- So please help me to welcome James Arendt.
(audience applauds)
Thank you for coming.
- Thank you, Penny and thanks everybody
for having me up.
Penn College is quite impressive and it's very nice
to be here.
I got on the airplane this morning and flew
all over the country, and arrived and was shown
much grace and much hospitality, so I'd like
to thank you all for having me, and especially for giving
me a deadline.
It's always nice to have a deadline to work against
as an artist, and so when you struggle for hours
and hours, and hours kind of by yourself
in your one-car garage surrounded by lawnmowers
and things like that, it's always nice
to come to a moment like this where I can have
a rapt audience and point at artwork and pretend
to be impressive, right?
This is the reward for all those hours, and hours,
and hours in drawing class.
Right, Drawing One students who are out there?
This is the payoff, this is where you get to have
a little bit of fun, you get to tell people about
your ideas, and you get to explain why
you do the things that you do.
So tonight, I'm just gonna walk you through the show,
then talk to you about how I arrived here.
So bear with me.
It's kind of a long, but not overly complicated story.
As Penny mentioned, I began as someone who loved drawing.
I was just talking with two little ones out here
in the crowd and encouraging them to continue to draw
because that's where I started.
My first love is drawing, right?
It was the thing that my parents figured out
that they could give me pencils and keep me quiet.
It worked a little too well (laughs).
So as I grew up and left home for school,
I grew up on a small farm in mid-Michigan
near a lot of automotive manufacturing,
around people who worked with their hands,
around farmers, around automotive workers,
and I wanted to desperately get away from that.
I did not want to grow up ad get a union card
and punch the clock.
I wanted something different, and as soon as I got
to art school, all I could draw about, all I could paint
about were those people, the people that I grew up with,
our experiences, what my life was like,
and I discovered how different my experiences were
from the other kids I was going to school with, right?
I kind of had this unique viewpoint on life
because of the way I grew up,
because of former jobs that I had,
things like lead organic remediation specialist.
Does anybody know what lead organic remediation specialist
amounts to on the farm?
(laughter) - Yeah.
- Yeah, so you can make anything sound good on a resume.
And so because of those experiences, I had a unique
outlook and continued to work.
In fact, my ideas, I was talking with a former professor
and she's like, "What are you doing now?"
And I'm like, "Well, kind of doing the same thing
"I was doing in undergrad."
The things I cared about, the people I cared about,
the stories I wanted to tell I've learned to tell
in new ways, and what really happened is in graduate
school, so after I spent four or five years in undergrad
learning how to paint, I go to three more years of school
to learn how to paint, I give it up.
I say, you know, my painting professor always encouraged
me to think about my materials as having meaning
all on their own, right?
But paint means something, the way it's applied
means something, it can be fleshy,
it can be shiny, it can be opulent, it can be seductive.
It can be all these different things
and as I worked with oil paint, I began to think
of what is the material communicating?
I found some severe limitations, right?
Oil paint, it's said, was designed to paint flesh
and primarily the flesh of kings and gods, right?
It does it beautifully, it does it better
than anything else, any other type of paint
is not as fleshy.
It is like the thing it wants to represent,
but the people I wanted to work with and the people's
stories that I want to tell were not like that.
They were not kings and gods, and so I had to cast around
for another type of material.
I wanted something that was more in line
with our experiences, and because of that,
I was kind of forced into denim.
I didn't choose it, I didn't want to work in it.
It's a terrible medium.
Do not pick it up, it's hard.
It's terrible at representation,
but in terms of what it communicates
and our knowledge with it.
How many of you have a favorite pair of jeans?
How many of you wear them out
until the crotch blows out?
(laughter)
It's the only type of garment we do that with.
It's intimate fabric, it's a working class fabric,
it's something we all have knowledge with
and experience with so people can anticipate
what these things are gonna feel like
and it comes in wonderful seven step value range,
Wrangler blue to acid wash white.
Very narrow spectrum.
So you get a lot of qualities that are nice
about the material.
I like what it says all on its own.
In fact, a lot of these works would just work
as heaping piles of denim.
If I was a more conceptual artist, if I was a smarter
artist, I would just pile denim in big pile
and call it good.
Wouldn't put all the work into the magic trick
that's its representation.
And then that's, but that's something I like.
I enjoy the magic of making images.
