Benjamin Edwards

Email interview conducted by Cesare Biasini Selvaggi, curator for Mucciaccia Contemporary in Rome. My responses were written over the course of a three-week period, from May 18 to June 6, 2020. I guess once I get going I’ve got a lot to say. The whole thing runs to almost 17,000 words.

How would you define Ben Edwards?

There is a very short piece, just a page, by Jorge Luis Borges called “Borges and I,” in which he muses on the duality of the self. “Borges” is the one who takes all the credit, the public persona that people know, while this other, inner Borges is actually the one who does all the searching and suffering. Now that the public Borges has made art from the sweat of the inner figure, he (the inner Borges) says he will need to begin the search anew. He ends by wondering which character has written the page we have just read.

I’ve always loved this story because I feel this same duality, in many forms. In ancient philosophy the soul is actually the entity that binds these two poles, whether it’s body and mind, matter and spirit, or maker and critic, creator and preserver. In Taoism this is the tension between Yin and Yang. The Tao, or way, is the totality of the interplay of these forces, which is really a dynamic flux of energy through time. In the Western tradition we want to fix things, to lock down this flow. With enough time and experience, with playing the different roles of the self, one sees that identity ebbs and flows through the stations of life. I’ve also learned how dangerous it can be to try to hold on to what is not meant to be static.

Where were you born and where do you live?

I was born in Iowa City, Iowa, but when they were very young my parents drove with me to San Francisco, when I was a baby. I grew up in the Bay Area, then left for Los Angeles to go to college. In 1993 I moved to the east coast and lived in various places, including New York, before I settled with my wife in Washington D.C. in 2002.

Where would you have liked to be born and where would you like to live?

I don’t think I would like to have been born anywhere else. Growing up in the Bay Area I wanted to get away to L.A., then in college I wanted to go to grad school on the east coast and go to New York to join the art world. Once I’d done that for a few years, I wanted to get away and live in the country. Having been in Washington D.C. for nearly twenty years (never my first choice, but my wife’s career is here) I constantly think about living somewhere else. I guess the point is that the grass is always greener, and there’s something natural about wanderlust and dreams of the perfect place. I suppose these days, looking at the idiocy of my country and how badly we are screwing everything up for the world, I fantasize about moving to Europe, probably an English-speaking country so I wouldn’t have to learn another language. This seems fitting since my ancestors never really should have come here and stolen this land and enslaved people to begin with.

When and how was your interest for art born?

I remember in the second grade I made a drawing of a griffin that everyone loved. By the next year I had become known as the kid who could draw things well. Around this time my dad was really interested in painting and rented a studio, where I would hang out and draw while he painted. He used to take me to galleries and museums in San Francisco. When I was about ten, he wrote a book called How To Be More Creative, and that was a big inspiration for me. You could still find it many major museum gift shops up until about 15 years ago.

When I was in high school, I took art classes every year, and that’s when I thought I would be an artist, because by then it was obvious I was not going to be a professional baseball player. But I still didn’t really know what it meant to be an artist. When I got to college I learned the rules of that game, and I tried on various guises and styles, but in my first two years nothing really felt like me. I was still just a student. In my third year I began taking photos of ordinary scenes around Los Angeles: rows of police cars, office buildings, homeless people, grocery stores, 7-11s, that sort of thing. That was around the time that I discovered the work of Ed Ruscha, and his projects really gave me license to do what I wanted, to document the urban environment I was living in. My painting professor that year, Roger Herman, gave me one of his old slide projectors, and I started projecting my images and painting from them. At first I just painted from the image, but I found that shifting the projector around and swapping images was more interesting. So that was really the beginning of my method of layering and accumulating parts of images, which I still do today. With those paintings I felt that I had moved from art student to young artist. However, it wasn’t until I left school and was on my own for the first time that I really felt what it was to be an artist. Suddenly you face the abyss, and there’s no one giving you an assignment. You either put on your studio clothes and work, or you do something else. That’s when you feel the driving force that determines whether you’ll keep going or not. It can be very hard and very lonely. There have been times when finished works just go into storage, and I ask myself what the point of it all is. I think persevering in the face of that is what makes someone an artist. The act of creation becomes the point, not the results that come from it. It’s like the message of the Bhagavad Gita: whatever your dharma, you simply do that the best you can and don’t cling to the fruits of your labor. That’s something to aspire to, but I don’t think that’s human. But like I said, the soul is what binds the mortal and the divine, and that god-like part of us is something to hope for.

Which was the most important acquaintance for your formation?

Without a doubt, meeting my wife during our first year in college had a huge impact on my development as a human being. Before I met her I was just a stupid kid who could draw well. But she taught me how to get serious about something, how to focus and work hard for what you believe in. She’s the smartest person I’ve ever met, and so passionate about issues that affect this country and the world. I wouldn’t be anything without her.

But by “acquaintance” I’m not sure that’s what you mean. I think of all the people I’ve worked with at various art-related jobs over the years, from art supply stores to frame shops to art handling. I learned a lot from many of these people, both good and bad things. 

But if I had to pick a single person then there is one brief experience I will never forget. In 1994 I was teaching an after-school art class to kids, and I was probably taking the whole thing way too seriously. It should have been more fun, but I was trying to teach them “art,” which was a bit of a mistake. There was one seven-year-old boy, really wild and quite a handful, and one day he was making an absolute mess. I had bought these supplies with a limited budget, but this kid didn’t care about that. When I told him not to waste the materials he said probably one of the wisest things anyone’s ever said to me. “I’m not wasting them,” he said, “I’m using them.” I try to remember that when I’m experimenting in the studio and things seem to be going nowhere. I try to remember to have some fun and not worry about the results. The process in itself is valuable.

 Is there an event or an acquaintance so intense which changed the way you look at things?

After graduating from college I went straight to grad school at the San Francisco Art Institute, but I decided to leave after only a semester because it wasn’t the right fit for me. But I did happen to take an ecology class from a rather strange old hippie, and that experience really opened my eyes. This was in 1992, so before climate change was really on anyone’s radar in any meaningful way. This guy talked about the fact that if they wanted to the car companies could make vehicles with water as their only exhaust, and I thought it just sounded crazy. Years later, of course, I knew he had been talking about fuel cells, cars that run on hydrogen. The catch is that you have to produce the hydrogen, and the way you do that may or may not be clean, but that’s beside the point. As time passed, and ecological issues became more prominent, I realized that much of what he said was right, even though it sounded kind of insane at the time. I learned the lesson to cautiously trust ideas outside the mainstream, or at least not to dismiss them without a fair hearing, while at the same time being highly skeptical of what I hear from more conventional news sources. In a way this also taught me to trust my own artistic intuition, to listen to the inner self when a seemingly crazy idea just randomly appears out of the blue one day. Most importantly, though, he taught me how to see and think ecologically, that is, from a holistic, system-wide view. Everything exists as part of an integrated system, and everything has its place, even waste and death. To me, capitalism is inherently anti-ecological because it tries to deny parts of the system it doesn’t value. The unsavory elements become “externalities,” which is a fancy way of saying that they’re swept under the rug where we don’t have to be bothered with them. To have ecological awareness is to say that the emperor has no clothes and that those nasty things we’ve hidden away will someday grow and fester into something truly terrifying.

 Is there an exhibition (not yours) that you remember with intensity?

In the summer of 1994 I lived in Washington D.C. for the first time because my wife was an intern at the White House. I took advantage of the free museums and saw a lot of art. The National Museum of American Art happened to have an exhibition of Thomas Cole’s series The Course of Empire. They installed it as Cole had originally intended, with wooden columns and red velvet curtains. It was beautiful, so dramatic (or, to modern eyes, melodramatic); it was like nothing I’d ever seen before. Those paintings have affected me deeply ever since. For anyone not familiar with them, it is a group of five paintings that depict the rise and fall of a fictional city. The central painting is slightly larger, and is flanked by two paintings on either side. The stages of this civilization are: the Savage State, the Arcadian or Pastoral State, Consummation, Destruction, and Desolation. It’s not hard to see the ecological connection, and given that Cole was really interested in showing the wild beauty of the American landscape under threat from a burgeoning industrialism, one can take this as an early warning to his contemporaries about what he was seeing around him. It’s a very Romantic vision, but also depressing because there’s something Cassandra-like about the artist in this vein. The visionary has an intuition that something is really off, but nobody will listen until it’s too late. I think ever since seeing these paintings for the first time my work has been haunted by Cole’s message. Taken on its surface it’s quite bleak, but I think if you look at his work more closely there’s a more hopeful message. Living in D.C., I’m lucky that the National Gallery has another one of his most famous series, The Voyage of Life. Here the paintings follow the course of a man’s life from birth to death, along the river of time. For the entire journey he is guided by an angel, though the man doesn’t see her until the very last panel, when he sees a sort of Jacob’s Ladder ascending into the heavens.

