CHILD'S PLAY - THE ART OF AMI TALLMAN written by Karim Khan
From the Hope issue of Don't Panic.
When I first got sent Ami’s work, I thought ‘what the fuck is this? Is she like, eight years old?’ That’s just how cute she is. She draws so cute that it’s a pity she doesn’t draw cute things like flowers and bunnies. Oh wait, she does draw dead bunnies, and bears and power-mad dictators and brainwashed groupies and religious hippie Kabbalah- loving crazies. She’s born in Camarillo, California, and is about to have her first solo exhibition at the See Line Gallery in Santa Monica. Yay for dead, authoritarian, brainwashed cute!
Your paintings look kind of like how a ten-year-old would draw, do you get that a lot?
I teach drawing to children, and all the ten year olds I know are much too uptight to draw like I do. The idea that children’s drawings are loose and free of inhibition is complete bullshit, and they’re generally extremely conservative about colour. If you mean they look sloppy and are very colourful, yes I get that all the time, though sometimes, rather than those of children, they are compared to the drawings of the mentally ill, the poorly educated, or the intellectually slow.
What or who would you say your inspirations were?
Inspiration is too changeable a thing to account for in a comprehensive list at the moment, but it would be a list which included Klaus Theweleit, Henry White Warren, Virginia Woolf, Mike Kelley, David Bowie, Laura Owens, film noir, Robert Musil, Tony Labat, Vladimir Nabokov, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and a good cup of coffee.
Awe and devotion are central themes in your current exhibition, spanning from the political to the spiritual - what makes them so interesting to you? As a person who's always been interested in politics, and idolized hippies as a child, I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out where things went wrong between the 60s and the world I grew up in (that being the 80s). Obviously, a whole lot went wrong, but when I saw that Rennie Davis, a hugely important 60s political activist, had gone off to run a cult for a guru named the Majaraji Ji in the 70s, claiming that people needed to fix their spiritual insides before they could change the world, I saw a part of my answer. Here's this Indian teenager saying he's going to use the force of his will alone to bring peace on Earth, and thousands of people who used to be actively engaged with the real world (as wild and crazy as that engagement itself may have been, granted) decide to give up and bliss out and leave it all to him. That blew my mind, especially seeing how much this guru's spectacles looked like stuff straight out of The Triumph of the Will or a Chairman Mao propaganda poster. I had to see what the appeal was, and became increasingly convinced as I studied the recruiting materials that it was largely really good aesthetics.
I know how important set decoration is to the production of awe and devotion from firsthand experience: most of my own most ecstatic moments can largely be attributed to lighting and timing, but I think of such moments as largely fleeting and serendipitous, and I was struck by how dangerous it could be to actively pursue such a thing as a permanent state. The rush of being part of a crowd, of being surrounded by flying banners and people who seem to accept you simply for being nearby, these things might convert someone to just about anything—I mean, it's obvious given some of the political parties that have come to power from time to time that this is the case, and yet I wanted to understand it better, so I drew it. Drawing things helps me think about them, it helps me study them in a sort of half-conscious way that lends itself to flashes of inspiration that mere contemplating never does. I'm not a spiritual or religious person, but I know the feeling that acolytes are chasing, I think it's similar to what junkies are chasing, but I guess someone said that before.
We heard that you lasted one semester doing philosophy at the New School in New York. Funnily enough, we just did an interview with Faisal Devji who’s the Assistant Professor of History there. Do you know him? Should we study there?
I don’t know Faisal Devji. I was a research assistant for a very nice history professor there named Eli Zaretsky. I would only recommend you study there if you like wearing turtlenecks with leather jackets and smoking pipes.
So how did you get your big break on the arts scene?
I’ll let you know when I get it.
Who’s catching your attention on the American art circuit at the moment?
Lindsay Brant, Kelly Sears, Brad Eberhard, Paul Chan, Will Rogan.
David Shrigley or Quentin Blake?
I’d rather be named Quentin Blake than David Shrigley. I don’t understand what you’re asking me about them.
When you were little you wanted to be a writer: do you think you can express yourself as much with art as you can with literature? Does it seem as effective or communicative as a medium? I think writing and art are suited to the expression of very different aspects of oneself. Art can be an endless associative chain, and can be facile, in the way that one’s idle musings on a series of seeming random things are facile. Writing is often expected to make a point, or to make something happen, like a plot. Art is allowed to refuse to do either of these things without becoming nonsensical and tiresome in the way writing tends to when it tries to do that. Art can be an experience of itself, without feeling obliged to answer the questions it poses, and it lets its audience choose its own pace and order. I don’t think art’s effectiveness necessarily corresponds to its communicativeness, whereas with writing, there is generally a more important relationship between the two. Drawing and writing employ very different parts of my brain, just like reading and looking do. I couldn’t do without either. I’m far more influenced by the writers I’ve read and known than artists, but my interests, and the way they’re shaped as intellectual objects, have tended to be more consistently suited to visual art. Or to put it another way: drawing is for brooding, writing is for figuring things out, and I brood more often.
How has the public response been to this exhibition? Do you have further plans with See Line?
I don’t feel like answering this question.
Okaay. It’s the hope issue. What hopes do you have for the future?
Open borders, Big Sur not being burnt to a crisp, war becoming boring to those who would make it, the art market not crashing.
http://www.dontpaniconline.com/magazine/hope/childs-play--the-art-of-ami-tallman
