Catching up, from Art Review

I wanted to post a couple of reviews that printed earlier this year in Art Review, London. Interview with Monique Van Genderen to follow after the holiday. Thanks for reading.

Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha, Blum and Poe, closed April 14th

Mickalene Thomas, Santa Monica Museum of Art, closed August 19th.

Interview: Jason Yates

Jason Yates

Interviewed October 26, 2012 and early October 27

I currently cannot beat Jason Yates at arm wrestling. There’s no good reason -- I have a minimum of 100 pounds on him. We’re both the sons of carpenters, used to long summers of long days swinging hammers and lifting headers. Considering he’s from Detroit proper and I’m from a farm in Texas, we should be evenly matched rough handed meat-heads. It’s not even close though, and he says it’s all mental. “You can beat me,” he says, “You just don’t believe you can.”

Yates and I saw the wolf. Taking a mental health day, I journeyed to the beach community of Encinitas where he lives and works. I wanted to ask him about his current work at the new MJ Briggs / Anna Melikesetian Gallery. The conversation started instantly and went on for ten hours. Yates is not remotely shy and has no trouble airing it out to whoever wants to listen.

A case of beer was consumed, a bottle of Wild Turkey 101. The whole time, Yates played selections from his record collection -- Beethoven, the Traveling Wilbury’s, Talking Heads, and delightfully (on loan from his neighbor) Willies Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger. He woke up in his son’s bed. I woke up in his. Ten years of drawings covered the floor, and the apparently, once the wolf took me into a deep sleep, Yates’ current work called Visigoth, 2012, a large canvas hanging in his living room, had made some progress during the night.

I wrote about Yates several years ago for Art Review, London, having stumbled on his work in Circus Gallery. At the time, he struck me as an artist of interesting divisions, several revolving personalities all struggling for dominance.

“These are vibrant but confusing exercises,” I wrote at the time, “an aesthetic surely part of the atmosphere in an LA where urban planning collapses into rioting and the high theory often pitched in its many art schools can turn sinister and loud.” Yates called me shortly thereafter and said that I sounded enough like a son of a bitch that we should have a drink.  We drank Greyhounds.

Now we are more inclined towards bourbon, and considering Yates recently had a show in Kentucky and Houston, a bit of the brown tastes just good enough. His show on Fairfax features a king sized bed and mirrors etched with a diamond tool alongside his more recognizable efforts, his monk tables and his vellum cross hatches. The monk tables and the bed look like my fantasy of what Donald Judd’s  dungeon must look like, all firm angles tied with ropes. In a sense, it’s true, but in a more important sense, the show is much, much more.

What follows is a partial account of Yates’ and my discussion there in Encinitas. A little about Mike Kelley and a lot about family, we try to get to the bottom of Yates a bit.

Jason Yates: It is not really a bed. It is a place to die.

Ed Schad: So the death hasn't happened yet? I read it as a trauma that has already happened.

JY: Well that's not as interesting. Personal trauma is not that interesting. Everybody is constantly doing that every second. We are all surrounded by death.

ES: What type of site of death is your bedroom?

JY: I don't know how to answer that other than I think that death will be delivered cold.

ES: Like Revenge in the Klingon proverb.

JY: The first day that I moved to Los Angeles, I died. I literally had to be revived. I OD'd. I was dead. I don't know if it is a mental construction or recuperation, but what I remember is that there is nothing there. It was black and cold and it was more drugs that brought me back.

ES: How did you show up in L.A. and have this happen?

JY: I was moving from Detroit. As it happened, I had friends that rented the place upstairs, a place upstairs, a shitty single in Silverlake back when you could rent a place like that for 400 bucks. I was well indoctrinated into the drug world. As a celebration, we were all living together in this building. Well . . . I didn't know what I was doing basically. The sun was starting to set and I'll never forget looking out these French doors with the light coming through, and it was beautiful. I looked at one of my “colleagues” as it were and said, “I think I took too much,” and I was out. I remember flashes, coming in and out of consciousness as they tried to revive me, but then I was gone. Apparently, I was dead for about 8 minutes.

