HAUNTED MEMORY
JIM SHAW
INTERVIEW BY HANS ULRICH OBRIST
PHOTOGRAPHY BY MAX FARAGO
OUT NOW
ISSUE 43 FW23
KALEIDOSCOPE's Fall/Winter 2023 issue launches with a set of six covers. Featuring Sampha, Alex Katz, Harmony Korine, a report into the metamorphosis of denim, a photo reportage by Dexter Navy, and a limited-edition cover by Isa Genzken.
Also featured in this issue: London-based band Bar Italia (photography by Jessica Madavo and interview by Conor McTernan), the archives of Hysteric Glamour (photography by Lorenzo Dalbosco and interview by Akio Kunisawa), Japanese underground illustrator Yoshitaka Amano (words by Alex Shulan), Marseille-based artist Sara Sadik (photography by Nicolas Poillot and interview by Daria Miricola), a survey about Japan’s new hip-hop scene starring Tohji (photography by Taito Itateyama and words by Ashley Ogawa Clarke), Richard Prince’s new book “The Entertainers” (words by Brad Phillips), “New Art: London” (featuring Adam Farah-Saad, Lenard Giller, Charlie Osborne, R.I.P. Germain, and Olukemi Ljiadu photographed by Bolade Banjo and interviewed by Ben Broome).
FROM THE CURRENT ISSUE
ESCAPE TO MIAMI
The most southernly city in the US, Miami exists in the tropical recesses of the American imagination: land of celebrity, thunderstorms, Tony Montana, and Art Deco architecture. Here, we meet the latest generation of Miamians—committed radicals in the fields of art, fashion, and music, who are dreaming up new narratives for the city they call home.
NEW ART: LONDON
The art world’s compulsion to categorize by the yardstick of “hot or not” has historically been the driving force behind the market and the gallery system. Commerce is intertwined with this metric, spurred on by the insatiable appetite to find talented young things to build up. This system is uninteresting: what’s in vogue rarely reflects those operating at the cutting edge. Who are those young emerging artists making work against all odds—work that is difficult and costly to make, store, exhibit, move, and sell? These five individuals typify this path. Working across video, sound, installation, and sculpture, they march onwards, carving out their own niche—exhibiting in empty shop spaces one day and major institutions the next. For them, making is guided by urgency, and persistence is motivated by blind faith.
SARA SADIK
KALEIDOSCOPE hosted a solo exhibition by Marseille-based artist Sara Sadik (b. 1994, Bordeaux), in November 2023 at Spazio Maiocchi in Milan, with the support of Slam Jam. Inspired by videogames, anime, science fiction, and French rap, Sara Sadik’s work explores the reality and fantasies of France’s Maghrebi youth, addressing issues of adolescence, masculinity, and social mythologies. Her work across video, performance, and installation often centers on male characters, using computer-generated scenarios to transform their condition of marginalization into something optimistic and poetic.
FROM THE SHOP
FROM THE ARCHIVE
MANIFESTO
In 2023, from June 22 to June 24 during Men’s Fashion Week in Paris, KALEIDOSCOPE and GOAT presented the new edition of our annual arts and culture festival, MANIFESTO. Against the unique setting of the French Communist Party building, a modern architectural landmark designed by legendary Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, the festival will bring together visionary creators from different areas of culture across three days of art, fashion and sound. The 2024 edition will run from June 21 to June 23.
CAPSULE PLAZA
In April 2023, a year after the launch of the magazine, Capsule introduced Capsule Plaza, a new initiative that infuses new energy into Milan Design Week by redefining the design showcase format. A hybrid between a fair and a collective exhibition, Capsule Plaza brings together designers and companies from various creative fields, bridging industry and culture with a bold curation that spans interiors and architecture, beauty and technology, ecology and craft. The 2024 edition will run from April 15 to April 21.
Since graduating from CalArts in 1978, Jim Shaw has eluded aesthetic typecasting by experimenting with almost every art form: drawing, painting, playing in punk bands, working in the movies, collecting ephemera, and chronicling his dreams. Through it all, he has forged an artistic career examining America—its iconographies, religions, psycho-geographies, and utopias.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST
We’ve known each other for 30 years, but I wanted to go back further, to begin with the beginning, and ask you, what’s the number one in your catalogue raisonné? What’s the first work?
