I was lucky to have the chance to interview Peter early in our friendship. We were living in these two post-industrial factory buildings, eight floors of artists stretched along either side of a city block, nestled in an area of Brooklyn that is full of creative people and progressive thinkers all finding their own way to make art. I met Peter at a party in my building, a monthly art showing run by some Hungarian expats. Peter’s art was by far the most interesting to me, and as we began to talk about this work, Peter suggested that we set up a proper interview.
A few days later, two bright eyed young artists sat on a neatly made bed with a borrowed tape recorder between them, playing at reporter and art star. The conversation that spun out of this was long, digressive and thoroughly delightful, as we riffed on our respective issues, finding common ground through art. It was the beginning of a rich and rewarding friendship, and, in dialogue form, represents, I believe, the crux of what Peter was working on his during his New York period.
DRAYTON HIERS: I wanted to talk today about the role of an artist both in society and in one's life: the experience of being an artist, and how one comes to conceive of that and carry it out. And you've had a very interesting history, in regards to that. How much of your personal history do you actually think is relevant? Is there a moment where The Artist, quote-unquote, begins, and everything else before that fades away?
PETER KALTREIDER: No, I think the history’sall of it, all part of it, it all goes into it. Everything that comes in eventually comes out some way. And so none of it gets wasted, all of the experience.
D: And so where do you begin your personal biography?
P: I'd have to start at childhood, probably at seven.
D: At seven?
P: That's when I decided I was an atheist. [laughs]
D: And how did that come about?
P: It just seemed like the answers that I was given definitely didn't work for me at a young age. We're brought up in a scientific society, and you look at things logically, and when I saw the way the adults around me were applying the answers, I realized that these answers weren't working for people. I realized that pretty young. I've come around to a new understanding, of course.
D: In what sense?
P: I think in a spiritual sort of sense; I've always been a spiritual person, and I know that I pray well, but I would still say that I'm godless.
D: So when you pray, what are you praying to?
P: Nothing. I'm just praying. Which for me is a lot more genuine. I don't think I need to pray to anything.
D: Is that this idea of creating energy in the world?
P: It is, it's a communication with I think just the universe in general. Absolutely. And also with myself, whatever's inside me. But I wouldn't take any of what I see for granted. It all seems so illusory.
D: Do you see that there might be a point where science and spirituality can converge again?
P: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we'll never lose a mythology, it just has to be new. It has to be refreshed. That's Joseph Campbell. Not me.
D: And do you have a sense of what that mythology could be, or where it could come from?
P: I think it should be something without symbols. I think it should be something that's far more abstract.
D: How do you tell stories without symbols?
P: I'm not saying that I wouldn’t use metaphor, but it wouldn't be a certain symbol like a Nike swoosh. Which is the same thing to me as a Nazi swastika. Or a Christian cross. They're all . . . they all try to objectify and make concrete something that is very fluid, liquid, and abstract. And it's good for minds that can't think metaphorically, but it's an incredibly dangerous situation.
D: Well it is, and Joseph Campbell, he actually says that most of the problem in Christianity today is that we take the metaphor as the truth. It isn't actually the literal birth of Christ, or the death of Christ and rebirth, it's our personal death and rebirth, our spiritual transformation. And we can use our journeys for his journeys. It almost seems that you're advocating an evolution in our understanding of stories. Because we're almost been wired now to take things symbolically. And you're advocating more of an intuitive, emotional approach to mythology.
P: I would like just a more abstract understanding of it. A flowing approach without an answer, without it freezing over, without the ritual becoming more important than the message.
D: How is it possible to make that clear at the same time that it's being abstract?
P: It would have to become a pervasive part of culture, I think, to where it became as normal as a Nike swoosh is.
D: And do you have a sense of where that might come from? How do artists create that?
P: I don't think they, I don't know if they do right now. I don't know if anyone's doing it. And if anyone's doing it, it’s the artists, they're keeping things open. I mean that's always where the artist is, at the forefront, right? He's groping in the dark. He doesn't know what necessarily is out there. You keep something noble and ideal in mind, and you shoot for it.
D: Well, if you listen to your Joseph Campbell, he says that artists are the shamans.
P: Right.
D: And in indigenous cultures, for lack of a better word, the shamans were the ones that spoke with god and spoke to you, and the artist – in healthy societies, the artist is aligned with the spirit as much as the priest is, or any other spiritual being. And they're a conduit for that spirit. But we live in a society where the artist has become marginalized.
P: Right.
D: I think politicians realized that artists had more of an impact than they did, and they began a very focused campaign to silence us. And so the question becomes, what does art do here? Because we're at the beginning of the new millennium, and what does art do, emerging from the dark days of the Twentieth Century?
