OtherPeoplesPixels Blog

Artist, sports fan and educator NORM PARIS explores the allegories of decline present in western narratives of heroism. His sculptures and drawings frame the bodies of professional athletes like Michael Jordon and historical figures like George Washington as architectural ruins and fossils thus rethinking the myths surrounding monumentality. Norm received his BFA from The Rhode Island School of Design, where he is currently an Assistant Professor in Drawing, and his MFA from the Yale School of Art, where he was core faculty from 2003-2008. He is represented by The Proposition Gallery (New York) and his work is included in the West Collection. Norm lives in Brooklyn, New York.

OtherPeoplesPixels: What exactly is Forton MG? It seems to be your favorite material, and you stretch its capabilities in a lot of directions. What does it offer that other sculpture materials can't?

Norm Paris: Forton MG is a casting mixture made of resin and gypsum, so it's part plastic, part plaster. There is something modern about the material’s synthetic nature; its plastic underbelly is “pop,” while its plaster-like appearance is classical. Forton is a shape-shifter, a chameleon. It is an aqueous solution that can be poured into any kind of mold, but it can also take on the properties of various metals and pigments. Lately I have been adding brass, iron and bronze powders to the mixture, which allows the cast to mimic metal. It can receive a patina just like metal can. The cast does contain metal, but the majority of the material, the binder, is something else. In that sense, it is both real and fake. Increasingly, I am using Forton in conjunction with other found materials and moving between different modes of sculpture and drawing. I want to avoid that point where material exploration becomes habit and expand the formal purview of the work.

OPP: The figure of Michael Jordan is a repeated motif in your work, appearing first in your 2005 sculpture installation Michael Jordan, Save The World.  I'm not sure if you are a Michael Jordan fan, but I suspect your interest in basketball—or baseball or football—isn't purely artistic, aesthetic or critical. Do you identify as a sports fan?

NP: I loathed Michael Jordan when I was growing up in Cleveland, but he was unavoidable. He was the first sports figure to become a global brand. Just watch some highlights, maybe the 1988 Slam Dunk Contest, and you will find that Jordan is a Hellenistic sculptor and a performance artist. He uses the aesthetics of Michelangelo to sell himself as a god within the Arena. But at the time I was just angry that Ron Harper (guard, Cleveland Cavaliers) was nixed from the Dunk contest because of some stupid injury.

MJ’s sudden fragility by the 2002-2003 season opened the door for a lot of that work from 2005-2009. He had physically declined in a way that made sports fans uncomfortable. Jordan couldn’t follow his own script. What caught my attention at the time—besides an unexpected fit of intense nostalgia—was how the discrepancy between the ideal and the real highlighted the faulty nature of the myth surrounding MJ. While I was working on the MJ installation in my Philadelphia basement studio in 2004, it struck me that I was making these sculptures of an athlete-as-hero while the country was at war, while the Weapons of Mass Destruction crisis was in full swing. My engagement seemed out of step with what was happening. I think Michael Jordan, Save The World was an awkward attempt to come to terms with an array of public, private and political concerns. My work has changed a lot since that piece, but ultimately I am still interested in the strange fragility of these monumental figures.

So yes, I am a sports fan. But while I’m personally invested in pro sports, I’ve also become fascinated by the unstable allegories that underscore a game or a season, looking at the phenomenon the way that Roland Barthes looked at wrestling. Since the action in a game is in real time, stories are constantly created and then torn apart. Spectators—myself included—imbue players with heroic meanings only to find that this affect is obsolete a moment later. Someone dropped a ball, or missed a shot, or tore an ACL, or retired. Athletic allegories are inevitably temporary because of bodily limitations, changing circumstances and shifting opinion over time. Gravity brings us all down. Robert Smithson’s ideas about entropy don’t only apply to the earth and the ground, but also to the figure.

OPP: Michael Jordan: Disasters of War (2006-2009), your drawings and etchings which reference Goya's famed series of the same name, feature Michael Jordan as ALL the figures. Could you talk about this choice?

