In a legal context, intention is obviously important. I’m afraid, though, that Ross was speaking about the creative (and sometimes revelatory) process, which, even when working toward total self-referentiality, is always partly a process of reception, while the “general public,” insomuch as there is one, is a consumer society, increasingly interested in products above production. We don’t want to work too hard. We will do almost anything to promote myths of easy emergence: Calvin Klein creates in his dreams, the Internet is anonymous, Ginsberg never revised. What Ross didn’t mention was that objects, icons, brands and viral images also demonstrate intention, often in the same way that drugs or vegetables or fruits make you crave more (or less) of them; they worm into our skin, and as a generation we are left with either death or scars. It’s a choice, if limited. Our relationship with these things is defining a new generation of artists.

If it didn’t turn so quickly to steam, one of the most common questions people ask artist Tomokazu Matsuyama would also be the most annoying: “Yes,” viewers say, drool dribbling from the corners of their eyes. “It’s even kinda stunning. But is it a painting?” Matsuyama, known as Matzu or Matsu, doesn’t let such quibbles get to him. He seems to trust that people will eventually become interested in why they cannot look away from his paintings, sculptures and occasional commercial work, and that this will trump their obsession with commercial or responsibility-less views of intention.

Speaking softly in his modest Greenpoint, Brooklyn studio on the eve of “In Case You’re Lost” at San Francisco’s Frey Norris Gallery, his first West Coast solo show, Matsu laughs about always being grouped with Takashi Murakami, probably the best known contemporary Japanese pop artist. “I am an active artist in New York,” he says. “I just happen to be a Japanese artist.” He notes that he’s friends with many of the Kaikai Kiki artists (Mr., Chiho Aoshima), and has shown with many of them. These artists, he says, are similar in outlook, though they are “coming from the East” while he is “looking from the West.”

“I was born in a very old, traditional part of Japan. Then, at the age of eight, I moved to L.A.,” says Matsu. Three years later, his family moved to Tokyo. “Coming from the ‘Samurai region’ of Japan,” he says, “I was very shocked.” At first the shock came from the popular surge in what he calls “young cultures” in L.A.–surfing, skateboarding, and their related visual languages–and then from the rapid urban environment in Tokyo. Eventually he moved to New York for grad school, where, as a burgeoning street artist and pop-assimilator he felt a natural affinity with many of the artists originally shepherded by Henry Geldzahler: Lichtenstein, Hockney, Basquiat, Warhol.

“There was always this identity crisis in my life. Where we now live is a hybrid, it’s extremely diverse. How do you define being Caucasian in the U.S. today? How do you define being Asian?” asks Matsu. After entering Pratt as a design student, he learned to paint and began to scoop from American and Japanese folklore and pop iconography, entering what Andy Warhol Museum curator Eric Shiner, in his catalogue essay for Matsu’s current show, calls a “global visual exchange.” This constant sense of exchange is a hallmark of Matsu’s generation–our generation–call it the generation of those who have a strong opinion about Nirvana, one way or the other.

As a result, Matsu’s work is deceptively slick. The two cornerstones of “In Case You’re Lost” vibrate with minimalism and density: the “life-size,” 15-foot wide triptych Runnin Further Deeper (2009) explores a landscape tied mainly to the subconscious, while and the Playmobil-meets-Remington cowboy pose of Wherever I Am (2009) is both unsettling and calming. What is taming whom?

Matsu notes that Runnin Further Deeper is a part of an ongoing series of large trans-cultural/mythical landscape paintings inspired by the work of ancient scroll painter Kano Sanraku. “The icon of the horse represents male power, and the horse itself has come to be a main cultural identifier for me,” he says. There is a sense that the universe is acting macho while everything in it is try to take care of it. “It’s not a landscape painting, it’s not an abstract painting. My goal is to portray our time with a generational feel,” he says. “To portray the generation I belong to.”

This is the generation gap of Tomokazu Matsuyama: In an age where we’re even more distracted by the byproducts of distraction than by distraction itself, we’re expected to be our own Boswell. We’re even expected to be our own Remington, recalling his intentionally iconic Western illustrations with Theodore Roosevelt. We’re expected to talk to ourselves. Even if you stop worrying about being lost, even if you stop thinking that it’s so important to be lost all the time, you are still bound to be defined by a generation that for the first time is defined by what it doesn’t do. Generations of artists are increasingly defined by an obsession with the branding of things that they grew up with but that were not yet branded. Suddenly the things you held so close–the music, the snowboards, the parties, the secrets–are in the magazines, hovering amid a VH1 onslaught, just beyond memory.

When I ask for more details about historical influences, Matsu lights up. “Here are my historical references!” he says, pulling out a binder of old but only slightly faded Japanese woodblock prints.” Oddly, the plaid and polka dots that people find “urban” and “contemporary” in his work are all here, colors slightly faded but patterns vivid. Matsu’s intention isn’t “cultural” per se; instead, it’s visual and amorphous. “Now I’m a collector,” he says. “In Japan, it’s so sad. Nobody buys this stuff.” He opens to a print of a warrior on a dragon-horse-beast-thing. We gaze. “This is from 1878 and you can buy it for $150.”

Matsu continues to do commercial design work, but only when he is able to view it as a way to reach people with his art. He has had fun designing sandals for Nike and snowboards for Burton. But when a major international fashion brand asked him to design their new logo, Matsu had to refuse: “I don’t do branding. That’s not what I do,” he says. Then, after a slight pause: “My brand is me.”

Javier Marias, the prolific Spanish author who blends wit and private conspiracies in unparalleled ways, was on KCRW’s Bookworm yesterday. As one would expect from the lengths of the provocateur’s written sentences, the interview went on so long that they had to split it up into two shows; the second one airs in a week. New Directions used my quote from a SFBG review as a blurb for the newly released third volume of Marias’s Your Face Tomorrow trilogy. I say that he is “sexy, contemplative, elusive, and addictive.” But I’ve never heard his voice. I’m about to. I’m kind of afraid.

The group exhibition Amor Fati (Love of Fate) opens at the Joyce Gordon Gallery in Oakland tonight.

