Brad Phillips – Hi Keith. So, where do we get started… I guess I’m interested in what you think about irony. You make images that I think could be seen as somewhat ironic; I’m thinking of your portrait of Obama, Anne Frank, celebrities, boats in rough water. But something in your approach makes them seem absolutely sincere. The portrait of Obama gives me hope for America, it doesn’t make me laugh. I wonder what you’re after and whether you see irony at play in your work.

Keith Mayerson – Hi Brad. Irony is such a loaded word. If irony means that “the surface meaning and the underlying meaning of what is said are not the same,” I hope that my work is NOT ironic, but, rather, that the images are about everything they seem to be and also work as metaphors for larger allegorical truths.

When I create my work I use a similar process as a method actor, trying to project my own life, thoughts, and feelings onto the image. As I paint the abstract notions of positive and negative forms, dark and light values, etc, I listen to music, audiobooks, etc, that relate to the work’s subject matter, and otherwise do my research, but ultimately I think about what the work means in my own personal ideological and emotional world to hopefully bring life (and perhaps my unconscious thoughts and feelings) into the frame of the representational aspects of the image. The subject matter is pertinent, but it’s what I bring to subject matter that is important, and then, like a comic stain-glassed window or prose poem, how that image coincides with other images in the installation gives the work its ultimate meaning.

For example, in my recent body of work Good Leaders, Endangered Species, Ships at Sea, which was exhibited just before the last presidential election, I really felt that we needed “good leaders,” as we were all like “endangered species” in a world that was like a “ship at sea.”  I painted Obama because I truly admire him and his ideology–I chose an image of him in front of the Capitol (infamously built by slaves) with his armed crossed and a confident smile as he represented (at the time) one of the few African American senators in American history.  I listened to his autobiographies on audio while painting and learned all I could about the man to hopefully bring out his inner personality in the portrait and my feelings about him.  In the interior of the installation (Obama hung at the entrance), I painted pictures of a snow leopard, the Dalai Lama at Radio City music hall, a polar bear, images from 9/11, and so on.

I feel that despite your political affiliation, most all people can agree that we need to save our endangered species, and this could be a starting ground for peace and understanding. In my image of the snow leopard, taken from the Planet Earth series, one of the very few of these creatures left in the wild was filmed in a snowstorm in Afghanistan. I thought this image was so powerful, and when I was painting the image became almost abstract as the snow and visual noise of the film triggered images from my unconscious. I thought of the plight of these precious creatures, so isolated in our world, strangely in the same mountains where we are hunting down terrorists that have threatened and attacked America.

A while ago I attended a three-day seminar at Radio City with the Dalai Lama, and it was so moving (but also dense and theoretical) that by the last day few people were still attending. The theater seemed like a giant ship in a way, and its architecture emulated a mandala, with the giant tankha painting describing the entity that the Dalai Lama was a reincarnation of–and in the lens flare of my camera the tiny flashes of light looked to me also like mandalas. I tried to capture the spirit of this uncanny scene by painting it and listening to Buddhist chants and prayers and books by the Dalai Lama, hoping the painting would transcend the literalness of the scene and be synaesthetically experiential of my ultimately ineffable memories of the event, which happened at the time when the world seemed in such peril.

The 9/11 paintings are from photos in the New York Times, of the atrociously sublime day I experienced and saw outside my apartment in SoHo, and, soon thereafter, with my NYU students (in time for the first tower to fall) in Washington Park. I tried to have empathy and compassion for each of the victims I painted, hoping that I could do something to help them, or at least the memory of them and their experience, and ours, by painting these pictures–the most difficult images I have ever worked upon. They really seemed like a world lost, or like our ship at sea, compounded by the fact that at the time of painting Wall Street had just crashed and we were in an ideological war for our president and what he and America stood for.

In the same exhibition, some images further, I had hung paintings of Louise Bourgeois (from my own photo I had taken of her at one of her salons) and the Marx Brothers in the film Duck Soup as they were dancing hysterically about “going to war” next to a portrait of Anne Frank. I love Louise Bourgeois and all that she and her art represents–it seems truly “post-post modern” in that it is beautifully formal and rich in content but also in feeling and emotion, and it is ultimately about what issues people bring to it but also what can’t be put into words. I also love that she is a woman who fought tremendously and successfully for her position as one of our greatest artists.

