In 2023 Parafin presented ‘Melanie Smith: Tickled Pink, Green with Envy’, the first show to focus only on the artist’s paintings. This conversation by email took place over the duration of the exhibition.
Ben Tufnell The earliest paintings of yours I’ve seen are monochromes from 1994. Did you study painting at art school and if so, what kind of works were you making?
Melanie Smith No, I never studied painting, this seems to be a bit of a myth. During my time at ReadingUniversity, I made a lot of relief works out of paper, then wood, which eventually turned into more three-dimensional pieces but which were somehow always attached to the wall. I didn’t really define any style until the last year when I worked incredibly hard to get something together. My final presentation consisted of wood reliefs that had carefully finished graphite surfaces which in some way resembled Minimalist surfaces. When I went to Mexico, I then made these monochrome paintings that were so bright and fluorescent you could hardly look at them. I guess the intention was to make the surface so impenetrable that contemplation was impossible. It was a rejection of what I’d been taught.
BT You’ve often spoken about a grounding of your practice in Minimalism. In a recent interview with Cuauhtémoc Medina you mention your ‘training as a Minimalist...’ Can you say something more about that?
MS Around 1984-88, when I was at art college, a lot of the tutors and students were looking at Donald Judd’s recent stacked pieces. It was all about the observer’s body, looking, the surrounding space and form, andI remember feeling intimidated by the slickness of his surfaces. They felt impossible to achieve. I’m not sure I was ‘trained’ as a Minimalist but the thought at the time was a certain reductionism of form and purity. All surfaces were to be reflected upon. Minimalist painting was a frame/window to be contemplated. Harmony, purity and order, which are all synonymous with Minimalism, seemed to me to be very Anglo-Saxon or Eurocentric concepts. Also, most of the big names were white men.
In Latin America Minimalism seems unthinkable. Excess and the informal or the Baroque are much moreprevalent. Somehow, the reductiveness of abstraction just didn’t make sense to me within daily life in Mexico. Its colonial past suggests such a different relationship to art history and I couldn’t help questioning that. My earlier work examined abstraction outside of a westernised framework. It corrupted Minimalism, almost breaking down the illusion of the surface, the veil, looking sideways at it or from a different perspective.
BT Recent installations (I’m thinking of Vortex forexample) might even be described as Maximalist – there’s film, performance, music, paintings, photographs, objects, all in dialogue, all interconnected – an almost excessive profusion of forms and ideas.
MS Yes, in one way it is to do with a certain reluctance to make categories sit in their own little compartments. I wanted the experience of looking at a performative piece that reconstructs a Blake illustration to be multi-layered. As a spectator you were looking at a live performance of a tableau vivant, sculpture and wall painting, but through a mosaic of several long-distance CCTV cameras. It can’t get more Baroque!
A meeting of form, plasticity, blending and flattening of three-dimensional space to two-dimensional was at the heart of that project. Painting moved into the performative space, and the time-based image became very still. For me the most successful projects that I have done manage to blur this edge between the pictorial frame and the camera frame. I think unconsciously I need to undo or unpick the staging of events in order to reveal where the ‘frame’ begins and ends, or perhaps where the historical context meets the contemporary. It’s why so many of my works go back into the past. There is a kind of layering up of distance and connection.
Vortex in some ways feels like a twisted biography. I find myself in some weird groundless spiral of history between the London of now, (and then) and the topsy turvy bodies of Mexican time travel. For me though I’m quite happy to stay in that space.
BT In a 2006 interview with David Batchelor, you said: ‘... even then and still nowadays, it never really feels like I’m a painter as such, although it really is the basis of my work...’. On the other hand, in the interview with Cuauhtémoc Medina in ‘Farce and Artifice’, Cuauhtémoc says ‘I think it’s quite apparent that these questions aren’t about painting, but about... what would you say? The framework of representation? Because Melanie Smith sometimes paints, it’s true, but she isn’t a painter.’ And you reply, ‘No, I don’t think I’m a painter....’
To me this suggests a deep and long-felt ambivalence about painting’s role within your practice. Can you say something about that?
MS You’re right, painting does seem somewhat secondary. It’s a good and very nagging question. There is something in my mind that you have to do it full time to be considered a painter. I have always developed bodies of works in dialogue with other mediums. These groups of works always form a holistic dialogue within themselves. They make a set of relationships in their own sort of cosmology. The painting surface is only one component within that dialogue.