Curator Lian Ladia has put together a potent mix of artists who aren’t afraid of politics and aren’t afraid of the subconscious. Highlighted by a “visual anthropological sculpture” by SFAI instructor and Bay Area gem Carlos Villa, the show includes work by Malaquias Montoya, Kwatro-Kantos, Faviana Rodriguez, and painterly duo MIJU, to whom I once wrote a letter as a review. Whether you love or hate your fate, this is a show to be reckoned with. The reception is from 6-8pm. The show runs through February 8th.

On the other coast, Brooklyn gallery Jack the Pelican sees the opening of A Space Exodus, a smart and irreverent show by Larissa Sansour featuring, among other things, “the first Palestinian on the moon.” The opening lasts from 7-9pm tonight, and the exhibition runs through February 7th. It’s fitting that Sansour’s show is opening while viewers have around 24 hours left to see the Wallace Berman show at Nicole Klagsburn in Chelsea. Exhibiting videos that took way too long to make, the two artists share an essential sense of humor, an aesthetic calm, a pained delight.

Larry Sultan is dead. The photographer behind Pictures from Home passed away from cancer on Sunday at the age of 63. The SF Chron, NY Times, and LA Times have similar obits. In 1990, Catherine Liu (yes, that Catherine Liu) talked to Sultan for BOMB about his home movies project; in the interview, Sultan says: “I want to measure how a life was lived against how a life was dreamed.”

In 2004, Tessa DeCarlo wrote for The Brooklyn Rail about The Valley, Sultan’s project relating the porn industry in the San Fernando Valley. In Art in America, Mellisa E. Feldman wrote that in The Valley, “Harmony reigns where you would least expect it.” Original versions of Sultan and Mike Mandel’s 1977 Evidence book are hard to come by, so Electric Works published a new edition (good gift!) of the found-photo phantasma. Sultan was a true gem. He will be dearly missed.

Miraculously, following death threats and other manner of bad vibes, photographer Roger Ballen, who has been working as a geologist and analog photographer in South Africa for quite some time, is still alive. Phaidon has just published the tableaux-master’s eighth photography book, Boarding House. In Frieze, Sean O’Toole writes about everything Ballen. At a fantastic presentation at the School of Visual Arts in New York a few weeks ago, in conversation with Darius Himes, Ballen told the crowd that “what photography is saying to you is that time never repeats itself.”

In honor of the new, biographical retrospective at the Jewish Museum, Karen Rosenberg asks, Who was the real Man Ray? At LACMA on Fire: Does Los Angeles deserve “a much finer icon than a train hanging from a crane?” In Cabinet: Is chess literature? And CultureGrrl follows what’s being built.

The 2009 music release schedule is winding down, so people have started making their arbitrary top-whatever lists.

While such rankings might be more potent some years from now, when we see which albums are actually still in rotation (like tomorrow’s Leonids meteor shower, where “trails laid down by the [meteor's parent] comet in 1466 and 1533 are expected to be the chief contributors to whatever happens”), some late-season releases and tours guarantee that this presidentially revolutionary year will be known as the year of the resurrected voice.

Alongside past years bleeding into this one with remarkable releases from (mostly) instrumental bands such as Au, Dosh, and Russian Circles, 2009 has given audiences a number of returned voices to chew on. They’re united by a glorious, theatrical chill. Last week at the Mercury Lounge, Lights played (with a substitute bassist, I think) to a small but well-lit audience enraptured by the group’s angular grooves and edgy but impressively controlled vocal harmonies. They rocked harder than Ted Leo at CMJ, and, in their more mellow moments, even conjured up some green, green California hills. It would be nice to see them tour someday with the Gossip, whose June 2009 release, Music for Men, was hot, underrated, and would make a dope late-night compliment to Lights’ dawny magic-making.

Tonight at the Make-Out Room in San Francisco, local troubadours Mark Matos & Os Beaches celebrate tomorrow’s release of  Words of the Knife on Porto Franco Records. You can say that Matos is a fine purveyor of neo-Tropicalia, or you can just say that Mark Matos & Os Beaches rock. Their live shows are always an intoxicating blend of California roots rock such as The Motherhips, earlier vibes such as the better (stranger) Jefferson Starship or better (less strange) Jerry Garcia Band, and something truly unique and passionate. Matos’ voice breaks at just the right times, and his cast of musicians balances this well.

There’s something gestural and hypnotic about Saint Judas, a new album from Renaissance man Mark Growden. Known more commonly for his scores for dance, Growden works in a style reminiscent of Tom Waits and, more locally, Miller Carr, and delves deep into the places where, as he sings on “Inside Every Bird,” Inside every bird, there’s a smaller bird.

Also on tour right now, and seriously not to be missed, is Vic Chesnutt (free-form bio). Yes, Vic Chesnutt! The PR materials for his new album on Constellation, At The Cut, are actually pretty damn accurate:

Chesnutt’s second album to feature musicians from Thee Silver Mt. Zion, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Witchies and Guy Picciotto from Fugazi (who also co-produced the record with Howard Bilerman of Arcade Fire fame) picks up where North Star Deserter (2007) left off, with an explosive group of arrangers and players allowing Vic to conjure snarling spittle and devastating fragile grace in equal measure.

It’s all true, and although some of the tracks on the album are a tad, eh, therapeutic, the numerous masterpieces–especially “I’ve Flirted With You All My Life,” which the band tends to do a little slower and more lilting live–make up for it. The album’s out now and the indie supergroup is currently touring Canada and the USA.

And the list goes on. Stay tuned. As Matos croons on one particularly intimate track, Hold on tight, hold on tight, and look for the light.

Gray has continued to confuse critics and delight readers with a meandering output of (mostly great) books bound together by an interest in how failing at love is connected to everything else. He now has a book or artwork for every mood or yearning, including the contemplative sadomasochism of 1982, Janine (1984); a curiously romantic Frankenstein re-imagining, Poor Things (1992), which won the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize; Something Leather (1990), a tale of rambling sexualities; The Fall of Kelvin Walker (1985), a high-speed London media parody that began as a theatre play; the schoolteacher politics of Old Men in Love (2007), which includes a diatribe against the War in Iraq and, like Poor Things, centers around invented historical finds; The Book of Prefaces (2000), an illustrated history of English-language literature through prefaces and marginalia; as well as other novels and numerous radio and stage plays and short stories. Last year, his former secretary and student Rodge Glass released Alasdair Gray: A Secretary’s Biography. Luath Press just put out a book of Gray’s plays, and sometime next year Canongate will let loose his anticipated volume A Life in Pictures.

