Above Left: Marcus Reichert on the cover of Art & Ego
Above Right: Professor Edward Rozzo
MR: Before we move on to the subject of pornography per se, I’m curious to know if you think there might be some correlation between the anger I often feel when viewing images of warfare, and especially the so-called collateral damage inflicted on innocent people, and the anger that might very well be at the root of violent aggression on the societal or national level. My response to my own anger can be to make an extremely violent painting or take an almost grotesquely bleak photograph. Do you have any thoughts on this?
ER: Anger and/or indignation certainly are a motivating force. They bring one’s instinct for rebellion to some constituted order. But the results are also fairly uncontrollable. It’s part of today’s egocentric identity: if I feel it must be right, then it must be healthy for me to act on it. That, in my opinion, is bullshit. Controlling one’s emotions has a lot to do with maturity, but we seem to have lost that part of the equation. We’re stuck only with: don’t show your weak side, don’t show your pain. As to anger being the reason to destroy and conquer bullshit.
MR: Yes, but it’s pain that triggers my anger, and it’s this pain that is evident in the painting that is the result of this violent reaction. Perhaps that is the value in such a work of art the pain that hopefully the artist shares with the viewer. OK, so what if you were asked to take pictures of two people involved sexually?
ER: It’s not the kind of subject matter that interests me as an observer. Let’s just say, I’d rather be in the picture than taking it. I’m not saying that certain images aren’t beautiful or significant. I can think of one of Nan Goldin’s images of a couple making love that is quite strong. But you see, sex as depicted in that image, I feel, is an interesting subject because it’s rooted in deeper issues than sexual excitement. Sex is the motor for a lot of profound communication. Making erotic pictures, though, is not really my line of business. I like a hands-on reality and not a conceptual one. I think fashion photography is far more interesting. It’s a mixture of commercial tease and social comment combined in an almost perverse way. It reveals problems of identity and roots. It reflects the individual’s desire to emerge and declare a sexual identity, whatever that may be, and it’s almost unconsciously about politics. Fashion photography calls out with provocation and allure. It’s like the sirens of Greek mythology. Fashion is somehow always calling you into her spell with either imagined perfection or provocative arrogance, somehow always trying to catch a piece of your imaginary identity and give it a boost. It’s a fascinating exchange which interests me immensely. For me, fashion is the concrete visualisation of the most subtle inner feelings about one’s self. It’s like visual psychoanalysis.
MR: It’s curious that you, whose photographs are so very different to mine, should have a similar fascination with fashion as a subject. My father went from being a portrait painter into advertising when he found it impossible to provide for a wife and three children on two or three commissions a year. He had been the art director for the US Navy’s enlistment program during WWII and had an uncanny knack for coming up with good campaigns, so creating his own advertising studio was rather a nostalgic adventure. At any event, he began bringing home copies of Vogue Magazine and Harper’s Bazaar and I found them very intriguing and very sexy. Later, when he got the Christian Dior hosiery account for the US, the selection of the models his studio would work with became my secret obsession.
My affection was always for the least orthodox face and figure, which is of course the direction discovering models has gone
in over the years. When, at the age of 21, I married Sally MacLeod, she wasn’t a model but very easily could have been, and later was. Wilhelmina and then Askew’s sent her all over the world, and I would occasionally chase after her. We had an especially divine rendezvous in your city of Milano, and it was there, after a modelling shoot with Sally still in her make-up, that I took some of my most memorable pictures of her. That’s the essential background to what follows.
When, in fashion photography or fine art photography, you have a subject with whom you are enamoured, exceptional things can happen¾one example being Jean Shrimpton and David Bailey, another being Georgia O’Keefe and Alfred Steiglitz. It’s the intimacy that brings the beauty of the moment and the psychology of that relationship into focus. I may be stating the obvious but this sort of collaboration doesn’t come around every day. I know you can appreciate this because your pictures of Kristin Helberg, your then wife, are intimate but also uncannily formal in a lyrical, dare I say, existentialist sort of way. My photographs of Sally were never meant to be published or exhibited¾because I wasn’t a proper photographer, let alone a proper fashion photographer¾but the clandestine aspect of photographing her nearly naked in public places like Holland Park in London is now acknowledged to have been prescient. These photographs are fragile things for me because our private exploitation of each other is apparent.
