Michael Stevenson is an easel painter. His paintings record objects that belong to ways of life on the verge of disappearance. He has constructed a surprising canon of examples: small towns, church and community halls, caravans, trophies, crepe-paper wreaths, stuffed pheasants, cigarette-packet dogs, earthworks, and Marlboro Men. All are recent orphans, not yet so out of date as to inspire nostalgia or sympathy. They are unfashionable but not yet in a fashionable way. (The same has been said of Stevenson’s style of painting.) Though he might appear melancholic, engaged in an extended act of mourning, it is precisely the newfound status of Stevenson’s subjects that fascinates him. During Badlands, his recent solo exhibition at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, I caught up with Michael Stevenson to discuss his work and its sources.

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Robert Leonard: Much of your early work addressed small towns. You grew up in Inglewood, just out of New Plymouth. Were the 1970s good for you?
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Michael Stevenson: The 1970s were a great time for regionalism. People moved out of the main centres into the country. That happened in New Zealand, and in the US as well. It was a decentred decade. Places like Phoenix became fashionable. There was that whole Sun Belt thing. It also spawned Neil Young and Easy Rider—mystical, druggie, pastoral, folkie, heartland Americana. Hard rock and corny medievalism—a description of ‘Stairway to Heaven’—sums it up nicely. The things that were popular in Inglewood then were from American white-trash culture: Kentucky Fried Chicken, the Dukes of Hazzard, hotted-up cars, confederate rock, and truckin’. If you look around New Plymouth now, it’s still the lowest common denominator. The burger bars have names like Arizona and Texicana. People think of small towns as isolated but they are plugged into an international culture, only it’s not a high-cultural one. In Auckland, they listened to Philip Glass while everyone else was into ZZ Top.
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How did you research those early works?
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I travelled. I found this mouldering network of places up and down the country that weren’t used much anymore. Church halls initially. Once, the church hall was the focal point for small-town life—every social event would happen there. Now, they’re marginalised. They’re sealed up or only used once a week. There’s a weird sense of loss and decline. They’re tragic, with Christmas decorations left up long into the New Year. I’d break in and rifle through everything, through all the cupboards. I was interested in the tidiness. These places were always ridiculously tidy, for no good reason. One of my pictures was called Church Cleaning (1989). Another thing that fascinated me was how modern most of those places looked. Pentecostal Christianity prefers multipurpose churches. It doesn’t believe in spending money on edifices. The people who built those halls had no idea of modernist architecture, yet they produced severe, modern-looking buildings entirely by default.
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What about your other early works, those ‘cultural landscapes’ like The Jesus Rock (1987), Jesus Christ Superstar in Levin (1987), and One Holy Caravan (1988).
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A lot of those works deal with the rise of Pentecostalism in the 1970s and the Jesus Movement, which presented Jesus as a long-haired, blue-jeans-wearing figure. They were trying to find a biblical basis for the alternative lifestyle—the Christian version of all that Neil Young stuff. That’s what Jesus Christ Superstar rose out of. The Doobie Brothers’s song ‘Jesus Is Just Alright’ was a piss-take on the whole thing. It all seems so dated now.
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How did people respond to your early works?
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Francis Pound’s wonderful line was: a neo-regionalist footnote to McCahon that bears too much reference to Philip Guston and Morandi. The early work confused everybody. No one knew what to make of it. People thought I couldn’t paint, or thought I was proselytising, especially with the more eccentric works, the ones with text, like Jesus Loves Us All in Clinton (1988).
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Your paintings present things but don’t tell us what to think about them.
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Yes. I’ve always been interested in art that goes in under the radar, that first and foremost appears really dumb. I’ve often dealt with things that are quite controversial, like Pentecostal Christianity and small towns, things that get people really heated. But I’m not interested in sending those things up. I want more sophisticated readings. It’s not heavy critique, more like a slightly ironic record. I’m not interested in polarised views and that has confused people. Image-based art is mostly about being for or against things and I’m not really into that.
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 After Elam, why did you move to Palmerston North?
