Artist Statement: Interior Landscapes
by Tom Pribyl
I like to describe my paintings as interior landscapes. I came across the idea of viewing the interior of the home as a landscape through the semiologist Marshall Blonsky. In his book American Mythologies, Blonsky defines the home as "the new nature of contemporary man and woman." He compares how we live in our houses and apartments to primitive man living in the jungle. But this new nature of the home provides us with a much more fortunate and pleasurable experience than the primitive jungle dweller could ever hope to experience. If we want it to be day, we just switch on a lamp. If we want moonlight, we light candles for two. We only have to go as far as our refrigerator to forage for food. We can experience a beautiful Fall season, not once a year, but once each month - it's not the leaves of trees that fall to the ground, however, but the beautiful and glossy leaves of magazines that make their way to the floor, the tables, the chairs, even by the toilet bowl. Most importantly, if we don't like our landscape, we can change it. We can redesign the paths that lead from one room to the next. We can rearrange the furniture. Even our plants are portable. To look at this another way, if the human subject were to be put in a zoo, the zookeeper would have to build a home in order to display the human in its natural habitat. (This actually occurred recently in Denmark when a man and woman were placed on exhibit in the primate section of the Copenhagen Zoo). The home is the new nature of man and woman, and I have chosen to paint the landscape of this new nature.
At first glance, it may seem that the formal qualities of my paintings are surreal in character, but this is not the case. Surrealists display an absurd juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated elements or present irrational, dreamlike imagery with the intention of putting the viewer in touch with the workings of the subconscious mind. They attempt to subvert the commonplace and the ordinary. I am attempting to do just the opposite. I'm trying to make apparent the realer-than-real reality that we get through television, movies, and advertising. My images have the appearance of a world based on camera tricks and computer technology. Walls warp; floors weave; chairs glide. While surrealism is deep and cerebral, my exaggerated reality is immediate and outward in appearance. My work is actually more closely related to pop art. Just like the pop artists, I choose to present banal imagery. But where the pop artists often used the visual language of mechanical reproduction to present their images, I use the dynamic and slick language of photography, television and advertising to present mine. It is this glossy, fast, special effects imagery and the interior of the home as landscape that constitute the form and content of my paintings.
Tom Pribyl
Consumerism Disses Its Contents: The Cultural Logic of Tom Pribyl
by Rajani Sudan
"Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates [an] insensibility [to the values of genuine culture]. It is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch always changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of it customers except their money--not even their time."
Clement Greenberg [Art and Culture]
"The necessary physical properties of the particular commodity--insofar as they directly follow from the nature of exchange-value--are: unlimited divisibility, homogeneity of its parts and uniform quality of all units of the commodity. As the materialisation of universal labour-time, it must be homogenous and capable of expressing only qualitative differences. Another necessary property is durability of its use-value since it must endure through the exchange process. Precious metals possess these qualities in an exceptionally high degree."
Karl Marx [Capital]
Resisting the sometimes limiting academic definitions of "high" art as a product of modernist revisions of aesthetics, Tom Pribyl's paintings of landscapes and still lifes signify both early modern--that is, the period extending from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries--and postmodern sensibilities. If the subjects of his paintings gesture toward a postmodern revaluation of commodities as "proper" objets d'art, he manifests earlier modern techniques of oil-painting popular in the history of European art which have been most visibly associated with wealth and property. Oil painting, as John Berger argues, "did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity" (Berger 1977: 87). Pribyl's work is partially informed by such concepts. Turning modernist notions of artistic subjects and techniques on their heads, his landscapes and still lifes exploit the common artifacts of everyday life as proper subjects for painting. His representation of such often disposable property in techniques that have historically been reserved for commodities that signify the wealth and substantive social standing of their owners challenges the concepts of class in relation to art.
Landscape painting was long considered a genre that somehow eluded the confines of commodification precisely because it seemed impossible to set spatial limits to such things as sea and sky. It became, however, in the eighteenth century a highly prized form for documenting wealth and social standing. Oil paintings of estates (sometimes with their owners), farm animals, pets, horses, hunting scenes, and the like recorded quite materially the properties of the people who commissioned such paintings.
Pribyl's landscapes capitalize on these notions, but he revises the idea of "land" in his paintings. Rather than choosing to depict property (land) as "natural," Pribyl focuses on domestic interiors, subverting the mystified concept of property as something that is natural. His "interior landscapes" portray the necessary but dispensable items of everyday life in late capitalist culture, but his use of oils grants them the same textural qualities of materiality that have been historically reserved for objects with more lasting "value." He argues, however, that the hard-edged realism of his representations is not based on "the visual language of mechanical reproduction" that pop artists have employed; rather, he deploys the "dynamic and slick language of photography, television, and advertising" in his paintings. Interestingly, according to Berger, the camera replaced oil paintings as the principal source of visual imagery, and although oil paintings are still being painted, their value as the traditional way of seeing was undermined and supplanted by various modernist movements--Impressionism, Cubism, abstract expressionism. Pribyl's uses of the language of the camera, then, work in two ways. First, it reinvests the conventions of seeing long associated with oil paintings to his representations, but at the same time it demonstrates the demise of those conventions by its very presence in his paintings. The slickness of his surfaces reproduce the slickness--literal and figurative--of mass culture and its effects. Pribyl erases the boundaries of "high" and "low" by disrupting our cultural expectations of "art" and its uses.
