We were lucky to catch up with Joshua Hagler recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Joshua, thanks for joining us today. Are you happier as a creative? Do you sometimes think about what it would be like to just have a regular job? Can you talk to us about how you think through these emotions?

I’m happy as a person and that makes me a happy artist. Painting, for me, has shifted away from a primarily achievement-oriented, ladder-climbing concern to occupying just one part of a larger contemplative or spiritual practice. In the end, there’s far too much going on politically, socially, economically, and so on in the art world to think I can make myself “acceptable” to the Great Lords of Acceptability. Needing validation to measure one’s quality or worth is an artist’s death sentence. I’ve found that the best thing I can do now is to take my inner life seriously, to cease apologizing for anything at all, and to put all trust in myself and in time. Every artist I know has a deeper individual intelligence than that of the collective so-called discourse of the art world or the culture broadly. To become happy within this reality is nothing short of a miracle, but it’s possible and necessary for the artist to work from a place of abundance rather than fear and shame.

I’d like to live many lives. I do admire, and often find more meaningful, the work that my friends and those around me do. I’m constantly humbled by the authenticity and intelligence of my friends here in New Mexico. They’re farmers and healthcare professionals. Musicians and emergency responders. Engineers, botanists, social workers, and so on. The best philosopher I know, I met when she was providing childcare to our daughter and the kids in our community. I tend to think of my friends as heroic and recognize the privilege and low stakes of what I do in comparison. I find it important to acknowledge this as a way of keeping things in perspective.

I never knew any artists growing up or even knew it to be an option. Coming of age in a working class environment life wasn’t always easy, in large part because of the trauma my family carrie in relation to the death of my youngest brother. Nevertheless, things seemed, on the surface at least, simpler, more direct, and straight forward as compared to the marketplace of culture production in which my social and professional life is situated today. I find myself rather uncomfortable around wealth, influence, and politics, and am never unaware of the blindspot the art world has toward the “lower” classes and to the complex issues around class generally. Social realities like pedigree, prestige, validation, taste, expertise etc. have long been difficult for me to believe as reality at all. The less attention given to those things, the deeper sense of fulfillment I experience in simply being present with the work.

Joshua, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

It’s almost enough to say this: When I was a kid, I liked drawing, storytelling, and creating worlds, and it just never occurred to me not to.

Within the small midwestern towns I grew up in, I had very little cultural learning or access. I was a weird kid who went to the local library on my own, just to explore and see what was there (as there was still no such thing as the internet). I suspected there was a larger world and I wanted to experience and understand it. I was the first in my family to receive an education beyond high school and earned a degree in visual communications (illustration and design) from University of Arizona in Tucson in 2002. In some ways I was lucky because while some parents might have tried to persuade their artsy kids to do something safer, mine were just happy to see me get a degree in anything at all. This meant that while they didn’t understand it, they also didn’t try to impede. The one rule was that I had to go in-state (Arizona by that time) as out-of-state was unaffordable. I received an art scholarship to go to U of A, which made it the least expensive and obvious choice.

At that time, I wanted nothing more than to write and draw comics and graphic novels. I wrote and illustrated a daily comic strip for the school paper as well as provided illustrations for op-ed pieces. I worked during the rest of my student years as art director for the same paper, and some of my first freelance work came while I was still in school, for the regional weeklies and even for a children’s book. A graphic novel script I began writing at 19 would later receive a grant which led to its publication in my mid-twenties. Even today, I’ll hear from a Hollywood-type threatening to turn it into a movie or show, which never actually happens. It’s sort of an ongoing joke at this point.

I wanted so badly, following graduation, to be a full time illustrator/cartoonist/artist (any, all) that I would make rules for myself and stick to them as I worked my day jobs. My final day job was at a frame shop, where I worked about 30 hours per week. The rule, then, was to devote an equal number of hours to my own projects, which meant I worked 60-hour weeks. I could barely pay my own rent on those wages, so art supplies were not easy to come by. At one point, I got a storyboarding gig, which didn’t pay much, but did require a lot of hours. So, on that one gig alone, in October, 2005, days before my 26th birthday, I quit the frame shop job. Long story short, I’d cobble together whatever illustration gigs I could get and then just work on my own projects with whatever time I had left. The rules were the same: however many hours I put toward satisfying art directors, I put just as many into making my own paintings, writing my own stories, etc. I’m not exactly sure, myself, how I eventually moved on from illustration altogether; it was a gradual process. I do remember the day I made my final phone calls to the last of my clients and art directors telling them not to offer me anymore work. I didn’t want to be tempted back when things got hard, as I knew they would.

I made my first semi-interesting paintings around 2006, and got my first gallery show in 2008, which is actually rather quick in retrospect. Between those two things, I lost my apartment and studio to an arson (I would eventually collaborate on an animation project with the arsonist some three years later…a long story in itself). A friend of a friend offered his garage for me to finish the show, and that seemed somehow to accelerate my growth as a painter. When you’re young, things can happen that way sometimes. I remember even the fire with such gratitude now. It’s astonishing how a life comes together, the way it could never happen the same way twice.

I remember feeling challenged at that time to meet anyone in the gallery world because I didn’t go to the local art schools, or to any school anyone respected, or receive an MFA like most of my friends and peers. To show in San Francisco you needed to have gone to SFAI or CCA, and those cliques were impenetrable. Even while visiting an old friend there recently, he made the comment that in academic “fine art” programs, one learns to ask “deep questions” as compared to the kind of program I was in. So this prejudice is still alive and well even in those I respect. For my part, I don’t think there are “deep” or “shallow” questions; just “interesting” or “boring” questions and, eventually, the realization that all explanations are part of one long infinite regress, “turtles all the way down.” The intellect is never enough; we’ve no choice but to live the question in practice. I’m not sure whether academic programs can teach that.

