Lowbrow Pop Surrealism Printmaking: An Interview with Gideon Näf
- Laura Thipphawong
- 4 days ago
- 12 min read
By Laura Thipphawong
Gideon Näf, Website: www.gidnaf.com, Instagram: @gidnaf
Gideon Näf’s work is the epitome of Lowbrow art, and that’s not an insult. Lowbrow is a counter-cultural art movement influenced by punk music, comic illustration, graffiti, monsters, sci-fi, and pop culture iconography; the name is a self-deprecating nod to the genre’s frequent exclusion by elite or high-brow cultural institutions. Lowbrow art can be obscene or taboo, sometimes playful and humourous, often dark and provocative. It’s universally bizarre, intensely expressionistic, and—counter to what the name suggests—skillfully executed. It’s a style and philosophy behind nearly two decades of Gideon’s work as an artist and entrepreneur.
When he’s not participating in regional fairs and markets, Gideon is in his Toronto studio creating original work, printing intaglio editions for the likes of Kent Monkman and other local artists, or hosting boutique printmaking workshops for public access. After a corporate takeover pushed him out of his former studio in 2007, Gideon began managing and renting to other artists (me included) sections of a large industrial space in Toronto’s Stockyards. A perfectly bohemian warehouse conversion amid craft breweries, truck lots, and several meat-packing plants, it’s one of the few areas in the city still available to artists at a decent price.
Visit the studio on any given afternoon, and chances are you’ll be treated to a mix of surf rock, the smell of beer or raw meat (depending on who’s working nearby), and a lively discussion about the highs and lows of artmaking. I recorded one such discussion with Gideon about the meaning of Lowbrow, the specificity of his art, and the state of the Toronto art scene.
Laura Thipphawong: How does your work reflect the populist and anti-elite sentiments that lowbrow art means to promote?
Gideon Näf: Lowbrow was actually a concept you had enlightened me to. My background is in punk rock and heavy metal, so that was my first inspiration, along with skateboard culture. My motivation to create was as much about the Dead Kennedys as it was in looking at Van Gogh paintings. The lowbrow movement comes from counterculture, and punk rock is one of the most, if not the biggest counterculture movement of the 21st century.
So, it's never been my goal to be in a gallery. I’m not against it. I create prints for other artists to show in the gallery setting, but the idea for myself was something I was never smitten with. A gallery is not really feasible for me, anyway, because my work is very tongue-in-cheek. I really like doing markets and talking to people, like at the Toronto Outdoor Art Fair. This is the exhibition venue I prefer, the model of selling directly to people and making it affordable.
The summer after third year at OCAD, my dad was sick. I grew up on a farm in Eastern Ontario, and I took a big chunk of that summer to go and hang out with him and look after things after he just had this surgery. One day, we went and visited this other old Swiss guy; we were sitting there in his very Swiss living room, drinking kirsch or schnapps or something, and we discussed art and its function. Something he said that always stuck with me was, “There has to be art for farmers, too,” and I was like, yes, exactly.
And that’s why I like printmaking. It’s a very accessible form of artmaking and production where labour is involved. Producing multiples makes art more accessible and less exclusive. You know the Walter Benjamin discussion of the aura of art and how the value stuck to an art piece is lessened when you make a multiple? I dismissed the idea that multiples were a bad thing. I always found it really attractive.
Laura Thipphawong: Speaking of value, an oxymoron that I think about sometimes is serious comedy: deftly made, thoughtful, insightful, complex comedic art. Humour is notoriously disregarded in highly acclaimed platforms for art recognition. The Oscars, for example, have only given the Best Picture award to a comedy about 10 out of 97 times, and that's using a precarious definition of comedy.
But humour is a necessary part of the human experience to be reflected back to us. Can you explain the impetus for using humour in your art?
Gideon Näf: Like many people who go to art school and sit down and write what they aspire to accomplish when they make work, I came to the conclusion that the expression of good art is honesty. It's an honest expression of that person, and the closer you get to that truth, the better it is. I'm a funny person. I like to laugh. I like to crack jokes. Always been like that. When I was a kid, my dad told this story about one of the first times he noticed me laughing really hard. It was about the brutality of humanity in a way: someone ended up getting knocked over and fell down in the mud, and my dad said I laughed like a devil. That’s a part of my personality and always has been.
