As a young child growing up in Kansas, it didn’t take long for Angela Dufresne to figure out that the social structure was “malicious,” to use her word, and that she was a budding lesbian. The two were surely related. “I learned that nothing I did mattered, so I could do anything I wanted,” she has said. “I wanted to be a storyteller, a punk, an image maker, and a feminist.” Dufresne’s paintings reflect all those instincts, and more. Her work is a wild cocktail of tenderness, absurdity, and theatrical flair—each canvas a whiplash of ideas inspired by her anarchic community of fellow-travelers and collaborators. In her canvasses sex and perversion are joyful and shameless, and often projected backwards into time, to create an alternative history to the dreary version we’ve been subjected to at school. A constant motif is the actor Gena Rowlands, who Dufresne describes as her “north star,” a figure who anchors Dufresne’s ambitions to translate “meaning in all of its complexity into a physical, visceral thing.”
Among Dufresne’s fellow travelers is the writer Jennifer Kabat, author of The Eighth Moon (Milkweed) and a contributor to Frieze. Both Dufresne and Kabat are communitarians by instinct and design, disdainful of the fetishization of artists and writers as singular geniuses. “We are all in this incredibly problematic and verbose interdependency and none of us actually exists alone,” Dufresne tells Kabat in this wildly entertaining conversation recorded over copious glasses of wine and a home-cooked meal in Dufresne’s Catskills home in May.
Jennifer Kabat: I wanted to talk about fly fishing, figurative painting, figurative history painting, cinema in painting—and I’m going to say something that sounds really cheesy.
Angela Dufresne: Cheesy? All right.
Kabat: Is making portraits of a network of people akin to creating a queer environment.
Dufresne: I’m going to complicate that a little bit, because fuck binaries. That’s always my number one priority as a queer. I really don’t believe in the abstract versus figurative painting binary. It’s a binary like male/female, like east/west, like Black/white. It’s that toxic. And it ties into the way that I think about queerness and painting as it relates to the genres. So you mentioned two mega genres: portraiture and history painting.
Kabat: But history painting is so denigrated that it’s actually cool.
Dufresne: Yeah, I learned that from [artist] Larry Rivers who threw the Pop Art treatment of history into the garbage, and really dealt with history in his work. The flippancy of Warhol—who I love—and the disjunctive post-structuralist aspect of Rauschenberg wasn’t interesting to me. Rivers never did that. Rivers painted Napoleon, or Washington crossing the Delaware. And I’m like, ‘This guy is painting Napoleon. What’s up with this?’ But anyway, I don’t think that those are figurative paintings—and this is the thing that’s going to sound crazy to everybody that gives a shit about my paintings, I do not make figurative paintings. My paintings include figures because they’re a part of this network or web of queer friendships that need to be legible in order to have representation in them. Now of course I love to draw the figure. I love nudity, especially superfluous nudity, and all that–
Kabat: –A good crotch shot makes a fine painting.
Dufresne: Yes. But I think of Foucault’s notion of gay friendship which transcends sexuality. The thing that is most significant for Foucault in his notion of friendship is creating a community of relationships—a non-normative network of people with whom you’re sharing a vision of the world—a vision for the past, a vision for the future and a vision for the present. I’m not making figurative paintings, I’m recording social relations.
Kabat: That makes sense but I really think that the whole body of work is about creating a network that can take in the totality of everything, and in doing so undermine the binaries of it.
Dufresne: Boom, then we’re on the absolute same page. There’s a particular pet peeve about figuration versus non-figuration. It’s like, ‘Are you straight or gay?’ It is a gendering thing to ask, ‘Are you figurative? Are you abstract?’ I’m both and neither. That’s the problem with the historians and the critics—they were, like, ‘Let’s create a binary so that my argument will win,’ which has been counterproductive throughout. It’s made painting into some stupid reactionary horror, when in fact painting in the bigger trajectory of history has been incredibly social. It’s about Caravaggio talking to a philosopher and also to a mercantile sociopath to figure out how to make a painting about the Seven Acts of Mercy. Like, having a dialogue with these people, and trying to figure out how to weasel his way into a position where he can express his perverted notions of sexuality.
Kabat: And get paid!
Dufresne: I’m much more interested in that as a model than a lot of the shit going on now.
Kabat: This is the thing that I like in your work: you take that 19th century trope and you fuck with it.
Dufresne: I do. I consciously do.
Kabat: There’s a big painting of yours, “Catch Directions and Toys,” at Bushel Collective [in Delhi, NY] that feels like a lodestone–
Dufresne: It’s a painting of fly fishermen inserted into an Albert Bierstadt painting. It was like manifest destiny equals tourism.
