George Condo: The Way I Think | Louisiana Channel

I remember when I got my first set of oil paints, it was very messy and it involved a lot of turpentine and oil and paint spreading all around the house and you know my parents would be sort of try to keep it all in your bedroom, try not to get it all over the place and so drawing was a kind of thing where you could have a notebook, make a drawing in it, shut the notebook, put it in your desk drawer, nobody would see it, it's much more of a private kind of thing. Whereas painting requires sitting out, letting it dry, anyone can come by and see what you're doing. So I always love drawing for the privacy of it. It's a cleaner way of making art. Let me see, right, so this is how I started drawing, working on some theme of maybe like the, maybe this will be like the sleeping bus driver. I kind of draw like you're walking through the forest, you know, where you don't really know where you're going and you just start from some point and randomly travel through the paper until you get to a place where you finally reach your destination and I think that with drawing sometimes I'll just think, well I'm just going to start with a human head, that'll be my earth or a personage of some sort and then I'm just going to expand it into whatever it's going to take me to and I like to work quickly. I don't see why it takes so long to make drawings. I mean basically you're working like the way a performer plays a violin, let's just say, like there's going to be a slow movement, a Sarabande or something of that nature and then there's going to be a Presto Vivace, but you can't miss any of the notes in either one and so the tempo is very important when it comes to art and I think some art has like a very slow tempo and some art has a very upbeat tempo, but it's not that easy to figure out on an upbeat tempo looking piece if it was actually made very slowly or if it was made very quickly. Sometimes you'll look at a de Kooning painting of a woman and you might think that he just smashed the whole thing together and like, you know, right away, but on the other hand it may have taken him months of just very slight, you know, meticulous changes until it all just came together the way he wanted it. So you never know when you make a drawing or when you make a painting where it's going to take you. When I grew up in New Hampshire, a sort of very rural mountainous place and then my family moved to another very small sort of apple orchard, lots of cows, little town near Boston and we were going to St. Mary's Church and I came back and I made this drawing of a crucifixion. It was really the first drawing that my mother kept of my work and she said, you know, I can't believe you had such a morbid sensibility as a child. You never did stick figures, you never did a big sun and a little head, you know, the big heads and stick figure type things. It was always a very kind of serious approach to drawing. For me it was always about, I think even when I first began making drawings, a way of expressing my feelings and I had a kind of a profound feeling of this strange crucifixion with Christ on the cross with blood dripping down, but I interpreted it in a strange way, my own sort of way where there were all the thorns were sort of on his crown of thorns were sort of abstracted into a background sort of abstraction to a certain degree. But then as I developed, you know, I started drawing dinosaurs. I loved drawing dinosaurs when I was six or seven and my grandfather was a doctor so I would go to his practice, to his office and he would give me his letterhead and I'd sit there and draw dinosaurs for him and he was Italian, he barely spoke English to tell you the truth and I'd try to draw them as accurately as I could and then just to be sure that he didn't think that, you know, I was presuming that a dinosaur was bright red or bright green. I would write not authentic color next to it just so that it was clear that this was the way I believed they looked but this is not necessarily the color and I hadn't really ever thought about showing those works until we framed them and I said, you know, in some ways they're very concrete early statements that led into my concept about, let's just say, jump, you know, 40 years ahead or 30 years ahead to this idea of fake old masters and the sort of not authentic color leading to fake old masters was a very sort of bizarre, you know, realization later and then I started to get into fishing with my brother and I did a really accurate drawing of a sunfish for my mother which she saved and most of all the art I have was saved by my mom and I think it was a result of being rejected from sports that she thought to put me in a painting class saying, well, you love painting, you love art, why don't you do that? And so every Saturday I would go take painting classes at the like the YWCA, it wasn't even the YMCA, so it was a bit humiliating, you know, with my brother on the baseball team and me going there and being this sort of nerdy kid doing drawings of clipper ships and things of that nature and then I think by the time I got to be a teenager I started really taking it seriously and starting to expose myself to literature about art and one of the first books I read about art was Gertrude Stein's book on Picasso and that was a very seminal moment for me in terms of the belief that even he was very young when he started, you know, I discovered that, geez, Picasso was like six or seven years old when he was making these incredible works of art so I could maybe have a chance, I can do it, I like doing this stuff, you know, but I could see how he had this European training and how in America there was no European training back in the 60s, everything was about minimalism, everything was about pop art and so I think it was at that point that I realized that art was more than just representation, it was a kind of a trip into your mind and what you could see in there and how you could materialize it in the form of a visual experience. By the time I reached college I thought I've done hundreds and hundreds of drawings, I'm so immersed into it and simultaneously at that point I began studying classical music. Once I started to feel like, you know, I don't really know if I'm going to be an artist when I grow up or what I'm going to do but I know I love it and I know I can't do anything else but at the same time I'd love to understand more about music so I was playing