Paul Burn Loves Pretty Shit: Truth and Trash Talking with Berlin's Favorite Folk Artist

I first met Paul Burn, Berlin-based expat, abstract sculptor extraordinaire, and freelance art fabricator, at an art performance put on by Schinkel Pavillon in my first week of moving to Berlin. One of my very first American friends, also originally based in New York City, Paul introduced me to much of Berlin's art scene due to his work in art handling at some of the top art institutes in the city, however, he himself is a self-identified folk artist. Using a myriad of found objects as materials, and ranging in mediums from sculpture to painting to installation, Burn brings a raw, non-pretentious energy to the contemporary art world. Many of his paintings, made with over one hundred layers of acrylic paint and manipulated by hand to create apocalyptic topographical maps, take several years to create. His sculptures, made of plastics and resins and wood, show his immense talent for realistic and abstract representation - but as inherently "folky" works, draw in the essence of truth, autonomy, and natural processes such as decay. Burn releases the form from the materiality, birthing life from inanimate things. But above all, Paul Burns loves pretty shit: he wants to see and love his work for its pleasing, compelling, and aesthetic qualities, removed from its conceptual foundations. A refreshing and lovely presence in the contemporary art scene, I was delighted to sit down with Paul and ask about his work, Berlin, New York, Schinkel Pavilion, grad school, and of course the latest gossip.

"Avalanche" by Paul Burn

GM: We met first at Flo Holzinger’s performance with Schinkel Pavillon at the Olympic Stadium. I saw you later at Schinkel, so I was first interested to know what your role is there.

PB: Clarifying, this is the Olympic Stadium in Berlin for those who don’t know, where Jesse Owens in 1936 won five gold medals. Hitler refused to shake his hand, he put the line to Hitler’s racist rhetoric. This is a Nazi stadium but it still stands to this day. That performance directly references that time and that incident, and how can it not? It’s forever going to be inextricably married. I was doing crowd control that night. I was happy to do it. As I was walking, I was saying, “Can you please sit down?” I improvised, I looked at you, and you are impeccably dressed as ever, and I said, “Oh, amazing outfit!” I continued on my spiel. Two or three days later you knocked at the back door [of Schinkel Pavillon] and we were putting up the next exhibition. The building is a Soviet building where people would have tea and cake. I was in the former kitchen area. It was a DDR building that was right next to the symphony - so they would go to the symphony, and afterwards they would go and smoke cigars and talk about business deals. Now it’s a Kunstverein, a contemporary art center. I help fabricate art for the artists’ shows, I put up art for the exhibitions, I’m basically an art handler. It sounds terrible to my mom. It’s the only job I have in Berlin in addition to occasionally teaching. You’re at the back door, and I said, “Oh! You’re obviously young and poor. You want to see the show? Seven bucks is a lot. I’m gonna let you in for free.” And then I told you about how to get into museums for free forever, and I’m not going to mention what that is. But you and I both know what that secret ticket is.

GM: We both know.

PB: The thing about contemporary art is that every artist's process is slightly different, but I am a bit of a master fabricator. I have worked for famous artists like Jeff Koons, and a lot of artists in New York City. I have a lot of experience working for other people. In Berlin, the job that uses those facilities the best for me is working in a museum. I have worked at other museums, but at this point, Schinkel is the only one I’ve ever kept.

GM: When you say “art fabricator,” do you mean “art handler?”

PB: No. As far as art fabrication, someone comes to you and says, “I want this to levitate in the air and I want it to be made out of concrete. Can you figure out a way to do it?” And that sounds crazy, but that is something that had to happen once. I’ve worked at an art conservation studio so I’m aware of what materials are going to be structural, what materials are going to not yellow or age or get brittle, I know how to fabricate molds, how to weld, and a lot of woodworking stuff. Being an artist requires a lot of knowledge, and I’m still learning. Right now I’m learning about ceramics, which I hate because they break so easily.