ES: This was in the hospital?

JY: This was in the apartment.

ES: What were they doing to revive you?

JY: Beating the shit out of me, putting ice cubes in my ass, putting me in the shower. EMS showed up.

ES: That’s horrible. Why ice cubes?

 

JY: Supposedly it shocks your system. Then two EMS guys came and shot me with Narcan and I starting yelling at them. Then they took me to Glendale Memorial. More Narcan. More profanities. If there is anything interesting in it, death was this volley between coming in and out of light. You hear people talk about a tunnel of light. I can get with that. I saw that. Then, I saw intangible black. There's intangible light too, but that's it, and that's gonna be it, that's all anyone is going to be able to tell you in this life.

ES: So the show, the bedroom on Fairfax, is a place to die, it is a location to go to that place, to do that again?

JY: I don't want to put too fine a point on it. If you want to talk about death, you still can't talk about it in terms of black and white. The only place that black and white exists is in art.

ES: Why?

JY: Because life has too many gradations.

ES: So art is a lie?

JY: I think we covered that. Yeah. Art is a lie.

ES: When I look at your work, I see all the things I am not supposed to see. I see Brice Marden. I see Jasper Johns. I see orifices. But the places that the work actually comes from seem to have little to do with what I am seeing.

JY: No, I'm not thinking about Marden or Johns or art at all. I am more interested in labor. I am more interested in being an worker ant. I’m not really thinking about anything.

ES: You are obviously a Mike Kelley fan, you seem to come, at least partially, out of the sunshine noir side of L.A.

JY: Everybody that had a relationship with Mike wants to say that it was special because he was an enigma and he is kind of intangible. He was on my thesis committee, along with Bruce Hainley, Mayo Thompson, Liz Larner, and Stephen Prina. I should have had Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe on it. If there were do-overs, I would have spent a lot more time taking his abuse. When it comes to addressing painting, I have never met anyone that is as much a purist about anything as Jeremy is about painting and that scares me. I am not a purist. I think I would like to tell you that I am, but I am not. I'm a garbage head.

ES: What does that mean?

JY: I would take the same approach to art as a green beret out in the field. I am going to use anything that I can get a purchase on. That's how I use history. I don't feel religious about anything that I come across. I use it all as a single word in a larger sentence. I don't feel religious about Jasper Johns.

ES: I don't think Jasper Johns feels religious about Jasper Johns.

JY: I hope not.

ES: Your work is dirty.

LY: Failure is dirty. If anything, I've discovered that if you strip back a layer of veneer, we are all pretty gnarly. I don't like secrets. I go out of my way very publically to strip away through those secrets.

ES: Is it a telling moment in your work when you lift the vellum and see a mirror?

JY: I actually think I fail as an artist, and as a person, when I try to get people to look in the mirror. It is not my job. Even though it's overly didactic, I still do it. I am willing to play to court jester. I want to grow as a human being. I have a huge ego, but it is important for me to strip it down.

ES: You’ve also mentioned Larry Johnson in connection with your practice before.

LY: I just remember Larry saying that he made art at his kitchen table, and hearing that helped me to develop a new method of surviving as an artist. It is more solvent for me to approach production in terms of my kitchen table. I had 3,000 square feet in Boyle Heights and at the end of the day, I am working on my bed. You can see how I am working right now. I have a studio on Oceanside, but I want to work right here in my living room. I've got all the accoutrements, but I don't use them. I want to be at home. Success in my head means to me that I can stay home. I also had a 3,000 square foot studio in Detroit, and I had fantasies about the 50s through the 80s type of big studio way of working. I was also romantic about art as a certain lifestyle.

ES: You wanted a John Chamberlain studio and an Andy Warhol life

JY: That's right.