JIM SHAW
Probably the stuff I did at CalArts, but I don’t know. Some artists will be difficult to create a catalogue raisonné for, and, I mean, I can’t imagine doing Raymond Pettibon’s catalogue raisonné. It would just be so thick; it would be so much work. And mine might be a little smaller, but it would be pretty big. And then there’s this, I don’t know, Protestant guilt about not being productive enough. I guess Warhol had that too ...
HUO
You once told me that you’ve been most inspired by artists who didn’t get stuck, that your favorites were those who always kept going in different permutations. Can you talk a little bit about some artists who inspired you and about this aspect of ongoing permutations?
JS
Well, it kind of happened over time. I didn’t realize as a teenager that I wouldn’t keep on doing the same thing. I remember when my sister was living in Atlanta, and there was a Rothko show at the High Museum of Art. I really liked how his work evolved but then it just stopped there at the “classic” Rothko. And I feel like that’s probably true of many artists—they stop at a certain point and just keep doing the same thing. And others, like Max Ernst, you know, they keep changing. They keep on doing different things. And I just felt like that’s the only way I could function. That’s the only way I could survive.
There was a brief period during the aughts when I was actually selling just about everything I produced. There was this kind of drawing and this kind of painting. They were very similar, but I had exhausted those things by the time the whole edifice crashed. I sort of resolved, when I picked up the pieces, that I would make sure there was some sort of an idea behind each piece. And it wasn’t just The Jim Shaw Thing being done.
HUO
Drawing played a big role from the beginning. I remember when we first met, you told me that drawing was your favorite medium. Is drawing kind of a daily practice?
JS
I still do tons of drawings for the paintings, but, economically, it doesn’t really pay. If I put the same amount of energy and time into a painting, I’ll get three times as much income for that work.
And it’s funny how, if I don’t do something, then I’m scared to take it up again, even though I’ve done it before and I can do it again. I would love to loosen up a little. The works that I’ve been known for lately are very tight and very pre-planned. And I keep on trying to come up with the right situation in which I can do something crazier. I will; it just takes a while. But it’s funny—it’s like there’s this permission that has to be granted. It’s hard to explain.
I know it would be so easy for me to just do it. But I’m so used to, say, finding a generic element to put in there that already exists, because that’s the authentic thing. If I make it up, it’s a fake version of this authentic illustration style. And so it’s scarier in a way, but I know I can do it.
HUO
When we met in the 90s, I remember I had this little book of your dream drawings. It’s a beautiful artist’s book. Can you talk a little bit about how the dream drawings began? Do you still do make a record of your dreams?
JS
I’ve got 270 some sound recordings of dreams and tons of cassettes. That’s the best way in my experience. I find that writing—this goes back to Marshall McCluhan’s theories about consciousness and text—interrupts parts of the way the dream is remembered. It’s a sort of incursion into your memory.
For example, one of the Gagosian’s show paintings, I Dreamt of a Cornucopia Stairway from Which Ghostly Comedians Were Descending (2023), with the comedians holding radios, has evolved from its original state as a vision from a dream, into a paperback cover, into a big painting.
I think, in the dream, they were inside an old abandoned house, and whether they were actually carrying radios, I don’t know. That was sort of a little bit of generic Jim Shawism. The old consumer products of the 50s and 60s haunt my memory, I guess.
HUO
The most recent piece in the Gagosian show is Dream Object: The Mirror of Venus from 2023. You just finished it in January. It’s a grid of mirrors coalescing into a man’s arm. Can you talk about that dream?
JS
Yeah. Well, the thing with a dream is that it changes and evolves. And the actual artwork can’t do that unless you make it a little lenticular. So, I was thinking about how could I make something that captured this evolution from left to right, and also be on these mirrored panels. And then I thought about this comic book from 1949 or 1950, called Venus. There were other goddess references throughout the show.
HUO
That’s by Bill Everett?
