Artist Presentation

Lisa Yuskavage and Carey Lovelace

 

Lovelace:  I actually wrote an article about Lisa in the magazine, Art in America.  It was on your reading list so I hope you all read it.  Basically we’re just going to have a conversation about Lisa’s work.  We have some slides and some images, but I’m going to let Lisa be the wonderful mind that she is and talk about her background, where she comes from as an artist, and also just the process of being an artist.  Like creating imagery and how do you come to create a body of work in a worldview?  I think that’s very interesting for everybody and also for photographers when you’re creating, to sort of map out your direction.  How do you discover your own vocabulary and language?  I think Lisa has been such an interesting and controversial figure in art and has really had an incredible impact and caused a lot of discussion with the sorts of images that she uses.  I think that the most interesting thing for me when writing about her is how she got to those images because it was much different than I would have expected.  I think that is sort of an interesting discussion to have.  Also, the issue of making imagery causes a discussion on how you see it as an artist and how the outside world sees it, so I’m just going to flip to…

 

Yuskavage:  I also just want to say that the reason I dragged another person here is because I was probably asked to do a slide lecture, but I’ve given so many slide lectures and they’re usually these really boring affairs, where you start with your early work and then go through.  Afterward, I’m usually so depressed, it’s just like you feel like this is what I spend all my time doing--this is so terrible.  You realize the march of time because you know, artists are very limited characters.  You have something that you can accomplish and it’s a very small thing and it has its place, and it’s important, but sometimes it becomes a little overwhelming when you realize what you’ve been doing for ten years.  I just couldn’t face that one more time but I didn’t want to say no because it seemed like an interesting project that was going on, a little different than the usual request.  You’re all supposed to be superstars so I thought, well, let’s talk to the superstars of America.  You’re all photography people so I thought that would be interesting.  But what you’re not getting is a chronological slide show by me where I say, “Then I did this and then I did that,” and “It’s 54x72.”  I thought that Carey is such an interesting person.  I met her because she called me to tell me that she was writing this piece and my first reaction was, “Is this going to be negative?”  What became interesting out of our conversation was who she is.  She’s also a playwright and I’ve been to see a lot of her stuff.  Well, not a lot but two.  She does really off-Broadway stuff which is very experimental and interesting.  It’s something that New York City has to offer and I would just say that it is something I would keep my eye open for because it’s usually collaborative.  Like she’s either playing in somebody else’s play, they’re usually little mini-plays, or they’re doing hers or she’s either directing or acting or the script was written by her.  So, I found her to be an interesting person and that’s why I decided to ask her to talk to me on behalf of you to sort of get me to say things that may be more interesting than the sort of boring hour-long diatribe about my lengthy amount of work.  I enjoy talking to her so that’s why I asked her to come here and talk to me.  I don’t know about you but I hope that if you guys have questions, kick in.  Not at the end but through it.

 

Lovelace:  I’ll put you all on my mailing list. 

People knew that I was writing, and they would accost me about Lisa’s work and say, “Well what do you think about her work?”  And then they’d proceed to tell me what they thought of her work.  It was this sort of series of paintings here, Day and Night, that seemed to really provoke people.  I just have this list of things that people said to me about Lisa’s work. . .

 

Yuskavage: . . . I’m going to get depressed!  (Laughter)

 

Lovelace:  . . . and I want to know what you feel and what your response to this is.  No, I’m not going to hurt your feelings.  Okay, “Pornographic, smut, slap in the face of feminism, misogynist, exaggerated versions of what she takes to be typical male fantasies, vacuous, self-hating, kiddie-porn,” and on the other hand, other people say, “feminist manifesto careerist.”  Now, when people say that about your work, how do you feel?

 

Yuskavage:  Well, you know. . . (Laughter) . . . I don’t know.  To be perfectly honest, I worked for a lot of years outside of the gallery system, I couldn’t get a show, I was teaching continuing ed, teaching watercolors to old ladies in Central Park, stuff like that, to support myself.  Really  not making it.  And I was painting these paintings and nobody called me any of that.  I believe that because I actually began to succeed and make money and be in the gallery world, the very people, let’s say the extremist of the Guerrilla Girls, I don’t know who they are, Carey may be one for all I know, the very things that supposedly they were fighting for, for example their argument that “the only naked women in museums are the ones painted by men,” I think I’ve made that different.  I’ve changed that.  It’s like point 1.  I don’t really think that it’s about that though.  I didn’t do that to put a check next to that one problem that the Guerilla Girls had with museums.  I don’t really think about any of that stuff.  The only thing I would say is that I did notice that my work didn’t bother anybody until it started to really take a certain type of place in the power structure, the way people perceive that.  You know, like Lisa Yuskavage is getting it and I’m not.  I’m sure all the landscape painters are annoyed, too.  Like, “Well, if I put a naked lady in the landscape, I’d . . “, so it’s really just. .   If I was doing what everybody says I’m doing, I really think that I would be sort of depressed about my work, but I think that what people really don’t know how to do is look at paintings.  Period.  I went to graduate school at Yale and my  undergraduate was at Tyler School of Art, where I studied with abstract painters.  Really wonderful group of people, and I really learned to look at paintings through the eyes of an abstract painter--meaning, phenomenology.  Like the phenomena.  Like look at something, look at the dot on a piece of paper and stare at it and talk about it in space, and talk about the edges, and let it approach you and then recede and really experience a work of art as an object.  Work is now judged so much differently.  When I went to Yale it was so much about developing something that I really hear very few people talk about anymore, which is called “an eye”; have a good eye.  To be able to look at something and really let the layers and the meanings and the complexity of the sign unravel itself to you.  I really believe that people that make these silly remarks aren’t really looking at it--I’d be surprised if they’re looking at them at all, but I’d be surprised if they’re looking at them as paintings in the way that I think that they’re made, which is, a painting like this is made over the course of you know, four to six months.  It requires lots of just looking.  When you look at the thing in person it has a very, very--it unfolds.  Like there are reasons why I paint it by hand.  Like the slowness or fastness with which a certain edge reveals itself to you, the relationship of psychology and the color.  I really believe that I’m a painter of the psychological and that is my interest.  So if I’m starting people up, that’s okay, but I do think that I’m very bothered by contemporary--a lot of people in the contemporary art world who are ideologues and cut themselves off from art.

 

Lovelace:  Oh, we have a question.

 

Audience:  Do you think that the place of art nowadays in society, and I’m responding to what you just said about how to look and the function of the visual, is to ask people to slow down in this age of “the eye” being just another tool to surf with and the bombardment of visual and media stimulation and the kind of slipperiness of any kind of significance around any kind of meaning? 

 

Yuskavage:  I have an answer to this because it sounds like you’re going to have a two-part question, so let me answer this part.  No?  Okay, well I get confused easily.  My answer is, yes and no.  The Yes part is that yeah, I do believe that high art is high art.  It is something that can be enjoyed by everyone, but it does take a specialist.  For example, I knew that guy who is the mailman and whose wife bought all that minimalist art, the Vogel’s, and I’ve been to their house and wow, these people are poor and he was a mailman--but he loved art.  That guy has what’s called an unbelievable eye.  I had him in my studio, you know, he’s not used to looking at work like mine, but he decided since Richard Tuttle told him to look it that he was going to try to understand it.  He was actually eventually able to put aside his prejudices about what he thought art was and was really able to look.  So when I say it’s for specialists, it is really incumbent upon us who call ourselves specialists.  People are getting degrees in this.  But I also think that people who just decide that they want to be specialists, like Herb Vogel who is a mailman, to take the time to understand that this is different than surfing the net or watching TV.  I think the no part of my question is I do not want to be someone who is saying, “Down with the Internet,” and “Down with MTV.”  I’ve got five HBO channels, digital TV, which I use to relax from painting, but I’m a person that lives in the contemporary world.  I have a slow connection with my Internet, maybe that’s why I’m not that excited about surfing, it’s slow going for me, but I also find that I’m not excited about--I don’t like reading stuff on the screen that much, but I’m not down on that.  That’s why I wanted to make sure that when I say, I really do think that people need to change their way of looking--one is dominating people’s ways of seeing.  And I think that I would ask, and part of the reason I’m here in a way is to ask you to understand that there is still the need for this.  I consider it being a person who makes paintings and also the way that I make paintings, and also the way that I go around and look at art, and I don’t mean just paintings.  I look at all art but in a certain way I feel like I’m one of the last people speaking Greek and I consider anybody who knows how to do that a friend of mine.  I cling to these people, I meet them.  If I bump into them and I don’t know them, and we’re both staring at something for a long time, I end up talking to them.  It’s interesting to me.  People who really allow--they’re generous enough to stand in front of an art work and to let it come to them, slowly, and to take the time to understand the complexity of the sign, not the simplicity of it.  That sort of goes to what I have issues with.  I just think that people are a bit simplistic.  I would say that the people who think that about my work are fairly simplistic people.  I would say that they don’t have the ability to access as many layers in just about any work.

 

Lovelace:  I just want to talk about the image a little bit--what I see in the image, which I think is very interesting.  When I think of porno or even traditional painting, I see a female as a projection of an idea, whereas what is interesting to me about your work is that I feel that this woman here is having an experience.  This is a woman who is a person who’s actually having an experience that I identify with.  In a sense, what I think is so interesting about your painting, and I think why it gets people upset, is that it actually challenges categories in a certain way.  Like if it were just the same old porno thing, I think it wouldn’t shake people up, but it’s in-between.  It’s a beautifully painted painting, which throws people off, and this is a real person experiencing . . .

