Conversation between Andrew Falkowski and Greg Lamarche in Swindle Quarterly No. 5
How is it that two artists can arrive at a similar aesthetic place from extremely different paths? New Yorker Greg Lamarche’s graffiti past brought him an appreciation for letter design and composition. As a graduate student at CalArts, Los Angeles artist Andrew Falkowski wanted a way to paint that drew attention to the ideas behind the work as opposed to the work itself, and settled on lettering. Both artists similarly collage their letters into compositions, despite entirely different processes, media, and rationales. Neither one had heard of the other, so we introduced them to one another.
Andrew: When I went to the Track 16 gallery and saw your show there (Other Possibilities, featuring Greg, Craig Costello, Andrew Schoultz, and Alicia McCarthy), I was kind of blown away by how well made they were, how precisely cut and put together.
Greg: Well, I don’t want them to be too tight. I guess sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t.
A: The ones that I was stuck on the most were the word ones. I was wondering – I did skate graphics and knew some people who did a little graffiti, though not that well or seriously – what is your interest in joining the quote – unquote ‘proper’ art world?
G: Well, I was drawing ever since I could hold a crayon, and both of my parents were art history majors. They brought me to these kind of graffiti-legendary shows in the early 1980s- the Fun Gallery, the Graffiti Above Ground show, and Fashion Moda. We would go when I was about 12 or 13. Then I got more serious and began writing on trains. But also, in 1981, when I was about 11, I started doing collage. Where we lived in Queens, my mother has a little studio and she would do things like neighborhood catalog collage work, cut out and pasted, but real printing – the way design was done before computer. Through her, I definitely knew about Joseph Cornell, Robert Motherwell, and Kurt Schwitters. Then I really got into graffiti and wrote on the trains. That and fireworks! I was really into fireworks as a kid, and I would use the remnants of the blown up wrappers. As I went to college at Franklin Pierce in New Hampshire, a lot of the art teachers took me under their wing.
A: Collage was also something I was interested in, with all the culture of resistance it represented, such as John Heartfield’s hyper-political anti-Nazi work in the 1930s and 1940s. Collage was a visual form with this culture of dissonance. And it seems a little similar with graffiti.
G: There is an interesting parallel there with us.
A: When I started doing these collage paintings, I was about to have my first anniversary of being married, was about to turn 30, and about to graduate school, and I didn’t feel like there was this definitive mark of what an artist was. I kind of felt like maybe if I have a master’s degree I would have arrived. All these benchmarks were dovetailing together and I didn’t feel like I had a better sense of self. That led me to look at the things that I identified with when I was coming up, and so I looked the influences around me, things like music, even the lyrics. That, combined with the ransom note, which to me was this weird symbol intended to command experience even when you’re hiding your identity, was really interesting.
G: It’s a lot of money and a lot of years –
A: The Beach Boys’ Smile album influenced me with these weird connotations, hyper-produced pop culture, proto-sampling aesthetic. There’s this anti-art dissonance with collage, like sampling in a way, as opposed to an original gesture like Jackson Pollack. A DJ friend of mine and I have talked about sampling, and how a lot of artists now start with a template, something such as letters – a framework. In the last few years, artists have become kind of editors of the world around them with sampling. You’re taking samples from the context around working. The lyrics I use in my paintings are from songs I listened to growing up. I use letters from fashion magazines, or from the packaging of foods I eat.
G: Do people get real literal on it?
A: Yeah, they do. People try sometimes to figure out where the letters came from, like ‘Oh, there’s a Hershey’s H.’ I haven’t designed my own letters for a while; it’s kind of one of my conceptual rules.
G: And that’s funny because that’s so diametrically opposed to the principle of graffiti!
A: So how do you negotiate graffiti and the fine art world?
G: I try to bring the fine art sensibility to the table, but also that movement of cutting out letters freehand. There’s nothing that can compare to being out in the street, no. Graffiti is oversaturated now, though, and I’m kind of more interested in people who can really rise to the top and do something new with it. Pushing the envelope is what’s interesting to me. Graffiti is like jazz: it’s an American art form that’s changed the world. It’s this fucked-up marriage between beauty and vandalism, and it’s tremendously inspiring!
