Conversation with Ruth Marten
Published in Figure/Ground Magazine
Ruth Marten was interviewed by Suzanne Unrein. February 7, 2020
Born and living in New York City, Ruth Marten has worn several hats, in spite of the hair. From 1972 to 1980 she was an important figure in the tattoo underground and, as one of the few women practicing the craft, influenced people’s ideas about body decoration, championing what came to be called Neo-Tribalism. Working during the Disco and Punk eras, she also tattooed in the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris during the 10th Biennale de Paris.
Hired by Jean-Paul Goude for her first illustration for Esquire, she had a 30 year career illustrating for many magazines, music and book covers and is most associated with the “Year in Provence” books of Peter Mayle, designed for A. A. Knopf by Carol Devine Carson. There was a brief stint as a fashion illustrator for Bergdorf Goodman, Salvatore Ferragamo, Barney’s and Vogue Magazine. That love of the printed image informs her current work: changing through overdrawing and collage the configuration and content of 18th century copper plate engraving prints. Personal work, principally on paper, has been a constant while working in these other fields.
Sine 1989 Marten has expressed herself exclusively through drawings, paintings and sculptures. Exploring the phenomenon of hair for its sexual, cultural and purely textural content, she exhibited work based on this obsession at Littlejohn Contemporary (NY), Adam Baumgold (NY), in the “Pop Surrealism” show at the Aldrich Museum (CT), “Hair, Untangling a Social History” at the Tang Museum (NY) and at the Halsey Institute in 2009 with “Hair on Fire”. In 2003 she embarked upon her current interest in reworking the images and historical content of mostly 18th century prints from engravings, which have been exhibited at Isis Gallery (London 2008) and Van der Grinten Galerie (Köln 2013) and have been collected by the De Young Collection (SF), Charles Saatchi, Don Ed Hardy, and others. In 2018-2019, Marten had a retrospective of her work at the Max Ernst Museum in Bruhl, Germany. She also teaches Watercolor Technique at the School of Visual Arts.
You are a master draftsman. Did you do a lot of drawing as a kid?
I did start making art very early. My mother, who had incredible innate taste and sensibility, she encouraged it once she saw I could do certain things. She had an incredible eye for interior design. She took me to museums and galleries. She was a great dresser. She knew she had no reason to know these things, but she knew. She was intelligent but grew up extremely poor. She had no possibilities herself so I became a project and I was fine with it. And I suspect also it was a place I went to because I felt safe there. I got the feeling that this was my vocation. It must have been because I never really looked further to do anything else.
Were you good at other subjects?
Penmanship.
Where were you living? Where did you grow up?
I was born in Manhattan and then we made the classic move to Long Island. We moved to Forest Hills in the 60s and then I went to the High School of Art and Design. I went from a white, uptight Long Island high school to you know, gay kids, Chinese kids, rich kids, poor kids. A total fabulous mix. And it was the 60s, so high school was great. And then my parents divorced and my mother moved to Jamaica Estates which is where the Trumps lived actually. But my goal in life was to live in New York and that’s the great irony because look at it now. There’s no there, there.
Did you move to the city right out of school?
I went to school in Boston and then I moved back to NY to start my grown-up life. I had to make a living. I had zero idea of how I was going to do that. I thought in my head that if I became a tattooist, I could draw, right. It’s what I like. So I got a little kit from Huck Spaulding up in Poughkeepsie and I started tattooing the burgeoning punk scene and especially the gay scene, and also women who were independent of their earlier, more domestic lives and wanted to assert themselves. And at the same time I was doing illustration.
That must have been a crazy time.
Well New York in the 70s was pretty interesting. There was a lot of crime, drug stuff, but when you’re a kid in your 20s, nothing’s ever going to hurt you. You just sort of move through it like you own it.
So you got jobs illustrating and jobs as a tattooist at the same time?
Yeah, everything was cheap in those days. I had a loft on 16th Street and it was $200 a month. But, you know, it was $200 I had to come up with, that, and I had a kind of useless husband so he wasn’t making his share.
Was he an artist too?
He was a singer. He had a great voice, but there was something wrong with him. He thought he didn’t have to work as hard since I was working hard.
Do you have memories of specific tattoos that you created? Were they always collaborations or did they ever let you go wild?
