SPARK
SI-027, from issue 4, 2022.
Dynamics of Power
Sasha Filiminov is an artist based in Los Angeles.
SF I am based in LA, and I live by the beach. I have my painting studio at Bel Air which I found on Craigslist.
UDÖ How is the work in studio recently?
SF I have been mostly getting commissioned to paint portraits, but I have also been building tables on the side. For myself, I have a show opening on June 1st, which will be a set of woodblock reliefs and prints. I am really excited about it.
UDÖ Your paintings involve lots of scraping the surface or evidence of printmaking. How do you go about your material exploration?
SF I had to take a printmaking course to be able to graduate from Painting. I took woodblock relief, and that got me into carving. At that point, I was at a place where I was really sick of painting pictures or illusions, like the traditional way of painting a scene. I didn’t get its point. The next step was the materiality of art objects. Now I am figuring out: “What is the utility of art?”.
UDÖ I resonate with that a lot because you make these beautiful-looking surfaces for them to sit on a corner. I would like to create objects that last emotionally and on a functional level.
SF By junior year, I had almost given up on oil painting and decided that the utility of painting is propaganda. My friend started a collective, and we made twelve giant reliefs that I hadn’t shown anyone, but we were thinking about the message and propaganda of the image rather than the image itself. There is this culture of painting your perspective in the world or events from your life. When I paint like that, the first thing that comes to my mind is: “So what?”. I simply don’t think propagating your perspective is useful to anybody. (sighs) I am still trying to figure it out.
SF I was reading a lot of Walter Benjamin and Nietzche at the time, and I was interested in starting the work with a parable. I had a whole group of friends with whom we wrote this entire manifesto about the viability of institutions. Why does everyone suck on the institutional teeth while it doesn’t truly give you anything in return? Then, Covid happened, and we all got kicked out of college (RISD) while it gave us no help. It was pretty self-evident. So that text you read is a sequel to the manifesto.
UDÖ The classic idea is that we spent many years to receive the validation of a piece of paper called a Diploma. Many other societal institutions receive shitloads of funding from all our taxes, but are they there to support you when you truly need them? One of the first questions I wrote for you was: “How do you define your art practice?” but I immediately crossed it out, thinking: “Is defining your art practice another form of institutionalized art pretentiousness?”
SF Yeah, fuck no. Luckily, one of my best friends went to Brown to study art history, and now we are starting our own gallery. So I won’t have to do so much of that institutional butt-licking. If you are not willing to do the brown-nosing, do it yourself. We both think there is a giant lack of progression in the art world. He is also from the school of thought that pretty pictures don’t do enough. Don’t get me wrong, I love beauty, but it has to have a substance behind it. The paintings have to point somewhere.
UDÖ What are your obsessions? What are the things that you keep pointing at?
SF Dynamics of power is the base of my work because it sits at the very core of identity or class struggle. Violence and death are universal vehicles of power, so I am constantly trying to find a fresh perspective to navigate the idea of power.
UDÖ What do you listen to when you are painting?
SF Strictly Chief Keef. You can call me obsessed or fanatic. I actually wrote a forty-two-page research paper about Chief Keef and his connection to nationalists rhetoric and rap music as oral history. Chief Keef and Greek oral warrior poetry are nearly exactly the same. I looked at the story of Greek general Yannis Makriyannis during his battle against the Ottomans and asked my girlfriend to translate first-hand sources. Chief Keef represents a gang in Chicago that fulfills all the UN requirements to be an independent nation. They have their own culture, distinct language, recorded history, and a whole hierarchical structure on how they organize, and it’s all based on Judeo-Christian structural language. The first gang leader is called King David, and “Chief” is the third rank in the gang. So that answers your question, what do I listen to while I paint.
UDÖ You also did the cover art for Omar Apollo’s single Hit Me Up which is more depictive than your paintings. How did that come about?
SF I made some oil paintings of kids with boxes on their heads when I was younger and have this childhood friend who now is a music video director based in LA. He hit me up about the cover around the time in college that I was shying away from depictive painting. He sent me three screenshots from the music video and told me that they wanted it in the style of my past oil paintings of kids. So, I made quick studies of three compositions with three color studies and combined them for the final. The song did not have a title yet, but there was a motif about calling people on the phone. So, I just picked the most generic stock photos I could find of “kids on the phone”, drew them with charcoal, and colored them in. I call the process “capitalist realism” because it is a re-rendering of stock imagery. Remember, this was during the time that I didn’t find any meaning in figurative painting. That cover is the most popular painting I have ever done and it is perhaps my least favorite. Now, a lot of the painting commissions I get, they want it in the style of the Omar Apollo cover. So, capitalist realism is still paying me way after they paid me for the cover. It’s a love-hate relationship.
UDÖ The goal is to reach the ultimate fuck you!
SF Exactly, fuck capitalism.
Follow Sasha Filiminov here
interview by Utkan Dora Öncül
Spark Interview-027