A: Pop art, as well, seemed to represent what the U.S.A. was careening towards, and is careening towards. Do you consider the gallery space really loaded with politics, and does it affect how you do things?
G: I worked at an art shipper for many years, doing very big international shows and then as an art handler for many years, and for me I have what I consider a very well rounded sense of what’s going on in the gallery setting, from a number of angles. Art galleries want to be able to market some real closed-system shit-
A: Oh yeah.
G: And where I’m coming from is graffiti, the competitive sport. And your peers are not the people you necessarily care about in a gallery setting, but you have to have a presence and keep it new and fresh. I missed out on the art school process of critiques, but in my own way I became my own harshest critic. I want to present letters in a way that’s completely new, and that’s why I want to avoid the ransom look.
A: One of the reasons I made a beeline towards ransom notes is that they were such a schmaltzy image in culture – ‘I’ve got your baby!’
G: A lot of people are unsure what it is when they see my collage work online. Maybe my process won’t be such a cycle later, but for now it is. I gather and collect a lot of stuff, both materials and ideas, for letterforms. I’ll have ideas of letters in my head, and I’ll cut 250 to 800 letters out freehand with an X-acto blade, clean them up a bit with scissors. Then I’ll lay them all out on a table, pull letters out for one piece or another, and leave then unglued and in place, and maybe a few weeks or a few months later I’ll glue them down. Depending on the size, they may take as little as six hours to glue down, or maybe as much as a week – some collages have close to a thousand pieces. I pretty much use everything: X-acto blades, razors, scissors, and hole punchers. I actually just discovered that craft store Michael’s, and while lots of what they have there is corny-
A: You can do such cool stuff with crafty materials!
G: And you can buy glass etch bath there! How do you end up going about making your paintings?
A: I’ll make a proper collage, then a color copy of it, project it, and trace it. What I end up with is this cartoon of the collage, but then burnish it onto the painting. Then I mix the colors, and in American print media there are only a few yellows and blues used. They end up dead flat; they could be a poster, almost. I use that flat and reserved surface to augment the ransom note aesthetic, but I like how it contradicts the melodramatic emotion of the song lyric that I’m painting. With the ransom notes, there is a real specific art background – anti-gesture. I want to take out the hand, but at the same time master making things.
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 at Rosamund Felsen Gallery
*PLEASE NOTE: OUR EXHIBITION WILL CONTINUE TILL DEC. 30, 05'
Andrew Falkowski
New Paintings
Kim MacConnel
Rate of Exchange
November 19 – December 30, 2005
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Rosamund Felsen Gallery is pleased to announce Andrew Falkowski’s second solo exhibition, which includes new diamond shaped and diptych text-based paintings.
Departing from the previous combative Ransom Notes series, the current exhibition is his third series of highly colorful text-based paintings. Falkowski’s collage aesthetics conjure references to early modernist abstraction with his formal re-organization of the grid and his use of the punk/pop song lyrics. Influenced by pop and dub song structures, Falkowski incorporates these sources into the modernist grid with a sense of play. Patterning, breaks, recursive forms and loops within the grid act as counterpoints to the introspective lyrics, suggesting personal examination. The initial read of the text is not simple, further complicating the viewers’ relationship to the work.
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In Rosamund Felsen Gallery’s side gallery, Kim MacConnel will be presenting a new series of collage and watercolor drawings entitled Rate of Exchange. MacConnel’s new work investigates the representation of the American military through the use of uncut paper currency. These collages are a specific critique of the current administration post 9/11 handling of events leading up to, and including, the invasion of Iraq.
Visualizing these events and images through the simple manipulation of paper currencies of U.S., Iraq, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Syria, Vietnam, France, and Germany & others, opens up the historic and current critical discussion to the directness of the role that money plays internationally. Nationalism is clearly depicted on currencies of many developing countries, including Iraq. MacConnel’s collages allude to American involvement in Iraq, historically and currently.
A folded origami airplane made from a Saudi Arabian one riyal note picturing King Abdullah's gaze flies over a U.S. twenty dollar note image of the White House, conveying two events of the pre and post 9/11 historical record simultaneously. Likewise, an Iraqi one dinar note picturing Saddam Hussein is folded like a fan explosion beneath an image of an American Humvee composed from one dollar bills. Here the rate of exchange is rendered even by undervaluing both the preparation for war and the intensity of the reactionary insurgency.