 

Yuskavage:  …you mean with an inner life. . .

 

Lovelace:  Yeah, with an inner life, which I think is very unusual.  For example, if I may flip forward to this.  In a way, yeah, I don’t know if I see that person as having an inner life. 

 

Yuskavage:  Well one of the reasons why Carey and I put some great nudes mixed in here with my paintings, and I also had somebody photograph some Penthouse’s from the ‘70s, is it’s a treat--you get to see all this different nudity.  The thing that I was always interested in with these things, because this was the kind of stuff that was around when I was a kid, is really how genuinely beautiful it is and how completely inoffensive this is.  I don’t understand how that could offend someone.  People sent me something more recent and I was really grossed out.  I’m really not into pornography, it really freaks me out, makes me feel like, wow.  I think I’m pretty normal about it.  I think if something is sexy, it’s sexy; if something is hot it’s hot, but some things are really gross and they’re appealing to some seriously gross wankers, you know?  But this thing is, I don’t even see it as being vulgar.  I don’t know, does anybody want to challenge that?  You think that’s vulgar?

 

Audience:  No, this is something in connection with something we were just talking about, and I guess it’s connected here.  I’m wondering how, if you find it necessary to separate the issue of “the eye” that you’re talking about, I’m assuming perhaps the eye is something that you’re identifying with yourself as a painter, as somebody who enjoys letting the painting come in, as you were describing, and what perhaps these Guerilla Girls would call the gaze, and is it just a question of being on the inside and the outside?  Because your paintings clearly are relevant to photography in the sense that they are framed in a way that could never have been thought of before, you know, Penthouse or photographs, and you’re clearly making compositions, which are framed to prioritize a gaze.  I don’t know exactly how you define that.

 

Yuskavage:  Look, the main thing is, the “gaze” as it was plunked around a lot in the 90s, which I hope you missed, it was depressing in the 90s, everything was about identity art, you know, everybody was poor, and some of the 80s artists are still poor, but I just remember a lot of people talking about the gaze, and I mistakenly used that term once in a quote, and I had to say, “no, no, no, I didn’t mean that,” because words start to get sticky and they take on other people’s meanings.  So the gaze, and let’s not pick on the Guerilla Girls because I think that they’re probably more responsible speakers, but let’s just say the people who approach, who came up with this list. . .

 

Lovelace:  . . all your friends.  (Laughter)

 

Yuskavage:  My ex-friends.  (Laughter)  They believed that art has political responsibility, that it’s a political thing.  They approach it politically.  The gaze is political.  I don’t believe that.  Everything is political, of course, everything can be looked at that way.  I also believe in the private and that doesn’t mean that the private cannot be politicized or used that way or thought of that way.  I am an artist.  I am not a rocket scientist.  What I do does not have to go to the moon and come back.  I don’t lose human lives by my blunders.  I can say, “Gee, I think that this Penthouse looks a little bit like a Vermeer painting and I think I’m going to make  a painting based on that.”  It can be a really idiotic jump or leap and it’s like, it’s my shit.  And the thing that is always interesting to me, why I don’t really get upset by comments like that, unless I was like in a room and they were all shouting at me or something, is that I think that you have responsibility.  Like I knew when I was young that I wanted to make provocative art.  What that means is that I am a provocative person.  I was always told, “Stop provoking people.”  I’m just naturally kind of--I like to stir the pot.  I one time had an astrologist say, “I don’t know what you do, but you’re stirring some pot.”  I thought, “Oh, I can’t help myself, it’s in the stars.”  (Laughter)  It’s just that I’m interested in things that are intense; I’m not interested in things that are muffled at all.  I’m not interested in things that are . . .

 

Lovelace:  . . . safe.

 

Yuskavage:  Well, I like to be a little unsafe.  Like I knew that people were going to question me when I got into my work in a bit way, like when I really started getting into my work.  Like I knew I was in the midst of a career when I was making certain paintings.  Like when I made True Blonde I knew it was going to be in the Whitney Biennial because they had asked me to --they pick a painting for the Biennial and then they said they wanted me to make two new paintings as well, “what do you have in mind?”  And I said, “Well, I was going to make these paintings,” so in making them, I knew they were going to be public, but I had to go into my studio and not let that become an issue.  I had to do something and know that when I put them out there, when I stood at the opening, I was going to overhear, stand behind people and overhear them saying lots of really weird stuff about me, because people always make that leap, as if you’re a soap opera character.  Like you’re the person like Alexi.  She’s always going around screwing everybody’s husband, everybody sort of says, “What kind of a person would want to do that?”  It’s art, and there really is a separation.  That’s why you have to work in a studio alone.  It’s not a collective. One of the things I was talking to Carey about was the idea that I really wanted to get across, like my message to the world that if there’s one person out there who even ten years from now this means something to them, I really believe that I’m a bit promoter of intuition and the unconscious and sort of building your house, your work, around the unconscious and trusting it.  You may be guided by some instincts, which are considered taboo, you may be guided by things that are wrong, but it’s not really wrong because it’s art and it’s who you are, and artists represent humanity, you know?  I may be representing a part of humanity that a lot of people are not interested in, but it’s what I can do, it’s what I can offer. 

 

Lovelace:  If I can just go back to the gaze question?  You know, it was in Laura Mulvey’s article in 1975, when the whole idea of the masculine gaze came up, and that was really talking about something very specific, which was in movies at that time.  That we always saw everything from the male narrators point of view, and I think the thing is, that was such an important thing to say at that time because it was true.  Everyone thought of themselves really as male because that was the way that reality was presented.  We’ve evolved a lot since then, which is wonderful.  I think the thing that is so powerful about the time we live in now is that we really have a multiplicity of ways to see things and to talk about things.  And I think with Lisa’s paintings, even though you’re looking at a female doing something sexual, is it the masculine gaze?  Is it a man that’s looking at her?  I’m not sure.  It’s associated with imagery that on the superficial level we associate with this oppressive approach to things.  But I think what Lisa does with it is often subversive, sometimes satirical, sometimes commenting on what’s going on, as well as making people a little upset.  I think that every time something goes outside of its category it makes people nervous, whether it’s Andy Warhol when he did his soup cans originally, even though now he’s this great classic but people were going out of their minds that somebody would show commerce in a serious art gallery.  It was so upsetting to people that for example, everyone left Leo Castelli because he showed Andy Warhol.  To me, when people have this reaction, and I didn’t mean to put you on the spot, and I feel terrible that I did that but to me, that’s often, not always, but often a sign that there’s something profound going on.  I just want to talk a little bit about the evolution of this imagery and go back a little bit.  Okay, we’ll whiz through art history here.

 

Yuskavage:  This is a student painting done by me.

 

Lovelace:  I just wanted to show you where she came from.  Really a conservative background as a painter in a lot of ways.  Growing up in Philadelphia, could you just talk a little about your background?

 

Yuskavage:  I was raised by people who weren’t educated and who were really very American.  I think my family was extremely American, like they put $100 in some Philadelphia Electric stock for my birthday and Christmas, like “This is for your college education.”  It was all about pro-education, whatever you want, just be happy.  And I was like, “Well, I think I want to be an artist,” and they were like, “Cool, just be,” you know. . .

 

Lovelace:  Was it unusual to be, in your neighborhood. . .

 

Yuskavage:  Well, people barely had dental work in my neighborhood.  It was sort of one of these places in Philadelphia where people were really poor and my parents were very prideful about bringing up people who were going to get out of the neighborhood.  They were really into that idea of the immigrant pyramid and so it was always very clear that I was going to be an educated artist.  That was my one thing, like I wanted to go to more of an academic school whereas in Philadelphia you have this place called the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts where you could just go and draw the figure and smoke pot, you know, “I just want to draw the nude.”  But my mother was like, “Well you have to go to college--you want to be an artist, you have to go to college, I want you to get a degree.”  In the end, she was right, because if I had gone to this Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, I doubt that I would have had the . . . I always wanted to be a figurative artist.  I knew that because the work that I was most moved by . .. . see I don’t really question.  I question myself a lot but I don’t question certain hunches I have.  It was like when I was a kid and I would go to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and I would see the great paintings, they were always these paintings of these figures, they were always figurative paintings and often they were paintings of nudes and I didn’t think like a junior feminist, like, “Oh, well, that’s wrong,” but that’s like slapping yourself for having any kind of urge.  So this idea of being moved by art made me want to be an artist, made me want to be a certain kind of an artist.  So I went to Tyler where they were teaching abstract paintings mostly because that’s what the teachers were doing themselves.  I actually was a figurative painter, like a lone figurative painter there, and I got a lot of support but I also learned to really think abstractly about paintings’  meanings.  I thought in the language of modernism, really, and to really understand that it’s a picture and that it has to function as a picture first.  It’s not an illustration.  A lot of people who seem to be coming out of school now, when I see a lot of these young artist, they’re figurative, but they’re work is very illustrative, and obviously they’re coming out of something different than what I came out of.  But to me, the really “ye-old” part of my work is the “ye-old” modernism rather than the “ye-old” 19^th century.  Like the stuff that I was doing that was related to the 19^th century was a little more kooky than anything.  Actually this painting is as big as my hand, so when it’s blown up it looks really course.  But this was done in 1985 when I was in school and they’re all invented.  I’m not sure why you’re interested in having this slide but I sometimes show this slide when I’m talking to undergrads or graduate students because on one hand, I always think it’s relative that I always wanted to paint not only the figure, but I always seem to be painting female characters, because I guess I’m a little dumb, it’s a one to one relationship, I guess my work is always somewhat about me.  Or, my relationship to the history of art.

