Richard Phillips

Interview

Yilmaz Dziewior: You take your images from fashion, high-life, and pornography magazines as well as the Internet and art (-history) books and magazines. How do you start? Do you begin with a certain topic, or do you find a special image first and develop the subject from there?

Richard Phillips: There has never been one way in which I begin a body of work. It started out by finding magazines on the street, and has gone through many changes since then. With the first body of work it did begin with one image, ”Mask” (1995), and developed from there, based on the recognition of the abyss-like emptiness behind the images I found from the sixties and seventies, and how they seemed to mirror the mood of the mid-nineties in both music, fashion, and general cultural attitude. In any case, there is an editing process that is gone through in stages. Topics may develop from recognition of divergent interests that have sublimated connections. The ”Portrait of God” (1998) was based on a memory of working in the basement of ”Interview” magazine in the eighties and being surrounded by copies of the Rob Lowe issue. This led to thinking about the scandal involving sex with a minor during the Dukakis campaign. From there ”Jacko” (1998) was a natural progression. In the decade since the ”Banality” show, the fortunes of both Jackson and Jeff Koons had taken similar paths to Mr. Lowe’s, and the once-touted, banal, commercial abstractions through the two media of illustration and sculpture had gained rich new associations by the failure of these individuals to square their public personas with their complex personal lives. On the other hand, images can be found by others, and through good timing may fit into a group of works in progress, as in the case of the ”Origin of the Milky Way” painting and Valentino. With the ”Origin…” a friend was visiting the National Gallery in London and sent me a postcard of Tintoretto’s painting of the same title. Months later, I was disgracefully trolling for painting ideas when I came across the image in an 8th Avenue porn shop. It was then that I knew I had found a way to tackle one of the great themes in art history about creation, through the physical evidence of surprise and betrayal. With ”Valentino” (2000) I received the image as a birthday card from my friend Jenny Bornstein, who thought of me when looking at an old ”Interview” magazine, having knowlege of my Rob Lowe painting. The resulting painting conceptually completed a group of female portraits to be exhibited at Max Hetzler Gallery later that year. Valentino’s presence as the surgically-altered, gay creator of women’s outward appearance amongst the collection of women’s portraits inspired by early phone-sex ads, established a discordant relationship that broke any comfortable reading of the show. With every group of work I try to upset previously established methods of image-sourcing in order to allow for the possibility for what is unknown to me to occur.

Y.D. The first exhibition of yours I saw was at Johnen & Schöttle in Cologne, where you exhibited as far as I recall just four large paintings. There was your depiction of the clay bust of George Harrison (”My Sweet Lord”), and a very puzzling image of a young woman wearing a scout hat, large red sunglasses, and a green shirt unbuttoned to show her breasts (”Scout”). The image is not only disturbing because of the girl’s age, which could be anything between twelve and her early twenties, but because of how it operates with the power of the gaze. It as if the woman had control of the situation, rather than being a sex-object. Then there was the painting with the strange title ”LVR LOVR UOIN”, which looks very much like a seventies’ graphics poster in praise of free love. It seemed to be a comment on the painting on the opposite wall, ”The General”, which showed two guys, a blonde man with an arm round the shoulder of a dark-haired beau. The dark-haired man is holding a little dog, which also appears as a logo on the shirts of the two men. It’s not clear whether they are a gay couple with a dog for a baby, or if they are just friends from the same office. To my knowledge the image was an eighties’ Valentino ad. Bearing in mind that George Harrison was well known not only for his drug abuse, but also because of a big scandal concerning his having sex with teenage girls, the whole show seemed to be very much about the idea of sexual liberation. How were the four paintings related?

R.P. Upon receiving the images of these four paintings Jörg Johnen asked me about the relation between them. My 1999 answer was as follows:

