Norm Paris

Norm Paris was born in Cleveland, Ohio and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. He has had solo exhibitions at The Proposition, New York, NY and Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York, and his work has been featured in exhibitions at Ortega Y Gasset, Brooklyn, NY, Monya Rowe Gallery, New York, NY, Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles, Ca, SCOTTY, Berlin, Germany, Transmitter Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, the Rochester Contemporary Art Center, Rochester, New York, NY, and The Print Center in Philadelphia, PA, among other venues. His work has been included in museum exhibitions at The Jewish Museum, New York, NY, the Children’s Museum of the Arts in New York, NY, The Museum of Drawings in Laholm, Sweden, and the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC. Norm was a 2015-16 resident at the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program, New York, NY and has previously taken part in the Triangle Artist Workshop in New York and the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT. His work is part of numerous collections including The Jewish Museum, New York, NY and the West Collection, Oaks, PA. He is a founding member of Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York. Norm is a Professor at Rhode Island School of Design and has previously taught at the Yale School of Art. Paris received his B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design and his M.F.A. in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art.

Statement
Over the past several years, I have created sculptures, drawings, and mixed-media works that explore my complicated relationship to masculine icons of the past, focusing on objects, iconography, and mythology that both aggrandize and diminish historical figures over time. I re-envision once heroic figures as relics, ruins, and absences; these bygone icons—once-celebrated athletes and musicians sourced from a mix of personal and public mythologies—are used as vessels to be modeled, covered, crated, or redacted. I alternately render and obscure my iconography through labor-intensive processes of hand-modeling, casting, crating, and erasure. My recent large-scale drawings are depictions of hypothetical unfinished monuments – sculptures that are in the process of being carved out of stone. They are derived from my ongoing series of “Card” works in which I employ my own boyhood sports card collection as a departure point for ruminations concerning the ephemeral nature of public figures. At times the card itself becomes a material relic. In my multi-disciplinary work, I often contemplate the revering and forgetting of heroes - and their unstable encasement within cultural memory.

Interview with Norm Paris

Questions by Marcus Civin

When I look at your work, I think of Simon & Garfunkel’s 1968 song, Mrs. Robinson, the lyrics “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.” Maybe I’m not the first person to ask you: do these lyrics resonate at all with you today?
I caught myself humming that tune while working on a drawing of Lou Gehrig for the Card series. That lyric really has always stuck out to me. 

There’s a double nostalgia there – at this point the song itself is to me like Joe DiMaggio was to Paul Simon. These heroic forms, the songs and the figures, are complicated shapeshifters. They look a certain way based on your cultural viewpoint and your place in time. Simon was looking back at someone anointed as an American Hero – served in a “just war”, great at baseball – during a different moment of protest over Vietnam. It reminds me of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: this uncomfortable generational crossroads.

Joe DiMaggio, like really any figure from the past, is sort of like a mirage in the distance – the details are obscured and what’s left is a mix of my wishes and a broad silhouette of facts. I actually read somewhere that DiMaggio was a little peeved when he heard that lyric – he had retired only a handful of years earlier and he was essentially like “Dude, I’m right here!” But maybe that’s the point of the lyric: the DiMaggio of the imagination had vanished even if the real DiMaggio had lived on. Maybe “Ideal DiMaggio” had been usurped by the recognition of a more complicated reality. I mean, that lyric from Mrs. Robinson was written around the same time as the Mexico City Olympics, with the Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised-fist protests. Before my time, for sure, but that seems like a pretty poignant contrast.

I’m learning about how you’ve taken as subjects superstar Michael Jordan. Also, you’ve created work about lesser-known athletes like the football running back and coach Earnest Byner. Father-and-son basketball devotees Press and Pete Maravich. I’m hoping I am the first person to ask you, in print, your feelings about the premature death of basketball great Kobe Bryant. What do you think we can learn from Bryant’s life and legend?
You’re the second person to ask me that…only because I’ve been asking myself about Bryant since I heard the news. I think I am mourning the idea of Kobe Bryant, and the era of my life that his career has bracketed. Basically it’s a mid-life crisis for me, on the back of a real trauma for others. He was my age, and I have a daughter too – on that level there is a gut reaction that goes beyond the specific figures involved. Honestly, I would be rocked by the simple fact of any father and daughter dying for any reason whatsoever! And there were several parents and children on that helicopter. 