ER: I really don’t know what to say about this aspect of my photography. It’s true, I did take many photographs of Kristin. I was influenced, of course, by Harry Callahan who was my teacher, but, I never convinced myself that these images were more than wonderful pictures of my wife. So, you might say, it was due to my immaturity that I didn’t continue with this kind of work. With later girlfriends, wives, and lovers, I never got into photographing any of them in a very special way. Marianne, my present wife, has often been the object of my photographic interests. But since I’m less interested in showing the erotically perfect side of life than in showing the distressingly realistic side, my subject, whoever she is, eventually refuses to be photographed, or refuses to allow the work I’ve done to be shown.
MR: You mentioned Nan Goldin as someone who takes very strong pictures of people making love. Beyond what I consider the compelling beauty of many of her images, she has the uncanny ability to bring a weird haphazardness into play which gives a quiet, disarming depth to the subject. Somehow, she manages to capture people and places together in a kind of collusion which I identify with enormously. Nan Goldin and I had a friend in common, Cookie Mueller, with whom I spent many an endearingly desolate night in New York. I first saw Cookie acting in a film by Amos Poe and found her very sexy. Amos and I were both struggling to make films and so we appreciated each other’s particular dilemmas. At any event, Cookie and I eventually met and we spent quite a lot of time alone together, and occasionally in the company of her young son Max. Cookie used to leave New York for days at a time. She used to go to northern Africa with a few of her chums and shoot heroin. She had Berber tattoos on her fingers and shared a needle.
In 1989, Cookie died of AIDS at the age of 40. Her husband Vittorio also died of AIDS due to his own addiction to heroin. Nan Goldin’s Ten Years After is a kind of gentle exposé of the life Cookie and Vittorio shared. These are supremely melancholy images that have an almost otherworldly fatality about them. But Goldin’s work with Cookie carried on until Cookie was dead. These images of Cookie’s transformation from vibrant woman to waxen object of fascination were shown at the Whitney Museum and, by all accounts, were harrowing. Cookie may have been reckless but she also had courage. She and Nan Goldin made a statement. I’ve never been able to look at these photographs. If I were outraged by Nan Goldin’s willingness to photograph Cookie dying it would be one thing, but I’m not. I’m just too much of a coward to see Cookie’s suffering frozen before me. Somehow I think it would have been easier to be there.
ER: Are we all artists? In our globalised world of shifting social and cultural values, the emphasis is decidedly on the freedom we have as individuals to express ourselves as we please, when we please, in any way that doesn’t conflict with someone else’s interests. You might say we’re approaching cultural anarchy anything goes and my taste has the same value as yours. After all, we’re all consumers. Or should I say, we’re all artistic consumers of our own identity. It’s a frightful thought.
MR: Yes, this casts doubt on the proposition of being an artist. And it makes the task of expressing what poetry there
is in the world and in our lives even more difficult. It has always been essential in some small way that a poet strike a pose, that he assume the character of his work. He was often an object of derision. Most people believed that being a poet was not a proper job for anybody, however these same people took joy in the spiritual gratification provided by the poet’s labours. The proposition of being a poet has been romanticised and, much worse, democratised, so that, as you say, now any-one can play at being an artist.
ER: It’s like our egos are exploding in space and will continue to explode in space until someone comes along and, against our will, constructs a wall to contain us. Then we’re really fucked. But is everyone really an artist? Or has everyone simply claimed the right to express themselves? Are we now like a bunch of kids taking a bath together?
MR: It would appear that this is very much the case. As I said before, the artist produces the ingredients that are now manipulated by the operatives of a vast bureaucratic scheme. I’m not paranoid. Anyone with any cultural wherewithal whatsoever knows that art has become a viable form of mass entertainment, and Tate Modern is the Disneyland of so-called fine art. It’s very big business. There’s nothing sinister in this, unless of course one regards the dilution of poetry and thought to make it more appealing to the public a form of degeneration. It strikes me as hideously ironic that the Nazis did their best to destroy German art of the modernist and expressionist movements when today virtually anything that is promoted effectively passes for modern art, but more exactly art that expresses the artist’s relevance within the bureaucratic scheme of things.