ES: But Warhol doesn’t strike me as a very happy person.

JY: I have never detected any sort of happiness from Warhol, no emotion actually.

ES: Other than reverence. I think Warhol's greatest gift was his capacity for reverence. He was a man that knew how to worship.

JY: But reverence needs emotion to be intelligent.

ES: You seem to find that emotional intelligence in music. I know a big part of your history is with Fast Friends and Holy Shit.

JY: I think the work I did with Holy Shit is very important. Ariel is a genius, but he’s also one of those geniuses that work very hard. Matt Fishbeck has always been ahead of the curve in terms of fashion and what people are going to like in a few years. That work, those posters, is still a big part of me, that time, that scene. Of course, few cared at the time.

ES: You definitely have an affinity for the underground. You dig extremely deep. I'm from Texas and never heard of this psychedelic, hillbilly cowboy music till you showed me.

JY: The legendary stardust cowboy. Fucking amazing. This is what I will say about Texas psych – they got it better than anyone else. They processed it and put out the most timeless stuff that there is. Most people have heard of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, everyone has heard of Red Crayola, but Golden Dawn? They made one record and they basically summed up everything that was incredible about pop and psyche and they nailed it. There must have been something in the water in Austin.

ES: There is still something in water in Austin.

JY: There is still something in the water in Austin. Austin is an incredible town. Texas is not the United States. I can relate to Texas, it is a different kind of repression but still at the same intensity as the repression that Detroit has, it has a different kind of environmental repression. In Detroit, the weather is bleak and the economy there, since the riots, has been bleak. But you can argue that the most visible, weighty cultural figures have come out of Detroit.

ES: I wanted to ask that, Jim Shaw, Mike Kelley, Mo-Town.

JY: Madonna. George Clinton wasn't from Detroit but got his stride in Detroit. The MC5, Iggy Pop, most of the influential bands, it just keeps going. Even more contemporary like the White Stripes, they were a cultural and artistic force at one time (say what you will). Eminem. This country, when it’s at its best, holds the underdog in the highest regard because we are a nation of underdogs. Aside from the Native Americans, who are the ultimate underdogs, we are a people that couldn't hold status anywhere else.

ES; One part Tammany Hall and one part P.T. Barnham, and it’s always been that way.

JY: People were stupid enough to move to Detroit in the first place, it was Ford's fault. It was the lazy man's manifest destiny. We don't have to go to California for a coast, we have a coastline as long as California, but when you get there, it sucks. What are you doing to do? You are going to create your own world.

ES: What do your parents do?

JY: My dad is a carpenter. Pounding nails.

ES: Summers with Dad, then full time with Dad, and full time with Dad is very hard.

JY: Full time with Dad sucks. You shouldn't have full time with Mom either. They are still together. My mom was the overachiever. She actually owns two art galleries, one in Scottsdale and one in Fountain Hills. My mom has a very intelligent heart. My dad was historically an academically brilliantly person but an underachiever.

ES: What did your dad read, what was he into?

JY: Basically anything that had to do with fringe alpha males.

ES: Who are fringe alpha males?

JY: Kit Carson. Geronimo. Custer was a grave disappointment to him. Lincoln is the only Democrat that my father will accept.

ES: And your family, pre-Detroit, were Southerners?

JY: My family goes generations deep in art and con art. We're from Kentucky. They are all con artists. I'm Scotch-Irish. I'm not Scottish, I'm not Irish. I am not even English. We ended up in Kentucky.

ES: You are the people that stopped in Virginia, ran into a gentleman on the street, and upon receiving a snub, pointed your nose west to Kentucky.

JY: And owned Kentucky. My family came over as surveyors for the crown and said the hell with you, we're staying. No one else would come over here. It wasn't a noble position. Who else would come? George Yates came here in the 1600s and never left. At one point, they owned Maryland.

ES: We're they Catholic?

JY: They were pagans.

