March 5–12, 1998

20 questions

Donald Baechler

Interview by Jennifer Darr

When I call Donald Baechler in his Soho studio, he's scrambling back and forth from ringing telephone to buzzing door, readying himself for a trip that will take him first to Sweden, where his work is currently on exhibit, then back across the ocean to Philadelphia, where he'll exhibit at Locks Gallery.

Influenced by Cy Twombly and outsider art, the 42-year-old painter assembles found objects and paints a simple image on top, perhaps a flower or a human head, in black and white and sometimes in a single color. In his early collages he used scraps of paper, receipts he picked up on trips and drawings he commissioned from drunks in bars. His recent paintings are considerably busier; they include rebuses, coloring book renderings, connect-the-dots drawings, mazes and pages ripped from children's books.

And though Baechler, who was raised by Quaker parents in Hartford, CT, is humble about his career, he's no stranger to celebrity. He once modeled for a Gap ad, cradling one of his giant zucchini sculptures; he created a painting for The Artist Formerly Known As You-Know-Who with his glyph as the central image; and posed with his index finger up his nose for a 1986 Andy Warhol painting.

Why did you start using flowers as a main image in your work?

My work of the '80s was preoccupied with human figures. But they started becoming a little too narrative. I started getting turned off by having to explain that there really wasn't a story; they were abstract relationships to me. I started looking at things that could satisfy me formally, but didn't have these particular narrative associations. Flowers somehow are surrogates for the human form. They fall within the same kind of space: they have heads—I know it sounds a bit a stupid to say that.

The collages in your current work can almost stand on their own.

People have said that to me. Abstract painters, particularly, really like my backgrounds and wonder why I bother to paint on top of them. I hear that from Ross Bleckner. Whenever he comes over and he sees a work in progress he says, "You should stop right there." I suppose there will come a time when I do just stop right there. But, at the moment, what interests me is the intervention of the image into this field, which is almost kind of perfect in itself, and the tension that comes from it. For me it wouldn't have that kind of charge without that. It would just be this polite abstract composition.

Many of your works include rebuses, which also serve as the paintings' titles. Why are titles important?

I used to title things number 1, number 2, number 3. That got confusing for me because I never knew which was which. And it got really boring just to refer to number 1, even though it was a rose or a tulip or a beach ball. I started looking for clues in the backgrounds, then I started deliberately including these clues in the backgrounds with bits of text from rebuses. But, in fact, the title usually has no relation at all to any kind of narrative reading. I am interested in a title being a way for a viewer to enter the picture. Titles are kind of like poems: they set a mood and allow someone to look at a work with an open mind.

You used to ask people to draw pictures for you. But you started receiving too many and you stopped using them.

Yes, I have boxes and boxes of drawings that I haven't even looked at.

Did any make it into your most recent paintings?

Probably a few of them. At one point I developed a collaboration with a young man who spends a lot of time in jail for various sorts of petty criminal offenses. I'll send him my own drawings that I want him to copy, lists of titles and art history books with marked pages. He'll do a drawing of a sculpture. He'll send back the drawing and he'll get a certain amount for each drawing to put into his commissary account so he can get cigarettes and cupcakes, whatever he wants. His name is David White. A lot of the drawings that end up in the backgrounds are his drawings.

What prompted the change?

I was getting too much stuff and I found it impossible to edit and organize it. I wanted it to be less random and more something I was controlling: the iconography, the vocabulary, the images, the text. I knew what I wanted and I just wanted to see how someone else could do it. Trying to find another hand to carry out my will, sort of.

Are you still influenced by outsider art?

I became really disillusioned with that field. It's really impossible these days to tell who's outside and who's inside; it is kind of a dealer's designation. The early days of so-called art brut really had a lot to do with discovering the abilities of people who were outside the mainstream art world. But these days—you know in New York there is an outsider art fair every year. The whole spectacle is very depressing and it is all about money.

Much of what you did in the '80s was against the grain. Did that enable you to survive professionally?

In the early and mid-'80s a lot of my friends suddenly became superstars. My career, the trajectory of my work (I hate the word career), has been much slower and steadier. I've never felt that wild up and down that I've seen happen to other people. I am very happy with the position I am in professionally. I have nothing to… [his doorbell rings].

Would you hold on a minute?

Sure.

Hi, where was I?

We were discussing how your career has been steady.

Does that sound stupid?

Anyway, there are certain artists, who we won't name, who had these skyrocketing careers. Three or four years later you don't hear about them. I have never been in it for overnight success or celebrity. I hate to even talk about this kind of thing because it sounds so superficial. It is not something I think a lot about. I don't think about career strategy.

Donald Baechler's solo show runs March 6-April 11 at Locks Gallery, 600 Washington Square South, 629-1000. Opening reception Friday, March 6, 5:30-7:30 p.m.