NP: I am interested in the foggy and spastic relationships in the Disasters etchings because there is no chance to settle the dilemma. The lack of closure becomes the point. I wanted to construct narratives that were not necessarily linear. And so I substituted every figure from Goya’s original compositions with Jordan; this basic rule sets the stage for a Freudian sense of conflict—he saves and maims and kills himself. I thought a lot about dark humor when I was making these prints. The gratuitous nature of them and the ridiculousness of the situation was alternately funny, inappropriate and sad. Like in Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards, overwhelming and ironic violence is the embodiment of a complex and uncomfortable emotional space. In that film, like in these etchings, instincts of victimhood and aggression are in flux.

I tend to find icons and to replace them whenever necessary. This happens in sports but is even more pronounced in the combustible narratives of politics. Goya’s original prints were protest etchings against the Peninsular War, and the inappropriate superimposition of Jordan calls a lot into question. I was looking at a fracture or conflation between this deflated leisure myth and a larger sense of real violence. 

OPP: There is a shift away from the figure. It's not absolute, but it is noticeable. Afterwards there are more sculptures of precarious structures, which may or may not be ruins of buildings that once functioned, but definitely don't now. Can you talk about this intersection of architecture and mythic heroes, which was drawn out in your solo show The Wall Still Stands (2011) at The Proposition in New York?

NP: As I finished the Disasters etchings I became more interested in the space around the action rather than the figure itself. I made the sculpture Rubble Fragment I (Mezuzah), and I realized that a piece of concrete could become the heroic figure instead of a literal classical body. I used the same substitution rule that guided the Jordan prints in the Reconstruction drawings, but architectural structures like two-by-fours and cinder blocks were the stand-in for human presence. Some of the drawings become defunct altars or shrines; others are failed utopian building projects.

I wanted to allow for a wider array of subject matter rather than harping on one obvious signifier. The architectural structures from the drawings are based on figures from sports clippings I've received from my father over the years and screen shots from old footage of baseball games, but they are heavily camouflaged. Bridge/Fortress/Hillis  began as a sculpture of the former Cleveland Browns running back Payton Hillis. Holding It Together (Pistol Pete) is based on Zurbaran's Saint Serapion. I was interested in the fragility of the structure, and its simultaneous sense of building and decay. This work explores some of the same terrain as the more overt sculptures and prints; but now I am encoding, encasing and cutting apart the source. Human form is roughly translated to architecture or rock formation. I’ve been looking at old sports writers like Henry Grantland Rice, who had a tendency to rename the heroes of the day as immovable rocks or some other monumental vision; the 1936 Fordham Rams for example, were coined the “Fordham Wall” and their offensive line was “The Seven Blocks of Granite.” This type of metaphor can be found in all sorts of places, from Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ozymandias to Pink Floyd's The Wall.

OPP: What do George Washington and Caesar have in common with Pistol Pete, Michael Jordan, Vince Lombardi, Jim Brown and Arnold Schwarzenegger?

NP: I witnessed all these figures through the lens of reproduction as a primary source of aura. Growing up, the distance of the photograph, print or video, and now the internet, allowed me to fill these vessels with my own meanings. There are countless posters of Michael Jordan stuck in mid-air as if he could levitate forever. Even the painting George Washington Crossing The Delaware is a fabrication which is only loosely based on historical fact, and yet this vision is as real as it gets. These people have been worshipped, albeit in vastly different times and places. While there are qualitative differences that separate them—George Washington actually did effect the world more than Pistol Pete—I am more interested in these icons as the embodiment of an internal response to popular American mythologies. They are mostly boyhood visions of manhood, all of which are more complicated than they initially appeared.

OPP: If you absolutely had to pick—pretend the world will end if you don't—would you rather go to an art opening or a sporting event?

NP: That’s like picking a favorite child. The question presents a false choice. I can have my cake and eat it too. I was drawing on my apartment floor as I watched game 7 of the 1997 World Series. 

And besides, sporting events can be art. Robert Smithson always talked about how the movies that were the most important to him and his peers were the B-movies, the sci-fi movies rather than the art flicks. These cultural artifacts were the platform on which he built his work. He was also immensely well-read and informed about art history, and he was certainly a part of the art world. He was intimately invested in all of his obsessions, and he reveled in the fact that he did not have to choose. I feel the same way.