 

Lovelace:  So, you went to school at Tyler. . .

 

Yuskavage:  I went to Tyler and then I went to Yale. 

 

Lovelace:  And what did you get from Yale?

 

Yuskavage:  From Yale, I studied with Bailey who is like the real hard-core figure painter.  He taught me a lot, but he wasn’t very – he did not take me in as – like I felt very loved and a lot of warmth from the faculty at Tyler, but I did not feel any love or warmth from the faculty at Yale.  However, what I got from Yale was, “You suck, you suck, you suck, you suck,” constantly.  Like, “How did you get into this school?  You suck, you’re so bad, you’re so untalented, you’re an idiot, you’re an illustrator,” it was this constant banging on the head, and something really wonderful happened.  I learned to trust my peers.  I stopped looking to people older than me to give me approval.  I was a little bit of a kiss-ass, I guess, in undergrad.  I was teacher’s pet.  I hated my peers because they were all noisy and not serious.  Then in grad school I hated the faculty so much and they hated us so much, there was so little love, that it was really a pretty intelligent way to do it, because they threw us together, and they were remarkable people in school with me.

 

Lovelace:  Who were you in school with?

 

Yuskavage:  Well, my husband Matt who is a brilliant artist and painter who you will be hearing about very shortly.  And all kinds of people were there.  Ann Hamilton was there, in sculpture, and Jessica Stockholder was there.  She was in painting and they asked her to move to sculpture I think.  Now she runs the sculpture department.  Gregory Krutzman was just a little behind me, in photo.  Sean Landers was in sculpture and John Kern was in painting.  It really goes on and on, there’s a much longer group of people who were there, but I totally forget. 

 

Lovelace:  So did they tell everyone, “You suck, you suck, you suck?” Or, was it just you?

 

Yuskavage:   I think everybody got it but I think I got it especially hard and it I think it was because I had chops.  They hated people who had facility because facility was the root of evil.  They preferred to see somebody suffering over a picture, but because I had a gene Sequa, obviously this painting looks suffered over, that was one they passed me on.  Like scrape it off, put it on, the paint has all these paint buggers in it, like angst.  I didn’t have enough angst, I paint more elegantly, and they’d said, “That’s gonna sink you, ‘cause you paint so well, that’s gonna kill you.”  In a way, all that stuff’s valuable, you can’t just rely on facility. 

 

Lovelace:  One thing that was interesting to me when we talked before, was that in Yale you were rather sheltered in terms of the artistic currents . . .

 

Yuskavage:  I didn’t know anything about contemporary art.  It’s hard to believe, ‘cause I went to school in Philadelphia, and New Haven, you have to pass through New York somehow, and I would go to the Metropolitan Museum or the Frick, I just wasn’t, you know, contemporary art looked really boring to me, and I wasn’t really interested, maybe I was a little afraid of it because I didn’t really understand how to—where the galleries were, I was scared of New York, and I just didn’t take an interest in art magazines, they seemed boring.

 

Lovelace:  But then you had a sort of coupe de fouth(?) when you saw. . .

 

Yuskavage:  When we finally moved here and I didn’t really want to move here, but my husband, who was my boyfriend at the time, came from Moscow, so he’s like, “I didn’t come all the way to America to live in the boonies,” and I was like, “Okay,” and I hid behind his skirt and we moved here, and got a really shitty apartment on Ludlow Street which is now probably like five million dollars, and we started to, you know cause I was living here and I wasn’t as afraid and I kind of knew where SoHo was, and I started to walk around and look at stuff.  It must have been the late 80s that I started looking, and I saw two things that really blew me away, and one was the Jeff Koons porcelain, the real kitschy, Koons porcelain.  (Referring to slide)  Oh, I like that because I always think she’s probably the chubbiest figure in a painting.  There’s a study of that, which is like real models, sort of outrageous, but I was like, “Hey, everybody’s calling me vulgar?” 

 

Lovelace:  So this was a sort of, with his wife, . . .

 

Yuskavage:  No, no, no the porcelain, the porcelain figurines that were like Michael Jackson with the monkey, and the nude woman with the pink panther, there were these sort of polychrome sculptures.  Now you only see them at Sotheby’s, like you never get to see them anywhere unless they’re being resold.  I walked into that gallery and I saw that and it’s funny because I was expecting to hate everything I saw, but I just let my defenses down because I didn’t care, and I was really into it, and I felt very attracted to it, and I liked this quality that he was being such a jerk.  There was a quality about what a jerk he seemed to be that I liked.  I didn’t think it was off-putting, I thought it was very human and interesting.  Then, I don’t know whether it was the same day or somewhere around then, I went to Metro Pictures and there was a Mike Kelly show and there was this arrangement of stuffed animals--these were great shows, historically speaking they were great shows--and he’d have these bunnies like on this nasty-looking afghan, and then he had photographs of two adults humping some bunnies, and somebody had shit on their ass, it was so, like, it was so id-driven, I was completely into it.  And I had to think, I remember walking back to my house and thinking, “What am I supposed to do with this?”  It’s like this really has nothing to do with me, I’m a painter, and what does this have to do with me?  And the question, when stuff like that happens to you as a young artist, you know, I realized that the more I looked into Mike Kelly, he’s really sort of from a relative poor Catholic family, like this Irish Catholic weird obsession with sex, like everything is so repressed that it’s funny.  My family always makes sex jokes.  My grandmother makes sex jokes and she says the rosary every night.  Thinking about it much later, I realized that it’s very based in the farm.  Like my family came from farming, and it’s like barnyard humor.  I mean I realized what barnyard humor is.  Like, I’m often in the art world, people are often so tight assed and fancy, and “Oh, you’re going to far now,” and everybody is very correct, and you don’t want to go too far.  And I realized that these artists were going too far, and like this Mike Kelly photograph, if I could buy something I would buy that, because it went so far in describing something that was so . . ..

 

Lovelace:  . . .beyond the pale . . .

 

Yuskavage:   Well, but it was so much about a certain kind of psychological state that was really not about high culture.  The other thing that we had talked about the other day was there was a show up at the MoMA called “High Low,” and it was an amazing show that Kurt Vonnegut put together, which apparently, Carey told me which I didn’t realize, I don’t pay attention to the press, had mixed reviews.  I didn’t know that because I thought it was an extremely pertinent show, and it was an amazing show because it really showed how a lot of artists, for example, like Phillip Gustner, a lot of artists, were using low sources and high sources, and blending them and making these kind of synthetic kind of connection, obviously like Andy Warhol.  So it had the high/low thing.  I actually think it really had a big effect on me, and I began to turn a corner with my work and began to sort of want a certain type of . . . I wanted to sort of inject a certain type of vividness into my work that I felt like all of these things had.  I can’t be certain because I really don’t know what years these all were.  This is really like me dredging my memories.  These are things that pop up to me that are memories that were really significant when I didn’t know what my work really--I had certain very clear ideas about what my work should be.  I knew I wanted to be a figurative artist, I knew I wanted to paint, and that’s a lot, but what kind?  I knew I didn’t want to be illustrational, I knew I wanted them to have strong psychological character, and I knew there were certain things.  I was pretty sure I was going to paint women, because that’s what made sense to me.  Then in terms of how they went from being all brown, 19^th century, to something else, let’s move to something else.  There was a series of watercolors called “Tit Heaven,” and I had this job teaching the old ladies watercolors, and they wanted to see my watercolors, and I was really like, “Boy, what kind of watercolors would I make if I were to make watercolors,” and I knew they had to please the old ladies so they had to have flowers, but I wanted it to be a little subversive, so I was sticking all these body parts in there, like there will be a peek-a-boo, find the booby.  I really made these to kind of keep my job, and ended up growing from there, but they worked perfectly like these little--because that was truly not art as subversion, it was a demonstration, like subversion to keep my job.  Like pretending I was something I wasn’t, which was a nice watercolor lady.  Anyway, I did 40 of these as a post-graduate. 

 

Lovelace:  What year is that about?

 

Yuskavage:  This is 1990, around 1990.  This is post Jeff Koons-type stuff.  You can see I started to want things to be more vivid.  The other thing is, have any of you tried to take your work out into the world yet?  Like show work?  I see a nod.  Raise your hand.  Like outside of school.  Okay, what’s it like?  What’s the response like?  I mean really, like in terms of what you expected.  Is it a lot more mute?  Like you think you’re doing something and it just kind of sort of flat-lines?  Like maybe your friends really like it, maybe one or two people come up to you, but it’s not like you rock the world.  You really expect to rock the world.  You’re in your studio and you’re winding up, and you’re like, “I’m rockin’ the world.”  Every artist does that in their studio.  Even amateurs, this is the universal thing about artists, they’re pumping themselves up unbelievably, like “I am a freakin’ genius!”  You put the work out there, and it’s like flat-line.  It’s really unbelievable.  I skipped all this work I did--I had shows and they were total flat-lines.  Then, like you go and see these other artists and other shows and they’re not flat-lined.  Something’s happening.  They’re culturally relevant, they’re relevant to the people who are seeing them, something’s happening.  People are thinking about and talking about the work.  There’s something happening.  And you’re not a careerist if that’s all you want, if you don’t really care what kind of work you make to get there.  And I could name names, but I won’t.  Like I see shows and I think these are concoctions to get that response, which I think was one of the comments about me.  I really wanted my work to have a voice, to lift above.  Like how do you lift your work out of that flat, that flat ebb?  It’s like you’re trying, you have to speak more clearly, and as I said before, I was making this work for a long time, and people were going out of their minds saying, “This is so cool, I really love this, I’d love to do something with you, but I just can’t.”  I went for six more years making work that people now consider as having been crafted to get attention.  But there was one difference.  I knew it was good.  And what mattered to me is that I knew that I had articulated my voice, I turned the volume up so much.  Now some of you may be very shy people, and your work is not about that kind of volume, but it’s turning the intensity up.  And making work so streamlined that it just has an impact.  Like somebody like Richard Tuttle does not make loud work, but it’s so streamlined and it really makes its impact.