"Chew" by Paul Burn

GM: Let’s talk about your work. The thickness of your topography paintings are striking in their heaviness and tactility. It seems as though, in this series, your work as an artist and a painter and as a sculptor become heavily intertwined. Can you talk about your interest in multidisciplinarity?

PB: I look around and I’m frustrated that I haven’t really merged them all. There’s these cave-like structures I made that kind of get close to merging together. I’d like to get the topographical paintings on that level. When an abstract expressionist artist is trying to paint their soul, we think of Pollock, Lee Krasner. You think of this animalistic thing, and I think that these structures that I’m making with all the holes in it get pretty close - that is the essence of what I’m doing. They’re decayed, eroded, melting, there’s this sense of entropy to it. I’m really obsessed with cave dwelling like the ones in Cappadocia, Turkey. They are several thousand years old. It resonates with me. That is the formal throughline. If we look at this figure that’s sitting on the table, he’s covered with these several hundred layers of paint that I scraped down. When I made him, I realized that he is essentially the logo for the POW banner in the United States. There’s this propaganda campaign in the U.S. that is a political organization that has skewed to the far right since its inception. I grew up seeing it everywhere. These American iconographic images - they’re in my DNA. When I go to free-form draw something now, I can’t get them out of me. I worked as a prototype sculptor for Teletubbies, Pikachu, the handbag of Barbie, G.I. Joe stuff. I learned to make these idealized visions of hyper-capitalism.

GM: Going back to the topography paintings, though, I worked at a gallery that represented this abstract artist from LA. He used a very similar approach to what I often call “representative abstraction:” he painted topographical, sight specific aerial landscapes that were essentially forms and color. I see many similarities in your work. How do you conceptually go about representing something from reality through abstraction?

Topographical Painting, "Continental Plate" by Paul Burn

PB: These topographical paintings are made in an intuitive way. As far as making an object that is zinging or dazzling my eyes, that’s a little more what I care about. I don’t care so much about the conceptual underpinnings anymore. As far as your statement about representation, that is something that used to really trip my mind. It’s called tomology. Homology is when the forces of physical nature are the same on a micro scale and on a macro scale. It’s basically how the human body is replicated. The patterns of erosion on a micro scale are the same as they are on a macro scale. They recur again and again. I found that really beautiful. If we look at these paintings, the marks on them are not arbitrary. They are the result of a layer being carved. The general public’s conception of an abstract painting is “It’s just abstract smears. It’s just random.” But there’s nothing about these that are random. You can see there’s a reason why this line was created because it’s physically been carved into that space. And yet, there’s this all-over and at-once-ness gestalt to them. There’s this sense that what you’re looking at is true. It’s representing the result of an action which is this erosion. There is also a sense of accuracy to it. The whole art speak thing makes my skin crawl.

GM: Sorry.

PB: I need it in order to procure a gallery or to sell paintings, but for the most part, I care about making pretty shit.

GM: That’s valid.

PB: Well, when I went to grad school, it wasn’t. I went to this highly conceptual art program where I got destroyed in critiques. It took me a long time to recover from that. I still have nightmares about the critiques. We had to dance around the fact that we were making beautiful commodities. But I am inherently a folk artist. And the art that most resonates with me is folk art. In New York, I would not go look at contemporary artists. I’d go find the folk art ones - the woven structures of Indonesia. I know a lot about contemporary art, but the stuff that I care about most is art that is made intuitively. And that used to be a dirty thing to say. It’s a combination of the university system trying to legitimize itself, it’s these horribly written artist statements to grease the wheels for collectors and buyers of art. They try to teach people in grad school how to “do” art speak.

GM: I feel that there is a push to legitimize folk art in the study of modern art now, though.

PB: If you saw the new [folk art] hang at MOMA in New York City, it’s a correction, you know? I am so cynical about it because I see how the market follows it. I predicted a boom for Native American art, and sure enough, Sotheby’s had this auction. I’m glad for it yet I still see it as collectors creating value out of thin air. Also, I think universities are doing their job of legitimizing all art as relative in terms of value. People got tired of looking at boring conceptual art.

