Artist Profile: AJ Fries

BuffaloVibe: I've read how the Albright-Know Art Gallery played a big role in exposing you to the arts at a young age. Was it there where you learned that art could be more than just decoration?

A.J. Fries: The best part is that I never thought art could be just decoration because art hit me when I was a kid. I was nine or ten years old and going to the library—the kids my age would go to the kids' section and I would go to the adult section. I'd get these giant—in my mind they were these giant books, but they were just large monographs of artists. I would walk home with my arms full of these things and just lie on top of these books and pore over them.

So I never even thought of them as decoration. I didn't even know what decoration was per se as far as how it affected art. I just knew that these things were amazing and I couldn't get enough. It was a drug. It was the closest thing—at least to a nine year old—to a drug. Other than, you know, Dimetapp. I was hooked from the get-go.

I can't even remember the first time I went to the Albright, but I thought it was a magical place. I was a horrible dork, especially for art stuff. My fiancé says she would love to have known me as a kid. But I was an art dork. I would imagine, because I'd see these pictures of artists in the 60s and whatever hanging out in their suits and their little skinny ties and all that shit and I'd picture—especially in the newer building of the Albright-Knox [built in 1962 by architect Gordon Bunshaft]—myself at that time in 1964 at a gallery opening where everyone is doing the champagne thing and talking to cool people. I'm like nine years old! I didn't know what the hell I was talking about or even thinking. I've been lost since then.

Were you drawn specifically to painting or was it art in general?

Yeah. I mean, sculpture [too], yes. When I was a kid I didn't know what new media was. Fuck, I still don't know what new media is. But, yeah, that was sort of my thing. I'm not sure why it was. I've always liked sculpture; I've just never been really good at it. Fuck, I don't even think I'm good at painting right now.

It's always been painting. Even though the first piece that I saw that scared the shit out of me was a sculpture, an installation: Ed Kienholz's The State Hospital [1966]. Just [explosion sound]. That was it. "This is terrifying me. I don't know why this is terrifying me. It's just a picture in a book of two figures and it's nightmarish."

But, yeah. It's always been painting. Andy Warhol because he had the same name as me—okay, I'm a self-involved little kid. "He's got the same name as me. That's great! He's a painter? I'm a painter! That's what I'm going to do!" Basically I started there.

With Warhol, was seeing how he was using these mundane objects kind of a springboard into the stuff you've done?

Yes. But thinking back then I didn't even know what a mundane object was. He was connecting with me like, "I have Campbell's Soup. I've seen a Brillo box. And now it's a sculpture, a painting." I think, "That's great!" It's really indescribable.

I've sort of had that current going through my stuff. I kind of put things that are either ignored or taken for granted [and say], "No, this is neat. This plastic bottle …"

I've always hated people who need to jump off buildings—adrenaline junkies. How boring must their lives be if the only thing that excites them is to almost die every day? Fuck you. I can—this [rustling with a reflective plastic bag nearby]. I'm interested in this wrapping. Months, I could spend on that. But then the introspective me thinks, "Why are you judging them? They're probably saying how your life is horrible."

If you can't find something interesting in something mundane then you're going to be bored. And I don't think there's such thing as a boring situation, just a boring person.

Something like that plastic wrapping, do you just see it and think, "I want to study it?" How do you choose your subjects?

A lot of times I see it and then I forget about. Then I see it and I forget about it [again]. I always have my camera with me, so if I see it I snap a few shots of it. Or hundreds.

It's something I just realized—although I probably should have been more aware of it as a working artist who has to talk about [his] work. What I've noticed I've been doing is that when I shoot the photos it's never from [my perspective]. I never look through the viewfinder or the LED screen. I'm never staring at that.

You're not framing it.

I'm not framing it from my point of view. All the shots are always from "not my point of view". I think that's sort of my idea of these things, that it's not necessarily me seeing [them]. It could be anybody seeing [them]. It's a subconscious conscious choice where it's my idea—or at least what I'm trying to do—that these are things everybody sees all the time. And for one reason of another you're not looking them. Or not looking at them long enough or not seeing all the really cool stuff that's there because you're too busy or too wrapped up in your own life.

Who really has time to think how cool dirty snow is? That's why artists are alive, so we can be like, "No, no. Take ten minutes. You can take ten minutes to look at this thing I spent a year on." So next time you're driving past a pile of snow, "Oh yeah. A pile of snow doesn't suck that bad." Whatever.

