One of the more successful paintings I made was created during a visit to India, where I witnessed a fascist party rally. In the colonial days, the fascist party used to wear short shorts, but that uniform wasn’t flattering at all. Most of the party’s members are potbellied, scrawny old men, like a donut hole with pretzel sticks at the bottom. And at this fascist party, everyone was wearing pants. Globalization meant the American ideal of the perfect body spread to India, and that’s when they abandoned their short shorts for pants. I was also going to the gym regularly while I was there, and the trainers would always ask me to take the weights off the squat rack when I was done. After a while, I learned that nobody did legs after I left, and so I would just leave the weights on the rack. These two instances coalesced into a painting that combined the current political, economic, social, and ideological structures. 

I realized two things. First, dudes don’t like doing leg day. And second, that dudes have this weird inability to look inwardly at themselves and say, My legs look kind of fucking chicken-like, I need to do something about it. I titled the painting Saffron, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace Leg Day.

Are these instances in how perception and culture change over time something you’re exploring?

The interesting thing about blockchain for example is the culture that it promotes and the idea of making everything public. Early on, Mark Zuckerberg and Christopher “moot” Poole, the creator of 4chan, held a debate at an internet content creator convention, just two awkward nerds going up against each other. Zuckerberg claimed that if everything is connected to your account, people will be more honest. moot went directly against this, saying that being anonymous is what makes people more honest. The funny thing is that years later the obscene rhetoric from 4chan moved over to Facebook, and people are now willing to connect their identities with horrible beliefs. We’re far beyond believing that people will self-police themselves if what they say online is connected to their public personas.

That friction seems to be abundant in your work — how people choose to be seen or remembered.

I recently wrapped up a painting about the Nayirah testimony in 1990. Right before the Gulf War, the United States Congress brought in a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl to talk about how the Iraqis were invading her homeland. She testified that she worked at a hospital and that Iraqi soldiers were taking babies out of incubation beds and throwing them on the floor, and then destroying the incubation units. She talked about how all of these babies were dying, how it was at the level of war crime. Of course, everyone couldn’t believe this was happening and it triggered the First Gulf War.

But after it was all over, it turned out that Nayirah was not actually a girl working at a Kuwaiti hospital; she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. A PR firm funded by defense contractors by the name of Hill+Knowlton picked her up to convince America to invade. 

Nowadays, if you try to find Nayirah on the Internet, she’s gone. She or her family paid to have her scrubbed. Internet scrubbing is interesting to me. The most famous example is Satoshi Nakamoto, the person who invented Bitcoin. He sold his passport photo as an early NFT, one of the first really good art NFTs. After selling it, he paid Google exorbitant amounts of money and scrubbed his presence from the Internet. 

If you think about it, our best commodity at this point is not our labor anymore, it’s our information. Instagram makes money based on how much my eyeballs look at skateboarding or twerking videos. If it can tell that I’m more into skateboarding that day, it’ll push skateboarding videos. So information is the best commodity at this point. How do you delete yourself from that? How do you scrub yourself from the internet, and how much does that cost?

I’m interested in what we’re asked to look at. I would see this advertisement on the street for Calvin Klein where they ask some shirtless 21-year-old white kid, “What do you think about the future?” And he would answer, “I want to live in a world where everybody’s freedom of expression solves all the problems of the world.” I tend to think that bad advertising like this exists as a ploy to make good advertising more effective, so that we're not even aware of it. A white kid wanting to change the future is enough of a distraction that people won’t notice that a really good ad hit them in their core and now they’re suddenly buying Everlane jeans.

It's kind of like how moderate Democrats are so behind the progressive left that when they finally catch up, they totally ruin and destroy the ideas in their wake and turn them hideous. I think that’s deeply connected to how advertising media operates. None of them have realized that the young people they’re advertising to no longer think about self-expression like we used to. It’s so 2016. Identity and uniqueness and the woke movement aren’t our obsessions anymore, stop using them to sell a product.

It feels to me like a Boomer’s worst stereotype of what a millennial is, advertised to Zoomers. My girlfriend and I went on a cruise up the Hudson River and we saw that storage facility with the huge advertisement that read something like, “Our kids are not in the closet. This is not the South. You can use our closets for storage.”

Fuck off.

Exactly. They were saying, “We’re in New York, our kids are woke.” And we just stood there and looked at it as the boat rocked and this surreal sensation of nausea and seasickness coursed through our systems.

