Here's an old 2008 interview of Tim after his, "The Artist in You" show at Jonathan Levine.
Wide-Eyed Nation
July 2008 - Issue #5
Tim Biskup is a monster. Prowling the world with his brand of merry characters including yetis, abominable snowmen and things that go bump in the night, all embedded in engaging and often overwhelming environments. From nostalgic typography to “baroque modernism”, Tim Biskup’s work is a manifestation of the So Cal environment which raised him. As a draftsman and technical painter for studios including Disney, Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, Tim has developed environments and characters that only a gifted imaginarian like himself could conjure. He is a master at balancing chaos and psychedelia with warm, child-like connections to flora, fauna, damsels, and deep spacial retreats. Eye candy with a razor. For almost two decades Tim has been utilizing any method possible to birth his creations, from Serigraphy (screen print), to vinyl toys, wood standee, composite sculpture, traditional canvas wall hangers and a clothing line (Gama Go). All of it done with the same meticulously detailed execution as his studio work. Pinning down this prolific jetsetter is not easy (his last stop was Taipei). Wide-Eyed’s David Dodde caught up with this jet-lagged Southern California native at his La Canada home. Here are a few written rants about his recent New York opening and his ever bustling touring schedule.
Wide-Eyed: What brought you to Taipei?
Tim Biskup: A DJ gig.
Wide-Eyed: Interesting. Is that a new direction you are going?
TB: Yeah, I’ve been DJing for a while as a hobby and it’s still a hobby, but more and more people are approaching me and bringing me out to events to DJ.
Wide-Eyed: So any good horror stories?
TB: I do have a really nice picture of a bowl full of chicken feet that look a lot like little, tiny, baby Godzilla hands {laughs}.
Wide-Eyed: Nice. Make sure you give me that photo.
TB: Yeah. I’ll try.
Wide-Eyed: How was the New York show and how do you think it compared to your LA shows and Paris and Tokyo?
TB: Well, it was a really different kind of show for me because it was the first time I really put as much written information into a show and so it was more literal than anything I’ve ever done. It felt like I was going out on a limb by expressing a lot of the things that I expressed; very personal and very scholarly in a way that I’m not necessarily comfortable with all the time. I had to do a lot of research for it and a lot of preparation. I did just as much painting as I usually do for a show but actually spent almost as much time researching it, doing writing and things like that.
Wide-Eyed: How was your writing used at that show?
TB: I did a book. I wasn’t sure if you had read that.
Wide-Eyed: No, I haven’t read it.
TB: If you go to the Jonathan Levine website and look at the show there’s a link to a PDF there. You can download the whole thing.
Wide-Eyed: So what’s under your hat now? What’s brewing now? What’s the next project?
TB: Well, after going through this whole philosophical change that the show represented for me, the New York show, my next show is called Operating System and it’s really an attempt to approach my art work from a new point of view; encompassing the conceptual ideas that I talked about in the last show in to the work in a way and also do a show about the process of coming up with a system. It’s kind of hard to explain it without looking at it from the conceptual and the visual side. So, on the visual side it’s three-dimesional sculptures. The sculptures actually incorporate the packaging into the piece. I’m working with computers to cut pieces of flat wood and they all fit together in to these sculptures that basically have these birds on top of them that are holding the paintings; kind of like an easel. Each piece is actually a crate that has a pedestal inside of it and an easel that holds the actual painting. It’s looking at the process of shipping and displaying and the way that the artist presents it and incorporating that all into the experience.
Wide-Eyed: That’s fantastic. I was reading one of your blogs and you mentioned “baroque modernism.” I thought that was a pretty fascinating term. Can you explain that to me?
TB: Yeah. There was this furniture dealer in Hollywood that called me one day out of the blue and was talking to me about my work. I was talking to him and that was the term he used for my work. It was at a time when I was really using a lot of flourishes and using the kind of shapes and things that were used by a lot of modernists, a lot of post-modernists, a lot of expressionists, cubists and things like that and yet I was adding a lot of detail, so much detail and so many little flourishes that it became more baroque than minimalist. So that’s the term he put on my work.
Wide-Eyed: I thought it was a nice term, a nice combination of words.
TB: It is, and it’s an aesthetic term, you know, it explains what my work looks like on some level. Recently my work has been a lot more conceptual and so it doesn’t fit quite so much but I think that there is a lot of cubist influence in my work, there’s a lot of modernist influence but it’s more expressionist than it was in the past; more personal and emotive; visceral I’d say.
Wide-Eyed: I can see that. So where did your characters like the HELPER go?
TB: Yeah. There was a piece in my last show that had the HELPER in it, but it was a sort of cubist version of him. But the title really says a lot about what the HELPER means to me these days. He’s not as cute as he was before and I started to really think about that character as a representation of the ultimate corrupt person. The idea of a Cyclops being a person who has lost their sense of depth and their sense of their ability to really see the world as it is. The piece that I painted for my last show was called ‘No God But God’. It was a reference to man creating, turning himself into God and essentially the HELPER is the monster that people turn into when they believe that they know the will of God. I’m not a religious person, but if there is a God, it’s not something that anyone can truly know. I think that’s where we run into problems is when we try to say that we know what God wants. It’s a very universal thing, it’s not a new idea, but for me, using that character to express that has really become the way that I almost always think about him. That started when I was working on a show called American Cyclops. That happened in Barcelona when I studied a lot of American history, Spanish history, and looked at Freemasonry and the origins of the American political system. I also looked at Native American history and the way that it was incorporated into that system. I used the Cyclops as a representation of the human form of things like the pyramid that appears on the dollar bill and the eye in the sky that appears in a lot of paintings about Manifest Destiny. He really became a representation of man turning himself into God and attempting to be God.