You've stripped back the color now and a lot of stuff has talked about your red/green colorblindness. Is your doing so a conscious decision to push the work further from your viewpoint? When I was in art school—as someone who is also colorblind—my teacher would wonder how I came up with these color combinations she liked so much and I'd admit I actually thought they were all the same color. So that ailment definitely puts you in an interesting place to create something only you specifically can see.

It's like the first AA meeting, "You're like me too!"

For me it was—whenever I paint something I try to paint something I would like to walk into a gallery and see. That's the type of work I want to make. So I take the point of the viewer and what makes it easiest to connect to a work of art. Which is a really difficult thing for me as an artist because I do the paintings for me, but obviously I'd like them to be shown. So you have to take the viewer into some sort of [account because] these things have to be viewed. Otherwise it's art therapy. But generally speaking I hate the general public. Yet at the same time I have to take them into account in some manner.

I've always had a problem in some ways with art where it's too overloaded with who the artist is in the work. This is too much of a blanket statement I suppose because there are many instances where what I'm saying is not true, but generally speaking I don't like work where I can tell [who the person is that painted it]. Man, woman, straight, gay, white, African American, Asian, Hispanic. If I can read that immediately I tend to not like it as much because there are that many more hurdles for me.

If it's done by a Hispanic female and she's a lesbian and I can see that immediately, "Alright, I'm not any of those things so that's hurdle one, two, three before I can even contact to the work as an object personally." There's thousands and thousands of artists from every spectrum whose work you can't tell. I love it when you can't tell. Is this painted by a man or woman? I don't care. I don't care about the artist when you're looking at the work because you're supposed to have a conversation with the work.

So, as far as taking out color: a lot of people have preferences for and against colors. I just remove it so all you're dealing with is composition, form, and tone. Sometimes I warm them up; sometimes I cool them down depending on the under-painting. I don't want a yellow background to be the thing that someone—not even that they're going to buy it, but that they walk away from it because yellow is their switch to be, "Well fuck that work." But at the same time I don't care. That's the thing!

I've really liked the whole black and white thing because I think there's a limitless amount of space, an infinite amount of possibilities just with black and white. I always say, "Color's for quitters." I'm all about simplicity—not in how I talk obviously—to do as much as you can with as little as you can. I think that's great.

I'd love to be a minimalist painter, but I'm not into all the theory. Have you ever heard certain minimalist painters talk?

There's a manifesto for everything.

Oh, you want to slit your throat … and their throat. No! It's a painting. Come on! You like the color blue so you painted blue. Stop.

I will say, though, with someone like Piet Mondrian—I love his work. I'm a graphic designer; it speaks to me. But I will say that when I found out he could paint a life-like landscape, it almost made it more worthwhile. He chose to go a different direction.

Exactly. No, that's totally true.

I have a problem now—right now, ha, I've always had this problem—where it's becoming harder and harder for me to just look at a painting and enjoy it as an object. Especially if I really, really like it.

I think of paintings as magic tricks. If a magician sees another magician pull off a great trick, they're immediately like, "How the fuck did he do that? Oh, I see. Well, maybe not … they did this thing."

I've stood in front of paintings that I've loved and had these conversations out loud between myself and the work. "Oh, I see. Okay, and then you— Oh, you fucking fuck. You fucker. Yeah. Okay. Nice." And then I go to the side of the painting because there's just so much information you get right there. Sometimes you can see fingerprints and shit.

I like painting as the image and the object. So that's that. That was a tangent. [Laughter]

That makes me think to when I first saw some of your work. I immediately went to a Richard Estes in my head with your soap bubbles recalling his Photorealist paintings or Charles Bell's gumball machines. But you push that label away and explain how you keep the texture of the medium in and retain the idea of the painting being as an object itself.

I don't think I'm a good enough painter to be labeled a Photorealist. And I don't think my work really approaches it because—the way I view Photorealism is that it's a pretty damn faithful reproduction of a photo. I use the photos as just a jumping off point.

They're kind of like your sketchbook?

Yeah. Because I rarely sketch. I've tried to do it before; it's just not me. It's weird. I think it would be interesting to try it for a year and sketch the paintings. I'd end up destroying them because I wouldn't like them.

