Damien Crisp uses his art to push for social change
Visual art could not exist without some kind of concept, and conversely there must be a visual element for conceptual art to exist. The primary difference between these two branches is that ideas are the most important components of conceptual art, whereas visual art can be devoid of ideas, having process as the only conceptual element. This creates a continuum, within which all fine art exists—except, perhaps, for an artist who chooses activism as their medium.
Damien Crisp’s work functions well at either extreme of the visual/conceptual continuum, a powerful combination of abstract imagery and realistic ideas, fearlessly probing into the realms of philosophy and politics.
His career started early in life—his father was a painter, so he spent part of his childhood in a studio environment surrounded by art books and works-in-progress. “I asked him to show me how to make a painting,” Damien recalls. “First, he sketched out a beautiful expressive charcoal drawing of the woods. I said, ‘No. I mean a real painting.’ So he showed me a simple way to make Cubist-esque drawings with colored markers. I sat at the table for a few days, and made hundreds of drawings on squares of paper. I thought of them as paintings, and I worked at breaking out of the Cubist line, towards more abstract work.”
In the late ‘90s, he started videotaping slow motion clips on his television. “I would piece them together using two VCRs, and mix audio live. It was a complicated process, remembering all of these clips, building an abstracted version of a movie,” he explains. “Rise, and fall. The sense of a narrative. Everything in slow motion. Dramatic music. Voice overs stolen from films.”
Soon after, he went to art school at Chattanooga State. “I focused on photography and painting. I moved onto UT, where I entered the painting department, and painting was introduced to me in an entirely different way—a medium radically changed by conceptual art, and minimalism,” he says.
“At UT I was influenced by a stream of visiting artists from New York and LA. I moved onto graduate school at School of Visual Arts in New York. My understanding of art was blown apart again. I broke painting down to construction paper collages, then I broke it down into installation, my studio, and played with drama, the line between reality and art, collages, staged photographs. I was shifting towards autobiography, heightened reality, reusing the trash of consumerism, political awareness inside the art world, and an idea of rupture, rupturing reality and tradition.”
After grad school, he worked for three artists who influenced him more than any experience in school: Bjarne Melgaard, Christopher Wool, and Cory Arcangel.
Crisp works with an advanced idea of mixed media, employing painting, collage, the subconscious, chance, photographs, hypersensitivity, mystery, video, words, tricks, daily life, news, discarded packaging, and more, into his art. His most recent abstract paintings are visually pleasing, but beneath the surface of every one of them is an intensity of emotion that is propelled by observations about the world we live in.
He perceives historic levels of economic inequality, the quickening pace of climate change, and the inability of our consumerist society to survive its effects, a political system that is controlled by big money, and militarized police. He has witnessed police brutality, the never-ending presence of individual racism, collective racism, and the oppressive power of institutional racism. Gentrification, class war, neoliberalism, new fascism—he’s seen it all.
“I tried to follow a set path for artists,” he tells us. “Grad school in New York, going to openings, meeting people, making contacts, smart networking. But I made art to be in my studio—surprising myself, meditative, with mainstream US reality at a distance.“I lost my faith in New York’s commercial art world. It had a corporate ethos in many ways. Networking, not material, placed artists in galleries. I was disillusioned, so I began writing about it all, critiquing it, which turned into what I call a pseudo-manifesto. The manifesto insisted resistance was possible, and could take the form of anything breaking the commercial art world’s corporate ethos. My writing expanded to address sociopolitical reality.
“An event called Occupy Wall Street was announced. The message was identical to thoughts that came out of my writing, so I showed up. Over days, weeks, I began to learn what it meant to be an activist. After we were evicted, I joined a string of protests against NYPD brutality, and Trayon Martin’s murder. Then Hurricane Sandy hit the city. Friends from Occupy started Occupy Sandy, which would become the number one hurricane relief group on the ground, surpassing the Red Cross. I was an organizer, primarily a volunteer trainer and hub coordinator.
“It was a tragic, but deeply transcendent experience. Communal. Perfect. Impossible to predict. Our underlying message was the concept of Mutual Aid, not Charity. It’s an old anarchist idea. Predating industrial capitalism, mutual aid was the norm. Village life. Shared land. A circle of support.
“An early anarchist writer, Piotr Kropotkin delineated the idea. He was studying evolution. Big money from industrial capitalists altered the study of evolution to inflate the importance of what we call ‘survival of the fittest.’ In truth, animals prone to mutual aid thrived much more than animals in competitive and individualistic communities. Charity, on the other hand, is a top-down gesture. It removes humanity. It creates a divide, and denies that we all need each other. Hurricane Sandy was a glimpse of the future with climate change. It is a future that requires concepts like mutual aid to replace top-down authoritarian structures.
“Later, I went to Ferguson, and stayed in the role of an observer. I began tweeting for Occupy Wall Street. Next, I began a project in Chattanooga. It was a Free Store my wife Michele and I organized with others. Our group is the Peace Collective. We took donations and organized an ever-changing store. Everything was free to take. We were open five days per week, eight hours per day, for three years. We would organize in the morning, open the door, and leave the store. It was also a kind of evolving artwork. It was an installation, as well as a gesture.”
Needless to say, Damien has some strong opinions on politics and our current President. “Trump is the byproduct of the American dream as it grew increasingly bizarre. His ideas are extensions of our fascist notion of American Exceptionalism—that we are predestined to colonize North America, and build what is essentially a contemporary empire across the world. It is the belief we kill people for good, ethical, reasons. As people say, our system isn’t broken. It was built this way. And this is very true.
“At the same time the country, I think, is quickly mutating into a nonsensical totalitarian reality dominated first by corporations, and second by two political parties that have been thoroughly gutted by the increasing power of big money over politics. The social theorist Jean Baudrillard called U.S. reality a simulacrum. Plastic. The only real reality is Disney World. And this simulacrum is morphing into a dangerous, surreal, society.”
When asked about local art and politics, he pauses a moment. “I don’t know much about the local art scene, and that’s my fault for hiding away in my studio, and writing at my coffee table. Our local government seems to be owned by real estate developers. There was a vibrant creative community in Chattanooga when I lived here in the ‘90s. It was just prior to aggressive gentrification. North Chattanooga was one of the utopias.
“Now development has destroyed its character, and the creative scene can’t afford the rent. An organic community is being erased, replaced by the impression of one—and it is viciously racist. It is as if old money set out decades ago to empty the city of people of color, and the poor, and refill it with cookie cutter white people.”
Crisp sees art as a vehicle for positive social change, and encourages artists to take back power. “Write. Curate. Start galleries. Create online sites to promote all of the hidden art out there. Artists should leave art centers. Stop living in high rent cities and struggling too much, often without space to create. Artists should stop networking, and be themselves.
“Build art communities with sincere interest among each other, and serious dynamics. Visit studios. Art automatically changes the world. Artists introduce a new combination of materials, altering energy, reality. Be irrational.”
Though he isn’t afraid to think outside the box, Crisp is firmly grounded in reality, and stays busy. He is participating in an upcoming group show in Brooklyn focused on painters who are the opposite of slick.
He is working to get a candidate elected in Tennessee’s 2018 election. He is finishing a book that he’s been writing since he moved back to Chattanooga, and he is working on a project that will help to redefine the labor movement…the details of which are a secret for now.
But, as with all things Damien Crisp, it won’t remain hidden for long.
Tony Mraz spent the '80s growing up in Dalton before moving to Chattanooga in '95 to attend CSAS, which enabled him to earn a scholarship to the Kansas City Art Institute.