Charles Gaines

LO-B

Before we get into your longtime mentorship of artists, I wanted to ask if you had a mentor.

CG

No, I never had the luck of having a mentor. I had a couple of influential teachers, but they weren’t mentors per se, and there wasn’t anyone who gave me a clue or even heads-up about what would happen to me if I decided to be an artist or what I could expect. There was one person who wasn’t quite a mentor, but he was as close as I came to having one because he was the first important artist I got to know—and that was Sol LeWitt. Sol was significant to me because he was very influential in getting my career started. He also was a significant supporter of my work. Other than Sol, there really wasn’t anyone around who was advising me. I had to learn everything the hard way. I even have the scars to prove it.

LO-B

When did you first meet LeWitt?

CG

It was around 1976 or ’77. I met him in Los Angeles. He was working on a project at LACMA at the time. His LA gallery was Malinda Wyatt. Terry Allen had suggested I visit Malinda to show her my work, which I did. I came down and got an appointment, and while showing her my drawings, Sol walked into the gallery and saw the drawings, became very interested in them. So, we set up a time for me to come by his studio when I was in New York next.

LO-B

That’s wonderful and I might loop back to that later. You’ve had an extensive career in teaching. Do you think there's a difference between teaching and mentoring?

CG

In my mind, teaching is always mission driven, so you are there to provide certain content or information that adds to the general education of the individual—to expand the person’s understanding and ideas around the practice of art. It’s not just about having technical skills. There’s a lot of pedagogy involved with the teaching of skills, but I was never involved with that so much. Fortunately, I started teaching some courses, both undergraduate and graduate, that were issue driven. I had to develop courses that tried to drive that mission and so forth.

Mentoring is different, as it seems akin to having an uncle, aunt, father, mother, brother, or someone who’s had certain kinds of experiences, helping you out. For whatever reason, the mentee finds the mentor to be a valuable person, as someone who could guide them through certain things that they didn't know about or talk to them about certain expectations that they should come to expect or not expect or how to adjust to this or that—basically to learn from the experience of the mentor. This happens specifically in terms of the practice itself, and conceptually too, to the degree that the mentee and mentor share certain ideas. There needs to be some shared set of conditions and interests. It’s more like having a relative: a good brother rather than a bad brother, right? A good father rather than a bad father. I suppose if you’re an artist who’s more like an outlaw, that could be a romantic vision of the artist that a mentee might like. But anyway, it continues this idea of a shared vision, even with the outlaw.

LO-B

Even with the outlaw! Can we talk about how you retired from thirty years of teaching at CalArts in 2022?

CG

Well, it was supposed to be a soft landing. I had planned to reduce my teaching load gradually, from several classes to two, and then just one—but then COVID happened, and it just accelerated that process. Courses in 2020 weren’t being taught in person, they moved online. By virtue of that, I automatically went to just teaching one course a year online. I did that for a couple of years. Everybody knew I was retiring. If my memory serves me, the soft-landing retirement turned into a request that I continue teaching certain courses online for a while. And I did that. The only problem was that when I finally retired and sent my formal letter—you know, “I hereby announce to all concerned that I am entering retirement”—they said, “Oh, you didn’t have to do that, Charles. We had already put your papers in.” And I thought, “Oh, my goodness. So, it’s so unceremonious. I mean, don’t I get a Bulova watch or something like that…? It could be anything!” [Laughs.]

LO-B

Well, it’s interesting that since you’ve retired, you’ve shown no signs of slowing down. It seems like you might be even busier than ever before. I wonder if you ever miss teaching.

CG

No, and I’ve thought about that—but I’ve realized I don’t. I’m from a generation of California artists for whom teaching was an extension of having a studio practice. Teaching worked well for me because my courses were oriented around critical thinking and discussions around ideas and their relationship to practice. It wasn’t about teaching technical skills except for writing skills, such as how to organize ideas. For the most part, the situation was seminar driven so I would flesh out ideas in my classes. These ideas were connected to my mission as a teacher, so it wasn’t me just throwing stuff in a classroom to see what would happen. It was always organized around a goal and a purpose. Still, because of the nature of what I was trying to teach, it was rather experimental in the ways we dealt with ideas. My advantage was that I always had very good students, and these kinds of conversations were very enriching. They expanded my thinking about art or the movement of my thinking about art.

