Jaqueline Cedar Interview with Grayson Cox

Good Naked is a gallery run by artist, Jaqueline Cedar, in Brooklyn. The gallery hosts projects that “hover around the intimate and awkward with a focus on work that engages tactility, humor, movement, and play.” Below is an interview between her and artist Grayson Cox whose work was displayed there in February 2020.

Jaqueline Cedar: Your army of khakis has me thinking about the drone of repetition that numbs a Go for Broke motivation to exit/escape.  How does this image/symbol feed into your work in relation to ideas of labor and economy?

Grayson Cox: The khakis came quickly as an idea.  I was thinking about Mark Zuckerberg and the clothing brand Banana Republic and how out in the open and obvious these kinds of symbols are and how we wear the history of our value systems all the time.  We were just watching Rupaul the other day and he said, "everyone is born naked and everything beyond that is drag, baby."  We are just packed full of symbolism.  I was thinking about Zuckerber's choice to wear khakis and a blue t-shirt everyday and the store Banana Republic and how it all leads to a fetishization of colonizing - straight out in the open.  I was thinking about how if you were going to go into rough terrain you might want to wear sensible clothes and how cotton was a major problem in American history but you would wear cotton fast-drying pants.  Safaris.  All the connotations you could link to khakis have to do with our dominance and being taken over.  It's a fashion but it's also directly related to soft power.  Speak softly and carry a big stick, straight up.  That's a really jam-packed symbol that is a readymade - there to be shown.

I feel like the pants sculptures are readymades especially because they were taken from the internet and I went hunting for pictures of khakis and I kept looking at and saving folders until I found ones that were empty because I thought that was interesting.  They seem to have a dick in them but they're empty so I thought, eureka!  This is the one!  It made sense.

JC:  Totally.  I'm also curious about the scale of the pants.  They are relatable and familiar, and yet quite obviously distinct from our bodies.

GC:  In terms of size and scale I was thinking about how the number one historical colonizer was Napoleon and he was a small guy, always compensating for his stature.  I thought it'd be funny to make them smaller than lifesize but still related because they're actually a powerful symbol.  That is the power stance.  A white guy wearing khakis is the dominant Darwinian figure in the world unfortunately.  Then behind them is an army of people doing the same thing.  Where are we in all of that?  We are benefitting from production lines and all things related to what Banana Republic basically uses, which is an already made supply chain to slave labor.  We're all totally complicit in this.

JC: Do you feel like this form of mechanical reproduction connects to or distances us from each other and this bureaucratic system we’re all a part of?

GC: I’m a big fan of conversation about aura and where the power sits in an art object.  It’s very hard to locate if you don't know everything about context.  Exhibition decisions are involved with making a kind of interface - relationship to body/image.  I was born in 1979, which is officially a micro-generation.  We weren’t born with the internet but we got the internet at a formative moment and had to grapple with what it meant.  We embraced the internet but still also embraced the analog life we knew before it.  Art is about that more than anything.  Interface is so important to me because I'm trying to grapple with images and physical things but still relate them to space and body.

JC: Yeah that’s clear in your work.  There’s a sensitivity to considering each image as object and creating a framework for presenting it as such.  The structures for interface provide us an entry point for looking/reflecting.  Could you talk about your relationship to printmaking in relation to multiples and distribution?

GC: I think about printmaking theory in terms of layers, process, multiples, and the social.  That's my current and possibly long term constitution.  Thinking in layers, considering conceptual power of process.  Multiples for me means thinking about why you're making and for whom.  There's a value system inherent in multiples and how many you make could have something to do with your relationship to a community.  There's potential in that.  Then there are the social aspects around printmaking.  It really works well if you work together and there's so much potential for connecting to a community because you can distribute the work.  Generally I can then start to think about how someone might receive that image.  What kind of frame might best present that image to the viewer.

JC:  It’s been interesting watching people relate to these objects and the way you’ve set up a structure with these body-like forms.  The first reaction to them is often laughter and the closest analog I can think of is this experience of walking past a set of mannequins in a clothing store that are not fully dressed.  It’s uncomfortable because it’s familiar but clearly not real.  We relate to them as bodies but the scale and missing limbs render them powerless and impotent, even in their power stance.  There’s discomfort in the situation as well as in the weight of these objects as symbolic forms.

GC:  Tragic but ominous and tragic/hilarious stuff is what I'm in to. Hyper-intense depressing stuff that is so dark that you laugh because you don't know what else to do.

To find out more about Grayson Cox and his work, check out his website.
To find out more about Jaqueline Cedar and her work, check out her website and check out Good Naked Gallery’s website, too!