Goron Massman

Year of birth: 1949, Body of Christ, Texas.
Where do you live: Rockport, Massachusetts, USA.
Your education: MFA in Creative Writing, University of Alaska-Fairbanks.
Describe your art in three words: Holy Fucking Christ!.
Your discipline: Heavy Weight Contender.
Website | Instagram

Your background in poetry and writing seems to heavily influence your visual art. Can you describe how your experience as a poet translates into your painting process?

Before poetry, before language, before art: the raw baby wailing in the vast, disoriented, subglottal, ego a slithering fireball. It tilts Earth like a goblet, sucks it down. It strides in naked uniform, like Napoleon. It swallows approval, like Niagara. Without validation it suffocates.

Follow the genres down the V to the vertex, the root. There, discover the universal language: fire, the unsophisticated eternal creative conflagration devoid of dictionaries and pigment paint. One painted with mud, blood, and spit. One animal-grunted song.

I do not distinguish the artforms from each other—these are mere costumes one dresses over internal fire—nor one genre’s influence on another genre. Desperation, rage, hunger, despotism create great art. I clothed my flames with words, then I clothed my flames with paint. The elemental flame makes art, not the jewelry.

You ask a fair question which requires a fair answer. Materials serve the primitive. The primitive invents the materials. One’s message burns with equal intensity regardless the accessories—and wants, like the baby, constant external approval. 

Goron Massman | Messages From a Lavatory

You’ve spoken about embracing primality in your work. How does this connection to raw emotion inform your use of color, form, and texture in your paintings?

I am unsophisticated, sloppy, messy, nicked, vulgar, and urine stained. I burst from the nurturing ooze, like a throbbing blood clot, and began devouring both scraps of food and my parents’ souls. I distrust sophisticates and intellectuals; I am anti-meticulous. Humans create neat, clean, almost clinical showrooms, emporiums, offices, neighborhoods, and metropolises to cauterize the slaughtering wars within the human heart. The wars captivate me. I have survived five marriages, three abortions, a psychological crack-up, raging OCD, cancer, substance abuse, an MFA program, and two, shall we say, suffering parents. Raw emotion chooses color, form, composition, texture. I subscribe to Allen Ginsberg’s edict, “first thought, best thought”. That is, for me the subconscious, the primal instinct creates art. I rely on no reason, law, restriction, or critical stricture. I am uninhibited force which rejects all caution. I am unedited. Whatever color, form, and texture appears in my work, be it literature or art, derives from pure animal instinct, from urgency, impulse, and opportunity. Sometimes I shut eyes and paint in the afterimages inside my eyelids. I trust primality that much.

I do not subscribe to the mind/heart dichotomy. The same essence generates both love and fear, respect and destruction. Your question implies this–to me—false dichotomy.  The only information I employ in the creative act is concentrated impulse.

You mentioned that you are influenced by artists like Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, but you also emphasize your unique voice. How do you ensure that your work remains distinct from these artists’ legacies while still drawing from their impact?

The genetically unrelated, independent, tortured artists collectively known as “The Irascibles” found strength in numbers. They could not thrive alone. Gorky would be marginal without de Kooning, Pollock interesting without Rothko, Gottlieb curious without Krasner. MoMA’s early rejection of these painters inadvertently endowed them with superlative influence, like metal fragments slammed into the magnet. Important to understand, though, was their individuality in all things emotional, intellectual, and historical. They were not one but many. They painted not collectively but singularly in the thrall of their unique lives.

As I love The Confessional poets—Berryman, Plath, Sexton, Hughes, Lowell,

Snodgrass–for their self-immolating courage in unearthing and celebrating their suppressed demons, I love the Abstract Expressionists for the same. Since my afore-mentioned crack-up earthquake at age 34, ruthlessly I have hunted my most injurious inner denizens. Those with needle teeth, claws, gristle, immorality. I am not a movement but a single earth screw drilling downward, tirelessly, proudly, and fearlessly. I honor my predecessors by taking their tenacity to the next level, but within the mansion of my own unduplicable psyche. My troubles are not their troubles. My conflicts not theirs. My monsters speak an original dialect that only I can translate.

(It is significant that Berryman, Plath, Rothko, Gorky, Sexton, and likely the sculptor David Smith committed suicide. I understand the dangers of pulling through the mouth the hanging clothesline of one’s viscera.)

Goron Massman | Two Monsters and Their KDZ

The scale of your paintings is remarkable. What is the significance of working in such large formats, and how do you manage the physical and emotional demands of creating on this scale?

