested in varieties of art making that are made for visual communication. Representational abstractions.

Your new work reminds me a lot of scratch drawings. Did you ever make them as a kid?

The way the aluminum escapes the black feels like magic. I made one once.

In some of your past installations you also include some sculptural works—how do you think these interact with your painted works?

I’ve always been interested in the play between different works and the kind of electricity that can exist between them. I showed the sculptural work with really large works on paper, I wanted to obliterate parts of the frame of view, so that was no specific way to look at anything but all together. It’s a way for me to disrupt and tweak narrative in different ways than possible with 2d arrangements.

Who are some of your favorite artists, and what do you admire about their work?

Not sure about favorites…I like the way James Turrell can vaporize your perception space and time. The Book of Hamza Painters for creating lusciously dense and mesmerizing, beautiful and gloriously violent pictures. Trenton Doyle Hancock for his ideas about what narrative work is (and of course being a mad man).

Can you talk a little about Apenest?

Apenest is a bunch of things that Cody Hoyt and I collaborate on together and with other people. Sort of based around our books, Apenest Vol. 1 + 2 put together with about 25 artists each donating a piece of art to a collective portfolio which we sell to pay for a huge chunk of production and printing. We cycle through different projects and have done silkscreen prints, blacklight posters, art shows, lots of weird limited edition t shirts, designs for other people, a DVD and handmade books.

Upcoming projects or shows?

I am in a show April 17th at Rinoceropolous in Denver April 17th with Suzy Coady, Zac Scheinbaum, and Meghan Tomeo. Some Apenest stuff and later on a bunch of people are going to come make a movie with me out here.

Right now I have a whole bunch of work up right now in a show with Denise Kupferschmidt and Eric Shaw at 92Y Tribeca in NYC that will be up till April 13.

Describe your perfect day.
Good coffee, good breakfast. Maybe go see some ridiculous rock formations or go for a quick bike ride. Come home, eat lunch, get in the studio and have a productive day. Make a good dinner for my girl and then get back to the studio.

http://www.brianwillmont.com/

Nich Hance

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 18:59:00 -0500

Name?

My full name is Nicholas Hance McElroy. “McElroy” means something like “son of the red haired lad”, which is a charming and true pejorative, but clunky. I mostly go by “Nich Hance” - it’s lighter to carry.

Location? Educational background?

I’ve been living in Santa Fe on and off since the fall of 2004, where I’m finishing up my bachelor’s degree. That’s been on and off too. I go to a small liberal arts college called St. John’s. There are no art courses aside from a theory-based study of music - and a mandatory year choir. It all might be better for taking photos than going to art school is. I tell myself that it’s easier to navigate creatively and build a vocabulary for yourself if your whole life isn’t operating in those terms. Maybe that’s a myth. If all goes as planned I’ll submit my Senior Thesis this upcoming Saturday and graduate in May.

Favorite artists?

I don’t know if there are many perennial favorites of mine. John Cage is someone who’s done a lot to inform my sensibilities about living and creating. Not that I throw the I CHING to choose which peanut butter to buy, but I try to borrow his sharpness. He has an album called “Indeterminacy” with David Tudor which is full of about sixty 60 second stories. Most of them are ultimately derailed - either musically or narratively - despite how succinct they should be. He’s an inspiration.

I watched the short film “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe” last fall, which got me pretty excited about him. If you haven’t seen it, the title is literal. There’s a wonderful little book of his that recently came back into print in english called “Of Walking in Ice”. He traveled from Munich to Paris in the winter of 1974 to visit the dying Lotte Eisner and the book is his journal from the walk. His considerations feel kindred to mine - dreams, how nature and psychology speak to each other, leaving society and a fascination with failure. He likes big, threatening landscapes, opera and says that film is more about physicality than aesthetics.

Jesse Brown (www.papervspencil.com) is a good friend and a good artist. A lot of his paintings read like secret landscapes to me, which is compelling.
We express similar concerns in very different ways. He has a beautifully designed book of text called “THE LIGHT INSIDE YOUR COFFIN” which is his way of thinking about death and doom. Even in the real thick of shit he creates from a bright, childlike vantage point. He just make a stop-motion video for that band Fleet Foxes, which gives a good sense of his style. It’s called “Mykonos”. Since it seems like I’ve been talking mostly about lifestyles instead of art I’ll say that Jesse can’t swim or drive a car. I love swimming and driving cars.

