Untitled Landscape 060307, 4″ x 24″ x 3″, Excised Road Map, 2007

Early last month, I attended the three-day Art Collectors’ Conference at Art Hamptons. In between hearing talks and presentations by dealers, advisors, magazine editors & curators… I met (a few!) artists whose works were intriguing enough to have me go back for more. Among the most memorable were the Brooklyn-based couple who represented …and were represented by the RHV Fine Art. My discussions with Georgia(US)-born Robert Walden & his Chinese-American partner Henry Chung were focused on why the New York media ignore artistic developments that are taking place out side Manhattan.

Later, I managed to catch up with Robert & Henry (separately) and talk about their work as artists and dealers.

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Homa Nasab – The laborious nature of your art contradicts the studio system of some of today’s most coveted (=expensive) artists like Koons or Hirst… This is assuming that you don’t have a dozen artists drawing away your images!

Robert Walden – I don’t see much of a difference between Koons, Hirst, Chahuly, and Thomas Kincade. I see them more as businessmen than artists. I suppose in a culture that values money and fame over substance and meaning it makes sense they are some of the most coveted. The art object can be taken and reproduced to the point where it is so commodified that it ceases to be art and is nothing more than product. It might as well be made in a factory in China across the street from a Nike plant or a made for Wal-Mart plastic bucket plant. How is it a commentary on commodification or art as commodity to make art that is nothing more than a product? Beyond the irony, I mean…what is it? I understand it…I just don’t see what makes it that interesting…kinda like reality TV. Funny how it seems mostly men who have risen to the top of the artist as industrialist heap…there are women doing it of course like Liza Lou, and others but none come to mind that have reached the “super-star” level of notoriety of the men. How’s that for irony?

I have probably been somewhat of a contrarian all my life. If my way of working is out of fashion I am OK with that. I am happy to keep working the way I am working…it means more to me that I make it…more human…That to me is more important than fame or money.

Ontological Road Map 062010, 38″ x 38″, ink on paper, 2010

HN – Where do inspirations for these cartographic (like) images come from?

RW – I don’t know…childhood fascinations with geography and travel…maybe growing up in MS I had an overarching urge to get the hell out of there and looking at other geographies was a way to transport myself to a more enjoyable place?? I guess we all have or at least I hope we all have things that fascinate us. To put a map pin into what or where exactly it comes from is impossible.

HN – When cartography – the birds’ eye view representations of geographic locations – was introduced, it was based mainly on imaginary or dramatic approximations of cities and locales. Of course, aesthetically speaking, these images appeared much more organic in nature than the satellite pictures that we see… even on Google Earth…

RW – If a viewer really looks carefully at my “maps” of urban environments they aren’t very realistic at all…they are quite fantastic. Maps have always been approximations and still are today. This is what is fascinating to me about maps. They are a representation in epitome of a landscape that, in the case of road maps especially, is a reflection of human manipulation of the earth. There are always going to be approximations and assumptions in cartography. The only projection of the whole earth that is not distorted is Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion map. Other projections have distortions because the process of flattening a spherical object (the earth) to a 2 dimensional surface (the map) creates them…look at Greenland on most maps for example. So, maps will always be inaccurate on some level. There in lies the interest for me in maps…the inaccuracies. Satellite images leave nothing to the imagination. They are the difference between watching a baseball game on TV as opposed to listening to it on the radio.

HN –You have talked about surveillance observations of our everyday lives and its meaning and implications as “a sense of watchful supervision from outside as well as from within”…

RW – Increasingly, we live in a world with cameras, on the street, in public spaces, in our homes and even inside our bodies. It is just about impossible to go from point a to point b without being filmed. The fear of being watched causes self-censorship…the worst kind of surveillance.

Then again people are turning that on its head by embracing the recording of their lives using, blogs, Youtube and even Xtube, which would be the extreme. We are self-obsessed.

The problem is that most of it is vapid. One of the meanings of discrimination is “the power of making fine distinctions; discriminating judgment.” (dictionary.com) We as individuals and as society, seem to be loosing the ability to make distinctions between things that matter and things that don’t.

Ontological Road Map 043010, 38″ x 38″, ink on paper, 2010

(Detail)

HN – The Surveillance Maps are dyptichs which are comprised of one traditionally executed ink or pencil panel that is juxtaposed against a projected digital detail photograph…

RW – After the drawing is completed I take a detail image of an area of the drawing and then blow that up in Photoshop. Then I project that image using an opaque projector (talk about old skool) and outline the image that is projected on the second panel. I then fill in the very large lines of this projection with paint (gouache) in the same color as the ink in the drawing.