A live basketball game is a singularity. It happens in real time and only exists in that moment. I suppose the artwork is at face value more static (unless it is performative or interactive), but certainly the experience of the work is also singular since it is specific to that time and place.

While I love the community aspect of the art opening, the support for the work of friends and peers, the reality is that there is more flexibility in seeing an art show—and art openings are often the absolute worst time to view the work. The sporting event is often the ideal venue to view the spectacle. And so, from a situational and phenomenological point of view, I choose the game.

To see more of Norm's work, please visit normparis.com.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist Stacia Yeapanis. When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the emotional and existential significance of participating in mediated culture in her embroidery, video, sculpture and collage works. She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2006), where she will begin teaching in Spring 2013, and is currently a 2012-2013 Mentor-in-Residence at BOLT Residency in Chicago. Notable exhibitions include Losing Yourself in the 21st Century (Maryland Art Place, Baltimore), MP3 (The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago), Please Stand By: Stacia Yeapanis + Readymade (Baang & Burne Contemporary, New York), Over and Over Again (BOLT Project Space, Chicago).

CHRISTINA PETTERSSON explores decay, memorialization, and resurrection in large-scale graphite drawings that reference classic literature from the English Canon. Her romantic landscapes, populated by a recurring female figure surrounded by animals, reveal the wildness of the experience of a world in decline. Most recently, her work has been exhibited at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood in Florida and at Launch F18, curated by Site95, in New York. Christina lives in Miami, Florida.

OtherPeoplesPixels: You draw exclusively in graphite. What are the challenges of this medium and what are the benefits?

Christina Pettersson: I am able to achieve a tremendous amount of detail working with graphite, but it's a very silvery medium. I sometimes miss the true darkness of charcoal or oil. It's also very difficult to photograph well. If I try to capture the authentic grey of my drawings, it looks dull, and I find I have to cheat the contrast for reproduction purposes. It's a shame. On the other hand, it's cheap, non-toxic, and absolutely the most comfortable medium I've ever used. And I've tried plenty. It reminds me of writing too: the singular aesthetic of words on white. It's strange to think that in all my years of schooling no one ever told me I could just draw if I wanted. I had to be a painting major... then fiber, then sculpture. When I finally started just drawing again in my late twenties, I knew immediately that this was it for me.

OPP:  Most of your drawings are quite large, bigger than the body of the viewer to be sure. Have you always drawn on this scale? Why is the scale important to the work?

CP: The body is almost always to scale with life, and has been for a long time. I find it very difficult to relate to a figure otherwise. I want the viewer to be able to step right up and feel as if s/he could step into the page, as my figures are stand-ins for the viewers themselves. I want the viewer to imagine being in the various scenarios I put them in. The fact is they are not much about my personality. I want to be a storyteller. Rauschenberg said that narrative is the sex of art, and I think I understand what he meant. I am drawn to the pleasure and pain of beautiful tales, and it is not about fulfilling logic.

OPP: I'm interested in the fact that you say they aren't much about your personality, because the figures are in your own image, correct? Can you talk about the desire to insert yourself into  "the pleasure and pain of beautiful tales?" 

CP:  The figures are almost always of me, but I don't consider them "self portraits." Admittedly, something about that term gives me the heebie jeebies...as if I'm trying to bare my soul, I guess.  Let's face it though: there's no avoiding yourself, no matter what you do. Yet when we write the stories about ourselves, we inevitably change them. So why not steal from the better narratives of the Bible, literature, mythology? In art, the whole of history becomes a record of my own life. The act of drawing is so bizarre and primal. It is the demon's whisper that no book is closed forever, so keep digging. So, I would rather resurrect Ophelia from Shakespeare's murdered chambers, without any idea of what will happen, than to tell you what I already know.

Legend
2009

OPP: There's is a pervading sense of Romanticism in both your drawings and in your video work. I mean that in terms of the mid-late 18th century ideals in European literature and art that were a response to the Enlightenment. There was a call back to nature and an attention to the wildness of the emotional life that is seen historically as a reaction to the hyper-rationalism of the Age of Enlightenment. Can you talk about these values in the context of our contemporary world?

