Terry Rodgers
Imagine heaven. Or rather the after party. It may even seem more like hell, full of vacuous, lustful models sipping champagne and redbull.
Terry Rodgers paints devilish portraits of that so sought after VIP group sex.
Chief Magazine:You grew up in the 50s and 60s. There was a lot going on in almost every area of life then. Especially in the art world, so much was happening. Were you exposed to that early on?
Terry Rodgers: My mother was pretty receptive to anything and my dad was an engineer so anything art related was weird to him. He was fine with it because he was a very open man, but it wasn’t something that he sought out. My childhood, though, was very interesting because the ‘suburb’ was a relatively new thing. Growing up there, it was a new world. You were very cut-off from everything. Your world was that suburb. There really wasn’t anything else. The nice thing about it though was that even though my friends were really connected to that, shall we say, community, I was always a little on the outside, literally. I was always interested in the outdoors. That’s where my focus was. The animals and streams and creeks, I was always out there. And because the suburbs were still new everyplace we lived was bordering forests or lakes or something. So I could always go out and explore freely. I had knives and all of that. I would make things and catch things and fish and do all of that as if I were in the country but yet I was still living in this suburbanized area.
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You went to college for art, so it seems as if you were exposed to art at a young age.
Actually when I went to school I had no idea that’s what I was going to study. I decided that a little bit later, there at school. But again, different from a lot of the people around me, I was able to be connected to some peculiar part of the art world. When you’re in D.C., you’re slightly spoiled. New York has a lot of art, but D.C. has free museums. So it was kind of ridiculous that I could be down there and frequently see things for free. There was no inhibition. I was always in the National Gallery looking at things from a reasonably young age.
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And among all the kids around me I was the only one who was taken by drawing and painting through junior and senior high school and that’s always what was noticed about me. But I didn’t know that’s what I was going to study. The Corcoran Museum is also a school of art. I would go down there on Saturdays, again, unlike anyone I knew, and I would take classes. So there I am going down for figure drawing in high school and after class I would wander all around the museum. So it was readily available. How I started doing that I don’t know. I was drawing all the time in classes; I would get kids to model for me to draw from. I can remember in 6th grade doing a mural in pastels that was the entire back wall of the classroom. I can’t recall anyone supporting that or being interested in that—teachers or anything. My mom of course did because she supported anything I did. But there was no push or pressure. It’s just if I liked something she was there to support.
During that time when you were wandering through those museums do you remember any painting or any artist that made you stop and say, “Oh crap. This is what I want to do”?
I don’t remember anything like that specifically, but I do remember the Phillips Collection, which is this brilliant, small, private collection and I worked there. I don’t remember whether it was in the winter or the summer but I was a “guard” there and out of everything I remember Degas. It was interesting that among the things I found interesting was Degas’s Bather. It was and still is a brilliant piece. That and Velasquez are the things that stood out in paintings that I saw. There wasn’t much then new that was riveting me or opening my eyes. It’s funny isn’t it?
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Your paintings are very voyeuristic but also the subjects seem a bit dissatisfied or bored. How much of that is because they actually were bored? It seems with guys like Goya and Velasquez in particular it was the first time that the painters’ feelings towards the subjects (i.e. royalty as subjects) were projected onto the piece. There always seems to be a hint of the subversive there, something about these "important figures" doing nothing at all...
I don’t know how objective I can be about the work but I feel a lot of the things are going on are fairly conceptual. The whole realm of me playing with body politics seems to be the most obvious thing, but the thing that’s as apparent to me as anything else in the painting is that I'm using this realistic vehicle to get at all the other junk. So the realism is just the realm in which I play to get at all these other things. It’s a play on “old fashioned” painting and your perception. That’s wonderful though that you thought of the court painters and those studies of human sense. My idea is that you see these people in situations that are way beyond their comprehension.
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Every single thing in their environment is supposed to lead to a certain feeling. All the sex, all the beauty, all the accoutrements of the room imply that they’re in a place where happiness occurs, that this is it, this is the ultimate. You have intimate sex, you have great people around you, beautiful environments and the confusion is that our culture promotes that, that idea that that is how you get some place. But we live within our heads and our interpretation. It’s not if you get this thing or this person or this place or this amount of money that happiness will occur. And our whole culture acts on the idea that those objective things will give you subjective experiences. And, yes, occasionally they do.
No, there’s nothing arguably wrong with the individual things that make up the idea, but there’s no reason to assume that they are the key to happiness. So that’s what’s going on there. I’m trying to paint a picture of the fiction that our culture lives. Every movie, every magazine, every Vogue—I mean every issue of Vogue—is about “this is what’s important for you”. And so it’s this push-pull of “Yes this is wonderful, but does it have actual weight?”
And where did this hyper-awareness of this struggle come from?
Well that’s the toughest thing for you to have to do is to try to figure out where you’re coming from. It’s obvious to me that it comes from all the junk in my experience. Just from growing up and hitting that age where your first social consciousness starts to occur. You think, “Well if I buy this thing, if wear these clothes, maybe that will help me be connected or liked or accepted”.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It’s a subconscious thing but I think it’s innate in all people, that self-consciousness, that drive to be accepted, to connect. That’s what I watched and still watch.
Looking at the evolution of your work, I noticed that the older work seemed subtler, more subdued. Why move toward doing the work you’re doing now, with more nudity and more overt sexuality?
I’m not exactly sure how to answer that. I like both of those directions and am compelled to work in either at any time. I don’t think anything has shifted for me. I don’t think I favor one over the other. I do think one is definitely more of a social study. You could say subtle maybe.
Maybe a better way to describe it would be that the older work seems more plausible.
