Indie bookstores; scuzzy rock bars; quirky coffee shops; that weird older guy’s house where the college kids hang out; a David Chang restaurant; countless record stores. If you’ve ever spent time in any of these places, there’s a good chance you’ve seen a Steve Keene painting—and once you’ve seen one, it’s hard not to see them everywhere. Keene has sold or given away more than 300,000 works over the course of his life, with a style made even more distinct by his particular taste in music. His most recognizable works are his album cover tributes, facsimiles of classic indie rock albums rendered in bold, chunky strokes. If you’re into the indie rock of a certain era, Keene’s work feels particularly familiar, since he’s made original album covers for his friends in Pavement (Wowee Zowee), Silver Jews (The Arizona Record), and the Apples in Stereo (Fun Trick Noisemaker), among others. Yet despite his ubiquity, he’s remained in relative obscurity as soaring skyscrapers have surrounded his one-story studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. You can buy six random paintings for just $70 on his website.
The Steve Keene Art Book is the first retrospective of his career, a sprawling and lovingly arranged collection of high-resolution photos of Keene’s decidedly low-res art. His practice is as much artisan as artist, rooted in a manual printmaking process designed to give as many people as possible a chance to have the visceral experience of owning a physical piece of art. Quite possibly the most prolific American artist of all time, the Yale art school-trained painter has remained an outsider in a “traditional” art world that seeks to maximize art’s financial capital, instead finding community in a DIY scene built on a love for the music. “Lots of people say ’art should be accessible to everyone’ but Steve really put this into action,” says Superchunk’s Mac McCaughan. And if you’ve ever been lucky enough to attend a Steve Keene show, it likely resembled a rock concert, with Keene posted up at his custom easels amid dozens of paintings and a boisterous crowd, furiously swiping from canvas to canvas with the same color on his brush. Onlookers climb up and grab finished pieces they want to take home, shoving a few dollars in the cash box on the way out.
In an interview at his home studio, Keene spoke with Pitchfork about his life in and around music.
Steve Keene: It’s meant to. They’re nice paintings, but the whole ritual is what gives it meaning. I didn’t really grow up on punk music, but my wife and I were on the college radio station when she went to UVA. You’re surrounded by so much creativity—the other DJs are creative, but also the tens of thousands of albums from the past 40 years, all their funky, weird artwork, all their liner notes. It’s just so jam-packed, and 99 percent of them are forgotten. It was sort of this different idea about how, gosh, I’m gonna be forgotten too. So why don’t I have fun with this? And why don’t I make art feel like you’re going to a show, buying a T-shirt or a CD?
I never really got turned on by ideas about the art world, or how you’re supposed to sell your paintings for $9,000. Once I started basically giving away my work, I felt really needed, you know? It felt like, wow, people really appreciate you doing something different. I’m starting to feel like the entire country is my art gallery now, because they’re all over—there’s 300,000 of them.
One of the reasons Dave Matthews became big is because fans were encouraged to make tapes—copying, like the Grateful Dead. It’s so weird that people would not like that, because that’s how you get the information out. It’s like seeing somebody from high school who you forgot about for 30 years or something like that—it’s really wonderful.
You know, at this time in my life, I wanna give people what they want. But I also have to do stuff for myself. What I do is like a yard sale. You go to a yard sale, you get records, you get old beat up pictures, you get old books. The album covers are nostalgic because, you know, I grew up at a time where you’d have your $5 and you’d spend an hour and a half at the record store. Am I gonna get Derek and the Dominos, or the Allman Brothers live At Fillmore East? And you’d spend an hour and a half deciding. These are like memorials to it, in a way.
If you’re in your town and you want people to know that your band is gonna do something, you go to the record store or the bookstore or the coffee shop and you drop off a pile of fanzines that you made by the door. That doesn’t really exist anymore. I tell people when we first moved to New York, the Village Voice was like the internet. It’s where you would get your job, your apartment, and the stuff to do on the weekends. It might as well be ancient Rome or something.
I don’t wanna commercialize it somehow. I really hope people think when I paint the album covers that these are tributes, because nobody’s getting rich here. My wife does have a good job and I make some money, but it’s not like you get rich painting these. So I don’t want people to think I do it for the money.
I’m gonna be 65 this summer. When I went to art school, all the art that was really interesting was process art. Basically, you set up a system, you set up your parameters, and then you just work within that.
You have to be machinelike in the discipline to do it. I wanted to turn it into a craft, like I make pottery and I have to make a hundred plates. Or I’m a cook, and I have to make a hundred pizzas.
It’s like you’re at the supermarket. I mean, honestly, there’s nothing more beautiful than just walking down the aisle of the supermarket, all the repetitions of color. So those are like stand-ins for pieces of work, for art. When I’d have these art shows and I’d see people walking around laughing, holding my art and showing their friends what they’re getting and trying to get more—that’s the artwork. Everything else—my paintings—they’re the props. They’re the material to have an artwork.
Bob Nastanovich would say—I hope I didn’t make this up, but I really think it’s true—that it’s better to have the world’s worst show than just an average show. You know, leave people wondering what happened. Pavement really were about taking chances in performances; they didn’t really practice that much before their tours. When they were on the Jay Leno show in 1994, they did “Cut Your Hair,” but [Stephen Malkmus] did this weird screeching, moaning thing for what seemed like 20 seconds before.
We’d been to a million shows in college towns, but the first Lollapalooza was the first time I ever saw 20,000 people that looked like the 12 cool people in your college town. Your friends go up on stage and take chances with all this crazy stuff, and it might be a total disaster. That really gave me so much energy to be like, it doesn’t matter—just persevere. You can’t redo the song you played two nights ago, you just have to do it again.
I think about David every day. I feel a little cursed by David [laughs]. I mean, if you liked David, you really were obsessed with David. The Silver Jews’ music, I wish I could hear it objectively. I wish I didn’t know David, just to hear the music, because that was David in real life. David was so funny and just interesting, everything he said.
I played it for the first time like two weeks ago, and I liked hearing it. It made me feel better. It’s pretty bleak, but the thing about David is that everything was slightly tongue in cheek. I’m glad it’s almost three years removed, now I can see a little bit of humor in it. It’s not just death and destruction—it’s irony and all this stuff.
