Social Realists thrived through the 1920s and 1930s. Their creative exploration looked to examine socio and political effects on the people challenged most. By 1939, many of these same artists had turned to
Abstraction, as archived by
Clement Greenberg in his essay, “
Avantgarde and Kitsch,” published by the
Partisan Review.
(Above, Joshua Hagler, Can't you see I'm a white man? Now give me something to get this paint off with! Oil on panel, 12 x 24 inches, 2015).
Explaining the historical development of
Modern art, Greenberg described, ”…only attention to form could reveal what was important and significant in the new art.”
(Above left, Phillipe Halsman, “Clement Greenberg,” 1959).
Los Angeles artist
Joshua Hagler blurs characteristics of the working class found in
Social Realism while contemporizing the figure in a surrealistic landscape. Although, details of Joshua’s paintings are both recognizable and mysteriously withholding, he chooses to further accentuate ambiguity while presenting social, political and religious cues.
(Above, Self-Portrait as Confederat Soldier, mixed media on canvas, 94 x 77 inches, 2015).
The Brandstater Gallery at La Sierra University in Riverside, California is currently exhibiting,
The Adopted by Joshua Hagler. The Adopted features large-scale Hollywood Westerns—inspired paintings emblematic of complacency and feelings of personal guilt in juxtaposition to the atrocities of the modern world.
(Above, The Ambush, mixed media on canvas, 60 x 82 inches, 2015).
With a desire to learn more, I thought to reach out to Joshua Hagler and share his interview.
mark murphy : The Adopted features a personal narrative, and like your work, seems to blur boundaries instinctively. What inspired you during the making of this work?
Joshua Hagler : Well, I’ve been thinking in this direction for a couple of years, where I’ve been referencing film stills from old Westerns. I had one show in San Francisco with my girlfriend Maja Ruznic called
Among the Missing, and another solo show in Houston called
My Name is Nobody.
(Above, A Taxidermic Initiant (One Day I will Be Chief), detail, 2015).
Although this work evolves from these earlier projects, its unique in that I’ve been looking specifically at films in which white characters attempt integration with American Indian tribes or simply white actors playing the roles of
Native North American characters.
(Above, Nobody Will Observe, oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches, 2014 featured in Among the Missing).
There’s something simultaneously problematic and cliche in these depictions, but it also reveals what I think of as a very real American ambivalence present in a post-industrial, post-colonial society like ours. Just here in Los Angeles, for instance, there is a kind of unnamed “back to nature” movement, an idealism overlapping with environmentalism maybe, but more esoteric and anxious in nature, whether one is eating only raw food or traveling somewhere exotic to participate in vision quests with dedicated shamans.
(Above, Hidasleep for a million years before the Brother goes Fugitive and only for Fugitives does it stir and call, mixed media on twin wood panels, 48 x 72 inches, 2015).
Beneath this urge to “go native,”
I believe, is a sense of shame, inherited by many who want to break with a historical precedent of genocide, slavery, and white supremacy. Even if we are sincere in our redemptive yearning, we misunderstand the imagery we’re appropriating in order to alleviate ourselves from the burden of a cruel and deeply uncomfortable history.
(Above, A Taxidermic Initiant (One Day I will Be Chief), mixed media on canvas, 96 x 144 inches, 2015).
I’m conscious of my place in the world as a descendent of colonists and settlers, as part of the legacy of Westward Expansion. My great great Grandmother, a Cherokee, was purchased as property by my great great Grandfather, who was white.
(Above, The Stranger)
When I was 16, my family moved to a suburb in Phoenix and separated from the Gila River Indian Reservation by Pecos Road. From our backyard, we could see an endless expanse of flat brown dirt and blue sky. Never signs of life, although there was a casino in the distance. Some of the neighboring yards were landscaped with faux Indian pottery shards. Our suburban development was called “Wind Song,” (very Pocahontas). So, what was hidden in plain sight was a history of prison encampment on one side of the road and the simulation of cultural destruction as a landscaping solution on the other side.
