Tran: When you went to Syracuse University for your undergraduate degree, was Greenberg still pervasively taught there?  

Powhida: When I was at Syracuse, there was a professor named Steve Zaima who really was into Greenbergian theory. Of the things we read were "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," "Modernist Painting," "Towards a Newer Laocoon," and readings of Thierry de Duve, as well as criticism on Greenberg's writings, like TJ Clark.

Tran: Was there a strong emphasis on theory there or was it just his class?

Powhida: Well, I also studied with Sharon Gold, who is a feminist painter, and her class was called Decoding Images . I had on the one hand Steve emphasizing touch and the speed of paint and the quality of the surface, and then Sharon who refused to discuss the material or ideas of quality or touch. She just wants to decode what the images mean from any angle; during her theory class we would critique anything but without using codes like figure or abstract painting. It gave me a strong background in feminism and feminist critique and it seemed extremely important. I pretty much stopped painting after that. And the literature classes at Syracuse were all centered on Marxist deconstructivism, so there's a strong emphasis on semiotics and deconstructing text. It all just bled together in the way I looked at art and how I was interpreting what I read.

Tran: Were you conscious then that you wanted to write criticism and did it carry into Hunter?

Powhida: It's funny, my intellectual background is from Sharon's class, but where I got feedback on my writing was in Steve's class. I once reviewed a show of the graduate students, who were also in the course with me, which he loved. Half of the grad students were angry as hell--they were sort of circus painters painting seven-foot self-portraits--and the other half were making bizarre installations, and were like, "Yeah!   Finally! Somebody's talking about this!" After that, Steve urged me to continue studying with him and encouraged me to keep writing. At Hunter, there really is no writing and I didn't write other than maybe for Valerie Jaudon but it wasn't really criticism. It was more theoretical analysis and reporting back on what we were learning.

Tran: In your artist statement, you joke about exploiting your Hunter degree. Do you find where you've gone to school is important in today's art market?

Powhida: Well, recently it does. Jack Tilton did a show where he hand-picked some grad school students from Hunter, Columbia, and...

Tran:   Yale.

Powhida: Of course, Yale, and they all sold their work. By definition, it's still student work, but obviously it has cache because of Jules de Balincourt and Jeff Sonhouse, with whom I would always get into arguments in graduate school over what we can accomplish with paint.

Tran: Does this tie into something I've come across where you claim Jules is your enemy?

Powhida: Yes, in some metaphorical sense. What he's doing with painting--let's just put it this way: at the Whitney Biennial, the "Down By Law" exhibition in the Wrong Gallery, Jules' painting with the sausage-fingered politicians holding a press conference is next to a Mark Lombardi drawing about the exchange of finances between huge powerful figures in a format of incredible critique, whereas Jules is completely on the surface, and it seems to be a trend. I wrote a favorable review of Jules for the Rail , where I tried to engage his larger narrative in context, but in terms of achieving that art stardom, I wouldn't say he's my arch enemy but my competitor. He doesn't know it, and the art world doesn't know it, so it's nothing unless it becomes real. I originally labeled Jules an enemy in a drawing I did for the Aqua Art Fair, a Miami Enemies List.

Tran: How did you come to write for The Brooklyn Rail ?

Powhida: When I got out of Hunter, that's when I realized there's not much dialogue going on outside of school unless you are doing it yourself. So four years ago, I started writing for Billburg , and just for my own avocation, I walked around Williamsburg with a notepad and a tripod to see what all of these galleries were doing and while I was introducing myself to Richard Tempiro at Sideshow, Phong came in (Bui, publisher of Brooklyn Rail ). After he saw me talk to Richard, he was like, "YES!   I need somebody like you to write this piece!   Can you cover the Paris/Brooklyn Exchange?" I didn't know anything about the history of Williamsburg and you know I offended a lot of people in the beginning--they said, "This kid knows nothing, there isn't any mention of Annie Herron..."

Tran: So writing for the Rail has given you a voice to engage with the neighborhood and the art being made here.  

