Conversation

Williamsbrug artist Bruce Pearson interviewed by Christian Viveros-Fauné

Evidence, 2000

Detail from Countersongs, 2000

Food, Love, Air, Light, Trees, Architecture, 2000

An Interview with Bruce Pearson
by Christian Viveros-Fauné

Bruce Pearson is, simply put, one of America's most important exponents of painting this decade. Along with a reduced company of artists, like Karen Davie, Fred Tomasselli and Lisa Yuskavage, Pearson has helped inject new life into the Lazarus corpse of painting, in his case abstract painting.

Pearson's large-scale works, made more monumental by their deep relief quality, look at once like swirling coral reefs and hallucinatory 3-D landscapes, rapturous fields of color and highly textured surfaces of well-calibrated, but ambiguous meaning. Cast from phrases literally or figuratively clipped from, among other sources, fashion magazines, product catalogs and bad television, Pearson's dense, hallucinogenic pictures are carved from modest Styrofoam, then painted a welter of clashing or complementary colors.

Giving language a palpable, material form and unabashedly keying into the look of 60s psychedelia, Pearson achieves what few his contemporaries manage: an active melding of high concept and the look of popular culture, a rigorous, critical content and a seductive, no less sophisticated, accessible visual appeal.

Visiting him just a few weeks before his upcoming exhibition at Manhattan's Ronald Feldman Gallery, I found Bruce Pearson's Williamsburg studio in an uncharacteristic tizzy. Overrun by a film crew, Pearson's painting quarters had been momentarily commandeered into a makeshift dressing room for actor Steve Buscemi. Crowded around the walls of the busy studio were most of the contents of Pearson's newest show, including a striking painting titled Ecstatic Explosions of Romantic Love. The painting, the artist informed me, referenced Botticelli's Birth of Venus for its color scheme. Intrigued—and always a sucker for ecstasy and romantic love—I set out to explore what the talented Bruce Pearson was on about.

Q: Let's start by talking about your working method. Give me some idea of how you make a painting like this one. Where do you begin?

A: Usually what I do first is compile a lot of text.

Q: Where do you get the text?

A: It's all found text. Whatever I'm reading goes in there.

Q: But I know you, you don't exactly read aimlessly.

A: Well, it's amazing how much stuff you can simply get from the newspaper. I get quotes from all over, from journals, from books I'm reading. I compile the stuff, put it into notebooks. Here's one [he shows me a notebook full of hand-written notes]. I work on about eight different series of paintings simultaneously. They are different as paintings and also as ideas. Each series has its own conceptual structure and the series are interrelated. I find text for each series. Then I do a drawing. I lay everything out in the drawing and make sure things are working as I want them to. If the drawing engages me, then I move into the painting.

Q: How do you execute the drawings? Are they in pencil, pastel, gouache?

A: I do them in gouache. They are really finished studies. Usually for the paintings I will do one really clear, finished study.

Q: Do you do any other preliminary work before the gouaches?

A: Well, I do some notebook sketches, you know, to try and push the ideas around a bit without committing to anything major. A lot of this body of work has started off as photography. I took, for example, a photograph of grass that I used in this painting [he rises and walks over to a large, vibrantly colored painting]. The image is of a patch of tall grass, about four inches high. I took it with my digital camera, did a little cut and paste, then inverted the image.

Q: So, what you're telling me is that this beautiful orange, violet and green landscape has its source not in found text but in a photograph of yours?

A: No, no. I always use text. I always start out with text. The text is rather difficult to read with this light, but it's definitely there. The text is very important to this piece as it is to all my work. There's a C, then an O, a U, an N, a T, an E, an R and so on.

Q: It's "Counter..." I'm sorry, but what's the rest spell?

A: "Countersongs."

Q: Right, right. I see it now.

A: You see, what I do here is project the image on top of the text. That way, the image appears wherever the text and the image intersect. If you just concentrate on the text, you have to look at the letters and not at the image. Both components tell a story and both components are evenly interlocked, but they can't be read at one and the same time. Unless you choose to examine the whole structure of the painting, and then you get a third reading. When you look at the whole painting, suddenly it becomes impossible to decipher either the text or the image. In order to activate one or the other visually, you have to separate each one out from the painting as a whole.

Q: You mentioned that you were working on six series at a time. Are those series that you're working on specifically for your upcoming show at Ronald Feldman or are they ideas that you've been working on for a while?

A: They are ongoing series. I'm always trying to add new things to them, like these photo-based effects.

Q: Well, how do these series work? What are they based on?

