EXORCISING THE POP GHOSTS OF A TRANSITIONING ARTIST

    Rob Pruitt has been riding a wave of late. There’s the art Awards—which Pruitt came up with for the Guggenheiman—an Oscar-type presentation that includes categories such as “Group Show of the Year, Gallery” and “Curator of the Year,” which held its second presentation in December of last year. His show Patterns and Degradation at Gavin Brown’s enterprise was a substantial exhibition, with ideas of Rumspringa and Amish-patternmaking encrusting what was ostensibly a mid-career survey. And in March, Pruitt and Public Art Fund unveiled “The Andy Monument,” a shiny ode to the only artist who may have tackled pop culture as much as Pruitt himself, in Manhattan’s Union Square.
    But it hasn’t just been a big couple of years. It’s been a big career. Pruitt seems to find himself in strange and notorious situations with his artwork. His 1998 “Cocaine Buffet,” a length of mirror endowed with an extremely long line of coke that induced the art world coterie to bow before it and sniff their pretenses away, was a reemergence after an unceremonious booting from the art world in 1992 after he and his partner Jack Early created a show about African-American culture that was poorly received, to say the least. (Early has finally overcome with a show at Daniel Reich Gallery after years as a caterer.)
    But if controversy haunts Pruitt, he doesn’t seem to show it. He has talked the Early-Pruitt debacle so deep into the ground that it seems like he’s bored of the whole thing—having even remarked on the fame the notorious show has delivered him. Hell, if anything, the whole thing was a blessing in disguise. To whit: while floundering in various jobs during his exile, Pruitt worked for Martha Stewart Living, creating house-sprucing activity pages. Cut to: 101 Art Ideas You Can Do Yourself (1999), one of the artist’s early successes upon his return, with an exhibition of examples to correspond.
    It’s all to say: Pruitt’s annals are rich. His “RIP” series, made up of custom tombstones for dead celebrities (Charles Schulz’ is simply decorated with Charlie Brown’s black-and-yellow zig-zag; Anna Nicole Smith’s is a vanity mirror with her name scribed on it in lipstick), remarks on our giddily-fascinated celebrity schadenfreude, while partaking in it brazenly. His glitter-flecked pandas straddle cute and consumerism—a towel depicting the cuddly-looking bear paintings curiously ended up in Target stores and the Standard Hotel in Miami. His iPhone photos and pictures pinched from his Facebook friends’ pages create a conflation of “the me generation,” privacy issues, technology, identity, and compulsion. Yet, at the end of the day, they’re just Rob Pruitt’s iPhone photos. At the end of the day, it’s just an awards show. At the end of the day, it’s just a panda.
    Intention makes art what it is. Rob Pruitt doesn’t have any bad intentions. He just does things that toe the line between good taste and bad, yet he does them from a sniper’s nest, ready to simplify any overly-serious navel-gazing the art world has to offer. He does things because they make his life more interesting. And that’s a lesson each and every one of us can learn.

Can you tell me a bit about working with us and working with James [Franco]? You obviously haven’t seen the final product at this point, but what is it that interests you about working with a magazine and working with somebody like James Franco?
Rob Pruitt: Well, I love magazines, and I have a fear that they are going to vanish in the next decade. As a young kid, I was reading my mother’s decorating magazines and cooking magazines. A lot of what I do has its roots in magazine culture, and some years ago I did a project about 101 art ideas you could do yourself, and I know that that was going out and flipping through magazines that my mom had around the house, like Better Homes and Gardens and McCall’s.
‘101 Ways to Please Your Man.’
Well, things like that, or ‘20 Ideas Under $20 to Revamp Your Living Room for the Summer Season.’ I just gobbled that kind of stuff up. It was many years ago that Flaunt rang me up and did a story on me and I am really grateful for that, because it’s nice to get the exposure, and I don’t really mean in the art world, per se. Because in the art world, the art is what gets you exposure. Growing up gay in a Maryland suburb—of course this was the ‘70s and so much has changed with the internet and sexual politics, and a softening of hatred—I was always looking for role models. I just imagined that Flaunt has a broad readership. Some cool teenagers in the middle of the country—of course, she or he has the internet now—they find magazines like Flaunt. I mean, I’m not looking to be anyone’s role model or hero, but hopefully they’ll find things that will broaden their horizons. That sounds like a grand notion, but I think that’s how I felt with Interview magazine. It was like a world I knew I would like to be a part of one day, but it was so far from where I was in suburban Maryland as a 13, 14 year old, so a project like this was exciting for me for that reason.
