By EKG | Sep 29, 2011

When Charles Linder isn’t hunting wild boar, collecting found objects, or BBQ-ing in the Tenderloin, he can be found in his studio, which was formerly used as a sweat shop. Unsurprisingly, Linder and the art he creates are just as interesting as all of that implies. He recently closed his LincArt Gallery to focus on his own art practice, which is tied very closely to his lifestyle. We visited his ridiculously expansive digs in SOMA where we learned about his process, his past, and how to remove a tusk from a boar’s jaw.

What are your plans for the fall?

Charles Linder: At the end of summer I always go and pick grapes with Angelo Garro at a couple different friends’ places and make his homemade wine. And with fall comes more hunting. I’ve been doing a lot of hunting lately. Since I closed the gallery, I’ve been enjoying a more spontaneous schedule. I’ve been working on some new paintings that came out of the pool show I had at Guerrero Gallery over the summer. I’m not quite done with swimming pools yet, even though summer’s over. It’s a weird obsession.

Swimming pools and bullet holes often recur in your work.

CL: I think the swimming pool connotes leisure time or a placidity that I don’t really have in my own life, but it’s something I enjoy when I travel. A few moments by a pool is the height of relaxation. In the Bay Area, not so many people have pools, so it’s become a compulsion to document pools wherever I stay, particularly at night. They’re beautiful at night. I’m still finding them to be a rich source of material both with the photographs and the more imagined color puddle pieces.

The bullet holes have definitely been a recurring theme. I have the standard lanterns, which are also a recurring theme, and those red, bullet-riddled gas cans, which are process pieces. I find the cans on Ebay and they’re shipped to my house in a cardboard box. I take the packages to the range or desert and shoot them until the box comes off. Sometimes I forget which can is in the box until it’s blown apart. My collection of signs with bullet holes is an archeology project, whereas the cans are much more of an authorship piece. The shot-up cans reference that whole American penchant for recreational violence. I’m not a proponent of that, but the works address it. They’re humorous, but alternately deadly and troubling.

Tell us about the Ghostang, a shot-up car you found that became your artwork.

CL: It was a found object that came out of my travels. I’m constantly wandering and looking for material, and when I saw that object in the desert down in Southern California, I was so stunned. It had all of the things that interested me — this crazy sense of recreational violence, the found object, the rust. My first car was a ’65 Mustang, so that also struck me — why would someone do this to a Mustang? We couldn’t find out much about who owned it. We traced the VIN number and nothing came up. It was on Bureau of Land Management property, so we asked if we could take it and if we needed a permit, and the guys jokingly said no, but we’ll give you an award for cleaning up the desert. I came up with the term Ghostang. I always make up words. It was like this beached ship that just ended up in the desert. It was also called a Car-B-Q at one point. There’s some talk of making it into a permanent barbecue.

Could you make custom Ghostangs?

CL: Yes, if somebody could meet the totally absurd budget for it. It’s had several iterations so it really needs a coffee table book to go with it. I would like to sell the piece, but it’s more of a lifestyle work.

How are your lifestyle and artwork intertwined?

CL: I’ve found myself more preoccupied with lifestyle than product. I feel fortunate and lucky enough to be able to live in a way where work doesn’t necessarily dominate my life. I’m good at balancing work and play on a functional level so that it becomes effortless. With the aspect of going on adventures — if I don’t do that, the work doesn’t happen. I have to be able to factor in that kind of time to find what might not necessarily be a thing, but an inspiration. You have to be able to just go on the trip to find the swimming pools, or whatever. That’s important to me.

Can you talk more about being a hunter?

CL: I grew up in Alabama, where I was introduced to guns as a kid. I had a mentor, a hunting mentor, and when I found hunting and being in the woods, it was everything for me. It was a recreational activity that was also connected to harvesting food. I’ve never hunted anything that I didn’t eat. That’s the absolute last byproduct of a spiritual partnership with your hunting buddies and the land itself, and a respect for animals that is tantamount to harvesting one.

CL: I’ve making jewelry pieces with the wild pig jaws; I’m harvesting the tusks. In fact, I’m boiling some in a pot right now, I’ll show you. I’m extracting the teeth to make a new bracelet. They’re two separate teeth, so I take one from each side of the jaw and glue them together. They have a metal infrastructure that joins them, and they’re glued with epoxy so it looks as if it’s one piece, but it’s actually two. The formalism of them is what interests me, the way they almost form a circle.

CL: More money. I’d move into the mint, evict the current owners, and begin minting Emperor Norton-esque Charles Linder monies which I could use about town and around the world in my favorite hotels. Charles Linder coin and paper monies would be accepted widely. Or I would have a non-profit entity that would allow me to continue my maniacal sponsorship of un-fundable art projects that other people present me with. That’s the second idea. The third would be a ranch. That’s my real cowboy fantasy project. I’d love to spend more time on a ranch. I could see vanishing to the country at some strategic point. So it would be a mint, a museum, or a ranch. How about all three?

CL:When I was a kid, some of the first work I looked at, and bought and loved was from so-called outsider artists or folk artists from the South that were in this category of their own. They had a way of operating that I admired and wanted to have in my own work. And I always wondered what differentiated them from the supposed insider artist. Who is to say on what side of the fence you should lie? Modern art is so skeptical and snooty, and I just hate that about art. The challenge is to keep it fun and curious and innocent somehow.

CL: Right now I’m liking the new Lil’ Weezy. I’m also enjoying some old Coltrane sides.

See Charles Linder’s work on view at Jones, 620 Jones Street in San Francisco.