ES: No way, they couldn't have been pagans. I don’t believe you.

JY: Okay, they were Protestants, they were proper Protestants. They owned a lot of slaves and then drank everything. The Yates at some point married into the Clark family in Canada. At one point, my great great grandfather was the bishop of Niagara. They were in that circle of Anglicans and Protestants.  But ultimately, we made Detroit happen.

ES: Were you thinking about any of this in your Kentucky show?

JY: It was called Master and Servant. I could show you the last will and testament of my great great grandfather where he is bequeathing his slaves, guns and bibles to his relatives. This was the late 1700s. I walked around naively, ignorantly in Detroit saying, “I don't know what your problem is, my family never owned slave.” We didn't talk about that. I had to go through country records to find that out. It is a troubling thing to realize you have this history. We still don’t talk about it.

ES: Have things at least improved?

JY: Coming from somebody that still has an appreciation of street life. There is a notable difference between how races interact since Obama. On a superficial level, he's done more for this country than anyone else as a figurehead.

ES: Do you see this in Detroit? Do you go back to Detroit often?

JY: I love Detroit, I love being from there, and I love flying that flag, but I've been back three times since I left and I left in 1996. I did my time there. There are wonderful people there and wonderful talent, but by and large, they all leave. I'll never forget one night and I was driving down Woodward, two guys and two girls, we all lived in Detroit proper. A car full of six guys pulls up and we were stopped at the light. We were high and that's why we stopped, because if you are sober, you never stop for a red light there. These guys looked at us, looked at me, and one guy takes his 38 and taps it against the glass window. It's winter and his window is rolled up. I said, “Hey guys, look he has a gun” and we all started laughing. These guys were stone killers and they look at us and their eyes and mouths drop and they start laughing too. That's how you have to play Detroit, you have to at least appear to be fearless. So me living in Southern California, you can understand why you say that I am cheating. No one ever fucking leaves Detroit.

Interview: Liat Yossifor

Liat Yossifor

Interviewed October 21, 2012

Liat Yossifor gets up very early and paints by natural light, details that gain significance once you know she works on Hollywood Blvd -- prone to late night revelry and not known for really anything natural at all. On her doorstep, as you wait to be buzzed in and up to her studio, you can have your picture photo shopped into a picture of Lady Gaga in the adjacent bodega. Hotdogs rotate on a spit. On your right and left are the stars of Dennis Day and Cathy Downs, two names distant enough to be a lesson in how quickly fame fades. Downs was once Clementine in My Darling Clementine, which I only know as the film that gets interrupted during an episode of M.A.S.H. It was Colonel Potter's favorite. The star directly in front of Yossifor’s building is blank.

On that spot in Hollywood, Yossifor has made strides as a painter, a journey which she likens to getting to know herself better.  I visited her for the first time about 5 years ago, when her canvases were populated with emergent figures on solid surfaces. Imagine paintings in all black and all white, their petroleum wet shining in the sun, revealing a rain shower of quick brush strokes. The brush strokes accumulate into mountains and then the mountains slide to reveal that that their grooves and valleys and hills are actually bodies. At the time, I admit I thought of the ancient sleeping gods that, in a previous understanding of creation, made up the world, the thought that if you looked at the sea a certain way, you could see Poseidon’s powerful face.

Yossifor has changed since then as a painter, currently her canvases fall away from such wispy and on my keyboard, purple descriptions. Visit her now and you confront fields of thick grey paint touched and carved from buckets of paint, blues and blacks and every spectral apparition mixing into grey. They are not delicate any longer -- the paintings come and go with each of Yossifor's sessions. You won't see the same painting twice until she has a show, for her paintings are being constantly scraped and repainted, created and destroyed. At least for me, her paintings carry grounds for extended looking, which is the art world's way of saying that they are weird, that things you didn't see before pop up and things that you thought you saw fade away. Yossifor can create, consume, and scrap in several hours yet when the paintings are done, only a fool would think they could consume them quickly.