The Marx Brothers were also geniuses; I painted them in their greatest film (made while the Nazis were rising in Europe), a film that is both hilarious and disturbing and apocalyptic, in a scene that emulates American’s false claims to the UN that began the war in Iraq. Anne Frank was an amazing artist who wrote a performative  legacy–she wanted to become a great writer to tell her story about the subjugation of the Jews and other peoples under the Nazis, and she did that–and was simultaneously a voice of a strong, independent young woman who wanted, unlike her mother, to become a powerful artist with agency, and she ultimately became a hero for post WWII, the baby boomers, and beyond.  I listened to her diary over and over while painting this and other pictures I have done of her; I also listened to music recorded at the time, etc, as I did Groucho Marx’s letters while I painted him, and so on, to get a real “feeling” of them while I worked.

My paintings aren’t photorealistic but “felt,” I suppose, and I hope my unconscious spills out into them to give them life. I love modernity for the emotions and feelings  works of that time can project, but also for their hegemonic formal nuances of light, color, and so on, and how they really could be “windows into other worlds,” the subconscious. But I also revere post-modernity for its politics and content, for producing art that had everything to do with the culture surrounding it and how it reflected larger truths beyond the picture plane. I hope to embrace both sensibilities in my paintings and drawings. They might not look exactly like received images that we are accustomed to seeing, perhaps simply because I’m gay and choose subject matter that many might take seriously (I also believe people like Judy Garland, Elvis, and James Dean made a significant impact on our way of life and culture). Sometimes people don’t know how to read my work, but I hope this is part of its strength, and that, ultimately, people might bring to the image and their relationship to the iconic subject matter their own ideas and will “get it,” its seriousness, in addition to my embrace of beauty and/or truth beyond surface representations.

Whew! That was a lot, but it was a loaded question, and I wanted to try to answer it thoroughly.

BP – Feel free to talk at length! It will just make the magazine bulkier/more chic.

I’m really interested in the fact that you listen to books on tape while painting, because there are so man scrims to transcend between a book on tape and a painting on canvas. In the one painting I’ve seen of your Anne Frank, she has a sort of Mona Lisa smile that is very heartbreaking. So few artists traffic in, if not sincerity, earnestness. I think it must confuse the viewer that you make paintings of people jumping from the World Trade Centre that AREN’T meant to be ironic or transgressive but simply exercises in compassion.

I think it was Primo Levi who said that there can be no poems after the Holocaust. Maybe it was someone else. But when 9/11 happened a lot of people said that it represented the end of irony, an end I would have looked forward to. as I’m not a fan of irony in art. Irony is only charming when it comes from the mouth of a child.

So thank you for those insights.

Back to handling, though: your paintings have a very specific look, the colours, the brushstrokes, the somewhat mottled look of skin and sky. You say you don’t paint photorealistically, but I wonder, do you paint from photos, and if so, how? I’m a big fan of projectors although purists scorn them. Do you grid things out or project them and then work from there? It’s simply a matter of the economy of time to me. So apart from the research aspect, what is your material approach to making a new work?

KM – I’ve done all kinds of works and used to paint out of my head and my imagination as much as from photos, which, of course, is conceptual in and of itself. I was raised with post-modern, post-Marxist politics. I was taught about the cannibalism of Degas, for example, how he absorbed women voyeuristically from the back and spit out his version of them through his mind and brush, etc, and I didn’t want to objectify people in that manner.

Before grad school I began painting images from gay porn magazines, etc, thinking that they had already been objectified by the camera, and, hopefully, that I could bring them back their agency (and/or explore deeper “significant truths”, etc) by painting their representation. This matured, perhaps, to using icons, or well-known people and images, as a common ground metaphor for what they could stand in for, and also, perhaps, for who they were as people in my work and narratives, while hopefully honoring them through my rendition of them–not as an act of cannibalism, but homage to them and a common pictorial vocabulary they are a part of.

For many years, if I wasn’t working from my pure imagination or creating figurative abstraction, I painted from observation and appropriated images from popular culture. I am interested in the old masters, how many of them created images that seem to fall apart into abstraction, or where subconsciously-derived images are brought about in the negative space, etc of the imagery. To have that happen in my own work, I used to look at negative/positive space, shapes, forms, etc, while painting, hoping to have the work be recognizable for its intended subject matter, but also to have it “fall apart” into abstraction.