So, in order to find this truth, I need to make something darkly funny. I like to watch people look at the work, and a lot of the time, it's a slow burn before they see something like a middle finger in a pie. Or you look a little closer, and you read the text, and I love when people get it, the visual joke. When I was little, I wanted to do comic strips like The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes. But I guess I got too cool and wanted to focus a lot more on playing music and being in a band. But as soon as I went to OCAD and started pondering, I had this twisted idea of taking Rembrandt and maybe Gary Larson and putting them together. I like to fill a gap with something that isn't necessarily there, and that goes for music-making, too.
It comes back to what you were saying about serious comedy. Life is serious and sad, and making art is ultimately a reflection of that. There's a lot of memento mori imagery in my work, whether it's skulls or a cut-down tree stump that refuses to die. You see these all over the place, cut-down pieces of trees that just keep growing. And to me this is such a symbol of resilience. In one of my etchings, you have this requiem on a ribbon around a tree stump that reads, “I only ever wanted to make you smile.” You have this sentimental statement; it's very sweet. And the second part in the book says, “Then I peed in the pool. Sure, you laughed. But it wasn't what I had intended.”
These are all just reflections on existing. It's sad. It's complicated. It's kind of funny, and it's not what you intended. It's a lot of accidents and stumbling around. But at the same time, while we're here, I think it's important to take stock and to laugh if you can.
Laura Thipphawong: There are several other recurring and sometimes hidden motifs besides memento mori in your work, such as cryptozoology, ancient history, crushed cans, hamburgers, rural Canadian blue-collar iconography, and the proto-human. Some of these images are traditional in lowbrow art, some not so much. What does this visual lexicon mean to you?
Gideon Näf: I think it was Magritte or Braque who said, you take your obsessions, and you hang it on a nail. And that's art. You take your psychological fingerprint and put it out there. For me, it’s about collecting symbolic fascinations, putting them in a pile and twisting them and using them as I feel necessary. The cryptozoology, I remember as a kid growing up on the farm, one of my jobs was to go up in the dark loft and throw down hay, and in doing that, my imagination ran wild. I remember watching Unsolved Mysteries, and there was the Sasquatch episode, and going into the barn the next night, there's maybe something big and hairy lurking around the corner. In pondering all this stuff and accumulating things to eventually work on, that was a big one on top of the pile.
I also love the idea of the missing link. We're all human, no matter what we look like, no matter what we do, so the idea of the proto-human is our ancestors. We all have this common bipedal relative. We can all come together on that one, and that's why I like to use it as a symbol of humanity. That's why I have them traversing around. It's like the manifestation of our collective being.
Gideon Näf, Back From The Party, etching, aquatint, 8x10
Gideon Näf, Run Wild, 3-block woodcut/linocut, 11x11
The folk Canadiana images are a reflection of my childhood. When my dad passed away in 2008, that's when I did that series. It was a suite of work—not a goodbye, necessarily—but something to pay tribute. So that's why I did images of barns and tractors from the farm, and I often mix this folk iconography with things like pretty swirls to create a folk-pop aesthetic. I started printing with sheets of plywood to get that natural texture, that grit. I wanted to turn the dial up on the folk side.
There are other symbols of Canadiana, like, hockey, and beer, and other shit. I wanted to reflect on that but not necessarily glorify it, and I wanted to put a punk rock edge on it.
I really like the idea of having elements either brought to the foreground or leaving them around scattered throughout the piece. So that's why you'll often see crushed cans in the work. It's a symbol of disposable culture. These are all symbols of where we find ourselves right now: manufacturing something, crushing it, leaving it, casting it aside. It's the same with the burger. There's this Burger Mountain that comes up alongside medieval weaponry and tools, which speaks to our brutality as people. It's not specific to any culture. We can be very brutal, violent creatures, and of course, the burger represents North America. That's why I planted that castle right on top of it. It's a little bit on the nose in terms of symbolism, but I just really liked that it’s almost a reference to the Tower of Babel.
In the No Billionaires piece, there's a broken sword and axe. That’s my peace symbol. I do that all the time. So yeah, the burgers, the cans, the tree stumps and weird animals, humanity and nature, and the struggle to find our place: It’s a pile of symbols and things that I reflect on. I mash them up and make a salad. The salad comes out different each time.
Gideon Näf, Sympathy, 3-block woodcut,14x14
Gideon Näf, Be Brazen, 2-block woodcut, 22x44
Gideon Näf, No Billionaires, linocut, 6x8”
Laura Thipphawong: No Billionaires is a rare work of protest art for you, a reflection of current events. What made you want to want to do something like that now?
Gideon Näf: I've never really made the issue of wealth specifically the thesis or the content of my work, but like a lot of people right now, I’m looking at income inequality.
