Move Through Four Decades, Two Continents, & One Mirrored Labyrinth with Artist John Miller
When presented with a chronologically linear retrospective from an artist as expressive about politics, economics, and society as Miller, we can't help but read between the lines of earlier works from the 1980's, like the impastos that he describes as "shit-like provocations" to recreations of Googled images of reality TV starlets crying.
John Miller's "I Stand, I Fall" opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami in February, marking the American artist's first solo exhibit in the US. The mid-career survey includes 75 chronologically-organized works spanning nearly forty years.
One of the most striking aspects of the exhibit is the staggering range exhibited not just in the artist's choice of medium, but also in terms of subject matter, which encompasses everything from reality TV to racial tension. A plastic-fruit covered figure that he describes as a "quasi-minotaur" sits inside of "Lost," his mirrored labyrinth. Elsewhere in the exhibition, mannequins in brown togas and workout wear ("Echo and Narcissus") pose in a near-empty room. The brown and gold impastos are also on display, as are other stark photographs - like his ongoing "Middle of the Day" series (1994-present), as well as vividly-coloured acrylics depicting a blacks-and-whites facing off during a sit-in alongside another acrylic painting of a pick-up truck orgy.
"[Chief Curator Alex Gartenfeld] wanted to put together an overview of my work that was distinct from shows that I've done before in Europe," Miller explained by phone several days after the exhibit opened in Miami. "His idea was to look at figuration - not in the traditional, naturalistic sense of the figure - but rather figure as a rhetorical platform and how I deploy it in different phases of my work for different ends."
Renata Certo-Ware: Art is frequently a reflection of the artist, and the way it’s viewed can be a reflection of the viewer. "Lost" made me think of - and I might be betraying my own generation here - the selfie generation. It's like getting lost in your own image; the work is very reflective, just by the nature of the medium.
John Miller: I think that's one way of reading that work, and it's funny because a lot of my work lends itself to selfies. I don't know if that's the case for a lot of artists. I've done similar works that people like to photograph themselves in front of - the wallpaper mural I did, for example, and the cut-out figures ("Untitled," 2014 from the Pedestrian Series). One time at Miami Basel I just showed gold reliefs and people liked to photograph themselves in front of those - just because they're gold, I think.
RCW: What was it like building "Lost"?
JM: It was actually built by a guy named Jonathan Gonzales, but I would go in from time to time just to see how things looked from the inside. [Once] you're inside the labyrinth you get a kind of hall-of-mirrors effect. It's a little bit like a fun house, it's a little bit disorienting. You can't get terribly lost in it but you can take some wrong turns.
RCW: One of your paintings, "Untitled," (1987) shows a sit-in and demonstrates tension between blacks and whites, police and civilians. Obviously this topic is top-of-mind right now, it's something we're seeing in the news constantly right now. Is it a current piece?
JM: It's actually a piece from the 1980s, and the source image is from the 1960s. I believe it was a sit-in that took place in Los Angeles but I don't remember the specifics of it. In some ways it's a little bit sad, in that many of the same issues remain. I think we have made progress with civil rights and human rights, but it's still definitely out there, especially with these latest declarations from [Donald] Trump refusing to distance himself from David Duke and the KKK.
RCW: Or Mussolini...
JM: Yeah, or Mussolini! It shows that these problems are still very much alive. It's funny because I had that painting in storage for many years and I forgot about it. When I came across it again, it kind of drove that point home.
RCW: How does your personal identity play into this piece, as a white person? How do you fit into the dynamic and tension that is portrayed in the image?
JM: Racism [is] a product of ignorance in many cases. But when I was younger, most people just simply tried to consider racism as the product of bad intentions, which it certainly can be, but on a deeper level, we have institutional racism. People with nominally good intentions can end up reproducing racist structures that they may not intend to be harmful but nonetheless are discriminatory.
So how do I see myself in that? I guess I try to be aware of my role. I don't think anyone is completely innocent in the process, so I try to think of the repercussions of my work and what I do. I also try to take a proactive role in my institutional life. For example when I joined the Art History department [at SVA] we didn't have any professors of colour - I made a push to hire someone which proved to be successful. On the one had it's not a cataclysmic thing to do, but it seemed a fair thing to do.