Sometimes I would have Cézanne-like moments when the spirit, or muse, would leave me and I would want to stop painting, and despite the rawness of the image, or revealed canvas, etc, I would hope the painting would have a life of its own. Sometimes, when I would go back into the imagery, thinking self-consciously people might not think its “done yet” (ridiculous, as much work from the mid 1800′s onward of course might have been done in a day, or a few days, and be regarded as fine, if focused), I would go back into these works, only to “kill” what might have been “alive.” I look at the work of Van Gogh and many of the impressionists and post-impressionists, and if feels that every motion of the brush, every reveal of gesso beneath the paint, or fervent stroke, is perfectly placed and balanced, and if one were to go into the work to cover up that space or make it seem more “realistic,” the composition would fall flat, like a soufflé taken out of an oven too soon. I found this true for a while in my own works, and would paint them until I felt they were outside of me, or working on their own accord.

When I moved to a bigger place and could paint larger, this method of simply painting–looking at formal relationships within the image to bring about the representational aspects–seemed unwieldy. Also, I think in my maturity I was able to gain a greater patience for the meditation that is the painting mode, in addition to looking more at the art history of the masters–realizing that Cézanne and company were amplifying the unraveling in a Velzquez, and the cubists making a “science” of it to bring about other hegemonic space, and then the modernists getting rid of representation altogether in the hope of achieving the sublime in artwork and “pure emotion,” albeitat the loss of direct outside content in their works.

But if you look at the stage right before modernity kicks in, at Manet, or Courbet, or even if you rewind history back to Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Goya, El Greco, and the rest, they “had their cake and ate it too” in that they were able to harness content via the allegorical nature of their figurative narrative portraits and allegories, while at the same time, fervently painted, and in the micro-managed moments were able to bring out mini-Franz Klines and De Koonings, etc, in each square centimeter. This became my obsession–to obsess what I obsessed about, and to try to bring about the fractal nature of micro-managed elements in my paintings until I simply couldn’t render them anymore.

In Matisse’s “Notes of a Painter,” he discusses (I’m completely paraphrasing here) how, when he was younger, he would paint until the moment left him, and leave the painting at that. Years later, some of these works–the moment of their creation lost in time–became flat, or lifeless, and that he, in his somewhat older years, would distrust his first instinct and go back and back again to paint what was underneath that instinct, or to paint a more fully realized creation (I think by scraping and painting and scraping again and again to keep it looking fresh) over time. I realized, too, that while some of my favorite (still!) works are the ones that simply unloaded themselves or spilt out, more of my works that were like climbing mountains were, over time, more enriched for me. Also, by painting bigger, it simply became more difficult to achieve recognizable faces, etc, if the head was larger than life, etc

I tried at first projecting the image, but to my dismay, this really made things more, rather than less difficult. Unlike the great opaque projectors of school in they bygone days of better-made technology, the projectors that are available (and pricey) at the art stores were seldom bright enough to really show much detail from a projected photo.  Also, obviously, it’s difficult for me to line up the projection exactly straight and horizontal to an exactly straight and vertical image–that causes some fun-house mirror distortions, etc, that are hard to paint out once discovered.

I found that the easiest, and most satisfying, way to paint from photos is the age-old grid system. I love how the grid abstracts the image, and allows me to focus not on how the eyes are too far apart or too close together in my paintings of a face, but rather, necessarily abstracts the image in my mind’s eye, allowing for my right brain to take control while my left brain can focus on what the image means to me, or the suggestive audiobook or music might inspire in me, etc I’m forced to micromanage my moments. I lay out a grid in charcoal on my canvas that is in proportion to my image, on which I overlay acetate–usually in the smallest squares I can challenge myself to work upon. I then take time to fill up all the square in my canvas–sometimes in three, four, or more passes until I really figure out the Tetris-like matrix of how form and color fit together in each, and until I can’t stand it (or worry that the grid on my canvas might create recesses due to too much painting in each square), and then I allow myself to breach over the squares, connecting the forms from each separate area together. At this point, I allow myself to flip over the acetate and work from the bare surface of the photo, again going through as many passes as possible, usually with tiny brushes, until I feel that the painting is full and complete and that I simply can’t do it anymore or improve upon how the measuring of shapes, forms, light, and color is transpiring on my version of the image. I then step away from the work, let it breathe for a while, and come back to it to make sure I don’t want to make any adjustments.

