Dan Colen
'READ THIS & CUM': DAN COLEN ON THE ART OF MAKING IRREVERENT ART
by Ana Finel Honigman
Dan Colen has a unique talent for combining grime with the sublime. Colen creates an inebriating cocktail of personal, cultural and art historical references in a remarkable array of mediums. His art is a perfectly measured and irreverently funny mixture of high and low.
Born in Leonia, New Jersey in 1979, Colen now lives in New York City's Chinatown district with the photographer Ryan McGinley. McGinley's 2002 series of portraits of his friends exuberantly indulging in impertinent behaviour (Colen included) made him the youngest artist to ever earn a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Colen received his B.F.A. in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2001 and had his first solo exhibition, 'Seven Days Always Seemed Like A Bit Of An Exaggeration', with Rivington Arms, one of Manhattan's taste-maker galleries, in 2003.
For that show, he developed a series of meticulously crafted photo-realist oil-on-plastic paintings documenting mundane and mythic activities of male protagonists and combining careful renderings of unremarkable settings with Disney-like touches of magic. One of the few constant aspects of Colen's art is his compelling skill at combining or cleverly clashing text and image. At the Peres Project's booth for London's Frieze fair, he contributed a massive oil painting of an extinguished candle, rendered in pure Walt Disney style, with the snaking smoke omitted from its wick spelling the words 'Blow Me.'
Colen also makes being an artist look like fun. He and his closest friends are a tight group of kids who mix frat-boy filth with artistic talent and insolent intelligence. Often featured in gritty and glossy magazines, a recent spread in W magazine shot by Bruce Weber positioned Colen and his closest comrades (the artists Dash Snow, Ryan McGinley, Slater Bradley and actor Leo Fitzpatrick) as inheritors of coveted memberships in their generation's down-town art scene.
Colen's contributions to high-profile and well-regarded group shows, include a series of sculptures of graffiti-marked rocks and wood fences to "Day for Night," the 2006 Whitney Biennial. For the "Bridge Freezes Before Road," exhibition curated by Neville Wakefield at New York's Barbara Gladstone Gallery in 2005, Colen presented a platform displaying random-seeming debased, found and crafted objects including a sign advertising 'DRUGS,' a Halloween fright-night style plastic cockroach and a truck tire. In fact, the array was inspired by a detail from 'Vampire's Picnic' Jeff Wall's 1991 satirical portrait of a cannibalistic scene-obsessed culture. 'Vampire's Picnic' was also the title Colen adopted for a structure of wood boards roughly nailed together and tagged-up in spray paint and ball-point pen with phrases like 'read this & cum.' Colen recently showed in the Armory Show, Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami, and the Frieze art fair with L.A.'s Peres Projects, and contributed to "Art Works for Hard Money," at Gavin Brown's Enterprise in New York. He currently has pieces in the 'Survivor show' alongside work by Cecily Brown, Sean Landers, Rob Pruitt, Roe Etheridge and others, which Rimanelli curated for Chelea's new power-player gallery, Bortolami Dayan. This October his work will feature in Charles Saatchi's 'USA Today' exhibition at the Royal Academy, London. Dan Colen will be in the Your Gallery chatroom to answer any of your questions on Monday 17 July between 6pm and 7pm UK time.
Dan Colen, Holy War, 2006
Dan Colen, Untitled, 2006
ANA FINEL HONIGMAN: You use a lot of humor in your art. Do you consider it satire?
DAN COLEN: Not really. It's cool if people find it funny but it's not really satire.
AFH: You mix images and text a lot. Why?
DC: Ed Ruscha was a big influence on me. He was the biggest and he is funny. He uses text really well.
AFH: Are you concerned text will limit interpretations of your work?
DC: Sometimes. It can be tricky. I think about that.
AFH: You have a remarkably aesthetically diverse practice. What propels you to produce such a variety of work? Are you concerned about getting bored?
DC: No, it just that I don't have a specific place were my work comes from or one specific practice. Things just occur to me and then I have to figure out how to make them. There are different ways of making and the ideas just come up on their own. I don't really have one starting point, so wherever I happen to be that morning, is where I'll move forward from. I'm really happy that I can work like that. I wouldn't want to be pinned down.
AFH: Did you ever fear that was happening?
DC: I had a big problem with my Rivington Arms show because after it everyone wanted me to be a photorealist painter but those were the only photorealist paintings I'd ever made. I just get one idea and then figure out to make it and that time it made sense that there were these paintings, but a different time, I might have another idea and need to figure it out differently.
AFH: What causes these shifts?
DC: Sometimes they are totally accidental. The first sculpture I made was going to be a painting of a sculpture in a landscape but it just wasn't working unless it was life-size so I made it as a sculpture instead. And then there was a time I made some really silly paintings for a really silly show at a gallery that thought I had work done that I didn't, so I just kind of delivered a blank surface and made the painting there, but then I feel in love with it and moved along with those. There is no real reason for any of it, I guess. It just kind of comes along.
AFH: Yet some of your stuff is very rigorous and other work is irreverently quick. Are you saying it is just mood that determines whether you'll labor over something or not?
