A Conversation between Brendan O'Connell and Alec Baldwin
Alec
Artists have painted trees, landscapes, portraits. I think there is, arguably, something inevitable about an artist taking on the environment of Walmart as a subject matter, what is it that initially inspired you?
Brendan
I had done a series of photo-based paintings in black and white. They were figures at home- watching television, or reading, or getting dressed- just doing ordinary everyday things. An artist friend suggested that I follow a model throughout the day doing ordinary everyday things out in the world.
Alec
And one of the most common everyday activities is, certainly, shopping…
Brendan
Exactly. I paid for a young actress’ groceries and took a slew of photos of her walking around Walmart and shopping.
Alec
And then you painted them?
Brendan
Well, honestly, the photos sat on my desk for two years as I was doing abstract paintings and these black and white photo-based paintings, but I kept coming back to these photographs and thought about the reasons why I found them so compelling. Then I started to see that there was a way to marry the different kinds of paintings I was doing into a series.
Alec
When I first saw the Walmart paintings, there was this archetypal blond with her head turned away from you and you are waiting expectantly for her to turn toward you and show her face. This has been going on since the birth of capitalism: people going out into the town square or market place to buy things and to have their physical and spiritual needs of human interaction met.
Brendan
Most definitely, and that is where Walmart filled an interesting gap. Farmers or people in rural environments didn’t really have the same opportunity that city people had for an endless variety of stuff and human interaction.
Alec
This is before the dating sites like Farmersonly.com
Brendan
Exactly
Alec
We all want to meet new people, to have new encounters.
Brendan
Which goes to a larger idea; whenever you go out into the physical world there is always the chance you might have an encounter. As you say, we all want to meet people, to exchange energy with them through a glance, a smile, a handshake. But when you live in a rural part of the country, you step out into the world and the one thing you don’t see much of is people, but you still need to step out to encounter other humans.
Alec
But because of the Internet, that isn’t true anymore.
Brendan
That brings up two thoughts connected to this series of paintings. Between television and the Internet, your average person is inundated with images. He sees more fabricated imagery in a morning than the Medicis did in a decade. A thousand years ago, the only place anyone saw an image was a painting or a stained glass window in church.
Alec
Then Guttenberg came along and gave the educated classes the printed word and the industrial revolution produced the shop window for everyone to walk by.
Brendan
Exactly, and the other thought is that people connect virtually through Facebook and Twitter, but one of the only places you can see large numbers of people interacting with their environment is while they’re shopping. You can see many people at a sporting event, but they are mostly spectators. Or you can see them at an airport, but they are in transit. I would argue that the grocery store is the most visited interior architecture on the planet, and it is quite possibly the most democratic.
Alec
Elaborate on that.
Brendan
Well, my mom was in our local Walmart in Torrington, Connecticut, and Meryl Streep was in line in front of her, and a lady in a moomoo was in line behind her. Where on earth are you going to come across that socio-economic class range? Not in Barney’s on Fifth Avenue.
Alec
I know the Dutch painters were the first painters to portray commercial markets and the Vanitas still lifes of the bourgeoisie. Then later the French Post-impressionists painted the commercial boulevards of Paris. Do you see any connection with the Walmart paintings?
Brendan
Walmart turned the boulevards of separate neighborhoods into aisles under one roof. And I am painting those aisles.
Alec
You are an American Pisarro! (laughing) So, you came back from Europe and you start painting Walmarts?
Brendan
Not till I moved to the country. There is a long tradition of American artists cutting their artistic teeth in Europe and coming back to paint America. I was in Europe for seven years during the Walmart expansion period, and when I got back Walmarts were spotting the American landscape.
Alec
Which American artists are you thinking of in particular?
Brendan
Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, Richard Deibenkorn.
Alec
When you think of a series of paintings like the Walmart series, isn’t the obvious artist that people think of Andy Warhol?
Brendan
The concept of playing with brands as an art form goes back to Stuart Davis, but Warhol really made the brand the focal point as it is in advertising. The brand itself became the icon. Warhol really set the stage for almost everything that came after 1960 in American art, but I have to say there is something cold about the works themselves. I wanted to create something painterly and less conceptual, and I am also drawn to the repetitive patterns of brands on a shelf.
Alec
So it’s really a populist idea of art that you are after? Paintings that people can relate to in Ohio or New York?
Brendan
Painting that no longer really worries about bending to fit high or low art concepts. But this idea was with me from the beginning, I just didn’t know it. Once I decided to “survive financially” by painting, I took to the streets in Paris and did portraits and caricatures to pay for my paints and brushes. There is nothing more touristic or commercial than that.
Alec
I met you in 95 when you were still in front of Notre Dame. What did you learn from that experience?
Brendan
In some ways that constitutes the foundation of my art education. I never went to art school, so spending ten hours a day trying to capture a likeness, or make people laugh, or make a connection- and to do that by making marks on a piece of paper- was significant. You don’t need a PhD in art history to laugh at a funny drawing of yourself or your spouse, but just because you might be sophisticated or an expert that doesn’t necessarily stop you from connecting with something in the street.
Alec
Therefore, the idea of relating to the spectator or buyer is important to your art.