Kobe Bryant was complicated. I think his story gets streamlined in an unfortunate way. Like I said before about “Ideal DiMaggio”, my relationship to superstars is that they look great from miles away, and we essentialize from distance. Things break down up close, like a low-res jpeg. Or maybe the simplistic image breaks down, and that allows other competing information to bubble up through the fissures. I bet biographers have this experience with every project.

What can we learn? To accommodate more nuanced and less reductive views of iconic figures. I was just telling my students that one great thing about art is that we can hold seemingly contradictory positions simultaneously (i.e. absence and presence, positive and negative, drawing and erasure, flatness and space, aggrandizing and criticizing, etc.) – and maybe we can find that kind of nuance and complexity in how we read our media. 

You mentioned my interest in people like Roky Erickson, Pete Maravich and Earnest Byner – I guess I am drawn to them because their errors and failings are really obvious, and within that complexity is a more full accounting of a human experience. It’s less flat. 

Do you mind talking in some detail about how you move between drawing, printmaking, and sculpture?
I think drawing and sculpture are the two arms within my studio, but printmaking tends to provide material and serial logics for both sides. I have been scraping into the surface of my drawings with hand and machine tools, really digging into the paper and debossing – pressing into the substrate - in a way that then effects what happens on top. Also, I’m borrowing engraving-influenced languages like cross-contour line, sort of importing these approaches into my drawings. The Erased Cards are partly a print project as well, this time using the debossed found offset litho color from the card almost like the ink deposit in an intaglio print once I sand away the high ground. 

My sculptures are often understood through drawing and print approaches. When I hand-model with clay, maybe it’s obvious that I see the forms as drawing-based. I think this is the case in the way that I use tools to effect contours and to articulate shifts in the surface. From a wider procedural perspective, moldmaking is basically the same thing as printmaking for me, in the sense that it is a repeatable matrix. Like printmaking, the casting process can yield crazy, unexpected results. I often use this potential for seriality to create hybrids – my basic rule is that a casting can never simply remain what it is. Just as printmaking has mutated from the initial desire for faithful reproductions of paintings to embrace all sorts of material invention, I don’t like to use the mold to simply replicate a model. It really can’t, anyways – material changes create irrevocable differences, and the second of anything is by nature different than the first. One of my favorite artist quotes is Jasper Johns: “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.” I want to change the original, to manipulate it in some way.

I believe we live in a revolutionary moment. The reign of all-male board rooms, male-dominated classrooms, sexist deans, CEOs, and presidents is shifting and changing. You take the mid-level psychedelic rocker Roky Erickson as one of your subjects. In 1982, he sang, “False Gods will bring the devil the blues.” As a man contemplating masculinity—particularly the gods and demigods of the recent past—what does the current cultural moment mean to you? 
Really I grew up adoring sexist deans! Just kidding. But that idea of False Gods is something that I do think about, both as a man and as a Jew. I’m interested in the Jewish prohibition on idolatry, not as a literal idea but as a way to think about all those misguided masculine constructions. Perhaps it’s a heavy-handed metaphor, or maybe just a direct instruction for our current day…don’t look to your political figures or strongmen for your own edification!

A confession, probably obvious in my case: I grew up loving Rock & Roll, football, baseball, basketball – and I still obsess over aspects of those things. But at the same time I am looking at the fault lines of all these structures, that are now more out in the open than they’ve ever been. It really is a big moment of reckoning. Growing up in Ohio in the 80’s and 90’s, and being conditioned by conventional gender roles just as they were starting to be more openly questioned, I’m re-surveying the things that I used to put on a pedestal. Maybe sometimes turning the pedestal into an examination table. For me that means living within the masculine spectacle – sort of sitting inside that adolescent fantasy, inhabiting whatever it was that I found powerful or neurotic about it and actually working my way out from that place without endorsing it. Drawings of ruins, sculptures of absences-  I think of these things as derivations from old heroic sources, sources that haven’t aged well.

Roky Erickson is a pretty good example of the breakdown of a heroic male archetype, so much so that a lot of people don’t really know who he is. But he reinvented himself a couple times. The thing about him that I love is that he is clearly vulnerable, it’s in the lyrics for sure. There’s something unexpectedly poetic about his confusion, and somehow his songs land on their feet even though his compass is totally off.

