Erik La Prade interviews artist Peter Young

Mr. Young’s retrospective and first solo exhibition opens at P. S. 1 on June 24th and stays open through September 10, 2007. The exhibit will feature 25 works and survey two decades of the artist’s career from 1963 to 1980. Mr. Young first came to New York in 1960 to study art history at N.Y.U. The artist studied painting for six months at The Art Students League with Steven Green and Estaban Vicente. He graduated in 1963 and went on to work for the Pace Gallery. In 1965, he exhibited a painting in a group show at the A. M. Sachs Gallery. His first solo show was at the Nicolas Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles in 1968 and his work was also included in…

Eric LaPrade: How do you feel about your show at P. S. 1?

Peter Young: I’m honored. It’s going to be a huge thrill for me, these paintings of mine in very diverse groups, and all together in one space. I had imagined a show where you’d go from gallery to gallery and it would appear as if you were seeing the work of different artists. That’s what I’m going to be able to achieve there. It will be like a show of seven artists. So, you’ll go from room to room and each room will contain a distinct type of work, completely different from what you’ll see in the next room.

ELP: I’m looking at a reproduction of a painting of yours, #30 from 1968, and I notice that you worked very large.

PY: I was trying to. I would have liked to work even larger. I was really challenged by size, and capable of creating large works, but was also limited by the doors in my studio and the size of my hallway and stairwells.

ELP: And maybe nobody would buy them.

PY: I didn’t have any worry about that because there were a lot of people around making paintings bigger than I was. Then, I made really tiny works, too. Have you been able to do any research on my career, to come up with any other information about me?

ELP: No. I’ve been trying to pull together material but it’s difficult to find.

PY: Have you been able to talk to any of my friends?

ELP: I spoke to one person about your work, Jean Noel Herlin.

PY: The archivist?

ELP: Yes. We were talking about a three-dimensional piece you made. It was in the “High Times” show, and Jean Noel was describing it as being aboriginal.

PY: A small painting stretched over ponderosa pine branches like an Amerind shield?

ELP: Yes.

PY: I don’t think of it as three-dimensional. I think of it as almost-not-a-painting.

ELP: It struck me as a painting.

PY: Are you familiar with the boxes I made in 1965?

ELP: A little bit.

PY: They were small boxes with dots on the front, but also on the sides. I don’t think of them as sculptures either.

ELP: My impression is that you went toward primitive art because it was the real basis for abstract work.

PY: You’re so right. I never thought of that.

ELP: I mean, that’s the real abstraction.

PY: I know what you mean. My great mentors, my painting and spiritual teachers, Lee and Luchita Mullican, collected so-called primitive art. As a teenager, I was around it whenever I spent time with them. They treated those objects with tremendous reverence and most of them were religious objects.

ELP: I recently saw the Outsider Art Show at the Puck Building in February, and there’s a religious element running through a lot of the work. The point I’m making is pure in the same way that tribal art is pure. It’s just put down for whatever reason, and there it is.

PY: I tend to agree with you.

ELP: Do you still feel you’re an abstract painter in that tradition?

PY: Oh sure.

ELP: That’s amazing that you have that continuity because people might say, well, he changed his style here and there, but you’re saying that it’s all one.

PY: Frankly, my game plan was to change styles here and there. Repeatedly. I’d figure out something smart and beautiful and do it for a while. Then, I sort of go into repose and don’t think about it, and after a bit, I start from a new place and do something as different as possible from what I’d been doing.

ELP: You’ve said that you only had two dealers in New York: Richard Bellamy and Leo Castelli. Do you feel you had the best possible situation?

PY: I did, yes. I was totally satisfied with them. I’m a Californian, so I also had a relationship with Nick Wilder, which was very important to me. I had a show with Wilder in 1968, which took care of my west coast thing. I also had a German dealer, Rolfe Ricke, who sold a lot of art for me.

ELP: Do you want to make a comment on the art world today?

PY: No. I’ve assiduously not thought about the art world since I left New York. I fully experienced the art world for ten years. I came to town with Twyla and the two of us were like golden children. We quickly met Ray Johnson and he took a shine to us and started sending us collages. We started going to Fluxus events and Judson events, and lots of poetry readings and dance concerts.

ELP: Did you go to Warhol’s studio?

PY: Yes.

ELP: What did you think of that?

PY: I thought it was kind of glamorous. One went to the homes of beautiful people a lot. There were parties thrown by rich people, and there was kind of an edge of glamour with all the grunge.

ELP: Did you think the glamour was covering up all the drugs and other things going on.

PY: Yes, if you want to look at it like that. At the time, I was intensely critical of the art world, intensely critical of the whole system. It appalled me, really.

Morally. I titled several paintings, CAPITALIST MASTERPIECE. And along with success I saw too much in-fighting and back-stabbing.

ELP: You saw the art world politics in action.

