Interview with Mark Wallinger

18/03/16
Interview: Mark Wallinger

Mark Wallinger: ID
Hauser & Wirth
26 February - 7 May 2016

The walls of Hauser & Wirth’s North Gallery are hung with huge canvases, dominated by looming black shapes, smeared on, with vast hand gestures, mirroring themselves and each other, demanding interpretation in the same way as a Rorschach test. The paintings – Vitruvian in measure, at twice a man’s height tall and an arm-span wide – are from a series of id Paintings by the Turner Prize-winning artist, Mark Wallinger (b1959). They form part of his new exhibition, ID, his debut solo show at the gallery, focusing on Freud’s interrogation of the psyche, the self and the subject. Easy to miss, beside these towering inky smears, is a much smaller work, Ego (2016), comprising two iPhone photographs of Wallinger’s hands, posing as a playful recreation of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam.

Next door, in the South Gallery, Wallinger has installed a life-size, mirrored, revolving replica of the New Scotland Yard sign, here signifying the superego, with its all-seeing, controlling eye – a nod to some of his more political works of the past. The back rooms house the smaller video pieces: Orrery (2016), Shadow Walker (2011) and Ever Since (2012), each one taking the viewer on a journey, much as they did Wallinger during the creative process.

After giving a guided tour of the exhibition, Wallinger spoke to Studio International about his own journey and the – sometimes subconscious – messages and significations implied.

Read this interview here

Marguerite Horner: Bringing the Sublime into the Mundane

29/10/15

Marguerite Horner: Bringing the Sublime into the Mundane

The Sufi master Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan once said: ‘To bring the sublime into the mundane is the greatest challenge there is’. The sublime, ideas of which are generally dated back to the first century AD, when the Greek critic Longinus wrote an aesthetic treatise on the subject,¹ is largely associated with greatness, awe and something exceeding human understanding or representation. Kant suggests it has the power to transform and uplift, to make human reason transcend sensibility, by confronting it with something at first seemingly incomprehensible.² His focus – as well as that of his predecessor Edmund Burke³ – is upon nature and the divine as sources for the sublime experience, and this can also be seen in contemporary 18th and 19th-century artworks by artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, JMW Turner and John Martin.

Marguerite Horner’s paintings might therefore appear to depict the polar opposite of the sublime. Her suburban streets and highways, deserted parking lots, cars, telegraph poles and wires, largely inspired by her experiences of small town America, are the stuff of the everyday – mundane, quotidian, manmade. Yet, with their grisaille palette, fluctuating between being crisply focused and blurred to the point of obfuscation, there is something uncanny about these otherwise easily recognisable scenes. They are familiar, yet strange – estranged. Freud delineates the uncanny as ‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’,⁴ as ‘nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression’.⁵ He drew a distinction between the uncanny and the sublime, by imbuing the latter with solely positive attributes, ‘rather than with the opposite feelings of repulsion and distress’. The uncanny, on the other hand, he classed as those things ‘which lie within the field of what is frightening’.^6,7 This is false on two counts: (i) his interpretation of the sublime is somewhat rose-tinted, since it is often associated, in the first instance, with terror and horror, and (ii) this very process of alienation and repression, which Freud attributes to the uncanny, is what leads to Kant’s transcendental encounter with the sublime.

Consider, for example, the incident with the madeleine in Proust’s Combray. Describing the moment of tasting the known-but-unknown delicacy, Proust writes: ‘…this new sensation having had on me the effect that love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal.’⁸ His description is of a form of self-transcendence, an encounter with the sublime, triggered through an encounter with the alienated and forgotten, the known-but-unknown, the uncanny. In the same way, Horner’s paintings serve to trigger a memory. In their veiled state, they seek not to represent, but to signify. They seek to fill their viewer with an essence. This realisation and resultant introspection then suggests that Horner’s paintings have succeeded in meeting the Sufi master’s challenge: a seemingly mundane image, like the simple madeleine, can contain the seed, or essence, of a memory or state, that can lead the viewer to transcend his or her physical being and cease to feel ‘mediocre, contingent, mortal’.

