Steve Locke:  It’s weird because I knew you before I knew your work.  I think it was the Yvonne Rainer/Rob Storr talk at BU.  Afterwards, we had a bit of a chat and you told me about PAPER MONUMENT and were sweet enough to send me a few copies.  Because of that, I thought of you as a critical theory/curatorial sort of voice and this got reinforced when we (with Colleen Asper, Anoka Faruqee, and William Villalongo) worked together to create a response to the writings of Ken Johnson in the NYTimes.  I didn’t really know you as a painter until your project at the deCordova Biennial with Roger White.  It was the first time I had seen one of the Plaid Paintings, and I really responded to the way it troubled some of the ideas I had been fed about abstract painting.  I spent a lot of time looking at them and I could not figure out why they were so potent and so humble at the same time.  They so clearly have these references to domestic things like tablecloths (that I think you enhance by not stretching them).  They made me think of Mary Heilman where she presents something that looks mundane and upon closer inspection reveals a complex series of decisions that belie the simplicity of the image.  Like her paintings, the Plaids are really matter-of-fact and directly painted.  They don’t have pretensions of heroism and they completely deflate the notion of the “gestalt” that is promised by Modernist Painting and in this way, they start to tackle some of the same territory as Daniel Buren and some of the other artists in the Supports-Surfaces movement in France.  But beyond that moment, your paintings seem to be engaged in something much deeper that the limits of what painting can (and should) do.   I see tensions through out the work (between public/private; modest/heroic; institutional/domestic).  Which leads me to my question:

How does conflict play a role in what appears to be a deeply structured practice in the Plaid Paintings and how does it inform decisions about the separate but conjoined acts of painting and presentation?

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Dear Steve,

Plaid , 2013, acrylic on acrylic, 18×42″

I’m so glad you asked me about conflict in the plaids! At first I thought that was too strong a word, but you’re right—the various conflicts are always there.

Of course, on a material level, plaid emphasizes the interweaving of warp and weft, so in this sense it renders the conflict/confluence of fabric visible. This is what I like when I’m looking at plaid. Each area of color emerges from the two sets of threads, so any adjacent hues are of necessity half the same, half different. For me these ramifications are interesting precisely because the rule is always explicit, inherent in how the thing is made. The pattern is surprising because it’s programmatic. I read every plaid I see like a vernacular Sol Lewitt.

And then with plaid there are also the interwoven, so to speak, questions of location and origin, issues that occur in a different register of intersections and coordinates but are nevertheless part of the pattern. Many fabrics reference or evoke a place, but plaid is a special case because it is both so ubiquitous and so commonly associated with “clans”—Scottish and otherwise. Actually, the earliest known examples of plaid are from 3500 BC China, but most people think plaid comes from Scotland, so that is itself notable. And the Scottish part of the story is complex because the famous tartans came to prominence as part of a (ongoing) conflict with England. At the same time, plaid became such a dispersed pattern because the Scots helped colonize India, where cotton “madras” plaids were produced for distribution throughout the British Empire. And of course now we live in a global age where plaids are made all over the world and depending on the context and their particular qualities can reference a range of places from honky-tonks, country clubs, grunge shows, the board room—all the while signaling membership in various groups. So the conflicts present at that level interest me, too.

I came to Ohio from Ecuador at the age of six, so for me the encounter with plaids is bound up with realizing that it was a prep-school pattern. My mom taught second grade at a private school, and I got a lot of my clothes from the thrift store there, and I think it was a way for me to fit in with kids that had a lot more money than we did. Wearing the right plaids was a way to disguise both my foreignness and my relative poverty, so I experience plaid as a kind of camouflage as well, a way of fitting in. So the pattern carries all those conflicts for me—of class, of origin, of group membership and assimilation—in a personal way. Over the years, I amassed a large collection of plaid shirts, not all of them preppy, and came to wear the pattern almost exclusively, but for decades I was merely a collector, a self-taught connoisseur.

Plaid, 2015, acrylic on acrylic, 18×24″

So I had developed a certain expertise, but deciding to paint plaids didn’t come from that so much as from sensing that there was a kind of joke in it, something funny about a painting that was plainly abstract but also utterly recognizable. I enjoy the category conflict. Somehow if you go from monochrome to stripe to plaid, even though the progression makes perfect sense, plaid ends up being the punch line. If you picture it with Buren, and he is repeatedly calling “scene!” with the stripes, I just keep going, adding stripes in the other direction.

And I like how the representation doesn’t function in a straightforward way either: Is this plaid a painting of something? An artist I admire—someone who doesn’t associate his name with his work—was making copies of Mondrian paintings, after Mondrian had died, arguing that paintings of abstractions could not be abstractions themselves. As I did with Buren’s stripes, I wanted to take that question to a different place, to where it involved patterns from everyday life.

