SG(Séverine Gossart):  So you are a sculptor originally?

LJ(Les Joynes): Yes, I studied sculpture in London and later in Tokyo. I was also working with photography from the early 1980s.  I started working more and more in painting in London in 1997.

SG:   How come that you went to London? You were born in California, right?

LJ: I grew up in Santa Barbara, California and was born in 1963. I grew up next to a mountain – near the National Forest for as long as I could remember. Life was pretty normal – you know, going to the beach on the weekends with friends and hiking in the mountains above the house. Santa Barbara where I lived was pretty rural – there were a lot of wild animals that would descend from the mountain – it was a magical place.

But also from an early age I developed a tremendous interest in other cultures – especially European cultures. I liked being able to see so many different points of view at once in these kind of cosmopolitan cities such as Paris and London and Amsterdam. And actually my first degree was in European history.

In 1983 I went to Paris to study French and French history and had an eye-opening experience, because it was the first time I could really posit myself outside of my own culture  - the self that I had somehow created until I was 20. While in France I saw that the self is not so simple – it is often re-determined by the challenges of one’s own host culture. []

My current series of paintings were originally inspired by archeological excavation sites. Back in 1982 I had the opportunity to be on an excavation of a Native American settlement in western Oregon. When we were digging we would always map out the objects in situ. So, when you find of an object – possibly recognizable such as a human bone fragments or a pot or a stone ax-head– you would draw the object in that layer of the level. You would also photograph it, of course, but you would have an image of that layer of history and how they are relating with their silent narrative –perhaps there was a battle and the axe-head is near a fractured scull – these sort of things. And because the earth is always shedding dust, ash, beetle husks, tree leaves over thousands of years the ground builds up and you find yourself looking at objects one or two meters underground that were once on the surface. Last year I was at the Metropolitan Museum and was researching these third century A.D. Japanese burial mound drawings  – they were these burial sites under mounds of earth from the Kofun era. And there were these beautiful drawings of these people, they were partially submerged skeletons and there were ritual objects around them. And I became really fascinated by how one could look at this particular object in this kind of gravesite, which is rectangular.  Like a canvas.

And so I started working with some of these images that were inspired from this idea, but also came from my own drawings so, I would add my own objects. And when I would layer the paintings in with different objects, sometimes when I would find it was becoming too obvious I would actually submerge them again.  I would cover up history again. I was imaging a space if I could look down into the ground with 3-D glasses and see all the objects in the earth down two meters.

I suppose that creates more of a mystery to it. And so, I paint wet-in-wet objects that I call platelets – because they are disc shaped like white blood cells. And in a way they act like white blood cells because they sometimes engage an object and submerge or digest it back into the canvas. So using these platelets I may for example submerge the central figure back into a background, and even make it disappear. The platelets look like either flying saucers or jellybeans or circles. When I bring them in they push everything basically back under again. And, there are pockets in paintings where I will have something that’s from a previous, period of and that will start popping through. And that will give almost like a cave entrance to another story – something primordial – and pre-narrative. And that’s what’s fascinating to me.

In a way I am an explorer - I can think of very few things as exciting as going through, for example, an abandoned city and seeing how weather after 10, 15, 20 years has changed it – how nature has reclaimed the city or a structure. For example, in 2003 a buddy and I were hiking out in an area east of Berlin.  Deep forest. We had jumped a barricade to go into an abandoned Russian military outpost. And it had been abandoned probably 10 years earlier and, you know, roofs start caving in because nobody is there to repair them. In Berlin, you know, it freezes then it gets hot and it rains, so water will probably eat away roofs, and then once the roof starts breaking in and a tree starts growing inside and the windows break. So you see this kind of reversion towards the original nature. Everything goes back to nature.  And if you imagine us in, you know, 50 million years, everything here in New York City will be perhaps a layer of sediment. We won’t be here to of course, talk about it, but the idea is that everything will be reduced to a layer of stone. I think is fascinating.

It’s like there’s no way to get around the reclaiming of form by the formless. Formless will always be the victor. As the alien said to the earthling: Resistance is futile.

