This Interview was featured in ISSUE 21 - Risk

Andrea Farr: You talk about having faith in your media, and I think this opens up a space for risks to be taken in your work. Is the incorporation of risk something inherent to the process of creating your work, or is it something that happens along the way?

Dan Colen: I think the most inherent part of my work is an obsessive need for control and some sort of perfectionistic ambition. That was where I began, and early on in my career, I saw how flawed it was. My first show pulled the rug out from under me in a lot of ways. It was when I realized that a lot of my intentions were not a concern for the viewership and even for people I was close with. I had put something out there that I related to in a certain way, and I had a lot of time to spend with it, but there weren’t enough signifiers for the things that I prioritized. I really believe that even if I have no grand solution for what I can put into the work, if I’m working with the understanding that that is my intention and that each day I’m aware of that, then I feel like it will happen. At the end of the day, what’s in my head and what I make will never meet. But if I have faith that I’m moving towards what the object needs to be then I can get to what the object actually needs to be. If I stay attached to what’s in my head, the object and the goal will never meet.

Andrea: Accessibility is an issue within contemporary art. It’s one thing to look at a painting made of bubblegum and see what you can get out of it based on your art history knowledge or personal experience, but it’s another to feel a connection to the medium, or have something through the construction of the piece that is more accessible to the viewer. So to me, what you create seems to be taking big risks, but what is your definition of risk?

Dan: ‘Risk’ is synonymous with the different ways I think about my work, but I rarely use that word. Chance, faith, accident, discovery, exploration, and more. Those are all risks. If I don’t know what’s going to happen, I’m taking a risk. I can sneak back into a place where I know what’s going to happen so I feel safer, but when I find myself there I’m not happy with it because I don’t want to know what’s going to happen. I’m most plagued by my fears of not knowing what the outcome will be, even though I don’t want to know that. The beauty of art is that it gets to be so close to life itself—it gets so close to breathing and feeling and real emotions and real relationships. There’s an experience that comes out of the failure, and in a way [the desert paintings] are a little bit of an ode to that, just like Wile E. Coyote’s life is about that.

Dan Colen, The Ballad, 2016. Photo: Jeff McLane. Courtsey Gasoslan.

Andrea: I wanted to ask about Mailorder Mother Purgatory, but also about these new [desert paintings]. What are the sorts of things you want people to experience when they see them?

Dan: Everything begins with a personal narrative and self-exploration. I really love acknowledging the actual physical space that’s between a viewer and an artwork, and the psychic and potential energy in that space. In the desert paintings, I think the themes connect really well to my studio practice and to personal experiences. That Sisyphean tale is something that I was interested in exploring; what comes out of failure and what comes after death. I thought that Wile E. Coyote was a good way to explore those things, but those paintings for me become hypersexual, and very much about women.

Andrea: In what way?

Dan: Her work is about the material of paint representing the earth that it comes from, and her experience of being in that place, using that material, and making an image of it. It’s an image of herself. It’s a perfect circle — you start with yourself and you go out and all of a sudden you’re painting the universe, and all of a sudden the universe is a painting of yourself. The Mailorders show was in 2017, and we started the paintings in 2010. [When I began] I was upstate, and I never owned anything, then all of a sudden I had to buy silverware and all this shit. Mail order catalogs started coming to my house. I was already having a challenging experience with accepting my adulthood or something like that, and those catalogs were not helpful. They were a metaphor, and really what we’re talking about with O’Keeffe — I just decided to explore that. I suppose I decided to explore it as blatantly as she did. There’s no attempt at trying to blend abstract resolve, it’s just saying, "Here this thing is. It’s also that thing.” I had been working with the bubblegum and had this idea of taking something from down here and trying to put it up there. I was working on another sculpture, which was a dedication to this friend of mine who had just died, and it was a scattered sculpture of all of these different restraints that were broken. The materials were very heavy — leather, latex, rubber, steel, and rusted metal. I was struggling with them similarly to how I was with the Mailorders, and they ended up in the same space when I moved upstate. They were in the same room together, and there was this very obvious relationship where these restraints were missing the people or beings that usually occupied them, and the clothing were all missing people. Something changed in that space, and my understanding of the work and my intention behind the work became totally different. I liked the idea of considering what it means to lose somebody. Some people you lose are totally inaccessible, beyond our control. Sometimes it feels even worse, and that’s something I’m very interested in. Maybe it feels worse because, at least when it’s totally gone all of a sudden, that space that exists between a viewer and a painting is able to exist even more like a ghost or a spirit, and you can interact with that. With a very deep intimate loss, it’s this other feeling which can sometimes be the most debilitating. I started thinking about the Mailorders as ex-girlfriends and ex-lovers, and the other piece became more than just this one person, and it was a very masculine piece. It was really about these people that had died, and other things about other people I shared time with that I don’t anymore. That went on for many more years. I allowed the metaphor to play itself out. With Mailorders, I was most into the shadows. The strips of color were the abstract parts of the things, even though we identify them as the figurative, but it’s only when the shadow starts happening that form is illustrated.

Dan Colen: The Trap,2016, Photo Tim Nighswander/IMAGING4ART. Courtsey Gagosian.

Andrea: It creates the opportunity for that abstraction to come out of these things that we think we know.

