MAN OF THE HOUR

Art is one of the most long-lasting and continuously-engaging activities that we, as a species, have ever created. Man of the Hour recently had the chance to sit down with veteran artist Matthew Rose to get a look at his particular methods of encouraging his audience to look at the world in a new way.

After reading, make sure to take a look at Mr. Rose's website and look at the rest of his work: matthewrosestudio.net

MAN OF THE HOUR: Your work employs a wide variety of media—drawing, painting, text, collage, assemblage; is there a particular medium you feel best represents your work? A style you prefer?

MATTHEW ROSE: I have trouble with the word “style.” The word makes me think of fashion, haircuts, fabric, and “going out of…” although it does remind me of the concept “style is thought,” an idea by the great 20th century art critic Herbert Read and whether that is true or not.  Drawing, painting, producing texts either by addition of letters or subtraction of sentences, and mashing it all together is my method, my style, if you like; yes, there’s a madness to it, although I generally work within the traditional rectangle.

I tend to think of all of my work as being intellectually and structurally tied together— with my hands, my pencil marks, brush strokes, cuts, pastes and my thinking. Since most of what I do involves physical cutting and pasting and painting and drawing—no digital reworking of images—and oftentimes a conceptual marrying of elements, you could call it all collage. My approach has been to use collage as a platform to take apart culture and consciousness and its objects, and reassemble it in a way that is surprising, but also in ways that resonate and evoke meaning. Like a song whistled from over the hedge that is barely intelligible. I’m not married to any technique, though; I’m interested in seeing what these things can look like to me.  I make them so I can discover them. Maybe uncover them and in the process reveal ideas.

MH: What kinds of ideas best represent your work?

MR: Take as an example the multiplicity of meanings in a spare work like “Withdrawing,” a lead pencil drawing of the word “withdrawing.” Or the frenetic reading and rereading in a small pair of collages of bits of comic book texts in Nervous Red and Nervous Yellow. Shredding these vintage papers into fragments, and then putting them back together in a way that challenges reading. Or the vast and sexy (and complicated) notions of love and courtship in works like Sparkasse, Haushaltern or Endless Love. There are also works where I feel the aesthetic need to absolutely fill out the workspace (the rectangle) to the edges (like Pollock) with surreal and compact compositions in a kind of house of mirrors – like The End of the World and Breathless. 

And because I work in series, producing almost an entire show in a month, these works tend to define a state of consciousness or a particular idea the way a group of essays might, or pages from a book. They are pieces of my life. But most of these works have never been seen. And I’ve only looked at them just a few times. 

MH:   What is it about these pieces that keep you interested?

MR: My favorite works are the ones that come out of nowhere, are super simple, and keep on talking to me, keep my eyes digging into them as if I’m seeing them for the very first time. If it seems as if I didn’t make them, I’m interested. There are works like Wilson, which shows a pioneer crawling out of a small rectangle of wallpaper, or Immaculate Perception—a 1930s girl in a bob haircut on a lemon tree. Or works like Les Affaires, which are enormous and depict hundreds of “transactions” (business in French is “les affaires”. My books, largely unseen like Days Like These and A Perfect Friend (collage works) tell some kind of story I’m still trying to unpack. Other books are on simple paper, stapled together and coated with gouache images and words like MAN SLUT, fresh and Untitled—abstract shapes and colors are extremely fragile and I’m drawn to looking deeply into them as if I’m searching for their meaning, their real meanings or their changing meanings. It’s the way a word intersects another, or colors collide, or the composition just sings. Those experiences reward my obsessions with visual intrigue.

It is true, I guess, that there are other works of mine I don’t much like at all.  I usually cut these up and recombine them into new works.  I just completed a series of collage works on paper with bits and pieces of these “refusées.” There are no bad ideas, really, just ideas that are poorly located.

MH: When do you feel your career as an artist began? What has been the highlight of it so far?

MR: I’m pretty sure my childhood mapmaking was the beginning of all this. Two things in particular, though: The words and shapes I put down on paper to describe—to myself—my relationship with my brothers was key. The idea that I could transfer at age 6 or so, my feelings in words and images was a powerful notion. There was a magic to it; and from that flowed many other ideas that brought together my interest in what art could possibly be. The other was around the same time—a purely aesthetic moment—where I took a small piece of bluish slate and held it up to a royal blue sky. I made a hand-held collage of it—these two blues, two textures. Purely aesthetic, but born of nature.

The highlight?  Hard to say—the exhibition I conceived and organized, A Book About Death, which launched in New York City in September 2009 was an astonishing beginning for what turned out to be a global and ongoing art project. Since artist-curators have organized then, more than 25 exhibitions across the globe, music videos as well as video artworks, posters, texts, and some 5,000 artists have participated. We invented, together, a powerful and free and open structure for art exhibitions, and have used the structure of the initial show to propel succeeding exhibitions forward with gravitas and richness and variety.

