Contributed by Nancy Friedland / I don’t remember exactly when I first came across the work of Aaron Michael Skolnick, but I do remember the feeling. Confronted by landscapes so filled with love and loss, I wondered how a painting of light in a forest could express so much. When the gorgeous images from his most recent project – face mash-ups of Aaron and famous, sometimes funny, often tragic characters – started to pop up in my feed, I needed to know more. I searched to see what was out there about Aaron’s show “The Entertainer,” currently up at MARCH Gallery in the East Village, and found nothing to satisfy my curiosity. As I began to dig into the work myself, I quickly realized that it had tentacles that wrapped around every aspect of the artist’s life. There were the paintings, yes, beautifully wrought, deftly painted, of course, but there was also an installation, photography, and performance. The work was so layered and complex that I felt the need to reach out directly to Aaron to ask him what it was all about. Last week, I picked up the phone and tried to uncoil some of those tentacles and make sense of a complex, brave, and very funny new body of work.
Nancy Friedland: Aaron, I feel like I could spend the rest of my life researching your work and not get to the bottom of it. That’s meant as a compliment, but I also want to say that it feels overwhelming. The roads that I’ve gone down to try and wrap my arms around the work … to be honest, it makes me a bit uncomfortable. Which I guess is a good place to start.
Aaron Michael Skolnick: Yeah, I mean part of the body of work is definitely about sharing my uncomfortability with the world, pushing that, not with malice, but presenting things that I find uncomfortable.
NF: With the idea of discomfort in mind and in preparation for our talk, I spent a bit of time looking at the work of Andy Kaufman. Intrinsic to his work was his ability to destabilize his audience, to not let them feel what comes naturally: sympathy, anger, laughter. He was intense in his effort to entertain. The title of your show is “The Entertainer.” Let me ask you, who is the entertainer in your work?
AMS: The entertainer is me, I guess. There’s a great clip of Jerry Lewis being interviewed and he’s asked, what’s it like to be up on the stage performing? And Jerry says, no that’s who I am. Being in this seat talking to you – this is the performance. I relate to that. This body of work is set up in multiple chapters: I want to introduce myself and the way my mind works. I want to show the audience how my mind is structured and how it maps out information. And so “The Entertainer” is the way for me to be the focus, to display that shape-shifting quality that I’ve had since I was a little kid doing imitations. The entertainer is me.
NF: There’s also a painting in the show that is called The Entertainer, but it’s probably one of the least “entertaining” pieces, which is to say, it’s deep and soulful, beautiful, and also heartbreaking. Is the title sort of meant to undermine that idea? Subvert it? Flip it on its head?
AMS: There is something heartbreaking or sad about that painting. Most people that entertain do it for a reason. There is something about presenting myself in that manner that reminded me of that Warhol quote: “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am.” But when you think about that quote, it makes that painting more performative. You walk into a gallery and whether you’re looking at sculpture installation or painting, you’re always staring at a performance. The Entertainer was one of the last pieces I did, and it completed the show for me. It’s a very confrontational painting. I think about Chris Farley and Robin Williams and these great entertainers. Whether we are looking at them through a romantic lens or not, there is always that sense of sadness.
NF: I love that piece. I’m really excited to see it in real life. My next question is specifically about Andy Kaufman. Can you go back in time and tell me when he entered the frame for you? Tell me a little bit about your relationship to him and about painting him.
AMS: Andy entered my life a long, long, long time ago when I was prepubescent. I would do imitations of him and other comedians. My dad got me the Johnny Carson box set and the first season of SNL that Andy appears in. My dad always talked about the TV show Taxi and Andy’s character Latka. I knew it was really weird, but I didn’t exactly understand the humor. I was too young. But I still thought it was cool, and I romanticized it. That’s always been my sense of humor. When I started the work for the show, I was at home alone watching the first season of SNL. I always talk to myself, and I just started doing Andy. I started filming it. I watched the Carnegie Hall concert that he did where he wore a T-shirt that said I LOVE GRANDMA, so I went and I bought really cheap fabric and I tried to sew it by hand, remake it, and it was wonky. I sent photos and videos of myself to Philip [Philip March Jones of MARCH Gallery] because we’ve been friends for a very long time. Then I started shutting people out of my studio slowly, in a healthy way. I was trying to get the imitation right, watching my face move on my phone, watching Andy on my TV screen and I was like oh my God that’s a painting! Something clicked very magically and organically. And I was like oh wow. That’s done.
