DENNIS ADRIAN

DENNIS ADIAN: I know that you, along with the curatorial staff at The Art Institute of Chicago, were involved in the selection of your show. Did you work with the French museum people too?

ED PASCHKE: I worked with the Art Institute people; we did have a meeting in France. The basic concern there was that the show consist of a substantial number of conceptually related works-the French seemed to feel strongly that you can't just put up works; you have to have some major philosophical premise to manifest in the exhibition.

DA: Did you feel that the exhibition ought to have a certain structure?

EP: It was really difficult for me in such a position to have an overview of my own work. What we tried to do was to put together the strongest possible body of work. There were many considerations flowing through my mind as I tried to do this. One was, should there be a kind of uniform sampling of the work? There might be stronger or weaker periods. Should certain collections, museum or private, be favored in terms of the weight that so doing might give the whole enterprise? But the primary goal was to have the strongest group of paintings.

DA: When you say the strongest possible work, do you mean the most representative images of some periods, or is there a level of quality you have aimed at or certain works that you feel to be really at the heart of your artistic and painterly considerations? Specifically, when you think about the early work, what do you think characterizes the most representative and best works?

EP: The very early work was about a kind of confrontational dissonance, a societal dissonance. I think there was an involvement with certain aspects of gendera playing around with issues of gender identification.

DA: The period you're talking about would be 1968 to 1972?

EP: Yes, works such as Ramrod and Hophead [cat. nos. 6, 7]. This earlier work is sometimes described as being concerned with the underbelly of American society. Then there was the shoe period, the woman series, and the man series. Then there was the couples series. This last series was confrontational. By degrees I was coming closer not only physically but psychologically to the point where in the group of cropped, close-up heads of the mid-1980s I felt I was penetrating the surface, the societal facade, the gamesmanship and the role playing, to get into that subterranean part of the mind that deals with the inner versus the outer self.

DA: Do you feel that these concerns begin really with the works having forms that suggest electronic media, where abstract forms and bandings start to be a kind of language of feeling and begin to articulate a state of mind?

EP: Yes. I think that the media, where all these sources originate, act as a trigger mechanism in my mind. I then project, fantasize, put together various component parts. For a while I was very concerned with the surface appearance of electronic communication. Eventually in my work I came to the point where forms and images disintegrated, broken apart in the fabric of electronic disturbance and its surface. In the most recent work, forms are becoming more solidified, getting back more toward certain kinds of psychological presences or to an edge or tension that characterized some of the earlier work.

DA: In some of the most recent images, bands or rectangles of color appear arbitrarily as though there are overlays or gels over part of the picture; also, there are disjunctively scaled images that recall similar paintings of the late 1960s.

EP: More recently I've been trying to investigate aspects of religion, violence, sexuality, and combinations thereof, stated in a more solidified way.

DA: In other recent works, there are quotations from images having specifically to do with art or even clichÈs such as the Mona Lisa, or images that are related to familiar sculpture and painting. I don't recall any such visual quotations in the earlier work.

EP: I am using the ideas of symbol, metaphor, or icon-ideas that bring with them a baggage of referential information. Certainly Elvis or the Mona Lisa are images that have recognizability and a certain referential arrangement that affects the way we see and understand the subjects behind the images. This potential grows out of a cultural fabric, and I guess what I want to do is to take some well-known images as a starting point and maybe try to combine them with others or to break down these images, maybe to dissect what sort of phenomenon broad popular recognizability is.

DA: I've always felt that even some of your early paintings are concerned with making philosophical points about how one sees and understands things, and about elements of painting.

