Interview with Sam Messer
In this age where much contemporary art delivers decorative, ready to please surface pleasures, Sam Messer continues to push ahead into undiscovered territory. The enchantment of his paintings comes from voluptuous imagery, density of textures, and the accumulation of tensions expressed with a firm hand reining instinct. Order is an afterthought. Despite the cacophony of images, the multiple layers of data and visual play, and the fiery explosions of color, the accumulated result is permanence. Expressing an alert and pained reaction to the world, the paintings are celebrations of expression. That is, though we're exposed to the flayed guts of an anxious soul, deliberately shown the gruesome sinews below the pretty flesh, the shout is hopeful and the responsibility accepted is heroic. Most important, the paintings are gorgeous in their horrific yet fantastical affrontery.He's not concerned with the illusions of representation, though each painting tells a story. He's more an abstract painter, portraying the patterns of reaction rather than the simply seen. His figures reside in the realm of their emotions. It is visceral feelings not phenomena Messer deals with. And to show us the life in that dimension, he uses the somewhat undefinable techniques of instinct, the way a poet describes from the air or a jazz musician improvising explains the beauty of the unexpected. He shows the energy emanating back and forth between figures and material. He shows the way subjects are involved and gives form to their unsubstantive functioning.
Where there's any visual depth, it's a staged depth as in "Good Fences Make Good Neighbors," which depicts two or so neighboring forms, half plant and half human, gagged and otherwise having an unpleasant time of it. Beyond the white fence that divides the midground, we can see the outline of neighboring dwellings. The story of what's being portrayed here may be decipherable. "Just people living in the suburbs," Messer says. But his concern, and the fun, is using the clues to build up a scenario to play with the compendium of interpretations. The political and social overtones are obvious and felt like a punch but without guilt or a force feeding of simple headline assault.
With a painting like The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, headlines are exactly what we get: the front pages of the Los Angeles and New York Times, a Hebrew, and an Arabic newspaper are depicted in each corner of the painting. "Wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good" is repeatedly written like a mantra across the entire surface which is pierced by the brutal shadow of a hanged man. The impact comes from the humane feelings he makes blatant and which, he attests, overrides the grievances of boundary fact.
Many of his new paintings use written language and numbers as another layer of textural filigree. As compositional design, this integration adds a further charge to the luster, assembling the formerly disassociated onto the same plane. Now we can see the inferred. The abstract thought, ethics, is combined into the visual recipe.
Messer's work is far from trends. It's uncompromising to any audience. The raw honesty is refreshing. He upholds the deepest truths, exploring the seen, looking with eyes wide open unafraid, determined to convey bare reality to a crowd getting soft and more used to easier, more familiar pleasantries.
The following interview took place in the artist's East Village apartment on November 1, 1989, a few days after his sixth solo show at the Ruth Siegel Gallery closed. He would be leaving the next day for the five-day drive across the country.
Greg Masters: Where have you gotten the strength to confront the horror in your paintings? I think about what your childhood was like and what fortified you to allow you to proceed into the unexplored.
Sam Messer: What I try to do is to just make them as real as possible. It has something to do with the way you're brought up but they're just about obvious day to day kind of things, situations, people I know, eating breakfast. I try to make them more about the feeling of the situation. The horror you talked about is the same horror as everyone has of trying to get up in the morning and just getting through the day.
GM: Most people don't confront that. They try to avoid it. You've made 10 years of your work about it. I think it takes an amazing amount of strength to deal with that all the time. Donald Kuspit said (with quotes of Whitehead), "Messer, like the best of the Expressionists, is in search of the "expressive sign" which is not simply interpretable but "creative," in that it elicits the intuition which interprets it." (Art in America, Summer 1983, p. 180) Where are you drawing your intuition from? What are you yearning for?
SM: Intuition is about knowing not thinking.
GM: I guess I'm trying to get to the magic.
SM: That reminds me of this brilliant research scientist friend of mine. He called me once to tell him how to have an adventure. John Walker once told me that there are two kinds of painters: painters that think with a brush in their hands and the ones that don't. I can sit back and try to figure out what it is I want to do, but executing that idea ends in the most contrived, boring result. It's like thinking you can know the answer before hearing the question.
