The Brooklyn Rail

Tom Friedman’s sculptural practice has established many ideas in the broader discourse, but perhaps most meaningfully, he has advanced the studio beyond traditional notions of production and into a zone of material grammar; a syntax of ingredients that collectively question what makes an object a thing. Friedman encounters this Aristotelian primacy by “sitting on the edge,” a phrase the artist has developed for dealing directly with the limits of what we can know.

In the past, Friedman’s sculpture has traced along the edge of what seems impossible, writing down every word of the dictionary or staring at a piece of paper for one thousand hours. For his current show at Lehmann Maupin, Friedman has moved towards painting, specifically towards trompe l’oeil and still life, to deal with an anti-Albertian pictorial space and depict what otherwise seems impossible to—the sand at the bottom of his shoe, the strange photoshopped effects that he integrates with the debris of everyday life, or the light and density of steel wool. By representing what seems like the unrepresentable, Friedman questions what a painting is for, and as with most things he does, disorders and questions the conventional notions of value and priority.

Andrew Woolbright (Rail): One of my early encounters with your work was in Chicago through James Yood, who described you as somewhere between an Eagle Scout and a comedian that also dealt with the miraculous. He introduced me to your work through Tony Tasset and this Chicago way of thinking through sculpture. I wonder if we could begin there. What did you distill from your time in Chicago, and your early days as an artist?

Tom Friedman: Well, I came from St. Louis studying graphic illustration at Washington University, and I entered the University of Illinois MFA program doing large charcoal drawings. I was just so unfamiliar with the language that artists used. I didn’t know any professional artists, but I wanted to do art, but I was always led towards something more commercial, like architecture, then graphic design and graphic illustration. I was fascinated by what was happening. There was an artist in the studio next to me who was a highly conceptual artist, and the way he talked about things, I was like, “What the hell is he saying? I really want to understand what’s going on here,” but I was really stopped in my tracks with what I was doing. So, the second year I was there, I came in and—this story is sort of my origin story—

Rail: It’s legendary.

Friedman: I threw away all my artwork, got rid of everything from my studio and boarded up the walls and windows. I spent a month making it a pristine white space with fluorescent lights on the ceiling. The floors were white, so when you went into the space, you couldn’t see the edges.

Rail: The studio as a white cube, or the matrix.

Friedman: Yeah, the matrix, it functioned as that. It started as an external thing that became sort of a mental thing. I could place things in my mind and think about them and move them around. It took my visualization up several notches, and my conceptualization of being able to think about how I experience something. That started me thinking about the experiential nature of things. Before that, I was interested in Eastern philosophy and Buddhism, and that has so much to do with this idea of emptiness and emptying out. But in Western culture, the idea of emptying out has a nihilistic association. In Eastern philosophy, it has to do with all the layers that are in between you and the experience, and removing all the assumptions, all the associations, so that it has sort of a minimalist quality and the object can exist as immediate and as present as it is.

Rail: I vividly remember hearing you tell this story at Brown University in 2013–14. There’s been all of this significant writing about post-studio practices, coming out of Daniel Buren’s “The Function of the Studio” essay, or later, Caitlin Jones’s “The Function of the Studio (when the studio is a laptop),” but what you created was the studio as a pure site of definition or grammar. I love this idea of the studio you invented—a matrix of definition or object-syntax within the studio. It frames so much of your work through the definition of language, or maybe anti-language?

Friedman: Speaking of language, I believe I have anomic aphasia. Well, this is a self-diagnosis, but it’s something I’ve read about, and it basically means I have a hard time finding the right words for a certain situation, or even finding words to describe something. Another term I relate to is called mentalese, where you don’t think through an idea using a string of words. The mind performs a kind of hearsay. It’s a more personal language.

Have you seen any of the semantic pieces I’ve done where, if this is this, then this means this, and then if this is this, this means this? And then I’d use a whole line of these small squares with indexed words, and shapes to describe that. So that’s more, it’s more things in relationship to other things that precede it, and then the person that precedes that or before it, that defines it. So, it’s all about context.

Rail: You’re just so graceful at finding this balance in between. I can look at your work and the eraser shavings become this satisfying formal mound, or it can be a reference to the monad, and it’s reflecting and reflected in this prismatic way—

Friedman: Like holographic film.

Rail: Yes exactly! And at the same time I can have this double vision to see it as punning up and punning down with material. I can see it as a way of spiritualizing the gag, you know? Erasers erase themselves. I feel like your work is always seeking the prime form. And it requires a kind of super-compression. What happens when you compress everything down to that prime state? And whatever that is, the energy can’t hold itself. You’ve compared it to getting to the quanta. This zone where the pure, abstract particle dances in a way we can’t comprehend, and we can’t ever know it. It’s the Ship of Theseus paradox that releases energy we couldn’t see otherwise.

