SPROUTING EDGE:

May 10, 2009

John Powers Interview

John Powers is a New York based artist whose work embodies a mathematical sense of beauty. If one were to visit his studio and didn't know any better, one might assume he is a carpenter with exceptional taste. Working in large scale, with painstaking detail, his work is striking. Receiving critical acclaim at a young age, John Powers quickly became part of New York's art movement. This article focuses on the role of technology in art and the experience of a New York artist.

PW: Do you see a role for technology in art or vice versa?
JP: I love writing on computers. It is so liquid - more akin to thought - but as for building models in 3D programs, it is amazing how limited the technology still is. One of my pieces - even a relatively simple one - amounts to millions of faces that need to be rendered. I have frozen some big computers with objects that I thought were pretty simple.

I very much like that my work looks digital, that it reflect my exposure to the technologies around me, but I like also that it is handmade out of base materials.

PW: What would you consider to be "cutting edge art"?

JP: I think of art in terms of scales of economy. . . I think that all artists have impact that is out of proportion with their means. After all Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates are famous and respected because they are at the head of entire economies, no exaggeration nation sized entities. Meanwhile Frank Stella, Robert Morris, and Carl Andre have as great (if not greater) a cultural profile and they are doodling with paint, wood and lead. I love walking into an artist's studio and finding something that is made of junk or base stuff that moves me.

PW: Do you feel like New York City informs your design?

JP: I love the city. I grew up in Chicago and loved that city. And before I came here I lived on a dirt road with no running water for six years - sort of a palate cleanser before the next course. I think art is an urban event - it requires the density and confusion of the city.

PW: How have you seen the New York art scene change since your involvement?

JP: The only art space in Chelsea when I moved here was the Dia - so yeah. I am glad I got to see the SoHo art world intact, but I like the Chelsea world more. SoHo was more intimate, even cozy. But within three years of my arrival in New York the weight was shifting to Chelsea.

JP: The thing that has caught my eye most recently are the new studio spaces being opened up in Gowanus and Sunset Park. The Williamsburgers created what were essentially slums for young artists. I always hated visiting those studios; they felt so mean and loveless. The ways they were laid out and constructed - everyone isolated in their little steel door closet - seemed to tell young artists they were not worth the trouble. By contrast, the new spaces I've seen on 8th Street in Gowanus and 33rd in Sunset park are more like MFA studios with large clean hall ways, public spaces where people can hang out in.

PW: How do you feel about the Lower East Side?

JP: It is such a popular neighborhood that it is hard for me to imagine how artists will get the kinds of spaces they need. So far I just lump it with Williamsburg - a place where artists are directly competing with frat boy jocks and hipster pupal-stage-bankers. But now that bankers make less then artists and the New Museum is down there that may start to shift. I think the Fertile Crescent that stretches from Long Island City to Industry City set back from the Brooklyn waterfront is the real future of the art world.

PW:What's the weirdest interpretation of your art you have ever heard?

JP: A friend's first reaction to seeing my work was that it was Fascist.

PW: Your interest in Star Wars has received considerable attention. Tell me a little about your interest.

JP: What is interesting to me about Star Wars is that all the discussions I have ever found focus on the film as literature. It's all about how archetypal it is - Joseph Campbells Hereo with a Thousand Faces -- or how banal - American cold War Imperial fantasies, blockbuster commercialism. What that misses is that after Star Wars everything about the future looks like Star Wars. Those guys cobbled together a bunch of tank models and invented a visual rhetoric that was so powerful that it totally transformed the way we imagine the future. Before Star Wars everything is smooth and all the outfits match the chairs and the furniture was clearly designed by the same guy - and everything is brand-spanking new.

Star Wars is really different. It took four hundred years for someone to figure out that the future was going to be older then the past - its a simple error built into language, we naturally think of the past as old and the future as new. Lucas was the first to see past that bias.

PW: Have you always been creative?

JP: My mother says so, and who am I to contradict her.

johnpowers.us