GM: I talk about horror and terror in your work but I never feel that's its a despairing helplessness. Ultimately the paintings are hopeful. If you're kvetching, complaining, screaming it's as if you're a legislator trying to make a statement to initiate change.SM: I think of myself more as a boxer trying to win the fight. You get the shit beat out of you but in the end you want to win. For me, the paintings are hopeful. What goes on in the painting is not a despairing kind of thing.
GM: That's what's tricky because the images might be grisly or dark but they're hitting this psychological insight that's obviously successful.
SM: I look at them, to be perfectly honest, and I don't see them as being grisly or dark. I really don't. I'm not just saying that. I know everyone else does. It's just the way I look at things. Obviously it has to do with my own history.
GM: Want to talk about that at all?
SM: No. I don't think it matters. Everyone has their history. All I'm saying is that I like to think of my paintings as being as straight-forward as possible. I always wanted to be an abstract painter. That's where the real strength lies. I never liked representational painting. To this day, I really don't. I don't know any representational painter working today who I really admire. I wound up doing these paintings. I'm still not sure why I do them. But I'm beginning to think of them as real American paintings. Real suburban American paintings. Good Fences Make Good Neighbors is the most suburban painting I've ever seen. To me, that's just people living in the suburbs. I grew up on Long Island, lived in the city, now I live out in California and back here. That's what I know. That's the one thing I've learned from looking at other painters. Everyone thinks El Greco had eye problems or that he was this weird visionary but if anyone goes to Toledo it looks exactly like that painting that he did of the town. The skies that he painted are exactly what the sky looks like there. He had his reasons for painting the figures the way he did but I think he was just trying to make them reach toward heaven. It was the original Darwin theory. He was trying to be very accurate. I also think Giacometti was just trying to paint as accurately as he could. If you really give them a chance and just walk in and look at one from a distance they look like photographs. I don't think Giacometti was about doubt, all those little marks. He was building up this positive thing as opposed to knocking down a negative.
GM: Not everyone could walk in and see them that way. Same with your work.
SM: Obviously my paintings aren't concerned with being pleasant paintings. Someone said the breakfast painting was a ghoul settling down to eggs and the morning paper. To me the figure isn't ghoulish, the situation is. I don't think it's easy to live, is what I suppose they're basically about. But I think that's part of the joy of living. I think there is a joy in struggle. No one likes to suffer but there's joy and a power in the struggle of trying to do things.
GM: How many canvasses do you destroy?
SM: Most, or I just paint over and over these paintings. There are so many paintings over paintings. When I have a show and send the slides off, by the time the show comes around those paintings in the slides don't exist. I have a habit of doing something in one that I think is great so I run around and put it in all the other paintings. And of course it only worked in the first one. So then I spend the time taking it out of all the others. So how long does it take? It very rarely happens very quickly. They usually slowly evolve their own history through the working.
GM: For this latest show you've moved away from personal, internal terrors to the terrors of the world's events. You're much more socially engaged, showing a social responsibility. Is this the first time?
SM: Yeah, I think so. It has to do with a few things. One, maybe, is I'm just getting older so you get less self absorbed. And the other came to me after a trip to Africa. I felt like Africa was like another planet. The sad part was when I realized it is the planet. We've just fucked it up so much that nature now seems artificial. My work has always been autobiographical. Now all I really do is paint and read the newspapers. So it makes sense to me to paint them. It's how I know the world.
GM: That's why the headlines in your paintings don't say anything. You're not hit over the head with messages. They transcend particular events and situations. They're not topical.
SM: Exactly. It's not the particular event that's important—they're always changing — but rather the oppression of events.
GM: What's the difference between being here in New York and out in Los Angeles?
SM: My older paintings were more studio oriented. Now, I've moved out of that. I literally have gone outside. All these paintings were done outdoors. In a sense I think it's a metaphor for this work. Part of it is getting out of New York. Getting away from the New York art world. In the New York art world you tend to stay with what your known strengths are. Once I left I started new things. New York is my home. Los Angeles is like being on the moon. I know virtually no one out there. I know no other artists in LA. I feel like a stranger. As a stranger you're free to make a new identity and to reinvent yourself. I thrive on working in this isolation. It's like when I painted as a kid. You get back to your original reason for working, your reason for being. Just working for the sake of working.
GM: That's what your reason is.
SM: Yeah, I don't know what else to do. It's the only thing I like to do. It's the only thing I really know how to do. It's the only thing I've ever wanted to do.
