Homay King: This is the one I called Flower or Flower Shape.
John Muse: Yeah, works like this and the one that we are calling Tina Turner—RIP!— keep so much, perhaps too much, of the original material in view. That’s something that I did in the early stages of this collage work, and not so much later. The problem with works like this is that once we identify shapes, we’re done. Thus the attraction of this grid which flattens and also creates a different space. The question is whether the faces and mouths and eyes in works so lock in the circuit of attention, that you can’t unsee them.
HK: Right? This is what I’m dubbing the Tina Turner Effect. It’s so interesting to talk about. At what point is the image spoiled? At what point does it shut down? At what point is it full of possibilities, a virtual symphony of abstraction? And then at what point does something lock in, and we can no longer unsee it? A center has been identified for the picture. This face, or this shape. Why is it a figural element that so often produces that effect? What we were saying initially is that it’s too bad that this happens because it closes down the possibilities of interpretation. On the other hand, that effect itself is fascinating, and I think it’s interesting who sees the face. How long does it take viewers to see the face? Can they unsee it?
JM: It’s like in Wittgenstein’s rabbit-duck illusion and his discussion of aspect. It is either a duck or a rabbit: the Gestalt can be flipped. It’s not that it locks in for any one person such that it’s only a rabbit. It’s that your seeing of the whole is organized under one or the other of those particular aspects. That doesn’t really fit this circumstance where I can’t unsee the face once I’ve seen it, I can’t return it to, say, a primordial abstraction, the soup of holes and shapes and gradations. I can flip, let’s say, foreground and background. I can make the browner parts with the spiral come forward. Or, I can push it back, like the Necker cube illusion, where you see into the corner, but you can make the corner concave or come back.
HK: Can I do anything else once I’ve seen the face?
JM: A work like this has much more of a Necker cube kind of experience for me. A shape like this has its integrity, for a time anyway, but then a shape like the blue one next to it takes over and I march across the surface with these blobby drips, some of them turning into positive, and some of them being negative, back and forth, back and forth.
HK: The Necker cube phenomenon is related in some ways to the Gold Blue dress internet meme. It took me a very long time, but eventually I could intentionally see it either gold or blue, by putting it next to other colors. It’s similar with auto-stereoscopic images. Magic Eye. That’s almost a physiological, perceptual thing you’re doing, sort of crossing your eyes. One can intentionally see stereoscopically or not, once you learn how to do it. Whereas this, this seeing the face and having it stubbornly stick…
JM: So if someone walks up to this and looks at it and arrives finally at a face, how long does it take? I can’t retrieve that as an experience. Having made it, I can’t retrieve the experience of finding it the first time.
HK: So, there’s a painting, or rather a lithograph, that is hanging over my dining room table that I have been looking at since the day I was born. My parents owned it, and then when I left Berkeley, I took it with me to Philadelphia. I’ve been looking at this many, many days of my life. It’s a Miró lithograph. As a child, I saw a face with a kind of hobo mustache. That big black circle was a mouth with facial hair around it. And then the circle with the dot was one eye, and then the little horn-shaped thing was a winking eye or an eyebrow. So the whole thing was a face. And then I also saw an elephant in the top half with the trunk coming down on the left. And this was how I made sense of it and appreciated it. I could really only see that face.
JM: As time went on, and we’re talking years, you know. Not minutes.
HK: That space started to dissolve or shift into other things. And part of it was me learning more about Miró and seeing other Mirós, for example, learning that he drew inspiration from bullfighting motifs and would use rings. The eye became a ring, seen in bird’s eye view. This is an example of an artist who works on the borders, where fundamentally he makes abstractions, but with certain shapes that come from or lead on to figuration in varying degrees of openness. This to me, is proof positive that it can be undone. It can change over time.
JM: With Miró, there’s no way not to see bird and human, to find the eyes and the sun. There’s no way to avoid that, and I don’t think he’s interested in creating a lot of resistance.
HK: It made me realize that the goal of eliminating the Tina Turner effect is not always, or not the only way to make abstract work.
JM: Of course. Miró is one of those. Much more than Kandinsky. I feel like I can walk away from Kandinsky easily, but somehow, down every dark alley you turn, there’s Miró again with a whole set of rich resources and playfulness. Pleasure and material and mark. In late Matisse, I always feel that he is still aiming for a contour, to bound something. Whereas with Miró worlds are built out of line and shape, and there’s no final contour. I always feel like Matisse is giving me an elegant outside, clearly defining an outside and inside, and the inside has no bones. Miró is all about the bones.