A: One of them is my series based on recovery language, my 12 Steps series. For that series I've been using a book with medical illustrations that a doctor friend gave me. I use images of dissections of the brain and project them on top of certain kinds of found text. The recovery language can be pretty brutal. This one here for example [he points at a catalog image of the 1999 painting Step 2] says "Today I will not give in to suicide." This one says [he points at the catalog image of the 1999 painting Step 1] "You deserve to be with someone who doesn't hit you."

Q: Now, where did you get that text?

A: I got both of those texts from watching Oprah. I was watching TV and this psychiatrist came on and was saying these things that struck me as, you know, banal but significant. So I fused the text together with these images to establish a sort of Rorschachian final image for people to project their selves on. I've also been accessing impressionist palettes for this series. This painting in particular [Step 2]accesses a Bonnard palette. This other one refers to a Monet palette [Step 1]. There is another one of my series that I call my Post-Feminist Masculinity series. That series references the way the male has been represented since feminism and how that representation has gotten scrambled. This painting, for instance, is titled Why Can't Love Come in a Six-Pack? In this series I use anywhere between twelve and fifteen images taken from fashion magazines and the sports pages. Then I project them and trace their outlines. It's possible to make out certain body shapes in the finished paintings, but they operate at a very subliminal level. Now, each of those outlines also intersects with the text. There is a W there, an H, a Y, all intersected at some point. Originally, I used Ralph Lauren interior decorator colors as my palette for this series. Lately, I've been pushing that series towards a more complicated palette. The new painting in the series is titled My Planet Wants Me Dead. In that painting, I used the palette from Leonardo's landscape The Virgin of the Rocks.

Q: I don't know that I've ever seen a Ralph Lauren interior decorator palette. What's it like?

A: Well, it's very subdued, lots of off-whites, creams, grays, dark greens, barnyard red.

Q: Barnyard red!

A: There are even sillier names. Squash Blossom. Eraser Pink. Hampstead Green. Bridle. I could go on all night.

Q: Well, Bruce, now that we've at least touched on some of the ideas behind your work—like your use of text, your changing palettes, your quotation of the mass media—I wonder: How did you arrive at your particular style? How did you wind up making work based on optical art and these thick reliefs? There is a comment of yours that has stayed with me. You told me once that you fought against the Op referent in your work for a long, long time. Yet you've appropriated it. Well, "appropriate" is certainly not the right word. What you and other contemporary artists have done with Op is, as you put it, access a style, revivify it, make it very much your own. How did this process begin with you? How did it come about?

A: Well, I was trying to reference psychedelia, which I've had a fondness for since high school. At some point I started to use text and I immediately thought about making it hallucinatory. Once you start to play with that, then you move into obvious references to Op. Well, at some point I did a drawing that was very, very Op-driven. That was at a time that things were starting to go a little better for me as an artist.

Q: When was this? Give me a time line.

A: It was around 1996. I was showing at Pierogi and doing some group shows at Ronald Feldman, but I was really just starting emerge. When I did the Op thing, I thought to myself, "My God, I'm committing artistic suicide!" Ironically, I got very, very nervous moving into this work because I was, after all, dealing with what seemed to be the most despised art movement in the 20th century. Conversely, that very fact interested me. It seemed to me that it was something to look into.

Q: Something to look into why?

A: Because it had been so...well, in its own way, it seemed forbidden, beyond the pale.

Q: There's a quote of Warhol's where he talks about "Doing the wrong thing at the right time."

A: Yes, very much. So after that, say six months later, my whole life changed. MoMA came into the picture because they were doing a reexamination of Optical Art in their "Projects" series of exhibitions. They had observed that a number of younger artists were making reference not only to Op but also to psychedelia.

Q: You were, of course, in that MoMA Projects Room show with Fred Tomaselli, Karen Davie and Udsomak Krisanamis. Now, there's another line of yours that I used in a previous article that I want to repeat to you. You told me once: "I had a show at Pierogi and then I had a show at MoMA."

A: Boom.

Q: Boom. That's quite a change.

A: Before the Pierogi show I had come to think that nothing was going to happen to me in my lifetime, that everything was going to pass me by. And then, eight months later, there was the Pierogi show and then a lot of things started happening for me. I was in a show at Exit Art, there was MoMA.

Q: And the work in the 1995 Pierogi show is still relevant to your work now, to the Op-related work?

A: Absolutely. At the time, I was pushing the idea of a block of white, of making Op paintings that were just white. My Pierogi show had a lot of color drawings, but the two paintings I showed were monochromes. I had one black painting and one white one. It was great. A lot of people had not seen my work, so it gave me my first real exposure.