Brendan
It’s a crucial component. That doesn’t have to mean millions of people, or masses, because some art, because of its nature, is geared to a limited aesthetic. But I believe it should try to communicate something. The other thing I learned from the streets was economics. When you are on the bottom rung of the capitalist ladder, there is no shortage of people who want to kick you off of it.
Alec
Besides the artists you mentioned, what are your other influences?
Brendan
Well, there is a lot of French and American painting that comes through this series; the French post impressionists, even the 50s French abstractionists- but then I’ve always been inspired by the awkward beauty of Edward Hopper’s figures. He really made people that looked like they were longing for a connection. And then Wayne Thiebaud’s delicatessen paintings; the products or brand aspect of the Walmarts make me think of him.
Alec
Do you think of these various influences as explicit?
Brendan
Yes and no. There is a bit of every kind of painting I like in these, which sort of fits with the idea of Walmart. A lot of diversity under one roof. It’s one painting series that allows for quite an eclectic mix of Americana.
Alec
How does Walmart feel about these paintings? You were originally thrown out, or “invited to leave” for taking photographs in the stores.
Brendan
Yeah, as a corporate policy a lot of retail environments do not allow you to take pictures. Evidently Sam Walton used to visit his competitors on the sly and take pictures and figure out what they did better than Walmart. I was going in on the sly trying to capture Wonderbread in all its glory. After the NPR interview where I said something to the effect that I had been invited to leave more Walmarts than most New Yorkers had ever been in, the Walmart people got in touch with me through one of my dealers.
Alec
What did they say?
Brendan
They gave me permission to go into the stores.
Alec
So you went from being kicked out to after the New Yorker, and the Colbert show, you have carte blanche?
Brendan
In a way. I had a few formal shoots with a professional photographer and a cherry picker. I could probably set up an easel in any Walmart in the world and just paint.
Alec
So the guy who gets thrown out is now the court painter. America’s brand painter.
Brendan
I did start to focus on the brands more; the blur of the brand out of the corner of your eye. The idea that people have “relationships” to brands. The first time someone bought a brand painting and said “Utz is one of the brands I personally connect with” I thought it was the strangest sentence.
Alec
Linguistically to connect to a potato chip? As in we don’t want simply to inhale a bag of chips, we want to “connect or identify” with it as we consume.
Brendan
Brands used to be something wonky ad execs got existential about…
Alec
but now your average Joe can talk at length about the nuances of brand identity. Let me switch gears. Did you feel like you were selling out when you started to get the media blitz?
Brendan
I was selling paintings and that didn’t feel bad. Some people acted as if I should stop the minute the New Yorker covered it.
Alec
They were “art” when no one was looking, but it’s commercial now that it’s been on TV.
Brendan
A well known curator predicted this. He knew my story about when I was a street artist in the south of France and the shop keepers called the police to chase me out of town. I went to the Mayor, did his caricature, and he gave me permission. Overnight I went from being the guy dodging the authorities to “the town artist.”
Alec
Sunday Morning CBS and Time Magazine did for you in Walmart what the Mayor of Carcassonne did for you?
Brendan
Yeah, but some people who didn’t know the back story thought that I punched a clock in at Walmart. My real goal was to paint America and one of the last public spaces in the world.
Alec
Elaborate on that… you mean because of the internet?
Brendan
Look at the big bookstores. People protested their arrival and now are nostalgic for Borders. You can imagine nostalgia in the future. I can picture my kids telling their kids, “There was this HUGE store where you could buy chips AND a bicycle and you could touch it and try it on before you took it home.”
Alec
Now you click and the drone shows up with your toothpaste?
Brendan
Exactly. I knew in 8th grade everything was changing when cable gave you a million channels and Dominos would come to your house in 30 minutes or less.
Alec
Edward Hopper was one of the artists that understood that America was in a pivotal place and some people were going to be left behind.
Brendan
Yeah, funny I always dreamed the ideal of this series and I don’t think I ever achieved it was somewhere between Hopper and Warhol. But I think we are in a similar period of massive transformation.
Alec
So how has it changed now that there is a dialogue?
Brendan
It has allowed other opportunities to emerge. I teamed up with a couple of entrepreneurs to start a group called everyartist.me. And we were able to do a pilot test with 8500 kids to guinea pig a national art experience.
Alec
That video http://bit.ly/everyartist was fascinating tell me more about that.
Brendan
Well the crux of the idea was to democratize the artistic experience- take art out of the privileged rarified world of galleries and museums and studios and bring kids’ art onto the high school football field.
It was an amazing experience so I teamed up with a group of entrepreneurs to figure out a way to make this experience scalable and replicable. We started asking fairly ambitious and hyperbolic questions like, ‘what if every kid who went into a Walmart could learn how to draw? How would that change our country, and the world? How could we spark next generation creativity?’
Alec
And what did you come up with?
Brendan
Well we have designed an art kit that is both a physical tool to make and frame art and coupled it with the best digital app technology that shows kids how to draw or simply make cool art. And through the app Moms can celebrate and share their kids’ art through all the social media platforms.
Alec
And people can buy this at Walmarts?
Brendan
We are still fine-tuning the prototypes, but the idea is that these kits would sell for $9.97 at Walmart and every kit that is sold we would donate one to a school for these crowd creativity events that helped spark the idea.