IN CONVERSATION: Adam Mendelsohn and Rachel Howard
Adam E. Mendelsohn: A possible beginning point in the show is a round canvas of shiny black paint that seems to be out of sync with the rest of the paintings. It reflects the viewer. I thought of it like a full stop. The end. Can you say why you included the big round black canvas ('Untitled") in the show?
Rachel Howard: There were many reasons not to put the black circle in the show, sometimes if you think about something too much then you can talk yourself out of a good instinctual decision, so I left it in. It brings the exhibition back to paint, the physicality of this kind of paint - it's simple.
AM: I think it's interesting that we found some common ground recently with Enrique Metinides' photographs and also that you are particularly fond of the one where the woman is hanging from a tree (she has committed suicide).
RH: I think what struck me about Metinides' work is the respect and distance he has on his subject matter. It's poetic and tragic. I think he's a very special kind of photographer. I know he doesn't see himself as an artist, so perhaps he's not as selfish or concerned with his ego.
AM: Most of the work in the show depicts women trussed up in ropes and such. I can't be sure if they actually refer to suicide because the figures aren't dangling from a noose in air, they're kneeling on the floor etc. It seems like they could also refer to autoerotic type stuff…… Like something from a fucked up sex party gone wrong.
RH: These are all suicides except ‘Hooked (Party With Tina)’ and maybe ‘Liar's Chair' which is more about the dark side of addiction. ‘Tina' is a euphemism for crystal meth. "Cassandra, Happy Birthday', 'Eva', and 'Ekstasis' are not sexual paintings they are about loss, alienation, displacement and pain.
AM: I like the newness of the surfaces: shiny and fresh. Almost like the surface of a photograph. You can see at the edge of the canvases all the under layers of paint: bright pinks, purples, and blue's – colors that never made it to the surface of the finished painting. The figures merge with the under-layers like it's all the same surface layer and make them look almost like they made themselves. The bright, acidic colours work against the disturbing subject matter. The dangling panties in ‘Pawn Dolly' are very sad and undignified.
RH: ‘Liar's Chair', ‘Pawn Dolly' and 'Hooked (Party With Tina)’ are about another presence, a second or third party including or excluding the viewer. You may be complicit. To me the most disturbing painting and original image is ‘Pawn Dolly’. Why would a woman commit suicide with her knickers half down? Then I realised she didn't do this, the photographer did or someone on the scene - a violation after death. This is a horror on many levels and a painting about ethics and pathos but also throws up where I stand in all this. Am I overstepping boundaries? How would I feel if that was my daughter/sister/mother/friend?
AM: It seems like a lot of the drawings downstairs were preliminary studies for the paintings: ‘Liar’s Chair’, ‘Hooked (Party With Tina)’ and ‘Eva’, among others.
RH: All the drawings are preliminaries for works that will exist or will never exist. Quite often a drawing is enough. All the paintings come from the drawings shifting the image further away from the original. I love the act of drawing with a brush and Indian ink on paper, the density of the ink and how the paper sucks it in. I feel uninhibited drawing, if it goes pear-shaped it goes in the bin.
AM: Did you work from live models? The drawings seem to depict the same woman more than once.
RH: The representational paintings are more conceptual in that I do a huge amount of research and drawings painted with a brush. These are swiftly done and feel a little like the motions of Japanese calligraphy. The sources of these come from everywhere but mainly the internet and newspapers. My sister is my life model (she is the recurring woman you see in the drawings downstairs).
AM: Neither the paintings (except for one or two) nor the drawings have faces. Why is that?
RH: There are no faces so this keeps them impersonal. Nobody and everybody at the same time. Bodies lay bare with what they're born with and the history that happens between birth and death. There is nothing to celebrate about pain and suffering.
AM: The show is dominated by female suicide although one or two of the drawings look like they could be men. Like the one with the guy in his boxers and a wife beater.
RH: One thing that kept coming up when painting the third-party paintings (‘Liar's Chair' etc.) is that it's known to us all that a woman-hater is a misogynist but why do we not equally know the word for a man-hater: a misandrist. That says it all really. I didn't start out thinking I'd do a show mainly of female deaths it just evolved that way.
AM: Going back to the paintings - I love the way the black paint that articulates the figures behaves similarly to ink. It seems so instant and direct. The paintings look like they've been poured, like no brushes were involved.