classical music and learning a lot of Bach and a lot of Renaissance music so by the time college came around when I was 17 or 18 I decided that I didn't want to take painting classes, I didn't want to be criticized by teachers, I didn't want them to tell me like, you know, listen you need to start at the beginning and just to go back to that one thing about academic training that artists like Picasso, Matisse and Cezanne had and what they rebelled against, artists from my generation, our sort of first real, let's call it classical training, was to begin from abstraction and I began with Kandinsky and Mondrian and some of the really wild abstract paintings that were happening, either futurist, you know, sculptures, Boccioni and these people and then moved from abstraction into realism so it was a complete reverse process from the way things happened in the late sort of 19th century into the early 20th century and I think the mid-20th century was going from abstraction into realism and so I started thinking a lot about how to take realism to another level as opposed to, say, representation and musically, you know, I understood, so by the time I got to college and I was studying music theory and I understood exactly how music was composed that you could hear it and it sounded like it all made sense but when you really read it and studied it and realized how rigid of a sort of formal construction it really was, at that point I realized music was not free enough for me to be really, let's just say, any kind of exponential player in the world of music. It was something, one thing to be an interpreter and to play Bach and to play Renaissance music, another thing to actually compose music when you study Beethoven's string quartets you realize these things are practically like science, this is like physics and art was more natural to me. It's such a mad, crazy world these days that everybody I draw is kind of a lunatic contrast to the lunatic here. All these various components of music, art, and I would say philosophy all started to become a sort of like if you could imagine a brain to be sort of like a television where, you know, you can just switch channels instantly and to try to find a way to create an iconic image out of this sort of interrelationship of all these different thoughts, philosophies, languages, and even musical structures like the idea of variations in music and I thought well there are variations that you could start to work with in paintings and there are different time zones in art that could be equally interchangeable that it doesn't have to be from today. Today could be, you know, a hundred years from now and today could be like a million years ago. It doesn't really matter. What really matters is what's there on the canvas at one moment and so I started to think that, you know, taking anything that I was sort of subjected to or was involved with like from the position of a from memory, whatever came through my mind, whatever I remembered, it may have been a constellation of different kinds of paintings all at once. Like all of a sudden I'd think of Velazquez and I would think of the way he painted some fabric but then, you know, that fabric and the way he painted it could be applied to a completely different subject and then you could set it in a background that felt like a sky out of a Poussin painting and you could get this sort of sweetness of a Fragonard and the harshness of Picasso and you could interchange all of these languages simultaneously and the thing that was happening in the 80s was this, I think someone like Polka in the late 70s and everything, he started to lay out various images at the same time so that they were like overlays of images and Picabia did it in the beginning but I wanted to find a way that all these images would combine themselves into one thing that would bring the recognition of many different things to people who saw it so they might look at it and say oh this is really influenced by Goya and but yet Goya never would have painted that or this has this cubistic sort of qualities of Picasso but it's applied to psychology as opposed to the psychology of a figure or and I think the most consistent thing in my work is this idea of humanity, of finding a way to represent the human consciousness in the representation through a portrait and so that portrait could represent what's not only the exterior appearance of that person but what's going through their mind and what emotional states could be happening to them and within them and so you might see a train go by and two people chatting on the train and one laughing and then the next passenger is sitting there sort of crying and if you combine those two emotions in one single figure you've got that kind of cubistic look at things but it's not seeing one object from all different angles it's seeing one sort of or many different emotional states in a single object. In the works like of the double portraits they're called double head portraits you see a kind of a sometimes a very realistic figure sort of in profile next to a very sort of abstracted cubistic type figure or you'll see something like in a piece that we're showing called The Prisoner where he's got this really scary face and he's locked in a kind of a almost like a cage and the shadow of himself is in the foreground sort of staring at who he is today and his is a kind of an existential type of situation where he is it's either the shadow that's really him or it's the visual you know sort of representation of him that's really him it's one or the other and most of the drawings like the bankers that I'm going to show they have this kind of hystericized sort of triple personality somewhere between conniving greedy you know love of money and very sort of sneaky sort of happy at the same time so you really don't know where they're coming from you don't know if they're just being nice because they want your money or if they're actually you know a sort of an evil entity who's smiling you know while they're you know while they're screwing you you know so I mean that can happen and then to turn you know negatives into positives like whatever is to consider to be a low form of art or you know a negative to a certain degree and this sort of you know just the ordinary characters that make up our lives like whether it's the janitor or the bus driver or the school teacher or the uh or the principal or whether it's the uh the the mailman or or the truck driver