I love the Photorealists. I've been to so many Photorealist shows. It's just staggering. I'd love to be able to do that. I'm not there yet. My work is pulling me in two different directions: to keep refining and keep refining to the point where I'm able to do that or just go even further abstractly, but still using the images as a jumping off point. And I'm really torn between the two things. Both of them offer their own challenges, rewards, and all that kind of stuff.

After a while I stop looking at the photo I'm working from. You get to a certain point [when] it's not about duplicating the photograph, it's about making a good painting—at least in my personal process of approaching [it]. I eventually just tear them up, throw them out, and then refine the painting as its own thing separate from the photographs. That's why I never let somebody look at the photographs.

Someone once suggested, "You should exhibit the photo with the painting." No, because then people are comparing the two and there are going to be differences and generally speaking the viewer will see those differences as a mistake or a flaw in the painting. Well no, that's not what I'm trying to do. [I'm not] duplicating one to the other just with a different scale and medium.

So yes. I will always push away the Photorealist label. I think it's an insult to Photorealists to say that I do anything that approaches them.

Back to the Albright-Knox and seeing it as a kid, did you have that "wow" factor of realizing the works you saw in books lived in your own backyard? I didn't go to the museum much as a kid so it wasn't until college when I discovered how my textbooks were displaying Buffalo-owned pieces as hallmarks of world-renowned masters.

A lot of times I would see these images in books before I knew we had them. Like I said, I was reading—well, I was doing it for pictures since I was nine years old—and I'd see, "image courtesy of Albright-Knox, Buffalo, NY" and be like, "Yay! Buffalo. I live there!" It wasn't until I saw the paintings in person that I realized their importance.

I'd look at a lot of books that had references to the Albright-Knox so I knew, "Oh wow, we have a lot of cool stuff." So, like Karen [his fiancé] says, I was a fucked up little kid. It was always in the back of my head—not as people have it right now like, "Oh this is really important"—that "Oh this is really cool." If you have that attitude when you're a kid and it's not like now when I'm forty-two thinking, "Yes this is a great institution". I always thought it was like my playground. I just had the coolest playground.

I mean I threw pencils at idiots back in the day when the Albright-Knox was free to go in. I was there constantly. I knew all the guards and they knew I would sooner tackle someone than damage a painting. So they let me get away with anything. They'd let me lie on the floor to look at stuff. I'd go in the Clyfford Still room for hours and I lean up against those metal guardrails.

Idiots from a wedding party getting their pictures taken came inside once and some fucknut was like, "Yeah, I painted my kitchen black once and that's what the drop cloth looked like." I just threw my pencil at him. Get the fuck out of my room. If you're going to approach it with ignorance, stay ignorant. Don't bother me. Or at least say it to yourself. My impressionable fucking ears are over here.

Ever camp out at Carl Andre's Lead-Copper Plain [1969] floor to see how many people would walk on it?

The best part is I actually walked on it once and the guard said it was okay. I don't know if it was, but yeah. There were so many pieces that I didn't understand, but that I liked. I couldn't understand why I liked them and I think that's really more important anyway. It's not about understanding the stuff. Does it connect to you in some way? Can you have a conversation with an inanimate object? Liking art and being an artist is a sort of weird schizophrenia because you're having conversations with things. I always dug it.

I feel bad that I wasn't always aware of the Burchfield [Penney Art Center] until college. Right across the street there was a bunch of cool stuff too that I was missing out on. Back when I was going to the Albright-Knox there was a ton of really cool stuff going on over there. Not until college when I was going to Buffalo State [did I realize what it was].

How does it feel to now have a piece of work in both the Albright-Kno and Burchfield Penney collections?

Neat. Neat.

When the Burchfield first bought the Twinkies piece [Crush, 2001] that was my first really big purchase of any kind. Now I'm never satisfied with my work. Never satisfied with the level of my career. So it's like, "Yeah, this is great. They should A. get more and B. it should [go to] other places now." I have to continue to make the work better and to get it out further.

Ask any artist that lives in town "What's your main goal for your work?" and all of them within their first three answers will [say] exhibit out of town. It's not just Buffalo. You pick an artist that's even in New York: "What's your goal for your work?" Response: "Exhibit out of the city." My response to them would be, "Go fuck yourself." [Laughter]

Any artist wants their art to leave and go away. I look at the pile of work that's in the corner [of my office] and think of it as my prostitutes not making me my money. "You're just laying there doing nothing. Go do something." [Laughs]

I'm not one of those artists that has a giant connection to their work once it's done. While it's on the wall and I'm working on it I will protect it as much as anyone would protect anything else. It's as close of a relationship as you can have with an inanimate object other than a sex doll. There are times where it's just magical and wonderful and great and other times I'm "motherfucking." I've called paintings "bitches," "twat," "cunt."