I like to put these two series together, so that they form a longer series of nine paintings. When you do this you’ll see that they match almost exactly what Edward Whitmont, in his book The Symbolic Quest, calls the stages of the Ur-myth, which is the mystery of life, revelation, and death. You have two visions intertwined, one very negative and ending in oblivion, the other very positive and ending in transcendence. Cole was a devout Christian, so you could take this as a fairly conventional didacticism about accepting Jesus, and so on, but to do that I think is too literal. Religious and mythological motifs must be taken psychologically, not literally, otherwise it becomes a kind of controlling dogma rather than a guide and ordering system for life. In my own meditation on these paintings as a whole, I’ve come to believe that there is actually a missing tenth phase, which viewers must supply for themselves. If you leave it at nine then the series forms a standard Gnostic conception of reality, where matter gives us life but it is to be transcended. In this view spirit is supreme. And that may have been what Cole intended. But since he so loved the natural world I’m not sure if that’s true. God is immanent as well as transcendent, and to live and suffer and die is to be human, and to know God (or as I often tell my kids, the Goddess too) is to experience both of these realities. So what is the missing phase? It’s the rains or even the floods that return the water to the earth. In The Voyage of Life, the man follows the water from a cave in the mountains all the way out to the sea. This is the Earth Goddess giving life, but the man’s spirit eventually ascends to the Sky God. What we don’t see is the Sky God’s capacity as giver of life anew. The Sun gives life but it can also be oppressive in its heat. It dries and dessicates. The heavens also contain clouds and the new water of life. In Greek mythology Ouranos was the primordial god of the heavens. One possible root of his name is that which also gives us the word “urinate.” What’s the point of all this? That there is no end, there is no collapse. Individually we all die, but collectively life will go on. It really depends on the scale you’re talking about: for the individual, or even a civilization, it looks like death, but just widen your scope and you call it dramatic change.

Which artists and works have influenced you the most?

I’ve already mentioned Ruscha and Cole. In college I was really influenced by Gerhard Richter. I’ve found that as I’ve gotten older I tend to look at more artists from the past rather than contemporary art. I love Cezanne and Gauguin. Picasso and Van Gogh have been important too. Edward Hopper was a huge influence when I was younger. I can’t forget Courbet, Manet, and Monet… but now my list is getting too long.

Whenever I answer a question like this and notice that these are all men (and white), I stop to think about what women artists have been important to me. Sadly, because art history hasn’t recorded as many women artists, it’s more difficult to come up with names. I’ve always really liked Georgia O'Keeffe and Frida Kahlo, but I can’t honestly say that they are in the same category for me as those that I mentioned in my first list. It’s much easier to find contemporary women artists to admire. Nicole Eisenman, Sarah Sze, Dana Schutz, and Inka Essenhigh come readily to mind. I enjoy their work very much, but I’m not sure if I can say they’ve influenced me. Joan Brown was a fantastic Bay Area figurative painter from the 50s. I really like to see the transformation her work took. I find that really inspiring. 

Over the last decade I have been looking at historic Eastern art more and more, particularly Chinese painting, but also Zen. And I love the fantastic landscapes and stories in Hindu art. I have tried, mostly unsuccessfully I think, to incorporate these aesthetics into my work.

What is your typical day?

My routine changed pretty dramatically in the fall of 2016. For years I had suffered from various pains but it got worse at that time. I had severe lower back pain for months and couldn’t do much. I found out that I have a form of arthritis called Ankylosing Spondylitis, which mostly affects the back and pelvis but also can affect tendons throughout the body. This change in my health meant that I couldn’t work as much, so I had much more time for reading. I had always read the newspaper in the mornings, but I got more and more interested in what I was reading, so I made space for that every morning. I religiously keep to this routine of about an hour of study with my morning coffee. I used to always get right to work after this morning routine, usually by about ten o’clock, but I’ve found that once I start working I get obsessed and don’t want to come out of it. I was neglecting my physical therapy and exercise, which is vital for preventing a bad episode of back pain. So now I make sure I do that before lunch. The mornings have become a time for reflection, writing in my journal (which is usually writing out my thoughts about what I’m trying to do with work), brainstorming and making notes with some kind of background instrumental music, and walking, swimming, and stretching. After lunch I rest and read a little more, usually something lighter, and then hopefully by two o’clock I’m in the studio getting to work. If I’m lucky I will have been able to spend a little time in the morning working on the computer, and I almost never get out to the studio before the afternoon. Half of the year it’s too cold out there anyway, and it takes a few hours to warm up. During the summer months, however, I reverse that schedule because it’s cooler in the first part of the day.

Once I’m in the studio I usually have two things going, one new and one old, or at least closer to being done. I’ll work for a few hours, then take my dog for a walk, then work on something else. Breaking things up into two-hour blocks helps me to deal with the pain and discomfort. After a few hours my arm and hand are pretty sore, and if I’ve been standing at the easel then I’ll need to switch to sitting down. I wind things down around six or seven in the evening and then lie down and watch the news.

After dinner I’ll usually watch a TV show or a movie with my wife or daughter (my son is not so easy). Sometimes I read before bed, but that usually only lasts about ten minutes before I succumb to sleep.

That’s a typical day, but rarely does a day go exactly like that. Life tends to intrude.

Have you got any ritual when you work?

My listening routine provides me with a sense of ritual. In the mornings I listen to soundtrack music or something atmospheric and instrumental, but never anything with lyrics, and no jazz. At noon I stream KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic, and I’ll have that on and off during lunch, etc. So if it’s a good day and I’m in the studio by two o’clock then I can listen to that while I work for an hour. I consider three o’clock to outer limit of getting to work, and by then I switch to news radio, which I can only tolerate for a few hours. After walking my dog I’ll listen to music again, anything from jazz to more contemporary music, whatever is new and interesting.

The one ritualistic activity I have in the studio is cleaning my palette. I scrape off the old paint onto a folded up paper towel, then I use that to wipe it clean. Then I unfold the paper towel and look at the design made by the paint. I always find this interesting but I don’t know what to do with them. I have probably hundreds of these stacked up, which I’m sure is some kind of hazard. I’m hoping to one day figure out what to do with them.

 Is there space for the unforeseen in your work?

This has always been a big factor in my work, and I’ve found that at times when it’s missing things dry up and get boring, too controlling. I’ve used many, many techniques over the years for inserting a certain level of chaos into what I’m doing. Early on, using a slide projector, this came from shifting the image around, as well as layering multiple images to get unforeseen combinations. In 2005 I started using a digital projector and using Javascript. I made an HTML viewer with a timer, so that every thirty seconds or every minute an image would suddenly disappear and a new one would project. Random numbers using a computer script have been the most common way to do this. In my 3D modelling program I use a script that will randomly load different objects from a folder, and I use that quite a bit as a composition tool. For a few years I experimented with chaos in my painting materials. I started using everyday household liquids like coffee, wine, motor oil, dish soap, and on and on, to see what kinds of results I could come up with. The challenge is to use the chaos, to mix it effectively with some kind of order, so that you get something truly complex and interesting, rather than just junk. I suppose that’s where the aesthetic and intuitive eye comes in. You start out with something and find one small part that works, and then you can build around that.

The important thing to me about using chance events is that it unlocks what’s going on in the unconscious. The conscious ego tends to want to control things, to be in charge, to know. That’s fine, but when you stay in that place things will eventually dry up and die, because nothing is moving. It’s like a very calm pool of water. The water may be very clear and still, and you can see right down to all the mud that’s settled on the bottom, but this is also a breeding ground for stagnation and death. If the water is moving then everything is maybe a little muddled, but something is happening. Change is happening. There’s a dynamic tension that happens in the creative process, from clear to muddled to clear again. It’s an ongoing process that generates new life.

Lately I’ve been trying to use techniques other than computer randomness to give me options. I’ve used dice, cards, the I Ching, and many other things. But it’s always important to keep in mind that what comes about is a suggestion or starting point. In itself it has no value. It’s how you interact with it that makes meaning.

Have you ever got fear of what you do?

This is the big one. Any creative person has to come to terms with fear. It’s always there. But there is a valuable side to this too. It’s a healthy sense of critical caution, so that you don’t just follow any old whim. It’s not really the smartest of psychological forces. It’s really primal, but it has its own logic, and if you can understand where it’s coming from then you can be allies. I like to think of this fear (of failure, of doing something stupid, of being foolish, or just wasting my time) as something like my dog. Whenever someone comes onto the porch, he barks. He’s obviously afraid, because whatever is happening is unknown, and it doesn’t readily fit into his model of a stable universe. Humans are just as fearful, just in more sophisticated ways. When I’m venturing into the unknown with work, I’m afraid, because I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s really the ego that is afraid, because it doesn’t want to lose something, it wants to hold on. But this is also the critical judge, the harsh voice that sounds the alarm, warning that precious resources are being wasted. To me, this really comes from the needs of the body, which the ego extends to all matters, even when it’s outside its jurisdiction, like creative, aesthetic work, the generation of the new. So it’s important to establish an equal counterpoint to this fearful, cautious side. The risk-taking, adventurous side must also believe in itself, and know that it is on equal footing with the critic, otherwise nothing will ever get done and things will die. Once they have this agreement (and this is the soul again, holding the two poles together in dynamic tension) then things can happen in a healthy way with the proper understanding. However, there is never truly a perfect balance. It’s a constant shifting back and forth. As an artist you’re doing, then standing back and looking, judging. It can be very manic-depressive sometimes, very schizophrenic. Looking at what’s going on at different times of the day, over many days, is really important, to get a proper view. Hopefully the artwork emerges at the end of this process. This is not always guaranteed. A lot of things give in to the harsh judge and don’t make it. This can be really frustrating sometimes.