Much of the time I am also questioning the place a particular historic painter or painting holds in the world today. I think I reproduce images rather than make paintings. I’m more comfortable saying I’m an image maker because I don’t think I’m concerned about composition, technique, colour etc, as perhaps traditional painters are. I’m interested in what happens outside the illusion of the frame, or in the cracks and fragments between frames. This is I think much more akin to an editing process. If there’s one thing I love, it’s editing, that ability to reshuffle and create drastic shifts and changes of tempo.
And yet, painting is the one medium that draws me in. I find it unfathomable, elusive and alluring. It can’t really be explained. I love the way it inhabits the world in a rectangle. But beyond that rectangle is really where my area of interest is.
I don’t think about my pictorial work as carrying and developing a style, or a particular technique. I think it’s about finding an imprint or image that maps certain pathways that time-based work cannot do. Recently I have begun to question the need for it to always be accompanied by video works. As you get older, with more work behind you, there are more possibilities to display different bodies of work together. This for me is somehow where it all begins to make sense. It’s almost like a memoir in progress. I’m beginning to see the depth of different scales and topics that repeatedly appear, resurge or appear in different ways. Nowadays it feels like there’s a cosmography or compendium of thought processes that are appearing through the cracks, and it feels like the tide is turning a little more towards this type of work.
BT Your film works are often described as ‘painterly’. What do you take that to mean?
MS I think they are. I think through surface and affect much more than through action or narrative. If anything, there is a layering of surface and sound. When I’m filming my most important tool is the video assist. I’m only focused on what comes into or out of the frame. It’s like a cropping tool, which later can be blown up or cut up. It’s interesting to think about how much these computer tools have changed the way we visualise or think about landscape or our environment.
I deliberately take things out of context so that the scale or geographical context becomes irrelevant (which I think also happens in the image-based works). I’ve become more aware that some editing techniques that I use also come into play with the cropping and framing. I think for example in flat abstract planes that connect different pockets of space. There is a deliberate disorientation of perspectives and places in my work that have a more painterly orientation. I don’t connect time; I break it down into dreamlike sequences that move back and forward and sometimes nowhere at all. For me this is the allure of painting, that time gets suspended, and I try to reproduce that sensation of discontinuity in my filmic works.
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MS What happens in your head when you see a work of mine?
BT As a curator, I’m used to looking at works of art in an analytical way, trying to figure out what’s going on. So, with a painting like Regency I (2012), for example, I’m drawn in initially by the imagery and the surface texture: it’s intriguing and appealing aesthetically. Then I look closer and want to understand how it’s made, how the paint has been applied, how the layers function. Then I’m conscious that I’m looking at an image of an image, or even an image of a surface, and all sorts of art historical associations come into play. And then I’m wondering why this image seems to be disintegrating, coming apart, and because of that I’m thinking about ideas of Empire and power and Colonialism, and the image coming apart under the weight of the history it bears.
MS I think as an artist it’s really difficult to see how other people perceive your work. We tend to put it out there and then carry on with our same assumptions or narratives of the work, but of course, there’s a minefield of other perspectives. What, for you has happened with this show? Has it changed in any way your reading of my work?
BT I think it’s confirmed a hunch I had about your work that while it’s all interconnected the individual elements can stand on their own too. I’m intrigued by the way these very individual pieces of work come together to create a much larger story, yet also have autonomy.
The variety of your work is amazing – all the different surfaces and supports – and that’s something you really don’t understand on screen. It’s why a show like this is important, so one can actually see and experience just how different the works are.
We’ve had visitors joking, ‘Oh, it’s a group show, who are the artists?’ I think that’s really interesting. The market demands a signature style of an artist, a brand identity, if you will. But I really admire the fact that you’ve resisted that.
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BT How do the works in different media relate to each other? In an exhibition the spectacle of a large-scale film installation seems to take precedence, to become the main event. It is perhaps then inevitable that the paintings and photographs are cast in a kind of supporting role.
MS Yeah, back to the old issue of scale. Video is inherently large and glossy, whereas my paintings are smaller, low key and restrained. It’s almost like the two things contradict each other! Video needs dark and dark walls for optimal viewing. Paintings need light. So, it’s really hard to get those two things right without sacrificing one or the other. I have more recently resolved this contradiction in making scenic ‘sets’ which allow for light and dark, or even a panoramic setting which allows the viewer to see image, performance, and paintings from different angles. This has what has been leading me to try think about the idea of stasis in video works, and then continuity/series/grouping of paintings, almost trying to mirror one technique in the other.
