FAQ:
a conversation with Ira Altschiller
What is your background? Your early training?
I grew up in New York - the Bronx. I started taking life classes at the Art Student’s League when I was 14 and continued for years. I’d get up at 5 every morning to take two subways and a bus to go to the High School of Music and Art. That school has now been folded into Lincoln Center. Eventually after 5 years of independent studio work I went the route of graduate school and got an MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute.
What of your early interests in art?
The popular culture led me to the fine arts. If you are older you go to the fine arts because you get tired of the shallow formulas and stereotypes in the popular culture. Movies, pop books, TV are all diverting and great fun, they have a visceral energy, but are basically unsatisfying. You’re only going to see what is saleable in the popular culture - the consensus rules; the personal, the eccentric, are discarded for demographic reasons.
If you are younger the popular culture is a natural nest to try out your sensibilities. There is a whole training thing that goes on in the popular culture; deciding the best this and that which can lead to a honing of critical thinking. I’m not talking about the thumbs up/thumbs down sort of nonsense, but if you listen to two kids sorting out their feelings about a movie, a sporting event, a piece of pop music, you can hear the training wheels rolling along, leading them to think harder and better - assuming of course a native ability for such growth.
The problem arises in the transition. Some people in our culture get stuck on pop culture. They fetishize it and demand it be taken more seriously than makes sense.
So for me it was early on an exposure to comics and animation that excited me. I wanted to be an animator; made a little, a very little, animated film which was heavily indebted to the great animator Preston Blair. Blair was influenced by the Disney style of animation, which itself had a sophistication brought into it by the influence of Rico Lebrun, who I read somewhere had taught art classes to the animators at Disney. There was a sophistication of line in much of the graphical Disney work - the animated characters - not the backgrounds.
Some of that early interest in cartooning infused my "Fields" series. Fragments of the popular culture; factoids of a floating consciousness.
Philip Guston seemed to share your interest in comic book derived images - did you ever meet him?
I came close. For a few summers I lived in Woodstock, New York, which was originally an artist colony. I’d paint landscapes and did assistant teaching at the Art Student’s League. Guston invited some of us to a party but I couldn’t go.
Was Guston an influence?
No, but in the "Fields" series in particular, I was influenced by much that influenced Guston I think. Guston left his early interest in such "comic" figures and joined with the great spirit of American Abstract Expressionism, making a fine contribution. When Guston came back to these comic derived images later in his life I felt he made a good beginning in his drawings but rarely realized that success in his paintings.
People don’t realize - it takes years for something you are interested in to fully integrate into your work. Guston showed great courage in changing his image so radically late in his career. He paid a price. It’s as though, because he felt a need to change what he was doing, he had somehow lost his talent. People whose job it is to be open and welcoming of change actively resisted the new work. What possible logic?
How long did your interest in animation last?
Too much drudge work in animation. It wasn’t long before I got interested in Mad magazine - the visual work is what interested me. I got to know many of the artists: Jack Davis and Wallace Wood come immediately to mind. David Berg was very kind to me. I didn’t know him, but the terrific Don Martin. The political and satirical quality was less important to me at that time than the draftsmanship. I just loved looking at the stuff. Wallace Wood gave me some Will Eisner comics. I still have them somewhere. He was a shy man; very nice to a kid. Wood was extremely versatile.
What are your influences among traditional artists? Who did you look to for inspiration? What artists do you most admire?
I’ve been painting for many years, so of course my work has its own momentum now. I’m less influenced than inspired by looking at other work at this point.
When I was about 16, drawing figures and visiting the Met every weekend, I began to study and love - well, all the greats - my own pantheon at the time - Rembrandt, Vermeer, Tiepolo, Caravaggio, Velazquez, Sargent. Later of course Picasso, Matisse, Goya, Matta, Gorky and then on to the great Abstract Expressionists, the wonderful Pop Art artists, particularly Johns and Rauschenberg. There was always a "painterly" preference.
Of course you are influenced by more than painting. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Whitman, Dostoevsky, Bach, all sorts of music effects you - Jazz, Rock; anything that moves you changes you. The ecstatic structures Bach built in sound had a big influence as an example. I remember in the Paris Review interview with Hemingway he listed Bosch as an influence. That’s pretty accurate about the way influence works in the real world. Artists are influenced not just by stylistic considerations. It is the vision in the work that inspires you.
