Interview

O’BRIEN: Well, it’s sort of kept going. It’s still a phenomenon.

OEHLEN: Yes, it still exists.

O’BRIEN: But can you be an abstract painter and a bad painter?

OEHLEN: Absolutely. [all laugh]

WOOL: The worst. I like a story you told once that I tell students sometimes. You said you were trying very hard to make seriously bad paintings, while the New Museum version of bad painting was really about something else—it was about outside ideas that were bad—but you were trying to make really bad paintings, and you realized that the worst ones you could make were exactly like the Neue Wilde painters in Berlin. And then you decided it really wasn’t worth it, and Dieter Roth said something similar. He was interested in making bad paintings, and he said he always failed, because with paintings it always looks good in some way. Just because of the material . . . But he could do it with music, he could do it when he was playing the piano by himself, but it was excruciating to listen to, and he would immediately have to stop. It kind of closes the loop.

OEHLEN: I mean, you have to do it seriously. You have to take responsibility. You cannot just do it as a side project and make an arrogant attitude, a gesture. I think Dieter Roth could not have done it because he was not a painter. You have to become a painter and hold your head out the window. You have to give it an importance, and I did that, so that’s why I could do it. [laughs]

O’BRIEN: I think bad painting in the sense of the original show was more faux-naïve, right?

WOOL: Yeah, it only challenged the most conventional ideas of what a good painting was, and these guys were talking about going much further with it.

O’BRIEN: Neil Jenney—who was part of that original show—he took the sort of childish or naïve art and made it internally abstract and pretty, in a context of the faux-primitive. When I wrote about your work in Parkett, I said that I thought of your idea of “bad” more like Thelonious Monk’s style and his title “Ugly Beauty.” It’s sort of finding the beautiful out of things that would ordinarily be a component of what’s regarded as ugly—like making something off-key. Does that make any sense?

OEHLEN: Yes. I don’t think you can really, seriously—or philosophically—try to find out what it is that a painting does to you. It’s contradictory. You can’t come to an end because, if it’s good, it’s beautiful—everything that’s good will be at the end called beautiful. But I like very much if you do things that seem to be forbidden and seem to be impossible, like a test of courage.

O’BRIEN: What’s considered forbidden now? I mean, it’s shrinking . . .

WOOL: What’s the most recent forbidden zone you’ve entered?

OEHLEN: Oh, what’s forbidden? I mean, at the moment, it looks like everything is done, but I don’t think that’s true, because 90 percent of the artists who are responsible for this or that invention, they just use it as an invention, as a method. They hide behind their invention. They’re not taking responsibility for it. They’re not doing it as painters. They’re doing it as inventors. A lot of people who are there as painters right now are not really painters, because they just have a process of doing it—they just have a way of making the painting, and that doesn’t hurt. It’s . . .

WOOL: A signature.

OEHLEN: Yeah.

O’BRIEN: What’s the old joke about conceptual artists and painting?

WOOL: [laughs] I don’t know, but it probably wasn’t very funny.

O’BRIEN: No, it’s not very funny. It’s a truism. Why are all the conceptual artists painting now? Because it’s a good idea.

OEHLEN: That’s good. [laughs] That’s mean.

O’BRIEN: But don’t you think that the recession, or depression, is changing the way that people look at art, or the way artists are approaching art? I was just walking around at Art Basel Miami, and all this doom was in the air, and I started looking at things and thinking, Well, that looks really too easy. That doesn’t look like art anymore. I think maybe just the pressure that has been added by economic adversity is going to make people want work that’s more labor-intensive or technically proficient.

OEHLEN: That is possible. Or at least that is what I hear from other people.

O’BRIEN: People want more for their money, not something just simply gestural.

WOOL: But I’ve noticed that for years.

OEHLEN: So what are you gonna do? [laughs]

WOOL: Was it you or Kippenberger who said, “When you run out of ideas, you make a diptych”?

OEHLEN: Well, it’s a saying. If you run out of ideas, you make a triptych.

WOOL: Have you made any triptychs recently?

OEHLEN: No.

WOOL: ’Cause that’s a terrible idea.

OEHLEN: I’m not running out of ideas. [laughs]

WOOL: No, but we’re talking about bad painting. Would you dare to make a triptych? ’Cause that’s a seriously terrible thing.

OEHLEN: It is bad, yeah—it’s a challenge.

O’BRIEN: I have a triptych that Jean-Michel Basquiat gave me for my birthday in 1980 or ’81. You’ve seen it hanging in my apartment probably. It’s on really fucked-up yellow wood. Then my friend [interior designer and artist] Ricky Clifton rehung everything in my apartment, and he rehung it vertically instead of horizontally, and my wife said, “You can’t do that.” And I said, “Well, it didn’t come with instructions.”

WOOL: Is it signed?

O’BRIEN: Yeah.

WOOL: Vertically or horizontally? [laughs]

O’BRIEN: My idea is that the one that’s chipping the most will go on the bottom.

WOOL: A German collector didn’t have tall enough ceilings, so he hung one of my paintings horizontally. I guess it didn’t look good because he sold it at auction.

WOOL: You don’t care how your paintings are hung? [Oehlen laughs] You used to not know which way they went.

OEHLEN: I still don’t know often, but when I know, then I care.

O’BRIEN: So what’s the new show at Luhring Augustine?

OEHLEN: I’m working with advertisement material—posters, big ones, just trashy stuff. And I’m trying to make these pictures have very trashy, cheap elements in them, things that will evoke feelings from the old left—left-wing protest feelings, anticommercial emotion.

WOOL: Are you using real posters, or are you reprinting them?

OEHLEN: Real stuff. And then I’m trying to forget all about that and make a nice painting.

O’BRIEN: Collages with painting on them?

OEHLEN: Yeah, it’s a very, very simple structure—it’s really noisy stuff that I’m smoothing down. [laughs]

O’BRIEN: Is it influenced by the current state of the world economy?

OEHLEN: No, they were done before.

O’BRIEN: Yeah?

OEHLEN: Yeah, the happy times.