In my paintings, I’m actually looking at what I call a middle world. It is between the recognizable and the unrecognizable. Jacques Derrida looks at for example binary oppositional reasoning. We have a frisson, a friction with the idea of the zombie. Why? Because the zombie is neither dead nor alive. So, should we see a zombie we are in a quandary, where the unheimlich, the uncanny, has been evoked; we can’t posit that phenomenon into one category or another. We don't have sufficient tools to process its existence except of course through popular science fiction and horror. We are momentarily suspended in limbo. We don’t have the language, or the fabric of language to really posit ourselves versus that object, so we feel really weird. And I think that’s a very interesting middle ground.  I feel excited about the idea of middle grounds between form and formless, light and dark, dead and alive, on and off – where a recognized object falls into decay through entropy and becomes unrecognizable.

I was on an island called Awajishima in Western Japan last year for a printmaking project and every day I would walk about a mile to this vending machine during my break. This is a really lush area with a lot of rice paddies and forest – really magical. Well the thing that caught my eye often was this old truck – someone had parked it on the side of the road – and lo and behold earth reclaimed it – almost like a giant octopus entangling itself around a ship and breaking it in two. This old pickup truck that had completely been covered with jungle growth where there was almost no truck left. And it had probably been there for about four years.

SG: Could you tell me about your upcoming projects?

LJ: I am doing some upcoming work on Nordic mysticism, which is the first time I’ve ever done anything - any project on mysticism in Europe - is to look at sort of the areas between present European culture and the idea of a mystical world of animism and these gods of Valhalla. Like Thor. Valhalla is an important element in Viking culture and peoples up in Scandinavia, especially if you look to the middle ages. Back then it was a completely different world, and I think that there is an interesting friction between where we are now and where they were then – like the echoes of their past is still here. 

Images in my recent paintings, including Debris-Field-Night-Vision are concerned often with these mystical objects that I will paint into them. These include birds, for example, which are creatures that were considered mystical by many cultures, and often as avatars: they are animals of the heavens, sometimes they are deified. When I was working in Berlin in 2006, I was painting these birds and then having them subsumed in the background and sometimes positing them into caves, which leads me into a lot of my work in caves.

SG:  What is the function of all these animals, not only birds, but also rabbits, eagles, owls and mice?  Do they have any function?

LJ: They are avatars. The first time I used a rabbit was in 1996 in grad school – These were part of a series called Rants I was doing at Goldsmiths – for me they were subconscious ramblings hence the name Rants. And these were made on giant vinyl-rubber banners using cartoon-like characters – rabbits, lemmings, owls, and deer - that were painted in various stages of life-threatening calamity. And next to them were these monologues – they were either dream sequences or philosophical questions and then like a cartoon with a misplaced dialogue the creature is being consumed by its environment – a bear trap, a zombie-blob that is engulfing these lemmings, an approaching truck on a highway –They were like being engulfed by formless objects that were taking them in.  It was almost like the child-like view of the world as it is, but it’s really full of calamity because formlessness is taking over. So, these were for me almost humorous characters that I could posit myself into to sort of tell this story of the narrative of formlessness and entropy. 

The creatures I use now, like the birds and the painting with the mouse in the other room are now more silent observers. The mouse that is in Untitled (mouse), 2007 is in fact inspired by a plank of wood I had in the studio with a water stain on it and there were these knots in the wood for eyes – it was just by chance that it looked like that.

Perhaps in this painting with the giant mouse, it is the storyteller telling the story of everything that’s going on around it. I’ve given it a crown of little feathers and a Dutch gracht or ruff - which is a voluptuous Elizabethan-style or Dutch 17^th-century collar, which is a recurring motif for me.

SG: And where does the motif of the feathers come from?

LJ:  Perhaps they symbolize America for me. I lived overseas for 17 years and this is a motif that reminds me of my past and sense of self. When I was growing up, I would stay with an American-Indian caregiver when my parents were out of town. She introduced me to glimpses of Native American culture that was all over the area I grew up in. The area I grew up in was steeped in Chumash culture and there was a natural history museum I would go to in Santa Barbara probably every year since I remember, where I would view these objects of the Native Americans in my hometown with whom we shared the culture. In Santa Barbara there is a mixing of several cultures: native American Chumash, local Mexican, white Anglo-European. There are a lot of Native American names of streets and most of streets in the city are Spanish. I grew south of the city- there I grew up at the foot of the mountains near the National Forest.