What did you like about the Abstract Expressionists?
Well, the energy, the quality of newness, the force of a fresh vision; the sensuality. But mostly, and this might sound overwrought, but the moral seriousness. I felt that they felt that painting was something more than a decoration or commodity. It was something you threw yourself fully into; take no prisoners.
So you are not a fan of the current: art-commodity-ironic-art-celebrity tenor of the present art world?
It’s amusing in a dry Dick Cavett who-cares kind of way. But I don’t get: why are people smug about it? This all must go back to high school issues for some people - am I being cool, cool enough, am I ok now?
Do you think Duchamp’s influence has led to the current ethos of the art world? That is, a more cynical, detached, cool and ironic approach toward art ? Toward the way artists address their audience now?
Yes, he was certainly seminal.
I think with Duchamp there began a seismic disenchantment of the artist with the artworld. I feel Duchamp was more a sociological artist - commenting and reacting ironically to collectors, curators, galleries - than an artist with an interest in the expressive nature of art. Warhol, his aesthetic offspring, was really a final campy cherry on the fudge cake of Duchamp’s achievements.
Duchamp once said something I really like: "I don’t trust art, I trust artists." He was on to the art establishment and played it like Heifitz played a Stradivarius.
You don’t sound as though you feel Duchamp had a healthy influence on art.
Well, I think it was reactive. I respond to art that is expressive. Duchamp was very bright and canny and funny and tellingly, seemed to be able to ingratiate himself with the very wealthy. But to his credit Duchamp managed to keep himself aloof from the worst outcomes in following that route; I don’t think he became a total sellout. He pointed many collectors toward deserving artists - works that ended up in major museums. But Duchamp’s work is irony squared.
Irony is getting a little frayed around the edges, I feel. It’s like trying to be cool in high school, as I said earlier. Detachment is really a strategy of self protection – there is fear in such a stance.
Even such skillful literary advocates of ironical detachment as David Foster Wallace, with his meta-fictions, is beginning to understand the need for a luminous, passionate connectedness in art. Directness might extend enormous liberties. You have to grow up aesthetically too.
But, that said, for a mature 21st century adult, swimming in the mire of the everyday, how can you completely avoid irony? Irony is part of the modern voice, just not it's whole or predominant expression; ironic distance in the arts is beginning to look more like schoolyard cynicism than detached knowingness.
Your work seems so different from series to series? Do you ever feel the need to stay with an image longer?
Nearly two years on a series isn’t a short time. That’s probably the length of time it takes to complete a novel.
The model of creativity is one of change. I don’t understand artists who base their career on one image. Growth should show, not through minor fluctuations in the surface, but through substantial shifts. Having said this I feel my work is very unified - not superficially, but fundamentally. I love the energetic, the ambiguous, the painterly and layered. So my work reflects those and I’m sure other ongoing interests. I feel there is a luminosity and meditativeness that runs through all the series.
And of course there is the recurrence of certain themes in my work. This makes me feel I am on the right track - for my sensibilities anyway. I’ll work on leaf/organic forms – as in the "Leav-z" series – and then return to the same content – botanical, organic forms – with a whole new take, as in the "Variations on the Book of Job" series, done years later.
Why does that make you feel you are on the "right track"?
I feel if I’m magnetically drawn and re-drawn to a subject matter it has some inner meaning for me – that I am working from a root interest. I don’t believe in examining that process too carefully. Nabokov asked about a novel in progress said: "you don’t do exploratory surgery on fetuses."
While I am quoting I’ll also mention the fine novelist Martin Amis who said that he felt his work was best when it came from the "back of the mind, not the front." That is, you need to take things that arise from a depth, without calculation, and drag this inchoate material through consciousness to get something really cooking. He didn’t say it in those words, but that was his sense and I agree emphatically.
You haven’t shown in the last year or two.
The commodity-art, art-celebrity thing we just talked about got off-putting. A weariness with the me-too attitude of many gatekeepers. A seeming inability of many, if not all, of the audience to look, even to feel. It’s as though people are fiercely numb. There is a need for safety and consensus that is often disheartening. I sell privately right now but I’ll show again when the time and venue seems right.
Why create paintings today? What does the audience make of it? What about installations, performance art, video?