Gray’s muralistic storytelling is no accident. Originally trained as an artist, he has commented slyly that he writes to support his art, and he has illustrated and designed his own books (and a smattering of other people’s) from the get-go. His woodblock-like murals, drawings and paintings are gaining increasing recognition in large part thanks to innovative Glasgow gallerist Sorcha Dallas. And he’s spent a lot of time up against the walls. Of Gray’s nine murals in public buildings, four have been destroyed and one is still being painted, at Òran Mór, a cultural center in Glasgow’s West End.

In 2007, Gray collaborated with stellar artist Francesca Lowe, and last October he was invited to speak at the Frieze Art Fair in London. Amid the chaos and sometimes obnoxious art talk of the fair, he spoke giddily about the picture books that formed his early opinions and–though this felt a little revisionist–artistic aspirations. He was interviewed on stage by Tom McCarthy (check out the free podcast here), who was surprised to find out that the harsh criticism of Gray’s work that appears at the end of Old Men in Love was actually written by Gray himself.

“I invented that hostile critic,” Gray squealed. “I thought that I had enough information to do a far better hatchet job on me than anybody else could!” His grand, sardonic sense of humor is in-line with other Scottish writers (whom everyone should read!) such as Tom Leonard, Liz Lochhead, and Edwin Morgan. The flap copy he created for 1982, Janine sees him at the height of this self-mockery:

This already dated novel is set inside the head of an aging, divorced, alcoholic, insomniac supervisor of security installations who is tippling in the bedroom of a small Scottish hotel. Though full of depressing memories and Conservative propaganda, it is mainly a sadomasochistic fetishistic fantasy. Even the arrival of God in the later chapters fails to elevate the tone. Every stylistic excess and moral defect which critics conspired to ignore in the author’s first books, Lanark and Unlikely Stories, Mostly, is presented here in concentrated form.

Immediately following Gray’s presentation at the art fair, we headed to a nearby pub to chat. We caught up about mutual acquaintances in Edinburgh, including Chapman editor Joy Hendry, who is still struggling to keep the Scottish arts magazine alive, and the brilliant historian Angus Calder, who died tragically last year. Gray ordered a gin and tonic.

All artwork by Alasdair Gray.

**

The Rumpus: Did the conversation after your Frieze slide show go as expected?

Alasdair Gray: Yes. I’m never asked unexpected questions.

Rumpus: Maybe, but suddenly everyone’s interested in your paintings.

Gray: I’ve been answering questions about my work, I suppose, since 1981 when Lanark was first published. I think people have not been generally so interested in my painting as something separate from the books. It was really less than a year ago that a Glasgow dealer, Sorcha Dallas, contacted me and indicated that she would like to sell my work. I grew up in Glasgow but there were no art dealers working there. There had been–in the late 19th century, until the 1920s, there were some quite important Glasgow art dealers just as there were Scottish artists who were exhibiting and selling work on the Continent–but all that disappeared after the Second World War.

So I was quite surprised, in the first place, to get a dealer contacting me, and then to find it was a Glasgow dealer. On the other hand, she exhibits internationally. Frieze is the international art fair she exhibits at in England, but she mentioned others. Holland, Switzerland, an art fair in Germany―is it Munich? I can’t remember. She mentioned three others. Each year she sells work for international art fairs in Europe. Is there one in America? I’m not sure. The thing is that she’s started selling my work from Glasgow and getting portrait commissions that she handles, and she’s been partly instrumental in hanging my paintings in Glasgow Print Studio.

Rumpus: She’s also setting up a foundation to collect and preserve your work. That pic at the slide show was the first picture I’d seen of your mural in the Glasgow synagogue. When you were studying mural painting how did they teach you? Did you go on fieldtrips?

Gray: One or two, not many. It was mainly looking at reproductions of Michelangelo and Giotto. Stanley Spencer I was very fond of, of course, and Diego Rivera, but I saw practically none of these as they were painted. They were just reproductions in books. I was teaching myself, you know, so I was very slow, particularly since I wasn’t being paid money to live on while I was doing it. When I was painting the church mural, “The Six Days of Creation” [Greenhead Church of Scotland, 1959], the Garden of Eden panel, I was working as a part-time teacher, three days a week, which left me four to work on the mural.

Rumpus: Were they giving feedback while you painted? Did you do an outline first and then fill it in?

Gray: It changed a great deal as it went along. Eventually the job took two or three years and they had hoped it would be done in two or three months. They got rather angry and were finally wanting rid of me. Fortunately, the minister was on my side. He was a quiet and rather gentle old man, but after he’d given me the deadline for when it would be finished, I came down and this particular panel wasn’t finished. I think he saw that I was on the verge of tears. He saw me and he suddenly said [in a big voice], “Finish it in your own time, Alasdair! Don’t worry about them at all!” I was very grateful to him.

Rumpus: Was the mural at the Scotland USSR Friendship Society in Glasgow supposed to be faster too?

Gray: It was never completely finished! I kept revising it, ever efficiently… I had the crucifixion on one wall, presenting it as if it was happening in the bottom of Glasgow. On the wall facing it I had the the triumph of death, the four horsemen of the apocalypse in the form of a thermonuclear warhead coming down into the middle of Glasgow, without being blown up yet. I never finished it in order to get around to doing the delights of peace in the room next door.

Also, at the time I was doing it, you had the Hungarian Uprising, you know, which the Russian tanks put down very brutally. Quite understandably, people were very angry with the Communist Party and the USSR. The director of Glasgow Art School had actually got me the commission, but at the official opening of the mural, none of the governors of the art school came.

Rumpus: Because it was too politically charged?

Gray: Possibly. Though there was very little publicity about it. There was an article about it in the first edition―the early morning edition―of the Glasgow Herald, but something else instead of it for the later edition, so there was no real coverage.

There was a Scottish professor of economics who was an advisor to Her Majesty’s government in the Treasury. Then later I heard that he was in the spy scandal involving the four British spies who turned out to be double agents for the USSR, as well as being in the British Secret Service. There was a fifth man who was never caught. This wasn’t the queen’s cousin, Anthony Blunt, who was let off. Apparently [this professor] was the fifth man, and I didn’t know, but he’d been invited to make a speech at the Scottish USSR.

