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March 22, 2025
Jeffrey Miller: There’s some overlap between the reviews you write [for the Brooklyn Rail] and the artwork in the Platform show. I saw drawings with a "Greater New York" theme, and then you’d reference the same things in your review of GNY for the Rail– “the Yeti Problem,” and so on.
William Powhida: After writing for three and a half years, it seemed like a natural progression, almost: not try to keep it separate, let it start to overlap. I’m trying to figure out a way to bring my writing into my art—to let it bleed in.
JM: Do you think of the review as a sketch for the piece? The piece as a sketch for the review?
WP: The reviewing I do for the Rail is separate from the art, but for a couple of years I was also writing a local column under a pseudonym that was very visceral and emotional. It incorporated how I was feeling that day, with a fictional spin on it. So I saw the drawings as an opportunity to let that particular attitude seep into an even more bizarre and crazy art criticism—which I wouldn’t ever pitch to the Rail.
JM: The work is very insider-referential: a lot of it’s about the art world, and you’re talking to an educated art viewer. Is that because the bourgeoisie is just unshockable at this point? Or is “shock art” not really what you’re trying to do?
WP: The letter-writing campaigns, the open letters to people – it’s not [just] shock-value [stuff]. . . . I don’t know how much people can be shocked.
The first drawing that I showed at Platform was an Enemies List drawing. Part of that came out of a show I had done previously, where I had six personalities—a teacher, an art critic, a cynical painter, a crazed video artist, a non-verbal drunk, and me . . . There was a video in the show, and it was presented along with a series of drawings that were attributed to the characters in the video.
That grew out of my own frustrations about who I was around particular friends: in the gallery situation, being very polite and calm, and then, around friends, just spewing anger and venting thoughts that I certainly didn’t want to make public. But I don’t think it was shocking, because there was a lot of self-effacing humor, and I put a lot of myself into it as a target as well.
It’s a response that goes beyond art, to the general culture of war and antagonism we’re constantly bombarded by: this creeping paranoia. Yet in the art world, it’s crazy how it’s politics as usual. We’re celebrating beautiful work done by beautiful people, and everything else that’s going on is just unacknowledged.
JM: There’s a big prize there—it’s a winner take all system. If you make it to the top of the pile you collect a lot of money, and you don’t want to jeopardize your chance of getting there.
WP: I don’t make a living off of my work, and I don’t have anything to lose at this point.
A lot of people have asked me, what happens if they want to put you on the cover of a magazine, or you get famous? My answer to that right now is that, if it gets to the point where there’s no critique left, that’s cool. I’ll just move on to the other projects and ways that I’ve been working.
When I saw how certain drawings could activate people, get them talking and interacting with the work socially, I did an “artist confessional” at Parker’s Box [in Brooklyn.] I built the booths, and for three days I invited people to come inside and confess guilt, or remorse, or whatever was on their minds. It turned out to be a really emotional piece. It disarmed people, it brought out a lot that I wasn’t expecting.
That’s a piece I’m interested in pursuing this fall. It opened me up to taking the characters that I’ve been developing, certainly the overblown artist persona, and trying to organize art tours in Chelsea. I want to try to push people out of their way of looking at art, their way of responding to it. I was fascinated, in the Parker’s Box show, by Susan Robb, who had this installation where she was dressing people up and taking them out of their usual roles and reassigning them these bizarre identities.
JM: That notion of asking the viewers to take on the persona, instead of just watching you do it – the analogy to Susan’s work is interesting. It can be uncomfortable for viewers, though – not everybody wants to play that game.
WP: No. It’s fascinating how many people show up expecting a certain kind of seriousness, approaching it without any sense of humor or irony.
A friend of mine infiltrated the Explorers’ Club in New York City, as an artist residency. She created a Micro-Explorers club, inviting people to go on personal journeys and document it and write about it and send it back to her. Watching people try to make sense of her project was as interesting as what she was doing. She gave them handouts that were poetic montages she’d created, and they didn’t get it—they were looking for something that was going to make absolute sense.
JM: You’ve talked also about Alison Smith, with the Civil War reconstructions—is that the same thing?
WP: Challenging people to express their views. The culture in this country is so polarized. We have the conservative hegemony, and it’s a little crazy. I’d like to see a little more antagonism, to see people stand up . . . .
JM: One of the notes I jotted down when I was looking at your piece just said “Unabomber . . . ?” When I think of “crazy manifesto writers”—that was a far-out voice, arguably from the Left . . .
WP: . . . Luddite, anti-technology . . .
JM: . . . I’ll be interested to see what response you get in Seattle. Seattle’s a very non-confrontational town: “It’s all good, man, if that’s your thing, that’s great.”
WP: Seattle has that, but then, thinking about the WTO and the riots—when there is something worthwhile to get up in arms about, it seems like there’s the potential there.
