Wayne Gonzales

Artists As an Witness of the Era

Wayne Gonzales, well-known for his politicized paintings, re-creates digital images downloaded from the Internet to portray anonymous crowd scenes with a controlled and calm color tone. Since the details are minimal, you may feel as if you are viewing out-of-focused photos upon closer inspection. When you distance yourself from them, you see that a crowd is staring at an event outside the canvas and cheering, passively waiting or falling into doubt and agony. art met Gonzales, who exhibited his works at Gallery Seomi, Seoul , from September 20 through October 18.

art: The source images for your works were appropriated from the Internet. How do you select your images?

WG: I type in words that are interesting to me, and then, browse the relevant images. Since I take the images very intuitively, I just take an image if I like what I see. I don't think deeply or worry why I like it or how I like it. I really believe that every part of the process should be working at the same time. The intensity of the whole process helps everything. I might go through an intensive period of gathering one or two hundred images every day for 3 weeks. Then, I review the images and take those which seem to be good for paintings or drawings.

art: What process of work follows your selection of images?

WG: I do a kind of drawing process on the computer. Sometimes, I do the drawing manually, but it is not a pre-painting actual drawing but a drawing to emit my energy. It's very important to me that my paintings are kind of blank in a way, like I do not give too much information. I want the viewer to project information onto it. Let me take the work depicting the audience sitting on the stand of a stadium, for example. If a highly visible spectator was wearing a T-shirt with the logo of a certain school or organization, I must take it off. In addition, if a part of the face or body is not clear, I should create it through computer drawing. And then I cut the image into parts to decide how many colors are gonna be painted. After that stage, I project parts of the image. The paintings are made by projecting each part onto the canvas and painting the parts individually. In many cases, I need to adjust them, but if I feel they are fine, I start painting.

art: Why are your works black and white or monochrome?

WG: I use color conceptually. Since 2003, I began to use monotone, and particularly in recent years, I have concentrated on monochromatic works. I wanted to darken the colors, because it was sort of a rock's emotional response to the world. I've done paintings with lots of colors, but it did not seem appropriate conceptually or emotionally. There was a break for 2 years when I used the yellow color only. Once I started the crowd series two years ago, it was just where my head was. For me, monochrome is an emotional content for me. What is more interesting for me is the difference in color and its illusion. So, although the color tone of my paintings might look black, it is actually a black mixed with blue. And the color which looks like blue is, in fact, a blue mixed with white. The reason we look at colors differently is because they are in the different contexts. Actually, they are all the same color tones, but they have different states of reality.

art: A critic says that the forms your paintings indicate are not comprehensible when viewed from afar, but they are comprehensible when viewed closely. He argues that it is one of the characteristics of your paintings, which hints the difference between an individual's opinions and those of a crowd.

WG: A good criticism. In the past when I was in the crowd, I could not decide on its scale. If you come near my painting, you can have an intimate relationship with the marks, but you can not see the bigger picture and when you can see the bigger picture, you can not have such an intimate relationship with the marks.

art: Your father was a truck driver. I heard that he got along with the prosecutor's officials, and that your mother's relatives were immigrants from Sicily connected with the mafia. I mean you grew up in an unusual environment. And I heard that you once prepared yourself to be a lawyer or public accountant.

WG: As my parents were not college educated and they were very working class, they wanted their sons go to college and to be professionals. I wanted to be an artist from a young age, but it did not seem possible. When I was 24, I decided to be an artist. After successfully graduating from college, I lived my life as a commercial artist, but I didn't like it. And I moved to New York when I was 30. All of my friends were younger than me, so I decided to think that I was 25. However, I don't think I wasted time. Not that we waste time, but we spend time to accumulate experiences.

art: We know your working style 3 or 4 years ago was different from your current one. Some of your works featured such state heads as Bush or other political leaders, or such political scenes as the Pentagon.

WG: I think it has been about 8 years since I began to do such work. I've done political drawings and paintings relating to the Bush administration and certain political events. It is my form of protest. It is way of processing my anger about what they are about and what they are doing in the world. Because we witnessed them not only stage the wars but also steal the election from the beginning, many of us were angry. It is not because I wanted to show the scenes to the public or the world that I was engaged in such works. I just did it because I felt I needed it to do so. I would do mostly drawings on paper and some prints to throw them into a box and then at some point, I would like to provide people with an opportunity to see the truth. The Republicans started to act as if the United States were authorized to stage a war as soon as September 11 terrorism occurred. And citizens were requested to donate much money to recover New York . I could not agree with the idea. There were various controversial positions about their policy. When the election season came, they held a large-scale convention in New York and tried to use its backdrop in order to justify their war. Many New York artists got angry with the development of the situation and expressed their positions through exhibitions, performances or demonstrations.

art: You mean those political events manipulated by the Bush Administration provided a momentum for your crowd series?

WG: My feelings about that kind of the political stuff was, “ It's an artist's responsibility to bare witness to his or her own time. ” I wish what I have witnessed and felt, namely, what I have expressed, would remain physical records. I did paintings describing the White House and the Pentagon. The Bush Administration manipulated the press not to cover the coffins sent from the war. During the Vietnamese War in the 60s, we could even see the people dying. They applied censorship to the images and thereby controlled production and distribution of the images. Under the Bush Administration, any image of the coffin draped with the flag could be never visible. Since I felt those images needed to be public, I sometimes drew an image of the coffin draped with the flag.