I have never been a member of the Communist Party. I haven’t been a member of any political party. I tended to take―I still do―the official Communist Party paper, it used to be called The Daily Worker, it changed it’s name to the The Morning Star. The only reason I subscribe is that in political matters, it’s the only newspaper on the side of the trade unions. I would never have voted Communist because a Communist government would have immediately done away with trade unions like they did in Soviet Russia, but I felt it would be right to give a little bit of support to the Communist Party in Britain because it was the only political party that took the side of the trade unions. The Labor Party had actually been set up as an alliance of the trade unions, but the middle class socialists had decided to do without the trade unions and just go for middle class socialists.

Rumpus: There are parallels in your books between what happened under Thatcher here in Britain and what happened under Reagan in the States. In The Fall of Kelvin Walker, in 1982, Janine, in all of your work where politics comes to play directly in people’s lives, it’s often as if the stories could be taking place in America, in spite of the cultural details about Scottish and British life.

Gray: Yes, it was an interesting thing that with the British press, we didn’t know, for instance, that there were campaigns against nuclear armaments in America. Then I met some Americans and realized that they’d been demonstrating, were anti-war, and so on. In Britain we never heard that. We were supposed to see America as one solid Conservative bloc.

That’s the thing with Kurt Vonnegut and, what’s his name, Gore Vidal. Vidal talks about the United States of Amnesia, how in the USA so much of the the political past is ignored or forgotten―the fact that there was the International Workers of the World and there was a strong left wing movement operating at the populist level in America. And there’s Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land,” which he thought should be the American national anthem, and quite a good one, too.

Rumpus: Those political attitudes play out most directly in our attitudes toward sex and sexuality. That’s part of why I think that 1982, Janine might be your best book.

Gray: Oh, it’s my favorite, too. It’s better than Lanark and the other ones.

Rumpus: It seems that many of the reviewers didn’t read more than the first 20 or 30 pages.

Gray: Aye, aye.

Rumpus: Even in your first mural, we see that things get crazier and crazier, but they always come back down to reality. And that’s the salvation in much of your work–it’s not something far away.

Gray: Yes, one review I once read was talking about Orwell’s 1984 and how no matter how dystopian a government may be, it can’t push beyond a certain point without becoming terribly incompetent.

The fact is that the Soviet Union was presented in fiction as being a terribly effective totalitarian machine, particularly their spying and policing. But it was pointed out that people spying for the Soviet Union were overseen. They had to do reports and everything. In applying for a miniature secret camera, it took weeks and weeks to get through the administration and get the funding. The only efficient spies the Soviet Union had were dedicated crypto-communists in Britain and other countries, and they were initially doing it because they believed that the future had to be communist. They were therefore spying for nothing and coming up with good results, but it was very inefficient because they weren’t believed. They were considered untrustworthy. Then suddenly it didn’t matter any more. You had Americans sending information to Russia because they could get money that way. They weren’t ideological at all. “It’s a financial arrangement, isn’t it, after all.”

Rumpus: Americans are sometimes still weirdly protectionist. In your short stories, even when politics isn’t actually there, it acts in people’s lives and affects the way they relate to each other.

Gray: It has to do with what money you have and what freedom you have to, you know, get on. My first wife was Danish. She comes through very badly in Rodge’s biography because my friends think she behaved very badly to me, and she did, she tended to have affairs with my friends, though not with my closest friends. Her basic attitude was that she didn’t enjoy sex with me and she had to do it with somebody. And I’m afraid I couldn’t take the line of, you will have sex with nobody but me! I thought, well, it’s not your fault. Just don’t tell me who it’s with, I don’t want to meet them socially.

Rumpus: Did that situation stimulate new trends in your writing?

Gray: My first marriage lasted nine years. I was writing various chapters of Lanark throughout that time and what I can remember is that near the end of the marriage, I could only relax by describing the horrible state of the city of Unthank and the institution under it. Because what I suffered…

We would have separated much earlier had we not had a son. I didn’t want to leave my son. Eventually I did because I was in danger of becoming violent. I could be friends with her again as soon as we weren’t living together.

Rumpus: Were you writing at home or did you have a separate studio?

Gray: At home. I could never have afforded two houses. We’ve always rented accommodation. Eventually we did make some money by subletting rooms. It became quite a helpful source of income.

Rumpus: Did you get to know the renters?

Gray: Oh, yes. Most of them became friends. Taught you a lot about life. Somebody once introduced me to a young artist or a young writer, I forget which, it didn’t matter which, and asked if I had advise to give. I said, try and get a house with more rooms than you need and then sublet. It will be a small income, and you’ll find that a lot of people who you trust most don’t pay you, and many people who you don’t find to be particularly trustworthy pay you quite regularly. Of course, they thought I was making fun of them, but it was the only piece of advice I could give to anybody. If someone tries to show you their writing and says, do you think I should stick to this, do you think I could become a real writer? Say to them, If you have to ask that question, no, you can’t.

Rumpus: You went back and taught writing for a few years. Did you find that your writing students were taking on similar themes to yours―Scotland, sex, politics?

Gray: Folk were admitted to the program based on something they’d written already. They were admitted because we felt that we could help them to become better at it. But we did not see it at all about telling them what to write about, just to tell them where their writing worked well and where it didn’t work well. If somebody had the basic drive to become a writer, I thought we could save them two or three years by showing them things they would find out for themselves eventually, but make it faster. It might be something as simple as to use as few adjectives and adverbs as possible, or things like sentence length. I have the bad habit in my writing of writing almost interminable sentences, joined up quite logically, then thinking, wait a minute, somebody needs time, we need a pause. Punctuation is necessary to regulate the pace at which this stuff is being taken in.

Rumpus: Has reading poetry helped you? Like maybe Hugh MacDiarmid? He’s very focused, refined.

Gray: Yes! I have, for example, studied Gerald Manley Hopkins as well as MacDiarmid, who I came to slightly later on. I began by thinking that MacDiarmid was more a poet of sound than sense. Then, having read some of his earlier lyrics, I found to my amazement that I couldn’t forget them. If it had been mere sound, I wouldn’t have remembered them. Gradually, saying “The Watergaw,” I started to think, wait, I know what he’s talking about! [Quotes from MacDiarmid's “The Watergaw”]:

Ae weet forenicht i’ the yow-trummle

I saw yon antrin thing,

A watergaw wi’ its chitterin’ licht…

[Gray interupts himself: "Or is it “glimmering" licht?"]