See: abookaboutdeath.blogspot.com and abookaboutdeatharchive.blogspot.com

I have had good run of recognition for my work as an artist these past few years—probably stemming from my massive, all-over exhibition Spelling With Scissors which took place in Denver in 2006. Wall-to-wall-to-floor-to-ceiling, I turned this space into an open flowing book; some 1,000 collage works all together produced a visual corollary of my consciousness and inside it all you had Lincoln, Nixon, black rectangles with scratch marks, stripes and lovers and killers and dreams. When I look at the installation shots of that show I’m not quite sure I actually did it. 

MH: If you had to give credit to one person for inspiring you to become a professional artist, who would it be?

MR: Probably my father, who owned a silkscreen factory in Queens, New York. He had his hands deep in the paint at one point and, while he encouraged me to pursue my interests in whatever I chose to do, he was a businessman and thought a profession like doctor, lawyer or even running his business would be better for me. Writing and making art were more my nature—and my independent streak chaffed at the kind of poor design-by-committee often found in companies, small and large. My father never stopped being interested in what I did. And he was always astonished that serious money came in for my works. I also collaborated with my mother—an expert needlepoint maker—on a few pieces like Communism. A red text with yellow ground.

But making art is really the point and not just selling it.  While I was already producing work and having shows, my correspondence with Ray Johnson, the late American collage artist (1927-1995) was key to a good deal of my thinking about working methods and language and thinking. Dada, Fluxus, Surrealism and sandpaper are key gifts from Ray.  Plus, of course, the world. The world just keeps giving me stuff to think about and turn into new things. 

MH: What do you think is the most important thing for people to know about being a professional artist? What is the most important quality an artist must have?

MR: Make at least one artwork every single day. If you put in your 10,000 hours, you’ll simply get it. If you only paint on Sundays, you never will. There is natural talent, of course, but you still have to put paint down on canvas or paper, or pick up those scissors or make those lines. Il faut faire. You have to do. Jasper Johns is famous for saying: Take a thing, do something to it, then do another thing to it. Something along those lines. His interest, and mine, has to do with all sorts of problems resulting from representing space, color, and conscious/unconscious notions. The mind is, in the end, thanks to Duchamp, very often the subject of art.

MH:   When you decide to make a new piece of artwork, is there a particular process you follow? Do you have a particular room where you like to work, or specific supplies you prefer to use? What rituals do you complete before, during, or after creating a piece?

MR: I’m like that lucky person who can sleep anywhere with any amount of noise or distraction. I can always make art. Often, it starts with a blank sheet of paper, or canvas, or a collection of bits of paper or objects lying on a table or my floor, or things lying in the street. An overheard bit of conversation, a phrase pulled out of context from a book.  I’m somehow struck by the peculiarity of an element. I want some wonderful mistake to happen, so I have to be ready for it, practiced in making good mistakes. So all that stuff that falls on the floor becomes an active part of what I’m doing…it’s where the good stuff is often found—just beyond my peripheral vision.

My studio is not tremendous but there’s enough space to spread out and work full-on; works typically pile up on the window ledge, floor, the tables and chairs as they dry and settle. It’s like running a small orchestra as I pull a work back into the mix, change it, scrape away, sand it down, or take it into the kitchen for a steel wool scrubbing under running water (for larger pieces, I’ll take them into the tub). I tend to work with addition and then extreme subtraction. The process is not too different from editing a novel or a short story or magazine article. Or maybe shaving a bar of soap down into a bunny rabbit, then letting it dissolve into whatever shape nature and water and time want of it.

I have select piles of magazines, books, scraps of paper, letters and of course, a full armory of pencils, brushes, knives, scissors, and other tools I’ve fashioned to beat these works into shape. As for rituals—I usually listen to old time radio while I work, but sometimes podcasts like Radio Lab or audiobooks like Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. After the works are done, I lay them out in a grid, let them dry, then flatten them out under two massive Larousse Universle encyclopedias from the late 1800s. They each weight about 3 kilos. Once they are flat and I’m happy, I sign, date and then store them, and clean up the mess so I can start fresh the next day.

MH:   Who is your favorite artist from history? Has that person influenced your own work?

MR: I couldn’t pick out a single artist but rather enjoy the immense card catalog that is art history. I’m living in an age where I can skate through time and draw upon the great works—and the great passages from the great works—from art history. But I’m very interested in the cut-and-paste business of color and shape and material, so for me the clearest line would be: Picasso/Braque, Schwitters, Ernst, Cornell, de Kooning, Johns/Rauschenberg/Ray Johnson. That four-generational bridge of image-making over the years has had more impact on me than anything else.

MH:  When did you decide to take art seriously as a job? What other career paths did you consider, before coming to this decision?