Have you ever had crisis times during your artistic career? How did you overcome them?

I’ve already alluded to one crisis, having to do with my physical condition. The period I mentioned, which came to a head in the fall of 2016, took several years to get to that point, and while I’m not sure it’s over, I’ve definitely come to terms with it and integrated the lessons from it into my life. But to see this crisis just in physical terms is to miss the point. It’s also psychological, and it has to do with the nature of change. A true crisis is not overcome; its reality simply becomes knowable and accepted.

Again, Cole’s work provides some instruction about this. You could see his five stages in The Course of Empire as corresponding to the five stages of the Great Goddess, or Nature, as Robert Graves talks about in his book The White Goddess. These stages are Birth, Initiation, Consummation, Repose, and Death. In Cole’s series The Voyage of Life, there are four stages, and these are obviously analogous to the four seasons, which is the relationship between the Sun and the Earth, the vital principle moving through periods of waxing and waning. One can apply this cycle to a single year or a whole life, or in the case of larger structures, like corporations, this might be decades, and for nations, centuries. For modes of civilization, and the consciousness that is expressed through them, the cycle may last millennia.

The notion of “overcoming a crisis,” as a conquering hero might do, is a peculiarly Western ideal that has dominated our culture for the last two thousand years. It is not that this idea should in itself be overcome, but rather made conscious and accepted as part of our psychology. The truth is that a complete life moves through each of the stages mentioned above. In The Voyage of Life, you could equate each panel as being roughly 18 years of a person’s life. This means that the crisis comes sometime shortly after the 36th year, which pretty closely corresponds to Dante’s age of 35 at the beginning of the Divine Comedy, where he finds himself lost in a dark wood. Carl Jung’s “creative illness” came on at this age as well. I certainly noticed that something was no longer right with me at about 35, and by 37 I could no longer ignore it. And again, I want to stress that the problem is not physical age or deterioration—this is simply the outward manifestation. What is appropriate for the stage of Childhood or Youth is no longer appropriate for Manhood (to use Cole’s titles, or middle age generally) or Old Age. One must accept that life gives new directives and roles at these stages. If a person does not align properly to this, then a catastrophe ensues.

How would you describe your research?

In the last few years my research has become much more serious and disciplined. There was a period in 2017-18 when I was not sure I would be able to keep painting. I had a tear in a tendon in my painting arm, and it wasn’t getting any better. Eventually, with enough rest and moderation of physical work, it did get better, but it’s not completely healed. During this time, I read more and more, and I became much more involved in my research. I realized that my previous conception of what an artist does, which is informed by our cultural paradigm, does not really fully define what I’m doing or what I’m after. I began to take my research into philosophy, psychology, and mythology, among other things, as a valuable part of my work in its own right, not just in service to making art. In the fall of 2018 I began a doctoral program in depth psychology, but after completing the first year I took a leave of absence in order to make work for this show. Now that the coronavirus is upon us, I’m not sure when I’ll be able to return to it. Eventually I would like to complete the PhD and put everything together in my teaching to art students. Writing has also been very important to me, so I will probably pursue that as well. I now see these things as just as vital as painting. My research is intense and ongoing, and it feeds all of my creative production.

I would say most of my research is through books, but I try to get out to museums as much as I can. Living in Washington D.C., I’m fortunate to have many great museums nearby and free. The National Gallery is one of my favorites, as is the Met in New York, and the Field Museum in Chicago. More recently, the natural world is playing more of a role in my research process as well. Just taking time to notice things on my walks, for example, or learning about the rhythms of the stars and planets, as well as the seasons.

What is the line of your research and its practices?

I will try to be as brief as possible on this question, because I could really go on and on and get into dissertation territory, and I don’t want to bore you with that.

For as long as I can remember I have been very attuned to my physical surroundings, and when I was young this was a mostly suburban environment that was beginning to undergo very significant changes. Growing up in the San Jose area and seeing the birth of the tech industry, with all of its allure and mystery and promise, affected me very profoundly I think. But this technological change also brought destruction and a feeling of being overwhelmed by some force that was really getting out of control. I saw orchards vanish, and every time I returned to my hometown it seemed more and more alien to me. Now I go back and I don’t recognize the place. And I certainly wouldn’t want to live there.

I suppose my first questions as an artist, when I was in LA and beginning to take my surroundings seriously as an object of aesthetic exploration, were about how I feel or should feel about this junk culture that has flooded into our world. One can simply throw up one’s hands and call it progress, or, at the other end of the spectrum one could rail against it and risk the epithet of Luddite. Neither position seemed the right one for me. I think I am still trying to understand that tension, and that division within myself. We tend to think of technology and nature as opposed, but is that really true? Is it not hubris on the part of humanity that we think that we ourselves are not part of nature, that we can separate from it, oppose it, conquer it, that our culture operates by a different set of laws of our own making? This seems like a dangerous illusion to me.

So for many years I sought to understand the nature of technology, this force that has ripped through human civilization at an increasing rate over the past few thousands years. If you look at the ideas of futurists like Ray Kurzweil you will surely come across one of his charts showing the exponential growth of technological innovation, and it becomes very tempting to agree with him that someday we will all be able to upload our individual consciousness into some cloud-based supercomputer. This is the old ascension-of-spirit idea rearing its head again, like the Rapture. On the other hand, if you take seriously the dire warnings of environmentalists, then things seem to be moving in the opposite direction. We are heading for collapse and ruin. This is the downward movement of the body, of physis, nature, gravity. How does one reconcile these two conflicting prophecies? I began to see that both can be true simultaneously in the context of a global community that is ruled by a system that thrives on vast economic inequality. You can have the super-rich in their bubbles of wealth, cut off from all the suffering, and you can have the poorest people in the world on the front lines of ecological catastrophe. As we know from Dickens, when you have the best of times living side by side with the worst of times, revolution is surely in the air. Or as Yeats said in his poem The Second Coming, “the center cannot hold, things fall apart.”

Several years ago I became very interested in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, because in his later writings he really addressed this head-on. In his essay “The Question Concerning Technology” he specifically inquires into the essence of modern technology. His bottom line is that this is what he calls Gestell, or enframing. It is a mode of Being where everything, even other humans, even oneself, only shows up only as a resource to be exploited. His alternative to this is poiesis, or making, in which Being unfolds into disclosure, or truth, which he calls aletheia, translated as “unforgetting, or bringing out of oblivion.” This was a very attractive philosophy for me because it gives the artist an important role in moving consciousness into new territory. The danger, however, is that it perpetuates the strict division between technology and nature, and even seems to assign values to them. It is all too easy to fall into the trap of the Gnostic versus the Luddite. I think Heidegger tries to avoid that trap in his later writing, but he’s so elliptical and difficult to pin down that unless the reader is willing to work and to really think then his point is lost. I think basically the power of technology is a challenge, a test, to the human species. Heidegger said that technology is something that humans cannot master by themselves, and that only a god can save us now. Right now we’re failing the test, quite badly. Are we doomed then? History shows that we’re probably in for some suffering, but we’ll get through it in some form or another. Whether we learn our lesson is another matter. How many more millennia must pass before we achieve some balance again, and will we ever have the power to sustain it? The very notion that “we” do this or that, that we have the power to begin with, is a fantasy. “We” didn’t create the climate crisis, and “we” can’t solve it. These forces have been baking for thousands of years, and we’ve just happened to come along when the pot begins to bubble. Technology itself is not something that we do, and neither is art. They are both forces of nature in a perpetual wrestling match.

In summary, I would say that my work continues to explore the dynamic between these two poles, and to try to understand the cosmic order that governs their cyclic patterns. I’m still trying to understand the role the artist plays in this drama. It seems to me that our idea of the artist is something that has changed over time along with changes in technological paradigms and modes of consciousness.

When do you decide that a work is finished?

That’s easy: when I become too afraid to do anything else to it. At some point you just have to let the thing go and admit that it is what it is. It probably didn’t turn out as I had hoped, but I accept it nonetheless. Every work is a failure in some respect, otherwise I would never go on to make another one. Yesterday’s great vision is tomorrow’s failure, but that’s okay, because there’s always a new vision coming up to take its place.