Ayont the on-ding.

And I’m thinking, I know what he means! It took a wee bit. The “on-ding” is a word for an on-blast of weather coming into your face. So if you’re seeing something beyond the on-ding, it’s beyond a snow storm or water. “Watergaw” is the name for a water rainbow, the kind of rainbow that forms in a mist of falling water.

Then [the narrator] thinks of this look that was given to him by somebody dying. I used to think it was by a woman, but it was actually his father. “An’ I thocht o’ the last wild look ye gied/ Afore ye deed!” The thought is of a dying person looking at you and meaning something, and not knowing what the meaning is, but knowing that there’s meaning.

Somebody is going out, like a light bulb, out, and they’re looking at me, and they know I know it, but they’re away and there’s nothing to be said. Then there’s this feeling, in bad weather, of suddenly seeing this water rainbow and thinking that it means the same thing that was meant by the dying father’s glance, or a dying anybody’s glance.

The other thing you’re finding is that there was an old Scottish speech, which I use myself. He grew up in a community where there was much old Scottish speech used. But he also mined the dictionaries of the older Scottish speech. “Aye, that’s a good one.” “Yes, use that!” He has actually restored quite a lot of meaning to Scottish words that people had forgotten.

Rumpus: Before I lived in Edinburgh, I hadn’t realized how much contemporary writing there is in Scots and in blends of Scots and other Englishes. Yet it didn’t take very long for it to start making sense, even when I didn’t know the words.

Gray: Well, the poetry of Burns was always very popular in America. His earliest book was extensively pirated in England, Ireland, and the States. Somebody worked out that there are more monuments to Burns in the USA than in Scotland. Of course, MacDiarmid was rather sarcastic about Burns Day because he felt that a lot of folk who had never read Burns found it a great occasion to be very “Scottish.” That’s why he said in “A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle,” something like nobody’s name has been worse abused, or misused, except Christ and Liberty.

Rumpus: “A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle” was an influence on 1982, Janine its portrayal of someone getting increasingly plastered, wasted, drunk, or whatever, and thinking about Scotland.

Gray: Yes, and themselves.

Rumpus: Ron Butlin’s The Sound of My Voice, which is a very pointed alcoholic “fantasy,” is like that too. It’s ethereally serious.

Gray: I haven’t read that one, though I know about it.

Rumpus: Sorcha Dallas has resurrected your early-70s project “Now and Then,” a short film with art by you and poems by Liz Lochhead. It’s a story about a couple breaking up―one poem ends with “New Love. New War.”―but it’s entirely fictional, right?

Gray: At that time, I had written some things for television. The only company in Scotland that commissioned things then was children’s school television. I’d written some plays for this producer in Glasgow, Malcolm Hossick of BBC Scotland, and he was interested in my art. He wanted to make a picture that would combine filmmaking with my art. He got this idea of using a room in his own flat. It wasn’t actually a Glasgow tenement, it was quite a posh terrace house, but the idea was that this room, a bedsit, had been rented by a woman art student. The film would would show her in the present tense, getting up and having a lonely breakfast, then performing various things throughout the day, but while doing it, remembering episodes. Her past memories would be shown through my pictures.

The actress who played her was a friend of mine and Liz Lochhead’s. She was no longer an art student. She was filmed in the present, in my house. When it moved into flashback you would see her with her lover. The bloke who played her lover was actually her boyfriend. They’ve been married for years now.

Rumpus: So for once art didn’t destroy the relationship. Though I guess the film was never made.

Gray: No it wasn’t. As usual, I was operating on too big a scale, too all-over-it. By the time I finished the pictures, Malcolm Hossick had left and wanted to live somewhere else. Nobody was paid anything. Liz Lochhead wasn’t commissioned, we just asked her to write a set of poems about the course of the love affair. [Indicates "The Rainbow" (1972), a picture with three versions of the same couple and a metalic-looking rainbow outside the window.] “The Rainbow” was to be recited over this picture. It was devised so the camera would be traveling up it until the end of the poem: “Our rainbow arched and spread, grew/ more and more vibrant until/ it came to earth with a shock.”

Rumpus: A book of your plays is coming out in 2009.

Gray: From Luath Press in Edinburgh. I just finished a play based on Goethe’s Faust. It’s called Fleck. He’s presented as being a modern university professor and scientist. He has discovered an interface between physics, plant growth, and psychology.

Rumpus: Does it have to do with drugs?

Gray: No, it’s presented as occurring after Nick―Mephistopheles, whom I call Nick―has become his laboratory assistant, and he wins the Nobel Prize. It starts with a prologue in heaven, like Goethe’s, in which Nick is like Satan in the Book of Job―certainly not the Christian Devil, more like God’s spy, the Chief of Police. It begins by describing Job, who is righteous but not tremendously rich. And he has a large family. God says, “Do you know my servant Job?” “Oh yes.” “Very rich isn’t he?” “Oh yes, he does everything you want.”

At the end of it, God relents. It’s not a very convincing ending, but it tackles the problem of evil. It makes it very plain that there is only one God in heaven and the Devil is to do what he is told.

Rumpus: And we’re being “tested” all the time.

Gray: The point is that unlike Goethe’s Faust, who rejects and neglects the woman who bears his child so that she commits infanticide, my Faust marries the woman he loves and they have a baby. The play happens in a universe where the souls of man are not immortal. God, the angels, the Devil, Nick, they are immortal. They go on forever. But I’m glad to say that my play ends with the Devil thoroughly cheated: “I hope this entertainment pleased you well. It has no moral. See you all in Hell!”

In my version, God says, “How’s the world getting on?” The response is that the world might be, perhaps, “a tremendous joke that pleases you.” Fleck is unhappy, like all decent folk who could not find the thing they strove for hard and long.

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At BushwickBK.com, Mimi Luse reports on a one-night-only multimedia Lil’ Wayne-related show, curated by Audrey Berman and Pete Deevakul. With Claude Léveque and Bruce Nauman squaring off at the Venice Biennale, Studio Von Birken’s Louis Vuitton-meets-Lil’-Wayne parody is as potent as a neon spliff.

It’s hard to look at some of Nauman’s work and not think about the fonts that haunt us, and it’s hard to think about that without visualizing the fabled Twin Peaks letterjobs. Now, writes LENSCRATCH, David Lynch is a “photographer,” too.