 

Lovelace:  Now, apropos of what you were saying before.  A work like this that’s just called, Faucet, is this . . .?

 

Yuskavage:  This is in ’95.

 

Lovelace:  Yeah, this is like three years later.

 

Yuskavage:  Okay, all my work was made up.  Completely made up.  Like I didn’t have a drawing, I just would start with this big canvas, and I’d just start like, well I think I’d kinda put it in the lower right corner and the light is going to come from here and I’m going to have this monochrome flesh-colored background and I’m going to stick this faucet there, like I kinda have these ideas, and then I would make the painting.  I got to the point where I got really, really, really sick of making work that way because I felt like I was constantly inventing these characters – like everything was so much like a one-shot thing, so I was questioning how to re-think drawings in my paintings in order to make, to create a different thing.  So what I did was I took, this painting that was just finished, I literally put the brush down and I went and had this stuff called Sculpey, and I made a little figure after her.  I sculpted her.  She never existed anywhere other than this illusion, and I made her three-dimensional. 

 

Lovelace:  Do you have an image of that?

 

Yuskavage:  I have the little figure.  Do you want to go to that?

 

Lovelace:  Yeah. 

 

Yuskavage:  Okay, so that is a caste of what I made.  I ended up making four others, and my idea to do that came out of a trip that, when I was an undergrad, Tyler has a program where you can go away to study in their campus in Rome, so I really wanted to do that, and it was a really life-changing experience.  I guess that’s one of the experiences of high art that really extremely influenced me, was going and really being in Italy and living there and really seeing art every day, and we went to Venice, and the teacher talked about how Tintoretto in order to get--he used to make studies, three-dimensional models of his paintings before he made them, and he would make these little wax figurines, very simple, and make almost like doll-houses and illuminate them with candles and make studies.  Then he had an idea of what he was going to do with the play of light.  And I thought that was really cool.  For years when I was teaching and students would want to make up their work and they’d constantly try to invent figurative paintings, and they didn’t have enough drawing background, they didn’t know about phenomenology of how to make edges seem like their spatial, I’d say, “Why don’t you do this?” and I’d give them the Tintoretto project, and of course you have to be extremely committed to your work to stop before your painting and make a dumb little sculpture and light it.   Think about it.  So nobody ever did it.  I did it finally.  And what ended up happening was . . .

 

Lovelace:  Do you have any slides of work that came out of that?

 

Yuskavage:  This is called Good Evening Ham Ass--well, there were a lot of images that came--once I made the sculptures what I started doing was to actually set up these sculptures in a still-life type situation and photograph them.  The first time I had to photograph something I took $50 and went to an NYU darkroom, I was teaching there by then, and I asked, “Anybody want to show me how to develop black and white photographs?”  So I was putting these sculptures in sunlight and in candlelight, and I was trying to figure out how to get all these different ways of lighting the figure, and all this stuff, and it yielded all these interesting results in terms of straight studies, and then leading to things like this.  (Referring to slides)  These two were more fantasies of the sculptures because what I did, what Carey doesn’t have slides of, is I actually have really straight-looking studies of the sculptures where you can see that I was actually painting from life, and it’s like this very serious light/shadow study of something which is a really bizarre-looking thing.  After that I was totally turned on by this idea of having a subject that was outside of my head that I could draw from on all levels, and there was a character called the food eater.  One was called an ass picker, one was called a food eater, one was called a head shrinker, social climber, and a motherfucker.  I was just goofing around.  Obviously the one picking her ass is the ass picker.  The thing is, when you’re not getting any attention for your work, it’s like you’re on your own and I could call this whatever I wanted, it’s not going anywhere.  No, I was just in my studio goofing off, and then somebody comes and says, “Oh, I want to give you a show and cast these,” and then you’re stuck with it.  Then it’s like, okay, do I really have the nerve to actually go for this.  I called them collectively, The Bad Habits, and put them on this big cubic pedestal, sort of like modernism and then chachkas.  Anyway, so the social climber is behind the motherfucker.  The motherfucker’s derived from the flesh paintings that you just saw, and the other ones came out of thin air.  They’re all kinda goofy and cartoony-looking little monsters.  I’m sort of influenced a lot by certain movies.  Like I really love this movie called, “The Brood” by David Cronenberg, which is like, I thought it was a really funny movie because, have you ever seen that movie?  The only thing you know in the beginning is all these people, like the mother is in the kitchen chopping vegetables, and she hears a rustling and she turns around and she screams and something comes and jumps and starts hacking away at her, and she dies, and it’s like this murder mystery, like who’s killing these people.  But what the police start figuring out is that all these people who are dying are all these people who are somehow related to this woman who’s in a mental institution, and so what’s happening, I’ll give you the end of the movie, I’ll ruin the movie for you, she’s in this special kind of therapy, this is totally Cronenberg, she’s in this special kind of therapy where she gives birth to her phobias, her pain, like her mother was mean to her, bad mother, she gives birth to that feeling and it’s a little creature and it goes and kills her mother.  When the cop finally goes to get her, she’s in this room and it’s filled with these, like, and it’s this really funny literalization of a therapeutic process and, you know, if I could just have a little thing come out of me and go get ‘em.  (Laughter)  So in a way, you’re revenge comes in the form of these things, these little creatures.  Okay, I did not see “The Brood” and then decide to go illustrate it.  It’s not an illustration of that idea, but these kind of grotesque-looking little figurines ended up being really funny things to make really straight studies of, because they look really wrong, but they’re really right because they were so accurately rendered in light and shadow, and I’m intrigued by that.  Then there were paintings, go to the next one.  This is a painting called Ham Ass.  Like I had a memory or a bad photo of the food eater, and the food eater basically just had a big stomach, and then I had to give her a big ass so she didn’t fall forward, and I thought, “Oh, that’s why you get a big ass and a big stomach,” like nature’s balancing act.  We were playing with this sculpture, and then when I went to paint it, I was sort of developing some sort of strange pattern on her butt, and I stepped back and said, “She looks like she has a ham for an ass now,” you know how they kinda put the cloves?  And again, it’s a little tiny painting, and I was sorta making it up based on, you know, so it’s kinda still going back and forth with invention, and the idea of the Ham Ass and the other study, the one you saw before, and then this one was sort of the Food Eater and the Mother Fucker having an interaction in the sunset.  My studio’s over by the west side highway, and there are always like Kool-Aid sunsets, so I put them together and made that Good Evening Ham Ass painting which, you know, it’s about 110” long, it’s pretty monumental.  It’s a silly painting, and the only thing that’s really funny is I made up the word Ham Ass.  I like to make up words about things.  You know, you’re an artist, you can do it, nobody gets hurt.  You know, Marcel Duchamp said the most interesting thing about paintings is the title and somebody else said the least interesting thing about the painting is the title.  I’m obviously somewhere in the middle.  I’d like to say that paintings can have interesting titles, but it was reported in the New York Times magazine once, there was an article about this guy who bought this painting, and they followed him around, and they said, “And then he stopped in and bought this painting by Lisa Yuskavage called Good Evening Hommoss,”  (Laughter) and I’m reading this and I’m like, boy, maybe my work is dangerous.  Then I thought maybe I should have Marianne Boesky write a retraction, just to stir the pot more.  We would like to point out that it is “Ham Ass” not “Hommoss.”  That’s much better.  Who knew?  (Laughter)

 

Lovelace:  Let’s go the next series based on your friends.

 

Yuskavage:  This is really early.  This is something way back in time but it doesn’t matter because I was explaining to Terry that I made this real oil sketch, there’s a lot of things people use sketch books for as a way to kind of allow ideas to just flow without the interruption of having to make major art work or anything, and I used to get little pieces of paper and just cut them in a really crappy way and just sit there with some music and goof around and let stuff kind of come out, as rude as it might be.  So maybe this was like five years before Good Evening Ham Ass.  So I was making this goofy little painting of this vulgar child whacking off.  This is not intended to make anybody excited about anything.  After I did it I realized that it reminded me of not what she’s doing or the fact that she’s on her knees or anything, but more her face, the vulgarity or demeanor of her, reminded me of my best friend growing up, this girl, Kathy.  It made me think that I got a little alerted to the idea that . . . (End of tape) . . . I have like a really accurate thought, but it’s almost like the airplane doesn’t get to take off for many years, but I had this idea that I should work with her, and I did go and see her and I called her and she’d just had a baby which is really weird, considering the way this thing looks, and I asked her if she would pose for me, and she was really very just instantly whipped off her clothes, and I said, “Can you be on your knees and pretend you, put your hands on, I just want to start with making an image of you that looks like the things I made up.”  No questions asked.  She was really cool about it.  She grew up where I grew up, totally knows me, totally understands me, and she said this is just so Juliana Park, the old neighborhood where we grew up, which really made me very happy. Like somehow they didn’t take Juliana Park out of the girl.  So I took these photographs of her, which I put away, ‘cause I thought, what the hell am I going to do with these.  Then about five years later I did something with it.  But she was . . .