EP: Central to my work is what I refer to as the law of opposites; I believe there are polarities between things; one gets from one extreme to the other by intermediate stages and steps. This law applies to issues of gender identification, which characterize much of the earlier work and which float in and out of my work over the years. Positive/negative, the idea of pacing a painting in terms of complexity and simplicity, the idea of public versus private, are elements that have always interested me and that I've always tried in some way to build into the character of the paintings. In my most recent work, there are ideas concerning religion, which can be seen or used in a positive or a destructive way. I think that the element that makes them united is the pulse of life. I think one of the first thoughts that mystified me when I began to study at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago was a critique about "life in the picture plane." "This painting has life in the picture plane, this one does not, this one has movement, this one does not." It was a year or so before I realized that the "life in the picture plane" had to do with the forces operating between the various elements that create tensions in the eye and mind as the observer investigates and considers all the different facets. All the pictorial elements-some with references, some with overt meanings, some with subliminal ones-somehow play upon the perceptive apparatus of the viewer so that movement, light, and so forth are going on inside his head.

DA: When I look at your paintings, I'm always stuck by their formal variety. In certain periods there seem to be sets of compositional concerns that are dominant; they gradually shift or give way to something else. Are these shifts of the formal situation the by-products of these interactive factors you mentioned or is formal structure something you consider independently? From time to time you've changed your way of working or the texture of the paint. You've even had other people introduce things in the paintings in order to alter your process. Do you do these things only in order to change the formal structure?

EP: Sometimes I've been concerned with consciously addressing certain formal issues, and the consequences are various metaphorical, symbolic results. At other times I've been concerned initially with certain metaphorical images and ideas and the formal invention is a consequence.

DA: About 1970-71 I remember the first quite large paintings of yours that I saw, Pink Lady (cat. no. 8). The scale seemed a big change because the earlier works, while not really small, had the scale of easel and cabinet pictures, comfortable or even intimate.

EP: I would compare the bigger scale to the experience of watching something on a movie screen where it's larger than you are. I think people who paint illusionistically have three basic choices of scale: to paint something smaller than it is, the same size it is, or larger than it is. I made a conscious decision to go larger than life because I wanted this almost overwhelming move-screen scale to happen-and to investigate it.

DA: Monumental figure painting as a category in itself is often considered apart. It's an undertaking not different in artistic quality from smaller-scale works, but it does belong to the upper range. The analogy I've often used is to music. One can write songs, chamber music, concertos, or symphonies and operas. The composer or the artist may want to demonstrate command of the artistic structure in all scales. The big scales often give an amplitude that makes the statement very profound, as well as large.

EP: Yes, the epic scale. It's almost like boxing; the heavy-weight division is the one that attracts people because this is as big as you can get: it's more powerful.

DA: Do you ever find that what you're doing picks up some hint or suggestion of something that appeared earlier and is them amplified in a continuation of the initial impulse?

EP: This happens quite often. Some element that I was involved with earlier, but never quite exhausted, is there still.

DA: Artists sometimes discover that issues in their current painting were dealt with earlier. In your own case, do you feel the issues raised are durable enough to sustain this sort of reexploration, or do you feel you might be merely "running the loop" again?

EP: I once heard somebody say that you can break an artist's output or working life into three basic categories. One is when you first strike out, everything is new and there's a first rush of raw ideas. The second phase is characterized by an obsessive concern for technique. The third phase is a regurgitation of phase one. So when these earlier things pop up again I have this panic that. But then I think everybody has a visual vocabulary of elements that always interests him. You may have used a particular element early on and set it aside because you haven't quite exhausted it. I think when you exhaust something, you throw it out of your bag of tricks. One of the cornerstones of my philosophy has always been that painting is not only autobiographical, but as well it's a problem-solving process. Problems feel awkward.

DA: Or they wouldn't be problems.

EP: Right. If you're dealing with issues that are old friends and that feel comfortable and you're not doing anything new, you have to pose problems for yourself. Creativity and innovation are how you solve those problems and, if you're only addressing those you've already solved, you're going to spin your wheels and stay at the same point in terms of growth and development.

DA: Would this open new possibilities that you might not otherwise consider?

EP: Exactlynew possibilities. Sometimes, if people are visiting me in my studio, I offer them the opportunity to do something to a painting in the hope that they'll present some awkward problem for me. They usually do.

DA: Some of them probably feel you are presenting an awkward problem top them!