Powhida: It forced me to look at a lot of work. Being a critic in Williamsburg, you get behind the scene, you meet the artists a lot more often, and get feedback on the writing, whereas in Chelsea, I may never hear back on it. So it really was and is fascinating to write for the Rail, and through it I've developed very strong relationships with a lot of the galleries. And for the first two or three years, I never talked about my works--I didn't want to be like, "Hey look I just wrote a review of your show, can you look at my stuff!"

Tran: How long did it take for you to open up in that way with Shroeder Romero?

Powhida: It took me three and half years to let Lisa and Sarah Jo see my work. But over that course of time, they've become big supporters, which made it really easy to say, "Okay, it would be great to take this opportunity to show with them."

Tran: I saw your "Joint Manifesto" in the space between Plus Ultra and Shroeder Romero and I talked to a few people who were also there about it. It came up that your work is in line with a popular style now where it's common to critique the present state of the art market and it's young art stars. But because it's almost redundant at this point, your critique is not damaging to parties involved--it's allowed. How do you respond to that?

Powhida: In some ways, I absolutely agree. There's no way around the fact that it's become a parody of itself. There was a huge article in New York magazine this week about how the art market can't possibly bust. There's like eight theories on it and it goes into the fact that the collectors and dealers are going into the graduate schools and picking people up before they even graduate and then turning them into instant stars. And the question is what will happen to them in a few years. Who knows?  

My criticism is not very deep in some ways. More for me; I get to introduce the galleries into Chelsea. I get to make fun of the practice, certainly myself in the process--making fun of this instant art stardom. Really, what's most important for me is to say things that are out of place--out of this social hierarchy within the art world as I interject things where they don't "belong." It's not that outrageous, but it adds to this fictional persona that may or may not explode and flame out spectacularly. At the same time, if it engages people in a discussion about it and activates things, I am still very interested. Hans Haacke was phenomenal when he tracked the lineage of these paintings and critiqued mega-corporations. I am just doing it on a level suitable to where I am.  

Tran: What draws me towards your work is your use of humor, a human quality that in some ways allows you to plant your seeds.

Powhida: I hope so. I'm willing to risk making fun of myself or saying that everything that I do is complete garbage if I can at least say what else is bullshit. Someone wrote a criticism of the LA Art Fair on this blog called Pathetica, which I had a piece in, the letter to Dana Shutz that was just a lament of feminism. It said something like, "I'm gonna go home now and burn all of my books and buy a lot of canvas and some big stretchers and don't worry, what do I know, I'm just an idiot." This guy wrote, "This is the saddest piece I've seen in the entire LA Art Fair."

Tran: That's pretty powerful.

Powhida: I wrote him a polite response, and said, "If you don't like this I think you'll really hate these!" He was intrigued I think and he wrote back that he liked and appreciated the work that's less about the artworld and more about the process of making art, with all of my bizarre insecurities and the way I kind of freak out.

Tran: But you are genuinely a funny guy.

Powhida: It's kind of like shedding layers, and being around people, how comfortable you can be and--I mean it's an interesting question. It's not so much a secret anymore, but three years ago I wrote as Keane A. Pepper in Free Williamsburg, and that was some seriously funny shit. When people started to find out, they would say, "I knew it was you, you son of a bitch, I love it! I may not agree with you all the time, but reading this thing as great fiction is a lot of fun!" (Laughter ) And that voice is what I'm trying to get out more. It's about trying not to be so critical and censoring myself as much at the risk of being politically incorrect or saying things that are just absurd.

Tran: Have there been times where you've held back?

Powhida: Well, right before my first show at Dam Struhlager where I said to myself, "I don't think I can show this. It may be too offensive, and even against what I think is right. Maybe I should take this down." But I thought if I'm nervous about it, if I'm scared, then maybe someone else who doesn't know all the motives behind the making of it will have a stronger reaction than what I'm having. So I was willing to take that risk.

Tran: How did things turn out?