JS
Yeah, Bill Everett did the later issues of Venus. And it was a very weird comic. She was both the goddess of love and a reporter for Life magazine or something like that. It seemed like a good vehicle for illustrating the more horrific aspects of Venus, because she can cause great horror to occur, and also her birth was because of the extremely violent castration of her father: his genitals were thrown into the ocean, and that’s what gave birth to her. Which also relates to the sort of combination of the birth of Venus by Botticelli and the explosion of the H-bomb.
HUO
To come back to the dream drawings, how does standard translation happen from a dream to a voice recording to the dream drawings?
JS
When I first started doing them, I was traveling in Europe and I just had a small little pad of paper. If there were multiple incidents in that dream, I would condense them together. Then I started condensing multiple dreams, because they weren’t all that interesting by themselves, but they might have one interesting element.
Later, in 1999, I realized that I no longer have enough time to draw all of my dreams. I’m not doing dream objects fulltime anymore. But I still will delve into them and make use of them. Every once in a while, you don’t have another kind of inspiration, but your subconscious keeps pumping out things.
HUO
So, even if the dream drawings, in that sense, stopped, the dream works didn’t stop.
JS
Right. Yeah. I also began to get better at drawing without a photographic reference. I improved a bit but I’m still not as good as Bill Everett or many comic artists. I became kind of ob- sessed over the last few years with that period of comics—the horror comic period.
HUO
In the 40s?
JS
It was the late 40s, early 50s. There was this sort of Golden Age of expressionism in the comics. When these guys first started making comics, they were getting paid a pittance, so they would just churn them out, working as fast as possible. This was also a period when they were unfettered by anything. I’m hoping to get back to there, to do paintings that are somewhat based in that era, even though I know it’ll be extremely uncommercial, because people don’t really want grotesque, ugly things with bright colors on their walls.
HUO
Can you tell me about the epiphany of your fictional religion, Oism?
JS
Yeah. Well it begins when I was working on “My Mirage.”
I was looking at a lot of American religions like Mormonism and Scientology and, at a certain point, I was thinking about doing musical numbers about them because I was interested in the way that Christians were presenting their propaganda in the post— Jesus Christ Superstar world. I was going to the Scientology-run Shaw Health Clinic in East Hollywood, and, one day, while I was waiting to see my doctor, Dr. Eugene Dank, I overheard him talking with one of the other people there about some crisis of faith within the church. And I thought that would be a very interesting thing to make an artwork out of, a crisis of faith in a new, made-up religion.
HUO
So, that was the trigger in your writing?
JS
I thought, if I was going to make up a religion, what would make it different from Christianity? I mean, I realized ultimately that I couldn’t escape Christianity’s influence, thinking historically. So I wanted to do a rock opera about it, but now I’m basically giving up on it, because I just don’t think I can hold a tune anymore. And I was going to be the singer.
HUO
In the exhibition at Gagosian, there was an unrealized part. I haven’t understood fully what’s realized and what’s unrealized. Both have to do with... It’s like an imaginary museum of books or a library?
JS
One of the ideas I had for a piece for Nicolas Berggruen’s house involved having two book cover paintings facing each other. And one would be projecting on the other one, which was a direct reference to the history of the house and how it had once belonged to the daughter of Louis B. Mayer and her husband, the head of production at Universal. They had this big collection of Impressionist paintings, but some of them were mounted on boards that would open up in order to project the latest film releases that they would show to their Hollywood friends.
So, that was an earlier version, but it ended up being a library in which I was doing a mural based on the history of books, but from a McLuhanesque perspective, and structured around the landscape as described in the first English bestseller, The Pilgrim’s Progress. The room is a sort of library, but it used to be their dining room, and it has this element called a “baffle” that was set up so that you wouldn’t have doors opening and closing
and revealing the kitchen during dinner parties. And, to me, it looked very uterine. And I had been thinking about all these fertility symbols, Frank Sinatra, and other stuff. The column that’s in the Gagosian show is somewhat influenced by that. And particularly the painting that’s on a book cover of The Egg and I, that was sort of an unrealized element earlier on in the installation. The installation hasn’t occurred yet, because there’s so much construction going around that it’s not ready. It’s been delayed by over a year.