 

Lovelace:  Now is this Kathy?  Or is this based on. . ?

 

Yuskavage:  Well, something like that, that’s a friend.  And the third idea I had, I was trying to figure my way out of this kind of grotesque character that I was doing.  It was kinda goofy kind of Ham Ass-type character, which is always going to be a little safe because it’s ironic because it’s funny, like a big, bulbous ass is a place where you go, “Well, I’m not really being tough, I’m hiding behind a pointy boob,” so I wanted to make work where the characters were more succubus like?  And not so obviously grotesque.  So I remembered that there were these really cool images that I used to see when I was a kid in Penthouse.  We were not protected.  This stuff was around, but it was funny because we didn’t feel bad about it, we just thought wow, I’d like to grow up to look like that.  I still do.  (Laughter)  So I decided to go look for these kind of images so I went to this bookstore on like 42^nd Street, it was a little spooky, I remember I was looking through these 70s Penthouse to find any images that I remembered having seen as a kid that I thought were really beautiful.  Two things happened.  One is I realized how really incredibly beautiful the photographs were, and when I talk about having an “eye” for things, I realize that these things are really influenced by paintings, that the photographers were not--because I also looked at the Playboys which don’t look so good, they’re much more pin-uppy--where these things have these kind of incredibly beautiful, that’s a beautiful photograph.  I thought the idea of the refraction and reflection on things was coming through a little bit.  Then I found out much later that the editor of the magazine was a very, very serious collector of master works.  Anyway, so I did select a couple of those images to see what it would be like to work from those.  This one doesn’t look like the picture that it came from; I was really concerned, just like with my own photographs, to do drawings and get away from the photograph, like I really need to get away from the photograph.  Photographs are too powerful.  So these are based a little bit on those Penthouse’s, not completely, but a little. 

 

Audience:  Could you talk a little bit about your scale-shifting from the sketch book to these life-size portraits, and why did you decide to go so large, or is that large enough?

 

Yuskavage:   Well the scale, I think that the reason--the thing is, when you’re a figurative painter is you take a photograph of anything, it’s always, the scale is always determined by humans, and when you work figuratively you’re always aware that either it’s going to be half life-size, quarter life-size, life size, and you’re always aware.  So if you have this feeling that you want the figure to be monumental and confrontational, it would have to be just over life-size and then you have to figure the scale of the painting in relationship to that.  So like 84 x 72 and just a little below that ended up being a size where I could make a figure have a certain sense of monumentality without, you know, because there’s that girl who makes those really gigantic paintings?  She’s English?  I’m spacing her name right now.  Jennie Seville.  Those paintings are really big, and they have to be really big because she wants this stuff to dissolve into cracks and crevices and you get lost.  So my paintings don’t have to be that big because it’s not really about that kind of surface, but in terms of working smaller, I think I work smaller as a way of feeling less intimidated.  I’m intimidated by making art because I really acknowledge my own stupidity all the time, like I’m not sure what I want to do, so working in a very unmonumental way, in a very intimate and very casual way where it’s sort of like sitting down, and you’re comfortable, and it’s about intimacy, I kind of open myself up.  For me, it’s all about feeling comfortable because if I were to be put on a pedestal at the Whitney Museum and asked to be painting, I would not be able to function.  It’s very different.  Like the difference between where the paintings end up, I have to block myself off from that, hugely.  So then when I get something, then I can take it to a bigger scale because I’ve got this sort of safety for myself of already having unleashed the idea that I wanted to go with.  And if it’s very personal and private and intimate and worrisome, I just kind of put blinders on and go for it.

 

Audience:  I just want to ask a question about something you said which was, photography is too scary.   

 

Yuskavage:  Images in photography are authoritative.  And for a painter, I don’t want to copy a photograph because photographs are better than copied photographs.  I’m always trying to be aware, like, what’s the point of copying a photograph.  For me, a photograph is an interesting place to use to record, like say, you know, to get certain types of ideas or moments or things like that, but then I think it’s incumbent upon me to try to find a way to find the painting that is coming out of that, so I use a drawing, and then I put the photograph away and then sometimes I’ll make a small painting.  And sometimes I take my small painting and put them in my scanner, which may be considered re-photographing, and then I will make a little grid, not a maximum grid, just a little grid, just to be able to loosely hand-draw, so I’m trying to get away – I have problems with authority, and photographs are very authoritative.  They’re right and I’m wrong.  I don’t want to be wrong.  They’re always better.  Even bad photographs are better than a bad painting.  Which is why so many people take photographs as opposed to painting, because they don’t feel as bad about the result.

 

This is a painting that nobody has seen.  No.  It’s one of the paintings that was in my last show that was going on simultaneously with the show in Philadelphia which was the five years of my work from 1995 to 2000 because places like the ICA don’t do retrospectives and I was too young for retrospectives.  Then it was a little tricky to put in work that had made a departure from that work.  It’s funny because I kinda got resistance from every body of work I ever made, like people were always, “Yes, but . . .” or “No, but . . .” The Philadelphia show got two thumbs up, but this got a “Yes, but . . .” so one time when I was giving a talk, actually I went back to Philadelphia and gave a talk, and there was something like 3,000 people in the auditorium so it was really scary ‘cause this was a big deal in Philadelphia because I’m a Philadelphia girl. People came from all walks of life to see me, people who had known my family or whatever, so it was really the scariest talk I’ve ever given, besides the sheer volume of people.  This one guy was like no.  I don’t know where he came from but he said, “I agree with Roberta Smith, the show in New York is terrible compared to the earlier work.  You’re off, you screwed up, you’re going the wrong way.”  I remember a good friend of mine, she gives a lot of public lectures, she said if you really want to scare somebody, count to five.  They think that maybe you’re going to call.  So I was like 1 (100) 2 (100) 3 (100) . . . and the audience was waiting to see what I was going to say, and I was composing my thoughts, and I said, “You know, you and Roberta will be changing your minds in a few years.”  All I can say is she didn’t like a lot of the works that she likes now; it takes time.  You’re damned if you change and you’re damned if you don’t change.  So what I always go on is whether of not I’m interested, because basically if I end up making a body of work that nobody likes and it comes back to my house, I’m going to have to hang it up, so I better like it.

 

Lovelace:  But your approach was different because here you were using an actual environment, it wasn’t photographed . . .

 

Yuskavage: . . . Right, what I did here was because I had made--those were some boobs, and they were real, they were not made up--the girl in the background is Kathy, she’s my childhood friend who I had pose for me.  I actually did end up incorporating her into work.  The girl in the foreground was a girl I met in the neighborhood where I lived, and she always had her stomach hanging out.  She’s one of those girls, it’s like a style now, it was not around when I was kid, I wish it had been.  We were like, have a roll, like have a roll hanging out.  I don’t know whether it’s coming from lesbian culture, but it’s very cool.  I’m thinking, wow, these girls have this tummy and it’s sticking out and she’s so cool-looking, and she was very, you know, and I just asked her if she’d model for me and she said she’d think about it.  And I never asked her about it again, and she said, “So when are you going to paint me,” and she started bugging me about it.  Then I really had to get it together, so I decided what I wanted to do, I wasn’t interested in working from Penthouse pictures, other people’s photographs, but I was also bored with the idea of making paintings that were in relatively abstract or monochrome spaces.  I knew of this mansion that I could go to and borrow and I had called up one of the Penthouse photographers that I admired a lot, I sort of wrote him a fan letter, and he actually emailed me back.  I was actually scared (Laughter) and he gave me a private link to his new web site to show me what he’s doing now, and it is so scary.  All I could say to him was, “Your new work is reflective of our times.”  Meaning, I really couldn’t stand what he was doing, it was all about bondage and pissing, it was horrible.  He gave me the idea that they used to go to mansions to photograph people, and that was how cropping was done, that it wasn’t done, it was basically they’d go and borrow places.  So I knew about this mansion I could borrow in upstate New York, so I got together everybody and we all went up there and I spent the day taking pictures of people, and it was this amazing experience.  Painting, for me, like this woman’s house, everything in the house when there’s no man around, this often happens with women, even if there is a man around-- everything becomes extremely feminine.  Every surface is feminized.  Every chair, every wall covering--there could be no man.  A know lot of my aunts do that, the house turned to Laura Ashley, and I’m thinking, where does the man go?  I’m feeling like I don’t know where to go here myself, choking on potpourri, and little hearts on the doors, it was so intense and feminine and so extreme.  I was interested in how the Laura Ashley thing is like this low-class person’s idea of high-class taste, and a high-classed person’s idea of low-class taste.  So I have done a lot of stuff with the Laura Ashley phenomenon, too, which we’re going to have to skip.  I’ve always fantasized about what Laura Ashley’s mansion was like.  Apparently she died falling down the steps in her mansion, she probably choked on the potpourri, and she fell down the steps and died.  This house has a name, it’s called Northfield, and it’s kinda like a soap opera, I was always into soap operas, The Young and the Restless, and the idea of these women lounging around their houses, all jeweled up, and waiting for something to happen.  So I took my friend Kathy and jeweled her up and set her loose in the mansion.

