Interviewed by Tanya Merrill
Painting a cast of characters, human and animal.
“I don’t want to be a windup girl,” Deborah Buck told me in her studio, pointing to a female creature with a crank sticking out of her back in the left-hand corner of a recent painting. Buck graciously walked me through the body of work that was heading to her solo show at La MaMa Galleria, a nonprofit gallery and an extension of the experimental theater club of the same name founded in 1961 by Ellen Stewart in New York City’s East Village.
These are some of Buck’s largest works to date, and this is the first time she has gone beyond the two-dimensional format. She refers to them as murals, which she creates by dissecting elements out of previous works and collaging them together to produce layered scenes populated by hybrid figures occupying the panoramic drama of history painting. These creatures wear pearls around their necks; they chomp monster-like teeth that mimic the same string of ivory beads; their painted bodies drip down the surface of the paper. The context of La MaMa Galleria is fitting with its affiliation to the theater, as Buck speaks of these beings as a cast of characters.
—Tanya Merrill
Tanya Merrill So we’re here in your studio looking at work for your show at La MaMa Galleria. Can you describe a little bit what I’m seeing?
Deborah Buck They’re all characters; they’re all a narrative; and they’re all kind of doing a ta-da. Some of them are animals, and some of them are just creatures that have never been seen before. It’s sort of like a gallery of heroes or criminals—I’m not sure which, and either one’s okay—that will lead you to the visual explosion of these murals. These were originally five individual paintings that I put on the floor and thought, Okay, what do I see here? And I’m like, They’re all wearing pearls. You know, I like pearls. I think that they’re feminine; but they’re hard, and they’re lustrous, and they’re a treasure that comes from the sea.
That kind of starts to make a mural, so I thought, I’m on to something. And then I thought, I need other pieces. So I began looking through other paintings that I didn’t feel were resolved, and I began cutting them up. I’d never done that before. I was like, I’m going to just get chopping. I got the scissors out. And they needed bridges to go in between, like this painting to this painting. This one is called The Mechanical Girl and Her Mechanical Dog.
TM Right, with the windup on the back, and the hand twists the nob.
DB You wind it up, which came from another painting. And another character here is from a painting called Proud Parents. It’s about those people that have a child, and they think that child is like the new savior.
TM Right. (laughter)
DB All of this began to make a foreground and a background. My work can tend to be flat, and it’s kind of how I see. I don’t have stereoscopic vision, and I’ve just figured out recently that, in fact, the way I see is flat because I don’t have great depth perception. So it’s also why the eyes are so important in this work. Instead of putting everything in perspective so that you can go back, I’m physically putting things in front from other paintings. They don’t have to make sense; they just need to be able to play together and join the same visual environment that I’m creating. So I felt like, Wow, this broke my problem with flatness, and it began to give the whole work more depth and new content without being hit over your head with content.
TM I love what you just said about the parents and the child they’re doting over. It reminds me of the artist Joan Brown, whom I love. She talked in an interview that I watched recently on the San Francisco Museum of Art website about the dichotomy of fantasy and facts in her work. I feel like a lot of what I’ve read about your work dips into fantasy, but there are real facts in there too—facts of life, like parents obsessing over their child. Do you feel like facts are important to you?
DB Oh, yeah. I’m making observations about the world from my perspective. I’m very interested in absurdity, which is so important to understanding what is real and what is not. We all know the mechanical girl and her mechanical dog, which she thinks is the most perfect dog in the world. (laughter) These are observations about humankind and about people and their places in the world and in society. But I don’t have to buy their gestalt, their whole worldview.
TM Can you describe an allegory from the earlier work that has carried over or perhaps two that have melded in the current, larger pieces?
DB Heavy Is the Head (2023) was my first mural, and as it began I immediately leapt to the idea of a timeline of formidable females. Ultimately, several of my all-time heroes emerged. They are Venus, Elizabeth I of England, the Empress Dowager of China, the Venus of Willendorf, the Bedouin women of the Middle East, Cleopatra, the showgirl, and an imagined robot of the future. The lesson is that time plays tricks on us—thus, the monkey reaching for the clock that it can never catch. The monkey sits on my head as a reminder of the complexities of time but most importantly not to waste it.
