BEAUTY IN THE DETAILS MARILYN MINTER IN CONVERSATION WITH LINDA YABLONSKY

Transcription

1 BEAUTY IN THE DETAILS MARILYN MINTER IN CONVERSATION WITH LINDA YABLONSKY MARILYN MINTER is rarely alone in her studio, a capacious loft in a commercial building on the edge of Manhattan s Garment District. It is humming one bitter day in January 2014 when I arrive for lunch. Six assistants are at work on computers, applying the first of many layers of paint to new works, testing temporary tattoos on Minter s arm for a new video, or preparing for a visit from a group of collectors. This is why I can t get any work done here, Minter tells me. She is not lamenting her success, which was a long time coming. She is sixty- six and enjoying it. She paints at the country house she shares with Bill Miller, a retired stockbroker and her husband since He s the love of my life, she says. This is all very different from the late 1980s, when Minter was a pariah in the art world and working alone in her SoHo loft. That is where I first saw the striking photographs she took of her mother in 1969 and never exhibited in New York. In 1995, they anchored an evening of readings I organized for The Drawing Center. Nothing has been the same for Minter since. LY LY: You ve said that you grew up with an alcoholic, pill- popping mother. MM: She was a drug addict. Alcohol made her sick, but she still got drunk whenever she went out. She was always on drugs pills, mostly. LY: Did she have any influence on your wanting to be an artist? MM: I started making art practically as soon as I could walk. I remember drawing in Brownies baby Girl Scouts with two other girls. I could draw people better than they could and, whoa! That was the first time I could do something better than anybody else. LY: Well, you were only five. So there wasn t much room for comparison. MM: I know. But I was so much better! It stunned me. Then I started copying comic books. Remember Brenda Starr? LY: Girl reporter! MM: Yeah, right! She had a sparkle in her eye and her boyfriend had an eye patch. I learned how to draw glamour girls from copying Brenda Starr. My parents were pretty glamorous when they were together. They looked like movie stars. LY: You grew up where? MM: Shreveport, Louisiana, and then Miami Beach. I think the reason I m as sane as I am is because we had a nanny. I had someone else taking care of me. LY: Your parents split up MM: when I was eight. LY: What did your father do? MM: He was an alcoholic, a compulsive gambler, and a womanizer. One of the reasons we moved to Miami was so he could go to Havana and gamble. He was one of the promoters for the Cassius Clay Sonny Liston fight. LY: Really! Did your mother work? MM: No. She had an inheritance. She was a Southern belle. 35

2 Hated women. Didn t like men that much after my father. Hated feminism. I have two brothers and we all left as soon as we could. LY: You went straight to New York? MM: I was afraid to come straight to New York City. I went to the University of Florida and basically never went back to South Florida again. Going to art school was my way out. I was a pretty bad kid to have. I was out all night. I got put in jail at sixteen. LY: For what? MM: Changing people s driver s licenses. [Laughs.] I could draw! LY: You mean, so they could get into bars? MM: Yeah. This was before lamination. LY: So when you left school you went where? MM: Syracuse University, for a Master s. And then I came here. LY: Did you always think you would be in New York? MM: Yeah, my whole life. When I was in school, I fell in love with Warhol and even called the Factory to find out how to do silkscreens and they told me. LY: So you came here to be an artist. MM: I was always going to be an artist. I figured out what kind when I was an undergraduate. I was going to be a painter. Actually, I thought I was going to be a photographer. I had a dual major. Came here with my first husband. LY: You got married while you were in school? MM: Right out of school. He was George Harris, an art director for an alternative newspaper in Syracuse. We left Florida together. We sort of grew each other up. I came here in 1976, started having affairs, and we split up but I got the loft on Mercer Street. I still live there. I worked for the guys who did the plumbing and electricity. One of them taught me how to solder. From there, I worked for a sculptor, Kenneth Snelson, and from there, I started teaching high school. I cobbled together all these jobs. I was teaching art at night to retired people in Brooklyn. Because I could copy anything, I did gigs at the Met, and I d be on display copying stuff when they brought tours around. LY: So you were doing all