This interview took place the glorious sunny afternoon of October 7, 2006, at the Spain Restaurant in Los Angeles, California, hours before the New York Mets swept the Los Angeles Dodgers to win the National League Division Series. The interview covers a wide range of questions: from Lawson’s artistic career, deanship at CalArts, and writing publications, to Lawson’s current thoughts on contemporary art, art pedagogy and the impact of market forces on artistic production.

Sergio Muñoz-Sarmiento (SMS): Your own work as an artist, having spanned different social, political and economic moments, how has it changed or evolved, or what problems have you noticed?

Tom Lawson (TL): So you want the whole story? [laughter] It’s a long answer.

SMS: Yes, that’s alright [laughter]

TL: I started being a professional artist in the mid to late 70s in New York, meaning I started showing work then. The art context in that place and point of time was quite specific; progressive art was conceptual and post-minimal. So for many young artists like me, recently arrived in town, the thing to consider was painting because it was the bad thing, and also to think about representation because it had been put to one side. I went to New York in my mid-20s, and ran into other artists coming from all over the U.S. and parts beyond, who were talking about similar things. For me I’ve always liked painting, but there I learned how over it was, despite the fact that you could see some of the best work ever produced by giants like Philip Guston and Jasper Johns in those years. Some of the other young artists I met were from a new place called CalArts, and they tended to be very sure of their ideas, but there were other equally interesting people from Madison, Buffalo, Nantucket and other exotic places I’d mostly never heard of. We hung out into the night, talked a lot. In time this talking lead to Susan Morgan and me starting REALLIFE Magazine, and the idea of this magazine was that it would be a place to hear the artist’s voice, artists talking about each other’s work, within a new media context framed by TV and movies. So we started this magazine and featured artists like Sherrie Levine, David Salle, Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince: newcomers to the city, not widely known at the time.

During this time in the 70s there wasn’t much of an art market; New York itself was a weirdly impoverished city, almost bankrupted. The Lower Manhattan area where artists were gathering, Soho and Tribeca and down below the World Trade Center, was an area that was deserted after the workday. The industries that built them had all gone, and the artists who lived there were the only ones that were there at night, so you very quickly knew your neighbors. It was a weird, small village feeling and atmosphere, very experimental — experimental living, experimental art, theater, and music, almost like an unstructured version of CalArts spread through the city. This was when I met some of the first generation of CalArts artists, people like James Welling, Matt Mullican, Jack Goldstein and David Salle, as well as Barbara Bloom, Susan Davis, and Ericka Beckman — there was a lot of interesting stuff going on.

I focused on painting and used imagery from the tabloid press, sensationalist images, as my source material, and framed them in a minimalist context. At the same time, and along with the magazine, I also started writing. I found that I had a facility for this. I think Flash Art was probably the first to publish longer pieces of mine, although I published in various other publications, big and small. In the very early 80s there was a big regime change at Artforum and I got into that, and that’s where Last Exit: Painting was published. That turn into the new decade signaled a big change, a moment when a number of curators and gallerists who had been paying attention to new directions in studio work began taking action, opening galleries, seeking a new generation of collectors. For me the significant one was Metro Pictures. Helene Winer had been working as director of Artist’s Space where she presided over a kind of salon where a lot of us met. But interesting though that situation was, it was a non-profit space where you could only show once; you know it wasn’t a career builder. So Helene got tired of that and decided she wanted to actually help people into the next phase of their careers, so she partnered up with an old friend, Janelle Reiring, who had been working at Leo Castelli as an assistant and together they started Metro Pictures. At roughly the same moment Mary Boone left her position at the Bykert Gallery and opened her own gallery around the corner, and Anina Nosei, first in partnership with a print dealer from LA called Larry Gagosian, then on her own, started another gallery focused on new work. All of a sudden there was this explosion of interest and a new market.

Soon there was this influx of Europeans; Italian and German painters and critics and collectors. An interesting thing happened; we began to make a living as artists. In the 70s we were all renovating lofts, knocking down walls, doing sheetrock, simple plumbing, you know, crap work. But in the 80s we were actually selling artworks, which is a very exciting experience. For a few years it seemed like you could do interesting work and get support for it and it was all part of a growing excitement. And we all did very well.