"What the fuck? Why won't you just take the paint the way [you're] supposed to?" Then you fight and then you make up and everything works again. Then you don't talk for months—I've had that. And then you get back together. "Oh, why were we fighting? Look how easy this is." Artists are fucked up people. We're really fucked up people.

Every artist wants their work to go out further than they've traveled. I don't know if it's greed or what. Or hubris. It's a fucked up job to begin with. I've said this to a bunch of people: I smear pigmented goo on fabric and I think it should be important. Fuck me. That's dumb. That's just stupid. But yes—I think it should be important. I'm saying something here. What I'm saying … I don't know just yet.

Exactly.

Answering a question you didn't ask: I don't go into my work with any serious "it has to say this" [mentality]. That I think really hampers the process of making the work. I have an idea of what I want it to look like, but what is it going to say once it's done or once a group of things are done? I can't say. It's not done yet.

Even two years down the line, after things are done, I'll go, "Oh!" Because you can't self-analyze while you're doing stuff. There are so many artists that try to—especially young ones who start out, "Oh, this is my message." Who cares? Make a good painting. Make a good sculpture. Make a good whatever. The meaning will come afterwards. When you start with the meaning it can be all over the place.

I had a great teacher who made a student cry in a critique because she went off on how this means this and this means that and this is what I'm saying and blah, blah, blah. And he made her cry because—first of all it was ten minutes of silence and he was all, "Ahh …" Then all he said was, "What's more important? Having a great message in your work or the ability to convey that message?" She clearly was not able to convey any message besides "I can't paint."

The message is in there, I'll discover it sooner or later. Curators and shit will write about it. I think that's also another barrier between the viewer and the artist. Not the artist. Fuck the artist. Between the viewer and the work. If you're nailing people over the head with message and message and message: "Okay, that's great. Oww. Your message is all in my face. I'm going to move on now."

[You must] leave it open to some kind of interpretation—like every piece of artwork is. Certain things are just so in your face and smacking you around. You're doing it for yourself too much. I hate the viewer, but I take them into account because they're important.

And you let them see what they want to see.

Yeah. I'm only giving them so much. You can't go off to, "Oh, he likes the Holocaust. He thinks the Holocaust was awesome." Clearly no. You're missing something there. But if somebody thinks—

Like the snow paintings I'm just working on there [points to the wall]. Those are the studies, I want to do these things bigger because I think those plow hills are frickin' gorgeous. I love the combination of—it's a natural phenomenon, then people worked on it. It's worked on but a lot of the results are random. It's not like the dude driving the plow has an exact design in mind. He just wants the snow to get the fuck out of the way. So it's random the way that it falls, but then there's the hand of the person manipulating it, and then it's random again. And then nature acts on that.

So it's these man-made mountains that are temporary—there you go. Giant things that are man-made but are temporary, but they're natural … okay. Run with that people.

What am I saying about it? Who gives a fuck? Are there deeper meanings than that? Of course there are. I haven't figured them out yet. I'll figure them out in like two years when I'm working on them big. But am I trying to say anything with these things? Fuck no. Hell no. I think these images are awesome.

That's my main point. I want to strip these things down to as simple as I can. Put them forth not having figured out the meanings I put in them and having other people think about them. I'll think about them and we'll come together eventually and be like, "Oh, that's what these are about."

I look at certain paintings that I've done three or four years ago—"Oh! Now I get it! This makes sense to me now." Even after reading what curators and writers have written about it—the insights there. The three cool essays written about my work were from Elizabeth Licata, John Massier, and Ron Ehmke. Elizabeth and Ron wrote for one show [Light in Shadow at Big Orbit Gallery, 2012-2013] and John wrote for my one at Hallwalls [Ignoring the Sirens, 2009]. They nailed it. Friggin' nailed it. And that's great. Again, I'm not going to see all that stuff while I'm making it.

Something I've always said: It's like trying to make a bed while sleeping in it. It's not going to work. Something is going to get in the way. Either you're not going to sleep well or your bed's going to look like shit. Get out of the bed and then make the bed. "Okay. It's a bed!"

There's that. Tangent! [Laughter] Jazz hands!