Interview

CURRIN: Yeah, it’s like being alive. It’s not superman that you’re making. Another big realization for me was: Just don’t do things that depress you. I realized if it depresses me, then I just don’t want to get close to it. If it brings me down, I just really can’t get into it. I think a big problem with art school is that it makes people feel like they have to be interested in everything that’s of high quality.

O’BRIEN: Yeah.

CURRIN: Donald Judd’s work is high quality, but it depresses me. And so immediately I could just say, “I don’t have to worry about Donald Judd now.” [laughs] It’s great. And I think a lot of people take a more scholarly approach where they feel like you’re supposed to study things that depress you.

O’BRIEN: Yeah.

CURRIN: But I think there’s not enough time to be interested in those things. And there’s so much that doesn’t depress me. There are aspects of repetition that also depress me. Seriality depresses me. Performance depresses me. Lack of narrative depresses me. All those kinds of cool things bring me down. So that was an important development for me, just realizing that you need to follow your pleasure, at least as a painter. I think any kind of artist needs to, no matter what you’re doing.

O’BRIEN: I looked up your Wikipedia page.

CURRIN: [laughs] Oh, god.

O’BRIEN: And it said that you’re a satirist. I don’t know how you feel about that. I mean, Wyndham Lewis was called a satirist, and I guess in his writing he was, in some ways, a satirist, but as a painter he wasn’t. I would never call your work satire. But for you, is there a satirical element in it? I mean, there are big boobs, but . . .

CURRIN: It’s not ironic. It was a conscious effort to—instead of being critical—just mock. [laughs] Or, instead of being critical, to do a caricature.

O’BRIEN: Yeah.

CURRIN: I always try to use this metaphor, and nobody ever understands what I’m talking about, but it’s like Jay Leno’s humor versus David Letterman’s. Jay Leno does this thing like, [imitating Leno] “Doncha hate it when . . .” So the joke is over already, it’s so overexplained. In other words, he distances himself from the thing that’s gonna be funny. There’s nothing worse than people talking about theories and humor, but I would say that I would be more like Leno than like Letterman, where it would be a caricature that sort of signals that this is going to be the funny part or the critical part. I thought that was more conducive to what I was trying to do—it fits in better with oil paintings than a completely ironic approach and being completely undercover. So I suppose I’m closer to David Levine, the illustrator from The New York Review of Books, who puts big heads on small bodies. In fact, I did a painting of Nadine Gordimer with a gigantic head. It’s like this intellectual whose head is expanded, because, partly, that’s the possibility of painting—it’s always an affirmation.

O’BRIEN: Yeah.

CURRIN: The feeling I got was that a painting of any quality is always going to have nerdy energy, an affirmation behind it. It’s gonna be like a kid playing a video game.

O’BRIEN: Pure enthusiasm.

CURRIN: Painting is like that much more than it is like being a lawyer and attacking a corporation, you know?

O’BRIEN: Yeah, that’s exactly the problem I have with calling your work satirical. If I look at Bea Arthur Naked, for example, that’s a very funny idea—there’s an ironic notion to that. But then if you actually look at the painting, there’s something very sympathetic about it. Because she’s somebody who scared me. If I were trying to find an intimidating female figure, at a certain point in my life I probably would have said Bea Arthur. Then you took her and, in the middle of a very funny idea, you found something human in her in that painting. It’s like you took a perverse idea and made it transcendent in the execution. It’s almost redemptive.

CURRIN: Yeah, and it’s also her fame. I mean, that was the funny thing—just the weirdness of having that as a celebrity face. Bea Arthur had a presence in my head. I had made a drawing of her long before that, when I was making abstract paintings.

O’BRIEN: Yeah?

CURRIN: And I remembered that drawing of Bea Arthur, and I found a picture of her, and I kind of copied and generalized that picture into a Soviet portrait of Bea Arthur, her eyes being black circles, and then I thought the breasts would be . . . that it would be like a Gorgon, you know, a terrifying Gorgon, and then a mother as well. But another, simpler way to put it is, whatever I’m painting, if I’m painting you and I’m painting your sleeve—it’s a gray knit sweater.

O’BRIEN: Yeah.

CURRIN: I have to like the fold in the sleeve. If I paint that sleeve in a painting, I have to like that sleeve. You have to like everything that you’re painting. Maybe on a narrative level it seems harsh . . . but I like everything in all my paintings. It’s as if you need to be less intelligent at that level.

O’BRIEN: One of my favorite quotes from Warhol is: “Pop art is about liking things.”

CURRIN: Well, that’s a profound statement.

O’BRIEN: People thought that Warhol was really taking the piss and being caustic, but he was taking things that were sort of ambivalent and embracing them.

CURRIN: And when you see the tremendous energy that’s in those things, which he always does as a kind of trick, because he had somebody else to pull the silk screen . . . But this idea of being completely standoffish masks this tremendous energy and love for every single thing that he makes.

O’BRIEN: Yep.

CURRIN: And it’s never critical art. I wonder whether there is such a thing as critical art. I suppose there are portraits of people who could destroy you. I mean, like Velázquez painting Pope Innocent X as a frightening child molester, or whatever the hell he looks like . . . [laughs] But a big part of moving toward that kind of figurative painting was, for me, there was a lethal laziness and a lack of probity in the context of art in the ’80s and ’90s. I mean, the main heavy lifting was done by Salle and Schnabel and Clemente and those people, because that horrified everybody from the early ’80s. That was really fun. I mean, as an art student, it was really fun to see them. And they’re all good artists, but a lot of them made just god-awful painting—embarrassingly terrible art. And that was the other thing: It was just a spectacle of people making unbelievably terrible art at a high level.