EP: Some people refuse to have anything to do with this suggestion, but some accept the challenge. That's exactly what I want: another mind doing something to my painting that I would not have thought to do.

DA: It suggests that being a painter, or your sense of yourself as a painter, is a kind of mechanism that occasionally you want to test.

EP: No matter how many times I pose that as a problem, I always have the same degree of anxiety and uncertainty about whether I can "pass." It's almost like proving myself again.

DA: There was a strange transitional period in your work that is not represented in the exhibition, during which you made abstract paintings without figures in a variety of compositional types. Some are quite symmetrical, some appear randomly composed, some have deep spatial effects, some are quite flat, but all seem investigations of pure painterly possibilities without any sense of beings or of the psychologies of individuals that is in all your other work.

EP: That's exactly right. I was getting more and more involved in a concern for surface, ornamentation, texture, and formal development. I decided to take the figure out altogether and just focus on what I could do technically, illusionistically, by playing with surface, texture, and light. It was a short series, and then of course I went back again to the figure but armed with a new awareness of surface and technical possibilities.

DA: Another category of paintings that isn't in the exhibition is the portraits, specifically portraits of private individuals. Why was it decided not to deal with them? How do you feel your portraits fit into the work overall?

EP: One can say they present problems and challenges. The commissioned portrait paintings brings with it certain constraints, limitations, or directs one's thinking in a particular way-or at least it does for me.

DA: The invention in them is certainly on a par with your other paintings. Is one of the challenges that you don't necessarily always work directly from the model? There has to be some dealing with the specific personality of the sitters at some point, especially if they are the patrons or you are required to meet them. Is that what puts constraints on your autonomy of invention? Also, I've always felt that there is a distinction between your paintings that are portraits and those that just happen to contain a likeness. In all the portraits, even if the bodies have been reworked or modified in some way, the body remains within the realm of the physically possible; the pictures that simply contain likenesses often have features that are impossibilities by any stretch of the imagination.

EP: With commissioned portraits, I've always felt a need to adhere to a fairly consistent logical portrayal of the person. In other works, not commissioned portraits, I include the likeness of a specific person within a freer kind of pictorial invention.

DA: When you first approached theater design, doing sets and costumes for Charles Ludlum's Turds in Hell, you used slide projections of paintings on paper rather than large-scale designs. Did this experience suggest investigating the possibilities of very large formats?

EP: Those paintings on paper were small scale, but I did them thinking that they would actually be experienced on a large scale through projection. Probably big canvases entered into my thinking then. I think you're right, though I never really made that connection before.

DA: The Turds in Hell designs have a lot of inventive and imagistic freedom, which was rather different from the work you were doing just before them. I recall that there were many designs-twenty-three or twenty-four-and they took quite a while.

EP: I think those designs are probably also related to the illustrations I did occasionally for Playboy magazine. These also were combinations of my own ideas and some from outside.

DA: For the Turds in Hell dÈcor, you designed objects and props such as furniture. Certainly this cannot be described as an excursion into sculpture, but did it get you thing about objects?

EP: I think so, although I hadn't really had that much experience with objects.

DA: I ask because so many painters of your generation in Chicago have also at some time or other gotten involved with objects. Their paintings are often objectlike. Roger Brown has done it, Philip Hanson, and Karl Wirsum. I wonder if your involvement with objects was different because of your work with the theater company. Was this how it happened?

EP: I think that is true, but also the experience of working in fairly close cooperation with the theater group let me see the underlying principles that relate all art forms. As opening night approaches, all these people are developing and perfecting their contributions. Somehow the various parts congeal into a oneness on opening night.

DA: Has the possibility of again working in the theater intrigued you? Have you had any nibbles? I have often thought that you would be terrific for opera as well as other kinds of theater.

EP: I have done a couple of things with Stuart Gordon at the Organic Theater in Chicago. It wasn't as extensive an experience as I had with Turds in Hell. I have never had an opportunity to do anything with opera, although I'm always intrigued by it. I did have the experience of working with some people at the Art Institute a few years ago. We produced a multimedia experience involving a videotape, a performance piece, a band show in Grant Park, and "Dos Egos" in the museum's auditorium. Those kinds of things do interest me a great deal. So, all you playwrights out there, look me up!

