BCR: Someone in the New York Times said that you invented and refined the existing style of abstract painting.
JL: Well all I can say is that I think these pictures do not look like any other pictures that I know of. And people may do related work in some way but it just won’t look like this. It is peculiar for better or for worst.
I go on asking him how was his work received from the beginning, he pauses for a bit, looks up with his small dark eyes searching in his memory then turns back to me and tells me how the controversy started. He talks of two teachers he had at the California Institute of Arts that argued over their opposing opinions about his work. There was always support and antagonism. Lasker is a man that has always believed in himself and has gone forward no matter what.
BCR: Was it easy to get your first exhibition?
JL: After I finish in CalArts I went to San Francisco and I lived there for about a year and a half. When I showed the early paintings to the galleries there they didn’t know what to make of them. But when I went back to New York at the end of 79 people were interested and that’s how I eventually got shown. My first exhibition was in a not very well known gallery and I got a little attention. Then later I joined Tony Shafrazi when he opened his gallery in 1981. That was about 4 years after I started doing this works. I was in the opening show and it was a group exhibition. That show got a lot of attention but my work didn’t. That was just when Figuration Neo-expressionism was starting to happen, the other three artists were pushed into that construct and I was the abstract painter so people just didn’t know how to relate to my work at that time. Of all the shows I did that was the one that nobody seems to remember me from. There was so much attention to something else going on there, that I was kind of reprimand and disciplined. People see different things at different times in different ways, you come to learn that. There was a number of views where was very hard to show abstract painting, then around the 1984 I started to get some shows, and things started to get much better for my work in the following couple of years.
BCR: Nowadays you exhibit a lot around the world, how is your work received from place to place?
JL: I exhibit more in Europe than in America. I exhibit a lot in New York, I’ve done a couple of shows in Los Angeles and in Chicago but basically I show in New York or I show in Europe. There is a very similar reception in both sides of the Atlantic. I think Europe has been more consistently receptive towards abstract painting throughout my career, and just generally abstract painting. While America has been, perhaps, more influenced by different trends. At the moment they say that people are looking at abstraction again, but on the last 5 to 10 years there has been a low and the most prominent painters have been very figurative.
BCR: Is that response quite positive?
JL: It depends as you go from country to country. For some reason I am extremely well received in Northern Europe, in Scandinavia but also particularly in Germany. I did a retrospective in Spain at the Reina Sofia, Madrid, and then I travelled to Germany and the reviews were somewhat mixed in Spain but they were extremely positive in Germany. It just seemed to be that the temperament in Germany was a bit more open to the work, but also I think it was a bad moment. It was just after America had invaded Iraq, so there was a certain amount of anti-Americanism, and I think that was reflected in some of the hostility towards an American painter.
Jonathan Lasker goes to say that when he was still studying he was influenced in his work by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg’s way of thinking. His paintings and the mark his trying to make are very different, but their hands off approach and cruel relationship with gestural brush work is very similar. He feels quite connected in some ways to the dissonant off beat jazz of Felonious Monk. Lasker admires the work of young artist Katie Pratt who shared an exhibition with him at the John Hansard Gallery in Northampton. And though he hasn’t seen her paintings, he found her illustrations very interesting. He also finds the work of Fabian Marcaccio very exciting, but goes on to admit that unfortunately he doesn’t get to see as much art as he would like to.
I thank him for the interview, and we carry on talking freely about our perceptions of art in general. And this is when with his he tells me that he finds that art is necessary for him as an artist but does not believe that art is necessary. I don’t agree with him to start off with so I push for an explanation.
JL: We can live, eat and sleep and exist very easily without art. I think that art is not necessary, but it is absolutely of high value. Like civilization it’s not necessary but it’s a great guiding social force. Just as civilization is valuable so is art. You would be really quite outstanded by how completely vacant of art some people are. There are those who are very martial in their view of life, particularly in more primitive societies which are constantly in a condition of combat, art falls away. Like after September 11 in New York, I was living there, there was a lot of rubble down town. You had to question yourself - were you necessary? But yes, I went into the studio and I definitely felt that my life was of high value and what I was doing was of high value. When I say value I am talking about things that elevate the spirit and you can have a life that is a very impoverished life without art, but it is that, it’s an enrichment and so it’s an enrichment that does facilitate our understanding and so it is very important.
I believe it has a compelling value in society, but when you look at the United States of America there is sometimes a true antagonism against art. So you do start to question - what is the value? And you feel like you have a part of the society which is almost a little bit antagonist towards what you are doing. So you think more thoroughly and you think is it really necessary? What is its value? How do you make a compelling case for what it is it you do? Maybe I think a little more analytically about that because sometimes in America is not a pure given that art is accepted as being necessary. European societies tend to be much more supportive of art; you see it in the national budgets. I think of this as coming from that opposition that you feel about art in America.
Everyone has something on the wall, whether they want to go into questioning what a picture is and think in that nature is another matter. But the compulsion to look at a picture is very powerful and that’s the mechanism that I am dealing with in these pictures. The urge to see a picture. It was written once that these pictures ask the same question of the viewer that the viewer asks of abstract paintings. The average member of the public will say of an abstract painting what’s that supposed to be. And these pictures are trying to ask that back, so they can play with that mechanism.