and these are not the glamorous people that you see on the covers of Vogue magazine but they are what the world is composed of and to give them a chance you know to sort of give them a spot in the uh in the world is I think what I always admired about Rembrandt to a certain degree that he began with these really big commissions and then as he ended his life towards you know he limited his palette to a very sort of three or four different colors of browns and blacks and and everybody just has this real soulful they're not glamorous they're not beautiful people anymore especially not in self-portraits but you can see the world that they live through on their face and I think that's what sort of happens you know and in my work is that you want to sort of feel the soul and the humanity of that character even if he's just a fictional one at a certain moment you know I started to think to myself why would there be or why should there be this hierarchy between a drawing as a lesser form of art than a painting I mean there are connoisseurs of drawing who love only drawings and then there's those who only want paint like you'll walk in the Louvre and you'll see the major paintings of Géricault's Raft of the Medusa or this one or that one and David and all these guys then you could also look at their drawings in a small cabinet you know like uh and think wow their drawings were so good Van Dyck's drawings are amazing but mostly you'll only see his paintings so I thought you know I love drawing just as much as painting so why not just make your paintings from your drawings but literally have there be no defined sort of hierarchy between the two mediums and so quite often the paint will be like I'll match the colors with pastel so you really can't tell if it's pastel or if it's paint or if it's a line of a black line made with a paintbrush leading into a line drawn in charcoal and just start to make what I started to call drawing paintings that were equal in form and content to some degree and medium was basically about the medium being equal and allowed for a lot of freedom because when you're painting the human figure you know there's a lot of structural anatomical structural things that you need to consider in terms of the volumes and the tonalities but when you're drawing you can just sort of free hand out the human figure and then combine that with painting that has nothing to do with the human figure you get this figurative abstraction that comes out of it that's equal in form and in meaning that there's no real difference between figurative painting and abstract painting because it's all painting to begin with and it's sort of like hieroglyphics in a sense that you look at them and you know that there are those that can interpret those hieroglyphics and tell you exactly what the symbols all mean but I think 99.9% of the world will look at them as you know a sort of pictorial language and I think that's what it is you know it's a pictorial language that you put together in your mind what the meanings of those particular images really are I think it's the viewer who really decides what's going on in the artwork not the maker there'll be one called silver mass that's a drawing painting that was a big canvas that I just painted this sort of mass shape in silver and then I like the way it sat on the canvas it just held the canvas by itself and then I used charcoal black charcoal and white white charcoal to draw into it and they were two kind of contradictory forms as well like a lot of the a lot of what I like to do as an artist is very contradictory kind of languages and painting where most artists wouldn't do that because if they were going to do an abstract painting it would really be an abstract painting they would never have figures scrawled about on it or it was going to be a figurative painting it wouldn't be set in an abstract sort of expressionist or action painting like setting so you have these contradictions that add up to something and I suppose that is what is for me exciting in the sense that you don't have to follow any rules as a painter you don't have to if you're making an abstract painting it doesn't mean eventually it can't morph into a figurative one or the other way around like a figure becomes much more abstract than even just as simple you know as abstract as you can get there are great abstract painters there's no doubt I mean Ad Reinhart was a great abstract painter and but to take an Ad Reinhart-like background or a Joseph Albers-like background and start to draw the figure onto it and sort of it's sort of an irreverent way of just cracking through the formalities of what certain artists felt or maybe believed that they had to do. The cartoon is a very bizarre weapon against strangely enough against the sort of intellectual concept of what our you know sort of supposedly high art culture is all about for example when I did the Kanye West album cover of the Dark Twisted Fantasy I used a sort of a cartoon language in this painting of this interracial couple and that idea of an interracial couple on the cover of an album was something that had never been done you either see one or the other or you see these but you never see that and to use a sort of childlike way of expressing that blew so many fuses that they really had to ban it they couldn't put it out because it was too like it was too close to a language that kids were familiar with but the subject was too politically charged for for children to say understand so and then it also infuriates it infuriates the older generation to see like I guess I suppose they subjectify the idea of their child making something like that would be you know not something they could show in school to their teacher and so the cartoon is a strange weapon in that sense and whenever it's used for any kind of mock religious purposes it turns into a complete nightmare I mean you know it happened in France and it happened and it's one of those things that just you know is just utterly no you cannot do that if you're going to represent God he has to be represented in some very respectful way but if you represent it as a cartoon all of a sudden you're enemy number one to the world and it's an odd thing because kids grow up with cartoons everybody laughs at cartoons and these are and it's the idea that you're not supposed to laugh at certain things and so and on the other hand people are to a certain degree personifications of cartoons are personifications