But it was interesting, because we’ve dealt with making actual furniture that was functional for the first time. If you’re doing a sculpture, you can do a sculpture of a chair, but it doesn’t have to actually be made out of the right materials. So, we had to consider all that kind of stuff.
This particular chair isn’t that functional. It’s this child’s seat. And it’s a little modernist stool, but crossed with kind of like
the chair that Huey Newton of the Black Panthers is photographed sitting in.
HUO
Oh, yeah.
JS
It’s kind of that. But then, on the backside, there’s a group of influential books (in terms of tribalism and the Manson family) and it is set up like the sephiroth, the arcane tree of life. Just because I like to do things that are complicated, or, if I can make a reference, I will, I guess.
HUO
That’s a good quote: "If I can make a reference, I will.” Going back to your unrealized project, this opera. I still think it’s really one that should happen. I think you should talk a little bit about it. How did that initial idea lead to an opera?
JS
Well, one thing leads to another. I’d come up with this sort of mythology based on the Book of Mormon and also all the stuff that L. Ron Hubbard made up about the history of Scientology. I was kind of inspired by tales by Yes’s album Tales from Topographic Oceans, which was based on a footnote to the Vedic scriptures. And I was interested in the fact that it was just this burning thing that Yes had to do. And it didn’t really work out that well. It’s considered a failure, but I think failures are interesting. They can be sometimes be more interesting than successes. An idea that can blossom out into a bigger thing is sort of the goal. And the opera is an example of that.
HUO
And with this opera, you were obviously putting together music, visual aspects, stage design. What would the music be in the opera? Would you have a composer or would you compose it?
JS
I had a prog rock band called D’red Dwarf. We had a sort of ayahuasca vibe—there was a bit of a krautrock thing too, evolving jams that had a groove of some sort, but a lot of weird elements. We recorded everything and we put out a little CD. And we performed a set in Miami that was loosely the first half of the story of the opera. But if you can’t hit the notes, it’s hard to be a singer. It’s a dream that may never get acted upon unless something weird happens.
HUO
And you also thought of making stage sets for it?
JS
I actually made a few. I had an inflatable fetus made and I did a trompe l’oeil painting of a defunct mini mall. I wanted a kind of decaying Sesame Street feeling.
HUO
So, quite apocalyptic, possibly? And also in the show at Gagosian there was a sort of feeling of a post-apocalyptic civilization, or a civilization disappearing, no?
JS
Yeah, there’s a feeling of that in reality, too. Things aren’t going great, are they? Nuclear war was our nightmare, but that was all potential; global warming is more real, a more likely way for the world to end. But maybe some miracle will happen and save us all. If not, things will just get hotter and harder; there will be more migrants, more nationalism, more fascism.
HUO
But, at the same time, I saw a video of yours online called Hope Against Hope. I think that was also the name of an exhibition you did prior to this one here.
JS
Well, I was reading some book on Greek mythology and, if it’s in a book, I’ll assume it’s true; if I read it online, I’m not quite so sure. Well, a lot of the things I read aren’t true, but they can still be inspirational. But according to this writer, when Pandora opened the box and all of the evils flew out into the world, the last thing that flew out was hope, which for the Stoics, was the worst evil of all—hope is the thing that leads to the world we live in, of consumerism and consumer desire, or the people who think they’re going to win the lottery. Because at heart, as much as I like gadgets, I know nothing is going to make me happier, really.
HUO
So, “Hope Against Hope”; it’s interesting, because there is also a painting in there called One Percent for Art.
JS
Well, it was one of those images that came to me. It’s a Greek hero who is attempting to cut off the Hydra’s heads. And the Hydra is a Calder sculpture, and at the ends of the Calder sculpture are wigs. In America, there’s this thing called “One Percent for Art,” which dictates that pretty much all large construc- tion projects have to devote 1% of their budget for artwork.
And sometimes that might be buying a bunch of small things, but usually it’s a Calder sculpture or a similar modernist work.