I think that my feelings of anger and the energy that occurred due to political events were inherent in those paintings in every way. My works in 1994 and 1996 used only green and yellow colors to depict real estates, resorts or hotels chromatically. That such resorts or tourism facilities are located at a lake-side or around mountains may mean that access to nature is limited by resorts and hotels.

I also started working with crowds or collecting pictures of crowds as a result of going to protest against the war. When you are a member of a large crowd, you feel empowered, but you cannot actually know its exact size. Unless the newspaper reports ‘400 thousand or 100 thousand,' you cannot estimate the size of the crowd. The police underestimate the scale of the anti-war demonstration, while its organizer tends to overestimate it. So the size or scale of crowds can be ideological. Here, I felt the digital-mode work disintegrating the images into dots was neither appropriate nor sufficient for me, so I wanted to express the brush marks again.

With the crowds, I started thinking in terms of a narrative structure which would be very contemporary and very American, as well as historical. The posture of the crowd waiting or looking for something is similar with the naive and idiotic rush to war. You can see some crowds are polite and deferential while others are distracted. Since I borrowed the images from the Internet, I have no clear idea of what and why the crowds see. In the context of other things they start representing, they have a poetic relationship. I ' m not trying to tell stories. There are certain things unclear that I wanna keep unclear. 

art: You once published a book in collaboration with the poet Vincent Katz.

WG: Many artists in New York oppose the Bush administration's direction and policies in their own ways. Some artists are more active, but the majority of them express their opinions through art. Several years ago, I befriended Vincent. Actually, we did not even know each other, much less were we friends. At the Elizabeth Dee Gallery in Chelsea in 2006, I joined Adrian Piper, Eric Baudelaire and Josephine Meckseper for a group exhibition. Vincent saw my works and called to ask me whether I would like to work with him. In 2005, during the confirmation hearing for Judge John Roberts to the U.S. Supreme Court, Katz wrote a long poem made completely of text taken from The New York Times. As he and I were doing parallel work, together we made this book JUDGE. Because I could be aware that many artists express through art their opinions similar to mine, the publication was exciting and meaningful for me.

art: Do you believe that a sense of history is important for artists?

WG: Every artist ' s work is political even if they choose not to be political. What I think about the artist ' s responsibility is that it's important for an artist to be a witness for their time. There is the following phrase in the campaign ‘live richly' of City Bank ubiquitous in every city or community of the United States; “ May your thoughts always be as deep as your pockets. ” It was a sort of philosophical quip, but it was really offensive. Because it was pretty much encouraging people to live beyond their means and to be ostentatious. But it was just an advertisement. People passing by this advertisement for a moment will notice the contents of the phrase. Although it was not deemed related to my work, I had such a strong response to it. I carried the camera to take photos of all the signs of this campaign and returned to my studio to re-create the fonts and put them into a box with other drawings. On the other hand, I got pretty angry. I did the drawing, while thinking about why they made me angry from an emotional point of view. I thought in a larger sense that during the Bush administration, the advertisements had affected our life very strongly. I felt that such signs symbolizing our time should not disappear but remain recorded permanently. As we have a bank crisis now, this ad campaign has disappeared, but my photos and drawings remain.

Not that I agonize over how I should be an awakened and responsible artist. Rather, I feel artists are records of culture. While I am not literally working, I think over and over again of how to be rigorous.

art: What impact do you want your works to have on people?

WG: Once when I showed my political work and had a question and answer session with my students, one of them asked such a question: “ Are you aware of how much impact your work has on the world? Do you know how much you can change? ” When I answered, ‘I have only a little idea,' he said, “ I ' ll tell you. Nothing. There is no impact. ” I said, 'No way!' and then, felt like arguing with him. But I don ' t believe that. Changing the world is maybe not intentional. Art can function in that way. If somebody sees something, they confirm their own feelings or make them to see the thing in a different way. And all those little things can add up something bigger. 

art: Do you believe that art can change the world?

WG: As a liberal person, in a liberal art world, you are preaching to the converted, like ‘ preaching to the choir. ' As an artist, I try only to be honest and subjective, even if it is not pretty, even if it is potentially embarrassing. Like artist Paul Chen. He was arrested and he does more public things. You do what you can.

art: Could you please give me some comments of your impression of and expectations for the new president?

WG: I think Obama is brilliant, and it is great that the US will have an intelligent, thoughtful president who is willing to engage with the world. Also, judging by the discipline of his campaign, we all expect him to be competent- a huge change! His mandate will be to govern from the political center, so he will not be as progressive as I would like him to be. But, I am very pleased and have a lot of confidence in him. It is hard to have expectations, since there are so many problems to address, but this election feels like a new start. However, there will be a lot of damage from the Bush years to identify and undo. In fact, they are busy pushing through as many last-minute policies as possible before they leave office. Policies that will have especially negative effects on the environment.

art: What do you as an artist think about this monumental election? Will there be any change in the artistic activities of artists in the US , including you?

WG: I don't know how this will affect artists and their work. It really is too early to tell, and there are too many factors. It was easier in a way when Bush became president as most artists I know were extremely angry about the stolen election and then the war. There was a lot to be critical of. Now I think most people just feel a huge sense of relief and a need to rest from it all. It will be important to avoid becoming politically complacent, but it's impossible to predict how the election will affect art making. I'm sure that the contraction of the art market will have a more visible effect in the short term.

2: Waiting Crowd, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 127x127cm

3: Cheering Crowd, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 101.6x127cm Images courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery