Alguns excertos de uma entrevista com Fred Tomaselli, pintor "psicadélico" de que muito gosto.

Chris Martin (Rail):
Rail: Theme parks, you mean like Disneyland?
Tomaselli: Yeah, I grew up next to Disneyland.
Rail: What a lucky kid. So was that a formative influence?
Tomaselli: Yeah. Going to Disneyland and then happening to go into a Bruce Nauman retrospective is a good indication of the dichotomous level of my formative growth (laugh). Also LSD had been a formative influence on how I saw the world. I was making these works based on theme parks with light trapping corridors that expanded into larger rooms. The subject of the works were their own artificiality and the mechanics of perceptual modification.
Rail: Which are very much theme in your paintings now.
Tomaselli: Yeah, what happened was the installation format seemed to have run its course and my work kept getting flatter and flatter, and I started thinking about the pre-modernist ideal of painting as a window into an alternate reality. I started seeing lots of comparisons between the utopian aspects of art and the utopian counter culture and also seeing the dystopic side as well. I felt that painting could be both a window and a mirror to the world. It's important to remember that I entered the art world as it was imploding into post-modernism and I was coming into the counter culture as it was collapsing into disco and cocaine. There was all this failure and loss of idealism and I was interested in digging through the rubble to see if there was anything worth keeping.
Rail: The art world was ruled by cynicism. Painting was discredited. You were coming in investigating utopias when everything seemed hopeless.
Tomaselli: Yeah, it didn't go well at first, which made me feel like I was on the right path. I really was pretty alienated from the art world discourse it seemed like so much arid theory for disembodied heads that had nothing to do with life. I didn't want to make art if it had to be like that.
Rail: When did you first collage actual drugs into your paintings?
Tomaselli: In 1989. It came out of my life experience. My friends were dying of AIDS and taking masses of pills. I mean at the time I started making this work drugs had morphed from agents of enlightenment and pleasure, to tools of survival. There was the rubble of the visionary quest that devolved into Studio 54 while the terror and enslavement of the crack epidemic raged through this crime ridden city I was trying to figure out if there was anything worth saving in all of that. That's sort of what got me into doing it and part of it was self consciously searching for a new way to make painting. I wasn't disregarding my own doubts but I was going ahead and doing it anyway. I was trying to put the contents of my personal life into the work in an attempt to talk about some thing bigger.
Rail: You first became acknowledge as guy that puts real drugs in his paintings. Did you ever find yourself in trouble for exhibiting marijuana and drugs?
Tomaselli: Not really. This isn't an attempt on my part to be transgressive or to push anybody's buttons. This is work that comes out of the way my life is. If I can make a life in the anonymity of the art world, that's all right with me. In a funny way, I've destroyed the drugs, or at least rearranged their use value. In my work, they travel to the brain and alter consciousness through the eyes.
Rail: There were no legal problems?
Tomaselli: I've had some issues come up. Once, I think 1994, the works were temporarily arrested in Paris by customs but were eventually released from the contraband prison. It was funny - I had an opening with no art in it. I showed at a gallery that was associated with a lot of conceptual art, so showing an empty gallery was initially interpreted as a Yves Klein style statement of the futility of art making. I was saying, "No I make paintings but they're locked up in customs' and they were like "That is so boring. You are so boring". (Laughter). There have been a few institutions that have tired to purchase my work that encountered a board of directors that felt they could get in trouble for it. By the way, I don't consider it my right to have my work purchased by museums - if they think it's too controversial, that's fine"
Rail: Most artists of our generation grew up surrounded by drugs. I think many of us were changed by our use of psychedelics. For me they helped open up a visionary world - a spiritual dimension. That was true of so many friends and contemporaries, and yet few of us put it directly into the work. I am really struck by how you made it the subject and content of your painting, which seems such an obvious but wonderful thing to do.
Tomaselli: Well, it came to me from a lot of different angles. It is one of the great repressed discourses in contemporary culture - this massive effect of psychedelic drugs on consciousness and its tremendous effect on American culture. But it's not talked about all that much.
Rail: Not only are you putting actual drugs into the paintings, but there's conscious depiction of psychedelic vision.
Tomaselli: More and more so - yes. It's complex fusion. I think of my work as truly hybrid in that it's made of photographs, objects and paint cohabiting different levels within the same picture plane. It's hard to tell what's what.
Rail: A physical hybrid of materials?
Tomaselli: It's a physical hybrid and a historical and stylistic hybrid. I'm borrowing from lots of different cultures and traditions, many of which are enemies to one another. I get a lot of juice from Asian art, German Romanticism, Pop Conceptualism and so on and so forth, but also, and very importantly, my brain has been hybridized by the use of hallucinogenic drugs (laughter). These works reflect a mind that has been conceptually, psychologically and perceptually altered from the use of these substances. I consider myself to be a hybrid creature. LSD has colonized part of my DNA and I'm trying to put that into my work.
Rail: Are you talking about an openness to a certain kind of visual phenomenon? An openness to psychological and art historical influences?
Rail: Do you still use hallucinogenic drugs?
Tomaselli: I haven't taken LSD since 1980. I think sometimes you need to remove yourself from intense experience and get some distance to really use it as subject matter. So my heroic doses of LSD are long over.
Rail: Are you involved with Tibetan Buddhism as a practice?
Tomaselli: No I'm like everyone else in the art world I'm Buddhist friendly, which is such a wimpy position. I'm not like Alex Gray who is totally committed to it. I'm very sympathetic to the Tibetan view of the common but I'm just not ready to throw my allegiances to any one particular ideology. I'm afraid of becoming too sure of things - too orthodox.
Rail: I think that's important to separate spiritually from religion. They sometimes coincide but they often don't.
Tomaselli: I'm uncomfortable with the term spirituality. It seems like it's a catch all for whatever people want their feel good stuff to be. So much of it is so narcissistic and being from New Age California, I have a slightly jaundiced view of that. My work is based on a certain amount of skepticism. I can't seem to get behind any particular program.
Rail: Fred, I can remember seeing paintings of yours which had a sunset landscape underneath this psychedelic patterning of pills. I thought that some of those paintings were the best visual illustration of actual psychedelic vision. They had that sense of looking at the landscape and seeing a dancing tracery on top. With certain psychedelics that's very much what happens - there is this overlay of a pulsing patterning on whatever it is your seeing. Were you conscious that your paintings were illustrations of that?
Tomaselli: Well, I was, I think that the first time I really saw the world through an actual scrim of other information was under the influence; It was later that I began to see nature itself through a scrim of politics and different ideologies. You know, the history of the American landscape was this imposition of utopian belief on nature and the perception of nature is always deformed by ideology. I started thinking about nature in terms of a vision of psychedelic but also in terms of the history of ideologies and this buzzing electronic scrim of politics, chemicals and pollution. Nature isn't pure and I wanted to access something that was real as opposed to sometime that was idealized. I want to get to where nature is in my head. On one hand, it can contain a visionary experience but it's also this social political construct that is sick and cranky.
Rail: This really reminds me of Frank Moore, whose landscape paintings of Niagara falls and Yosemite National Park addressed those same issues. Did you know Frank's paintings?
Tomaselli: Oh yes, we were friends and had a lot in common.