Could you describe the concrete materiality in your work?

I prefer to use oil paint over acrylics, but have used both extensively over the years. There have been times when I’ve mixed various substances with the paint, both oil and acrylic, so that the surfaces can be very textured. It was important for me that the painting be experienced differently in person than in reproduction. Lately I have been less concerned with getting elaborate with the paint, and I have a pretty straightforward method of building up layers of oil paint. I’ll usually start with a monochrome under-painting, with sienna tones and thicker white paint for the highlighted areas. Then I’ll apply color in block shapes over that as a further underpainting. Sometimes the paint layer can be thick, but usually not. I try to be as free and loose as possible within the structure of the composition at this stage, and just enjoy the process of painting. After that layer dries I’ll work section by section over the whole thing, applying a thinned coat of stand oil to the area I’m going to work on for that day. Then I’ll do a final layer in oil, and the stand oil film gives the painting at this stage more fluidity and more translucence.

As I said before, I’ve tried some experiments with different materials, everyday household liquids mixed with paint or ink, to see what kind of new effects I can get. Some of my paintings have this as an underpainting. I’m trying to get that more chaotic ground to inform what I paint over it, but I often find that this chaotic ground is so beautiful in itself, so I don’t want to touch it. It’s become a big problem for me, how to work with it in a way that I find satisfying.

What are the searches that best represent you and best treat your expectations?

If I look back on all the things I’ve really been interested in, that really got me intrigued, from the time I was a kid, the common thread is the intersection between place, story, and development. So before I knew anything about Thomas Cole’s work, or Thomas More’s Utopia, or any art or mythology really, I was a bored little kid trying to think of what to draw, and I would end up creating these fantasy islands. I would pick the best spot for my mansion, a baseball stadium, the best beach, and so on. When my family first got an Apple IIE computer in the 80s, I learned how to write very simple computer code using the Basic programming language. I wrote stories that gave you either/or options and you could go on this journey step by step and the game would unfold according to what choices you made. When I was in college, I started playing the computer game SimCity and I absolutely fell in love with that. I bought a Mac and got really hooked on the game, eventually making massive printouts of my urban creations. I’ve always tried to incorporate this love of creating a place and a story with my artwork, but I feel that I’m still searching for something, that I haven’t gotten it right.

The interesting thing about SimCity, as well as many of my creations (because I’ve made many versions of my own fantasy city in my work; not all of this is apparent in my actual painting but remains hidden in my computer archives), is that the fun is in the process of making rather than the finished product. This relates to my interest in psychology. I began to realize that this process is a vehicle for self-revelation, and to reach the end of the journey is death. You always have to have a mystery in front of you, otherwise things stop and you’re psychologically dead. Things need to move to be alive, but you can’t move unless you have the emptiness of the unknown to pull you in. There is fear of the unknown, as I’ve already talked about, and that is our healthy sense of caution, but there is also the intense desire to know the unknown, to make it known, to incorporate it into our being.

In which direction your artistic research is going?

Right now I am very interested in mythology, in particular similar themes that come up again and again across cultures. This is why for a number of years I have been more and more drawn to Jungian psychology, because Jung really set out to bring ancient myths and philosophical teachings in line with the psychological present. These stories become guides for how we explain what is happening to us. I have also been thinking quite a lot about what a story is and why we make them. A story is basically a chronicle of change that happens to one person or a whole people. This change can either be one of balance to imbalance, or vice versa. When you put a series of stories together you can arrive at a cycle, where the end echoes the beginning, but it cannot be exactly the same. Some lesson or revelation must have resulted from the change. To me, this is the purpose of our existence, to glean the lessons of life so that they may passed down to our descendants. We do this by learning about our past, as well as by extending the mythic structures into the future so that we may understand what is happening to us. We eat chaos and produce order, and eventually that order breaks down into chaos again, fertilizing new life and growth. Consciousness is an awareness and stewardship of that system.

To really understand mythology, you have to know about a lot of things. You need to be familiar with history, archaeology, and also astrology, because even though the modern person will dismiss the idea that the stars and planets reflect some cosmic order, there is no denying that the ancients believed that. So if you don’t know anything about astrology and its traditions, then you’re not going to know what and how they were thinking. The same goes for archaeology. You can’t possibly hope to understand the stone circles of Britain, for example, if you don’t have some basic literacy with the seasonal movements of the Sun, and its relationship to the Moon.

Lately I have been looking at the history of games as well. It’s curious that board games evolved right along with writing and the rest of civilization, including mathematics and astronomy. The oldest game is 5000 years old, from ancient Sumer. So the game is just as old as the first written epic, the story of Gilgamesh. I think these are all ordering systems that people invented, and they are all interconnected. The wheel of the zodiac is the first great cosmic clock, and many early board games are of the circle and cross form. Just as time moves along with the great wheel, the players move their pieces according to chance and fate along the board. And in a story, the main character travels along the same wheel from beginning to end, at either a higher or lower level, but in the same position in terms of the board. Or, the hero may move from an outer position to the center and then back out again, as in the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, for example. The game and the story often share a dualistic structure. One side is white, the other black. The hero battles the villain.

 In terms of Jungian psychology, you could say that this is the birth of the ego-shadow dynamic in consciousness. I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that this evolves along with writing and the documenting of goods of value. So the ego and wealth, or health, or goodness, are inextricably linked, while the shadow represents everything dirty or alien or evil. Suddenly people get the idea that death can be conquered, that the soul is immortal. What begins as a game of black and white turns into a cosmic battle of good versus evil, and in the myths of the Iron Age start to exalt the “masculine” and demonize the “feminine.” The rest is history. I think artists have been trying to resist that in various forms ever since. However, I don’t think it’s particularly constructive to think in terms of masculine and feminine. I prefer Heidegger’s distinction of Gestell and poiesis, which is also very close to Iain McGilchrist’s thesis, developed in his book The Master and His Emissary, that the left-brain values of dominance and control have usurped the more holistic and meaningful right-brain values, which are traditionally associated with the arts.

Can you tell me a project or a work where you find a positive meeting between your story and this materialization?

I’m not sure I totally understand this question. There are projects that could be seen as being more successful, but I don’t like to think of my work in these terms. I’ve tried a lot of different things over the years. Sometimes I’ll keep coming back to an idea over and over again, thinking about it but never really getting down to exploring it. Sometimes things just wither away and die, neglected and forgotten. I guess we tend to think of the things that make it into a finished artwork as positive, and among those some really stand out, but you can’t have any of that without the negative space.

What are the preferred tools for the development of your work?

I’ve already mentioned my painting media, and my experiments. The other side of that has been photography and digital imaging, which has always been very important in my work. In the early 90s I was taking photographs using mostly slide film and then projecting them. As the decade progressed, we kept hearing more and more about the new digital cameras that would be available at affordable prices. It wasn’t until 1998 that I finally got a PC and bought my first digital camera and taught myself Photoshop. This completely revolutionized my process. I started making printouts from Photoshop and then switched to an opaque projector. In 2001, after my first solo exhibition, I started using 3D modeling software, a now-defunct program called Truespace. That allowed me to control the space and generate my own imagery. So instead of relying on photographs I could make models of architecture, render an image, and then paint from that. I grew frustrated with the imprecision and labor-intensiveness of projecting everything, and since I was starting to use some very complex graphics, I had to devise a new way to get my imagery to canvas. So in 2004 I came up with a process of designing a day’s worth of painting in Photoshop and then printing the shapes directly onto masking tape. I applied the masking tape in strips to the canvas, then cut the shapes as stencils for acrylic paint. This allowed me to get an extremely high level of detail. My 2004 painting Immersion shows this technique the most clearly.

Once I finished that painting, for my second solo exhibition, I was exhausted, and I knew that I could not sustain that process. I wanted to switch back to oil and using the projector. So in 2005 I bought a digital projector and wrote some code for a viewer so that I could shift my virtual images at will. In 2007 I switched from using Truespace to 3D Studio Max, a much more sophisticated modeling program. But using the projector and trying to paint in a detailed way caused me some physical problems. For the first time, at the end of 2008, I developed severe pain in my painting hand and wrist. Earlier in the year I had already developed a new experimental technique with acrylics, using a vinyl cutter to make stencils. So in order to let my hand heal I stopped using oils and the projector and instead spent the next few years making a new body of work in acrylic. These were also extremely detailed and complex, but I was able to manage it with a very sophisticated technique, and with the help of an assistant.

By 2010 my hand had mostly healed, and I was looking for ways to go back to oil painting, and to push my work in new directions. I think I am basically still in that same territory. Now, having tried so many technological experiments, I am really tired of constantly keeping up with all the changes. Recently my old computer died, and my version of 3D Studio Max went with it. So now I am forced to use the new version, which now seems very foreign. All the old things I have relied on have changed, and I can’t get them back. Now my focus is less on using the computer and more on physical models. I have begun to make models out of cardboard, returning to where I was over twenty years ago before I bought my digital camera and learned Photoshop. I suppose I’m trying to strike a good balance among all these techniques, so that I can still use the computer without becoming completely dependent on it.