P: I think art needs to forget the world. I really think that the art that gets pulled into politics or that has a message or propaganda is more part of the problem than anything else. I think propaganda is propaganda; if someone has a message in their art, they've found an answer, and I think the moment you find an answer, you’re cutting yourself off from the flow, from your ability to be outside the world. If you're making art that's outside the world, or that is pushing, is in that dark region, somewhere ahead of us, where the light fades out, that's the art that will give us that birds'-eye perspective, that's above the fray, which is tapping a compassion that helps you overcome the real problems without becoming just another combatant in the fight. I'm not saying the artist as a person shouldn't fight the good fight; you should definitely be in the fray, but the art should be outside of that. Or else you totally lose perspective.
We talk about Peter’s past, how he discovered his art as a young man, and how it was an intense, scary experience for him. He stepped away from his art for a while, went into the Navy and worked on a nuclear submarine.
D: So you went into the Navy as a way to flee the life of an artist, to get as far from it as you possibly could.
P: I think that's probably a lot of it. There's always a lot about the art world that I've completely avoided, and I never even knew who other painters were until just a few years ago. Probably a few years after I started painting, I started looking into people that had developed ideas that I started to think about. That’s how I discovered Kandinsky: I started to think about analogies between art and music, and I thought, 'Well, I bet someone else has thought of this.' And I saw Jackson Pollock's Autumn Rhythm, and it's an analogy between music and art, and then that's how I came to Kandinsky. And I think that's a good thing, too. It’s like what our mutual friend Wes was talking about recently, how he in some way resented knowing the history of art. There's a lot of pollution in there. You definitely have to ride on the shoulders of giants, not hide in their shadows.
D: But there's a great value in knowing history,
P: You have to, sure. But you have to learn it in your own way: every time I've learned about new artists it's been because I'm at that point in my own art, and I've had to learn about that. I think that’s a lot more impactful.
D: I think the fun thing about being an artist is that you're building your own world, and you're also building our history, the way we see ourselves. I know for me that I know the history, but I pick and choose the people that I like, and styles I want to work in, the movements and ideas that I choose to bring into my world. I think that’s like decorating a house.
P: It’s building a cathedral, block by block.
D: And your work has this stained glass window effect.
P: It does have that look, doesn’t it? But that's not intentional! I mean none of it's intentional, it just comes out, and that, that's what we were talking about before, the personal history, it all, it all eventually comes out.
D: And so how do you paint? What is your process?
P: So my process is: I get my canvas, and the first thing I do is look at my colors and I think of the color that I like the best. And it's always a transparent color to start off with. And I put down the brush and I put it on the canvas, and then that starts, and the paint can grab onto that. When there's nothing on there, there's nothing for the paint to grab onto. You actually have to touch the brush to the canvas, that's the most important thing. A lot of times either I follow out a line, or I cover the whole canvas, and then I grab my rag and I start wiping away until I find a shape that makes sense to me. And then after I do that, it gets to a certain point where I stop, and then the next day I'll add another layer of transparent color, and I do that for maybe ten or fifteen layers. And then eventually the opaque comes in, I add some impasto.
D: You’re losing me in the art terms Peter. Now what is transparent color?
P: Just transparent color.
D: Like a shellac? Can you even see it?
P: No, they’re the pigments that are just naturally opaque or transparent. A lot of synthetics are transparent. They're normal colors. I don't use crimson red, I mean Alizarin Crimson, because it's a fugitive color, but it's a transparent color.
D: A fugitive color? What does that mean?
P: When the sunlight hits it, the ultraviolet rays turn it a different color. It turns brown. A lot of brown in old paintings used to be a brilliant red. [laughs]
D: Oh! Interesting. The pyramids used to be covered in paint.
P: Right. Yeah, it all deteriorates.
D: And all the Greek statues used to be covered in paint. And we think of them now as these really staid, simple people. It's strange: so much of our image of history is so wrong, because we're reading it from today, so we imagine people walking around Greece, all of these white statues, when they actually had blond hair and blue eyes, or we think of Egyptians and their giant, sandstone pyramids, and actually they were –
P: It sounds pretty gaudy. [laughs]
D: Green and pink! It's totally gaudy, it was as gaudy as our society is today. And I think we endow upon these ancient cultures a nobility or simplicity that they didn't have.
P: [laughs] Right, right. Like classical elegance.
D: You spoke before about painting in the dark, or painting in the dark, towards the light. Do you paint alone?
P: I have to paint alone. I don't have to paint in silence, I can have noise around me, but there has to be a door, a closed door between me and other people. Absolutely. But I've noticed, coming to New York, and I had a little bit of this in California but not a lot, is that interactions with other artists is wonderful. It is important, I think. We push each other, feed off of each other. But the actual painting is solitary.
D: And, along with being alone sort of personally, or physically, are you alone in your own mind? Often when I'm writing I'm thinking about the people who are going to be watching it, because theater's such an audience-based medium, but then Wes has said to me, 'Oh you can't do that, you can only be yourself, you can’t let anyone else in.” How does you audience factor into your art while you’re in the process of creating it?