At least Charles Linder isn’t boring

By Emily Hunt

“I’m deep in the middle of the Sonoma wilderness,” says Charles Linder, taking a break from boar hunting to talk on his cell phone. “I’m surprised I’m getting reception.”

Boar blood might not be exactly what comes to mind when one thinks of Napa Valley. Regardless, KQED and the di Rosa Preserve both continue their fostering of modern artists on July 27 with Linder, the first speaker in their series of summer lectures with Spark artists.

KQED’s Spark follows various personalities in the Northern California arts scene. And for “personality,” Linder certainly fits the bill. Past performances of his include two full pig roasts done in the Tenderloin of San Francisco (“The locals came out, which was bizarre,” states Linder bluntly) and a performance-art piece with Linder sawing through boar heads after drinking all day.

Linder’s first gallery, Refusalon, began in an adopted garage south of Market in San Francisco. In 2006, Linder was featured by Spark for his creation of Lincart gallery, which supported various artists including Yayoi Kusama and Tucker Nichols. Since then, he has foregone gallery ownership to focus more heavily on his individual art career.

“Owning the gallery was such a dysfunctional idiosyncrasy of my personality,” chuckles Linder. “It was an obsession I couldn’t stop. I always used to deny this, but it’s very hard to do two things at once well. I had to admit to myself that I was not being that creative of an art dealer or artist.”

The di Rosa has paid particular interest to Linder throughout his career and currently owns eight of his works, one of which is Fiat Lux, a collection of animal crossings signs demolished by grime and bullet marks.

Linder’s art has continued on a similar theme. One of his current collections, Twenty Five Easy Pieces, involves the artistic altering and mounting of taxidermy animals, found skulls and the oil canvas rendering of an adorable woodland creature holding a sign that says “Fuck you / Pay me.”

Growing up in Alabama, Linder hunted as a child but stopped after his move to the more animal-rights-oriented state of California. He has recently gotten back into the chase again, and, he jokes, he’s made it a large part of his art.

“I love spending time in the woods stalking, and the whole food-preparation aspect. Boars are introduced, nonnative species wreaking havoc on the fauna and watershed. But they taste good,” Linder says on the growing connection between his art and lifestyle.

That very connection, according to Linder, is what makes the San Francisco art scene special. “I gotta admit it’s kind of cursed,” says Linder. “Everyone lives here, I think, for the lifestyle. I couldn’t say I stayed here for money or career. My lifestyle has become a career. I don’t think I could do that in L.A. or New York as easily.”

Indeed, Linder continues to harness his lifestyle into an art with his newest exhibition at San Francisco’s Guerrero Gallery, displaying photos, painting and physical representations of pools. According to Linder, it’s the deep aqua colors and the association between poolside and traveling hotels that inspired the collection. As is only protocol, a goat roast kicked off the opening reception.

In Napa, a wine and cheese reception follows Linder’s lecture.

Charles Linder speaks Wednesday, July 27, at the di Rosa. 5200 Sonoma Valley Hwy., Napa. 7pm. $5-$10. 707.226.5991.

I’ve talked before about how helpful it is for galleries to offer food and refreshments at openings, that a lot of art seems more beautiful, profound, socially conscious, and politically relevant to the well-fed and slightly tipsy. I lamented the shocking lack of cheese cubes as well as the austere Kruschev-era-style Perrier-rationing at 49 Geary, an unfortunate state of things on its own, but especially piteous in light of something I heard at the most recent first Thursday. A couple of stalwart art lovers who’d attended the monthly art walk since 2001 said that in former days of plenty, not only did the galleries there serve more generous amounts of water, champagne, and wine — and in glasses made of glass rather than plastic – but in what now seems like an ecstasy of largesse, offered entire wheels of cheese. I was ready to despair that America’s best days really were behind it, and that that behind, happily fattened on bries as fragrant as the feet of French angels, had waddled away forever.

But as I approached Guerrero Gallery on Sunday for the opening of Mark Mulroney’s “Sent Upstate” and Charles Linder’s “Swimmingly, with Watermelons and Referrals,” I was greeted by Linder himself, sweating manfully over the barbecue. He basted a magnificently darkening, odorous, glistening goat. A goat. For us to eat while we looked at art. Also offered were corn on the cob, artisanal mini cupcakes, homemade slaw, grilled veggies, luxury Vickles pickles, kimchee, and watermelon cocktails.

Once inside, Mulroney’s graphic yet comical depictions of sex and death were omnipresent. You’ll see some if you read further.

The airy, skylit gallery devoted most of its exhibition space to Mulroney’s paintings and collages. The artist explains the themes of his work with, “We are all going to die and wish we could have gotten laid more, but that is no reason to be upset and feel sorry for ourselves.” His figures are reminiscent of 1970s comic book characters with (comically) enlarged sex parts.

They copulate and murder each other. Sex as well as death are treated with levity, consistent with the artist’s statement. It’s all very jolly, a bit grotesque, and I’d think twice about going to bed with someone who had this work hanging on his wall.

Linder’s installation features a water-filled pool with floating watermelons and white towels stacked nearby. The gallery’s website states that it offers a “glimpse into our own longings for depth, spiritual saturation, and carnal immersion.” Perhaps this is so, because in the past century the swimming pool came to represent “the good life” in America, implying as it does the presence of money, space, leisure, and health. The installation appeared to achieve its aesthetic apogee, however, when a man stripped to his tattoos and jumped in to play with the watermelons bobbing around him.

All in all, I am now spoiled for other galleries. I expect to see string cheese and cocktail franks at the very least, come the next first Thursday, Aug. 4.