The second mural, The Eyes Have It (2023), depicts the allegory of visual perception. My eyes are the gateway to my imagination. We all learn by looking and watching, everything and anything. You must always be looking, but what you see at first may deceive you. Your eyes and head must be open to the signs around you, and they must work together. No two people see the same thing the same way. The allegory of the second mural is just that.
The two murals together make up what I consider my creed: Watch carefully; honor your heroes; and use time wisely.
TM When I look at your figures, I think very much of the Surrealist game of exquisite corpse—you know, folding the paper and coming up with different combinations of creatures. I’m so curious if you find that the origin of these creatures is surrealist and playing with chance just to see who evolves, or is there also a sense that you’ve put the windup on this sort of monster girl so that it’s intentional at the same time? There’s chance and intention in creating this new creature to say something specific.
DB I don’t want to be a windup girl. If I’m a windup girl, to me I’m a monster. They’re all takes on humankind and people, personalities, and how we observe them. It’s interesting because this is a more positive way for me to do the layers by taking pieces of paintings that maybe did not work in a totality but can work as auxiliary players in a larger scope, along with a way to build that layer thing, which I kept doing by scraping the paint off and then going back in and then leaving it so that there is a whole other painting underneath. But I do find the world—not in a dark way, although some people may think it’s dark—but I just see things as being absurd, just completely absurd. And if you don’t embrace that, it gets too hard. You have to embrace the absurdity because we don’t have the answers. We don’t know why we’re here. I always go back to Charles Darwin; if I want answers—like, Why is this happening?—I go back to Darwin.
TM Is that where you think your animals come in? Do you think that it starts with going back to something more scientific and natural?
DB I think maybe more primordial, just primordial instincts. And humans are animals, so we’re really no different. We have the same driving force, whether we recognize it or not. That’s why they’re all animals. Also, they’re a way to remove the message a bit, to make the message easier because they’re animals. If I made people who were acting as obnoxiously as these proud parents, it would be very offensive, and it would make it harder to see the work. But by using these phantasmagorical creatures, it becomes much more palatable. But then they’re indicators. I always say that these creatures come out of me in the process of doing the work, but they make the world more interesting to me. I’m so glad that these creatures exist, at least just in my world; and if I could go outside and find them, I’d be thrilled.
TM But that’s why you’re making the work, right? So you get to spend time with them here, and get to live with them, and they become real?
DB Yeah, and hopefully other people will see them as metaphors for other things and ultimately take away a joyful message in the continuance of life and differences among all animals, human and furry. That mix is kind of what makes things interesting. They’re my cast of characters, and they come in all sizes and all shapes.
TM Sometimes they’re very specific fables that we all know to be true. And then sometimes it’s your own fable that you’ve created by pulling pieces from things that we might be familiar with or other little symbols that lead us down a rabbit hole. There’s the balance of the two.
DB Fairy tales, as we all know, are not fairy tales. They are codes. They are lessons for life. They were made for children so that the lessons wouldn’t be so harsh. Except in the case of Grimm. Have you ever read Grimms’ fairy tales?
TM So intense.
DB Whoa. So, yeah, I think of them as codes. They’re all codes for teaching. But they’re shadowed in magic to make it all much more palatable.
TM And then you’ve added your own layers on top.
DB Exactly. And I believe in magic. I don’t know where that came from or how, but that’s part of the absurdity.
TM Lineage of storytelling.
DB I like to make all my stories open-ended. Because that’s a question. And I always say the Buddhists say that the question is the answer. So if I can put questions out into the world with this work, then my job’s done. Because the way I see it, my job is to make people question the status quo and to question their own lives in whatever small or large way they need to question them. So I’ve been successful if I’ve done that.