Powhida: It was good. It got my first NY Arts review. It sold one little thing, but I sent those drawings to Seattle for a juried group show and managed to sell them all during the opening. They got the humor and it struck a nerve with them. The drawings were kind of like psychosis and weird indecision, like, "I don't know what I'm doing, help, help!"

Tran: Was this a turning point for you?

Powhida: Actually, the shift that really turned it to this direction was in graduate school. My studio was divided right down the middle with literally a scrim. On one side of it, there were three wall painting installations dealing with narrative, sort of like personal but generic haunted house stories, but they were also about creating atmosphere and about paint. And then on the other side, I created a wall of letters, notes, sketches and doodles from my job, from seminar, from looking at art in Chelsea--I called it my Wall Of Shame, and I remember a critique with Juan Sanchez and some other students. And there was this kid, Tim Siber who was staring at the Wall Of Shame who finally says, "I hate this thing on the other side, this painting stuff. What's this?  Can you talk about this? This is not really art but I love it." Then Andrea Blum, who also taught there, came to my studio and said, "I know we are not studying together but if you ever want to talk about this, call me because I really see something in this that I can relate to."  

Tran: Did she become an important resource for you?

Powhida: I actually ended up studying with her for my thesis. And I just remembered asking her, "Andrea you told me that there was something that you can relate to. I don't know what it is, maybe you can explain it. This still feels contrived, how many people have already just tack stuff on the wall?" She just replied, "Sometimes I feel like I am in a bubble and I'm not really able to feel anything or touch the world, and when I see this work, I've met someone else who is in a bubble." Ultimately, for my thesis there were four walls of this stuff. In some ways it was a really bad show but there were some people at Hunter who loved it. They were like, "Thank God there's something here. I can sift through this; I can dig through it." I think you can trace what I am doing now back to this.

Tran: You draw and paint scraps of paper, notes and such using trompe-l'oeil, which makes sense for your work, because you are constantly pushing the envelope of what can be considered art and by painting these, from life or imagination, you blur the line some more while also giving it an art historical context. Do you find yourself using that technique a lot?

Powhida: Well...yeah...a lot. ( laughter ) It definitely elevates it but it can be seen so negatively. This stupid framing device gives it an authority, a voice it wouldn't have otherwise. And I guess that's my only defense for it. It always drives me to then make pictures that would otherwise not be looked at. Obviously, a long time ago, I decided that illusionism is not bad in the way Greenberg said, but that flatness is not the end of the world. And it's funny to play with that idea, you know, it's got that shallow sense of depth and it's just above the surface, so it's all still in there...He would kill me, like, "This is not art."   ( laughter)

Tran: By what I can make out on your website, your work is presented as a montage of articles painted or found, with associations to people you run into, text and things you come across, to criticism you've written, which seems somewhat fractured and disorganized.   Your writings, on the other hand, are very thoughtful and well articulated and follow a logical structure. Both are in the world of criticism but your presentation of them seems different. Can you talk about the relationship of the two?

Powhida: The writing for the Rail is where I am trying to articulate what I believe is important in art and what should be talked about and I go out of my way to try to find artists like Eric Heist, who's showing at Shroeder Romero, who is making fantastic art. So all the writing for that is laid out and thought out. I remember a teacher I used to work with at Bushwick High School Institute, who was a philosopher in Germany, he must've been quoting someone when he said, "There is no organized thought without writing." Making art is a lot more about taking risks and saying things that maybe I would not say publicly but it gives the work a pathos, and it's a lot more fun in the sense of play and letting associations go wild. In the end, I definitely need both.

Tran: What would you say about those who keep their art and criticism separate?

Powhida: James Kalm, who also writes for the Rail , came into my studio, and after looking around at everything he said, "I am amazed after looking at all of this stuff how close everything is in proximity in terms of the writing--your notes about shows, your notes about other artists, your drawings." He compared it to looking through a coral reef where it's like moving through this giant mass, as opposed to some other artist's studios where he'd find two paintings that they're working on and a little glass palette--everything is compartmentalized and ready to go into galleries. My work is about my life and they do bump and play off of each other and inform one other.