these jobs and making art in your studio. MM: Photorealist paintings. LY: You painted from your own photographs? MM: Yes. My darkroom was my bathroom. This was I would show dealers my slides, and they d say, This is Photorealism, but it s really boring. I was painting black- andwhite photos on raw canvas. I gessoed it and left in all the marks of trying to paint. And it looked so good. LY: The few I ve seen look fantastic now because the photos themselves were kind of abstract. MM: Yeah. They were of wood and linoleum floors. LY: They re not what you usually see in Photorealist painting. MM: No, and they weren t then. People didn t like them. They were conceptually based, so they weren t shiny and they weren t glittery and they weren t billiard balls or Polaroids. I had a show of these paintings right out of grad school, at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse. That was a big deal. It s so interesting how they re being appreciated now, and really painful, because I destroyed a whole bunch of them. What was I thinking? They were pretty cool! LY: When did you start showing in New York? MM: I started with Gracie Mansion in collaboration with Christof Kohlhöfer. We did two shows of image sandwiches he would paint on top of me. This was 1984 and 86. We were both high as kites. LY: Were you ever afraid that you might become your mother? MM: Never. She died in Actually, I was always afraid I d become my father. LY: How did you get her to sit for the photos you took of her? 36

3 MM: Oh, my mother was happy to pose. She was a total narcissist. She saw herself as this beautiful woman. She was always gorgeous. She didn t see how run-down it all was. I showed them when I was in school, and the reaction was, Oh my God, that s your mother? And waves of shame came over me. LY: Did you ever think about having children? MM: Never. I broke up with someone because he wanted to get married and have kids. I love kids. I just don t want to be a mother. Never had that gene. I m not a girly girl. LY: What was the nature of your collaboration with Christof? Was it figurative painting? MM: Yeah. He would do projections, because he worked with Sigmar Polke and that s the kind of thing they did. And I would do the realistic part. He didn t know what I was going to do and I didn t know what he would do. So we traded these paintings back and forth, and we were both egomaniacal and painting on top of each other, so we fought like crazy. LY: How were the two shows received? MM: We had good reviews. But we fought so much and everybody knew it and said, Oh, they re going to break up. We were notorious. LY: You broke up after the second show, but you also changed your painting style. MM: I had to. There was this long period of time when I was making terrible things, because I was trying to be an Expressionist painter. I wanted to fit into the dialogue, but it looked phony. Because I was such a confident copier, I could fool people, but I could see that this was not my vision. So I worked my way back to what I could really do, which was reproduce imagery. Before I started the collaboration, I was making wall paintings and playing around with enamel paint. It was a way to cover something fast. I decided to try working the enamel with my fingers to soften the paint. Immediately, I got offered shows. I did one at White Columns and ten galleries made me offers. I ended up going with Max Protetch and had a burgeoning young career. That s when I met you, when I was doing Food Porn. LY: But the Food Porn show wasn t at Max Protetch. MM: No, it was at Simon Watson. They did a collaboration. LY: What was in the show at White Columns? MM: It s funny, these were my first paintings in enamel, but I don t think they were my best work. They were based on dot screens. The painting of Jayne Mansfield and Sophia Loren was the first I made after I broke up the collaboration and the first one I liked, so I didn t destroy it. Then I started experimenting with dripping, and the drip paintings ended up as Food Porn. I let the paintings drip and then hand- painted the dot screens. It s fake mechanization. Fake Expressionism. LY: What do you mean by dot paintings? MM: I took images from magazines and turned them into Veloxes, which were dot- screen transparencies. And I stuck them in the overhead projector at an angle and painted over the projection. These were the paintings at White Columns and then at Max Protetch. LY: Tell me about the porn paintings you showed at Protetch. They re quite explicit. And they border on Photorealism. MM: Yeah, with enamel, though. And I let it drip. They were what got me kicked out of the art world. Nobody bought them. I got excoriated