Spotlight on...Peter Plagens

Author: Alexxa Gotthardt

Peter Plagens - painter, educator and novelist - is a visting professor of Contemporary Art and Criticism for the semester and was a Newsweek senior writer for fine arts for over 15 years.



The Middlebury Campus: You have your hand in many aspects of the art world. What do you consider yourself ?



PP: I'm a painter who happens to have done all these other things as artists are sometimes wont to do. They're avid this's or that's and there's a lot of history of artists writing art criticism, but they are always artists first. On the other hand, a byline, especially for the popular press, travels a lot farther than the artist's identity unless, say, you're Jasper Johns or Robert Rauschenburg. So I accept the fact that if you would ask anyone else but me they would probably say, "Oh he's a critic and he also paints." Fair. But really, I'm an artist.



The Campus: How did you get involved in the arts? What was your inspiration? Did you always know you wanted to be a painter?



Plagens: Kind of. I went to college. I went to an art department at a big university, the University of Southern California. It was a biggish art department, but still I went to college to go to college. Actually, I thought I would be an English major, but that's what everybody said you were until you figured out something else, right? But USC had ceramics, photography and graphic design. I really liked the painting class, so I switched gears and decided to become an art major.

Before that, though, my first influence was my father. He was an unsuccessful commercial artist and a good man and very philosophical. He taught me a whole lot of stuff [and to] get into oddball little things. He could draw really well, so I grew up with him always bringing home drawing paper. But I went to college and I got a degree in painting, and then I just kept going. At USC, I realized I liked school a lot, so I kept going and went onto Syracuse and got an MFA. By that point, I knew I was an artist.



The Campus: Would you say your college experience really shaped you into the artist you are today?



PP: Oh yeah. First of all I went to college and not an art school. I didn't go to RISD or the Museum School in Boston or CalArts. It wasn't a deliberate choice - I was lucky to even go to college. I got a scholarship from USC, so I went, and I'm very indebted to my alma mater. They done me well. And by the time I got out of college I was a painter, and the fat was in the fire.

I've been doing it for 40 years and I haven't ever stopped doing it. I was a college art teacher for about 20 years and then I was the art critic for Newsweek for about 15. I always did something else, but kept the fine-art vein through it all.



The Campus: How do you balance being both an artist and an art critic? Did you ever encounter resentment from either side?



PP: Well, there are different reactions. One is, yes, it distorts your place in the art world and skews your views. If you write art criticism, which is to say, in essence, if you publish your opinions about other people's work, you're going to be considered politically. Every artist I know practices art criticism, only they practice it at Puffy's Tavern over a pitcher. I don't do that - I get it out in the open, and I don't know whether it's brave or compulsive or egotistical, or just happenstance. Being both an artist and a critic does skew your opinions. If you're a kind of liberal, democratic, progressive person you believe that conflicts of interest should be avoided. So here's a case where you're playing both sides of the street. Do you recuse yourself? Do you say I can't review that show at that gallery because I'm a painter and that's the next step-up gallery I'd like to get into? Well I didn't do that, but when some other artist shows and I write a favorable review, it's tainted because I kind of play both sides.



The Campus: Do you feel that a fine artist would have a better perspective as a critic than, let's say, an art historian?



PP: I wouldn't say better, but sociologically, on the political people front, as an artist you know what it's like to show work, what it's like to be criticized and what it's like to deal with galleries from the other end as a seeker. There are some dangers. For instance, part of your business as an artist is to be biased in terms of aesthetics and art theory because that's what gives you your configuration. But, as a critic, you want to be fair, and fair doesn't play with your artist temperament. When you go into the studio you're under no obligation to be fair to your tubes of paint. You do whatever you can with them to get what you want. The other thing is that as an abstract painter, I am much harder on abstract painting than I am on other stuff. So it's surprised me that I don't let my fellow embattled abstract painters have a free pass because I'm one of them. On the other hand, if I go to something that has projected video that has a kind of Hollywood power (Matthew Barney-like), I tend to be less critical because it's so groovy and I couldn't do it.



The Campus: How would you describe your personal artistic style? You said "abstract" before.



PP: Well yes, I paint abstract paintings. I'll use sort of hyper-colloquial terms for a minute. They're a combination of messy and neat. You could say expressionist or cerebral, but literally, when the paint goes on, there's a lot of chance and messiness involved, especially in the beginning. This messiness has also combined with very neat, even-a, hard-edged, masked-off, taped shape in almost all of my stuff for awhile now. This creates a kind of compositional uneasiness. They're not harmonic. I don't necessarily go down easy, and I don't mean that in the sugary sense at all. My paintings are just more jarring and less optimistic, there's less harmony in them.



The Campus: Do you have any new projects in the works?



PP: Well I have this retrospective exhibition that is now at its third and final venue. I do have another show in December at my dealer in New York that I've had for 30 odd years, Nancy Hoffman. Everything's done for the exhibit except there's this one really weird, maybe one-step beyond, painting. It could be really good and it could be a bridge too far and I'm trying to work on it and get it resolved and get it done and see whether it will be in the show or not.



The Campus: Are you trying to get a certain message across with your new work?



PP: Since I have gotten to a certain age and a certain stage in things, I have gotten to be progressively more self-indulgent - something that I really would have worried about more when I was younger. I don't worry about "What's the message the painting is trying to get across?" anymore. The old theatre critic, Jack Kroll, now passed away, used to refer to T.S. Eliot's objective correlative: "It is the thing outside something that correlates with something." The painting is the objective correlative of my interior state. And the first question any reasonable reader or viewer would ask is "what the hell is so important about his interior state?" And I would say, "You know, you've got a point there." But I have beaten mine into a sort of artistic configuration over the years and now I feel I can fully indulge myself. Actually, I'll tell you what it's like. It was a T-shirt I saw in Vermont when I did this gig as a visiting artist at an art colony. My oldest daughter came up to visit and she liked this T-shirt of a rather nice drawing of a kind of lumberjack guy. Overalls, plaid shirt, stocking cap, looked French-Canadian, but an American version, holding an ax and the caption on the shirt said "I'm from Vermont and I do what I want." Well, lately, when I ask myself what is
it that's driving what I'm doing, I come to the conclusion that it's that idea of "I'm from Vermont and I do what I want." I've finally gone over the edge.

- By Alexxa Gotthardt