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Joe Zucker’s “process” art over the last 40 years has been eccentric, puzzling and uniquely appealing in its formal logic. Varying wildly in approach and technique, his work is concerned with ideas of art storage and exhibition, historical outcasts, materiality, race relations and reconstruction agriculture versus industry are all fervent subtext. His craft of visual modernism has a commitment to a basic premise, uniting his oeuvre with surprising clarity – the creation of an artwork.
What are you working on right now?
I am working with a new material to start on smaller paintings. I’m planning to do some large-scale frescoes on gypsum board [drywall], and soaking watercolours into the board. I don’t know if you know what sheet rock is, the wall panelling you put up instead of plaster? I’m carving into the sheet rock and painting on the gypsum underneath after cutting the paper off to get to it, before soaking it with colour. It’s very tedious.
You were there at the beginnings of “process art”, a movement that emerged when you were a young artist in the 1960s.
Yes, most of my work has been an emphasis on the construction of a painting itself, the “process”. Usually there is a strong bond between the making, and what the thing looks like. That started really back when I was in graduate school and began to make canvas paintings – diagrammatical and magnified paintings of how the fabric of the canvas itself was woven. That has always stayed with me. A lot of artists of my generation – Richard Serra, Barry Le Va, Joel Shapiro – were dealing with “process”, and most of them dealt with it in an abstract form. But I was trying to find a way of dealing with imagery and relating it to the process.
Was this a radical style at the time, in the sense of creating work that was determined by the materials, work that essentially narrated itself through its production?
I’m not interested really in style except for the very style of the painting that results from the process I work on. I don’t spend a lot of time refining, and I never alter paintings. A lot of young artists in my time were really involved with post-war ideas of change. My generation existed under the auspices of Mister Picasso; it was much harder painting in 1965 when he was still alive. I studied with disciples of Picasso in the School of Paris, so if you realise the tremendous weight of the Paris School and its insistence on style, you can understand why a person like me is a heretic, an anarchist. Young artists now don’t understand that impact of Cubism on Modernism, for example, and that’s changed. The rules have changed.
Do you set rules for yourself or your processes?
I control the degree of abstraction in a way. Many of my paintings are literally abstract, and that becomes a product of either process and the relation of the tools used or how it’s made to the size of the format. So I don’t choose between abstractions; the kind of math involved will often make the paintings more abstract then figurative. It’s like: how do you make something recognisable with a 9ft by 9ft format using cotton balls? A lot of it comes out of pixilation, how to make an image readable with a one-inch module.
There has been a lot of mythology or history in your work – magicians, pirates …
seventeenth-century ships were always made of wood and canvas. I always thought a pirate ship and a painting on an easel had a certain affinity and I tried to make that allegory apparent. The scroll paintings I’ve done are like sails. There is an attempt to take that type of archaic technology and use it to celebrate the kind of bankruptcy of painting, concentrating on the literal relationship between painting and canvas and wood. Pirates are innovators in their own social cult, like artists or magicians. They were always about appropriating, not being influenced – making colourful clothing, customising ships to be used in a more practical way of chasing down their prey. They were inventors, in a sense, within their own classless society. Traditionally art was about influences, not appropriation.
You spent about seven or eight years on the cotton ball paintings. Why cotton as the material in the first place?
I really like a lot of early European paintings, pre-Duccio, really primitive stuff, eleventh and twelfth centuries. I also love Mexican muralist painting. In a way, frescoes take the artist’s hand out of it. It’s tied to the process, it’s something quick and beautifully naive.
‘Tales of Cotton’ [currently at the Mary Boone gallery in New York, with paintings from 1975 and 1976] is really about the emergence of a number of things all coming together – the history of cotton, the history of the South, an allegory of my childhood, all rolled together into one metaphor. It’s very weird that you can take a piece of soaking cotton and eventually develop a skill that becomes played out. I went from a very archaic style to almost rococo.
You have been a working artist for 35, 40 years now. How do you find art-making in America has changed?
As a survivor, as a professional, I take what I do seriously as an obligation. I don’t separate myself from the professional class of any other kind of discipline. What I guess I’m saying is that the romanticism of one’s youth as you survive the contemporary art world and then participate in it really has to turn into an obligation as a professional. There is a romanticism in new art making that isn’t necessarily long lasting.
Do you find the art market plays a bigger role in your work now than before?
A lot of people have forgot about Dr Willi Bongard. He was a German journalist who had a newsletter in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s [Art Aktuell, which ranked contemporary artists and awarded them points for certain achievements, ranging from a review in Artforum to being invited to the Venice Biennale]. It was published on cheap yellow or pink paper and would tell people the top 100 artists in Europe and America. He once came to my studio and stole a cotton ball as a souvenir. I think now, the language of criticism and the marketplace is embracing concerns outside of aesthetic value. That language wasn’t there when I was a young artist. Decisions were made on plastic issues.
Where do you see contemporary art going?
I think right now the future of my profession looks like one of those pie chart diagrams: 14 per cent oversized photographs, 11 per cent painting, 24.5 per cent installation, you know… and I think even if those percentages could change, available wall and floor space is related to that diagram more than any singular, mainstream direction. It’s a continuous and pluralistic art world. I don’t know, maybe somebody will find a new way to paint a tree, then everybody will start painting trees again.
by Syma Tariq
From the Glass Archive – Issue Two – Rapture
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