Yossifor’s current show Thought Patterns is at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe in New York, which has now reopened for another week after Hurricane Sandy and is up till November 10th. However, I caught up with Yossifor a couple of Sundays ago at a Starbucks in Culver City and we talked about her transitions and her growth. Strangely, Yossifor and I both had an idea of the point where her work started this transition, a light brown and black painting she displayed at Susanne Vielmetter's old space east of La Cienega.

ES: I remember a couple in the mountains in the Vielmetter show. However, I especially remember that little brown painting.

LY:  Yes, there was one painting in that show that was worth making the show. It was called Tear Drop (below) with a brownish background, a very small painting. It is one of my favorite paintings still, but it is lost.

ES: It's lost. How is that possible?

LY: A collector bought it but never picked it up. Then a writer wanted to write about it while looking at it, but when they mailed back, it never arrived. I've looked everywhere, basically it is lost.

ES: Son of a Bitch.

LY: Son of a Bitch.

ES: So that little painting was the herald of things to come. What made that painting different from other paintings in the show? When I remember the painting, it was a distortion in a well grooved world. For the other paintings in the show, it was matter of this mass of brushstrokes becoming figures becoming mountains becoming painting again. However, that little painting was a bit of a Soutine-like disruption. It was a piece of meat. In a smooth world, it was decidedly different.

LY: When people came to my studio, I had all of these painting set up, all these large paintings. They would look at those, and then they would see that little painting in the corner and they would say, “What about that, can you move that over next to the other ones.” I would move it into a prominent position. That painting was the end of that work. I was no longer attached to that work and I think that little painting was, finally, just painting. I don't think I was letting myself paint, and I feel this inability to just paint held me back. I put all this pressure on myself. I wanted to think about monuments and art historical references, but even talking about it is exhausting. But that painting was the end of it, and I think that following painting flowed from that painting. After that, it became more about how to make a painting.

ES: Or where the power of painting comes from, truly comes from.

LY: To be honest, I wanted painting to be about something else other than just painting. I was really looking at Beckman's writings and really holding onto a subject matter. I wanted painting to do so many other things that maybe it was not equipped to do.

ES: Okay, let's go back. Let's get our reader to this point in your life. Let's find out what it meant for you to let go of subject matter, why there was subject matter, what any of this means.

LY: I started as an abstract painter, as big as I could make complete with pallet knives and buckets of paint from Utrecht. It was just natural to me. I was 19 at the San Francisco Art Institute and that's what I was doing. It was a bit romantic.

ES: Where did you go from the work you were making when you were 19?

LY: I went to representation. I had a real need to frame my work. I started doing portraits of women I knew that were in the Israeli Army. This sounds ridiculous in retrospect. The portraits themselves were white on white or black on black. I wanted to completely collapse the figure and ground relationship. There was the knife work as before when I was 19, but now I wanted to explore a subject. I didn't think there was much to be done with a political subject like that and painting, so it was this was an experiment. I remember going through a lot to bring those two together.

ES: Was that a product of graduate school, that everything had to have a political push? (Below, Water, 16 x 12 inches, 2012)

LY: I went to UC Irvine so you would think that, but in actuality, the second Intifada (wiki the link) broke out while I was in graduate school. The Palestinian uprising consumed half my brain. I left Israel during the first Intifada, but I didn't know how it happened. For me to become obsessed with the second Intifada wasn't any sort of activism. Actually, to be at UC Irvine at that time was the best place for me to be and to make that kind of work. It just lined up in a strange way.

ES: Lari Pittman says that you can never paint in a political way but that paintings can be political. I really like that.