CP: Absolutely. Most of my stories are resurrected from the best literary tales throughout history, spawned by murder or undying love. These are the primal fires that fuel my desire to be alive in the world. The figures were previously in large expanses of empty space, but lately the background has been playing a larger role. The sense of distance that it evokes echoes the romantic landscape tradition, from Claude Lorraine to the Hudson River School. The “sfumato” of the landscape—to use one of the four canonical painting modes of the Renaissance—literally means "gone up in smoke." I love those weird Pagan landscapes, too, especially Giorgione's Sleeping Venus, which shows a woman inexplicably reclining on flowing fabric in the romantic outdoors. There is this sense of an empire on the brink of collapse from it's own decadence. The old world is receding, and this reclining woman is both protector and destroyer. I want to restore that epic and mythological dimension, a sense of awe and reverence for the world.

OPP: From 2004-2008, you made a series of drawings of bricks taken from the houses of famous writers, including William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, and William Butler Yeats. Then, in 2009, you made drawings of the overgrown graves of Zora Neale Hurston and Eudora Welty. The first thing that strikes me is the difference in how History treats male and female writers. Was this part of your intention when you made the later drawings?

CP: It was, though I'm not sure how deliberate it was at the time. Now that seems obvious to me, too, but in the beginning I worked on instinct and trust. I did initially visit the last surviving house of Zora, down the street from where she was buried in Fort Pierce, Florida. But it was a mean and lonely place of poverty and obscurity she died in. It was the opposite of the brick and magnolia grandeur of Faulkner's estate. Her grave itself was unmarked for over a decade, a mere empty lot beside the train tracks, until Alice Walker bought her a tombstone. The tree I drew is a Brazilian Pepper. It's not a tree so much as a shrub, an invasive species no one plants intentionally. It grows in the ditches among the weeds. Welty, on the other hand, was a white woman who was born and died comfortably, and was buried in a beautiful Civil War-era cemetery in Jackson, Mississippi. At her grave is a proud Juniper tree. So even between the two there is a great psychological distance.

Jack Kerouac's House, detail

OPP: The second thing that struck me about these drawings is more about you than the drawings themselves, and I see it in all your work that references literary texts. In your statement about the brick series, you say: "A lone graphite drawing of a brick, surrounded by a great expanse of white paper, can tell the story of how spirit actually finds its way inside of matter and how humans tend to it." This is a beautiful idea that gets at one of my personal interests: fandom. Although fandom is usually associated with media, like TV shows and movies, or sports, I love the idea of literary fandom. It's really the same thing: an intense engagement with a "text" (in the flexible, postmodern sense of the word), in which the text is a portal to other ideas or to other people. Did the houses and the graves you chose have personal significance for you?

CP: Yes! All great love affairs. Fandom is a perfect way to describe it. After all, stealing bricks from houses is certainly as weird as tearing off a scrap of cloth from a singer and keeping it at your bedside table. We each choose our own holy relics. Text, in particular, is a portal for me, because I can lift certain phrases and sentences off the page and carry them around in my head. They hang about for months and years, haunting me, repeating and repeating. I could stare at a painting by Caravaggio forever, but I could never carry it around afterwards. Not even a hand or a foot. My mind won't hold on to it. Drawing the bricks was partly about that—an attempt to make as close a copy as possible. In the end though, a drawing of a brick is not really a brick at all. But with writing you can make an exact copy. I suppose this is the real source of my romantic relationship with the world. When I walk down the street on a fall day, Shakespeare is incanting:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

And so on. I just looked up the word incantation, by the way. "Ritual recitation of verbal charms or spells to produce a magic effect." Isn't that wonderful?

It's a shame most people only read stuff like Shakespeare in high school. Writers were great prophets in the past, like oracles or augurs. Tennyson was one of the last poets famous enough to have crowds of people follow him down the street to his home on the Isle of Wight. That was long ago. That was fandom of a different color.

OPP: Before, you mentioned you want to tell stories and that the graphite reminds you of writing. Did you ever want to be a writer instead of a visual artist?

CP: Always! More than I wanted to be an artist probably. But getting your second choice in life isn't at all bad. I just want more time to read: weeks, months, years. It's the only thing that makes me wish I believed in an afterlife, because like Borges, "I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” So, third career choice: librarian? 

To view more of Christina's work, please visit christinapettersson.com.