At Frieze.com, politics and kitsch at Akram Zaatari’s solo show.

In Cabinet, rhythmic role playing: “As far as­ we know, onl­y one man took him up on the proposal, an expat American card-carrying communist jazz trumpeter and polyrhythmic prodigy named Conlon Nancarrow.”

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At what point does the viewer start seducing the artwork?

Oscar Wilde said that democracy is just the “bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.” That’s funny until you actually think about it. Really, we could all use a good bludgeoning. In an era where many artistic projects over-democratize, turning viewers off with excessive game plans and inexplicable wall text (or exhibitions that “talk down” to the viewers), there is a certain solace and challenge–akin to what it would theoretically be like to read a ballot where the propositions meant what they said–in finding art that is clearly crafted and unconditionally receptive.

Hilary Pecis and Elyse Mallouk are promising young artists who make work that does this in radically different ways. They’re currently showing side-by-side at San Francisco’s Triple Base Gallery. Pecis has an involved solo show in the main room above Mallouk’s multi-channel video installation, “Trickle-down: Yours for the Mining,” in the so-called Triple Basement. But that’s where the similarity ends. Pecis’s mixed media work, some of it culled from glossy sources, captures both contemporary gluttony and a seemingly ancient spaciousness. “Intricacies of Phantom Content,” her Triple Base show, takes its name from a Baudrillard essay concerning expendable information as a stand-in for truth. Her collages seem at first to present the “dark truths” of consumerism, but the more time you spend with them, the more they summon a geological feeling of forces and ungraspable time frames. When humans start to dissolve, when the mirror of production empties, what is there to consume?

Mallouk’s work is more conceptual. For her Triple Base installation, she has filled the underground space with rotating projections of diamonds, gems that doubly or triply don’t exist: their sources are digital, they move through the space almost weightlessly, and their shapes, touched by an artist’s hands, have been “cut” by darkness instead of light. At the heart of the basement are free, hand-drawn, glistening prints of diamonds. On opening night, gallery visitors began to hold their new prints up to the light streams from the projectors, treating them less like prizes and more like personal screens. They’ve been very popular. Mallouk already had to do a second edition of prints.

The original plan for this interview was to do a type of in-the-moment mail art, a visual conversation that would expand on the format of Jesse Nathan’s interview with Tucker Nichols.  But it didn’t happen that way. We met at the gallery and had a good time piecing things together, cutting images and text out of Time, frieze, and other outlets, making a ramshackle collage and responding to each other visually. But the visual material kept sparking the flames of “real” conversation. The following interview is an amalgamation of visual, group, and individual interviews. Triple Base likes to do more than just sell art. Tonight, I’m giving the exhibitions’ dinner lecture, and on Sunday, there’s a closing party.

The Rumpus: Taking your aesthetic contemplations of desire seriously means asking at what point your artwork stops being seduced by you, the maker, and starts seducing you, the viewer.

Elyse Mallouk: Yes, there’s a lot of time spent…wrangling, trying to get all these different elements to work out, especially with video. Then there’s a certain point after everything’s been installed that I can take a little bit of space from it and consider what’s working. It’s an exciting moment! It doesn’t really tell me whether it’s going to work on other people—I need to see other people in the space–but I think that it gives a hint. I like to watch how kids behave around my installations because they clearly haven’t had experience with the critical dialogue around art. Their experience shows whether the project is engaging on a pre-verbal level. At the MFA show I had a stack of “candy” posters and kids were even pretending to lick them!

Rumpus: Desire for the art’s references…

Mallouk: Yes, the downstairs installation is talking in part about desire for the artwork itself.

Hilary Pecis: People are seduced by their own image.

Mallouk: I do try to seduce the viewer in my work. Does your material seduce you?

Pecis: It’s complicated, but yes.

Rumpus: It seems that television and advertising have grown up together. I’m especially interested in the ’50s and ’60s, when both applications were still so consciously performative. Plus, TV still walks the line between moving images and stillness–people talk about the medium itself, size, feel, screen, placement. Advertising, from campaign ads to product placements, might have become more and more dislocated, but it has never quite become surreal.

Mallouk: Advertising, too, has started to tailor itself to people’s responses to it. The aesthetics have to do with formal visual seduction: bright colors and glossy surfaces. Hilary takes that as a starting point.

Rumpus: Advertisements for luxury goods are interesting. The products mights not be something that anyone actually needs, but they are presented as having tremendous aesthetic value: these iconic, cutting-edge whatevers will broaden the aesthetic value of your own life. It’s not so different from art sales.

Mallouk: I’ve been using diamonds in particular as symbols because they resemble artworks. They are culled from raw material, polished off by human hands and made “precious” and “unique.” There’s a symbolic and sentimental value as they are passed from generation to generation because they last longer than people do.

Giving away prints is another way to question value and where it comes from. Each print is signed and editioned. You can tell which “frame” you have. Each is a “unique copy.”

Rumpus: It’s like having an animation cell.

Mallouk: Yes, I was thinking about it like an unbound flip book. It would function if you had all of the pages, but you don’t. You only have one.

Rumpus: Hilary, your work does have a panoramic, silent-cinematic quality. Do you work on multiple pieces at once?

Pecis: I do. I work on pretty much everything at the same time!

Rumpus: That lends itself to a type of audience participation in the moment of your show.

Pecis: Yeah, the current work is pretty much all the same place, like a panoramic view split up into different sections. That’s where the titles come from. They’re all from the spring season or the winter season.

Rumpus: For your undergrad degree, were you already working in this type of collage?

Pecis: I worked on landscapes, ink drawings. They were similar, but I was more interested in displaying information, such as striations in rocks. I think at that time they looked like depictions of information, data codes. They were similar to what I’m working on now, but there’s been a long evolution of the landscapes.

Rumpus: Has working in the Bay Area changed the way you think about landscapes, even theoretical ones? It’s such an outdoor culture.

Pecis: Oh, sure. There’s so much to look at. There’s so much visual stimulation.

Rumpus: Elyse, what were you working on pre-MFA?

Mallouk: I was painting a lot, but not working in any other media, really. I had experimented with making a video game, but it was frustrating…

Rumpus: A theoretical video game?!