I use a full range of the primary colors in addition to purples and violets, and try to mix my own secondary and tertiary colors. I think, for me, you can make more interesting colors this way, and try to realize the wholeness of the image rather than the parts. The old masters all began by proving themselves to prospective patrons by painting the figure well against a background, painting hair that “looks like” hair, lace that “looks like” lace, and so on. After they get bored making rich people look good and painting “realistically,” they realize it’s the entirety of the scene that’s important. They bring out the chiaroscuro, etc, where all the elements add up to bring the whole impact–that it’s not just the figure that conveys the message in the scene, but how it relates to the background elements, the symbolic metaphors of the props, etc

By gridding a canvas, you really are forced to realize that everything, every square inch of a painting or image is important.  When Buddhists look at a chair, they don’t think of it as a chair, but rather as pieces of wood attached to strips of metal, occupying space, etc If you step on a chair, suddenly it becomes a ladder! Same is true when painting or drawing from observation–to render “realistically,” you need to realize how the positive space interacts with the negative space, and so on. Negative space is key–it’s the thing that adult minds forget to look at. But if being an artist is about developing your third eye, or “reading between the lines,” rendering the negative space, the “space between the lines,” is the answer to realizing the wholeness of the image–showing how it may relate to things in nature–and bringing about an image that makes one’s experience within the world aesthetic in the plastic space of the picture plane. Gridding, I find, makes a structure for your left brain to harness while your unconscious way of seeing, your right brain, comes about in the full realization of the world of your image. Although now I sometimes find the desire just to let my hair down and “go for it” once again!

Whew, sorry for the long explanations, I guess thorough painting lends itself to thorough (hopefully not overdone!) answers.

BP – Where to start, again. I’m really interested in the fact that you use a grid. It helps to explain the look of your paintings, which is somewhat mottled and compartmentalized. The smoke in the 9/11 paintings, for example, I can see in retrospect that their unwieldiness is the result of little squares of abstraction. Bits of green and violet. Things that seem unnatural–but you manage to make them naturalistic in a bizarre way. I wish I had the patience to use a grid, but I find, at least for the sort of paintings that I make, that a projector is ideal. I wonder if you ever read that David Hockney book called Secret Knowledge, where he posits that people have been using optic devices for 500 years. He makes some pretty irrefutable arguments.

Your way of painting allows for more happy accidents and some looseness I suppose. The Buddhist analogy is interesting, although I wonder personally if they see a non-chair turning into a non-ladder when they step on it.

Do you ever find that painting these one-inch square abstractions makes you consider painting abstractly? Because you’re managing to be both modern and post-modern in a single work, which is a hard line to balance I think. A question here, I don’t know. You mentioned Degas, and I can see the Degas aspect to your paintings, the colours and the handling. Do you ever feel like the odd man out, painting with a grid, being earnest, eschewing irony, etc? There aren’t any artists I can think of working with the same intentions and techniques as you. Did you have any negative feedback from the 9/11 paintings? It takes I think, courage to make those.

KM – Well, I started in grad school, or even earlier, as an undergrad, to appropriate different styles for their post-modern way of conveying different meanings, depending on the historical development of a particular style, and to incorporate the cultural context of that style. When I did my Pinocchio series, I consciously made one look like a Rube Goldberg cartoon, a William Blake plate, and so on. In a subsequent show entitled the “Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” I had seven different styles happening, to delve deeper into the meanings I wanted to convey: pictures of Rimbaud as the character from the late 1800′s symbolist French vampire story “Les Chants de Maldoror,” as drawn by Odilon Redon, and signed by Paul Verlaine. In the same series I did pictures of River Phoenix abducted by Blue Meanies and saved by a teddy-boy John Lennon in oil painted on metal to look like Yellow Submarine film stills, and a narrative of Archie from the comics falling in love and having a relationship with Reggie, who turns into an alien, done in the style of Japanese woodblock prints, because I always thought Archie comics looked like Tintin comics and Hergé might have been influenced by Hiroshige, and so on.. But I ultimately felt overwhelmed with post-modern pastiche. I felt I was my own art director dictating to myself how to render without allowing myself the freedom to make gestures that might have been more from my own self, whatever that “self” might be…

