JON PYLYPCHUK

So, what have we lost?

Everything.

Everything. What did you lose?

A best friend. Tony. Exactly one year ago today. Our entire world was under, or is still under, duress. And we had an opportunity to assess what’s important and what’s not important and change things and we kind of didn’t. I mean, hopefully we will and it’s just a slow process, but I think that’s one of the things that we lost: that moment of potential shift, you know, in the way humans treat other humans. We had the opportunity to think about how things change. Think about Black Lives Matter. What have we done other than put up a few flags and sort of carried on? I mean, I know that I try and make changes in my life every day and try and follow what I think is the right thing to do to be a part of this group of humans, but I think that’s part of what we lost. We lost that moment when we could have done something different.

People wanted to position this as a time of great possibility. With every crisis, there is someone who wants to be like, “Well, great art is going to come out of this.” And I think what you’re suggesting is that it could have, but maybe it didn’t necessarily.

Well, great art probably did get made; whether it’s going to be recognized is another thing.

Right, exactly. Something that comes across in what you’re saying and also in your work is a certain amount of dailiness to it, you know. There’s time imbued in these works and it gets me thinking of—do you know Sally Mann’s series where she went to a farm and people decompose and they study it?

In Tennessee? Yeah.

I had been thinking about that series. Decomposition is about time. There’s a certain dailiness about it from the decomposition of the body to the creation of work, to the minutiae of the decisions one makes every day if one wants to live a political life or whatnot. So, what I guess I’m wondering is, what was your relationship to decomposition, or the dailiness, or the slow march? The physicality of time.

Well, that’s a patina. I mean, coming out on the other side of this I think about my father, and how I didn’t hear a lot about the Second World War, or really understand a lot about the guy’s life, aside from some small things, because a lot of people don’t want to come out of something awful not looking shiny. They don’t want to come out of it bruised, or cut, or smashed in any way. I think about my dad in that sense. This guy ran away from Ukraine when he was fifteen years old; both of his parents were dead, and he spent the entire Second World War bouncing around Europe trying to survive. He came out on the other side of that and never really spoke about it, but he carried a patina of that life that is something that, I was telling my kids, “You have to really soak in and marinate what just happened to us,” because collectively we had something happen that I never had happen in my life. I could have been terrified of nuclear war, whatever horrible thing, but having an actual event that spanned the world, that still affects the world, is so much more intense than any little thing I can make up in my brain or pretend is a bad thing that I’ve lived through. My dad carried these giant mitt hands from shoveling coal and shoveling dead bodies into a pile. That patina and that time lands on people. It just depends on how intense the fire is that you’re going through, right? I think I went off track, but I think about the Sally Mann thing and that decomposition is like erasing the life, but through erasing that life you’re watching, everything but the idea disappears.

I don’t think you went off topic at all. That makes a lot of sense because it’s about honoring one’s trauma, as it were, but also honoring the ability to not be able to speak about it right away, which is important in every context. But it gets me thinking also about this movement between the individual and the collective. In terms of Sally’s work, it’s very much about her family but it’s also about the sort of evocation of the quote-unquote universal values, or phenomena, or what have you. But also, what was so—as I understood it—central to you creating this work was you existing in a collective tragedy while experiencing a personal one. So, I wonder what that experience was like.

Well, I still feel like I’m probably like a ten-year-old kid who wipes out on his bike and then has to tell everybody about it, rather than the kid who sheepishly walks to the garage, wipes himself off, and pretends nothing happened. And that’s just me. I realized this too, actually, looking back two years after having lost Joyce Pensato, that she was the first person close to me, and we were friends, but many, many other people were way closer to her, so I’m not trying to say we were super close, but she meant a lot to me, and she was the first person who had died in my life within probably ten years. So, it’s interesting to have this moment of time where I’m having a personal tragedy, the whole world is having a whole swath of personal tragedy, and we kind of sync up and I go, “You know what, I actually have a little bit of experience with this, so let’s make some jokes about death and try and feel a little bit better because, like, you know, everything is fucked.” [laughter]

I do think that, in addition to the jokes about death, there’s a very political aspect to this work because I think it’s super political to empower people to see their personal tragedies as worthy of the attention we would give to war, plague, pandemic, or what have you. I think that’s what this work does, and the way you talk about it, because sometimes we don’t treat our personal tragedies with the same degree of seriousness. And I think that’s always been a queer and feminist political strategy, making the personal political. But, yeah, I think there’s something very political here about empowering people to feel the magnitude of their personal daily suffering.