There are a lot of examples of the Native American heritage if you look for it. The feathers are a symbol of this culture for me – and my relation to this culture – it is also a symbol of my Americanness as I discovered it while overseas.

To me, feathers also represent the middle world I was talking about – birds being often depicted mystical as subjects, the idea of bird wings on humans: angels, birds as guardians to the netherworld. When I was eleven my favorite book was on the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen by Howard Carter the archeologist – here they were unearthing these fabulous birds that represented the soul.

The bird feather motifs also work like the platelets or disk-like objects by flattening the plane and creating a surface tension. They also will submerge the object’s outlines.

SG: Right. There are also other recurring motifs – I would say mechanical elements that seem to me to refer to science fiction. Could you tell me more about these elements? I am thinking to works like Military Experiment by InterPlan West or Sputnik Voodoo Buffalo.

LJ:  I have a big fascination with the imagination of science-fiction writers especially Philip K. Dick where he would in sort of a detective, cheap dime-novel detective story film-noir way, he would describe extraordinary situations for mankind, and then describe also the mundane aspects of living on Mars and, you know, how hard it is to get your vacuum cleaner serviced there and things like that. I found there's so much humor in a lot of Philip K. Dick’s novels. In one book, UBIK, the author talks about a place between life and death. He writes about a sort of after-life conversation capability. These are people that, before they died, opted to go into a special type of suspended animation where they become neither dead nor alive, but they have for example a 500-minutes life – kind of like a battery –operated transistor radio so you could by the flick of a switch bring them out of suspended animation and into the present for a few minutes – to talk to them, ask them questions. And this one guy had his wife who was diagnosed with a terminal condition and then she was put into this suspended animation in a some kind of capsule-sarcophagus-like box with a window for the face, and when he had a question about their company’s business – she was the business mind of the team – he would go in there, turn her on and she’d say, "How are you doing?” and he says, "Fine, there is just one problem" and she would solve the problem, they’d turn it off and he’d have for example 480 minutes left. And when they were off, they were all on this network, this grid of suspended animation, and they would just constantly dream while they’re off for the rest of the year. So they wouldn’t be dead, they would be in a sort of a middle world. And sometimes the personalities would transmigrate from one body to another and, you know, you could get the wrong person when you’re talking to them. Sorry, wrong channel. It’s so bizarre. That’s the kind of imagination that I tend to bring in the studio.

I am also interested in the author, Arthur C. Clark, who wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was the movie that was later directed by Stanley Kubrick. I am fascinated by the idea of these giant, doughnut space ships that are imagined in the future, like it’s like space travel is so common in the future- they are so used to it. It makes a very good backdrop for the discovery of the black obelisk. Science fiction as a genre is so enthralling. It side-steps conventional binary-opposition patterned logic – as it does not really exist, full stop. It is based an imagined future that feels like it could be so real.

In 2005 I went to Southern Japan to photograph these curious rock formations and lights in these caves in Akiyoshidai on the southernmost tip of Honshu Island. It’s an underground cave called Akiyoshidou and there, there are these magnificently and sometimes garishly lighted caverns, formations above these ink-black underground lakes.

Caves for me are quite curious and I’ll tell you why. I grew up on the foot of a mountain in Santa Barbara. I didn’t have a name for the mountain, so I called it my mountain and – [laughs] ok, I was four so I can get away with that. Every day I’d look at this mountain. If I walked, I don’t know, 100 feet, up the road I’d be in the forest, you know, in the forest where you’re not supposed to be at night. I did get caught once when the sun went down extremely fast and I was three-quarters way up the mountain and I lost the trail. I eventually got home – a little scratched up from the brush but it’s a place where there are mountain lions and a lot of coyotes and rattlesnakes, so it’s full of wonder and danger. 

When I was a very small child, I thought mountains were full of things. I thought they were hollow. Like when I would put a blanket over a chair and make a cave or a fort when I was playing with friends – there was both an outside or an inside. So, I thought mountains were hollow and I remember asking somebody in my family: "what’s inside a mountain?" And they said, "well…more mountain". And I thought, "but that doesn’t make sense. Something’s got to be inside" –

SG:  What's got to be inside then?

