No Easy Way Out, 2006. Ink on paper. Courtesy the artist.
Currently part of the Workspace residency with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, his Hudson Street studio is relatively raw with its white walls, cement floors, more or less open access and the incessant sounds of cab horns outside. Both minimal and chaotic, the space is fitting for Bilsborough's paradoxical compositions of clean white cubes occupied by figures engrossed in rowdy parties and wild orgies.
Beyond our cups of Madarin Orange tea brewed a conversation of Bilsborough’s painstaking process of mathematical and geometric calculation; the role of art history and Alfred Barr in his witty series Looking At Art; the influences of comics and Bauhaus architecture; and the misnomer of his depictions as “pornographic.”
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Nicole J. Caruth: So, I noticed that you have a BA as opposed to a BFA.Michael Bilsborough: I originally enrolled at Columbia as a visual art student and in the first semester decided that I wanted to do philosophy instead…I wanted to study painting and take more drawings classes [too], but I just couldn't get into my schedule. So, after I graduated I decided that in addition to getting a job, I was going to take art classes. I found SVA [School of Visual Arts], where I could get a job and take free classes in the evening. After taking classes for a while I decided to apply to their MFA program…
NC: When you were working on your BA in Philosophy did you draw in your spare time?
MB: Oh yeah – all the time. I’ve been drawing since birth and [whether] inside or outside of classes I was drawing. It comes from a compulsion.
NC: Was drawing your form of stimulation growing up [in the desert of Southern California]?
MB: Yeah, I kept really busy. Despite the kind of suffocation of being in the desert, I don’t remember really ever being bored. My friends and I were really creative and my parents [also] kept us busy. I was really involved in athletics [with] the cross country and track teams. I was [also] addicted to comic books, so my friends and I were always drawing and my friends and I were drawing together [and] making comic books. That’s probably where I really started to learn to draw…not just learn to draw, but to appreciate drawing and images. You would start to find your favorite artist in the comic book world and you would find out what they were doing in 1978 compared to what they were doing [in the present]. You would see the development of their style and how their style would change slightly depending on who they were collaborating with, you would see new shifts in the artist’s hand.
NC: There are quite a few comic exhibitions in New York right now, such as at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Jewish Museum and, of course, the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. How do you feel about comic strips in a museum context?
MB: It’s interesting to put comics into a museum context, because, first of all, the drawings aren’t really made to be originals with a long life—they’re made for reproduction. So, to put them in a museum is more of an archaeological enterprise. I guess it’s more about showing in a museum and the way that [that space] sanctions or reinforces it, prizes it as significant effort and not just a typical Sunday comic.
NC: Now that we’re talking about comic books and I’m looking at your work, I [realize that I] had never seen that influence before, but now I can. I was actually going to ask you if you ever had an interest in architecture, because of the precision with which create these drawings and also everything seems to occur in a room, the home or a very cube-like space?
MB: Definitely. Starting to look at architecture was what really brought this series of drawings into existence. Looking especially at 1930s and 40s architecture coming from Europe, like Gropius and Bauhaus, clean lines and geometric spaces. I started to see how that was different from working with the figure in a lot of ways, because the human body/figure is not clean lines. It’s irregular with odd shapes and textures, so it was interesting to put those together. And certainly I learned a lot from going to see gallery and museum shows where everything happens in a white cube, for the most part—and that white cube is designed to be neutral. It’s not supposed to cast any bias towards the work [depicted]. It’s just a white wall and it’s not really responding to the work happening there. So, I like having these kinds of chaotic inexplicable scenes happening in a room that doesn’t really seem to conspire with what’s happening. Although some of the things that I put in the drawing—a wine bottle, food, clothing—those kind of coincide with the narrative, but the room is really there to structure and to impose more aesthetic geometry on more indulgent biomorphic kinds of shapes.
NC: I started looking at the drawings more closely and realized that these indoor spaces in which the scenes are all taking place lack much furniture. It’s very basic, just a bed or a table…
Let's Just Try It, 2006. Ink on paper. Courtesy the artist.
