JOE ZUCKER

From “In Conversation: Joe Zucker with Phong Bui,” The Brooklyn Rail, December 2010:

On learning art early:

My mother took an art history class at the Art Institute [of Chicago] with a woman named Katherine Blackshear, [who] impressed her so much that she wanted her little Joey to go to art classes at the Art Institute every Saturday when he was just 5 years old. So I went there almost every year, I think. I’d miss a year, but I’d go back. I won a gold key award, which was some kind of massive civic Chicago contest where you got a little prize for being a good art student.

On painting the canvas:

One day I was standing in my studio and I couldn’t figure out what to put on the canvas, so I decided I would paint a picture of the canvas. I would reduce it to the subject of how canvas is made, and it was going to be reductive in a way that had to do with the material construction, not reductive in the way of what Mondrian did with Cubism.

On early influences:

I felt that I had failed with figurative painting to some extent so I got involved with Ad Reinhardt, especially with his interesting phrases or ideas. For example, someone asks him, “What do you do, Mr. Reinhardt, while you’re repainting the damaged surfaces that come back to you?” And he said, “I stand there and think of all the paintings that haven’t been painted and never will be.” It had a real impact on me: this kind of world where you would never escape from ideas, no matter what style you were dealing with.

On his work:

Richard Artschwager said it best to me once in the Spring Street Bar. He said, “Don’t listen to those people. They don’t know what you’re doing. They don’t understand that you’re making the surface and the image simultaneously. They don’t see that.”

What I was and still am doing has always been about trying to take a specific image and put it together with how I made it or what it was made of. 

Sometimes the connection of the imagery and the process is like an adjective that describes when two things became one. And sometimes the imagery is farther away than what the thing looks like. The images more often than not call out for the right process of style in order to fully say something. Other times, I’m trying to deal with imagery that can be dealt with on a literal level, and still have a really tight style.

Mosaic is a craft. And when you deal with craft, you deal with generations. You deal with a language of aesthetics that’s passed through reproduction of the soul, in a sense, of people.

This universal lineage of craft appealed to me, and my attachment to craft-like objects has to do with the tactile reality that does not need a language to explain its purpose.

…I jump party lines in terms of what things interest me. There’s no commitment in terms of value judgments whatsoever. What I really am interested in is how I can use different means to continue on.

The original lake paintings served as the container for the paint; they served as the tools.

Lake paintings:

Some of my paintings make themselves in that they are the image, they’re the process, they’re the tools; it’s all together. In other words, the lake paintings were receptacles filled with paint, tilted in such a way that a horizon was created by how the paint dried, not by some aesthetic decision where I should draw a line and separate them.

Box paintings:

There’s a political notion that if you are going to make a painting that eventually will be consigned to the depths of some storage facility, you might as well have control over your own crate; why have a crate inside a crate when you can create your own crate?

First of all, de Kooning has had remote influence on these paintings because he clearly knew how to make a friend out of paint. Secondly, in the east end of Long Island, we’re surrounded by water. If there’s a relationship, in that respect, to de Kooning, it is that both de Kooning and I are interested in the physicality of painting

In regard to the impermanence of artwork/archival issues of “American” art:

… the need for constructing things is more important than anything else. 

As string theorists have pointed out to us, there is no empty space. I’m interested in science as a different way of looking at aesthetics, one that deals with the materiality. I think the more painting is related to objects, the more it’s in touch with the universe.

Sometimes I don’t like the paintings very much, but that’s not the issue. These paintings are about paintings.

On coaching basketball:

I guess I like coaching basketball because there’s something about basketball that’s very systematic, which relates to how I think as a painter.

Website: www.joezucker.com