    More particularly, James and I started a friendship a year or so ago and we’re always talking about things we could make together. He has a very, very crazy schedule—my schedule is probably a lot less crazy than his, but still crazy—so we haven’t really done anything in the studio yet. So, Flaunt just seemed like a no-brainer in terms of both of us dipping our big toe into the water of collaboration. It will work out well for James and I to do little things together before we do something bigger, if that ever happens.
In collaboration, do you have to sometimes give up some of your personal authorship of a project and how you personally feel about aesthetic decisions? Is there a lot of negotiation and concession, like, say, being married?
I always hold back on answering that question because I would have to reveal too much of myself as being a control freak and a really bossy person. Probably, I am the last person that should be collaborating, because I am control-freakish. But, I think that’s why I like to do it—it’s sort of like bondage, in sex, when you’re tied up: I can’t really do everything I want to do, but somehow that feels good.
The other thing that piqued me about what you were saying before is this very tricky question that I’ve been struggling with since working with James. It brings up all these ideas about somebody that comes into the artistic milieu from another place—like being a person of prominence and shifting their career. I’m wondering what you think about that idea, because you are interested in a certain idea of celebrity: some of your works like the ‘RIP’ series and ‘Dead in the Nineties’ talk about our culture’s obsession with celebrity, and…
…And The Art Awards. And my flea markets too, where I invite all my famous artist friends to have a table and sell anything that they choose to. I think it is something I’m totally interested in, and like James, I’m interested in not being known for just one thing. For me, I can’t speak for him, except that I have this obsession with him, that it has to do with attention deficit disorder. I get bored so easily; I really was raised by a television while my parents were working. To this day I can’t watch a whole program. I’m just channel surfing the entire time. If I’m driving in the car, I have the radio on scan, so I just listen to ten seconds of each song before the scan program switches it to the next station. I think that what James is doing is probably something that is not a strategy; it’s just something that he has to do, because he is compelled to have a place for all of these ideas that he has. When I was younger, I used to think that everything was a strategy—everything that every artist or celebrity did—but now, I just think that we do the things that we have to do. Because making art is about being unbridled in terms of what it is that we do.
Sure. Perhaps it’s a question for him. Anyway, you work in a space where artists dare not go sometimes, like working with Target—with the panda towel—and Marimekko. Do you set rules for yourself as to what you won’t do? Do you have an aesthetic limit?
I don’t know. I’m going to sound like a dum dum, but I don’t really think about things like that. I just wake up every morning and try to focus on what I’m excited about that day, and, of course, the offers that come in through email or through the gallery are always factored into that. I think there was a period of time between when I was very young and was involved in a collaboration and then I re-emerged as a solo, singular-identity artist. There was that period when I wasn’t really invited to the party, and that didn’t feel very good at all. So, I think that what I do now is have a fear of saying no to any project that I am invited to do, because I remember what it felt like when I didn’t have any invitations to do anything.
    But, yeah, I think that I edit. There are some things that I probably wouldn’t do. But I like a good assignment, too, and I always try to think of a way to make a bad assignment for a group show or a magazine project something that I do like. So, therefore, I just end up doing everything that I am asked to do, basically. It’s what I always wanted since I was a teenager, to be invited to do the things that I’m doing. I hope that making a beach towel that’s distributed through Target is the tip of the iceberg for me. I would love it if Target would invite me to do a whole home décor line with affordable art to hang on the walls and reproductions of some of my paintings on bedsheets and the whole shebang.
Do you have an idea of who your audience is when you make something in a mass-produced way? When you’re making something for more people than you can imagine, how do you deal with how they’re going to look at it?
I think I just look inward, as someone who is an avid consumer. My family’s pastime was to go to the mall on weekends, even if we didn’t buy anything. Our conversation happened over shopping, and so I’ve been consuming as an average American since childhood. So, when I’m thinking about something that would be mass-produced and have a really wide audience, I’m thinking about it as a compelling product. Does it look beautiful? Is it cool? Is it something that I would covet? If I covet it, maybe other people would as well. I don’t know. It’s not that dissimilar to making a painting for me. I try to put everything I know into it and hope for the best.
We were talking about this idea of intention and strategizing, and it seems like these are ideas that do come up in your work, but it seems like, in some way, you struggle against these ideas, or purposefully try not to pay attention to those impulses?