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One reason was that I couldn’t get a job in Auckland and couldn’t afford a studio. But I was also interested in retro culture, and retro culture is laid on thicker in the provinces. Palmerston North is like the Bible Belt. The problem is that when you embrace retro culture you embrace retro politics, and I don’t want to be identified with that. People think I’m trying to prop up dodgy politics but it’s not that at all.
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Are you a regionalist?
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I’m interested in the filter-down effect, like with all those people in Inglewood living in A-frame houses. Those houses obviously look back to the alternative lifestyle, but those people have no idea of that at all. They lack the knowledge to connect the form with its origins. That’s what happens with Pentecostalism too. There’s a huge irony deficit. The original reference gets lost. Songs are sung in a Pentecostal-church setting—some of them were originally Elvis songs! Chopping off the source—not understanding the source and just having bad versions to play with—that’s what regionalism is all about.
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Your style became much more realistic with the wreath paintings. Why?
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I’m interested in content. Realism allows you more detail, allows you to signify more. Realism is also an appropriate way to do regional subject matter because it’s an accepted style in the provinces. Ian Wedde once said that regionalism, out of necessity, always means some form of realism. Because I’ve taken on those styles, people perceive me as being a ‘bottom-up’, while seeing someone like Julian Dashper, who brought low references into high abstraction, as a ‘top-down’. That distinction doesn’t allow for a meeting in the middle.
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Why the interest in wreaths?
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A lot of my work had been about a sense of decay and I became interested in how you could represent that quite easily with a wreath form. The first wreath painting was Key (1990), which was based on an ANZAC Day wreath I saw. This was the only painting I did with the wreath on a monument. I really wanted to move it away from that war thing, so I put the wreaths back into the kinds of buildings I’d been painting before. Some of the wreaths were for clubs that actually existed and others were for fictitious one. I made a lot of wreaths to paint from. I made them of cheap ticky-tack materials: tin foil and crepe paper. I showed some with the paintings at Gregory Flint Gallery. At the opening, people accused me of being a grave robber.
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You travelled to the US soon after doing the wreaths. When was that exactly?
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Late 1991. I spent most of the time driving through the heart of the country, through rural Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee—all through the central region. I wanted to be immersed within that huge continent. It must be the weirdest place on the face of the planet. I wanted to be in the middle of it and take on all those myths, and believe them where possible, because for so many Americans that’s how they live and that’s how they want to live.
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What is it like in the middle of America?
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It’s far more sparsely populated than New Zealand. I think you could feel more isolated in the middle of America than you ever could in New Zealand. You can see why places like Kansas are so into the Union, because, if they weren’t, nobody would ever have heard of them. They’d just drop off the edge, since so few people live there. Some of them would be third-world countries if they weren’t part of the Union. There are fifty states and they operate like separate countries. Each state, each county in fact, can do what it wants. New Zealand is so much more homogenous. BP can have a campaign and completely renovate every gas station in the country in a matter of months. Things like that don’t happen in America. You go through parts of the South and it’s just like William Faulkner. Another thing is, they do put up new stuff but they don’t pull down the old stuff. We drove through lots of places where there would be three gas stations, but only one of them was functional. The first one’s falling down but no one goes and pulls it down. It just stays there. they don’t get rid of it. It’s very strange, that whole decay.
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Were you there looking for subject matter?
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The whole experience was overwhelming initially and it was hard to work out what I wanted to record and what I wanted to leave. So, I just started looking at what I had just left off painting in New Zealand—grave decorations—for a start. The most amazing ones I saw were at Gracelands, which is a culture all on its own. They tell me Elvis made a bit of music, but he sure knew how to decorate. Americans are big on trashy decoration. The church strips it all out, but then people put five life-size glowing Santas on the front lawn. In New Zealand, the high/low thing is clearly defined. People here are really uptight about it, probably because high culture is under siege. But it’s interesting there to have that distinction made completely redundant. There’s that wonderful Jeff Koons quote: I accept Micky Mouse, I hail Donald Duck, I love Bambi too. I think until you have achieved that you haven’t had an authentic American experience.
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Did you find anything new?
