Gardar Eide Einarsson: The New Art Politico

Tonight, Norwegian artist (and BlackBook New Regimer) Gardar Eide Einarsson will unveil a new group show, alongside Davis Rhodes and Stanley Whitney, at Manhattan’s Team Gallery. Einarsson, a sleeved, longtime lover of punk music, scrambles innocuous slogans and imagery into message-driven art pieces. These rebellious politics have attracted acclaim from critics and art lovers, but disdain from one very ornery 80-year-old woman. Here, the newest force on the New York art scene fights back.

Do you feel as if you and your work have been misinterpreted?
It’s easy to fall into the cliché of being this crazy New York artist, you know? That’s always been something that I’ve tried to deconstruct and deflate in my work. But I have a feeling that it’s harder to really do that here, because there are situations in which you’re immediately read as a “downtown artist.”

You moved to New York from Norway on the day before September 11, 2001. I’d imagine it was a difficult time for artists who deal thematically with rebellion.
It’s funny, because I’ve recently been thinking about that a lot. It—all of the National Guards with their guns and humvees—had the effect of eliciting in my work a catalog of repressive images, with an almost paranoiac take on it.

At one public show in Norway, an 80-year-old woman said that your art was worse than the Nazi occupation of Norway. Are you often met with that level of vehemence? Do you search it out?
It might be too much to suggest that I actively pursue that type of reaction, but I do see merit in art that can genuinely shock people. This piece, oddly, wasn’t really that shocking. It referred to sixteenth-century Germanic myth. I mean, it wasn’t like babies were being fucked. The fact that this lady got so up in arms about it—because she was kicking it, really physically destroying the work—well, I just thought it was hilarious.

Where do you look for subject matter?
I’m a pretty adept Googler. I gather material, read old books, and then get into the deep, dark corners of the Internet.

Bad stuff?
My friend and me used to have this deal where we’d sit down in the computer lab at school, and we’d be like, “Alright, I challenge you to find the most fucked up shit.”

Who won?
Invariably, one of us would say, “That’s just gross—I’m going to go home.” It never ended in a funny way. The creepiest one was this series of photos taken by two teenager murderers in some guy’s apartment after they killed him. There were all of these photos of them making jokes with his severed body.

I’m not sure I can segue anywhere from that, but I’ll try: When I Google your name, the first image that comes up is you naked in your Lars Von Trier photograph.
My little sister found it at school! She was at her library computer with friends!

You are often photographed shirtless. That has to get a little tiresome, no?
I hate it when photographers ask me to take my shirt off in front of my paintings. Would you ask a fucking female artist to do that? “Can you show me your boobs?” It’s like the worst reading of my work as a “punk artist.” It completely ignores the self-reflexive aspect of the work.

But tattoos can also express that type of self-reflexivity.
Definitely, but there are also times when it’s about filling space. So the tattoo artist will be like, “What do you want there?” And I’m like, I don’t know, a skull? I have the Black Flag logo that Raymond Pettibon did, which covers my arm. I also have Banksy’s drawing of the Misfits Skull. Banksy and I had a bet that if he could draw the Misfits skull in under 30 seconds, then the tattoo artist would give us the ink for free.

So did you get it for free?
Yeah, and that’s why it doesn’t really look like the Misfits skull.

I heard you recently took up surfing. That’s not exactly very punk of you.
I have to defend this to a lot of people. They’re like, “You’re surfing? That’s fucked up!” But there is a surf subculture that is very punk rock, with shaved heads and heavy tattoos ... and surf Nazis. But it’s funny because a lot of people are like, “What are you doing with that hippie, pot-smoker bullshit?”

The tattoos, the punk aesthetic, the fascination with American outsiders and criminals—it all lends itself rather easily to criticism. I’d imagine you often have to argue against the claim that, by depicting violence and murder, you’re glorifying it.
Another criticism that I’m subjected to a lot is that my work is parasitic on the glamour of those people. One argument is that I glamorize them, and the other is that I want to get some of that glamour. But that reading doesn’t take into account that the work, again, is self-reflexive. It’s not about glamour; it’s about failed glamour.

Failed glamour, which is about the collapse of individuals, is wholly anathema to the myth of American men throughout history.
I think that definitely comes from having a total outsider view of this country. The myths I play with are the very things that Europeans find so incredibly offensive about Americans. It’s hard to come to this country as an outsider and not see the American myth as somehow tragic.