Sculpture by Paul Burn

GM: You see a lot of pretentiousness in the art world in New York - it comes out of an ego thing. Here in Berlin, there’s less of that.

PB: Let’s talk about Berlin. Berlin has a lot of great museums, New York has money. Banking is in New York, the fashion media empire is there, so the amount of intellectual power in New York is immense. So if those people have the money to sway the art market, they will, and they can and they do. Christie’s and Sotheby’s are guilty of collusion - there’s a case where they ridiculously inflated the value of an artist and admitted to it. Berlin doesn’t have that market, so Berlin doesn’t have that money. I sell paintings out of my studio to pharmacists, to computer people, to middle class regular people. In New York that didn’t happen, because people sniffed me out. “Does he have a pedigree? Where did he go to school? Is this going to be a safe investment?” If you go to the openings in Berlin, it’s all artists. For the most part, all of the galleries here who survive truck up their wares and they ship them to all the art fairs. Javier Peres did thirteen last year. Esther Schipper does ten to twelve per year. There’s about fifteen galleries that are always at Art Basel. I was walking around and was like, “Wow, there’s so many galleries from Berlin here!” Tanya Leighton, Neugerriemschneider, they are beholden to going to the fairs. But Germany has a love of culture that the United States doesn’t have. Every small city and small town has a Kunstverein, a small regional museum, it’s a value in the culture. Because it’s a value here, people show an interest in the work that I do. As far as a city where there’s a “scene,” I think that you came to the epicenter of coolness. Schinkel Pavillon at any opening is going to have the most fashionable, well-dressed, cool young kids there. It’s the hip gallery. And it's a stereotype of itself.

GM: Speaking of Schinkel, I met Anna Uddenberg today.

PB: Eight years ago, she wanted to get me to help her with some casting. I gave her my rate, and she was like, “I can’t afford that.” And it was under twenty an hour. She’s doing fine now, though. Sculpture was so labor intensive then, but at that last show at Schinkel Pavillon, that was all 3D printed. The game has changed in her work. It’s a weird thing, though people don’t lord it over you if they’re an A-list artist. They’re super humble. I like Anna. The second time I met her was at the opening of the Giger show at Schinkel, and she’s dressed like an Indiana truck driver, she’s really chill. I explained to her how the work was made, and she said, “Oh, I’m also a sculptor.” And I said, “What’s your name, would I know your work?” And she said “Anna Uddenberg.” And I was like, “No shit!”

GM: Let’s go back to your sculptures. What strikes me about them is the range in size and style. From your tiny, rough-around-the-edges, abstract bottle cap sculptures to the chic, almost monstrous “Long Legged Jetset Lady,” it seems like you do it all. What is the value in experimenting with different sizes, mediums, and ways of creation?

"Long Legged Jetset Lady" by Paul Burn

PB: I’m a fan of what I call the “seed” of art. My favorite works tend to be by an artists’ first inklings when they’re waking up from the dream and they start to stumble into their art. That early stuff is incredible. Maybe because you can also see how it becomes formulaic later on. My ambition is big. I once made something called the “Ice Cave.” Nine people could sleep in it - it was this ice mountain thing which had cast bodies laying in the snow which had “died” in a plane crash in the Rocky Mountains, there were these baboons in snow jackets. This was over twenty years ago, but it’s New York, no one could keep it, so it ended up getting trashed. That to me is my greatest work and the biggest work I’ve made. My ambition is to make something that big again. Everything else I feel like are models with the idea that it could get made on a bigger scale. I look to these folk artists in the deep South, or the Southwest of the United States, or in rural France, who have spent their life slapping concrete in bottles to make this Gesamtkunstwerk, this master work. It’s all a matter of committing to that space. Every day I want to be making that big bang, but what can I finish today, so I still have the idea of art in a smaller object. To make sculpture is to eat volume, and to eat your storage space. In the artists of my generation, there’s a lot of ambition that would have gone into a sculpture that gets flattened into a painting because it's a commodity and easy to store. Also, we can all agree on what an object looks like, but with a sprawling installation, you’re eating up a piece of real estate. What’s the sweet spot? How are we supposed to experience it? Whereas with a pretty painting, we can all agree that that’s the artwork.