 

Lovelace:  I think she looks a little more fatigued.

 

Yuskavage:  Well that’s what everybody says, but it was a quiet moment.  I had given them a lot of champagne and I think they were coming down off their buzz.  Seriously, they insisted, the girls insisted that they wanted champagne and orange juice, so you start out at 7:00 in the morning, and by 10:00 you’re already coming down.  So they were all really sleepy and the sun started coming in, it was like 12:00 and they were hung over, so the look was kinda like this extremely decadent sort of thing.  Of course I was a nervous wreck all day but in the end, looking at what the pictures were, they really came together.

 

Lovelace:  How many paintings were there in this series altogether?

 

Yuskavage:  Oh, about six or seven.  The last one I started before I started any of them but I couldn’t do it--it was too hard because there were so many things to negotiate like this to that, and this is an enormous painting, it’s 84 x 72.  For me, having to deal with all of these shifts, I knew I was setting myself up as a painter for a lot of hurdles because it’s different than making, like if you picture that painting Faucet where there’s flesh-colored figure on a flesh-colored background?  That’s sorta easy.  This was like a level of ten on the difficulty scale and it wasn’t that I was looking for a level of difficulty.  I just knew that I didn’t want to make paintings where the figures were represented in an abstract monochrome ground.  I wanted the house to take on this kind of personality, not like a personality like in The Shining or anything, but a personality that had everything: the books, pillows, padded couch, this weird monkey thing, all these things had as much character as the figures and it challenged the figures.  It was fun.  They’re supposed to hang this at the Whitney.  Somebody bought this for the Whitney, so maybe you’ll actually be able to see one in a year or so. 

 

Audience:  I’m going to digress a little, because I wanted to go back to what you were saying before at the beginning when you were responding to some of the criticism of your work, or praises, you said that you painted from the id and then you said something before that about how it seems like it bothered you that people made this leap between your work and who you are, and I’m just trying to figure out, you know, between you saying that you’re painting from who you are. . .

 

Yuskavage:  Because the id is not who a person is.  The ego is who a person is, according to Freud.  And that’s all gobble-goop, too.  That’s all like possibly, maybe.  This is all made-up 20^th century stuff.  This is not real.  It’s not science; it’s hokey science that I totally buy into.  It’s fiction, but I totally am interested in artists and writers that are portraying the more out of control thing.  But in order to make art you have to be very much in control.

 

Lovelace:  It’s just like saying somebody who makes movies about murders doesn’t mean that they’re a murderer.

 

Yuskavage:  Like the great story about Lolita.  Is he a pedophile?  Is he promoting pedophilia?  And the argument is still ongoing.  I’m going to put you on the spot--have you ever had a fantasy that was sexual or otherwise, there are many kinds of fantasies, that you would never, ever, ever do?  You know, something that is really out there, it’s too far.  Okay, like let’s say that for some reason you had a fantasy about your 10-year old nephew that’s looking pretty hot.  (Laughter)  Whatever, but it’s passed through your mind.  You have a thought.  Is that who you are?

 

Audience:  No, of course not.

 

Yuskavage:  Okay, so if you make art, if you decide to make art about the dangerous things that you may think about.  Or, let’s say that you’re interested in all of us, it’s not just you.  You’re using yourself as a microcosm of what you believe the world is about.  You’re going to put your own ass out there to say, I believe that bad people have dangerous thoughts, but that doesn’t mean they’re dangerous. 

 

Lovelace:  It’s interesting to me that we have so many books about crime and killing, and that that seems to be okay to imagine.  We don’t think that somebody’s promoting crime if they write a crime novel but it’s interesting that when you get into the realm of sex it’s actually a more fraught area in some ways.

 

Audience:  My question isn’t really whether you are the person you paint, or the painting represents who you are . . .

 

Yuskavage:  . . . I’m hot (Laughter)

 

Audience:  . . . but I’m thinking about the social implications, like feminism and all these theories around when you put your work out there, basically on some level you don’t have control anymore, people . . .

 

Yuskavage:  That’s the fun of it.  You have control by your next picture.  You can turn it up, turn it left, turn it right--you can change things.  I’m aware of how my work is being received.  I knew all that.  They don’t say it to my face, but you hear rumors of it or people write it, you see it.  The thing I have been most recently taken in from the world and decided to deal with is that I’m not a painter of the nude.  Like if I were to drop dead tomorrow, that would be my obit, “painter of the nude,” so how do I, while I’m not dropping dead, make work that makes more clear what I am interested in.  And what I am interested in is the fact that I want to be a painter of a psychological character.  I want to make intense paintings about--and sex is very psychological, and being naked is very psychological.  I’m also interested in the history of art and how things collide in all that.  So I have been making paintings with clothed figures.  I thought, well, if you don’t want to paint the nudes, stick some clothes on people.  And then I had to ask myself, what clothing?  Stay tuned, you’ll find out.

 

Audience:  This is kind of tied in to what we’re talking about, the projected image and what you’re projecting out there and what do you expect to come back, and what do you think that--

 

Yuskavage:  I never expect anything to come back, really.  Maybe if I used to I’ve learned to cut--when you become a public person, I’m not Madonna or anything, but even as minimally public as I am, there is such a way as cutting yourself off from certain types--you don’t go to certain places in your mind.  You kinda just say, “I’m not going to go there.”  In other words, I had to force myself to stop worrying or trying to imagine how it’s going to come back.  That’s too much to worry about.  I try to take on the responsibility of making it clearer and clearer and clearer for myself, and I use feedback when I do get it to see where I’m not so clear. Clarity is really hard.  The hardest thing I think you guys are going to find out is to actually open your mouth and put your ass on the lines.  It doesn’t mean that you have to make dirty pictures or difficult pictures or provocative pictures.  It can be a very, very gentle notion that you’re really passionately interested in, whatever it is, you’re going to find out that’s the hardest thing, and maybe that’s the thing you get critiqued for or whatever, it’s like who the hell are you and how are you different than everybody else, and why should we look at your work.  And don’t go to Chelsea to find that, because I go around and I’m like, “Who the hell are you and why should I be looking at this?”  But I do say to students, when they ask me or say, “Everything sucks,” I say to them, and I ask you because you probably think everything sucks, I would say, “What are you, as the next generation, doing to change that?”  What are you doing and how are you preparing and how are you going to make it different?  Whatever you don’t like, don’t do it.  Don’t do it because you think that’s what you’re supposed to do.  Supposed to is for suits, not for people like you.  You’re anarchists.  You’re supposed to rebel against something, and if that means to rebel against other artists or the protocol or whatever, you should not accept anything as a given, because Marxism is something blah, blah, blah, like if you go to a school where somebody’s blah, blah, blah, I missed all that theory crap, thank God.  We didn’t read in school, thank God, we just painted.  But if anybody’s doing that and that’s not interesting to you, hey, don’t be such good kids, you’re supposed to be bad.  You’re not supposed to be good but maybe you are a good kid, you know, but in that, be yourself.  Be really stubbornly yourself, in an extremely forceful way. 

 

Lovelace:  And it’s very hard to do that.

 

Yuskavage:  I think that’s what I’m doing and it pisses people off.  I’m sorry but I am happy.  I am really concerned about that.  I was not happy when I was making Tight Ass for Press, 19^th century-looking pictures that were like, you know, maybe I had a few people that liked them.  But I wasn’t offending anybody; nobody was being bothered by me.  I was being nice and I was over there, and in terms of these like fucking feminists, it’s so annoying because I actually don’t like to generalize, but it’s like the people who would like to shut me up, that is so antithetical to the ideas that they’re involved in.  And that’s what’s so pathetic about it.  And what am I going to do with people like that?  I think they should have a parade for me, I really do.  But they won’t because they’re cowards, you know?  I just get really frustrated by people who want to shut everybody down.  They go to schools and teach boys to take women’s studies classes, and art now becomes a question of, is this okay?  You know, like the way you’re supposed to have sex in colleges now, you put your hand on somebody and ask, is this okay?  But when you’re making art and you’re alone in your studio you shouldn’t be going to yourself, is this okay?  Because obviously, guess what they’re going to say?  No.  You’re going to be told no all the way down the line.  And if you do get told yes, you’re probably going to be making some shitty-ass little boxed up thing that not many people are going to like.  It’ll be like the muzak of contemporary art and you’ll get some dumb show somewhere but it won’t go very far and you’ll be miserable and commit suicide, so don’t do that.

 

Audience:  I have a question about whether or not you think the artist has a responsibility.  I mean, I agree that one shouldn’t censor themselves but then you think the artist has to have some kind of responsibility for the work they’re putting out there.  It’s interesting for me to hear what you’re saying about how you feel that your work is pushing boundaries.  I just actually was at the Philadelphia ICA on Saturday and there were still books and posters up from your show, and on the cover of the book is a cropped image so that you don’t see all the mediation that there is in these images and the distortion of the figures but looking at that, that just looks so typically pornographic to me.

 

Yuskavage:  The cover?

 

Audience:  Yeah, the one with the . . .

 

Yuskavage:  That’s exactly what I was going for.