Friedman: Where is that line where it goes from being it, to not being it? Another realization that I had from this self-diagnosis is that it puts me in a sweet spot that I call “sitting on the edge of infinity.” It’s where you’re thinking: How can there be something? How can there be nothing? How can there be no beginning? Thinking about there being no end is a little easier, but no beginning? That’s just fascinating to me. And just a couple steps over is where it all makes sense. But that’s a non-reflexive place, not a place where you’re thinking about it. It’s a place where it’s just pure beingness. It’s such a sweet spot for creativity because it’s right on the edge of the unconscious and the conscious. And we’re sort of butting up against it.

Rail: It’s the edge of what we can possibly understand. Our limit. How stunning. It uproots our idea of self when so much of our existence is reliant on this thing that we can never understand. Most people repress the truth that we are sitting on the infinite.

Friedman: In my brattiness, I say, thirty-thousand feet is a provincial perspective.

Rail: Can you elaborate on that?

Friedman: It’s very Newtonian. We’ve shifted from a Newtonian world, and it’s very clear in terms of politics and media and information. We’re in a quantum world where people are talking in the media as if they’re trying to be objective. But there’s no such thing as that anymore. They are part of the equation, and they’re acting like they’re not. I think that thirty-thousand feet is missing an infinite part of the picture.

Rail: I love how you put that. Maybe this is a good moment to transition to talking about your paintings. When I heard that you were doing a painting show, I’ll be honest, my first reaction was “Tom Friedman’s doing a painting show? Noooooo, not him!”

Friedman: No! [Laughter]

Rail: I truly believe that you’re one of the greatest living sculptors. You defined an idea of sculpture in the late twentieth century that has given more space to others to work out what sculpture can be. I value your work so much, and I value the way you think so much that I inherently trust this new step. It’s just like how I trust that you really stared at that piece of paper for a thousand hours in 1000 Hours of Staring (1992–97). Which, by the way, did you really?

Friedman: Oh yeah. I meditate every day. It was just my meditation for the day.

Rail: So was it a thousand days of an hour each? How did it work itself out in terms of time?

Friedman: I would just mark it down, and this is where I really wish I had the paper that I marked it all down. It was an hour here; an hour and a half there; ten minutes here and there. I remember there was a bug that got stuck in the middle of it—a moth—maybe three quarters of the way through. And so it was just there, and I’m meditating on it, and I think it died on the piece of paper. And so when I wiped it off, it left a little mark. I guess it excreted something. I thought, should I keep that there? I didn’t. I scraped it off. It’s one problem that I have with that piece that no one really knows about.

Rail: That’s interesting, did you think of that gesture as a form of embellishment? Or did the mark make it into a drawing?

Friedman: I felt it would have changed the conversation about the piece so much.

Rail: I share that work with my students all the time. Andy Warhol taught us that it doesn’t matter how long you spend on anything. That’s not where value is. We’re beyond this idea of production. And then you come at this question in a totally different way. This blank piece of paper holds maybe the most time an artist has ever spent on a single work. Time-wise the piece is in a conversation with architecture or work made by communities, and there’s no reward or no production to it, but it’s in the space of time of a cathedral being built. An A4 cathedral—

Friedman: Well, I did the opposite too in Everything (1992–95). I wrote all the words in the English language on a piece of paper, which was an exercise in filling, the complete fullness of something. Those pieces didn’t come out at the same time. They’ve never been shown together. I think that they should be shown together. They kind of were started at similar times. In the early nineties, I was doing all this work that really had to do with getting to the limits of the materials. I mean, I also did the piece Untitled (A Curse) in 1992, with the cursed space above the pedestal.

Rail: Which is invisible to the Newtonian mind, or the positivist mind of the Enlightenment.

Friedman: Yes, and so it started at about that time.

Rail: Let’s talk about the tabletop trompe-l’oeil piece, Detritus (2025). It is this non-Newtonian eye you’re getting at. Trompe l’oeil is anti-narrative. It’s anti-meaning. And that feels like the beauty and terror of democracy and information being all laid out on the table, leaving everyone to form connections however they like.

Friedman: Well, I’ve incorporated painting and that trompe l’oeil into objects before. Probably my first painting was the painting of me, naked, face flat on the ground, which was just paint. I studied graphic illustration, but I really learn through discovering, through doing something new that I haven’t done before, and I’ve never painted on canvas. And this is just painting on canvas. This is traditional still-life painting.