HK: This is where, you know, it’s like he’s going back to cave painting. The frame is gone, the contour is gone. It’s marks on a wall.
JM: But there is sometimes a frame. In this one, for example, the bottom edge is an edge from which something is emerging, and maybe on the left. But nothing on the right, and nothing ever pierces the top. So the bottom—I feel a lot of affinity for this compositional strategy—maintains a respect for the horizon. But the horizon is now defined somewhere in the lower third of the frame. Whether it’s heads or animals or portraits or landscapes with stars, there’s still a kind of gravitational field that exercises dominion over the matter that is there.
HK: Totally. There has to be a limit of some kind. Even if it’s just one edge. Or limits provided by the materials and the process.
JM: What crossed my mind was what Gerhard Richter does with his very simple paint-on-found-images, work that I love. It’s unsurpassable, where paint is to image as a kind of rhyming, occlusive smear. Where there is some kind of clarity, the paint functions as interruption. So there’s a way that abstraction is sometimes understood to be: I’m thinking of Mondrian, the standard art historical chestnut, of showing the Mondrian tree that eventually turned into the Mondrian grid. There’s a way that abstraction can be conceptualized as the discovery of something essential. So that the smiley face that we all grew up with becomes a perfect exemplar of the faciality system. Black holes and white lines, our eyes and mouths. There’s another way of thinking about abstraction, though, which is not about distillation, that departs or attempts to depart from something otherwise phenomenally accessible. This is how the grid has typically been characterized. Right? The grid is “perfect” mathematical formalization; it has no natural correlate. For example, there are film techniques that have no physiological correlate. Yes, the camera can move the way the head moves, the camera can focus the way eyes can focus. But the zoom has no phenomenological correlate. It has a psychological correlate, tunnel vision or the collapsing or expanding of a view. The zoom though is abstract, because it takes on meanings that have to do with psychic economies, not with experiential ones. So, my point is that there are at least two ways of conceptualizing abstraction, one that that has to do with distillation to form and/or the Platonic sense of Form that underlies the concrete—and another concept of abstraction that seeks to evade or does evade the phenomenal.
HK: It’s non-representational.
JM: Of course, it’s a representation, meaning that it’s an image. But to the degree that it’s non-representational, it makes no referential claim to the world. In this regard, I think of the conversations we’ve been having about Immanuel Kant’s critique of aesthetic judgment and Edward Weston’s peppers, Kant gets weirder when you think about the spectator that Weston anticipates. The best spectator is the one who says: It’s not a pepper, and it’s not not a pepper. It’s in this virtual sort of trembling between. It’s the structure of disavowal. I know very well that he put a pepper in front of his 8×10 view camera, then made a very long exposure of a pepper. Nonetheless, I find myself seeing worlds and flesh and torqued matter, ceramic, glass, and metal. I see nebulae, galaxies, stars. If I see the flower the way the botanist sees it, I’m no longer making an aesthetic judgment. If I see the flower the way that Plato would have me see it, as the dim copy of a transcendental Ideal, then I’m also doing it wrong.
Collage is that method by which one gets to use anything whatsoever, having the anything-whatsoever still retain its attachment to the world. Therefore, it’s like the pepper but nonetheless offers other experiences than simply the experience of the sources. The concatenation goes into a kind of syntax.
HK: My way of getting at this is through Gilles Deleuze, the image as a category. It’s not about truth or falsehood. It’s not about what you call disavowal. It’s not about, oh, I’ve been fooled into thinking this image was the real thing. There’s no moral judgment. Everything is image. Whether I’m looking at this coffee cup or looking at a picture of this coffee cup, they are both perceptions. My perception of a coffee cup and an image of the coffee cup are of equal status. It’s not the Platonic model where the Idea of the coffee cup is the real cup, and the one you have here on earth is but a poor material copy, made of, you know, the shit of the world. It’s neither of those things. It gets beyond the judgment. Everything’s on an equal playing field. It’s like Nietzsche in “On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense.” It gets us out of the problem where the representation is a lie and real things are real, or vice versa, as for Plato. I guess that’s what I’m interested in. And I think when images virtualize and become full of possibilities, and you can see multiple things in them, that’s the space of play where you realize that that can happen with every perception.
