Service Industry: An Interview with Jay Batlle
In “Life Lessons,” a short film directed by Martin Scorsese, Nick Nolte plays a
tortured painter named Lionel Dobie, who experiences a creative block as a new
exhibition of his paintings is about to open at a well-to-do gallery in Soho.
Paulette, his assistant and live-in lover, is played by Patricia Arquette, who
taunts Dobie with her irrepressible sexuality while denying him
satisfaction. Paulette’s rejection of Dobie and his ensuing sexual frustration fuel
a frantic but fruitful spurt of productivity, inspiring him to create large,
emotionally charged paintings. At the end, Dobie’s exhibition is hailed as the
work of a genius, and at the gallery opening he picks up another young, starstruck woman, promising her valuable life lessons. Scorsese gives us a portrait
of the male artist, living the high life as a rich and famous painter in downtown
Manhattan who can only paint when he experiences excruciating emotional
pain. He is outwardly macho, but inwardly requires a perpetual state of turmoil in
order to be creatively successful.
I bring up the character of Lionel Dobie because he represents for me the myth
of the artist to which the thousands of young art school students who descend
yearly upon New York City aspire. It is precisely this fantasy (and the crushing
reality that few artists actually become art stars) that is at the heart of Jay
Batlle’s work. He works in sculpture, painting, and drawing, and these objects
embody Batlle’s obsession with the idealized life of an artist as well as the
temptations of “the good life.”
Jay Batlle and I became fast friends at an opening at Nyehaus in Chelsea for an
exhibition about San Francisco Bay Area art during the Beat years. It was an
auspicious moment for me to meet Batlle for the first time, because he was in
his element— hanging out amongst drawings and paintings from a pivotal
moment in the West Coast art scene, accompanied by good drink, food, and
animated conversation.
It was then that I put two and two together and realized that I had seen his first
exhibition at the Nyehaus gallery when it was still at the National Arts Club on
Gramercy Square. It was called “Cutting out the Middleman,” alluding to the
term in economics used to describe the removal of intermediaries in the supply
chain: essentially Capitalism 101. Ironically, it was the last show for the gallery
at that location, as Nyehaus is now amidst the many galleries of New York’s
Chelsea neighborhood. Many of the works featured in this first exhibition were
inspired by hotel stationery drawings by the late German artist, Martin
Kippenberger. Kippenberger died at the age of 43 from liver cancer, and he
documented his physical decline in a series of paintings based on Théodore
Géricault’s, “The Raft of the Medusa” (1818-1819). In 2008, the Los Angeles
Museum of Contemporary Art organized a retrospective of Kippenberger’s
prolific career that came to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He was
born in postwar Germany, where WWII was vivid in the memory and culture of
the divided country. The generation of artists who preceded him was compelled
to address the psychological results of the war, but Kippenberger led a
revolution in his city of Cologne to repudiate the moralistic tones of his
predecessors. His career could be likened to a tragic comedy, where irony and
cynicism masked a deep and serious engagement with the history of art and its
future possibilities, cut short by a life of excess.
I find that same renegade yet slightly Machiavellian spirit in Jay Batlle’s work. A
Californian at heart, Batlle is influenced by the legacy of West Coast artists like
John Baldessari and Chris Burden, artists unafraid of embracing color, popular
culture, and conceptually-driven art. Batlle is equally captivated by painting and
sculptural movements from Europe like Arte Povera to CoBrA. His first studio
was his childhood kitchen in Arizona where he lived with his father and learned
to cook as a preteen by baking inedible cakes that allowed him to discern the
difference between success and failure in all creative endeavors. Batlle’s whole
oeuvre, in fact, exploits the dichotomy between the two extremes, with the
understanding that sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but that is the
ultimate gamble of an artist living in New York.
This interview takes place over a few weeks during the preparation of and
following his exhibitions of paintings and drawings titled “Gourmand” at AFP
Gallery in April and his drawings, sculpture, and cooking performance at
Nyehaus in May 2012 titled “Parties of Six or More,” where Batlle showed
drawings and a sculpture while he served 1500 roasted oysters and copious
amounts of wine to the 250 visitors who came to his opening.
KC: It seems that you are concerned with the question of “lifestyle,” but of an
excessive nature: eating, drinking, and sex, while also living the life of an artist in
New York with few monetary means. Sensual pleasure often emerges in your
work, whether it is in your performances involving serving food, or in the erotic
portraits of women you do on restaurant menu stationery (as though they were
the plat du jour). What do you think about this?
JB: Eating is something that I became obsessed with while living in NYC. The
foodie culture here is probably the best in the world. You can get anything you
want here, can’t you? The question of lifestyle came into the picture when I
realized that this is why most artists move to New York, to realize this cinematic
dream of the big loft, the beautiful muse, and eating out everyday at Mr.
Chow’s. This fantasy is probably the driving force behind SoHo’s real estate
success of the last 40 years, the soft cultural power of the American dream, in
the form of the successful artist. I like to play with this in my practice, and so I
use the stereotype of the male painter, with my wife, my beautiful muse, and
greyhound, Seymour. My work has always been a critique of value, or why we
choose to like something.