DC: I usually do it out of necessity. The sculpture started out of necessity because painting is so mind-numbing that I needed another outlet. I needed to have a different kind of physical contact with my work. Sculpture is so much more playful and hands-on. It's not so much of a commitment. I can just play more. Also time is an issue. There might be some conceptual reason for some of it but a lot of times, it's just that if I've been working on something for eight months, I might want to pump something else out in a day.
AFH: So are you saying you're making work quickly right now to meet the sudden interest in your stuff?
DC: Not really. I've never shown so much work before but I made most of this work before the sudden interest came along. It's just nice.
AFH: Right, it's nice when people care.
DC: Right, but I wasn't trying to keep up. I'm not trying to keep my habit up or anything. I can't make more work than I do. I don't like it when it's not good.
AFH: Do you have relationships with your collectors?
DC: I have certain relationships with some of them and there are some I like to see but I know a couple of artists who at least have one guy who they are always with or always hanging out with, and I don't really have anyone like that. Well, what I like about Javier (Peres) is that he gives me my space and I like to maintain some kind of distance between the world of sales and the world of production, but sometimes collectors will be so cool that you get to know them.
AFH: Who buys your work? Are they young bankers or older collectors?
DC: So few people own my work. Dean Valentine was the first to buy my work and once he did, then a lot of other people started to. A lot of my stuff has been bought by Hollywood. I have no idea what that means but it has. I have no idea what they do with it even.
AFH: How sensitive are you to the reception of your work?
DC: There really hasn't been any. Nobody writes about my work. I know a lot of writers and curators are getting in to it but really people just like it. I haven't heard any critical feedback or anything. I don't really know why but I don't mind. It's nice when people like the work, and it would be nice if more people liked it but when too many people like it, it kind of makes me curious whether it might not be the best thing but overall, having support is helpful to my mental state and my production.
AFH: Yup, it's nice to be liked.
DC: It might be just something I tell myself to make myself feel better but I guess it's good that people like the work even if they don't know what to say about it. Well, I've never gotten a full review and the only write-ups I get are usually in a social context.
AFH: Right. What is up with that? There seems to be a lot of focus on you and your friends as a team or a scene.
DC: I don't think I had anything to do with that. It started with Ryan Mcginley and because everyone was coming along at the same time, when Dash (Snow) and I started doing stuff the interest remained. It doesn't bother me and I think eventually someone will write about my work, seriously.
AFH: Do you think of yourselves that way and do you consider what you do collaborative?
DC: I don't feel that way at all. I'm sure you could find ties between our work but as far as I'm concerned, all my close friends and I are not collaborating intentionally. I think my work is closer to some older artists. I've recently become friendly with a bunch of different artists who I kind of feel more connected to on that level.
AFH: Like who?
DC: Well, I stayed away from artists for a while. My friends are artists but we don't really see ourselves like that at all. We're friends in the pure, unprofessional sense. We started running on the street together and it had nothing to do with our work but coincidentally we all started taking it really seriously but that was not how we began. I grew up with Ryan (Mcginley) and I've know Dash (Snow) for eight or nine years now but I'm also starting to spend a lot of time with Nate Lowman and Adam McEwen now.
AFH: Do you feel focus on your social life detracts from attention to your work?
DC: No, I like that people talk about us and recognize us as a group of kids because we're all close. It's nice. And I also like that we all do separate work. I would rather my closest friends do different stuff than what I do, so it doesn't get mixed up.
AFH: You mean so there is no rivalry?
DC: Yay. Me and Ryan have been living together for so long. We never have any problems as roommates. There is no competition. He's gay. I'm straight. He's a photographer. I'm a painter/ sculptor. It's easy. There is no rivalry, even accidental or whatever.
AFH: As a group, you and your friends seem to straddle the line between the fashion and art worlds a lot. A lot of artists tend to get burned doing that, meaning they are not taken seriously by the artist world because of their association with fashion. Are you concerned about that?
DC: I hope I don't get burned. It is a little annoying to have that line and have people worried about who crosses it but people will write what they write. People find their way into you however they can. You have no control over it. If I take myself seriously enough and don't worry about it, then hopefully I'll be taken seriously.
AFH: Were you hesitant about doing the W shoot?
DC: Not really, though a lot of people warned me about it. I am pretty close with Cecily (Brown) and she told me to watch out because she had gone through it. But it was just one thing and it was silly but it's nice that in the future we'll all get to look back on it and think how awesome it was we did it.
AFH: You mean because Dash got to ride on a camel in Chinatown and then you were all at the beach together?
DC: Yes, it's true and it was also cool getting to meet Bruce Weber. He was awesome and it was fun working with him. It was fun hanging out though how it ended up was silly and none of us were happy with it. It was supposed to be more like a profile than a fashion shoot, as far as we had been led to believe, so we were all kind of bummed. We gave them so much time and so much information and then it didn't come out as we had thought at all, so in that respect, it was a bummer. But honestly, I don't really care. I don't get too caught up in it. I take myself too seriously for it to effect me now. If it has an effect long-term, then that would be a bummer.
AFH: Do you think focus on you as a member of a fashionable group of artists affects your market?
DC: I couldn't really say why in a small amount of time, I went from there being really no interest to having a lot of people know me. I am sure there are a lot of reasons but if that is one of the reasons, then I really don't know. It's hard for me to keep track of how it happened.
ANA FINEL HONIGMAN is a critic and PhD candidate in art history at Oxford University.
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