I regarded the classroom as an extension of my studio because the same ideas that were being fleshed out, which I was thinking about on my own. Interestingly, this helped me become more experimental and take greater risks in the studio. That was harder to do in the classroom because the discussions dealt with very complex ideas. Half the time, neither I nor the students knew what we were talking about! We were struggling through these things together! Through that process, I expected a certain kind of knowledge or understanding would happen. And it did.

When I stopped teaching, I thought I might miss all that. What happened instead is that such discussions and thinking were still a big part of my practice; there was an increased number of requests for writing and other situations where I could talk about ideas experimentally with others. The opportunities to think critically didn’t slow down. The increased interest in what I had to say about things, beyond speaking to my students, surprised me. I did not expect that there would be this broader interest in a national discourse about art.

LO-B

And now that you’re executing projects like American Manifest on such a large and public scale, has your audience broadened?

CG

Yes, because the work is critically driven and as it gets out there the opportunities to talk about certain ideas, which push the work, increase. To that degree, yes, they circulate. Also, there’s a separate demand for my critical thinking, that I see as a detached product from my studio work. If you trace the development of my studio practice, you can see how certain ideological issues are important to me, and in one way or another how they play out in the studio work. However, discussions can be narrowed around the relationship between those ideas and the works themselves.

There’s a whole other domain where I’m talking about the idea of general knowledge, but it’s not directly connected with what I’m doing with my work, even though it can often inform the work. That’s the part that surprised me even more because I could see people being interested in what I have to say about, for example, why I put chains on Moving Chain. I didn’t imagine people interested in, or even knowing, what I think about the general idea of aesthetics, subjectivity, or democracy, so that was a nice surprise.

LO-B

What made you want to start teaching in the first place? You mentioned the legacy of Californian artists, like Baldessari, merging the studio with the classroom, but was there something that made you want to teach? Or did you always know you wanted to teach?

CG

I always tell people that I became a fully conscious human being late in my younger life. I was just floating and moving through stuff. There was a track of lights on a path set in front of me and I just walked along it. As I walked along, I became an artist. When I started elementary school, I had drawing skills. If you have drawing skills in elementary school, the teachers give you drawing projects. Those inform you or let you know that, in one way or another, you should be an artist because artists have drawing skills, right? So, you have these skills to be an artist, which is not fully the case, but this is what they thought. So, there was a track that students could move along.

In Newark, there was an arts high school. We call them magnet schools these days, but this was before the idea of magnet education. Newark developed the first school of its kind: Arts High School, dedicated to music and art. The kids in the Newark public school system who demonstrated such skills were encouraged to apply to Arts High. You have to take a test to get in, which essentially means that you should be able to tell where, in space, the tree is located in the landscape—that’s one of the questions that I remember from the test.

They gave me drawing tests that demonstrated hand-eye coordination and those other kinds of tests. So, I got in and still, I was unconscious. I went through that system, which was essentially academic courses in the morning, and in the afternoon, you study painting, drawing, art history, and so forth. Then it was time to go to college. As I said, I was unconscious. I guess, it just occurred to me that I was supposed to apply to college. So, I applied to the State University system in New Jersey. I applied as an English major, and the only reason I applied as an English major was because I had an English teacher, Mr. Rickenbacker, who valued what I did. I did very well in this class. He was a Shakespeare scholar, and he liked my writing. I received more encouragement from Mr. Rickenbacker than from any of my art teachers. So, I said, well, I’ll apply for English. My guidance counselor said, “What? Are you crazy? You just go and register in art.” So, I said, okay, and I applied to art. I unconsciously went to the art program.

I finally woke up during my third year of college when I had to decide if I was joining the workforce. Making that decision, at that point, was more critical than it was when I entered high school or even undergraduate school. I realized I had two distinct interests. One was art and the other was music. I had formal training in both—having been taught by professional percussion teachers for four years. I enjoyed the music department at my undergraduate school. I had a choice between art or music. I decided to go to graduate school to study art. I had to make that choice in my third year because I’d gotten lousy grades in my academic courses up until then. I didn’t focus hard enough to develop a significant portfolio. So, I was unprepared at that point. I tried to build both. I tried to build up my grades, and I tried to build a portfolio.

When I was ready to apply to grad school, I still had one of the worst portfolios of any undergraduate art student, not only in New Jersey but probably in the entire world. Somehow, I got into the Rochester Institute of Technology, and not easily, because first they rejected me and then I asked them to reconsider me. I still don't know why they eventually accepted me, but I did very well there.