There have been times in my creative output I have deliberately come up with a strategy and followed through with it, and there are other times when I feel very relaxed about being adrift in my own sea, where I’m just making things in a very organic way, not really thinking about how they will fit into the world once they leave my studio. And then there’s something in between those two things that is sort of like a strategy, but it’s more like playing chess. I’ll make something, it’ll go out into the world, and then maybe an art critic will review it, and the next thing I make is slightly tempered by the response that I got from the previous body of work. So, there’s a dialogue with viewership that comes into play ever so slightly.
Some artists purport to ignore the idea of their show being reviewed. Or, the response to their show.
Well, I try not to Google myself. But, when I go to the gallery meetings, I usually get handed a folder of recent press. I guess I could choose not to read it, but I don’t really see the point. Except that I don’t like to get my feelings hurt. But, it ends up being an exercise for me in being a better person, that I should be able to take having my feelings hurt, so therefore I read the reviews and deal with it.
I can’t imagine that there’s so much negative review of your work anymore. There’s probably some critique, but it’s a question that leads back—and I don’t know if you want to talk about it—speaking about Red, Black, Green, Red, White, and Blue, it must have been a very strange thing to see that response. Was that completely unexpected, or did you know that it was going to provoke, or did you just misjudge the provocation level?
The primary intention was not to do something that was only provocative, but the primary intention was to address an open wound on American culture and history. This country was built on slavery, and it’s only been in my lifetime—I was born in the early ‘60s—that equal rights were legislated. The repercussions of that—even though we have a Black president today, which is the most amazing thing that could have ever happened—racism still exists. I can only speak for myself: I thought it would be an interesting subject matter to address because it was so daunting and, in a way, a taboo. Especially, at that moment that the work was made, it was this period where people in art were thinking about identity issue politics, which primarily meant you were making work about your own identity. If that was the case, we should have been making work about white, gay males in our mid-20s. But I thought that that would be a little easy, and, in a way, I thought that this project would address that. Because when I was in high school I certainly felt alienated, picked on, and beat up on the playground for reasons that were outside of my control. Just for being born gay. And so, I don’t think that they are exactly the same by any means—being born black and being born gay—but I certainly thought there was an open door to address the history of Black Americans in pop culture.
Perhaps the idea of art has changed, and the idea of what levels of identity you can put into a piece of artwork has shifted. For instance, perhaps the ‘RIP’ series or ‘Dead in the Nineties’ might be criticized for being insensitive to dead people. Nowadays, people look at things with a deadened gaze.
Well, I see art today as being more splintered. I don’t see a particular movement; I see many, many things, and maybe it’s because of digital communication, the internet. Everything’s happening at the same time. It’s not like abstract expressionism in the ‘50s, pop art in the ‘60s, and minimalism in the early ‘70s, and then German expressionism in the ‘80s. I think that now you can spend a Saturday afternoon walking around Chelsea and seeing 50 different movements happening all at the same time. When I made the ‘Dead in the Nineties’ wine bottle sculptures, that was just a very personal project to me and I probably wasn’t thinking too much about it. I was thinking, ‘I no longer have my career, but I didn’t stop making art in the studio.’ It’s a bit of a pun. I keep a notebook, and I always have when I make my art—and I don’t even see myself as a macabre person—but whenever a celebrity dies I jot it down. It’s something that I’ve always paid attention to.
When someone like Amy Winehouse dies, how does that affect you?
I have a text pal, and we don’t text each other unless there’s a celebrity death. It’s like a thematic pen pal, but she’s my text pal. Whenever she hears that a celebrity has died, she texts me ‘RIP Amy Winehouse,’ and when I hear of a celebrity that dies I text her RIP and the celebrity. That’s the only texting that she and I do, and it’s not an art project, but it’s just a very fun, narrow conversation that the two of us have across the Atlantic Ocean. She’s in London. I don’t know. It’s a place to put that mini-obsession that I have. It’s also a way to say hi to this person that I like very much within a structure.
And then, I wonder what it takes for someone to be canonized by you, like the ‘RIP’ series?
I don’t know. Because I don’t think that I have the same interest in celebrity as, say, Andy Warhol. I’m not going to make art about Lady Gaga. Sure, I read Perez Hilton every day when I wake up and have my coffee, but it’s not like a singular focus of mine. It’s just amusing to me. It’s like following a real life soap opera. When I was young, my sister had a bunch of Barbies, but she didn’t really play with them. I took them into my room and played with them. I think of celebrity as my adult version of playing with Barbies. Even though I probably don’t even see half of these people’s films, I just like to follow, like many other people around the world, the trials and tribulations of their everyday lives.