Tran: Can you talk about "Persona"?

Powhida: " Persona" was a show with a six-channel video where I played six aspects of myself divided up to see what would happen if all six of my personas were in the same room. So they bicker and argue and fragment. Like, there's a critic loosening his tie trying to tone things down and beg the others not to destroy his career. There's a non-verbal drunk guy who's flaring his head around and looking dazed, and one in drag, which is basically about my wife and I.

Tran: So in a sense, you performed different sides of your personality in their wholeness as six different characters?

Powhida: But it felt really real in some way; the performances were just how I am in certain situations. And that kind of gave me the liberty to mix roles--what would this video artist make if he was drawing pictures, what would this painter do, this diaristic writing all over paintings, just letting everything go--which I've already started to do. I think in a lot of ways it was a breakthrough in a sense that I could take my art in certain directions and if I would just follow it for a little while and not worry about trying to make things that look like art or what would be accepted as art. To just do these things and see where they go.  Explore it.  That show was so much about me it was disgusting.

Tran: How did people react?

Powhida: There was a sort of response to it that encouraged me to take certain aspects further. I admire those like Tim Hawkinson and Tom Friedman who will take on some Herculean task, which pointed me towards the drawing of Everyone I've Ever Met From Memory (that I can remember ) and the bizarre stories that I associate with them--I remember this kid from high school, he was a jock and an asshole and he screwed a girl in my basement, to friends that have passed away, to people I had met on the street--for some reason, they just stuck.

Tran: Another interesting element is its shape; it reminds me of Manhattan.

Powhida: Yeah, it's bizarre, it looks like a map when you are far away. After I was done with it, it occurred to me it's a map of one particular middle class existence and on the very edges are bump-ins with celebrities, like Willem Defoe.

Tran: So it spreads out from the closest relationships to more random and brief encounters?

Powhida: Yeah, well I started it in the middle with a particular person who I had met in college who was so beyond my experience--like a crazy monster of a person--and goes forward from there and back to my mom and dad, where the family starts branching out--all the babysitters and a whole string of people that I knew growing up.

Tran: How long did it take you to do that piece and when did you decide it was finished?

Powhida: Well, I started it in October or November of 2004 and then worked on it until the day of the show. I actually forgot my mom's boyfriend of almost ten years because I didn't know where to put him initially--should I put him chronologically or should I put him next to my mother because he's that important now or--and then I just forgot!

Tran: (Laughs )

Powhida: Because I think I was angry with the guy at the time. He was really hurt, so I drew him in at the opening and just tried to get out of the situation. The drawing had the quality where there were certain things that I had either forgotten or hadn't thought about. It was really exhausting, where I kept asking myself, "Who is this, and this and this? Why do I remember you? What did you say, what did you do?" So I guess the question is, "Is it over?" I don't know. If I should still draw and keep working on it, I'd like to attack it in five year chunks so there will remain that challenge to go back and sort through and organize life based on the people that I ran into kind of chronologically--but then the associations kick in and it becomes chains of people and events that pop through.

Tran: It's such a loaded piece; I can see you pushing it down numerous paths.

Powhida: I think it can also be just a blueprint of a drawing that I'll do eventually, where I will cast every one of those people as a pop culture figure, a character from a movie or a book or something that other people would be able to use as a filter, because right now those people are so specific to my personal experience, what do they have to offer anyone else?

Tran: So you think your audience will relate easier to popular icons or generic stock characters.

Powhida: Yeah, it'll give them more clues to who those people were and hopefully the audience will grab onto something where they can relate to specific characters. If I asked that question, "Who would play you in the movie of your life? Is it a specific actress that sort of looks like you, or is it somebody who has a similar personality, or was it a role they played, would you be very specific and pick a character?"

Tran: Your work's diaristic format makes me curious who in literature and the visual arts appeal to you and influence you to work in this way.