What is your exhibition that you are most fond of?

I really couldn’t say. I’m not sure I’m happy with any of them. I’m still hoping to someday get it right. I think I felt the most proud of, and most content after, my first solo exhibition in New York in 2001. I worked then harder than I’ve ever worked in my life.

Which artist of the present or past would you like to do an artistic duet with? A four-handed project?

I’d like to go back to the Neolithic period, when artists were still painting the walls of the caves but also beginning to decorate pottery and sculpting figurines. I’d like to know what they were thinking and feeling as they made them. I wouldn’t mind being there when they built the stone circles at Avebury.

Among your project and exhibitions, what gave you the most satisfaction and, on the contrary, the most disappointment?

I prefer not to express particular disappointments, of which there are many. My works are like my children. I did my best and they are what they are. It’s not for me to judge, except privately as a part of my own artistic development.

How important is the connection with the art of the past for a contemporary artist?

I can only answer this for myself, for the kind of artist I want to be. Our notion of the artist is really broad today, and includes a wide range of traditions. Among the younger generations, like my two teenage kids, if you say “artist” then you’re most likely talking about a musical artist. In a way this is totally appropriate, because the first artists were mostly likely shamanic figures who used singing, drumming, and dancing to reach an ecstatic state and commune with the spirits of the ancestors. I think it also depends on the age of the artist. For a young artist, say, under 30, I don’t think it’s very important to be attuned to the past. Youth is about looking forward, pushing to develop one’s own unique voice. To dwell in the past can be dangerous because it can muffle that emerging voice. I’ve found that as I’ve aged I’ve become much more interested in past traditions, that I want to widen and deepen the conversation. I’m not as much interested in contemporary art, but I am intensely interested in learning about history and ancient traditions.

Nietzsche addressed this question in his essay The Uses and Abuses of History for Life. There he talks about the weight of history as being a potential burden for the creative artist because it gives rise to the feeling that everything’s already been done. There’s this kind of smothering and stifling from so much tradition. The critic, on the other hand, has a need for history and tradition so that the new may be put in the proper context, and so it may be considered worthy for saving. This tension, which may be seen as a variant of the Dionysian and Apollonian polarity he laid out in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, is exactly the same dynamic that I spoke of earlier. There is the more intuitive and spontaneous mode that is needed for creation, an assertive, willful push into the chaos of the unknown, where one must almost become the chaos and remove any barriers. And then there’s the stepping back and evaluating, where the critical eye for order and clarity comes in. That’s the creator-critic polarity that every artist must develop. In my view, in the first half of life the intuitive spark comes more naturally. It’s much easier to just jump into something. But with more experience comes more judgment, and a wider body of work as a context for new works to develop within. In the second half of life the role of the critic comes more naturally, and one must work to get that spark back. It’s very easy to get overly critical.

In the end, all art begins as a conversation between individual and society in the present. As time goes on and the circle widens, the artist engages in dialog with more and more artists from the past, but with an eye toward the future. One must eventually ask oneself: what am I doing today that may be valuable for the future? How can I initiate a new dialog? How am I a bridge from the past to the future?

What is the strongest criticism you feel to do about the system of culture and art today?

The short answer is money. Art should not be a profession. One should not have to worry about money when making art. However, if you took money out of the equation then you probably wouldn’t have art anymore. You’d have spirituality or religion. Art would go back to being a form of worship and communal with the divine, as it was before the Medici invented modern banking in the Renaissance.

In the modern age we tend to think that art has no function or purpose. Aesthetics are non-utilitarian. It is this pure realm of beauty, the subjective experience as developed by Kant in the Critique of Judgment. However, I don’t think that’s true at all. Art has become an industry. It’s a system that produces commodities that are bought and sold. It is still a form of worship, but its mechanisms have gone underground, into the unconscious. This is ideology that for the most part goes unquestioned. When Nietzsche declared God dead, he meant the old, recognizable God, the one you can easily identify. The new God is the invisible hand of the market, the idea that capitalism magically governs our globalized world. So art is still tied to religion, it does have a purpose, but that social function has become twisted and deformed. When the conscious object of worship—God or the gods—disappeared, the religious need didn’t go away. Rather, it chose a different object, albeit unconsciously. The modern conception of the artist is the visionary and the prophet, the lone Romantic hero who will deliver the voice of truth to the people. The art world has its pantheon of such heroes that have been handed down to us, as well as the new prophets that still walk among us. The system feeds off of this heroic ideal and attempts to neutralize its revolutionary power by converting it into a more abstract form of power, that of the commodity, which may be equated with the language of ones and zeroes. This abstract power resides in that virtual universe we call “the market.” This virtual world is really our collective psyche and represents all our hopes and fears.

Ultimately, the market is nothing more than societal belief about how the future will go. It goes up and we have growth. We all just assume it will steadily go up and we will all be better off tomorrow than we were yesterday. Over the last few decades we’ve seen a number of holes punched in that faith. More and more it looks like it’s simply not allowed to go down, because that would be too dangerous. That really makes you question whether or not we’re living in the real world. Maybe we’re serving to perpetuate a fantasy that may one day turn into a nightmare. I wrote about this back in early 2013 in an essay called The Artist in the Age of Contraction. This was a lecture I delivered at Georgia State University. After the talk I was told that people thought it was quite dark. But I think world events have shown that I was basically correct.

In a perfect world I would make art and restore its proper focus, which is the mystery of the divine. I would be able to give what I make away so that it could be enjoyed publicly, for free or at cost. Money, as we know it today, is nothing more than an enslavement of future generations. The growth we’ve enjoyed must be paid for eventually.

What do you think of the relationship between contemporary art and politics?

We live in a time when there are so many opportunities to have a voice, whether it’s through social media or voting or consumption habits, and yet it feels like it’s more and more difficult for this voice to have much impact on social change. Collectively there is great power, but individually there is very little. I think making art is one way to put a different kind of voice out there. The goal is not necessarily to change the world, to change how others think or what they do. If I’m mad about climate change then making art about it is probably one of the least effective things I can do with my time. Making art is about inner change. An artist has to be somewhat narcissistic in this respect. A more productive question is, how do I contribute to the problem of climate change? What do I do about that? Is there any way out? The artist struggles with questions like this, with feelings about a situation, a dilemma, and comes up with some kind of aesthetic object that reflects the inner struggle. It won’t spell it out for you, though. It’s like an enigma, an artifact of a lost culture, and you might have to work at it to glean some of the truth that is there, hidden in the object, and may be released within the viewer when a similar struggle takes place. The artist’s dilemma becomes the viewer’s dilemma as well. We’re all in this climate change situation together. It really sucks. In just a few generations our world may be almost uninhabitable. The question for politics is, what do we do about it? The question for the artist is, how do we feel about it? These work to inform the other, but they should not be confused. Art bears witness to the times, and at its best it can provide inspiration to one’s contemporaries. In that sense art can impact politics, but in a very indirect way. In more popular forms, such as music and film, or even something like street art, this impact can be much greater.

Does contemporary art still have an ethical and moral value in contemporary society?

Certainly contemporary art has ethical and moral value for society. Whether it has ethical and moral relevance is another matter. Every artwork was made by a person or group of people. That activity has value. But what are they doing? How are they using this opportunity? I must admit that I dread making the rounds of galleries in New York, and don’t do it much anymore, because I don’t feel that I’m seeing much that’s relevant. I don’t see much that speaks to me. I don’t think I’m alone in this. Music and high-quality television series (and sometimes movies, but less so these days) have filled the void left by contemporary art. There’s got to be a sense of story or myth going on. This pulls people into a world. The art gallery is very cold and uninviting. I usually feel that I’ve stumbled into someplace (a high-end retail establishment, for example) where I don’t belong and I am not wanted. Museums tend to replicate this. People are made to feel either very smart and knowing, or very dumb and out of it. It seems to me that the chief ethical and moral value this system perpetuates is that of a priestly class that oversees manufactured scarcity. That is what most of contemporary art has become. It’s become a means of consolidating power rather than liberating it. That is a value, and that’s important in the right context, but I think for the most part contemporary art, or at the very least the system that governs it, has lost its way, because ultimately art must be about liberation and change.

Do you think that the artist could still have an impact on reality?

The artist’s hypothetical audience is the mirror image of an inner loneliness and sense of isolation. The writer or the dancer or the painter says, I feel this way, don’t you, whoever you are out there, don’t you feel it too? We live in a world that starves us of human connection. Art is an expression of that hunger. People have feelings and want to be heard by somebody, and maybe that somebody lives in the future. The goal is not necessarily to impact reality as much as to restore it.

What is your attitude for spirituality and religion?

