Scott Zieher’s “Concrete Poet”
in conversation with Adam Winner
Originally published in Issue 07 of Manor House Quarterly: MYTH.
Scott Zieher composes abstract figurative collages using visual material culled and cut from American periodicals dating to the 1960’s and 70’s. His body of source material is effectively finite, insofar as it can be found only between the covers of on-hand, out-of-print periodicals. Operating within this generous constraint, the work comes in waves, possessing a definite flavor of its original sources.
His constructed images are regularly imbued with fatherly qualities, composed of such elements as would likely have been in the purview of a typical mid-century American male. Authoritative. Sporting. Boozy and smoky, with undoubtedly ample virility. Teetering on the edge of explicitness, the works stop short of full exposition and instead allows the viewer to bring their own associations to the imagery being presented. Zieher’s collages are celebratory and un-ironic. His fragmented heroes are well groomed and freshly coiffed. There is a rich vein of subtle irreverence and entendre. There are knowing winks, if not outright high-fives.
He engages the act of myth gathering. He sets to work with an eye and an ear for media celebrating and selling the dusty stuff of the American mid-twentieth century. Cars, suits, brassieres, cigarettes, whisky, appliances and all manner of material excess as presented on paper of variable quality from periodicals of varying longevity.
An active poet and owner of a contemporary art gallery in New York, Zieher recently took some time to elaborate upon his creative process and its place in the larger arc of his life.
What first sparked your interest in arranging collages on paper? You also write poetry, do you find that collage work provokes a similar process in your practice as a poet?
I’ve kept notebooks that included both collage and writing since I was in high school, but I’ve written poetry quite seriously all along and have published several book-length poems and in many magazines. Upon moving to New York I really began to concentrate on the two disciplines simultaneously. They inform each other constantly, both as specific modes of making (much of my book-length poetry could be considered acts of collage) and as ways to feel productive creatively. If I’m reading, I’m writing, and if I’m looking at art, I’m often wishing I were in the studio making it. There is nothing as exhilarating as making collages for me. The shift between two disciplines has always been fluid.
The impressions and sensibilities evoked by your written work seem to manifest themselves visually in each of your collages; the colors in particular are suggestive of a past era. Is this a conscious attempt at elevating the material from its original context?
I don’t necessarily think I’m elevating anything above its original context; to the contrary, what I do is a bastardization of some really hard-working, mostly anonymous artists with airtight practices and solid, constant deadlines that result in a judgment of good and bad. When I look through the source material of past publications and ephemera, I’m truly astounded at how much craft, how much work has gone into our advertising — artists, photographers, whole graphic teams, mostly aloof from actual creative decision making, it’s fascinating. Mostly I think I prefer the fluid lines and that chalky, bleached out, impossible color available in magazines and reproductions prior to about 1965, which is the year my father died, and the year I was born. I have worked toward that posthumous birth concept since I’ve been conscious of creative expression.
The material of your collages are often found on the street, in a dumpster or an abandoned basement — since you rely upon these things, is there an aspect of faith in discovery?
There has been a wealth of material that I’ve found over the years. I’m a scavenger by nature, and that tendency, and the relative freedom to get my hands dirty without a whole lot of fuss has allowed me to drag home a thousand architecture magazines waiting for the recycling truck at 2am. It’s the result of decades of paying attention. The acres of perfectly viable consumer goods I walk past on my twenty minute commute from my home to the gallery is astonishing. Flaneur Syndrome. Specifically, I’ve happened upon a 30 cubic yard dumpster full of antiquarian books, countless photographs, and most recently those architecture magazines from the late 60’s. Much of that material makes up the collages in the exhibition at Charles Bank Gallery. I rely on found material, but when money’s alright I do buy things to cut up. I lost a huge amount of stuff in Hurricane Sandy. It’s not hard for me to quantify such ephemeral material, it’s priceless. And yet, being a dealer, I price this stuff all the time. Curious quandary. It’s just a lot more rewarding to find something whole on the street, like an archive of any kind. I’ll take that act of faith over falling into the rabbit warren of eBay any day.
I get the sense that a lot of deliberation goes into the composition of your collages, in both their arrangement and placement on the page. There aren’t a lot of second chances when working with vintage paper. Is there any consideration of a digital practice, with infinitely reusable elements and possible arrangements?