Anyway, I would somehow find a patron, or, rather, he would find me, from a most unexpected place: the San Manuel Tribe in Southern California. Because of a young man my own age, to whom I’ll always be grateful, whose family owns a casino, I was able to focus on making art for two full years, which would lead to my first gallery representation in 2009. I was still totally unrecognized in San Francisco, but I was beginning to show in other cities and countries anyway.

From 2006-18, I made very little money in all that time, but I was extremely resourceful food- and space-wise. I was married and divorced from my first wife as I was a constant train wreck from financial and existential panic. I projected my victim fantasies onto everyone at all times. I was what you’d call a “hot head.” I never really knew how to really be present with things as they were happening, and I certainly hadn’t learned gratitude. I often say taking responsibility for one’s life is the hardest trick to learn. So although I’d been working full time as an artist all these years, I never could accept or celebrate it.

In 2017, broke and desperate, I gave up living in California after fifteen years, and landed in rural New Mexico, having received the Roswell Artist in Residence grant and residency. Things immediately started to feel better and the work underwent an incredible transformation and the career followed even as I was no longer in a major city. It’s only been in the past couple years that I’ve made a good living and find myself in the position of being able to choose how and where I want to show or take on projects. My career has been somehow long and unglamorous, but it also seems impossible that it’s happened at all.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Somehow, along the way, and with no one in particular to blame, I learned that my worth as a human is to do with my achievements. So, for most of my life, I’ve wanted attention and acknowledgment for my effort as a way of being able to see myself as a person who matters. I needed to escape the redneck philistinism of my past and become acceptable to the “cultural elites” of, you know, California or New York or wherever. But because I never could seem to get the amount of praise and inclusion I thought necessary in my quest to become human, it meant seeing myself as I imagined others saw me, as a worthless puddle of sewer drainage whose birth and life is completely irrelevant to the more important doings and directions of culture. But what happens is that each time we’re granted access to a new “floor” in the tower of achievement, we see that each room is as empty as the last. The hierarchies simply have no meaning, and when we see that for ourselves, we might find we’re living in this kind of dissociative sleep-scramble for no discernible reason but for lacking a better idea about how to comport ourselves in such a reality. This default sleep-scramble is one which mandates that all successes and failures be met with new schemes and strategies in order to ascend to the next floor, which, by now, we should already know to be empty! What a racket, this Nihilism of Ladder-Climbing!

So, after years of seeing for myself how art is acquired by museums or how it’s decided who’s important and who’s not, there really is no institution left for me to believe. There is no Board of the Enlightened somewhere out there calling the shots. The first reaction upon finding this out is to get going on a litany of grievances, to point out the hypocrisies and subterfuge of the whole order of things. But then, you see, that’s just another contribution to the whole thing! Part of the song and dance, the great collaboration! You can’t rebel against it, you can only stake out a miserly claim on it. The grievances of the overlooked and put-upon is where its power as a legitimizer comes from. The litany is yet another sleep-scramble to make ourselves feel better about the fact that we still want to be accepted by people we don’t actually respect or even know. All of this to evade responsibility for our own life and our own work, to avoid the most embarrassing of truths about ourselves, that we feel owed. Self-entitlement might be the most ubiquitous quality among artists, and it’s one which can only be unlearned in a state of exasperated finality. We all die. We’re all forgotten. No one remembers what we had to say about it.

In all of this, there have been many things I’ve had to unlearn, but I think the most important thing that happened is that, eventually, after everything discussed above, I simply got bored. There was a time I might have killed myself, and I do mean that literally. That’s when you know you’ve grown myopic, your experience of reality has somehow been truncated. You forget the best thing about life is its mystery. That’s where the awe and the curiosity comes from. That’s where the world grows larger again. My wife Maja Ruznic and I had a daughter. I developed a meditation practice. I spend a couple hours a day, most days, in the Sandia Mountain Wilderness in central New Mexico. What once, in the art world, seemed like an all-encompassing reality, has become something which now hovers harmlessly, and a little absurdly, in the distance. I’m profoundly and daily grateful for the life I have. The career will come and go. It’s not important.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

One day, not all that long ago, I heard myself say something: “There’s nothing the art world can offer me that will make my life better.” I was to recognize two things at once. First, that I live a profoundly meaningful life with no excuses remaining to avoid happiness and, second, that I’m no longer invested in “art world” as a sphere of reality outside of a distant abstraction which now takes on it’s proper size in proportion to life.

Nowadays, I receive a lot of correspondence from students or younger artists. I notice personality types, and types of questions, concerns, fears. The type I tend to hear from seem to have a hard time relating to the art world, at least in the way they understand it. It might be that their values or priorities or ideas about the world are not really part of the intellectual fashions of the moment. And we do certainly live in a time of harsh consequences for non-compliance. I try to respond when I can. Often it seems that when I’m responding, it’s the first time they’ve ever heard anyone say such a thing. Or perhaps they’ve heard those words, but didn’t know it could be relevant to art.

I’ve been feeling a greater pull in the direction of service or mentorship. I’m a great admirer of the music producer Rick Rubin. I relate to his thinking. As my desire to be the center of attention has diminished, a desire to be in a supportive role is growing. I’m wondering now what the second half of life might look like if I’m able to graduate into this sort of role. To imagine this feels infinitely better than to continue thinking of my own “market” or whatever. I think this is all part of a pattern, or an arc I suppose, common to the stages of life when we’re attentive. It feels good to be a part of something that I can’t even explain. I’m so interested in consciousness, whatever it is. What is it about consciousness over there, or over there, or over here? I don’t even want to make anything better or to change the world. I just want to know: what’s over there?

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.joshuahagler.com
• Instagram: @haglerjosh