ALL TASTE IS DISGUSTING

“I find eagerness extremely unattractive. If someone’s living their own cool life, they shouldn’t be so interested,” says artist Borna Sammak. He’s not answering my questions, it’s 2:00 am, we’ve relocated to an all-night Mexican spot near his studio. He’s been working every night, preparing for his show at JTT Gallery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan this July, and sleeping it off by day at his Williamsburg apartment, where he’s lived since 2016. A week earlier, on a more voluble night for the thirty-five year old New Yorker, he mentioned considering that year a turning point. It was the fall of 2016 when Sammak first showed with Sadie Coles HQ in London, presenting his hallucinatory vision of the real world. His massive sculpture, a tangle of subway turnstiles, sat in a posh Mayfair garage surrounded by everyday signage (“File Your Taxes Upstairs”) that created wry concrete poetry. One hawkish painting comprising heat-applied graphics made me think of a bystander surveying the mash of bumper stickers left after a violent ten-car pileup on an American highway.

Sammak’s apprehension is singularly attractive. As his former professor, critic and curator David Rimanelli, says, “He is very cuddly and fuzzy and all that but like how certain sea urchins are cuddly but then, ouch, changed its mind. What a witty sea urchin.” Or as his friend Alissa Bennett, writer and director at Gladstone Gallery, says, “Part of the complexity of Borna is that he is just as honest with himself as he is with the rest of the world—it might be withering, but it’s also probably true. He does a decently convincing pantomime of a fuck-up, but at a certain point, anyone who really knows him stops buying it. Whatever is rattling around inside him when he claims to be squandering his time generally comes out fully formed.” What job exists for people like this but Artist?

Raised in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania by software engineer parents, Sammak learned how to make a picture work at an early age. As a teenager, he studied Nicolaïdes’ drawing techniques and served an apprenticeship at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. Getting into the city’s hardcore scene broke him out of the suburbs. After moving to New York in the early 2000s, he attended NYU and began his net art career. On a surf club called Double Happiness, he trained his eye on the hectic motifs he would refine later in tactile work. He made holding tradition up to ridicule look fun, exhibiting the first eight video paintings he made in a Soho Best Buy’s television section for a day. He put in time at restaurant jobs, did graphic design for a pop star, and left the city for Baltimore and Los Angeles. Like everyone worth waiting for, he’s lived multiple lives and wears his feelings on his sleeve. As he embroidered on the arm of one of his Carhartt jackets: “I PREFER NY,” with “prefer” satin-stitched in white cursive over the heart of “I <3 NY.

Thora Siemsen
Borna Sammak

You’re wary of talking about art, why?
I’ve always hated talking about art. When you see other people engage in it, whether it be their press release or their artist talks or their interviews, they’re forced to assert what the art does to the psyche, and as soon as we have a verb in the sentence, we’re lying. I don’t like talk like that. I like talk that relates more directly to the physical world, that has more tangible meaning. I think talking about art devalues it, it’s like explaining a joke. I can’t sit around and tell you, “x is important because it interrogates y and z.” No, it doesn’t. It’s a fucking painting on the wall. If anything, you might be interrogating something when you look at it. That’s between you and the painting. I just like knowing how things are made, put together, where they came from. Stuff that’s real, that’s true, that’s not conjecture.

How much room for your error do you leave in a work?
Depends on the work but, generally speaking, sculpture is working backwards and painting is massaging it until it’s done. I don’t approach all work like that. The text-based stuff I’ll sit on for months or years on end.

Some of my friends roll their eyes when I say this but others fully get it, but I think there’s a lot of not making things that’s involved in making art. Because you have to mull these things over for a long time to know if it’s actually right and you want to make it.

How long does a work look like nothing to you until you see something else? Does it ever look like something to you from the beginning?
I would say they look like nothing when they’re functionally done, the canvas is full, but you don’t like it. In the beginning stages, you see potential.

Have you always been a restless person?
I don’t feel restless, but everyone tells me I am.

How many miles a day do you pace?
At least six.

How many square feet is your studio?
They say 2,000, but I think it’s slightly under 1,750 because they always count the use of the bathroom and the hallway and the stairs towards the 2,000.

It’s massive.
Yeah, it’s like a basketball court, cut hot dog style. I had a really big ego in 2017 and now I have to pay for it.

What’s the largest scale thing you’ve ever figured out how to make?
That couch was crazy. Though I had a ton of help from Lanning Smith in Baltimore, whom I worked with on that. We made sure to assemble it exactly how a real couch is made, all the different layers are in there. Then it’s a game of doing it at crazy angles so you can get 50 feet of couch to twist and bend and loop over itself and grow appendages. I had the idea for it when I moved into my apartment at the end of 2016. I got a couch off eBay for very cheap for what it was, a blue and white striped Ralph Lauren couch. It was a brand new couch sitting in consignment, unsold due to brashness, ever since the housing collapse of 2008. Custom made for a mansion that never finished being built. The couch piece is based off of that. I had really wanted to use the exact same fabric, but they’d discontinued it the month I started working on the sculpture. Got one close enough, black and white, thinner stripe, thinner material––but still technically a Ralph Lauren fabric [laughs]. I wanted to keep that obnoxious preppy look to it. Interior design is disgusting. All taste is disgusting. You get exhausted by yourself, no matter what it is. It’s vulgar.

