- Please give our readers a little bit of information about yourself.
- I was born and raised in Southwest Missouri, got…
- I was born and raised in Southwest Missouri, got my BFA in painting from Missouri State University in 2003 and my MFA from Indiana University this past spring. I am currently teaching drawing at MSU in Springfield, working part-time at the public library, and trying to figure out how to make paintings around my new schedule.
- Many of us don’t grow up with painting and art as part of our daily life, especially many of us away from the coasts and our routes into the fine arts are circuitous. Was that your experience? How and when did you say, ‘I’m going to do this?’
- I was not exposed to a lot of fine art growing up; my inspirations were television, video games, and comic books. I always loved drawing as a means to create imaginary worlds and I fantasized about someday becoming a comic book illustrator, but “Art” didn’t really occur to me as a viable or even a contemporary profession. This is because there are no art galleries where I’m from so my idea of art came from a handful of field trips to big museums where paintings seem like ancient artifacts. My knowledge of art history was so slight that before I went to my first painting class in college I had a vague vision we would be painting surrealist-type work. I think many people assume art is a natural talent and that an artist knows his or her calling early on, but for me it was gradual. Even after I got my BFA I wasn’t sure if I was going to be a painter, but I stuck with it because I don’t believe in callings, I think you just have to commit to something and the more you become involved with it the more interesting it becomes.
- Talk about your creative mulch—that is your daily inspirations, ‘fine’ art & not fine art:
- Anything to activate the imagination really helps work flow so I watch and listen to things in the studio. Old television shows and cartoons are great: WKRP, Welcome Back Kotter, Land of the Lost, Three’s Company, Cheers, The Flintstones, The Simpsons, Fraggle Rock. Adult Swim is the avant-garde of pop culture for me, and I think Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim are geniuses. Documentaries and old movies are also good to play in the studio because you can follow the dialogue without having to look at the screen too much, especially movies adapted from plays like Dial M for Murder and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I just watched Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke which was really moving. I’m so glad to be living in the age of DVD’s and special features. Some books I like are Bill Bryson’s A Brief History of Nearly Everything, Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, Witold Rybczynski’s Home: A Short History of an Idea, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. As for music I listen mostly to Bob Dylan lately, especially his latest stuff and his radio show on XM. Some things in general that inspire me are maps, google image search, pixel artists like eBoy, Where’s Waldo, catalogs, clip art books, basements, attics, grocery stores, construction sites, abandoned buildings, overgrown lots, geology, weather, natural disasters, memories, houses, dreams, and walking. As for fine art, Patrick Caulfield and Matthias Weischer are two of my all-time heroes. I think Amy Bennett’s paintings are very interesting because things in them feel miniature which underscores the fact that looking at paintings is basically playing pretend. Paul Noble, Adam Dant, and Oliver Zwink create really interesting and rich worlds through drawing. And I like the photographers Edward Burtynsky, Candida Hofer and Brian Ulrich.
- Is there any other art or artist that you feel your work is in direct dialogue with?
- I don’t know about a direct dialogue, but I have come across other work by young artists that is similar to my recent work in that it also deals with disaster. Ben Grasso, Valerie Hegarty, Wendy Heldmann, Josh Keyes, Heather Mekkelson, and Alexis Rockman are a few. I think the popularity of the theme has to do with the chaos of our world now, economic disaster, war, volatile climate change. I guess art historically I am currently drawn to the regionalists like Benton, Curry, and Wood. They seem to have been living through similar times.
Do you work slowly? (If so) What are the benefits of working slowly?
- I’m not sure if the speed I work is slow, and it varies anyway. Sometimes I will finish a painting in two weeks and other times it takes two months, but by the time I’m done it usually feels like it’s been a long process. They evolve a lot. I think paintings should take place over a span of time because working, looking, sleeping, and coming back to work again gives the painting time to become rich. I would rather over-work something than rush it.
- Are you an improviser?
- I am, to some extent, because I don’t begin with a plan. Beginning a painting is like taking a walk without a destination and turning wherever I see an appealing avenue. The final painting is the result of pursuing decisions that felt right and abandoning ones that didn’t. But “right” is subjective and you have to be sensitive to you own instincts. At least this is how I’ve been working lately; my work from before grad school was much simpler compositionally and paintings usually only included one or two objects. I think the reason for that had to do with impatience and the need for control. Sometimes I would get really into planning paintings but then have no desire to paint them. The past couple of years I’ve become a lot more comfortable with uncertainty and letting a painting grow over time.
