Ten questions from Nicole Mauser for Brandon Anschultz regarding his exhibition Below Horizon.
1.
NM
The title of your current exhibition, Below Horizon, underscores viewers’ literal position in the gallery walking below sculptures but also speaks to your technique of pressing the canvas into paint to generate pattern as image. This situates the viewer to be underneath/inside of the painting. Can you talk about considerations of the body and creating an atmosphere through installation in your work?
BA
Titling is one of my favorite parts of any exhibition. I always want the title to convey multiple meanings, points of entry, clues and references. When I first visited Regards, I was drawn to the bi-level layout and wanted my show to begin with a strong horizontal line bisecting the space from the door. Situating the viewer is something I love to play with, and want to walk a line between creating satisfying “reveals” and subverting hierarchies. And you’re right, beyond the layout; I do try to situate the viewer both inside and outside my work. Several paintings on the back wall as well as White Under Canvas do this directly. After stretching the canvas, I spend weeks adding and sanding thin layer after layer of gesso, then thin layers of enamel, completely obliterating the canvas texture. Then I apply a thick layer of either acrylic or oil, press other canvas into it to emboss the texture back onto the surface. Putting the viewer inside the painting in a way. I love that weeks of work go into setting up a situation that takes a few minutes to subvert. The paint objects operate in a lot of the same ways.
2.
NM
Below Horizon positions the viewer on a horizontal axis. At what point in the process do you begin to negotiate viewer vantage points?
BA
Hopefully from the beginning. Upon entry, the first thing you see is an articulated blue line (Double Bend) pointing into the space. If the ambient light is cooperating, that blue is keyed to be a close complement to the color of the floor, heightening its saturation a bit. From there, you’re pointed to a small object (The Tip) resting at the end that should point to the yellow-green line (Curve and Bend) upstairs that then points to a nearly invisible glass rod on the ceiling (Rod). That’s the main line. There are tangential offshoots. Upstairs, Curve and Bend frames Pink Inside, which is sneakily resting on the windowsill downstairs. Hopefully, a satisfying reveal of something not initially seen. It also can loop the viewer back along the axis to Black Star, which is placed above the door when you enter and probably goes initially unnoticed.
3
NM
I’ve had the privilege to watch your work develop over the years in multiple venues. In 2014 at the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, your exhibition title makes explicit reference to the Tennessee Williams play and film, Suddenly, Last Summer; hot, swampy, and humid atmosphere that engulfs Williams’ southern characters could also apply to St. Louis summers. On the surface your work appears purely abstract. Can you speak to how a literary work like Suddenly, Last Summer inform your overall process and titles today?
BA
I’m about to immediately contradict myself. Above, I said that titling is one of my favorite things. Sometimes it’s not and I find my work really difficult to talk about or explain, especially before it’s fully formed. For that show, which was based on a proposal, I needed a concrete starting point to conceptualize from. I have a ton of ideas for departure points. Mostly pop culture or literary or musical references, nostalgic, personal or somewhere within queer history. I’ve always wanted to do something with that title, which I love on it’s own, but also alluding to a lot of the reference points in the work which all really resonate with me: anger and self-loathing, gardens, New Orleans, hidden gay culture in the 40’s and 50’s, prehistoric plants, fountains, Katherine Hepburn. It started as a framework to hang some ideas from, but eventually turned back on itself and seemed pretty authentic to what I created. The vibe of the writing crept into the work in small ways, a flourish of found wrought iron or a piece of costume jewelry. I don’t know what else I could have called it, after the fact. The name fit.
4.
NM
Your paintings are legible from a distance yet reward closer inspection. I am reminded of Robert Ryman’s nuanced and repetitive formalist surface investigations. What does formalism mean to you?
BA
Aah formalism. Is it currently a dirty word? It seemed to be when I was in school. I have unapologetic formalist tendencies. I love formalist works and definitely think along those lines. I think I was helped in my early art education by having my fundamental design classes in an architectural education setting. Form following function, having rules to break, etc. Is that defensive? It seems like I’ve spent a lot of time defending formalism.
5.
NM
Your color palette oscillates between flat “oops” castoff commercial latex paint shades to very tightly keyed oil paint hues such as hotmagentaviolet on coollemonyellow. How does desire and intensity function in terms of color, shape, and form in your work?