I’m working with the writer John Reed on a collaboration using the imagery from a luscious old comic book in the public domain. John’s got scans and we’re talking about blowing the images up and making for a much larger final image than I’ve made thus far. I’ve done this kind of thing before, but it was reversed, as I made illustrative collages after reading the novel in the collaboration The Pornographers with Christopher Grimes (Jaded Ibis, 2012). This time, John asked me to make the collages, which he would in turn write at in response, Ekphrastic style. Otherwise, I’m pretty keen on original source material. It is by design the hard-won prize and seems like an elite status as far as materials go, but collaboration is most fun in the spirit of experimentation, so I’m happy to go against my analog inclinations.
What is currently in your studio? Is there a Holy Grail, a most coveted run of a specific periodical?
Bits and pieces of everything I’ve mentioned are in my flat files. A great stash of 1970’s science fiction magazines I got at Kayo Books in San Francisco, lots and lots of pieces still exist from the LIFE magazines I got in 2010, they were being dumped by Pratt’s art library in Brooklyn. I have a complete run of Gentry magazine, which is not going to be cut up, and was definitely a pinnacle of magazine lay-out and vision. It can’t be elevated or improved, and I wouldn’t mess with it — it’s visually stunning. I’m much more interested in finding new old things, inverting Ezra Pound’s dictate: make it old. It may not end up in a work of art or a poem, but if it’s old, I’m interested in having a look at it. Especially if it’s being discarded.
Once acquired, have you had to embrace a certain discipline in accepting the constraints of the language, imagery and chroma of the given body of material?
That’s actually one of the great joys of working with material like this — the constraints are like learning a new language, or a new medium, each time around. The difference between 30 years of LIFE magazines, chronologically bridging the Depression and Vietnam, followed by a stellar collection of Architectural Record is vast. Like the difference between baseball and cricket, or gouache and oil, or Hungarian and Greek. Digesting a possible visual shift or growth, making a distinct voice with these seemingly restrictive multiple sources is no different than learning a new language.
Are you conscious of a universal key to your work? Is there a translatable visual language or do you see the arrangements as more formal than narrative?
I’m satisfied with the actual key to my creativity being my father’s death two months before I was born. I’m filling his void with excelsior, he is re-made of my own (abundant) dunnage, and that material is sacred cast-off material for me, mostly. My mother was very generous, and cognizant of my inclination toward words and art. She thought I was going to be an art history professor. I was really lucky to have her behind all this, despite her general dismay at the inability to make a living as a poet once it became clear I wasn’t cut out for traditional academia. She died in 1999, the year I met my wife, Andrea, and we’ve subsequently managed a successful gallery for a decade. That’s my narrative. I’m also enamored with the corollary between certain poets and certain artists. And with an anti-academic approach behind it all, despite my over education, the thin line between Baudelaire and Benjamin has been a driving force. Poet among painters, the words alone make me so happy. Those poetic and atmospheric disciplines have often overlapped in my own imagination. The Charles Bank show is the tightest arrangement I’ve conceived, and represents about 2 years of work.
the conversation of your work has been put into the context of myth, to what length do you find this theme coinciding with your work?
Much of what I make is like a kind of paean to my father, who died two months before I was born. Not having known him, I’ve spent a good bit of time dwelling on the years of his prime, circa 1947–1965, which was the year he died. The entire body of what I’ve made has that at its core, so I think the rebuilding (out of relatively thin air) of a forebear has an element of myth inherent.
The title of your exhibition suggests this grandiose character, perhaps an inner archetype, brought to existence through your various collages. If the narrative of your personal history were such a strong influence to this body of work, would you consider your findings (evidenced by the finality of each work) to re-present that history through an accurate or fictive lens? Can that void ever be filled, or do you suspect to always find something missing?
The Concrete Poet is really more about the end result than me. These are the plastic remnants, the concrete evidence of a poet making art. But for the more complicated part of your question, which I would need two pages to answer; my next book of poetry has the following quote from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, which is very succinct on the topic:
“Now this son whose father’s existence in this world is historical and speculative even before the son has entered it is in a bad way. All his life he carries before him the idol of a perfection to which he can never attain. The father dead has euchred the son out of his patrimony. For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more so than his goods. He will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man in life. He will not see him struggling in follies of his own devising. No. The world which he inherits bears him false witness. He is broken before a frozen god and he will never find his way.”
