I know that we have more than a few listeners/readers based in Europe, and if you happen to be hanging out in Copenhagen this weekend, make sure to check out Bad at Sports’ Tom Sanford’s latest paintings at the opening for his new solo show at Gallery Poulson. (Sidebar to Mr. Sanford: when the eff are you gonna show in Chicago, so I can check your work out up close and personal-like??). Based on the images Tom sent me, this show looks hot. Below you’ll find a few words from the artist that describe the show, an accompanying press blurbie, and some images to give you a taste of what to expect. The reception is Friday night from 5-8 pm, and the show runs through October 1st, 2011.

“2011 is fast, painting is slow. I am interested in history, but I work in a post-historical period. I make paintings about the time I live in. By the time I finish the paintings, their subjects are history. I am an American, living at the end of the American Century. Things are happening all the time. I learn about these things on the radio, on television, on the internet, on Twitter. The media is my muse, I paint by the light of my computer. I make paintings about the things that interest me. I wish I had time to paint more things, but art is slow and the world is fast.” – Tom Sanford, 2011

 

For his first solo exhibition at Gallery Poulsen, Tom Sanford’s work continues to reflect the artist’s ambivalent fascination with a culture that is driven by the 24-hour news cycle, hungry for scandal and obsessed with celebrity. Sanford’s paintings use a variety of genres to present the villains and victims, the tragedies and triumphs of the moment. The story of the hijacked Mersk Alabama and the rescue of Captain Richard Phillips by the USS Bainbridge are presented as a history painting akin to Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa. The recently deceased British rock bad girl, Amy Winehouse, is painted as an icon to be venerated by her fans. The seamy exploits of anti-heros Charlie Sheen and Silvio Berlusconi are painted in a garish, yet beautiful tableaux; these paintings are part renaissance painting, part low brow political cartoon. Sanford’s work is hybridized and bastardized like the culture it emerges from.

In the four Custom Mao paintings, Sanford shifts genres to the conceptual. Sanford takes advantage of globalization in his production by outsourcing a large part of the labor to China, and then adding the intellectual property himself in America. The artist has commissioned Chinese painters to paint copies of the famous state portrait of Mao Zedong, on which Warhol based his 1973 silk screen paintings of Mao. The paintings are then shipped to Sanford’s New York studio, where he “customizes” them by altering the paintings to become cultural archetypes from his western cultural milieu. Through this conceptually driven means of art production, as well as the juxtaposition of eastern and western cultural iconography, the artist comments on the shifting dynamics of global cultural and economic power at the end of the American century.

Tom Sanford works in New York City and has exhibited all over the world, including solo exhibitions at Leo Koenig, Inc. in New York and Galleri Faurschou in Copenhagen. His work has been exhibited at the Cincinnati Center for Contemporary Art, the Chelsea Museum in New York City and the Palazzo delle Arti in Naples, Italy. He is currently preparing for an exhibition in November at Gallery Zidoun in Luxembourg.

 

Custom Mao Zedong (Zombie), 91.5x61 cm, oil on canvas, 2011.

Custom Mao Zedong (Gene Simmons), 2011.

#Winning (Charlie Scheen & Capri Anderson), oil on wood, 122cm x 101.5cm, 2011.

"Italia alle Vongole" (Silvio Berlusconi), oil on wood, 122cm x 101.5cm, 2011.

Watery Grave (Osama #124976), 2011.

Maurite and Brandl discuss the itinerant European artist life, art study and the artworld in Latvia, Maurite’s difficult-to-photograph linear imagistic paintings and generally have fun meandering around art topics while Brandl fails to pronounce anything in Latvian correctly including her name (which begins with an “i”, by the way, in case Richard and Duncan screw up this paragraph.)

"The Most Beautiful Duck Blind in the World," 2011. 9" x 12 1/2" Gouache and graphite on paper