PY: I thought of it as a highly effective filtering system that functioned very well. But I can’t speak for it anymore. Now, I can’t even comprehend it.

ELP: The art world got to be so big.

PY: And so fast. And so rich. Like it’s been industrialized. So, artists like myself, from a generation that used hand tools and made our own stretchers. Now, people are spending large sums of money to create spectacular installations. But New York is far from my interests and concerns. I haven’t had a foot in it for a long time. I don’t know. I mean, I’m having a show at P. S. 1. So, if I wanted to really fuck off I could start going around the world and hanging out at art fairs. But, I’m absolutely not going to do that. Or, I have to watch out and make sure I’m not going to do that!

The point I’d like to make is that the art world was, and is, a matter of a intense friendships. When I think of the art world in my days, I don’t remember it as a place where people were fighting it out for fame, but as a place where a group of friends loved each other. I think that’s really hard for people to understand. We were all these isolated souls and what we really wanted was community. The idea of being a community was so needed and so potent, so we functioned like a community. When we lost people overboard, it was sad for the whole community. When somebody made a beautiful show, it was like “There you go. You’re on our team.”

ELP: Community was the most primary support.

PY: Absolutely. You and your friends were what it was all about. The fact that everybody was making art was almost secondary to all these humans, crashing around downtown, late at night usually.

ELP: It must have been wide open in some ways.

PY: We were taking acid in 1964, and it was real Ousley acid that came from the Bay Area. A group of us would drop it and go around the city with no fear that anyone would know we were high. We knew that absolutely no one had any idea about psychedelic drugs.

ELP: 1964 is very early.

PY: Very early. But see, acid came into the lives of a lot of abstract painters at that time. It was common throughout the whole community. And I think it had a great deal to do with the beauty and the mystery of the art.

ELP: Doing LSD?

PY: Yes. I really think so. At the same time, people were reading all the great spiritual literatures. You know, I’ve managed to not say things publicly or write statements. Or, the few things I have written are very hard to find. But one of my few statements written in the early 70s was in answer to a request from ART FORUM magazine. It was polling a whole bunch of artists over the question, “Is painting dead?” It published a group of responses to that question, but didn’t publish my response. In that statement, I said that I considered all the abstract painters of my generation to be religious painters. I said something like “the absolutism we are insisting upon is very akin to the religious experience.” It’s a very important statement. I basically said that all the very good painters were making religious art but didn’t even know it.

ELP: Maybe that statement is still in their files, turning yellow.

PY: Most of my other statements were pretty off-the-wall. I did say once that I was a surrealist.

ELP: You don’t have to be held captive by things you said 20 years ago. The show which recently closed, “HIGH TIMES, HARD TIMES: PAINTING IN NEW YORK, 1967-1975,” starts in the year 1967, but from what I have read, I get the impression this style of work actually began earlier, maybe around 1965.

PY: Absolutely.

ELP: So, why the year 1967 was chosen as a starting date is curious to me.

PY: The curators also stretch it too far into the 1970s, for my taste.

ELP: In 1963, the Park Place Gallery began and represented a total break from the Pop Art concept and commercial selling.

PY: The Park Place gallery felt like home to us. First of all, it was located downtown and that gave it a useful feeling, being right there. It was a haven for about a dozen really good abstract artists. But none of the artists in the Park Place Gallery were actually part of my painter gang.

ELP: Your gang being?

PY: A group of friends that got together in 1964, and by 1965 were painting ambitiously. I’m talking about a gang of friends that didn’t only include painters but also included poets and dancers. I’m talking about my immediate group of friends which was like a mini-community. It also included, for instance, Tex Wray, the carpenter, who built stretchers for a lot of us. Some of the group didn’t make a career in art, they were just friends. So, it was a group of very, very young artists, some of whom were right on the edge of real breakthroughs, we felt.

ELP: Did you feel the Pop movement was too oppressive?

PY: No. We were too involved in being abstract painters, working in this very severe language which we were exploring.

ELP: Did you feel you were working under the oppressive Abstract Expressionist shadow?

PY: Not at all. We were continuing the achievement of Abstract Expressionism. We all felt totally at home in the art of Pollock, Newman and Rothko. That art was like the Holy Grail for us.

ELP: The catalogue for the “HIGH TIMES” show gives a different impression.

PY: The curators of the show had an agenda which they call Experimental Art. We never said to each other ‘we’re making Experimental Art’ when we were making art. To experiment implies a trial and error procedure, as if we were just poking around. We were absorbed in making abstract paintings, and we were turned on by each other’s work. So this experimental premise the curators had, led them to select a lot of art which is literally ‘off the wall.’ There are a lot of objects, but a limited number of actual paintings. Their premise was that we were trying to get away from painting by making these experiments.

ELP: Because painting was considered to be dead.