Simon Morley, discussing the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, notes that beauty is static, that we are charmed, seduced and captivated by it, while the sublime transports, moves and dislocates us from our self. He references how Arthur Schopenhauer ‘explored the fissure that lies at the heart of being, and envisaged a self that can in certain situations observe itself in the very act of confronting a fearful inner abyss’.⁹ It is this inner abyss that Horner captures so strikingly in her paintings: a sense of loneliness and emptiness, a far greater and more terrifying phenomenon than anything nature can offer. As Derrida observes, contrary to Kant and Burke: ‘The sublime is not in nature but only in ourselves’.¹⁰ Horner herself speaks of taking inspiration from Jung, when he declared a similar, if reversed, observation: ‘For the only equivalent of the universe within is the universe without’.¹¹ She says: ‘In my paintings, I strive to capture the meaningful dialogue between my internal and external realities, which are metaphorically portrayed, by using images intuitively taken from my passing landscape’.¹²

To return to Morley’s notion that the sublime transports, moves and dislocates us from our self, we begin to understand the latent symbolism of Horner’s cars: parked or frozen in movement, they are vehicles of transcendence, transporting the viewer from within to without, from without to within. Her use of blurring, reminiscent of Gerhard Richter’s use of the squeegee, has dual effect. Firstly, it suggests transience – a sense of passing by, of motion. Secondly, like the veiling of the greyscale palette, it reduces the image to the bare minimum – the Proustian essence. Richter, speaking of his own use of the technique, says: ‘I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. […] I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit. Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant information’.¹³ In terms of the sublime, these blurred passages represent what Lyotard terms: ‘a cleavage within the subject between what can be conceived and what can be imagined or presented’.¹⁴ They are the physical, painterly manifestation of this fissure.

Derrida, in his essay ‘Parergon’, focuses attention not on the object of contemplation (the work, or ‘ergon’), but on its boundary. He speaks of the need to frame something to prevent it from becoming merely monstrous. Horner’s paintings are full of frames within frames: the grey skies, streets, and parking lots are bisected by bright white road markings, lamp posts, trees, and telegraph wires. In Boxed In (2010), the block of flats is set in a vivid red square, restricting the main frame of reference to a fraction of the composition, with the mundane continuing all around. Within this red frame, a myriad windows – further, smaller frames – push up against one another. Each offers a different (albeit the same) viewpoint, a reflection of the outer world. This segment could be seen from any angle, upside down, it would make no difference. Pixelated imagery, like reflections on the retina, multiple tiny photograms, just prior to being interpreted into a coherent image by the mind. Horner speaks of a constant dialogue between the mark and the inner eye in the process of her painting. The same is true for the viewer as he or she interprets it. Horner is providing just the ingredients – the flour and lemon juice of the madeleine – and asking viewers to reconstruct their own memories – to recognise in the universe without, their own universe within and to confront and transcend this inner abyss. In so doing, she is bringing the sublime into the mundane.

Notes

1. Longinus, On the Sublime, available online as part of the Project Gutenberg, EBook #17957, trans. by HL Havell, 2006, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17957/17957-h/17957-h.htm (accessed 11 October 2015)

2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, 1790, trans. by JC Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911)

3. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)

4. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVII, 1917-1919, ed. and trans. by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), pp219-252, p220

5. Ibid, p241

6. Ibid, p219

7. See also Jessica Wren Butler, ‘What is Literature?: The sublime/uncanny as a conceptual framework for answering the answerless, and the problematic quest for certainty,’ essay available via academia.edu (accessed 11 October 2015)

8. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 1, Swann’s Way, 1913-27, ed. and annotated by William C Carter (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013), p51 [my emphasis]

9. Simon Morley, ‘Introduction: The Contemporary Sublime’ in The Sublime: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. by Simon Morley (London and Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press: 2010), pp12-21, p16

10. Jacques Derrida, ‘Parergon’ in The Sublime: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. by Simon Morley (London and Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press: 2010), pp41-46, p44