LJ: - I would imagine, there is some kind of a structure. Some sort of scaffolding perhaps, tunnels, caverns, big hollow spaces. Maybe even cities.  In the late 90s, I created these plastic foam mountain sculptures creating these mountains out of plastic foam and putting lights underneath and this was a very big interest of mine to recreate these hollow mountains. And in the paintings, sometimes I will have these structures that look like support structures. If you were going to create in Hollywood an artificial mountain, you’d have to have an armature of some sort, made of steel pipes – like those used by scaffolding construction workers on New York buildings. I really liked the idea of this and would include some images of scaffolding holding up some of the structures in my paintings - it’s my way of asking the question, what is inside and what’s holding up the mountain.

So the caves also were for me, an exciting place to go. I love being in nature. I like going on hikes and if there is a cave, I probably would definitely go inside of it. And going into this cave in Japan allowed me to really explore this idea that there are indeed these special places inside of mountains: like it’s full of pathways, it was full of strange red and yellow romantic lighting inside: golden tungsten lighting, blue-white halogen lighting, and greenish fluorescent lighting; all these different color spectra. In the caves I was purposefully using daylight film so I could capture the eerie and supra-natural quality of the interior lighting as it would be captured on a specific temperature sensitive film. Inside the mountain, there was another mountain, and I got off the trail, which, you know, is against the rules, and I started walking up the sloping wet stone hills using my tremendously heavy tripod with my medium format camera on top as a hiking stick, which is not very recommended, and nothing got broken, thank goodness.

But it became very slippery because the sky inside the mountain, this permanently black sky, the permanent night, is always raining. It’s raining all the time. Water seeps though the earth, filters through the seventy feet of rock and drips down inside the cave – constantly.  I had to wear a raincoat and have an umbrella inside and as I was climbing up and I touched the ceiling and at that point, was using this great panoramic view to photograph these strange lights and formations. When I would photograph the lights from up there or from down below, they almost look like stars or…In one situation, it reminded me of the lunar excavation site of the monolith that was in Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001, where all these astronauts have this, you know, dug-out pit and they found this monolith under, you know, how many meters of lunar dust and they’ve got all these spotlights on it and they’re going, "what is it?” you know.  And I found myself in this really bizarre environment in these caves just thinking about that.  So, that’s just me in the mountain.

SG:  You also mentioned industrial architecture and oil refineries.  Could you tell me more about this inspiration –the recurring industrial elements in your work?

LJ: The industrial elements are related to the idea of an imaginary structure that holds up the mountain, for example, an imagined construct. It’s sort of this man-made structure that is quite beautiful when I look at refineries. But when you look at a refinery because you’ve got to really want to look at it, because if you’re looking at it in person, it’s not usually on the touristy guidebook trip. They’re pretty ugly, but at the same time, they are a wonder of lines that intersect in 3-D; for me, it’s hard not to get fascinated by this wacky structure of piping and other objects.

Sometimes I will go to industrial construction sites and draw parts of them into my sketchbook. Last summer some friends and I visited the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam that is temporarily in the old PTT building near the port. I’d already seen the show there, so I said "I’ll meet you up in the café", and I was looking out of the windows in the café on the top floor, and I saw these cranes that were used for constructing new buildings around the dock area in Amsterdam – there were all at about eye level and I found them tremendously curious.

It was like a giant erector set. When I was small I had a little toy set where you create structures; it was nuts and bolts and screws and pieces of metal with holes in them and you could construct these really strange objects. Probably given in the hopes that your child would become an engineer, graduate from MIT and build these buildings. I would build these formless structures [laughter].

And at the Stedelijk when I was drawing these cranes outside of the window, I was fascinated by the materials that were used to support the structure and the counterweight of the crane, and you’ve got a ballast on one side of cement and steel and on the other side, you’ve got the fairly thick cable that goes out on a boom where they would lift up payload. And everything is done with balance and precision, and I just loved the idea of the intersecting lines. And so, quite simply, I would take those things and I would bring that as a motif into a painting to explore that. In fact, many of these paintings, I guess you could look at them as many paintings within one painting.