Got it. Yeah, I’m not trying for plausibility at all. Even when I was doing that, that wasn’t the focus. None of these parties took place. They are a compression of a version of the fantasy. One way to say it is that these paintings are no different than a painting of someone living in a trailer riding a motorcycle and the feelings and ideas would be transferred to that.
Really what this is about is desire. It’s about what are the things that signify desire. And I'm not saying that what’s in my painting is what you would desire. They’re simply metaphors for what you might desire. In your case it may be to write better, or to have a fourth language.
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The things in my paintings are simply overt symbols of a pictorial part of our culture. So the pieces in the paintings are never meant to be real, and more recently they’re an even more compressed fiction, so that there’s more going on in the space than is conceivable. It's like taking a notion of what a fantasy could be from whatever onslaught that’s telling us that we ought to have this or that. It’s all bullshit. All of the pieces of the bullshit are great but they don’t add up. So you end up with this infinite profusion of confusion. It’s like I'm trying to paint the sense of too much-ness.
That makes me wonder, what do you surround yourself with? What’s important to you?
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Working [laughs]. There’s a lot of working, reading, music. It’s not a question of what people should be surrounding themselves with. I’m not saying that people have to be rustic. All of these things are great but the big question is what on earth do you do with yourself. The key is where does interest lie.
Painting gives you the ultimate control to represent things in any way that you want. Have you ever thought of branching out, have you worked with film or photography?
I used to do a lot of film work. In the beginning I was very much into painting and drawing, but I did get into doing some film work. But I ended up really focusing on what I'm doing now. The very first reason being that film can be a very expensive, collaborative medium. It’s very difficult to do it solo so you automatically are turned into this manager. I have a hard enough time managing me [laughs]. The peculiar thing about being able to move stuff around and just all that other subjective stuff is lost outside of painting and drawing. When I'm working I always have a palette filled with all sorts of globs and mushes and marks, and that’s always the best thing that I do. I endlessly marvel at the stuff that’s occurring there. That is just the constant magic for me. That’s where the language is born. It starts with marks and I respond to it and the marks start to signify something. All of that is a form of language inventing itself before my eyes. How much of that is coming from me or from the paint itself I’ll never know, but it’s constantly occurring.
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It’s so interesting to hear that. If I were to not have any idea about what your work looked like and try to make a guess based on that statement, photorealism would be the last thing I would think of.
Well if you were to see the paintings in person you might be hesitant to call them photorealist. All of the paintings are just a little bit surprisingly large, so that when you look at them they don’t come across as photorealistic. I have zero commitment to photorealism. I have no interest in miming a photograph. I think there’s nothing in there except an idea. And not only has it been mimed too much, it doesn’t have much meaning in the first place.
When you look at the painting, there’s a whole lot of stuff that occurs along the lines of, “Well that doesn’t look quite right.” I’m playing with this illusion of closeness. I can be on both sides of being convincing as well as being a totally fictitious thing. It ain't real. When you come to a painting that’s 10 feet long, you see the mushy and mashy language of the paint. You don’t look at it and say, “Oh that looks real.” You may think it looks real enough but it isn’t a reality. Yeah, but you would expect from that statement that I’d be painting like De Kooning. And I like De Kooning a lot. But a lot of the paintings out there, when you get into it, you see they are related; perhaps not in that beautiful squishy, goopy style, but inasmuch that they’re about an invented reality. They’re marks that are pretending to be real. They’re not miming reality, but sort of acting on the pretense so that they can represent this composite of our minds, or a metaphor of the composite of our minds.
Your work seems as if you’re pointing a finger at this idea of finding happiness in materials. Is that something that you think is particular to our culture as Americans, or is it a more broad idea of people in general being easily lost in this maze of amassment.
My sense is that no matter where you are there is a cultural hierarchy, a hierarchy of cultural desires. I think that that is more likely a piece of human nature. I don’t know if we can change it or know if we can avoid it and I'm not here to tell anyone what we can do about it.
Every culture has its hierarchy of values. It just seems to be one of the things we do. And what I'm doing is I'm grabbing the loudest version of it. And coincidentally it happens to be something that can relate to all of sorts of cultures. Nude bodies and sex seem to be across the board, although it may be a different take on an ideal. It’s not just American. If you look at what these pictures are focusing on, I'm sure there are a fair number of private parties in Saudi Arabia or Japan or Germany that would have relationships to what I'm painting. Having the ability to do these sorts of things within your society has a certain universality.
I read that you had done illustration and murals as well as being a fine artist. Are you still working as a commercial artist?
That was a long time ago. I’m now doing exactly what I want. Over the last three, four years I've had a really solid reception in Europe. My sense is that it’s slightly less inhibited. In some ways it’s a less conservative culture. I've had good response here from a good number of people but the response there has been very solid.
When I was reading about you and some reviews about you, I came across this phrase: “success du scandal,” referring to some success that may be won by way of scandal or shock.
I don’t find that a really regular response. That’s certainly not where I live in the paintings. There might be a certain shock to other people. But the paintings have to work for me and I'm not about to be shocked by something I work on for so long. That doesn’t interest me. I am utilizing some of those things that get under our skin the most, and I'm interested in [them] to a degree to which some people can look at them and get what I'm trying to say, whereas others look at them and feel slightly scandalized. They’re a problem for me because I'm not communicating with them so much as they are responding to their own prejudices. I'm interested in the person that can see past that and can see what’s going on. The scandal is not what it’s about. It’s about the levels of language we create for ourselves within this world and what we think is important.
Website
www.terryrodgers.com
Photos
Estelle Rodgers
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