Interview: Matt Christy & Brady Haston (March 2011)

Do you feel that you identify with any artist (or artistic theory) in particular? If so, in what ways does he/she/it influence your work on display here at Twist?

Matt Christy:  Where to begin? I'm influenced by a lot of theories and a lot of artists. One person who sort of ironically came up while I was thinking of putting this show together was Gustave Courbet, who was the founder of the Realism movement in France in the 1800's. Courbet said something like, "Show me an angel and I'll paint one." His point of view was that because angels do not exist he would not paint one. I have this video piece in the show that I called, "Show Me an Angel", after this quote. In the video there is the image of a man covered in blinking eyes, which came from Revelations where four angels (beasts) are described as being covered with eyes all over their body. My Christian roots are all over the show. I don't believe in angels; I appreciate Courbet's opinion; I even agree with it. However, I can't seem to "Give Up the Sublime", to quote another text in the show (it's written on a painting). My point of view is that there are angels, but only because I made one. Art is our angel and can't be conditioned by issues of strict realism, indeed it never was, because art engages the psychedelic antipodes of the mind and the imagination, the birth place and life world of religion and all sorts of demons, ghosts, monsters, and figments. I also think that that is where we live most of the time, in our heads, within our imaginations, these fictional narrative are what we act on.

What is it in these few artists’ works that made you want to bring them together in one space?                                              

Brady Haston: I chose these artists from a few hundred that attended last year’s Southern Graphics Conference in Philadelphia. Their work came to my attention because it seemed a bit darker and edgier than the majority of printmakers there. After my selection, I started to think of how I could impose a narrative linking these different artists and wrote my curator's statement around their work.

What do you feel is the importance of artwork to the average viewer and consumer?

BH: The viewing audience comes to an art event to escape the familiar and visually/conceptually challenge themselves.

MC: I think you sort of answer your own question when you note that the viewer is also a consumer. It's an accurate, but unfortunate assumption that this category describes us now. When we are reduced to consumers, not to civic, communally and ethically guided people, then art is only another commodity, a hiccup between commercials.

Your question calls to mind the question of the ideal viewer. That is, what/who is the ideal viewer? Or to frame this question in broader terms, who are the masses, how do we view the masses, the public? Is the public to be understood as a people deceived by politicians, advertising and the media and who would behave ethically and wisely if only the wool was pulled back from their eyes and they were allowed to freely exercise their creative and communal powers? Or is the public a horde of thoughtless apes that need to be held in check, always on the verge of barbarism? Should art be simple and entertaining so that it can be easily consumed and influential? Or should it recoil from the "stupid" public in order to find its home among intellectuals and academics ("people that matter")?

Artists have answered this question differently throughout art history. But the narrative of modernity is a plebeian one, one in which art tries a hundred different ways to break with the class/intellectual/academic/ political isolation of "high" art. But often the "public" responded with antagonism to the new forms (Dubuffet for instance, who adopted childlike forms and unsophisticated images had his paintings slashed when they were first shown in Paris). The attempts to break the old "high" art forms proved just as readily academized as anything else.

Nevertheless, we live after the experiments of modernity, in which all things prove capable of acquiring meaning through the arts. The hierarchy of forms and subject matters is completely abolished. And that's where we are. And this is a good thing. It is in part a narrative of democracy.

But back to your question, who is the viewer I make art for? Well, I make things because I have to. I make it for me; it's all that keeps me sane, that stands between me and total, paralyzing depression. But I also make it for others. It's my belief that much academic art is unnecessarily obscure, oblique, and ambiguous (I'm guilty of this too, being fully academicized). But I don't think this should mean artists adopt forms that fit uncritically into a consumer society, or that they make pop art because that's what people know and love. People will never think if you continually make the assumption that they can't. Instead I assume that people are thoughtful, that they are capable of the things I'm capable of, that we share the same fears, loneliness, and drudgery of life. So I guess in the end I hope to make art that is accessible to a wide variety of people, from the intellectual to my mother, but that also is critical of my society (appropriately so, I think) and can give voice to playful feelings but also feelings of discontentment, angst, and alienation. However, what I do not want to do is alienate people, or make them feel stupid. I don't make art for Rupert Falwell, a wealthy ass makin bank on the backs of the bruised, and Jerry Murdock, a millionaire Christian Fundamentalist Senator who writes hate mail to gay celebs asking them to become straight. I would like to make art that bothers them.

What’s your favorite candy from childhood?

MC: Googoo Bars

BH: I can’t remember now.

Name the first 3 words that come to mind when you think of David Bowie.

MC: God is American.

BH: I don’t think of David Bowie.