Michael Markowsky in conversation
with Jan Tumlir,
Recorded in a car driving around Los Angeles.
Friday, July 7, 2006

JAN TUMLIR: In your work, it seems you are trying to keep pace with the unspooling of experience and the perception of experience, but you are not simply recording it with some kind of mechanical device. Because you are choosing to draw it or paint it on the spot, you are also making a bunch of very specific decisions that in a way function to interrupt the experience of perception as something that is located in time.

MICHAEL MARKOWSKY: Definitely. Because, as I'm moving, the things I look at disappear from view pretty quickly, so I don't really have a chance to study anything in any particular detail. I have to pull a whole bunch of things out of my field of vision really quickly and commit them to memory.

I've thought a lot about this thing Mike Kelley said when he spoke about my work. He suggested that I was forming a language of symbols, breaking the landscape down into letters, a kind of short-hand. Because, for me, it's an interpretation of experience; it's not really recording at all.

I certainly don't feel any need to respect reality. I'm not trying to represent faithfully a single moment of time. It's an abstract period of moving through space, a complete collapse of an hour and half of driving onto one surface, which is impossible... It is an impossible space.

You are talking about the recent paintings that you are doing?

Yes, that and also the drawings. Those are not spaces you can enter into. Even if the paintings suggest space, and I guess you could imagine yourself going into them, but the space doesn't exist anymore, anywhere, its imaginary, it's a big construction, its based on an experience, but none of those... if I paint a tree and I paint a car beside it, I can tell you for sure that they were never next to one another in so called 'reality'.

Right, it makes evident a thing that is inherent in all pictures: That they would never be simply a single moment, because that doesn't exist, basically. It's always a little slice of time.

Yes, in that way the whole process is very cinematic. When I was doing
The Chinatown Project, I was constantly thinking about the similarity of what I was doing to film, specifically film noir. I mean, this idea of me chasing down a drawing, driving in cercles, literally tailling other cars because I wanted to draw their features... this absurd love triangle between the road, the drawing and myself...

This is something that I've written about: The particular quality of noir when it shifts to Los Angeles. Spatially, noir is really about the movement between the overworld and the underworld, and when it moves away from a typical vertical city like New York toward a lateral city like Los Angeles, it necessarily has to move around laterally on the roads and on the freeways. It's interesting because it makes for a whole different set of movements. And, as you say, there are some things that are implicitly filmic about driving that go beyond noir...

...The car's wheels and the movie's reels, the proportions of the windshield to the movie screen...

...It is the perfect emblem of infinite recession, which is really all you need in a picture; the sense of a progression toward the vanishing point. The road movie is sort of like the ur-movie, the archaic ultra-movie.

As you say, whatever happens when you are in that space, especially when a camera is also brought into play, when you film yourself making these driving drawings, it will be implicitly dramatic, or cinematic, or film-like, almost no matter what you do. Is that what you are thinking?

Hmm. I suppose drawa will arise when any two things happen simultaneously... But it's not just me doing two things at the same time in front of a camera: the camera itself is also in motion. Which is why I'm not surprised that one of the first things early filmmakers did after inventing the movie camera was to mount it to things that move.

Right.

Trains, planes, cars... Because it is exciting to see movement while you are sitting still!

Famously, the Russian filmmaker Vertov actually had a cinema on a train, going through these little farming towns, to expose the peasants to propaganda films.

The agitprop trains...

...That's such a great idea, to see a film on a train... And again, you have 1900, which is the year zero for electronic media, or moving media, or media that records sound and movement as it happens. What is interesting about that is not necessarily the way that media is able to keep pace with life or even exceed the pace of life as it is doing right now when you have media that is actually moving faster than life is in a certain way, but the way that older media respond to the new media. Because the sort of influence the new media has on the way that we experience the world, that's not really measurable in the terms of the new media. It falls back on the old media to give you that kind of verdict, how this is actually impacting the way that we experience life and the world.

That's why painting can never be obsolete, because it's really the fact that it connects to the very beginnings of art history. That it is the oldest medium that will essentially safeguard it though every change. It is the place where you are able to measure how perception changes.

It is the yardstick, right. And I've always been fascinated by painting in that way, the parameters have and will always be the same. No matter how advanced we believe ourselves to be, we are still faced with the same basic tools: pigment, brushes and support. It is very humbling... Can anybody today make a painting as beautiful as Titian? We have this notion of getting better and better and advancing forward, but I think the arts as a whole bring reality into focus. When I read The Odyssey, I'm struck by the genius of the story, the way it is told, the structure. To think it was written nearly 3000 years ago...

Inasmuch as how it can function at present to measure change, it is also a reminder of what stays the same.

...That we haven't strayed too far... It's reassuring. Art is exciting because, as an artist, I realize the possibility of doing something completely new is absurd. The challenge with painting is that it is always familiar. The game hasn't changed much, the essential format is the same. What is interesting is not what you paint, but how you paint it. And by 'how', I don't mean style or technique, I mean process.

I love the idea of being able to have some sort of dialogue or engage with artists across centuries. I would like to see artists today have more ambition to compete with great artists of the past, rather than just acknowledging history.

