Meet Mat Gleason

Today we’d like to introduce you to Mat Gleason.

Every artist has a unique story. Can you briefly walk us through yours?
I’m a failed artist. I did not have the discipline it took to make great art. In 1988, my painting instructor at Cal State L.A., the late Lydia Takeshita, visited my studio and told me I just wasn’t a painter, I was a writer. While that hurt, she was correct. And the results speak for themselves. I published a magazine, Coagula Art Journal, that covered the Los Angeles and New York art scenes beginning in 1992. We’d leave stacks at hundreds of galleries on both coasts. I had a lot of help from people around the country who had different degrees of antipathy toward the art world, it was great fun, and I enjoyed the notoriety. I had no aspirations of pleasing anyone, but within two years, everyone in the art world knew me. There is a lesson. Also, I got sober in the second year of publishing it, so there is another lesson.

Coagula is in the canon of institutional critique, you can trace so much of the “art” that falls under that umbrella to what I started, and I must say, with the help of dozens of people over the years, that was the closest I ever got to being a cult leader! Ironically, complete sets of Coagula magazines mercilessly trashing art world institutions are now in lots of prestigious institutional collections like MOMA and The Getty. You can either embrace paradox or be a whiner, so I embrace that paradox. I did a lot of curating and opened an art gallery in 2012, Coagula Curatorial, the buzz then was that the outsider becomes an insider, but by then I had already been to the mountaintop, so the paradox was easy for me to segue into.

Please tell us about your art.
My writing and curating are my “art.” My message used to be about subverting the establishment but when you run a gallery you owe it to the artists for their work to be seen in a manner that makes it look as perfect as possible and that usually means a conventional space – so much challenging of art’s formal fundamentals these days is bullshit perpetrated by lazy rich kids and art school teachers (themselves usually former lazy rich kids) who are terrified that their students are coming for their precious jobs, so they encourage a destruction of presentation methods to suffocate all career staying power.

I’m either loved or hated, bring my name up at a party, there will be a variety of opinions – but almost everyone will have one, and usually a strong opinion about me. And I have worked my ass off to make sure of that at the expense of a lot of party invites.

Do you have any advice for other artists? Any lessons you wished you learned earlier?
Art that gets noticed (and collected/curated into shows/generally supported) is art that creates desire. And almost no damn artist does this. 96% of artists make something that is a minor tweaking on some art they experienced, and they are trying to recreate that experience.

In 1998 I published an interview with Richard Serra, and this same question was posed, and he said the greatest advice: “Work out of your own work. Don’t work out of anyone else’s work.”

I wish I had learned earlier that when you go in for the kill, finish the job.

How or where can people see your work? How can people support your work?
I manage to get my stuff out there. I have a flair for drawing attention. When television producers Michael Levitt and Jill Goularte were looking for a Los Angeles art critic they googled “Los Angeles Art Critic” and hired me to be a judge on a television reality competition show
(Skin Wars Fresh Paint – https://www.netflix.com/title/80179556 – currently on Netflix) with RuPaul, so I guess if you want to support me you can google me.

This summer my podcast will debut at www.SecretsOfTheArtWorld.com so be on the lookout for that.

Just google me or be in the L.A. art world for like a week you can’t miss me.

Buy my book, a collection of my writings from earlier this decade at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Century-Hit-Puberty-Selected-2010-2014/dp/1502808749.

I’ve done television and movies, usually involving art commentary, check out my IMDB page: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2182271/.

I produce a streaming web teevee show MODERN ART BLITZ: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSkyJ-GexpZc4ql35REiRTw.

Contact Info

• Website: http://coagulacuratorial.com/
• Instagram: @matgleason
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/art.critic
• Twitter: @RevHalofan

Image Credit:
Coagula Archives

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