Kevin Zucker is a painter in Columbia University's MFA program. He combines painting with computer drawing to make pictures of unpeopled interior architectural spaces. On December 5, 2000, I went to Zucker's 115th Street studio to talk with him about art, his art, other artists, the future, the computer, and the idea of the sublime experience.
David Shapiro: What does it mean to you to make sublime art today?
Kevin Zucker: Well, there's been a transition in the concept of the sublime from an experience of an externally imposed, religious state of awe and terror to an increasingly internal or psychological experience — like with what Barnett Newman was trying to do, and then, more recently into a more purely informational kind of conceptual "space."
DS: But you're not trying to induce sublime experiences in your paintings?
KZ: Right. I'm not trying to do that. But, the idea of sublimity interests me — I'm interested in the shifts over time of what sorts of experiences our society regards as sublime.
DS: So, if you've had some sublime experiences in the last year, what would they be?
KZ: I think that the movie The Perfect Storm is an amazing illustration of the way the sublime is being thought about by the people who are in the business of trying to induce it. They're recreating terrifying, Thomas Cole-ish experiences of nature, which, interestingly, aren't the source of the sublimity so much as is the simple fact that it was digitally-rendered.
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| Kevin Zucker, Untitled (Stereo), 2000 | ||
KZ: It's almost like we can try to measure the sublime in terms of gigabytes and processor speeds.
DS: So, do you think that we're stuck in a situation in which the medium must be the message?
KZ: I think that there's that certain feeling about the computer, because it's still in transition out of its own little modernism. It's only now that we're just getting to a point where we're seeing digital work that isn't about digitalness.
DS: So, you don't think that the essence of your work is that it's computer-generated?
KZ: On the one hand, I'm just using the computer as a drawing tool, like any other drawing tool. But, on the other hand, we're still at a moment in which the computer is conceptually loaded. I'm dealing with a conception of a space as much, or maybe more than, a space itself. The computer is the place where those conceptions or ideals are being manufactured.
DS: Meaning that you aren't interested in actual space?
KZ: Meaning that this (pointing to Untitled (Hallway)) has as much to do with a video game of Versailles as it does to do with the real place. I'm thinking about the tensions between the generic and the specific, between an object, an image and an idea. There's no question that what's being depicted isn't something that could be literally perceived — it's so definitely mediated.
DS: Is it possible to have an unmediated experience of art anymore?
KZ: I don't think so, not in the conventional sense, but I don't think that really matters a whole lot at this point. Mediation is all over our experiences of art. Take Edward Hopper — he's an example of someone, who, through the calendars and posters, has become identifiable with the idea of alienation. You see "alienation" in glowing red letters, rather than actually having a genuine emotional experience of it.
DS: But his work is, while potentially alienating, not necessarily sublime. That is, from Hopper, we might conclude that the situation of "witness-to-the-scene" is insufficient for the sublimity of a picture.
KZ: Of course — it depends on what's being witnessed. Anyway, Hopper's too picturesque and too shifty to ever really be sublime.
DS: And your own paintings have no figural witnesses, but they do have the marks that people have left behind, like scrapes on the door. Are your works not about alienation? Do you think a witness is necessary to produce not only sublimity but also to produce the sentiment of alienation?
KZ: I think that the sublime and alienation are two very different things. What happens when you take the witness away from the sublime? To Newman, the zip, the vertical stripe, was the figure, the witness to the void. To take the zip out of those paintings would take away their content — their sublimity. The marks of the hand in my paintings are about the witness or a connection, but at more of a remove. To me, it's a second order thing, but still really interesting, which, I guess is a reason that I'm attracted to these processes which inevitably leave traces of their making.
DS: So, how do you make your paintings?
KZ: I do 99% of my drawing on the computer. Then I've got a few different processes that I use for transferring plotter prints onto a smooth acrylic surface. In the end, I wind up masking those areas off and painting around the transferred ink. The process always degrades the legibility of the information, and the areas that suffer the most are those that are transferred out of the computer; those that wind up the
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| Kevin Zucker, Untitled (Hallway), 2000 | ||
DS: And your paintings aren't ever of specific places?