Yeah they did. I wasn’t a very good technical tattooist because I didn’t train with anyone. I was just sort of winging it, which I don’t recommend. Well I wasn’t going to hang out with Spider Web and Big Joe and those people so, you know I did the best I could, but what I contributed to tattoo culture was to encourage people to think of tattooing as a verb not as a noun. In the sense that anything could be a tattoo and if anything can be a tattoo you mine art from other cultures. It’s everything we think of today, but in the 70s, people didn’t think in those terms. It was the kind of typical tattoo flash images that were on the walls of commercial parlors and they didn’t really extrapolate. Artists did and Ed Hardy on the west coast of course. That was a major accomplishment in terms of turning people’s ideas of tattooing around. We’re good friends now. So he in his way and me in my little way. We were artists first and tattoo artists afterwards.
Would you come across your tattoos later, on the street?
Oh yeah. I’m not going to name names.
Because there were famous people that you tattooed?
Yeah, yeah.
Were you simultaneously doing your own art at the time?
Yeah, I was doing that too. I was doing my first illustration for Esquire and the art director was Jean-Paul Goude. And then I was also figuring out what the hell my art was at the time. I was very interested in ceramics. I was drawing on ceramics.
Were you creating ceramics too?
Yeah, yeah. Well, those were my interests in school – ceramics and drawing. So eventually they got together. I made these slab drawing glaze pieces with very pop subject matter. Because they were clay and because the glazes were so weird, everything had a nice distortion to it. They were a little primitive, but they were also sophisticated. I enjoyed that. I remember going to Frumkin [Gallery] when it was uptown and showing my work, and they looked at me like I had three heads, walking around with my ceramic slabs. As you know, it’s taken a long time for the art world to review, revalue, work made out of clay.
And now it’s more popular than ever.
Well it is because it’s been held back for 50 years. I think Ken Price was very instrumental in separating the craft, the boogie man title of craft from art. I think the way he did that was by not glazing. By coming up with that surface he did, which I’m not crazy about, but I understand it. It reminds me of Italian handmade paper. But the forms that he made. People who don’t really know ceramics have no idea how insanely difficult and extraordinary those things are. Some of them have 10” walls and they build the kiln around the artwork. I was in love with a group called the Funk Artists. People like Ron Nagle and Ken Price. I’ve always liked the West Coast artists, even though I’m very Eurocentric, but I liked them because they were very pop culture and they have a sense of humor. I find that to be a real necessity.
Your work seems to have a nod to surrealism, but then they are also incredibly funny. Downright comedic.
Well I’m not a very comedic person but I take it out on my work. That’s how I entertain myself.
I outright laugh when I see some of your work. Do you, when you are making them?
Yes. If I don’t laugh, then it is probably not working.
“Canapés II”
I think about Max Ernst and to the darker places that his work goes. They’re wonderful but without your humor.
Well, Ernst was an incredible, conceptual artist. He had such a fecund imagination. He was an amazing man and he had a difficult life. He produced just a shitload of work. I don’t like all of it, but if he had only produced, “Une semaine de bonté,” those incredible collages, if he had only done that. That was just one of the things he did. Yeah. Those to me are so perfect. They’re steeped in psychological insight. They’re a product of the junk flea market material that was around when he was producing stuff because they were ahead of him. That was mid-19th century. And I love to go and find stuff too. I started working with the old prints from stuff I found at the flea market because I fell in love with the paper. It’s like skin. Just out of curiosity, I wondered what would happen if … and then I was off to the races.
When did you do your first piece?
2006.
What were you doing before that?
All those hair paintings. I did that for a long time. And then it got kind of popular so I didn’t want to do something that other people were also doing if I could avoid it. Also it had run its course. I actually spent about two years on this couch staring at the ceiling. I didn’t know what to do after the hair pieces. I was so invested in that. So the flea market saved me.
You just happened to be at a flea market and thought, hmm..
Well I saw these card tables covered with 18th century book illustrations, and the guy, Arby, who was the salesman, a real slob and you know, like a lot of these print dealers, they cut them out of the books, right? But the truth is, that nobody wants the books. Individual pages had more promise. It was a fluke, but then it appealed to my sense of the absurd. And also, to the way I was raised. My mother was, as I said, very encouraging, but she was also very proper. So a lot of this work is iconic, the way it sits on the page, and it purports to tell you how to live, what kind of furniture to live on, scientific inventions. It was a manual. It was an education for people who were first able to buy books. You know, which after the Royals, it was the merchant class. And then by the late 18th century they would produce smaller books for the common man. And then of course, the 19th century with the printing innovations and the burgeoning middle class, then magazines. It was lithography. I wasn’t interested in lithography, and also the paper was really bad. But the 18th century was perfect. The paper is exquisite and it had these funny tutorials on social life, which you know, have all been shot down. But I thought, well, I’ll be the one to shoot them down.
Do you look at these images and then something comes to you visually?
Yes. And sometimes I held on to something for years that finally was the right thing, right? But mostly, I would never go near something of extraordinary value, aesthetic value, and I couldn’t afford to go near anything of financial value, like an Audubon. They don’t need my two cents worth. But this other stuff can definitely use it. Like Chippendale for example. He was a very savvy businessman. He hired an army of etchers, engravers, which were often in the same house, to draw up his furniture ideas. Then he would bind them and send them to all the major cities in Europe and then to the colonies. So people would order Chippendale chairs and tables and what have you. Those were the first ones I did. The furniture is for you to put something on the table or in a chair. I’m actually doing something now that echos that. I just realized that as I told you.
Funny, I was just going to ask if you go back to certain themes.
Sometimes. The show I just did in Cologne was photo-oriented. I found antique photo postcards and I had them photographed at a high resolution and then printed archivally but made really large, really large for me, 30 x 22 inches. For me that’s like a billboard, they’re like posters. I had a show with those and I worked into those with gouache and sometimes watercolor. Those were a lot of fun. I’m also working on these that are 3 x 5 inches, for the Cologne Art Fair. I have to produce 20 of them.
Do you use a magnifying glass?
No. It’s stupid work, but I have a passion for stupid work.
I love the alligators. I work with them too. They mean so many things to me.
What do they mean to you?
Among other things, they symbolize for me the reptilian in other people and in myself. They’re also so funny to me, funny-looking.
Don’t you have one where it’s embracing a human? I have one of those too. Well, there are certainly a lot of alligators out there.
What does it mean to you?
Danger, I think. Fascinating because they’re so dangerous.
“4”
Did you see them when you were in Miami?
When I was three years old, we went down to Florida, and apparently we saw alligator wrestling. I’m sure it probably traumatized me. I never forgot about the alligators, they were my strange totem creature.
Is there an intention for you with your work in terms of subverting, or is it more fun and play for you?
I think subverting is very important. I’m a glass half empty kind of girl. I like when things are beautiful and I make things beautiful. But I would never be happy with just prettiness. There has to be dark side. And nowadays it’s so easy. The hard part is trying to find a bright side just so you can get through the day. I’ll show you something I’m working on for my next show, the “Sex and Death” show. That’s gouache on paper. The idea of the decomposition. Actually it was inspired by a piece I saw at the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum. There was a Korean artist who made a cadaver suit. It was all black and buttoned up, very chic, actually. It had diagonal buttons across the front with little covers. On the sides, it had these white mushrooms. I thought, that’s very interesting. So I did my own version of that.
“Sex and Death”
Do you know how it’s going to go before you start?
You have to allow yourself some leeway. I’m so much of a control freak. I have to keep allowing my inner voice to tell me to do this or that. Not try to be in the straitjacket.
You have this printed out and then you begin. So you could potentially screw up?
No, I would just paint another mushroom on top! Well, I’m not a process painter. So I wouldn’t be messing with the paper. It’s just a straight gouache job.
Now that you are starting this series, it seems absolutely perfect for you – “Sex and Death.” I’m surprised you haven’t done it before.
I’m surprised too. How much longer am I going to live, so I better get to it.
How did your Mom react to your more subversive work?
It wasn’t her cup of tea but she knew me well enough to know she wasn’t going to be able to talk me out of it. She opened my eyes to the world and I saw what I saw. I’m the art director, I’m not re-inventing the wheel. I like the collaboration part of it. I don’t have the kind of ego where it’s necessary to create this whole world out of whole cloth. I like working with ideas that have already come to be with centuries of life to them. You come to yourself if you stay alive long enough. You get to play them out.
What were you creating as a kid? Were you subversive then?