MC: A lot of times I think of them as staged settings for a production [in which] most of the furniture that appears on stage is only what’s needed. There’s not extra accessory kind of stuff. So, just like the people [or] figures in the drawings fulfill purposes for both the narrative and the composition, in that [same] way the furniture is there to fulfill a purpose, to tell you something about what’s happening, but also as a compositional device. [One of the] points of these drawings is economy, so [I’m] only putting out what I really need to. Architecture organizes space, but it also regulates behavior. It regulates where people move, how they navigate a space [and] how they respond. To look at art in a compressed space is much different than [to look at art in a space] with 20-foot ceilings and 1,000 square-foot rooms.
What’s happening in the drawings are like Bacchanalian parties where it should be unmediated and impeditive, but the space is there to kind of organize what’s happening. Compositionally, it imposes on the space a little, but it’s also like a stand in for rules and regulation. [It’s the] same with the perspective that I use. Most of these drawings have several overlying perspectival systems; it’s really complex and to arrange these takes a few weeks. So, while these parties should just be spontaneous and visceral, the perspectival system governs everything and really controls what can go where, because ultimately it has to make sense; everyone fits into really rational spaces.
NC: And I see [on this sketch] that you have calculations and numbers and it’s so precise.
MB: Yes, geometry and math. I’m all for gestural [and] expressive art, but I think that I can use perspective and calculation for practical purposes to make the picture come together, as part of the concept, [as well] as part of the narrative.
NC: It’s such an interesting contradiction, because when [one] looks at the characters there seems to be no sense of rationale or any sense of rules or boundaries, but when I look deeper into the space, it’s true what you say, even when we think that we’re not, we all function within some kind of predetermined parameters. Do you see the drawings as one continuous narrative or do you see each of them individually?
MB: Individually they’re all absorbing. I usually work on just one at a time. Also, when I work on a drawing, I’m in the world of that drawing. A lot of times, I can look at these and recall the context under which I was making it. I can recall what I was doing outside of the studio in my life, the music I was listening to…they’re like little time capsules. But as a body of work, I see it as a series. It’s not a long narrative from one to the other; they’re more like episodes than a series.
NC: I asked because I was looking at an earlier body of work in which the figures are depicted in white cubes that more resemble museums and galleries with large phallic sculptures as their focal point. There appears to be a very specific narrative at play here and perhaps a critique?
MB: That was a series called Looking at Art. I made that because I was in the first year of my MFA program and to prepare for the program, I did a lot of summer reading [prior]. Once we started I was still reading—old reviews, articles, essays, books—so I was learning a lot about art history and I started to make work that was about that and the way we see it and respond to it. It started with something that came from reading Alfred Barr and he’s part of that hard Modernism that has kind of eroded now, but it was helpful as a way to learn, because [Barr] divided things into Apollonian and Dionysian. Apollonian abstraction was like Mondrian—geometric, more theoretical and planned; Dionysian which was sensual, so, you have Jackson Pollock and [Arshile] Gorky. While no one can cleanly fit into one category or the other, it’s still useful as a device for how [art history] works.
Apollonian Art, 2006. Ink on paper. Courtesy the artist.
So, I decided to create Apollo and Dionysus looking at art and arguing over what they liked and experiencing it together. I was trying to find art that would fit into those two themes, so Apollo liked geometric abstraction, but also Minimalism because it’s all basic forms and it’s mathematical and based on logical consequence. Dionysus didn’t like that because it was too confining… All of this watching people at museums and Sotheby’s auction previews...The way personalities mix, you see people puzzled [or] praising and sometimes it seems really phony and sometimes really genuine. And sometimes you join in either way. I look at art for the theories, the ideas and the craft, but I also like the spectacle, [like] a sporting event or something on the street. Sometimes a big sculpture can be like a performance in the way people experience it on different levels.
NC: Are the characters in your drawings based on people that you know or are they imaginary? Do you ever insert your own image into the drawings?
MB: The characters fulfill narrative and formal purposes. I use the narrative potential of a figure posed or in motion, while also considering its compositional value. A man standing and pointing away works differently in a drawing than a tree with a branch extending out. In the narrative, the figures play roles: the alpha male, the heroine, the defeated, the dominant, the submissive and other ideas. Their purpose or role is more important to me than [their] personality or likeness, so it's kind of synthetic. Of course, their source is my imagination and not a photo or live model, so it's kind of intimate. But for me, autobiography is an insufficient primary motivation for making art.