Near public records there’s a lot that’s fenced off that acts as battery storage for electric cars, and the next block over is the Gowanus Green project. It feels like a joke. If anything happens to those batteries, if anything leaks, who’s going to deal with it? A bunch of people in public housing.

It’s funny to hear Democrats talk about green cars, especially coming off the failed coup in Bolivia, where Elon Musk claimed that we’ll coup whoever we want if it means we can get all the lithium we need for our cars. When I talk to Democrats at art openings, they tend to announce that they want to buy a Tesla because it's good for the environment. But the truth is, you could buy a used 1984 Ford pickup that belches black smoke out of its rear end and has 300,000 miles on it and you're going to look cool as fuck. And guess what? You're better for the environment for doing that, because the carbon footprint of creating one of those iPod-car monstrosities is so much greater than reusing a vehicle that's changed hands four or five times.

What’s your stance on the sustainability versus regeneration debate?

I feel like we spend a lot of time thinking about how we as a collective can move forward and what we should be doing as a community. If you recycle your bags, you're doing good. If you commit to this composting community thing, you're doing good. But when are we going to start having the conversation that it’s no longer on us?

Think of walking down the alley and getting mugged — the person pulls a gun on you and demands your money. You’re the performer when you get robbed. You might think it’s the other way around, that the person who has the gun is doing the performance and you’re reacting to it, but it’s not. You’re in the moment, you can be threatened, you can end your life right now if you want to. But there’s a typical structure, a guide of what you have to do. You're supposed to hand out everything, phone, wallet, keys whatever it might be.

That's what sustainability always feels like to me. We're being told to follow the script. If you want the world to be like this, we have to do this. What is the point of Greta Thunberg going out and telling people what to do? We can follow instructions, but we have no power, no leverage, no gun in our hands. What do we do to get leverage? I'm tired of the current discourse, I'm tired of people coming to me and saying, “Hey, you’re a young person, you're smart, you're engaged in the world, you have naive ideals, and you should tell me what we should do.” The real question is, where’s the money at? The people asking us what to do are the ones flying around in private jets. At this point, it’s not a question of consumption, it’s a question of power. When are we going to get off the fucking hamster wheel? When is it going to flip? 

I recall seeing a graph that indicated that when there’s a massive drop in the standard of living, there will likely follow a revolution. We know from the past two years that there’s been a drop in the standard of living.

What would you say to people who go off-the-grid? It feels like an outdated ideal now.

It’s outdated, but now the concept alone has expanded entirely. There’s off-the-grid influencers now. They exist. I was scrolling through Instagram one day and got an ad for this pregnant girl in basically no clothes cooking at her tiny stove in her trailer. And she’s advocating for going off-the-grid and living her lifestyle. There was a quote from Žižek, who had picked some British model to be weird about, where he says that she’s the best writer in the world because she’s read fewer books than she’s written. To him, that’s the ultimate writer. Off-the-grid influencers are similar — this idea of putting out content and not looking at anything, being a complete producer, a zero-percent consumer. I mean, I doubt that’s how it actually plays out, but that’s the ideal: shitting into the void and consuming nothing, shitting out pure celestial energy.

You don’t have to go off-the-grid to unconsciously do things that change the way you relate to capitalism. How does someone become unadvertizable? What does it mean to be a person who’s not persuaded?

I came up with the phrase platform mania. The platform makes you manic and you're addicted to that mania. A feedback loop.

We have a compulsion to consume ads. There are some apps that are your good vegetables, and then there's apps that are your cake. Instagram is a cake, YouTube is a cake.

I recently attended a lecture on data trauma, which is the idea that everyday you have your information mined from you, and trying to partake in its benefits can backfire. You know this is happening to you and you try to take part in it, but the algorithm doesn’t care. Like when someone posts a Tweet and says, “Twitter do your thing,” and it only gets two retweets. You expect the algorithm to work for you and it kills you when it doesn’t, which means overall, the algorithm is killing all of us. You see people asking for donations to get out of a fucked up situation, and their GoFundMe page receives two dollars, even though it’s been open for six months. These are people who need assistance, and the algorithm doesn’t provide it. And it’s why so many people are depressed.

How are you interested instead in material objects, materials, and experiences?

There’s a pilgrimage site in India that I visited with my dad and his friend, where the base is a monastery, and you have to take your shoes off. What sane, smart people do is take their shoes off, hold them in their hands, walk through the monastery, and put them back on to climb. What we decided, these three bohemian art people of India, was to climb up barefoot. We nearly died getting up there and nearly died even more coming down, if that's possible. I remember blacking out and sliding down sheer rocks, which are practically at a 45 degree angle. The entire experience was insane, the three of us climbing on these black stones that were cooking in the sun.