PY: Right. But we absolutely never for a second worried about painting being considered dead. For us, that was perfect. That meant we were working out of a void.
ELP: You went back to zero.

PY: Right. There we were. We saw that Poons and Stella had already made brilliant moves out of that great Abstract Expressionist ovoid. We had these two artists just ahead of us, and the fact that people were making sculpture like Robert Morris and Don Judd didn’t interest us. We weren’t tempted by sculpture or getting off the wall. We were only challenged by painting. The show makes it look as if the painters were trying to do anything but paint. There are, however, some wonderful paintings in the show: Dan Christiensen’s painting was stunning. I liked the soft spray paintings of Jane Kaufman and Larry Stafford. Also I thought the paintings by David Diao and Jack Whitten were terrific.

ELP: In January 1967, Art in America published a round-up questionnaire, Sensibilities of the Sixties, proposed by Barbara Rose and Irving Sandler. They wrote in the first paragraph: “Today it seems difficult for artists to talk to each other in any spot more public than the studio. There are no more places where art-conscious people meet regularly like the old Club, The Cedar Street Tavern, such uptown galleries as Parsons, Kootz, Egan, Stable, or the Tenth Street Cooperative, downtown. The art world has grown too large and too fragmented for artists to maintain personal contacts in all sectors." Looking back, do you think that’s valid?

PY: Later there was an explosion, but in our time the art world was like an ocean liner, as Robert Motherwell said, and we were all on a cruise together. It felt like we were all part of one community. It wasn’t fragmented. It hadn’t gone out of control.

ELP: There were clear lines of communication?

PY: I think so. Everyone was hanging out together – the artists, the curators, the critics and poets. It was one community, the art world.

ELP: Reading them now, some of the written responses in this questionnaire are interesting. Roy Lichtenstein wrote; “There is no avant guard today.” Whereas, Allan Kaprow writes, “Yes, there is an avant guard today.” While Dan Flavin writes, “My dictionary does not connect sensibility to art.” Judging from these varied responses, some people were in favor of whatever was happening and others were not.

PY: I think I left New York because of a lot of sui-critical fights. I went there young, I did what I wanted to do, I figured it out, as it were, and then I got out of there because I didn’t want to engage in critical dialogue with anybody.

ELP: Which is exactly what this long published piece from 1967 is, a critical dialogue.

PY: Mostly, that time for me in New York was one of not splitting hairs. The artists themselves didn’t give a shit about splitting hairs, or about what anybody else was doing or saying. I don’t think the show or catalogue gives a very good picture of the times. First of all, we were totally lily-white. We weren’t concerned in trying to figure out where our black brothers and sisters were. And we weren’t very intrigued by Europeans and didn’t really like them. And as far as women were concerned, it was an all-male club. It really was the severe, abstract painting thing. But people are right in understanding that somehow Lee Lozano broke that barrier. Lee was the one woman who knew many of the painters intimately, and had a studio life together with them.

ELP: What about Joan Synder or Dorothea Rockburne?

PY: Not within my immediate community, but sure. But I didn’t personally know either of these women. I got out of there so fast. In 1969 I was out of there and they were just getting rolling

ELP: Perhaps the worst we can say about the HIGH TIMES show is it was a show with an academic point of view.

PY: That makes me squirm. That’s all. I would have liked to have seen more actual paintings by these same artists. That would have stunned people.

ELP: Stunned people in what sense?

PY: Just because of the glorious beauty of the number of paintings these artists produced in their careers. To me, painting during that period is glorious, psychedelic, meditative and religious.

ELP: In 1995, Ronnie Landfield organized a show called “SEVEN PAINTERS” at the Nicholas Alexander gallery. It exhibited some of the same painters from the same period as the HIGH TIMES show, but it has a different sensibility.

PY: Ronnie Landfield is one of the great polemists and street fighters for abstract painting of our time. And, he’s a good writer. I totally trust his point of view on the history and importance of about 50 to 75 1960s painters. He recognizes and celebrates their achievement.

ELP: I saw Ronnie’s show and I liked it very much. It was exactly what you’re talking about – the glorious sense of painting. So the HIGH TIMES show was misleading because they leave out so much.

PY: Yes. And by doing so, they left out some of our very good friends, with Ronnie heading the top of the list. However, the woman’s work in that show looked very, very good, I think, compared to the men. I thought, “Oh my God!” We were all just hanging out with the boys and here were all these great spirits all around us. So, from a feminist point of view they did a great job.

ELP: I was a little puzzled to see Carolee Schneemann and Yayoi Kusama videos in the show.

PY: Yes, they could have made room for other painters. However, the whole period was charged by so much cross-fertilization between dance, music, theater, technology, painting and sculpture. A lot of collaborations were going on simultaneously but were not dealt with in the show. It’s not even implied by this show. But the show “HIGH TIMES HARD TIMES” has opened up a dialogue.