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What artists say off the record is usually a lot more
telling than what they say on the record. There's something
about a reporter's notepad or tape recorder that can tighten
the lips of even the loosest creative cannon, a phenomenon
that never ceases to surprise and disappoint me. I ought to be
used to this reticence by now, and yet I cling to the image of
the artist as freewheeling, free-thinking iconoclast, living
as an open book, gleefully airing dirty laundry and opening
skeleton-filled closets to the world through their art.
Alas, this conception may have held sway in the days of the
Abstract Expressionists, who lived out loud, channeling pure
emotion onto canvas and mining personal demons for aesthetic
epiphany--but it's lamentably outdated today. This, after all,
is the age of what Jerry Saltz and Jeff Jahn respectively call
"termite art" produced by "hug-me's": precious,
pseudo-conceptual fluff timidly advanced by neurotic Gen-Xers
who scour their childhood for inspiration, only to come up
with a VH1 montage of Lucky Charms, Schoolhouse Rock,
Nerf balls and Downtown Julie Brown. Impotent, devoid of
constitutional gravitas, these slouching Harrell Fletchers and
Red Switchboard Braceleteers are portraits of the artist as
Derrida's bitch. Half a century removed from the
paint-dripping, guts-spewing Pollocks and de Koonings, today's
obsessive-compulsive artists try to micromanage how their art
is received by the press and public, rather than just letting
the work speak for itself and the chips fall where they may.
One artist recently asked me to email her a list of
questions I intended to ask during our interview, so she could
carefully prepare her answers, spontaneity be damned. That's
nothing compared with Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who demanded
they be allowed to read and approve all interview texts before
publication when they jetted into town last September for
their show at the Portland Art Museum. WW refused to
dignify this brand of pre-censorship and declined the
opportunity to interview the pair.
An artist type I did interview last year complimented a
well-known local artist by exclaiming, "She's the balls!" Two
days later, there was an email in my in-box: "Could you please
not print the part where I said, 'She's the balls!'? It's
probably not appropriate. Also, would you please not mention
that I smoked during the interview? I'm trying to quit. I
detest smoking and wouldn't want to set a bad example for
people." Perish the thought that creative people might
actually smoke!
One young artist who'd recently been picked up by a gallery
confessed to me that he felt conflicted about "selling out"
his indie roots. I found this an honest and valid nuance of a
growing artist's life and wanted to include it in the
interview, but he feared the admission might harm him in
gallery politics.
Far more disturbing than any of these instances is the
artistic inspiration that dare not speak its name: psychedelic
drugs. "LSD really opened up my whole world as an artist," one
painter recently gushed, quickly adding, "but don't print
that." Confessed another: "A peyote trip when I was in my late
teens started my career in art. I would not have become an
artist if I hadn't had that experience. It changed the way I
saw--and still see--the world."
Two other artists I've interviewed have acknowledged the
transformative influence of LSD, while a third hailed
psilocybin mushrooms as a creative catalyst. Although it's
been more than a decade since any of them touched the stuff,
they're still afraid for people to know the truth. They hide
it more zealously than if they had a past as a porn star,
child molester or Republican. Why the skittishness? Mostly,
they explain, it's that they don't want the fashionable
postmodern art establishment to pigeonhole them as hippy-dippy
romantics. But since when do real artists give a damn how the
establishment perceives them? Don't we look to artists to
express and embody the avant-garde, the anti-establishment?
Here is my wish for the New Year: that artists will be
artists--in all their expansive, uninhibited glory; that
they'll concentrate on their art, not on dictating how others
view it; that they'll defeat their insecurities, put an end to
the Nixonian obfuscations, and be as candid in conversation as
they are on canvas. Let's all go on the record in 2005, shall
we?
Originally published on
WEDNESDAY, 1/5/2005
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