KC: Can you go into detail about why Martin Kippenberger is such a huge
inspiration for your work?
JB: My show at Nyehaus in 2009 was mainly a sculpture show, where I was
trying to set the record straight in New York. The show was about being in debt
to all the people who help you along the way in your journey as an artist, so I
made a giant collage on two canvases called “Free Lunch.” The collage was of
my paper trail in the artworld glued on gigantic restaurant stationery I printed out
on canvas. Nyehaus showed my book works in vitrines as well, which are blank
Kippenberger hotel stationery books that I have filled with my own
drawings. Formally the books are like Rauschenberg’s erased De Kooning
piece, but in reverse: I was filling a void. We also featured original drawings by
Kippenberger in that show to create a parallel, but my work is much more
American and Southern Californian in intent and structure. It’s closer to Pop,
while I see Kippenberger as a contemporary Dadaist. “Cutting Out The
Middleman” was like a giant résumé to show how much I had done at that point,
though I was still relatively under the radar of the New York art world.
Honestly, I don’t know how important Kippenberger is for my practice, other
than some formal generalizations and that I like the vulnerability in his work. It’s
easy to say “Kippy” made stationery drawings and a big part of my practice is
my restaurant stationery works, but a lot of artists have drawn on stationery, like
Robert Gober, Elizabeth Peyton, Dieter Roth, and Sigmar Polke. I blow up
restaurant stationery, and then doodle on them. Kippenberger’s sculptures had
a bigger effect on me. Ultimately, my stationery practice came out of working
and running restaurants in New York and Paris.
When I was in college at UCLA, I saw Kippenberger’s “Peter” sculptures in a
book, and that marked an important moment for my thinking about art. After
UCLA I moved to Amsterdam on a fellowship and hung out with Georg Herold,
an artist who was part of Kippenberger’s clique in Cologne and one of his best
friends.
I was ultimately expelled from the program in Holland for not working hard
enough in my studio. I moved to New York and worked in a sandwich shop
making $4.25 an hour, living in five story Chelsea walk-up with an aspiring
English actress. At that time I made black and white ink drawings and sculpture
that was very ephemeral. These sculptures subverted an object’s form and
function because I made them out of wood that was literally falling apart. They
were more like three-dimensional sketches and people thought the works were
unfinished models, but instead it was a drawing approach to sculpture that you
see everywhere in galleries these days. My first solo show in New York was at
that tiny Chelsea apartment. I called it Flat Experiment #1. I showed a 9’ wood
structure hanging from the ceiling–a ramshackle fire escape in form and very
Arte Povera in spirit. I served spaghetti and meatballs and we drank martinis on
the roof. The work was purchased for a private collection and the piece “lived”
in Boston for nine years until a water leak caused the ceiling to cave in and
destroyed the sculpture. It was a relief to think even art dies.
KC: Let’s talk about the way that your art and the serving of food to your
guests/viewers go hand in hand.
JB: I’m interested in the interchangeability of wealth and power, and the
blurring of boundaries between the two when it relates to indulgence and
excess. Imagine you are waiting tables at a private party. At the beginning of
the event, there is a host, the guests and then those who serve. The boundary
between these two camps is clear at the start of the evening, but the interesting
part is when the roles of server and served gets blurred towards the wee hours.
I’m interested in when the host, the person paying the waiter, becomes equal to
the hired person. This enables a sort of pure pleasure and perhaps straight out
debauchery can ensue. There is a loss of clear roles, and the naming of these
roles become abstract or lost. There is a shift in power position and an escape
from class structure, and possibly capitalism.
This was my intent in the oyster performance at Nyehaus, called “Please Help
Yourself.” At a certain point I stopped serving even though there was plenty of
food to go around, but most people didn’t go help themselves, they demanded
service. So my friends who attended started shucking for themselves and
others became servers, though I was “the artist.”
KC: In the garden of Nyehaus, you installed a sculpture called “No Beginner’s
Luck,” composed of Monopoly pieces stacked on top of each other. Tell me
how this sculpture came about.
JB: In 2007 I was asked to make a sculpture for a bank in London. I was
traveling there and staying at the Arts Club in Chelsea, living out my English
boarding school fantasies. I was going to make it with the production company
Carlson & Co. in California, famous for producing Jeff Koons’ and Charles Ray’s
sculptures. In my mind, I saw the finished work as this perfectly produced
object–a 10′ cast aluminum totemic sculpture inspired by the classic game of
capitalism, Monopoly. A team of fabricators would make it, and it would cost a
lot to produce, but in my head the idea was too big to fail, I had to make it
happen. So after two years of meetings and contracts and a little model; I got
this huge commission from the bank, all on my own. The production of this
trophy for traders would cost most of the commission, and I would make just
enough to cover expenses and maybe get a new pair of John Lobb shoes.
