Pretensia Quarterly Interview with Darwin Price Upcoming Issue – Fall/Winter 2004 This interview recorded earlier this year at Pretensia Quarterly’s office in Berkeley Ca.
Interviewer: Terrance Riley
Darwin Price is a well-known artist in the San Francisco Bay Area art scene. Often present in his work is the reconciliation of such dichotomies as good/evil, anima/animus, orange and green. I had the chance to talk to Darwin Price about an upcoming show.
TR: Greetings Mr. Price, please have a seat. Can I call you Darwin?
DP: sure.
TR: Our readers have been very interested in your work and I’ve followed your career personally with great interest. Should we break right into the questions?
DP: Why not?
TR: All right. Well to begin with, many visual artists acknowledge an oscillatory process of delving into subliminal experience and imagery and integrating this with more conscious manipulation and methods of plastic construction, which then becomes a platform for interface with aspects of contemporary environment, e.g. images from the media, idiographic and nomothetic trends. Do you feel this kind of creative/evolutionary direction informs your approach to materials and ways of working?
DP: Not much.
TR: The prevailing aesthetic for many decades towards increasing integration of the psychic and personal realms in the creative process and its products have become tacit in the visual arts. How does your personal experience, destrudinous/libidinal motivations, oscillations in self feeling that you have alluded to at many points in your career, and genetic (in the psychoanalytic sense) matters contributed to your work?
DP: It has a negative capability.
TR: In reference to your early work you mention the constructive aspect, in which the skein of creative processes, and certain vogue elements must undergo a procrustean treatment/truncation to become manifest. Is this kind of melding/obliterating process one you feel you have control of, or one of which you feel yourself a passive spectator and integral part?
DP: The first one.
TR: You have said that you’ve felt that your dreams and other unconscious imagery were the waste products of the self. Does this affect how you work and does the flow of this psychic-fecal effluvium create a miasmatic aura, which colors your work and its atmosphere?
DP: Well…Now that you mentioned it.
Artist Spotlight: Darwin Price with Interviewer Charles Bookman Posted on 27 September 2004 – 9:28pm
CB: What do you do for inspiration?
DP: Ronald Regan movies & Nitrous Oxide.
CB: What do you do when you’re not creating?
DP: I have a day job.
CB: What makes someone a successful artist?
DP: They don’t have a day job?
CB: CB: How’d you know you were going to be an artist?
DP: Tea Leaves read by wandering Gypsies.
CB: What’s your primary medium(s)? Why do you choose them as opposed to something else?
DP: For the last several years it’s been using Oils because they are the preferred medium of nine out of ten dental hygienists.
CB: If you weren’t an artist, what would you be?
DP: Its moot as everyone is an artist anyway.
CB: What words of advice would you give to up and coming artists?
DP: Ignore advice (including this).
CB: What three attributes would you give to a monster in order to destroy Japan?
DP: I’d make the monster Godzilla. Why? What can I say? I’m a Traditionalist.
CB: Were there any low points in your career?
DP:The time one of my bronzes was stolen from a gallery who subsequently chose to hide the fact from me.
CB: What did you learn from them?
DP: Always remember to make the sculpture too heavy to carry.
CB: Could you have avoided them?
DP: If I’d thought to low-jack it.
CB: Who’s your favorite musicians?
DP: Scott Miller of Game Theory, Michael Hedges, Miles Davis, Nick Drake, Darol Anger, REM, Regina Carter, Itzhak Perlman, Yoyo Ma, and Robyn Hitchcock of course.
CB: Artists?
DP: Kent Williams, Lucian Freud, Robert Motherwell, Odd Nerdrum, Roy Lichtenstein, and Joseph Bueys (and that fucker who paints the ?happy little trees?).
CB: Writers?
DP: Rudy Rucker, Richard Dawkins, Robert Wright, Daniel Dennett, Phillip K. Dick, Douglas Adams, and Christopher Moore.
CB: If you could have any super power, what would it be?
DP: The power to affect political change with nothing but the naked power of my single vote.
CB: Why?
DP: Haven’t you been reading the papers?
CB: What trends do you see emerging today in art?
DP: A lot of people are doing many things, which are artsy, artistic, artifice, artificial, and just plain art.
CB: What’s your thoughts on them?
DP: Thinking about art can be like thinking about sex; it’s a bit interesting, but at the end of the night you’re still alone with mother thumb and her four daughters.
CB: What drug habit would you suggest to an upcoming artist?
DP: I’m told that Heroin is very chic.