Jason Dunda’s work is impeccable. Each mark he lays down is precise, predetermined and, really, perfect. He paints wood grains, anthropomorphic hummocks, death chairs and wheelbarrows. Over the course of our friendship, I have remained intensely interested in his process, both as curator, as artist and publisher. In part my fascination stems from a sense that his work is a testament to the impossible. He paints towers that could not stand up, even if they appear to have structural integrity. Or, in another instance a fabricated tree made of smaller pieces of wood, appears to be trying to hang out with “real” trees; the fake tree obviously fails, yet it is also more interesting as a tree and diminishes the others which fade into the background. All of these pieces are made in gouache and a couple of years ago Jason told me he was going to start making giant, wall-length works. He was making them for a show in Dubai. He would ship them in giant, construction-site-sized tubes. It was all planned out. He was excited, I couldn’t wait to see how it worked and I realized as I went home there were so many impossible things in that equation: first off, you can hardly breathe on gouache without leaving a mark. Secondly, Dubai is a massive massive distance. Thirdly, the city itself sounds like a cartoon, a monument to human enterprise in impossible conditions: I’ve heard, for instance, it boasts a building with a ski hill. It’s all impossible and, for that reason, amazing. But all this strikes me as a perfect metaphor for what it means to create work in the first place. There is an idea that making work supplies a certain posterity. It is a vehicle to outlast one’s own lifespan. Despite the ageless popularity of this idea, the life of a painting is full of hazard. Historic works get lost on boats, burned in fires—you name it. It’s remarkable that anything stands the test of time. Dunda’s work faces off with that issue. His paintings are materialistically vulnerable, capable of reflecting our own existential fears. Thankfully, each one has a sense of humor about itself—what’s even more remarkable give the precision and time the work demands.

"The Most Beautiful Electric Chair in the World (Comfy Chair Proposal)," gouache on paper, 2010, 8" x 9"

Caroline Picard: Can you talk a little bit about gouache? When and why did you start working with it as a primary medium? What is most difficult about it and how do those challenges complement your own artistic goals?

Jason Dunda: Gouache is a very opaque type of watercolour.  It’s been used in the past in design and animation—any backgrounds in pre-digital age cartoons are probably painted with gouache.  I began using it about five years ago to make some quick works on paper to help me compose my oil paintings.  I ended up enjoying my experiments in gouache a little too much and my work on paper became the central focus of my studio practice.  Gouache isn’t the most spontaneous medium—just like watercolour, once it’s down on the paper there’s no changing it so you have to be very confident and sure of what you’re doing when you’re working with it.  The paint is also very matte and chalky—a quality I love—so if you lay it down too thick it cracks and/or dries very inconsistently and looks horrible.  Basically, it’s a very delicate and precise material to work with.  I often approach my work with a cautious delicacy and I really like to master a medium so I like the challenge.

JD: I mostly paint images of wooden objects, so I have a lot of yellows and earths but I mix it up with the occasional dull turquoise or cool grey here and there.  Because my subject matter is pretty consistent, I’ve been able to develop a central colour palette over the last few years.  There’s a couple dozen colours I work with regularly and I’m constantly adding to it and changing it.  I choose and modify the colours in order to have a wide range of contrasts in temperature and value but maintain a limited, harmonious intensity.  The colours are pretty dull and work well with the colour of paper I choose a ground for most of my paintings.

CP: That leads me to another question about the way you make a piece. As I understand it, and partly because gouache so fussy, you plan out a painting before sitting down to paint it. Will you talk about what that process is like and how your foreseen vision matches its end result? How do you translate an idea into a visual structure? Does the idea occur visually in your mind’s eye? Or do you execute a kind of transcription, translating the idea into a visual language?

JD: That’s a great and huge question and I’ll try to answer it as best I can.  I do a lot of research—both visual and academic—and do a lot of really quick messy image-making when I plan out a piece.  So yes, there’s definitely a translation that occurs.  The initial image in my head almost never turns out to be the end result and I think that’s a good thing.  Filtering thought through imagery and materials is a tricky thing and needs a lot of fine tuning if it’s going to work.

"The Most Beautiful Mixed-Use Devotional Sentry Tower in the World," 2010, 9" x 11 1/2" Gouache and graphite on paper

CP: Do you ever run into limitations within your visual language?

JD: Some days I feel there’s nothing but limitations.  You can interchange ‘limitations’ with ‘structure,’ though, and in that sense it creates possibilities and propels my thinking and making.  When I’m feeling particularly limited, though, I’ll declare to myself that my day in the studio is going to be different from the usual—I’ll spend the day with the expectation that I’ll have no usable material results and all I’ll do is experiment.  I’ve recently gone back to oil painting partly for this reason.  I can mess around and translate my ideas into a different set of materials.  My new oil paintings are really terrible.

CP: How do you anticipate scale?

JD: I never go bigger than my apartment door.  I learned that the hard way, seriously.  Scale occurs to me most profoundly as the relationship between the viewer and the piece.  There’s a sense of intimacy and humbleness in small works and a more aggressive, public presence in large scale works.  I tend to go to the extremes of this spectrum.  Gouache is a really difficult material to work with in large scale— the surface can be really inconsistent over larger areas—so there’s a particular challenge I like about large-scale gouache paintings.  I love antagonizing the intended use of a material.

