FANZINE: Your paintings are bittersweet in the same way that Foucault writes about the power of fascism. I think they represent both the success and failure of political structures. They aren’t hopeful in any way, which I find not only a disheartening feeling, but also a rather lonely one. The images you use don’t create a landscape in which dissonance will be heard. To what degree does the current political climate inform your work?

HANDELMAN: The current political situation feeds all kinds of feelings and ideas into my work, but none for the purpose of illuminating “information.” I think it’s fueled a great amount of anger, sadness and perhaps most of all paranoia. But the work has always existed in an imaginary space that is however rooted in social and political reality, is about a kind of paranoia, a kind of dream where fantasies are enacted and fears are played out. The work often does aestheticize politics, only to such a degree that its dysfunction can’t be turned outwards; it exceeds persuasion and its power is self-consuming.

FANZINE: There is the suggestion of something faintly religious about this work. Through the landscape, through the light, it is as though there is something larger out there. And though it’s a seductive force, it’s not necessarily a good one. Where do you situate yourself vis-à-vis seductivity versus negativity?

HANDELMAN: Oh there’s definitely a religious or spiritual dimension to the work I make. Religious ideology and faith played such a big role for The Hudson River School, and its predecessors in figures like Caspar David Frederich and Turner. American Christian ideology is, of course, central to the rhetoric of “Manifest Destiny.” The Sublime is really the bracketing aesthetic term of the epoch. But the spiritual dimension to the political and historical developments in 19th century America were part of what made them so diabolical. The historian Barbara Novak wrote that “[t]he taking of the continent was powered by an undisputed Christian consensus, a missionary zeal, a largely benign interpretation of progress. The themes are contradictory: the growth of a comfortable middle class and an ongoing Indian genocide; the idealization of nature concurrent with industrialization; confidence in an inevitable future and a selective memory of the past.” (Nature and Culture, P. xii) So I’m always thinking about the emotive and aesthetic forces that marshal ideas and actions, and light has always played such an important role in that.

This spiritual connection to ideology is also an intrinsic part of fascist psychology. Speer’s “Lichtdom” at the Nuremberg rallies was also meant to instill feelings of a transcendent order and national destiny. I think this idea of losing yourself in the seduction and beauty of something is really remarkable and terrifying. Mike Kelly talks about the relationship between fascism and the sublime, of the loss of the self and the potential annihilation of the self to this larger entity. Perhaps too, we could say the same thing of the televised experience of the “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign. Throughout all these things though, there’s this sense of beauty and the orchestration of positive forces. One of the challenges for me has been to tease out this dark side from a space that always feels really good and that’s always light.

Marc Handelman lives and works in New York. He is represented by Sikkema Jenkins Gallery, and will be in the upcoming show “USA TODAY” at The Royal Academy of Arts in London, October 4th, 2006, and “This ain't no foolin’ around” at the Letterkinney Art Center in Letterkinney Ireland, July through August.


Image Notes:

Gorge (detail)
2005, oil on canvas, 47.5" x 36"

Trademark
2006, oil on canvas, 41" x 82"

Only One
2005, oil on canvas, 93" x 168"

Our Banner in the Sky
2005, oil on canvas, 89" x 144"