11. Carl Jung, Collected Works of CG Jung: The First Complete English Edition of the Works of CG Jung, vol. IV, 1953, ed. by Sir Herbert Read, Michael Fordham and Gerhard Adler and trans. by RFC Hull (London: Routledge, 2015) p1482

12. Personal communication with the artist, August 2015

13. Gerhard Richter, Text. Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, ed. by Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist (London: Thames & Hudson, 2009) p33

14. Jean-Francois Lyotard, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’ in The Sublime: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. by Simon Morley (London and Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press: 2010), pp27-40, p36

Images:

You wont find it by yourself 

2013 

oil on linen 

50x50cm 

Barrier 

2014 

oil on linen 

50x50cm

Void 

2011 

oil on canvas 

50x50cm 

Boxed in 

2010 

oil on linen 

50x50cm

All © the artist

Interview with Adeline de Monseignat

17/11/14

Adeline de Monseignat: interview

Adeline de Monseignat: Home
Ronchini Gallery, London
14 November 2014 – 17 January 2015

Dutch-Monagesque artist Adeline de Monseignat’s work is greatly influenced by Sigmund Freud’s concept of the uncanny. For her current exhibition at the Ronchini Gallery she has created a large-scale installation exploring childhood memories.

Taking the exact measurements of the bedroom in which she grew up, she has recreated the space using the red-and-white striped awning from her family home as the walls and her old blue-and-white striped bed linen.

Nestled in the bed – which itself is surrounded by partially built walls, comprising material-wrapped bricks and oddly angled mirrors – is a family of what the artist refers to as “creaptures”. Now recognisable as De Monseignat’s motif, these glass spheres filled with vintage fur call into question the distinction between animate and inanimate objects.

This particular arrangement pays homage to Louise Bourgeois’s marble sculpture Cumul (1969). The installation is strangely claustrophobic, at once familiar and strange – indeed, the epitome of the uncanny.

Studio International met De Monseignat in her south London studio a few weeks before her exhibition to see the work in progress and to talk about some of the ideas that inspire her.

To watch the video of this interview, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/adeline-de-monseignat-home-creatures-ronchini-gallery

Essay: Myths and Mythologies. Urban Myths. GFEST Gaywise FESTival Visual Arts Exhibition 2014

Myths and Mythologies: Urban Myths

GFEST Gaywise FESTival Visual Arts Exhibition 2014

Menier Galler, 51 Southwark Street London, SE1 1RU

10-22 November 2014

Launch evening, 11 November 6- 8 pm (by invite only)

Featuring SADIE LEE, MATTHEW STRADLING, JOAO TRINDADE, JENNY WELTON, MATHIAS VEF, GÖKHAN TANRIÖVER AND ENZO MARRA

According to Helen Morales, a Cambridge University academic specialising in mythology, scholars have produced as many definitions of myth as there are myths themselves. For her, a myth is as much about process as it is a thing.[1] It is ‘a continual process of telling and retelling.’[2] Rudolf Bultmann suggests that the real purpose of myth is not to present an objective picture of the world as it is, but to express man’s understanding of himself in the world in which he lives.[3] Indeed, the bare narrative is only part of what makes a myth a myth. The ancient Greeks had a collective psychological and religious investment in their stories.[4] In more recent times, Freud, for one, was fascinated by myths and sought long and hard to account for their power. Morales goes so far as to claim that without classical mythology, there would be no psychoanalysis, and this is not too bold a claim, since much of Freud’s work is based on his interpretation of the Oedipal myth (amongst others).[5] Freud saw psychoanalysis, like myth, as driven by an inexorable movement towards truth, a means to discover, explain and understand oneself.[6] For him, myths were case studies from which to draw conclusions about men’s universal experiences.[7] As attempts to understand and define the self, myths play a particularly important role when it comes to anyone who sees him- or herself as different from the ‘Other’. It is unsurprising, therefore, that they play an especially pertinent role within the LGBTQI community.

