Interview May 2008
Pawnshop: In your practice, the aspect of responsibility (or of blame) is often muddled; there is no room for ego or individual pride because the work of the curator often can not be differentiated from the artist’s or the studio assistant’s or the janitor’s or the collector’s. Are you challenging the art world?
Justin Hansch: Jason (Starr) and I once attempted a selfless art object which entailed me getting Jason drunk to the point of oblivion. No memory, no nothing. He made some paintings and drawings, which upon finishing I wrapped up and anonymously sent to the office of Paul Schimmel. The idea was that Jason would not remember what he had painted; therefore he would be unable to take any credit for the great works he had made. A true altruist. Not a pat on the back. They were just paintings … I don’t think it worked.
PS: I can’t believe it didn’t work. Paul Schimmel will be contacting you or Jason in the future…
JH: Also I imagine DeKooing with alztimers, admiring paintings he made, wondering where they came from.
PS: There is avoidance of categorization, maybe even a complete rejection. It seems to be less about a formula / fundamentals and more about relationship between the artist and the art object.
JH: On the contrary, I do think there is something in there about the fundamental act of creating. In order to create you have to believe, in spite of the fact that the notion of perfect communication is deeply flawed and ultimately, would be boring anyways. People make things to express themselves. That’s cool. … and they believe othersmay get something out of it … the possibility of communication.
PS: Maybe it can express a sign of the times, a political point, etc. It’s pretty delusional to think that others get something out of it.
JH: The crazy thing is that every now and then, it actually does work. Or at least I believe it does. I see something and it changes everything and art is awesome. For an individual, this drawing in may only happen once or twice a year, perhaps less or more, but it is enough to keep a community going for a couple millennia.
PS: Do you use this idea of practice to create traditions or rituals for your art? You seem to look at the practice of art as an entity to be applied to every work so that the individual becomes a part of a whole rather than it standing alone (i.e. JMOCA, Sunday Painting, What Father Wants with Jason Starr).
JH: The objects themselves are often just half of the game, almost like props on a stage. On some level I want them to look like objects that would stand alone, only they don’t, they stand aside and beside the point.The great American poet James Krone once said that, “the physical results, although usually quite astonishing, function more as a catalog describing their system of making”.
PS: In Sunday Painting, each one required a fresh Sunday, a different world event, but they’re all holistically linked through your political, cultural and social perspectives. Wasn’t this body of work done every Sunday with a GROUP of fellow painters in your studio?
JH: Nope, I was the only one there. In fact that project was really quite solitary. In terms of the paintings themselves, I simply tried to do my best…. I mean good paintings, pretty pictures…. Most of the decisions I made were formal ones. I wonder what socio-political view you think comes across in those paintings?
PS: What (exactly) is a formal decision to you? Is technique the ‘formality’ in this case? I’m trying to clarify.
JH: I was trying to set up a situation for myself in which action, in this case painting, was easy. A system for production. When I first started the project, there where ideas involving me as an individual in relationship to these other people and events… that the paintings could work as a way to process the information, control it, personalize it. The qualifier was that I chose the images that I though would make the best paintings. After a while I really started taking a liberty with what the original image was and what the painting became in the end. Eventually the images became arbitrary and it just became about me making good paintings. Regarding formality … when I paint, the painting takes form.
PS: Your show at China Art Objects, “What Father Wants” was a shared vision both of your selves and your fathers. Perhaps this is what you meant when you said you like to create things for an extremely specific purpose. The statue of your father was an extremely specific sculpture made for a specific exhibition theme.
JH: Really? I felt like that show was pretty broad; everyone’s got a Dad.
PS: Broad? But the sculpture was specifically half your dad and half Jason’s dad. Infact, that’s why that sculpture’s face was the invite image, yes? And so it was a two-person exhibition. That seems to me very specific to the exhibition’s concept.
JH: For that show Jason and I took each of our fathers and mushed them into one being, a sculpture. I suppose the interest started with the idea of taking something personal and forcing it into the first stage of communal. Our father could then be everything familiar and unfamiliar: standards, taste, a stand up guy … manners, but a thing on wheels. He is an inspiration, a motif, a shaman, a facilitator of creation; he wheels and reveals the divine and mystic. Father is an apparatus for aping the painterly role of topicality. He is the solidarity of the painter, a vague and inevitable collaboration.
PS: You refuse to ignore the enjoyment that comes from creating. I think your interview with James Krone for “Sculptrue” really rang home with how you enjoy painting, specifically.
JH: Yep!
PS: The only thing I haven’t liked that you have done in the past is surfing paintings. It’s totally unfair of me, but I think that’s such an obvious thing to do because you used to be a pro surfer. But actually, I bet if you put some time into it, you could do really tremendous paintings of surfing. I think the one I’ve seen is too cartoon-ish and it doesn’t seem like you put the same panache into that one. But maybe that’s why some other person would want to buy it. So who’s to say?
JH: Surfing and art are the same; they’re both cool.