From just finishing a 300 lb. sculpture, I type this interview with bruised left ribs from studio fall number one, and swollen left ankle from studio fall number two, plus, by cursory count, seventeen slashes through my hand flesh. Like a thin slice of sandwich meat, I have thrice been buried under the poplar loaves of fallen paintings. This is not sour but sweet. It’s small price. Unleashed emotion requires big canvases, like schooner sails designed for wind. I cannot capture with small. I paint with the full circumference of my arms, with my hairless calves and thighs, with my torso, and with my dick. I assault, mug, and smite. So as not to gash the canvas, I staple it against a hard wall. Such physical engagement taxes at seventy-five. Those who are not septuagenarians may not understand the spirit’s ageless tenacity. Old men still want to fuck all women. Old men still want to conquer. Old women still want to knock ‘em dead.

You’ve stated that you paint “without inhibition.” How do you navigate the tension between artistic freedom and the need for structure or intention in your work?

I have no fantasies of structure or premeditated intention in my work. Elysian fields do not exist. Purity is fallacious. Trusted technique produces imitation–I am not representational. I detest the intolerance league of enforced order. I refuse to be shamed by non-adherence to the ten commandments of effective painting. To me “without inhibition” means “without obedience,” “without indoctrination,” “without knowledge”. Only babes of the wood embody true freedom, where an insect equals in importance an ancient cedar. Where clam commands the rapture of ocean. No hierarchy clouds value. Big and little do not exist. Structure and intention foreshadow mediocrity. Fixed intention asphyxiates wild freedom. I have no architectural brain, nor blueprinting instruments with which to preordain a preconceived work. Rather I grant an overriding emotion complete traction to swipe where it will. If that emotion be rage, then rage, like a released goat, paints the painting through me. If that emotion be Joy, then Joy slips me on like a fleece coat. Animal instinct obliterates whatever mist of intention may fill my brain. The thing never evolves predictably, and ultimately invariably forms itself into an unrecognizable beast.

Goron Massman | Bluebird Drowning

Your art has been featured in various international publications. How has the reception of your work in different cultural contexts influenced the way you view your own art practice?

I suffer from self-loathing grandiosity.  Simultaneously I fantasize receiving world recognition while hating myself. I imagine stopping in tracks museum patrons throughout the world. I imagine Phaidon Publishers releasing Gordon Massman: Unlikely Genius. This is delusion.

I do not paint for regions, schools, or factional categories of thought. Underlying the comforting layers of intellectualism lies the primal animal root system connecting the human species to itself: survival, hunger, procreation, insecurity, power, dominance–all fragilities of the blood. Stripped down to the jungle floor lies the raw force of similarity. Subtract nation states, boundaries, cultures, civilizations and you have the naked terrified human. From wherever they hale, I paint for that. In this perspective cultural contexts have no authority over my work. I invariably strive to touch the deepest humanity-to-humanity connecting chord.

In your artist statement, you express an intense focus on emotional honesty. How do you stay true to this unfiltered honesty while still engaging with the public through your art?

In 1983 Death spoke to me, “Know Thyself or Die.” Death meant this literally, like a man with a razor. He saw a fool, philanderer, player, frat boy expiring from repression on a filthy rug with a baby boy and a frigid wife. I was wood-constructed, blind, stupid, and dying. Death said, reach shoulder length down your throat, grab entrails with fist, and fucking yank. Dump organs on the floor and bathe yourself in blood. Death spoke iron words. I walked like a weathered clothespin into the eternal thicket of self-examination. Forty-two years later meet skinless Gordon, worm, slug, baby turtle protected by no subterfuge or dodge. Inchoate guileless fetus. Air hurts, sun sears, bedsheets scrape. I cannot engage with the public but with truth. Accept it or bolt.

Goron Massman | Orbiting Neptune

You mention what might be called a bedrock reality deep in the species connecting all humanity to itself resulting in what might be called an oceanic saturation of empathy. What is that reality and have you ever captured it in your art?

We all burst from the womb invincible, like superman or woman crashing through brick walls into the den of evil. Chests thrust forward, cape fluttering, fists bared. Then data floods the brain: knives make us bleed, car doors smash fingers, branches cut heads, knobs bruise ribs, ankles twist, ribs break, toes stub, concrete scrapes knees. Then shortly after we destroy our 20s with ignorance, delusion, stupidity, and blindness a poison slants down upon us from an ominous sky. We name it Death. Indomitable Death. Inescapable Death. Nothingness breeding fear, rage, fragility, insanity.

The awareness of Death connects us all. Death-consciousness is that bedrock reality. Death unites us, like a Pando of Aspens.

Art cannot capture this or salve this or vanquish this. Art is impotent against this adversary. Most certainly I of mere labile flesh have never, and never will with sticks and pretty colors, with duck cloth and polyethylene resin, with savage ego and gelatine nails–certainly I have never captured Death.