An Especial Conversation with James Casebere

James Casebere is an American contemporary artist and photographer living in New York and Canaan, New York. His work is in the collections of and has been shown at major museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Hammer Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum (New York); the Tate Gallery (London); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles); and many others. He has had solo shows at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (Canada); Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (Spain); Museum of Modern Art Oxford (UK); the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art (Ohio); the Indianapolis Museum of Fine Arts (Indiana); and other museums.

His most recent exhibits have been at PS21 Performance Spaces for the 21st Century, Chatham, NY; Daniel Templon Gallery, Paris; Sean Kelly Gallery, New York; Helga de Alvear Gallery, Madrid, Spain; Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE, Cooper Union, NY NY, Miami Design District.

James is the recipient of many awards, including the American Academy in Rome, the Abigail Cohen Rome Prize, the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame Honoree, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Grant, the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts, Visual Arts Fellowship, New York State Council on the Arts: Visual Artists Sponsored Project Grant and more.  

I had the pleasure and honor to ask James questions about the psychological aspects of Architecture when he considers a piece of artwork complete and more.

UZOMAH: What makes creating art poetic?

JAMES: When I began making art as a young artist, I was, of course, influenced by other artists, the work going on around me at the time, the work I had seen as a child, art theory and criticism, and the work I saw in magazines or books. However, I was also very interested in poetry and literature generally. I wanted to construct images that were poetic, that were iconic, and utilized visual symbols and literary, religious, or mythical references. I spent a couple of months in Mexico and immersed myself in Latin American, Magic Realism, and Mexican literature; I was interested in metaphors. I feel that to make successful art; I had to access not only social relations, dynamics, and shared history but personal memory and sensory and emotional experience. This seems to be where the richness of poetic experience lies, in deeply felt emotions.

Caffey’s Inlet Lifesaving Station (Dare County, NC), 2013

U: How do you explore the psychological aspect of how people use spaces and their relationship between sculpture, photography, architecture, and film?

 J: As a member of the first generation raised on TV, I have an unconscious image bank resulting from film. I was also very affected by The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard and his other books, and Museum Without Walls: The Voices Of Silence by Andre Malraux is, in essence, about the way our experience of art and particularly sculpture, is affected by its mediation through reproduction. I was also aware of the dichotomy laid out by Walter Benjamin between the analysis of art versus its aura. I took a political stance in critiquing the way photos are used by totalitarian regimes. But I also embraced a democratization of art, given that most of us experience art through photography, in as much as photographs, prints, and books are more affordable for the average person.

At first, I wanted to avoid the spectacle of the image and the ways in which cinema could manipulate the viewer, embodied by someone like Steven Spielberg, who would pull at the viewer’s heartstrings, and at times reduce the world to good and evil. And I found his films deeply conservative and dangerous for that reason. Perhaps I did not quite get the way he was also addressing psychological issues in some depth. Godard was someone who loved film noir and its uncanny atmosphere but allowed for a kind of critical distance in the way that he employed collage - montage - to draw attention to the “materiality” of the medium through cutting and pasting shots. I loved the way Film Noir embraced the city as a character in the narrative, the city as a place, creating unease or anxiety and fear.

Solo Pavilion for Two or Three, 2020

U: What draws you to make architecturally based models?

J: All of the above. It started with my personal experience of space in the suburbs and the anxiety, and fear, inside my home. Though I loved him and sensed his support, there may have always been a sense of danger around the explosiveness of my father, who was quite introverted. I never knew what he would do next when he might lose his temper and act out at home. This may be where the uncanny comes in.

Red: Orange Solo Pavilion, 2018.

U: What and when do you consider a work of art complete? 

J: A photograph is only done once it is printed, after the color correcting, cropping, retouching, and the final approval at the lab, in its final size. A sculpture is only complete after being installed somewhere, seeing it in relation to its sight and surroundings in its final material form.

Landscape with Houses (Dutchess County, NY) #2, 2009

U: You studied with Siah Armajani as an undergraduate student at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and John Baldessari as a graduate student at Cal Arts. What lessons did each instill in you that you still carry out in your art projects?

J: Siah Armajani was deeply philosophical, very interested in Heidegger, for example, but also in the American metaphysical poets and later pragmatists like John Dewey. He embraced usefulness in art and the American vernacular of the 19th Century. He introduced me to Robert Venturi, and I was particularly impressed with the book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, in which they discussed architecture as a sign system and took issue with the modernist embrace of what he called “Space as God.” (I might expand that to space and light.) This gave me an avenue to trace the history of architecture back to certain core moments, like the origins of the suburb in the Bungalow craze and the Arts and Crafts movement and, before that, Shingle Style Architecture. I kept going back further into history to identify origins and defining moments, like the Enlightenment, for the origins of different cultural institutions. Siah also looked at art as a political project.

Between undergraduate and graduate school, I went to NY to participate in the Whitney Museum Independent Study program, where we had access to conceptual artists, French theory, like structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction, but also the Frankfurt school, embodied by Walter Benjamin and Krakauer. Following that, I went to California and found myself in a laid-back California milieu with a brand of conceptual art that embraced humor and the everyday. John Baldessari was very open and accessible, and the atmosphere was not at all hierarchical. He and the artists he invited were very connected to the European art world, and there was an even more demystifying of the process of being an artist for me than there had been in New York, where we had the opportunity to meet artists in small group seminars. There was a seriousness to NY conceptual art that was rooted in Marxism, but in California, I found a disarming acceptance and the west coast connection to Zen and Eastern philosophy, particularly with John. There was a de-skilling involved in the approach to art and, of course, the elevation of the idea over the object. At CalArts, I appreciated the openness, and acceptance, the learning from my peers, and the relationship to pop culture that was critical but playful.

For more information about James’ artwork, please visit his site and follow him on Instagram.