But as the Reagan period developed and extended it began to get weirdly cynical. The politics were turning nasty, and the idea of marketing art was becoming the driving idea in making art – Ashley Bickerton made a piece with a device in it that purported to monitor the work’s increasing value . Things were getting less comfortable, and by the late 80s I was getting really disillusioned with the whole thing because it was just a scene ruled by fashion more than anything. I remember a particularly sour moment — Martin Kippenberger had a show at MetroPictures at the time of the Wall Street crash and the cynicism of Kippenberger along with a pervasive anxiety about where the money would go just got to me, made me think, “You know, is this really the world you want to be in? [laughter]

This is the time I got interested in public art, because it seemed like a way of supporting my interest in representation differently, of getting money differently, circulating the work differently. The challenge of doing things in the public sphere, and developing some content that would connect with regular people. I did a number of big projects in New York, Madrid and various cities in the U.K., from 1987 to 1991, and I really liked them and thought them successful projections of my ideas. I did a lot of temporary murals, and I did them in situ. I wanted a chance to talk to people passing by, gathered around, asking, “What the hell is this?” I always found that people were generous and curious talking about what I was doing. I did a lot of work with images of public statuary and people would recognize that, “I know what that is, I used to play on that statue…I see what you’re doing…I remember that guy…” Or, “Hey, that’s Abe Lincoln,” and it was never Abe Lincoln, it was some New York politician from the 19th century who had worked in the Tweed machine, or a renown poet dear to the hearts of an immigrant group that had finally made enough to pay for the memorial. The work I was trying to do was to bring this submerged history back to attention, and it kind of worked, people were talking about it, after we got past the Abe Lincoln problem. [laughter]

For a few years that was pretty good, but ultimately the drawback of public art is actually politics, because at the local level you have to get through all these committees and arts commissions and departments of general services, bored employees, and traffic control. One time I had to answer a whole set of questions regarding my use of very bright colors. The concern was that they would be distracting to motorists. And this for a mural that was about 20 feet over street level [laughing], motorists wouldn’t even be able to see it.

SMS:

Because billboards aren’t distracting right?

TL: Exactly, [laughter] commercial billboards don’t even have to go through all this process [more laughter].

SMS:

That’s because it’s commercial.

TL:

Exactly. It was on a city building, a municipal building at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, so there was also this concern that motorists on the bridge would see it and veer into the river. [laughter] I thought that was pretty exciting, so I went out onto the bridge and sure enough, you could actually see it pretty well, which was great. Bu it was also pretty small and you know, it wasn’t distracting.

Anyway, it was during this time that I moved out here to take up the job at CalArts. I’d been a resident of New York and had an investment in its representation, and an older history stemming from Britain, and I was ok with that, because it made sense to me. But I couldn’t figure out a public space of Los Angeles that made sense to me. I just couldn’t get my mind around the problem in a way that satisfied me. So I stopped thinking about public art, and got more involved in the issues of educating young artists, and when you’re running a school it takes up a little bit of time.

SMS:

Just a little bit [laughter].

TL:

Yes, just a little bit. I began to pursue other things in the studio. I made paintings about fire, because one of the first things you notice when you move out here is the fire season, which is a shocker if you are not from these parts. Hillsides and buildings regularly burn down in October. So I did a whole bunch of paintings based on images of fire, and it turns out there was a particularly bad season of fire followed by a season of riot, and I just thought that that wasn’t the idea; that that wasn’t the right time to show them. I didn’t want to have them misunderstood as having anything to do with ‘the fire next time.’ That wasn’t what I had been thinking about.

SMS:

Now is that something you would have thought about in New York?

TL:

The fire?

SMS:

No, the politics.

TL:

Yeah, it was local weather conditions, local politics, local housing patterns; it was those kinds of thing I was thinking about. I was thinking about Goethe’s Faust. I wasn’t thinking about inner city politics.

Then, within the year there was a huge earthquake that rattled CalArts and we had to evacuate the building for six months for repair. My job went from being merely the dean to the entire project manager looking to find alternative locations, figuring out what we needed to continue, and how and where to provide that, and keep everyone’s spirits up. I really got into it because it returned me to the day to day excitements of doing public art. I was out on the road much of the time. I got a cell phone for the first time, a laptop with fax connector, so I could be in touch with Joann at the art office. She was in a trailer on the parking lot at CalArts, and I was driving everywhere in the Santa Clarita Valley creating the art school again and making sure that people were ok with it.

We found these amazing Lockheed buildings that had been test sites for stealth technologies — a huge hangar and wind tunnel, and all these experimental labs. They gave us the use of the main building and we cleared it all up, turned small offices into studios, and bigger offices into art galleries and classrooms. Some students left, but the ones who remained learned a lot about improvisation and experimentation, hands-on. There was a student there who had done some prior projects about public interactions and he made a bar that opened every afternoon at five [laughter]. It was an amazing six months.

In this period I got myself a new studio and began doing a new set of paintings that I still don’t know what to think about. They were diptych paintings with each panel about the size of a table-top (3’ x 5’). Up until this point I had kept a studio on campus, but after the earthquake I didn’t have access to that studio and couldn’t get my work out. So I got this idea about making art that would fit in the back of a station wagon. I needed to make something that I could pick up and get out.