Powhida: When I was at Hunter, I remember being introduced to Guy Richards Smit's work--who shows at Roebling Hall--and the first time I met him personally was at a ridiculous SOHO loft party. When we get in there we find the owner has a day planner on his desk. Guy and I and this other dude we came with sit down and start filling it out with errands like: Must get coke! Must get strippers and then call mom. Get dry cleaning. Get drugs!--it was hilarious. (Laughs ) Then when I really got to see Guy's work, I saw he had created this persona of this stand up comedian, Jonathon Gross Marlamand who toured the art world in the US. Still no one will touch his work, in some ways because of this critique. He has since switched gears, and is doing this other persona, Maxi Guile, which means "really horny" in German, which he incorporates in his band--so he's been able to do all these sorts of things under the umbrella of being the artist.  Bjorn Melhus is another artist who plays all these characters in his videos that are just so bizarre and strange--I love those. I've written three or four reviews on his stuff.

Tran: He also shows at Roebling?

Powhida: Yes, and he also shows in Germany where he's a big star but hasn't yet broken through here. The tone of his work often shifts from serious to dark comedy; bizarre to just like over the top. And then there are Brooklyn drawers like Jim Torok, who shows at Periogi, who had a show where there were all of these diaristic drawings with this kind of cartoon stand-in where it goes from anywhere from internal pathos--thinking back about his father, becoming an artist, to these kinds of rants against the art world, like, "Hey asshole! Thanks for your money, I'm going to jump into my SUV and drive up to my house in the country and burn shit."  

(Laughter. )

In literature, the idea of intervening in the narrative, like in Donald Barthelme's book, Sixty Stories , is what inspires me. I am getting a lot of ideas from Post-Modern fiction, too. I love The Age of Wire and String , by Ben Marcus. I still see tons of art being made that is just lifted right from that book. When I was out in Syracuse, I also studied Hypertext with this writer, Jeff Parker, who's been very important for me, in fact I've collaborated with him on a project and the drawings will be shown in Seattle.

Tran: Tell us about your collaboration.

Powhida: Well, he had called me one day and asked if I would illustrate his new story, which I wasn't interested in. What I was interested in doing instead was to draw some documents based on what I've read but with me as me as narrator, who he'd have to trust to make up events and things that may or may not be in the story but in keeping with it--and that led to these 11 drawings. The narrator at one point has to re-apply for the position of boyfriend. His girlfriend fires him at this surreal moment and he has to stand in line with all of his tools, re-applying for this position and so I created his nemesis also in line, which is his best friend--it's so ridiculous!

Tran: How did Jeff Parker like the addition?

Powhida: Parker loved it. He said he would have messed it up if he had to create a nemesis--developing the history, naming him and such.

Tran: Often in your work, you present people as portraits or caricatures.   

Powhida: Yeah, it's sort of like a bad habit, where it's like I better get rid of it or deal with it. Or use it. Keep drawing stupid faces everywhere all the time and try to connect to other things I want to talk about.

Tran: What's interesting is, it's a constant reminder of being disconnected from the body.

Powhida: That's fascinating--yeah, just the memory of the face there. It could be as something as bizarre as my mom, who is an artist as well--who I am so proud of, she just had a piece in The International Print Center of New York--but way before then, she used to draw people's faces on napkins at restaurants and scare them away. And she would draw them with ballpoint pen and white-out.  

Tran: ( Laughter )  

Powhida: My grandmother had been an artist too but it wasn't socially acceptable to do that in front of the kids so she kept it hidden away.

Tran: Have you ever gotten a chance to see her work?

Powhida: I saw some of it. I just knew she loved Picasso. Before she passed away a couple of years ago, she gave me her old Picasso book, and said, "I love this!" Meanwhile, it's this tattered old book that she's clung onto and it was obviously looked at so much--all this modernist sculpture. I finally understood what she was passionate for and what she was making.

Tran: Let's talk about your upcoming show "Paper Beings" this April in Seattle at Platform Gallery. I read your press release for it on your website, and what's interesting, the press release itself seems like a piece of art. Do you see it as so?