I can appreciate installations but they seldom move me. There are some very clever artists out there; but I feel detached and unmoved invariably. Saying "I get it" or "that’s interesting" isn’t compelling for me. Simple illustrations of politically correct ideas, playing with materials for their own sake, work with no nuance and all attitude, don’t interest me. Maybe the true master of the new form hasn’t yet come along or I haven’t seen their work. I don’t know. I love the still image - especially in this frenetic and often shallow society. Still images feel personal and human to me. One person speaking to another, at a deep level, quietly, over time.
Is the subject matter itself of importance? Do you respond to the current efforts at sociological engagement?
It’s troublesome when artists assume they can solicit favor with politically correct work. It’s not that the ideas are wrong or bad; it is just that they are so obvious. It’s even more troublesome when such cynicism is rewarded, which seems to happen far too often.
Do you feel people have the patience for meditative images?
Unlike the popular culture, art needs you to bring something to the party. Popular media wants you to be passive. It beats you into submission with flaring action and sound. If galleries and curators are doing their job they are helping the public to understand that other side of consciousness that doesn’t rely on high display.
This requires insight, a quality always in short supply. Somehow the value of insight needs to be encouraged. It’s not a received notion in our society that insight has any value.
Personally, I think of a painting as a space, a map of consciousness. I feel the power of art is in it’s suggestiveness. I feel there are such large unexplored areas - images that people are afraid to think about. The whole area of psychology, of reacting viscerally to images - not ideologically - but to images themselves as suggestive psychological documents.
How do you feel about the current state of art education?
I’ve been out of the academic mines for some time now. In general, universities, which now seem to produce almost all our artists, are not a good source for original creative thinking. In universities you learn, if you work at it, a critical and verbal approach to the world that can be very interesting but can also become incestuous, losing a human interest and even a human voice.
There are a number of incredible art school lawyers about with an impressive rhetorical skill. It’s the work that is produced through this process though that has me wondering...
Academia has influenced the bureaucratic structure of the artworld - turning it into a political and consensus building establishment. A parallel universe to the university. There are stirrings of the 19th Century Salon in many of the frenzies surrounding current art news. This has produced an anomaly in a segment of the audience: they "approve". They "like the idea"; they "see how it fits in with art historical traditions"; they feel it expresses a superior moral caste. It’s really all very puritanical when you think about it. Embarrassing.
How did you feel about the "Sensation" exhibit?
A paradigm. The work, designed to gain attention, did. A collector, using a museum to inflate the price of his soon to be auctioned collection, managed to achieve his purpose. The work, which I’ve only seen in reproduction, seemed perfect for the purpose - of the collector and the museum. I don’t know if it served any purpose in the realm of the spirit.
Why a paradigm?
I say it is a paradigm because the art establishment now seems to fear being marginalized by the monster popular culture and this show expresses that fear.
The route some curators and museum folk have chosen is to try to compete with the popular culture. You really can’t compete. The popular culture will always outvulgarize you. That’s what the popular culture is for. A buzzy diversion. But "Sensation" felt to me like a reactive, fear-driven show. You can’t gauge the success of a gallery or museum show by the number of people who attend or the amount of press it receives. Art insinuates itself in some mysterious way into our thinking. Work that does that is successful. It leaves an image behind, an embedded path in the flaring neurons, a shadow of something or other on the cave wall. The gauge of success shouldn’t be vulgar body counts or the black ink from an accounting firm - attendance figures are for impresarios.
Ofili’s "Virgin Mary" painting seemed to get the most attention. Did you think it was "best of show"?
Chris Rock, the great young comedian, said: "It (the controversy) isn’t really about the painting. The painting doesn’t even look like the Virgin Mary. It’s all about the title." Well said. A conceptual controversy, with no referent.
Ofili seems to have a decorative graphic talent but I hope he doesn’t head back toward that dead zone that Barbara Rose, the art critic, called "the interesting-object approach."
Do you read the critics?
I feel the best critics are poets. There is a long tradition there and a community of feeling. Certainly the best interpreters of the ambiguities of images are poets and highly skilled writers. Insight is what you’re looking for. You’d fall flat on your face if you ever heard a true insight from many in the art establishment.
You tend to read critics as filters for things you don’t have the time for or have little background in. Except in the rare case of a critic with great insight. I can perform those functions for myself in the realm of art. I like reading art history. John Rewald was a terrific art historian. Very sound in a satisfying way. The New York Review of Books has interesting meandering essays on art - James Fenton is often rewarding. Walter Benjamin had an aphoristic gift. Francis Haskell and John Richardson are useful.