CP: Sometimes you create sculptures as well—what I feel is like an almost traumatic transition, to move from a single-dimension surface to a three-dimensional physicality. When do you chose to work in three-dimensions? What is it about a given idea that moves you to break (if you’ll grant me this) a kind of third-wall of the art object?

JD: I’ll certainly grant you that and I think you’ve got it absolutely right.  The tangibility of an object is really different from the illusion of form and space in painting and that’s what led me to make the first and so far only object I’ve ever made for exhibition.  It’s that trauma as you call it—that fight between the illusory and the tangible that I wanted to conjure up when I used a large-scale painting as a sort of backdrop for an object.  I paired a painting of a dilapidated pulpit with a fancy wheelbarrow I custom built and had upholstered.  I used the opposition of image and object to highlight certain elements of my ideas—the conflation of the utilitarian and the ceremonial and a parody of cultural structures.

JD: Surface and I get along very well.  No matter the medium or imagery of the project, my work over the past several years relies upon a thorough consideration of surface.  Because I’m a painting dork, I have to learn everything possible about the materials I’m working with.  I have a tremendous amount of patience when experimenting with materials and it’s really important to me to show a certain amount of that mastery in the work I make.  I also think that it’s really important to me use the materials in the wrong way but still make it look good.  Most of my oil paintings look like they’re painted on some kind of plastic but it’s a concoction of walnut oil and wax.  Similarly, my big gouache paintings involve a process of staining nine-foot tall pieces of paper in order to transform its colour and surface.  I know when a surface is working when another painter can’t figure out how I’ve done it.

CP: Recently we’ve had conversations about how you feel somewhat restricted by the predetermined nature of your current approach. Do you feel like that sense has to do with gouache? Or perhaps a shift in what you want to get from of an act of painting?

JD: Both, definitely.  I think the busy work of planning, testing, and preparing when using gouache forces me to slow down and think a lot more while making.  This can be a great thing or a very bad thing – I’ve felt stuck many times recently because the next move I need to make presents such a risk, but then again there’s something very satisfying about meticulously constructing an idea while I meticulously construct a piece.  So yes, I want to get something different out of the process of painting but I’m not ready to quit gouache.  Ideally, I’d like to get reacquainted with oil paint while continuing the trajectory of my gouache paintings.  There’s something very interesting to me about working across media and showing the results together.  Incidentally, I’ve done a couple of oil paintings recently and they’re really awful.  It’s like I’ve never picked up a brush before and I really haven’t got a clue.

CP: Although this wasn’t my first thought in relating to your work, there was a certain point that I suddenly made a connection between your paintings and cartoons/comic books. Could you talk a little bit about that relationship?

JD: Oh man.  Well, it’s no secret that I’m a comic book and cartoon dork and have been since I bought a copy of The Incredible Hulk #238 after a swimming lesson in 1978.  About ten years ago I began incorporating a linear, graphic approach into my work and I thought it was really successful.  I’ve gone back and forth between painterly and graphic over the years and I find the most satisfying paintings to me are the ones that balance those two qualities.  The thing that’s most interesting to me about the aesthetics of comics is colour related to surface.  Today, comics are printed on super glossy paper and computer coloured and it’s spectacular but it’s not what I was immersed in visually as I was growing up.  Comics used to be printed on a pretty low-grade paper and the ink would just sink in to that surface.  The quality of colour in my work is directly related to this effect.   I mix colours that are relatively dull and I often make the contrast between the paint and the colour of the paper pretty low.  It’s a nostalgia thing for me that’s turned into a subtle narrative choice.  Right now I’d define my work as being less cartoony and more graphic—I’m looking at Disney all the time but it’s in concert with Ukiyo-e prints, illuminated manuscripts, and early Renaissance painting.