NC: On your site-specific installations: was To Make the Common House a Home your first attempt at this scale?
MB: Common House was my first wall drawing, done at SVA in 2005. The title and premise of the show was Under Construction, because much of the work was still in progress. But as students, we were also "under construction." So I did a construction site at life-size scale. And my new [current] wall drawing at Sara Tecchia Gallery responds in a similar manner. The show's title [Your Line Is Making Me So Wet Right Now. I Love It.] is sexual, campy and gender-specific, so I try to fuse those ideas into the picture. The murals, or wall drawings, synchronize with the ideas and physical space that surround them—just like designing installations specific to their venue.
NC: How does this change the experience with the drawing? Or, what was your intention moving from paper to wall?
MB: Working at life size opens up new layers of interactivity with the viewer. I can consider real-life eye level, for example, and how the viewer will look up and down, tracking what's up high above them and down low below them. Everything is more theatrical and confrontational. To merely make a big drawing would be predictable. I think the scale itself can be material and a layer of mediation.
NC: Is there a relationship to street art and the idea of impermanence?
MB: I dabbled in graffiti years ago, but always preferred the privacy and enclosure of a bedroom or studio. Anything I now have in common with street art is coincidental. I completed the aforementioned murals fully aware of their impermanence—hence the ironic title of the latest, From Here to Eternity—but I hope to eventually do one meant to last forever, whether it be a Scottish castle or school cafeteria.
NC: Let’s talk about the “elephant in the room”—these orgiastic depictions of indulgence and deprivation, gratification and destruction, which have been referred to as "porn," “sex scenes,” or an interesting description from a press release from Sara Tecchia Gallery, “formalist neo-pornographic drawings.”
MB: Orgies are libidinal, unpredictable and sensual, opposed to the drawing style I use: cerebral, calculated and restrained. That's one reason for the architectural settings, a pictorial surrogate for the way I'm thinking. The pictures are not porn, because the sex acts I draw are usually inscrutable or at least ambiguous, unlike the specificity of porn, and because the pleasure of the sexuality at work is as undermined as it is celebrated. I'm trying to get at things like physical desirability, sexy legs, for example; but also vulnerability and grotesquerie. So if there's porn, there's also a cold shower. Titillation—the main goal of porn—is my last goal. Then again, I can't determine how a viewer will respond.
There's Something You Should Know, 2006. Ink on paper. Courtesy the artist.
NC: What’s the process of transferring from pencil sketch to ink drawing given the meticulousness with which you create the “sketch”? And why ink as opposed to any other medium?
MB: Ink is flexible and direct. I could use enamel, gouache, string, nail polish or Valvoline, but ink just seems natural. The black line is more important than the material. It seems skeletal and arid, and makes you look more at volume and space than light and color.
To use perspective the way I do—lots of vanishing points—requires more space than if the same picture were drawn from a single vanishing point. So I have to start small and then transfer to a larger paper. This enables me to boost the scale and to keep things tidy. The clean, black line is part of the idea, because it's more ascetic, unlike the indulgent things happening in the picture. All the measuring, correcting and transferring is pragmatic because it helps me get to the finished drawing, but it's also aesthetic, like a delay of gratification, holding back a climax. So it's mediation—insulating the completion from its beginning. I can hide my tracks when the paper is clean, which doesn't happen in more "expressive," gestural drawing. Sometimes a drawing or painting is a record of its own progress, or of emotional states, or of decision making, but that doesn't apply here. My finished ink drawing is more like a machine processing pictorial mechanics.
NC: Who are some of the artists that have inspired you or that you think are doing really great work right now?
MB: Boy, there are so many entry points…Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley; Nicole Eisenman; Julie Mehretu; Barnet Newman—I feel like I look at abstract painting more than figure painting, because sometimes you can understand things about the painting itself as an object, but also about the use of space and color…Not to be a prude, but I also look at a lot at Renaissance and Northern Renaissance drawing and painting…
NC: If you’re at all prude it certainly doesn’t come across in the work you produce!
Bilsborough’s work is currently on view at Sara Tecchia Gallery through February 24, 2007 and viewable at LMCC’s Works in Progress Open Studios this Spring.
This conversation was first published on Febraruy 9, 2007 with ...might be good, a project of Fluent~Collaborative.