Q: Had you had a solo show in New York before?

A: No, I had never had a solo show.

Q: When did you arrive in New York?

A: In 1981.

Q: So, essentially, you'd been working for 14 years, from 1981 to 1995, in relative obscurity or at least without a solo show?

A: And without a getting too many group shows either. There was pretty much nothing going on.

Q: So what did your work look like before you turned to Op?

A: Before the texts?

Q: Yes.

A: I was doing a lot of abstract work that was biologically driven. They were also reliefs, like what I'm doing now, but without the content or with a different content.

Q: So the impulse to go Op and also to do text came at the same time.

A: It started with a collaboration with another artist. We had this idea to do an art piece a day, based on talk shows. That was when talk shows were really prevalent and their content was really severe. We would write down all the text, concentrating on material that would exemplify what was being discussed. Eventually, I did a series of psychedelic posters based on these texts. It was so enjoyable the first time that I did more of them. Then, Martina Batan [from Ronald Feldman Gallery] came over and put a couple of posters into a show. That opened up a lot of possibilities. I began to deal more and more with specific ideas, while exploring new notions I had about making paintings. I started off by using domestic situations as content. Then, I started thinking about other things in the world. So I began a series of white paintings based on spirituality today. I'm not talking about the Virgin Mary, but instead about people who claim to have had sexual encounters with extraterrestrials and crystal energy grid systems and remote healing, which is actually the title of one of my paintings, which I took from a New Age catalog. I wanted to use this idea of whiteness, of our instinctual relationship to white, and its associations with notions of clarity, purity. Then I began work on all-black paintings. I wanted to see whether I could stir instinctual reactions to certain palettes. I found out, for example, that my black paintings were received by people as mysterious or powerful. They lent themselves to that interpretation. I noticed that if you use a certain kind of palette, then people will generally respond in a particular way. The only colors that still seem to me to be wild cards are bright colors. Most people have a hard time with really bright colors.

Q: Maybe your use of monochrome palettes in your early Op-inspired paintings also had something to do with your working out the relationship between abstraction and text. Those two have not gone well together historically. There's the well-worn purist tradition of abstraction to fight against.

A: Well, what I'm really trying to do is to investigate the ideas of abstraction, image and text. How they interrelate, how they move back and forth to open things up rather than shut things down.

Q: So are your paintings abstractions? Or are they qualified abstractions?

A: They are abstractions, but they are also image and they're also text.

Q: So you're really straddling...

A: No, I'm not straddling, I'm weaving. I'm weaving together all these elements. And I think they do get woven together as a single structure.

Q: Well, do you find that you have company in weaving together these various influences and traditions? Don't you find that to be a defining trait of artists, especially painters, of your generation?

A: I think so, yes. But I also find that in other art forms. I find that a lot in the books I'm reading, in many of the authors I'm interested in, in much of the music I listen to. I think that the whole idea of drawing and accessing all the knowledge that we have available now—and computers may have a great deal to do with this—can generate a much stronger impact. It's important to draw on different media, different genres, different disciplines.

Q: Maybe this is a good time then to elaborate on the sculptural or relief elements in your work. When did you begin working with these elements?

A: As a student at the San Francisco Art Institute, I looked at Rauschenberg and Johns. Duchamp was just starting to be rediscovered in the early 70s. Stella's shaped canvases were also around. There seemed to be this idea in the air about breaking down traditional notions of what painting could or could not be. I've always thought of my work as painting, because one of the fundamental things that defines painting is that it is essentially frontal. Even though my paintings have a relief quality, I still think of them as very much as painting and not sculpture.

Q: But your use of relief is extraordinary, they are not reliefs like you'd find in a print or a painting heavy with impasto. Your reliefs jut out from the wall about five inches.

A: Well the whole object is around five inches thick. The relief part only comes to about an inch or so.

Q: But what I mean, Bruce, is that your work is not just simply pigment applied to canvas. What are the materials that you use to make your paintings and how did you arrive at using them?

A: Well it's paint on styrofoam. I carve the styrofoam with a hot wire. Anything I can draw with a straight line I can cut with a hot wire. So, essentially, I can be as detailed as I want to be. I came upon styrofoam as a medium after experimentation and some advice from friends. I had this friend with this heavy Parisian accent by way of Tokyo, and she said "Why not use the stuff that they pack refrigerators in." Well, I was with a group of people, and it took us 45 minutes to figure out what she was saying. Then another friend said that he used to cut styrofoam to build theater sets. He mentioned the use of the hot wire. He told me all I needed was a car battery, a sewing machine pedal and the hot wire. He said he'd hook me up. I said great. So a couple of days later, we went down to Canal Street and got all the stuff. I've been working with it ever since.

