This is one of the first of a series of “Iconscapes” that I continue to create today. In 1994, when we were living in Echo Park just after both being at UC Irvine, Andrew had just gotten into graduate school at the CUNY Graduate Center. On the road trip from CA to NYC, I was driving our Daihatsu loaded up with luggage, listening to the Beach Boys, and particularly Pet Sounds. I had previously had a solo show in Los Angeles, where I had seven different narratives, in seven different styles, to create an uber-narrative called “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell!” after Blake. I was creating, thinking in Post-Modern scenarios, about how style relates to content, and speaking in other formal languages for their baggage they carry to convey ideas, etc. But when I was creating this show, I was also reading the first of the John Richardson Picasso biographies, and I was inspired how simply if Picasso painted a still-life, if he wanted to paint a still-life. If he wanted to paint a portrait, he would paint a portrait. He vacillated from different stylistic languages that while relating to other art histories transcended them via Picasso’s idiosyncratic vision, with ease. Why was I art directing myself? Why, like in previous works for my last show, would I draw Rimbaud as the Comte de Lautremont’s character Maldoror, in the style of Rodin as signed by Verlaine? How could I simply draw and paint what I felt, “naturally”, culling form from my unconscious in addition to my conscious mind in such a manner that would also hopefully have relevant content?  When in Brian Wilson’s great song “You Still Believe in Me,” when he sings “I wanna cryyyy…”, and continues expanding the word in his emotional singing, the sound of the word also becomes the sound of a real woeful crying, and the signifier and signified become one. I’ve always wanted to do this in my painting and drawing, fuse emotion and form with content—I think the Great Masters achieve this; indeed, it is what makes them become great. When you look at a Rembrandt, the synesthetic emotions you experience are created by the form of the painting of the work, which together, along with the viewers conscious interpretation of the meaning of the allegory combine to create a moving, visceral and cerebral journey.

I began upon arriving in New York to create many automatic drawings and paintings, allowing myself to “let my hair down” and not think too consciously about what I was creating, or what style it was in. Picasso said something like (I’m paraphrasing here) if you draw a circle without an aid of a compass, its imperfection is your style” and “if you copy the old masters, how it’s not like the old masters is what is YOU about it”, and I believe this is true. There is something very tangible about the “signature” of an artist—if you know De Kooning, when you see a De Kooning scrawl on a napkin you know it’s a De Kooning.  When Buddhists think about the “I”, they think about whether the “I is being of the mind or the body—if you hit your hand with a hammer, and say “I can’t believe I did that, who is the “I” you are talking about? When someone kills your avatar when playing a videogame, you say “someone just killed me” but who is the “me” you are talking about? When making a picture, thinking your thoughts, hopefully how it’s not like the photo or scene you may be looking at is what is “you” about it. And when you paint abstraction from the mind, perhaps how it exceeds ideas of abstraction in art history, how perhaps it doesn’t relate to things you may consciously know, is what is “you” about this essentialized image that one may relate to in a close, emotional and experiential way.

In any event, I bought inexpensive linen (but good quality) prestretched canvases, and I tried not to be too precious. I had also been keeping sketchbooks, encouraging myself to be as active and free with them as possible, and this image emerged. We were living on the corner of Kent and Williamsburg in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the early 90’s, which had already become somewhat gentrified, but was still remote, with crack vials and prostitutes on the sidewalk (it later became a cool indy art gallery venue Secret Project Robot, where my NYU students held shows via my classes, along with the basement venue Monster Island—the building was subsequently demolished and now is a Whole Foods!). We felt isolated and literally cold, it was a difficult transition period, both in my life and work, and I think this image appeared more as “Police Robot Man” in my sketchbook than a word, and I wanted to keep that spirit alive when I created this image, in one stop probably, that became one of my favorite works of all time that I have created, as hopefully it conflates the word with the image and the feeling to make a small painting that has a big impact.

I gave it to Andrew for one of his birthdays, and it was also shown at the Knoedler Gallery (by the GOOD people there!) at one of their last project room shows before they closed—I was happy to be vindicated by the oldest gallery in New York, originally a gallery that was a satellite of the Paris gallery of Theo (and Vincent!) Van Gogh.  I of course am so glad that Stuart Comer also appreciated this work who curated me into the 2014 Whitney Biennial, and I placed it there near my Buddy (Robot Gorilla) painting to hopefully exclaim the sentiment that perhaps the might be feeling, seeing (in the painting next to it) King Kong at the base of the World Trade Center (an allegorical painting for the horrible events I witnessed), and a soul of a person that perhaps could be carried aloft, like one of the dead by the angel in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.

Inspiration

Marsden Hartley, Portrait of a German Officer, 1914, oil on canvas, 68.x x 41.4”, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

I have long been inspired by Marsden Hartley’s “abstractions”, some of the first of their kind in America, inspired by Modernism in Europe but also Native American art, that synthesized symbiology and language in coded images (to speak for his love of a German soldier, among other loaded paintings)