And of course, as an artist, you’re romantic about your place in the world, but really, the 1% are the only ones who can afford to buy art. Or it’s the 1% or the 1%.
HUO
Have you done public art commissions?
JS
No, I haven’t. I know if I could, it would be weird. I’d like to do a melting wedding cake for MacArthur Park. But I can’t imagine working on those things. It would be hard. Maybe I will someday.
HUO
I heard rumors that you wanted to do a moving animatronic sculpture?
JS
I did a few, and then I thought, “These things are going to break.” I dreamt of one recently that I might make, but it’s so simple, and some projects are better off being unrealized. They’re just an extrapolation of something you’re thinking about. A lot of times when I’m doing a show, I’ll go, “I’m doing all
these works. Oh, I’ll do another one that’s tangentially related.” And they’re not always the best pieces. But I like that there are mistakes and failures involved in the work, because we learn by mistakes.
I thought that one thing that keeps me from doing a lot of things is that I’m not a natural writer. I can imitate different kinds of writing. But I’m not good at just sitting down and writing something I feel is worthy. I’ve been wanting to do these things with puppets for a while, but I never had a dialogue for the puppets to say. And I realized now, I could probably do it with AI, just make a bunch of them and edit it down to something functional. And that would at least get me into the ballpark. Because I know what I’m thinking about. I know what the elements are.
Like it’s possible to do an AI version of William Burroughs’s cut-up method to create texts that could be worked with. I did try using DALL-E once. I made a prompt involving Al Gore. And one of the weird things was that these images of Al Gore really looked like Francis Bacon paintings. They can’t use preexisting images of a person, but they can sort of create a caricature of that person. And it just creates these smushed-out things that look like Francis Bacon paintings. So, I think you could apply that to writing too, and you could get smushed-out versions of writing. Like how I use Xerox machines to smear images sometimes.
HUO
Yeah, it could be that your ripped-up self-portraits could come out of AI. Because, before, you talked about rejection of iconic works, and there is one series of your work which are kind of icons, which are these ripped-up self-portraits.
JS
Yeah, the irony of that was that it began with a piece I had just completed for a show at Magasin, and it was funded by Pierre Huber. He sort of pulled a trick on my dealer where he was paying a bargain rate to own one piece (the Donner Party), but he was going to pay a full amount for another piece. And he just ended up not signing the agreement to buy the other piece for the full amount. So I was working for minimum wage to get this piece done, which later on was auctioned off and everyone was outraged, since all of these pieces were supposed to go to Huber’s own museum. But I was also told that I was going to be doing a show at his gallery and then one at Metro Pictures, and I’m like, "There isn’t enough work for two shows. What
am I going to do?" And I was despondent in some ways. So, the first ripped up self-portrait was a very literal mirroring of that despondency.
HUO
That’s how it began?
JS
Yeah. It was sort of an art world suicide, because I was forced into this weird position, but after the show, the dealer said we could have sold three of those—it was the first time I ever had a waiting list for my work. And the other ironic thing is that, when he did sell the work, it went for well over the suggested price, so my prices went up, and, in a weird way, I benefited in the long run.
HUO
And the ripped-up self-portrait series continues?
JS
I sort of ended it, but I could revisit it. I’m going to do a fundraiser at the New Museum where an artist does a portrait. And so, if the person who bids on the Jim Shaw portrait wants a ripped-up portrait, I could do one. Or I could do a distorted portrait or I could do a straight-ahead portrait. But then I’ve only ever been commissioned twice ...
HUO
To do portraits?
JS
No, just to do pieces. One was that Nicolas Berggruen commission, and the other one was a piece that was meant to be in front of a Picasso stage backdrop.
HUO
Let’s talk about the Picasso then. How did that work?
JS
It was in Toulouse for this festival, and there was this Picasso stage backdrop that was in the Abattoir. All I knew about it
was that it had a figure from the tarot deck as part of its element in these destroyed houses. And then, as it was going on, they said, "But wait, we’ve got a Dali backdrop we’re going to put in the same space." I started thinking about them as two opposing sides of the Spanish Civil War. So, I made the Spanish Civil War part of the storyline.