(Above, An old couch sits in front of an abandoned building on the Gila River Indian Reservation by Mike Olbinski Photography).
mark murphy : What moments in art history really inspires you? What artists of the past really get you going?
Joshua Hagler : This might sound cliché, but honestly, I’d start with cave and rock art. I recognize an impulse to understand who we are even 30,000 years ago. It also fuels my desire towards a more spiritual existence, however, mixed up and confused that might sound.
(Above, Bulgaria Magura Cave Paintings).
Without begetting and begetting throughout art history here, let’s fast forward to the mid to late 20th century, and I find that same impulse in the work of
Anselm Kiefer,
(detail above). He opened up space in modern and contemporary art for me to place my work. I don’t feel that many people in the art scene I’m familiar with want to talk about religion, philosophy, and mysticism in the way that his work does. But because he does, it gives me some confidence that this kind of work and dialogue is valuable even if I feel somewhat isolated from what's going on around me.
For example, my recent painting
Self-Portrait as a Confederate Officer, (above detail), wouldn’t have happened without Kiefer’s Nazi salute self-portrait paintings and photos in his early career. The gesture was an ironic one, calling attention to the part of Germany's past that it didn't want to acknowledge. With the conversation about race in the America of the present day, I want to look to the past to understand where I fit.
My work deals a lot with the concept of the
colonist or
settler. I align myself with America’s white-supremacist underpinnings within Westward Expansion because of all positions I could take, it has the greatest redemptive potential. This parallels the work conceptually—its questions about religion and formality and how the work is physically made.
(Above, Rivermouth from My Name is Nobody, 2014).
mark murphy : What is your approach to narrative? How have you applied this to your sensibility in film and sculpture?
Joshua Hagler : Well, I think I’m very attached to narrative in my work. I was a cartoonist when I was younger, have written many short stories and unfinished novels, film scripts, etc. Conversely, art about art has never really done it for me. It always felt like it helped to be rich to understand it or at least to pretend convincingly that you understood it.
(Above, Night Grass).
Narrative drives our mythologies, our religions, how we think of ourselves in society, history, within our families. I was born in a working-class family and was the first to attend college. Grad school wasn't even something I considered doing. Too far out of orbit. Art about itself would never make sense to anyone I grew up with. And so my entry into the contemporary art world was through a blissfully naive use of narrative. However, if you try to approach narrative in painting like you would through these other media, it just doesn't work. It took me awhile to learn that.
(Above, They're shootin’ buffalo. Government says, killed a million of ’em last year alone. Oil on canvas, 36 x 72 inches).
In some ways, I think the way I’m working now is a kind of inversion or freezing of narrative as a way to extricate and magnify a moment which is no longer related to a specific film for instance; the narrative moment is now detached. By detaching and rearranging these narrative moments, they start to work for rather than against the paintings; they can exist both autonomously and in tandem.
(Above, And then later that night you were lying, looking up at the ceiling and the water in your head was not dissimilar from the landscape, and you think to yourself, "why is it that the landscape is moving but the boat is still? Oil on canvas, 48 x 36 inches).
Through this strategy, I’ve created what I think of as a meta-narrative called “The Religion,” which functions as a kind of constructed site or operating table, in which I can rearrange narrative elements, symbols, parts of language, etc. The symbol of “The Religion” itself, suggests a timeline, in which its reality begins in 19th-Century America and continues into a distant sci-fi future.
(Above, Initiation, detail).
With my current video
Between Winds, I have had the opportunity to deconstruct narrative similar to the way I do with the paintings. Since the images occur in time, it feels narrative within the singular work. The video and paintings in my current show
The Adopted are in dialogue with each other and this helps to direct the way in which the viewer sees and deciphers what's happening in the work.
Kind thanks to
Joshua Hagler.
The Adopted by Joshua Hagler, with introduction by Houston artist
Trenton Doyle Hancock, is now available.
Drift, film and collaborative art project.
Ink & Other studio visit feature.