I think that's an aspect of artwork
that we're all initially drawn to and I've continuously
been drawn to bad representation, and in bad representation
over good representation has an advantage.
Bad representation is like a magic trick,
but one that you can see how it works.
It's Like this.
Nothing up my sleeve.
A bad magic trick allows you to see how the trick is done.
It doesn't lessen the enjoyment of it,
it just makes it visible.
This is how Penn and Teller operate, right?
The bad magic trick, bad slight of hand.
My representation is bad slight of hand.
These are jeans.
They're not people at all, they're just jeans pushed
in different configurations and cut in different shapes
to look like people or to simulate people
and the people I choose to represent
are family members.
They're either blood relation or nearly so.
A lot of the people in the room tonight or either
close friends or direct blood relations.
So I'm just gonna go through and I'll point
to some pieces and I'll tell you a little bit
about why I chose these people and who they are
and how they came to be.
So directly behind me here
is my niece, Meghann.
This wonderful label that Penny did for me
on her embroidery machine, that's really nice.
Meghann was born premature, really, really little.
I was in fourth grade.
She was one pound, 16 ounces or 14 ounces,
just under two pounds.
She's now in her mid-20s.
She's an Infinite Filmmaker, she lives on
the mean streets of Detroit
making documentary films.
And so as I think about her, as I think about
my relationship with her, she's in a far removed location
from where I live, we interact very rarely.
What could I do for her as an artist?
Well, I wanted to protect her, and so I looked at
the materials I had at hand and my wife and I
spent three days cutting out every single rivet
from every single pair of jeans we had
so that I could armor Meghann, right?
She's tough.
That's what I wanted people to know about her,
but I also wanted to add some toughness to her,
I wanted to kind of send the gift
from my far-distant, removed location.
And this way, I get to have my family, right?
They live in my garage.
Even though I'm 16 hours away, I get to think about them
and turn them over, think about their lives,
think about my relationship with them,
and improve that relationship.
On this wall over here is my other niece.
This is Elly.
Elly's 13 and terribly awkward.
Were any of you 13 and terribly awkward or serial killers?
Duh-duh-duh. (laughter)
To be 13 is a terrible age.
Were any of you 13?
- Oh yeah. (people chatter)
- Oh my goodness, 13 is the worst age ever.
You suddenly got an almost adult body
and none of it works right and you're tall
and gangly and you feel like you stick out
like a sore thumb.
And so someone donated a pair of jeans to me
that had these wings painted on it
and I thought, "Man, if any 13-year-old can use anything,
"it would be a pair of wings."
And so that's what I did for her.
So as I make these portraits of them,
I'm actually thinking about them a little bit
of how I want them to be, how I know them to be,
how I know them to be, right?
Not as they are, but what I want for them
and so I bring that to the work.
There's a lot of different stories.
Some of them are more interesting than others,
but just as a non-family example, I'll talk
about Kathryn Akin over here.
Kathryn is a neighbor of ours, harried by four children,
four children under five.
And so her day-to-day existence is busy, busy,
busy, busy, busy, and as a father of three girls myself,
I kind of know what that feels like, and so as I'm thinking
about her and I'm thinking about what she needs,
like what can art or what can I represent about her life
if I'm bringing to that the fact that she needs
to be multiplied, there needs to be more of her,
or there needs to be a period of rest.
And in fact, the way I'm building it,
the application material is like the thing.
She is harried or stressed out, right?
Is another way of saying that.
So is the application of material.
If you get up close on that, you'll see
that it's odd little bits piled up
on top of each other.
And so I like that, and I like the way they resolve.
I think one of my favorite artists is Vik Muniz,
who's a Brazilian-American artist and works
in garbage, and sugar, and chocolate, and all sorts
of different things that are bad at making images,
and he talks about watching people watch
works of art, that they do something like this.
They get very, very close like this
and then they lean back like this,
and then they get very, very close
and then they lean back like this.
And he talks about the perceptual shift that happens
and he's actually studying what happens
in between people's ears, right?
The fact that we enjoy things for what they are,
paint or denim in this case, we like that,
we like to be able to see it,
but we also like the magic trick of representation
and so we oscillate back and forth,
and that's a powerful tool that you can use
that he points out to us.
You can use that over and over again.
So the newest work here is behind you.
These are my totemic figures.