Mallouk: Yeah! It was an interactive thing where a sphere was covered with images on the inside. You could crawl through the sphere and make your own path through the images. It came out well but the process was so frustrating to me. Part of why I wanted to go back to school was to learn technical skills.

I’ve wanted to figure out ways of creating more immersive environments. At the recent MFA show I took one thing from every medium aside from painting and tried to arrange them in a way that worked like a puzzle. Each element related to another, usually with formal cues, not necessarily thematic clues. The viewer had the job of constructing a narrative out of the pieces that are there. The installation in the Triple Basement is less of a puzzle and more of a sensory saturation.

Rumpus: Hilary, your work is primarily formal or sensory.

Pecis: I feel like my work is really just an assortment of images, taken from magazines and the such. They’re put out there for the viewer to make sense of in any way that they might choose. That’s the only type of participation that’s required. They’re just landscapes composed of images, taken from other sources.

Rumpus: You’ve both just completed MFA degrees at CCA, but Elyse, you’re going on to do an MA in Visual and Critical Studies as well.This may not be a fair question, but is more artspeak really good for accessibility and participation?

Mallouk: Well, I’m going to try to write my thesis about what’s made contemporary art inaccessible and how certain artists are starting to provide entry points for participation. I want to be an advocate for that! Some works have a generosity that invites participation, but I’m still not sure what makes them swing one way or another.

Entertainment is one thing that can make art more accessible. There’s a reason that people don’t go to gallery openings. Instead they go to the movies or watch TV. There are a couple of reasons. One is that those things are easier and a lot of people, including me, want to just zone out sometimes. But it’s also that those things are made for them, made with the viewer in mind, constantly taking the viewer’s reaction into account and tailoring the medium to it. That’s something that art hasn’t done. Art has been tailored to critical responses. Now that I’ve come through an MFA program, I can speak “artspeak” and I understand a lot more art than I used to. I was thinking about that at the Venice Biennale. It was sad that the preview days of the Biennale were packed but opening day was empty.

Rumpus: Hilary, you’re free from school now. Will you be staying in San Francisco?

Pecis: I don’t know. I lived in New York for a short time and would like to move back there. San Francisco is a nurturing place to work in terms of making art, though not necessarily selling it…

Rumpus: What are you working on now?

Pecis: Some animations. I’m not sure if it’s conveying what I want it to convey, but I have some time to mess around with stuff right now.

Rumpus: Has the animation work been fun, or has it been more frustrating, technically?

Pecis: A little bit of both. I think that the animation work might be more indicative of contemporary media. It’s fleeting. Images and sounds are short lived. They disappear.

I keep the first picture in mind, but I frame each new picture as if it’s its own composition, bearing in mind that it is related to what came before it and what’s coming after it.

Back in the ’20s, Alfred Stieglitz moved away from human shots and began to photograph clouds because he wanted to show that  his “photographs were not due to subject matter–nor to special privileges…clouds were there for everyone.” He paved the way for abstract art by focusing on perception itself–perception, that is, plus exquisite technique. With the recent publication of The Time After, Front 40 Press founder and Chicago-based fine art photographer Doug Fogelson is working with a new, “architectural” version of the Stieglitz philosophy.

Seeking to “stimulate deeper consideration of the ‘post climate change’ era,” The Time After presents multi-directional, panoramic photographs by Fogelson and essays by Derrick Jensen, Eiren Caffall, and Bridget R. McCullough Alexander. Designed by Tim Hartford, the large-format book is distinctly elegiac, sometimes dark, sometimes playful, not necessarily happy or sad. Like Signs of the Apocalypse/Rapture, an exquisite art-and-music book published by Front 40 last year that pointed out work that “blurs the line between annihilation and euphoria,” The Time After can be seen as a series of questions.

The Apocalypse book, which features work by everyone from Ed Ruscha to Sonic Youth, has an accompanying show opening this weekend at Chicago’s Hyde Park Art Center. When I caught up with Fogelson on the phone, we started by laughing grimly about how hard it is to get people to buy art books, even when the LA Times selects your book for its “favorite books of 2008″ issue. I mean, what does it take? Front 40, distributed by the University of Chicago Press, is not a nonprofit, said Fogelson, “but that doesn’t mean we’re making any money.” Too bad, since they’re doing amazing work.

The Rumpus: The world is becoming more fluid.

Doug Fogelson: I guess new media is equalizing the playing field a little. We did a project with Urban Space, which we found through wooloo.org. The project curated photographs of urban spaces, sent in from people all over the world. It was like this global city. We tried to bang together a book design. There was no money because of the atmosphere right now, but it was pretty cool to see the “unedited” version of everything, the four corners of the earth plus the other corners besides.

Rumpus: Let’s talk about your new book, The Time After. I really like the London photos. They’re very specific.

Fogelson: I need to go back there. Badly.

Rumpus: They are so relentlessly specific in terms of London’s built, iconic environment. I don’t know how to say this without sounding cheesy, but there’s a shimmering, refracted sense of unity in the book, the whole “one world, one planet” thing that got beaten into us in elementary school on Earth Day.

Fogelson: That’s part of my intention. The bad part is that, unlike awesome projects like Earth from Above, I haven’t been able to get around the world to places like India, Turkey, or Morocco. I haven’t been to a lot of places, but you’ve got just to work with what you’ve got.

The Rumpus: In the Biota series, I like how the geometries of light are in the background, subtle and textural, and although they are repeating, they don’t quite completely repeat. It’s sort of analog…I guess this rests in your process.

Doug Fogelson: My technique is to use the same process and let the subject matter define the outcome. The process is very, very simple. I exploit the camera’s shutter and winder mechanism so that I don’t completely advance the film. I’ve been doing photography for awhile and the reason I first got interested in it was to manipulate it because of its inherent quality of taking light from two dimensions. I was trying different ways of touching it, stacking it, sandwiching it. When I came around to this process, I just got hooked. It’s so simple. I had to find a camera that would allow me to control how much the film advances.

I have a lot of rules and self-assignments. I don’t take one picture and then turn the camera sideways. I’m very architectural about it. I keep the first picture in mind, but I frame each new picture as if it’s its own composition, bearing in mind that it is related to what came before it and what’s coming after it.