I love the quote by Da Vinci, who said (again I’m paraphrasing here) that artists always paint themselves. I think what he meant was that sometimes, when an artist creates a portrait of someone else, sometimes it looks more like the artist than the person they were attempting to render. But I also think it’s true that we paint our brains–I’m thinking the inside of our brains, or things that spill out from our unconscious. When I look at Cézanne I always see what I call a “Cézanne hole,” where, in the center of the canvas, it seems more rendered than the surrounding elements–probably where his face was most when he was painting pleine-aire.  In this area, often times you can make out subconsciously eyes, teeth, moustache, and beard, and so on–almost as if he was painting the inside of his face, like a mask.  When you look at his rocks, they spill out into plastic spaces of subconsciously realized figures and dream worlds. When you look at Van Gogh’s paintings, in the cypress trees, etc, you can make out faces and eyes, beards and noses, that look very much like Van Gogh when he painted them. In the negative space of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon there is a cartoon icon of Picasso, looking almost like a character of him with the same hair, etc., as when he painted it. In fact, in most of the figurative works of modernity that are painted from observation and the imagination, where the painter is projecting onto the subject matter and allowing this projection to be more important than the subject matter itself, as Picasso said, “a painter paints to unload themselves,” and you see various psycho-sexual elements, faces, and figures that the artist might not have consciously intended but subliminally put into their work (of course, I might also be projecting onto them myself, like a productively misread Rorschach blot, but really, it’s obvious once you start looking for these things).

Once I started seeing this, I wanted to get the “battery that was operating my engine” and I spent many years painting abstractly, trying to eschew style, and get to the “real me.” Sorry to quote Picasso so much, but I love how he was able to challenge himself over the years by changing the looks of his works–but something still remains that is “him.” He said (again paraphrasing) “when you draw a circle without the aid of a compass, its imperfection is your style,” and I believe this is true. I spent years, as a son of a psychoanalyst, making automatic gestures in rendering, trying to have my right brain supersede my left, trying to make “honest” moves that would bring out my subconscious. My stake in cartoons is that I believe that part of their power exists in our dreams, where we probably see iconic images of ghost-like smiley faces that we project onto (that’s grandpa!, etc). Our minds have simplified forms as memory devices that metonymically stir up language and experiential associations. I wanted, with my “iconscapes,” to render these into life–with plastic space and volume, like a Gorky painted with the “reality” representation of the Renaissance–like a painted, three-dimensional dream. I would think of memories and dreams while I painted, hoping my hands would conjure them up, hoping, like when a kid tries to erase an etch-a-sketch board to see what made it work, to erase consciously realized representation to find the ghost that haunts it from behind.

But I ultimately felt (not that I have abandoned these works, nor saying I would do them again) that perhaps I really was painting my brain–different synapses, etc, with maybe a few unconsciously realized elements–basically painting an organic representation of the interior of my skull, brain muscle tissue, and so on. When I realized that the negative space of modernity and the old masters harnessed these mental elements and had the added element of content-rich, figurative, allegorical worlds that related to something outside the hegemonic picture plane, I became hooked on mapping my unconscious onto the frame of representation. I still think of them as figurative abstractions. When I was looking, like so many people, at the smoke coming from the World Trade Centre on 9/11, I saw faces, “angels”, etc, and part of my ideology of painting these works was to try to discover what those things really were. The surroundings of snow leopards in remote regions have the same effect–what could be hiding there? I don’t paint to play in a fantasy world of elves and aliens and angels, but to divulge what our minds project onto these images and how they react to them. Who knows what lurks behind the everyday realities of what we are accustomed to and tuned into, what we are “seeing”–whatever that is!  Grids help break forms into abstractions, and perhaps, subliminally, allow the unconscious mind to spill out into the representation.

People were really moved by the 9/11 paintings. I was super nervous about them, but I only received good responses–I watched people go into the room, standing between the images of the people in the two buildings, and begin to cry. This wasn’t my intention, but, I have to say, I was overwhelmed that the viewers were able to feel and experience, synaesthetically, what I felt about that horrible day and time. It made me feel that I had successfully conveyed what I wanted to express: emotion, remembrance, honor, and so on. Perhaps the abstracted, unconscious elements were part of this experience as their brain perceived the image, I don’t know.

There is something that comes between content and form, signifier and signified. It’s the mortar between the bricks, perhaps it has to do with brain perception, but also perhaps it has to do with the Buddhist interpretation of the self, or even an idea of the “soul.”