SG:  Yes, indeed. And what about your sketchbooks? Could you explain us your work process – the way you draw for instance?

LJ:  Sure, well, I usually draw when I see something that’s of interest to me, so I’ll have something that will inspire me. Maybe it’s an old painting by a Dutch master; maybe it’s a new contemporary sculpture; maybe it’s a building that’s falling apart. So I will use my sketch book very often as a place to work out ideas, to solve problems because I usually have a set of things that I want to create, some of the ideas take some years to gestate.  Others are works I can create that day in the studio. Sometimes when it’s a project that I’m doing, I’m thinking of elements that I can bring into it to further develop, for example, a painting series. So the sketchbook drawings either become expressions into themselves, as maybe idea of objects I might draw that are on top of buildings, these alien spaceship-like water towers in Tokyo for example. Or they would become brief notations of something that I can probably resolve in the studio.

SG: Do the surrealist automatic drawings inspire you, is it something that is of interest to you?

LJ: I like Dada automatic drawing as well as the idea of Raoul Haussmann’s Dada sound experiments in 1920 where they would make recordings of repeated sounds like “Pa-Pa-Pa-Pa” or “Beh-Beh-Beh-Beh” – in a repetition that almost distorts our perceptions – they become mantra-like sound-objects that have their own space and create their own boundaries. When I listen to these I become entranced in the repetitive gesture of sound and perhaps this is the reason that Buddhist prayer is often accompanied by the ringing of a bell – it disrupts normal/ cyclical thinking patterns – you know what I have to do today, who I am meeting tomorrow – what are we going to cook for dinner…and allows one to let go.

The platelets of repetitive strokes I put in my canvas disrupt the flow of narrative to perhaps mask it, distort it or envelope it. It makes it easier for me or someone else to come into the painting and imagine what they want to imagine. And I like that. I like that we can bring something of ourselves into a painting that we are looking at – it becomes a very private and important dialogue. I have spaces where I imagine objects and others have places where they see certain things – an elephant, two eyes – something and that can be private and very personal. There’s nothing tremendously iconic about a repeated brushstroke or a repeated sound, but it becomes perhaps even part of a hypnotic tapestry.[]

I’m a huge fan of Cy Twombly  - he’s one of my favorite painters and draftsmen because he’s able to create these simple two-dimensional objects and scribbles that are in these tremendously simple compositions that really talk to this playful child inside of me. It’s kind of like he dared to have fun and to make artwork that pleased him.  I think that’s one of the things that I appreciate in other people’s work is how much I think they are having fun. How much they are enjoying the dialogue they are having through the work. I believe one can often tell if the artist has a sense of humor and if they enjoyed making it.  When they don’t enjoy making it, it’s sort of like a light has gone out, and you can tell when somebody has a piece of work that’s more of a chore.

[]

SG:  Could you tell us about your drip culture series of works? We haven’t yet spoken about that though you mentioned it with your sculptural works.

LJ:  Sure. When I was in south London, one autumn day in 1996, I was working outside at the college and I was preparing a sculpture in plastic foam. I hadn’t used it before. I had been using plaster for a few years. Plaster has memory. You make a mark in plaster when it’s wet and it dries that way. Another good thing is that plaster is inert; it doesn’t kill you when you’re breathing around it.

Resins are also very fluid and tend to adapt to the forms and molds around them.  They are very durable especially when reinforced with glass fiber. However, once cannot really affect the flow of the resin, shape it with ones hands in the same way as with plaster.  I found that with plaster I could use both its qualities of a quick drying mass of material and be able to shape it and affect it with my hands– almost like wet clay  - for a few minutes before it hardened and set. And I was able to have this control. And then after that, I would paint them and then wax them with T-Cut car wax, and they’d be these gleaming, you know, plasticky objects and the process was quite fluid and I was quite intuitive. They were like three-dimensional marks that one might make wet-in-wet on a canvas.

