with Joe Brommel, October 2019, for our 2019 Haunted Mill
I usually send along some brief questions before these interviews, and you have my favorite response I've ever received. To the question of what you’ll leave behind in Wassaic, you said, “hopefully will be able to leave behind some hog heads, they won’t all fit in my car.” So tell me about the hog heads.
It first started when my dad said he wanted a hog head for his cabin. That’s the original one right there. And then — I can't put my finger on how this came about — I had this click in my mind that it'd be kind of funny to do a project about Josef Albers using hog heads and animal heads. Because Josef Albers is Color Theory 101 stuff, and I’d always be bored to death by that: Oh my god, why does it matter what shade of orange is next to this other shade of orange? Who cares?
So wouldn't it be funny to make a joke on that? What if you were hunting for the interactions of colors through ridiculous fake taxidermy?
Can you say more about that? Because there's a joking project here, but also a semi-serious one in that you’re sort of skewering the importance of color theory.
I don’t think they’re skewering it, they're more giving me a vessel to be able to explore it and be serious about it without dread. I've been able to reprocess a lot of color theory and color interaction through doing this project that I wouldn't have otherwise. So it's more of a mechanism for me to allow myself to do it.
And in my practice, typically I like to find a stupid joke and take it to an extreme. Before doing these hog heads, I was working with bananas and making floppy bananas firm again. That was my joke that I've been working on for a few years.
Tell me more.
It’s one of the only good ideas I've had. I've been trying to move away from it. At the time I was trying to make raisins plump again.
Did it work?
No, I mean, I wasn't actually trying to make raisins plump again. I was making work about failure at the attempt of making raisins plump again. I was wondering what else I could do, and my girlfriend at the time was like, “Why don't you just fill bananas with cream?” And then our dear leader got elected saying, “Make America great again.” I was like, Well, I'm going to make bananas firm again.
[Laughs.] What led you to want humor to be the basis of your practice?
I guess the first step was my first successful sculpture. It was in undergrad and we had a grant program where you could get funding to make a big sculpture on campus for the art festival. Me and my girlfriend at the time did a sculpture that was a joke on the school's motto: “Truth even unto its innermost parts.” We made this giant clam with soft outer shells and a hard interior which looked like a giant vagina. It would fail and the hard inside would fall out and reveal the innermost parts. That was the catalyst for the jokes about everything else.
How does failure fit into the equation? It’s the flip side of the coin of humor, maybe?
I feel like it’s the source of humor.
Say more.
Maybe not so much in this particular project, but in a lot of the other work the failure’s trying to undo an un-undoable thing. You can remelt and refreeze an ice cube to infinity, but you can never unpeel a banana.
We've talked about the color theory behind the pieces, but how do you think of this as an installation, as a full trophy room?
I was looking at pictures of trophy rooms and how a lot of the time it’s just awkwardly stacked, ridiculous heads that are pretty gaudy and weird. That’s a generalization, of course. Maybe there's some hunters with some really great ki who could throw together a really satisfying trophy room.
So [the installation is] thinking about that, although I'm not sure if I have enough to really achieve that level of absurdity. I made a few of these objects before this show, but as individual objects they never quite did it. That was one of the guiding principles in arranging this room: that these objects needed to exist in an installation and not solo. Like the pink, orange, green head is not nearly as good without the two shades of blue behind it. The [combination of] colors playing off the wall, other objects, and lighting is the only way to make these objects successful.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
I don’t want to push this question too far, but is there a connecting thread between the way you think of the aesthetics of trophy rooms and the MAGA rhetoric we were talking about earlier? They seem like similarly masculine modes of communication or projection.
You saying that is the first time I've connected [the trophy room] in my head to the bananas. But with the bananas, it was 100% a metaphor for the failures of machismo. I'm gonna act like a fool and be an asshole because I'm so concerned about my banana being floppy.
Maybe this is like a bad joke becoming funny because you say it over and over again. “Josef Albers trophy room” is a little bit funny if it exists as one of these objects, but seeing it over and over again and making a whole room out of it makes it that much funnier.
Maybe this is an obvious question, but how did you choose the animals that you decided to put in the trophy room? Because some of these are not traditionally trophy animals. My conception of a trophy room is boars, bucks, and maybe a bear — but not walruses.
I’ve been avoiding deer because I didn't want to make antlers. [Laughs.] The other things — like you said: hogs, bears are standard. But the goats came because I was thinking about goats as a Satanic symbol, and with the walruses I was thinking about the movie Tusk. Have you seen it?
I have not.
It’s kind of a knockoff of Human Centipede, where an evil doctor in a mansion captures a reporter and for his sexual fetish transforms him through surgery into a walrus.
[Laughs.] I love it.
I haven’t seen the movie either, but I just saw the trailer and the posters. I think that was enough, I didn't have to see any more.
So I’ve been facing one side of the room, but behind me are these more abstract versions of the work. Can you tell me about these pieces and how you see them as playing into the broader trophy room?
It’s another Albers reference. He had a series called Homage to a Square. And I thought it’d be fun to make an homage to square animals. For some of these it's just painting on little pig snouts and then I will maybe do some minimal sculpture to put on some tusks or a nose or a rhino horn.
What do you think is the next step? Will you continue thinking about Interaction of Color as a topic of your work in the future? Or has this exhausted that for you?
In the short term, I think I can pack this away and laugh about it. But in the long term, I'd like to be able to redo this again. Crank it up ten more levels. Furniture, bigger space, more animals. I think there's potential for a lot more with this. I think it hasn't reached peak saturation yet.
Paul Belenky was born in 1991 in Boston, Massachusetts. Paul graduated from Brandeis University in 2014 with dual bachelors degrees in biology and studio art. He completed his MFA at MassArt in 2017 and spent the next two years teaching visual art in elementary school. Paul lives life in the pursuit of a state of a specific kind of “trolling” surreality because to him, absurdity and play often approach the truth more closely than reality. Paul works in installation, drawing, and sculpture, and aspires to make work that draws both smiles and grimaces.
2019 Haunted Mill
2021 Haunted Mill
2022 Haunted Mill