Q: Now, Bruce, let me go back a ways for a moment. When did the idea of doing art first occur to you?

A: Consciously, when I was about five, I think. I wanted to be a cartoonist starting in grade school. I did not see a lot of art exhibitions when I was young. Then I saw the "Dada and Surrealism" exhibition at the L.A. County Museum of Art. That experience totally changed my life. I was overwhelmed. It made me want to do something besides cartooning. I became very interested in the history of art. I went through lots of books, learned to draw the figure properly, drew perspective and begun devouring volumes on 20th century art.

Q: So when you finished high school you were pretty clear about what you wanted to do?

A: What I wanted to do was always clear to me. I wanted to be an artist. What changed was the form the ambition took. When I graduated high school I visited the San Francisco Art Institute. I really wanted to study there, but my parents made it tough on me. They wouldn't give me the money.

Q: They wanted you to do something practical.

A: They wanted me to go to a community college for a couple of years. But the community college had hired all my high school art teachers. I had learned whatever I was going to learn from them by the time I was a sophomore. That made me even more dead set on going to the Art Institute. Eventually my parents relented and paid for my first year. I got scholarships for the following years.

Q: Did you think then that it was possible to make a living as an artist?

A: Well, I sort of thought: "There must be a way." Of course, I never thought it would be as rough as it was. After the Art Institute, I went through this phase where I thought living was more interesting than art. When I got over that, I returned to making art and moved to New York. In New York, at first I couldn't figure out how to meet people. I hung out with a lot of experimental artists. I was involved with people who were doing lots of experimental music. Of course, that didn't help me at all in connecting to the art world. Eventually, I connected with a lot of the artists living in Williamsburg. I was living out here myself then.

Q: And of course, you eventually curated a very large show of Williamsburg artists. You curated "Just What Do You Think You're Doing Dave?" at the Williamsburg Art & Historical Society. How many people were in that show?

A: I think there were about 55 artists in the show.

Q; A lot of people still talk about that show when describing the development of Williamsburg arts scene. Why do you think that is?

A: Well, I think it was the first large survey of the artists in the neighborhood. A lot of people were in it. There was Amy Sillman, Fred Tomaselli, Roxy Paine, Joe Amrhein, Charles Spurrier, Polly Apfelbaum, Suzanne Cohen, Eve Sussman, Simon Lee, Greg Stone, David Brody...

Q: Lots of people....

A: James Siena, Sean Mellyn, Peter Soriano... I wish I had the card with me... David Byrne, one of the guys from Sonic Youth, David Scher....Essentially, I had been doing lots of studio visits and had seen a lot of great work. Then, I was given this opportunity to use this building that could accommodate much of it, and I thought to myself, "How hard could it be?" [laughing]. After losing ten pounds, I realized just how hard it was. In retrospect it turned out to be very satisfying, but not satisfying enough to want to repeat the experience.

Q: You mentioned Duchamp, Johns and Rauschenberg as influences. Are there other artists, painters in particular, who have influenced your work?

A: The two painters that most interest me right now are Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke. What interests me about them is how they are able to deal with lots of ideas in their respective bodies of work. There are also, of course, my peers. I love seeing their work. There are lots of good shows out there now by a number of good artists.

Q: It seems to me that the best of them also deal, like Richter and Polke and yourself, with important ideas, lots of ideas, in a real substantive way. Would you agree?

A: In the past, when I was doing my early abstract painting, it seemed to me that I was working with a closed system. Now, it seems that the more permission I give myself to find interesting material, the more I open up possibilities. The more possibilities I open up, the better the ideas become. There was an excellent survey exhibition of drawings in the mid-nineties at MoMA called "The Maximal Sixties." It showed that the era produced very strong figuration, very strong conceptual work and very strong abstraction, while also entertaining a large number of other artistic currents. The sixties was a period of great experimentation, not only in the visual arts but in music as well. Then came Minimalism, which as lovely as it can be, was this driven, puritan movement. It was about shutting down possibilities. Now, it seems to me, things are opening up again. There's the notion of new media and the resurgence of old media that is being interpreted in brand new ways. I think many, many artists today are being affected by these new possibilities.

Bruce Pearson's newest paintings will be on view at Ronald Feldman, 31 Mercer St., from January 6 through February 10, 2001, (212) 226-3232

Carol Kino writes for The Atlantic Monthly, Art in America, Art & Auction, and many other magazines.