What do epic landscapes mean to you?

They’ve come to mean different things in different compartments. They have a certain aesthetic appeal that’s tied pretty closely to the feelings they conjure. I don’t think any thing else can sort of stir you through-and-through the way they can. It doesn’t have to be Alaska either. One of the most powerful landscapes for me is the part of northern Minnesota where my grandparents live. It’s flat, with corn fields and little punchbowl lakes everywhere. It gets so so cold in the winters and there are such massive electrical storms in the summer that everything blows up to a scale that makes it seem a hundred times bigger. It isn’t a sense of “epic landscape” that is easy to photograph. I’m unabashedly sentimental about it.

I think there’s something almost gaseous about consciousness - it sort of reaches to the edges and fills whatever space you put it in. Bigger spaces lend a very different perspective and context. My friend Karen once told me that she would go on walks certain places to insure her “smallness”. The same sense of scale can also create a feeling of antagonism. I have a memory of camping on the Washington coast as a kid. The beache was dark and rocky, with thick wood crowding against the high tide line. Pretty quickly the waves and the open space became something terrifying. It was eating everything away all the time and was bigger than anything. It’s something that I want to look more carefully at but I’m not really sure how to do it yet.

How would you describe your process for making a
photograph. Do you set out to make a certain photo or do
you just stumble across your subjects? What has surprised
you the most in your process?

A lot of the time the photos are able to come together pretty casually. The biggest factor is whether or not I’m lugging a camera around. Any time I can forecast that I’m going some place pretty with friends I’ll bring it, make them stop and stand still at least once while I meter and set things up. I really like the dialogue that arises between this more formal portrait aspect when its married with a landscape. I want to believe that either element could stand on its own. Sometimes its better not to put the two together.

I’m consistently surprised by how often the photos I’m most excited about don’t turn out. I want to deny that I have a certain photo in mind, but the fact I can get so bent out of shape about a picture not looking like I thought it would says something. It takes me a little while to warm up to what might’ve worked well in its own right because I can’t shake the idea I had.

Lately it’s felt more important that I develop a sense of coherency in my photography. I could very gleefully continue shooting whatever comes up circumstantially, but that doesn’t necessarily give me traction with the questions that I have. I’m trying to plan a visit to my mom’s home town this spring to document her family. She has seven brothers and sisters and was the only one to leave the town they’re from. They are hardy, large, northern folk who hunt and fish and ride snowmobiles. This feels like a project that I’ll sit down with, make a list of the photos I want to get and then try to make them happen without too much contrivance on my part. I hope this doesn’t destroy the magic of things.

Nich’s flickr:

http://flickr.com/photos/lawns/

Nick Meyer

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 21:58:00 -0500

Nick Meyer studied at SVA and RISD, before getting his BFA at MassArt. After six years of art school he still hadn’t had enough so he packed his bags and headed west for sunny California where he got his MFA from CCA. Soon enough all the vitamin D and positive attitude took it’s toll on him so he moved back to his home town in rural Massachusetts. He now lives in a big house with a bunch of his friends in Northampton, where he spends his time in front of a computer in his basement.

Mr. Meyer, What’s up?
Really nothing at all. I’m snowed in. Trying to get some work done.

How would you desribe your artwork?