Powhida: It's definitely an extension of the show, and therefore might qualify as a piece of art. It's not going to qualify as a piece of art to a collector but I don't care. But in terms of giving the show a context, of framing everything, speaking where I am not supposed to speak, not in the kind of generic gallery language that's safe and articulates underlying motives for people. I did another similar thing at the Artist File--Artist's Space hosts and Artists File Online where you can put your statement online. I give them a list of different possibilities and it goes something like:

Dear interested party, You are a blue chip dealer and you may be looking for new meat for your gallery. Give me the show. Give me $100,000 and lights out!--It's over!

And then it comes down in the ranks; it says:

You are an unknown like me. Put me in the show. We'll make a name for ourselves and we'll crash the whole world!

And then at the end, it's like:

This is a piece of art in itself. Print it out, put it in a frame, put it in your show.

The press release is just part of the project that is a process that I am definitely tied to, but I'm not the artist or author. I'm the narrator. Let's see if I can get away with that.

Tran: Along with your collaboration with Jeff, what else can people expect?

Powhida: It's going to be an extension of the Everyone show at Dam Stuhltrager where I really start to develop this fictional narrator, this artist who is William Powhida, who is now divorced, who is getting incredibly rich, has Vogue photo shoots, parties all night, has lunch with collectors, who is now done with Zack Feur and is totally done with Leo Koenig and is just climbing through this mess. It continues this career projectory, this alternate reality that's something I'd never want.  

It also has a couple of new versions of Artforum's Top Ten, which is pretty brutal and there's the first large scale figurative--if you'd even call it--painting that I've done in a long time. It's about the actual house where I lived with Jeff Parker for the summer and all the weird motherfuckers that we knew who end up in the stories one way or the other. It bridges the really personal work that I have in my own narrative, my relationship with this writer, and then these fictional drawings that are--if you look at the show carefully, they're in there, they are over here, they're in my drawing Everyone I've Ever Met , and it actually sets a scene for the larger drawing, but it's rendered with notes. There's little notes hanging off everything. I needed to color it a bit to bring it to life with gouache-- sort of reminds me of a coloring book activity--it's not about paint at all.

Tran: I noticed you don't use color much. Where do you stand with Color Theory?

Powhida: I use it only in the incidental, when needing the ephemeral. Like, this needs a blue line; this needs some colored tape. It's not like, "I love yellow, this red is my soul..." Robert Morris had this great interview with the curators for Lyon, France, where he just tears apart Color Theory as metaphysical nonsense. I though it was pretty amazing. I love color in some ways but I can't ask it to do things that are culturally specific.  

I used to study with this guy Heng-gil Han who runs the Jamaica Center for the Arts and Learning and we had a long talk about his mission out there and he said, "I used to see art as beauty and art as aesthetics, and it followed all of these rules and I was really engaged by it, but then I had to make a shift and asked is art communication? What form can it take to communicate the idea?" That seems to be the most important thing, and that's where I fall right now in the end of aesthetics and language.  

Tran: Have you thought about what you are going to do for your Shroeder Romero show in the fall?

Powhida: Well, I'd like to redo the critical, artistic confessional booth in the gallery, similar to the one I did for Parker's Box in 2004, and do it two days a week for the duration of the show. I'm also trying to organize a lot of the bloggers to see if they'd be interested in signing on to blanket Chelsea for a month and use the gallery as a site to post to the public or organize these art tours out of the space with these bloggers leading them with these very serious defined perspectives of what is good, what is important, what is meaningless, and maybe make an attempt to cover every single show in Chelsea in the given month when the show is up. Those will certainly be one or two of the projects going on--I'm sure there will be drawings and paintings but I still have to work out how they will relate. It's probably going to lean more towards performance and these social activities.

Tran: I see it as an important transgression for you.

Powhida: I would love to use the gallery as a home base and hopefully refine, develop, and toy with the different identities that emerge from say the Seattle show. Which I feel is the most important thing. So that's where I am kind of at.