Antennas of the Race: Kevin Regan vs. Radek Szczesny
Tonight marks the closing party of the Bushwick Biennal at Nurture Art, so if you haven’t had a chance to check out the survey of local emerging artists, you have until Sunday to do so.
Below is another artist on artist interview featuring two of the participants in the biennal: Kevin Regan and Radek Szczesny.
Kevin Regan: So tell me about the artist collective you were in with Lolo. What was it called? Is it still active? I heard something about it from Jeremy. This was something you were doing over in Williamsburg, no?
Back in Gainesville, Florida, in the mid 90s, just before I moved to New York, I opened an alternative art space with a couple friends of mine (John Cason and Matt Roberts). It was called Blank Space. I was involved in it for a year and then I moved to New York. We did 10 art shows during that time. We also lived in the space. It was a blast. The whole set up was a little unusual for Gainesville which is more about old houses than industrial spaces. Sometimes Bushwick reminds me of Gainesville.
C/O Kevin Regan
Radek Szczesny: Yeah, I was part of a group called OpenGround, which used to run a space over on Grand in Williamsburg. It was started by friends of mine from school, Jenny Walty and Patrick May, who at the time found this place that used to be a pool hall, and started an artist run gallery. I think it was around 2000. Being generous about their space (which they also lived in) and very open about the whole process of curating, they would invite about twenty five artist each year to self curate, promote and set up about six show each season. It was all done by consensus, with people having this really active dialogue about their work and affinities emerging. I remember it as being very helpful in terms of figuring out how to present your work to the public, and also supportive and fun–the openings were kind of all nighters, with DJs or bands (destroying a few PA systems in the process) taking over later in the night. Since Patrick and Jenny gave up the space on Grand, we have become a sort of loose network of collaborators, coming together for studio crits, group show we curate, and occasional bbqs. Last year, during the Bushwick Open Studios, we put up a show in an old hair salon on Central. I’d say that the ethics of DIY, punk rock and strategies of the early seventies New York artists like Gordon Matta-Clark with things like Food restaurant, or Fashion Moda up in the Bronx were the guiding spirit of the whole adventure. Essentially we wanted to create a homegrown support system for ourselves, and mix it up with the community that was around us. Being a former punk rocker, how do you feel that whole set of ideas and aesthetics has influenced your work?
Regan: It has definitely influenced it. I’m very influenced by an idea and aesthetic of punk and DIY. But it’s one that includes things like early Sonic Youth, the Butthole Surfers, the Minutemen and Meat Puppets. I guess it’s basically SST records in the mid 80s with album covers decorated with Raymond Pettibon drawings and Richard Kern photos. This stuff is some of my formative influences. I would also include zine culture, Re/Search, Semiotext(e), Hakim Bey and his idea of the Temporary Autonomous Zone and Robert Anton Wilson’s notion of “guerilla ontology.” There’s something DIY that connects all this stuff.
I thought it was really interesting seeing that book about Drop City in your studio. I love stuff like that too. There’s a form you paint that resembles the dwellings on the cover. It shows up in several of your paintings. Didn’t you say you bought the book partly because of this?
C/O Radek Szczesny
Szczesny: I think I bought the book because I was doing research on intentional communities and how viable they are, But the cover, or the Buckminster Fuller geodesic domes that were on it was a happy accident, and I can say that I am very much inspired by complex mathematical or natural structures. The painting that you mention is a pairing of a natural tree and one that represents almost a mathematical rendering of it. And, as you pointed out, while the regular tree looks pretty self-contained, the digital tree looks like it could just keep going and spread everywhere. I like contrasting these notions of nature vs. technology, or nature vs. architecture, and imagine the possibilities in their interaction. That of course goes back to Fuller, who imagined his domes as the perfect way of integrating with nature. The funny thing is that the domes didn’t, really, and like so many of the images from that time, they look like dated visions of failed utopias. But I like repurposing the images of that time anyway. For one, it reminds me that a lot of those ideas need to be investigated further, and two, I like the strategy of playing off of something vaguely familiar and with a heavy associations and twisting it around to mean something else.
There is something similar going on in your work, almost a violent fuck you to the images that are available, nay, streaming into one’s visual field. For example, you talk about how you like to use the “wrong” images, so can you maybe explain how do you mean wrong, and what is that impulse about?
Regan: I love the connection between the book cover and your paintings. Happy accidents are awesome. There’s something about communes that fascinates me too. I’ve been studying a particular “intentional community” too. It’s called Children of God. It’s a little bit different because it is Christian community ‚Äî cult really ‚Äî that advocates free love. They started up in the late 60s. All the original members were hippies, Jesus Freaks. They were apocalyptic which is a weird kind of utopianism.
I guess what I mean by ‚”wrong” is making the choice that seems like the bad choice. I guess its transgression writ small, a way of undermining my inner aesthete. But the thing is, in the end, it all ends up aesthetic anyway (at least to me). So then it becomes really about peeling back layers. But the funny thing here is that there is always another layer underneath. I think it’s an act of negative self-transcendence. I think this relates to the masks in my work. We talked about this some when you were in my studio. I think the masks are some weird combination of self-revelation and self-transcendence. But you’ve kind of got masks in your work too. I would say they’re in your monster paintings. But I was kind of wondering about it in relation to your found image paintings as well. Do masks figure much in your thinking too?
Szczesny: I’m actually kind of scarred of masks–there is a level of anonymity and attached (lawlessness)[that's not the word I want to use] that freaks me out a bit. They definitely make Halloween the edgiest holiday. But it’s also a thing that attracts me to them. Monsters are people I know and love and see around me, with their features disfigured. It’s almost like a smudged fingerprint, a partial match. You know– “the names have been changed to protect the innocent.” In another way, the monsters are also about creating a certain distance–there is enough information in those drawings so that they can be placed in the specific time and place, and they become “types” that people can identify with. So, it comes back to this vague echo of familiarity, but with a twist. On the other hand, the found image drawings I’ve been making are a way of closing the gap, and making them somehow closer–I have been collecting these iconic images, and drawing them with sepia ink as if they all were part of some family album. I guess it makes for a pretty turbulent family history. The desire to translate them all to the same language comes from wanting to be explicit about how involved I am (we all are) with the narrative of history. This is the notion that makes me think of Laocoon and its agonizing desire to extricate your self from this historical grasp. As if a right perspective and distance would absolve you from the responsibility for it.
It seems the use of mirrors in your work carries a similar weight, albeit one that is pretty specific to the medium you are using–the digital collage made real, messy and definitely not flat, and then mirrored as a gateway of this other order. Your image of Ronald Reagan, multiplied, feels to me like a joke on your own name, but also as this evil twin shadow, who also substitutes for the recent president. Do you feel like your work exists in parallel planes that make up a whole, or it more of a ba”bush”ka[ha ha] doll effect?
Regan: Do you mean matroishka dolls? The dolls within a doll within a doll… Yes! They actually are something I think about. I’m very interested in the loop as a compositional figure. But I like the parallel place thing too. Some of the pieces definitely play with the idea of the mirror as a portal to or through some higher dimension.
I have to tell you one of the things I really like about your work is the dusky, nighttime feeling I get from it. I think you paint film stills from a dream ‚Äî dream still. Maybe it’s because of the dark washes but I think the figures you paint a part of it to. You know what I mean?
Szczesny: That’s cool–I think of them as pictures from the prom dance at the end of the world, there is a certain loneliness in them, but maybe also mapping out a shape of things to come after. So yes, a dream.