If I’m Being honest I don’t have a good answer to that. In short I take pictures of my friends and our lives together, but it’s probably more than that. I think there’s a bit of fantasy involved. I work in a pretty documentary fashion; don’t pose my subjects, don’t set up scenes. But I think that what I choose to show, how I edit it, keeps it from being a straight document. I could digress here for a minute and talk about Barthes studium and punctum but that would get boring in a hurry. Pretty much it’s just a way of remembering. You create your own history. And honestly I don’t really believe that history is capable of being totally true so you make it up. I’m making it up. In my memory at least, I come from a fairly permissive environment. There wasn’t a lot I could do to rebel or get under my parents skin. In the end I find that I’m just trying to live this life of theirs that I only know from my childhood and through old snapshots that have been filed away in albums. It ends up being pretty simple: it’s hot so you go swimming, it’s cold so you stay in, read a book, you spend time with your friends because it’s just better than being alone. I have to admit though that most of my pictures are jokes to me. Little things that make me chuckle. I’m making fun of myself and my subjects. I’m just lucky enough to have friends with a good sense of humor. It’s funny to talk about this as my artwork. It’s more the thing that no matter how hard I try i can’t escape. I have a few other projects in the works, some of which aren’t even photo based, but I’ll just stay mum on that for now.

I think since I’ve met you, you’ve always talked about the presentation of your photos being in book form. Word on the street is that it’s finally happening. Details?
Yeah. My graduate thesis was a book titled “Pattern Language.” It’s a collection of my work to date pretty much, with some clever editing and a lot of help from friends and teachers. it has a loose narrative, but really is about the pictures and the over arching story. My friend Woody Hambrecht is starting a small independant publishing company called Brick publishing and I’m the lucky guinea pig. We’ll see how it turns out. Hopefully it will be out in March, but there’s still a lot to do. Sorry for the plug. The book form has always just been a natural format for the work. It sits better in the pages. I guess because the pictures are about a group of people. It’s a story to begin with so why not put it in a story format. I think the book lends itself to the recurring characters and recurring themes. It points out the similarities in how we live our lives as well as time passing, aging, people coming and going. It just makes a little more sense, makes the pictures more tactile, less something that should just be looked at, but something that could be held and moved. It makes it a bit more animate.

Ok, so you have an MFA. Now What?
Unemployment comes to mind. I mean the idea was to teach, but it’s a cut throat industry. so honestly we’ll just have to wait and see. In the mean time I’ll just keep making work. At least I can pretend to be a professional.

What advice would you give to young/emerging artists? Get out while the gettin’s good. No I think the best thing to remember, and I always need to remind myself this, but don’t get caught up in the bullshit. I mean, it would be nice to make a living doing what you love, but don’t whore yourself out to make that a reality. Just keep making the work that’s important for you, keep showing it to anybody with eyes. It’s just a game of perseverance and patience.

What 5 artists should everyone know about?

God, now I have to think. my two all time favorites are Alice Neel and Edward Hopper. Because they’re really just that good, but everyone already knows that so… There’s this one photographer who I didn’t hear about till last year but I think he’s been around for awhile, his name is Seiichi Furuya. Just really beautiful pictures of his wife and child and a real heartbreaking story. I have a couple friends in Philadelphia who are doing some great things. Two of them are at Space 1026, Alex Lukas, makes great paintings and Crystal Stokowski, does just about everything. Also in Philly my friend Jena Derman makes amazing drawings and really amazing baked goods. Lucky Dragons, a band and more. Everyone should definitely know them. Paper Rad, if you ever have the chance to read a comic, or see Extreme Animalz or Dr. Doo play you shouldn’t miss it. I really have too many to list. There’s a lot of great shit happening right here in Northampton, just people making art. no hang-ups. If you come by I’ll show you some stuff.

What’s the best part about living in Western Mass?
Well, like I said there’s a lot of people doing a lot of things, just because. I really like that, and not to get to hippie on you, it creates a really good energy to be around. Also it’s quiet, no distractions. I have most of my life here that makes it easy, all of my friend (subjects) under one roof. It’s close to a bunch of major cities, but not a major city itself. We have four seasons here which was a big problem on the west coast. You can wear a t-shirt at night during the summer and go a whole winter without seeing your body fully naked. I don’t know. My mom and dad are here, I like my parents.

What’s the worse?
There’s not enough spaces for people to show their work. also I don’t have a job and I wish there was one for me here.

http://breaksheart.com/

Mark McKnight

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 15:40:00 -0500

Hi Mark, Congrats on your Fullbright! Can you tell me a little about what you’re working on?

Thanks! I’m working on photographing in Finland… I’m starting to put bits and pieces of things together and figure out exactly what I’m looking at and why. I think it’s probably the most organic way for me to work.

