Merrell Hambleton Interviews John Miller

This month, Barnard visual arts and art history professor John Miller has simultaneous shows opening at Friedrich Petzel and Metro Pictures galleries. They will feature Miller’s recent work—sculptural pieces compiled from found objects and plastic fruit, all of it coated in gold. In a phone call Wednesday afternoon, Miller took a few minutes to talk about the artists and criticism, the link between gold and feces, and the excesses of opera.

You work in a number of different mediums. What is the advantage to your art? Do you prefer one medium over another?
I’m not so much wedded to a medium per se ... I think sometimes you can, of course, get ideas from the material you’re working with. I’m more in the medium as a means to an end, I suppose. And I’m certainly not alone in that. I think it’s part of a generational divide. When I was at art school many of my teachers were focused on medium-specific art and in school I ended up majoring in video, which was then a very new medium. After I got out, it was probably 20 years before I went to video again. I just tended to jump around. But it was more driven by the project rather than the material.

Is there a unifying theme to your work?
There is one. A lot of my work has to do with the interrogation of value in a capitalist society and how value is assigned and sort of disparities between the price of something and the meaning of something.

What’s your interest in gold?
Well, I’ll tell you, the way I got into working with gold arose from an earlier body of work that stretched over six or eight years, working with a brown impasto kind of trope that had an ... explicitly fecal quality. And gold in many ways is the opposite. But also, according to Freud, gold and feces, as symbols, are interchangeable in dreams. So I’m kind of interested in that link and opposition. 

Where do you find the materials for your more recent work?
With most of my recent work, I buy cheap plastic stuff online such as plastic fruit and lately I’ve been buying a lot of toy guns. I have to sign a waiver because they’re realistic-looking guns, so they’re not legal to sell in New York City unless you say they’re going to be used as theatrical props or something like that.

How do you title your work?
Well now I just have a kind of system for titling my work where I’m alternately picking titles from soap operas and titles from minimalist criticism, which of course is a reductive sensibility. So there’s a paradox in the titling schema. But not all of my titles are programmatic. Sometimes the title is the most challenging thing about the work. 

Why soap operas?
I think of opera as having to do with excess, so maybe just in opposition to minimalism. I thought the paradoxical nature of the minimalist titles seemed fairly clear so I thought, well, something that would come out of a more vernacular discourse, rather than the rarified discourse of minimal art. 

You teach a course on art criticism by artists. Does that reflect your ideas on who should write art criticism?
I don’t think it should be written exclusively by artists, but I think it mainly reflects how I write criticism. I suppose that what interested me in doing that was just to see how much ... it seems that artist-critics have more forcibly shaped the discourse, with respect to the critical and the political story I focus on in that class. So maybe they’re in a better position to do that just because they can also produce work that kind of lives up to their mandates that they identify in their criticism. At least in that respect, the work of the artist-critics I focus on in this class seem more consistent than, you know, journalistic art criticism or academic art criticism. 

What’s the most important quality for an art critic?
For me, I’m interested in trying to consider art criticism as a kind of materialist practice. In my own work as a critic, I was very influenced by a French literary critic, Pierre Macheret. He tried to set up a framework for materialist criticism. What he advocated was, rather than approaching the work with an idea of what it should be, trying to look at what it is in its own time. Evaluate how it functions based on what it is, rather than what it should be. 
How do you teach?
It differs a bit depending on who I’m working with. Initially my teaching style was very much influenced by one of my own teachers, Michael Asher, who was down at Cal Arts, where I did graduate work. His style was to say very little and to force the students to produce their own discourse, and to see themselves as the subject of their own discourse. So we would have classes and he would just arrive and say, “Okay, what are we going to talk about?” At the time there were only three or four people in the class so sometimes there would be painfully long silences. He was very hardcore and he would just wait until one of us said something. In retrospect, I really appreciated that and I think it’s an approach that can work with students who want to be artists or who are art majors, especially grad students. I teach an intro drawing course, and I’d set up a more structured framework for those students to work in. 

How do you feel about learning visual art in an institution?
It used to be that people saw a separation between academia and the market and its become more and more evident that in a way academia is a kind of precursor for the market and a lot of it has to do with legitimation processes that are reflected in an academic setting, in terms of the grade. It might sound odd for a teacher to be saying this, but for me I would like the whole practice of art de-legitimated. Work that’s just done simply for its own sake rather than, you know, for the sake of a credential. It’s sort of saying that I would like to change the system, I suppose. When I was in school, all the courses I took were pass/fail, so there was less emphasis on grades and symbolic achievement. Now it’s a much different time and a much different climate. Certainly grades are much more heavily emphasized. I see that as a bad tendency. 

Is there such a thing as bad art? If so—what is it?
Well, I think there’s such a thing as reactionary art, in political terms, so that could be called bad. But generally I don’t like to couch aesthetics in a moral framework. From a personal standpoint, it’s more simply a case of things I like, things I don’t like.