Leon Golub

I'm Leon Golub. I'm a New York painter. I've lived in New York since 1964. I am still attempting to push these images in the face of a partially receptive but often very reluctant public.

Actually what I represent is a very minority position within the art world because the American art world and maybe the international art world is not interested in this. It's interested in frisson. Provocation. It's interested in intention, it's interested in formal beauty. It isn't interested in having it's nose stuck in the muck of things. They don't want it. It won't sell. And who the hell wants to come home and look at this anyway? There are a few screwed up people who might want it, but basically, any real normal type wouldn't want this on their wall, we know that.

"Interrogation I" 1981

I started in the late '60s or middle '60s. I started with wrestling photographs, because I was doing paintings of male figures who were nude, struggling with each other.

I'm nuts on images. I cut them out of books and newspapers, mostly books and magazines. And this is absolutely crucial to me, because this is one of the ways I tap into the world. It's the way I visualize it. But I see the world not just out of my own obsessive attitude. I see the world because it comes to me through media. Through film, through newspapers, through TV...we're surfeited really. We're over exposed. We're shoved at all the time by media. And I've often said it's kind of a half joke, you know how they say you're sixty or eighty percent water? Well, actually we're made up of twenty-five thousand photographs, eleven thousand films. All of this has moved through us and is affecting us in some way or the other. So we're media creatures. We're living in an extraordinary visual world.

I want to do a certain kind of reporting, a certain kind of reportage. This is the way things were at this particular moment in time. The moment being the 20th, 21st century. This is where I'm situated. When I look out this is what I see. I'm not interested in abstract notions of beauty. I'm not interested in formalism. I am interested in beauty because, due to my perverted sense of things, I think of this as beautiful. I really do. I don't call it pretty. It's beautiful because it resonates. It's beautiful even if it comes with a certain charge of ugliness as well.

"White Squad III" 1982

The content is real time. These guys are doing this right now, right here, right there, under our nose, across the street, a thousand miles away from here, you see? They're doing it all over the place. They did it in the 15th century. They did it 1000 BC. This is how people handle people under stressed circumstances, and when people in power are interested in controlling their areas of control, and people who are dissident for whatever reasons, are attempting to upstage them. So it goes on all over the place. It could be Los Angeles, it could be France and so on and so forth.

I have to have some kind of predisposition to do this kind of thing. I do have a certain cast of mind, but that's true of any artist. You are bringing to bear all of these points of view, subliminal impulses, early childhood stuff, god knows what, paranoid fantasies, who knows what the hell you're bringing to it. The point is what you're bringing to it, or where you come from, at some point you have to make a reality connection. But if you have the same kind of impulses that I have and you don't connect it somehow to reality, to the world outside of yourself, then you are going to be over self-obsessed and you're going to do stuff which is going to be impenetrable or at least insufficient to handle any ideas beyond your own trauma. So everybody has to pick themselves up, whoever the hell they are, optimists or pessimists or paradoxes, and locate yourself. You're operating in a real world with real people in real time.