I think new things are always a source of rejuvenation, cross-fertilization; although you never know what the by-product is going to be, you know it's going to affect your thinking beyond the present experience. It's an important part of growth to allow oneself to be open to different kinds of experience.

DA: The scope of the exhibition is limited to paintings, but I wanted to ask you about the role of drawing in your work at various periods. Your drawings always seem independently conceived as autonomous works.

EP: A group of large drawings shown in Paris a few years ago are a combination of media-pencil, oil stick, wash, etc. I think I've always had a view of drawing as something very essential to painting. I've never done drawings that led to a painting, although some of my drawings have reflected ideas similar to those in contemporaneous paintings. But for me drawing is something that exists in its own right. Sometimes after I've done a painting I'll do a drawing based on certain related ideas. If I want to find out more about an idea in a slightly different way, I'll approach it in that fashion.

DA: Some artists feel that there are certain kinds of artistic issues, concerns, or undertakings that don't quite all fit in one work or that have various aspects that require realization in more works in the same medium. Is this part of your idea of the function of drawing?

EP: I think so. A drawing usually doesn't take as long to do as a painting, although certain of my drawings have taken quite a while. There is another way to think about this whole subject of the relationship between drawing and painting: my paintings are developed initially with a black-line underpainting.

DA: At that stage the work is almost a drawing.

EP: Yes. In a sense the drawing is in the painting.

DA: Well, it's a very economical way to proceed, because if there is any kind of a fiddling around or developing of the idea at that stage, it's at least already on the canvas. I think drawing and painting are closely tied together in your work, although there aren't many elements in the finished paintings that can be called drawing, despite the presence of some writing or a detail that is in itself linear. The underpainting is a kind of tonal drawing beneath the color that affects the final hue because the layers of pigment often remain transparent.

EP: Some of the underpaintings and the drawings mentioned earlier have an intricacy similar to the finished paintings. Now, I often try to force myself to do things that are more haphazard, more quickly stated, in order to capture the initial nervous impulse, the gesture and its spontaneity. I have felt that I was excessively involved with drawing to the point where I might lose the spontaneity of the lines, and that I should somehow learn to limit myself to a shorter period of time in which to work on a drawing.

DA: The recent paintings seem to have even more intense color than before. There is a more resonating clang to the colors of the work now. Is this something that you have consciously developed?

EP: I'm using more layers of colors on top of the black-and-white underpainting now; as a result, I think there is a patina or build-up of multiple layers, sometimes two or three layers of the same color, that gives the hues a depth or richness. In the earlier years I would just put one layer of color over the black-and-white underpainting.

DA: Have you thought of this layering as a conscious analogy to techniques such as glazing or older techniques of slowly developing the color by means of washes or thinned pigment layers of this kind?

EP: It took a few years for me to realize that I am doing underpainting and glazing-like the "big guys" used to do. I didn't always use black underpainting I used various dark colors. When I really because aware of it, I began to try to play to that as a strength. I explored and experimented with the idea of two, three, and four layers of the same color over a given spot to see what depth and luminosity one could achieve with such a multiple layering.

DA: Because such a technique probably takes more time, do you feel that you have to slow down to the pace of the development of the invention as it evolves on the canvas?

EP: When I do the underpainting, I intentionally try to avoid the presence of detail. I use larger brushes so that I can't really get much fineness but can see the major things.

DA: Then not many of the image's grosser aspects are changed or developed later? Once you get it where you want it in the black, then things are set to a certain degrees?

EP: Because I use oil paint, it takes time for one layer to dry; only then do I go on to the next one. I work on several paintings at the same time to use my time more efficiently. Because the process occurs over a wide range of time, I feel there is also a possibility for more layering of ideas to take place; I hope the layers of ideas are being built into the layers of paint.

