LESLIE WAYNE: You grew up in Rome and have been living in NYC for the last six or seven years, right?

BEATRICE PEDICONI: I first came to New York in 2009 for two months because some artist friends invited me to check out what was going on here compared to the European art scene. On that first trip I met Stacey D. Clarkson, Art Director at Harper’s Magazine, who asked me to do a portfolio for their April 2010 issue. And because of that I was contacted by Michael Gira, of the New York City musical group Swans, who invited me to do the cover of their upcoming album My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky, released in September 2010.

That’s interesting. The cover of the new Radiohead album reminds me a lot of your work and I remember thinking, “Gee, Beatrice really ought to think about doing something like this!”

Yes! Good thinking! That encounter with Swans really made me aware of the connections between music and my work and from that moment on I’ve often collaborated with musicians and composers for my videos.

You just did a collaboration with a dance company at the Sheen Center in New York recently and I was sorry I missed it.

Yes, the choreographer Vanessa Tamburi, and Artistic Director of Flusso Dance project asked me if I would do a video scenography for one of their performances during the Idaco NYC Festival of Dance. I like the idea of collaborating with other artistic disciplines to see my video in a different context. So I was very curious and I totally embraced the project when she told me that it addressed the issue of foreigners, which in my opinion is one of the ancient ghosts of mankind. It’s certainly a reflection on the future of Europe, which needs to solve the conflict between its bureaucracy and the desire to be hospitable, and perhaps rethink their fundamental choices about human mobility. Also I liked that when she asked me to do this project, she said it was because I was working with water, which represents movement and displacement. And in my work it’s not the water that moves, but all the substances/elements I make pass through it. So that project became Moving ID-ENTITIES, which I am sorry you missed. It was great and we hope to present it in another theatre in the future.

It sounds very dynamic. I also hope there will be another opportunity to see it. So where did we leave off? You were telling me about your album cover for Swans. That was back in 2010.

Yes. During that same period I met Lyle Rexer and after showing him my work he included me in a group show he curated for the Aperture Foundation called “The Edge of Vision.” Esa Epstein, the Director at Sepia Eye, who was at that time running Sepia International, saw my work there and suggested I apply for an artist residency called The Lucid Art Foundation, in Inverness, California. I got that residency, which brought me back to America in 2010 for three months. On my way there I stopped in New York and met David Freedberg, Pierre Matisse Professor of the History of Art, and Director of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University, who asked me to do a solo show at The Italian Academy in February 2011. A few months before that show I decided to move to New York with my brand new artist visa. After all these incredible events happening in such a short time, wouldn’t you have moved to the US too? I saw it like a call I could not refuse!

Absolutely! What a whirlwind of amazing experiences and connections!

You know, I first saw your work at the Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia two years ago. It was an immersive experience, and completely transformative. You projected a video of these moving fluids on all four walls, and they floated round the room on an endless loop and in total silence. It was as if I was back in the womb!

Can you tell me how you first came up with this idea of painting in water, as you call it?

When I was studying in my twenties, in Rome the most professional and prestigious school of art was the University of Architecture, so that’s what I got my degree in. During the first two years I was able to take courses in drawing and photography and I loved both techniques. I supported myself by photographing my professor’s architectural projects and publishing them in architecture magazines. That income helped me to continue my own research, which was more focused on drawing and abstraction and the very opposite of the static and immobile architecture I had to stage and photograph for money. I was much more interested in movement, the unstable and unpredictable.

Then one day around the beginning of 2000, I found myself in a shocking situation. Someone I knew very well had fallen down some stairs. I went to help them, not knowing what to expect and was feeling very anxious about what I would find. There was blood everywhere and I totally remember the exact moment I found emotional detachment from that scene and started to look at the beauty and the texture of the blood. I was amazed by it and this allowed me to find the strength to enter the room and call for help.

The day after when I woke up I took a tank from my dark room, put some water in it and I started to drop whatever color I was using for my drawing and painting into it, trying to re-create that beauty I had seen in the blood. The moment I saw the colors disperse in the water, I felt a kind of serenity I had never felt before. So from that traumatic experience, I created something that gave me a sense of relief, of being able to transform a tragic situation into a magical experience. I thought if just one viewer looking at my work could feel the same thing, that this was already a great success. So I really like that you describe my work as transformative, you totally get the sense of it.

Yes, I felt as if I was enveloped in an environment that had no language, just a kind of primordial beauty. But I also felt that it was utterly contemporary and of its time, in spite of our being in the middle of a digital revolution. It felt like you were taking a stand.

Unlike Andreas Gursky for example, whom I always thought was brilliant in the way he uses digital manipulation to create photographs like one would create a painting. But you literally are putting painting and photography on a level playing field.

But let’s talk first about your current show at Sepia Eye. You have on display four different manifestations of the performative act of painting. A limited edition artist’s book, a series of Polaroids, large format prints from 8 x 10 transparencies and a video.

