Thomas J Gamble INTERVIEW
Gamble’s use of past material in order to convey his thoughts of the present creates a bridge between a time that isn’t so different from now. Issues of isolation, disheartening political realities, and ecological horrors are feelings that encapsulated the human experience 40+ years ago as much as they do now.Due to circumstances we did not interview at that moment but, nonetheless talked through his show and generally discussed his process and ethos when working on his projects. Below is our conversation via email, which references our previous meeting and discusses how he conducts his research, what is endearing about 80s punk zines, and using humor to get the message across.
Hi Thomas, how are you feeling after your show’s opening?
I’m alright, thanks. It was a very fast turnaround for this show so it was a very intense period of work there for a while, but I’m happy with it. I feel like I can really only generate concrete ideas for new projects by making things, so making this show has got me excited about a lot of new ideas I want to explore, and I have a bunch of collaborative projects in some different fields that people have been patiently waiting for me to be done with my show to start, so I’m stoked for those as well. Thanks for taking interest in the work, it’s really flattering… we’ve been kind of internet buddies for a while now…
Of course man! I was introduced to your work through Humor and the Abject and your series Infinite Hesh. It just was really funny, had a very blunt delivery, as well as the sketches themselves just pairing so well with the cynical situations occurring within the comics. Now when we talked at the gallery, you mentioned that it wasn’t until you were older that you realized you wanted to pursue a career in the “fine arts”. What was the turning point or instance that helped you recognize this was the path you wished to go down?
I spent a lot of my early and mid-20’s doing odd jobs to scrape by and spending my free time pursuing creative projects- being in bands, conceiving strange little “art projects”, writing poems, taking photos. However, at some point the drudgery of the low-skill odd jobs that I had to endure to get by became exhausting and was taking up too much of my energy to do things that mattered to me so I decided to finish college. Unfortunately, endlessly studying lots of things is not really an option in the States, and for me anyway, higher ed necessitated taking out a wild amount of predatory loans (that I do my best to continue to not repay), so I had to settle on one thing. In undergrad I studied English literature, because I’ve always been an avid reader, but ultimately the prospect of using my creative energy writing papers for journals only other academics would read about this or that very specific literary focus didn’t seem fulfilling either, and despite my love for literature, I wasn’t meant to be a novelist.
All this time, though, I had still been making drawings, making paintings, making collages etc by myself, and they were very important to me. So, being impractical (and having sampled some of the design courses at my undergrad which quickly made me realize I didn’t want to be a designer), I decided to continue to go to school, but now for “fine art”. I applied to a graduate school in Portland, OR more or less at random to get away from the east coast for a while and luckily met with an MFA director, Arnold Kemp, who also had a background in literature. We hit it off very well and Portland seemed like a sort of semi-idyllic alternative to the rust belt and that was that.
How did you come to the title of “Adventuring into Basketry”?
“Adventuring Into Basketry” was the title of a British anarchist-leaning punk fanzine. The authors of the zine were clearly trying to be cheeky and give their little subversive fan publication a very milquetoast name… probably taken from some book laying around one of their parents’ homes in early 80’s England. I immediately liked the idea of appropriating the appropriated title. I think the naming of a show or a piece or whatever can often undersell the visual complexities of the work and color people’s opinions before they’ve even entered the gallery, and I liked calling this show that was full of personal, and political, and I think sometimes very melancholic imagery something totally anodyne and nondescript. In talking it over with William, the gallerist at Hyacinth, he mentioned that “basket weaving” and “underwater basket weaving” (an actual course offered, as far as I could research, only at Reed college (near Portland where I went to school) had become something of a pejorative for what Republicans deemed frivolous liberal arts spending and education.
Some relatively quick research yielded an entire history of Republicans at various levels of government talking dismissively about “basket weaving” or “basketry” in everything from their effort to defund the National Endowment For the Arts to warning against the frivolity of what your child will be learning should you send them to a coastal liberal arts school to a sort of dog whistle dismissing state funding of primarily Indigenous craft movements. So it was these two things, really; a sort of homage to the snark of the original appropriators, and an underhanded way at using conservatives’ own codified, prejudiced language against them (“you want to see frivolity? I’ll show you frivolity”).
What interested you in printing on plexiglass in your latest show? How did you consider lighting when constructing your pieces?
The use of plexiglass came from my desire to push collage to a stranger place. The transparency of the plexiglass and the play of light allowed for a sort of disembodied collage. I probably also have a taste for it because it’s sort of an underdog medium in the art world… we’re used to bricolage now or artist’s abutting sourced images from different places onto one picture plane, but collage, I think, has an unfortunate and unfair association of hobby or the amatuer about it. I’m interested in trying to pull off “expensive” looking pieces using non rarified material. The materials I use are made precious by the care with which they are composed. Hopefully the effect is as interesting as something like oil paint on raw linen but this is plexiglass, the stuff they make covid shields at checkout counters with, and the images are vinyl and resilient inks; industrial printing methods made for car decals or outdoor signage.