If I were to visit Finland, where would you take me?

If you came to Helsinki, I would probably bring you to a couple of places for some hangout. My favorite places so far have been Ravintola Tori, which offers some pretty incredible food… reindeer meatballs and some typical Finnish lager. I think every time I’ve been back to Helsinki I’ve also spent at least a few hours in Ateneum which houses a pretty beautiful permanent collection of Nordic landscape paintings (and whose influence hopefully makes its way into the work that I’m making) as well as Kiasma (the contemporary art museum). In the North where I’m living I would probably just suggest renting a car and driving to the Swedish border or around Lapland, which is the kind of place you really have to experience to understand. Especially in Winter.

If you had to describe your work to a stranger, what would you say?

It probably depends on the stranger. I would probably say “disparate” but that has more to do with what I’m constantly hearing from other people and less to do with any acute interest I have in confusing viewers or obfuscating my intentions. In most cases I avoid describing pictures to people because it defeats the purpose of looking at them and not only would it give people some preconceived notion of how or why they should look at them but also defeats the purpose of my showing them.

Describe your process for making a photograph. Do you set out to make a certain photo or do you just stumble across your subjects?

It definitely varies. Most of the work that people have seen is all of people who I came across (driving, walking, on bus, through an acquaintance) but I’ve certainly made pictures of people who are close to me and also in a few cases, gotten to know people who I initially met as photographic subjects. I shoot with a larger camera… it’s kind of arduous to bring it everywhere so in most cases, the pictures I make are the result of me going out and trying to make pictures. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. In a few rare cases, I’ve seen something without a camera and made a note to come back.

In your opinion, what makes a good photographer?

One summer, a couple vans, some assistants, models, accountants, a trampoline, fireworks. Or you could just be borrowing your mom’s old Pentax. Or you could drag an 8x10 around. I think there’s a variety of ways to make great pictures and anyone can make them… certainly the amount of incredible “found photographs” out there serve as evidence of that.

What artists are you excited about right now?

I’m really excited about a lot of my friends… I’d rather talk about their work then mine most of the time. I just saw a bunch of great work on my friend Peters “flickr”… It’s just a random selection of stuff he’s made over the last bit of time and it’s certainly only a small fraction of a pretty extensive and great collection of work but people should be aware: http://www.flickr.com/photos/24101414@N03/

Also, my friend Paul Schiek had a show at Stephen Wirtz right after his inclusion in Bay Area Now. My buddy Michelle Blade continues to make paintings that thrill the shit out of me… I really admire the sincerity in her work. I helped my friend Calvin Tresize document some pretty stellar performative work over the summer and I believe he’s going to be showing that in Los Angeles in the near-future. My friend Alex Heilbron, also blowing my mind right now with some new work during an I-chat tour of her studio. Case Simmons and Andrew Burke had a show at Lightbox in LA that I just missed before I moved but I did see all the work and it’s monumental and disgusting and perfect at the same time.

Historically… I’m really excited about Imogen Cunningham. Before I left for Finland I helped manage a giant project in which me and several other individuals organized the curating, archiving, framing, and hanging of hundreds of her prints for an exhibition. After handling the prints day after day and noticing the variety of subject matter, I really began to appreciate her in a way that I don’t think I otherwise would have. The variety in her work is really an indication of one persons interest in constructing a visual world that sometimes has everything to do with and other times absolutely nothing to do with reality. I’m still interested in that age old, often clichéd discussion of “photographic truth”. Somehow the work functions, I don’t know if I could ever put it into words or if it’s even worth doing. And also, Walker Evans. Always. I don’t even think I need to elaborate on that one.

What’s next?

Next? The more I think about all the good work that is and isn’t being seen for vast and weird reasons, the more I think I might like to start curating. Maybe consider an MFA for the sake of teaching? I’m also working on editing a small book of my work that should be out in 2009. I’ll keep you posted….

http://www.tinyvices.com/Mark_McKnight_1

brent cunningham

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 23:01:00 -0500

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.

http://brentcunningham.blogspot.com

http://www.hookepress.com

http://www.artifactsf.org

http://www.spdbooks.org

Adams Puryear grew up in Massachusetts and attended the Massachusetts College of Art. After...