BA
For the most part, color is the point I begin from. To correct the assertion in the question a bit, the “oops” colors start that way, but are never used straight out of the can. I take quite a bit of time mixing and remixing these bases with others and with industrial colorant to maneuver the colors into the shade and finish that I want. I’m always thinking about color theory. How I can use color strategically, both subtly and aggressively. I want some colors to be very in-between and unnameable and others to be strikingly themselves. I only recently went back to using fluorescents. I had to make myself stop relying on their jarring contrast for a few years and tried to emulate that intensity with colors in a lower saturation and to manipulate them with proximity. I like setting up a situation where every color in a work is setting the stage for one color to really sing, or for another color to disappear. A lot of time, the color dictates the form, it’s location and size. I also like to throw in a color that pitches everything else off balance.
6.
NM
In Black Star you list “shoe” as a material. Why is it important for the viewer to be aware of embeddedness?
BA
I really went back and forth with that decision. I think it goes back to my desire to have multiple meanings. By shape alone, the black form approximates an anatomical heart. I always want to be pretty honest in my representation. The paint objects, when not bisected to show their layers, can appear pretty simple and amorphous, and their internal armature is obscured and can be unrecognizable. It goes back to giving clues. I also love alteration. The original title was “Black Star, Black Heart, Black Foot”. Again, multiple meanings could be inferred. Conversely, I sometimes lie about what’s inside.
7.
NM
This particular exhibition seems distilled and restrained. I’m struck by Rod, an easily overlooked piece. How do you recognize and use restraint?
BA
That’s funny, I don’t feel like this exhibition is that distilled or restrained. I had a show a few years ago called Pacer, which only included 5 objects in a fairly large space. This one felt packed! Rod does a couple things for me. First, it continues the horizontal thru-line that begins at the door. Secondly, it was initially conceived to support a hanging sculpture, but I quickly decided that wasn’t needed. I like how it’s hidden, but there, and shows potential without the payoff that I set up with other “frames” in the show.
8.
NM
One could argue your paintings are sculptures and your sculptures are paintings. What is your investment in material play and role reversals to invert conventions (both physically and politically)?
BA
I think that is the heart of my practice. I was trained really rigorously as a traditional painter. Fresco, encaustic, figurative oil painting, landscape and all that. At the same time, I apprenticed to a master carpenter. I’ve always been a tinkerer, and after graduate school I really allowed myself to work the way that is most natural to me; it’s always been about material improvisation. My paintings feed my sculpture, which feeds the painting, in a loop. You’ve been in my studio, I take the “mad scientist” strategy as far as space, materials and time allows. My work only really started to feel sincere when I shirked off an educationally imposed need to start from an idea or a theory and work from there. I have to explore, and the most satisfying way I’ve been able to do that thus far is by jumping between painting and sculpture. It feels right to me when I can talk about my sculpture purely in painting terms and vice-versa. I love that loop and it feels like a pretty fruitful way of working right now. I find talking about it politically to be a frustrating conversation. Maybe I’m just stubborn or don’t have a good answer.
9.
NM
You are a prolific producer. Systematic combinations of visceral surface, color, and material seem to be driven by an obsessive scientific method of sorts. Does that system ever break down? If not, how is it useful?
BA
It breaks down constantly. Every time I feel like I’ve got a method of production, I usually either get very bored of it or find a way to break its circuit. I probably make three failures for every success. Fortunately, with the way I work, I can generally recycle it into another strategy and make it into two more failures and maybe one success. The ratio isn’t great, but keeps me in the studio. I will say that I’ve intentionally slowed down my impulse to move from exploration to exploration. I give myself moratoriums on how much I can produce in a given period of time. Last year, no new paintings started, this year, no new paint objects started. Although I break my rules pretty regularly. I’m digging pretty deeply into exploring certain materials right now, gessoes in particular. Coming up with some pretty neat formulations and methods of production. One thread of exploration that is consistent is the mode of display, the “pedestal” or the “frame”. I get to problem solve and fabricate, which usually goes back into informing the objects or paintings.
10.
NM
How does consumption and design play a part in the nowness or ‘friendly modernism’ quality of your work?
BA
That’s a huge question for me and one I’m always trying to answer. I’ve always tried to dissect the now, particularly around color and shape trends. It creeps into the studio regardless of intention, so I try to be mindful and at least tweak it or at best subvert it a bit. What exactly makes something look “so 2003”? Why did antlers appear everywhere one year? The distance between the now and trendy is very slippery… I do love that term, “friendly modernism”. Is it insulting? I’ve always been obsessed with modernism in all its forms; furniture, design, art, architecture and equally obsessed with its sometimes-spectacular failures, particularly in architecture and urban planning. Maybe I’d rather make work that seems like “angry modernism”. I think I’ll work on that.
Brandon Anschultz is an artist living in St. Louis.
Nicole Mauser is an artist and writer living in Chicago. Mauser is also Engagement Coordinator at the Block Museum and Lecturer at the University of Chicago.