- RK:
- You have a great line, that to be an artist is to be a scam artist.
- WG:
- I said that?
- RK:
- I read it in an interview. I loved it. I should say I don’t read “scam” as “scamming the viewer.” It’s more like scamming perceptual logic, cultural assumptions, fixed narratives.
- WG:
- But maybe the viewer should be scammed a bit too—all the best artists did their share of fucking with our perceptions or expectations.
- RK:
- Well, I agree with that, I was just trying to soft-pedal it. So tell me about your early days in New York. You were a guard at Dia, and I know you cite Dan Graham as important to you.
- WG:
- I was a guard in the late 1990s. And I worked in his sculpture on the roof. I made coffee, read the paper, watched videos, daydreamed. The work was about intersubjectivity, and I thought my subjectivity was pretty integral to the operations of that piece. But on the side, I was also making sculpture of my own, mirror pieces obviously influenced by him and—
- RK:
- De Maria?
- WG:
- Yeah, but also weird Manhattan lobbies, decor. I would walk around New York and think about what was salvageable from the history of abstract sculpture and generic 1970s Minimal-looking public art. I didn’t grow up having any knowledge of or reverence for art, but I knew what art should look like. And at that time, I was interested in the fact that this was supposedly obvious to me.
- RK:
- Warhol’s “Shadow” paintings were installed across the street then, in another Dia building.
- WG:
- Right. That connection has been made to my work. I understand it, in a way.
- RK:
- The very restricted forms and palette, and the overlaid shadow, a kind of nothing. Not unlike the black TIFF file you use.
- WG:
- That work of Warhol’s is either a parody of Minimalism or he’s doing it because he’s thinking, “This is what people do now, and this will look really good.” Or it’s one and the same—which is sort of brilliant. I don’t know if it was originally commissioned by Dia, but it’s perverse for Warhol to be grouped along with Flavin, Judd, De Maria. He was the weirdo. I mean, they were all weird, but Warhol was an entirely different kind of artist.
- RK:
- With the “Shadow” paintings, he’s submitting to the form, wanting to trespass, and be considered part of the canon, but it’s at best only a very partial commitment. Do you relate to that as a sentiment?
- WG:
- I think so. I mean, I think all of the paintings I make are kind of funny.
- RK:
- Scott Rothkopf mentions in an essay on your work that you tug on the fabric as it’s going into the Epson printer, and he calls that “action painting,” and I thought that was truly hilarious. But the humor in that is partly discursive humor—I wouldn’t necessarily crack up looking at the paintings themselves.
- WG:
- There’s humor, sure, but they’re not laugh-out-loud one-liners.
- RK:
- Is it ever the case that there’s a dimension of humor for you, but people are too reverent about your work?
- WG:
- Oh, yeah. That always happens.
- RK:
- And do you just let them preserve their reverential field?
- WG:
- Yeah, you can’t force someone to see things differently.
- RK:
- Because the humor is derived from a certain set of layers that you have to have already moved through in order to see why a particular kind of gesture is funny?
- WG:
- Right. I’m trying to think how to put this: I probably feel more of a connection with the people who find my work funny than with the people who don’t find it funny. But I do think it’s important to let the work go out and play, even if it’s the wrong context or an incorrect interpretation.
- RK:
- Do you want to show me what you’re working on for “The Painting Factory”?
- WG:
- Sure. This is the beginning of a six-panel painting. And this is one half of one of the panels.
- RK:
- So this six-panel painting is vertical.
- WG:
- Yeah. And it’s the same width as that painting leaning against the wall there. Which is my normal size, using this printer, the same one that I’ve used since 2004.
- RK:
- This is the Epson that’s forty-four inches in width.
- WG:
- Yes, the linen is folded in half and taped together. I’ll flip it and print on both sides, from the same TIFF file I used for the black paintings. But for those, I cropped the canvas down to just the printed image. And this time I’m going to stretch it as tall as the wall will allow—eighteen feet—leaving all the excess blank space intact.
- RK:
- They’re giving you a big exhibition space.
- WG:
- A big wall. I just told them to give me the dimensions and I would make something to accommodate.
- RK:
- Is that because it’s so deep into your method to work with external, fixed parameters?
- WG:
- Yes and no. Sometimes it’s just easier to be told what to do. But I’m always looking for a logic to making work, and sometimes the size of a wall will do. MOCA just acquired a black painting of mine, so I thought it was a natural step to make six more for this show but let the material stretch to fit the given wall. Recently, for a show in Zurich, I made a series of paintings where I started with the same file, but I stopped it immediately. I’d let it print for a few seconds and then disconnect.
- RK:
- Printus interruptus. And what happened?