I do think that some of the most interesting or ambitious - because this is about ambition - artists of recent times are the more historically inclined ones like Jeff Wall, and I also think of Jeremy Deller. Any painter who is ambitious, or who is going to get anywhere I think, has to understand you are dealing with a historical ground, that you are actually working on a ground of history.

What is interesting about art, and this seems to me to be a fundamental characteristic of art, is that allows for this kind of sense of measuring across time. There are not many things like that. You can take it back to prehistory if you want, or you can at least take it back to the beginnings of recorded history.

Yeah, this is it, turn up here, on Robertson...

...Art as a kind of diagnostic tool, Right?

Left...

I mean especially in the way that you are talking about art...

Oh...

...Some of the things that you are doing, for instance, could have a function or use-value to someone studying consciousness or perception, or for a scientist let's say.

That would be wonderful!

For instance Freud; some of his most interesting pieces of writing are not necessarily about people who just came into his office from out on the street, but the stuff he wrote about art and artists like Shakespeare and E.T.A. Hoffman, those are amazing pieces of writing. He actually used artworks as these kind of diagnostic pieces of evidence of how consciousness works, how memory works, how perception works. These are concrete remnants of these processes.

Hmm. It's fascinating to me how the way we look at the world has changed over time. It is beautiful, really.

I remember this moment when I first started to appreciate Alex Katz's work. It was in one of those Artforum articles where they have artists talk about process, and he was talking about this one painting of a tree, and he described it as something he drove by regularly at a certain hour of his day on his way back from his studio, and he saw it everyday, and he'd been wrestling with this image and he talked about how many canvases he threw away because they were becoming too encrusted, and he wanted the image to be done in one go. And that was really important to him, to have this aura of facility in the image, that there is nothing laborious about it, there is no build-up which would signify struggle or a deception because something is being hidden under something else. So I was really interested in that description of process: This real insistence on the transparency of process, where you would actually throw away canvases, whole paintings, because they are beginning to get too thick.

Well, I've done a lot of paintings that I don't like! I haven't thrown them out though... I keep them as experiments, to experiment on. I guess I still wonder if there is way of resolving them... And sometimes I do. Nevertheless, it is very hard for me to go back into a painting after I've walked away, because that moment of focus has been interrupted. And for that reason I very rarely take breaks while I'm painting. I just have to paint until I'm done and then I'm done. Sometimes it takes me a couple hours, sometimes a few days. I prefer it when things go smoothly, but it doesn't always work out that way.

But I don't mind people seeing the struggle, that's something I appreciate when I see other people's paintings, I like to be able to see the process developing, and witnessing an artist changing his or her mind.

I need to get some gas... I just bought this book on topographics, and one part of it is about path-finding and the history and theories of path-finding, which I thought would be interesting in relationship to all this stuff that had come up during The Lateral Slip exhibition. I think that really does speak to these two very different ways to negotiate the landscape: either you blaze a trail, you have these tools to chop down and dig up what is in front of you, or else you find a way around it based on the lay of the land. The first is maybe emblematic of a modernist relationship to nature.

Absolutely. Another thing, thinking about paths, is how often the Impressionists incorporated paths and roadways into their paintings. I don't know if they were thinking of it as simply a visual...

...Cue? It's certainly that as well.

A compositional device. But it may also have something to do with a period when steam-powered cars are just being introduced, when pathways are giving way to roadways. When paths are being paved, and set in stone, outside of the city, rather than just these trails that change over time, fall away... the land might overtake it and it might disappear. But when it's paved, it becomes part of the landscape, like a mountain, more permanent.

There again you can see how painting almost has a sort of documentary function. And when you are talking about the distinction between, let's say, a dirt road and gravel road and a paved road, photography at that point is really not equipped to deal with those distinctions, but it's true that painting of that sort, that was so sensitive to the relations between colors and textures and things like that, actually could...

Oh yeah!

So I think it would operate as both a sophisticated notion of what it takes to lead the gaze into a space that is pictorial, and kind of paradoxical inversion of that. This road that seems to promise perspectival movement, but you're actually entering a flat picture, a picture plan of the pictorial space.

Yeah, and its like the difference between looking at that and a Ruisdael painting where the paths go up and down and around hills, organically following the landscape, versus like what you are saying, blasting a pathway through and making things flat. The automobile, which was very primitive at the time, it wasn't able to make it up those hills, so the roads had to be flat or graded. Monet particularly, captured that really well in his paintings, basically this ideal renaissance perspective, roads receding endlessly into the horizon.

 

JAN TUMLIR is an art-writer who lives in Los Angeles. His articles appear regularly in Artforum, Frieze and Flash Art. In addition, he has written catalog essays for such artists as Bas Jan Ader, Uta Barth, Cecily Brown, Liz Larner, Jorge Pardo and Pae White. Tumlir teaches art and film theory at Art Center and the University of Southern California. LA Artland, a book on contemporary art in Los Angeles co-written with Chris Kraus and Jane McFadden was published by Black Dog Press in 2005.