Then, I came up with this decision about becoming a teacher. I knew I would have an MFA and that I was going to move to New York. Many of my colleagues in the MFA program went into teaching. So, I just thought teaching made sense. It was an easier decision about how to survive as an artist. In short, I blundered into the career of an artist.

LO-B

At that time were you painting?

CG

I was a painting major at RIT.

LO-B

What prompted the switch to conceptualism? Was there a moment?

CG

I knew my training was heavily influenced by the idea of art as being expressionist and certain European, modernist ideas about the artist being an expressive agent. All my teachers were influenced by Abstract Expressionism. Of course, I knew that conceptual art was in its nascent stage. I didn’t identify with what I was seeing in that direction because there was a more fundamental problem: I was having trouble identifying with the process of artmaking. I was identifying that artmaking was constitutively a process of being able to identify, with oneself, as an artist. I later discovered that this process was based heavily upon the idea of the expressive imagination—the site of creative expression. It was argued, or at least modernism argued, that what constitutively was art, or the behavior of an artist, was essentially expression: creating ideas, expressing from your subjectivity. There was an expectation that this would be a joyful experience for you—to generate ideas from nothing.

But it wasn’t. I can't explain why it wasn’t. I knew it wasn’t, and I knew that if this was what you must have in a studio practice to be an artist, maybe this wasn't for me because I couldn't get anything out of it. It’s not that I couldn't do it. I could perform that way. I could put a canvas up, contemplate it, and come up with an “inspired idea” connected to an impulse of making certain marks that comes from a feeling I had. However, every time I came up with something, it didn't mean much to me. The whole thing was so arbitrary. There was no way of personally identifying that whatever I made was an extension of myself, my identity, or even the idea of my subjectivity.

There were a couple of books that brought me in touch with certain ideas that I liked, or at least addressed what I was concerned with in terms of artistic practice. They offered alternatives. One was Henri Focillon’s The Life of Forms in Art. The second book was George Kubler’s The Shape of Time. Those books gave me the idea that the model for art-making that I was taught wasn’t the only model in the world. There are other ways you might be able to think about it. That’s why I did this global search of practices. My move out of painting happened because I became aware that you didn’t have to be a painter to be an artist. So, I recognized that my main problem was with painting.

LO-B

Painting with a capital P?

CG

Yeah.

LO-B

Because there’s still painting in your work, but you don't call them paintings.

CG

Painting is the medium that most passionately or expressively articulates the conditions of your subjectivity. Paint is an incredible material because it’s malleable and it can stretch, bend, do different things, and create shapes and marks that you can say are the tropes of, or the markers, of an existing subjectivity inside of you—the space where your intuition resides. But, because I wasn’t interested in expressing myself, my problem with painting was that I couldn’t buy into this idea of the expressive subject; the practice of painting was the consummate example of the expressive subject. I thought that if I got away from painting, I could get away from that idea of expressive language. So, I came to drawing from looking at art on a global level. I began to consider drawing as my practice, and I responded to it as a practice much more because drawing, in turn, responded to my thinking more than painting did. That’s how I began working with systems and rule-based art. I discovered that the idea of the expressive subject was a particularly Eurocentric and Western idea. Other cultures didn't have such an idea. I’m not saying that I have this unique insight into things, but I was able to see the intrinsic value of other types of practices.

I was fully aware of the hierarchy of art history, where the Eurocentric model was thought to be the most sophisticated form of artmaking, and the arts of other cultures were not. I was never influenced by that kind of thinking. I knew that within certain practices in European art, artists themselves were reconsidering this situation of hierarchy. There’s a history of efforts to bring the so-called “primitive” into modern art. I understood the colonialist driven problem of identifying such strategies of the primitive or identifying a certain kind of “authenticity” to primitive cultures, that only have significant meaning when handled by European artists—as if “primitive” peoples couldn’t sophisticatedly handle or deal with anything.

I realized that I had to rethink the idea of the connection between art and subjectivity, especially what I found was a privileging of art by naming it a purely subjective practice. I found that the way that I could do that as a Westerner was to deal with systems and rule-based practices because then subjective decisions can be replaced by systematic decisions, which I make available and simple to understand.

LO-B

How did that begin?

CG

I came up with the idea of systematic work by looking at some tantric drawings of the universe. Those drawings are products of images that were realized by a disciplined process of mediation; they aren’t products of the tantric imagination. They’re products of visions or images that become iconic in the production of tantric art by tantric artists. They aren’t intuitions or expressions. They are diagrams of the universe and represent a certain idea about the universe’s structure.