Dear Jörg,
In reference to my paintings’ sources, they are all inspired by images found in Men’s magazines from the sixties, seventies, and early eighties. The four paintings are related in their depictions of love, morality, and sexuality. The painting titled ”My Sweet Lord” was inspired by an image in Playboy Magazine’s ”Pop Jazz Awards” 1973. The title refers to the hugely successful George Harrison solo single of the same name. Depicted as a pinch-pot clay sculpture, he takes the form of a spiritual and moral authority. His Old Testament severity or hippie Christ appearance gives him the attitude of standing in judgement, all the while promoting (as in the case of Harrison himself) drug abuse and sex with minors. This contradiction of messages, coupled with the Gothic carving style of the sculpture as award from a porno magazine, presents a hypocrisy of personal conduct that is the hallmark of late sixties and now nineties public, white, male, figures of power. The ”Lvel…” painting (the title of which is what is seen on the painting where the word ”love” is implied yet never spelled out) was inspired by an illustration of a late sixties’-early seventies’ twiggy-style interpretation of twenties’ flapper chic. The illustration was obviously inspired by a photograph, yet having no photo-realistic treatment serves as an ideologically and formally two-dimensional counterpoint to the physical, sculptural, three-dimensional representation of ”My Sweet Lord”. The purely surface or superficial nature of the painting locks the subject firmly within its factual, abstract representation. The promotion of dimensionless love prohibits commerce—sexual or otherwise—with the ”separated by life” formal opposite of ”My Sweet Lord”. The painting titled ”The General” stands in opposition to the previously mentioned painting’s inability to relate on spiritual or formal terms. Inspired by an advertisement for the designer Valentino’s ”Oliver” line of clothing in 1983, the painting explores the subject of speculation as to the nature of the relationship between the men themselves and their dog. They may be gay lovers, or office pals, or both. The dog may be their surrogate child. The fact that they are white, happy, well-dressed, with matching shirts and watches, provides clues from which this deciphering may take place. ”The General” painting’s crisp realism and subjectivity of a possible gay, stable, loving, positive familial relationship stands in direct contrast as well to the implication of the severe, unbending, religious law safeguarded by the Jesus/Moses of ”My Sweet Lord” and flaunted by the ”Lvel…”. The painting titled ”Scout” was inspired by a hard-core pornographic photo where the model was cross-dressed in a Boy Scouts of America uniform to address young men’s sexual fantasies. The objective to show sexually deviant behaviour of what looks to be a minor (under eighteen and relating to Harrison’s sexual transgressions) proposes a different image of love apart from the Madonna/Mary coke-whore icon of ”Lvel…” and the two young men of ”The General”. ”Scout”’s projection of male fantasy by men for men removes the sense of participation in a relationship with both the physical image of the girl, isolated in a totally black space, and with the vague reflection of her own masturbation in the circa-1973 sunglasses.
Best regards,
Richard

Y.D. Your New York exhibition revolved around the painting ”The President of the United States of America”, which showed Bush shortly after hearing the results of the election that made him President. The image is like a strange caricature. ”The Bourgeoisie” depicts naked female twins—in the context of the exhibition one might see them as Bush’s daughters. ”Old Granddad”, the trademark bust of the bourbon label, functions as a comment on Bush’s former alcohol problems. ”Liberation Monument” and ”Negation of the Universe” can both be seen as expressions of sexual liberation. What about the paintings ”Selena” and ”Artist”? How are they to be interpreted in this context?

R.P. The key to interpreting the ”Selena” and ”Artist” in my ”America” exhibition rests in the grossly overused word ”freedom” as it relates to personal sovereignty and subjugation. ”Selena” was inspired by a close-up image from a pornographic layout, where her lips were the erotic focus. Taken from that context her portrait was meant to function as a total sensual and political refusal to integrate Anglo-colonial representations that dominate the show. Her relationship to the Bush painting stood in for one percent of the population that did and still does not believe that he is the President. ”Selena”’s profile purposely looks away, while her blaxploitation name-label commercially redirects and suppresses her protest. Her beauty was meant to enforce a sense of self-possession and power outside of, yet surrounded and coded by, a majority culture, art and otherwise. ”Artist”, the final painting in the ”America” exhibition, was segregated and isolated in her own room. The title of this painting redirects the location of the subjectivity out of the exhibition. Taken literally, the slightly drug-addled gaze of the artist is focused somewhere out in mid-space, where the subject lies (the viewer). The display of her breasts over her bra references attempts to use sexual commerce to attract more viewers, i.e. subjects. The newly liberated artists must rely on personal humiliation as so-called ”freedom of expression” to successfully integrate into the aesthetic/non-pornographic world of social relevance. In both paintings, the lack of specific, declarative meaning or relationships to one another function on the whole to produce images of a static struggle to assert freedom or sovereignty among millions of united Americans.

Y.D. After the terrorist attack on the WTC, reactions to this exhibition changed fundamentally. Some critics even described the portrait of Bush as heroic. Roberta Smith wrote in the New York Times: ”Ten days ago, the big grisaille image of president Bush’s face that was included in the show of Richard Phillips’s lurid new paintings at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery in Chelsea looked vapid and slightly sarcastic. But now, in the city that was the capital of the blue country on the post-election voting map, the painting was suddenly devoid of irony and more animated, perhaps because one looked at it harder, with a greater sense of familiarity. One could read dignity and monumentality into it, as if it were a mock-up for a carving on Mount Rushmore, and see the deep magenta panels flanking the face as an attempt to mix red and blue.” Some critics saw the painting of the George Segal sculpture as resembling rescue workers covered in ash. How do you view context-related interpretations of your work in general, and of your ”America” show in particular?

