Ross Bleckner talks to Dan Cameron - '80s Then - Interview

It--in painting certain images. I just felt like whatever they are, regardless of whether they're important or unimportant, interesting or uninteresting, they are records, they attest to a moment in time that I was living through. What was odd was that, three years before, if someone had said to me that I was going to be painting flowers, I would have thought it ridiculous. AIDS, and fear, made me make the images a little more representational, and at the same time personal and more political. It made me identify myself more as a gay man. So I guess it was oddly liberating. You identify yourself more as a gay man, or whoever you are, and it helps you to realize more who you are as an artist.

DC: In many ways, you were the first artist to actually explicitly address AIDS in your work. A couple of years later there were Keith Haring, David Wojnarowlcz, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. But remember that your first show of that period was really cathartic for people. They were looking around desperately seeking something that would help pull that grief out and express It.

RB: People wanted to historicize it, to contextualize it, to try to see all sides of it. You know, when you put into perspective the rupture in consciousness that AIDS engendered for gay people--the stigma, the confusion, and the hysteria--I think it was very profound. It ruptured my sense of unending optimism--of being young, being American, coming to New York, being an artist, the energy, all that.

DC: I want to tackle your work from another angle, beginning with the premise that abstraction isn't realty abstraction anymore, that what we call abstraction is so well understood as a system of signs and symbols and modes of representation that it's really just another kind of representation. Oddly enough, your work was making the same argument then, as now. It wasn't "not abstraction." You created these images that, although they were representational, still seemed very much your work in a kind of hard-to-define way.

RB: Well that's it--the "hard-to-define" way. Suddenly it occurred to me that you could put representational images under a microscope and they become different kinds of entities. I don't know if they lose their property as representation, but they take on other properties that are harder to define, more abstract. Some of the paintings that seemed the most abstract were, in fact, the most realistic, whether it's the mutating cells, DNA structures, or blood cells.

DC: But you know, prior to the work that was explicitly employing flowers or heraldic imagery, you were already sitting on the fence about abstraction and its role.

RB: I think it has to do with how much narrative--in the sense that the things they depict are actually in the world--I'm going to let into the work, and how far or how close it is to an apparent abstraction. I mean, sometimes the paintings show a fragment. Sometimes they blur the object. Sometimes they move further away from it, or sometimes they need to go very close, as they did in the mid-'80s. There's some other point where you can back up more as well, both on a psychological and formal level. You need to and you want to, just to keep things refreshed--or in the vernacular, "to keep it real."