I want to ask you about the performance first, as it is gestational to the rest of your work. From that initial traumatic experience, you have developed a unique method of painting as performance by injecting different substances into water, from honey, egg, oil and milk to inks and paints.

I say painting because I actually paint on the water. I have many brushes, all different kinds and thicknesses and also different syringes. To be more precise, I first drop the color, previously diluted with solvent in the case of the oil paint, and then I paint with brushes on the surface of the water.

It sounds relatively simple, but I know that you’ve done a great deal of research to find the perfect chemical structure for the water to accept the fluids in a way that they would perform most compellingly. You then document the fleeting essence of these fluids in motion, in prints, books and videos. 

Actually this is the first time I have treated the water with a powder because water and oil don’t mix, and in order to facilitate my painting on the surface I had to make the water more jelly-like.

So for this project, you used only oil paint and the effects are quite different from some of your earlier works. The Polaroids and large-format prints look like aerial maps, or strange geological pools of something prehistoric. They also have the delicacy and beauty of marbleized paper.  

First of all, the very idea of using Polaroid today is nostalgic. I so remember as a child being captivated by the magic of its instantaneousness! Now it’s a virtually forgotten medium, overcome by the newer magic of the digital revolution. Are you, like Tacita Dean, taking a stand for the inherent value of analogue film and the unalloyed image of an instant in real time?

Of course there is a kind of nostalgia in the use of Polaroid, but in my case it’s not intentional. I have been using Polaroid film since I first started to record my ephemeral painting process. What is new in this show at Sepia Eye is the format. I was lucky enough to work with the Impossible Project in 2014, which revived the use of the large format 8 x 10 inch Polaroid. I started using 4 x 5 inch Polaroid film first, as I felt it made perfect sense with the action of my work. Each print is a record of a unique instant in the paint’s movement. But also, Polaroid cannot be reproduced and so the prints are a singular and real record of the painting in the exact moment the paint exists before it dissolves.

I had a more conscious feeling of nostalgia for old artisanal techniques in the making of my book. Each book was individually wrapped in linen and each page was bound by me, using a loom I made for the occasion. The book is also wrapped and tied in the traditional method historically used for illuminated manuscripts.

The book is pretty complex in its conception. It’s not just a limited edition. It’s a project of nine unique books. The first book only has two Polaroids in it, taken during a session in March. The second book has three Polaroids, taken during another session in April, and so on, until you reached the ninth book which contains ten Polaroids from the last session taken in November. It’s a crazy idea, but at the same time makes perfect sense when you think about it. The Polaroid print is unique, the moment in time that it records is unique, and so each book is unique. Together, they form a kind of gestational record of the whole project, from conception to birth! Nine months, nine books.

Yes, exactly.

Also, the way you open the book and see the Polaroids first framed behind a passpartout and then revealed when that window page is turned is very interesting. Just visually, seeing the pink of the film paper exposed is formally striking next to the monochrome of the print. But also to see the naked Polaroid like that is a way of declaring once again, that each one is unique. I can’t help but think that your knowledge of architecture contributes to the way you visualized these books as objects rather than simply enclosures for your photographs.

In general, do you think three dimensionally, or are you thinking only about what the two-dimensional photograph will end up looking like?

I love this question! To be honest I never think about what the photograph will look like. I just think about what I see while I am working. Even now with this new body of 8 x 10 inch Polaroids, I was painting with oil paint using red, blue, green and yellow but I recorded them with black and white instant film not even knowing exactly what kind of black and white grade they would be. I liked the idea that by giving the painting over to photography the work would continue to change, not just as a technique but in its color.

Transformation, illusion and movement are an integral part of my work in every sense. But I agree with you that my architectural studies have somehow influenced me in thinking three dimensionally. They’ve trained me to arrive at this kind of mental process, and I realized this even more as I started doing video installations to create an environment, a space that becomes a vessel in which the visitor is invited to enter.

Sepia Eye is at 547 West 27th Street, #608, New York, 212 967 0738

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http://eastmanhouse.org/events/detail.php?title=burley_2014-15
http://robertburley.com/disappearance-of-darkness-2012/

I leave tabs open as reminders to myself — references or links to things I might, could, or should be doing. Often, these sites serve as surrogate memorials, remaining open only so that I can allow myself to feel better by acknowledging that attention is being paid, and that I have a plan. A part of me is invariably trying to forget, to ignore the ignored, and leave behind the burden of everything I cannot or simply will not do.

