ART
An Interview with Marc Handelman
/ Paddy Johnson
07.13.06
FANZINE: It’s interesting that most of these artists are not painters. Many who are, though, tend to be very philosophical about paint—what it means to them and how it has been used throughout history. Do you have an idiosyncratic relationship with paint?
HANDELMAN: I don’t know how I would generally characterize my relationship to paint. It’s always been very controlled. I think there’s actually an increasing sense of control with the material even as the more recent work looks looser, or less controlled. There’s a false sense of freedom of many of the forms and that’s really interesting to me.
I’m always asking myself that question about the paint. I mean, you’ve got this gooey stuff with all the baggage of a language that’s fundamentally unfixed but all weighed down. You want to be conscious and critical of the codes and frames that might be externally imposed, but ultimately you want to negate all those restrictions and make your own language.
I’m trying to find a space somewhere between a kind of debased language, like an extreme version of those painters who make the 5-minute sci-fi landscapes in Times Square with tons of short cuts and effects, and one that’s a lot more subtle, one that even contradicts what it sets out to do. Ruscha, even the wholly commercial shorthand of Moran might be at one end, but unlike them, a kind of bodily implication in the materiality is very important. I don’t mean this in its more traditional, rhetorical and gendered terms, but I think it has to do with desire and the extent to which desire becomes externalized, engaged physically. Not ideas about desire, but the impulse to form with your hands, this thing. To construct it out of these little tools that has your body and its anxieties as well as pleasures written all over it. Like how your handwriting changes depending on what you’re writing.
With that recent painting, “Only One,” that’s inspired by the FOX News billboard, it was crucial for me to enter a dimension of that language in the most direct way, and perhaps with the ubiquity of programs like Photoshop, any kind of handmade image takes on an excessive nature. You can’t not be present at any point in its making. The implications for me are about my personal responsibility, agency and a space where things are a lot more unclear, at times critical, but also more insidious.
FANZINE: I feel like I’m not supposed to like these paintings—or at least not be seduced by them but they are like those giant lollipops you get as a kid. They look great, but are ultimately too large to take in all at once. The same is true of propaganda I think. FOX News, Thomas Kinkade—they have the allure of something easy, but the underpinnings are very complex. The trouble is that these things are so complex that it is difficult to fully represent them. Do you feel your work is a complete representation and interpretation of these underpinnings?
HANDELMAN: Well, I think in the examples you give, you get sort of hit on the head, sucked right into the space that’s been designed for just that. I think the way those types of images function is actually very simple. Those images don’t slowly unfold like a Morandi or Agnes Martin or something. Everything is right there on the surface. And you’re not supposed to think when you look at those things. You’re supposed to feel something. And you do. I’m as seduced as anyone else, maybe only I’m creeped out at the same time by it. I don’t think I’m trying to represent some hidden dynamic or anything in an analytic way. I, too, want to create very emotive work. I’m not outside of the problem so to speak but that’s a more interesting and real position to be in. Andreas Hyussen, in this essay called “Monumental Seduction,” has this great quote from Foucault who writes about “the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us” (Hyussen, Present Pasts, P. 39. 2003). I think about that idea and feeling quite a bit. I’m not sure you’re supposed to like the paintings. I certainly feel discomforted about a lot of what I do.
HANDELMAN: I don’t know how I would generally characterize my relationship to paint. It’s always been very controlled. I think there’s actually an increasing sense of control with the material even as the more recent work looks looser, or less controlled. There’s a false sense of freedom of many of the forms and that’s really interesting to me.
I’m always asking myself that question about the paint. I mean, you’ve got this gooey stuff with all the baggage of a language that’s fundamentally unfixed but all weighed down. You want to be conscious and critical of the codes and frames that might be externally imposed, but ultimately you want to negate all those restrictions and make your own language.
I’m trying to find a space somewhere between a kind of debased language, like an extreme version of those painters who make the 5-minute sci-fi landscapes in Times Square with tons of short cuts and effects, and one that’s a lot more subtle, one that even contradicts what it sets out to do. Ruscha, even the wholly commercial shorthand of Moran might be at one end, but unlike them, a kind of bodily implication in the materiality is very important. I don’t mean this in its more traditional, rhetorical and gendered terms, but I think it has to do with desire and the extent to which desire becomes externalized, engaged physically. Not ideas about desire, but the impulse to form with your hands, this thing. To construct it out of these little tools that has your body and its anxieties as well as pleasures written all over it. Like how your handwriting changes depending on what you’re writing.
With that recent painting, “Only One,” that’s inspired by the FOX News billboard, it was crucial for me to enter a dimension of that language in the most direct way, and perhaps with the ubiquity of programs like Photoshop, any kind of handmade image takes on an excessive nature. You can’t not be present at any point in its making. The implications for me are about my personal responsibility, agency and a space where things are a lot more unclear, at times critical, but also more insidious.
FANZINE: I feel like I’m not supposed to like these paintings—or at least not be seduced by them but they are like those giant lollipops you get as a kid. They look great, but are ultimately too large to take in all at once. The same is true of propaganda I think. FOX News, Thomas Kinkade—they have the allure of something easy, but the underpinnings are very complex. The trouble is that these things are so complex that it is difficult to fully represent them. Do you feel your work is a complete representation and interpretation of these underpinnings?
HANDELMAN: Well, I think in the examples you give, you get sort of hit on the head, sucked right into the space that’s been designed for just that. I think the way those types of images function is actually very simple. Those images don’t slowly unfold like a Morandi or Agnes Martin or something. Everything is right there on the surface. And you’re not supposed to think when you look at those things. You’re supposed to feel something. And you do. I’m as seduced as anyone else, maybe only I’m creeped out at the same time by it. I don’t think I’m trying to represent some hidden dynamic or anything in an analytic way. I, too, want to create very emotive work. I’m not outside of the problem so to speak but that’s a more interesting and real position to be in. Andreas Hyussen, in this essay called “Monumental Seduction,” has this great quote from Foucault who writes about “the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us” (Hyussen, Present Pasts, P. 39. 2003). I think about that idea and feeling quite a bit. I’m not sure you’re supposed to like the paintings. I certainly feel discomforted about a lot of what I do.