And not to put on too much concealer. And I feel like, in a lot of ways, and I obviously have no experience—

Putting on concealer? [laughter]

I’m not going to go that far. But I don’t know what it’s like to have to put on concealer to try and hide a reality that I think needs to be more open. At UCLA we used to go to a gay bar all the time and it was the funnest place. I was saying actually, to another guy, “Where do people go now to be counterculture?” I just don’t know. And you could walk into that place, and nobody judged you for anything, ever. But I also don’t know what it would be like to feel like I have to hide in any way, but that’s my privilege. But I also feel like, until we embrace the idea that if somebody hits you, you don’t hide that they hit you, you tell everyone that they hit you and you stop that from happening. I think that’s important. In this collective grief we’re all feeling, instead of going, “Hey, our economy’s back on track, everything’s going back to normal,” go, “You know what was really fucking cool? That we helped each other when we needed it.” And how great would that be if we did that when we didn’t need it?

Absolutely. There does seem to be a thread of a sort of relational aspect of your work, first in the sense that, you know, as we talked about earlier, you are very much part of the community here in LA, and second in that there are relationships among the figures within your work. Do we see the figures in your work—in this case, these ghosts—do we see them as autonomous figures, as sort of having their own lives? Do we see them as metaphors? Do we see them as personifications? Do you know what I’m getting at?

Sure.

I think there’s a tendency to either make the figures in your work versions of you, which sometimes they might be, or that they somehow exist autonomously of you. How do these figures relate to these collective and personal traumas? Are they metaphors? Are they manifestations? Are they illustrations? Are they stand-ins? Are they—you know what I’m getting at? How do they relate as expressive entities?

I had an interesting relationship with them because the way they look in the show is a lot different to the way I spent time with them. They sat, as you saw before, on the picnic table in the backyard and I interacted with them, almost exclusively, as a group. So, if I think about humanity as a group, it’s really easy to generalize things and say like, we’re all—like statistically you can kind of go, “OK, I understand the behaviors of people, statistically, in a very general way.” But what ended up happening for me was, as they sat outside and got a little weathered, I rewaxed them. So, each one of them I took one at a time, heated it up, reapplied the wax, buffed it out, and so I held each one. I spent time with each one and regained a relationship with that individual similarly to how, when I made them in the first place, they were individuals. They’re individuals that got shifted into this collective, they got removed from this collective as individuals, returned to the collective yet again, and then displayed as individuals. There’s a fluidity in how that relationship is, because I think you can generalize things for the collective, but even in generalizing things for the collective, you can find all those things as individual as well. It’s almost like they function both ways, because, you know, again, in a group collective grief situation like this, we’re all carrying the same scars. Some of us have deeper scars, some of us have different scars, but in the end, right now, as a species having gone through this “oh, fuck” moment—“What are we going to do?”—we’re all carrying at least that thing that holds us together. And some of just us tend to believe it or not, which is a whole other story.

OK, final question: Lady Gaga or Katy Perry? Take a stand.

OK, we’re going to fight over this, but I have to say Katy Perry.

What?!

She carried me through a lot.

Wait, tell me more, because she did for me too.

2015.

