The Residue of the Performance

 

I'm currently fascinated by article Steve Keene after reading this article on him in the NYT, "Mile a Minute Painter has a Retrospective."  He painted the cover of Wowie Zowie and Fun Trick Noisemaker.

On a recent afternoon, the painter Steve Keene stood inside “the Cage,” a room fashioned from chain-link fencing and large sheets of plywood, situated in the center of his home studio, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Keene, who is sixty-five, was applying dabs of pink paint from a plastic tub to sixty plywood panels, each affixed to the Cage by a loop of wire. He is often cited as the most prolific painter in the world: he estimates that he has more than three hundred thousand paintings in circulation. His outfit—blue shorts, a white short-sleeved shirt, red sneakers, rubber gloves—was dotted with paint. Certain items in or near the Cage (a watering can, a container of kitty litter) had accumulated so many paint blobs that they’d become nearly unrecognizable. “I love the idea of doing sixty paintings a day, and finishing them, more than the idea of trying to make one that I think is perfect,” he said. “The whole system is based on trying not to beat myself up.”

This month, the art gallery ChaShaMa is hosting Keene’s first retrospective, at its Brooklyn Heights location, and celebrating the release of “The Steve Keene Art Book,” from Hat & Beard Press. Keene’s work is vibrant, graphic, and funny. He’s best known for painting reproductions of iconic album covers, from John Coltrane to Kraftwerk to Hole, though he’ll paint almost anything. (He has also been commissioned to produce original album covers, including for Pavement’s “Wowee Zowee.”) Each weekday morning, Keene randomly selects ten scenes, usually culled from cheap art books he buys at the Strand. He makes six paintings of each image, working on them simultaneously, circling the Cage, adding one color at a time. There is something modest and machinelike about the way he drifts peacefully from piece to piece, never pausing to fuss over the results.

This article provides a sense of what kinds of things he's painting:

That day, Keene was re-creating the grainy portrait from the cover of Neil Young’s “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,” a vintage Norman Rockwell illustration of an aproned matriarch putting a roast turkey on a dining table (he’d added the words “Food Blog” to the bottom), and a Chinese-takeout carton, among other images. Keene sells his paintings on his Web site, usually for around ten dollars each, but buyers don’t get to choose which pieces they’ll receive—they merely commit to a quantity. “My paintings have been two dollars or five dollars or twenty dollars for thirty years, and I like that,” he said. “There’s an informal network of people who know my work. It’s not underground anymore, but it’s not in an art-world structure.”

I learned some about "process art," which I might have known as a name, but not much more.  It makes me think of Jeff Tweedy's "Write Just One Song," (which is really about writing a song a day, about making art less "precious."

“I just love to work,” he said. He’s a process guy. He’s often compared to Warhol, but Keene feels more in line with Robert Rauschenberg, and with the installation artists of the nineteen-seventies. “They set about to do a series of tasks, and the performance was the art work,” Keene said. When Keene shows his work in a gallery, he often makes arrangements to paint there, too. “My paintings are the residue, or the souvenir, of the performance,” he explained. 

This from a Pitchfork article about him:

When I went to art school, all the art that was really interesting was process art. Basically, you set up a system, you set up your parameters, and then you just work within that.

It sounds like you’re designing a machine, giving the parameters to input the data and then create something else.

You have to be machinelike in the discipline to do it. I wanted to turn it into a craft, like I make pottery and I have to make a hundred plates. Or I’m a cook, and I have to make a hundred pizzas. 

and this, which makes me understand the "process art" better, and makes me think of Don DeLillo and Andy Warhol:

You’ve said that any one individual work of yours are incomplete parts of a whole. Can you elaborate on that?

It’s like you’re at the supermarket. I mean, honestly, there’s nothing more beautiful than just walking down the aisle of the supermarket, all the repetitions of color. So those are like stand-ins for pieces of work, for art. When I’d have these art shows and I’d see people walking around laughing, holding my art and showing their friends what they’re getting and trying to get more—that’s the artwork. Everything else—my paintings—they’re the props. They’re the material to have an artwork.