Go on…
What did you do, exercise your twee little opinion about something and then you got it and it looks good? I don’t know, there’s a point where you’ve just got to feel gross about it. Who gives a shit? It’s silly. Feels undignified to have cared that much in the first place.

At any rate, the giant ugly RL couch is still my couch, I sit on it, the cat clawed a hole in it.

We need to talk about Kevin [Sammak’s cat].
First off his name is Kevin, Whom I Love.

Do you talk to him?
It doesn’t speak English so just stuff like “Stop!” and “Shut up” and “You are the one that I love.”

How do you feel misunderstood?
People think I’m really mean, and they’re literally correct that I am very mean. Nevertheless, I feel misunderstood.

When do you feel most functional?
Between 2:00-6:00am.

What happens then?
Everyone in LA’s asleep. Anyone up in New York has better things going on. There’s no one left to text, so I have to work.

When did you stop sleeping at night?
I think it was a slippery slope starting in 9th grade. Not doing homework is what started it. That’s kind of still what’s going on. I hate homework.

Did you grow up religious?
No. God in my house was using Solitaire for Windows 95 like a magic eight-ball, asking yes or no questions, seeing if it’ll pan out for you.

What about your parents?
In Iran they were brought up Islamic, but I think after living through the revolution, they became disillusioned with what goes on in the name of organized religion. There was never any mention of religion in my house and I’m not sure but I think they might believe in God, generally. It wasn’t until I was much older that I considered that may well have been a conscious parenting choice. I should ask.

Were they encouraging of you doing art?
Yeah. I always did art. In high school I would take art classes in the summer outside of school. My high school had a really good art program, and to be honest, I think most of what I learned about how to make a good artwork was what I learned in high school. College was a whole different thing, that’s where I learned what contemporary art was–– how to be an asshole.

What were you looking for in the world as a teenager?
Counterculture, basically. I suppose that’s what I’m still looking for.

Were you involved in the art scene in Philly before you came to New York?
I’m trying to remember at what age I learned what Space 1026 was. That was a studio space in Philly across from the Trocadero. They’d have art shows but they’d also sometimes have music shows, it was maybe more punk-DIY leaning. I remember going to that, but not a ton. I went to the museum a lot, just through school, not even on my own. We’d end up going to the Philadelphia Museum of Art all the time. I remember I really liked Rauschenberg at some point in high school, which is funny to think about. I guess I still like it.

You’ve been going out in New York since you moved here in 2004. What do you think is missing from nightlife now?
There aren’t DIY shows or raves like there used to be. That kind of space seems to have been bought up and if not flipped then sat on by more corporate-style real estate entities. That kind of access to places to gather and be loud for cheap seems relatively gone. Now when things happen, they’re at a functioning club with a doorman and a liquor license and a real bar.

What have you learned about yourself this past year?
That I can both stay asleep and stay awake for more days than I had previously imagined. Also, that I can have a nice time no matter what, even when I’m not.

What are you private about?
My studio. Stewart Uoo and Piotr Uklanski are the same way. To Stewart it’s more about headspace, to Piotr: “That’s my underwear, my temple.”

Whose advice do you seek?
My best friend from high school, Joanna Simon. The advice is always about how to navigate myself, not others. You need someone that knows how you tick and will account for the bullshit you’re inevitably going to pull anyway.

For advice about navigating the world I go to Jasmin Tsou and Alison Gingeras.

And this isn’t advice per say but when I’m talking to Juliana [Huxtable] we’re always quick to break down any dynamics at play out there and our relative places within them.

Who in your life sees things the most like you do?
I’ll say Elaine Cameron-Weir just because she’s always saying that we’re the same to me. And while I do believe to some people I am just as hot as Elaine is to everyone, Elaine and I are very different people. What I think we share is a similar style of ennui surrounding making art in the first place. And ennui surrounding life as an artist. Sticking with it despite all the day to day indignities, unsure most of the time if you’re even communicating that which cannot be put into words well enough to even warrant devoting your life to it. Ennui could be another word for drive here or standard or drive to meet that standard. And all the ensuing grumpiness.

Which qualities are important to you in a friend?
They have to be funny. Otherwise, what are we doing?

You want more artist friends who don’t care about celebrity.
The point of being artist class is you want to embody or propose an alternate set of values and a different way of thinking and some variants on what is already going on in the world that would make it better. If everyone you’re surrounded by is praising celebrities and watching just as much television as the populace, fully plugged into the same thing, holding the same or more value to the entertainment trash mechanism, then what are we doing? I just don’t care about it, I think it’s lame. I want to spend less of my life fielding other people’s care for it.

Thora Siemsen is a writer living in New York City. Photography by Marquale Ashley.