As the final negotiations came down and the contracts were signed, Lehman
Brothers collapsed and the world economy went with it. I learned a big fucking
lesson, which was to never quote projects in currencies where the production
currency isn’t the same. The British pound was at 2.20 to the dollar, but
dropped to 1.75 the day I was to get the wire from London to start the
production of this piece which at this point only existed in my head. I had to
renegotiate the price, because now the production cost more than the
commission, and essentially I owed money on the contract out of my own
pocket. There was an uncanny irony to the situation of making a piece critiquing
the structure of capitalism and our childhood memories of “playing,” while the
whole project came apart for financial reasons. I had to cancel the whole thing,
which was a huge failure for me and a big lesson.
Now, almost 5 years later, the finished work is at Nyehaus in “Parties of Six or
More.” It’s a cast resin work with a beautiful metal pewter coating and finished
with a white patina. It stands 10 feet high and is composed of the same forms
initially commissioned by the bank, with one exception: I made the entire work
from scratch, with my own hands and labor. I titled it “No Beginner’s Luck,”
which seems to say it all.
KC: Gordon Matta-Clark, an artist active in Soho in the 1970’s, is known for
sculptures he made by carving abandoned buildings with chainsaws. He
created “Food,” a restaurant on the corner of Prince and Wooster streets where
artists would convene, share meals and cook for one another. It was a very
idealistic moment. In the crumbling shells of buildings left derelict by the flight
of industry from New York City in the 1970′s, artists sought more immaterial
ways of expressing themselves that centered on community rather than selfreliance, on experiences rather than objects. Of course, many of them made
both experiential as well as object-based art. How would you compare what
transpired then to what is happening now, given the huge changes in the art
world in the last forty years? How is what you are doing different from MattaClark, given your own historical context?
JB: In my opinion, too much is happening too fast for anyone to notice what is
valid or lasting right now, and forty years ago so little was happening and very
few people were paying attention. People can go back historically and cherry
pick. The more people involve themselves with art, the less effect it has. Art
gets homogenized into the machine of the mundane. I am very calculated, but
also extremely critical of what I do as an artist. I am trying to stand out, to break
out, to make people stop and think and live. I still have to isolate myself in my
mode of production, to remain edgy, but not elitist.
The simple answer is that I’m not Matta-Clark and it’s not 1970, but more
specifically, he was more of a hippie on tequila and I’m more of a bon vivant on
burgundy. I don’t have clear intentions. I only believe I do. Don’t get me wrong,
Matta-Clark and my work have a strong bond and a relationship historically. I
just don’t want to close down the reading of my work too fast. Matta-Clark is a
very big influence, specifically his sculpture, and the sculptural problem of props
versus discrete objects or performance leftovers. My work has a very literal
aspect to it, and I think Matta-Clark’s food/ sculpture/performance has this
directness that I need and want from art. I don’t want to have some esoteric
practice, or some fake narrative to validate why I do this or that. I need it to
mean something, so something is at stake. Even if it’s idealistic, or romantic,
my work needs a pathos…an urgency, a problem.
Jay Batlle No Beginner’s Luck 2012
Cast resin, steel, metal B coating, patina, and clear coating
Dimensions: Overall: 101” x 36” x 28”; Sculpture: 73” x 36” x 38”; Pedestal 28” x
28” x 28”
Private Collection, NY
Jay Batlle “Cutting Out The Middleman” (Amstel Version) 2009
Materials: Mix materials working fountain
Dimensions: variable
Courtesy of the Artist and Nyehaus
Jay Batlle Cutting Out The Middleman Installation Nyehaus Gramercy
Park 2009
Jay Batlle Cutting Out The Middleman Installation Nyehaus Gramercy
Park 2009
Jay Batlle Cutting Out The Middleman Installation Nyehaus Gramercy
Park 2009
Jay Batlle “Untitled” The Stationery Series 2008-2012
Materials: Ink, pencil, and watercolor on restaurant stationery
Dimensions: 8.5″ x 11″ unframed
Private Collection, Russia
Jay Batlle “Basque Artist” The Stationery Series 2008-2012
Materials: Ink, pencil, and watercolor on restaurant stationery
Dimensions: 8.5″ x 11″ unframed
Private Collection, NY
Jay Batlle “Sometimes Soup Is So Good” The Stationery Series 2008-2012
Materials: Ink, pencil, and watercolor on restaurant stationery
Dimensions: 8.5″ x 11″ unframed
Private Collection, NY
Jay Batlle “Lunch With Silvia” The Stationery Series 2008-2012
Materials: Ink, pencil, and watercolor on restaurant stationery
Dimensions: 8.5″ x 11″ unframed
Courtesy the artist
Jay Batlle “Simon Asleep With His Money” The Stationery Series 2008-2012
Materials: Ink, pencil, and watercolor on restaurant stationery
Dimensions: 8.5″ x 11″ unframed
Private Collection, London
Jay Batlle “He Made Me” The Stationery Series 2008-2012
Materials: Ink, pencil, and watercolor on restaurant stationery
Dimensions: 8.5″ x 11″ unframed
Private Collection, Germany
Jay Batlle “Batlle Reserva Performance” Clages Gallery Cologne 2011