LA-based contemporary artist James Georgopoulos— sculptor, painter, photographer—is setting the art world on fire with his fiber and paint-based artwork in “The Guns of Cinema” and “The Cameras of Cinema” series’. TREATS! heads to his sprawling Hawthorne airport-based studio to talk movie iconography, guns, and what he hopes his art will provoke among viewers.
James Georgopoulos couldn’t get anyone to look at his photography. He’d been slogging away in the makeshift darkroom he’d fashioned in his bathroom, using dangerous photo chemicals to create abstract photograms, and he had zilch to show for it. “No one was taking notice,” he says. The bad memory singes his voice with exasperation. “They didn’t give a shit. I’m like, ‘Wow, look at this.’ And people were like, ‘Yeah, but I don’t get it.’ I’m like, ‘It’s done without a camera. Can’t you see!?’”
At a loss, Georgopoulos threw one more strand of spaghetti at the proverbial wall. He gathered together items associated with pop culture violence—brass knuckles, a grenade, a gun—and photographed them. In the end, it was the gun that stuck. “A gun,” he says, “that was the hardest thing to find. Because no one has guns, and [the ones that do] don’t want you to shoot their gun because of the serial numbers. But once I shot my first gun, I texted it to a bunch of friends. This one particular friend trains an Iranian princess, and she’s obsessed with Scarface. He’s like, ‘Can you get the Scarface gun? Because I have a client who would buy your work.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, I think I can get that pretty easily.’ So, I found it. This woman Breanna Livie that owns a company called The Golden Closet had it.”
Finding the gun was the easy part; the rest took some doggedness on Georgopoulos’ part. He hounded Livie for a while, made sure she knew his intentions were pure, and landed a gun from Scarface—a Beretta—hook, line, and sinker. “She let me shoot it,” he says with a laugh, “after being very persistent.”
Shoot. What a word. To hit, wound, or kill with a missile fired by a weapon. It vies with the most ignominious words in the English language—especially now. Or it comes part and parcel with a creative vocabulary, as in: to record with a camera. Entendres aside, shooting is, without a doubt, the most prevalent word in reference to Georgopoulos’ work. Over the course of several hours, we speak the word nearly 50 times; sometimes in the context of photography, sometimes not. (For the record, we say “gun” over 100 times.)
Once he printed off that first gun, he was hooked. He knew that there was something universal about the subject matter. It goes without saying that action movies featuring guns are routinely at the top of the box office. He began to realize that each armory he approached about their guns had several famous prize weapons in their possession: guns from Pulp Fiction, Terminator 2, and Dirty Harry etc. He loved the look of the nickel or chrome platings of the guns against the silver gelatin photo paper. “It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever printed,” he says. “I knew at that point that there was something there.”
Several years and a few hundred prints later, Georgopoulos has a photo lab in Venice Beach, California, and a painting studio literally on the runway of the Hawthorne Airport in South Los Angeles, a quiet, little airport that inconspicuously houses some of the most important aviation and aeronautic facilities in the world, including a fuselage factory that looks like a skyscraper set on its side, and the laboratory of Elon Musk’s Space-X. “There are spies,” Georgopoulos whispers, as he takes me through the hangar that he uses to build some of his larger creations. Literally spies from other countries hanging out here, he claims.
As we walk through his studio, he says,“I’ve got a bunch of Angelina Jolie’s.” The artist is gesturing to the photograph of a sidearm that lays flat on a workstation. The highly detailed image is affixed to a luon (a type of plywood made of tropical wood) panel. He’ll sand it, and then apply black paint to the background. Later, when the painting is done, Georgopoulos will apply a thick resin to varnish the piece. He begins explaining to me the plot of Salt, Jolie’s movie from which he has utilized a weapon for his latest series. “She’s this Russian spy,” he says of Jolie. “It’s sexy.” A Cessna lands about 100 feet away, drowning the studio in a buzzing density.
He has to get the Salt painting out in a few days, but because Georgopoulos values the artist’s hand very highly, he doubts he’ll be able to get it out in time. “I want it to look like it’s a car finish,” he says about the background of the paintings, which he pairs with an iconic color—Tiffany blue for example, or the colors used by Lamborghini. “But it has to have some handwork in it, too. When people look at the guns, I want them see that it’s not actually made by machine. It looks like it’s made by machine from afar, but once you come close, you’re like, ‘Oh. Wait a minute…there’s strokes.’ And I think that’s a nice quality, because so many things are digital now.”
The handiwork is evident in both the process and the subject matter. “My brother summed it up one day,” Georgopoulos says. “All I used to do was buy models and put them together when I was eight years old. Go to the store, buy a model, and put it together. I wouldn’t read the instructions; I would just do it my way. I remember hearing my parents would say, ‘He has to get out more and play with the kids.’ Fuck those kids; I wanted to build models.”
To that end, Georgopoulos rejects any notion that his utilization of guns in his work is anything more than a fascination with the image of a gun as a mechanical, aesthetic achievement. He doesn’t sidestep questions about the role of guns in society, or their subsequent vilification after the recent spate of mass shootings, but he does remind me that despite the fact that guns are literally what are depicted in his art, that’s not what his work is about. “I don’t shoot,” he says. “I have no idea how to handle them. There’s always a professional handler in the armory wherever I am. They show me to make sure that there are no bullets in there. I don’t own one. I haven’t learned anything about them. I want to keep it that way. To me, it’s not about the gun; it’s about the image. The metal screws, the gold, or whatever it happens to be, it’s that. It’s the machinery. It’s how it’s made.”
Still, Georgopoulos has his moments of vulnerability. Guns are imbued with a power that is undeniable, and not only that but, because of the shootings, firearms have a bad reputation. “When I watch [certain violent films], I do think to myself, ‘Why am I making this body of work? What is it?’ And I have to go back and, not remind myself, but I know for a fact that it’s not about that.”
Despite the fact that Georgopoulos tries to remove intention from his work, sometimes he runs into problems. This year, a particular gallery mentioned to him that they didn’t feel comfortable exhibiting his gun work. On the other hand, Georgopoulos’ exhibit at this year’s Sundance featured his gun work alongside another body of work that deals with famous film cameras that were used to shoot iconic movies, including Jaws, Lawrence of Arabia, Star Wars and, most recently, the RED camera from Tree of Life. “To me,” Georgopoulos explains, “the side of the story that I want to present is just the image of it. Let people decide for themselves how they want to see it. After one of the [shootings] in New Jersey, I was actually pulling something out of this gallery, and people just started saying to me like, ‘What the hell. Why are you glorifying these things?’ Well, I’m not actually glorifying anything. I’m showing you something. You can make up your own minds what you want to do with this thing.”
It is worth mentioning that Georgopoulos’ guns are photographed in profile, which demystifies them, and helps transform them into the objects of metallic beauty that Georgopoulos sees rather than weapons. “You’re not looking at the barrel,” he says. “I’m not pointing it at you. You’re looking at something that’s just floating in space.”
Georgopoulos doesn’t grow weary of talking about the gun work, but maybe he’s just being polite. Or maybe he realizes that they are his bread and butter. “I’d love to phase out of it,” he says. “I don’t want to be known as ‘the gun artist.’ I just shot a new round of guns, and those are going to be the only guns I print in 2013. Every single gun I’ve made or shot prior to this shoot will be retired.” He pauses as another plane rumbles to ground. “I’m going to be shooting the Godfather guns in New York. And once that’s done, I think I’m done [with the guns]. Yeah.”