I track the memory usage of my web browser. My computer is showing its age, and it is usually these unread, unexplored tangents that bog down its ever-shrinking resources. It serves to further remind me of all that I might be doing. For months now, lurking in the background, I have had a tab open to the personal website of the photographer Robert Burley, who for five years documented the demise of analog image making. Burley traveled around the world photographing what amounted to a literal dematerialization of his chosen medium. Captured in his photographs is the corporate contraction experienced by all of the giants of the industry. There is the never-ending stream of building implosions at the Kodak Park in Rochester and the simply deserted factories of the bankrupt Polaroid, companies both decimated by the rapid shift to digital imaging. This shift proved inevitable, and yet, caught so many entirely off guard. Although the finality of the transition was never quite clear while it was unfolding, now, after the buildings have fallen and the thousands of layoffs completed, Burley’s images serve as a succinct summary of this abandonment of the analog.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about this transformation of technology; I attended art school during the thick of it, to study photography, and watched as it unfolded. At times, I felt like I was being abandoned by my own medium, falling behind in the future I had always embraced. As it no doubt is for many in college, the alchemical thrill of photography was nearly extinguished in me, the sheer magic of watching images emerge from the baths was something that played little role in the work I found myself making. Preoccupation with craft proved to be the undoing of many of my friends, lost in the labs spending hours upon hours in overly complicated modes of printing, making perfect, airless photographs. I fought against such elaborate production in my own work: I wanted something else from my images, a reason for the photography to have occurred. The weight of technicality is a burden not easily shifted in the making of photographs; it’s an inescapable fact of the medium that many can never seem to reconcile their work with. This fundamental problem has, of course, been discussed to no end, always to rear its head every decade or so, critically.

Such are the problems of art school. I never entirely resolved my concerns with craft, and my work most likely reflects this. Perhaps these are the building blocks of many photographers’ educations. I can only speak to my own experience, but I will say that there were many questions that certainly should have been asked of us as students, but were not. All artistic mediums, to varying degrees, contain their own material-based justifications, an inherent logic to their representative ends and uses. Photography obviously has its own, and yet we constantly ask for these once-simple definitions to be expanded and reconsidered.

This compulsion to define the medium is further complicated by our world’s full-scale digitization, and now these conversations often shift toward this electronic inevitability faced by photography. While the allure of the darkroom seems to be something that many fondly remember, few speak of it. Rather, when it is invoked, the analog era is employed as an all-encompassing nostalgia, and merely another emblematic loss of the well-worn past, demolished for a harshly gleaming replacement. In the wake of prolific, all-seeing, skill-less iPhone photography, such an assessment is inevitable, but also understandable in light of the endless of hardware and software upgrades we must all take part in, brought on by corporate-imposed planned obsolescence. The past, as we remember it, was never plagued by such artificial limitations.

There is something both wonderful and deeply depressing about this act of photographing the systems and places central to the development of photography, yet now no longer needed for its practice. Appropriately, the final venue for the current traveling exhibition of Burley’s photographs in the United States is the George Eastman House, named for the founder of the now much diminished Eastman Kodak, and the oldest museum dedicated to photography. In 1932, faced with severe disabilities, Eastman chose to end his own life, leaving behind a legendarily brief suicide note, now viewable in his namesake museum’s permanent collection. “My work is done, why wait?” Eastman wrote; could there be a more chillingly upbeat assessment of death?

The month before I started in art school, Kodak announced the discontinuation of traditional black-and-white photographic paper. The company’s inexorable slide into insolvency over the last decade was a protracted comedy of corporate errors, with each misstep launching several more, a latticework of insurmountable loss forming with each futile restructuring. Following this saga, I found it to be one of the more depressing episodes in the recent history of photography; in Kodak’s unraveling, I see my own failures reflected back at me. Try as I might to justify the upgrade, I know that for my purposes, there is little that a new camera could do that my long-outmoded one cannot. I see in Kodak’s failure of vision the fate of many of the things I care very much about — a broader, dark renunciation of possibility.

Burley’s photographs are laden with the latent potential that compels many to take their own, an analog security that can’t easily be replicated. In one image of a former Agfa film factory storage room, huge master spools of film are stacked upon racks, awaiting their final coating and cutting before being packaged as 35mm rolls. The spools stretch out into a florescent-lit horizon, making clear the incredible capacities once required to supply our unlimited desire to capture images on film. A part of me that pines for unchecked progress can dismiss these documents of a world that is rapidly being lost, and firmly place my faith in the perfected vision of cloud-powered futurity. There is another part, though, that finds such collectivism abhorrent, a terrifying disfiguration of placid continuity. This part longs to know the final destination of those prospective rolls of film, through chemical transformation, and it’s the part that believes in a tangible reality, and discards the well-marketed replacement.