These sculptural figures are people in my life
that I've created, and these are more recent additions.
These are Paul Olson, and Christine Conry,
and Logan Woodle.
These are people I work with down the coast of Carolina
and they're essentially my new extended family,
and so I've adopted them as my own.
I get to know them very well, I get to investigate
them through artwork,
and it's fun.
They're like, growing out of the ground.
And in terms of meaning, in terms of structure,
I like to think about our relationship
to work and working class materials through
the people I know and how that has affected their lives
and so a little bit of my autobiographical story
feeds into this.
I grew up in an automotive town where we used to build
every General Motors vehicle in the United States
and since I was a kid, we've lost 80,000 jobs
in the automotive industry, just in my town
and so it's really changed things
for people and to watch them struggle and to watch them
look for work and to watch them have relationships
to work is what my work is about.
I get to think about our relationship to work.
And so a lot of us have experience with jobs,
or a lot of us have some experiences with work
and in my experience, it's been not that work is bad,
but that certain types of work are better.
And so artwork, for me, is one of those types of work.
It's what I call whole and undivided,
and the history of work since industrialization
is about the division of labor,
it's about cutting work up into pieces
so that we only ever get to see just a little slice of it.
Art's not like that.
Art makes you have to engage
with work that's whole and undivided.
You think it up, you design it, you execute it,
you manufacture it, and you come and talk about it,
so it's a complete world of work and that makes
work enjoyable, right?
It's not a burden to do that, it's fun
and that's the type of work that I want people
to be able to engage in.
Unfortunately, the structure of our society is such
that most of us work at little tasks,
work at little slices of work.
We have just a small component of the work placed
in front of us, and that's what assembly line work
is really like, and the people I grew up with
worked a lot on line, and that means you do just one thing
and you never get to see the finished car.
You just put the bumper on, right?
And that work is a drudgery.
No matter how good it pays, it's not satisfying.
And so as I work through work and think about work
with working class materials, that's really
what I'm turning over in my head.
What do I want to know about people's lives
and the relationship to work and how it affects them?
And the reason I work with family is because I'm placing
people through image making in vulnerable positions.
Hi Meredith (laughs).
In very vulnerable positions, and so I would only do that
with people that I love, right?
Image making is a form of power exercise.
When you draw a picture of someone, you're exercising power
over that person's image and that's why
we have to be sensitive to those types of things,
and working with my family allows me to be insensitive.
I love my family, my family knows I love them.
I can do anything I want with them
and they have to be okay with it.
Why?
Because they're family, they can't get rid of me.
But to do that to other people, to walk into
other people's stories is something that artists
should be sensitive to, to not trespass
on other people's stories, to not exercise powers
on populations that you don't have
any resonance with.
And so that's one of the reasons I work with family
one of the things that I wave my finger at other artists
and say don't do that, don't be tourists
in other people's lives.
Tell your stories, all right?
Those stories are for other people.
And so as you walk around tonight, enjoy the work.
You can see a lot of different techniques,
you can see the big sparkly naked Jim back here.
Don't look, it's PG-13
there are children present.
(laughter)
Ah.
But if you're gonna make people vulnerable,
you should make yourself most vulnerable,
the most open to criticism, and most exposed
and so that's really a literal
exploration of that and in my transformation
really from a farming, working class kid
and to now, a rather prestigious-ly placed
college professor type dude who gets to do stuff
and travel all over the country and come here
and talk to you, this is the lever that art
has worked in my life and something that it might
do for you as well is that it's a powerful tool
of transformation, and if you have a vision
and a dream, you can use art as a lever
to help you position yourself where you need to be.
And so I hope many of you will walk around, enjoy the show.
I'll take a few questions now.
I'm talking too long.
Professors talk to long.
(laughter)
But if you're curious about how they're made
or anything like that, shoot.
- Harper is (laughs), Harper is a little devil.
Harper is my seven-year-old daughter.
She's three in that image.
Harper's a little girl with a fire cracker,
the sparkler on the far wall and she's mine.
She is the first of mine.
My wife and I have three daughters.
Our newest is four weeks old, so I'm operating
on limited amounts of sleep right now,
but they're all beautiful and they're all
kind of uniquely different.
I think the strangest thing about having children
is that even though they come from the same parents,
none of them are exactly the same, and so Harper
is my musing on kind of the ephemeral nature of childhood
and just, you wish you could hit a pause
button for childhood.