R.P. The very shift in meaning that writers recorded about my Bush painting, and the projection of people’s thoughts about those who emerged from the ashes that day onto the ”Liberation Monument” painting, describes a long-held objective of relinquishing the control of expected meaning in painting in order to set loose multiple metaphoric possibilities that do not have to agree with themselves. The paintings you mentioned in the ”America” show were specifically designed to function this way. Layered reference and formal painterly interpretations are set against one another to start this chain reaction. The plastic Day-Glo panels in the Bush painting sought to neutralize the presidential authority of the image by pressurizing the newsprint-grey image of Commander Chief in a DKNY fashion-billboard manner. Likewise the image of Segal’s ”Gay Liberation Monument” was removed from the public context and placed in a private iconic space of non-secular 22 carat gold. The attack of 11 September suggested a reading of heroism and commemoration for the painting. This was a collective psychological by-product of external public actions during this time. My paintings are deliberately vulnerable to externally applicable and prejudicial meanings, which may adhere to the painting in unpredictable ways.

Y.D. You invited the noise band ”Black Dice” to the opening of ”America” and they performed in front of your paintings. The sound level reached over 140 decibels and made a lot of people leave the space. You described their music as ”soundscape of our as-yet-unheard future”, and mentioned that ”they are the source of new sonic power”. What were your reasons for inviting them to play at this opening?

R.P. By the fall of 2001, the NY gallery scene had reached a level of sold-in, moneyed conservatism. There was a palpable sense of entropic somnolence with each newly-minted ”museum quality” gallery. My experience was that creative energy was not in the New Chelsea art world but in a growing noise-music scene in Brooklyn. While painting my exhibition for Friedrich Petzel Gallery (in the heart of New Chelsea) these punk and industrial-inspired emanations became the soundtrack for my painting. When Black Dice (the most powerful and radical of groups) agreed to collaborate on the opening night of ”America”, I invited Bjorn and Eric Copland, Hisham Bharoocha, and Aaron Warren to view the paintings in progress, and then asked them if they would compose a piece based on their experience of the paintings. They produced two pieces for the event, and at 7:30 PM on 8 September they detonated an explosion of sound that resonated throughout the streets of Chelsea. It was my intention to completely disrupt art viewing anywhere near my exhibition. I wanted to loudly bring voice to dissent, and liberate the exhibition from inane networking and glad-handing of art openings for the space of an hour. Set up in front of the painting of Bush next to ”The Bourgeoisie” and ”Negation of the Universe”, Black Dice created a space where the sonic enormity of their sound paralyzed an estimated two thousand visitors, effectively negating all forms of communication apart from the sound and images of raw communicability itself.

Y.D. You used gold leaf for the first time in ”Liberation Monument”. The new paintings for your London show, ”Birds of Britain”, incorporate aluminium leaf, which is similar to silver leaf. Such materials have a long tradition reaching back to the beginnings of painting. They were formerly used to emphasize the importance of the figures depicted, to highlight the dignity of kings, saints, or gods. What made you start using these materials? What do they mean to you?

R.P. All the way through the different phases of my painting the specificity of surface, and how it communicates, has been important to the reading of my work. With ”Liberation Monument” my initial impulse was to dislocate the sculpture from its public environment and focus on the temporal connection between the two male figures. Gold paint was my first thought, but after viewing a Tiepolo tondo at the Metropolitan Museum, where a plaster sculpture was depicted against a gold-leaf background, I decided to investigate the traditional use of 22 carat leaf. The effect it had on the painting was to infuse the imagery with an iconic quality. The sense of unlimited space and light, without respect to reality, emphasized to me the humane and compassionate relationship between the men beyond publicly sanctioned sexual politics and other commemorative ambitions of Segal’s sculpture. The gold freed the function of the image of the sculpture from literal interpretation, and made way for a visually amplified possibility of unpredictable meanings beyond pedestrian pop ambitions. Likewise the gold created a referent to a non-secular space within which the monument (whose meaning is categorically excluded from a majority of non-secular orders) is allowed to communicate a message of humane love. The reflective aluminium leafing of the background, eyes, and teeth in ”Birds of Britain” was intended to exploit the limitless, spacial light-effect and literally encourage the eye to pass in and through the portraits. The grisaille flesh is set up as a hollow mask further stripping the subjects of their physical and psychological identity, and leaving the portraits with a sense of disorientation and horror.

Y.D. The inspiration for your ”Birds of Britain” paintings was a book you came across when doing research for a painting of an owl. You did not intend to make your current London show site-specific, but in the end it was very much connected with its city of presentation.