RCW: I noticed that gold and brown both have strong presence in your work, especially the reliefs. It seems to me that the colours couldn’t be more different, they just evoke different emotions but at the same time, gold is almost a version of brown. What do the colours mean to you?
JM: The first gold piece I did is in that very first room [in "I Stand, I Fall"], that small gold phallus, and there's a brown one in that room too. The idea came straight from Sigmund Freud, his idea of whether seeing opposites - in this case gold and excrement - can represent each other in dreams. So there's a connection between the two based on valuation. One appears to be worthless but the other appears to be what determines value.
RCW: What does fruit mean to you? It's prominent in "Gladhand," and I've noticed it in a lot of your other work as well.
JM: First there's the story of how I got to it. A New York art dealer used to have a gift exchange every year at Christmas, and I was friends with her so I would go. One year I went with my daughter, who was probably about five or six at the time. Carmen was the smallest one there and she got to pick first, and she picked the biggest package and it happened to contain this ceramic piece - I think it was 1940's vintage - that represented a cone of fruit so I just recreated that - that piece is in the first room too - using plastic fruit so that the fruit looks a little more vivid. But after I did that I was at a point where I wanted to move on to the brown impasto motif and I was looking for something that could have the same effect but in a way be the opposite or be different. I was thinking of the fruit as a cornucopia motif, but then pushing it to where it was too much of a good thing in a way, where it tips over from being desirable to a little bit repulsive.
RCW: My mom, who is Italian, always uses the term "Abbondanza" -
JM: Oh! I was once in a show called that! I forget which gallery did it. Marilyn Minter was included as well. I had a fruit piece in that show as well.
RCW: Well the term (obviously) means "abundance" but - at least the way my mom uses it - it could be almost a little bit vulgar, like a vulgar abundance.
JM: I was definitely after that feeling. Also I was thinking of when fruit hits a perfect ripeness, it can be a day later and it's overripe and not appealing anymore. It's kind of a tipping point situation.
RCW: You've had solo exhibits in Europe, but this is your first in the US. Is there a reason? Did you feel that your work didn't connect as strongly with a US audience compared with a European audience?
JM: I'm not sure that those are the determinants. When my career took off, I was doing that brown impasto work, which was a bit of a provocation because it was an excremental or shit-like aspect. I think it had more to do with American culture being more puritanical and German culture being less so. I don't think that's so much the case anymore. That's one aspect, but also where my work was first embraced in a big way was in Germany, where there were collectors who wanted not just to buy work out of one show, but who wanted to commit to buying works of mine over a long period.
Art has a different position in Germany; it's much more linked to an idea of civic discourse, there's a different intellectual armature for artistic practice that my interests jived with at the time. There's a lot of US art that doesn't translate over into the German scene and vice-versa with a lot of German art that doesn't make it over here. Since the 1980's, things have become a lot more globalised so there's much more back and forth; the cultural differences are becoming a bit less distinct.
RCW: You made a comment in an interview with Interview about how the location of where your work is shown affects how it's received - the comparison you gave was Metro Pictures gallery versus a vegetarian restaurant.
JM: Oh yeah, the context is totally different.
RCW: Yeah, so I kind of saw a parallel there between what you are saying about Germany versus the US and Metro Pictures versus a vegetarian restaurant - that the context really affects the work and how it's perceived.
JM: On that score I really believe in John Dewey's notion of artwork as distinct from the art object. His position is that part of the artwork includes how the audience looks at it and what they think about it, and that kind of response gets to the social dimension of the artwork. That's something that I think is really important.
RCW: Do you feel an urge to control the way that your work is perceived? Does an artist really even have that ability?
JM: Some artists try to. Two artists who I admire, my friend Mike Kelley really did that a lot, and in fact tried to use the audience's response almost as a material in his work; he would play with that. Also, I think Dan Graham exerts a lot of control over his work through his writings, because he's often his own best critic in a way. I feel like I'm a bit more open-ended about that.
After a certain point I just want to let go of the work and just let the audience take over.
Renata Certo-Ware
John Miller: I Stand, I Fall runs until June 12, 2016 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami 4040 NE 2nd Avenue Miami, Florida 33137 Tuesday - Sunday 11am - 7pm FREE ADMISSION