in the press, because I was a pro- sex feminist, a traitor to feminism. This was 1989 to 1992, the height of political correctness. I had seen the Mike Kelley show at Metro Pictures, the stuffed animals. I thought it was brilliant. I thought that if a woman artist had done it, no one would give her the time of day. And I thought, What is the subject matter that women never do? Porn. But it had to be hardcore porn. I thought, You gotta do cum shots in the face. See what happens. Does it change the meaning? I believed that no one had politically correct fantasies. LY: I m surprised that people objected, because you were taking control of a territory dominated by men. MM: Duh! I ll give you the reviews! The gallery closed the show a week early. They were embarrassed. It was a nightmare. I had some defenders Larry Clark and Jack Pierson and Cady Noland. And you. You put me in that show at The Drawing Center. LY: But that wasn t until 1995, and it was only for one night. 37

4 MM: I know, but that changed everything. Because of that, Postmasters showed that whole body of work [the mother photographs] and people had to rethink, because if you come from dysfunction you can be taken seriously as an artist. Before that, I was a party girl from the 80s and then, all of a sudden I m successful. Then I do this hardcore porn and I m this party girl again, and supporting the patriarchy. This is how the world saw me until I showed the photos of my mother. It s such a cliché. LY: When was the Food Porn show? MM: I did a painting show at Protetch in 1990 and almost a year later I did the Food Porn show at Simon Watson, so I could make a television commercial and have something to sell. I always wanted to make a TV commercial. It s on YouTube now. LY: Tell me about that. MM: I had just seen the Bruce Nauman video Clown Torture, where he s jumping up and down in full clown costume going, No, no, no. I thought it was genius. I did some research and found out that it took only $1,800 to buy thirty seconds on David Letterman, and everyone was watching David Letterman back then. So I said, I ll do it. But it had to be a commercial for something. So, I made all these paintings so I could make the commercial. They were paintings of food being torn apart. LY: And painted in an Expressionist style. MM: Oh, yeah. I would make the underpainting and then I had my assistants come in, and we worked night and day to turn out a hundred of them. That s when I got into working with assistants. They d come in and I d make the underpainting, and then they d turn on the projector and paint in the dots. We d work in shifts, night and day. LY: I thought that show was great, personally. What was the general response? MM: It was pretty good. I sold a lot of them and this was during the Recession. I did Letterman, Arsenio Hall, and Nightline. I got press for doing that commercial! LY: And the Postmasters show of the photographs of your mother was when? MM: After the straight porn show, which was a disaster. I thought everyone thought like me. It was a big shock to find that I was in the minority. I had the lesbian and gay community behind me, but that support was small- time. Cindy [Sherman], who was my idol, was demonizing sex, and here I was, making pro- sex. We opened at the same time. The reviews compared my bed, being empty, and hers, with demons in it. [Laughs.] In one New York Times review, I was compared to Robert Ryman, because we both painted on metal! When it comes to sex, even very enlightened people can get paralyzed. LY: Sometimes you can tell instantly when something is important, but it can take twenty years or more to understand how it works in the context of everything else. Art from the 70s or 80s can look very powerful now. MM: Isn t it interesting? LY: Because we re not looking at it so emotionally, so we can now see the art for what it is. People may call your porn paintings boring again, because it s all over the Internet and so everyday that it s almost a cliché. MM: Exactly. LY: You re a pioneer, Marilyn. MM: That s a great way to look at it. LY: Okay, so you d done these three shows. One was a disaster, one woke people up to you. Then your painting style changed again. What was the development of that? MM: I started beating up the paintings, taking acid to the surface and a sander to the painting itself I left canvas a year before the porn paintings, and everything s been on aluminum since. Then I started taking my own photos instead of appropriating them from magazines. That s when everything jelled. LY: They anticipate what your painting became in the 90s and 2000s extreme close- ups of body parts. MM: Yeah. I didn t have any assistants then, and the paintings took so long that I couldn t fill up even a small gallery in time, so I started showing the photos, too. LY: Were you still with Protetch at that point? MM: No, I was with Xavier LaBoulbenne. I had three shows with him in the 90s, and I was still dead broke. Then, Johan Olander 38