RH: The reaction or figurative works are more controlled in that I sort of know what I'm doing before I put paint to canvas, as opposed to the abstract works which are freer and have no planning at all. Their scale is more manageable than previous canvases, less of a physical battle. Anyway, I build the background as if it were a painting in its own right and then introduce the figure. This process is like a sort of alchemy of timing, patience, precision and chance. I paint the figure from the preliminary drawings, trying to keep it simple and true to the sketch, then dissolve and liquefy all the lines and brushstrokes with the varnish, erasing my hand, my trace.
AM: ‘Happy Birthday' also makes me think of a fun-house mirror. The way that people will always be fascinated with stretched, pulled and elongated bodies. The figure is smeared and makes it almost seem like it's pulling you up or ascending.
RH: Happy Birthday' is a good crossover from my abstract paintings to the figurative. This is my first true figurative show but I don't see my paintings in terms of representational and abstract, just all as painting. However, for purposes of clarity, it's probably better to divide them in this way. The abstract paintings are much more difficult and fraught to paint, in fact I'd go as far to say sometimes I hate painting them. It's very difficult to paint nothing and to get it right - I discard many canvases. I equate this process to a battle. Most of my abstract canvases are very large, so it's a mental and physical task to complete one.
AM: I read an interview that you did with Damien Hirst in 2001 and I really liked what you said about abstract painting. You said that everywhere you look these days we're just completely bombarded by figurative images and that it's kind of interesting to just put these fields of colour in front of people and say: Here it is. Try and handle this. And yet this show is a big shift in that it's almost all figurative…
RH: I've always done figurative drawings but what got me into this subject matter was several years ago an acquaintance committed suicide. Firstly, he was dogged for years with mental illness but was also a high-flyer, a high-achiever. Secondly, he did a profound amount of research on the internet on ways to kill himself and finally – and this is what really disturbed me - was that yes, I knew he'd hanged himself but it was the manner in how he'd executed it. Instead of swinging from the rafters as I imagined, he'd merely knelt down and asphyxiated himself. A simple act, as if in prayer. At any given point he could have saved his own life but instead he chose death because life was so unbearable. Also suicide seems to be one of the last taboos... shame and guilt and sin; all the things I love and hate. Suicide, mental health issues and addiction all inform each other to some degree and affect many people at some time in their lives either directly or indirectly. Also, without getting all statistical, suicide is one of the highest causes of death under the age of 25, which is a lot of unhappy, displaced people.
AM: I like what you've said in the past about the impossibility of painting because it's such a long tradition etc... Can you talk a little more about that?
RH: Well because I did a joint honors at Goldsmiths in art and art history, or art theory I think they called it, which is ridiculous because it's a bit like trying to make art with your hands tied behind your back. You need to gorge yourself with art history then purge yourself of all previous knowledge. Of course this is impossible, but an important stance to try to maintain otherwise you become paralyzed by history. For me, guttural/reaction painting is far more interesting than self-referential/clever art.
AM: I also think it's interesting to look at the show as the scrutiny of private behavior. how denigrating that can be. It makes me think of this contemporary notion of celebrating and exposing private suffering and humiliation. That might be a stretch…
RH: What interests me is the line between what is acceptable and not. For example, last week there was a documentary on the death of princess Diana and the role the paparazzi played in her death and how up until they realized she was dead the photographs were like gold dust. But at the moment of her death they were worth nothing. The paparazzi were used as scapegoats initially and pilloried for their hunger for a sensational image, yet vast quantities of people lust after images of celebrities every day. It's a modern day currency. It's not celebrity I'm interested in it's taking a moment, the final moment of someone's (no one's) death, that I'd found on the internet (usually forensic images that have got into the wrong hands) and transposing that final moment somewhere else. If I'm to talk in literary terms I'd say I would want to use the beauty of tragedy in Emile Zola (L'Assommoir, Nana) crossed with Capote's In Cold Blood, in that I'm taking the skeleton of fact and filling it with my own interpretation of an event of which we are only given the ending. Many of the hanging suicide figures were in domestic settings I took these details out and changed other small details. It's more a memory of that moment as opposed to being absolute.
AM: Do you think it's possible to understand what drives someone to suicide, or to understand the act itself, through a painting?
RH: No, probably not, but these works are also about paint, painting and colour through the use of a mundane material like household gloss, gravity and trying to convey the grief and absoluteness of loneliness and the release through death. Life moves at such a fast pace and painting for me is a slow process. I want these works to capture pain. Using fact to create fictional paintings about fear, loss of hope - these are sad paintings, not gratuitous or greedy for sensationalism, but hopefully painted in a way that makes the melancholy bearable to look at. Suicide happens every day. Or more to the point in answer to your question, you tell me
Adam E. Mendelsohn is a freelance art critic who writes exclusively about contemporary art.