Rail: Wow. Of course. It’s the very fact that these are painted on canvas that made me feel like it’s a departure, but it’s not.

Friedman: When I make my sculptures, it’s like juggling a million variables. Now it’s juggling maybe two hundred thousand variables. When you’re doing sculpture, it’s like a Rubik’s Cube. You’re having to think about its structure. Why this structure? Why the material? What are its vantage points? But with painting, there’s one vantage point. I realized entering into this long, very concise painting tradition, that sculptural tradition is kind of here and there. The conceptual art tradition is here and there, while painting tradition just keeps going.

It is compressing things because the ideas are still there. But they’re different, like one painting that isn’t here, the first one that I finished, is called Yarn(Brain) (2025). It’s a pile of yarn that’s all different colors. It’s got all the little hash marks that show the twisting of the wool. And that gets to the diagrammatic quality that we’re talking about. But this idea of these linear elements all intertwining, being enmeshed with each other—

Rail: Yes! Like a swarm of something that creates an image.

Friedman: Right. And also the title of the show, Detritus, is something I realized sort of borders on the fetish. I love garbage. I walk around, especially in New York, and when I see things, I think about who dropped them. I love seeing pens or writing materials that have been dropped, because I think about—especially with my connection with language—what have these pens written?

Rail: I love how you view objects as active or vibrant actors. The pen conditions the writer to write, or there’s more influence than most people consider. The pen pens. And then you ask, is this a pen capable of Proust? Your painting also reminds me of that ancient Roman iconography of the unswept floor or unswept house, asàrotos òikos. There’s magic to asking: what if we memorialize our scraps into something permanent? It’s post-human philosophy centuries before we thought to have that word, because it takes what we leave behind more seriously than we do.

Friedman: That’s interesting. I like that. A lot of the detritus in these paintings comes from material that I’ve considered, like packages of things I’ve consumed. I tend to save a lot of the packaging. I call them ingredients. I would make a bunch of ingredients for pieces, and I’d always have extra.

Rail: Do you have returns? What are your consistent ingredients?

Friedman: There are returns. There’s a constant thread. I call it reviewing. It’s sort of reviewing what I’ve done, in a way, that aspect that I find interesting, conceptually. In a sense, it always comes back to the self. I’ve spent years making these colored Styrofoam balls, and they don’t come out of a package. I have to go through this laborious process of making them. Those are a recurring thing. There’s a lot of shapes I’ve made out of paper. I used to do a lot of paper work where it really had a lot to do with building systems. One thing would lead to the next and I would sort of teach myself how to come up with a very complex form through very simple steps.

Rail: Is Styrofoam even depictable within a painting? I mean, I feel like that’s something that’s actually impossible to paint in an interesting way. And going back to your attraction to seemingly impossible questions, it seems like you’re now also drawn to what seems like impossible subjects.

Friedman: It’s a specific Styrofoam that I’m interested in. It’s what Styrofoam coffee cups are made up of that have all the little balls. I don’t know what that type of Styrofoam is called, but it’s a really interesting type of Styrofoam where the balls kind of come off. And if you get a really nice piece of that Styrofoam, you can just pull off the balls, and it makes a really clean surface of the existing balls that are bonded. It’s a loose bond.

Rail: Are there any bad ingredients? Has there been an ingredient that you can’t figure out how to return to prime?

Friedman: If I’m in a position where I don’t have the time to go down the rabbit hole, and I do go down the rabbit hole, it really throws me off, and I’ve got to quickly recover. In the long run, it’s a seed that’s been planted, and then I’ll come back and I’ll understand it. I used to do that more early on. I’ve gotten better at saying, “Oh, I need to stop here and put this aside.” So, yeah, I think that there are some materials. I just can’t think of anything offhand.

Rail: The other question I want to ask is about this interesting kind of flattening out in the paintings. It’s funny, because, like you said, I think sculpture fails in a multiplicity of ways and one of them is location. An object can be wonderful in one context and totally fail in another.

Friedman: Yeah, interesting. That’s the thing with sculpture: you really lose that control. You make it in your studio. You control the environment and it can be just perfect, right there, but then it goes to this cavernous space, and you really have to think about it being kind of diminished. I mean, for me, it works out because I like things that are diminished.

Rail: Wow. And you somehow accommodate the diminishing of things. Or anticipate it. I’ve been thinking about that Sanford Biggers piece of an inflating Fat Albert that he did after Michael Brown was murdered, and it was shown at David Castillo gallery during Miami Art Basel. So the location of that piece has all these people drinking champagne around it, because they just came from the convention center. There’s this great review by Taylor Renee Aldridge where she critiques it, and her critique almost gets there, but it’s really a critique of space. She doesn’t say it explicitly, but you can’t make the convention center of Art Basel not a convention center. And maybe galleries can’t facilitate trauma or guilt or violence now. That piece could be successful if it were put outside of an NYPD precinct, or if it was used at a protest, or if it was used somewhere else. But that piece revealed a limit of the art world in its own way. It was a political and spatial sitting on the infinite.

