Greg Lookerse (USA, b. 1987) is an interdisciplinary artist, author and educator based in West Michigan. Lookerse makes mixed media drawings, installations and performances.

Born and raised in Yucaipa, California, Lookerse received his BFA from Biola University (2009) and his MFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston at Tufts University (2014). He has won awards and grants, exhibited internationally, and lectured extensively.

Statement

I am the most pretentious type of artist. I am not a painter, or drawer, or sculptor, or any such easily categorized maker of art. I am an interdisciplinary artist. Like Lucy I, unfortunately, have some explaining to do. There isn’t a single word or a quick quip like an elevator pitch that makes it easy to understand what I am making. Instead I have to use a long extended metaphor like an allegory because my art is more about the process of making art then it is about the medium with which it is made. I hope the pretense can be excused by the end of this statement. But I am not some lone snob who paid for a fancy and expensive degree to call myself something that no one really understands; after all, the greats like Michelangelo and DaVinci worked in all the mediums of the day as well. They were artists not painters or sculptors. They did it all.

But let me try to explain rather than compare myself to Fiorentini geniuses. I am trying to remain humble after all in order to get rid of all that pretense.

I heard from a friend that The Boss – Springsteen of course – once said that music and art is like a math problem. It’s simple really, 1+1=3. By all my accounting and arithmetic I can see that that adds up. Even if it was actually Dylan not Bruce or if the quote is a myth delivered by a muse not a musician.

Let me break that equation down and show you the rational behind its irrational numbers. 1, the first one. The one at the beginning is material. In the beginning – of an artwork I suppose – there is nothing except the junk in the studio. The artist decides what materials to use; well it is better to say that most often the choice is made by something other than logic. Most often it is budget. But also some interior yes like what George Saunders says about a man with his model train set and a hobo. The artist doesn’t think, “I will use this paper and this ink,” it more like a feeling that simply confirms in the affirmative that this is the material. That this stuff here is good enough to start with.

Then there is the second 1. This is the human. The artist who is also made of material but somehow is able to move things around like a golem of clay mobilized by some spiritual force. The actor. The mover. The one who pushes pigment and stone. The one who exercises the will to reshape the junk that happens to be at hand in the studio. Again, I like to think it is reason and ration that directs the brush or the chisel but that would be to simple. Saunders again, it is more like an instinctual urge. It happens before reason but is immediately followed by innate confirmation – when it goes right – or innate disgust and frustration – the more common feeling as most often it goes wrong. Like a baseball player at the plate who knows at the point of contact if it’s headed for the stands or if it is foul because of the way it “feels.” Madeleine L’Engle calls this listening to the work. The artist is less of an agent and more of a primary witness.

These two singular things are mixed together in a grand summation game. 1+1. By all accounts what we should get is a simple duality. Single plus single equals dual after all. Yet, as The Boss said, that is not the case with a work of art. Somehow if you take material and you add an artist you end up with more than the sum of those two parts.

3. The three. The three that comes from the two other ones. A work of art is not just material moved by a particular person into a unique arrangement. If it were we wouldn’t spend so much of our fleeting time on looking at those clever configurations. We would spend the majority of our time cataloguing and tracing the objects back to their origin like archeologists rather than appreciators. Think about it; how on earth do children know when they enter an art museum to ask the simple question, “what does it mean Daddy?” They make a leap that somehow is almost innate. They are not just looking at paint on canvas moved by Pollock, or Homer, or Rothko. They know that there must be some other thing that has shown up in this strange equation. The child doesn’t ask, “where did this come from?” or “is the provenance of this particular piece air tight? Are we sure this is an authentic Vermeer or is it some knock off worth diddly squat?” The child is looking for that third thing, the meaning.

Hence three.

This third thing is the mystery I am trying to understand because I have to know; where does the meaning come from? The studio is a wrestling ring that never seems to get cleaned up after a bout. I keep coming back, thinking I have won, only to find there is more material here than I thought.

I keep coming back and wrestling it around waiting for that third 1, that 1 that makes the third show up. I don’t know how to find it. It isn’t rational after all. Maybe it’s imaginary. Maybe it’s mystical. But it keeps popping up like a mole and I only spot it out of the corner of my eye.

Somehow between the mixture of material and human action meaning emerges. This is what I am after.

This is why I can’t just say I am a painter, or drawer, or sculptor, or some other such thing. I am an interdisciplinary artist. I make whatever it takes to find that third thing.

I would rather just call myself an artist but that doesn’t mean much anymore. People want to know what I make and that word – artist – doesn’t say much at all. Well, as I was taught in school, I am trying to show my work. Like long division.

My artwork is layered like sediment. All of it is stacked on top of each other. Like I said, I am wrestling through my studio and there is all of this stuff. As I push one thing I notice another moves.

I stack things on top of each other and notice that really what I am doing is making collages. They take the form of drawings, sculptures, and actions. They get arranged into frames but also into installations.

I am trying to help you see my additive work as I search for that mysterious third. Either all there is in my work is rearranged materials or there is meaning. If there is meaning then The Boss was right. Math is a funny irrational endeavor far more akin to what mystics have said or else it’s all a stupid game of arguing over mixed up mud. Either way my hands get dirty and the work gets made and it is all connected to same process and place that I call my practice and my studio.