GM: I see traces of a lot of artists in your work — Picasso, Beckmann, Bacon, Alfred Jensen with these new works with numbers. Reading the criticism about you, the writers have always felt inclined to point debts out. I never feel you're leaning on the past or that you need precedents. I feel more that you're borrowing some technique or method. How do you incorporate the past into your work?
SM: I try to use past artists the way Ali or Tyson might use some knowledge of a past boxer. In the past I would make homages to certain paintings, particularly Picassos and Goyas. People always compare me to Bacon which is interesting because I never look at Bacon. I never looked at Alfred Jensen before. But since I've done this new work I've been looking at him a lot. Now it seems my work leads me to certain artists I had never really thought about.I think my work is totally based on one of Goya's late black paintings of two people sharing soup. One person is feeding the other a spoonful of soup. It's really about that moment just before the soup is taken. The painting really doesn't look like anything but it has this incredible clarity.
The one thing I've learned is that great paintings are usually about basic stupid things. Occassionally you get these grand scheme works, like Guernica, or Goya's The Third of May, but you can't expect that. Paintings really aren't about anything. Which allows them to become about everything.
If you're looking for influences on my work, go look at James Hampton's Throne for the Third Millennium of Heaven's General Assembly, that's at the Smithsonian.
GM: It has been a funny decade as far as making product and the market booming.
SM: First of all, I think it's the greatest thing in the world that collecting art has become a "good idea." Only non-artists think the poor-starving-genius-artist is romantic.
I find there are two kinds of artists. The ones with a pop-star mentality who play to the market and the ones who work for the long haul. The artists that mean anything have to create their own market by getting people to see things as they do. The problem is everyone tries to fit people into groups so they can market them. Then you get people like me who are just plodding along and people don't know what to do with us.
GM: I find it refreshing.
SM: So do I.
GM: Obviously there's a public that does too. You've had six solo shows in New York and a bunch of shows in Boston. You've hit some nerve.
SM: It amazes me, it really does. I always expected my mother to be the only one who said they like my work.
GM: Do you keep notebooks?
SM: I draw all the time but I really don't use them when I paint. Occasionally I'll go look at some sketch. I draw the paintings as I'm working on them. All these prints are usually based on paintings that I'm working on. I have some ideas of paintings I want to do before hand but they'll probably, hopefully wind up being something totally different. Like I said, it's when the work takes over, and leads me somewhere, that I get a real power out of it and know it's done.
Right now, I'm painting portraits. My friend Jake Berthot told me I should be a portrait painter so now he's putting his body where his mouth is and sitting for me. I had a portrait in this last show [Yo Taplitz] and I did Tama Janowitz's portrait about eight years ago that she used on her book cover. Those are obviously very straightforward. With Tama's, I wanted to do an old salon painting which I thought was perfect for her.
GM: But there was also the portrait of your poet friend Denis Johnson which is much more interpretive.
SM: But it's a much more accurate portrayal if you know Denis than if I just had him sitting there. I've always liked to think of my works as poems in the way they describe moments. Denis's poetry was the first contemporary American poetry that ever meant anything to me. Before that, I mainly read Spanish poets. He turned my tracks around because his poems are about what I've always wanted my paintings to be about — these little situations, things that happen to people, kind of drifters. To me they're very American. His novels are the same way. So that painting of D.J. is as straight-forward as Tama's actually.
Someone told me this story about Picasso. Picasso was doing a figure painting and he didn't have a model to look at so he took his shoe and was staring at the shoe and painting the figure. That to me makes perfect sense. It's about being specific. I think people like Pollock and Hesse are so great because they were that specific. Abstract painting, when it has that solidity of reality, is as real as that shoe Picasso was looking at.
GM: Defining what that solidity is is difficult.
SM: That's what makes people forever interested in looking at artists. If my idea of what reality looks like was the same as everybody else's who would need it. When Monet's haystacks first came out, people couldn't see that they were haystacks. When we look at them they look like photorealistic paintings. My hope is that in fifty to a hundred years reproductions of my paintings will be hanging in some pizza place in Brooklyn.
GM: Do you have a sense of your being a visionary or ahead of your time?
SM: Of course, like any artist I have a sense of grandeur. I think that's one of the driving forces in anyone's work.
Painting: Queen of Africa, 1989, 84x108 inches, oil on linen; photo of Sam Messer by the author; drawing is from a letter from Sam Messer to the author, 1989