Similarly, still lifes, "first used in the mid-seventeenth century by the Dutch to describe paintings of inanimate objects," became by the mid-eighteenth century a highly popular way to display the wealth of abundance and an abundance of wealth. "Before the tradition of oil paintings," writes Berger, "medieval painters often used gold-leaf in their pictures. Later gold disappeared from paintings and was used only for their frames. Yet many oil-paintings were themselves simple demonstrations of what gold or money could buy. Merchandise became the actual subject-matter of works of art" (Berger 1979: 99). Much of this interest in ostentatious display may be traced to the emergence of the middle classes and the invention of capitalist culture. Recently acquired wealth in the form of imperialist spoils (in different parts of Europe but most prominently Great Britain, France, and Holland) may have prompted the desire to document and record such acquisition in the comparatively more lasting--and, arguably, more "valuable"--form of artistic representation.
Pribyl's still lifes reflect such cultural phenomena. He suggests that the 1980s may have also been a time for an economic expansion for certain classes that, in the art world, was manifested by the "rapid expansion of art buyers and patrons." But, according to him, what's left is the "junk," and our bonds to such junk amount to so much detritus. Fittingly, the debris of consumer culture are documented in his still lifes. The leavings of fast food meals seem to be the most insistent subjects of Pribyl's nature morte, perhaps because of their complete divorce from any commodity that we privilege as being "natural" and therefore of lasting value. Fixing the dross of everyday junk food into the permanence of oil paintings, Pribyl acknowledges that the wastes of society may be cultural icons of as great significance as the more conventional subjects of still life paintings.
The first definition the Oxford English Dictionary gives for the word dross is the "scum, recrement, or extraneous matter thrown off by metals in the process of melting." Pribyl's descriptions of his uses of "hyper-real special effects...based on camera tricks and computer technology" in order to produce his still lifes, together with the subjects he chooses, seem peculiarly fitted to both the literal and metaphorical implications of that word. Pribyl confuses and refashions our artistic expectations of this genre by representing in disturbingly exact detail not symbols of wealth or abundance (for example, gold) but the dross of what money buys. Pribyl reconfers the "preciousness" of the metal gold, whose artistic value has been traditionally registered in the genre of still lifes, onto its superficial dross which he then documents in the convention of still lifes. Precious metals and the commodities they signify, so long the "proper" subjects for conventional European oil paintings, get recast, so to speak, in Pribyl's still lifes as another kind of cultural alloy as he continually reinvents the surfaces that signify "art."
"I may not know a lot about art," so the saying goes, "but I know what I like." This statement's almost parodic familiarity presupposes that "liking" and "knowing" are categories that are hopelessly separate. Such a divide, while ostensibly gesturing toward individual taste, seems to be much more ideologically informed by such issues as class, gender, race, sexuality, and nationality. While it's undeniable that certain genres of artistic representation are going to be received differently by different cultural groups, what's striking is the more general acknowledgment of a principal difference between "high" and "low" art. We recognize and, for the most part, participate in the topographic demarcations of this difference: art belongs first and foremost in museums, then in galleries, and finally, with more outspoken reservations, in other spaces that are less rigidly defined, perhaps because they accommodate other transactions as well: restaurants, shops, the streets and such. In fact, it would seem, that our opening cliche needs to be revised: "I may not know what I like, but I know a lot about art."
What follows this revision, of course, is the question of where and how we obtained this knowledge. The New York Times Magazine--a self-proclaimed "cultural icon," at least according to one ad--declared not too long ago that in the next century the differences between "high" and "low" art would be insignificant, erased in the interests of (post)postmodernity. And yet, the writer's suspicion of the need for that erasure is most tellingly represented by the reconstructed canon she offers, a canon of cultural artifacts that employs the same distinction of "high" versus "low" that she declares to have been eradicated. "High is Low," the writer claims--not, you will notice, "low is high"--but this equation may produce an anxiety about the loss of distinctions that mark high from low (New York Times Magazine, September 29, 1996: 175-177).
Such arguments are not new. Clement Greenberg's 1939 essay on "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" ventriloquizes a form of hysteria often heard during periods of perceived radical shifts in aesthetics. Even if Greenberg's sympathies, like Douglas's, are symnpathetic with a socialist impetus to eradicate the differences between high and low cultures, like Douglas, he grants "genuine" artistic license--art with quantifiable cultural "value"--to the high, arguing that kitsch as a "deceptive" form of representation lays "traps...even in those areas...that are the preserves of genuine culture." Greenberg targets artists and consumers alike, whose "sensibilities" would lapse into a gross desire for "enormous profits" that tempt the "avant-garde itself." Crucially at issue here is the question of determining "real" cultural value from the "pressure of kitsch", or, identifying the "real" from the "fake," and the puzzling instances of borderline artistic cases that invariably emerge from such a rigidly determined hierarchy are "always to the detriment of true culture" (Greenberg 1961: 11-12). The unspoken issue of class informing his representation of "kitsch" gestures toward the ways in which we have solidified our admittedly various understandings of artistic representations in terms of hierarchies that are apparently determined first and foremost by the academy.
The academic commodification of art, then, may be foreclosed by a cultural commodification of art. How has "art" been bought and sold in the marketplace? Marx's identification of the effects of commodification points to the fetishization of commodities in capitalist cultures. The fetishism of the commodity reifies both social relations and the products of labor. In many ways, the mystification and dissemination of aesthetics and artistic representations follows this cultural logic: the painting, invested with its intitial "use-value" (as, for example, a way of registering and cataloguing property) acquires a life of its own in the marketplace and becomes an object of exchange-value. Even if we generally believe and reinforce the Romantic ideal of artists as a singular and unique, possessing an innate ability to represent perpectives peculiar to them alone, we are also drawing from a history of Western art--particularly European oil painting--that depends on the notion of artist not only as a free-standing genius, but, equally importantly, as the recorder of commodities.
Rajani Sudan
University of Texas at Arlington
Copyright © Enculturation 1997
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