In answer to your question, the various media relate to each other in different ways in each series of works. There is no one formula that binds it all together. Sometimes it might seem that the delicacy and intimacy of the images directly contradicts the impact of a video work. The Spiral City series form a static cartography that counteracts the movement in the video. In the mural pieces that I have done with the restorer Roberto Mondragon, the slowness of reproducing an image during the length of an exhibition is actually very filmic for me. The canvas becomes the screen.
In the Diagram series (which now numbers around 100 or so pieces) of very small wood panels, the works connect thought processes. They become bridges. These Diagram works have become very important over time because they can be anchors as to how to read different groupings of images over different moments of my production. If anything, this intertwined nature of my production has become more evident the more of it that exists! It’s never like one series linearly leads to another, it’s more like a double helix that bends back on itself and spirals upwards and outwards.
BT One of the characteristic tropes of your paintings is – to use another filmic analogy – your use of soft-focus. The images are often blurred, indistinct, somehow contingent. Can you say something about that as a strategy? Is it a veiling or distancing device? Or is the intention to give the painting the quality of a filmed or photographed image?
MS That might all be for the analyst to decipher. The internet has affected so much the way we perceive information or images, and where disorientation effects so much our sense of presentness. We have become so accustomed to a chopped-up version of reality. It’s like our sense of place has become blurred as if we were actually nowhere at all, only floating, disconnected and cognitively dissonant. I think contingency is the key word, perhaps suspension too.
The larger Fordlandia and Spiral City series are airbrushed so the blurriness of edge is inevitable. The paintings in the Xilitla series are suspended through layers of encaustic and oil paint, built up or sanded down. There is a feeling with those images that the closer you get the less you see. In a wider sense there is an elusive quality I like to keep. I hate to be definitive or lay down the law about how the works are interpreted. Perhaps they are enigmatic but I think the best I can ask of the viewer is to try to unpick some of the associations. What did I just see? What was that all about?
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BT When we first discussed the idea of an exhibition focussing only on your paintings, I think you were a little sceptical. At least it’s not something you’d ever done before. But I think you found the installation process fascinating, seeing all these wonderful interconnections arising and echoing between such various works; some formal (flatness, spirals), some in terms of palette (the orange spectrum of the lower gallery, for example), some more thematic (urbanism). How do you feel about the project now?
MS Well, many things to say here. Yes, there were unexpected groupings that emerged throughout the installation, and I think we allowed for many random associations to happen. I guess I was a little worried that the different textures might be a distraction, because so much of the early work is out of focus and abstract, and the works now are way more precise and technical in a sense. This grouping of paintings is something that started happening in my MACBA show in 2018. Because that was a survey show of many years of work, it felt like there was a certain archaeology of forms that was emerging (through colour, theme, scale etc), like
a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces don’t fit. I think these groupings work in pretty similar ways to the editing process I use in film; clusters of associations arise, and then are shattered by an interruption – a jump cut, or a painting that gets wedged in the middle of my very logical thought process. You kind of think, hang on…
I thought I was looking at something continuous, but wait, maybe not.
These resonances had only really happened though in the context of video installations, and I feel this painting only dialogue has opened up a whole new Pandora’s box. Wonderous and scary. Slightly scared of letting go of something but also in another way I feel more relaxed to just let the work associate itself, if that makes sense.
BT Could we zoom in and look at a couple of specific works in the show? You mentioned that you felt Bulto 2 (2010) embodied many of your concerns as an artist, that you regarded it as a key work. Could you say something about that?
MS The video Bulto (Package) is all about identity. It’s a mysterious package that gets pushed and shoved around the streets of Lima by different groups of people. It circulates through schools, archeological sites, moto-taxis, boats etc but ultimately comes back always to its starting point. But nobody knows what it actually is, or why they are hauling it around. It’s the story of identity in colonised countries, something so enormously obtrusive but you can’t put your finger on, it remains elusive, but it’s incredibly weighty to deal with. The series of paintings I made in tandem with that video are all different kinds of ‘Bultos’ in pinky red; pigs, flamingos, body parts. Bulto 2 is just a theatre curtain with a spotlight on it. We have no idea what’s behind the curtain, but we know that red curtains and spotlights mean ‘stage’ and that something is about to happen. There’s a behind-the-scenes and an in-front aspect, and with painting there’s the canvas and the frame, and then there’s everything else around those conventions. I think that sort of sums up my work.
BT The Regency paintings depict patterned wallpaper – they are literally paintings of surfaces – but the imagesare disintegrating, entropic, particularly in Regency I (2012). These works feel political, in that they are somehow commenting on Colonialism and cultural appropriation. Is that right?
