Interview

CURRIN: It wasn’t really until after I got out of art school that I realized that I’d been doing that sort of for the audience, for that context. Somehow, being alone in the room, it made no sense at all to make those kinds of paintings.

O’BRIEN: But when you started on the path you’re on now, that was really the most unfashionable direction you could take, right?

CURRIN: I guess so, but it didn’t feel that way at the time. In some ways it felt like almost the opposite, like it was surprisingly easy to get attention and be different. This is sort of a glib way to put it, but it was sort of like doing conservative paintings with a straight face.

O’BRIEN: Yeah.

CURRIN: All of sudden everybody got worked up—which is far from being an unfashionable thing or bravery.

O’BRIEN: Yeah.

CURRIN: So it’s getting a reaction, you know? Part of it was just taking the people who I had liked a lot—David Salle and Schnabel and Polke and Kippenberger—and changing the format slightly. Instead of layered physical space, I kind of layered culture. You know, different languages battling on one painting. I thought an interesting thing would be to make it kind of authoritarian . . . [laughs] You know, one language, one image, one source of meaning—more of a boring thing. And I had seen an interesting
way to kind of hide the ball with my influences. I’d also seen -[Francis] Picabia, and Picabia made all these paintings of Spanish ladies—which I thought were totally fascinating, weird things. And I was always fascinated with Neue Sachlichkeit [the New Objectivity] and Christian Schad, this German realist from the ’20s and ’30s. I loved the weird, out-of-step-ness of what they were doing, and you couldn’t figure out where they stood politically and whether they were modernists at all—whether they were some sort of right-wing modernists . . . I also read this book around that time by [Percy] Wyndham Lewis. He was a Vorticist . . .

O’BRIEN: I’m sort of a Wyndham Lewis nut. I love his writing and his painting.

CURRIN: So you know who I’m talking about. I read this book . . .

O’BRIEN: The Demon of Progress in the Arts?

CURRIN: No, I read, uh, Tarr, and it just blew my mind.

O’BRIEN: Yeah. It’s amazing. We’re supposed to think only of Joyce as modernism. Lewis isn’t in the canon.

CURRIN: And because of it, I realized that there was another half of modernism that was completely hidden, because it had sort of lost—

O’BRIEN: The struggle for art history, because it had some fascist associations . . . Wyndham Lewis shouldn’t have said those things about Hitler. [laughs]

CURRIN: Yeah, yeah. [laughs] He was misquoted.

O’BRIEN: Lewis took it back. Hindsight is 20–20.

CURRIN: Hitler was what Europe needed. [laughs]

O’BRIEN: Or vice versa. But that was pretty early. Lewis took it all back.

CURRIN: He had to go to Canada, right?

O’BRIEN: Yeah.

CURRIN: But just to see modernism through a fascist lens, and that sort of social good, the progressive social good that’s always laid on LeCorbusier and modernism, and just on modernism. You realize that it was superfluous. [laughs]

O’BRIEN: Well, Le Corbusier is represented as an idealist, but he was invited by Mussolini in ’34.

CURRIN: There is a fascination with violence and power in all modernism, and I sort of saw classic modernism as being more similar toWyndham Lewis than to the Renaissance. It’s not about flow and the presence of humanism and all those things. People like Picabia became much more important to me when the perversity of the whole 20th century started to become prominent to me.

O’BRIEN: Yeah, I think that history hasn’t really been settled.

CURRIN: And so the rearguard feeling of figurative painting—the unprogressiveness ofmaking a figurative painting—didn’t bother me anymore. It’s not like I got enabled by a fascist, but much the same way that I stopped structuring my paintings as abstract paintings, I realized that subject matter does not matter. Or it matters the least. And especially interesting subject matter—that’s the worst. So that was kind of another way to stand out, to play it straight. Or if you do something interesting, then make it ham-fisted, try to fool the smart people—you know, fool the priests. That’s a long way of answering. It wasn’t unfashionable in any kind of daring way. It was just exactly what I was dying to find.

O’BRIEN: I think it was daring to take up the genres that had been made taboo by the success of minimalism and conceptual art that dominated the critical establishment. When Warhol was doing portraits, it was really unfashionable to do a portrait.

CURRIN: Right.

O’BRIEN: Especially a commissioned portrait. The still life was completely out until some brave souls started doing it again at the end of the ’80s. Wyndham Lewis’s book The Demon of Progress in the Arts is basically a very reasoned rant against modernism and how extremism was leading to the end of art. The idea that there is progress in the arts in the same way that there is progress in science is absurd. You get to what he called “the point beyond which there is nothing.” Art is evolutionary, in that it responds to the times but it doesn’t improve.