I don’t know if I’m the only one on this path, but as a monk for art and a pilgrim for artistic journeys, I hope I have a lot of fellow travelers who are passionate about their pursuits.

BP – Now it’s getting meaty! Knowing you’re the son of a psychoanalyst sort of flips the script a bit. And that you trudged through abstraction. You quote Picasso a lot, and I’m always asking people, “Picasso or Matisse?” as a sort of litmus test. I think Matisse was a blowsy old fart but I like his paintings much more.

I also really feel like each show is a self-portrait–I know this is sort of a retrograde or idealistic position to take, but to me it’s true, you are actually in the work, or you are the work. So it makes the work hard to talk about. When someone asks what my paintings are about I start saying “Well, I’m six foot two.” Oh, and it’s amazing that people were moved to cry when you showed those tower paintings. I can see why they would. I’ve always been annoyed that musicians get people cheering and singing along and we get dead silence and limp handshakes.

Anyway, back to topic: cartooning. You are the Grandmaster of Cartoon Studies at Georgetown University or something, right? No, really, your work is very much not cartoonish to me, so I’m interested in where your involvement in cartoon art begins and ends.

KM – I love both Picasso and Matisse, but also love both Elvis and the Beatles, so I’m weird that way! I just saw The Barnes Foundation again in Pennsylvania, which is just so great–dripping with impressionism and post-impressionism, with Goya, El Greco, Asian art, and Shaker furniture and hinges thrown in for good measure, all copiously arranged by Mr. Barnes for its educational juxtapositions and aesthetic metonymic correspondences. Great stuff, all, but what’s striking about Matisse and Picasso (and really, Cézanne) is how they are able to move and vacillate between subject matter and styles: Renoir comes out as a great but obsessive, pedophilic painter, Soutine is a mannerist of sorts, de Chirico is just really eccentric, but both Picasso and Matisse are able to keep moving, keep conscious of what they are doing but also maintain a critical distance from it, and are able to progress as they move along. I don’t think Modigliani or the others were consciously into branding, and they are all so great, but it goes to show you where being the artist who does “____” gets you, and why both Matisse and Picasso were such geniuses (and Cézanne, too: so earthy, and perhaps un-self-conscious or critical, but able to be expansive). They keep moving and challenging themselves.

Also, as everyone knows, they were bringing the essential into their figurative works, accessing the power of the icon to elevate their work to iconic realms.  A terrific book that many people love and is a bible of sorts that I teach in all my classes is Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud. Ostensibly a comic about comics, it’s really about how all word/image combinations work to create meaning–as I read it, it’s all about semiotics and the cognitive mind. He discusses how when images become more iconic than subjectively rendered, it has the power to have more people relate to it. More people can identify with Charlie Brown than Rex Morgan because he’s drawn super simple, like a smiley face–he could be anyone. More so Snoopy, as anthropomorphized animals could be anybody. This is due to three factors, according to McCloud: because we know what other people look like, but, when not looking at oneself in the mirror, have a very fuzzy notion of what we ourselves look like; we see faces in everything, which is probably an ingrained survival skill; and we tend to anthropomorphize inanimate objects (for example, your pen becomes an extension of your fingers; when someone hits your car you say “someone hit me,” not “someone hit my car”–same thing is true for avatars in video games). We recognize the smiley face as a human face because we know what other people look like but “forget” what we look like: it could be us, and after recognizing this, we “suture into” (McCloud’s term) that icon, “become them,” and “mask” into that world.

Ancient Chinese monks knew this: when they drew their iconographic pilgrims in complex backgrounds, they wanted the viewer to suture into the character and become transported into nature. Videogames rely on this for you to become “one with the machine,” when you suture into your avatar and become transported into those worlds that so many people spend their times in these days. I’m always interested in what is the “you” that is transported in these vehicles–I think it’s very Buddhist, in a way. What is the self? Is it the mind? Is it the body? When you become the avatar (like in the movie!), who is the “you” it becomes?

Michelangelo wanted to become immortal by transferring his soul into everything he did, to give it a life of its own and for his life to extend into his works. I think this is really true–what holds form and content together? Signifier and signified? For most great works, the answer really is ineffable–perhaps an emotion or feeling, something you experience when you stand in front of them. Michelangelo definitely has this. What is the mortar between the bricks of form and content–could it be the soul?

