Artist’s statement

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.

From Terry R. Myers, “Joe-in-a-Box: Joe Zucker on Art and Illusion,” Modern Painters, December 2005

On his box paintings:

The other thing about these works is that they address one of the problems of painting, which is how to make diptychs that have a real structural relationship to each other, not just an aesthetic one. My box paintings are married together forever. There is a logical connection between the image and the lid; a connection that continues the kind of completeness I’ve been interested in for a long time in my work

Another group of works, which I’m planning to install in the second room of Kasmin’s gallery, are other objects that would help make up the studio: an easel, a closet, a bed. These are objects of sparseness, objects that have an existential loneliness, but they don’t speak of artists’ poverty. … This was what I had in mind when making these new paintings, these studio items showing nothing of the person, just the kind of eternalness of objects. The stools, the tables - they’re separated even from that other pictorial problem of modern painting, how to deal with imagery and illusion. I’m stripping this down.

… the new watercolours are images of drawings and paintings of every style I ever made. They’re no longer concerned with other people’s stuff being stored: this is my stuff.

My large, singular painting also has a shallow space for illusion, and in it I can be in total control of how much I want to unroll my past to determine. the space of my new paintings.

So when I came to thinking about colour for the chairs, I began to think of them as isolated in their woodenness. Wooden chairs in wooden boxes, with the ground that they are surrounded by the colour of the shadows of the boxes, not an illusion of anything, but simply the colour that is in a box

From the Hamza Walker and Brenda Richardson “Mayflower” Interview, May 2010

On his days in art school and his early influence

I mean, many young artists today are working creatively within a Cubist framework. But they can’t possibly understand what it was like to be a young artist with a Picasso that was still alive! You simply could not go there, period.  This was fully realized art of the highest order. That door was definitively closed for us. We had to look elsewhere. And I turned to Abstract Expressionism and became completely infatuated.

It’s that existential dilemma: Where do you start? And it came to me. What if I make a painting of what the canvas itself is made of? What if I simplify the subject matter of the painting to the pattern of the canvas itself? I wanted to make something that would go out into the world and stand for nothing but itself. Something that itself contained all of the information needed to understand it. This was in 1964, and that was it. Everything fell into place for me.

You can be tempted into reducing and reducing to the point of emptiness, simply repeating terms dictated by the perimeter of the painting. I wanted to breach the perimeter and get into the very substance of the painting.

On graduating from the Art Institute of Chicago

The head of the graduate review had a memorable parting shot for me: “The thing we like about you and your work is there’s not much to look at.”

My work, above all, speaks to that characteristic American need to fabricate things. It’s as if we landed here—the Mayflower comes ashore—and right away it’s time to get busy and build the first log cabins.

On ‘The 100-Foot Wall’

It taught me that art is not an object, an isolated thing, but an ongoing commitment. It’s an act of becoming, a seamless continuum.

…at some point I focused on the correlation between canvas and sailing ships. The wood of the ship’s hull and masts stands for the easel, and the sails for the canvas. I painted the Mayflower and other historical ships and sea battles. I used ersatz brushstrokes and complicated drawing and came to realize that my real love is being an artist and making art, not advancing the myth of modernism.

Sometimes I feel as if I’m standing off by myself, and no artist wants to stand alone.

I see my art as both conceptual and idiosyncratic. If only by virtue of the unorthodox materials I use, I’m an anarchist. I’m not part of an identifiable genre.

An artist wants to be affiliated with a recognized group or a movement. It’s a paradox, really, because artists supposedly emerge as individualists. When you’re young, people say, “You have talent. You’re different.” But the maverick, ever an artist of conscience, creates something unique and unclassifiable and pays the price of standing alone.

From Chuck Close, “Joe Zucker,” Bomb, Summer 2007

On the Art Institute of Chicago

It undoubtedly influenced the eclectic nature of my work, which is experiential rather than aesthetic; it comes from a natural experience of loving painting rather than a theoretic disposition.

Some people think I love sailing ships, but for me they are just part of a visual strategy: they are wood and canvas, as are the stretcher bars and canvas painting surface. … I rarely paint things that I like.

On his cotton ball and slavery paintings

This is the way to construct a painting. If you’re going to make a painting about pain, suffering, and racism, you might as well make the object of the racism the tools with which you make the painting.

I regard my work as conceptual and literal rather than expressive. Therefore I have a fear of writer’s block rather than a fear of creating pictorial imagery. I concern myself with continuing a logical connection from one diverse style to the next.

The imagery is determined by the material, what the painting is made out of, or the process. This enables me to keep a kind of framework for the change of style that often occurs in my work with very different-looking kinds of objects.