Kabat: And I remember frolicking naked bodies in it.
Dufresne: There are nothing but superfluous naked bodies in the painting, and it’s the antithesis of what you should do in a landscape like that, where the figures were always small because it was about manifest destiny.
Kabat: It was about seeing the people as adjuncts to the landscape.
Dufresne: And I made them big.
Kabat: But Bierstadt also had frolicking naked bodies.
Dufresne: But they were mythological.
Kabat: Well, they were indigenous naked bodies.
Dufresne: Even more revolting.
Kabat: All about power.
Dufresne: And mine I thought of as queer Outward Bound. I needed to unthink the relationship to the natural world, it turns out, beyond normativity myself. I’m still susceptible to all the problems of the world.
Kabat: I think we’re all susceptible to it. I think the Bierstadt motif, which is really the Hudson River School motif, is so ingrained in American consciousness, and here we are right now in the Catskills, the place that created the template for it. Whether you are poor white working class or indigenous you were just part and parcel of the landscape—you were made small.
Dufresne: I love your first thrust into this conversation—where does queerness play its part. So I made 35 paintings in conversation with the artist William E. Jones. And William basically directed me to make history paintings. One that he prompted me to make is called “Stalin’s Vagina.” Another is “Dolly Parton and Lord Byron.” And when I started painting his portrait in 2017, I realized, “Holy shit, this bitch is going to boss me around.” I’m supposed to be this hermetic studio artist who would never let a voice come in and pollute my singular, intuitive imagination. And I’m like, fuck that, pollute me! Because the hermetic definition of a painter and their intuition is total bullshit, especially given the shit show politics that we live in right now. So William is my ultimate queer kin, only to be topped by Werner Schroeder, the great German director, and the closest thing in cinema that I’ve found to what I care about in painting or what I wish painting would do. His films destabilize our relationship to representation and to narrative. To me, breaking the fourth wall in cinema and distortion in painting are the same thing.
Kabat: Can I ask a question that’s kind of a segue but maybe not a segue? Gena Rowlands and John Casavetes. Before your [current work] there were a lot of Gena Rowlands.
Dufresne: Gena Rowlands should be every painter’s north star because she is a great translator of text through movement. The Cassavetes’ did not casually improvise things—they were rigorous with scripts. My childhood was not that dissimilar to A Woman Under the Influence. My mother was kind of an hysteric, kind of suicidal, she was all over the place. She also, in that looseness, in that vulnerability, was utterly compelling to me as a child, because as a child you want to care for someone.
Kabat: But you also want to be safe.
Dufresne: I didn’t even know what safeness was.
Kabat: You’re also her prisoner as a kid, I’m just going to say. So her stuff is captivating because you’re a prisoner.
Dufresne: So the reason I’m so obsessed with Gena Rowlands is, first, she’s a brilliant translator of text—to embody it, whatever that means. She can articulate 72,000 feelings in one second. That’s what a great actor does. And a great painter should do that, too. Like, translating meaning in all of its complexity into a physical, visceral thing. Great actors do that. Rowlands is very special because she asked John to write the script for A Woman Under the Influence. She was like, “I want to make a theater play about a burgeoning middle aged woman with kids having a nervous breakdown.” And then Cassavetes wrote the script and handed it to her, and she said, “I can’t do this every day, we need to make a film. And so then Peter Falk gave them $250,000 and they started production of the film.
– Angela Dufresne
“Gena Rowlands can articulate 72,000 feelings in one second. That’s what a great actor does. And a great painter should do that, too.”
Kabat: That’s a lovely story, I didn’t know that.
Grand: Why would Falk do that?
Dufresne: Because he was in the film and he understood that they were doing some of the most revolutionary acting and filmmaking of the moment. And he had invited both of them to be on Columbo, and he was making tons of money from that show. So, yeah, Gena Rowlands is my role model as a painter—as a translator of affect, as a translator of pain and agency and survival, all of these things. Also the thing about Rowlands, unlike most actresses that people bow down to today, with the exception maybe of Cate Blanchett, she’s fundamentally not sentimental about herself and her own beauty or about the role she’s playing. She is absolutely ruthless. And she has done that from the beginning to the end. So she is a role model to me as a painter because I’m always going to be tethered to human frailty and human faults and human mishap, and whatever egoism is going to get in the way, and that’s the thing she was always able to encapsulate unsentimentally, even more so than Cassavetes. That’s why she’s my muse—not because she’s a beautiful actress, but because she is able to articulate humanity in a way that very few people have ever come close to doing, at the level of Alice Neel.
Kabat: I like the Gena Rowlands–Alice Neel comparison. That’s hot.