So I enjoyed doing that, but then I realized that every time I wanted to move one of these 300-pound sculptures, it took like six people to schlep it and they were very fragile. The last plaster sculpture I made was in 1997 – called Giant Blob it was made of half a ton of Crystacal, which is a heavy-duty, very dense, and rock-hard plaster used by sculptors reinforced with steel, MDF and chicken wire and fiberglass, and it was huge. And damned almost indestructible.  But as I said it weighed half a ton.

I started doing was working with small models of cars, toy cars, that I would get at the flea market in Lewisham –in south London. One of the first sculptures I made was of the Bikini Atoll nuclear experiment, which was this giant mushroom cloud that was created through a nuclear bomb in 1945 and the military had anchored several ships to see how they were affected by the bomb blast, the epicenter being about half a mile away. I created this small little plastic foam sculpture with these little cars trying to, you know, maybe trying to get out of the explosion. And then from then on, I started working with the foam later in Tokyo making the mountains and also these giant flowers, which were like inverted volcanoes or a hollow inside. And for me, the drip work is fascinating because it freezes this moment of making form. Every time I make a pour, the pour drips, streams, expands and then that pour is frozen. And it’s almost like it becomes a frozen token of that moment that I was there. There was this combination of formlessness and simple materiality that the foam expressed that I was able to explore.

And it’s in the same way that I really appreciate abstract painters because I can see their brush stroke and marks on the surface. There is the immediacy and the history of the marks as one covers another or mixes.

SG:  So am I correct if I say that you’re more interested in the making process, in the performative aspect of abstract painting rather than in the result, in the painting itself?

LJ:  Well, I think to answer that question, I could use an example of two artists. One, Jackson Pollock who I really am inspired by … his process. I’m not talking about aesthetics; I’m just fascinated about the directness of the process and the end result. It is like a collection of frozen moments. There’s very little affectation in the work. I think when he hit upon this expression of surface and this moment of interaction with, you know, fairly normal paints, I think he hit on something where the result is akin to an elegant mathematical solution, which I find is beauty in itself.

Now comparing Pollock with De Kooning: De Kooning is somebody that in his own way struggled with figuration and abstraction. It is the moments of revealed struggle that interest me the most – there is where I find the most tension. And then I was always interested in his struggle between figuration and the introduction of abstraction. There was a palpable anxiety that I could see in his work, and that anxiety is very present for me in his paintings. Again – I feel the artist is supremely present in the making of these works. And so, his paintings about woman for example, there is a tactical quality of his, I guess, touching the human form, touching the woman, and then working with the conflation and the deconstruction of the human form. And actually, you know, some people don’t like them as much as I do, but the Clam Diggers as sculptures that he has in Washington, D.C. at the sculpture garden…I find those sculptures also very intuitive. 

There is this moment in some painters careers – like De Kooning and with Philip Guston with his abstract works in the mid-50s and early 60s which were portents for his very powerful figuration, elegant and immediate brushstrokes and use of bold form as with Zone, 1953-54 and Close-Up III, 1961 which I visit often at the Metropolitan Museum. It is like a storm brewing and he is demonstrating its power.

[]

SG: In your work, you look to what you call a "middle world", a world that appears uncanny, full of avatars or strange unreal creatures. There is however a series, The Car Crashes, which you said to be based on images of real events – the downtown New York images following 9/11.

LJ:  The Car Crashes were actually a series that I started in Tokyo in 2000, where I wanted to transform form, recognized form into formlessness, into some middle state. I was using hydrochloric acid on toy automobiles made of plastic. I had an arrangement with a plastic recycling facility outside of Tokyo to save me all the plastic toys, and they had a truckload of them for me –

SG:  Great! [laughing].

LJ:  – and I was trying to find ways of taking these objects and really reducing them down to something a little bit like that truck I was talking about in southern Japan that had been covered over with weeds. The idea of the Mayan temple, the idea of some burial ground in Egypt covered by sand…these were all places that I find I’m compelled to go see because they are in these kind of halfway revealed states.  And Car crash was actually a painting of a sculpture that I made where I put this plastic car on the ground - the car was about 5 inches long - and step on it repeatedly. And then, when it had completely broken up, to start pouring a much more fluid type of polymer on top of it, that was pigmented, and in that way, freezing the car in some sort of stasis between itself and a state of entropy. And so, it was in a way doing the same thing I wanted to do with hydrochloric acid without killing everybody in the room, and doing it in a way that I found much more effective. And then I took that car and then I scaled it up as a painting. I was very much interested in it’s being semi-recognizable as an object and [in] the inherent moment of tragedy that was, I guess, the narrative in that.  September 11th was a really powerful experience for me but this work was not a direct response – I had been working on this idea already for a couple of years prior.