Please join us for the artist’s reception on Saturday November 19, 2005 from 5 – 7 pm.
Gallery hours are 10-5:30, Tuesday-Saturday.
For more information please contact Bari Ziperstein at 310.828.8488
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at Rosamund Felsen Gallery by Jody Zellen of Artweek
To the delight of the want-to-be detective, Andrew Falkowski’s paintings require deciphering. A colorful montage of appropriated letterforms clutter his canvases. Each letter has been carefully reproduced from media sources ranging from candy wrappers to store logos to miscellaneous advertisements. They are then painted on the canvas to spell out lyrics from pop songs. The painted letters are cropped within irregular rectangles and assembled on the canvas mimicking the format, but not the anonymity, direness and demands of a ransom note. As if to undermine easy communication, the paintings are difficult to read: The letters sometimes overlap each other, dramatically change size, or directional flow.
Falkowski’s works use phrases from songs by bands such as the Smiths, Stone Roses, the Clash, Creation, Eminem, Public Enemy, Oasis, Fucking Champs, Germs and Guided by Voices. Well aware how the punk movement used the ransom-note format as part of their graphic style, he is careful not to quote directly from their aesthetic, yet, like Sid Vicious, et al., Falkowski chooses lyrics that confront the viewer (or reader) directly. For example in Self-titled (Maybe you’re gonna …), the letters spell out the phrase “maybe you’re gonna be the one that saves me.” Each letter has its own color, form typeface and shape. The red “m” that opens the phrase is below a blue “A” within a yellow rectangle. The “m” is curvy and flowing while the “A” is more authoritative. Each letter occupies its own space and, while most are oriented along the vertical access, some are placed at off angles to aid the flow of the reading. But because Falkowski plays with the formal arrangement and overlaps the letters, the words are difficult to read. Nevertheless, the works do speak to the viewer who, without knowing the originating lyrics, might be at a loss to decipher and evaluate Falkowski’s quotes. But the whole song is less Falkowski’s concern than how that phrase translates in the context of the exhibition and in relation to the other paintings.
Most of the phrases are excerpts from a longer dialogue. In Self-titled (I don’t trust…), the letters are collages over a large question mark that occupies the right side of the composition. The phrase reads: “I don’t trust you why should you trust me?” What is going on in this painting? In this song? Similarly, in Self-titled (I don’t have…), the graphic forms of the letters seduce the viewer into the composition. The phrase “I don’t have to sell my soul…its already in me” emerges from studying the canvas. It’s easy to get lost in the orange “S” intertwined in the purple pattern that surrounds it or to marvel at the richness of the colors or the strength of Falkowski’s painted line. Yet the artist is asking for more. His work engages with the viewer on multiple levels. At the same time that it seduces, it also accursed and threatens. “Well I’ve never asked for the truth but you have lied to me,” declares one painting. Another states: “Ask me why and I'll spit in your eye.”
Through these painted collages, Falkowski enters into a dialogue with graphic design, with pop bands as well as with the audience he wants to buy the works. He successfully appropriates the precedents, and by transforming song lyrics into ransom-style notes that are beautifully and carefully painted, he demands that his creations are to be seen and valued as high art. Or else.
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 "Black and White and Grey All Over
The Paintings of Paul Morrison," by Andrew Falkowski
I prefer the Magic Kingdom to the great outdoors. This is probably due to the few but consistently bad experiences I’ve had camping. Whether it was a bear or Eagle Scout attack, eating soggy pop tarts, sleeping in leaky tents, or stepping into makeshift shit-pits, I’ve never felt at one with nature au naturel. This is not any great surprise, considering my relationship to public spaces generally owes more to Imagineers arbitrary pre-set signifiers than my coming to terms with the specific requirements of my contingency in a foreign context, whether it’s America the beautiful or the mall of America. But one might say that this conditioning has not rendered a specific kind of experience of nature, as foreign, so much as I have become a perpetual foreigner in all environments, knowledgeable of them through general terms as mediated fields. So while I cannot exist in the woods, I have an understanding of what they are supposed to look like. Space, then, exists as a stereotype of itself. This is a little alienating, but it does provide a kind of distanced recognition. It is the quirkiness of this recognition that initially interested me in Paul Morrison’s landscape paintings.
