“Do you remember Jonathan Silverman in The Single Guy? Do you remember Caroline in the City?” he asked me over coffee in the Village, a sticky July afternoon. Decades ago, he had shown me a painting he’d made under the influence of Paul Klee, and while O’Hare’s aesthetic has matured since then, he has retained the Bauhaus philosophy about the intersection of craft and design and culture, the main ingredients in his current work.
I remember that painting from the 1990s, but I didn’t remember The Single Guy; he assured me that it wasn’t important. “It’s not that it’s obscure. You don’t want to be esoteric, it’s not about ‘Did you get the reference?’” He pivoted to the topic that really animated him:
“Whether it’s watching Jonathan Silverman or collecting baseball cards, we all spent time on them. To me, they’re valuable, so how do we understand them, given that we spent all that time doing them? The time spent is valuable. Even if it’s wasted.”
The life of labor, Ralph Waldo Emerson had it, “creates not men, but drudges.”1 O’Hare has worked in commercial illustration and animation — a “content creator” for MTV and YouTube and Adult Swim — the Bauhaus of our moment. Along the way, he has accumulated a dense personal vocabulary of infographic symbols, runes and glyphs that now populate his fine artwork. Born a few miles but a few centuries from Emerson, O’Hare put it to me this way:
“The commercial stuff, they pay me directly for my time. I make x amount of money per day, I give you this stuff. I can quantify my time. What about all this stuff — whether it’s fine art, or collecting baseball cards as a kid, watching shitty tv shows, drinking coffee, dropping off your laundry. Most of life. Most of life is time spent on the marketplace. We ascribe no value; or we are giving away — we are consuming. No I don’t agree with that. That time has value. That time is more valuable than your time ‘at work.’ That’s what I choose to elevate.”
Among his recent works is an ongoing meditation on collecting baseball cards as a boy — an educative moment in his sense of value. “The way we came to baseball cards was as an investment. We all had this story that your dad had a Mickey Mantle rookie but your grandma threw them out. So you should grab the rookie card because someday it’ll be worth something. But then you turned fourteen and the market collapses and you move on to other things, and they’re worthless -- and that’s your introduction. They’re worthless. But are they? I think they do. I still have all of them . . . The things are still there. Nothing about them changed. Except the way we conceive of them. They’re worthless, or whatever.”
He still has them, so he can still stare at them, as he did when he was ten years old. Today he makes life-size transcriptions of the backs of cards — not the player’s faces, but those columns of stats and strange anecdotes that appeared on the backs of Topps playing cards — numbers kids poured over like Talmudic scholars. His output is a very faithful copy, but not a photographic one: the figures are written down, recognizably in O’Hare’s handwriting, rather than copied as a trompe l’oeil.
“The baseball cards represent the value of the players — their value as players in the market place. It’s a speculative value . . . These are a record of a player’s value. If your average went below .300, they were in a different tier of the market. This is a trace of that.”
It’s a snapshot of a theory of value that captivated the minds of people of a certain age — a whole generation collecting trading cards, comic books; the ‘pog’ craze of 1994. That generation was raised up on horse-trading itself as its pastime. Kids in the 60s grabbed Mickey Mantle because they loved Mickey Mantle; they were consumers and then collectors. But in 1992, kids were learning not to collect, but to speculate. There was a booming trade in magazines just to track the value of trading cards and comics — you could subscribe to Wizard Magazine or Overstreet Guide to get a monthly report of how much your Adventures of Superman #500 was worth.
How much is it worth today? Almost nothing. A whole generation can’t be squirreling something away and expect its value to skyrocket, and it didn’t.2
The boom-and-bust cycle revealed that our childhood pastimes had been transmogrified into grown-up-style investor mindsets. Over the same period of time, all the grown-up activities have been changed into childhood-style games. “They turn your managing of life into — they gamify everything. Your banking app on your phone — it’s fun.” The apps for day-trading speak the same visual language as Candy Crush or Fortnite; we were trained by Topps to excel at data-entry jobs.