Your recent series of graphite drawings, titled Monuments, look to me to be part-human, part-abstract-geologic-formation. I think these drawings could be understood to represent figures somehow covered, about to break out, or are they entombed in stone? Can you say: what do you think about your Monuments series?
Yes, I see all those references embedded in those drawings. They were initially meant to be drawings of unfinished subtractive sculptures, carved out of something, but I am also thinking about Pompeii and Swamp Thing and Golems. These figures stuck in amber, fossilized. Ultimately I like to imagine the forms as being in a state of flux despite the frozen connotations. There’s a strangeness to the space in them from different distances; the size makes it so that there is a different experience up close, where areas of rubbing and markmaking become abstract, compared to the way that these almost-abstract areas cohere to form an image from distance.

So much has changed in the recording and broadcasting of daily life. In my lifetime, I watched baseball in black-and-white. I just read that the new Raiders stadium, where I live in Las Vegas, will be the most connected stadium anywhere. The internet will be super-fast. In 1978, the fastest cameras had shutter speeds of 1/1000th of a second. The cameras reporters now tote around in stadiums can “see” and “capture” at 1/32000th of a second. Can that even be right? How does our digital present inform you as a researcher and an artist?
That’s super interesting! There are several tracks to this for me. First off, I watched The Fumble – when Earnest Byner lost the football at the goal line in the 1987 AFC Championship game - unfold in real time, when I was 9 years old, in front of my Grandmother’s ornate, wood-encased 1980’s style TV. I remember not being able to see that Byner had fumbled - the ball was suddenly “not there”, a presence becoming an absence. This was a relic of old-style TV in a way, since the televisions of that era didn’t have a high enough fidelity to actually document the speed of that moment. But it’s also a metaphor for not only the loss of a ball, but also the loss of the game, the absence of success, even the erosion of a memory in general.

And so I was compelled to recreate the space around Earnest Byner in that specific moment. I built a 3d model measuring the inches between the bodies of Byner and Jeremiah Castille, the defensive back for the Denver Broncos, the split second before Castille strips the ball. This was based on as many views as I could find from the event. The process of “reconstructing” that event generated two large-scale crate-like sculptures. I was using SketchUp, which is rudimentary, but it felt like I was employing the program as a prosthetic device, the software extending the staticky memory of my Grandma’s classic television.

Like a lot of people, I use the “digital present” of today, and the ubiquity of images via the internet, the ease with which we can construct and visualize form and space, as sources and methods for projects all the time. But really I am thinking as much about analog media formats. My “Stacks” - which are castings of records, vhs tapes, comic books, and cards – are really me looking at these forms of media as failed heroic figures.

You do so much. You’re an artist, a curator, a professor. You seem to move quickly between work, studio, shows, and residencies up and down the East Coast. And I imagine there are friends, family. Are any two days alike for you? What does a week look like? Perhaps week-to-week, you’ve formed rituals? Can you identify your patterns?
Everyone’s busy, I think. There’s always a balance between this and that for all of us. Regardless, I definitely don’t do it alone. My partner Jackie Hoving is a powerhouse, also balancing being a parent with her own studio and teaching, while being the co-director for Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York, where we are both founding members. We share the burden in a lot of ways – I couldn’t do what I do without her. 

There are a few kinds of “typical” patterns, as many artist-teachers will tell you – the typical in-semester rhythm and the out-of-semester rhythm. During the academic year it is about balancing teaching stuff with family and studio work. I need to keep projects moving during these times – my motto is to try to do at least one thing for my studio every day, no matter how small or large. When there is a show or a deadline I am pretty much not sleeping. And then there is the summer, when there is more space for a balance between family and studio.

For me things work best when the different endeavors are feeding one another, and they often do. But sometimes I struggle to shift gears between a studio head-space, a spouse/dad headspace, a teacher/curator headspace, etc.

What are you working on now, today?
I’m making drawings, doing some casting, and also continuing to expand the Card project. Investigating some larger-scale printing and transfer techniques. After finishing a curatorial project last fall titled Secondary Sources, Jackie and I are planning another show at Tiger Strikes Asteroid. I’ve been working on some writing, and putting together proposals. Not all happening literally “today”…but generally that’s what is cooking.

To find out more about Norm Paris and his work, check out his website.