I’ve read interviews where you’re talking more about the lengths you go to to consider the way work is displayed outside of the studio. And then for your painting you arrive at this anti-Albertian perspective of the trompe l’oeil, and the still life, which denies the authoritative pleasure that linear perspective offers. The illusion doesn’t form in our eye. So we’re always trying to see behind something we can’t. Our eye zigzags along the surface in a matrix. You define the limit of our approach and it’s a non-sequential loop. You know, it’s like Maurice Merleau-Ponty said, where the depth of things is always invisible to us.

Friedman: Yeah, with this piece you’re referring to, which is titled My old Shoe (2020), I have a history of using my old sneaker, which comes from a Buddhist saying that you wear your ego out like an old shoe. I wear New Balance because I’m flat footed. And this is one sneaker, I was just blown away by how many pieces there were when I dissected it. Which sort of goes back to my idea of breaking things down to their elemental parts. And here I place them on my Eero Saarinen table, which is a bit of a biographical element because I’m from St. Louis and the Arch.

Rail: It’s almost like an Ashley Bickerton idea of a portrait through purchase. Is that what you’re saying?

Friedman: Well, I’m from St. Louis, and Saarinen was the architect who did the Arch. But then there’s the X. I initially was going to keep the outer layer around the round table just dark. But I thought that I’d bring in the bottom of the chair and that hot glue gun and the lamp that I had, and then the container that contained all the elements. I arranged it almost like yinyang, but it kind of became a Māori war dance face with the tongue of the shoe. Have you seen them with the tongue sticking out?

Rail: Yeah, the tongue of the shoe becomes like a human tongue. I also really enjoyed the moments of particles or like, something’s really just—

Friedman: Oh yeah, the sand! Yeah, that was stuck in the shoe. I wanted to keep everything,

Rail: That’s brilliant, because it reminds me of something I’ve been calling “Chardin’s refusal.” One of the many things I love about Jean Siméon Chardin is that there are moments in his paintings where it doesn’t matter how close you get to the surface, you still can’t tell what a certain thing is. There’s a scrap on the table and it’s perfectly and exquisitely painted, but you can’t get to know the scrap, but it’s right there. And you’re just like, what is it? Dust? A peel of some kind? And that’s wondrous and very Buddhist, that getting closer doesn’t reveal anything. And I think that your painting has these moments of similar refusal. It’s like, how do you depict an unrepresentable thing?

Friedman: Sometimes when I’m painting, I use these glasses to get me very close. A lot of the time when I’m rendering these things, it’s just color and shapes. It’s very basic. I don’t know what I’m rendering in the moment. I have all my paints pre-mixed. I use a full spectrum, and I have them in this rack that I made. They’re in tubes that are upside down so that I can just open them, and then I have this tray with small one-ounce jars. There’s a whole bunch of them in this tray that I can cover. I mean, the thing with acrylic paint is that they dry out so fast.

Rail: Right, yeah.

Friedman: I paint with a small brush, and so I’m basically color matching depending on what I want to do. But it’s pretty abstract. Because when I work from a photograph, I do a very specific drawing onto the canvas. I don’t want to be spending time figuring out where something is, at least that’s not what I’m interested in right now. That will be a part of a process that I’ll incorporate. But at this point, I want to just render, or kind of off-render the section that I’m working on, and it’s a matter of getting to the right color. And I want to be able to get to that color in a fraction of a second. At the end of the day, I step back and look at what I’ve done—

Rail: And you painted your glasses, the ones you wear to get close to the painting, in Self-Portrait (2025). I love how they are suspended alone. Floating above a shadow.

Friedman: What I like about that painting is that you can tell I’m smiling.

Rail: Yes! The smile comes through vision. The shadow makes it pictorial, or confuses the assumption of the space I may have had without it.

Friedman: Yeah, the shadow is the same color as the shadow you cast on the painting from the light. We’ll have to make sure the lighting in the gallery matches that. But I have a history of incorporating self-portraits in all the bodies of work that I do, which kind of acts as a reminder that you are coming back to the beginning.