It wasn't exactly that though. You know the cliché of a painter in front of canvas as if they are facing the unknown. That's how I felt at the time trying to bring the political and painting together. There was a lot of second guessing. I had to photograph these women. I just had to. Then, “What the hell do I do with these photographs.” They ended up as the paintings in Anna Helwing gallery. It’s funny to me now that the work looks preplanned because when I was making it, it was an open field. I didn't decide that I was going to take these women and make portraits of them. I just needed to go talk to these women. The impulse felt genuine and organic. It was also identity.

ES: A discourse that was dominate at that moment. In some ways, it still is.

LY: In that moment and in that school at the time, yes. I think that political art doesn’t always have to be so transparent. Brenna Youngblood, for instance. I've been thinking a lot about her work. Politics is part of the work because it is who she is. I feel political in a similar way. I get up in the morning and I am an immigrant, a woman, an Israeli, I just don't have to think about it so hard.

ES: What was your next show?

I did a show at Pomona College Museumof Art. I felt at the time that it was a complete outsider project -- you wouldn't even know that I went to school in L.A. making that work. I was looking a lot at Goya's Disasters of War, not the more graphic ones but the more abstract ones. I would go to LACMA to look at them, I remember their titles were really silly like, “Lord, Help Us,” and things like that. Even though I was looking at them, I was thinking again mostly about figure ground and romantic landscapes. I was drawn to the Goyas and I just went after it. I remember having a studio visit with another L.A. artist and they said, “you know what is great about this, that people will actually be mistaken and think that you are serious about it.”

ES: They thought it was a put on.

LY: Yes. We look at the same work, look at the same magazines, and he could never even consider that this could be sincere. That's why I felt like so much of an outsider.

ES: The whole idea of sincerity as a put on, that it is just a posture, is not as popular as it used to be.

LY: When I made that work, I didn't think about it as ever getting shown. I had all of these ideas of myself. I think I over-romanticized a position where I took myself into the studio. It is funny that I sound like I am talking about a person a long time ago, but it wasn't actually that long ago. A lot of has happened in 5 years. I was stubborn in a certain way. I wasn't actually an outsider, because I thought I was an outsider.

ES: A true outsider wouldn't think they were. They are just living the dream. They are no conscious of being an outsider. They are an insider but in a world that doesn't match up with the world that will eventually judge them. Therefore, when the world’s don’t match, they seem charming in some way. Ultimately, however, they are just the guy making wood sculptures in the middle of Texas. (Above, Figure/Flag, 80 x 48 inches, 2012)

LY: Okay. I can take that. When you are an older artist, you are not exposed to fashion so much, but all I know is when I was in graduate school, people kept saying to me this outsider thing and I began to take it on as an identity. And then it got boring.

ES: What got boring?

LY: To keep that up, I would have to continuously ignore the artworld. You can't live in the artworld and keep up conversations. It just organically didn't work for me.

ES: The next step after Pomona was Susanne Vielmetter, which brings us to the brown painting. Shortly after, you went to Germany. Can you talk about that?

LY: I went to Germany for a residency and actually made my work there for a show in Frankfurt. You have to come up with a proposal, and that is another thing about painting is that you can never propose it, so I won't even bore you with the proposal because I never followed through. Before I got my canvases, I had two weeks to just go around. I really got into what was around me in post-war German.

ES: Beckman

The still lives. I fell in love with the still lives. What happened to painting after World War I was one of the most exciting times in painting. For one, people were shocked there could even be a world war and they could lose -- so many ideas about nationality and self. You have Kirchner painting dancers and bathers and elegant women then all of a sudden make self-portrait as a soldier, Beckman makes The Night. Things turn sinister.

ES: How did that impact the work you did for that show?

LY: I was already in that state after the Vielmetter show. It worked with who I was and who I was thinking about. The history museum was in the same area. Every day, I walked through the History Museum to my studio. On display, were the private diaries of Nazi Soliders. I didn't go there to explore that history. I had friends that said they've been through enough, don't go there and make that type of show, but I couldn't control it. I was there and the images started to come up for me had something do with black and white documentary, a sort of History Channel. The work was meeting of those things.