JM: So, my contribution here is that the photographic translation—and I do mean translation—in the literal sense of something being moved, of an image giving birth to another image across time and space, is the mode by which that symphony of virtualities begins. Right? You don’t get a Weston by simply knowing how to look at a pepper well. You have to have the Weston. You have to have the photographic translation, the movement of the image, a transformation. You don’t get a collage simply by piling all the materials on your desk and looking at them in the right way, to allow those possibilities to emerge in the mind. The making of an image, of a film, of a painting, of a sculpture is this translation through materials. Yes, I’m still thinking of depiction as a problem, and we could leave that behind, too. But even the Miró here, that black and that yellow, and that lithographic stone upon which these materials were inscribed, and then imprinted on paper, that whole procedure was required as translation, such that we now have what we have.
Otherwise you would have to argue that you don’t need a Weston to make an image. If everything is an image, then the difference between the pepper that he was working with, and the one that we have in the photograph still needs to be articulated. It’s not that they’re rivals: this is what Deleuze would say. It’s not Lacan, where the sign murders the thing. I think artists can make good use of the fantasy of rivalry. I mean, you don’t get Magritte without a little bit of that charge that comes from rivalry. The world that one can create which is in relation to the world that one lives in. That’s Magritte…You don’t get much from those works unless you keep some tension between where you live and what you see.
HK: But that rivalry is not the same as Zeuxis getting fooled by the trompe l’oeil in the contest with Parrhasius. Right? But it’s a great thing, it’s a thrill.
JM: I think of Reinhardt’s little cartoon, you know. A man looks at an abstract painting and says, with churlish disregard, “What does this represent?” And just below the painting speaks back: “What do you represent?” The cartoon poses abstraction as a challenge to the representational. If people are also representations, what does that mean?
HK: If everything is a representation, then nothing is. It relates, I think, to what Kaja Silverman means when she talks about how we give ourselves to be seen, and the world gives itself to be seen. That it’s a mutual relationship. We, too, are given to be seen. She’s getting that from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the chiasmus, the double-sidedness of vision and visibility. I don’t know that a painting can see us back, but…
JM: There’s a great moment in Ways of Seeing, the John Berger film and book; he’s mostly in full Walter Benjamin mode, with the museum as the point and stake of class warfare. But then he says this really interesting thing: just look at these paintings in silence: the painting is strangest when it’s simply there, silent and still, collecting your attention only giving back to you its silence. There’s a garrulousness to everything else in it, like its visibility. But if we if we allow for a moment to think of paintings as persons that are fragile, delicate, and that we respond to as though they were in need of care and protection and attention, then other things are entailed in that attribution of agency or power, a kind of autonomy, but also a kind of kinship. A sort of oblique relation to others, like the quiet cousins who are there with you and your family, but not really. The paintings and photographs and artworks that surround us have that quality. No doubt this Miró, for you, was and is very much like a friend. Maybe a weird friend. Did you ever see it at night as something that was possibly terrifying?
HK: Oh, yeah, for sure.
JM: That mouth, that open mouth: once I saw it, that’s all I see. Now I see an eye and an eye, and a big mouth and a throat and an ear. Two ears. It can flip. This is maybe a Gestalt shift between friend and enemy. It’s like Santa. “I see you when you’re sleeping, I know when you’re awake.” Is that good? Is that good or bad, Santa? Are you like God in that way? You’re judging, but you’re also full of love for me. “It’s gonna hurt me a lot more than it’s gonna hurt you, except, no, actually it’s gonna hurt you more.” That kind of thing. Maybe our works do this. Maybe our works promise that kind of ambivalence that we need to live up to. They not only have to live up to our expectations of them as sensuous, ever giving things, but we have to live up to their demand that we take care of them, see them well, treat them with respect and share them.
HK: So I love this model of thinking of them like companions of a kind. And I think that’s a core component of our keywords here. But there are other topics I want to make sure we get to in this conversation. I think, if you were to speak a little bit more about process, and the time that it takes for you to make one of these, the kinds of hesitations you make, that would be one way to get there, to start to see how these static images are dynamized, to get at their multiplicity.