I'm thinking about the value of things. I got into this philosophical chewing and kneading of value, market, currency. Money is tied to resources tied to wealth and what a specific political union is capable of.
Okay, I’m not a Communist. I believe in a fair, free market, but I believe billionaires should not exist. There's no single entity that deserves to live with such excess. There's no religion or philosophical school of any value that would condone this degree of sheer decadence. It's outrageous that we allow it to happen. I had a simple proposal for an art project that states two words: No billionaires. Encourage nonviolent protest to broadcast a chosen path through capitalism. Make things cheaper, hoard less money, be less greedy—immoral, inhumane, billionaire. I wanted to make this into a sticker and then either give them away for free or sell it for two bucks. In that way, we’re still using a system that I don't wholly disagree with if you're using it the right way or the fair way. So, I think I'm more compelled to sell them for a twonie.
Laura Thipphawong: One of the issues of wealth and income in Toronto concerning access to art and opportunities for artists is the rising rent. You had another space before this one, and gentrification pushed you out. How is the artist community changing in the face of the great homogenization?
Gideon Näf: What stung about that, and actually gave me more reason to sharpen the tools of my production, was twofold: Yes, it was gentrification, but it was also that we were pushed out by Ubisoft, a major digital media company, the antithesis of how I work. Digital culture, in general, in some ways, renders image-making meaningless. It can be so cheap and easy to do; you can blast people with it one thousand frames per second, and then, what does it mean?
Since then, I have developed a contempt for Ubisoft and mass digital production. It almost made me want to double down on what I do. A friend of mine worked for Ubisoft, so for a while, we were in the same building, and he came up to look at some work one day. He saw Battle Royale; it's an etching, and in the middle of it, there's this burger mountain fortress that’s being fought over. And he said, it's too bad you don't do animation because I would just love to see all these figures moving around. I was like, you fucking baby. You can't even just look at a single piece of art and meditate on it. It has to move around for you to feel engaged.
So, in the studio, we really saw the writing on the wall. When we first got in, it was a really cool building, with all these mom-and-pop manufacturers and a wide range of creative-industry people, as well as a drywall guy or a plumbing guy, or something like that. And photographers, all kinds of stuff. But eventually, it came to be known that Ubisoft was taking two floors, and then a few years passed, and then there were rumours that they're taking half of the third floor. And then that's when we all knew that eventually they would take the whole building. They became this entity. Luckily enough, in that old studio building, there was Matt Bahen, who is now in this studio, and there was Tristram Lansdowne, who, up until just this year, was also our studio mate. The three of us banded together with my friend Justin, and we went out looking for spots, and we landed here in 2017.
What it comes down to is that people speak a nice game about cultural production and endorsing culture and wanting to provide the city with a landscape that produces great culture. However, space is at such a premium that creativity is stifled. All the funky stuff happens when people have a room to work, and it doesn't cost them an arm and a leg to do it.
So, this is where we're at. People are making art in their closets because that's all they're given.
Laura Thipphawong: Do you think that there's an artist diaspora at this point because of everything going on?
Gideon Näf: I've heard of it. Even in terms of people outside the creative industries, there are a lot of people moving out. A good chunk of my friends moved to Alliston and Georgetown, and a few out by Peterborough. It makes sense. A lot of people went to Hamilton. But I’m not saying they’re all gone. There are artists left in the city. Some of them are sitting here in this studio. It hasn't been a big exodus, but it has been a gradual trickle.
Laura Thipphawong: And what does Toronto look like if this keeps happening and artists are pushed out of studios, but, more importantly, pushed out of their homes? What happens when you can't afford to live comfortably in your apartment anymore, let alone have space to create artwork? As more artists are pushed out, what happens to Toronto’s culture?
Gideon Näf: I'm not sure. I'm fearful. I'd like to think that no matter what, people make things. Artmaking is older than agriculture by tens of thousands of years. It's such an innate compulsion.
I think any of us would like to visit a city, check out a cool downtown core, see some cool shops and some great pieces of local art, or go and see a local band. This is something we strive for. Some years back, I saw Rob Ford at the airport—he had gone on some mission to see why Austin is so cool. You know, it has this really vibrant music scene.
They went to go and research it, and I'm sure one of the first things that they would have found is that there's affordable and accessible studio space for artists, and that there's already an established infrastructure: people who invest into the scene and make it possible to incubate art. Toronto has a great art scene despite so many constraints. Is it as good as it could be because investment is so low, and the cost of space is so high? I can't say.