But I was also thinking about the fact that I was being asked to do something in front of Picasso. I thought, that’s ridiculous, to compare myself with Picasso, for my art to have some sort of relationship to his. And then I remembered that my old teacher, Jonathan Borofsky, had a drawing called I Dreamed I was Taller Than Picasso.
HUO
Jonathan Borofsky was your teacher?
JS
Yeah. He was a teacher at CalArts.
HUO
Who else did you have there? Baldessari?
JS
Baldessari and Laurie Anderson, Doug Huebler also. But Baldessari, as a teacher, was the most influential.
HUO
What did you learn from him?
JS
That asking questions or letting people talk was a good way of teaching. He basically let the students run everything. Oh, another person, briefly at least, who was my mentor was Judy Pfaff. I think she was scared of me and Mike Kelley—she thought we were these sort of Detroit hoodlums or something, but her work was much more energetic than what was normally shown in the late 70s.
HUO
And you and Mike, are there unrealized collaborations between him and you? Because he had such a huge catalog of unrealized projects.
JS
Well one thing he realized at the end was to release a CD of my guitar solos that I recorded when we were roommates. And there was one project that I did, sort of an illustration for him and Paul McCarthy, done in the style of sixties men’s violent mag- azine pulp covers. Paul was the evil sergeant, and Mike was the suffering sad sack. He did want me to sing a number of depressing songs for failed older men, found in old crooner albums.
HUO
But you and Mike had a band together in the 70s?
JS
hat was a collaborative process. Music generally is a collaborative process if, like me, you’re totally untalented musically. That’s why I was using my voice, because I just cannot bring myself to play an instrument; I can’t even play, like, a Ramones song. I can’t keep up the repetition.
HUO
Can we talk about movies and the design you did for movies?
JS
I designed parts of a movie, Earth Girls Are Easy. The actual designer was Dennis Gassner, but I did the titles and I did some of the spaceship and the fur designs. Unfortunately, the company producing it went bankrupt in the middle of it, so half the stuff I was designing didn’t happen.
HUO
But that’s exciting, because I’ve not read about that yet. I always wanted to ask you if you have projects for movies.
JS
For my first job out of CalArts, I worked on Terence Malik’s follow-up to Days of Heaven, which went into turnaround, but it was the movie, The Tree of Life, that ended up being made 35 years later with Brad Pitt.
HUO
And that was one of the first films you got involved in? And what did you do for that? Design props?
JS
I was trying to design the dream of a god, and also a prehistoric animal that could be realized without using stop-motion animation.
And I worked on Moonwalker, the Michael Jackson film. The scenes that were going to have special effects, they printed them all out for rotoscoping. And there was one scene that I was working on where he turns into a robot, and, in the initial version, he gets up and his face is silver and angry, but he has this white stuff dripping down his face. It looked like someone just came all over his face.
Somewhere along the line, someone must have said, “Michael, that doesn’t look right.” So it didn’t make it into the film. Anyway, those are some of my Hollywood credentials. I did a lot of TV commercials.
HUO
What are your favorite TV commercials you did? Because it’s interesting. Fellini did TV commercials. Salvador Dali did them.
JS
There was a Super Bowl commercial we made for the Canned Food Council that involved this sexy robot in space thinking about canned food. That was the most sort of spectacular commercial I worked on. Then there was a Scientology one. It was this H.R. Giger world that you were lost in, and then the camera pulls up from the maze and sees this exploding volcano in the dis- tance. Did you see the film version of White Noise, by any chance?
HUO
No?
JS
Well, apparently the big train accident that happens in the film was shot at, more or less, the location where there was just a train accident in Ohio.
HUO
Wow. So reality caught up.
JS
Yeah.
HUO
H.R. Giger had a train in his garden, a sort of ghost train. In the house, there were, of course, monsters all over. He wouldn’t sleep, and he sat on his bed, and you would walk around this house full of creatures. It was pretty scary, they looked at you from everywhere.
JS
One of the films I worked on was Species, which featured that train.
HUO
Your work for film hasn’t really been summarized has it? There hasn’t been a book or something? Do you think of elements of these films as being artworks by you?