At the top is a temple for worshipers of Shiva, the God of destruction. The pilgrimage site is meant to evoke that liminal moment mentioned in the Bhagavad Gita where Shiva destroys everything for rebirth. Hindus used to do animal sacrifices there, but nowadays they give food offerings. The whole mountain is black, but the rock at the top is extra black because they've been burning years and years of offerings up here. At this point, the surface is rock mixed with oil, ghee, and charcoal. You can take your finger and just swirl through it. 

This experience really informed my relationship to charcoal and why I’m drawn to it in my work. I undergo periods of complete obsession with it because it’s such a primal object in human history. It’s a product of sacrifice, a product of burning, it’s man’s first foray into technology, it has purification properties, it’s a fertilizer.

Using more charcoal recently means that I’m also trying to use less color in my pieces. I think I've used too much color in the past. Last time somebody wrote about my work, they mentioned pop culture references and psychedelia. I don’t hate psychedelics — I grew up selling psychedelics to tourists after all. My hometown in India was a stop for all the Eat, Pray, Love people. They would stop there to find themselves and we sold them acid and shrooms. They’d hang around, ask where the good parties were at, and we’d say, “Not here. Take your mushrooms and dip.” 

I think about that time period: We used to go hiking, and we’d visit a friend of ours who allowed us to pick all the mushrooms we wanted in exchange for dried products. However much we picked fresh, he’d give us the equivalent weight in dried shrooms. I never thought about it then, but now I realize people would kill for that type of opportunity. Especially those tourists.

What other approaches do you take to your work?

Satori is the Zen Buddhist term for immediate enlightenment, when the past, present, and future come together and coalesce. You’re aware of the wind blowing, how you feel, your breath, everything simultaneously. It’s supposedly the same feeling as enlightenment, but brief and worldly, so it’s unsustainable. In five minutes, you'll forget about that wonderful moment. I’m interested in this brief period of time, this liminal space, and I connect those ideas to the people in history who are defined by one event, and that’s all we know them for.

One of my works is on a politician named Enoch Powell, who’s known for his speech called, “The Rivers of Blood.” He made the case that immigrants arriving in Britain would deprive Brits of their communities and were a very scary invading force. I became interested in Enoch Powell as a phrase and used a free association method to think about that phrase over and over. At the bottom of the work, I painted him and the words from his speech, but everything above him builds on top of that. The piece was about creating the eureka moment of Satori when everything clicks into place and you suddenly understand everything.

All painting is always conceptual. To me, the crux of the issue is learning how to coalesce a larger concept into one moment. The painting about Nayirah doesn’t even look like her, but that doesn’t matter because the painting is just her. If somebody reads into what it’s about, that’s great, but if they don’t, it doesn’t matter because the work exists as a coalescence of everything. I don’t necessarily do a lot of research; I’m not trying to dive into scholarly articles, because it’s not part of the flow for me. Instead, it’s more like a social media algorithm, like a psychic with dowsing rods trying to find water.

So many other artists rely on the explanation though, because their work is just trash and boring to look at. I like to walk around Chelsea and drop into galleries just to fucking laugh at Mickey Mouse pop art shit and floating rectangles. It’s a gift from God when there’s actually something worth checking out. But most everything else makes me think, What the fuck is this doing in a reputable gallery?

That's why I like working at Christie’s. You'll see shit and ask yourself, How is this making money? It's so great to actually see the flow of money, and it’s nice when a work isn’t valued highly because it’s dogshit and everyone knows it. But there are other works that make so much money, and I just don’t get it. It drives me insane, because it’s valued like a stock and nothing else.

At Christie’s we don’t talk about art as it relates to its values, aesthetics, or history. The questions they ask are, “How much should that sell for? Who buys it?” A good example is Picasso. They won’t put him in with the post-war collection, even though historically he’s part of the post-war; they’ll sell him to Impressionist collectors. At the auction house, it's all about money. And now the art world is turning itself inside out for a stake in cryptocurrency and NFTs, and it’s become so apparent that the West just wants to accelerate and burn itself out faster than we expected. The future is just a bunch of ugly-ass apes and burning the world down for crypto. 

It’s almost relieving to think, Oh, we're going to fucking kill ourselves. It’s a death cult. I would love to be a psychic reader right now, and all my prophecies would say, your life is going to get infinitely terrible from here on out. That's $10. Easy job. Easy fucking job.