Wide-Eyed: That’s interesting because I used, for the Wide-Eyed logo, I chose the all-seeing eye, the pyramid eye. Instead we turned it into a Bambi version, a soft version; instead of the critical eye, a more open version of that. So I can definitely relate to that concept. So any new collaborations? I know you did Barcelona with Baseman. Anything new?
TB: No actually Barcelona wasn’t with Baseman. The last show I did with Baseman was Modular Populous. We just happened to be in the city at the same time when our shows both happened. It was in a different gallery. Collaborations. I do them a lot in the toy world with vinyl figures and things like that. I am working on a couple of collaborations in Japan and I’m actually doing a show at the end of next year that is going to be mostly collaboration but I can’t really say to much about it.
Wide-Eyed: That leads me on to my next question. This is directly from Andy Cruz. Is there ever going to be a Tim Biskup typeface with House Industries?
TB: {laughs} Absolutely! It’s a matter of the forces of all of our lives coinciding. In the last year or two I really haven’t used that much text in my work. I haven’t really progressed as far as the type and things like that. The paintings that I am working on for my Paris show in October all have text in them. I’m thinking a lot more about text now and so I think it’s kind of inevitable that that will be pushed forward and hopefully we’ll make that happen soon. I know it’s been a long time coming.
Wide-Eyed: It’s a House project. They are all a long time coming but they’re worth it every time.
TB: Yeah, Yeah. That’s good. I agree.
Wide-Eyed: So, is there any artist that’s really impacting you right now?
TB: I have a couple of friends that I really relate to. James Jean, his work is really mind-blowing. I always look to Murakami.His strategy is really appealing to me and I’m always trying to comprehend how he organizes his world. Those guys are very influential now.
Wide-Eyed: I can see the Murakami connection in your large sculpture pieces. How you’re using all mediums which I think is something that is really unique to your work as well.
TB: The thing that really blows me away about Murakami is his ability to build infrastructure. Same with Jeff Koons and several other artists who are able to make such large scale things happen and to manage the PR end and build something that seems like it has such a specific intention to it. That really appeals to me because I’ve never been able to have such specific intentions about my work. I’ve always felt like I was following this trail through the forest and hoping that it made some sense. It always seems to at the end. But I always feel like I’m kind of running blind hoping that I don’t run into a branch.
Wide-Eyed: Who or what do you think has had the most significant impact on your craft and career? What has been the impetus for you moving forward?
TB: God, there’s a lot. I would say Ren & Stimpy, John K. that’s a big one, The Residents. Christopher Williams was a big inspiration to me when I had him as a teacher at Otis/Parsons. The impression that he made on me is only now coming to fruition. Being such a completely conceptual artist, I really liked what he had to say but it wasn’t relevant to my work. Now, when I’m so fiercely going after that part of my work, a lot of things he said to me when I was in his class are starting to make sense. Not just make sense but start to become really important to the work that I’m doing.
Wide-Eyed: It’s nice to have someone that influenced you that way. I think it is key that people come out of school saying, “Oh yeah. That person really changed me.”
TB: Yeah. To be able to look back and say, “Oh yeah this thing that this guy said to me really changed the way that I think about this.” That’s a big deal. He’s one of the only teachers that I walked away feeling like that about. Carole Caroompas was another one. She was actually never one of my teachers but we ended up spending a lot of time together working on an album and just the things that she said about art, the things that she said about life really had a big effect on me and the way that I think about my work.
Wide-Eyed: If we could all have one of those.
TB: I’ve had a lot of them. I mean, you know John K. and The Residents, both people that I got to spend time with and talk to and work with. I mean, very influential people, very inspired people and those have always been the people that I related to the most. Seeing them do what they do. It can be, it’s challenging on a level that I don’t think you experience with people you meet in life.
Wide-Eyed: That’s a great answer. I’m always fascinated by the guys who originally contributed to Juxtapoz and what their feelings are ten years later on its impact on the artists’ community and the culture around us. Do you have an opinion on that?
TB: It has changed so much that it’s kind of hard to see it as the same thing now. It was kind of like the only source of information that I had for a long time about the art world that I wanted to be a part of. I mean, I could have gone out and bought a copy of Art Forum but I had no connection to that world. I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to be part of it. So when I got Juxtapoz it was a meeting of the minds. Even though I didn’t know any of those people for years and years of buying the magazine, it was the only place to get that information. It is still underground relatively. Lots of people know who Mark Ryden is. Lots of people know who Robert Williams is. For me now, I get more from Art Forum but I don’t get a sense of community from Art Forum I get a sense of frustration and it’s a new kind of challenge for me. I feel challenged by the things that I read in there. There really isn’t anything like what Juztapoz meant to me when it was first coming out because it was really kind of a guidepost saying, “Yeah, you can actually do what you want to do and somebody will listen, somebody will look at it and maybe you will even find someone who enjoys it.”
Wide-Eyed: And now they outsell Art Forum.
TB: {laughs} Yeah! Amazing! It’s amazing that it has become a real movement and I think that’s important. I think it’s an important movement sometimes I get really disheartened by the fact that we’re not being shown in the Whitney Biennial or things like that, and I always kind of think, well, I know young people are working in museums and eventually those people will be in charge. Those people see what I do and my friends do and they think that it should be there so it’s just a matter of time really.
Wide-Eyed: Finally, what continent haven’t you shown on and when will you?
TB: Africa? I don’t believe I’ve ever shown in Africa. But I think that’s the only one.
Wide-Eyed: It’s a big life Tim Biskup.
TB: Yeah it is. So we’ll see. Maybe I’ll show in Egypt or something like that someday.
Wide-Eyed: That would be great.
TB: We’ll see.
To see more of Tim’s work go to:
www.timbiskup.comwww.jonathanlevinegallery.com 