MR: I’ve always made art, every day, even when I wasn’t exhibiting. I started working out of books in high school and have focused more and more on the integrity of the books and for about 25 years on a range of supports—canvas, wood, paper, etc.  I was always serious. Ask any of my ex-girlfriends.

At Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island), I dipped into everything from biology to filmmaking to writing to religious studies to Zen Buddhism. And afterwards, I toyed with everything from academic (Kierkegaard scholar), lawyering and doctoring, to magazine editing. In the end, I’ve always done a number of things that involve words—writing for national newspapers, major magazines like The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Art & Antiques (about art, wine, business), and teaching and lecturing very part time. I’ve designed and launched magazines, produced them, edited them, worked on films as a kind of script doctor, and worked with people on a range of their entrepreneurial ideas, as well as my own. I like the quick-hit collaboration of all these kinds of projects. I like to help people get things done. That’s probably why I love playing music with other people, even if they have no musical aptitude.

MH:  What makes the difference between “professional” artists and “amateur” artists?

MR: Professional artists get paid, no?  Amateur artists produce it for the love of it. But those two “categories” don’t have much meaning to me. Professional is an approach. Do something every day. 

MH:  A lot of people think of art as a dangerous choice of profession; the image of the “starving artist” is a powerful one. What has been your experience in that regard? How long did it take you to “make it” as an artist?

MR: I’m not starving, and probably never did because I always worked in a number of ways to make enough time to produce art, to satisfy my obsession. I remember when I worked as an editor and writer in New York some years ago, I’d be drawing while on the phone. Over the years I worked in this job, I produced a huge pile of magic marker drawings. I started selling work about 20 years ago, and found myself surprised at the time that people were happy to pay for what I did, that they found something worth keeping on their walls from what fell out of my head and spilled from my hands. I’d be out of Brown for about 10 years or so. Every year it gets better in terms of the work. If you build it, they will come, and all that stuff like that there.

MH:  How important, in your opinion, is feedback for the aspiring artist? What sort of feedback is most important? What sort is safe to ignore?

MR: I suppose feedback is important. I have certainly received enormous positive reinforcement with sales and shows and critical reception of my work, and that mostly from artists, the people who think about art-making. But in the end, how important should it be? Not very. Think about all those great artists who never had a really significant public—Bill Traylor, Ray Johnson, Jess, Henry Darger and a million others. They produced work because they had to, not to please anyone, and certainly not to sell it. It was a necessity.

The best response to your work is when people call you up and say, “I’ve been thinking about that piece of yours…” It’s not about owning it but about your work entering into a dialogue with an individual’s consciousness.

Once, in New York City, I put up some of my collage works at a friend’s loft on Lafayette Street for an art exhibition and cocktail. People got wildly drunk on Jell-O Shots and someone wrote on the wall next to my works—a series of Chinese Flash Cards and Curious Texts affixed to cardboard—Ce n’est pas l’art (“This is not art!” Russell Steinert, a good friend and great artist, said: “Hey Matthew! Congratulations!  That’s fantastic, look at this!” He thought the reaction was terrific, even though he had to clean the walls. So: Ignore nothing.

MH: If you had one piece of advice to give to anyone aspiring to a make a living through art, what would it be?

MR: Become a doctor first. Study anatomy.

MH: Everyone has certain ideas about how their career will unfold, certain expectations; often, these expectations are not met, and the “real job” is far different than what they anticipated; has this happened for you? In what ways?

MR: I never conceived of art-making as a “job” in the sense you appear to mean it. Rather, making art is something I did and have always done and do every day. So I never had those sorts of career expectations. Yes, I want my work to be seen and talked about, but there’s no promotion path; the art world is a snake like labyrinth with very few clearly marked doors/entrances/exits. The best thing you could do for your career is to either get arrested or die. And both in spectacular fashion, if possible.

MH: What are you reading right now?

The Stuff of Thought, a book on language and thought, and their complicated relationship, by Steven Pinker. He writes about verbs, mostly, and other grammatical nuggets, dead metaphors and strange constructions that take rules or deny them. Like when a waitress refers to a man sitting at a lunch counter by saying, “The ham sandwich wants you,” or a sick person by saying, “The gallbladder in 102 needs new bandages.” Our language generates a stream of associations and flows along a nervous system of rules, evoking meanings that turn in the water, drown or float as words connect with what we hear and see. This is key to what I’m doing with visual art that connects up with word fragments and broken down meanings.

MH: What is the theme song to your life?

MR: “Plan B.” Do you know that song? It’s also the name of a novel I wrote.

MH: What does “man of the hour” mean to you?

MR: First thought: Warhol’s 15 minutes in the 21st century. Second thought: Why do I make art? Because…I like the hours.  

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Again, to learn more about Matthew Rose and to see more of his work, visit matthewrosestudio.net