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In becoming aware of Schnabel around 1979 – who, in those days, was showing at the Mary Boone Gallery – I was admittedly skeptical, largely due to the excessive application of objects, such as steer horns, branches, and ceramic plates, that adorned his painted wooden panels. In retrospect, my problem was less with the rancorous appearance of these objects than with the presumed semiotic connections being imposed upon them by that new colony of infestation, “art writers.”  In spite of Schnabel’s curious lack of formal demeanor, his ambitions were clearly bent on reviving allegory in painting (and eventually in film).  In comparison with the fray of emerging painters of the time, Schnabel’s work had a certain radical touch, somewhat insouciant in comparison with the “Tenth Street touch,” shown by painters twenty-five years earlier. By removing himself from the cynicism employed by commonplace expressionism in the 1980s and 1990s, he positioned himself closer to what astronauts called “the right stuff.”  While the broken plates and sprawling tarpaulins did not gel with my minimalist sensibility, they eventually managed to uplift the squandering anti-aesthetic discourse of those decades to a more physical level as painting moved from its soporific semiosis into the limelight of spectacle. Through a series of unhampered surface disruptions, Schnabel transformed the heavily mannered paintings of his early years into a curious, if not elusive lightness outside the reach of Transavantgardia, East Village graffiti, or the kind of American art school painting epitomized by David Salle.

Lightness in painting is difficult to obtain nowadays, and when it occurs, it appears differently then it did in certain Northern Baroque painters, such as the Alsatian steward, Sebastian Stoskopff, or that dour Dutchman, Frans Hals.  Yet, by the twenty-first century it appeared necessary to rejuvenate this point of departure in painting toward an instant photographic point of view.  Some of the most magnetic photos in this jerky, smudgy sequential portfolio are the sepia-toned and painted, 18 X 24 inch Polaroids of American actor qua wrestler Mickey Rourke. What makes these images of Rourke so appealing is the immense bravura, the tattooed torso, and the unguarded grimace of this postmodern Peter Lorre, this half-crazed, persistently debauched, sex-ridden actor that will go down in history a cut above the pretentiously bewildered dungaree-boy, Johnny Depp. Somehow one cannot avoid praising Schnabel’s generosity as he positions his lens on his subjects.  This would include the magnificent aging Lower Eastside rock star, Lou Reed, who bears a simulated King Arthur sword amid the overgrown flora at the artist’s seaside domicile in Montauk, and Herculean tenor Placido Domingo whose feigned machismo reverts to a sublime Etruscan melancholy. There are others, of course, ranging from the perennially elegant actor, Max van Sydow, to the stubbornly coy Christopher Walken.   Most touching perhaps are the rough-edged Polaroids of Schnabel’s two sons, Cy and Olmo (the latter’s head is framed in a shawl on the cover of the book). These are the intelligent wild children of nature, youthful fauns in the out-of-doors cavorting in the garden of delights, bearing the pulse of a generation in the throes of conflict twixt the virtual and the tactile realities of human emotion.

There are also a portraits of Frank Stella, Rula Jebreal, and Takashi Murakami – each posing as if for a screen test – clearly casual, yet carefully articulated, each representing selfhood liberated from the director behind the camera. There is an art to doing this, and the art is convincing throughout the book. Even when the scenery appears vague and uninteresting upon first glance, there is an overall sense of a purpose in the photographs, a sense that the subject and the scenery belong to art.  Rather than dwelling on objects, Schnabel focuses on light.  Rather than the furniture in a room, we are shown an installation. Rather than the pose of a rephotographed psychotic from the 19th Century, we are shown a contortion of a human head slightly tilted to one side. The hands imply an irregular occurrence where the mind rapidly diverts from the presumed innocence of the sitter’s expression.

In turning the pages of these highly engaging and visceral Polaroids – a photographic technology that reached its peak in the early 1970s – I am reminded of Marshall McLuhan’s remark that to make art requires that the artist revert to obsolescent techniques that preceded the latest advance.  I immediately relate this to Nam June Paik, known for his ingenious assemblages built from old 1950s TV cabinetry, but it may apply just as well to the work of Schnabel. Polaroids offer a certain arcane accuracy to the user that is full of surprises. Because of the clumsiness of the large camera, it is not always easy to control or to hold in place. As a result, happy accidents may occur, with a kind of accuracy the artist may not have intended.  One gets the impression in looking at these Polaroids that Schnabel is somewhere between painting and film-making, and that his life is a constant quest to discover a world that he has not yet experienced.

The culminating affect of this portfolio, edited with an introduction by Petra Giloy-Hirtz, elicits a feeling of intimacy.  This raises the question as to whether Schnabel seeks to capture his destiny through a transformation of what is common into some higher level of meaning. I enjoy the suspension of this notion, as it does not force the issue. Instead, there lingers an exuberant, tantalizing world in which everyday life becomes an adventure, filled with emotions that continue to blossom forth as the camera moves happily from one portrait scenario to another, always on the edge of expectancy.

Petra Giloy-Hirtz, Julian Schnabel: Polaroids. New York: Prestel, 2010. ISBN 978-3-7913-5076-9, 192 pp. 100 color illustrations, $49.95

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