JM: So it’s the most prosaic way of talking about process, I mean, it can be super dull. A lot of it is about the ad hoc. Throwing together. Cut things with other cut things.
HK: Until they begin…
JM: …to make a certain formal sense. Formal sense has to do with things that are yummy things that also keep virtualities alive. Things that lock in particular ways. Here are a group of paintings that I’ve made, all of which are going to turn into backgrounds. These paintings are made by mixing paint directly on the surface of the paper and using silicone squeegees to create patterning that I will then go back into, either with the hole punch & hammer or with a knife to cut along these contours.
HK: Do you paint on it, let it dry, and do it again? Or just once?
JM: I usually do it just once, sometimes twice, but rarely. The challenge is to not overwork the material, because what I need is for what’s underneath to show through. They need strong patterning lines that I can then cut against when it comes time to do some weaving.
HK: So, do you have four stages here? First is finding the source page, which is found from a magazine, or blank, or what have you. Two, you paint it and let it dry. You might have some of the source image showing through, but not too much. And then three is punching or cutting. Four is taking those pieces—in how many layers? Arranging them, weaving them, putting different ones on top and on bottom.
JM: Correct. It’s rarely more than four layers, and that’s because at this scale the paper won’t hang together.
HK: Another question: what’s the most enjoyable part of the process for you? Do you like the painting, the cutting, putting the pieces together?
JM: I think the best thing is always discovery, and discovery can happen in any of these stages. Back in the day when I would prepare my own photographic paper, make my own emulsions, coat the paper with emulsion, and make the big negatives. It’s rare that there was discovery in that process.
HK: Because you’re executing a set of steps that you know are preparatory. I loved the dark room. I loved the phase where you put it in the bath, and slowly see the picture develop. That was like magic every time. For me that’s discovery.
JM: With the protocol, you just have to do it right. You have to pay attention. You have to get it right. Technically. You’ve shot the film, you take the camera into a black bag or a dark room, you take the film out of the camera, you roll it into a metal reel, you put that reel into a metal canister. It’s like a cocktail shaker. You pour the chemistry in. Look at the clock. You agitate it gently, you pour out the liquids. You have to get it right. But there’s no discovery in it. At least there wasn’t for me. But putting the negative into the enlarger, making your contact sheets, the making of prints: that’s all discovery. So, I have tried to put together a process to maximize discovery in every phase. There’s discovery in the painting process when it’s paper or when it’s auction catalog materials or monograph materials. There’s discovery in the cutting. There’s discovery in the initial layering of pieces. And the discovery that comes from showing these works on Instagram is bizarre. I learn so much seeing other people see and respond to things.
HK: And it’s an intuitive process. It’s not like, “I want to make a thing that looks like this,” so I follow this script or protocol to make it to the best of my ability. It’s the discovery, and the time it takes to do that. Discovery is integral to what these works end up being.
JM: It’s intuitive, but not entirely intuitive. I know I need contours, so I will use stencils, and I will use a squeegee to create hard edges that I can make harder by cutting on them. I know that there is a certain vocabulary of forms. The loops and the U-shapes, and the pinched hearts, and net lattices. I have a formal vocabulary of drawing that I can go to.
HK: There’s a set of parameters, or givens.
JM: It’s like there is a tool kit. I don’t have all the tools. I only have some, and I can use them well, and I have materials and forms. And sometimes there are breakthroughs where suddenly a new set of images emerges like those bamboo/sea creature brush strokes. I’ve been making them for a long time, but I finally made ones that I felt like kind of finished something with that form. So, it’s not “anything goes.” If you look at a Pollock, you know you’re looking at a Pollock. If I’ve done my job, then people looking at my images will say that they are seeing images that I made. They know I made them. Something that art historians and critics don’t talk about so much anymore is style. I know that I have one or a few but my goal has never been to refine it. My goal has been to discover it. To go back to the Ad Reinhardt cartoon, I’m actually trying to learn what I represent. I’m trying to work through a set of habits in order to see what else there might be. Maybe I’m peeling the onion, and I’m hoping not to get to its core, but to see more and more interesting layers. So the answer to the question the painting asks in that cartoon is…
HK: “I’m not finished yet.”
