John David James

Can you elaborate more on the specific ideas running through your own practice?

There’s maybe three themes that put all my binders together, which interconnect them. I honestly have to say that a lot comes from experiences of altered conscience when I was younger.

It’s just this feeling and thought pattern that has stuck with me. It’s a bit of a coldness, it’s a bit of a hard edge and it’s a little bit muted.

I guess the “artwork in an artwork” is definitely one of those key themes?

Yes, the idea of showing a picture framed on a wall as the piece as opposed to the piece on the wall was, in my mind, a huge conceptual idea where all of a sudden the artist is the viewer of a work that he’s made.

So when I make art, I try to look at it as a viewer, not a creator.

If I was going to have a show. You would hang the show a week before it opens to photograph the show. I would then print the photographs and I frame them beside each painting. My final piece would then be installation shots of the final show. I have this Polaroid of maybe nine pieces that I did in my studio, and all that is left is that one photograph.

But what does it mean to you? Why is this the step that makes you so happy?

It makes me purely the viewer, which is what I was always looking for. I’m always looking for that piece in my mind that will stop me in a gallery.

Isn’t that kind of egoistic because you make the viewer also go one step behind, You know, if I were to see your show, I wouldn’t be the spectator. I would be the spectator of the spectator.

In the end it’s just me dealing with my emotions. Throughout my life there have been disappointments, but the build up to the disappointments have been fantastic. For example I was gonna have a show in Los Angeles which I made piles of work for but then the gallery messed up big time. I canceled the show but had the best time in the world making the art.

I’m allowed to be egotistical about my own stuff because in the first place, I do it for myself. One of my issues I have with artists is that their egos are presented. They think they are the greatest. I know I am not, but I’m trying to be the best I can for myself so I can be proud of what I’ve done.

Do I care what other people think? Not really, because I’m content with what I’m doing for myself. That’s super egotistical maybe, but I know I am making works I like, which is different from most egomaniacs who want everybody else to like what they’re doing.

Of course I appreciate good feedback and people liking my art but if everybody hated it, I would be making the same things probably.

Looking at your work – especially your collages – I feel a sense of melancholy – what do you think about that?

It somehow comes back to this (acidic) feeling when I was younger.  On the one hand it’s the fact that you’re almost pulled to a third person watching things happen, you become this viewer of the world. You are slightly separated from it all. That’s also where this idea of tension comes from that I have always liked. So when I do my collages I’m trying to create tension in forms. In my music it was the same. I always wanted to have that same sort of feeling of this slightly forward line.

I want it to be a bit uncomfortable and I want to be drawn to it and although they are made to become paintings to become photographs, I love playing with the human form and I am just happy making them.

You mentioned having three key themes and we’ve now touched on two of them. What is the third?

Making art. There is being a viewer of my art. There is going for this feeling of tension I’ve had in the past and the last one is trying to make art.

I’m always trying to make works that would fit my category of “art”, to make the one piece that would stop me, something that I would like to see in a gallery that I had never seen before. I like this excitement. I love to be fascinated by the world and fascinated by something you made yourself and that’s what I’m working towards.