I think it’s important to differentiate between those two terms. They are different ways of relating to the divine. I don’t really like to say God, because that has become a gendered and patriarchal term. And I don’t think Nature or the Goddess suffices either, because that has become just as gendered in the opposite direction. Even the term “Godhead” is problematic. So I prefer “divine.” I firmly believe that it is part of human nature, part of our innate psychology, to have some sense of the divine, that it is not merely something that is imposed by culture. But there are traditions through which various cultures have thought about the divine, and stories that have evolved to make sense of it. Heidegger talks about the human condition as one of being thrown into existence, that there are circumstances of time and place and culture that are beyond one’s control. Religion is one part of this. A person is born into a religious tradition, and ideas of the divine are either imposed or suggested from the outside, and that can shape the way a person thinks. Spirituality, for me, is a sense of the divine that comes from within. I don’t want to say that one is superior to another, but they are different, and each fulfills a different need within each of us.

It is supposed that the word religion comes from the Latin, religare, which means “to bind together.” In the Hindu tradition, the word yoga, not to be confused with the modern, Western variety, means “to yoke,” as one would yoke an ox. So in this sense religion is something that binds a person to community, which is of course very good. However, when the beliefs become orthodoxy and don’t allow for change or growth, and especially when they interfere with one’s inner relationship to the divine, then religion becomes dogma, and this is very dangerous. In Hinduism there are different types of yoga, and one may choose the type that is best suited for one’s nature, and to me, this kind of relativity is an important factor in avoiding the dangers of dogma. Bhakti yoga emphasizes devotion, jnana yoga emphasizes knowledge and self-realization, and dharma yoga is about right action. These are all paths to the ultimate goal of moksha, or liberation and spiritual enlightenment. This goal, then, is almost exactly the opposite of religion, which binds, because one attempts to escape the bonds of samsara, or the wheel of existence. That’s very interesting to me, because we have an inner, spiritual need for liberation where we bond with the divine, as well as an outer, religious need to bond with our community. Again, we find the idea of the soul holding these two conflicting drives together into some kind of unity. I believe the dynamic tension that underlies the human soul, with its fourfold relationship to the divine, is at the heart of the creative process.

Individual and society: what fascinates you about these two worlds? What is the connection between each other and with your work?

Last year I was reading about the brain quite a bit, and I discovered something very interesting. A human baby is born not fully baked, while if you look at a foal or most other mammals, they’re up and running about relatively quickly. Why is that? It turns out that it has to do with the size of the brain relative to the rest of the body. In a human baby it’s really big, but a big head is very dangerous for a woman in childbirth. So the solution has been to have a bodily premature birth, so that the brain gets a lot of its encoding out in the world. This relates to Heidegger’s idea of “thrownness” again. A foal gets its survival instructions, its instincts, while still in the womb, while we get them from the world of culture. So we are not just animals in this regard, and that’s why we have this sense of being divided. We bind together nature and culture. [The book on this is The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, by Leonard Shlain.]

What makes mammals different from other animals is their social bonds, as well as their capacity for emotions and nurturing their young. Humans have taken this much, much further. This has allowed us to sing, dance, paint, write, and make tools. We make art as a way of connecting to each other and making meaning out of our world. This is the birth of society.

However, as our technologies developed over thousands of years, we have moved further and further away from this mammalian connection. The idea of the individual, most scholars believe, is a modern concept. The human ego was really in its embryonic stages throughout the Bronze Age, but with the invention of writing you get something completely different. Suddenly nature and objects in the world may be separated, documented, and controlled. The sense of an inner mind, separated from the world, was a result of reading to oneself, rather than aloud, and this happened in late antiquity. Technology continued to facilitate that separation, allowing for further growth and control, until it reached a sort of existential crisis in the philosophy of Descartes, the first modern philosopher who identified the mind-body duality.

So the very notion of the individual carries within it a sense of alienation. This is why our modern conception of art arose at the same time that our technology was taking us further and further away from nature. This became most clear with the rise of Romanticism after the Industrial Revolution, and was itself a reaction to the Enlightenment values of the Scientific Revolution of the previous century. Now we live in a fragmented, atomized world, where society is made up of little units called individuals. But that’s an illusion. Society came first. We are so embedded in this way of seeing the world that we cannot conceive of how something cannot be made of little blocks of stuff, like atoms. Science has shown that atoms, and subatomic particles, are not “things.” The world is made of energy, and this takes the form of matter, but at the foundation lies a web of relationships between states of being, not little chunks to be broken down ad infinitum.

This atomized mode of consciousness has meant that we experience the world in a very binary way. This has allowed us to manipulate, control, and exploit matter and energy. There is great power in this. But we have not yet demonstrated that as a society we have the wisdom to control the controller. Our tools make and control us now, as Marshall McLuhan pointed out. This is our cultural paradigm, and we are not born with it inside us, as an animal is, but are thrown into it. As soon as we’re born the culture begins to wire up our brains. And as soon as we figure out what’s going on, if we ever do, then it’s too late. So technological culture has a life of its own. The technological society does not know of human values because it is a system that was designed over many generations with a very simple mandate: accumulate and consolidate wealth and power by extracting natural resources. This is Heidegger’s Gestell again, but it’s humanity in a devolved condition. There is no consciousness, no caring, no meaning. In its worst form it’s just a virus amplified to global proportions. A machine with only a gas pedal but no brakes, and certainly no steering wheel or driver. It doesn’t take much to see where a machine like that ends up.

In today’s world, the individual may have consciousness but no power, or power but no consciousness. Most of us fall somewhere along this spectrum. It is rare to get someone with both, and it is tragic when history delivers us the most ignorant and powerful man ever to walk this Earth. Individuals are rising up because of prolonged, systemic abuse by their society. They don’t want to be treated like interchangeable units that need to be manipulated and controlled. They are attempting to assert what they really are: the circulating lifeblood of human society, a web of relationships, all important and vital to the coherent fabric of civilization.

What is truly contemporary for you today?

“Contemporary” literally means together in time. What is contemporary for me is not the same for my parents or for my children. We’ve each faced a different set of hurdles and milestones. Contemporaries are in the same boat, traveling through the same stations of life. As co-protagonists in a shared story, contemporaries often mark those stations through music, or technological development. Nostalgia for these lost worlds is a way of getting some psychological distance and putting things in context. I think it’s a healthy way of preparing for the uncertainty of the future, as long as it’s grip is not too strong.

There is no universal “contemporary” because our world is a mix of generations who literally see things through different lenses. It’s important to value those other lenses and not just think that one’s own generation has all the answers. This goes for young and old. The old have probably forgotten what it is to be young, and the young do not have the wisdom and experience of the old. We all need each other in this respect. We need as many different kinds of eyes and voices as we can get, because the challenges we face are steep. This goes not just for age, but for all backgrounds. As a white, heterosexual man, my worldview is very different from that of a gay black man’s, or a woman’s. I simply can’t see the world in the way that they do because I haven’t had to face the same set of challenges. So I am limited. I must do my best to acknowledge that limitation and listen to those who can teach me so that I can be better. We all have this responsibility. In this sense, everyone alive today is contemporary, and we are one. But this one is a vast tapestry of diversity and multiplicity. We can never be united as long as we don’t honor and learn from that multiplicity. It’s a tragedy that it seems there will always be those who are simply too afraid to learn and grow. Two nights ago, Trump had peaceful protesters tear-gassed and forcibly removed from Lafayette Park just so he could be seen holding up a Bible in front of a church. Outwardly he wants to be seen as the alpha male thumping his chest, but we can all see that inwardly he is ruled by fear. He’s the biggest coward history has ever seen.

The current experience of the covid-19 health emergency: which reflection has made you mature in your artistic work, on your role, on the meaning of art and life more generally?

We are now living through an unprecedented situation. It’s emotionally and psychologically exhausting. We need to turn to whatever we can to find healing in a moment like this. We can also take this opportunity to remove ourselves from the mundane flow of life and really reflect and turn inward. The pain and torment of today are the seeds of the new art of tomorrow. By itself art cannot solve our problems, but it can help us to reach a place of wisdom, and that can inform future action. It seems that dreams work in a similar way. Sleep scientists now believe that REM sleep and dreams are the key to emotional healing and stability, because the sting of the actual event is distanced from our memory of it. Trauma can prevent the brain from doing this, because the pain is too great. But as long as the burden is not too great, and if we take time and care, eventually we can move past the pain of the event and we can learn from it. Dreams and REM sleep are the unconscious mechanism for emotional healing, and art can have the same function in our conscious lives.

How do you see the future?

Right now we are at an extremely critical juncture in history. I have no doubt that the near future will be very messy and very painful. The most vulnerable populations will unfortunately bear the brunt at first, but it will eventually reach all sectors of society. Our global civilization is entering a period of dynamic change because the tension between two forces has been building to such an unsustainable level. This is not a new phenomenon in history. The Bronze Age cultures suffered overwhelming devastation around 1200 BCE, plunging the Mediterranean civilizations into a dark age that eventually gave rise to the Iron Age and the classical world. It’s very interesting, and ominous, that the worst destruction was inflicted on the palaces of the elites. About a thousand years later it started happening again, to the Romans, and another dark age ensued. We haven’t experienced anything like that in the modern age, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen again.