When talking with you about your latest work, you mentioned the admiration you had for early punk zines and their aesthetic in terms of their cut and paste amateur construction. How were you originally exposed to this world and how has this gone on to influence your work?
I became interested in punk at a time when zine culture was in decline, but it was all part of an ethos of creating non-traditional modes of visibility and finding ways to get what you make into the hands of like-minded people. Honestly a lot of zines weren’t very good, or they weren’t very interesting, but they were accessible. My family didn’t have a lot of money when I was younger and they weren’t early technology adopters so I didn’t have the internet in my home until I was close to 18, I didn’t have a cell phone until college, and buying these weird, cheap little magazines that some kid in your city or somewhere nearby or even somewhere across the country made who was into the same stuff you were was invigorating and exciting and it made you feel like part of something.
I mean, clearly punk is highly aestheticized and I was drawn to the starkness of that aesthetic which is reflected in zines, but I was attracted to them maybe even more because I think zines were also a lonely kid’s sort of network, and I grew up as a lonely and sort of isolated kid in middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania. So again it’s two things, it’s a particular aesthetic but it’s also the romanticism of the idea that somewhere, some kid was writing these little manifestos in their parents basement and then dragging it all to Kinkos to photocopy it and mail it off to a record label to hopefully distribute it. That’s touching. It’s like sending transmissions from outer space in terms of the likelihood you’re going to get a response, and that aspect of it feels very resonant with making art. Now we make things and we put pictures online and the feedback loop is a lot faster but it’s the same in many ways– people making things nobody asked them to make because they think, for some reason they probably can’t even explain, that it’s important to do so and then sending those things off into the world in the hopes of a response.
You mentioned that you truly enjoyed the interviews with young people in these punk zines, and have displayed quotes from them within your work. You discussed the common thread that can be found between the issues they speak of and the fact that these issues continue permeating society to this day. What are some of the issues that had the most impact on you and how has it affected your perception of the current state of affairs?
Yeah. The interviews were actually the main aspect of the zines that I wanted to integrate into a body of work. The aesthetic of them is cool but there are endless examples of that punk aesthetic being translated into other forms of culture, whether it’s fast fashion or free downloadable fonts or some millionaire celeb wearing a Crass shirt and a black bandana around their neck; it’s ubiquitous, so that act of re-presenting an aesthetic alone didn’t seem conceptually worthwhile. What I did find really compelling though was that in this huge lot of old zines I inherited, mostly from the early 80’s and mostly from the UK, the things the authors and the bands they interviewed were concerned with are, 40 years later, still very much the concerns of young people. The politics are still relevant.
I’m biased of course, but I think the reason punk has remained durable, so to speak, why there are still punk “scenes”, why young people are still starting punk bands when so many other youth subcultures have come and gone, is that punk is a reactive movement against very specific social and material conditions that really haven’t changed in any meaningful way. The kids in these interviews, some of whom appear in the work, are worried about global warming, police brutality, a false nativism that results in xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment. The ability to draw a through-line to contemporary political issues and address them obliquely through more or less forgotten objects from the past is compelling to me, and is a testament to the fact that we aren’t alone in some uniquely worrisome present. We are part of what has been a multigenerational struggle against the abuse of power.
Your latest work seemingly displays feelings of isolation and a cultural consensus of frustration towards the current power/economic structure within society. What change do you feel needs to be made in order for these frustrations to be alleviated?
That’s both a very straightforward and a very difficult question, I think. On one hand, what needs to change is clear right?: it’s the chorus of causes cited by the kids making zines in the 80’s, enumerated in part above, we all know them by heart. Wealth disparity is probably at the heart of a lot of it. If I’m qualified to talk about any place, politically (which is dubious) it would be about the US. Here, If I were to speculate, we have never gotten over the Calvinism of the Puritans and the fact that America’s specific brand of capitalism cloaks itself in a Protestant work ethic, “bootstrap” mentality while only be able to exist in the form it does as the legacy of chattle slavery. I’m not a sociologist or a theorist, and not even many of them, I think, have answers to “where do we go from here?” My intuition, though, is that we have to proceed in good faith, so to speak. What’s encouraging, I think, is that it seems to me a lot of younger people especially are starting to see through fake partisan conflict. We’re all disenchanted, but I think that that disenchantment gives us the unique vantage point to start to collectively envision actual alternatives.
Your work is constructed using primarily found images and text. How do you conduct the, for lack of a better term, research that leads to a works production?
