Alexis Rockman is a contemporary artist known for his paintings depicting the precarious relationship between man and nature. Ever since he graduated from School of Visual Arts in 1985, Rockman has consistently participated in various solo and group exhibitions, both nationally and internationally. His latest New York show, "Expedition," was held at Gorney Bravin + Lee this past fall. I recently met with Rockman at his basement studio in Tribeca to discuss the new work.

Sarah Rosenbaum: How did the paintings in "Expedition" come about?

Alexis Rockman: I've been working with tropical iconography off and on since I was a kid. I've always been interested in the animals and plants of the equatorial tropics. I had just come back from a trip to South America, where I was camping in the jungle for several weeks. I started to think about the tradition of tropical travel iconography and decided that what I wanted to do was insert myself into a framework of familiar pictorial strategies, like the hunting image and the fishing image, and set up a series of expectations that I could then play around with for various reasons having to do with ideas about conservation and about fears — some founded, some unfounded — about the animals and plants that live there, and how our culture perceives them.

		Alexis Rockman, Tropical Hazard, 2000

SR: And the decision to use your own portrait in them?

AR: After the initial burst of narcissism, it becomes as detached as anything else. I would look at photographs or a reference that I had generated and treat it like any other object that I was thinking about.

SR: I've been reading a lot of reviews of your show that discuss this theme of the "triumphant traveler," but the themes in your paintings seem more complex than that.

AR: I'm more interested in the theme of the "ambivalent traveler" who went with the presumption of trying to live triumphantly, who comes back feeling more confused than before.

SR: So, what kind of view of nature do the paintings present?

AR: Like you said, it's a very complicated and confused take on whatever nature may be. My agenda was to mirror how our culture perceives these ideas or images, and how confused we all are about where our bodies end and where nature begins.

SR: How do you think that the relationship between nature and man functions, especially in a painting like Tropical Hazard?

AR: The idea for that actually came from a Claritin commercial on television — there was this Laura Ashley-looking woman wandering through what looks to be a late summer field of grasses, and up pop these allegedly scary images of pollen or whatever was going to torment this person. I'd always thought that that was an interesting strategy — to have an innocuous-looking landscape, and up pop scary things. So, with that in mind, I wanted to take a paradise, Club Med-type of landscape and use myself as the allegedly triumphant traveler and have all these circles pop up that would show the parasites or diseases that had been accumulated by that particular body. Obviously, it's very improbable that one person would get all of those things simultaneously, but I'd had several of them and felt that I was entitled to generate the hypochondriac's version of hedonism.

SR: You do an incredible amount of research for your paintings. Even though you might sometimes distort the size or the color of an insect, for example, you're still very careful to get the scientific details correct. How does science factor in?

AR: I'm interested in a credible platform. I had lunch with someone today who feels that what I'm doing is incredibly restrained [by scientific accuracy]. "Well," I said to him, "not to undermine your sense of my narcissism, but I really don't think that my subjectivity by itself is that interesting." I'm interested in my subjective relationship to the information. I'm not a scientist, but I'm interested in generating credible scenarios that work on a number of levels, and I'm also interested in hijacking the language of credibility for my own purposes.

SR: Do you see your paintings in terms of an artistic discourse, or of something else, like a scientific discourse?

AR: I don't know what "artistic" means. I think that any cultural practice is cultural practice. At this point, to segregate them couldn't be more dull, as far as I'm concerned.

SR: What percentage of your audience do you think can actually appreciate your accuracy?

AR: I'd probably say none.

SR: Does that matter?

AR: I'm working on another fish painting now, and on Monday, I ‘m going to Philadelphia to talk to someone at the National Science Foundation about these fish that he's been recovering from the Amazon throughout his whole career. I'm interested in what he

Alexis Rockman, The Ecotourist, 1997

has to say, and after all is said and done, I am interested in his response to what I'm doing, and I'm interested in the dialogue between institutional scientific language and art history.

SR: Do you feel like your large representational oil paintings are anomalous in the New York art world?

AR: Right now, I think it's pretty fashionable to make big oil paintings that have figures in them, isn't it?

SR: There's also a lot of installation and video art . . .

AR: There's far more figurative painting now than there was five years ago. It's getting attention. But, I'm not looking to join a club. If you want to join a club, you should be in the Boy Scouts. Interesting artists generate their own contexts. I don't see a lot of painters that are painting animals, but that would make me nervous.

SR: What kind of emphasis do you place on the actual craft of painting? Despite their sometimes disconcerting and grotesque subject matter, your works are incredibly seductively crafted.

AR: Craft is what it looks like, isn't it? Anything, no matter what it is, is what it looks like. So, I couldn't be more interested in craft. That doesn't mean that it has to be knitted like a sweater; it could be done in two minutes. Craft is the criterion that determines the success or failure of an image, right?

SR: So what are you working on now?

AR: I'm working on a show for New York next year. I'm working on three books, a computer animation project that I'm directing, possibly a movie, all sorts of things.

SR: You recently taught at Columbia. How was that?

AR: You'd have to ask the students. There were times I enjoyed it and times that I hated it.

SR: Any plans on teaching at Columbia again?

AR: Not until they raise their salaries (laughs). No, all kidding aside, I think that it's a very positive thing to have another vital art school in New York. This — the last few years — is the first time that Columbia's art school had any strong national presence or force. That may have everything to do with me working there . . . who knows? But yeah, I would love to do projects with them.