KZ: Right. They're more specific as things, meaning that they have a certain thickness and a certain weight.
DS: Why the inconsistency of light on these specific objects?
KZ: It has less to do with inconsistency than it does with non-naturalism. Light is, like perspective, a conventional abstraction of the way we experience. The light in my paintings is not "believable," but it's acceptable, which is our standard for representation. It's our standard for video games, for special effects, for everything — we accept the convention.
DS: One might guess, but wouldn't necessarily know that you use computer drawing programs, and if you told me that you painted every inch of your paintings, I suppose I'd believe that too.
KZ: Yeah, you could probably convince someone that these were painted without the use of a computer. But, I'm not interested in imitating painting or in hiding the conventions of the computer, so much as I am in colliding some ways of making and representing. What do the computer's conventions and painting's conventions have to do with one another? And what do they not have to do with one another? And how can they work together?
DS: Is painting by itself too historical to be viable for you?
KZ: Painting's totally viable. While it may not be the absolute mainstream expression of our visual culture, it's not as though it has any "cutting-edge" pretensions either.
DS: So you wouldn't make a protest painting?
KZ: I wouldn't rule that out for all eternity, but given the state of things now, I can't imagine what that would look like — I can't imagine how it could be a painting.
DS: So, is any art capable of catalyzing change?
KZ: To make a statement like that— "this is a catalyst for social reform"— would kind of assume operating out of an avant-garde place, which is seriously problematic -- you'd be back to a way of doing things that's probably beyond repair. Ideology in art is, for the time being, more about finding a place to move around within what's there.
DS: You've got the ghosts of past ideologies all over your paintings. Here's a baroque chandelier put into a modernist ceiling (pointing to Untitled (Chandelier)).
KZ: While the grid and the nature of the floor tiling do definitely recall modernism, it's not flat. The perspectival depth has as much to do with Alberti and the vision of the Renaissance. It's only really modernist in an architectural sense, and even then, only if you take it literally, which, if you do — which is one of a few perfectly legitimate ways of looking at it — then, I'm equating the decrepitude of the baroque chandelier with the decrepitude of the modernist ceiling. Then, it would be like saying there was a baroque attempt at the sublime — through excess — and later, a modernist attempt at the sublime, which is sort of the opposite of the baroque attempt — but they have the same sense of loss, the same sense of pathos.
DS: It's interesting that the chronology is inverted here. The more obvious response to these same questions would have been to put, say, a modernist chair in a baroque architectural space. But, the precariousness of that chandelier hanging in the room is also interesting to me because it recalls the most clichéd and yet still deeply sublime question — the tree in the woods — why do you talk about this question indoors?
KZ: I think that the idea of the sublime got brought inside a long time ago, not necessarily literally indoors, but into an internal, subjective psychological state. So, these paintings have something to say about that, but more about the place we're at now, where the sublime disappears, in spatial terms, into "virtualness," into an idea of space.
DS: Maybe the real difference now is not so much the location as our option to have or not to have a sublime experience. At, say, Niagara Falls, I might allow or not allow myself to have a sublime experience.
KZ: The idea of setting aesthetic experience outside of the course of life is an old one, though. The question now would be whether doing this still works, assuming it ever did. Since the sublime experience is supposed to tap into something fundamentally unnamable, this is hard now. What would you say? — "Hey, hang on, I'm going to experience awe in the face of this unnamable force now. I'll meet you at the car." Sounds dubious.
DS: But whether or not we're still able to set aside aesthetic or sublime experience, we are unquestionably still able to make aesthetic judgments, so is it Pollock or de Kooning?
KZ: de Kooning . . . but for entirely personal reasons. He was more or less my first favorite artist.
DS: Picasso or Matisse?
KZ: Matisse. For the time being.
DS: Rembrandt or Vermeer?
KZ: Vermeer.