Remarkable Hail: So, you've managed to gather a lot of momentum in Los Angeles considering you graduated from a fairly obscure MFA program nowhere near there. How did all of that come to pass?
James Cartwright: Well, I attended Southern Kansas University for graduate school. It's not a very well known program, but when I found out that Ross Bleckner was teaching there, I was kind of like... Man, I really like Ross Bleckner! I've never heard of this place, but hey, if they've got Bleckner, maybe they've got some steam, or whatever...
RH: And then you found out...
JC: Right. Then I found out it wasn't that Ross Bleckner, it's another guy. This guy who paints these undersea murals.
RM: Oh, right like that guy what's his name. In all the beach towns. Wieland or something? With the whales and the dolphins?
JC: Yeah. Right. Exactly. Except this guy's work was all fucked up. Like, you know, it would be a pretty standard underwater scene but then you'd notice something weird... like on one of them (a commission for a sea food restaurant in downtown Wichita,) the dolphins were all exactly the same dolphin. He does his rough drafts using Photoshop, so for this painting I'm telling you about, he just selected one of the dolphins and copied and pasted it repeatedly into the scene. Each dolphin is exactly the same, but all the rest of the animals are completely unique. Oh yeah, and the kicker is that this guy has never left Kansas. He lives in a completely landlocked state, has no desire to leave, but he can't make himself stop painting all of these weird undersea murals. I think he has autism.
RM: really?
JC: No. But there's definitely something wrong with him. His last non-mural works were a series of fourteen small-scale oil paintings depicting a solitary white whale at the various stations of the cross. So, yeah, the premise is a little screwy to begin with, but then, when you get to the twelfth station--the one where Jesus-as-whale is getting his big, fleshy flippers pounded into the cross by the Romans--if you look closely at the whale, he's got this really disgusting expression on his face--this leer. No, seriously it's this really filthy and disgusting leer. Ew, God. Just thinking about it makes me want to take a shower. It's horrible. But, I mean, it's really amazing and powerful at the same time. He's really a hell of a painter in terms of his technical skill, so he was pretty disappointed when I decided to try my hand at painting abstractly--non-pictorially.
But yeah, anyway, his wife Jean used to teach at the Kansas City Art Institute. My first big show after grad school was a two person show with her at the gallery there at KCAI and pretty soon after that I lucked out and was asked to do a solo show at her dealer's gallery in Los Angeles.
RH: I'm assuming you're referring to Diffusion/Refraction's old space in Chinatown?
JC: No, it was actually right after they moved to Culver City.
RH: Okay. That was the show that I saw. That was your first show in L.A.? The one you did last year?
JC: Uh huh.
RH: Tell me about that show. You mentioned it was kind of a departure for you...
JC: Yeah. I'm taking a break from abstraction. Too much freedom. I hate freedom. It's what this country is supposedly founded on right? Freedom? Fuck freedom. Give me some oppressive rules and regulations please.
RH: How about an order? Will that do?
JC: (laughs.) If that's all you got. By all means. Feel free. Boss me around.
RH: Okay. Tell me about the big diptych from the Diffusion show.
JC: I grew up in San Francisco. All the titles from the show are actually these lame puns from San Francisco coffee houses, which was kind of this dumb inside joke with myself that I didn't actually mention to anyone until this very minute... breaking news. anyway, the diptych is called Uncommon Grounds which is a horrible, horrible place where I actually used to work for a couple of years when I was in high school, but yeah, I digress... (laughs)
RH: What's going on with that one?
JC: Well, it's a diptych, so it's divided into two parts, obviously. The first panel is this really goofy computery looking thing that I actually did design on the computer with a rendering program, and the second one is from an image I found on the internet--a screen grab from an old Atari 2600 version of hangman. The two halves are meant to hinge together conceptually and to some degree compositionally.
RH: I should point out that the second painting is basically this blocky graphic rendering of a monkey being executed.
JC: Yeah. Kind of. And the word "TODAY." So, both paintings have two basic elements and then the ground. In the first one, a dolphin is swimming just below the illusionistic surface--the painted one, while depending on how you look at it a woman is either floating in the air a split second prior to the mother of all belly-flops, or she is floating face down, dead in the water. Half in/half out of the pictorial ground occupied by the dolphin. In the first painting the relationship between the two basic elements is that of a woman and a dolphin divided/not divided by the painted, illusionistic plane of the water's surface...
RH: And in the second painting?
JC: It's actually kind of the same. The interesting thing about the Atari version of hangman is that unlike regular hangman, where guessing incorrectly results in the materialization of death, literally in the form of a guy getting strung up at the gallows, in the Atari version, guessing incorrectly produces a living Darwinian protohuman who is hanging from a branch of his own volition. The dichotomy is human/not-human instead of life/death. The successful materialization of the word keeps either death or the monkey at bay, depending on which version you're playing.
RH: So what about in the dolphin picture? What's going on there?
JC: In each painting we have a close animal cousin juxtaposed with civilization, but separated by some kind of a scrim. In the first painting man is represented literally by the human body and the scrim is the surface of the water which obscures our view of nature/not-man which is echoed in the form of the dolphin below. In the second painting, civilization is represented by the word and the scrim is the relationship between word and the object it describes, which perversely refuses to materialize in the presence of the word. The monkey materializes only in the absense of the word. The real (in the form of nature, or the monkey) has in effect been supplanted by the descriptor(the word, or civilization).
Similarly, the connection between the two objects is perversely thwarted in the first painting either by the barrier of the water's surface (assuming the swimmer has not yet penetrated the water's surface, in which case she is doomed to hang there for eternity or at least the life of the painting) or in the second, more morbid scenario, by the swimmer's penetration of the pictorial surface (the false ground) of the water and communion with the object (the dolphin) at the cost of her own life, since in this scenario, she is now floating face-down dead in the water.
RH: So I'm assuming you chose the dolphin in the first painting for the same reason as the monkey in the second? Because of its behavioral/cognitive similarities to humans?
JC: Well in the case of both animals, we have some humans(scientists even) making claims that these animals are capable of some rudimentary approximation of language, so that's partly it, but in the case of the dolphin, it's mostly just a nod to Bleckner.