- WG:
- These are the ones here. So in a way, I probably wouldn’t have made this MOCA piece before having done the Zurich paintings. They were visually permissive.
- RK:
- I was wondering about those. I didn’t know if they were finished or not.
- WG:
- Yeah, I call them “unfinished” because the file never finished.
- RK:
- They remind me of when you order something to print and then you don’t want to waste printer ink, and you can’t get the printer to delete the order, so you just tug the paper out of the printer, and it streaks wet ink.
- WG:
- Well, that’s exactly what I did.
- RK:
- So how did you get these vertical stripes?
- WG:
- This is what happens when the linen goes back through the printer—the ink was wet and there are wheels inside . . .
- RK:
- Those are the traces from the rollers.
- WG:
- Yes. I call them tire tracks.
- RK:
- They remind me of when a receipt roll needs to be changed, it gets those long vertical stripes—
- WG:
- Yeah, in pink.
- RK:
- Almost like with film leader, it’s the thing you’re not meant to see.
- WG:
- Right. Similarly, I think I’ve tried to embrace the directional quality of the way the paintings are made. And also let that spooling quality to the material and the machine come through in the work.
- RK:
- And this is dirt from the printer? Ink buildup?
- WG:
- The printer, the floor . . . I just pile them up and drag them around. These pieces are really huge and hard to move around, so that just becomes part of a record of everything that’s happened.
- RK:
- With that one over there, there are a lot of imperfections that can be seen, but are those in the file itself?
- WG:
- No. The file is just 100 percent black.
- RK:
- So these are all things that are real surface events.
- WG:
- Absolutely every single thing. Actually, for the MOCA painting, you can tell that the quality of the printing is different from this one. Here you can see horizontal banding that comes from “economy” printing. You know when you’re printing on your regular printer, you have all these options? I thought for the MOCA work I would use “quality” printing.
- RK:
- Museum quality. I love it. I think they make printers now that are especially designed to put fabric through. Yet this Epson printer is designed to print very large photographs.
- WG:
- It was. It’s old and rickety and dirty, but the new model is probably used for a lot of photos we see these days.
- RK:
- But in your studio, it’s not taking the kinds of print orders it was designed to accommodate. It must have idiosyncrasies you’ve grown accustomed to dealing with, in order to get it to perform for you.
- WG:
- Yeah. It’s a real character. I’ve gotten better at it. And it’s gotten a lot better at what it does.
- RK:
- You’ve trained it.
- WG:
- I think it’s gotten used to the way it should work for me. It’s given up on certain things it was designed for.
- RK:
- You’ve broken it, like it’s a horse. A workhorse. The Swiss artist Roman Signer will take a camera and tie it to a windmill blade—he makes the camera endure various situations and thinks of it as the Suffering Camera. So this is the Suffering Printer.
- WG:
- The Tortured Printer.
- RK:
- And the way you have to coax it. I love that term, to coax—that you coax it and work with it.
- WG:
- It’s become more lax about some things now; it’s not as particular about where it wants to print. Because, really, it’s designed to save paper and ink, so if it doesn’t think a spot is an optimal area of the print surface, it’s not supposed to print there. The new printer is smarter and more difficult to work with.
- RK:
- And that presents new challenges for you, I’d guess? A more sophisticated machine can’t be tricked as easily into doing what it’s not meant to.
Wade Guyton’s studio, New York.
Photograph by Wade Guyton Studio
- WG:
- Totally. I’ve only made six paintings with it. And it was a struggle. So for this show I’ve gone back to the old 9600 printer.
- RK:
- I’d guess new printers and improved technology could actually interfere with the structures you’ve set up. And that if you had a more expanded range of tricks, this, too, could screw things up.
- WG:
- There is a seduction to technology and all the new developments.
- RK:
- But there’s a danger to it, no?
- WG:
- Yeah. Just because an artist uses the technology doesn’t make it interesting.
- RK:
- It seems to me that one of the biggest challenges to creating—in any genre—is how to build conditions of necessity. To arrive at something that succeeds as art, that is both original and articulate, is to have found a way to foreclose arbitrary decision-making.
- WG:
- Or to take the arbitrary decisions and just let them be the structure, which is what I’ve done.
- RK:
- Which means these decisions are no longer arbitrary: They are rules.
- WG:
- Every time I’ve made any change or advance—if you want to call it an advance—in the work, it’s often caused by something accidental, and then I’ve let that become the template for what follows.
- RK:
- An accident as a norm, or beginning. Deleuze has a line about style, it’s from this filmed interview with him, and he says that style is when you make the language stammer and stutter. He emphasizes that the creator of a style does not, him or herself, stammer. Rather, they make the language stammer. It seems so apt, in a way, to what you do.
- WG:
- That’s really beautiful.