MS Yes, I think they’re pretty eerie. They came out of the Xilitla series of paintings about Las Pozas, where Edward James created all these oneirical concrete structures in the jungle of San Luis Potosi. It is somehow an emblem of Colonial imposition. There’s one very early structure in this fantastical garden which resembles the beginning of a medieval castle, and others that are concrete moulds of Fleur de Lys and Doric columns that form tunnels and half-built architectural shells. It’s a direct cultural appropriation from one place to another, with the difference that as it’s incredibly humid and full of moss, creatures, plants and all sorts of moulds are literally eroding that imaginary away with time. I thought a lot about Robert Smithson during that period, and now of course I can’t help drawing a parallel between entropy and the fading of Empire.
BT The new watercolour paintings you’ve made for the show feel very different in register to the older works. They’re like painted collages, or even edited paintings. Do you feel that they come closer to a filmic way of working?
MS Curious you say that, in a way I think they are less filmic. Seems like I’m piling everything in my head on one sheet of paper, and I think this had something to do with the isolation of lockdown. They felt like a response to all the present-day environmental entanglements, and yet they go further back into history.
Generally with these, I start working with quite abstract forms, and then fragments of backgrounds from other registers (botanical illustrations, Romantic paintings, diagrammatic forms) start to work their way in to the compositions. They come from many sources: books, photos, internet, paintings. I can’t seem to get away from Romanticism and the Enlightenment. It’s always hovering around in the background as something to rub up against, as if all these jumbled references want to break with any rationalism.
I thought a lot about psychedelia during the pandemic – not in a hippie way – but as a new type of psychedelia that is emerging from digital technology, screen life and a place of anxiety. It doesn’t really seem like a way out of anything, more like an inescapable hallucination. The pandemic made us so internalized, so in that way these new drawings are like a compendium of odd strata in my head that dot around several themes and topics in my work in general throughout the years. Really, this word palimpsest which I have used quite a bit, whereby things becomesuperimposed or effaced but still bear traces of earlier forms or references, seems very apt.
They don’t necessarily refer back to one film, which is quite a break with previous projects, as if they have their own meaning or place in the world. I’m still trying to work out what all that means, but something has shifted in the last couple of years, and I think it has to do with constructing or making worlds rather than registering them.
BT This may be a complete red herring, but I’ve been thinking about translation in relation to your work. Do you think being an English person living in Mexico, being bilingual, constantly translating information back and forth, might create a certain sensibility or way of thinking?
MS Not a red herring, it’s an absolutely vital part of who I am and what the work is. Of course, you can never really truly leave from where you come from, and at the same time it would be almost cliché to say that the experience of living in Mexico has completely changed my way of perceiving the world, but there is something in that. Something of the informality in Mexico (economies, street, architecture etc) has made me understood the underpinning of so many formalities (economies, street, architecture!) of England. What’s very interesting is that so many of the discontinuities of time, Modernity and the sort of baroque alternative of excess and
overflow in Latin America is now also appearing here in UK. We can’t really say that in UK there’s a smooth consistency of appearance anymore; it’s all seeping up through the cracks. I think this is why the ‘backstage’ or what’s on the edges of the official line is what interests me in this translator role, as you put it. Although translator always has this connotation of a two-way conversation. I think my work is way more full of hybrid elements. In that sense I don’t think the paintings ‘translate’ as such the videos, they are a step aside, out of place, but somehow connected.
Can I ask you, what’s the challenge(s) of representing this type of work, or explaining this layered approach to audiences who may not have any connection to Latin America? Are you also some kind of translator?
BT I don’t think of myself as a translator really, but I do feel I’m an intermediary. When I worked in museums there was a duty to the visitors, to give them all the information they might need to ‘get’ the work, to take something from it. In a gallery like Parafin it’s a different proposition and I think visitors understand the distinction.
There’s a handout with info about the show but no labels. There’s a basic introduction but no interpretation. Of course, when I’m talking to visitors I’m often asked to ‘translate’ or ‘interpret’ – to explain what it’s about – but I try to resist definitive readings, to keep it open.
The risk is that some of the audience might not see the full nuanced complexity of the work, but I think that’s a risk worth taking.
Finally, and with this question of translation in mind, redaction – taking something by taking away or withholding information – seems important for you. It’s the opposite of construction. Perhaps more akin to editing. Can you comment?
MS I like the viewer to work that out.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Melanie Smith: Tickled Pink, Green with Envy, 5 April – 20 May 2023
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