P: Hopefully not at all. You will catch yourself thinking, 'Oh, how, how is somebody going to view that?' and I had a painter friend who was working on a painting recently ask me, 'Oh, I want to put a little valentine up in the corner, like she's the Queen of Hearts” – because he was doing a portrait of a friend – he said, 'Is that cheesy?' And I said to him, 'Why would you ever ask that?' It doesn't matter. If it for some reason wants to get out on the canvas, you’ve got to put it there. And then later on you can go ahead and say, 'Ok, I did this because of this, or that' or whatever the reason may be, but it's really bad to have someone looking over your shoulder and questioning, whoever it might be. Your audience, your mom, your friend, a painter you admire. There's another artist, I don't remember his name, but he has this quote about how he knows when he's really painting. He says, 'Well, first of all when the art critics stop talking, when the museum directors stop talking, when the art magazines stop talking, when my art teacher stops talking, then I'm getting closer. When my wife stops talking about my paintings, then I'm getting close.'
D: Talking in his head?
P: In his head. As he's painting, these people stop talking, they start getting silenced. Finally he says, 'When I stop talking, that's when I'm really painting.' And that's the truth. When you're really painting, you're so in it there's no ego, there's no self, there's no audience, there's nothing but paint on canvas.
We begin to talk about the idea of transcendence, of the desire to leave the world behind and also the reality that this world is where you live and where you actions have impact and meaning.
P: That’s actually the duality that I would like to reconcile, and I think that’s what everyone in this culture's having a very hard time with. We're an abundant, prosperous country, all of us yearning for some sort of spirituality, some sort of transcendence; even the artist nowadays has become so iconographic, so that the artists are becoming these artists who are geniuses at marketing, and then the artwork becomes very thin. I'm not saying that there aren't the prophets who are also disseminating their word to the people, but it's a rare thing. And that's what I would like, to have one foot thoroughly on the earth, and one foot thoroughly elsewhere. I definitely don't want to be a hermit up in the mountains.
D: Right. You want to be an Art Star.
P: I want to be an Art Star.
D: And what does that mean for you, to be an Art Star?
P: I think it’s to be one of the great prophets, whose method is actually getting to people, the way that the Nike swoosh gets to people. But I wouldn't want it to be thinned out, like the Kahinda Wileys or the Jeff Koonses. I wouldn't want to just become the art as a marketing tool.
D: Which raises the question: is it possible to reach people on a meaningful level and still be an Art Star? The culture we're in these days is so image-conscious and self-obsessed –
P: Right.
D: And the media is leading it down that road, so that anyone with anything to say isn't really heard from, and the people that seem to be Art Stars have nothing to offer.
P: That's true. I don't know if it’s possible, that's why I want to try. I always think that I can do the impossible. And it's been done in the past.
D: I believe in the impossible.
P: I do, too. But you know, I'm not saying I'm a prophet or anything, I'm just saying that I'm genuinely, sincerely trying to find – I'm on the search. I believe that fully. And I'm not trying to make some product that's going to be easily packaged, and marketed to the world. But when you're really on that, and you're trying to come up with something that is beyond what you've done before, and outside of it, because it's that birds'-eye perspective, as soon as it reaches a second generation, it's already crossed over, and the rituals becomes that problem you were talking about before. So I don't know how you reconcile it. I really don't.
D: We need to keep creating our own rituals.
P: Absolutely. Always have to refresh it. And as soon as my art rips it open, it'll scab over again, I'm sure within 20 years.
D: This really calls for a complete change in how we view our role as a society. Right now, we don't create society the way that we create money, or affluence, or property. We don't create social texture, we don’t create a personal capital.
P: I don't know. I don't think I've thought about that.
D: Well then how about this: where do we go from here? What is the role these days of the art industry in creating art?
P: You mean the machinery of the art world?
D: Yes.
P: The art world is very jealous of the music and entertainment industry. And I think that really clouds its judgment. I think the way that the music industry and the entertainment industry disseminate themselves is admirable, because they have a huge impact. Of course, I personally believe that what's getting out there doesn't necessarily have the contribution it could. I think that's probably a popular sentiment. The machinery of the art world I think is coming around to where if we did have a person who was putting out great art – which is happening, I think people like Geerhard Richter are really making amazing art, and it's very profound, and it's filled with that doubt and belief that are necessary to carry us forward, and keep that mythology refreshed – I think we can bring it back to the people. Because what happened, of course, is that the art world got separated from society, it became snobby and difficult and certain people believed that they knew about art, and other people became very intimidated. People have a hard time just jamming out to a piece of art the way they can jam out to a piece of abstract music. Music can be completely abstract and people will dance to it all night long, but when they are confronted with a piece of abstract visual art, they can't handle it. I don't think there's any reason for that. I think that it would be really good if people’s minds could be opened up to what abstract art can do for them.