Harmony Korine, Elizabeth Peyton and Jim Lambie share their wisdom via the New York artist's eponymous monograph
As an artist, DJ, musician and club owner, Spencer Sweeney has become as much a part of New York’s cultural landscape as the towering buildings which dominate its skyline. He first emerged in the city’s art scene in the late 1990s, and has spent the past 25 years painting, working, exhibiting and playing, with a sprawling archive of work, both visual and aural, the result.
Nowadays Sweeney’s ever-evolving network of friends, collaborators and acquaintances is a vital part of his creative practice, so it follows that when it came to putting together his eponymous monograph, published by fellow artist Urs Fischer’s imprint, Kiito-San, he include them too. The resulting tome (a heavy one, at that) intersperses pieces from Sweeney’s extensive archive with extracts from candid conversations with his friends, Larry Clark, Glenn O’Brien and Harmony Korine included: think Andy Warhol’s philosophies, brought with a thud into the modern day. Here, AnOther selects examples of his progressive and playful work, along with extracts from conversations with his talented friends, to educate and entertain.
Harmony Korine on his multi-disciplinary practice…
“My whole life, all I ever wanted to do was everything. Ever since I was a kid and even when I was right out of high school and starting to make films in the early ‘90s, all I ever wanted was to act on urges and not really differentiate so much between one thing and another. What I became known for was my movies, but I was always doing everything. I was doing a lot of stuff more privately. It was more my own thing, and I always liked the idea of a unified aesthetic, or a unified vision. It all comes mostly from the same place and it’s all creation, right?”
Elizabeth Peyton on appropriation in painting…
“There’s a totally natural funnel thing that happens in painting. For instance, you run into someone and they tell you about Handel’s opera Orlando, and you look it up and maybe you take a photo off of your computer screen, and whatever. It’s gone through so many transformations outside of your body and inside of your body, because with painting it gets inside of your body and then comes out through your hand. It’s just like a funnel. It goes from the big end of the funnel into the small part, and it all goes in there. And painting has such an ability to contain so many different layers of time, so even if it’s a painting of, say, a flower, or somebody’s face, or a shoe, or anything, there’s so much other stuff that’s going to be coming into that. I don’t want to say one’s better or worse – but it’s more open. It’s a very open process, how all that stuff goes in there, right? And so magical.”
Jim Lambie on the myth of writer’s block…
“I have to say I never feel as if I’ve ever really got it, or that I have anything particularly to lose. I honestly feel like I’m inside something that I’m either doing or not doing. And in terms of physically making a piece for a show, I feel like I’m always inside potentially and I fucking love that thing. I’ve never understood writer’s block. I’ve I’ve never been afraid of anything like that because for me it’s never about anything that externalised. I think I can only do what it is I do, within the parameters of what’s available. So everything is that thing. Everything has potential. I think writer’s block is getting caught up too much indie your own publicity.”
Spencer Sweeney is out now, published by Kiito-San.