 

Audience:  So to me it seems very familiar, like it’s participating in this broader kind of image patterns in politics . . .

 

Yuskavage:  It’s exactly the size of a Penthouse cover and has the same amount of letters as Penthouse.  It was designed exactly, it was the graph design--it was intended to be exactly familiar.  But then, when you open it up, it has nothing to do with that.  It was a small model of what I think people see in my work.  If you only look at the cover, you’re going to see one thing.  If you open it up, you’re going to find something else.  And that was what that was about.  I was trying to have a message.

 

Audience:  Can you say more about what you want that relationship to be between the cover and the inside?  Like how are you . . .?

 

Yuskavage:  Yeah, the cover has a, it was ripping off, I mean I could probably be sued because I ripped it off so much, the Penthouse design.  Another way the way Penthouse kind of covers the head, the exact kind of coloring and everything like that, and I wanted it to provoke you to say, “Eck, she’s just a smut queen,” exactly what you just said.  Whatever you just said.  But if you open it up, it’s dead-on to an extremely classical art catalogue, without any fancy design at all.  I actually wanted to be design-less.  I had a designer where I said I want this to be invisible design. 

 

Audience:  I know you’re saying that you’re anti-positions of feminism, but part of that project. .

 

Yuskavage:  Wait a minute--before you agree with that--I didn’t say I was anti-feminism--I’m anti-stupidity.  I love feminists.  I don’t like knee-jerk anything. 

 

Lovelace:  . . . because feminism is really about freedom, letting people have. .

 

Yuskavage: yeah, I enjoy real feminism, not repressive, choking . . .

 

Audience:  Okay, I get your point about not wanting to repress or shut down options, or rule out certain areas, but at the same time it seems like part of the project has been to question the politics or the power involved in these types of very eroticized, you know, you were even saying yourself, well maybe I am a child pornographer in some way.  Well because you were saying before that nobody gets hurt, it’s art, and it’s true that it doesn’t have any kind of direct social ramifications, but it is, nonetheless, participating in these other kinds of systems of power.  Do you feel that you need to take a position on that?

 

Yuskavage:  It’s not really.  How does it really do that?

 

Audience:  Well one thing I was thinking about is there’s an essay by Carol Duncan, “The MoMA’s Hot Mamas,” and she talks about very sexualized violent representations of nudes in MoMA’s collection, and how it sets up public space as a space where women are made to be looked at, but not necessarily--I don’t know, she sees it as kind of a repression, like being a woman in that space, and she links that experience to being out on the street and seeing these huge Penthouse ads in bus stations, which she talks about in the article, how she went to take a picture of the Penthouse ad and there were actually these boys that started yelling at her, and it was very clear that she wasn’t supposed to be appropriating the image for her own use, but that was kind of setting up a space where women are objectified.  So it’s that kind of power dynamic that I’m thinking about, and thinking about walking into the Philadelphia Museum and seeing your cover, your catalog, that looks so Penthouse-like, and thinking about how that was setting up the space, it raised these questions for me and I was wondering if you think that’s important to address.

 

Yuskavage:  I’m probably just making things more difficult by doing stuff like that, which is part of being provocative to myself.  I’m not really interested in Penthouse, and here we are talking about it, and I’m recognizing that maybe I should have just had--I shouldn’t have gone for that kind of cover; I should have just gone for something pretty boring, then I wouldn’t have to talk about this stuff, because it’s not my field of interest, I’m always intrigued by and interested in painting, and I really don’t have anything to say about the power dynamics. 

 

Lovelace:  It’s a huge subject, we could go on because it is very interesting, but also what I thought what was interesting what you were saying, when she was taking pictures of Penthouse, that was when people got upset, and to me, that’s sort of what you’re doing.  The females intervening in this power system, and that’s part of what’s unsettling because it raises questions, so it makes one sort of upset.  I think it opens these questions:  What is pornography?  What’s the point of pornography?  We can sit here and talk about that . . .

 

Yuskavage:  And, are pictures of naked people pornographic?

 

Audience:  And I was going to say too, what constitutes intervention and what is just repetition as well . . .

 

Yuskavage:  I just think what I would go down as my final word on it is, just as life is messy, I think art should be messy.  It shouldn’t be like, you know, “I’ve got my theory and I’ve got it all locked down.”  So many people have approached me, like this is manifesto-driven work, like I have this long drawn-out idea about how this is supposed to function, and I sense from you that you would like it to be neater.

 

Audience:  No, I’m just asking for you to articulate your position on the issue.

 

Yuskavage:  But if I really had a position, it would be neat--that I believe in that and I’d like to believe in that.  I just.  . . I trust the mess of being a person, and I trust  . . . I was probably wrong to use that catalog cover, it was probably wrong to do that but I couldn’t help myself.  At the time I was feeling like, ha-ha, this is going to be funny.  I’ve always known that I have the same amount of letters in my last name, which is annoying, my name is like ridiculous, everybody spells it wrong and I thought it was funny.  I was playing with myself by doing that.  And people are taking this stuff seriously.  You’re just having this private little joke on yourself and it’s reproduced 5,000 times and people pay $25 for it and take it seriously.  Sometimes it’s storing something up but that’s the thing--I really am just one kooky, irrational person who doesn’t really have any kind of manifesto or sense of order about any of this.  Coming here and trying to put it in some sort of order is the best I can do.  You’re an artist, right?

 

Audience:  Artist and art historian.

 

Yuskavage:   I’d just say, trust the mess a little more.  Leave room for that in the margin, that it doesn’t always fit.  Things don’t always fit.  People have all kinds of things coming and going.

 

Lovelace:  I’m a critic and a creative person, and I feel like there’s the critic part but as the artist part, I think it’s dangerous to have the critic part get involved with the artist part.  So when you’re being the artist part, you just have to--it’s difficult if you’re one of the two, you know, because the critic part can get in the artist part and question it.  You just have to trust wherever it takes you.

 

Audience:  I was curious, is your work perceived differently outside of the states?  Is your sense of humor, that you obviously don’t have, is that a problem in this country and not somewhere else?

 

Yuskavage:  You know what’s really great about showing elsewhere?  I don’t understand what they’re saying.  (Laughter) I don’t try to get the reviews translated because it’s one last thing.  You know, rich people around the world seem to participate and buy them.  People who buy them also like them, I would assume.  I don’t make a lot of work.  I just had a show in Italy and I flew the first day you could fly again in September and it was just me and Anton--the big tall black guy who write the article, this fabulous guy.  You know who I’m talking about?  It was just the two of us on the plane.  So we’re both going to Milan because it was this weird thing to go there and I kept thinking, “God, I hope people are not pitying me the whole time I’m there.”  Like buying my paintings because they’re thinking, “poor you.”  There was this weird thing because the one thing I noticed is young Italians--I think they hate my work because they think I’m an idiot for working figuratively.  Because they hate their own tradition and they think it’s really retarded, they never go to the museums.  And when you go see shows of contemporary Italian art, it’s really like 20-30 years early American stuff, but they really think what’s hip is really passé here, and they don’t get it.  They don’t get why you’re doing it.  In that sense I think the hip culture in a place like Italy is not interested so much in me.  Like they come to my opening and they just look at me.  They don’t talk to me, and I don’t understand what they’re saying anyway.  But the collectors usually do speak English.  I did watercolors, large watercolors the last time, and it was a fun show to have.  I’ve shown in London--I’m actually going to show in London, it’s my next show in September at the Royal Academy, which is a weird situation.  They’re expecting 90,000 visitors.  I’m a little afraid--I’m trying not to think about people looking at the paintings again; you try not to think about the public reception.  In England they’re so gnarly, what they say about art, they’re very good at making fun of people there.

 

Lovelace:  And they write about it in the papers, too.

 

Yuskavage:  Yeah, in the papers and TV.  Ooh, I don’t even want to think about it.  I did make the gallery promise me that they would not send me any press.  I said I do not want it.  If I beg, don’t send it.  They’ll just totally cut me to pieces and make fun of me and I can’t handle it.

 

Audience:  It’s okay; they don’t speak English over there.

 

Lovelace:  Yeah, they speak British.

 

Yuskavage:  I don’t know what the English think of me.  Different places I go, I don’t know what people think really.  I guess I’m not really that well-known in Europe or other places. 

 

Audience:  Still, really, I’d like to know, do you think your sense of humor is a problem with this kind? 

 

Yuskavage:  Translating? 

 

Audience:  No.

 

Yuskavage:  When you say “sense of humor,” do you mean that in the paintings there’s a kind of satire?  What?

 

Lovelace:  Like is she joking right now or . . .?

 

Audience:  So maybe this is a misinterpretation on my part . . .

 

Yuskavage:  Where are you from?

 

Audience:  I’m from Germany.  I don’t have a sense of humor.  We all don’t. 

 

Yuskavage:  I’ve heard you do after a little drink.  (Laughter)  You specifically, they told me. (Laughter)

 

Audience:  So maybe I’m misinterpreting and making the mistake that I think that because you’re sitting here and you’re being funny that I think that it is also in your painting.  I also thought that before I heard you talk, but again, this might be wrong, but if it’s not wrong, do you think it’s part of . . . like the criticism that was mentioned before.