"The Most Beautiful Effigy in the World gouache on paper," 2010, 10" x 14"

CP: I suppose in some way, I think it’s really interesting because cartoons tend to undo a certain gravitas that is pervasive in the rest of the world. Wylie Coyote falls off ten thousand cliffs with comedic survival. Superheroes are constantly being resurrected and, by virtue of that resurrection, become even greater. What I find interesting is that painting affords its own gravitas. The weight of its canon, for instance, or the way that (at least when I was in art school,) people always ask why something is painted rather than being photographed or manifested more directly. I just wonder what happens for you, when you start to incorporate that cartoon language as a stylistic tool? Particularly when, as in the gallows for instance, you’re painting “serious” objects, while also employing very technical strategies —there is still a palpable sense of humor…

JD: Wow, that’s a mouthful but you’ve hit the nail on the head.  There’s a sense of detachment both in my work and in comics and cartoons.  In comics it’s a result of these adolescent power fantasies (among other things) and in my work it’s an impulse to not be so heavy-handed in my politics.  I’m not nearly  informed enough to make specific social or political statements, so I’m not interested in resolving anything.  Instead, I want to imply a narrative that embodies a particular and often fucked up set of social values.  Hence the gallows that can double as a vaudeville stage set or a sentry tower with a quaint aluminum awning.  I’ve always thought the images that I make in gouache are the evidence of some other civilization that exists parallel to our own—parallel universe narratives in sci-fi are also a current love of mine.  In my world, though, instead of granting wild canines the ability to mail-order anvils I simply gussy up the instruments of control.  Either way, it’s a happy place in which you don’t quite notice how desperate the situation is.

Jason Dunda has a show coming up with Laura Davis called “Lock the Doors.”

Slow
Opening reception, Saturday, April 2, 6-9pm
2153 W 21st Street
Chicago, IL

Gemäldegalerie, view of The Wings of the Wurzach Altar, Hans Multsch

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the role that reproduction plays in both the circulation and understanding of paintings, in part due to the flurry of online discussion that took place around the launch of Google Art Project last month. I’m not all that impressed by Google’s latest expansion of its Mapping empire, although I know that many educators think it’s a valuable teaching tool. I do like how some folks are already using it to curate their own idiosyncratic collection mash-ups — check out Chicago Now blogger Taleen Kalenderian’s “10 Art Babes from Google Art Project” for an example. Funny aside: when I first read the headline to that post I assumed the author was male, and that he was “cruising” the galleries virtually, surveillance-style, for good-looking women. And then I rolled my eyes. Now I sorta wish that that had been the case, because the museum galleries featured in Google Art Project are always dispiritingly absent of any human presence. I guess this makes sense, given the nature of the Project, but I find it depressing to look at – a sad, premonitory vision of a future where the physical spaces of museums are totally vacant, while across the globe countless clicking fingers connected to asses planted firmly in chairs peer through screens at the Vermeers and Van Goghs.

One substantive critique that has already been launched at Google Art Project — let’s call it GAP for short — is that (surprise surprise) it doesn’t include enough women. This is certainly true, but that’s mostly because GAP isn’t a curatorial project in and of itself. It’s simply mapping museum collections as they stand (or recently stood). So the lack of women is a fixable problem: When museums start putting more work by women on their walls, there will be more women represented on GAP. But here’s the problem that I’m not sure is fixable: the preponderance of museum galleries on GAP dedicated solely to painting, and the tendency on the part of those who decide which galleries in particular will get “Google Mapped” to not only focus on painting over other media, but on paintings that are either image-based or that translate well photographically.

We should remind ourselves that technology is biased, that the form of content delivery shapes the nature of the content delivered, as well as how it is received. In his book Program or Be Programmed, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff argues against conforming to the logic of social media or other technological platforms. If people working in the art and design fields celebrate the launch of GAP uncritically, the logic of GAP will subsume us until it becomes normative. The answer, as Rushkoff also advocates, is for us to be conscious of the ways that technological biases are deployed. (For more on Rushkoff’s work see here).

I’m more than a little afraid that Google Art Project will really take off,  and that as a result curators will start making installation decisions based on how their galleries will look on GAP. But I’m also bolstered by the fact that GAP isn’t meant to be an archive, nor is it a catalogue – it’s a map whose destination points will shift over time. The problem with GAP’s form of mapping is that its contours are pretty much set, and that means a huge swath of artistic production that isn’t particularly reproduction-friendly, is–and will continue to be–omitted. Mind the gaps, indeed.

Alte Nationalgalerie

Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian

The Museum of Modern Art

The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia; view of he Apparition of Christ to the People (The Apparition of the Messiah).

Tate Britain

This week: Bad at Sports presents an interview from our media partner Art Practical. Kim Anno is interviewed by Bruno Fazzolari as a part of his ongoing series of interviews with artists regarding abstraction. Kim Anno is an Associate Professor of Painting at CCA who makes videos, photos and paintings with an undercurrent of environmental activism. Bon Appetit!