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Transition Offense
On the occasion of his solo exhibition, “Transition Offense” at the Buia Gallery in Jesse Sposato: What are you trying to accomplish in your work, or, what would you like people to take away from it? Mike Quinn: I’ve gone through different stages of answering that question for myself. I think there’s an inherent need to rationalize chaos that comes with addiction or escape because it’s not a formulaic thing--you can’t explain why there is chaos in life, and how that chaos works itself out, so, because there’s no real way to do that, I’ve used visual arts as a way to put some order to things like pain, escape, addiction, and obsession. Something I’ve been looking into recently is this idea of achievement, and success and failure, and how a lot of times in life, we’re geared to aspire to these fleeting moments of achievement that happen very infrequently. My work tends to look less at these moments, and more to the successes and failures of every day—three cigarettes instead of ten, one cup of coffee instead of several. It’s those small moments, the fine line between success and failure, that’s very poignant to the work I’m making. I noticed that when people walked into my show, they didn’t necessarily say what they liked about the work, but they started talking about their own issues—maybe it’s an unconscious goal I had, but I think the work allows people to say, “It’s okay to talk about these things.” This is definitely fruit for discussion. I’ve had people open up and say, “I’ve been in Alcoholics Anonymous for this long,” or “I had this issue.” I have a friend who emailed the gallery, who I hadn’t talked to in years, who is in AA now, and we ended up getting in touch, and she just let all this stuff loose after seeing my show, and it was amazing.
In The New Yorker’s review of your solo show, “Transition Offense,” Martha Schwendener writes that your debut addresses “manly obsessions.” What role does masculinity play in your art? I think, more than anything, my work stands for the weakness of the American man. It is masculine work because it deals with ideas of “jock-ism” and male weakness, and what happens in that light--those moments of failure when you can’t really cope. The notion of the American man as this tragic failure figure having to appear very strong, but in actuality, isn’t always able to. The reason [my art] can be successful is because it is looking at masculine weakness--that’s something I’ve always felt strongly about dealing with in my work. Sports, drugs, and addictions are the ever-present threads linking your pieces together. Why? Are these personal struggles? What is your relationship to these things, in both the physical and emotional sense? When I first started the work, the reason that sports became important was because I was looking at these ideas of obsession and weakness again, and I was making work that looked at the aftermath of what happens when the American hero becomes the American family man and those days of athletic glory are over. So, I’ve looked at sports as something that was maybe underrepresented in the visual arts. It’s always worked for me, because, like I said, people have touched on it, but in very bare and removed ways. Some people look at it like, the nuance of sport is sexy. I’ve seen videos before—there’s an Annika Larsson video I saw that deals with uniforms and the sleekness of sports—but it doesn’t really deal with the fact that there’s a lot of artistic dialogue about what goes into the phenomenon of sports and watching sports, fanaticism, issues of escape from the every day--the people that, when they sit and watch these games, are removed from the shittiness of their every day life. I think that that’s, at the very least, the starting point for me. Like everything else, like shopping, sex, drugs, and alcohol, especially in this country, [sports] are really viable sources of escape for a lot of people. When their team is doing very well, their lives are passable and they can get up in the morning and wait for the next game. That’s why I feel that I have a good mix with both mediums--the drugs and alcohol, along with sports--these tend to be the more interesting pieces, because drugs are drugs are drugs, and we know what they’re there for, and I think when you add drugs plus sports to equal art, it can be a very interesting thing that I don’t think a lot of people have touched on. Personally, I have a very admitted dependent relationship with substances, and I think that I’ve struggled with that for a long time, as a lot of people that I know, and family members have. I was actually just talking to my therapist about this, and she even said, “your whole life has been about addiction, your abstaining from it, or your trying to not be a part of it, falling into the sins of your fathers and things like that,” but regardless, my lot in life seems to be the acknowledgement that we all try to escape in one form or another, and that’s a difficult thing to admit. Everybody’s goal tries to be to stay in life as much as they can, but a lot of times, it tends to just be too difficult, and so I think that the acknowledgement of sports as an escape might even be secondary.