One prevalent mythological tradition is the oral – or, nowadays, written – form, deriving from the early tradition of story telling. Another, however, is the visual. Western art history is full of scenes from classical mythology, Christian religion and pagan folklore. Take, for example, Titian’s group of large-scale mythologies inspired by the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, painted for King Philip II of Spain between 1556 and 1559. And what about Correggio’s Danaë from 1531 or the various representations of the Rape of the Sabine Women by Giambologna (1579-83), Poussin (1634-35 and 1636-37), Rubens (1635-40) and Picasso (1962-63)? Depictions of scenes of mythological rape, or of the foreplay leading up to the act, have long been an apparently licit way to portray erotic scenes and the enjoyment of sexual activity.

Looking through a queer lens, there are numerous characters and motifs from mythology that have acquired extra levels of meaning through artistic representations. The myth of Jupiter and Ganymede is an iconic gay story, hugely popular in Roman art and literature, as is the myth of Apollo’s love for Hyacinthus. Exemplary for female same-sex desire are Iphis and Ianthe from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, although Ianthe does believe Iphis to be a boy, so gender is somewhat blurred here. Of course, the myth of Hermaphroditus opens up gender binaries altogether.

This year’s GFEST Gaywise FESTival – now in its seventh year – has taken this vast playing field of myths and mythologies as the theme for its visual arts exhibition at the Menier Gallery. With three commissioned artists and four further participating artists – international and at differing stages of their careers – the responses have been as varied as they have carefully thought out, serving to support Morales’ opening gambit about the myriad of possible interpretation.

Matthew Stradling perhaps toes a line closest to the story thus far, with his contemporary – and queer – renderings of three traditional art historical subjects: Lucretia, St Sebastian and the Dying Slave. What Stradling takes from the myth of Lucretia – raped by Tarquin, son of the last king of Rome, an act which ultimately leads to her suicide – is the idea of shame, especially as a converse to pride, and the question of why so many images of gay men have been images of suffering. In his painting, he places himself as Lucretia, who, shown baring her breasts, is both pained and suffering, but sexual at the same time. Her pearl necklace is a symbol of femininity, as well as of sexuality. A central element to Stradling’s works is the idea of power play. Michelangelo’s Dying Slave is shown in urine-stained underpants with ‘thank you’ stitched on the band – thank you for making me submissive, the artist explains. Similarly, St Sebastian, the adored object and penetrated and passive male – claimed for the gay world by Derek Jarman’s 1976 film Sebastiane – is depicted by Stradling with an erection, forcing the question: what does it mean to be passive? In an SM world, mightn’t the myths of suffering and shame actually be turned on their heads?

Sadie Lee also works with art history, but has chosen just one artist, the 18^th century Rococo painter François Boucher (1703-1770), of whom she has created four pastiches, challenging myths of female sexuality in the process. Her confrontational works, which subvert Boucher’s idealistic scenarios with women in a pastoral landscape, lying together, with Cupid and his cherubs overhead, are sensually arousing and erotic in a way that the originals never could be. In place of Boucher’s voluptuous goddesses, Lee introduces real women from vintage 1970s porn magazines, engaging in explicit acts of lesbian sex. This element of kink, building on a personal interest in pornography, has been described as an I Modi for the iPhone generation. By expressing the subject’s genuine pleasure, Lee introduces an important – and previously absent – element to her versions of these images: empathy with the model. Her ‘borrowing’ of imagery of sex workers also raises concerns about the status and role of the models used in past times.