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During my time in the South I became interested in smoking as a subject. In Durham, North Carolina, where they make cigarettes—Lucky Strikes and Chesterfields—I came across this bronze plaque that read: ‘Dedicated to the millions who smoke the cigarette that satisfies. Chesterfield 1948.’ And then I was hooked. In Durham, they roast the tobacco and it smells like chocolate or cooked apples. It could almost entice you to take up smoking, which I did very briefly—one or two cigarettes. Smoking is a marginal thing now, at least here in New Zealand. But it was different in America. The Marlboro Man was everywhere. There’d even be cigarette drops where they’d send out free cigarettes in the mail. It was incredible. People smoke lots in the South. And a lot of people still chew tobacco. Chewing tobacco—have you ever seen it? It’s like having a whole wad of tea leaves around your gums. The good ole boys, all chewing their Red Man.
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So, it’s going to be hard to kill off smoking in the South.
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It’d be like trying to outlaw dairy products in New Zealand. It’s hooked in on all sorts of levels, like education. I had friends at The Duke, a well known university in Durham. It was started by Buck Duke, who made all his money from tobacco. That sort of infrastructure is through the whole of the state. You couldn’t remove it. Anyway, after Durham, I became interested in the depiction of smoking throughout art history. For instance, tobacco and pipes often appear in still lifes. One common theme in still-life painting is the vanitas, which goes back to the book of Ecclesiastes—‘Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.’ It’s to do with the brevity of human life. When Chardin, say, depicted smokers’ accoutrements in his still lifes, it was as a vanity, a luxury, and also as a symbol, the brevity of life being suggested in that puff of smoke, like the snuffed candle. But the funny thing is, back then, they didn’t realise tobacco could actually kill you.

I also got interested in smoking and modernism. Cigarettes really are a product of the mechanical age. They only started mass-producing cigarettes in 1884 and they weren’t really that popular until the first World War. Leger’s The Mechanic (1920) is the best example. Back then, smoking a cigarette, having a tattoo, wearing a black singlet and being a mechanic had something to do with utopian modernism. Now all those things still go together but they mean something completely different. If you wanted to say the same kind of thing now you’d have to have a guy with a ponytail tapping away at a keyboard and drinking Perrier.

Another thing that interested me were all those photographs of famous painters smoking, artists like Rothko, De Kooning, and Guston. And there are those famous black-and-white photographs of Pollock by Hans Namuth, and also a movie of him smoking and painting at the same time. People thought Pollock’s painting signified the unbridled sexual and creative potency of the artist. That’s interesting, considering the anti-libidinous effects of large quantities of fags and booze—the grunge factor in modern art.
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Smoking was a strong trope of existentialist experience.
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Those photos will mostly be set ups. It interests me that those painters all wanted to be seen as smokers. Guston painted lots of self portraits smoking. And, of course, much of the work is about self-destruction. But there’s a huge amount of irony and self-parody going on too. Guston’s Painting, Smoking, Eating (1973) is the height of the grunge factor. He’s smoking in bed and eating and painting. There’s a nasty array of tins with all sorts of solvents in them next to the bed. And there’s French fries on the bed, with ketchup all over them. There’s a definite death wish in there. And this masochistic artist persona was heavily adhered to in New Zealand painting in the 1970s. For instance, Clairmont, Fomison, and Maddox are all shown smoking in Marti Friedlander’s famous book. And smoking may have been just the tip of the iceberg. I’m interested in artists’ addictions.
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When did they discover smoking was bad for your health?
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The Surgeon General’s report came out in 1964,  but it wasn’t really until the 1970s that things started to change. Interestingly, more people smoked in the 1950s than at any other time. It was the high point. That’s when they started to bring out all the new brands, the cool-flavour menthols and the tall cigarettes—Long Horns. It’s interesting, smoking and modernism, that thing of perpetual newness.
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Cigarette advertising has become very artistic.
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During the 1980s they started to place restrictions on what you could put into cigarette ads. They outlawed a lot of text early on. Then they outlawed the human figure. You were allowed to have a hand and an arm. You could get away with a bit of leg. The ads ended up more and more focused on the packets themselves or on some other detail. Because the content was so restricted, the ads had to develop an incredibly complex sets of signifiers. They became so sophisticated and so obscure that anyone not initiated into the campaign wouldn’t even know what they were ads for. The ads became more oblique, more like art. And they used more and more art references. There’s a B&H campaign where the gold pack always appears as some kind of artwork. It’s excavated in an archaeological dig, it’s a bit of modern art that’s just been uncrated in a museum, or it sits on an easel. Quite often, the ads moved into a still-life format, even quoting from Dutch still-life painting to suggest that sort of sophistication. They took on the golden light, the dark backgrounds. They also took on aspects of the vanitas theme, which is highly ironic.