I saw a correlation between geometry and an object that first gave me the idea to go into arithmetic systems, or this idea of numbers as how I can employ a rule-based system for a correlation between an object and a structure. I started by creating an equation—a simple calculation on an X/Y axis—which produced numbers that I then used as a code to help me write out a sequence of numbers in order to realize the form.

Essentially, I followed the rules on a grid that I simply numbered in sequence—a sequence of numbers up to the point that the code gave me. For example, if the code and the calculator gave me the number 63, I counted out 63 squares, and if it said 42, I counted 42 squares, and so on. By following that road, a shape was produced on the drawing, and the shape constituted the material mapping of the numbers that were given to me. Those shapes form a kind of parabolic curve. This whole process of calculating numbers—and producing a drawing that gave you a set of values that allowed you to produce new calculations, which would give you another drawing, and keep this going on in sequence, reminded me of biological organic development.

LO-B

I see. So, then it’s also a little different from early conceptual art, which aimed to make the practice of art more empirical and to remove representation and meaning. Right?

CG

Yes, I thought that the purpose of the rules was to eliminate subjective interpretation and make the process more empirical. I thought that if I removed the conditions of language and interpretation so that you had more of this one-to-one correlation between an object and an idea, there'd be no space between them.

When I saw these parabolic shapes, which reminded me of biological growth, I realized I was seeing a representation. This rigorous mapping produced an image that looked like something it wasn’t. I got curious as to how that happened because, you remember, my whole struggle was being suspicious of the idea that subjectivity and the creative imagination are what makes art, art. I wondered: is that interpretation a function of my creative imagination, of me applying my subjectivity in that interpretation?

LO-B

Let’s talk about this in terms of your ongoing Numbers and Trees series.

CG

So, I went from doing these drawings to doing the trees series in 1975. The reason that happened is that I was driving in Fresno, California along a highway, and I saw a walnut tree orchard on the side of the road. I went out there and I looked at the orchard. It was winter so there were no leaves. It was interesting because here you have a whole orchard full of walnut trees that are similar because they're the same species, but in fact, no two trees are alike. Trees are like fingerprints or snowflakes. So, the number of possible shapes, patterns of branches and limbs, is infinite within its ecosystem, or species. I then decided to take photographs of the trees. I converted the photo image of the tree into what’s now called a digital image—a gridded image of the tree. That grid created the tree form by aggregating numbers that occupied the shape of the tree. The numbers were part of the mapping of the shape.

In other words, the numbers were not an aesthetic element. The numbers had this instrumental use. They facilitated the mapping of the shape of the original tree. By converting the trees to numbers, I can layer a whole series of trees on top of each other and reveal lots of patterns of what I call “sameness” and differences. I could reveal areas where trees are different from each other, and I can also reveal how they're alike, that they share. When you map that, it makes a visual form that you might say is a rendering or drawing of a tree. In this case, the tree is rendered or drawn by the system of mapping, the tree is not drawn by my skill of copying or creating an image from my imagination. So, that’s how I got into making work out of systematic operations, and the tree system has been the same since 1975.

When you look at it, you have to remember that the work is in series and it’s a serial overlay of trees on top of each other. The serial overlay is achievable because I use the numbers rather than the image of the tree that comes in the photograph. I convert that image to numbers, and I’m able to layer these things over time. When you look at the series, you can see the layering of these trees—it starts with one tree, then it goes to two trees and three trees. But you can see this. You can see they're layered on top of each other, and you can see the layer, the areas, and the series. You can see areas that are different. If you compare tree number two to number three, you can see there's a difference because the new tree number three produces visual effects that are different that don't exist in tree number two. You're just making this mapping of differences as the series goes along. What's complicated is that as the layers become denser, as you get four, five, six, seven, eight trees, then the following becomes more complicated.

It is like a geological excavation because each tree has its own color. On the grid, the shape of the tree is determined by the numbers. You could follow the colors and you could follow the numbers up to a certain point. I think by tree five it becomes a little complicated to continue following it. At that point, you can find evidence of newness and evidence of sameness, because, as I said, each tree has its own color. If it's added to a series of existing trees, those colors in the new tree will change the visual appearance of what has already been there, and you can follow that. I mean, you don't need to follow the calculation. You can certainly follow the systematic production simply by the changes that happen as it goes through the system.