The third commissioned artist, João Trindade, works in quite a different manner. His medium is photography and, rather than looking at classical myths, he draws on the myths we build up about ourselves and other people every day of our lives, putting each other into boxes and creating barriers. He looks at judgment and prejudice and how to overcome these in order to create a space where love and communication can flourish. Building on a personal story, he has worked with a transgender model and created sculptural mannequins out of wire and mesh and photographed them in positions suggesting manipulation and puppetry. He deliberately seeks to make his photographic work look naïve, reinforcing the idea of myths as elementary means of exploring and uncovering our identities, as psychological case studies, and as tales of becoming. As Freud’s colleague Otto Rank phrases it: ‘Myths are, therefore, created by adults, by means of retrograde childhood fantasies, the hero being credited with the myth-maker’s personal infantile history.’[8]

Mathias Vef also works with photography – as well as film – to explore myths from a psychological angle. He sees myths as common narratives, often unverifiable, but important elements of all cultures, especially subcultures. Furthermore, he sees them as both a form of collective unconscious within the (sub-)culture and as means of connecting (sub-)cultures with the mainstream. That is, he notes that stories of LGBTQI life do creep into straight culture, but that somehow they always remain mysterious and other, almost sacred or mystic. Vef is interested in what he terms ‘a contemporary, new or future mythology; myths in formation’. Transcendent narratives inspire his atmospheric work, as he speculates about ‘the aesthetics of mythology’, working out a personification of forces and archetypes. ‘Myths to me,’ he says, ‘are a kind of psycho-genetic bond throughout generations […] Maybe like Carl Jung who spoke of universal archetypes that are expressed in mythology.’ His video work, I Do Me, was inspired by body modification which he sees as a pure manifestation of the will, an embodiment of mythopeic thought.

Jenny Welton’s series of work, Dark Paradise (2013), is also photographic and takes as its starting point the myth that homosexuality can be cured. Drawing upon personal experience, Welton surveys various claims of cure, past and present, actual and fictitious. Her surreal images are accompanied by newspaper and textbook cuttings and propaganda-style quotations.

Gökhan Tanriover’s work brings a contemporary psychological take to the classical myth of Narcissus, using it as a starting point to explore issues of body image and dysmorphia. Radical myths about how we should look are proliferated by the media and are known to disproportionately affect the LGBTQI community. A former doctor and current photography student, Tanriover is fascinated by the motion and distortion that water can cause on subjects behind the lens. The technique he has used for this series incorporates water and glass to cause partial distortion of his subjects, reflecting the bias we have against our own bodies. The water and use of reflections on glass also recall the story of Narcissus, something with a personal element for Tanriover, who used to spend his summer holidays at his grandparent’s country house in Turkey, within walking distance of a small creek, said to be the body of water in which Narcissus drowned.

Finally, returning to the medium of paint, Enzo Marra creates texture by dragging away and building up pigment in his depictions of Francis Bacon, an artist whom he considers to have become a mythic figure and an embodiment of the concept of ‘gay artist’. Describing him as ‘larger than life’, one might wonder, is this icon a myth towards which Marra – and indeed the other artists at GFEST – aspire, or one from which they learn and move away? And how much verity can be attributed to this myth? How much of it is a skewed representation of a figurehead by outsider eyes, prejudiced and judgmental, putting people into boxes, just as Trinidade has highlighted? Echoing Marra’s own words, Morales concludes:

‘What makes someone mythic is not whether or not he lived, or lived well, but whether or not he was larger than life. Mythic heroes were – and are – outrageous and outstanding. They are phenomenal. They distil some collective ideal or fantasy.’[9]

As celebrators of LGBTQI identity and culture, all artists – and no doubt visitors – participating in GFEST certainly tick these boxes. If myth is a process, an evolving tale, let us come together now to change the future versions that are told.

---

[1] Helen Morales, Classical Mythology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2007), p.2

[2] Morales (2007), p.115

[3] Rudolf Bultmann, ‘New Testament and Mythology’ (1941) in Kerygma and Myth, ed. Hans-Werner Bartsch, tr. Reginald H. Fuller (London: SPCK, 1953), p.10

[4] Morales (2007), p.31

[5] Morales (2007), p.69

[6] Morales (2007), p.71

[7] Morales (2007), p.74

[8] Otto Rank, ‘The Myth of the Birth of the Hero’ (1914) (reprinted) in In Quest of the Hero, ed. Rank et al. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp.3-86, p.71

[9] Morales (2007), p.55

All images © the artists

[some are unfinished details]

http://www.gaywisefestival.org.uk