5 [an assistant] came on board, and we started working together. I taught him how to paint like this. We re not really doing realism. We re painting sections of total abstraction. LY: Beads of sweat, flesh, pubic hair. MM: Yeah. Layers and layers and layers of paint. These guys are making the underpaintings now. I don t do that anymore. LY: How come? MM: I love painting. I d rather do that than anything, but I have so much going on these days that the only time I can do the underpainting is when I m in my studio upstate. When I work in the city, I usually just work on the final layers finishing the paintings. LY: Are all of these paintings based on photographs? MM: They re not based on single photographs. I take parts of upwards of thirty photographs and combine them into new images. We make them in Photoshop, and I use them as references to make the paintings. LY: Let s go back to the mid- 90s and your show at Xavier LaBoulbenne. MM: Three shows, small pieces. They sold for $5,000 each. I got all good reviews. I loved making those early paintings. I just wasn t that good yet. I was teaching myself how to paint with enamel. It was such time- consuming, labor- intensive work that I needed an assistant to be able to realize my vision. LY: When did Photoshop come into it? MM: As soon as Photoshop existed. Before that, I combined images manually. I d take a picture out of Allure and, instead of a neck being a neck, I d alter it, draw it really long like a swan s. LY: So when Photoshop came along MM: I was in heaven. LY: Distorting and layering the photographs, and painting from those images. So you have these three shows, your dealer does you wrong. Then what? MM: I couldn t get arrested for a while, then I got offers from galleries but it was like dating. Everyone who wanted me I didn t want, and everyone I wanted didn t want me. Because of my friend Jack Pierson, I got a show at Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris, and then Thaddaeus offered me another show. It was like getting a promotion after you thought you had been fired. I had a gallery in Sweden, Andréhn- Schiptjenko, which was always supportive of me and started bringing me to fairs and selling my paintings. And so did Thaddaeus Ropac. So I was in the vernacular internationally but not in America. Laurie Simmons and I were using the same lab, and she saw these new photos I was doing and told Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn [of Salon 94] to go see my work. At the same time, Fredericks & Freiser offered me a show of the photos. Then I started getting put in group shows. And then, out of the blue, I got offered a one- person show at SFMOMA. And then it snowballed. I got into the 2006 Whitney Biennial. They took four paintings, which is all I can make in a year. I was on the cover of the catalogue, in the ads, and on banners all over Madison Avenue. At the same time, I did a billboard project in Times Square with Creative Time. Regen Projects put it on Sunset Boulevard. LY: How does popular culture feed your creative process? MM: It s like food. I really believe in making art from the time I live in. I regurgitate it. I made the video Green Pink Caviar to put in movie theaters, but only one did, Sunshine Cinema on Houston Street. That was right around the time I had my first solo show with Salon 94, in LY: The imagery you were making in the late 90s to the 2000s the extreme close- ups and lurid colors borders on the grotesque. MM: The way I was thinking about it was that if you get in close enough, you get rid of narrative. I was going for the least amount of information that can still have lots of power. Multiple readings. Like when you pull your socks down and there are those lines in your legs. Things like that really interest me. Everyone knows about it, but no one s ever made an image of it. I notice these things. I notice graffiti. I notice what the ads look like underneath it. I notice that sweat makes people look sexier. I ve always been fascinated by details, so I m not telling people what to think, but I still have content. Multiple meanings, multiple reads. That s all I m interested in metaphor and paradox. LY: Do you still feel like a young artist? MM: Yeah, I ll never feel like I ve got it made. It ll never happen. And that s okay. I feel like the constant marginalization is a healthy thing. It keeps me really hungry. 39