John Seal Interview
December 2016
Conducted on the occasion of the exhibition “John Seal: While There is Still Life To Live”
On View at Ooga Booga / 356 Mission Rd through January 8, 2017
Ethan Swan: Can you start by talking about the sweater paintings you showed in New York last year? I think they establish a precedent for the works in the show at 356 Mission.
John Seal: The sweaters started as a regular rectangular painting first, and as I was painting them I thought, “what would be the conditions that paintings like those could actually sit comfortably in the world?” I started wondering about different avenues for taste or style, and how collecting art does sometimes become a way to “sport your snazz.” I think it is a little problematic when people expect art to reflect their style.
The original paintings were becoming very patterned, and I was thinking about other ways people might project them onto their personas. That’s what led me to sweaters. I wanted to draw a parallel between a person’s expectations of what a work of art could or should do in their ideal role for a painting, and what I wanted the painting to do. Basically, I wanted the painting to misfit that ideal. I wanted a format that could present a perfectly obedient and tasteful object (“Here’s a daring sweater! Put it on! People will think you are loads of fun!”), but simultaneously show how it can precisely never be that obedient, tasteful object.
The sweaters were also an offshoot of thinking a lot about framing and how frames work, and what frames do; and what role the frames have in the presentation, and also the consumption of art. A frame has many roles – it physically protects the painting. But there’s also this funny thing, especially with really heavy and ornate frames, there’s a sense I get that the frames are to protect the viewer or the viewer’s environment, the collector’s environment, from being fully contaminated by the artwork. It’s a little cage for the painting so that it can’t escape or take over.
To read the interview in Spanish click HERE
ES: This is what’s curious to me about the current show. As you say, the painting in the sweater frame could be a pattern on a sweater, but the painting on a banana, for example, couldn’t be an unpeeled banana. There’s something more contentious about the works in the current show because there’s more of a tension between the shape of it and the content of it.
JS: Right. It’s less of a comfortable fit, for the most part. There’s also a force fit feeling from the fact that the frame really did come first for the works at 356 Mission. The painting itself is being pressed into duty of filling the frame—as opposed to the frame merely augmenting the painting. There are many points to this, but part of it was realizing that not only was this a way for me to talk about style in the life of the painting as it’s consumed, but to also to talk about the role of painting in our culture. This also connects to a belief that I’ve been fostering/festering for a while that we have lost the feeling that painting is actually a way of understanding the world-- of figuring out how we can further our understanding of the world. It’s a way of being able to paint a banana that doesn’t look anything like your expectations of a banana but pressing it into a banana shape. In a sense, it’s an attempt to portray the idea that we actually know very little about bananas. There’s so much more to a banana than we could actually express.
Again, there’s this implicit message that to make a painting, and to view a painting is work. If you’re expecting it to be anything other than work you’re expecting the wrong thing. But also that work is the delicious thing of the object. Bananas are beautiful looking with the peel on, but they’re much nicer with the peel off, you know what I mean? But getting the peel off and doing the chewing is work. And it applies, also, to painting. Both the effort to make a work of art, and the act of viewing and interpreting a work of art require a lot of energy to be spent. Not only is this spent energy, this work, necessary, it is, actually, the most pleasurable facet of the work of art.
ES: In the presentation at 356 Mission, the shaped objects are all quotidian objects. You showed me the comb when you were working on it, and you hadn’t filled in the paintings yet but there were gaps left for them. You explained that the painting is dandruff, which I love. But you can’t imagine much on dandruff. I keep thinking about the wildness of the painting and wondering if you’re suggesting a sense of potential in the banana, the magic that’s just beneath the peel? The way you’re talking about “work” feels more realizable in this group of objects because of their plainness.
JS: In a sense. It’s also about the error in communication and the error in perception, and, in some ways, it’s a complete misunderstanding of what a banana is on the inside. It is some kind of wild guess of what a banana is under the peel. It’s also an attempt to open up a conversation about what we do think a banana is, and why we think that. Our perception of bananas is as full of errors as that painting of bananas is. I’m trying to open up a big can of worms, and there are a lot of differently shaped worms in there. He painting is almost trying to make the claim, “why isn’t this what you think a banana looks like on the inside?” because our perception of what a banana is, is full of gross errors. There’s a real point to this – I think that there is so much further we can go and I think we’ve lost that faith. I think we’ve lost that faith for a couple of centuries now. I call it faith, but it should just really be considered a fact; a single fact to replace all the other facts we think we know. There are times when I feel the only way we can go forward culturally--to put it in dangerous terms—is to go back to a place of wonder, of assuming that I don’t actually know what the fuck is out there, and I don’t even know, precisely, how I’m looking at it. I need to start looking at how I’m looking at it. That sounds dreadfully postmodern, all the looking at the looking, but it’s an essential part of undoing this process. Basically, I’m trying to find some balance between the looking-at-looking, and the looking-at the-thing-looked-at. I’m trying to display them both evenly, and fairly, and at the same time.
ES: I want to know more about the frames and the paintings. Maybe it’s a romanticism of woodworking or craft or something, that adoration for wood, but it feels like an interesting tension between the care and soft touch that’s visible in the frames, especially the fruit pieces, and the painting, which has a wildness, a closeness to violence. Was this tension difficult to wrangle?