ES: Is this why you went grey in your new work? The History Channel thing.

LY: It would be nice to say that, but no. The grey is so much more for me. The grey is the result of color being consumed, of constant editing. The grey is like the unfortunate result of a thousand paintings that got destroyed in the process of making this one painting. I don't even love the grey. The grey is result. (Above, Horizontal, 12 x 16 inches, 2012)

ES: And this was a product of the Germany show?

LY: No, the Germany show as still in the vein of Susanne Vielmetter show. Lots of blacks, blue backgrounds, I think it happened to me because the light in Frankfurt was so different. It wasn't like in California – in Germany, the light didn't do much for the work. I was working in artificial light so I felt like I needed color and contrast. I couldn't make nuanced work and see it. I had five large rooms to myself and it was just a strange situation. The work was a direct result of my daily experiences. It was the light in my studio, it was walking through the history museum, it was seeing huge posters for the history museum show that was there the whole time I was there. I was sponge.

ES: From that show, you started doing what you are doing now after much struggle. You had a while where you worked through many different things, describe the transition.

LY: I had six months to make my last show at Angles. As a beginning, I started making the black paintings in a continuation of Germany, but I had exhausted that argument. They seemed superficial. They were the look of my paintings but there was none of me in them. But three months before the show, I scrapped everything in my studio. I scrap a lot anyway, but this was different. I changed my painting technique on the spot. The show as still wet and dripping and it was all done very quickly. I remember thinking that it is either going to work or kill any possibility of me wanting to become a painter.

ES: All in

LY: The drama was very real to me. I create that drama in the studio. It is cliché and romantic but I think I need it.

ES: You had to cut your ear off.

LY: Yes

ES: As you know, I've always liked your little paintings, but you've described your process to me in the past as wanting to achieve the big ones.

LY: For example, the show at Angles Gallery I must have made 40 small paintings in order to get the 16 that you saw. Then I did not make a ton of large works. I agreed with you about the success of the small ones because I just didn't move my hand enough to make the large ones. For this new show, I made 40 large paintings to end up with the 9 and I remember there was this breaking point where it started to make sense. I remember going to an art talk where someone said that one out of five make it out of the studio, and I thought of them as lucky, it's more like one of the 40.

ES: Well, it gives you something to do. It is way of living the day out. (Above, The Pair, 80 x 60 inches, 2012)

LY: It really is, sometimes I think it keeps me in the studio longer hours and if I destroyed what I did, I have to get up in the morning and do it again. But I think this show, you can't escape the fact that some were scraped because the edges are very revealing. The black line and the moving of the fat, grey paint that I feel when looking at all the big paintings together that making and destroying became sort of the theme. It seems to me that the process has become the theme.

ES: What we've been talking about seems to be a transition between being conscious and just living. When someone asks you that, they are trying to know what it is, but in life, in our lives, we certainly rarely know what it is while we are living it. It is something that arrives.

LY: Some people figure out really early on that they discover that painting is a sort of abandonment. I'm not sure I would have something to work on it if I reached that point. I feel like I am searching for that total abandonment. I am curious about the process of working towards it. Mark Dutcher was telling me that some of Guston's paintings that are a transition between the abstraction and the figures, some of those paintings are some of his best paintings. He is just one example. There is something about working through your own limitations in public that can be interesting, that you keep those stages in some way. Sometimes it falls flat, but there's a working towards. You are not buying it, I can tell.

ES: It makes sense, but it is not necessarily something I understand. Art is a strange business. I don't do it. I get that transitional things can be interesting. Herman Melville, for instance – his craziest, most lost and gnarly novel is Moby Dick. That's exactly why we like it. Or that is the American taste in art. We like the unruly massive thing. We like Augie March, Infinite Jest, Leaves of Grass, these big sprawling messes are what we love.

LY: I like messes. I don't know what a good painting is and that’s a good thing.