In Empty Water Bottle Wise Old Sage (2025) I drank some water from a water bottle while I was in bed. My computer was to the side of the bed. It was the evening, and I crushed the water bottle, and I was going to toss it on the ground, but the way the light was hitting it in the dark room really caught my attention. I turned it upside down and placed it onto my laptop and took a photograph of it with my phone. The variety of values in the plastic water bottle was really interesting. I had to build it up with transparencies. I mixed the transparencies of a medium with the pigment, and I had to lay it on very lightly. I had to let that dry, and then I would come in with another layer that would intersect with that layer, so at the intersection, it would build that color or value up. In a way, that’s a kind of logical thinking that makes sense from my previous work.

I’m always thinking about the future, and I’m about to work on a painting of steel wool. I took some photographs of steel wool, and I was first thinking of rendering them really specifically, but then I’ve been playing around with having these tubes of paint with a mechanical pencil tip so the paint comes out in a very thin line. You can just squeeze it out. I’ve been playing around with channeling steel wool, not rendering it, but by drawing it with that tool and figuring out how to layer it. And I figured out, it’s comically easy to create this incredible visual phenomenon of the steel wool by starting with almost white, and then you work your way down with these scribbles over and over each other, and then it looks like steel wool. It’s really bizarre.

Rail: It’s such a sculptural way of thinking about painting. I remember someone came into my studio in grad school, and I was describing something I wanted to paint and he said “Oh, you can’t paint that. There are limits to what we can paint.” And I was like, “What do you mean?” He gave an example of a plastic toy ice cream cone. He said to paint it, it will just look like a badly painted ice cream cone. It’s usually an issue with scale and context, but I had only ever heard that anything is possible to paint. The more you describe your subject matter, the more I think it’s another sitting on the infinite, another limit.

Friedman: But it’s also in a context of other things that might make it make sense. And there’s also the history of my work. I’ve used blue Styrofoam for a long time. So if you know my work and you see something blue, you’re probably gonna think that it’s Styrofoam.

Rail: And that goes back to your other interest in belief.

Friedman: Yes. I’m teaching myself how to paint bees, because I want to paint a swarm of bees. It’s really creepy how they swarm. I want to paint that, and I don’t want to paint it by rendering. It’s hard to find an image that I want to use, but I really wanted to do something like that. So, this is where my thinking is with painting, and to see where that will lead.

Rail: You have this ability to make everything in perfect crisp detail, but you don’t always choose to do it. You can’t read the crumpled dollar bill for instance, but you could have done that. How are you thinking about when you use legibility and when you don’t?

Friedman: Well, one thing I forgot to mention is that I tend not to render the words, I fracture them to make them illegible.

Rail: That’s very interesting, especially considering your self-diagnosis.

Friedman: There are some words I don’t render—like there’s a sour cream Pringles container. I don’t render that. There is an Us Weekly magazine with Princess Diana on it. I don’t render those letters.

Rail: In the dollar bill the face of George Washington is blank or a stand-in.

Friedman: Some of those come from manipulated photographs of things. Some are actual things. So there’s a bunch of Q-tips, and they’re photographs of Q-tips, then there’s a real one on top of it. So some things are manipulated, some things are actual. There are some drawings of things. So it’s—

Rail: Different forms of resolution.

Friedman: Yeah, there are different layers. Then I take a photograph of that relief. When I made the relief, I would take photographs of sections, and some of those sections, I would twirl in Photoshop and then layer over it. Others are just photographs of sections, and then I lay it over the thing so that you’re seeing part of the real thing.

Rail: So it’s literally images within images, within images, and the real piled within them, discreetly. You’re scanning in high resolution, low resolution, and reality.

Friedman: Right. And I really liked it with Detritus (2025). I wanted it to break apart as you got closer. I was into John Singer Sargent’s loose painting style. And I feel like with the amount of information in it and that breaking apart, it sort of holds up from a distance, but then it breaks apart as you get closer.

Rail: Well, that’s the anti perspective of painting. Painting usually rewards closer looking and for you that’s where it breaks down. You’re rewarding looking from a distance, kind of like set or stage-painting. Objects may be weirder than they appear. [Laughter]

Friedman: That’s leading into the next painting of the bumblebee, which is based on a sculpture I made a while ago where I actually made a bee that was suspended and made this garbage that seemed like it was jammed up against the wall. I took that image, manipulated it, added some more things to it, to render it, and then added the bumblebee with its flight path indicated.

One thing that I think about with art is—using the analogy of bees—there’s self-pollination and there’s cross-pollination. I’m interested in the cross-pollination process, as opposed to the self-pollination of art. And in that piece, the bee is kind of exploring and gathering its pollen from the various elements, and then wandering off into the distance.

Rail: And is that a freedom thing? Or is that wandering off into the distance?

Friedman: Yeah, maybe a freedom thing. It’s open ended.