Interview with Tom Lawson, Dean of CalArts School of Art

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.

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