Other questions?
Where did I learn to talk into the microphone like this?
The backdrop, the listing ships.
It can be seen as a metaphor for even my own family,
a lot of families like my family.
I like listing ships.
This is cut from a single bolt of denim fabric
that I got from a plant in Georgia.
I was actually able to cut four of those
out of one bolt that they sent me
and it's a silhouette image of listing ships
and I think that's a nice metaphor for a lot of people
who have been through struggles like this
with employment, have lost jobs, have lost family,
have suffered through divorce, or suicide,
or all the other effects of these types of tragedies
that befall communities have, but still somehow
manage to float.
I like that.
Bill Cosby taught me to do this.
When I was young, I would listen to Bill Cosby records
and as I got older, I would listen to Bill Crosby
records backwards, (laughter)
listening for Satan.
Never heard Satan (laughs).
Any other questions about the work?
- [Woman] Who's Mike and what's that representing?
- Mike's my older brother.
Mike's nine years my other.
We shared a room our whole life.
Can you imagine?
18, sharing a room with a nine-year-old.
How much fun is that?
Mike's kind of like my darker image, right?
Mike stayed on the farm.
He works in Orion Construction.
He had two daughters right out of high school.
This could have easily been my life, right?
Except for a few choices that I made along the way.
It's an interesting guy.
He's different from me.
I call him the Great White Hunter.
He's a man's man, but man does he not
have access to his emotions.
And so as his daughters grow up,
a lot of these girls on the wall are his grown daughters
and as they grow up, he does not know
how to let go of them and so there's been a lot
of battles between him and his daughters
over letting go, and so for me in that absence,
right, that literal absence of a child in his torso
is him struggling to come to terms with that, you know?
And it's not always like it's a happy, fun,
sunshine-y story about the struggles that people go through,
but I think those things are real, right?
And I like the real.
I'm a sincerity junky.
That's why I make them out of really real jeans,
and they're really real jeans all the way through, right?
They're really real jeans on the back,
they hang from really real jean buttonholes
because I like truth and I like Maurice Sendak.
Maurice Sendak wrote Where the While Things Are.
Maurice Sendak passed away and I thought
the best line that anybody said about him
was he never lied to children.
He wrote fiction his whole life.
He never lied to children.
So I think there's power and if not being factual
and being truthful to your experience,
and so that's a powerful tool that you can wield.
There was another with over here?
Mackenzie is my niece's daughter.
So my brother who's nine years older than me
is a grandfather, all right?
A young grandfather and Mackenzie is actually
his second grandchild, and so these things get complicated.
Mackenzie is just another character in the drama
of the unfolding family members.
I have in-laws, I have step-parents,
so there isn't a shortage of people to think about
and work with.
I even have other mothers.
I hope a lot of you had the good fortune to have
other mothers or other dads, right?
These were the people who you showed up
at their house after school and you drank
their juice boxes and they always
had Kool-Aid in the fridge, those type of people.
They're the ones who saved my life, right?
In a really hard time, as I could have either
ended up in art school or somewhere else,
and so these were the people who kept me
on the art school side of things.
So that's paid off.
It's a lot of hard work, it's a lot of lonely hours,
but I get to be here and I get to be doing it,
and that's a lot of fun.
- [Female Audience Member] Your subjects,
what are their reactions to being your subjects, like?
- Let's talk about my mom.
That's the real question.
What does your mom think of what you do?
(audience laughs)
Mom's here, mom's on the back wall.
Mom's in her nightgown without her hair, right?
Maybe some of you had moms who don't always
have their hair on.
She does not like that,
but she likes this.
And that's the amazing thing because my mom
is really proud of the things that I do
and I try to be kind, but her in hair gussied up
to go out with the church ladies is a fiction.
- Yeah. (people chatter)
- And I wanted a picture of my mom, who more than half
of the time is asleep in her chair at nine o'clock
at night with her hair not off, but off kilter
and she's a good sport about it.
But I love my mom, let me say that on tape.
I love my mom. (audience laughs)
Did a lot of great things for me.
Entered me in my first art contest, right?
That's what moms do.
But those relationships are fraught with complication.
I'm sure you understand, right?
Everybody has a teenager out there understands mothers
and fraught relationships.
