Artist: John Currin
Born in 1965, John Currin is an American painter renowned for his exaggerated female body parts and social/sexual themes.
JC: The subject of a painting is always the author, the artist. You can only make an illusion that it’s about something other than that. I think that’s what the function of representation is: to give a painting the illusion of a subject. In the end, that’s why I started seeing no reason for me to paint abstractly. Some people would say, “Abstraction is as much a representation as anything else.” But I wanted it to be more simple-minded. Why can’t I just be forthright about saying that I’m the author, that I’m the one who determined it?
KS: Are you saying that, since you think the subjectivity of an artist is an intrinsic part of a painting, there’s no reason to paint abstractly anymore?
JC: No, I would never say that. I would never say that I’m on this “team,” that I’m on the “team” of figurative painters. I never felt a responsibility to revive or uphold the continuing validity of representation, of representational painting. I do find myself looking at old art, but it’s because those are the best pictures. I can see that there may be a historical reason to paint like Richter or someone, but I think there’s always a perverse reason behind every one of those logical, historical justifications. For example, Cubism was perverse when Picasso first did it. People justify it by talking about looking at an object from three sides and so on, but it always seemed to me much more about seeing the ass and the breast at the same time. That’s basically what Picasso used it for, and even after he gave up Cubism, he still habitually drew the ass crack, the pussy and the breast on the front. The metaphor was not about time travel, it was about total sexual domination.
When I painted those pictures of older women, partly it was a bit of a joke on the idea of the subversive nude. How many times have you read that Manet’s nudes look back at you with confidence and assertiveness? People never know how to separate the picture from what the painting is, so they look at it and think, “Oh, she’s looking at you in this assertive way.” I always think it’s exactly the opposite. It’s as if Manet is claiming even that, even their self-assertion he’s taking away, even their ability to look back at you he has claimed with his brush. A lot of painters are facile, like John Singer Sargent, but certain of them transform it into a real metaphor. With Manet, it’s not just facility, it’s a means of showing that he’s utterly ruthless in what he claims as his own creation. That’s why his flower paintings are upsetting to look at, too. Even the beauty of the flowers was claimed, as if he were claiming God’s very own creation.
To whatever extent painting can be considered a moral act, it necessarily goes in one of the worst possible directions. As an author, you have a weird, guilty authority over everything you create. You can’t make a painting without embracing your own desire as something good. You can find all kinds of examples of this with the Expressionists. There’s a perverse aspect to their saying “I made it this way, I made the shadow on her face green.” When you choose distorted or unnatural colors, it’s not lyrical or metaphorical so much as it’s infantile or atavistic. A green shadow is not “minty,” but a flaunting of the idea that you are free to do something. That’s why I’ve always thought of myself as an expressionist artist. I think in terms of expressionism because it’s involved with dumb ideas, really stupid ideas; and even if my strategy would seem to be mapped-out, some people would even say “smart,” that’s not what I mean when I say “stupid.” I’m talking about stupid urges and stupid desires, things that don’t involve any irony or anything intellectual.
(via supervert.com)