Life went on during these “dark ages,” but a lot of culture and knowledge was lost in the process. In The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter notes that nutrition levels actually went up in the Roman territories after the fall of the empire. That says a lot about just how imbalanced that system was. We have been heading toward dangerous levels of inequality for decades now. It is not just capitalism that leads us into such a world, but the abstraction of money as a store of value that is removed from natural resources. At first coins were made of pure silver or gold, then the Romans figured out how to add other metals and debase the currency. They cheated nature, and that was the beginning of the end for them. They let abstraction rule over natural order. In the late Middle Ages the mechanical clock was invented, and suddenly the abstract concept of universal time could be separated from the rhythms of the Sun and Moon. Time could be measured and controlled, completely cut off from nature. The Romans invented the use of the grid in urban planning, which controlled space. Late medieval European culture invented the mechanical clock, which is not just a grid superimposed on natural time, but a system of universal time in itself. With this came the idea that the future could also be gridded off and controlled. Both of these technological innovations combined in the Renaissance in the form of perspective, which tied the worlds of time and space to the viewer. The vanishing point is mirrored by the subject’s inner eye. The modern ego is suddenly master of both time and space, and objects may be manipulated and controlled at will. By the time of Descartes, the modern separation of mind, or abstraction, and body, or nature, is complete. This Newtonian paradigm of the world as machine ruled science until Einstein exposed it as an illusion. Psychologically, however, we have not yet been able to get past it. The theories of Einstein seem to defy common sense because the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm is a way of seeing the world that has been drilled into us by culture for several hundred years. This is why you still have people going around thinking that one day they might scan their brains and upload into the cloud. These are people who cannot get past the idea that they are essentially machines, living in a desolate mechanical universe.

The most important technological innovation that gave birth to our modern age, one that I think is terribly overlooked and not really properly understood, is the invention of credit. Usury was always a sin, but the Christians had no problem delegating their dirty work to the Jews, who did not practice this among themselves but had no qualms about doing it for Gentiles. So religion, the force that is supposed to bind community, is thrown out the window for the sake of profit. The Christians projected their shadow onto the Jews while they created an illusory image of their own purity.

This development is important for two reasons, and these both directly impact the situation we find ourselves in today. The first is that we are still suffering from the false piety of the Christian ego. It cannot stand the idea that it is anything less than completely holy and righteous. This creates a terrible dark side. America is absolutely stained with this shadow. We saw it with slavery, with Jim Crow, and Trump has tried to normalize it again. In order to keep itself pure, this ego must have a scapegoat to blame for everything that’s wrong with its world. You’d think that after Hitler this could never happen again, but it’s shocking how wrong that appears to be.

The second effect is intimately related to the first. While the ego-shadow dynamic sets up the battle between good and evil, dividing society into two classes of people, one superior and the other inferior (or even subhuman), the use of credit is a tool for accumulating resources for the “good” side, while denying those same resources to the “dark side.” In the modern world, if you have capital (which originally comes from “cattle” by the way) then you can create more capital. If you don’t have capital then you have to work for the people who do. You may do all right in the process, but not nearly as well as the investors. This imbalance grows and grows over time. Because it is not natural, but an abstraction, something that the ego wants to be true, it is not sustainable. The second law of thermodynamics, the natural law of entropy, will eventually have its way with such unnatural accumulations of wealth and power. I believe we have been heading into such a crisis for many years now. It is only now that it is too obvious to ignore.

The bottom line is that white men have held and accumulated power for too long and to such an extent that they have created the seeds of their own demise. But like a wounded and threatened animal, right now this is a most dangerous breed. They won’t go down without a fight. But down they will go, and when they do it will be painful for all of us, unfortunately.

What is Aftermodernism?

This is a term that Hubert Neumann began using as a way to describe a recurring aesthetic he was seeing among contemporary artists. I understand it, in short, as an aesthetic that embraces a lack of closure or finality, and a tolerance for the unknown, the mysterious, and the enigmatic.

Could you define Aftermodernism as a movement?

From my understanding, this question is contradictory and unanswerable. To define an enigma or a mystery is to lock it down and understand it. Then its allure is stifled and killed. We’re always trying to figure things out, but the mystery always stays one step ahead of us, leading us into unknown territory. When you lose that you lose your soul.

When did you decide to participate to Aftermodernism, and why?

I never decided to participate in something called “Aftermodernism,” which may or may not be thought of as a movement. As an artist I came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, when Postmodernism was in vogue. I suppose artists of my generation, who were art students during this time, got kind of sick of this new paradigm of deconstruction, as well as all the dizzying theory involved. But I can only speak for myself here. I got sick of it. I still feel wounded by it. I feel like I’m still trying to rid myself of all the things that were taught to me during this period, because ultimately, while maybe necessary as a reaction to Modernism, it was unhelpful and unhealthy psychologically. If Modernism is too much about a progression and the heroic, then Postmodernism is too chaotic and unmooring. You lose your grounding. There’s a lot of freedom there, but in the end its lacking in values. At least that’s how I’ve felt.

I met Hubert in 1999 when I first started showing in New York. I was working on a new painting that fall, and I was just starting to use digital imagery and composing things in Photoshop. I started layering and accumulating images of consumer architecture, like big-box stores and gas stations. It was very much rooted in a Postmodern sensibility. He came to the studio and saw the painting in progress and was very interested in it, so my gallery at the time really wanted me to finish it so they could sell it to him. After a few months, however, it just wasn’t feeling right, so I scrapped it. I knew that I had to go much bigger, and my methods had to be more intense. I didn’t like completely planning things out on the computer, so I devised a hybrid method of preparing fragments in Photoshop and then projecting them in different positions onto the canvas. It was a mix of order and chaos, planned and spontaneous. I began that painting in March of 2000, and Hubert came to see it a few times as I was working on it. I think my gallery was pretty annoyed that I had scrapped the first one, but by summer it was clear that I was doing something pretty unique, so I was off the hook. I didn’t finish the painting until March of 2001. Convergence is now on the top floor of Hubert’s home, and I don’t think it’s left that spot in the last 18 years.

I don’t know when Hubert came upon the idea, or the name, for Aftermodernism, but my sense is that he had the intuition of this aesthetic first, before he could give it a name. I like to think that my work played some small role in that. I think we were both in the same territory at the time, without being able to consciously articulate it in words to someone who could not see what we saw.

What is the main selection criteria for Aftermodernism artists?

I think for now that mostly comes down to Hubert’s eye and instinct. Hopefully later others will be able to pick up on it and extend it further. It’s all about adopting the right attitude. One has to be curious and let go of fear.

According to you, why you have been chosen for Aftermodernism?

Hubert, and his daughters Melissa and Belinda, have been collecting my work for over twenty years now, something I’m very grateful for, and proud of. I’m fortunate that they are always curious to know what I’m going to do next. This freedom is very liberating for an artist.

 If you would have to write a manifesto for Aftermodernism, which would be the main points of it, the main aspects you would feel like highlighting?

In my mind I associate Aftermodernism with two movements in 20th century philosophy. The first is the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. It is a feature of our mode of consciousness to think of the world as made up of objects in empty space. He felt this was a great mistake. When you really look at phenomena, there are no “things” but only processes in various stages of unfolding. It depends on the time scale you want to use. Over millions of years the continents on this Earth have shifted dramatically, as has the climate. Nothing is fixed. If you narrow your timeframe, then what is really a process shows up as more fixed and solid, as a thing. But quantum physics has demonstrated that this is an illusion, though a necessary one for us to make sense of the world. Whitehead felt that the impulse for creativity and novelty, what he called the adventure of ideas, was the force that propelled this organic process of life.

Another movement to emerge from 20th century thought, though even more obscure than Whitehead’s process philosophy, is the integral philosophy of Jean Gebser. While process philosophy provides a certain directionality to Aftermodernism, always attuned to the horizon of creativity in an embrace of mystery, integral philosophy provides a structural mechanism, as well as a multiplicity, to the history of consciousness. It provides a map of where we’ve been, and it indicates some clues about where we might be headed.