Dufresne: I don’t know how the Cassavetes’ do it—they’re the fucking biggest freaks ever, if you see their oeuvre, starting with Faces, which is one of the most brilliant critiques of racism. That’s from 1964, and then it’s Shadows, an even more extreme critique of racism. And then they pause, and have to make a living for a while, and they come back hardcore with A Woman Under the Influence. I get so tired of people being like, “My personal narrative!” I don’t believe I have a personal narrative. In fact, I don’t even think that I’m an individual. This whole notion of individuality that is perpetuated in our culture is like a fucking psychosis. It’s narcissistic. I don’t think that anybody latching onto personal narratives benefits from that ethos. We are all in this incredibly problematic and verbose interdependency and none of us actually exists alone. And I think the Cassavetes got that way before any of these theorists that we now quote about inter-dependency did.
Kabat: One of the things that I like about you is the way that you create a larger network and that larger network isn’t just what your visual work embodies, it’s about shielding ourselves from normative ideas around us, whatever those happen to be.
Dufresne: I think network is the wrong word. It should be the right word, but it’s just been framed within the rubric of AI or the Internet. It’s about trying to manifest another way of embodying relationships.
Kabat: So when did that start?
Dufresne: It started at a certain point when I had a bunch of dumbass gallerists asking me to make shit that was the same.
Kabat: Which is always what gallerists want.
Dufresne: It was all so absurd. Nothing I’m doing as an artist is going to alter this albatross that is the financial system. The fact that you can’t sell the things I’m making has nothing to do with what I’m doing. I had done a bunch of paintings that used the motifs of landscape and of architecture, and people were like, ‘Can you make more of those? Can you make more landscape paintings?’ And I’m, like, ‘I never made a landscape painting. I don’t know who you’re talking to.’ So that’s when I started pivoting to portraiture and it was not just from resistance; I was trying to build relationships with people that I thought were brilliant. I’ve always wanted to interact with my subjects more in a social way. So that was the beginning of it. I’d started making portraits in 2007, and then I decided to throw another layer of collaboration on it, and created this project called Have Bush Will Travel. There was a 1960s Western TV show called Have Gun Will Travel, so it was a pun on Manifest Destiny and the lawlessness of the American West.
Kabat: Which also seems like a theme in your work.
Dufresne: So, I invited all these people on Facebook to send a proposal for a way they would like to be portrayed, and then I forwarded them to a jury I assembled, and made ten paintings based on the jury’s decisions, and the one that is still the most amazing depicted the artist Bethany Fancher as a female centaur beating John McEnroe at tennis. It is a really nice painting, and one of the reasons it’s a nice painting is because it isn’t my self-expression. So it’s this idea that the painter is also a medium—and that it used to be that, whether in the Renaissance or the cave paintings, we’re a medium through which the culture expresses itself. We’re not narcissistic assholes that are flexing our prowess. That’s why bottoming as a painter is super important for me.
Kabat: I’m just thinking about Caravaggio bottoming as a painter. I had a whole other image in my mind. I was going there.
Dufresne: But there’s also a contradiction in that, because Caravaggio never bottomed, right? He always had his particular aesthetic standards that are met in those paintings and those are without a doubt his—not necessarily the people that pushed him?
Kabat: OK, IRL that dude was bottoming, but I kind of think there is a dark realism in his work. Those are the things that mattered to him. I think his interest in verisimilitude and the dirtiness in it was a way of creating a networked image in the way you do, though entirely different because it’s a different moment. Even though his work is about a pure sense of authorship—a new kind of visual voice, blah blah blah, which is about a singularity—I think his expression of what’s happening around him, trying to capture something that’s not idealized, is actually doing that.
Dufresne: You can go back to Gena Rowlands with this because [Caravaggio’s work] is entirely unsentimental. And that’s the thing. I am playing with the notion that I’m a dissolvable porous entity.
Kabat: We also have to talk about fly-fishing.
Dufresne: I don’t know how this ties in, except to say that as a non-hermetic artist if I had arrived in a place where people were surfing, I would probably be surfing now. I just suddenly realized there were rivers everywhere [in the Catskills] and I liked fishing and I needed a form of meditation. Also I’m a person who is obsessed with mimetics. And engaging in the natural world in the system of mimetics, i.e. mimicking bugs on the surface of water, trying to get fish to jump up after them, became as exciting as painting to me. And it was a way of leading myself into the fabric of this very particular space. So I tie flies with dog tail, and my hair, and deer tails that I might find on a corpse in the woods, and I go out into the rivers, and I try to talk to the fish. That’s what I try to do.
Kabat: That’s awesome.
