Lari Pittman in "Romance" - Season 4 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

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.