R.P. Intentionality, like any other part of my work, is subject to detours, reversals, and change without warning. In the aftermath of 11 September, I got back to work by searching for an image of a great horned owl. My inspiration was a vague memory of a wartime Picasso painting of a bird that has no natural predators. In my ornithological search for this image that was to start my collection of images for an exhibition at White Cube in London, I came upon a book title, ”Birds of Britain”. Thinking I had scored a source for indigenous owls of Britain, I was surprised to discover ”birds” meant girls in sixties’ terminology, and this was a book of photography of London’s youth-quake generation. From this source, four images were particularly inspiring. They were all of women who, at the time, were undoubtedly at the height of popularity and fame, yet with time had faded into obscurity along with the photographer John d Green, who in the style of David Bailey had made a brief ascent to the apex of the scene. It seemed to me that these images, if lovingly painted on an abnormally large scale and in oil paint with gilded aluminium eyes, teeth, and backgrounds could unlock their collective failure and express a side of life that socially, politically, and poetically they were never intended to address. That is, a truly alienated state of being, a portrait of apparent meaninglessness, where the experiment of living is tested against a control of delusion. Thereby becoming, to use a phrase by Giorgio Agamben in his essay ”Means with no End”, portraits of ”humanity after the failure of peoples”.

Y.D. Almost all your paintings address the issue of representation in popular culture. In contrast to Pop Art, which claimed to stem not from aesthetic culture but from mass culture alone, your strategy could be described as second-order popular art, for it already embodies a critical, theoretical discourse.

R.P. Rather than opposing my work to Pop Art, I have seen it more as an extension of the consequences of it. I suppose that would classify it as a second-order experience. The combination of the traditional, European academic painting (techniques of which were rejected by Pop artists in favour of imitating industrial and commercial methods) with images that were often retrieved from magazines of the original Pop era sets up a collision of formal and critical strategies. This disables linear thought and meaning in favour of the possibility of shifting contradiction. If Pop Art sought to be the blank mirror of capitalist ”I want to be a machine” realism, then my work seeks to break that mirror and eradicate the control of these static agendas. There is, in fact, humanity behind this emptiness, and it is not the humanity that would be dictated to us through cynicism and irony. Representation in my painting is not only the means to unleash this potential, but it is an inseparable subject of it as well. Misreading, prejudices, hypocrisy, contradiction, duplicity, and fraud are as one with love, charity, hope, and temperance. It is not a detached, critical relationship that I wish to establish with my paintings, nor are they demonstrations of morally acceptable theory.

Y.D. How do the women, men, animals, and sculptures you paint relate to the images you produce of them?

R.P. In the late eighties and early nineties, appropriation in art often sought to critique society and culture by turning the images of power directly against their source, in an effort to expose the corrupt agendas of larger political entities. There was a decisive separation of the depicted subject from its form in the service of a directed message that, while devaluing the image, attempted to usher in superior ideals. At this stage painting was generally relegated to entertainment/media status, where representations of once expressive styles were seen as a conceptual social critique. The so-called painting emergency sought nothing other than the perpetuation of itself as a still-born medium trading on sympathies of initiated well-wishers. Painting as a medium was seen as an illustrative form, which sacrificed its physical and visual power to an idealistic end. Yet it is precisely the texture of these commingled relationships between times, efforts, irreconcilable differences, and hypocrisies which painting now has the power to meditate on and possess, unleashing new gestures from a position where these delusions can be seen as a control in our present social experiment, where power infused into the visual and physical reality of painting can reflect this, our alienated and fallible state of humanity.

Y.D. As a white, Anglo-Saxon, heterosexual male, how would you describe your relation to certain topics in your paintings—sexism, for example, or the use of stereotype images of female Afro-Americans, or sexual liberation for gays and women? My impression is that dealing with questions you are not yourself directly involved in enables you to preserve more distance intellectually, and so to transform them more easily into conceptual works.

R.P. As a white, Anglo-Saxon, heterosexual male my relationship to social concerns are commonly defined as, on one hand, privileged and, on the other, categorically out of touch. As an artist, I do not make claims to moral authority or turpitude. Yet I do live in and respond to a world where there is diversity of life experience other than my own. My distance to these realities is factual, and often beyond my control. My paintings do embrace stereotypes of lives that are not my own and present them, not as a directive on my opinion of these lives, but rather as a catalyst for larger reactions to them, as they relate to the internal significance of the images. There is no adjudicated proof to be established that would legitimize my relationship to these images. Apathy and irresponsibility are built into the commercialized crusade for righteousness. Unbelievably, there is a possibility of an art that, after the nineties, will not preach or illustrate, that will be literally destructive of the coherence and order that define the levelled-out stasis of modern, socially relativistic culture. The hope is to set up favourable conditions in relationship to these topics, whereby patterns of thought may be ignited through individual, direct, sensual experience of the living and the beauty in painting as Art.

First published in Dziewior, Yilmaz (Ed.). Richard Phillips, (Hamburg: Kunstverein Hamburg, 2002)

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