- Tell us about one useful thing you were taught or told.
- I traveled with Barry Gealt right before he retired from Indiana University in the summer of 2007. What’s great about Barry is he treats you like an artist rather than a student. For someone like me who’s quiet and usually a little insecure, it can be easy to let the opinions of others cloud your own. But walking around the Venice Biennale, discussing art that none of us had seen before, and being able to have a conversation with a teacher who respected my opinion gave me the sense there are not good or bad reasons to like something. In school you so often have to justify your likes and dislikes but at some point you must learn to trust your subjective reactions again so that you can begin to find what’s unique about yourself. Caleb Weintraub also reiterated this fact to me by pointing out that defending your work is really only something you have to do in school. In the real world I suppose people either take it or leave it, but that can be hard to realize when you’ve mostly only known a teacher-student dynamic.
- Tell us about one useful thing you learned for yourself.
- It’s important to work thoughts out on the canvas rather than in my head. When I’m stuck on a painting, it’s usually because I’m trying to figure out what the final product should look like. I’ve wasted lots of time staring at paintings attempting to finish them with my mind, but when I remind myself the process is what’s important, the work starts flowing again. Even if I have doubts about what I’m doing, I’ve learned to work anyway because doing something is usually better than doing nothing. I don’t rework areas as much any more, if I don’t like something I just figure I’ll probably paint over it with something else later, so I’m always moving forward. Giacometti’s words help me get over any hesitation: I’m indifferent to whether or not something is a success. A successful painting, a failed painting, it’s all the same to me. A successful painting, a failed painting, a successful drawing, a failed drawing, these things don’t mean anything. The failed one interests me as much as the successful one.
- Where are the figures? What are they doing when these events are going down?
- I’ve never been interested in using the figure and I think it has to do with being an introverted person. I‘ve always enjoyed being alone and seeking out secluded places. Figures in the paintings would almost feel like intruders. Also, having people in a particular pose or movement would shrink time into a single instant whereas I would rather time be neutral. The events are not in the process of happening, they have already happened and the viewer assumes the role of the figure, mentally moving through pathways or sifting through clutters of objects. Sometimes I think I would like to do installations like Mark Dion or Keith Edmier, a guy I just read about in Art in America who recreated his childhood kitchen. I’m more interested in creating an environment that viewers can explore at their own pace.
- When is it important to be accurate or ‘right’ in a painting?
- Whenever it doesn’t get in the way of what the painting is about. I made a painting of a sinkhole collapsing to reveal a basement rec room and I kept getting hung up on things like perspective and what would be inside the walls as far as sheetrock, insulation, wiring, etc. But I realized in later paintings that I didn’t really care about that stuff, I just felt some sort of obligation to it in order to make the scene convincing. So I just started plugging objects in and I realized the illusion of space was created without worrying about whether there was plausibly enough room for them to fit. Our brains are designed to make sense out of information so you can rely on the imagination of the viewer to fill in a lot of gaps. When I need to be reminded of this I look at Early Renaissance paintings where the perspective is totally wacky, or just think about old video games that used oblique and isometric projection but were still engaging as believable worlds.
- What are you working on now/next?
- I feel like it’s time to shift direction a little bit from the body of work I began a little over a year ago. In the beginning they weren’t really about disasters, they were more like a way for me to combine random things that interested me onto one canvas. My work was a little all over the place as far as subject matter and stylistically, so I decided to just throw everything in together to battle it out, and it was liberating. But there are themes of memory and home somewhere in the paintings, and I think I would like to focus on those a little more.
- Thanks, Joey. Keep us informed as to how that new work is going! For the record, Joey tells me that his favorite disaster movies are Supervolcano and Aftermath: Population Zero, both of which are made-for-television movies.