 

Yuskavage:  That’s the problem with people.  I think not having a sense of humor is a serious flaw.  One should work on that.  Like I say, lighten up.  I see people take it too seriously.  That’s the other thing, it’s like they’re shaking, like Oh My God, you’re doing something that . . . Like she was saying about the Andy Warhol boxes, like now everybody is saying he’s a God, but he was really turned around and actually gave Duchamp credit.  All that stuff, it’s an artist’s responsibility to look at stuff.  I don’t know, maybe some people don’t want to shake things up and that’s cool, too.  Any other questions?

 

Lovelace:  My question is, what’s for lunch?

 

Yuskavage:  You’re never going to see me again, and I don’t answer questions in public.

 

Audience:  I’m curious about something that was quoted in her article.  You are quoted as saying something to the effect that, “I am painting these bodies because I’m painting about things that I’m uncomfortable with about in my own body,” something like that.  Did I paraphrase that correctly?

 

Yuskavage:  I didn’t say “uncomfortable with in my own body,” I said, “uncomfortable with about myself.” 

 

Audience:  About myself.  Okay.  Then I interpreted that as “body.”

 

Yuskavage:  That’s about you.

 

Audience:  Then I guess it might end up changing, because now I think that you already have answered that.

 

Yuskavage:  Let’s talk about you.  (Laughter)  Are you comfortable with your body?

 

Audience:  I think we all are.  But what I was thinking then was. . .

 

Yuskavage:  Actually, my work has always been about things in myself I feel incredibly uncomfortable with and embarrassed by.

 

Audience:  Oh, okay.

 

Yuskavage:  Like my big, dumb fingernails.  I’m very embarrassed about this.  But that’s on my body so it goes back to . . .  (Laughter) Just to answer the question that you meant to ask about that actual quote is that there’s a lot of artists, like Phillip Gustin or Diane Arbus or the German filmmaker, Carpenter--these are people whose work is tough.  It’s tough work.  It’s not the rosy upside of life, but when I look at their work I always feel happy.  Maybe that’s a dementia in me but there’s a certain kind of thing, which is kind of this powerful intense thing that seems to me, is not a waste of time when you’re making art and you’re actually digging into stuff like that.  It is worthwhile to spend your life unearthing that stuff.  What those people were doing, and they were really my--them and others--they were my Gods.  I went to see a movie once called “Heavy.”  It’s a very painful and difficult movie, and I sent these friends of mine to see it.  They walked out in about the first 15 minutes and they said, “What the hell did you send me to that for?”  I just realized, note to self: get new friends. (Laughter) And I was thinking, how could they not like that?  So I started this conversation with them about do you like this?  Do you like that?  But this one guy that didn’t like it he’s a pediatric oncologist so every day he deals with the grim reaper and I don’t, so I had to give him some credit, he wants art to be lighter.  More like pop art.  Looking as a young person at people like Diane Arbus and people like that, and reading her biography which is a terribly flawed thing, because nobody participated in it that really knew.  It was a lot more about the author than the facts but it was very, very, very important for me to read that and she was really looking in the world for herself, and she wanted--and I think it was important that--and I’m not sure how anecdotal this information is, but one of the things towards the end of her life, and she obviously suffered from depression anyway which is thought of differently now than it was then, but she took those pictures of the retarded adults in costumes.  A lot of people liked those pictures but she didn’t because they didn’t know she was there.  She was truly a voyeur for the first time and she didn’t want to be a voyeur--she wanted to be in it.  That really stuck in my mind.  You’re not a voyeur; you want to be in it.  That’s why I don’t think it’s different than presenting pornography or something like that.  I want my work to be dangerous because I always want to feel a little wrong.  The wrongness of it prevents me from saying, “okay, this is it.”  Sometimes I go to shows and I really get the sense that people go, “I’m really good, I’m doing something really good for life; for humanity.”  Humanity is better because I’m making my art.  It’s about spirituality, that’s got to be good, right?  Nobody gets hurt.  There’s this whole thing, as opposed to mining a certain other kind of thing, like Phillip Gustin, who was dealing with his own anti-Semitism.  You know, his early drawings are signed Phillip Goldstein.  Then he changes his name to Gustin.  He’s always wrestling with himself.  That painting where he made himself, you know, the painter, painting a self-portrait with the Klan hat on.  That was really one of the masterpieces of the world, to me.  The guy is really putting his ass on the line.  So when I said that quote about wanting to make work and that I feel incredibly uncomfortable, I was sort of talking about those types of artists, like Edan Faspin (????), there are things that he does and the way he put himself in his movies, I hope that I’m not tragic like a lot of these people. That was the one thing, it was like I kind of want to be one of those artists but I don’t want to be tragic.  I don’t want to be swollen, drunken and than drop dead really depressed and suicidal.  I don’t want all those stories around me, so I go to the gym.  That’s the thing, I don’t believe in that hype, that you have to be completely in ruins to deal with these kinds of issues, but it is important to me.  Those kinds of artists mean everything to me.  They’re my foundation, in a way, of where I come out of.

 

Younger:  Thank you very much.

 

(Applause)

 

Yuskavage and Lovelace Synopsis

by Carla Cioffi

 

This presentation was a conversation between painter Lisa Yuskavage and art critic Cary Lovelace.  Yuskavage received her MFA from Yale School of Art in 1986 and is currently living in New York City.  Lovelace writes regularly for Art in America and has also written for Performing Arts Journal, ARTnews, The New York Times and Newsday.  The format of the presentation was set up so that Lovelace would ask questions of Yuskavage in order to create a dialogue in which to talk about the artist’s work while simultaneously showing slides of her paintings.

 

Yuskavage’s paintings depict women with exaggerated bodily features, almost caricature-like, in various states of self-examination or repose.  Her paintings have been considered controversial, not only because of the content of her work, but also because of the way in which she has chosen to represent these female figures.  Her work has been described as being “pornographic smut” and “a slap in the face to feminism.”  Yuskavage feels that the negative responses to her work come from people with a simplistic frame of mind.  She believes that too many people do not know how to really look at paintings.  They do not allow themselves to experience the work as an object and to let it slowly unfold and allow the complexity of the signs to unravel itself.

 

There are various influences on Yuskavage’s work, which range from David Cronenberg films, childhood friends, and old Penthouse magazines that she saw when she was a kid.  She was fascinated by the fact that the photographs in Penthouse were based on classical paintings.  She first started to work from photographs as she eventually found her way to painting.

 

Yuskavage considers herself a psychological painter, guided by intuition and unconscious impulses.  She always knew she wanted to make figurative work and found she was always painting women.  Though she describes the content of her work as fictions, they are about her in some way.  Her early work as an undergraduate was traditionally impressionistic--small intimate paintings of innocuous scenes.  It wasn’t until she moved to New York after graduate school that her work started to change and take on a bolder stance.  She was soon introduced to works by artists Jeff Koons and Mike Kelly and it was their sense of “going too far” that appealed to her.  This idea of pushing the work into the realm of the larger-than-life started to take root in her paintings.  She encourages people to make art from the standpoint of being “stubbornly yourself in a very forceful way” and streamlining one’s work to the point where it takes on a clear voice.

 

 

Yuskavage, Lovelace Analysis

by Phuong M. Do

 

Lisa Yuskavage chose to have a conversational format with Cary Lovelace as a way to present her work.  This was done in order to break the routine of showing a chronological slide-show history of her work.  However, the exchange between Yuskavage and Lovelace was not so much a dialogue between the two as much as it was a guided talk directed by Lovelace, meant to help Yuskavage go through a historical progression and development of her work.  

 

Yuskavage’s paintings of distorted, disproportionate, and almost grotesque female nudes are controversial because they invoke the taboo of voyeurism and they present the female body as being an erotic and sexual object. The artist began her talk with a list of criticisms of her work. She also noted that her works became controversial when they started selling and when she entered the power structure in the art world.  When asked if her paintings reflect issues with her own body, she rejected the notion because she said she believes that her work doesn’t really reference who she is as a person.  Yet, this is in contrast to Lovelace’s interview with the artist for an issue of Art in America published in July 2001.  In the article Yuskavage was quoted as saying, “My work has always been about things in myself that I feel incredibly uncomfortable with and embarrassed by.”  

 

It seemed that during her presentation Yuskavage was uncomfortable with discussing the content of her paintings and instead focused on her process and the formal aspects of painting.  When pressed to answer a question regarding responsibilities and socio-political implications that artists should assume for their work, Yuskavage took a laissez-fair position.  Instead, she began to elaborate on how on her idea that people don’t really know how look at paintings.

 

It is clear that Yuskavage is accustomed to getting asked questions that place her work in a political context.  She spoke generally on the subject but not on the content or meaning of her work.  She elaborated on the process and inspiration for creating but separated them from who she is.  Yuskavage succeeded in keeping the presentation within her own parameters by not answering questions that went beyond her technique and process.  As a result, the contradictions between her work and her talk were not addressed.

 

Perhaps if more questions were directed to Cary Lovelace dealing with the contents and socio-political context of the paintings, the discussions might have been more open. We never learned from the artist, whether she feels she is liberating images of women because she is a woman depicting these images or whether she is playing into female body consumption.  The cast of sculpture-characters she created for studies are all given demeaning names such as, social climber, ass picker, head shrinker, food eater and mother fucker.  These all raise questions about her relationship with women and how it is personified in her paintings.  Since we were unable to broach the discussion dealing with the content and meanings of her work, Yuskavage’s paintings are open to interpretation.  The responsibility of inferring cultural meanings from Yuskavage’s work seems to rest somewhere between the artist and the viewer.