An Interview with Gregory Michael Carter
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It is very difficult for me to begin this interview, because of the extreme difference between your art and your sensibility as a social being. The art of yours that I have seen is very political. It is not fun loving and carefree as you represent yourself in social exchange. The political life you represent on the canvas is often times the violence imposed on others by hegemonic powers. Although you do not represent their faces, you use their symbols—e.g., missiles, big tanks, and slave ships, all instruments of domination and destruction. Then, too, you use the fleur de lis, which one does not immediately think as a symbol of violence. The violence is embedded in that symbol: conquest, enslavement, colonization.
Yes, the French Revolution.
Can you explain the contradiction I spoke of earlier: Gregory the social being versus Gregory the visual artist. In an earlier conversation, you told me that one's life informs one's art.
I spent a lot of time working on maps in the last few years and that led me to read about the places that I was doing my work on top of, if that makes any sense. Instead of working on traditional journals, just hard bound journals with white paper, acid free paper, I start buying atlases and doing drawing and painting on those. So, in reading the places I was doing the drawing on, I would have to do more research as to why Stalingrad is called Stalingrad or Leningrad or why on this version of the map there is East and West Berlin. So, history has a lot to do with it. The more I read about history, the more I realize that people really haven't changed very much, you know? In maybe the past fifty or hundred years, we've made incredible bounds as far as technology, as far as culture, as far as basically connecting the world, connecting all these places. But the politics are still the same. People are still greedy, you know. People still wage war over beautiful women, you know. People want more than they want to work for. It's through these observations of the world. A lot of the times how the media tries to portray the world shapes the way I go about doing my work. [End Page 437]
Will you use what you just said to talk about the first two paintings of yours that I got excited about when I first came to your home. I don't know their titles: the one with the image of the young woman in it, and the one with the upside down chess piece, the rook.
The second one you are referring to is called Advancement and I hadn't titled the other portrait. It's a portrait of a friend of mine. Her name is Ilea (see the Visual Art section of this issue). She's a painter and a musician. And I use her likeness in really this series of works that I'm working on. I've been doing a lot of portraits. I have to backtrack a second: I've been doing a lot of portraits, some of which I showed you a moment ago upstairs, of American Women, and she is one of the models that's in that series of works. It's just the idea of multi-ethnic women and how that's innately a part of our country and a part of our culture. And it's not really like that anywhere else in the world to the extent that it is here. Like our President, now, is a result of this. And it's just very difficult to grasp her features. We like to categorize people as much as we can, but people can't tell where her features come from. So I think she is an interesting subject for that reason. And, you know, she is really beautiful, too. That is what interested me about her, and why I've been doing so many drawings of her.
This other piece is called Advancement (see the...