Do you feel skill has any place in art? So much art now seems conceptually based, whether or not there is an artifact produced. Do you feel skill is irrelevant?
No more than it is irrelevant to a writer or musician.
Why isn’t your work political or sociological?
It is. It’s just not obviously so.
Let’s go through the individual series. Could you say a little about them?
Variations on the Book of Job-
This is the most recent of my series. I worked on it while I was rereading the Book of Job. I’m not a big reader of the Bible, but the Book of Job drew me in. When I was in High School I wrote a poem inspired by this book and received a huge amount of approval for it. The head of the English Department walked it over to the student magazine insisting they publish it. He said that it would cause a sensation. They lost it. I had no copy. The Book of Job itself; the warm feeling of encouragement; the aborted publication; all stayed with me.
The images themselves - a luminous ground with the shadowy leaf-like, vine-line forms; they move me inexplicably. There is something of the tragic dance in the series. I wanted to grapple with feelings I had while reading through the Book of Job. No effort to illustrate; illuminate would be better. I made an effort to be inventive and surprising in the natural forms. They are both symbol and substance.
Insectiana-
I was reading something about E.O. Wilson, the biologist, and it got me thinking. I got some guidebooks and used the form of insects to explore some sort of magical thing, I can’t really put it in words. There is such an ancient tradition here. Insects have always been peripheral, decorative elements in art; I wanted to give them center stage.
Inside the Inside-
This was such a tough series. I almost gave up. I came out of a year and a half of work on it with eleven paintings for the whole series. It fascinated me, the coming together of separate quadrants of a canvas - you tend to compare and contrast in such images. There is always the question: do you want the image to add up or to pull apart? Synthesis or antithesis.
Leav-z-
This series has a tragic feeling to me. I felt melancholy when doing it. The deep sensuality of the paint saved me. It’s closely related of course to the "Variations on the Book of Job" which I just finished recently. That’s what happens, I keep returning to themes, looking at them differently, for different expressive possibilities. None of this happens consciously. In a time that seems to so value a calculated effect, I find I have to be magnetically drawn to a subject.
Rods-
It feels as though I did this series a hundred years ago. The color in a few of them is a bit more aggressive than I’d do now. I wanted a very forthright feeling. A feeling of forms that don’t end with the end of the canvas. It was amazing seeing them all hanging in a relatively small space at a show. They are unusual, unstretched, hanging flat against the wall, grommets on the corners.
Water's Edge-
This series, with its swirls, came out of my playing with French Curves, the draftsman’s aids. I bet Stella came to these shapes the same way. My approach is very different though. I’m not interested in the graphic here but in the possibility of form. These swinging shapes all suggest organic form. Color was very important in this series. Undersea creatures.
Waves-
Waves is closely tied to "Water's Edge" if not in the time it was created, in the spirit behind it.
There are so few pieces in this series I almost didn’t include them. But I liked them a lot and they related to "Water’s Edge" so I went ahead and put them in.
What importance do you attach to the size of the work? Many of the series are not scaled to current expectations as to size – a predisposition to six-foot-plus or even mural-size paintings.
I’ve never felt the size of a painting expressed the ambition of the painter. I respond to images that are on a human scale. Some work requires a large scale of course, but too often you’re at a loss as to why the work is scaled so large if not for marketing reasons.
Something to meditate upon rather than a piece that offers itself to a corporate lobby is what rivets me. There is an intimacy I am after...
Have you done digital work?
Yes, quite a bit, since about 1994. I have a group of digital images that would be great as Iris prints if I could find someone to fund the printing.
You seem to write about art subjects periodically.
Yes, I wrote a piece for msnbc.com a year or so ago. I wanted to reach a wide audience, had some things I really wanted to say, and the editor was very nice. There will also be a piece coming out soon in the venerable MIT journal of art and technology "Leonardo".
Where do you think things are going? How are you going to change anything?
Art doesn’t change things. It’s an expressive, human, interior thing. An artist best expresses his or her criticism by the work they do. It is something I honor in any creative person - the raw courage just to put it out there. It is a lot easier standing on the sidelines and sniping than creating something new and presenting it for all to see. I feel art created is a gift given. You do it and say, "here, hope you like it."
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