Interview: Matt Offenbacher and Vic Haven
by Amanda Manitach

Friday, August 23, 2013

Last week, Matt Offenbacher and Vic Haven took home this year’s no-strings-attached $25,000 Neddy awards in painting (Offenbacher) and open medium (Haven). Below, we talk about winning, enthusiasmism, painting and fantasy benders.

So what are you going to do with the prize money?

Vic Haven: Retire

Matt Offenbacher: I’m very fortunate because unlike many artists I don’t need this money to meet my living expenses. One thing I’m going to do is to buy some art made by artists living and working around here. I’ve been saying for years we need more adventurous, dedicated collectors. I can put my money where my mouth is. I think this is going to raise a lot of interesting questions for me. What are things worth? What work should I buy? Who should I buy it from? What will I do with the stuff I buy? The other thing this will make possible is some traveling, including perhaps some living and working in Europe. I’m hoping to spend time in Rotterdam, where I hear there’s a great international artist community.

When I generalize about both of your work, I think of Matt’s as being motivated by history and story-telling. I think of Victoria’s as a deliberate wrangling (organizing) of data, sentimentality, material. How do you feel about each other’s work?

MO: Vic’s work is brilliant. I think of her as an artist’s artist because I see a lot of her work as being about the life of an artist, the people and places and relationships which form community. It’s always so perfectly worked out, formally and materially, but never fussy. I don’t know how she does that.

VH: I remember the very moment I first saw Matt’s paintings (Howard House 2006). One in particular stopped me in my tracks; a wildly colorful, full-frontal owl with an inquisitive and piercing gaze. It was staring back at me from the center of the canvas and told me " this guy knows something about painting". The unassuming owl seemed to have it all....from a nod to Jasper Johns cross-hatching to the melancholy pictorial space of a Caspar David Friedrich, with a little of my grandmother’s unabashed glee for the act of painting itself sprinkled in. Matt definitely knows things about painting, but it’s also what he doesn’t know and the questions that he continues to ask...about painting (can a painting be embarrassing?), about art (can an exhibition be a zine?), about community (can artists expand and experience community within a sales environment, i.e. Seacat.co) that I value so much. Thank you Matt for sharing your enthusiasmism!!

On that note, Matt, you coined the word "enthusiasmism" and talked about it at the Stranger Genius presentation two weeks ago. Can you provide your description of that term for those who missed the event?

MO: I was trying to sketch out some ideas about queer themes in visual art ("friction & resistance" and "perverse-centricity" were the other ideas along with "enthusiasmism"). What I think I said is that enthusiasm is the opposite of coolness. An enthusiast is someone who is both over-committed and under-skilled, someone who puts themselves into positions of potential embarrassment, someone who reaches out with a fervor which they have no reason to believe will be returned. However, I think it’s this very excess of energy, this desire to connect and court disaster, which can be so effective at generating new forms, new ways of knowing each other, and new kinds of spaces for seeing and being with each other’s particularities. The usual way of thinking about community is that it forms when individuals put aside their differences, and come together with shared interests. One queer idea that I really like is the possibility of building communities that exist not in spite of differences but are, rather, made up of differences. A community of difference works by affinity and inclusion, by celebrating and bringing together peculiarities, kinks, inclinations. I think enthusiasm can be a glue in this kind of community.

(Above: Offenbacher’s studio; below: Haven’s studio)

Victoria, drawing (a love of line) seems to be paramount to your practice. Drawing is associated with a unique form of immediacy, fragility, chance and directness. What are your thoughts about drawing? About drawing as a root of your practice?

VH: I consider drawing as my practice, not just a root of my practice. It’s all drawing, all the time: a filled-in corner, a carved chunk of wall, some rubber-bands wrapped around nails, two brass rods soldered together in the shape of an X, a necklace, a ring, cold rolled text, tape on paper, tape on wall, a bending walk, splicing sound, etc.

Matt, I’m one of your fans who likes your ideas about painting more than the actual paintings themselves (maybe I’m the only one?). How do you feel the intellectual/conceptual aspect of your painting practice relates to, supports or subverts the object-ness of your paintings?

MO: Hm. I don’t know how to answer this. I’ve never thought of my ideas and paintings as separate. Although I think you’re not alone in not liking my paintings very much. I don’t know why that is. I like my paintings a lot. Maybe there’s something in there about taste. That’s a topic I find interesting.

Well, I do enjoy your paintings, but I confess to often being more fascinated by some of the ideas and stories behind them, like the wildly wonderful Decor for Interstellar Flight. You seem to have no shortage of ideas or projects. How do keep it all organized—your projects, ideas, your time?

MO: I make lists and have a bunch of folders on my computer desktop to throw things in. I also write stuff on little pieces of paper which I put in my pockets and carry around until I do whatever it says on them I should be doing.

What are each your creative processes like? Do you sketch out ideas, do they come from reading, all in your head?

VH: Walk. Read. Talk. Think. Draw. Meet. Listen. Text. Make. Edit. Love.

MO: My main creative process tool is a sketch book, one of those hardback ones with the black pebbly covers. When I have an idea which I think is awesome I put it down in there with some combination of drawing and writing. It’s mostly scrawling, it’s pretty ugly. Then, usually that’s the end of it, because a few minutes, hours, or days later I realize that that idea? Not so awesome after all. I have a ton of these notebooks.

Do you have a feeling for where your art is heading?

VH: I don’t right now and I like it that way.

MO: I’m really excited about the painting I’m going to do for the Neddy exhibition. I’m going to start painting it tomorrow. It’s a place-specific painting on one of those gigantic concrete columns that are in the middle of the Cornish gallery. I think they must pretty much hold up the whole building. Also, I’ve been thinking about theater sets, and puppets shows, different kinds of performance situations which can involve painting. I’ve been collaborating with some amazing visual artists in the past few years, and I hope to continue that. I would also like to try collaborating with non-visual artists. Dancers, for instance. Actually, I’m hoping this award might help with that. One cool aspect of it is that Cornish has invited us to become involved with the school in some way, if we would like to, and I know Cornish has some pretty amazing dancers.

Let’s reword the initial question: If you had to take your money and go on a weekend bender with one living artist, who would it be and why?

MO: I’m too old for a bender. Well if I had to ... Jeffry Mitchell, because he’s so fun and an amazing artist and often up for a good bender. I guess that’s not much of a fantasy though because he might actually do it. I don’t know. Most of the artists I admire from afar seem like pretty sober types. Oh, there’s a critic-curator-writer I would jump at the chance to go on a bender with. Jan Verwoert. Not only is he brilliant and funny, he seems like he would only get funnier and more brilliant the more drunk he was. Also he’s very cute. Gretchen Bennett and I have a long-standing crush on him.