JS
Not really.
HUO
But it’s interesting how artworks can infiltrate film.
JS
One of my CalArts classmates was an interesting video artist, John—I can’t remember his last name, and he kind of disappeared after he left LA. But he was working at a prop house, and they wanted him to make Abstract Expressionist paintings for them.
HUO
Oh, wow.
JS
Once, I found a painting of a woman with a forties hairdo staring at the viewer, and behind her was a soul trapped in a tree like in Dante’s Inferno. It was for sale for $50 at a prop house. Across from the Hollywood cemetary. And then I was up late one night and I was watching this Edgar G. Ulmer film called Blue Beard, about a murderous puppeteer. And it turned out that painting was made for that film. It was the clue that helped the police to find the killer. I went back to buy it, and it was gone.
I kept thinking about how I should go back and get it. After that, I vowed to have enough money on hand to buy any thrift store paintings that I might find.
HUO
And that brings us to the thrift store paintings, which is the way we met. Because in 1993, I curated this painting show with Kasper König, which was the first show I really curated.
And we thought it was interesting, because, and not for the first time, painting had been declared “dead.” And yet, there were so many artists working with paintings. So, we thought it would be inter- esting, in 1993, to do a kind of survey on paintings. And I mean, Agnes Martin was still around at that time and Maria Lassnig and Robert Ryman and Leon Golub. And then it went to the younger generation, like you, Marlene Dumas, Albert Oehlen, and Luc Tuymans, who were among the younger artists at the show. And you had an exhibition within the exhibition, because, from the very beginning, Kasper and I wanted there to be a show within the show. And that was your collection of the thrift store paintings. What was the epiphany behind them?
JS
I was in a thrift store, and I saw a very large painting based on a Breck shampoo girl, which was this series of ads of these pretty girls painted in a really old-fashioned manner. So, that was the first one. And then I realized, “Oh, there’s more weirdpaintings out there. I think I’ll get some more weird paintings.” I also collected paperbacks, which I bought for the covers; then, people started to value them and they became worth mon- ey, but I thought, “Oh, the paintings I’m collecting could never really be priced because there’s only one. They’re all unique, and it’s all in the eye of the beholder, any value they have.”
HUO
One thing I want to go a little bit deeper on maybe, towards the end now, because we’ve covered almost all my questions, are all these archetypes of paintings you see in the thrift shops, and how rarely you see abstract paintings.
JS
The problem with abstract paintings is, if they’re interesting, they’re probably by successful artists. It’s rare to find a good abstract painting in a thrift store. You also don’t see a lot of naked men in thrift store paintings. There’s a lot of naked women. I don’t think people like naked men; they don’t buy naked male paintings. Even non-nude-male-dominated paintings don’t sell as well as female-dominated paintings. There was this fresco designed by Michelangelo to celebrate the patriotism of the people of Florence. He did one, and da Vinci did one also. And all that survive are other people’s copies of the work that they did. So, I did one that was a combination of the two designs and then another. And that was a small drawing, but I also did a large mural piece based on it. The Michelangelo original was basically an excuse to have a bunch of naked men. It was an incident where a false alarm led to all these bathing soldiers, hurtling, getting out of the river.
HUO
Oh, wow. And where is that work?
JS
Sitting in storage. It’s big. 18 feet by 30 or something.
HUO
What about portraits?
JS
After a while, you get enough badly painted portraits.
I mean, I guess the most giving are the surrealist paintings, because they’re always being made and they’re always interesting. They’re always the most giving in terms of the psychology of American weirdness; it’s like an anthropological portrait of America. I’m still finding them, and people are still giving them to me. But I don’t want to have a lot of stuff left over when I die. I also have collections of drawings and photographs and the occasional objects that come from thrift stores and flea markets.
HUO
And, in some cases, you did your own thrift store painting, which is also fascinating. You gave instructions to assistants, no? How does that work? What are the instructions?
JS
It would basically be a descriptive title.
HUO
The instruction is the title?
JS
Exactly. I had a lot of employees, and every time I’d go out of town, there wasn’t necessarily much for them to do. And since they all went to these conceptually oriented art schools, they weren’t all that skilled at painting, which made them good at doing thrift store paintings.