JM: That’s right. Yeah, what do you represent? I don’t know yet. You tell me. Yeah, I’m hoping you will help me discover this. Together we’ll discover it, and hopefully other people will learn something from these discoveries, and I will learn something from what other people see in it, and there’ll be a crowd assembled that includes me in the work. But it isn’t me locked into the work solipsistically, in the way we imagine the artist in their garret trying to work out something alone.
HK: On another note, it occurs to me how much of this is related to weaving and textiles. When you’re knitting or weaving, the thing has to hold together. There’s no adhesive on the back of it. Whereas with collage, you are free to create these things that, were they not glued down, would just unravel. It’s like a coil or a spring, but it’s also a Mobius strip. If you pulled it like this, it would lack the integrity of a real coil.
JM: Yeah. So, weaving for me is precisely not about structural integrity. I mean, cloth is a miracle. It’s just a string that turns into a two-dimensional, robust, durable thing. I always side with the weave to the degree that it promises a hesitation, an illusion of interpenetrating surfaces. I can slow it down when I can create minor paradoxes of shape and depth. It’s just a piece of paper, but because of the cross hatching I can’t tell where things are. It’s an eddy as opposed to an abyss. This is the problem with seeing Tina Turner, right? Is that an eddy or a whirlpool? And if it’s a whirlpool, then I’m less interested. But if it’s an eddy out of which you can come and return, it’s not fatal. It’s not a fatal attractor. I like it when it can sustain my attention longer than it has any right to based on its materials. So yeah, the weave is not for the sake of strength. It’s for the sake of hesitation. It’s not for the sake of making something big out of something small, or something multidimensional out of something one or two-dimensional. It’s about compositing and complicating space, creating a fold in time.
Works of art—and now I’m quoting Kosuth—are holes in the real. Artists pull things out of the world. It leaves a hole somewhere. That’s Duchamp’s operation, right? The readymades are all objects, but insofar as they begin to worry the status of what constitutes an artwork, they’re holes. They’re portable holes and artwork is portable. That’s kind of what I’m obsessed about currently: the power that an artwork has to be a passage, an impossible passage.
HK: So it’s like the Acme Hole, the Road Runner.
JM: Yes. In some way every artwork, through its placement, is that. I suppose this is just institutional critique, that every object, through its placement, can become an artwork and therefore some kind of hole.
HK: It’s not just institutional critique. It’s a hole that you could travel into, through the looking glass. A portal. It’s a hole that leads onto a whole. Again this reminds me of Deleuze. He’s into the indivisible, what cannot be divided. What cannot be divided into parts without losing its qualities, its nature? So, you know, scientific or computer or mathematical thinking would have it that we can endlessly divide and chop things into bits of data and then put them back together, reassemble them, re-render the bits and pixels. Like Mike Teavee in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And then, voilà, here it is again, the same thing. But Bergson says no, there are certain things that are not divisible in that way. You can’t take a loaf of bread and turn it back into the components of wheat and yeast; you can’t atomize it in that way. It’s related to Zeno’s paradox, right? A mathematical paradox of dividing and subdividing, creating ever-smaller bits and molecules and particles. If you put it all back together it should be the same thing, but in fact you can’t. Things that are living, things that change, really anything that exists in durational time—you can’t do that.
JM: It makes me think about composition and the effort through the 20th century to do away with it. I want to make the case that arrangement, harmony, composition, balance, push and pull—all of these ways that artists have of talking about where stuff should be in the frame and why—are wholly abstract. Because it’s nowhere. It’s an idealization. Take the example of the cafe wall illusion. Every optical illusion that I could present you with is only as durable as the whole that I present to you. At a certain scale the illusion always goes away. On the other hand, when you look at it as a whole, it’s cognitively impenetrable. There’s no way of staring at it so that these lines appear as parallel. However, if I were to take a close up of this image, and bring you right inside of one of these black squares, the illusion is gone. There is always a scale at which the optical illusion will disappear—ha, unless it’s fractal. My visual cortex is tasked with making sense of it as a whole. Making sense of it as a whole throws you into illusion, making sense of it as discrete parts destroys the illusion.
HK: Yes. The grooviness disappears in the close up.
JM: The grooviness disappears when you’re close, and comes back when you’re far away. There’s always loss in going from the whole to the part. A qualitative shift in what something is.
HK: Yes, that’s exactly what Deleuze is saying.