ER: Yes, when moral and ethical guidelines are forged through cultural masturbation everyone just loves the latest album, theatrical piece, film, new emerging artist until we all feel a healthy orgasm of self-justification. Are we now a political entity of “ethical” intellectuals trying to navigate the limits of narcissistic anarchy? Has visual expression replaced religion? Has art become a way of sharing the guilt, anxiety and pain of living? Is it like group therapy? Is it something to decorate our walls with while our walls become moving images of virtual emotions?
MR: It seems to me that we are consumed by our own exquisite personalities as manifest in our art. Everything around
us must be a manifestation of our sensibility, and that manifestation had better have impact. Our identity has become our ultimate work of art, but only if we can get it across convincingly and here’s the best part with technological proficiency. And we aren’t talking about anything as mundane as achievement or as inept as personal style: we’re talking about the technology of the new aesthetics. We’re talking about the infallible incandescence of celebrity. Yes, moving images of virtual emotions shall triumph, that is, until virtual emotions become passé and everyone learns how to cry on cue, which is coming.
ER: I believe in late modernity more than post modernity. That means I believe that things can become better. The ignorant youth isn’t simply ignorant. The consumerist
wasteland of western society isn’t simply a wasteland. I have faith. The faith of Thomas Aquinas, the faith of Plutarch. Our secular society is not without a spiritual basis, it’s just difficult to find it, especially amongst the commercial vultures who govern most of our daily consumption. We’ve still got a long way to go, but I think visual expression, understanding ideas through colours, forms, etc. is a kind of psychotherapy a visual psychotherapy. It is a form of confession, a very private confession between ourselves and a communal sense of self.
MR: I don’t share your faith, because I see mankind committing the same acts of cruelty again and again. What you say about visual psychotherapy however does make perfect sense
to me. It really is at the subliminal core of my painting. I can’t say the same is true of my photographs, because the photographs are only obliquely about exposing my psyche to myself. I look at the photographs and I am nearly convinced that what I see before me is what I know, or what I knew when I took
the photograph. As objects, photographs are mysterious and elusive things in themselves. My paintings are about something else altogether. They very often are painted in a kind of trance. What occurs on the canvas is coming from a place I can’t reach in any other way. In fact, there is no known logic to this sequence of events. Yes, it is a form of confession but that confession is written in a language that is not immediately decipherable. It takes me a while to understand what I’ve put on the canvas and then, either I eventually move on to a second state, or the painting is complete.
ER: But that, I think, is the beauty of this new kind of confession. It’s not evident, it doesn’t lose its meaning after the next yawn or commercial. It does take time to understand, but that’s its beauty. It’s a new way to get in touch with, as you say, a place one can’t reach in any other way. That’s what spirituality has always been about. That’s why I believe in this second coming in the form of art, design, and culture. It’s already here, but we’re not aware of it yet. Most people haven’t been pulled into the revelation. Getting back to your painting, I think understanding your work is about understanding some very subtle and sometimes disturbing things. It’s about contemplation. I wish people looked at photographs in the same way, but they don’t. They simply flip through the pages and say something like “Oh look, what a boring street corner.” At least people look at a painting knowing that it’s not easy to see.
MR: But it’s not a new way, it’s a very old way. Good painting has always been about this. Painters as diverse as Henri Matisse and Jackson Pollock are about this. Sentimental painting, the kind of paintings people make in prison or of their girlfriends and boyfriends, is very much about this. There are confessional works of art and there are disarmingly confessional works of art. The portraits that Antonin Artaud drew near the end of his life at La Maison de Santé d’Ivry were about shared confession. His subjects allowed him to probe their faces and their psyches in a way that is almost painfully intimate. Artaud’s drawings of his friends are frightening in that they are so bleak and yet so opulent in their detail. His eyes rove over the pores of his subject’s flesh as his mind roves over the landscape of his subject’s soul. I can’t think of any other way to put it. Artaud opens up the person before us and enables us to see what he sees. His subjects had courage.
ER: You mentioned the technology of the new aesthetics, which is very much about personal expression and visibility. By now, we can see what’s coming: images everywhere, all the time, fluidly on our person, on walls, in empty space. We’ll be connected to the internet and similar real-time globalised webs 24 hours a day. We already live outside the space-time continuum of our fathers. We’re getting ready for the ubiquitous self. The problem is that most people are victims of image culture.