DA: With this kind of layering and more intricate technique, do you find that at a certain point you pretty much know the final form? How exactly do you know when the work is finished?

EP: That is one of the most intriguing questions of artistic involvement: how do you know when the thing you're working on is finished? That question always comes up in art class, and it's one of the most difficult to answer. The best answer I can give is that the work is done when there is a sense of completeness there. It goes back to my earlier mention of the art-school question: "Is there life in the picture plane? How do you know when it's alive?" It's like the moment in Frankenstein when a lightning bolt comes out of the sky. Within a painting, a film, a book, or a dance, lots of decisions are collectively built up and everything affects everything else. When there has been engendered a sense of interdependency, a sense of completeness to this circuitry and all is connected in some way, then the work is self-sustaining and you can walk away from it. After that point I realize I don't have to support it any more, it can stand on its own. I don't think I can calculate it and say: "Well, in ten minutes I'm going to be done when I get this one psychological element in place." It just suddenly strikes me that it's all there. I have to be responsive to the work, to listen to its ability to say that it is finished. For me there has to be the possibility of invention every step of the way; even though I set up the major elements with underpainting, critical decisions still remain.

DA: Right up to the last touch?

EP: Right. Sometimes those decisions are the most difficult of all because it's just some little twist of something and it's there.It's a magical thing.

DA: Some painters I've known finish a group of works in a period in which they're working very well and hard, and it is the period itself that comes to an end. Then they keep the paintings around, looking at them critically for quite a while, editing, perhaps rejecting some. Does this ever happen to you, that something you thought was alive was only artificially maintained or on batteries as it were?

EP: There are variations in any artist's work; some are not so good, some are good. Some paintings I feel are not as functional as others. Dealing with them at this stage is a challenge. Such work provides me with an opportunity to do things I might never otherwise try in a painting: it's a desperation move, in an attempt to bail out a painting, I'll reach out for something that perhaps I've never done before and possibly find a new element for my bag of tricks.

DA: What would you say is the success rate of your emergency-room technique?

EP: I would say nine times out of ten the results are very exciting to me and they provide me some of the most important breakthroughs in terms of growth and development.

DA: Have you ever had a memorable struggle with a problem painting?

EP: There's a painting in the show called Mid American (cat. no. 5). I gave up on that painting three or four times, then tried to revive it-mouth-to-mouth resuscitation-several times over a period of about a year or more. I finally arrived at the state that it's in now. I think painting is an autobiographical activity. Sometimes one takes on certain challenges, certain problems, at a given time yet is not equipped to finish them at that time. Later, perhaps because of greater maturity, experience, or a different perspective, one can complete the painting. The kind of mind-games one plays with oneself are very interesting. One may at times have to trick oneself into a state of thinking or into doing the things necessary to solve a problem.

DA: Your recent exhibition at the Phyllis Kind Gallery here in Chicago [1988] seemed very aggressive.

EP: The paintings shown are high-impact paintings.

DA: These recent paintings bear annotations or graffiti. It looks as though there are notes on them, such as an artist might write on a drawing, when he makes notes about color or wants to remember this or that. These handwritten notes are quite small in scale in relation to the rest of the image.

EP: They create sort of an aftereffect. The intention here is to set up a kind of time-release factor, giving different levels of information. There are certain things one doesn't confront immediately in these paintings. The first impact is there, followed by a delayed perception or realization of other aspects.

DA: In these paintings, particularly the large ones, the effect is so striking and splendid that one doesn't on first sight just march right up and start examining the surface for small things. One wants to take it in at one focal distance. Then curiosity about the facture brings one closer. Have you deliberately varied the handling of paint to refresh the compositional gambits?

EP: I think that some of those kinds of changes are motivated by an interest in formalistic change of pace, in other cases, if I want something to be more ethereal, less concretely stated, I'll intentionally alter the technique to be loose, tight, or varied, as the case might require.