In terms of re-presentation, which was how my teacher Robert Reed insisted on pronouncing it, the painted plaid is a peculiar thing. You can’t actually interweave the paint, so the illusion of plaid involves layering, transparency, and a lot of guile in the way you choose and organize the colors. Eliminating the canvas was essential to this, as it allowed the paint itself to serve as its own ground. All my plaids are acrylic on acrylic, and I paint them front to back, so the first things I put down are the first things you see, and the gesso goes on last, to seal the back. (The reverse of conventional painting, where you cover things up as you go and the last thing you put down sits on top.) There is a tricky illusionistic system at play, but it’s also just overlapping paint presented directly, where everything I do is evident in the final result. So here too, in the process, I think the conflict between illusion and material reality is the generative force.

Works in the studio of Dushko Petrovich

Born in Quito, Ecuador, Dushko Petrovich is a New York-based artist, writer, editor, and teacher. He received his B.A. from Yale University and his M.F.A. from Boston University before going on to serve as the Starr Scholar (Artist-in-Residence) at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. He has exhibited his work at venues including the deCordova Museum, in Boston; Rachel Uffner Gallery, in New York; the Suburban, in Chicago; and the Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen.

His writing has appeared in periodicals such as Bookforum, Slate, Modern Painters, and the Boston Globe, among others. Petrovich is a co-founder of Paper Monument, where he has co-edited many publications, including I Like Your Work: Art and Etiquette and Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment. He also chaired the n+1 Foundation’s board of directors from 2013 to 2015. Petrovich currently teaches at Boston University, RISD, NYU, and Yale. His newest project, Adjunct Commuter Weekly, made its debut at ICA Boston in July.

Double Painter 3
graphite, acrylic, oil, alkyd, spray paint on paper, 50” x 100”, 2013

SL: As I have watched your work over the years, I am truly stunned by your painterly invention and your use of material. With a complete embrace of differing and often competing painterly and artistic styles-from still life, to appropriation, to expressionist mark making-you consistently and surprisingly create complex painterly fictions based on what you refer to as “discredited” texts. In the current work, based on (William Shakespeare’s) Timon Of Athens, you have moved into performance and music as well, but I see these as extensions of a painterly practice and this leads me to my question. This commitment to using paint and eschewing other methods that would make the work easier to produce does not seem to be strategic in your work. It reveals itself as a deep commitment to the practice of painting; I would even go as far to say that you have an “ethics of painting.”

I am wondering how what I sense to be an ethical commitment to painting informs the development of the kinds of imagery that appears in Timon of Athens.

CD: Steve, Thank you for such a plump and thoughtful question.

I made a previous wobbly attempt to respond to the part regarding an ethics of painting. I’m now sitting in a coffee shop in Atlanta with a pencil and a sketchbook, formulating a new answer. I’m flanked at the counter by a pale woman quietly playing Hey Ya! on a ukulele, in a way Andre 3000 might not recognize. There’s a painted mural on one wall depicting a sea monster drinking coffee through its tentacle-trunk. Three young men have laptops connected to outlets by power cords that in this context look like feeding tubes. And the young woman who poured my coffee has a tattoo of a radio tower on her thin left arm. I ask her if it’s a specific radio tower and she says, “No I drew it. It doesn’t exist.” Somehow this all seems relevant.

So as I prepare to answer your question properly this time, I have to admit that it never occurred to me to consider my attitude toward painting as an “ethics.” But I realize that it is, though perhaps not in an obvious way. The unexpected mutability and mobility that painting provides are both core qualities to me. Painting always has one foot in the 15th-century and one foot in the current moment, and its tools are mostly slow, inefficient, and difficult to learn. These generally discredited qualities are the ones I like the most. This is probably why one of my favorite paintings is Picabia’s The Handsome Porkbutcher.

Thomas Lawson wrote an essay in 1981 called “Last Exit: Painting” where he suggests that conceptually savvy artists transplant their artistic agendas into the discourse of painting. His logic was that the entrenched audience and a marketplace for painting made it a perfect location for transgression. However, as time has passed it’s increasingly doubtful that conceptually based transgression is going to make anyone’s day. But the important subtext of Lawson’s essay is that painting is infinitely adaptable with an inherent ability to purloin from other media. Then in 2000 Douglas Fogle curated an exhibition called Painting at the Edge of the World, whose catalog essay compares painting to a virus due to its capacity to continually mutate in response to new challenges, returning more resilient each time. I am convinced that the anachronistic materiality of painting allows it—like the simplicity of a virus—to acquire data from other disciplines and constantly recalibrate its own status. Mutability equals survival, and painting’s dogged shape-shifting capacity provides a durable artistic vehicle for me, and one seemingly without limit.