GM: There’s an interesting tension in your sculptures: they remind me of the process of Dada-ist automatism in that they are slightly whimsical, nonsensical, clearly intuitive, and almost spontaneous. But in sculpture, I feel it is harder to mimic this process. Sculpture has to be more intentional, more highly engineered, more scientific than painting - it must hold its weight, deal with various materialities and elements, such as being fired in a kiln. Do you see your sculptures as spontaneously produced? Or do you find them highly engineered with the appearance of abstraction in their final products?

PB: I want them to feel like they’re birthed. I don’t want to see hardware, or nuts and bolts. There is a sense of skin or polish to them, so I think of them as bodies. There’s a skeleton, muscles, bones. I can’t get away from the figure so even when I try to make something that’s purely abstract, it still looks like a skull. I want to experiment with it to see what it wants to do. I look at materials that I find and I think “I know what this could do.”

"Our Pet" by Paul Burn

GM: That’s interesting because with automatism, it’s all about the experience of the artist and what the process of creation does to them physically. It’s about the body. This seems different. This seems like you are, in some ways, disconnected, and instead the conduit to release the form from the materiality. Does that make sense?

PB: Yes. Brilliant! I don’t like a right corner - I don’t like straight lines. It’s something I abhor, so even my rectangular paintings are not completely straight. There’s an eroded edge. It goes back to the concept of truth, the force of nature that compelled it to get into that shape. Certain patterns are really compelling because there’s a rhythm to them. In African textiles or Aboriginal paintings, or in Papua New Guinea art, there is this rhythm that the artists have. There’s truth and cohesion that’s really gratifying to look at. And the market agrees. I want to make art that does not require a pedigree, does not require a different language or culture to understand it, I want it to be something that people look at and find it compelling and pleasing. I don’t want to look at art that requires a pedigree. I prefer art that is dazzling in its own right, so if it was dug up two thousand years from now, people would be like, “Wow!”

GM: My last question is if you have any pieces of Berlin art world gossip that you can share with me?

PB: There was a famous museum director here who was pocketing all the entrance fee money from the front desk and spending it on their dry cleaning, their taxis, their food. The museum was a nonprofit, and she gets a whopping salary. Over the last year they’ve been auditing her, and she went to LA with a friend of mine and they said, “We’d like you to come and show up to meet,” because they need all the people on the board to show up to meet with the Berlin Senate. And [the museum director] said “I don’t have to show up to that, do I? Legally?” And they said, “Listen, we’re trying to keep you out of jail.” That’s what I was hearing from the Assistant Director. There’s so much more that I could say about this person. My “gossip” is old gossip - it’s just trash talking. Like, Sterling Ruby and his wife got divorced because she was off her meds and really violent, and self-medicating, and he said to her best friend, “What do I do?” And those two ended up taking care of Sterling’s kids. He was hit on by people like Winona Ryder, he could have fucked half of Hollywood but he’s really loyal to his friends and uncorrupted despite showing at Gagosian. He’s the anomaly. The dot paintings that Damien Hirst seems to be making, he has thirty studio assistants that do it and he comes in and “finishes” them like Rembrandt: Rembrandt would do the flourish on the helmet. Elliot Humley did the same thing.

GM: I had an art history professor who was one of Roy Lichtenstein’s assistants. He fully painted one of Lichtenstein’s most famous pieces.

PB: Oh, I have gossip. There’s this artist that pretends she’s making these paintings. Her name is Britta Thie, she’s a former model. She says she’s making these, but in an interview, someone asked her if the paintings were oil or acrylic and she had to dodge the question. They’re made in China by slaves - there’s a factory called Royal Art Academy. For a thousand bucks you can have it made, including materials and shipping. The actual person making it is paid nothing. It’s the fact that she’s pretending it's hers - you would need several lifetimes to paint them all, and you can see they’re not done by a person who loves painting, or by one single hand.

Sculpture by Paul Burn