DA: Like a number of other artists of your generation from Chicago, you've shown internationally for quite a long time. You showed in Scotland-in 1973, wasn't it? When you have traveled occasionally to exhibitions abroad in France or Switzerland or the United Kingdom, do you find that your paintings are perceived differently there than they are in America?

EP: Because the work reflects societal forces or elements-dynamics-in this culture that may vary in respect to another culture, I think that abroad there might be an absence of some of the associational information that is contained in the painting. This information might go unperceived, or unresponded to. Conversely, some things in the work might provoke a more acute reaction.

DA: But recently you have incorporated likenesses of universally recognized figures such as Elvis and Hitler.

EP: I did those to try to transcend societal and regional differences. I start with the premise that everybody knows who this is, everybody has a certain framework for this, and then I go from there. It's a societal, iconic, almost religious significance that some of these faces have in terms of how widely distributed images of that face have been. We all have a certain way of associating with them. From that as starting point, I proceed to destroy the image by what I do to it. I purposely painted Hitler with pastel colors, it's almost like the musical number "Springtime for Hitler" in Mel Brooks's film The Producers. I did Washington and Lincoln twice and tried to set up a time-release factor with parts of the painting intentionally colored to look almost like the work of an Old Master and other parts painted with the garish glow of more contemporary color.

DA: Now that the exhibition of your work is more or less set except for a few final choices and issues to be resolved, would you characterize what you think the exhibition is about? In other words, what does this selection of your work address in a broad way?

EP: I think it shows what I was all about at all these different times during my development as an artist starting in 1968 or so. I think one way to look at an exhibition is that just as the component parts that go into the making of one individual work all produce a totality, an exhibition can be thought of as component parts, a totality of various ideas that have concerned the artist. It's a reflection of the interest, the hang-ups, the preoccupations that I had at different times. Some of these things perhaps were a response to what was happening around me. The social unrest and upheaval that characterized the late 1960s show up in the work from time to time. I think it's just my path, my journey as a human being evolving within the sociological/societal framework.

DA: If you were describing your evolution as a kind of progress, what territories have you gone through and where do you find yourself now? You mentioned the impact of societal forces and events that all of us were responding to at the end of the 1960s, where the exhibition begins. Are there philosophical, metaphysical, and other private concerns in it too?

EP: I would say the early work was about my relationship as a young adult emerging into the turbulence of those times. In the intervening years I've gone through these various changes and have become more introspective; therefore the work has as well, in terms of psychological motivations and other concerns.

DA: After the societal issues of the 1960s, what would you say have been your overriding concerns and where do you find yourself now?

EP: Well, this is probably one of the hardest questions one could possibly try to answer, but I'll try because in a sense I feel that whatever my work is about is perhaps better judged by others rather than by myself. I'm too close to it. I think as the work progressed up through the 1970s, it was involved in various aspects of role playing, societal role playing, gamesmanship, interpersonal relationships, and gradually evolved into more and more of an inward, introspective, psychological sort of thing. What I feel is happening recently, or beginning to happen, is that maybe there is developing a little bit more of a concern for issues outside of self toward religion, weapons, societal violence, and art. I think that there had been a swing of the pendulum in terms of early societal concerns that progressed into inward concerns. Now the pendulum is swinging back out again.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This conversation with Ed Paschke is drawn from a single interview session lasting about two-and-one-half hours that took place at the artist's home on the evening of October 19, 1988. The conversation commenced without an agenda and without notes but with the understanding that the topics would range over the artistic and interpretive issues raised by the retrospective exhibition at The Art Institute of Chicago, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Dallas Museum of Art. Paschke asked the interviewer to "put the text into English," excising repetitive sections, clarifying ambiguities, and deflating windiness.

In accordance with the artist's instructions, the present text is an assembled reduction of the interviewer's questions and the responses and remarks of the artist. Instead of a record of the actual conversation, it is a concentrated and rectified presentation of Ed Paschke's thoughts about his work in its artistic and technical aspects and some of his reflections on the scope and nature of his career to date and as it is presented in this exhibition. The artist has read and approved the "interview."