- RK:
- He’s talking about writers who are great stylists. But I feel it pertains to visual art as well. This idea that you take a language and push it to a kind of limit. And he calls it a “musical limit.” With the Epson printer, you keep all of the parameters so pared down. You make a lexicon. And then you force these small aberrations from within this very tight lexicon.
- WG:
- Right. And you control some of it, but then there all of these moments where they’re uncontrollable. But then you’re aware of the boundaries or the limits of the lexicon.
- RK:
- Let’s talk about these red-and-green-striped paintings. They look almost like a photograph of textured linen. The green stripe, especially.
- WG:
- It’s actually a scanned image of printed red and green stripes, from the endpaper of a book. The green gets pulled apart when it’s printed this large.
- RK:
- Why does the green lose itself but the red does not?
- WG:
- Because the green had black in it. The green was made from yellow, blue, and black in the original printing process, I guess.
- RK:
- Oh, of course. And red is a real color, a primary. But the green has these strange textures to its appearance, and underneath, an actual texture: the linen on which this degraded color is printed. So the painting is both a picture of a disturbance and an actual disturbance.
- WG:
- I think that’s where things become kind of interesting, where there’s a confusion between the two incidents. The paintings are basically digital photographs. They just happen to be on canvas. When I started making them, I was more interested in figuring out how I could make a painting.
- RK:
- First you were printing on pages from books.
- WG:
- Yeah, I was tearing pages out of books, putting them through a desktop printer. I liked the interaction between the printer ink and this other ink underneath. And I kept making them because each time I tore a different page out of a book, there was something new to bounce off of. So in the beginning I was really responding to the image that was on the page. And then I started becoming skeptical of that. So then I’d just tear the whole book apart and put it all in the printer and just print the same file over and over again, over all these images.
- RK:
- Do you know the essay by Meyer Schapiro called “On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art”? He begins by talking about how the concept of the picture plane, the rectangular sheet of paper and its blank, smooth surface, is not at all perceptually intrinsic. Such a field, he says, corresponds to nothing in nature or mental imagery, which is all unbounded vagueness. He talks about how the prehistoric artists who made cave paintings worked on an unprepared ground full of texture variation, and perhaps even more importantly, they often drew their animal figures right over the works of other artists, stuff that was already there on the wall. And he theorizes that the preexisting image is so irrelevant that the artist treats it as if it were invisible, and in a sense it is: The cave wall is not a picture plane in the modern sense; it’s a surface on which to work. But now it’s not that easy, I would imagine, to get to a state of just putting one set of marks right over another image without taking into consideration what the original thing is. You can’t not see the picture plane. But you can insert some level of automatism to image making. The machine doesn’t know what it’s printing on. It can’t see the image.
- WG:
- Right. And sometimes it’s better if I close my eyes too.
- RK:
- Schapiro says that the prehistoric artist makes his drawing “as one makes fires year after year on the same hearth, over past embers.”
- WG:
- Wow. I love the idea of the hearth—building fires and forgetting the last fire. “And the modern artist keeps printing fire paintings year after year . . . ”
- RK:
- And like the embers, something, in the case of the printer, is built up.
- WG:
- It’s true. There’s a trace of each painting that travels from canvas to canvas. They get piled up or get dragged around, and it seems like ink is always leaking out from somewhere.
- RK:
- So when did you make a transition from found book pages and start printing on linen?
Wade Guyton’s studio, New York.
Photograph by Wade Guyton Studio
- WG:
- I began to think, If these are my drawings, then where does that lead? Can I make a painting? I tried unprimed linen, but the ink would soak in, and a friend said they looked like stained towels. I wanted crisp lines. I thought that’s what the printer was good at. So I found this linen at New York Central that is primed for oil painting. Turns out it is made in Provence. But I liked the surface of it. I thought it felt good.
- RK:
- Painterly?
- WG:
- Yeah. Although no painter I know would probably buy that. It’s made for, maybe, amateur painters.
- RK:
- But for you it was chosen out of a technical consideration, of finding a surface that the printer can work well with.
- WG:
- Right. Although it didn’t really work so well with it, but it worked well enough that I liked the results.
- RK:
- I would imagine that with a more slippery surface, the ink applied to it would pool or drag or something.
- WG:
- Well, that’s what this does, in a sense. Oil paint just sticks to it. But ink-jet reveals more about the material itself. I started recognizing all these inconsistencies in the primer. And when I called them about it, the people at the company in Provence thought I was crazy. “Who’s this idiot in New York?”
- RK:
- You’re testing their canvas in an environment in which it’s not intended to
be tested. - WG:
- Exactly. And it really was, at a certain point, purely experimental. Because the results were so unpredictable I couldn’t build on things that I had figured out already, with the drawings. So I got really frustrated and started printing these black rectangles over all my failed paintings.