Any other questions?
Good question.
A lot of people ask me where do you get your material?
I ask.
I come to things like this and this is where I solicit.
I say, "Pass the hat," and I say, "Do any of you have jeans
"that don't fit?"
(audience laughs) I'll be here 'til tomorrow.
I'll be happy to put them in my carry-on bag
and take them home.
I'll show you my UPS address.
I have not bought materials in four years.
Everyone, and I really like this part of it.
People show up with short stacks of washed jeans
and they'll be on my office chair, they'll be outside
my door, they'll be in little plastic bags.
Everything that you see around you
is entirely donated by people who wanted
to be part of the work, and that's really important to me.
If you're gonna tell people's stories, if Mehgann
is gonna be a model, Meghann's jeans should be
in the piece and that's, when you think about material,
when I touched on materiality and its inherent meaning,
when you think of what cotton is,
cotton is work, cotton is dust and tears in the field,
it's the sweat of garment makers,
it's the lives of people who wear it out,
and then it comes to me,
and so it has work embedded in it and I like that.
That's the material working for me
versus me trying to make the material do something.
Anything else?
My first love is drawing.
I'm a slave to observational drawing, unfortunately.
My training is very traditional in that sense.
People who can cartoon, that's another skill
that I did not hang onto.
So imaginative-based drawing is difficult for me,
but observational drawing, figure drawing,
things like that is pretty natural for me to do.
Now I work from a rule-based creativity area.
I used to be a painter.
I still consider these paintings to a certain extent,
but when I sit down and go into my studio,
I used to look at paintings and speculate.
What is this supposed to be?
Would it be better like this?
Should it be bigger?
You know, all these questions that artists
run through their mind.
In my studio practice now, what I do
is I have a rough sketch, usually on my garage wall.
Eh, eh, eh, eh, eh.
I thought of that, I drew it,
and usually I'll have to write a note next to it
so I can remember tomorrow what that was.
Some of these ideas are not so good.
Okay? (audience laughs)
They get tossed in the dustbin of history,
but the ones that make it to the point
of where I'm ready to begin follow
this rule-based creativity platform,
an di have kind of like, four rules to help me in the studio
so I always know what I'm supposed to be doing.
My rules follow something like this.
What's the material?
Denim.
How big?
Life size.
Who?
Family.
And so within that kind of framework for myself,
that rule-based creativity, I can go anywhere I want,
I can do anything I want, but I know
ex what I'm supposed to be doing
when I'm in there and that's something about
the discipline of work that's not taught
in school, is it?
You need to get the work in the studio
and you need to make work in the studio,
and you need not to sit and think about
what am I gonna make?
I know.
I know what I'm gonna make every time
I go in the studio.
I got three kids, I got 20 minutes.
(snaps loudly)
Does that answer your question sort of?
- Yeah. - Sort of.
- [Man] Thank you.
- Anyone else?
Shut 'em up.
(laughs) I have color, color in me.
Man, I had a great senior show.
My undergraduate and I was (mumbles) the walk, you know?
Confident.
Had 20 paintings coming out, undergrad.
They were spectacular, they were large.
They were what we used to call BIPs,
big important paintings
and I got massacred on color and they were right.
Boy, I didn't want to hear it.
Look at these paintings, they're awesome!
Yeah, they're kind of muddy, there's too much yellow.
And working through that, I've discovered the solution,
right, monochromatic.
(audience laughs) An immediate sense
of harmony through an underlying concept of sameness, right?
If I introduced denim colors, which might be
a possibility further down the road,
it has to be integrated, it has to be just like any
other painting, right?
It has to balance proportionally against
the other colors.
Denim comes in a variety of different colors.
Indigo I like though, not only as the primary
pigment that we find in denim, but it also has
a long, historical tie to West African slave labor
in South Carolina, where I live currently.
So the fact that it's a native plant
that was grown in colonial days in America
and is tied to the work of so many people
who were brought here
against their will, seems important.
So yeah, color's something.
But yeah, I can see colors sometime.
Harmony, harmony, harmony, harmony, harmony, harmony.
It's an important factor in works of art (laughs).
All right, and if there aren't any other questions,
I'll say come on up and talk to me, I'm friendly.
And enjoy the rest of the show.
Thank you very much for having me.
(audience applauds)
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