[]

SG:  Could you talk about curating?

Curating is a very exciting thing. I think it is great when artists curate shows. A few years ago I worked on a project, which had originally started, with Konstakkuten in Stockholm. A colleague and friend of mine, Klega had it in London at his space and it came to me in Tokyo. When I was in Tokyo a professor of mine heard I was curating the Tokyo leg of the show and said: "Oh, I heard you curated a show", I said yes. And then he said, "So, you're not an artist anymore. You're a curator."  I first just stared at him waiting for the punch line – but, man he was serious. Curating for many people is not the domain of an artist – it is almost by definition the domain of an art historian.  And it made me think, I thought, "Wow!  Why…What is that about?".

In London, artists, that I know of, wouldn't think twice about curating, or writing art criticism for that matter. Curating of artists by artists is a lot of times, an incredibly organic and fluid process and often can reflect a small group’s perspectives and interests. In the spectrum of exhibitions curating by artists compliments curating by art historians, which can come from quite a different perspective. Yet I’ve even met people in New York that have told me when an artist curates it generates a “conflict of interest.” To whom – the world? To scholars, to academia? I think still for some people curating by artists makes a lot of people nervous like there has to be some control over these artists lest they just get completely out of control. (laughs). But,  I think these statements reveal a great deal about people’s perceptions of artists.

Curating by artists is often just a different way of looking at a story or a sensibility. Sometimes when artists curate their shows they may bring in people they know – they might say "I know these people, I know what they’re thinking about. This is kind of representing something we're doing. Let’s just do it". And there is a sort of immediacy about it that I appreciate.  Whether it is artist curated or art historian-curated I am always moved by well-planned shows. I really liked the Dada show that I saw in Washington, D.C.. There was also the Beat Generation show at the Whitney some years ago, it exposes me to something that, as a painter, I might not necessarily see elsewhere.

SG: You made many references to art historical figures, like Pollock and De Kooning among others. How would you define your relation to artists from the past?

LJ:  I guess I have been really lucky – I was exposed to the work of these artists as long as I remember. It was just something that I would do – like some people go see Aunt Mildred at Thanksgiving – I would go see Pollock, Guston, De Kooning and Miro’s work at the museum.

Whenever I go to MoMA I usually start it out by looking at an early De Kooning’s black and white painting for no other reason than I just really enjoy looking at it. Then, his woman painting just around the corner, and there is some minimalist Arte Povera sculptures on the corner from that by Fontana, and another white furry piece, Acrome made by Piero Manzoni made in the early 60s.

This morning, when I was at the Christies’ preview for the auction, I saw some ‘70’s De Koonings, some of Philip Guston’s work from about, I guess 1965, that were sublime - I think that they’re people that I respond to. [] I’m quite inspired by my contemporaries – as well as De Kooning, Antoni Tàpies and Philip Guston.

SG:  Dubuffet too, maybe?

LJ:  Dubuffet is fascinating to me. It's the same interest that I have for Cy Twombly.  He makes these playful pictures of people like a child would make. He makes this doodles of faces, and there is humorousness in that. And I just can’t help but love it.

And Tàpies is a little bit more formal; he has a wonderful way of working with this sheer materiality. Almost like he is drawing into the sand – it is so primitive and simple and intuitive for me.

But when I think about Burri with his burlap and red painting juxtaposition object at the Tate Modern, or at Pompidou, the Fontana sculpture, I think, the Ceramica Spaziale – I think it is 1948 or 49 – which is black, obsidian-like object about knee-high, and it looks almost cube-like but then it's so unformed that, you know, it's so curious, and it poses so many questions. Because, you first think is, "what is it?", and "what is it mean?". And it is probably one of the most powerful sculptures I’ve ever seen in post-second world war art. It just asks so many questions, and it answers them just as fast. And it is like that black rectangular monolith in 2001, a Space Odyssey, the astronauts, were feeling when they were going close up to the black rectangular door-shaped monolith when they looked into it, when they saw really stars that it was like almost a portal way to another entire universe. And in this object by Fontana – it just asks me so many questions. It is quite formidable.