What kind of audience reaction do you expect from those viewers who are unfamiliar with your subject matter? I think that the work is very open in a way--it’s autobiographical and personal work, so I think that people respond to it in the same way that they respond to me. I mean, they can see me as someone who is an art-maker that knows a lot about contemporary art, or they might see me as a sports fan, or they can see me as an addict, or as a guy that makes things. I’ve had people come up to me and be like, “I saw that game,” or “I was such a big fan of that team.” But, like I said, there was also this girl that emailed the gallery because she was really affected by the work, even though she understood none of the sports references. And then there are people who like the juxtaposition of both, and they might not be familiar with all the sports references, but they recognize that these ideas of addiction, abstaining, and failure, are very underrepresented. And I think they’re humble, as I hope that they are, in a way that a lot of contemporary art, or a lot of art in general isn’t. There’s a self-deprecating humor about my work, an honesty about it, and a desire to say, “we can talk about these things and learn from them,” which is pretty universal. What is your working process like? What kind of schedule do you set for yourself, if any? How often are you able to make time for working on your art? Because it’s hyper-personal, and because it’s about specific times, days, and moments of abstaining--using or not--or reflection, it’s always an on-going process; always, always, always. There’s a period of collecting that happens; pieces are constantly being added to. There are drawings that have to do with the paintings or the sculptures, moments that need to be documented, physical pieces to be collected--so, usually, there’s 20 or 30 different things being worked on at once. The downside to that is, finishing pieces is difficult because everything is interplaying. That’s the one reason I can’t have a studio outside my home. I’ve realized that leaving my domestic situation, where I live and go through the emotions that we all do when living our lives...if I were to put that in a vacuum of a studio, and then say, “Okay, create in this sterile environment that you don’t live in…” it wouldn’t work for me. So, even though I don’t have a ton of space, it serves its purpose well. Coming back to the answer about time, the switch is always on--the collecting process, and the introspective inventorying is always there. The practice is ongoing all the time, and when I need to actually sit down and put in a few hours worth of work, then I do that, but in general, I’ll collect, collect, collect, get ideas, and then take a couple of days and work for that period to put things in the order that they need to be in, and finish pieces.
You work at a gallery and have for years. How has working on the inside of the art world helped your career and/or been detrimental to it? The detriment is just the time. When you have more time, obviously you’re going to get a lot more done, and I’ve found that no matter what, you’ll make better work if you make more work. And the only way to make more work is if you have more time. Even though my work doesn’t take as long as if it were, say, huge welded sculptures, the collecting process is not easy. The burden of my artistic practice isn’t that it’s totally and utterly time consuming, but that it’s emotionally consuming, and I have to go into this place and deal with these issues. That’s the other side of the coin--it’s not going to take me five weeks to sit down and execute this painting from start to finish, but I am going have to think about things that are very difficult, and delve into this emotional pool in order to pull these things out. The flipside is that you meet a ton of people, whether they are artists, collectors, gallerists or other people that work in galleries. That has ended up making a huge difference, because they come to your show and they talk about you; they know what your work looks like and some of them buy pieces, so that has been very helpful. The other thing is that, I work in a secondary gallery. That means not only do they show very established artists, but my boss in particular, shows extremely high quality work. And so, for years now, I’ve been exposed to fine works of art, so I see what that level of artistic professionalism or perfectionism looks like and that has been really important.. What are you working on currently? The college and professional basketball season just ended, so I have a lot of pieces that are being finished now; the collecting process that was going on is now being assembled. I have one piece I’m working on for a summer show that’s a wall piece, and then I’ve just been building on the body of work that is concurrently running. I’ve also been toying with ideas of some outdoor, large-scale installation stuff that I’m working on with my dad (a physicist, so whenever there’s any math involved in an installation, he helps out there, or with the rigging or the development of a project). I’ve been starting to think about a proposal for the Who are your heroes? Artistically, definitely Paul McCarthy, Robert Ryman, Marcel Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg. And then, my dad is a big one. My mom is sort of an anti-hero--I’ve always thought about that. Whenever somebody asks me what my influences are, I’m always like, my mom, but not a good one. Michael Jordan was [a hero] for a long time when I was a kid. When the Chicago Bulls first started winning all these championships … [at the same time] I remember as a very young kid that I recognized that life could be shitty. That things weren’t always fair. You know, life wasn’t easy. And [then, simultaneously] Michael Jordan was sort-of defying logic. He was setting the precedent for what you could do as a human being. Even yesterday, it was so weird--I read an article in this basketball magazine on the plane coming back from
What inspires you? I think a need to be healthy, and to communicate effectively. Growing up in |
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