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So how did you incorporate these ideas into your work?
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I’ve always been interested in dragging up marginalised retro culture, and the woven space-frame cigarette-packet dog is a wonderful example. They were big in Inglewood in the 1970s. I remember them being made of Pall Mall Reds and B&H Golds. It took so long to make them, you were killing time. Some would take 600 packs to make, so it was like overkill, a monument to your own death in fact. And yet, those dogs are so kidsy, so cute—like giving cigarettes to children. I put them into a vanitas still-life context but also with that advertising look.
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Where do the dogs come from originally?
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They’ve got British origins—American cigarettes are soft packed. It’s a lower-working-class thing. Only certain brands are ever used. People who smoke Dunhills wouldn’t want to plait a dog out of them I’d imagine.
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The dog symbolises faithfulness—doggedness.
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When I was in the US, I saw a stunning Jeff Koons show at Sonnabend. He’d made these fantastic, polychromed wooden dogs, some of them straight out of Disney movies like The Lady and the Tramp. And they were sitting there, arranged in front of the paintings of him and Cicciolina, with their tongues out, panting—a wonderful play off between fidelity and infidelity. There’s a similar aspect in my dogs. Smokers are brand loyal and the cigarette-packet dogs each are generally made of one brand only. That loyalty thing is played off against smoking as a vice.
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How did you pick the other objects that go with the dogs?
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They’re mostly kitsch, ticky-tack sort of stuff, and often related to death in some way. Perhaps they are some sort of grave decoration or have an air of tragedy or datedness about them. The praying hands. The sawn-off piece of antler is incredibly brutal. The cowboy boot in Mild (1993) relates to the Marlboro Man. It could refer to Boot Hill, the last resting place of the cowboy. And JPS (1993), with its golf ball, brings up the fresh air athleticism of golf, sports sponsorship even, although cigarette smoking is no good for your health.
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Are you going to continue to explore the theme of smoking?
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At the moment, I’m fascinated by the Marlboro campaign. It’s so big, long running, and complex. I’m doing a series of works relating that campaign to earthworks from the 1970s. It comes from my interest in anomalies along that regional/international divide. Earthworks were part of international modernism yet they could also be seen as the height of regionalism, in that they’re site-specific, made from materials found on site, and they’re about the myth of the region. You have to travel huge distances to see them because they’re in one place, sometimes for a limited time only, like a McJordan Burger. Artists like Heizer, Smithson, and De Maria fled the New York dealer gallery scene for the big western deserts, where the mythical Marlboro Men of old had gone to be beyond the law. I’m reinventing those earthworks as easel paintings, so they become part of the art market, which is just what those artists were trying to escape.
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Did they see themselves as cowboys?
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They certainly saw themselves as rebels, like a lot of artists do, and the authentic American rebel was the cowboy. Heizer and Smithson traded in the horse for the Caterpillar D8 and they were out there in the desert, alone, for months, bulldozing. And they dressed like cowboys. There are shots of Heizer in the desert doing Double Negative in full cowboy gear and the Saturday Evening Post published one of Smithson in a cowboy hat sitting on top of a non-site. Even Christo did it. He went to Rifle, Colorado, to hang Valley Curtain. Suddenly, he’s dressed as a cowboy too. There was also cowboy behaviour. I think of Heizer out on that dry lake bed doing donuts on a trail bike, which he called ‘drawing’.¹
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Is there still a place for the Marlboro Man?
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The Marlboro Man no longer holds sway as a hero and model for artistic behaviour. His kind of posturing is truly dated. He’s dying out, just like the smoker—entropy personified. But Marlboro Country will always have its followers—the myth is too enduring. ‘Back out on the mesa, it’s still dirt, dust, diesel, dynamite and a cold wind blowing.’
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[IMAGE: Philip Guston Painting, Smoking, Eating 1972]