Lari Pittman: I think as chaotic as American culture is—
sadly, ironically, or even perversely— I thrive on that.
I’m able to carve out a tremendous amount of freedom
and even more particularly in Los Angeles.
I can control this idea of aesthetics and beauty—
micromanage it more here than I could in cultural situations
where there is such a strong, established code of aesthetics—
that it’s still the wild west on some levels,
that you can still paint it any which way you want.
I want to offer a painting that somehow the viewer has to stand in front of it
and almost not believe it.
But in the act of not believing it, what they’re actually seeing,
they get swept away in it.
Everything about it is fake and artificial,
but they get transported somewhere far away.
That’s a great thing.
The work is visually available to everybody.
Multiple viewers can approach it very differently.
For example, I’m always excited when the UPS man or the water man comes in,
to the front of the studio, and makes a delivery—
and they immediately just respond to the work and thumbs up,
that type of thing.
I will not high five though.
But I’m also interested that the work occupy a denser,
critical territory that would require a different type of audience,
maybe a different type of visual literacy.
The work is not confined to one demographic.
The work has the capacity to navigate between these very,
very distant polls of the populist and the elitist.
There’s a very, very strong Mediterranean core to who I am.
And quite frankly I need a lot of sun.
I was born in Glendale, California, but my formative years were in Colombia.
My mother is Colombian.
My father is southern, from the United States,
from a Protestant background.
So I grew up in a very...not a contradictory world,
but a hybrid world.
I had a pet chicken named Jaime,
that I remember my aunt Ligia bought for me at Sears
when we were living in Colombia.
Then we moved to my mother’s family town near the equator.
I was not going to leave Jaime behind.
My father asked the captain or the pilot if I could bring the chicken on my lap
and that was fine, it was all cleared.
My grandmother was with us living for a while in Cali
and I requested that we make a traveling outfit for Jaime,
so we made a vest.
I was just very proud and I was never made fun of.
It was just that kind of idea of totally normative.
And so my father was with me and I was allowed to have my chicken,
fully dressed for travel on my lap.
I think that that kind of pre-condition of
allowing me to express a fey side, I guess, as a young boy,
was given full reign and never, ever commented on,
and I think that that’s why the decorative aspect of the work
comes systemically, organically, naturally to me because
it was really allowed to bloom and blossom and wasn’t curtailed or curbed when I was a child.
I’m grateful for having a charmed life and a certain amount of privilege
I’m very excited and thankful for.
But even within that framework of living somewhat in a bubble,
I think what keeps me radicalized is being aware of the overwhelming hatred
that is exhibited by the American population
and through actual legislation against homosexuals.
I can lead quite a pretty life (LAUGHS),
but it’s always quickly clarified by those very aggressive strains in American culture which,
in a way, wonderfully puts me in my place.
I will not leave painting. I won’t leave it.
I won’t leave it down.
I think it comes from a deep cultural pathology that maybe homosexuals might have.
That is, you fix something up— that kind of service component of one’s kind,
of looking at things and fixing them up.
That’s kind of how I looked at painting in the ‘70s,
because it was a completely abandoned thing.
And I was kind of thrilled that it was abandoned.
And I maybe had a chance to fix it up.
The impetus for this painting really comes from Mexican retablo
which is a devotional painting on tin
and I think it dates roughly from mid to late 19th Century.
I’m an avid collector of these anonymous painters—
of these retablos that were used as devotional imagery.
I’m attracted to them ironically as an atheist.
I’m attracted to religious art
simply because it usually shows a hyperbolic moment
like the suffering or martyrdom of the saint—
or, in this case, a very dramatic moment in the life of Christ.
So I do look at this religious image through a secular lens.
And then, actually, this little painting was able to
give me the cues for the color palette in the painting itself.
Although now I need to have a more destabilizing color introduced in it.
I’ve always taken from the retablos,
but it’s more about a type of painting technique—
a kind of decorative, applied arts technique
by which they embellish the surface of the retablos.
And that I’ve been doing for over twenty years.
But this was the first time I sampled so directly.
I think it was because it was about figuration.
Every morning, I have a walk about, looking at all the cactuses that we’ve planted.
Really studying them.
This is the first time that instead of inventing or fabricating a painting,
that I’m actually referring to something very specifically
that I’ve been looking at every morning.
What I think still has to happen in a painting like this is that
we’re seeing the setting and we’re seeing a list of nouns.
And there are a list of adjectives.
So the nouns are all being modified.
But, linguistically, what isn’t happening in this painting is the verb yet.
In all of the paintings—
and especially in the ones that I showed in New York at the end of last year—
it really is a form of poltergeist or animism that’s inhabiting the scene.
The tableau.
Clearly, something is occurring in this area of the painting.
Some sort of shift of identity of a space, but we can’t name it.
But, then, a way for me to somewhat sublimate it back down
and for it not to seem too spectacular,
I’ve placed a spider web over it to somewhat... like a net, to somehow corral the effect a bit.
It’s a central part of the painting, but again it’s still not enough
for it to be the verb of the painting.
And somehow I think the verb of the painting has to occur somewhere in here,
somehow to activate the branches of the cactus
even at the expense of it being a little bit more allegorical.
That I wouldn’t mind.
I’m not resisting the invasion of that aspect of my private life,
which is the garden really clearly finding its place in the work.
I don’t respond to the idea of nature at large.
I prefer landscaping.
And landscaping as a way to push back a little bit the chaos of nature,
of the kind of violence of it.
So it’s imposing a type of rational gardening structure
over these cactus and succulents.
We’re not as keen on a type of naturalism so the garden has a very decided mannerism to it.
The cactus are the surrogate structure.
And the garden is one elaborate metaphor.
One of the things that gardening induces in the gardener,
for good or for bad, is a rumination on mortality.
Because you have a concentrated and
very compressed relationship to the life and death of plants.
You think about that a little bit more than if you didn’t garden.
It becomes a heightened synopsized life and death cycle
over and over and over again.