That was great. I’m noticing how easily this work transitions around from piece to piece, from being flat depictions one reads laterally, to reading more spatially. Paint handling and surface (I’m assuming from jpegs) also vary a lot, as do depth of emotional connection. I like the structural range of the composition that’s going on, too.
really enjoyed this. very thoughtful and engaged. i sense a directness, a sort of tandem action that plays between the thought and the work – not that the work relies entirely on cognitive intention, but rather that the interaction between the making and the thinking spawns more and deeper experiences, thoughts, and actions.
i don’t mean to hijack this, but if joey – or anyone else – wanted to jump in to answer a question, i’d like to ask one:
what is the relationship between thinking/analyzing and making/bringing forth, particularly for grad students?
so many students sense a disconnect, a kind of challenge to the very idea of making when they’re expected to talk about it. so many people seem to experience grad school via this notion that they’ve been attacked, violated, and that they have to defend their work against this violation as if something pure and honest in their work is torn away by analysis or excavation. but reading joey’s thoughts about his own work, i don’t sense that. of course, he’s been through the gauntlet of establishing and justifying the work, but i just love the language and tone he uses here. it’s a tone that suggests that he’s not going to stop explaining, investigating, responding to, and – in a sense – justifying the work to himself even now that he’s out of grad school. i want to know more about his feeling about “explaining” himself/his work, and i’d love to hear other people express their feeling about it.
it’s an interesting question Matt. For one thing, I think that the relationship between thinking/analyzing and making/bringing forth depends largely on the kind of work a person sees him of herself making and their overall process. Ideally these should be split evenly because it seems like the process of thinking/analyzing lends to the work an intentionality and accountability that viewers are able to perceive. But maybe that’s just the way I personally want to work???
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the different reasons that people chose to go to grad school and get an MFA; for some reason I think it’s related. I think you’re right that lots of people view grad-school as some sort of violation, and I don’t know why exactly…My guess is that the artwork is primarily about “expressing yourself” and defending it feels like staving off a personal attack. Again, it all goes back to how artist sees the work functioning in the world. When it’s ONLY an expression of self, rather than an attempt to communicate to an other, there probably isn’t much point in doing grad school anyway.
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Excellent interview
I’d love to hear from someone who would turn Matt’s question around. I think that faculty, especially in group critique situations can get rolling with a lot of artspeak that is pretty disconnected from a student’s sense of making. I admit I’ve been guilty of doing this.
Also, curious to hear from people engaged in teaching, what kind of cultural myths do you find yourself up against, and how do you deal with them? Just a few weeks ago, one of my students told his classmates the story of ‘the artist who painted the all-blue canvas and sold it for like a million bucks’.
Maybe this is along the lines of Chris’s request:
I’m not sure I really like having my thinking and making separated. I guess they are, generally speaking, but it seems like whenever I’ve done something genuinely good, there’s no separation between the two, and also, no matter how much thinking/talking I do, I can’t explain those works to my satisfaction.
Also: I think, generally, that art terminology sucks, literally. So many of the words we use suck the meaning out of the things we’re describing. “Figurative,” for instance, makes painting human beings sound like doing your taxes.
Lately, I’ve been fantasizing about what would happen if the concept of “art” didn’t exist in our collective culture. What would that be like? What would that mean for envelope-pushers? Would they still want to do it?
nice interview.
I’m a little late to the discussion here, but I wanted to pick up on a few issues Sam raised above.
I have been talking out this issue of thinking and making in a number of conversations of late. It’s a question that seems to be “in the air” right now, and I agree with Sam, and might even make the assertion more strongly, that when I am working well, the cognitive and the performative aspects of the work are one and the same. There is a speculative aspect of making art that always for me engages thought/conception/analysis in tandem with the act of forming the stuff under my hand…it wouldn’t be the same process without this cognitive aspect. I also completely agree, however, that the attempt to describe and explain the work always falls short.
Do we need to make a distinction here as to language-based thinking versus image/form-based thinking? The question reminds me of some analysis of Joyce’s Ulysses (by Nabokov, perhaps) pointing out the challenges of Joyce’s crazy project to transcribe the flow of human consciousness, memory, desire, awareness of the body, etc. into the written word…how imperfect and awkward a vehicle the word is for some of those aspects of mind.
And finally: Sam, could you say more about the “concept of ‘art’” in our culture, as a foregrounding condition of investment for “envelope-pushers”? There is a good potential discussion in there, but, for the life of me, I am hard pressed to come up with a satisfactory description of what this culturally shared concept might be. Are we talking about a rarefied art-world understanding of the concept? Or a more pervasive, top-to-bottom, notion of art shared by the culture at-large?
Top to bottom. The cultural, top-to-bottom understanding right now, if I’m not too far off base, could be categorized pretty much like the party system in 1984. There are the insiders who appear to really know Art and get it (as much as it can be got) and have access to all the necessary means; the interested outsiders who, despite their not being in the inner circle, still see value in Art and try to understand it and participate in it; and then the “unwashed masses” who don’t care about it, and to whom Art isn’t really speaking anyway.
The average working person doesn’t care about Art (by that I mean self-aware Art, like Duchamp or Koons or whoever), beyond saying “I like that” or “I don’t like that” or “I don’t get it”. BUT I’d also say the average working person who likes Thomas Kinkade likes him, in part at least, because he’s actively not making Art in the style of Duchamp or Koons.
The examples in my head are the artists whose activities would, without the qualifier of being ‘art’, appear to be esoteric-spiritual or just insane. Piero Manzoni, for instance, would be a guy who canned his own doo-doo.
I don’t think it would de-authorize the most effective of these artists, by the way. It actually could make their actions more meaningful, perhaps, because there’d be no buffer zone of people “accepting” the work deferentially, without really being convinced of anything.
I’m kind of sad that Matt Ballou’s question didn’t take. It seemed like a more radical re-envisioning of the making/expaining dichotomy. The typical discussions of these two aspects of artmaking/art experiencing seem like they’ve gotten pretty cliche-ridden by this point.
Sam, I don’t know how to go forward with this re-’art’-ing discussion without throwing the name of Arthur Danto into the mix. Danto’s central idea, that sometime in the 1960s, the way in which art operates and the activities that can therefore be labelled ‘art’ underwent a significant change. Danto, as I understand it, borrowed the premise from Hans Belting, who discussed a similar shift between the way that art operated and the activities that could be labelled as ‘art’ that happened in the Renaissance.
So, are you suggesting a third modern re-envisioning of art?
Also, is there any evidence of trickle-down happening in a post-Brillo Box world? As in, most everyone doesn’t get Manzoni, but maybe somewhere some designer does and something that person does ends up a Spencer’s Gifts or the novelties section at Urban Outfitters?
Didn’t mean to steer off the first topic entirely. I see them as connected. For me, sometimes I feel like the whole “Art” thing is just a big distraction from the real activity of making things. Even now–I’m pondering this instead of working in my studio.
I think this is more about a changing personal understanding than a broad, cultural one (appropriate, given our format, har har). There’s a real problem with self-awareness–I start worrying about context before I’ve even got anything worth the worry. The thinking-acting thing does fit into the Danto world: art = philosophy. It seems like many grad programs are more interested in a student’s ideas than his/her craft, because the craft part might be moot from an academic angle. If the craft isn’t up to par, the work’s going to flop in the outside world anyway. I’m sympathetic to that, by the way. I wouldn’t want a student coming out of my grad program (the grad program I run in Fantasy Land) making tunnel-vision angst rants, or pointless formal digressions, or ironic abjections, even if the work is pretty capably made.
The Manzoni-to-Spencer’s idea is interesting, if maybe a pretty challenging exercise in art-faith yoga.
For the record, I’m not saying there can’t be a rich, double-lifed thinking/acting thing going on with art making. But I do think it’s more natural for some to maintain.
Anyone wanna co-author Faculty Are From Mars, MFAs Are From Venus with me?
My choice of words above was inapt, in that I intended to suggest “across-the-board” culturally, rather than a top-down hierarchy of concepts of art…
Isn’t this question of analysis/defense vs. making in the specific context of grad school a natural consequence of the fact that grad school HAS to be about much more than a skill-set, or some kind of pictorial competence? An academic machine is cranking out “artists”, a bizarre kind of credential after all, and a central question in that orbit has to be, “Why?”, in terms of the work being made and offered for critique.
As to Chris’ hypothetical designer ending up with a presence at Urban Outfitters or Spencers: does this designer have work marketed at these final retail outlets, or he/she just working there, for the holiday rush?
yes, yes, yes – choberka is hitting it here:
“Isn’t this question of analysis/defense vs. making in the specific context of grad school a natural consequence of the fact that grad school HAS to be about much more than a skill-set, or some kind of pictorial competence?”
my question above was rooted in the apparent dichotomy between faculty and graduate students. what’s the dichotomy? it’s between notions of presenting competence. grads come in with the same product-orientation and object-preciousness and sense of knowing-what-i-am-doing-without-ability-to-explain-it status that they left undergraduate education with. i don’t mean to overly simplify it, but it seems like there’s this notion that students often think that if they make something the right way it’ll all be ok, as if a formalistic or stylistic characteristic of the object was all that’s necessary for the artwork to function. meanwhile the faculty are all focusing on another arena, one that’s intimately connected with the formal elements, subject matters, histories, etc, but which functions in analysis, reading, predication, and implication. when you get a student who for the last 5 years has thought that X = p and the faculty start to suggest that X actually = y, well there’s going to be an issue. the analytical/intellectual/philosophical angle has defied the intuitive angle, hence our conflict. we’ve all experienced this.
sam makes totally legitimate points – i too no longer separate thought and action really (even with i’m primarily thinking or primarily making) – but i never would have been able to approach the quality of that synergy i feel like i get at now without being challenged in grad school to live in that distinction for a few years. it’s hard to make students step out of the intuitive, working stance and step into the analytical, critical stance. but both are so hugely important and totally necessary to one another. we’re not asking grads to abandon one in favor of the other or totally be another thing. we’re telling them that the same intensity and knowingness must – at least for 2 or 3 years – be a part of what a person is doing – practically, intuitively, formally – as an artist.
do you see what i mean?
the tricky part is, to borrow your equation from above, matt, is that X = y +p . that middle ground that doesn’t discourage intuitive development of work, but does encourage work plus thoughtful consideration of the work is tough to get to.
on the students’ end of, i think too often students assume that faculty want concept to come first, which is inhibiting. it’s difficult to convince people that working through to an idea is a way to go about developing practice.
one thing i appreciated about my experience at Indiana was that i felt faculty pushing me mostly to want to increase my scope. to make me want more for my paintings, to value experimentation and exploration. theory would be, naturally, an aspect of that. but i never felt like i was being pushed TO BE more theoretical for it’s own sake.
one last thought on the thinking/making dichotomy: it seems like many of my favorite artists are those who explore options for how thinking and making are related. i really enjoyed the blurbs Currin writes in the big monograph. why he paints the paintings is the meaning of the paintings. i think this is what makes richter compelling to art folks (whether or not they like richter (and whether or not they’re stocking at Urban Outfitters)). guston, nozkowski, melanie schiff–all artists who ask me to consider their personal relationship to making as a part of their content. how to include that into education, i don’t know.
sam, i need a ruling: has this thread gotten too preposition-heavy?
Matt B – I agree with you. School is a place where you’re learning to be an artist but at the same time you become so self-conscious it’s almost impossible. Nevertheless I think it’s usually beneficial. Of course some people end up in a program that is not suited for them, and I’m sure a few exceptional people may indeed be better off on their own, but I would say most who feel ruined by school were just uncomfortable with the vulnerability involved in the process. Besides, blaming school for ruining your abilities suggests they were accidental in the first place. Personally, thinking/analyzing has helped me make the paintings I want to more purposefully instead of accidentally. Thinking/analyzing for me has involved decision-making that I was apprehensive to do early on because I was afraid of “defining” myself. I was also just lazy and impatient much of the time, but you can’t expect to get to the studio, flip a switch, and start making good paintings. I think students sometimes live two lives, one in the studio and one in the real world, and if you merge those your understanding of your own work becomes so much easier.
i like that reformation of the equation, chris. exactly right.
i wonder if one of the major issues we’re facing here is the general belief that grads come in with – and one seemingly promoted by undergraduate conditions – that in grad school you have to come with a project already in mind and then execute that project. i know that this was my impression coming in, and it’s something i’ve talked about with my own grads and others from around the country. one of the first things that happens is that all those premises and notions are immediately challenged, found to be provisional or based on a huge background of stuff that hasn’t been really thought out, and so the proverbial carpet gets pulled out. i’ve started to really overtly – and maybe a tad priggishly – tell my undergrads who seem interested in going on to grad school that grad school is about developing a critical eye and rounded practice, not about having a project you execute.
i love what joey says about studio/life there. i really had to give myself permission to see them as a unified thing, not as a duality where sometimes i’m doing studio and other times i’m doing life. grad school made that unity a reality.
Ruling: sentences are still pretty navigable, carry on.
Great interview Joey! It’s really inspiring to hear how your work is progressing post grad school. Wish I could see them in person!