I wish I could say I was, but no. I liked pop culture, I liked comic books. I liked books, illustrations. Everything a kid in New York is exposed to. The absurdity, the low end, the high end. When I went to high school, there were so many kids from different walks of life. We would go visit each other’s houses on the weekends and some of these kids were on Park Avenue and some were in Coney Island and I enjoyed it at the time, but I don’t think I completely realized how phenomenal an education I was experiencing by being able to move in and out of all those different worlds. Different classes, different ways of living. That to me was always what New York would or should or could be about.
You mentioned that you think of the alligators as being a scary thing. Do you feel like your work is about making the scary visible?
Maybe. I’m someone who’s kind of frightened about a lot of things. I don’t know. At this point in my life, I guess I have some tried and true totems. I’m mostly scared of what’s going on politically in this dictatorship that’s kicking in, which is, you know, going to eclipse everything we know. That’s terrifying. So, I hole up in my room and try to stay calm, and I go swimming a lot. And I guess like a lot of us, I’m freaked out. So yeah it fits to have scary stuff arise at this time.
And the need as an artist to put it out there.
Yeah.
Do you think the subversion in your work has more to do with the darker aspects of the human psyche or your psyche?
Yeah, it’s just my fucked up head.
Do you reflect on them after?
No, I really don’t. I’m not intellectual at all.
When you first discovered the surrealists did you feel a sense of kinship with them?
Well especially the Weimar German artists. I just thought they were so hip. Then look at Man Ray, a New York artist. He did so many things. Other artists have run with just one of those things. He was the first to cover that sewing machine. I don’t know what the genesis of Christo’s involvement with that was but Man Ray did it once or twice and moved on to other things.
What are your dreams like?
I have a lot of dreams. They are important to me.
Do you write them down?
I used to. I did some Jungian dream therapy for a couple of years. I always had trouble finding a place I could afford. Even 30 years after getting this apartment, my dreams tend to have to do with real estate, places. Who’s there? What’s left behind? Do I belong there? That’s a recurring theme. Yeah, I like dreams. I like the randomness. It is not random when your unconscious picks certain things out in what happened that day. It’s very well chosen by our unconscious. But because your unconscious is so indecipherable to your conscious, it seems random and strange. I think I have a real love for serendipity and finding things you’re not looking for. Yeah, I think that’s kind of a drive of mine. And that’s why living in New York is a great place to gather material.
“Industry,” 2019, gouache, cut paper collage and watercolor on archival print, 27 x 20 inches
When did the art world start paying attention to your work?
Not until the Germans did when I was 65 years old. That’s when I had my first show there and they sold my show out. I remember sitting on the plane going over to Germany, to my opening at the Van der Grinten Galerie, and thinking, I blew it, it’s too late, I’m too old. Nothing is going to come out of this, what’s wrong with me. Boo hoo. Then I get there, change my clothes, I go to the opening and watch people buying five and six at a time. After spending half an hour looking at something. Yeah, it’s all about timing and luck and finding the love.
How did you end up in Germany to begin with?
I was in a drawing show at the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris in 2010 and I had way too much time to kill. My English dealer at the time, had gotten a booth and I realized I hadn’t been to Paris in a very long time so I went over there. I was bored out of my skull, walking around and taking cards when I liked the work. But of course no one wants the artist coming toward them. I always had this very old fashioned idea that the work would speak for itself. Right. So I found this gallery in Cologne and unbeknownst to me the two partners were splitting. Also unbeknownst to me they were crazy about history there because Cologne is a Roman town. Cologne means “colony” and it dates back to something like 300 AD. So it was a complete accident. Back in New York, I sent Xeroxes to them and it just so happened that because the partners were splitting, the partners I ended up with were looking for artists because they were opening a new gallery.
How great.
Yeah, when does that ever happen?
Do you ever do work that isn’t a collaboration?
I do watercolors. I would like to do something with writing. I always have something on the stove.
There’s so many things to do.
I know, that’s why I need to stay healthy.
Do you know and think about why you are creating?
No. I never thought about the why. I had problems in the past with the what. Definitely. I think, in a way, I coalesced quite late. Having been an illustrator, the what was always somebody else’s what. When I stopped illustrating it took me quite some time to learn how to move away from that. And maybe in a sense, I’m still doing that. But the story is so obscure and arcane that if what I’m doing is in fact an illustration, nobody knows the text so it doesn’t matter.