SG: I would also be interested in talking about the reception of your work; I'd like to know if you're interested in the interpretation of your work by other viewers. For instance, have you seen any differences in the reception of your work in Europe, in Japan or in America?

LJ: Before I think about other people's perceptions, I first of all think about own dialog with the work. I have a different dialogue with everything I make. I think that it is essential to trust my own intuition, and that sets a foundation how I will perceive others’ comments. They are going to come from their own positions and backgrounds. In a way it is very exciting as the interpretations can be as unique as the personality of the individual.

In a very important sense the work itself is a physical representation of my dialogue with myself, with others – with my universe. And so the response can be quite exciting. When I am creating work this dialog I am speaking of is not literal but it is almost outside of myself.  And there is always a dialogue between the works themselves – one piece will inform another in some way – and I often will keep them in the room so that I can be inside of this nexus or conversation they may be having.

I always believe in artwork being pieces of language and it's almost like an artwork is perhaps a string of words like a poem, or an artwork is like a misspelled word – perhaps a Freudian slip, or a notation about something, or is a question. I enjoy the dialog about the work – with other artists, with collectors and curators – and I like hearing the different interpretations and levels of interest. It’s also a constant dialogue on how we read forms, symbols and space.

Essentially, once a work is complete and is in the public the interpretation is up for grabs. And sure, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It is very personal and subjective.

I’m delighted when people have different interpretations that might say a piece of work I’ve done and they say, "I see an elephant head in there, don’t you see it?", and I say "Yeah, sure. I do now.” And, I think that's great. I think on the whole my work is interpreted the same across different cultures. However with the work that deals more directly with the formless –like the foam sculptures or the early work I did in the abject – there may be more connection to Western European culture and American culture. I recall giving a lecture in Tokyo on my work - I spoke about the concept of the formless and formless philosophy and how it is the antithesis to the universe of form around us – I recall looking at the audience… I really could have been talking about the weather in Kansas – it just did not register the same way. 

SG:  (Laughing)

LJ:  There are different readings of my work. So, once it leaves my studio in a way, it becomes a communication for other people, and I can't really control that. For me, there is a pretty clear line between letting that come in too much. I don’t have my studio in a subway station where everybody is walking through. I’m very private with my studio because that’s where I want to be, work and listen to Led Zeppelin, Miles Davis or whatever I'm listening to, and make these visual compositions. Without someone looking over my shoulder and suggesting I add a little red there or a mouse over there….

SG:  (Laughing)

LJ: When I want to have more dialogue, and then I’m happy to bring people in, and then see what they say. It’s a balance of worlds in a way – mine and others’. I’m always interested in what’s going on in people's minds when they look at something. Sometimes its "Wow!..That’s scary", or "that’s really provocative". So, I think it’s how much one as an artist wishes to take on board from others. I think it is critical in art-making to be honest with one’s self and to not worry too much about other people's dialogues.

I have a series of works called Neanderlust that I have been working on since 2003. It is a very exciting dialogue I am having with this part of me – or this part of humanity perhaps that is ingrained in us – but no longer perceived – like a lost sense of instinct. I feel it or see it out of the corner of my vision. And so, when I try to express this in sculpture like black flower, or even the rant cave I made in 1999 or Anomaly  [2003], which is like this dark, landscape as seen from the air. A place dark and mysterious and before the advent of man. The only problem with sculpture for me is that when you make about 10 of them, you know, you need a warehouse to put them in – they draw on space very fast. (left: Les Joynes, Anomaly, 2003, black urethane on canvas, 72 x 54 in – detail to right))

SG:  How would you consider your studio space?  Is it a retreat, a place where you are able to have this dialogue? Or is it just a working place…a storage?  [chuckles]

LJ: It’s a place where I can set undisturbed to manifest something and work on it, and also a place for me to show the work and observe the dialogue [they have] with them. []