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Keene imagination
A rock-and-roll painter pumps up the volume
BY MIKE MILIARD

"I think it’s better to make a hundred okay-to-bad paintings than to make one good painting," says Steve Keene, who has been known to tout himself as "America’s Most Prolific Painter," over the phone from his Brooklyn studio. "Everyone knows how to make one good painting."

Keene likes to think of his paintings as "souvenirs of a day." At present, he’s got somewhere in the neighborhood of 200,000 souvenirs festooning record covers and bathrooms and gallery walls across the country. He paints all day, every day — often churning out upward of 100 colorfully primitive, slapdash, acrylic-on-board mini-masterpieces in a 24-hour period. His work, which will be on view at the Paradise Lounge beginning next Thursday, is done in assembly-line fashion, with hundreds of small boards set up like tiles on an expanse of wall and attacked methodically and concurrently as hundreds of almost-identical images come into view. "I’ll put down the blues, then yellows, then the reds," he explains. "They’re all started at the same time and all finished the same time." It can be taxing to be so fertile, though as Keene points out, "no more taxing than if a baker had to decorate 400 birthday cakes at Safeway."

Which is exactly the kind of comment that drives some people nuts. Some hail Keene, who has an MFA from Yale, as a subversive "anti-art" populist; others consider him one more gimmicky hack (one critic was quoted in Time magazine calling his work "schlock . . . mean-spirited and cynical"). No question that he raises interesting questions about the confluence of art and commerce, salability, and creative worth. The fact that his works festoon the living rooms of big names like Dennis Hopper and Stephen Malkmus notwithstanding, Keene’s paintings are cheap, selling (at galleries and club gigs alike) for anywhere from $1 to $15.

But Keene says it’s not his aim simply to make art for the masses. Those rock-bottom prices are just a corollary to his artistic vision. "It’s like a graffiti idea. I really just want to see the art everywhere. It’s not really about a missionary zeal to get people to afford art. You could get a better piece of art if you bought a poster at a museum. I’m just obsessed with doing it, I enjoy just getting it out doing my thing as efficiently as possible."

Does it make him a decent living? "Well," he says, "I dunno about decent." But even at a few bucks a pop, an artist can’t help making a bit of change if he’s as industrious and prolific as Keene. At a residency at a California gallery a few years back, he’s reported to have sold a jaw-dropping 17,000 pieces.

Keene’s frenzied paint-spattered inspiration gives these primitive images a vital immediacy that owes much to the rhythmic punch of rock and roll. No surprise, then, that they’ve made ideal record covers for everyone from Pavement (Wowee Zowee) to Merzbow (Ikebana), as well as mindbendingly messy stage sets for the Apples in Stereo. Moreover, many of his paintings are simplistic riffs on other LP covers (Blondie, the Pogues). It all makes sense given that the inspiration for his feverish productivity came about a decade ago at a radio station. "I used to work at WTJU, the University of Virginia radio station. And we’d get hundreds of albums every week — this is before CDs. And you’re just surrounded by all these images, all these album covers. Tens of thousands of pictures in piles. I just got turned on to re-creating that effect."

The visceral, kinetic nature of Keene’s technique is also analogous, in a way, to musical performance. And In fact he often paints live in front of his soon-to-be customers. "I kind of think of it like punk rock. Just putting yourself on the line and hoping for the best. Sometimes the goal is to just do it. To try your best and not worry too much what other people think."

"Outsider Inside: New Artwork by Steve Keene" is on view January 22 through March 24 at the Paradise Lounge Gallery, 969 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. There will be an opening reception January 22 at 7 p.m.; call (617) 562-8814.

 


Issue Date: January 16 - 22, 2004
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