David Humphrey is a New York artist who has shown nationally and internationally. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize among other awards. An anthology of his art writing, Blind Handshake, was published by Periscope Publishing in 2010. He teaches in the MFA program at Columbia and is represented by the Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, NY.

QUESTION:

There is a tension in your work between fakery and authenticity. Your frequently quote over-used, sentimental, cliched imagery and work to reinvigorate their emotional credibility. And you also quote painting techniques such as freehand expressionist brushstrokes which used to signify honesty but empty them of their genuineness. Ultimately, your playful entanglement of the fake and the authentic is a sympathetic reflection on the vagaries of contemporary life. Our relationship to the fake and the authentic has changed because of the present administration and the pandemic. In our public life, what is true and what is false are issues of life and death. I am wondering what you think about that dilemma. Do you feel your work changing in response?

ANSWER:

Attack, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 60×72

It was liberating for me as a young artist to see all artworks as rhetorical, or as social beings that want something. The language of painting is porous to so many crafted perspectives that parsing fake from authentic didn’t seem very rewarding and perhaps even got in the way of adventurous growth. The performative side of painting could be understood as a type of acting. In school I absorbed the hermeneutics of suspicion (Nietzsche, Marx, Freud and their heirs) to feel like it was possible to see through cultural forms and achieve critical distance. The risk, though, was that some of the juice could be drained from the crazy energy it takes to make new paintings year after year. I prefer thinking of the artist as charlatan, trickster or rebel. We engage a wily craft of dissembling, disassembling and reassembling.

On the Ground, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 72×60

The political application of this is not obvious. Everything about our current administration inflames my nausea, anger and mortal sadness every day. Social protest movements make me happy and should continue forever. My newest work has the police as its principle subject and is an attempt to drive my feelings about authority into a topic with massive public consequences. It’s a paradoxical challenge, though, to make a work with authority and power in the service of undoing authority and power. I began working with these themes a few months before the pandemic and BLM uprising (the issues with policing and social justice are appallingly old). My instinct during the first phase of protests was to pause because the gap between art and life felt so huge and insistent, that art seemed reduced to something puny and whiney. Perhaps art needed to be a simple witness, doomed and provisionally free. Yet somehow, weird strengths emerge from this swamp of weakness. What are they? I guess some of what I felt all along: the power to reflect and expand consciousness, to push language and culture into new thought-forms, to imagine and reimagine freedom, to resist the oppressive machinery of business-as-usual and, as you said, to reinvigorate the over-used and cliché.

Subdued Demonstrator, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 44×54