JS: I do think they are two very different materials, not only in their physical structure and how they need to be manipulated, but also historically and culturally they’re very different materials. In a sense, loving them both requires very different actions that have very different outcomes. The softness, as you put it, the overtures towards a certain kind of gracefulness is something that wood can have. For centuries and centuries people have loved to look at wood, and like to have it around. I’m not immune to that, and it affects the way I work with it. That’s a big part of wanting to use wood as opposed to some other material. Also the decision to not paint the wood, to leave the grain visible. In a sense, the combination of frame and painting invite one to see the wood grain as a painting made by a tree. It is as though to say, “here is a tree making a painting, and here is a person making a painting. Let’s put them together and see how they talk to each other. “
Some of the softness of touch you perceive is also due to an economy of expression in their form. For as overtly comical that the shapes can be, they are much more readily assimilable into a broad, mass culture, than the paintings themselves. Part of that is the brevity, the sort of modernist brevity with which I approach the shape. This is a rather tricky subject because, in many ways, it’s what the paintings themselves are working against. That modernist, graceful brevity is a highly troubling force, I think, in the making of objects in our culture. Because I believe it’s far too easy to achieve, and it leads to some horrific work, some extremely boring work. I guess what I’m suggesting is that the frames form a sort of compromised in this way, but pointedly and overtly compromised. Yes, they do look graceful, I mean, we’re conditioned into that, especially by high modernism: the most simplified thing is the most graceful, and thus the most beautiful. This is the easiest, most boring formula for making a beautiful object. I’m pressing that in service to the banana which is intended to be a little bit mocking, a little bit humorous, but it’s also definitely making a concession to those sorts of precepts about beauty. It’s making a compromise. I want to assist the painting into the world, thus the frame will make some of the compromises that the painting, then, does not have to. I am making it sound as though the sculptural elements are somehow secondary, but it is not true. The compromise itself is compromised. The painting and frame work with each other, and they work off each other. The grace of the frames, and the awkward energy of the paintings challenge one another as to which is the more genuine.
ES: In the show, there will also be the works on easels, those are paintings, right?
JS: They will be. But those will actually be really sculptural because they sit solidly in three dimensional space, and also because I really wanted them to be thought of in terms of scale and three dimensional materiality. In the backs of the canvases I put these giant staples so they would read as very large versions of small canvases, not for the sake of Hollywood theatricality, but really just to reinforce this idea that these are to scale. They help establish scale or, rather, a set of scales that the objects and viewers must contend with.
It also makes them far more sculptural. When I was making them I kept thinking they were the closest thing I’ve ever made to real sculpture-- these fucking canvases. It’s hilarious, or so I thought.
ES: Reinforcing the change in scale is really important. Obviously like the banana work is bigger than the fruit, but that happens in art, things change scale to show detail or fill space or whatever. But the outsize canvases really make clear that there is scale shift when you enter the gallery. So during the exhibition you will make the paintings displayed on the giant easels. Can you talk about that process? Will you try and replicate everything exactly as it’s seen in the gallery? Or is there some flexibility?
JS: Yeah, that’s the idea so far. We’ll have to see when I get there how it changes. I want to leave as much thinking about it as possible to the moment I’m actually there, and not overthink it beforehand. I want to force myself to actually have to deal with it in the moment. It is my wish that, in the end, they actually do become serious paintings. I want them to be as successful, and as unsuccessful as they need to be to become actual paintings and not just fulfilling a thought. It’s already becoming dangerously close to that, their presence there and what they’re doing, because in a sense they are there to open up the space between the paintings and the still life set-up on the central platform. It also opens up a space for the viewer in which they can consider their role in the viewing and consumption and the production of this work. The easels begin their life in the exhibition dangerously close to being a prop; so the activity that happens during the course of the show, the painting of these paintings, has to be aimed completely at undoing the prop-ness of those paintings, and push them into the space of being real paintings. I hope I can do it. If I can’t, I’ll feel like I really failed. But failure is an important part of making art too.
ES: Before we started this conversation one of the ideas I had was that the frame gives a clear sense of order and familiarity. This is the shape of a comb, this is the shape of a mug. Comfortable and graspable. Then the painting within that frame brings disorder to that sense. And I wondered if the still life painting being made of those objects returns them to order by containing it in a way, but now that we’re discussing it I realize it’s actually the opposite. The paintings on the easels actualize this potential that you talk about, of undermining the understanding of these objects. You’re not returning them to order in the still life, you’re not switching it back to a more photographic image of a banana. I guess what I’m wondering is if the still life isn’t an ending, but a beginning?
JS: Exactly. It’s just a beginning, which is a central point in this exhibition. The disorder and instability of the assumed object of the banana or whatever, I appreciate that. It puts it back in a very elementary space of contemplation. It’s like we need to go back to square one on this, Painting 101. So, I’ve made a still life set-up for painting 101. Because it’s to our advantage to keep things at square one and keep rethinking it and not pretend that we actually understand what it is—a banana, a mug, a still life arrangement, the act of painting, the act of viewing, art as an object, and art as a set of histories. All of these things are so completely ordinary, and so completely extraordinary. One of the most beautiful things about Painting 101 is that a certain proportion of people in that class will sit down in front of that still life setup, and not understand it as a cliché at all, but really face those objects in that situation for the first time.
ES: Do you want to talk about the title?
JS: I mean, a big part of that was just a feeling of the time, honestly: the election. That darkness sold so well made the times feel dark. But, the title also completely works with the way I think images and objects work together. It’s just, you know, we’re here on this earth surrounded by fascinating things. We share the same space for the time being. And while we can still access that space, let’s do as much as we can in that space. It sounds a little depressing, but it’s not meant to be. It’s meant to be freeing, and celebratory of the physical world, the world outside ourselves that we can learn something from. The danger of the title is if it’s only seen as a pun. The pun is there, the pun is inseparable from the title, but the pun is also partly there to reinforce the idea of this installation being a still life, or a way of approaching there being still life. It slips away the moment you put your hand on it.