My idea was that if I wanted to produce a painting of a tree from my imagination, the decisions that I make about color, texture, shape, and so forth would all be decisions that would come from my imagination. However, in this systemic approach, those changes don't come from my imagination. They come from the system. They're produced by the application of the system. By using the system, you encounter visual forms and relationships that you could never imagine because it isn't being prescribed by an existing formal language that limits your ability to make decisions using your creative imagination. Then you have this unique experience where you're as surprised by what's being produced as any other person in the audience. It's all a discovery, and that’s something I really like about the process.

LO-B

And so generative, for decades now.

CG

Well, what happens is that the system of layering the image never changes, but the colors and the shapes of the trees are different. The earliest framework for producing these gridded images of trees came from my triptych works where I took a photograph, made a line drawing of the tree, and then a number drawing of the tree shape. Then the idea came to me to collapse the triptych into one thing. That's where the Plexiglass boxes come from.

Then the idea came to me that I should zero in on, or do an enlargement of, a section of a tree, not just the whole tree. That's when I started doing what's called those exploded drawings where you isolate just a section of the entire tree and have that occupy the space—the visual plane. On top of that, or behind that, you do the gridded image. So, what happens is that you discover the visual language that you're working with, and certain possibilities are revealed as you work on it.

Those changes are not intuitional because such changes are produced as possibilities as you’re working in a particular structure or system. For example, I first painted the tree on the Plexi, then a gridded image of the tree on the Plexi, and then the photograph of the tree on the panel behind the Plexi. Then I got the idea to reverse that. So that’s a new presentation of the image. It’s one that's created by the system I’m working with. It’s more like a permutation of an idea, a geometry.

After the reversal, I figured I could do a close-up of one of the trees and that's where I got the exploded image. Now people said, “Well, isn't that outside the system?” I argue, perhaps fruitlessly, that it's not. Because it's an enlargement of one of the cells or several of the cells of the grid. It’s a detail of the same grid and it is a concept that’s produced as a permutation of the existing language I was working with. So, it’s more like one piece generates an idea for a new idea for another piece, but within a totally closed system.

For the newest body of work, or what I call the Tanzania work, we got this crazy idea where we would do an exploded image of the tree, the Baobab, and layer the series of Baobab trees on top of each other, but only within the contours of the exploded image. Now making that decision created dramatically different visual results. Each time you make these changes, what happens visually is dramatic. It changes the character of the works in significant ways—as if you're being poetic or expressive or operatic about it. The Baobab created conditions where the process of layering, and the visual effect of the colors on each other as you layer them, happens in a way that hasn’t happened in earlier works.

LO-B

Before we end, I wondered if you might offer some sage advice. You’ve been working for several decades through many difficult social and political moments. Was making art helpful? Are there other things one can depend on in this time of deluge?

CG

It’s hard to think about art as a therapeutic thing with the virtual destruction of modern society going on now. So, I don’t have a strategic way of thinking about it, except for the thinking that if artmaking is a significant humanist enterprise, you come to realize that nothing can kill it. This tells you something about how deeply rooted the impulse to make art is or even the impulse to see art. All of that reinforces the ideas of its significance.

There have been various moments in the past where I thought we were entering a doomsday scenario. The question of the legitimacy or the significance of art never occurred. The only time that I thought about it was during periods when I didn't have any money. I mean, I couldn't even keep a studio open, and I couldn't buy materials. Even then, I was still making art, even if all I was eating for dinner was ramen noodles. Sometimes it makes you think that maybe you're out of your mind, but you still find yourself making art. So, that's something significant to think about at times like this because it locates what we value.

In many ways, art represents a discipline, a practice of discovery and recovery, and those are two specific humanist impulses that happen and take on their own language during times of crisis as well as the good times. I'm thinking about how art became my language of self-understanding. Art provided me with the experience of not only understanding myself as an individual but understanding myself as a political being—as a person living in the world and my relationship to the world. Most Black artists have been put on the shelf and set aside; they certainly didn't have equal access to the world of art as so many white artists did. It’s only been in the last few years that some moment or movement in that direction has been allowed to happen.

But most of the time, Black artists were separated, and their work was marginalized and so forth. The work itself became the means of determining the tools for emancipating from these states of marginalization. It always happens. At an individual moment, you may not see this pattern of emancipation—you only see patterns of interest and strategies of interest. But when you look at it in the long run, the tools to overcome the things that are holding you back are located within one’s effort to make works of art—the actual execution employs tools that allow you to survive in general. Maybe that’s why I think that, as I was saying before, one of the good things we could take away from moments like this is that you can’t just kill the impulse to make art.