In any event, this is my stake in comics–I love the power of the icon that makes you relate to it, and once you suture into the icon, how you are transported into an allegorical world that is removed from reality yet relatable. It’s a double-whammy scenario that makes comics so powerful: iconic characters in iconic or allegorical worlds. Also, McCloud talks about closure–for him, this is when the mind completes the ultimate content of any work. This could be when you see the back of your friend’s head and say “oh, that’s so-and-so,” or when you see half the label of a litre of Coke and know its Coke. It’s also, in a comic, when (the example McCloud uses) you see someone chasing someone else with an axe in one panel, and then you “hear”/see the word “Aieee!” in the next panel. Even though the artist doesn’t spell it out, you become an accomplice in the violence of the comic as your mind fills in what isn’t there. This is why sometimes movies from the ’50s that don’t show monsters but shadows on the wall can be more effective than today’s graphic horror films, or why Hitchcock is the sexiest and most violent film director: you don’t ever see the blade penetrate the flesh in Psycho and no one ever takes off their clothes of in any of his films. Your mind can make stuff up better than can be graphically depicted.

Not all comics and cartoons are artful: they don’t effect closure when they are used to sell toys, for example. But all art is like a cartoon in that art is an iconic image or object or event that stands in for things much bigger than itself. Art involves closure.  Instead of gutters between comic panels, it’s the space between you and the art object or image that makes you think–and while you identify, perhaps, with the symbolic metaphor of what you are gazing at, you are thinking about what it means to you, and it moves you in intellectual and ineffable ways.

Comics are also political. I grew up in Colorado, which at the time had a great art museum if you like Fredrick Remington statues and Native American art and not much else. My access to contemporary art was through the cartoons in the New Yorkers that my dad brought home from the his office, or MAD Magazine, National Lampoon, Heavy Metal, or underground comix I found at comic book stores (some mainstream superhero stuff, too).  Most cartoonists are already “postmodern,” if that means ideas come before the image–having to relate something outside of the hegemonic world of the image. Most cartoonists bring up ideas aesthetically, which is the job of most contemporary fine artists. But comics are for the world: they are printed and distributed everywhere, with the subversive edge, at least in America, of being”kid stuff” that is often (although, thankfully, less today) overlooked.

I teach fine art at NYU and Brooklyn College but comics at SVA, where I am also the “Cartooning Coordinator.”  The biggest difference between my students at NYU and SVA is race and class. My NYU students dress better than I do and tend to be white and privileged. ”Taste is habit,” said Duchamp, and it’s really true. Most of them are there because they had an Auntie Mame that brought them to museums, or went to private schools that actually had good art teachers and/or taught art history, or sometimes their parents are collectors or artists, and they grew up around contemporary art. Most of my SVA students are middle class, and they come from EVERYWHERE. Sometimes they are hard-wired to tell stories through word-image combinations, but for many of them, they simply don’t know what the contemporary art world is about, or think its all Mr. and Mrs. Howell stuff.

Its all good. I think the art world is fascinated with the language and machinations of comics (even Roland Barthes mentions them in this essay “The Third Meaning,” although he didn’t get a chance to see the complexity of the works created today), while sometimes the cartooning world has a reverse snobbery against the art world (is all about rich white people). I grew up creating comics; I was always the comic guy in my schools, and I did a daily comic strip as an undergrad at Brown University. When I came to New York after Brown, it was my original intention to do gag cartoons for The New Yorker, which I thought would pay my way to create paintings and write plays (like I did as an undergrad, as a semiotics and studio art major). But my first jobs were in the art world, first as an editorial assistant for a now defunct art magazine, Contemporanea, and then as the front desk person at Robert Miller Gallery, when they were in the Fuller Building on 57th street and John Cheim and Howard Read were the directors. I would drop off ten cartoons a week to The New Yorker and go to my job at the magazine and gallery, where I realized that the artists like Alex Katz, Basquiat, Alice Neel, etc, were doing something like I was doing, but without the worry of having to make people laugh. I became more interested in rendering and bringing up ideas aesthetically than I was about making things humorous.

