Populism comes to the art gallery, en masse

He's not covering the Virgin Mary in elephant dung or equating the mayor of New York with Hitler. In fact, his work is remarkably free of provocative content, whether sexual, political, or just plain gross. Why, then, is the painter Steve Keene, ART '84, so controversial?

COURTESY STEVE KEENE Paul Kennedy declines to teach a lecture in order to avoid the repercussions of a TA strike.

I had the chance to ask the man himself on a phone interview from his Brooklyn apartment, where he lives with his wife Star, an architect (and, based on my interactions with her, his manager), and where he has his studio. "I honestly don't know why it threatens people," he said of his work, whose broad strokes and bright colors generally coalesce into faces, animal and human, centered and close-up on the canvas. Words often appear in the paintings as well, as in his portrait of a cat with large blue eyes, a red triangle of a nose, and asymmetrical whiskers. Scrawled across the bottom of the painting are capital letters spelling, "I love my cat."

So it's not so much the paintings themselves that are making enemies. And it's not Rudy Giuliani who's playing the puritan. Rather, it's Keene's process that pisses off members of the art establishment—people who don't bat an eye at nudity or obscenity, but who resent Keene's "mass-production" painting method.

`Red, red, red. Blue, blue, blue.'

In a sense, it's appropriate that his critics have focused on this aspect of his work, since Keene also emphasizes the process over the product. The mild-mannered painter claims not to court controversy, but controversy seems to be an inevitable byproduct of his work. And the same might be said, in fact, of the art objects themselves, considering his manner of speaking about them. Keene stresses repeatedly that for him the art is about the process, a kind of "game." But he also uses the language of labor. In his studio-cum-factory, he lines up six easels in a row, with 15 or 20 canvases, and attacks them like a one-man assembly line. He goes down the line, trying to make all the paintings identical, one stroke at a time. "Yup," he affirms. "Red, red, red, red, blue, blue, blue, blue. The goal is to be machine-like." Working this way, he produces 50 to 100 paintings daily, and tallies his life work at 90,000 paintings to date. His prices range from $1 to $10, so his patrons range from little kids to art connoisseurs.

Keene sees himself most as a kind of performance artist. He reminisced fondly about a recent show in Santa Monica, where he would paint all day, and people would hang out for an hour or so to watch him work. When spectators left with a painting in hand, it would serve as "a souvenir of attending that performance." For him, the word "painting" is clearly much more a verb than a noun. Exuberant about the act, he adds almost as an afterthought that "the paintings are the outcome of that process." When asked if there are any paintings he's particularly attached to, ones he would resist selling, the answer is an unequivocal no. "I can paint more tomorrow," he explains. "I'm attached to the process. It's like I'm a baker making 300 cherry pies a day. At the end of the day, you don't want to eat cherry pies."

Gimme indie rock

Though he maintains his bad-boy, outsider rep, Keene was classically trained in his home state of Virginia and then headed to Yale, where he primarily studied printmaking. After graduating, he did traditional landscapes before discarding the genre out of boredom and developing his trademark style. But Keene doesn't talk shit about art school. At Yale, he felt surrounded by impressive talent and strong opinions, initially overwhelming. Ultimately, though, other people's opinions didn't intimidate him, but rather gave him confidence to mature artistically. "That they all have strong opinions makes it valid for me to have my own strong opinion." School, in his view, is "about molding someone to have a strong opinion for a good reason."

Yet, since he left art school, Keene has been more a part of the indie rock scene than any art scene. His paintings grace the covers of several albums, such as Pavement's Wowee Zowee and the Apples in Stereo's Fun Trick Noisemaker. Though not a musician himself, he's a life-long fan of those bands and others of their ilk, such as Palace and Neutral Milk Hotel. At college in Virginia, where he befriended Pavement's Stephen Malkmus, he and his wife Star were deejays on the college radio station. He's also held art shows at concerts and compares his painting sessions to concerts.

Indeed, despite his innocent shrugs regarding the ruffled feathers of the academy, Keene can't hide a quietly subversive streak, an instinctive resistance to orthodoxy and elitism. He's been deemed the "Johnny Appleseed of art," and he uses words like "populist" to describe his work. "Why does everything have to be distributed in the same way?" he wonders. "You go to an art exhibit, you're supposed to have 20 paintings on the wall, they're supposed to cost $500 each, you're supposed to have wine and cheese." He invokes a musical analogy, noting that in that discipline the gamut runs from folk music to symphony orchestras. One of his goals is putting art in "places where art is not supposed to be shown."

A `pretty funny' fame

After graduating from art school, Keene tried, like any starving artist, to seduce the New York art world. But that got old fast, and rather than whoring himself for the big bucks and big-name galleries, he opted for this unconventional yet pragmatic approach. Ironically, museums are now taking interest in his work, undoubtedly due in part to his iconoclastic methods. Recent exhibits were held at the Santa Monica Art Museum and the Museum Ludwig in Germany. The media, including Time Magazine and The New York Times, have also been knocking on his door. He finds his burgeoning celebrity status "pretty funny," but denies that a museum setting compromises his work. He's aware that just by virtue of their location, the paintings in these galleries could boast price tags that well exceed single digits. But though the context changed, the prices didn't. "I was a good guy," he laughs.

Demystifying the artist

With a modesty uncommon among artists, Keene acknowledges that his oeuvre consists of simple paintings, not intricately painted ones. "They're not meant to be Rembrandts," he said. "This is a humbler kind of art." He uses words like "fun" and "game" to describe his art, but there are people who say art isn't about fun and games. Academic Dean Wayne Morris of the Moore College of Art and Design told Time that Keene's art was "mean-spirited and cynical." After observing Keene's enthusiasm for getting his work out to people who don't normally own art, and knowing his honor-system practice of leaving a box for "suggested donations" at his shows, it's understandably hard to take those epithets seriously.

Slightly more sympathetic are art students who complain that, while they slave away in efforts to become better painters, Keene stages his "side-show" with computer-like tactics, stealing attention from more "serious" artists. Still, one wants to roll one's eyes at stodgy academics like Moe Brooker from the same institution, who have whined that "art is supposed to address the human condition." It's hard not to wonder whether his detractors would be drooling over him if he charged $90,000 for a single painting rather than producing 90,000 paintings for as little as a dollar each. It's ironic: a clichéd complaint about modern art is the feeling that "my kid could do that, and it's selling for a million dollars." That is a layman's attitude, and now Keene is exposing its dirty flipside: the art elite bristles at affordable art.

Meanwhile, as Keene provokes debates on anything from economics to the nature of art, he's just doing his 9 to 5 job like any pro. "You hear so much about inspiration, waiting for the right moment," he says. "I want to demystify that attitude. Art is a job—but it can be a beautiful job."

Photograph courtesy of Steve Keene.

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