We’re taught a strange lesson of our own value: keep working; keep playing. They’re not fundamentally different activities when childhood is commodified and adulthood is gamified.
It’s exhausting; it also produces so much waste.
Enter the idea of exhaust in O’Hare’s philosophy. Every system produces exhausts — waste-streams that are not the intended output of the system. Some of these are “collectibles” that are slabbed in plastic3 in hope of wild market appreciations; others are intended to be instantly deposited in the dustbin.
“That’s the receipts thing. I was at Dunkin Donuts and I got this forty-page long receipt. This dinosaur-tail worth of data for like a $2.19 coffee. Not even from an environmental standpoint, it’s just interesting that we do this. I was just sitting in Dunkin Donuts, which I like better than most coffee shops, actually. There’s the garbage next to the door that’s for the receipt that you just got. So I just started tracing them.”
The receipts represent another arm of O’Hare’s recent work: a tapestry of almost abstract squares, populated by the almost meaningless transcriptions of tiny, nearly-valueless transactions. O’Hare resists nostalgia and the impulses to deconstruct or even self-document. Others have done this, he notes — how much did we spend on coffee in 2017 compared to toothpaste? How many razors will I use before I die? Self-reporting doesn’t interest O’Hare — in fact, it’s part of the problem. The system requires you to always be documenting micro-transactions; to keep Mario’s cart moving forward, keep “liking” on social media, keep shifting the Gamestop shares — because otherwise you will cease to exist.
O’Hare resists this perspective almost convulsively. This is what life is made up of — not the ceaseless self-reporting to our corporate handlers, but of small sips of coffee.
A distrust for deconstructionism fuels a more constructive body of his work in collage and animation. Frenetic piles of images are culled from stock photography and traced and warped and remixed and animated: the results are off-kilter and dizzying, but also rich and surprising — “starting with what’s expected and then go further and further away,” he observes.
“I’ll take stock images, and arrange them all in Photoshop. I work over them, so I’m turning layers on and off, so you still have that under there. I closed a layer of an old project, and I found the perfect image underneath.”
“Tight Ferrari,” a collaboration with Sean Yeaton of the band Parquet Courts, “is the same sort of thing. Creating a stock-image band. In the context of the stock image, it kind of makes sense . . . but when you trace over them, [the actors in the photo] look maniacal, they look desperate. It’s almost like lifting away a layer and seeing something more authentic, but you’re actually adding to it.”
For an artist that celebrates the value of time wasted on The Single Guy with Jonathan Silverman, he is relentlessly productive. Music videos, commercial illustrations, and some sort of digital lava lamp that has yet to be named by Western culture clog his daily schedule. In between, he fuels his own exhaust channel, drawing constantly, filling sketchbooks on traditional paper with remarkable precision and polish. If he views the value of money as childish and gamified, he eyes the workbench as a certain palliative — and in this, he is Emersonian again:
“There is no way to success in art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.”4
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843, Lawrence Rosenwald, (ed.), Emerson Selected Journals 1841 - 1877, Vol. 2, New York: Penguin Random House, 2016, p. 178.
For reference, a good copy of the first appearance of Superman has gone for about $4,000,000; a good copy of the first re-appearance of Superman after the character’s death in the 1990s — a hotly-collected comic when it first came out!— is $6.57.
“‘Slabbing’ is slang for getting a comic professionally graded and encased in an un-openable hard plastic shell” — this is a real thing that real people did to real comic books in the 1990s.
This reminded me of a new documentary that just came out about my favorite process artist/musician, Matt Farley: https://youtu.be/7viOVfRRhNI
His music is loosely tossed off in contrast to Kieran's meticulous style, but it's genius at scale. I think he's released 20,000 quickly composed songs about all sorts of mundane things in a deliberate attempt to make a living off Spotify, which he now does. Also, like Kieran and Sean, he's from the North Shore (Danvers).