2015. OK. That was a year.

That was a year, yeah. I’m in the studio and I’m starting a new body of work, not knowing what I was going to do. And I had had a conversation with Fizz [Joyce Pensato] about what kind of—I said, “I’m going to try and make paintings again. I haven’t made paintings in five or six years,” and I said, “What should I do?” and she says, “Why don’t you try one-shot sign paint?” and I said, “OK.” And so I got this one-shot sign paint and I’m figuring out how I was going to do it and I was just like, “These are going to look like Joyce’s paintings.” So I get to the studio at seven thirty in the morning and I put “Firework” on repeat. Fifteen times I listened to this song, over and over again, as loud as I could play it in the studio. Nobody’s around, it’s just blaring because I’m just psyching myself up because I’m a firework, you know.

You are.

I am, but you have to remind yourself of that. And I ended up starting to make these paintings that had everything to do with that self-affirmation of that one song and I think that I probably made thirty paintings listening to that one song on repeat.

Sometimes you just need to live, and laugh, and love. I mean “Teenage Dream” made me gay, essentially. She did that. But maybe that’s the thing. I guess we assign a certain degree of intellectual value to Lady Gaga’s work. Maybe that’s not the right metric of value.

I think it depends on how your day is going, really. I mean, every once in a while I feel like Lady Gaga, but most of the time I feel like Katy Perry.

I love that for you. She was at Felix on the day I was installing my curated section and I had to—we were installing Judy Chicago works in a hallway with Jessica Silverman and these big bodyguards came up to us and said, “You have to clear a path for Katy Perry,” and I was like, “Judy Chicago or Katy Perry, what do I do? Like, I can’t choose.” I think we eventually had to move because Katy Perry won, because she would.

I think I probably would have beat up one of the bouncers for Judy Chicago, but, you know. [laughter]

I mean, I’m so demure, tiny, fragile, and skinny that I couldn’t have held my own. But yeah, Katy’s great. I’m Team Gaga but “Teenage Dream” is one of the best songs of the 2000s—of this century. It’s just so good, and then it was in Glee, and you know, there was no going back after that. I was like, “I like dudes now.”

Right. That makes perfect sense to me.

So, what was your entry point to Katy Perry?

I don’t remember. I actually think I was listening to Ashlee Simpson’s “L.O.V.E.” over and over again.

Incredible.

Kelly Clarkson, “Since U Been Gone.”

Incredible.

And Katy Perry was the heroin to the Kelly Clarkson weed.

Oh my god. Yeah.

Because I love Kelly Clarkson, and I love Ashlee Simpson, and I have this habit of listening to one song over and over again, but ultimately, I think that the Katy Perry positive message that worked me up to make me feel like I could actually make artwork was what really worked. You know, Ashlee Simpson and Kelly Clarkson were fun to make artwork to when I already knew what I was doing, but Katy Perry was actually giving me the confidence to start again. Interestingly enough, the whole painting show that I did for Petzel in 2020 was done listening to Feist, her new record Pleasure, which is incredible.

Now I remember the real last question I was going to ask! There’s no text involved in these works, per se, and I wonder how that functions for you. Is there some sort of story in your head? It’s like asking Cindy Sherman what the movie is.

I would say that because this body of work is . . . I know that it’s not just about my friend, I know it’s about much more than that, but it’s almost like you’re portraying something over and over again as a surrogate for what’s missing, over and over again. And you’re involved in this collective grief. And it’s like when a kid gets hurt, like a little kid gets hurt, depending on how bad the injury is, is how long the pause between injury and crying, right? And so, if I could imagine why there is no text in this, it’s because that pause is that long. So, a kid falls down and bashes their head on the table: if it wasn’t that bad, they’re like, “Ahh,” but if they fall down and bash their head on the table and there’s this protracted silence, then it’s like, “Oh, fuck.” I think that’s what it is. I think that’s the difference. I think that’s what’s missing and maybe why the text is missing. I felt like, as individuals and as a group, the ghosts are still speechless by everything and they’re not interreacting because they don’t know how to do it, nobody knows how to do it yet. And until you have a bit more time to recognize the trauma, that’s when the bad jokes start happening, or the communication starts happening. I think. I don’t know.

Well, I hope it comes back in some form because, like I said, you’re my new favorite poet.

Well, thank you.