HN – I think that psychoanalysis is a form of internalized surveillance, as is, say, active meditation… Does this form of ‘surveillance’ play a role in your work?

RW – That is an interesting notion…making my work is a bit like meditating. It is a very “wax on, wax off” process. Sometimes this is tedious and other times it isn’t…then again what is more tedious than turning the same screw on an assembly line for 8 hours a day? My work is a reflection of the movement of my hand and the state of my thinking when I am doing it. Each drawing is like a diary entry…the numbers in the titles references the date each piece is finished. So, one diary entry follows the next. My reference to surveillance is intended as metaphorical of myself and of everyone.

Untitled Landscape 051907.1 (Excised Road Map), 2″ x 3″ x 1/2″, 2007

HN – What is the genesis of your Cutout Landscapes or Maps? By the way, your Cutouts are really quite beautiful objects …

RW – Thanks…The Cutouts are road maps where I cut away everything except for the roads…leaving a sort of lace network. Some are left unfolded but others I refold back to their original rectangles and those are hung on the wall with map pins or museum mounts. I got the idea about 12 years ago and at first was not folding them back up. However, when I needed to store them it was easier and less damaging to fold them. There are several artists that I know of now who are doing similar things. It would make for quite a schizophrenic solo-group show. These pieces are metaphoric of the fragility of things, land, the earth, and time or our experience of time.

HN –On the one hand, maps are based on very practical and necessary tools of path-finding… and on the other hand, they are somewhat obsolete with the advent of GPS, etc…

RW – GPS usually gives us the information in a map format…the mode in which the information is given is different. However, the geolocation of the individual, place or thing is the point of a map, whether it is digital or actual. So, I don’t see a difference between a map and a GPS device… it is kind of like the difference between Dr. Zhivago on paper and Dr. Zhivago on an Ipad. The form factor is different but the information is the same.

HN – How would you describe your ARTificial spatial constructions – utopian, idealized, critical, etc… It’s a very old fashioned aesthetic(ized) genre of science fiction!

RW – Well, since early on I was heavily influenced by the utopian drawings of Le Corbusier and others…I could say utopian. But I think all three words you used could apply. They are definitely idealized and I see them as metaphorical for the state of me and us…humanity, I mean.

HN – When did you establish your gallery RHV (& what does it stand for)?

We started in 2008 as Robert Henry Vintage selling vintage house wares from the 1960’ and 70’s. We needed something on the walls too. So we started showing our own work and that of friends. We started taking art to art fairs and the recession forced us to move the vintage items on-line so we could sell to a national audience. So, the store morphed into a gallery and here we are. It is no worse than starting as a poster salesman…is it?

HN – How did your gallery survive through the most …economic challenges since the Great Depression?

RW – At the time we began no one would say that there was a recession…but the experts on the economy knew we were in one. Since our timing is perfect, we actually started this after the recession began, it remains to be seen if we will survive or not…it isn’t over yet.

HN –How do you negotiate the conflict of interest of being both an artist & a dealer to fellow contemporary artists?

RW – I don’t consider it a conflict at all…who better to buy art from than an artist? You wouldn’t got to an ornithologist for a root canal, would you? Owning a gallery is the only profession (other than an artist) that I can think of where anyone who deems him or herself to be a gallerist is one. The government won’t allow doctors or lawyers to do the same thing. Chemists through their professional associations etc. deem what is and is not chemistry, for example. So…why is it that any idiot with the money to stay in business can make him/herself into an art dealer with absolutely no knowledge of art or art history…or anything? Why should artists not be gallerists? So, because I can. I am.

Artists and other art professionals (people with actual knowledge of art) should be the arbiters of what is and isn’t art. The market should not set the rules…artists should do that. In other words, galleries should not sell ‘art’ that has no integrity but is easy to sell to people who don’t know any better.

I understand why artists want to give someone else responsibility, but not the power, to make them into

art stars…to make their careers for them. However, this notion of the artist being in the studio 100% of the time and the gallery doing all the work to promote the artists work is a romantic fantasy…artists need to get over that! Artists need to be better businessmen… it is time for artists to be their own dealers…now THAT’S irony!

HN – What is the single (set of) criteria in an artist’s work which you would not compromise?

RW- Consistency.

HN – I am going to be talking to your work (& life) partner, Henry Cheung, soon… so, perhaps you can tell me how the two of you met & how do you define your working relationship ….

RW – We met at a friend’s dinner party. Our working relationship is difficult (impossible) to separate from our personal one. This is a team effort in many ways.

- Tune in for my conversation with Henry Chung… (coming soon).

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Tags: Brooklyn, Cartography, Contemporary Artist, Maps, RHV Fine Art, Robert Walden