- RK:
- The black rectangle—this is the TIFF file.
- WG:
- Yeah. The black TIFF came from encountering all these problems in making X paintings. When printing the Xs, there was a mushy quality; all the ink was soaking in and dispersing. It was more like watercolor. So out of frustration I started printing these black rectangles over all the failed paintings, just to cover them. It was like editing.
- RK:
- So you didn’t resolve that problem. You just redacted the errors. Blacked them out.
- WG:
- Yeah. Because I didn’t want to look at them, but I wanted to work, to do something. Later I realized that this mode of correction could actually be productive.
- RK:
- You use one TIFF file, with fixed dimensions?
- WG:
- Yeah, one black TIFF. In my old studio on 38th Street I had a small elevator, so all the works were constrained by the height of the elevator as well as the width of the printer.
- RK:
- What’s this an image of?
- WG:
- This is just scuffs.
- RK:
- And what are these marks in this painting?
- WG:
- It looks like it got jammed. I probably walked away to go to the bathroom or do something, and when I came back the heads were stuck just going back and forth, and so the ink was dripping down.
- RK:
- Do you like this kind of thing?
- WG:
- That I actually don’t like so much, but you won’t even see it because it will be so high up.
- RK:
- And this white line?
- WG:
- It looks like the linen was stuck and caused an abrasion. The printer was trying to pull it, and the linen is so long and heavy, and it can’t pull that weight. Usually I’m standing with it, helping it along. I guess I didn’t give it enough slack.
- RK:
- Whenever you step away from the printer something can happen. Do you step away knowing it might, and this is just built into the practice?
- WG:
- No, never intentionally. But I also just get distracted easily. Or I’ll think, “I’ll be back in one second . . . ”
- RK:
- But if vigilance and perfection were necessary for the production of your work, it would be different work.
- WG:
- I don’t always know what it is, but there is some ideal that I feel like I’m working toward. It’s not like I’m thinking, “Oh, let’s see what happens,” and then walk away.
- RK:
- It’s always noted that your method removes hand labor. But I don’t know why it gets so emphasized. It’s relative, where you point to one technology terminating and another commencing—like maybe the earliest prehistoric artist painted with a stick, and then at some point a guy came along and developed this instrument that had animal fur at the end, and he said, “Look, this is much more absorbent.” And one can just imagine the first guy turning to him to say, “Do you, uh, still call that ‘painting’?”
- WG:
- With that modern object. The stick with the animal fur.
- RK:
- Painting evolves. Moving from the stick to the brush to the Epson printer. And it’s hard to say what is felt anymore, you know? Technology is our felt reality.
- WG:
- We’ve all kind of succumbed to it very quickly, and that’s not going to change.
- RK:
- It’s a mystery to me how an artist is able to make something of the very present moment. Face it, and use it.
- WG:
- For me, it was just natural to start using the printer. It was sitting on my desk the whole time. I knew I couldn’t draw, but I was still trying. I thought, “This is so stupid—what am I doing?” So I let the printer do the work.
- RK:
- Among writers, very few are able to pull off a real use of the now, I feel. Houellebecq and Bret Easton Ellis are two who do it very well. They put present-day reality through a treatment as contemporary as what they’re trying to respond to.
- WG:
- I don’t, but a lot of people dislike the two of them.
- RK:
- There is something off-putting to people about being a stylist of territories that are crass and vile. So what you were trying to draw, anyway?
- WG:
- I was just making lines—not even complicated things—just lines over these book pages. Or, like, an X, with a Sharpie. And then I realized the printer could clearly do it better than me.
- RK:
- So you just sent the page on through. And you liked the way that it looked.
- WG:
- Yeah. And then I just went with that.
- RK:
- Did you know you were on to something?
- WG:
- No, not really.
- RK:
- At what point did you know that it was going to work for you?
- WG:
- I’m not really sure. One thing just led to another.
- RK:
- For this show, is making a giant painting a kind of experimentation? To see what works, what happens when you make something larger?
- WG:
- There is something totally obnoxious about making such huge work. People make these spectacular things at this scale—and this is going to be so unspectacular. But I’m also not so convinced that they’re paintings, anyway. They’re not really installations either. They’re something else, so it’s fine for them to expand, to take on different shapes. They’re not really architecture either, but the way they grow is . . .
- RK:
- Slightly sculptural?
- WG:
- Sure. And the way I handle the material—it goes through this process and the end result kind of mimics, or is in drag, as a painting.
- RK:
- Right. A sculpture with a photographic skin. In drag as a painting. And then it can occupy that role for a little while.
- WG:
- [laughs] Yeah—why not? Occupy Painting . . . ?