Jens_Algood_lnterview

Chase Allgood: Reading your terminal project proposal essay has me thinking about the line between dandyism and effort and thinking about, as you mentioned in the essay, your painting techniques of like getting thrown to the ground, or throwing a painting out of the window, and using these actions, combined with meditation to approach a state of mind around not composing, not thinking, not trying. How does that relate to your painting practice and the work you have coming up in this show?

Jens Pettersen: I've always been interested in sort of the idea of, of swiftness or in another word an elegance, you know, there's no brutishness or ugliness in a way, as these kind of broader categories of making the work. So, I want to implement strategies that are more easy going, but also in a way asserts a confidence, and that comes from practice, practice and doing things over and over again. So, you can sort of work with a convincing, swiftness, you know, and that also involves the meditation aspect, the idea of not trying.

There's also aspects of, I don't know, this is like a hard word to bring up, but like coolness. What makes a cool painting? It's easy to make a cool painting if I wanted to. It's harder to make an uncool painting. That just kind of led me back into abstract expressionism, which is such an uncool genre. There is this Amy Sillman essay that I love, AB-EX and Disco Balls, in it she calls abstract expressionism, like, jazz, but jazz with money, it’s a weirdly conservative way of making art, but through that I’ve learned the idea of action and the idea of swift action and elegant action in terms of bodily movements and using your brush. It hopefully resolves itself into an elegant and swift interpretation in the painting where it doesn't have, like, struggle, grossness, and brutishness. The idea of fighting or wrestling with the painting, I’m not as interested in. I'm more interested in something being decadent and nice, sort of swift and easy, and you know, there are a lot of complications within that.

CA: When you interviewed Joshua Abelow for Hob Gob in 2022 you talked about a Trisha Donnelly performance at Casey Kaplan where she rode in on a horse and it was only really documented through word of mouth, sort of like old folk tales, which got me thinking about things that are only documented second hand and that relationship of performance and documentation. What for you, especially in the painting work, what part is the performance and what part is the documentation? And does this distinction even matter?

JP: It's something I've been thinking about a lot. Getting access to, or restraining the access to, that extra bit of information, whether it's like performance or peripheral like inspiration, this is kind of where the book comes in as an index of thought and research and images. So, there was a lot of work happening there in the book. But then the painting has become more and more direct in a way, it started with these very, not even meditative paintings, but very restricted paintings where it's like 2 or 3 marks on the canvas. I love Michael Krebber and those guys that were super restrictive and sort of funny, but I had to let that go a little bit, and sort of be more brave in a way, I had to let go of some of that sort of embarrassment, and just put it all out there. So, there’s more of an immediate record of the quote unquote painting performance. I think what I'm interested in, is relating that information and the record of time that's on the canvas and the decision making, and how that transfers back to the book and these pieces of text and images. The translation or the movement from painting through this peripheral source, that space in between and how that is translated is what's really interesting to me. I think that is where a lot of the coyness or the complication of things that are happening within that space between these two objects happens, they're being worked on simultaneously and in tandem, but they function in such different ways, but at the same time they say a lot of similar things.

CA: Looking at your work in the show and particularly the interaction between the paintings and the book, I was thinking about the Susan Sontag quote about pornography you have in the book, and how as she states its basic tone is affectless and emotionless, I was thinking about that in terms of perversion of the usefulness of images, especially since you use a lot of photography in the book. With the book there's a whole different energy that comes from looking at something on the wall vs in a 300-page book. I always find when you have books in a show, especially if they're not hidden in a vitrine, and you actually can flip through them, you're going to interact with them differently than any other medium. How do the two, in your mind, act differently for the audience, and do you feel the idea of a perversion there, in the sense of the severing from the general myth and meanings that the images already have?

JP: I think there's a lot of cohesion with the images that are in the book, even though they're all quickly picked out and organized in a very quick way. I think that also comes into the idea of trust and automation, to be able to look at those things and, and sort of carry with you either like a mental image or a rumor or a description of that thing that has a certain language and it has a certain style, and to be able to have that now in the back of your mind when viewing the paintings. I'm really interested in that connection. I don't have a mission statement with something that I wanted to do in particular. So, I'm really interested, again, in that, translation or transformation, from images and text to the paintings.

It was also interesting that you brought up perversion because one of my first, sort of seminal artistic discoveries was Torbjørn Rødland talking about one of his books on YouTube and he was talking about perversion and fairy tales or children's stories where in Europe and the Western part of the world children's stories had the perversion and pornography and violence stripped from them. But like in Japan for example, there's still a very clear distinction between adolescence and youth and perversion, and we think, like that's so gross and grotesque and perverted, but it’s still with us in Europe and America, as a culture it was just revoked, but there's still sort of like the ghost image of it that we can recognize and sort of find, like weird and like grotesque and appealing at the same time. I think that's why for me it's important to acknowledge that Sontag text and acknowledge Georges Bataille, those people that would be like yeah there is a lot of porn that is happening in the paintings, there’s lot of decadence and pleasure and prolongation, and a lot of sorts of goofiness and glossiness and all that stuff is there and it's pretty obvious, and it’s just an affirmation of, like, yeah, I'm not commenting on it necessarily. I just want it to be like, yeah, it's there. Of course it's there, and it's there, in the book too. It's not even that grotesque, but like with the furry porn that's in the book. There's a lot of images of you know, people that are like, oh I don’t know it depends, but sometimes I think people are telling on themselves when they say like, oh, this is like a perverted image or not. My images are pretty subtle. Though they obviously are hinting and are coy in a certain way.

JENS PETTERSEN, STICK TO SPORTS runs through July 27th 2024 at Helen's Costume, 7706 Se Yamhill, Portland Oregon