Do you make up little stories of your own?
Yeah. I probably spend too much time thinking about Tom and Katie. On one hand, I could care less about them, but then if I’m totally bored at a red light in traffic, I might daydream about what they might be doing at that particular moment.
When looking at your iPhone photos, I had the thought that, throughout any period in history, regardless if there’s a movement going on now or a thousand of splinter movements, artists hang out with other artists, even if they’re not from the same movement. And it seems like…
...Nobody wants to talk to me.
No, it seems, actually, a lot of your photos have a lot of celebrity artists in them and the flea markets, and The Art Awards. It leads into the idea of what is a celebrity artist and also, is there an archetype, or a particular way an artist should be now?
You’re asking questions—some are just too hard. I really don’t know. I do know that I love being around other artists, and it really fuels my own work. I don’t know if it’s about our competitiveness. But then, I have a very broad way of categorizing artists. I think it’s just anyone that is involved, I don’t know if you went to art school, but even as a magazine editor I throw you in the artists category, too. Also, time is just so limited, I really don’t have time to meet people outside of my own world, sad as that sounds. I don’t really know any plumbers or professional athletes, or doctors—I do know doctors, but they’re collectors. But that’s not really the answer either. I think I just love being around other artists and I don’t know if there is an archetype these days. Or something that young people are modeling themselves after or aspire to.
Tell me about Pattern and Degradation. Walk me through it and tell me how that fits into your timeline and what has come out of that in your dialogue?
As I was saying, I make this work very organically and automatically, and then after I finish it, I tend to reject it myself, and I have these ideas that I want to be an entirely different kind of artist. Not necessarily ‘look for the signs and symbols and pictures in the world that I live and transfer them to a canvas,’ but I just want the image to go directly from my brain, through my arm, and to the paintbrush, and be more spontaneous and more expressionistic. The year before, I had put out a monograph of everything that I had ever made, so I had become very familiar with my own themes over the past 20 years. I thought that I should do a recap and put them all to rest, and then I was going to re-emerge, just as I used to have a fantasy when I was a school kid about showing up on the first day of school every September as not the nerd anymore—the person with the right sneakers, and ready with a funny joke, and full of confidence. But, of course, that never really happened, but that’s how I always view my art-making practice. After having made the Pop Touched Me book, I thought, ‘Now it’s time to put all of these ideas to rest, and I’m going to be that artist I’ve always wanted to be.’ Right after that show, I would reemerge. It’s very hard to articulate, even though it’s something that I’ve thought about for years, what I would be reemerging as—the painter that goes into his studio, and then leaves at the end of the day covered in paint, because that’s not who I am today. At the end of the day, when I leave, I probably don’t have any paint on me. I’m like very exacting and like things generally planned out.
Well, is ‘The Andy Monument’ part of this reemergence, or is that prior to the sloughing off of your past career?
The Andy Warhol monument was something really thrilling to do. And I’m glad you asked that question, because when I was spring cleaning my studio, I came across a proposal to the Public Art Fund that I made 10 years ago that was rejected. So, it’s actually a 10-year-old idea of mine, and it’s an idea I felt strongly enough of to not let go of. I didn’t resubmit it every year. Your question was: is the monument part of this shedding that skin and reemerging? It really isn’t; it’s a transitional work.
    I really like public art that doesn’t necessarily challenge the public, but still fills a need. With ‘The Andy Monument,’ I just like the way it seems useful. Andy can stand for all artists and all art. It’s just a place to recognize the importance of artists. And, of course, Andy was, and is, important. I also think of it as a companion to the Statue of Liberty that welcomes people from other lands that want to be a part of this country. I think that Andy stands there welcoming people that felt alienated in their hometowns to New York City, so they can be who they need to be, and always dreamed of being.
I wanted to ask you what you think the world is going to be like in a hundred years?
Oh, gosh. That is another very hard question. I think that all of the rivers and oceans will be clean again, because I think that the green movement will really kick in and reverse all of the damage that we’ve done. I must not spend much time thinking about the future, but I need to, and I want to answer this question. I’m hoping that everyone will be treated equally, and we will have figured out a better solution to war. I guess that’s all I can see so far.