Mobility is another issue, and painting provides it in multiple ways. First, painting can be a portable, mobile orphan tumbling though time into a sequence of unpredictable environments, the eternal outsider. But there’s another type of mobility that’s even more important to me. Painting remains buoyantly resistant to the seduction of new technologies that only promise additional new technologies. As you say in your question, I could make work that’s “easier to produce.” But to do so would diminish my own self-reliance and hook me into a system of technological life support that reduces my mobility, just like the men here whose laptop cords prevent them from roaming the room as freely as I can with my paper.

It’s even worse when artists mechanize their artistic thought processes. The machine aesthetic values speed, efficiency, and predictability. It produces urges where there were none, such as the urge to partition the past and make it as orderly as cutlets. It can soothe artists into believing they can anticipate the future to make it less indeterminate and frightening. I might love Sol LeWitt, but I hate the way the working method for his wall drawings turned art into computer programming: the successful completion of instructional sequences producing identical outputs. This creates the illusion that the future should be knowable, that one should only produce artwork according to prior plans within predictable time frames. This always strikes me as a poisonous mindset and one that would never allow for the creation of a piece like Picabia’s The Handsome Porkbutcher.

In 1981 Rene Ricard wrote an essay called “Radiant Child” that correctly describes graffiti as a form of painting suited to the (then) contemporary moment because it transformed artists’ names into recognizable brands. It’s a grim trajectory to watch the modernist quest for a subjective signature style morph into an ‘80’s desire for artist branding. Any artist who avoids experimentation because it might disrupt their brand identity has agreed to willful immobilization. I gravitate toward artists whose unpredictable movements make them difficult to brand, as with Picabia’s The Handsome Porkbutcher.

When I started the Timon of Athens project, I did so because wanted the continual discomfort of making paint do new things. And I wanted to treat a 400-year old play like it was current, relevant, and obvious. When deciding to make different types of painting for each character in the play, I purposefully avoided a full plan of action. The heterogenous practice I initially wanted unfolds itself intuitively as I continually fatten it with new work. The constant change from character to character also removes the expectation of stylistic consistency, and deposits me outside the corral of a solidly recognizable brand. (If anything, I constitute a corruption of the Shakespeare brand.) I move though the characters in no order and with no narrative goal. I make a different number of works for each character. Some characters might produce fifty pieces. Others might produce one. I’m careful to advance without strategy, instead creating a mental environment where thinking, as (Jean-François) Lyotard says, “…Is almost no more than letting a givable come towards you.”¹ This way of thinking through paint provides me the combination of discipline and freedom that I find necessary as an artist. The continual drive toward skill acquisition can be demanding, but so was smearing out a bison on a cave wall. And so is butchering pork.

Painting is both fast and slow, one of the oldest art techniques and one that’s continually renewed. It has a creative template that accepts that if something can be imagined, it can be made visible—which is now the standard operating system for photography, video, and film as well. Painting permits its users to hold disparate thoughts at the same time, the way theatergoers can recognize Meryl Streep onstage while also completely believing the character she portrays. The strip of wood depicted at the bottom of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna is both simple paint on canvas, and also the coffin of Pope Sixtus. It is both. The pantied crotches in a Balthus painting or in Alice Neel’s Wellesley Girls are both incidental slippages, and not. A scrap of paper really can be a portrait of Iris Clert. And not.

The marks I’ve made on this paper may outlast this coffee shop, its mural, its ukulele player, its underfed barista, and me. It may outlast the laptops in the room and the computer screens on which readers will eventually see my notes transcribed. This is the mutability and mobility that painting provides me, a nourishing code of ethics fed by the likes of Picabia’s The Handsome Porkbutcher.

Craig Drennen

¹Lyotard, Jean-Francois (trans. G. Bennington & R. Bowlby). “The Inhuman: Reflections on Time.” Stanford University Press. 1991. p. 18.

Craig Drennen is an artist based in Atlanta, GA. He is represented by Samsøn in Boston and Saltworks in Atlanta. His most recent solo exhibition was at Ellen de Bruijne Projects in Amsterdam, and he is currently featured in the “SCORE” exhibition at MOCA GA in Atlanta. His work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, and The New York Times. He teaches drawing and painting at Georgia State University, served as dean of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and is on the board of Art Papers magazine. He has worked in the exhibition departments of the Guggenheim Museum, the Jewish Museum, and the International Center of Photography, and others. Since 2008 he has organized his studio practice around Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens.