An Artist’s Dialogue with Persuasion
fluoro spoke to New York based artist, Hooper Turner about his conflicts with painting, a fascination with brands and why he believes advertising can never be art.
Much of Hooper’s work explores our relationship with advertising, while Hooper admires the breadth of knowledge of people in advertising and their ability “to really delve into psychology and semiotics of pictures” he suggests that “it’s just important to distinguish art that ‘the persuaders’ want to move products; the artist doesn’t have an agenda, often just an obsession.”
(f) Tell us a little bit about your background, have you always wanted to be a practicing artist?
(HT) I grew up in a very rural part of America, so I didn’t have much experience with seeing ‘art’ firsthand. Most of my knowledge of culture came through illustrated textbooks, encyclopedias, magazines and television. This kind of experience really leveled the critical field as far as ‘high art’, ‘low art’. The exciting promise of art was being able to imagine, express, and control a private visual world. When I was young this meant creating some sort of a narrative fantasy, but now it is more about making formal and conceptual choices with visual ideas.
At one point, I studied painting in Paris and was a copyist in the Louvre. I really wanted to feel close to all those amazing Old Masters that I loved! During that experience, I never lost respect and awe for those European painters, but I did return to America with a sense of alienation. I realised I couldn’t buy into painting as a way to narrate grand humanist themes, to provide moral instruction, or expressing the unique “spirit” of the artist. I think I’ve been trying to deal with these conflicts for the last 10 years: what is originality? Authenticity? How do I relinquish my ego and make something that is rich in meaning yet undetermined? Imagery and forms are already around us readymade. Nothing comes from nowhere!
(f) ‘Advertising can sometimes be regarded as art.’ What is your view on this statement?
(HT) Most of my work borrows some vocabulary from advertising and design culture, but although advertising can be artful, I would never regard it as art.
There is a necessary utility to advertising that prevents it from being open-ended and useless as only the best art is. I see trends in design and advertising and fashion to make them a branch of fine art, but I think that misses the point and disappoints all these disciplines.
(f) How do your two most recently exhibited series’ Catalog Paintings and Typeforms differ with their messages?
(HT) The Catalog paintings are very labour intensive, being close copies of fashion ads and catalogs, with screen-printing on top. I chose the images for their wealth of references and psychological richness, but then the technique of oil on canvas brings its own particular history to the image. I like these paintings for their ambiguity (are they art or advertising?), their open-endedness (the viewer makes their own references), and the conflicting relationship between the text and image.
In Typeforms I exercise greater control over how the viewer experiences the work, and the text appears in these paintings to conceal, abstract, and restrict. I’ve painted the Typeforms on art auction catalogs, photos of celebrities, and old paint dropcloths, chosen for their resemblance to Abstract Expressionist canvases. I use the forms to prohibit and control the viewers’ reading of the imagery, to obscure the functionality of the letters, and to experience the sensuous materiality of paint.
(f) Is the choice of Helvetica a conscious one, how does this relate to your message?
(HT) The Helvetica typeface is known worldwide for its legibility and rationality. It’s the typeface of corporations and is found everywhere here in New York, especially in our transportation system. I thought that using the letters as to make visual abstractions, which also act as foils for found imagery, would be an interesting idea both formally and conceptually. The sans-serif letters and numbers, whose essential function is to communicate, lose their intended “meaning” in my paintings as they hover on the edge of legibility.
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Hooper Turner’s solo exhibition Typeforms is on display until Saturday 20 April 2013 at LaMontagne Gallery, Boston. For more information: www.lamontagnegallery.com.
www.hooperturner.com