JM: Right. This makes sense to most people. “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” Your bread example has more to do with entropy, with not being able to uncook baked bread, or to put a smoothie in a blender and have it turn back into fruit and yogurt. This could happen. But it doesn’t happen. There are more ways for things to be disordered than ordered. There are good mathematical ways of describing this. The other idea, though, is that the whole is always less than the sum of the parts, to the degree that every part could also be something else. This is Graham Harman’s idea. When you turn wood into a violin, it can’t be a shed. Only some of the powers of any part are being mobilized to hold the whole together. And therefore the whole is less than the sum of the parts. To get clear about the difference between the more and the less is an interesting task. With the optical illusion, it’s only in the whole, in the gestalt, that there’s something like an illusion, and the illusion can always be dispelled, clarified, or destroyed by change of scale, because it has to do with the way our visual cortex processes complex wholes and how we’ve learned to navigate shadows and edges.
HK: Well, the only thing I would add is it’s not just change of scale, because you could miniaturize this and it would still be groovy. It’s when you select out a part that it changes.
JM: Right. So let’s take out a part. Nothing worrying about that little part. This is totally far afield, but one of the deep mysteries of life after germ theory is that there is a way in which every part of us is also indicative of the whole because DNA is in every cell. Thence the fantasy of the resurrected dinosaur from the blood found in a mosquito in amber. This common sense that we are indivisible. It’s not the homunculus, but it’s a little machine, an abstract machine that can be plugged into other machines to grow.
HK: I don’t want to get too far into Deleuze, but this is what he and Guattari are talking about when they talk about the body without organs. The organized body is one that has been subdivided into organs that have specific functions. It’s like a worker who specializes in one task. There’s a division of labor. These cells are not going to grow an arm, even if they still have the code for it, because they’ve become stomach. It’s organized. Whereas in the body without organs, any part has the potential to become a different part. You do see this in, you know, primitive life, that capacity that is more like a germinal cell. Every cell has the capacity to become an arm, a stomach, an ear, but after a certain point in time, the body is organized. Once you add the psyche into the mix, it gets more interesting. Because you have people who might use their leg as a sexual organ, or who might think with their hands, or use their head to hit a soccer ball. These are all different ways you can de-organize that strict division of labor.
JM: So, once upon a time we would say things like, As it is in heaven, so it is on earth. Analogy reigns. Foucault would describe this as an episteme based on similitudes, and that the similitudes need to go both directions. We live according to the stars, and the stars show us what our lives are. But with the double breakthroughs of the telescope and the microscope, where we are no longer scale-dependent, we found ourselves living in a world where at massive scales there are different physical laws than there are at microscopic scales. And with something as simple as dropping a mouse and an elephant from a platform, the mouse is going to be OK and the elephant is not, because scale matters. Scale is not something that allows for invariants moving up or down, given the four-dimensional world that we seem to be inside of. So I’m interested in coming back to the idea of the whole—at what scale? What are the proper scales for artworks such that we can encounter them? This relates to Kaja’s point about scale. My work is not infinitely deep and it’s also not infinitely scalable. The farther I go into it, the more I discover that I will lose everything and only find the chemistry of paper and pigments. And the farther I move away from it, eventually it becomes imperceptible. So there’s a way in which scale kind of is an anchor; it anchors relation. And, well, we’ve defeated that somewhat with screens. Because screens allow scale to be the museum without walls. The monograph on the table brings everything close to me and can make it all manipulable.
HK: Scalability is also a corporate concept, right? We start with one McDonald’s. Is it scalable? But that way of thinking is about replicating it identically, on a larger and larger scale. That’s very different from the selection of a part or a close up or a detail, or finding a scale that anchors a relation. Another example that pops to mind is the scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off when Alan Ruck’s character goes to the Art Institute of Chicago and looks at the Seurat. We get a close up, another close up, another close up…
JM: So there are some artists that make works that they might describe as scale models. And where they’re playing with the difference between what it is they’re depicting and what it is they were looking at when they made the depiction. Michael Fried quotes Tony Smith answering a question about a cube he made that was six feet tall. Why is it six feet tall? Well, if it were any bigger than the person looking at it, it would be a monument; if it were any smaller, it would be an object. There’s genius in this, in taking scale seriously. I’m also thinking about movement around the work, art that takes that into account. It’s a realist proposition. Judd and Morris and even Hesse cared about that little bit more that something could be. To be above, just a little bit. To look at a painting was to be looking up as well as looking at, and that covers so much of Abstract Expressionism and post-Abex work.
