In the early 1930s, a fledgling Ansel Adams took a gig shooting promotional material for the Dominican University of California, in San Rafael. For his recent solo exhibition “Grounds” at the university’s Barbara D. Goodman Gallery, the San Francisco-based painter Hiroshi Sato delved into the school’s archive, using Adams’s photographs as references for a suite of oil paintings mining the contemporary political moment on college campuses, the social alienation of the Internet age, and the state of fine art in America. (You can read my review here.) On the occasion of the exhibition, I had the pleasure of being in conversation with Sato at Marrow Gallery, in San Francisco. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Max Blue: You’re not only in conversation with Ansel Adams but also Ed Hopper and Bay Area Figurative Movement painters like David Park. I think this comparison is not only stylistic but also conceptual and political. Hopper painting alienation related to the social and economic circumstances of his time feels impossible to divorce from the vibe of your paintings. How are you thinking about these things? I’m interested in this dialogue between the two eras.
Hiroshi Sato: There’s a shifting happening between the formal aspects of painting and the other aspects of art. What the Bay Area Figurative Movement did was understand that there was a shifting happening in the zeitgeist with abstraction coming to an end. And then they took that understanding in a new direction. I think they were pretty successful in how they moved on from that zeitgeist.
MB: To decide to make representational figurative paintings today feels like a very intentional choice in this historical moment. Can you tell me about this choice in direction?
HS: The Ashcan School painters were thinking of a universal visual language. Because we’re humans, representational imagery is the one that is de facto universal. That’s how we see the world. A representational object has an inherent context that’s embedded in it. When you see a cup, you innately understand what it’s for, what it does, even if the basic forms may be slightly different. That kind of trust that we are still living in that consensus reality, and by extension trust in representational imagery, is a language we can use as a thread. That’s why, even though Hopper was painting a long time ago, we can still understand and empathize with what a Hopper painting is doing almost instantaneously. That unmediated aspect is core to what art is and why it’s so powerful as an object in conveying information. In postmodernism, we started to shift ideas of art to being more like content and intellectual property, and the purely formal aspect became something more like branding. But that isn’t really what art is. Art is essentially a communication of shared experience. Now, the reasons why people are making art is more important than ever, because we live in a time of such mediated imagery. Everything you see online is going through a mediated source — a phone, an algorithm. Baudrillard was completely right! That is literally what is happening. It’s not theoretical anymore.
MB: Can you briefly break that idea down for me?
HS: Postmodernism is the cultural logic under late-stage capitalism. In that, we start to enter a media-oriented world, where we’re looking at simulations of things that create the signs and symbols that we in turn make into identity. By looking at symbols and signs in simulations, we start to prefer the simulation rather than the real. In hyperreality, our identity is completely gone and we’re only seeing the real in simulation. Hyperreality is a state that is more real than real. Baudrillard was theorizing what life would be like in postmodernism. Now we’ve lived all the way into the digital, cell-phone age, where the whole reality of your media consumption is completely curated and isolated by your own preferences and mediated by corporations. We’re all choosing our own realities and we prefer them over the real. We all know that. What I’m talking about isn’t novel or new. It’s literally what is apparent to us right now. But we need art to show historians in the future what it was like to be alive during this time.
MB: I want to call out a specific painting in the show which is “Panel 55.” It’s a woman’s face, partially obscured, and behind her are nautical flags. It feels like the most obvious painting in this most recent group of work that directly calls out some of the layered meanings you’re talking about and approaching. Talking about signs and symbols in Baudrillard — those are the most literal signs and symbols in the show. It feels like an invitation to viewers to engage with the work on a deeper level. Someone versed in that symbolic language could decode this painting, whereas someone who isn’t, can’t.
HS: In this isolated, curated reality we all live in, we have our own internal referents and language now. That’s what the internet kind of is. That’s also why another painting is titled “If You Know You Know.”That’s a pretty Internet based meme saying if you don’t know the reference, it’s too long to explain, but if you do, then you can’t unsee it. That is in itself how we’re experiencing the internet and each other’s connections. We’re all getting more isolated into smaller and smaller bubbles where we understand each other’s references or our cultures, but the other people outside of that bubble don’t. In the case of the Internet, a lot of information is third hand or could be wrong or the context is completely destroyed. There’s no knowing. Parsing the data or being overwhelmed by the data essentially is what it is now. These paintings each have a couple layers of “if you know you know.” I am constructing these paintings with people in the future in mind, hoping that they will be able to understand the references I’m making and understand what it’s actually depicting, more than the people in the now.
MB: You’re invested in a project of trying to take some physical lived experience back from the digital world. At the same time, the act of doing that involved being chronically online and painting that experience. that experience of the physical world is no longer wholly divorced from the experience of digital space now. You have an ouroboros of reality.
