Fred Tomaselli

Photo courtesy James Cohan Gallery

Fred Tomaselli, "Generator" (2006)

Photo courtesy James Cohan Gallery

Fred Tomaselli, "Halo of Flies" (2006)

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I don’t consider myself a psychedelic artist. I’m not trying to depict a trip or depict what it’s like to be stoned on LSD. That’s an impossibility, so I don’t even try to go there. But psychedelic drugs directed me toward art-historical objects that have informed my work. I got involved in the culture around psychedelics and started looking at bad psychedelic black-light posters and Op-Art. But that led into my love of Tibetan art and Indian miniatures and Persian miniatures—so there are these core interests that came from psychedelics.

Well, if you’re not a psychedelic artist, what was it that made you feel that these psychedelic influences belonged in your art?

During the 1980s I was making installations about escapism. Back then, you weren’t supposed to make art that was escapist—that was the worst thing you could do as an avant-garde artist—but to me it seemed escapism was the dominant theme of our culture at the time. Ronald Reagan was president and all kinds of things were going to hell because our culture didn’t have a very good grip on reality. Plus I was coming out of the stoned-out, drugged-out world of stonerism and punk rock, and I was utilizing that reality in my work.

When I started making pictures, I was thinking about this idea of a picture as a window on to another reality—and the idea of losing yourself in the sublime and the transcendent. I thought that dovetailed with some of the rhetoric around psychedelic drugs, so I started inserting pills and hemp leaves into the work.

I wanted people to have an escapist experience but also to think about the mechanics of escapism. I wanted the work to be beautiful and seductive, but I also wanted to talk about what that meant. That led to what I’m doing now.

You said that you don’t have a radical agenda for your work. What sort of agenda do you have?

I don’t propose to make any conclusions with the work. I don’t think that good art usually does. If anything, this is anti-manifesto art. Or not even anti-manifesto—it’s not that it’s against manifestos, it just doesn’t have one. It can take all the contradictions and still be a healthy object.

What sort of contradictions do you mean?

I started out more or less illustrating the ideas that I had, and then as the work expanded and evolved, I started heaping all these [images] that people thought were antithetical to one another into the work. I started adding more and more of the decorative, and more landscape, and more nature, and more folk-art influences. I don’t mind those contradictions being in the work. They reflect my reality.

It’s also true, isn’t it, that a lot of those issues have sometimes been thought inappropriate to ambitious contemporary art?

There was a short period in the late 1980s when the art world was involved with a very in-your-face political aesthetic. It seemed that there was a total disdain for beauty and seduction and desire, although there were a lot of people talking about it—especially the sexualized politics that came out of AIDS. But for a while my art seemed to be antithetical to the zeitgeist that was operating in the art world.

But since then, I think the art world has caught up with all of that and embraced it, and now I find myself in the funny position of being one of those guys who makes pretty pictures, in the context of an art world that’s full of that sort of thing.