But wanting still to make large paintings, I started making the diptych thing. They were juxtapositions of interiors and faces. The interior spaces were all — well, the whole thing was psychological. The pictures of interiors were of insane asylums, cramped little cells with wooden benches, narrow hallways and steep staircases, that kind of space. Across a slender divide of bright color these confined spaces sat next to large faces, mostly found in old movie stills and newspaper clippings, expressing some kind of emotion. They were faces wracked with extreme emotion; they could be shouting, screaming, laughing. They are strange paintings in flat acrylic color and I showed them in London, but nowhere else. They were not well received. The most response I got was: “I guess this is Los Angeles color.” I said, “Los Angeles color? Los Angeles color is bleached out non-color, what are you talking about?”

So mid-90s I’m enjoying the teaching, running the school and thinking about art, a kind of abstract thought that can feed writing, but not painting. Studio wise I’m having a bit of a hard time. You know, I had been so involved with the whole New York thing since arriving there as a 25 year old, that coming to a new city when I was 40 I never really got into the process exactly. I was out of the feed-back loop.

Now, my parents had died in the late 80s, first my dad and then my mother a few years later. After she died my brother and I shared a small inheritance, much of it old furniture that had actually been my grandmother’s. I found that I felt very attached to that stuff, and to the idea of Scotland. Suddenly I was faced with the idea that if I were to go back again I’d be a tourist, and having to stay in a hotel room, kind of weird. So I took the money and bought an apartment in Edinburgh and put this old furniture in it so it’s a nice memory container. Susan and I still go there every year, sometimes two or three times a year.

During the mid-90s I went a lot because I was working closely with the art school in Glasgow; they have a process called ‘external examination’ where people from the outside come and basically ratify that the grades are ok. I was the external for the painting department for a number of years. During that same time I was invited to be one of the co-selectors of the British Art Show, which is a — I love the word — quinquennial exhibition, every five years. It’s a national exhibition organized by the South Bank Centre, London’s premier organization for all of the arts, including the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the National Theatre, and the Hayward Gallery. That’s to say, it’s a big deal. The show is intended to be a survey of significant trends in British art, and our version was the official moment of recognition for the Hirst/Emin/Gordon generation; pretty hot. For a year and a half I went to London at least once a month to meet up with my two co-selecting colleagues and visit studios and talk about what we were seeing.

During this time Britain was going through a series of slow crises. It was the end of the Thatcher/Major period, and the Tories were seen as corrupt and ineffective, out of touch. It was also the beginning of the end for the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and there were bomb scares in London quite regularly. So when the labor party came in under Blair, part of the promise and part of the excitement, although it’s hard to imagine now that Blair excited anyone, but he did, part of the excitement was a promise to bring about constitutional change to devolve power back to the older nations within the Union, to create local parliaments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. What came of that for Scotland was called devolution — a new parliament, sort of equivalent to a state government, with tax raising power, but still subservient to central government for the big issues.

I really got into reading about all of this. Whenever I was in Scotland I read the latest that people were writing from left, right and center about whether Scotland should be fully independent or partially independent. In the course of all that I discovered a historical figure from the 18th century, an interesting figure from the period of the French Revolution, someone who had spoken about republican politics at that point and had been punished for it. I started researching this man and just got lost in the research, and this is a project I’m still working through. I’ve written a couple of little books using archival material and my ultimate goal is to patch all these little books together and make some sort of novel. It’s constructed using the same principles I use in the paintings, found materials, tweaked and manipulated and stuck together. The story is a fantastic story, full of all kinds of adventures, violence, drugs and betrayal, mixed with radical politics and their accompanying paranoia, all kinds of great stuff, and actually kind of contemporary.

This work of research and writing freed up my imagination again and I eventually got back into painting. So in the last seven years or so I’ve been painting again. At some point I realized that giving huge amounts of energy to all kinds of public work, from murals, to organizing big exhibitions, arguing school budgets, it’s a lot of energy, and interesting and selfless in some way, but not actually as rewarding as it theoretically ought to be. So I go back into studio production and I’ve been making paintings, and really liking it. I’m going to show some of these paintings in a few months here in LA, so it’s like going public with what I have been doing under the radar, privately. [laughter]

SMS:

Instead of taking what you’ve been doing public. [laughter]

TL:

But you know, all the other stuff continues. I got involved in the

Afterall project, about 4 years ago now, which is a whole other big mess in some way, trying to figure out how two institutions can collaborate on a publication that makes sense to both of them, an editorial group where we all know each other, and like each other, and at first glance think we agree, but when we actually get down to cases we don’t agree. It has been complicated trying to resolve all that, and an ongoing project. The journal has moved forward, it’s gotten better. We have some important new support from the Warhol Foundation, We’ve just gotten a new distribution deal that’s going to make it much more visible than it has been in the United States and we’re launching a website…

SMS:

And then