NF: Your landscape work from 2022 is much less demanding on the viewer, directly beautiful and easier to take in. Looking back at that work, you’ve said you thought you were doing something that was more conceptual, but it was taken up in a more straightforward way.
AMS: I was trying to make work that wasn’t conceptual as such, but I set up these weird parameters for myself. By the time that show opened, something had clicked; language hits us when it’s ready to hit us. You can know the words forever, but it only hits you right when it’s meant to. I realized I was trying to speak to the world in a language that I, myself, don’t speak, trying to be someone I’m not. I’m trying to be this calm person but I’m nuttier than squirrel shit! I do bits all day long and talk about Heidegger or a poem by Frank O’Hara, and then some strange history with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. I was trying to work in this way that wasn’t working for me. I was using landscape to train my eye and my hand to paint, but in a way that was a failure for me. I wasn’t speaking in a way that I wanted to speak, and I was censoring myself in the way I’ve been censored in the past by others.
NF: Do you feel that this body of work is more successful in presenting yourself in all your glory? In a complete way and with all your facets? Do you feel you feel more understood?
AMS: Oh, 1000 percent. A friend of mine was begging me to see the work before the show. She walked into my studio and she was like, “Oh my God it’s you! This is you!” She was looking at the mini-T-shirts and the big T-shirt that’s hanging in the woods behind my house and the schmuck painting of me coming out the window in the sky.
NF: There’s something about clothes without people, especially in miniaturization – to me they’re about loss. I find the big ones funny, but I find the little ones heartbreaking. Maybe because they were something that I loved as a child, so that anything tiny breaks my heart. Clothes without their people, absent people. What do they evoke for you?
AMS: The giant clothing and the miniature clothing function in the same realm for me – they’re just so ridiculous! I want to find a way to speak about costume and I had to make it funny for myself. I was thinking about going to certain shops when I was younger and getting like my first band T-shirt. The heartbreaking part for me was that I never really fit in with the other kids. I remember wearing a Led Zeppelin T-shirt and a Nirvana T-shirt – those things made you stand out where I grew up. When you’re young and you get these articles of clothing, they come with a school of thought. You don’t really understand it yet but over time certain things leave you and certain things stay with you, and those costumes become part of your identity. I love that weird moment, a fracture in reality. Some things become real and then some things stay a costume because they don’t fit the way you are.
NF: I like that.
AMS: The big T-shirts just started out as a challenge. There are a lot of things that I’ve done in my studio practice and my time in school to challenge myself. I would just make myself do something for the sake of learning. I’ve never been afraid to fail. So I made a giant Nirvana T-shirt.
NF: You’re giving with one hand, letting us live in that nostalgia, and then you’re taking it away – you’re like, nope it’s not what you thought. It’s huge! It’s ridiculous!
AMS: I love pointing out how silly we are. This show is a response to the art world. I’m not afraid to say I think we take a lot of the wrong things seriously. I just had somebody visiting my studio from a museum. We were talking about the performance part of my show, and he was like, yeah, you’re not allowed to laugh, like genuinely laugh, in the art world anymore. I guess I want people to laugh. Because when you’re laughing your guard is down and you’re having fun. You’re digesting the language. You’re not coming into it trying to prove that you get something. When you’re laughing, the language stands a better chance of getting under your skin.
“Aaron Michael Skolnick: The Entertainer,” MARCH Gallery, 62-64 Avenue A, New York, NY. Through February 22, 2025.
About the author: Nancy Friedland is a painter who lives and works in Toronto, Canada. She used to be a photographer but she’s alright now. http://www.nancyjanefriedland.com
Great interview. Thanks. Looking forward to seeing the show.
The work and the interview – so refreshing!