In brief, Gebser proposed different structures of consciousness that have been dominant at different moments in our history. He refers to them as structures rather than stages, because we have not left them behind so much as layered over them. They’re still there, operating within us. The first, the Archaic structure, is that vast domain of proto-consciousness that stretches deep beyond the Paleolithic and into our animal natures. This period is for the most part closed off to us, but it is our origin, and it still presides deep within. One might think of this as the “reptilian brain,” or the limbic system. The second, the Magic structure, is closely connected with symbolic image, and the power associated with representation as a means of control over divine forces. The cave paintings of the Paleolithic are a good example of this kind of belief system. In my mind this is closely aligned with the hunt, which allowed humans to take their first steps into civilization. The third, the Mythic structure, Gebser associates with the spoken word, as well as singing and poetry. In my view, this is a change from the hunting paradigm of the Paleolithic to the agricultural paradigm of the Neolithic. Mythology during this period was mostly about making sense of the cycles of fertility, birth, death, and regeneration. The fourth, according to Gebser, is the Mental-Rational structure, and this is the world we have known throughout recorded history. The shift from spoken word and memory to writing, fixed meaning, interiority of consciousness but exteriority of memory, is represented by the birth of Greek philosophy in the dialogues of Plato. Gebser believed that this change had an efficient mode, which he called the Mental, lasting until the early Renaissance, and a deficient mode, which he called the Rational. This is what we have known as the Modern Age. Gebser believed that this deficient Rational mode has reached a moment of crisis, because its way of seeing the world has reached the limits of effectiveness. All of the downsides and costs have become more and more dominant, so that this structure of consciousness is no longer appropriate for a new set of problems that have emerged. Looking around at culture in the first half of the 20th century, Gebser saw a new aesthetic of fragmentation, chaos, and nonlinearity in the form of Cubism and modernism in literature. He felt that he was witnessing the dawn of a new structure of consciousness, which he called the Integral. As the Mental-Rational structure reaches its crisis, this new structure is still nascent and largely unknown.

Gebser was very pessimistic about our prospects in the short term. He felt that an “irruption of time” was upon us, and that the transition from the Mental-Rational paradigm to the Integral paradigm would be very painful, at least at first. He stressed that this is not something that we do, rather it is something that happens to us. In his view, the Integral structure of consciousness remains transparent and open to the other structures, the Archaic, the Magic, the Mythic, as well as the Mental-Rational. They all have their efficient and deficient modes, and the Integral structure of consciousness is about being open to the reality of all of them.

I see the idea of Aftermodernism in a very similar way. We’ve become conscious of Modernism, that it still exists, and while it may be changing, and even dying, for now it still rules. Postmodernism represents an almost knee-jerk, violent swing against the ideas of Modernism; it’s like a child throwing a tantrum, insisting on his independence. The philosopher and psychologist Ken Wilber called this “aperspectival madness.” Ultimately, however, Postmodernism is merely an extension of the Modernist paradigm, and is subsumed by it. If you look at the idea of Aftermodernism in the light of Gebser’s philosophy, one may recognize that Modernism, as the Rational structure, will always be a part of us, part of our history and our development. That’s never going to go away. But its time as a ruling paradigm is coming to an end.

Aftermodernism’ s social media info states: AFTERMODERNISM IS ABOUT CIVILIZED DIVERSITY - NOT USING POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC POWER TO ATTACK AND DESTROY. IT IS THE MORAL RESPONSIBILITY OF A  DEMOCRACY. Could you delve into this concept for me?

Civilized diversity seems like it should be such an easy thing to accomplish, and yet again and again in the 21st century we’ve been shocked to find how elusive it actually is. Americans are fooling themselves if they think they live in a democracy. We have been so frustrated because all this time we thought we were living in one, that we invented it even. But this country was founded on theft, genocide, and slavery. That original sin rots our very foundations and continues to emerge from the depths every now and again to remind us. If America was founded on a single vision, the so-called divinely ordained mission to secure and accumulate resources for the purposes of expansion and economic growth, then it should come as no surprise that the very continuance of America relies on the perpetuation of that mission. America, as it has been, must die to its old self so that it may be reborn as the fulfillment of the words in our Constitution, its higher mission: America aspires to be a democracy, a “more perfect union.” We still have a long way to go.

America has been a democracy in theory, but rarely in practice. The framers of the Constitution designed an inherently conservative system, one where change is very difficult to achieve and the status quo enjoys many protections. The United States was established as a republic, with an eye toward democracy, but the framers actually distrusted rule by the people because they thought it was dangerous and unstable. Ironically, their conservatism denied healthy exchange from the people to those they elect to be their representatives. There are a number of forces that create such inertia in our system and create impediments to democracy. The first, and most obvious, is the Electoral College. We have seen two very painful occasions in recent years where the winner of the popular vote did not win the election. This gives inordinate power to smaller, more rural states, which in theory should decentralize power. But the framers lived in an agrarian society, which is what the system was designed for. After industrialization and urbanization, the more progressive values migrated to the cities, along with most of the working class, so we actually have the exact opposite result of what the framers had originally intended. The second impediment to democracy is the Senate, which again gives inordinate power to rural states, and in particular its now-abused tradition of the filibuster. This is not in the Constitution, nor has any American citizen ever been given an opportunity to vote on it, but this peculiar tradition, by requiring 60 votes—a supermajority—for anything at all, basically makes any kind of real change all but impossible. The third problem is gerrymandering, a practice which thwarts the will of the people and instead seeks to consolidate power by the victors. Over time this has created the highly polarized political environment that we see in this country today. The fourth major impediment to democracy is the failure to grant statehood to the District of Columbia or Puerto Rico. Washington DC has a population of 705,749, while Wyoming has only 578,759. Puerto Rico has a population of over 3 million. And the fifth reason we do not live in a democracy (I could probably go on: voter suppression and the systematic disenfranchisement of people of color, for example, are not insignificant factors) is the collusion between the government and the corporation. Because of the lack of regulation on campaign finance, as well as the Supreme Court ruling of Citizens United, which gives corporations the same rights as individual citizens, perversely equating money with free speech, elected officials have transferred their allegiance to those who hold the purse strings. All of these factors contribute to the consolidation of economic and political power, and against their equitable distribution. This is not democracy. Until these flaws in our system are fixed, I don’t believe effective change in this country will be possible. This raises the risk that change will come by more catastrophic means. 

So the United States government is conservative by design. Elections are brief windows of opportunity for change, for liberation, for the people to express their will for the higher mission of a true democracy, a more perfect union. Elections have become battles between the lower mission that this country was founded upon and continues to serve, that of profit, and the higher mission of civilized democracy, where power flows to and from the people.

The founders of this country were aware of these lower and higher missions, and they did their best to forge a compromise between the two. Our hybrid soul held together until the Civil War, then was forcibly fused back together again. But the rift runs very deep, and it seems to be splitting us into two again. History has shown that a crisis usually occurs during the transition from one economic paradigm to another. One one side stands the status quo, those who benefit from the existing order, while on the other side are those who seek change, progress, and a more equitable distribution of resources and power. Almost always, the side that seeks to hold economic and political power, and the status quo, at the expense of liberating change and economic justice, is the loser. But it often takes a battle to settle the matter. All of the movements of the last decade, from the Arab Spring to Occupy, to those fighting for climate justice, to Black Lives Matter and Me Too, all of these share the same motivation: a more equitable and a more humane distribution of political and economic power. Civilized diversity is the moral responsibility of a democracy, but first we must continually strive toward this ideal against the forces that would deny it from us. Over the last few decades, America has been losing that battle.

I believe that art has emerged in its current form as a reaction to Modernity, as an expressive and compensatory vision that stands in defiance to its inhumane worldview. It is time for those who wield the levers of power to truly listen and learn. Artists have sounded the alarm bells for centuries. Art is the polite form of the expression of our own humanity and soul against the escalating forces of dehumanization. I pray we never have to see its more impolite, more insistent twin sister, namely, revolution.

* * *

My responses to these questions were written over a three-week period, from May 18 to June 6. When I began, the world had already been suffering the terrible effects of the coronavirus pandemic for over two months. I myself had a mild case of the virus in early May, but my wife became quite ill and is only now recovering. Then, on May 25, George Floyd was murdered by the Minneapolis police, and my city, along with so many others across the nation and the world, erupted into mostly peaceful but very urgent and frustrated protest. I have just returned from a visit to the corner of 16th and H St., the site of St. John’s church, where President Trump so shockingly tear-gassed and forcibly removed peaceful protestors so he could be photographed holding up a Bible. My family and I were proud to march and show solidarity with the protests. Walking among so many people who feel the way I do gives me hope that my country can correct its dark path before it’s too late. I have felt this same optimism after joining the Occupy protests in 2011, and the Women’s March in 2017. The passion of the people gives me hope, even if the record of my government does not. The election is now just five months away, and the stakes have never been higher. A once-in-a-lifetime window for true, transformative change may be coming into view. I sincerely hope we don’t blow it.

Postscript: August 14, 2020

I would like to take this opportunity to suggest one very easy thing my country can do to correct course before it’s too late. President Obama, in his eulogy for John Lewis, informed us that the filibuster is a relic of the Jim Crow era. The question of the filibuster has always been a binary one, whether to keep it or scrap it. But it doesn’t have to be so. I suggest the Senate change the threshold from 60 votes to 55. Hopefully this gives more power to the independents and moderates from both parties and thus deescalates the cancerous polarization that began with the Gingrich era. It’s a small step toward a proper democracy, and while many more will be needed, it’s at least a start.