Philip Taaffe talks to Bob Nickas - '80s Then - Interview - Biography

BOB NICKAS: I remember exactly when we met. I had put together a show in the spring of '85, in a little storefront on Lafayette Street, and included a painting of yours, with a field of abstracted Arp shapes and Playboy bunny heads. This was my "art about art" show. The works you were doing then had some very clear references to Duchamp and Bridget Riley, and some that weren't as obvious, like Paul Feeley and Myron Stout, It wasn't until a few years later that you showed me your earliest work, from '81-82, which was something else entirely.

PHILIP TAAFFE: That's right.

BN: They were very graphic, mostly black-and-white paintings on Masonite panels, with a kind of seismic energy. When you moved on to the paintings you're known for--those dealing with issues of opticality and making reference to other artists--did you just get up one day and say, "This is the painting I'm going to make. This is how it's going to look, and I know why"?

PT: I called those early paintings the "picture binding series." The tape I used for making the lines was the same stuff people used for taping photographs into albums, and it came in various colors. A painting would go on for three or four weeks: nailing a panel to the wall, applying the tape, gouging the surface, scraping the tape off the surface, putting more tape on, and gradually, torturously building this self-enclosed image. One day I had halfway completed a panel and I just said, "I don't want to do this anymore." At the time, some of my friends were John Ahearn and the South Bronx graffiti artists, also Donald Baechler and Ross Bleckner, and so a lot of the people I knew were doing this very free kind of work, and I was doing this very strict, very disciplined work.

BN: What was the first step?

PT: Toward the end of the "picture binding series" I had wanted to expand the scale and do an allover picture. The visual tension, the play with positive and negative space in these works, and the opticality and the sharpness of the lines led to a reconsideration of Op art. I thought it would be a logical next step. Going around the galleries I was seeing what Mike Bidlo and Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince were doing, so this whole idea of shifting one's historical perspective, one's relationship to the immediate past of art history was a very interesting prospect.

In the meantime, I'd been going to wastepaper-disposal plants in Newark, New Jersey, in this big old '57 Chevy. I would drive to these plants where printers get rid of their end runs for various rolls and samples of things like lightbulb-packaging paper, and bring them back to my apartment in Jersey City. I had always wanted to surgically dissect a Bridget Riley painting, just take it apart and put it back together. I had all these rolls of paper, and I decided to make linoleum carvings and print and collage the lines on this found paper. I dissected the wave in one of her paintings, and then another, and then a third, and I made the carvings based on projections of these waves. They were very carefully engineered and surgically constructed, even if they ended up having a strange topography.

BN: I remember a Riley diptych that you titled Adam, Eve [1984], and then of course there's Overtone [1983]. These suggest original sin, and echoes.

PT: Well, the title of her painting was Fall, and an overtone is a reverberation, like an afterimage in music.

BN: What about this sense of being disobedient, or fallen?

PT: I can tell you about a more recent episode. Bice Curiger curated an exhibition called "Birth of the Cool" in 1997. I was at the reception at the Kunsthaus Zurich, and Malcolm Morley was there as well. We were walking through the show, and he was looking at these paintings of mine. One was after Barnett Newman, We Are Not Afraid [1985], my answer to Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue, and he turned to me and said, "Philip, that was a mistake. You know you shouldn't have done that, right?" And I said, "Well, you know, Malcolm, we all have to work through our own problems in our own particular ways." I had thought a lot about what I wanted to do or needed to do, or what I would learn from the most. I asked myself, "What is my identity as an artist, and what do I need to see made?" But I was also trying to declare myself a member of the tribe. I felt as though intellectually and artistically I was a part of that milieu. The New York School of painting, that's what was most formative for me growing up. My re sponse to that was to make a liturgical reconfirmation, almost as a sacred act.

BN: I recall the reception of your work was Immediate when it was first seen in the mid-'80s; people got it right away.

PT: I think a lot of people felt that some of the photo-based, appropriative work was a little dry, and that mine was concerning itself with the romance of painting, the facture of painting and craft. I think it was intriguing to people that someone could have a strong conceptual bias and yet make something that held up as a crafted painting.