My process for any project starts with me going back to the archive of material that I’ve created over the course of many years and that is constantly being added to. This archive exists both physically over boxes and boxes of “stuff”- newspapers, National Geographic magazines, old porno, cartoons, xerox zines, etc. and digitally with notes apps, found jpegs, pictures I’ve taken myself, bookmarked or screen-grabbed things from the internet, etc. There’s no “off time” as far as adding things to the archive, it’s just a habit I’ve developed and it isn’t very selective on the ground level- it’s just things I come across through life, through reading, through looking at my phone in the middle of the night, through something I heard someone say and wrote down… When I start to form the idea for a project, it’s a toss up whether the initial idea is conceptual or formal; sometimes I have the formal idea- “I’d like to make something with paint as an excuse to use these yellows that I like” or, alternately, it’s something vaguely conceptual like “I’ve noticed that these songs and this philosopher and this novel are all saying something about a specific thing and I want to highlight the through-line i’ve found and hopefully add something to it”.
In both cases, though, the next step is going back through all this stuff I’ve accumulated in my free time and finding little pieces I might be able to plug in, that might be relevant, that might even change the project. I sometimes think of my method of image making as like a combinatorial game… here is something funny, here is something melancholic, here is something visually heavy, here is something visually delicate, here is a joke or a tragedy, and these parts get arranged and rearranged until I find a juxtaposition that is no longer about any one of the component parts but about something new and mysterious and hopefully, compelling to other people.
In your comic series Infinite Hesh, you display instances of your characters commiserating about the reckoning of the world and the alienation/isolation we often feel, but through a humorous lens. What interested you in covering these topics?
I think that making that comic sort of functioned like a slowed down, more satisfying version of the kind of mental decompression time we use social media or getting drinks with friends for or whatever else people do to get things off their chest; to work through something for a little while and then say “Ok, I’m done with that” and move on from it. During the time i was making “Infinite Hesh” I was living back in Western Pennsylvania and feeling really isolated, so the comics, (which were originally supposed to be political cartoons aligning roughly with the start of the Trump presidency and meant to alleviate some of my own anxiety) became a way to sincerely address issues on whatever level (my own personal life, the art world, the political climate) that felt, at the time, too big to just squelch.
I worked them out through the often kind of laborious style of drawing you see evinced in them, a real detail heavy pen and ink style, which to me is a soothing thing to do. This has been noted more eloquently and at great length by people much more informed than me, but humor is a.) noticeably absent from a lot of discourse on art which I think is strange because I think the art world is often very funny and full of very funny people (Sean JP Carney, who ran the website and hosted the podcast at Humor and the Abject that Infinite Hesh was attached to felt this way too and was making work about it) and b.) I think humor can often be a way of approaching things at sort of oblique angle that if you addressed head-on would just turn people off- it would be too much, their lives are hard enough already, they don’t need some tortured guy making a drawing about why he feels bad too– but if you offer the viewer something, even a bad joke, and talk about why maybe we both feel awful or why our generation collectively feels awful such an inordinate amount of the time, then maybe there’s some connection there, it’s giving the audience something instead of just telling them something they didn’t ask for or worse, telling them what they should be doing instead. As you noted, it’s slow-form commiseration.
In the series you also show a distrust and dissatisfaction with the contemporary art world. What are your qualms with how the “industry” at large functions and chooses to champion certain artists over others?
I’ve been laughing about this one. I can’t say too much, from a professional standpoint, because ultimately I am complicit. I want social change and equity and at the same time I fully understand I exist as a maker of things that are often purchased as luxury commodities. I’ve really tried to move away from a posture of cynicism on this subject, because I just don’t think it helps anyone and can easily paralyze you or make doing art, which is hopefully something an artist loves, into another arduous job in a vast world of arduous jobs. One thing I will say is that I think artists need to look out for one another, which sounds almost glib but I believe it. If someone gets a big chance for something you perceive as questionable, that’s not about the artist, and it’s not about you, and it’s really destructive for artists, who have already chosen a really difficult profession, to spend their energies coming down on each other for the scraps we’re handed. Popular culture still filters from the bottom up. What artists who are unknown except to a few friends and internet admirers are doing right now, what they are wearing, the ideas they are articulating, seemingly unnoticed, is very likely what will define the aesthetic of art and fashion and culture in 2 years, or 5, or 10. While I have some degree of cynicism as to why the “industry” chooses some people and not others, it’s important to remember that, somewhat paradoxically, we the relatively powerless hold all the cards as far as taste-making is concerned. Don’t work with selfish people who don’t respect you, don’t allow yourself to be exploited for exposure without compensation, don’t make what you think someone wants to see and then get upset if they don’t like it, etc. Find like minded peers that have your back and who you can share ideas with and forget the industry–push each other, work hard, keep in touch with the friends you admire even when you’re depressed. If the industry is smart, they’ll pick up on what you’re doing, if they are determined to just give retrospectives to 90 year old painters who are already rich and famous, well, then at least you’re doing what matters to you and who wants to be part of that anyway?
Thomas J Gamble INTERVIEW
More Thomas J Gamble to check out.
https://www.instagram.com/thomasjgamble/?hl=en