of people like a lot of the Looney Tunes characters and all these guys like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck and whatever they are in fact sort of realistic people and personifications of those realistic people and so I thought about it going the other way like what happens when the cartoons return back to who they were personified of and what does that person look like after he's you know he started out as a person became a cartoon lived that world and then came back to human and what has he morphed into does he look like he did before or is he now you know forever you know transformed by his cartoon self into what he is today so I like and I also always loved the use of cartoon language in like Ed Ruscha's early paintings and in Warhol's when he did Popeye and Superman and I thought it was a big pop statement to bring that language in but I think the interest is that it's a sort of an entry into a certain kind of serious component of the human psyche that will open up their mind to a serious way of looking at something and at the same time they might get a kick out of it sometimes I just care about the diagonal motion of a drawing I just care about where it goes on the on the paper what it is in the late 80s there was a moment when I was trying to come to terms with like you know I always thought what was incredible with these artists that had names for their art like cubism impressionism you know abstract expressionism this that the other thing and I remember Robert Rosenblum this famous art historian he said what do you call what you do and he said what is it neo-surrealism is what what do you call this stuff I said I don't know let me think about it and then I said I guess you could call it artificial realism and it would be you know allow for a painter to go back and paint somewhat realistically but to represent that which is artificial in our world so it would be more like a very accurate painting of something totally artificial and then that came down to the idea of the behavior of the sort of artificiality and in the human behavior and that was another thing that I started thinking about is the sort of artificial nature of certain I don't know what you want to call it personalities okay and just kind of finding all these different ties between the self the appearance of the self the essence of being things like reading things like Heidegger and reading Kant and understanding what they were talking about when Kant was trying and his book about beauty and talking about what is beauty you know and his definition was beauty is that which pleases without interest which is a very extraordinary kind of thought that which pleases without interest and so I thought yeah you know that which is real but is also a representation of what is artificial is kind of an abstract thought coming from there but now flash forward from 1987 or 88 when I wrote that to where we are today fake news everything is artificial realism so talking about politics you watch the news you don't know what they're talking about you know all you hear about is fake news and the phenomena of social media and that 90 or 30 percent of everything coming through social media is being propagated by you know trolls and bots and all this sort of crazy artificial intelligence and everything is about you know artificial realism now it's gone from an artistic concept to a like a daily chaotic political concept where we don't really know what realism is at this point because it seems to be so artificial and it's so it's so staged that and so scripted and the scripts are meant to divert or disinform and from whatever reality is actually happening and so you don't know well what's the reality we're being diverted from what are we being differentiated from you know who are we and what are we what you know it's like that Gauguin painting who are we where do we come from and where are we going it's kind of tough to say right now but it is pretty clear that the world has become a sort of a an artificially you know a realistic one where the reports coming in from one country or another or this country or that country or discussions with global leaders are filtered to us in such a way that we don't know what they really said we only get an idea of what they said and then there'll be various pundits that will be on television what did you think about the way you know Putin and Trump's how do you think that conversation went you're like who would know it wasn't recorded so all we're going to get are these strange shadows that are cast down upon us and sort of moving all the light out of the way and so one thing I can say is that art is one of the most sort of truthful experiences and truthful things that we have in our world today is that art is the truth and everything else is a lie I'm hoping to express you know and I know this is probably not true but that anybody could be an artist that anybody that has anything going through their mind and that can take that what goes through their mind and just somehow visually materialize that will be able to express the way that they think and that and at the same point I'm hoping to express you know the multiple variations of the way I approach humanity and the way I approach the portrait or abstraction which is to me an abstraction is to some degree what's in the mind and a portrait is what's of the body and given that I love making drawings that's one of the most sort of pure examples of how you can exhibit what you think you're good at and also what you think would be inspirational to others in terms of hey I could pick up a pencil you know and a piece of paper and just draw what's going through my head it doesn't have to be a doctrine of a certain you know art historical concept relevant to our time colors I hope the audience experience the way their minds work that they go in and they say I think like that but I would never express that on a piece of paper or I would never know how to or maybe I can but you know I haven't and that they are open to the idea that anything's possible and but also that they do understand this idea that these works of art are really the truth that there's nothing behind them that's not visible to them right away so I just hope they have a good experience and enjoy a sort of the traditional medium of drawing and see how it's still alive that art doesn't die and these practices of artists that have been going on since the cavemen are still happening today