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 18:53:00 -0400

Adams Puryear grew up in Massachusetts and attended the Massachusetts College of Art. After graduation in 2004 he moved to New York and started an internship turned assistantship turned residency at Greenwich House Pottery in the West Village of Manhattan. He currently lives in Brooklyn.

Hi Adam! What’s happening?
Hi Erica! I’m glad to be fake-talking to you. I’m about to start another series of anti-tech missiles. It is very exciting.

What’s your favorite thing about living in Brooklyn?
The culture here is pretty incredible. There is a little something here for everyone in the arts. There are crazy art people who do pretty neat things all the time and a lot of great music all over the place -almost all bands come through here. Plus there are a lot of interesting and unique events here all the time and some are free every now and then. It is a fun place to be and there is always something to do.

What’s your least?
I have the usual complaints: it is crowded, stressful, busy, dirty, no trees, and hard to see friends sometimes. It seems that most people have a love/hate relationship here, me included.

Do you have a Day Job, What do you do?
I have two. I am a Resident Artist at a ceramic studio and school called Greenwich House Pottery in the West Village of Manhattan. It is a paid position and requires 15 hours of work a week of kiln loading and clay mixing. The benefits are free materials and kiln firings, studio space, and unlimited access to a shared studio space.
It is in a unique location too. Even though it is the upscale West Village of Manhatten there are still a community of crack heads roaming around and right across the street lives the minimalist/modern artist Frank Stella. That combination keeps things pretty interesting.
I also work as a gallery assistant/art handler/curator at a contemporary Cuban art gallery and informational resource called the Cuban Art Space outside of Chelsea. It is in the Fur Coat district of Manhattan, which is odd and a little silly. Especially when thinking that the people at the Cuba Center (largely left-wing radicals, communists, or anarchists) are surrounded by bourgeois fur wearing men and women.

Art vs. Craft?
They both have their place in the world. For me personally the pottery I make acts as a sketchpad to flush out both my conceptual and technical ideas for the larger sculptures to come. Also it’s easier to sell my pottery, which makes it easier to survive financially as an artist.
Ceramics is still largely in the craft field as it will be for maybe forever. But there is a growing intellectualism in my generation that contains the desire to bring ceramics to the next level in the art world.

What three things inspire your work?
Life Experience is the main influence. It’s a pretty broad inspiration that includes news and current events and culture and trends that provoke an emotion that I want to communicate to others.
One of the latest examples I can think of is a few months ago during short period of time where I had witnessed several bar fights. From these incidents I began making beer steins that had brass knuckle shaped handles. The concept of these steins is to shatter it over your opponent’s head after entering into an dispute where there is no way out. After this action you’d be left with the knuckles to help you triumph in the skirmish.
Handmade pottery is all about a specific use: a pitcher for pouring, a bowl for liquids and solids, a mug for a liquid-sometimes hot. So with these Beer Steins for Barfights, I find it fun to bring pottery a little closer to the edge. Especially because it tends to stay far away, in its proverbial comfort zone.

Why clay as a medium?
In school I was majoring in sculpture and using the usual materials of artschool: metal, wood, and plaster. I enrolled in a wheel working class late junior year and found that clay could more easily achieve a lot of things that the other materials I was working with could not. The fluidity of the material was pretty attractive and the ease and quickness of working with clay appealed to me.
Also throwing clay on a potter’s wheel is often a very meditative process. This course of action gives clay an emotionally positive zen quality that few three dimensional mediums can deliver.

So, you come from a family of creative people, how has that influenced you?
It is a really supportive environment to be born into even when the people in my family’s viewpoints and artistic appreciation differ. It is also helpful when they can edit an artist’s statement well or when I am seekng advice.

Where is the best place to see art in New York?
Chelsea Gallery Openings, usual the first Thursdays of the month is the best. There is so much art and so much variety on those nights that usually one can find something that they like. A lot of the time, there is at least one show that’s beautifully mind-blowing.

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Tue, 02 Sep 2008 11:10:50 -0400