Morrison designs these scenes by depicting trees, flowers, and bushes in various ways. These images are a conglomeration of signifiers oddly co-existing in a floating amalgam. Photographic silhouettes of shrubs sprout cartoon flowers. Graphic tree forms are lost, melting into the forest’s abstract patterning. But they do not accrue to proffer landscape pictures so much as make the cursory designation landscape, all within the discursive realm of these mediated filters. The space is tight, implied through scale and placement on the two dimensional surface. Early modernists took this strategy from Japanese ukiyo-e prints as a way to wriggle out of the confines of traditional Westerns perspectives. The top of the canvas indicated the background while the bottom of the canvas implies foreground. Horizon lines bisect the flat white liminal field into land and sky, but there are few recessional lines tracking into the distance. Scale seems to be the primary illusion of depth. Larger flora are in the foreground while smaller flora recede. And the varying widths of bush, tree and flower outlines push some things back and other things forward. The thicker the outline, the closer the object. Considering how integrated these paintings are with human perceptual relationship to the subject manner, there is a chilly isolation to the paintings. Fences not only act as compositional breaks and structures, they suggest the art historical precedents that define the conceptual issues at hand. These paintings look as if Morrison ventures onto Roy Lichtenstein’s wildlife ponderosa, depicting an originating referent of ersatz perception in order to depict an Eden without moral anthropomorphism. They are pastoral scenes without psychology.
These paintings are painfully cool. They are nature schematized. It is this schematic designation, particularly his use of such a reductive color palette that is the crux of their potency. By using the essentialist tones, black and white, Morrison seemingly forfeits the pictorial realm of color to the discursive sign values of language. As un-mixed signs, these two colors are thought to be dialectical in their capacity to omit the cosmetic rhetoric of painting’s misrepresentation of misrepresentation (a picture being the bad copy of nature, which is itself a fallacy according to Plato). In an effort to deduce what is best, color, suspect by virtue of its cosmetic sophistry, is simply not used. But in this instance, these paintings cannot be said to be mimetic fallacy of illusory deceits. Morrison uses black and white to depict rhetorical signs that reflect the diasporadic nature of formulated reality based in mediated representation. These paintings represent nothing but the perceptual language available to present things in contemporary society. These paintings screw with the notion that a painting of nature is a facsimile of an illusion. Instead of ‘reifying’ representation, Morrison uses the complex web of language to create an odd kind of ‘natural’ representation. His images of nature filtered un-naturally.
Composing a picture with a diasporadic array of styles of signification coming from botanical encyclopedias, coloring books, cartoons and clip art, Morrison’s work creates an interesting resistance to integrated formal and pictorial landscapes. His paintings depict nature through mediated fields that equalizes all signs values as equally foreign. These signs collectively proffer a generalized depiction of “nature” that embodies the distance painting and people may have come from their roots. Queasy and fake, they are nature re-contextualized as a foreign, though recognizable, stereotype which has little to do with romance or the atavism of nature being an originating referent. In topsy-turvy fashion, he switches it so that nature refers to culture. By doing this, he maintains a tricky balance between visual illusion and ontological rigor in order to present an interestingly contemporary view on a traditional genre.
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 at Rosamund Felsen Gallery: Press Release "Ransom Notes", 2004
For immediate release:
The upcoming exhibition at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery will be:
Andrew Falkowski
“Ransom Notes”
October 16 —November 13, 2004
Rosamund Felsen Gallery is proud to present Andrew Falkowski in his first one artist show. Andrew is a recent graduate of Cal Arts and is presenting a series of highly colorful text based paintings entitled “Ransom Notes.”
Traditionally the ransom note is used as an anonymous vehicle to state demands. The format was also co-opted by the punk movement as a way of d.i.y. graphic design and collage. Andrew quotes both meanings. He uses the ransom note’s idea of anonymity as a screen behind which he places the more subjective meanings of his narratives. The initial read of the narratives is simple, they are song lyrics, however taken accumulatively, this body of work speaks very specifically to an intimate relationship between the viewer and the work.
Please join us for the artist’s reception on October 16, 2004 from 5—7pm.
Gallery hours are 10—5:30, Tuesday—Saturday.
For more information please contact Bari Ziperstein at 310.828.8488
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