Frances Stark, Scuff Patrol, 2023, acrylic and gesso on canvas, 62 × 78″. Photo: Elon Schoenholz.
Referentially dense and formally promiscuous, the work of Frances Stark entangles sex and politics, confession and critique, to produce profound, self-implicating vivisections of contemporary life. Below, Stark discusses her latest exhibition, “Serve the Dominant Ideology or Stop Being a Pussy,” which is on view through July 29 at Barbara Gladstone in New York and marks a return to painting for the artist.
THE FIRST ARTIST I really connected with, other than a musical icon, was Henry Miller, particularly through his novel Sexus (1949). I loved it because it was autobiographical Americana by an ultra-free-spirited ex-patriot. He was an extraordinary storyteller—uncompromising, funny, raunchy, but also high-minded and beautiful. My way of working ended up being very close to his. I write with my life.
As much as I love visual art, what I love about reading versus going to a gallery is that you must read every word, every page, in order. Like musical notation, every punctuation mark tells you how the words are supposed to sound, and when you should stop or pause. You can’t just take a book and read it backwards. A book is a map of exactly what the artist wants you to navigate. Meanwhile, you can walk into a gallery and not even look at everything on view. It doesn’t command that level of precise attention. That’s always been an interesting predicament for me because I usually make artworks as if I’m holding your hand. If you look away at the wrong moment, I’m probably going to be mad.
I’ve been making paintings for about five years now, since the 2017 Whitney Biennial, in which I showed a suite of paintings of Ian F. Svenonius’s 2015 essay “Censorship Now.” His text is essentially like Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal in that it’s not really arguing for censorship: He’s saying censor the state. I thought Svenonius’s essay was perfect and felt that it was coming from a place of art with a capital A, a much broader place than art that comes out of art schools. Svenonius has been an underground icon for his whole career, and he was essentially calling out the culture industry at large. I felt like the only way to bring his voice into the Whitney was to sneak it in on some very large canvases. And it really worked. The large-scale book spread format made it easy for the viewer to enter, almost like pages from a children’s book.
In 2020, I began having conversations with people outside of the art world through an anonymous Twitter account. It was great being anonymous because it made it very obvious to me how much I had relied on my name being attached to what I say. I ended up interacting with people I was reading regularly and gained their respect simply through my words and not my credentials. One of the people whom I became friendly with was Sam Husseini, an amazing journalist and well-respected critic of the Iraq War. He is featured in one of my new paintings.
The paradox of being both an insider and an outsider is pretty much central to how I make work. During Covid, my email server and my website mysteriously went offline and I thought, “Let it crash, let it go.” I ended up only doing a few local projects, a collaboration with Vans through MOCA and an eight-page spread in a sex magazine called Richardson, which I turned into a suite of paintings that I showed in Henry Taylor’s Chinatown studio/gallery.
Frances Stark, The Spread: An American’s Experiment in Free Love, 2022, acrylic, graphite and silkscreen on canvas, 4 parts, each 68 × 72″. Photo: Ramsey Alderson.
One of the images from the Richardson work was a rather explicit nude portrait of me (taken during the height of my sex-chat days). I wanted to reinforce the fact that My Best Thing (2011) and other similar works were, in fact, made with my body. Those pieces weren’t intended to be statements about how lonely we all are on the internet. I made that work with my sex energy. It wasn’t only sexual, though, it was explicitly political too.
As a contemporary artist, I feel complicit in the dominant ideology because I see how the art world functions and who it really aligns itself with. The paintings in my new show, “Serve the Dominant Ideology or Stop Being a Pussy,” draw from a charged meeting and subsequent exchanges I had with an artist who had reached out to me through Instagram. Shortly after our first meeting, which was amazing, he broke the news that he, an army reservist, was being deployed to Iraq for a year. This is an artist with an MFA, teaching art at a junior college, with a steady and serious drawing practice. There is no social support for exceptional people like him; it seems he had to get it from the military because that’s where all the money is.
— As told to David Muenzer
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