But there was one guy who was a teenager who went to LACHSA, which is the local arts high school, and I had to mess his works up because they were too well-painted. The other ones, I would scuff them up, but I didn’t have to amend them too much. It has to be aged a little bit. They’ve never been integrated with the thrift store paintings, as if they were actually real. They were always known as fakes.
HUO
Fake thrift store paintings, in that sense. I mean, in a paradox, you made fake thrift store paintings, and they are real works by you.
JS
Yeah. Well, I had a girlfriend in Ann Arbor, but I moved to California when the relationship just happened. I was about to leave town, because that’s how fucked up I am. I gave her some artwork that she then gave to a thrift store when we broke up.
HUO
My very last question: we talked about your work for cinema, which was fascinating. One thing which related directly to cinema is, of course, these backdrop paintings in Bordeaux, which was an amazing exhibition of your biggest paintings. Can you talk about the genesis of that series and how it connects to the movies?
JS
When it came about first, I was mulling over the situation in the early 2000s, when the drumbeats for war were going on.
I was thinking about the way that, between Reagan and the Bushes, they utilized this very fake nostalgia for the good old days, which, in reality, were caused by what they would term “socialism,” which was FDR’s New Deal. And it was their way of destroying the New Deal. When Reagan came in, they really pulled the rug out. My wife was doing a video and she needed a backdrop, so my friend Dani Tull had said, “Oh, you should look at this website where you can rent them.”
HUO
And that’s how it began?
JS
Well, when I looked at the website, I noticed they were selling them, and the prices were almost the same as renting. I started getting ones that had a sort of nostalgic aspect to them. The first ones were of suburban streets, and then I would paint what I considered to be giant political cartoons on them, because I was working with politically charged themes. After a number of them, I realized they can only exist rolled up in some warehouse, they’re so big. If they’re not in a museum, they’re going to be unseen but, I decided that I liked the aesthetic: the cracked elements represent another past reality or a nostalgic world. I decided to start working on smaller pieces of them. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last ten years.
HUO
And then the last thing is: Do you have unrealized feature film projects?
JS
Just bad ones, bad ideas for feature films. I mean, I wish that I had followed David Lynch’s trajectory because I think he’s the greatest living artist, in some ways.
HUO
Can you talk about that?
JS
He may not be the greatest dramatist ever, but, as an artist, I think he’s great. The weird thing though is when you see his actual paintings and the way he evolved as a painter, you can see just how much he’s influenced by Francis Bacon. Like the monster that rips apart people in the first episode of the Twin Peaks reboot is such a Baconesqo9ue thing. I think it speaks to that self-destructive aspect that Bacon had and that Lynch probably has and that I have—that feeling that you don’t belong. Another one of my favorite artists is Scott Walker, and Scott Walker clearly had a goal of disappearing.
HUO
Of disappearing?
JS
Or Trent Reznor. There’s a Nine Inch Nails video where Bob Flanagan puts himself into this machine that basically destroys him. And that’s sort of what I imagine Scott Walker’s fantasy world being. I’m not as extreme in that, but self-deprecation is a very important part of my life and my aesthetic.
Jim Shaw (Midland, b. 1952) is a Los Angeles-based artist. Over the past decades, Shaw’s work has responded to American cultural history through painting, drawing, and sculpture. His latest exhibition “Thinking The Unthinkable” was presented at Gagosian, Los Angeles, in February 2023.
Hans Ulrich Obrist (St Gallen, b. 1968) is a curator, critic, and author of several curatorial-milestone books. Obrist is the co-director of exhibitions and programs at the Serpentine Galleries, London.
ALL CLOTHES: BRAIN DEAD
PHOTOGRAPHY: MAX FARAGO
STYLING: RITA ZEBDI
IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST; GAGOSIAN, NEW YORK, LOS ANGELES, LONDON, PARIS, LE BOURGET, GENEVA, BASEL, GSTAAD, ROME, ATHENS, HONG KONG; MASSIMO DE CARLO, MILAN, LONDON, HONG KONG.