Expressionism Today: An Artists’ Symposium
quoted by Carter Ratcliff, in Art in America, December 1982. (by the author’s and editor’s
permission)

(Carter Ratcliff writes art criticism for Art in America and many other journals as well as having
written monographs on many artists.) In a way, painting comes down to rhythm and color. That’s what draws the eye. And if I wanted just
the rhythm and the color, I’d be an Abstract Expressionist. But I feel guilt or something. I feel I have
to acknowledge everything else. Do all the steps. The whole Greenbergian flatness, for instance. It
sustains me. I swallowed all the critical ideas hook, line and sinker. Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction, for example. I was really taken by the essay. So Abstract Expressionism is terrific,
but I’d just as soon see my images transferred into print—into four-color reproductions.
The cultural baggage I carry around gives me a foundation which I acknowledge by using images
from magazines and books. I paint on top of them. So I loose the distance—I bring the image up close
and touch it. Then I photograph it, so it becomes untouchable. It goes back into the distance. Next, I
touch it again, paint over it. And if the work is reproduced, it of course has to be photographed all
over again. So I see myself as setting up these resonances—layers, showing the touch and denying
the touch. This idea of cover and recover. It ends up with the skinniness of the photograph. I like that.
My things look like they are about touch, but you can’t touch them.
All this has to do with the mechanisms, the functions, of an image—how it works. When Robert
Longo and I were hanging out in Buffalo, from 1975 to ‘76, we would talk about “picturism.” Sound
familiar? I don’t know if Robert ever talked about it with Doug Crimp. It was one of those in-the-air
concepts. Anyway, figuring out how an image works seemed like something fun to do. Jack
Goldstein’s idea of it was to put little figures in a gigantic ground. Even then, they looked like they
were in the distance, literally. He liked the untouchability you get that way. And of course that has a
lot to do with the images in contemporary media. I wanted to extend it to include anything that had
ever been made flat, so everything became fair game—old master paintings, everything. Willem
deKooning. I went to his studio because I wanted to touch the hand. I’ve never washed it since.
Magritte. The Soutine touch, and of course there’s Manet. And Sargent. I love the facile painters.
What I like most about painting, all kinds of painting, is that it ain’t what it looks like. Not that it’s
simply an illusion. I like the contradiction, that my things can have an old master look, the look of
Abstract Expressionism and a look of shiny smoothness. I like those paradoxes—flatness and its
opposite, the way the photo reveals and the paint conceals. Shuffling and reshuffling, then adding
another deck and reshuffling that. I try to condense all those layers into a single image, so that, for
me, what is describable by the printing process is the important part. It really is a struggle. I don’t
know, I guess it is—sort of a contingent struggle, in a way.
I’m not challenging the world. I don’t see how painting can be a threat to anybody. I don’t see it as
politically effective. I see it as diversionary. Art can inspire people. It’s the curtain over the abyss. It
ain’t food, that’s for sure. But to inspire people—that’s nice. I like that. I like the radio on, the odd
tune, lilies of the field. All that kind of stuff. So I do these little things, very small paintings. And I
project slides of my collages onto white paper, then I paint over the projected image. It’s sort of like
Photo-Realism, only I use my fingers instead of an airbrush. When my images are blown up that
way, they have a skinny, decal-type effect I love. It’s sheer. It’s weightless, it’s loud. But some of
my works start large. So I can get hit with “academicism” and “pretension.”
I think what I do is both. As I paint, I’m learning history in reverse. It’s like doing my schooling
backwards, but sometimes it’s also my life—to get an image and examine it, suck it dry and throw it
away, then move on to the next victim. The result is all these layers of painting and photography,
which I set up to look grandiose. That’s “pretension.” I think it is grandiose, and its got all of these
trimmings. Decoys. And there’s always this idea of blending. With “picturism” the emphasis is on
distancing but, like I say, I’m also interested in bringing the image close. I have this personal,
Abstract Expressionist way of covering an image with paint, but everything gets in between that style
and the final image. Relationships develop. So it’s not just me alone, painting. I have this
conversation with the outer world, which takes place in my imagination.
The conversation blends everything, and the blend sets up a relationship between figure and ground,
past and present, the image from the art book and my intention. And so on. The blending convolutes
those relationships, confuses them. So I’m not trying to find an ultimate distance where I can put a
pristine, untouchable image. The point for me is the variety of the relationships. I see art as a
metaphor for many of the things we experience—from abruptness to smoothness or how one thing
flows into the next. I’d like to put all the pieces together. That’s not possible, but I imagine it—the
inclusiveness and busyness, this compacted, impacted, condensed quality, all adding up; a body of
work, each piece conditioning what follows, cumulatively, so that it contains my sense of experience.
Something like that.
The other thing is that I don’t want to deliver defined goods. I don’t like being understood. That’s
why I would just as soon deliver my work in a book, where it can be dealt with privately, personally.
That way there isn’t so much chance of being understood in a way that is going to nail me down. I
want to set up the look of a code, but not the solution. My paintings are like contradictory solutions all
developed from the same evidence. So the idea of the artist continually doing the same painting is
interesting to me. Painting it over, then bringing the image back in another way. I discard. I resurrect,
and so on. There’s a destructive element that intrigues me, too. That’s what I like about Delacroix,
Abstract Expressionism. Chamberlain squashed things. I was thinking about how you like a scary
movie. It threatens you, but it’s a diversionary threat. I like what Tom Lawson said about “phony
painting.” Is it phony or is it Memorex? Yikes. I think that my things work like that, sometimes. You
know. Scary monsters.