[What's important is] the cadence of the subject matter, the performative aspects. On the urban side, I’m out there doing a little foxtrot or a tango across the crosswalk. I’ll take a picture, cross the street, take a picture back where I came from. Halfway across the street I’ll shoot down the street. I’ll shoot kitty-corner. There’s a pattern that I try to do that helps me and the camera disappear so that I’m not getting noticed. For urban subjects, it’s very geometric, with people and the built environment. But with the natural world, you get fractals and chaos, like with leaves. As viewers, we have a different reaction to it. It feels like it’s all the same thing, since it’s all the same structure.

Rumpus: Your urban shots capture what it’s like to slowly discover a very particular area, where someone lives in the city. A thousand aspects of the same zone are revealed at once. It’s kind of the same with the wilderness shots.

Fogelson: The urban shots can take a couple of hours, waiting for people and the light. With the airplane shots or water pictures, it can take a few minutes or a number of hours. I bring up the duration because people look at the final photographs and say that it’s all “the same moment,” but actually it’s multiple moments added up.

Rumpus: That relates to the them of this volume. All of these human actions have combined to put as already in “the time after.”

Fogelson: Yes, we are for so many reasons. Photography is a  momento mori of something past. And this process–even though I feel that it brings a more present sense to the subject matter–is still past. It’s just multiple moments.  It tricks our brains into vibrating closer to that. You can have an interactive thing with it instead of just saying, “Oh, that’s a picture of the tree from the past.”

Rumpus: And checking it off your list.

Fogelson: Yeah. There’s human time, there’s natural time, and then there’s cyclic or cosmic time. We’re trying to hint at that without being really overt. The pictures themselves don’t speak to climate change directly, but hopefully…

Rumpus: Even without the essays, the book would have a resonant sense of cyclic time. Nonetheless, I was moved by Eiren’s piece about images in the mind forming a sort of mantra, in the sense that they remind us how we “existed once.” It’s like we’re now in art where we used to be in climate science. She writes, “I live in the time after the time when we had no idea that we’d ruined things for good.”

Fogelson: I love the way Eiren writes. She really thinks things deeply. The eulogizing-the-planet thing might be macabre and hard for people, there’s something very loving and beautiful in her presentation. She’s a musician, too.

Rumpus: At your Elmhurst Art Museum show, there were sounds of air travel along with the photos, which were taken from airplanes. Was that a one-time thing?

Fogelson: No, I like to do sound and video. The funny thing is that being a photographer you’re supposed to have shows at photography galleries and there are supposed to be prints in a regular format, but I always wanted just to be an artist and not have to worry about the photography-versus-art crap. My goal with the shows is to create an immersive environment. I think that’s a part of the goal when I stick the camera up in people’s faces or into tree branches or waves. The idea is to bring the immediacy of the experience closer to the viewer.

At the Elmhurst show, the idea was to make viewers feel like they were levitating a little bit. The sound was panned between two speakers, so the sound was located in space, and the photographs were different scales, so we got people to move around in the gallery “in time and space,” so to speak.

At a show of the waves pictures, I did a huge wave sculpture of cast resin and we built a lifeguard stand. There was a video projection and a soundtrack. And the pictures were hung at odd intervals along the wall, plexi-mounted so that they were “floating” and wet-looking.

Rumpus: Was there a long period of experimentation with your current photo technique until you made a print and knew that you’d found it.

Fogelson: I’ve basically been experimenting with the technique and the subject matter since the beginning, which is odd since I didn’t know it at the time. I was looking back at intervals thinking, what is interesting to me? Why is it interesting? Do I want to keep messing around in the darkroom, or with pinhole cameras? I tried manipulating the surface of the prints. How [my current technique] came to be was that I was experimenting with collaging various negatives on top of each other and then putting them on flatbed scanners, and I really liked the way that those overlaps worked. This was in the ’90s. I was working as a commercial photographer then, too. Before digital, I would go to a shoot with a 4 x 5 camera, lights, chords, cables, sandbags the whole nine yards. I was hungry for some way to get out and still be touching the medium but without being typically laden with so much stuff, without having to shoot a ton of roles or sitting in front of the computer for too long.

Rumpus: So it was a drive toward immediacy in your actual process?

Fogelson: Yes, [and eventually] I found this weird sweet spot.

Rumpus: So you’re not manipulating them at all on the computer?

Fogelson: No. I shoot very carefully on film, though it’s impossible to pre-visualize what all the overlaps will do, even as controlling as I am. When I get the film back, it’s all connected. I look at the film to find out which portions might work. It’s possible to go back and redo things. Once I have film that works, I will sit in front of the computer with it, but just to get it ready for printing; I never collage it digitally. Then we take it to the lab and they print it onto regular photo paper with a light-based process, like a lambda print.

There’s another reason, a spiritual reason, for that, too. If you just took a bunch of pictures and then sat in front of the computer and tried to collage them, I don’t think it would have the same energy. When you’re shooting it, you’re being impacted by the real space and time.

Rumpus: So are there any particular shots in the book that have stories behind them that would be impossible to know just looking at them?

Fogelson: Well, the one of London was cool because it was taken from the top of a church and it was a massive climb to get to the top. For almost all of them, I’m putting myself into weird situations—sneaking through crowds, treading water. It’s all about vantage point.

Rumpus: Have you had situations in urban environments where people get nervous about what you’re doing or try to stop you?

Fogelson: That’s the cool thing about photographing in different countries: each country has a different reaction. I was in Tokyo in April and the people were very cool, fairly ignoring you. In Hong Kong, I thought that they were ignoring me and then I went back and looked at the pictures on the light box and found that everyone was looking right at me! In California, people will say, “Hey! What are you doing?” In London, people were like, “That’s totally cool! Right on!” In New York, people are pretty good about ignoring you.

Rumpus: I was looking at the shots of waves and wondering if there were clouds superimposed on top, but I guess not.

Fogelson: Nope. Things are getting more and more abstract in my current work. There’s a lot of stuff bleeding through into the negative space.

“And then he said, ‘When I was young…’ and I was like, ‘What?’ and he said, ‘Oh, when I was young, before I formed my political opinion, I used to think John Lennon was cool.’

“And I was like, ‘So that means after you formed your political opinion, you didn’t think he was cool, because you thought they were all, like, wanky left-wing liberals. And that means you’re a right-wing conservative, so you’re going write me up as a terrorist.’”

- M.I.A. talks to Negar Azimi in Bidoun

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