Anita Rogers Gallery: Gary Gissler, “against interpretation,” 2025, installation view. Images courtesy of the gallery.
The following transcript is an edited version of a conversation between painters David Humphrey and Gary Gissler that took place on October 3 at Anita Rogers Gallery. The discussion was held in conjunction with Gissler’s solo exhibition “against interpretation,” which was on view at the gallery from September 3 through October 8, 2025.
David Humphrey: I’m going to improvise this conversation, but I have a thought to start with that has to do with the title of your show, against interpretation. I want to think about each of those words separately and then spin it into a conversation. Let’s start with interpretation. I’m reminded of a famous quote from Nietzsche that’s been re-quoted 18,000 times: There are no facts, only interpretations. This turns out to have all kinds of interesting and pernicious reverberations as we navigate our post-fact politics. But also it had a life within deconstruction and opened up a way of thinking about thinking. Interpretation designates a very primary relation that spectators have with artworks. What do we do with them? What do they want from us? What is their sociability? Oftentimes an artwork solicits an interpretation. But here we have a show that’s against interpretation. I want to start by asking you what you think about interpretation and what associations you have with it.
Gary Gissler: Yeah. Interpretation. I didn’t actually lift it from Susan Sontag.
How we interpret our culture is based not just on seeing something and naming it, but how we recognize that we’re seeing it in a room, and the room informs the thing that we’re looking at. So that’s the baseline for me. I’m in private practice as a psychoanalyst. And in that practice, there’s also the story that we tell about our lives and the associations that we make and the burden that we’ve developed for it, and freedom from that comes from reinterpreting those circumstances that we tell a story about. I’ve taken that perspective and introduced it into my work and into my life. I’m really clear that there is no reality, that all there is is the words that we throw at something before naming it, and then we have this thing that’s real. One of the problems with language is that it’s clunky, it never really gets to the true essence of what something is.
DH: My understanding of Sontag’s argument in her essay Against Interpretation is that somehow language and criticism impedes or gets in the way of a primordial relationship with the object. I think this idea has a utopian dimension, but I think she is mostly making an argument against bad criticism, because good criticism establishes a living relationship with whatever the object is in the context of how one experiences it. Her argument against interpretation appears consistent with the kind of inclination you have to a primary encounter that can skid around language, while perhaps acknowledging its impossibility.
GG: Yeah. The thing is, though, we don’t, in the moment to moment of living our lives, recognize that we’re interpreting reality and that it’s not really possible to get there. We keep blundering into our lives thinking that this is the reality that we’re building a truth. I think the best we get is some description of what’s before you, like your checkered shirt.
DH: I like the idea that the brain uses a kind of anticipatory algorithm to summarize sense data and make our movement through the world more efficient, apparently fluid. If we saw everything, we would be overwhelmed and disoriented.
GG: That’s really good.