HS: There’s going to be so much obfuscation when people in the future try to look back to now. There’s so much of that interaction being muddled by bots and AI chat — how could you possibly sort through all of this information to have an accurate understanding of what’s happening now? That’s the problem I’m thinking about. I’m organizing these paintings with the visual references of representational imagery in order to make them a little bit easier to understand. I’m treating the representational as a veneer and a vehicle for what the paintings will mean in the future, obfuscating it on purpose to change the literalness of what people today are seeing it as.
MB: But on some level, these are just beautiful paintings. And that the veneer maybe is one of many layers of the work conceptually but also it can function on that level alone. And in doing so it carries with it a powerful political and cultural statement which is what it means to make a beautiful representational painting in the 21st century and to do so earnestly. Something I think about a lot, with the zombie formalism and cultural schlock that we deal with in the fine art world and online — let alone where those two places intersect, like NFTs — is just what it means to earnestly make art of any kind. I think that we’ve moved through postmodernism and arrived back at modernism as the most earnest exploration of the human mind in art that we saw in the 20th century. You could say that to be a modernist, representational painter in the 21st century is, in a way, a postmodern move. It’s postmodern to be a modernist. What does it mean politically, culturally — even emotionally — to recommit yourself to beauty?
HS: One of the main things I reference in this series of paintings is the documentary Hypernormalisation by Adam Curtis. In that film, what I thought was such a great observation that Curtis made was that postmodernist cynicism and the ironic distancing in postmodern art has made the artists become out of touch with reality. I think we all innately understand that we’re bored with that kind of out of touch-ness. there’s a starvation for sincerity, while even understanding the postmodernist ideas that everything has been done, there’s no monoculture or any of that. Completely serving capital in terms of how art is made is the understanding that it’s just content in that sense. A desire for art to be outside of being content is where I see the sincerity coming from. Everything is completely monetized and mediated by platforms, and we’re looking for something that doesn’t have that kind of value. to the degrees to which tech has monetized human interaction, I think we’re desiring that sincerity again. Who cares if it’s postmodern? We just want it. But because of the capture of market forces and the need to make a living, artists are stuck doing the same thing. I don’t see a lot of art that has shifted. You wouldn’t even know a pandemic happened just looking at their art.
MB: I think this is reflected in the market, too. We see art fairs and galleries that continue, again and again, to exhibit this kind of regressive, 2018 style work, and now the art market is collapsing because people don’t want to buy that work any more.
HS: You can see that in museum shows, too.
MB: One of the thematic threads in your work that is related is the idea of academic freedom and freedom of speech and expression as embattled on college campuses. I think a lot of these initiatives are incredibly earnest. And you see an administration — the college, the presidential administration — trying to snuff that out. That’s another kind of regressive desire.
HS: It’s all interconnected. Our world is so complicated, and in that complication it becomes difficult to disentangle each part. It’s so self-evident — the real, the not real, how we’re mediated. My paintings are also pretty literal. We’re at a point right now where there are so many things you can make art about in the present of what’s happening, I’m just trying to delegate. I’m one artist trying to make cohesive work. What I keep thinking about is, what are other artists doing with their work? Why is it that I’m doing this and not everybody else? Who are the ones being sincere?
MB: I think it was Jackson Pollock and the idea of the American avant-garde that set the precedent for the American art market and the premium that’s put in individualism. Something that you don’t see in art today is collectivism, the way you see that on college campuses.
HS: The hard part is, even if there was to be a collective art movement — in either direction — the question is, what is it going to be? We still can’t conceive of anything new or different. That’s where we’re stuck. And that’s another reason I think of these paintings as being for the people of the future. People in the future may have moved to that next stage. We’re not there yet in terms of art as a whole. We’re still stuck in pre-covid. What I’m doing as an artist is trying to say there’s something that’s the same happening. We all experienced the pandemic. That’s where I think people are starting to coalesce, understanding that there are still things that we can share. In the arts, I think there has to be a move towards that. There is actually a shared aspect to art. That’s starting to take shape, but we don’t know the size of it yet. People consciously starting to think about this over time is the only way it starts moving in a more collective direction.
MB: I want to ask you about another piece in the show, “The Art Department.” It can be read either as a really bleak picture of the end of arts education in this country or as art as the thing that is literally the light in the darkness. Or, it’s both at once. Which side do you fall on? Is art the light in the darkness? Or something that can only be born out of its own death and has to be reinvented?
HS: One thing I love about San Francisco is that there are so many artists here and they’re all so different. I fall on the side of a little bit of hope. In terms of everything becoming data and becoming captured by capital, we’re starting to see people thirst over the idea of art. The idea of a thing that is not created for consumption only is something that is on a lot of people’s minds. San Francisco is one of those places where that’s being thought about in the local arts movements.
MB: I appreciate that more temperate attitude of “a little bit of hope.” Maybe a little bit of hope can be enough.
HS: And the future isn’t written yet. It depends on what artists are going to do going forward. What are younger artists going to make going forward? In that way, it’s not on me at all. It’s on them, it’s on the future.