I see that in New York City, but it’s limited to a couple of groups that are still researching 9/11. I have a close friend who’s completely wrapped up in the most extreme conspiracy theories . . . It’s absorbed his entire life. It’s kind of scary. I can’t tell if it’s a genuine concern or just a way of dealing with the entire situation: the wars, the culture conflict, the disbelief that anything like this could happen; trying to justify it in some way, or feeling so powerless that the only way to assume any power is just to keep digging and digging.
JM: There’s a pathologization of it, as well. The subtext is, it’s the media or professional people that are allowed to do all the digging and speak up. If you do it, you’re weird.
WP: Absolutely, if you do that, you’re strange, and you don’t have the authority to say what happened. The only authority is these shady government committees that are put together in questionable ways, and those are the final statements…but there’s still a whole subculture of disbelief.
The Enemies List is an expression of that powerlessness or underlying anger or rage simmering below the surface—but at the same time, having a sense of humor to deal with it. Otherwise it’s too repulsive to think about.
JM: You’re a high school teacher. How much of what you do—that mixture of anger or powerlessness or confusion—comes out of what your students are doing or thinking?
WP: I teach in the Clinton Hills/Bed-Stuy area of Brooklyn. There’s a constant sense of antagonism in the school. I don’t know if it’s a defense mechanism, because the kids’ world is so rough, horrible: they put on these masks of being tough and hard. But after you get to know them for a couple of months—they’re scared. I can see the parallels with the work.
I definitely am stuck in a high school mentality, and you can see it in the notes, this frustration at having to go to meetings, having way more time than I need to doodle.
JM: So, your own high-school experience . . . ?
WP: Upstate NY, pretty standard. I just wanted to get out of there as soon as possible. There wasn’t anything there for me, artistically.
I grew up in Saratoga, and I still mine the upstate ethos, the self-destructive mentality that everybody has.
JM: The biggest city in the world is three hours away from you, and you’re stuck here . . ..
WP: . . . and it might as well be another couple of states away. It seemed that far, growing up.
College was another source of craziness that I mined in the newer works that are in the Platform show, like the Fiendship Painting. For me, that work was my way of telling a short story, as opposed to Everyone I’ve Ever Met (From Memory), which is more my novel. It’s a monumental activity—to create a self-portrait through everyone that I’ve encountered who stuck with me.
JM: Would you do that as an ongoing work—if somebody buys it, just mail them another addition to it every year?
WP: Maybe alternate years—or wait five years and tackle it again. It was exhausting, mentally and emotionally, to go back thru all these places, avenues and alleys of association, things I’d forgotten.
It’s a blueprint for another series of works that takes that very personal narrative and shifts it into a pop culture narrative, by casting everyone in that drawing as an actor or a character that captures something about the person.
JM: “Who would play you in the movie of your life?”
WP: Even a fictional character can shape your world view.
I’m also thinking about a fictional version of Everyone, but with all the characters I’ve read about and movies that I’ve seen: trying to create indexes of all those characters, like starship captains or something absurd like that. A series of drawings that organize my life, as much for myself as it is for the viewer.
JM: it doesn’t seem like there’s any way ever to end that project. In fact, you have to pick something arbitrary, like starship captains, in order to make progress on it at all.
WP: And the associations, what pops up with those ideas, trying to draw it –that’s where my love comes into it, to be able to draw it and be imaginative and not worry about trying to create something from life. Just let it grow out of my cultural experience.
JM: What else do you see out there in the rest of the art world with the narrative richness you talk about?
WP: Richard Smith—people don’t quite trust him because he’s transformed his personality for every project. He did stand-up comedy for a while and he has hilarious videos where he tears apart the art world as this over-the-hill ’80s painter. Right now he has a rock band that he performs with, very self-reflexive, crazy songs, they do performance—his work has all these different layers to it. And there’s a German artist, Bjørn Melhus: usually he’s the subject of his own work, playing different characters. He covers a lot of ground.
Interesting—but definitely not representative of [other] work that’s going on now. A lot of the criticism I have with the art world now comes out of the fact that what I studied and was passionate about in college has faded away. It’s almost like nothing was learned from really challenging art work: Hans Haacke; performance-based or socially-based stuff—did Vito Acconci even live, you know? Did that even happen? Or is it absolutely OK to just make big dumb objects?
I said in the last press release, sort of jokingly, that feminism is dead—goes back to the fact that there are only one or two Allison Smith-like figures working in the NY art world right now.
JM: So, as an art viewer, how should I look at and engage with art? What would a “good art viewer” look like to you?
WP: For me, the ideal viewer is someone who accepts their responsibility to complete the work. I believe I’m responsible for about 50% of the work: I make it and I have a certain intention, but [then there’s] how the work’s installed, what it’s next to, the political-cultural conditions at the time, the viewer’s experience. I want them to trust their own experience and be able to read it subjectively, and do that first before being given outside knowledge, being given answers, having their opinion or taste made for them by wall text, statements, and so on.
My work, the press releases—those things usually serve as a buffer, and I’m trying to use them as another way of communicating.
“Paper Beings,” work by William Powhida
Platform Gallery
March 30 – May 6, 2025 |
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