I switched into fine art, building up a portfolio to get into grad school and get my MFA. When I did my thesis show Pinocchio the Big Fag, I first wrote a play that I then turned into a comic, and, fatigued from doing panel to panel transitions, decided to make separate, narrative images instead, which I think I still do, however open-ended and ambiguous they may be. I really do think of my shows as narrative installations, or comics-on-the-wall. I had the chance to work with Dennis Cooper, the writer, who asked me to collaborate on what turned into “Horror Hospital Unplugged” (soon to be republished by Harper Perennial), which, while too arty for the cartoon world and too cartoony for the fine art world (and too gay for everyone!), helped me get my first jobs teaching comics, which I still love doing today. It keeps me from getting hit by lightning: as my work their breaks through the rarefied world of fine art, and as my students go out into the world and get published, we help to make the world a better place in a broader way, reaching out to a more pluralistic audience than many are able to reach in this world. It’s gratifying. I enjoy analyzing how comics help to create synaesthetic experiences that people feel as much as read and try to translate those same machinations into what I do in my paintings and installations.

BP – Did you ever get any cartoons published by The New Yorker? Whenever I make drawings I have The New Yorker in mind. There is a Seinfeld episode where Elaine goes to The New Yorker offices and demands that they explain why a certain cartoon is funny. I love that. Patricia Highsmith spent her whole life trying to get published by The New Yorker with no luck; meanwhile, she was becoming famous for her stories about killer snails for Omni. Do you still make cartoons? We should wrap this up. What do you have coming up? What are you working on right now?

KM – Well, when I was still working at Contemporanea, we were working under deadline, and I arrived late to a talk with Lee Lorenz, who was presenting George Booth, Roz Chast, and others. I told him, “Mr. Lorenz, you might not realize this, but today was our silver anniversary, as I just handed my one hundredth cartoon to you!” He replied, “Well, Keith, if you saw George here (meaning Mr. Booth), he took ten years and a thousand cartoons before he had his first one published. Now, I’m not saying it takes that to get in, but it helps!” I kept submitting, but after my talks with people like Alex Katz and being inspired by the art that was surrounding me in Miller Gallery, I realized that art was the philosophy of thinking aesthetically, and, while I enjoyed cartoons, I realized the freedom of the artist to explore new ground, make investigations, pursue the science of what it was they were exploring, and express oneself fully through the vehicle of the art, and I was hooked. It’s been a long road, and while I enjoy comics per se, and feel like I’m an avante-garde cartoonist in that (to paraphrase McCloud) I make non-linear narratives in installations of juxtaposed paintings and drawings in deliberate sequences, my work has been for many years on the wall instead of in a book. I was finally published, though, in The New Yorker, when I had my first New York solo show at Jay Gorney back in 1996, and they asked me for a self-portrait, which I had printed, proudly, in their art listing section (and they have fortunately reviewed shows there subsequently, so its always a thrill to see my name in The New Yorker’s font!).

But, as I keep saying, I keep my hand in the mix. I’m currently curating a huge show at the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art here in Manhattan. It’s entitled “NeoIntegrity: Comics Edition,” and it’s part two of a big group show I curated in 2007 at Derek Eller Gallery in Chelsea. While that show was based on a manifesto I wrote that involved 180 artists, mostly “fine artists” with some cartoonists mixed in, this show is the reverse: over 220 artists, with some fine artists who work in iconographic traditions in the mix. I’m hoping to continue to bridge the gap between “high” and “low,” whatever that is, and explore the power of the iconographic image in sequence. This show, like the other, has many famous artists and yet-to-be-famous artists, old and young, dead and alive, all of whom create art out of the power and spirit to move and communicate with the viewer through the soulful intentions of their creative expressions. I’m pleased that the show will also have a catalogue, which is currently over 600 pages, and will act hopefully as a go-to anthology of the currency of comics and iconographic art.

I’m also trying to build my website, www.KeithMayerson.com, so that I can get out to the world my history in my own context, and I’m painting away for shows next season in New York and Cleveland. I’ve been inspired by my graphic novel Horror Hospital Unplugged being reprinted in the fall and the catalogue for “NeoIntegrity” to try to create more books that could breach the mainstream (some involving photography, from my experience “covering” the haute couture shows in Paris that Interview asked me to paint). I’m working on more works from photos and images in my own life, wanting to be post-postmodern and turn my immediate world into paintings that will hopefully resonate with others.

BP- thanks so much for asking me all these questions!  I hope that this was interesting and that there is something here worthy of being said and printed. Many thanks to you; I really respect and admire your work, it was really an honor (and I’m so pleased you are going to be participating in “NeoIntegrity: Comics Edition,” too!).