HK: Pollock made paintings on the ground.
JM: He’s making them on the ground, but he’s making them on the ground to go on the wall. Take a painting that has drips coming down. They signal something about the world, right? That the world remains horizoned with a clear sense of up and down. Pollock was not interested in that being clear to anyone. He knew that there was an embodied viewer, but that the encounter was not an encounter with something that had been under the same forces that the world has. He didn’t want those indices.
HK: That’s right. There’s the bird’s eye view from above, and then the worm’s eye view from below. With a Pollock we might as well be looking up at the celestial, the constellations, even when it’s on the wall.
JM: In cinema when the camera tilts up, I’m looking up without having to move my head. There’s a proprioception. I can get dizzy watching the roller coaster. I can get dizzy with the gimbal shot. But it’s a dizziness that happens without me needing to move. All it takes is the visual cues of me having moved in some vertiginous way, the experience of a kind of vertigo.
HK: This relates to your film and video work, the play with proprioception in gyroscopio and American Breakfast. I think of rotations and orbits, and how our sense of the solidity of the earth, of gravity, of directional orientation, toward things or toward other people, our sense of up and down is…not exactly an illusion, but a gift or given of some kind. There is no difference between falling and rising in outer space.
JM: Speaking of giving, I want to conclude by talking about the idea to give away the artworks at the close of the show. The event will be called Everything Must Go! There’s no auction or contest. The aim is to create the beginnings of a richer social practice project, including documentation of people with the framed work they’re leaving with. That’s a good image. I’m interested in whether it’s possible any longer to maintain specific and individual relationships with people who have the work, because the market is there to obliterate that. That’s what money does. Money anonymizes every transaction, every encounter, and everyone leaves feeling that the debt has been paid. This is about inaugurating a moment where the longevity of the debt is unclear, debt in David Graeber’s sense of the term. I have a promise from someone. They have a work. It’s the beginning of a relationship, it’s the beginning of being in—in what?—in community with people, who could make all sorts of choices about what to do. And I’m interested in that.
HK: Now that you put it that way, I get it. It’s a counter-art market practice, and it’s also counter to frequent practices of hoarding contemporary art, putting it in cold storage spaces. Here it’s more like you are trying to cultivate the Reinhardt cartoon relationship between the work and the person, that they’re talking to each other, and that it’s an ethical process. That there is a relationship of care for the work, and that the work is going to continue to speak. It’s going to live; it’s going to have a continued existence out in the world. We’re sending it forth out into the world where it has more work to do, rather than just distributing it and saying everybody, lock it away, it’s done, the transaction is complete.
JM: That’s exactly right. It’s in conceptual continuity with the front of the house / back of the house structure of the gallery, in the sense that what we have is an entire workflow that makes me accessible that demystifies my process. It also relates to what I write about collage as a medium that both is and is not inside of the art world. There’s no way for me in good conscience to describe what I’m making as non-commodities, non-objects, or non-optical works. But I’m interested in the way that the process of their creation, exhibition, and transmission can continue to make them lively in ways that we’re not really trained to take seriously as artists, or as people interested in looking at art. There’s conceptual continuity between the exhibition as a whole and this concluding event. I want to be able to make that case.
HK: The more you speak about it in this way, the more I like this idea. If chance is the key element to what goes where, it’s a beautiful thing. It’s like you’re sending them off, you know, like sending your kid off to college or out into the world. Some of them are going to go on and have these wonderful lives, and some of them might not. It’s about giving oneself over to trust the contingency of that process.
JM: It’s a very soft obligation. When someone leaves with a work, all they’ve done is make me a promise. It’s not a contract. You’re going to promise to take care of it. You’re going to promise to let me know where it ends up. I’d love a photograph of one thing that’s nearby it.
HK: Not cut off from its surroundings. To see what else is on the wall next to it, what’s nearby. The collage becomes part of another collage.
JM: Right. It’s a very John Berger Ways of Seeing idea—the interest and intention that people have when they begin to make the worlds around them rich visually. So I would love to know where each one ends up.
Extra Medium | John Muse is made possible with support from The John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities and the Distinguished Visitors Program.