Dan: Once you roll into the darkness, you’re describing form. You’re not looking at a red strip anymore, but you’re actually going back into space. It’s describing an atmosphere, depth of field, and perspective. Space becomes much more abstract. I really love that dilemma in the paintings, so I started concentrating on those recesses and I started thinking about the paintings in comparison to the sculptures, which were very soft and tender. I really started thinking of them as these wombs, and these paintings more like mothers than girlfriends. It’s just funny to think that I started out feeling like, “Fuck life. My life is horrible, and these things are horrible,” and then ended up being, “Oh my god.” The Mother paintings, which are landscape paintings, are the newest. the deserts and the Purgatories I started at the same time, and I’m finishing that series now. The Mothers were really the beginning of them and started as a kind of self-portraiture; I was really thinking about my experience in several years of time, and being out in the wilderness and not knowing which way I wanted to turn— seeing different horizons and different potentials, and not being able to descend into them. Those three don’t tell the narrative, but the bigger series of the Mother paintings are really about those vantage points on the edge of a wilderness into some sort of place of comfort, and I think that’s where risk, the question of risk, really happens, at that kind of crossroads. You say, “Well, I don’t feel comfortable with it but I can accept that I’m here, and so let me engage it.”

Andrea: Speaking of the Mother paintings, the Mailorder appropriations, and even your new Wile E. Coyote landscape appropriations, I’m really interested in this idea of using appropriated work to inspire these paintings. The history of appropriation is very politically and culturally involved, you think of Barbara Kruger and you think of Richard Prince, and I don’t think your work is void of a similar context. What has appropriation meant to you and what has it done to the process of creating your own work?

Dan: Yeah, a lot, and I feel very connected to what you’re saying. Just even in terms of risk in a way, I have discomfort even with my use of Disney. I question it. I do think that cartoons are a really ripe place for me to work out of. I don’t want to only be there, but I do think a lot comes out of that, and I’m very happy to acknowledge that, and I really like how desire and fantasy and a lot of different themes I can kind of explore there. The paintings that I’ve appropriated from Disney have taken me so long, it’s stretched out. By the time I’m done with these Mother paintings, it’ll be 20 years. Maybe I thought it would have been two years, so then you get stuck in this place where people are often like, “Well, what is it about Disney?” and I don’t know if I could ever justify that. And again, we get back to this place that is so important to be able to talk about what happens in the studio, because that informs, and really that’s a big part of it. But regardless of that, it is something I am committed to, and I want to pay tribute to the precision and mastery of those works, those films, but also free them of their context, and take them out, and let somebody have a moment of a personal experience with something that we have such a collective conscious about.

Andrea: What do you mean by taking it out of this context? Do you mean letting them experience the image outside of the idea of Disney, which is so wrought with certain meaning?

Dan: Yes, outside of the Disney context, but also outside of the movie that it’s from, and the narrative of that specific movie. There’s something amazing, and maybe this is more about appropriation in general, but it’s why these things scare me because you can’t disassociate from that. It’s impossible. They’re so powerful. There’s this one painting that’ll be the first one that I’m going to finish. This painting makes people feel good. One thing Disney is really good about is that everything feels so familiar.

Andrea: Right, the aesthetic rhetoric they have is undeniable.

Dan: Yeah, and it makes people think they know the place or they understand the experience. Talking about appropriation now, from my generation, I want it to be a little more twisted than Barbara Kruger or Richard Prince. It’s a dilemma for me, not borrowing something obviously because they’ve freed me from that, but am I freeing it from its associations? To elevate gum, or even to elevate Mailorder is one thing, but to elevate this, when it can never free itself from even the feeling that it gives, that is taking it out of its context and the person having the same experience. It’s a different experience because it is a different experience. I don’t have too many articulated ideas around what exactly I’m doing with appropriation, but I do know it’s a little more twisted and it’s also a little more about an intimate experience. I’m seeking to maintain that, and I want it to stay connected. I want it to be less aggressive of an act. With the Disney paintings, I’m uncomfortable with the fact that it's part of my practice in so many ways, and I sometimes get lost in wondering if it represents some of the more aggressive stances I want to take. How does it relate to me making a giant wall of crack pipes or a heap of garbage with birds that live in it, or a giant crumpled American flag? How does it relate to those things? I feel some of my own personal doubt and discomfort and it makes it hard for me to articulate anything because I always find myself getting stuck in asking myself how confident I feel on the topic. Nevertheless, to move forward through those spaces is just to stay in risk.

Andrea: You’re removing the immediate response of familiarity from these Disney pieces, so it takes this journey from something that is Disney where you automatically know how to handle it, to something that is a little bit more up for question. Do you think that the risk in these pieces is the variability in the final product, and having less of a direct or an immediate response as compared to your other works?

Dan: I think so, and you just have to keep going with it and accept that it takes more dedication than anything else. It makes me more uncomfortable than anything else. I have to really commit to this thing. There’s a lot of other weird layers to it with marketing and other things that complicate things. I committed to it because I came through with it. It took me two years and now it feels really good, and with these candles in the Disney paintings, in particular, it was the first time I incorporated the idea that I need the medium and the process to define the end result. I need it to be part of the how, the why, and then when I apply the paint. Those started it, but by the time I got to the end of those, it wasn’t enough. I knew I didn’t have enough to push that as far as I wanted to. So, actually, coming back to these paintings, which have a similar sensibility to those because they’re coming from a similar source, I’m using the paint in a way that actually gives me more urgency to make them. Now, all of a sudden, the material is working in dialogue with the source in a different way than it was, and that’s really what I needed. I do feel like I’m plowing forward in a new kind of way.