I think the real problem in the future globalised world will be visual illiteracy. Visual art is pure communication, like music. It allows people to get in touch with themselves, with problems bigger than themselves. That’s all good. Unfortunately, the vast majority of viewers are totally visually illiterate. Some think they understand because they can recognise subject matter, others because they can identify some classical school of thought. Beyond that, they see nothing.
MR: I watch people in my studio, I see how they react to something alien to their everyday lives. I wait for the atmosphere to envelope them. I wait for the viewer to be possessed by some strange sensation. When I walk into another artist’s studio I experience the same thing: the same transforming sensation. Occasionally, nothing happens, but usually there is something about the thought circulating in that place that either penetrates my own thinking or that I reject. It’s about being pervaded, perhaps even consumed by another sensibility. It’s a marvellous thing to experience, especially when it’s your own work that is generating this sequence of revelations. I think people who are serious about experiencing visual art are willing to momentarily leave themselves behind. For me, there is too much art that flatters the viewer with his presence on the earth, with his importance as judge and jury in the artworld melodrama. I like to think that my pictures require a kind of selflessness to be appreciated.
ER: That’s why I teach. It’s like being a prophet in the desert: no one is looking for you, no one thinks you’ve got anything interesting to say. We’ve all got something interesting to say, but we’ve got to say it to each other. That’s why the role of art is changing. Rightly so. We all should have the possibility to express ourselves in various forms, but whoever chooses to dedicate his life to making images should be regarded as someone who is meditating on the meaning of life.
MR: That, I think, is the sense of responsibility that we acknowledge to ourselves when we are looking at something that we find worthwhile. But I’m not at all certain we all have something interesting to say, at least not visually. There is the joy of expressing one’s self visually, and we see this joy especially in children’s drawings and paintings. But we also see it in almost anything created visually by someone who is excited by the experience. I’ve worked as a visiting studio critic in painting and the difference in people’s attitudes to their work can be shocking. The difference of course lies in who regards the effort of making a picture as a privilege and who regards it as a job. I often wonder why someone wants to make a career of painting when that career is tantamount to employment by an unacknowledged corporation, the corporation of successful art. It’s the idea of being a successful artist and therefore a celebrity that runs contrary to what making images is meant to be about. Whosoever meditates on the meaning of life through his images is blessed.
ER: And like any mystical experience, some people get it, some don’t, and some fantasise about it via projections of themselves in an auto-referential way. I don’t know what the role of art is in society because art is no longer an established group of things that people do. Some still think art is exclusively painting and sculpture, others think it’s photography and video too. My roots lie in what I consider to be the evident meaning of a series of writings by Anada Coomaraswamy in the 1930’s and 40’s while he was the Curator of Indian Art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He said: Art is not the object, it’s the process. Once you’ve grasped that, the world opens up and you no longer categorise what art is and what art isn’t. It’s the process, it’s the way you do things. Whether you’re painting a painting or building a table, what enriches the object is the artistry you used in making it.
MR: I think a lot of what we’ve been talking about throughout these discussions has to do with just this. Simon Lane made an astute observation about our current predicament when he said:
“In the same way in which visiting card printers suggest limits to their clients’ profession(s) for reasons of space or indolence¾“Phrenologist, Philanthropist, Phantasist” society tends to look askance at those who confess to a multiplicity of talent. In earlier times, the polymath was two to a penny: a doctor was a botanist, a parson a poet, a poet a soldier. These days, not so, for we have evolved, or devolved, into the specialist. If it was tolerable for James Joyce to strum his banjo (in private) then it was always considered slightly pretentious of Paul Bowles or Anthony Burgess to compose music as well as fiction. More’s the pity.”
This harkens back to my belief that all of it is about finding poetry in the world. Depending upon the visceral extremity
of the subject, that poetry may be horrific and excruciating to experience but it is nevertheless the manifestation of a sensibility the artist’s sensibility in pursuit of meaning, no matter how abstract or elusive that meaning might be. We’ve certainly agreed that the meaning is often in the experience of the thing. When Simon mentions Joyce strumming his banjo, it’s fascinating to imagine the same mind finding an harmonious (or discordant) order in the rhythms of his words on the page. There is a discipline to this process in any medium which is very difficult to grasp. Although it certainly hinges on the ego for much of its impetus, the compulsion to find or distil an imagery that in any way communicates what we want to communicate is necessarily a process of refinement, at least in the way our minds struggle towards an imagery that possesses an undeniable resonance. This may sound terribly complex, but it’s actually quite simple: it’s about finding the inexplicable meaning in what we see.
ER: You might call it finding poetry, I’d rather call it finding oneself through what one does. It might be visual art or it might be a craft. If you do it with your mind and your emotions, you produce objects that reflect not only yourself but some part of everyone else. It’s about finding meaning, like you said. I totally agree.
MR: Something has been pestering me which we might discuss: extreme identification with one’s self and what this has to do with making images. I often worry that any image I make is totally irrelevant because I made it. At the same time, I argue with myself that whatever image I make, if made with integrity, might at least be of some subliminal consequence for the viewer. I openly admit that the reason I paint is to demonstrate to myself that I am actually alive, but that may be an attendant aspect of my particular psychosis. I sometimes wonder if when a person commits an unbelievably violent crime if that person is not at the time finding the only way he knows to project himself into some sort of reality. I wonder if when we make an image, by taking a photograph or making a painting, we aren’t similarly projecting ourselves into what subconsciously we consider a forbidden reality.
ER: Often we are driven by influences we can’t control, like our parents’ attitudes and habits, like childhood traumas. These are ready-made compulsions. We’re constructing our sense of self. This is what we’re doing when we desire and buy something we feel is essential to our own way of living. How much is projection, how much is conscientious projection, how much is pathological projection? This is a rather delicate question.
MR: Albert Camus’ character Meursault kills a man on the beach apparently without motive. His mother had died the day before, or some other day. Meursault doesn’t keep track of time very well. The Outsider begins as a kind of hallucination. For me, I was convinced by the book, and my own experience, that life is an hallucination. We’re never really certain why Meursault kills the stranger, except that the man was going to die anyway. We can kill any living thing at any irrelevant moment in our lives. But what does this mean? Even in its unbearable slowness, life is violent. Sometimes when we make a work of art, I believe, we are objectifying our violence, our anger. Life can be a horribly frustrating proposition. Perhaps sometimes it’s this violence one needs to experience to bring one’s tenderness, one’s pathos into focus.
ER: But not everyone has the same frustrations to vent. In part we express ourselves to communicate, in part we express ourselves to alleviate some deep feelings, in part we express ourselves to show ourselves that we’ve done something worth looking at. It’s like attributing meaning to things. In any society you can only attribute meaning to things which everyone agrees upon, otherwise they’re just random meanings which negate the hermeneutic process of attributing meanings.
MR: We have to project new meanings which initially appear to be nonsensical. It’s how intellectually we evolve.
ER: They don’t mean anything to anyone else but you.
MR: Frankly, I don’t care if anyone understands what I’m saying when I say it. They can and will understand later, or perhaps not. We are programmed to live and express ourselves selfishly. It’s only when we bring the mirror up close that nearly everyone sees the same thing.
8th May to 10th August 2007
Milano / St. Hippolyte du Fort
ART & EGO
Marcus Reichert in conversation with Edward Rozzo
Z I G G U R A T B O O K S
London
REPRODUCTION CREDITS
Drawings, Paintings, and Photographs
- ART & EGO, cover photograph of Marcus Reichert by Edward Rozzo, 2007
- Edward Rozzo, Self-Portrait, 2006
- Nan Goldin, Skinhead having sex, London, 1978
- Marcus Reichert, Sally MacLeod, London, 1979
- Edward Rozzo, Marianne
- Edward Rozzo, What's Wrong?, (series) 1999-2004
- Nan Goldin and Marcus Reichert, Sony World Photography Awards, Cannes, 2008
- Marcus Reichert, Red Nude, 2006
- Marcus Reichert, Maison de Santé d’Ivry, 1977
- Antonin Artaud, Portrait of Jacques Prevel, 1947
- Marcus Reichert, Beirut, 2006
- Edward Rozzo, What’s wrong?, (series) 1999-2004
Top left: Advertisement for ART & EGO, photograph by Marcus Reichert
Footnotes
Published by South Asia Books as Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art by Anada Coomaraswamy
The Light of Thought (Introduction), Displaced Person: Poetry, Pornography & Politics, Marcus Reichert, Ziggurat Books, London, 2006
ART & EGO is available from amazon.co.uk -- http://www.amazon.co.uk/ART-EGO-Marcus-Reichert-conversation/dp/product-description/0954665651
